by Adam Johnson
There was something wrong about it all, DJ thought, but he nodded. “You have to do something for me,” he said. “Give this place a chance. It takes getting used to, I know. But today I saw a bus stop for an old woman. The bus had hydraulics or something—it knelt low so the woman could climb on. That would never happen at home. The North would never make a machine that bowed down to a person.”
But Sun-ho didn’t listen. “And bring your new girlfriend,” he said. “A touch of the accordion never hurts—trust me, the Gangnam ladies will love that.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” DJ said. “She has a husband.”
Sun-ho grunted. “She had a husband. Everything in the North is gone. That goes for us as well. Your parents, whom you can’t bring yourself to talk about—they’re gone. Everything I had, everything I was, none of it exists here.” Sun-ho rolled so he faced the wall. “Now go,” he said.
“I can’t just leave you in jail.”
“No? Why not?”
“It feels like I’m abandoning you.”
Sun-ho glanced back, smiling for the first time. “You say that word like it’s a bad thing.”
—
The next night, DJ did as he’d agreed. When darkness fell, he and Mina made their way to Apgujeong in Gangnam. Here Shinsegae glowed in gold and purple light while Luxury Hall crawled with scrolling color. There were stores clad in metallic armor and stores whose colored tiles climbed down the walls and spilled into the street. In one shopwindow they saw a pink teddy bear with diamonds for eyes; in another, cupcakes coated with flakes of gold. You didn’t have to be North Korean to know that entire families rose or fell for less than what some were willing to pay for a jewel-crusted hip-hop baseball cap.
Mina donned the accordion and, revealing a streak of dark irony, played “Following the Party to the End” as they strolled by the window displays.
On Dosan, near Seolleung-ro, Sun-ho called out to them.
“Come, my friends, come,” he shouted.
When they approached, Mina played a riff from “Nowhere Without You.”
“So, where’s this good-time meeting?” she asked.
DJ stared at Sun-ho’s North Face jacket. “Didn’t you send that north?”
Sun-ho smiled. “That was a spare,” he said.
DJ looked up at the glimmering tower. “You live here?”
Sun-ho joined him in admiring the building. “Nice, huh?”
He produced a key card and used it to unlock the building’s mirrored front doors. Instead of heading for the elevators, Sun-ho took the fire stairs, swinging his bad leg down each step before holding the rail with two hands and dropping the good. DJ and Mina trailed him for two flights until they came to a concrete corridor for infrastructure access—here were the distribution panels, the fire sprinkler valves, a freight elevator. Sun-ho used his card to beep open a tiny janitorial closet that smelled of fast-food wrappers and dirty clothes. Taking most of the closet space was a molded plastic chair on which rested a large black backpack. Plastic bags and jugs of water hung from the ceiling, and there was room for a single stack of cardboard boxes. From a box, Sun-ho grabbed a couple of cell phones, which he pocketed.
DJ asked, “What is this, some kind of storage unit?”
Sun-ho displayed two dirty automotive fan belts.
“For the weight,” he said, “there’s nothing stronger than a Toyota fan belt.”
Mina took quiet stock of the closet. “Are you living out of here?” she asked.
Sun-ho swung the pack onto his back. Then he turned to DJ. “I’m sorry I only have one chair,” Sun-ho said, staring with a strange seriousness in his eyes. “I can get another if you like. Do you want me to get another chair?”
DJ didn’t know what to say. “Is there a lack of seating at the meeting or something?”
Sun-ho didn’t answer. He grabbed the chair and closed the door, but before it swung shut, DJ got a glimpse of what had been under the chair: a water jug, half filled with what looked like urine. He wondered about Mina’s question. Could someone live in a closet? Could a person sleep sitting up? He and Mina exchanged a look.
Sun-ho was already headed down the hall with his chair, then pressing the call button of the service elevator.
“How long have you been in this building?” DJ asked.
“It’s a very exclusive address,” Sun-ho said.
When the elevator doors opened, the three of them stepped inside. Sun-ho swiped his card to press the roof button. Soft tones marked the floors as they flashed past.
“The meeting’s on the roof?” DJ asked.
Sun-ho handed DJ the key card. “So you can get out of the building,” he said. The card was marked with a name and an apartment number.
When they arrived, the roof was dark and windy.
“I don’t understand,” DJ said.
“There is no meeting,” Mina said.
Sun-ho said, “You think I would go to one of those brainwashing sessions?”
“What about the Gangnam ladies?” DJ asked. “Do they exist?”
“I’d never betray Willow like that.”
DJ stepped out onto the roof. The tar under his feet was soft. Fragments of cloud blew past, their bellies aglow with the light of traffic and commerce. Beyond the curtain wall was a skyline of twinkling amber. And then the dark rope of the Han River.
As his eyes adjusted, DJ noticed two brown cylinders: helium tanks.
Right away, Sun-ho started to strap the plastic chair to an outcrop of conduit with a rope tether. He cow-hitched the fan belts to each arm and began filling a towering clear balloon with helium from a tank.
In disbelief, Mina turned to DJ. “Are you going to stop him?”
That was a good question.
“Are you really doing this?” DJ asked. “Assuming you don’t die from the cold or the lack of oxygen or the landing, don’t you think they’ll kill you?”
“Traitors,” Sun-ho said. “That’s who they kill. Not heroes.”
“You can’t really believe that. They kill anyone they like.”
“Okay, I’ll grant you that,” Sun-ho said. “But you don’t have to worry about me.”
Sun-ho tied off the first balloon with a braided cord and attached it to a fan belt. The chair lifted, held only by the rope tether, where it danced on plastic toes. Sun-ho began filling another, the gas hissing, the balloon bent and whipping in the wind.
“Willow is much younger than you,” DJ said.
Sun-ho didn’t respond.
“You two have barely spoken.”
Sun-ho called to Mina. “Do you know ‘Arirang’? Would you play ‘Arirang’ for me?”
With a look of bemused wonder, Mina opened her accordion case and began to button the first slow chords, and then from the piano keys came the ancient melody.
“Yes, beautiful,” Sun-ho said, attaching another balloon. “Dongjoo said you were talented. Did you know this song is from the Joseon Dynasty? Six hundred years, that’s how long our people have been singing it. Do you know the words, will you sing it for me?”
“ ‘Arirang,’ ” Mina sang. “ ‘Arirang, Arariyo.’ ”
Sun-ho rolled the tank to the chair so he could anchor it with his weight. Backpack in his lap, he began to fill another balloon.
“Listen to reason,” DJ told him. “Willow’s father is in the Party. Anyone his daughter married would have to be a member. It would never work.”
Sun-ho looked up from his plastic chair. “Don’t you believe in new beginnings?” he asked. “Where’s your sense of possibility?”
To signal an end to such talk, Sun-ho began singing along with Mina, a duet accompanied by the accordion and the hiss of helium. DJ looked up to the balloons as they filled—angry, they spun and tugged in the turbulent air.
When six balloons were filled, you could almost see the chair’s weightlessness.
Sun-ho turned those wide, sad eyes upon DJ. “ ‘A thousand ri with every stride,’ ”
he said. It was the start of a propaganda slogan they’d all been forced to say a thousand times.
DJ asked, “Why are you going in the dark?”
“Light, dark, it doesn’t matter,” Sun-ho said.
DJ felt his eyes getting hot. “It does matter,” he said. “I don’t want you to go. You’re all I have.”
Sun-ho nodded. “Think of it this way. I’m what you had of the North, and you’re what I had of the South. We’ll always fit together like that. We’ll always be a team.”
DJ shook his head. “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”
“Come on,” Sun-ho said. “ ‘A thousand ri with every stride.’ ”
DJ was silent.
“ ‘A thousand ri with every stride.’ ”
DJ finally finished the sentence: “ ‘The winged horse Chollima flies.’ ”
Sun-ho smiled, warm and large. Then he loosened the knot that freed the tether. But he did not float into the sky. The chair’s legs rattled. Then they started skittering across the roof, picking up speed until Sun-ho was slammed against the curtain wall, the balloons violently whipping.
DJ ran over and put his hands on the chair to weigh it down. “You’re going to get yourself killed,” he said. “You can’t even get off the roof, let alone to North Korea.”
Sun-ho smiled again. “A simple mistake,” he said. “I forgot to give you this.” He lifted the backpack and held it out to DJ. When DJ reached for it, Sun-ho paused. “Don’t get on the ferry,” he said, his eyes large and intense. “If you follow their rules, you’ll become one of them.”
DJ took the heavy pack, and when he did, Sun-ho was gone, snapped up into the sky, spinning wildly and swinging until he was no longer visible.
DJ felt the weight of the bag, recognized the metallic clatter of its contents. He didn’t need to look inside to know it was filled with catalytic converters. He kept looking at the place in the sky where Sun-ho had been. There was no way Sun-ho could get what he really wanted; there was no way he could sail a thousand years back in time. Maybe the closest a person could come was North Korea.
Mina stopped playing. She locked her bellows and joined DJ at the wall.
Clouds came and went. Before long, the sky no longer resembled the sky Sun-ho had disappeared into.
“That would never happen in the North,” Mina said. She shook her head, a look of wonder in her eyes. “Everything there is planned out. They’ve got it all rigged. This, though, this was…spontaneous and unexpected, this was real.”
DJ let his eyes drift across a horizon of buildings—thousands of lights, millions of them. The darkened apartments still made more sense than the lit ones. And there was no single light to guide you.
“You never think about going back?” DJ asked.
They were standing side by side, gazing north.
“Back?” She shook her head. “I feel like I just got here.”
“Yeah,” DJ said. “Me, too.”
In memory of
Thomas Mannarino, 1964–2007,
and
Eric Rogers, 1970–2012
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Stanford University for their generous support. I’m also indebted to the Kalmanovitz Library at the University of California, San Francisco, where portions of this book were written.
I’ve been the beneficiary of many fine editors: Tyler Cabot and David Granger at Esquire for championing “Nirvana”; Christopher Cox at Harper’s Magazine for his judicious edits of “Interesting Facts”; John Wood and Steven Albahari at 21st Editions for lovingly hand-printing “George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine”; and special thanks to Cheston Knapp and Michelle Wildgen at Tin House, where “Hurricanes Anonymous,” “Dark Meadow,” and “Fortune Smiles” first appeared. “Hurricanes Anonymous” was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories. “Nirvana” was reprinted in The Best American Nonrequired Reading.
This book could have no finer editor than David Ebershoff, and Warren Frazier is the prince of literary agents. The support of the Stanford writing faculty has been invaluable to me, particularly Eavan Boland, Elizabeth Tallent and Tobias Wolff. Thanks also to Gavin Jones. I’m grateful to Ed Schwarzschild, Todd Pierce, Neil Connelly, Scott Hutchins, Skip Horack and Russ Franklin, all of whom read versions of these stories and offered sage advice.
Special thanks also to Dr. Patricia Johnson, Dr. James Harrell and the Honorable Gayle Harrell. Phil Knight is my source for wisdom and inspiration. Stephanie is my Pleiades, my Polaris, my Hōkūle‘a and Southern Cross. Thanks especially and eternally to Jupiter, James Geronimo and Justice Everlasting.
BY ADAM JOHNSON
Emporium
Parasites Like Us
The Orphan Master’s Son
Fortune Smiles
About the Author
ADAM JOHNSON teaches creative writing at Stanford University. He is the author of Fortune Smiles, Emporium, Parasites Like Us and The Orphan Master’s Son, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. He has received a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His work has appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, Playboy, GQ, The Paris Review, Granta, Tin House, The New York Times and Best American Short Stories. He lives in San Francisco.
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