The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” the First Mate said. “There’s a reason she doesn’t come to see you off.”

  “Give it time,” the Second Mate said. “She’s still coping. I’ll show her the light.”

  “Hokkaido,” the Pilot said. “The ice up there is worse in the summer. The shelves break up, currents chum it. It’s the ice you don’t see, that’s what gets you.”

  The Captain spoke. Shirtless, you could see all his Russian tattoos. They looked heavy in the sideways light, as if they were what had pulled his skin loose. “The winters up there,” he said, “everything freezes. The piss in your prick and the fish gore in your beard. You try to set a knife down and you can’t let go of it. Once, we were on the cutting floor when the ship hit a growler. It shook the whole boat, knocked us down into the guts. From the floor, we watched that ice roll down the side of the ship, knuckling big dents in the hull.”

  Jun Do looked at the Captain’s chest. The tattoo of his wife was blurred and faded to a watercolor. When the Captain’s ship didn’t return one day, his wife had been given a replacement husband, and now the Captain was alone. Plus, they’d added the years he was in prison to his service debt to the state, so there’d be no retirement now. “The cold can squeeze a ship,” the Captain suddenly said, “contract the whole thing, the metal doorframes, the locks, trapping you down in the waste tanks, and nobody, nobody’s coming with buckets of hot water to get you out.”

  The Captain didn’t throw a look or anything, but Jun Do wondered if the prison talk was aimed at him, for bringing his listening equipment on deck, for raising the specter that it could all happen again.

  When darkness fell and the others went below, Jun Do offered the Second Mate three packs of cigarettes to climb atop the helm and shinny the pole upon which the loudspeaker was mounted.

  “I’ll do it,” the Second Mate said. “But instead of cigarettes, I want to listen to the rowers.”

  The boy was always asking Jun Do what cities like Seoul and Tokyo were like, and he wouldn’t believe that Jun Do had never been to Pyongyang. The kid wasn’t a fast climber, but he was curious about how the radios worked, and that was half of it. Jun Do had him practice pulling the cotter pin so that the directional antenna could be lifted and pointed toward the water.

  Afterward, they sat on the winch house, which was still warm, and smoked. The wind was loud in their ears. It made their cigarettes flare. There wasn’t another light on the water, and the horizon line separated the absolute black of the water from the milk dark of the star-choked sky. A couple of satellites traversed above, and to the north, tracers of shooting stars.

  “Those girls in the boat,” the Second Mate said. “You think they’re married?”

  “I don’t know,” Jun Do said. “What’s it matter?”

  “What’s it take to row around the world, a couple years? Even if they don’t have husbands, what about everyone else, the people they left behind? Don’t those girls give a shit about anybody?”

  Jun Do picked some tobacco off his tongue and looked at the boy, who had his hands behind his head as he squinted at the stars. It was a good question—What about the people left behind?—but an odd one for the Second Mate to ask. “Earlier tonight,” Jun Do said, “you were all for sexy rowers. They do something to piss you off?”

  “I’m just wondering what got into them, to just take off and paddle around the world?”

  “Wouldn’t you, if you could?”

  “That’s my point, you can’t. Who could pull it off—all those waves and ice, in that tiny boat? Someone should have stopped them. Someone should have taken that stupid idea out of their heads.”

  The kid sounded new to whatever heavy thinking was going on in his brain. Jun Do decided to talk him down a bit. “They already made it halfway,” he pointed out. “Plus, they have to be some pretty serious athletes. They’re trained for this, it’s probably what they love. And when you say boat, you can’t be thinking of this bucket. Those are American girls, their craft is hi-tech, with comforts and electronics—you can’t be picturing them like Party officials’ wives rowing a tin can around.”

  The Second Mate wasn’t quite listening. “And what if you do make it around the world—how do you wait in line for your dormitory toilet again, knowing that you’ve been to America? Maybe the millet tasted better in some other country and the loudspeakers weren’t so tinny. Suddenly it’s your tap water that smells not so good—then what do you do?”

  Jun Do didn’t answer him.

  The moon was coming up. Above, they could see a jet rising out of Japan—slowly it began its great veer away from North Korean airspace.

  After a while, the Second Mate said, “The sharks will probably get them.” He flicked his cigarette away. “So, what’s this all about, pointing the antenna and all? What’s down there?”

  Jun Do wasn’t sure how to answer. “A voice.”

  “In the ocean? What is it, what’s it say?”

  “There are American voices and an English-speaking Russian. Once a Japanese guy. They talk about docking and maneuvering. Stuff like that.”

  “No offense, but that sounds like the conspiracy talk the old widows are always trading in my housing block.”

  It did sound a little paranoid when the Second Mate said it out loud. But the truth was the idea of conspiracy appealed to Jun Do. That people were in communication, that things had a design, that there was intention, significance, and purpose in what people did—he needed to believe this. Normal people, he understood, had no need for such thinking. The girl who rowed during the day had the horizon of where she came from, and when she turned to look, the horizon of where she was headed. But the girl who rowed in the dark had only the splash and pull of each stroke and the belief that they’d all add up to get her home.

  Jun Do looked at his watch. “It’s about time for the night rower to broadcast,” he said. “Or maybe it’s the daytime girl you want?”

  The Second Mate suddenly bristled. “What kind of a question is that? What’s it matter which one? I don’t want either of them. My wife is the most beautiful woman in her housing block. When I look into her eyes, I know exactly what she’s thinking. I know what she’s going to say before she says it. That’s the definition of love, ask any old-timer.”

  The Second Mate smoked another cigarette and then tossed it in the sea. “Say the Russians and Americans are at the bottom of the ocean—what makes you think they’re up to no good?”

  Jun Do was thinking about all the popular definitions of love, that it was a pair of bare hands clasping an ember to keep it alive, that it was a pearl that shines forever, even in the belly of the eel that eats the oyster, that love was a bear that feeds you honey from its claws. Jun Do visualized those girls: alternating in labor and solitude, that moment when the oarlocks were handed off.

  Jun Do pointed to the water. “The Americans and Russians are down there, and they’re up to something, I know it. You ever hear of someone launching a submarine in the name of peace and fucking brotherhood?”

  The Second Mate leaned back on the winch house, the sky vast above them. “No,” he said, “I suppose not.”

  The Captain came out of the pilothouse and told the Second Mate he had shit buckets to clean. Jun Do offered the Captain a smoke, but when the boy had gone below, the Captain refused it. “Don’t put ideas in his head,” he said, and walked deliberately across the dark gangway to the high-riding bow of the Junma. A large vessel was creeping by, its deck carpeted with new cars. As it passed, likely headed from South Korea to California, the moonlight flashed in rapid succession off a thousand new windshields.

  A couple of nights later, the Junma’s holds were full, and she was headed west for home. Jun Do was smoking with the Captain and the Pilot when they saw the red light flash on and off in the pilothouse. The wind was from the north, pacing them, so the deck was calm, making it seem like they were standing still. The light flashed on and off again. “You going to get that
?” the Pilot asked the Captain.

  The Captain pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it. “What’s the point?”

  “What’s the point?” the Pilot asked.

  “Yeah, what’s the point? It’s shit for us either way.”

  Finally, the Captain stood, straightened his jacket. His time in Russia had cured him of alcohol, yet he walked to the pilothouse as if for the harsh inevitability of a drink, rather than a radio call from the maritime minister in Chongjin. “That guy’s only got so much,” the Pilot said, and when the red light went off, they knew the Captain had answered the call. Not that he had a choice. The Junma was never out of range. The Russians who’d owned the Junma had outfitted it with a radio taken from a submarine—its long antenna was meant to transmit from below the surface, and it had a 20-volt wet-cell battery to power it.

  Jun Do watched the Captain silhouetted in the pilothouse and tried to imagine what he might be saying into the radio by the way he pushed his hat back and rubbed his eyes. Jun Do, in his hold, only received. He’d never transmitted in his life. He was secretly building a transmitter on shore, and the closer he got to completion, the more nervous he became over what he’d say into it.

  When the Captain returned, he sat at the break in the rail where the winch swung over, his legs hanging free over the side. He took off his hat, a filthy thing he only sometimes wore, and set it aside. Jun Do studied the brass crest with the sickle and hammer embossed over a compass face and a harpoon. They didn’t even make hats like that anymore.

  “So,” the Pilot said. “What do they want?”

  “Shrimp,” the Captain said. “Live shrimp.”

  “In these waters?” the Pilot asked. “This time of year?” He shook his head. “No way, can’t be done.”

  Jun Do asked, “Why don’t they just buy some shrimp?”

  “I asked them that,” the Captain said. “The shrimp must be North Korean, they said.”

  A request like that could only come from the top, perhaps the very top. They’d heard cold-water shrimp were in big demand in Pyongyang. It was a new fashion there to eat them while they were still alive.

  “What should we do?” the Pilot asked.

  “What to do,” the Captain said. “What to do.”

  “Well, there’s nothing to do,” Jun Do said. “We were ordered to get shrimp, so we must get shrimp, right?”

  The Captain didn’t say anything, he leaned back on the deck with his feet over the side and closed his eyes. “She was a believer, you know,” the Captain said. “My wife. She thought socialism was the only thing that would make us strong again. There would be a difficult period, she always said, some sacrifices. And then things would be better. I didn’t think I would miss that, you know. I didn’t realize how much I needed someone to keep telling me why.”

  “Why?” the Pilot asked. “Because other people depend on you. Everybody here needs you. Imagine if the Second Mate didn’t have you to ask stupid questions to all day.”

  The Captain waved him off. “The Russians gave me four years,” he said. “Four years on a fish-gutting ship, forever at sea, never once did we go to port. I got the Russians to let my crew go. They were young, village boys mostly. But next time? I doubt it.”

  “We’ll just go out for shrimp,” the Pilot said, “and if we don’t get any, we don’t get any.”

  The Captain didn’t say anything to that plan. “The trawlers were always coming,” he said. “They’d be out for weeks and then show up to transfer their catch to our prison ship. You never knew what it would be. You’d be down on the gutting floor, and you’d hear the engines of a trawler coming astern and then the hydraulic gates opening up and sometimes we’d even stand on our saw tables because down the chute, like a wave, would come thousands of fish—yellowtail, cod, snapper, even little sardines—and suddenly you were hip deep in them, and you’d fire up your pneumatic saws because nobody was getting out until you’d gutted your way out. Sometimes the fish were hoarfrosted from six weeks in a hold and sometimes they’d been caught that morning and still had the slime of life on them.

  “Toward afternoon, they’d sluice the drains, and thousands of liters of guts would purge into the sea. We’d always go up top to watch that. Out of nowhere, clouds of seabirds would appear and then the topfish and sharks—believe me, a real frenzy. And then from below would rise the squid, huge ones from the Arctic, their albino color like milk in the water. When they got agitated, their flesh turned red and white, red and white, and when they struck, to stun their victims, they lanterned up, flashing bright as you could imagine. It was like watching underwater lightning to see them attack.

  “One day, two trawlers decided to catch those squid. One set a drop net that hung deep in the water. The bottom of this net was tethered to the other trawler, which acted like a tug. The squid slowly surfaced, a hundred kilos some of them, and when they started to flash, the net was towed beneath them and buttoned up.

  “We all watched from the deck. We cheered, if you can believe that. Then we went back to work as if hundreds of squid, electric with anger, weren’t about to come down that chute and swamp the lot of us. Send down a thousand sharks, please—they don’t have ten arms and black beaks. Sharks don’t get angry or have giant eyes or suckers with hooks on them. God, the sound of the squid tumbling down the chute, the jets of ink, their beaks against the stainless steel, the colors of them, flashing. There was this little guy on board, Vietnamese, I’ll never forget him. A nice guy for sure, kind of green, much like our young Second Mate, and I sort of took him under my wing. He was a kid, didn’t know anything about anything yet. And his wrists, if you’d seen them. They were no bigger than this.”

  Jun Do heard the story as if it were being broadcast from some far-off, unknown place. Real stories like this, human ones, could get you sent to prison, and it didn’t matter what they were about. It didn’t matter if the story was about an old woman or a squid attack—if it diverted emotion from the Dear Leader, it was dangerous. Jun Do needed his typewriter, he needed to get this down, this was the whole reason he listened in the dark.

  “What was his name?” he asked the Captain.

  “The thing is,” the Captain said, “the Russians aren’t the ones who took her from me. All the Russians wanted was four years. After four years they let me go. But here, it never ends. Here, there is no limit to anything.”

  “What’s that mean?” the Pilot asked.

  “It means wheel her around,” the Captain told him. “We’re heading north again.”

  The Pilot said, “You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?”

  “What I’m going to do is get us some shrimp.”

  Jun Do asked him, “Were you shrimping when the Russians got you?”

  But the Captain had closed his eyes.

  “Vu,” he said. “The boy’s name was Vu.”

  The next night, the moon was strong, and they were far north, on the shoals of Juljuksan, a disputed island chain of volcanic reefs. All day, the Captain had told Jun Do to listen for anything—“anything or anybody, anywhere near us”—but as they approached the southernmost atoll, the Captain ordered everything turned off so that all the batteries could power the spotlights.

  Soon, they could hear patches of open break, and seeing the white water froth against the invisibility of black pumice was unnerving. Even the moon didn’t help when you couldn’t see the rocks. The Captain was with the Pilot at the wheel, while the First Mate was in the bow with the big spotlight. Using handhelds, the Second Mate was to starboard and Jun Do was to port, everyone lighting up the water in an effort to gauge the depth. Holds full, the Junma was low in the water and slow to respond, so the Machinist was with the engine in case power was needed fast.

  There was a single channel that wound through fields of frozen lava that even the tide was at pains to crawl over, and soon the tide began drawing them fast and almost sideways through the trough, the dark glitter of bottom whirring by in Jun D
o’s light.

  The Captain seemed revived, with a wild, nothing-to-lose smile on his face. “The Russians call this chute the foxtrot,” he said.

  Out there in the tide, Jun Do saw a vessel. He called to the First Mate, and together, they lit it up. It was a patrol boat, broken up, on its side upon an oyster bar. There were no markings left, and it had been upon the rocks for some time. The antenna was small and spiraled, so he figured there was no radio worth salvaging.

  “Bet they cracked up someplace else and the tide brung her here,” the Captain said.

  Jun Do wasn’t so sure about that. The Pilot said nothing.

  “Look for her lifeboat,” the Captain told them.

  The Second Mate was upset to be on the wrong side of the ship. “To see if there were survivors?” he asked.

  “You just man that light,” the Pilot told him.

  “Anything?” the Captain asked.

  The First Mate shook his head no.

  Jun Do saw the red of a fire extinguisher strapped to the boat’s stern, and much as he wished the Junma had an extinguisher, he kept his mouth shut and with a whoosh, they flashed past the wreck and it was gone.

  “I suppose no lifeboat’s worth sinking for,” the Captain lamented.

  They’d used buckets to put out the fire on the Junma, so the moment of abandoning ship, the moment in which it would have been revealed to the Second Mate that they had no lifeboat, never came.

  The Second Mate asked, “What’s the deal with their lifeboat?”

  “You just man that light,” the Pilot told him.

  They cleared the offshore break, and as if cut from a tether, the Junma settled into calmer water. The craggy ass of the island was above them, and in its lee, finally, was a large lagoon that the outer currents kept in motion. Here was where the shrimp might congregate. They killed the lights, and then the engine, and entered the lagoon on inertia. Soon, they were slowly backpedaling with the circular tide. The current was constant and calm and rising, and even when the hull touched sand, no one seemed to worry.