The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

  A half-dozen rifles were unslung, and they made a nearly instantaneous click. Above, on the deck of the frigate, all the sailors with their cups of coffee froze. In the quiet was the familiar clank of the rigging, and water sloshing out of the live well. Jun Do could feel how the waves rebuffed from the frigate’s bow double-rocked the Junma.

  Very calmly, the Captain called to the Second Mate. “It’s just a hat, son.”

  The Second Mate answered the Captain, though he didn’t unlock eyes with the sailor. “You can’t go around the world doing whatever you want. There are rules and the rules have to be followed. You can’t just up and steal people’s hats.”

  Jun Do said to him, “Let’s just let the sailor go.”

  “I know where the line is,” the Second Mate said. “I’m not crossing it—they are. Someone has to stop them, someone has to take those ideas out of their heads.”

  Jervis had his sidearm out. “Pak,” he said. “Please translate that this man is about to get shot.”

  Jun Do stepped forward. The Second Mate’s eyes were cold and flashing with uncertainty, and the sailor looked to him for help. Jun Do carefully took the hat off the sailor’s head, then put a hand on the Second Mate’s shoulder. The Second Mate said, “A guy has to be stopped before he does something stupid,” then took a step back and tossed his knife into the sea.

  Rifles high, the sailors cast an eye toward Jervis. He approached Jun Do. “Obliged for helping your man stand down,” he said, and with a handshake, slipped Jun Do his officer’s card. “If you’re ever in the free world,” he said, then gave the Junma a last, long look. “There’s nothing here,” he added. “Let’s have a controlled withdrawal, gentlemen.”

  And then in what was almost a ballet—rifle down, retreat, shift, replace, rifle up—the eight Americans left the Junma so that seven rifles were pointed at the crew at all times, and yet, in a brief series of silent moments, the deck was clear and the boarding craft was away.

  Right away, the Pilot was at the helm to bring the Junma about, and already the fog was stealing the edges of the frigate’s gray hull. Jun Do half closed his eyes, trying to peer inside it, imagining its communications deck and the equipment there, how it could perceive anything, how it had power to apprehend everything that was uttered in the world. He looked at the card in his hand. It wasn’t a frigate at all, but an interceptor, the USS Fortitude, and his boots, he realized, were crawling with shrimp.

  Even though their fuel was low, the Captain ordered a heading of due west, and the crew hoped he was making for the safety of North Korean waters, rather than a shallow cove in which to scuttle the disgraced Junma. They were running with the waves at a good clip, and with land in sight it was strange not to have a flag clapping above. The Pilot at the helm kept looking at the two white squares on the wall where their leaders’ portraits had been.

  Jun Do, exhausted in the middle of the day, swept the shrimp he’d spilled into the gutter troughs and out into the water, returning them to whatever world had made them. But it was fake work, this sweeping, as it was fake work that the mates were about with the live well, just as the wrench the Machinist held was a prop. The Captain was circumnavigating the deck, growing angrier, judging by the way he muttered to himself, and while no one wanted to be near him when he was like this, no one wanted to take an eye off him, either.

  The Captain passed Jun Do again. The old man’s skin was red, the black of his tattoos practically shouting. “Three months,” he said. “Three months on this boat, and you can’t even pretend to be a fisherman? You’ve watched us empty a seine purse on this deck a hundred times—don’t you eat off the same plates as us and shit in the same bucket?”

  They watched the Captain walk to the bow, and when he came back, the mates stopped pretending to work, and the Pilot stepped out of the helm.

  “You camp down there with your headphones on, tuning your dials and clacking all night on your typewriter. When you came aboard, they said you knew taekwondo, they said you could kill. I thought that when the time came you would be strong. But what kind of intelligence officer are you—you can’t even pretend to be an ignorant peasant like the rest of us.”

  “I’m not in intelligence,” Jun Do said. “I’m just a guy they sent to language school.”

  But the Captain wasn’t listening. “What the Second Mate did was stupid, but he took action, he was defending us, not putting us in jeopardy. But you, you froze, and now it may be over for us.”

  The First Mate tried to say something, but the Captain glared at him. “You could have said you were a reporter, doing a story on humble fishermen. You could have said you were from Kim Il Sung University, that you were studying shrimp. That officer wasn’t trying to be your friend. He doesn’t care about you at all.” The Captain pointed toward the shore. “And they’re even worse,” he said. “People don’t mean anything to them, anything at all.”

  Jun Do stared, without affect, into the Captain’s eyes.

  “Do you understand?”

  Jun Do nodded.

  “Then say it.”

  “People don’t mean anything to them,” Jun Do said.

  “That’s right,” the Captain said. “They only care about the story we’re going to tell, and that story will be useful to them or it won’t. When they ask you what happened to our flag and portraits, what story are you going to tell them?”

  “I don’t know,” Jun Do told him.

  The Captain turned to the Machinist.

  The Machinist said, “There was another fire, this time in the helm, and the portraits, unfortunately, burned. We could light the fire, and when it looked burned enough, put it out with the extinguisher. We’d want the ship to still be smoking when we entered the harbor.”

  “Good, good,” the Captain said. He asked the Machinist what his role would be.

  “I burned my hands trying to save their portraits.”

  “And how did the fire start?” the Captain asked.

  “Cheap Chinese fuel,” the Second Mate said.

  “Good,” the Captain said.

  “Tainted South Korean fuel,” the First Mate said.

  “Even better,” the Captain said.

  The Pilot said, “And I burned my hair off trying to save the flag.”

  “And you, Third Mate,” the Captain asked. “What was your role in the fire?”

  Jun Do thought about it. “Um,” he said. “I poured buckets of water?”

  The Captain looked at him with disgust. He picked up a shoe and regarded its colors—green and yellow, with the diamond of the nation of Brazil. “There’s no way we’ll be able to explain these,” he said and threw it overboard. He picked up another, white with a silver swoosh. This, too, he tossed overboard. “Some humble fishermen were out in the bountiful North Korean waters, adding with their efforts to the riches of the most democratic nation in the world. Though they were tired, and though they’d far exceeded their revolutionary quotas, they knew the birthday of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung was nearing, and that dignitaries from all over the world would be visiting to pay their respects.”

  The First Mate retrieved the pair of shoes he’d saved. With a deep, painful breath, he threw them into the sea. He said, “What could they do, these humble fishermen, to show their respect for the great leader? They decided to harvest some delicious North Korean shrimp, the envy of the world.”

  The Pilot kicked a shoe into the sea. “In praise of the Great Leader, the shrimp leaped willingly from the ocean into the fishermen’s nets.”

  The Machinist began pushing whole stacks of shoes overboard. “Hiding in the fog like cowards were the Americans,” he said, “in a giant ship bought with the blood money of capitalism.”

  The Second Mate closed his eyes for a moment. He removed his shoes, and now he had none. The look in his eyes said that the wrongest thing that had ever happened was happening right now. And then the shoes slipped from his hand and into the water. He pretended to look at the horizon so that no one w
ould see his face.

  The Captain turned to Jun Do. “In this story of naked imperial aggression, what role did you play, citizen?”

  “I was witness to it all,” Jun Do said. “The young Second Mate is too humble to speak of his own bravery, but I saw it, I saw all of it—how the Americans boarded in a surprise attack, how an ROK officer led the Americans around like dogs on a chain. I saw them insult our country and parade in our flag, but when they touched the portraits of our Leaders, lightning fast, the Second Mate, in the spirit of true self-sacrifice, drew his knife and took on the entire platoon of American pigs. Within moments, the Americans were retreating for their lives, such was the bravery and revolutionary zeal of the Mate.”

  The Captain came and clapped Jun Do on the back. With that, all of the Nikes went into the sea, leaving a slick of shoes behind. What had taken all night to gather went over in a few minutes. Then the Captain called for the extinguisher.

  The Machinist brought it to the edge of the ship, and everyone watched as it went into the water. Nose first, a flash of red, and it was barreling for the deeps. Then it was time for the life raft, which they balanced on the rail. They took one last look at it, beyond yellow in the afternoon light, and when the First Mate went to push it over, the Captain stopped him. “Wait,” the Captain said and took a moment to gather his resolve. “At least let’s see how it works.” He pulled the red handle, and as promised, it deployed with a burst before it even hit the water. It was so new and clean, double-ringed under a foul-weather canopy, big enough for all of them. A little red light flashed on top, and together they watched as their rescue boat sailed off without them.

  Jun Do slept until they made port in Kinjye that afternoon. The crew all donned their red Party pins. Waiting for them at the dock was a large group—several soldiers, the maritime minister from Chongjin, some local Party officials, and a reporter from the regional office of Rodong Sinmun. They’d all heard about the insulting American radio transmissions, though the last thing they were going to do was brave the American fleet to rescue the Junma.

  Jun Do told his story, and when the reporter asked his name, Jun Do said it didn’t matter, as he was only a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world. The reporter liked that. There was an older gentleman at the dock whom Jun Do hadn’t noticed at first. He wore a gray suit and had a flattop of short white hair. His hands, though, were unforgettable—they’d been broken and had mishealed. Really, they looked as if they’d been drawn into the Junma’s winch. When it was all over, the older man and the reporter led the Second Mate off to confirm the story and get more quotes.

  With dark, Jun Do made his way down the fish-cart paths that led to the new cannery. The old cannery had had a bad batch of tins and many citizens were lost to botulism. The problem proved impossible to locate, so they built a new cannery next to the old one. He passed the fishing boats, and the Junma at her tether, men in button-down shirts already unloading her. Whenever bureaucrats in Chongjin were caught being less than supremely obedient, they’d have to make a pilgrimage down to Wonsan or Kinjye to serve a couple of weeks doing revolutionary labor, like hand-hauling fish night and day.

  Jun Do lived in the Canning Master’s house, a large, beautiful dwelling that no one else wished to occupy because of what had happened to the Canning Master and his family. Jun Do inhabited only one room, the kitchen, which had all that he needed: a light, a window, a table, the stove, and a cot he’d set up. It was only a couple of days a month that he was ashore, and if there were ghosts, they didn’t seem to bother him.

  Spread across the table was the transmitter he’d been building. If he broadcast in short bursts, the way the Americans did from the bottom of the sea, he might be able to use it undetected. But the closer it came to completion, the slower he worked, because what in the world would he have to broadcast about? Would he speak of the soldier who said, “Smokey, smokey?” Perhaps he’d tell the world about the look on the Captain’s face as they motored south past the wide, empty beaches of Wonsan, which is where all the bureaucrats in Pyongyang are told they will go when they enter the paradise of retirement.

  Jun Do made a cup of tea in the kitchen, and he shaved for the first time in three weeks. Out the window, he watched the men unloading the Junma in the dark, men who were certainly praying for the moment the power went out, and they could retreat to their bunks. First he shaved the lather from around his mouth, and then instead of finishing his tea, he sipped Chinese whiskey as he drew the razor, the sound like a blade through sharkskin. There’d been a certain thrill to telling the reporter the tall tale, and it was amazing how the Captain was right: the reporter didn’t even want his name.

  Later in the night, after the power was out and the moon had set, Jun Do went on his roof in the absolute darkness and felt his way to the stove flue. He hoped to rig an antenna that would extend from the flue with the pull of a rope. Tonight, he was just running the cable, and even that had to be done under cover of total dark. He could hear the ocean out there, feel the offshoreness of it in the air on his face. And yet, when he sat on the pitch, he could make out none of it. He’d seen the sea in the daylight, been upon it countless times, but what if he hadn’t? What might a person think was out there in the unfathomably grand darkness that lay ahead? The finless sharks, at least, had seen what was below the ocean, and their consolation was that they knew toward what they were descending.

  At dawn, the shock-work whistles sounded, usually Jun Do’s signal to go to bed. The loudspeaker came on and began blaring the morning announcements.

  “Greetings, citizens!” it began.

  There was a knock at the door, and when Jun Do answered, he found the Second Mate. The young man was quite drunk, and he’d been in a vicious fight.

  “Did you hear the news?” the Second Mate asked. “They made me a Hero of the Eternal Revolution—that comes with all the medals and a hero’s pension when I retire.”

  The Second Mate’s ear was torn, and they needed to get the Captain to give his mouth some stitches. The swelling on the boy’s face was general, with a few bright, isolated knots. Pinned on his chest was a medal, the Crimson Star. “Got any snake liquor?” he asked.

  “How about we step down to beer?” Jun Do responded before popping the caps off two bottles of Ryoksong.

  “I like that about you—always ready to drink in the morning. What’s that toast? The longer the night, the shorter the morning.”

  When the Second Mate drank from his bottle, Jun Do could see there were no marks on his knuckles. He said, “Looks like you made some new friends last night.”

  “Let me tell you,” the Second Mate said. “Acts of heroism are easy—becoming a hero is a bitch.”

  “Let’s drink to acts of heroism, then.”

  “And their spoils,” the Second Mate added. “Speaking of which, you have got to check out my wife—wait till you get a load of how beautiful she is.”

  “I look forward to it,” Jun Do told him.

  “No, no, no,” the Second Mate said. He went to the window and pointed to a woman standing alone in the fish-cart lane. “Look at her,” he said. “Isn’t she something? Tell me she’s not something.”

  Jun Do peered through the window. The girl had wet, wide-set eyes. Jun Do knew the look on her face: as if she desperately wanted to be adopted, but not by the parents who were visiting that day.

  “Tell me she’s not outrageous,” the Second Mate said. “Show me the more beautiful woman.”

  “There’s no denying it,” Jun Do said. “You know she’s welcome to come in.”

  “Sorry,” the Second Mate said, and plopped back in his chair. “She won’t set foot in this place. She’s afraid of ghosts. Next year, I’ll probably put a baby in her—then her breasts will swell with milk. I can tell her to come closer if you want a better look. Maybe I’ll have her sing. You’ll fall out the window when you hear that.”

  Jun Do took a pull from his beer. “Have her sing the one about true h
eroes refusing all rewards.”

  “You’ve got a screwed-up sense of humor,” the Second Mate said, holding the cold beer bottle against his ribs. “You know the children of heroes get to go to red-tier schools? Maybe I’ll have a whole brood and live in a house like this. Maybe I’ll live in this very one.”

  “You’re welcome to it,” Jun Do told him. “But it doesn’t look like your wife would join you.”

  “Oh, she’s a child,” he said. “She’ll do anything I say. Seriously, I’ll call her in here. You’ll see, I can make her do anything.”

  “And what about you, you’re not afraid of ghosts?” Jun Do asked.

  The Second Mate looked around, newly appraising the house. “I wouldn’t want to put too much thought into how things ended for the Canning Master’s kids,” he said. “Where did it happen?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “In the bathroom?”

  “There’s a nursery.”

  The Second Mate leaned his head back and looked at the ceiling. And then he closed his eyes. For a moment, Jun Do thought he was asleep. Then the Second Mate spoke up. “Kids,” he said. “That’s what it’s all about, right? That’s what they say.”

  “That’s what they say,” Jun Do said. “But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can’t live with what they’ve done.”

  The Second Mate had been a babe in the ’90s, so to him, these years after the famine must have been ones of glorious plenitude. He took a long drink of beer. “If everyone who had it shitty and bit the dust became a fart,” he said, “the world would stink to the treetops, you know what I mean?”

  “I suppose.”

  “So I don’t believe in ghosts, okay? Someone’s canary dies, and they hear a tweet in the dark, and they think, Oh, it’s the ghost of my bird. But if you ask me, a ghost is just the opposite. It’s something you can feel, that you know is there, but you can’t get a fix on. Like the captain of the Kwan Li. The doctors ended up having to amputate. I don’t know if you heard that or not.”