The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

  “Suppose you had dealt with me,” Jun Do said, even though he had no idea what he was talking about. “What is it you would have wanted?”

  “What would I want?” the Senator asked. “I never heard what you had to offer, exactly. We’d want something solid, something you can mount above the mantel. And it would have to be precious. Everyone would have to know it cost your leader dearly.”

  “For something like that, you’d give us what we wanted?”

  “The boats? Sure we could lay off them, but why? Every damn one of them is freighted with mayhem and compassed toward trouble. But the Dear Leader’s toy?” A whistle came from the Senator’s teeth. “That’s a different prospect. To hand that thing back, we might as well take a piss on the Prime Minister of Japan’s peach tree.”

  “But you admit,” Jun Do said, “that it belongs to the Dear Leader, that you’re holding his property?”

  “The talks are over,” the Senator said. “They happened yesterday, and they went nowhere.”

  The Senator then took his foot off the gas pedal.

  “There is, however, one more issue, Commander,” the Senator said as they drifted to the side of the road. “And it has nothing to do with the negotiations or whatever games y’all are playing.”

  The Mustang pulled beside them. From its passenger seat, her hand hanging out the window, Wanda spoke to the Senator. “You boys all right?” she asked.

  “Just getting a few things straight,” the Senator said. “Don’t wait for us—we’ll be right along.”

  Wanda slapped her hand on the side of the Mustang, and Tommy drove on. Jun Do caught a glimpse of Dr. Song in the backseat, but he couldn’t tell if the old man’s eyes were crinkled in fear or narrowed by betrayal.

  “Here’s the thing,” the Senator said, and his eyes were locked into Jun Do’s. “Wanda says you’ve done some deeds, that there’s blood on your file. I invited you into my house. You slept in my bed, walked amongst my people, a killer. They tell me life isn’t worth much where you’re from, but all these people you met here, they mean an awful lot to me. I’ve dealt with killers before. In fact, I’ll only deal with you next time. But such dealings don’t take place unawares, such people don’t sit down to dinner with your wife, unbeknownst. So, Commander Ga, you can give a message direct to the Dear Leader, and this is on my letterhead. You tell him this kind of business is not appreciated. You tell him no boat is safe now. You tell him he’ll never see his precious toy again—he can kiss it good-bye.”

  The Ilyushin was littered with fast-food wrappers and empty Tecate beer cans. Two black motorcycles blocked the aisle in first class, and most of the seats were taken up by the nine thousand DVDs Comrade Buc’s team had purchased in Los Angeles. Comrade Buc himself looked as though he hadn’t slept. He was camped out in the back of the plane where his boys were watching movies on fold-up computers.

  Dr. Song meditated alone on the plane for some time, and he didn’t stir until they were far from Texas. He came to Jun Do. “You have a wife?” Dr. Song asked.

  “A wife?”

  “The Senator’s wife, she said the dog was for your wife. Is this true, have you a wife?”

  “No,” Jun Do said. “I lied to explain the tattoo on my chest.”

  Dr. Song nodded. “And the Senator, he figured out our ruse with the Minister, and he felt he could only put his faith in you. This is why you rode with him?”

  “Yes,” Jun Do said. “Though the Senator said it was Wanda who figured it out.”

  “Of course,” he said. “And concerning the Senator, what was the nature of your conversation?”

  “He said that he disapproved of our tactics, that the boarding of fishing boats would continue, and that we would never see our precious toy again. That’s the message he wanted me to deliver.”

  “To whom?”

  “To the Dear Leader.”

  “To the Dear Leader, you?” Dr. Song asked. “Why should he think you had his ear?”

  “How should I know?” Jun Do asked. “He must have thought I was someone I’m not.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s a useful tactic,” Dr. Song said. “We cultivated that.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Jun Do said. “I don’t even know what toy he was talking about.”

  “Fair enough,” Dr. Song said. He took Jun Do’s shoulder and squeezed it in a good-natured way. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now. You know what radiation is?”

  Jun Do nodded.

  “The Japanese invented an instrument called a background radiation detector. They pointed it at the sky, to study something about space. When the Dear Leader heard of this device, he asked his scientists if such a thing could be attached to an airplane. He wanted to fly over our mountains and use it to find uranium deep underground. His scientists were unanimous. So the Dear Leader sent a team to the Kitami Observatory in Hokkaido.”

  “They stole it?”

  Dr. Song got a wild look on his face. “The thing’s the size of a Mercedes,” he said. “We sent a fishing boat to pick it up, but along came the Yankees.” Here, Dr. Song laughed. “Perhaps it was the same crew who fed you to the sharks.”

  Dr. Song woke the Minister, and together, the three concocted a story to mitigate their failure. Dr. Song believed that they should depict their talks as a complete success until, as they were about to agree on the deal, a higher power interceded via a phone call. “It will be assumed this is the American President, and Pyongyang’s anger will be redirected from us to a meddlesome, vexing figure.”

  Together, they practiced timelines, rehearsed key moments, and repeated significant American phrases. The phone was brown. It sat on a tall stool. It rang three times. The Senator only spoke four words into it, “Yes … certainly … of course.”

  The trip back seemed to take twice as long. Jun Do fed the puppy a half-eaten breakfast burrito. Then it disappeared under all those seats and proved impossible to find. When darkness came, he could see the red and green lights of other, distant jetliners. Once everyone was asleep, and there was no life on the plane but the pilots smoking in the glow of their instruments, Comrade Buc sought him out.

  “Here’s your DVD,” he said. “The best movie ever made.”

  Jun Do turned the case in the faint light. “Thanks,” he said, but then he asked, “Is this a story of triumph or of failure?”

  Comrade Buc shrugged. “They say it’s about love,” he said. “But I don’t watch black-and-white films.” Then he looked more closely at Jun Do. “Hey, look, your trip wasn’t a failure, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  He pointed into the dark cabin, where Dr. Song was asleep, puppy in his lap.

  “Don’t you worry about Dr. Song,” Comrade Buc said. “That guy’s a survivor. During the war, he got an American tank crew to adopt him. He helped the GIs read the road signs and negotiate with civilians. They gave him tins of food, and he spent the whole war in the safety of a turret. That’s what he could do when he was only seven.”

  “Are you telling me this to reassure me, or yourself?” Jun Do asked.

  Comrade Buc seemed not to hear this. He shook his head and smiled. “How the hell am I going to get these fucking motorcycles off the plane?”

  In darkness, they set down on the uninhabited island of Kraznatov to refuel. There were no landing lights, so the pilots dead-reckoned the approach and then lined up by the purple glow of the moonlit strip. Two thousand kilometers from the nearest land, the station had been built to service Soviet sub-hunting planes. In the shed that held the pump batteries was a coffee can. Here, Comrade Buc placed a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills, then helped the pilots with the heavy Jet A-1 hoses.

  While Dr. Song slept on the plane, Jun Do and Comrade Buc smoked in the crackling wind. The island was nothing more than three fuel tanks and a strip surrounded by rocks glazed white with bird guano and littered with chips of multicolored plastic and beached drift nets. Comrade Buc’s scar glowed in the moonlight.

  “Nobod
y’s ever safe,” Comrade Buc said, and gone was his jovial sidekick tone. Behind them, the old Ilyushin’s wings drooped and groaned as they took on their payload of fuel. “But if I thought someone on this plane was headed to the camps,” he added, turning to Jun Do to make sure he was being heard, “I’d smash his head on these rocks myself.”

  The pilots pulled the blocks and spun the plane, nose into the wind. They cycled the engines, but before lifting over the dark, choppy water, they opened the bilge, slopping out all the plane’s sewage in a midnight streak down the runway.

  They crossed China in darkness, and with dawn, they flew above the train tracks leading south from Shenyang, following them all the way to Pyongyang. The airport was north of the city, so Jun Do could get no good look at the fabled capital, with its May Day Stadium, Mansudae Mausoleum, and flaming-red Tower of Juche. Ties were straightened, the trash picked up, and, finally, Comrade Buc brought Jun Do the puppy, which his men had crawled the length of the cabin to capture.

  But Jun Do wouldn’t take the dog. “It’s a gift for Sun Moon,” he said. “Will you get it to her for me?”

  Jun Do could see the questions moving through Comrade Buc’s eyes, but he voiced none of them. Instead, Comrade Buc offered a simple nod.

  The landing gear was lowered, and on approach, the goats on the runway somehow knew the moment to wander away. But touching down, Dr. Song saw the vehicles that were waiting to meet the plane, and he turned, panic on his face.

  “Forget everything,” he called to the Minister and Jun Do. “The plan must completely change.”

  “What is it?” Jun Do asked. He looked at the Minister, whose eyes showed fear.

  “There’s no time,” Dr. Song said. “The Americans never intended to return what they stole from us. You got that? That’s the new story.”

  They huddled in the galley, bracing themselves as the pilots leaned hard on the brakes.

  “The new story is this,” Dr. Song said. “The Americans had an elaborate plan to humiliate us. They made us do groundskeeping and cut the Senator’s weeds, yes?”

  “That’s right,” Jun Do said. “We had to eat outside, with our bare hands, surrounded by dogs.”

  The Minister said, “There was no band or red carpet to greet us. And they drove us around in obsolete cars.”

  “We were shown nice shoes at a store, but then they were put away,” Jun Do said. “At dinner, they made us wear peasant shirts.”

  The Minister said, “I had to share my bed with a dog!”

  “Good, good,” Dr. Song said. He had a desperate smile on his face, but his eyes sparkled with the challenge. “This will speak to the Dear Leader. This might save our skins.”

  The vehicles on the runway were Soviet Tsirs, three of them. The crows were all manufactured in Chongjin, at the Sungli 58 factory, so Jun Do had seen thousands of them. They were used to move troops and cargo, and they had hauled many an orphan. In the rainy season, a Tsir was the only thing that could move at all.

  Dr. Song refused to look at the crows or their drivers smoking together on the running boards. He smiled broadly and greeted the two men who were there to debrief them. But the Minister, grim faced, couldn’t stop staring, at the tall truck tires, the drum fuel tanks. Jun Do suddenly understood that if someone were to be transported from Pyongyang to a prison camp, only a crow could get you over the bad mountain roads.

  Jun Do could see the giant portrait of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung atop the airport terminal. But the two debriefers led them in a different direction—past a group of women in jumpsuits who faced a pile of shovels as they did their morning calisthenics and past a plane whose fuselage lay on the ground, blowtorched into four sections. Old men seated on buckets were stripping the copper wire from it.

  They came to an empty hangar, voluminous inside. Potholes in the cement floor were pooled with muddy water. There were several mechanics’ bays filled with tools, lifts, and workbenches, and Dr. Song, the Minister, and Jun Do were each placed in one, just out of sight of one another.

  Jun Do sat at a table with the debriefers, who began going through his things.

  “Tell us about your trip,” one said. “And don’t leave anything out.”

  There was a hooded typewriter on the table, but they made no move to use it.

  At first, Jun Do only mentioned the things they’d agreed upon—the indignities of dogs, the paper plates, of eating under the hot sun. As he spoke, the two men opened his bourbon and, drinking, both approved. They divided his cigarettes right in front of him. They seemed especially fond of the little flashlight, and they interrupted him to make sure he wasn’t hiding another. They tasted his beef jerky, tried on his calfskin gloves.

  “Start again,” the other one told him. “And say it all.”

  He kept listing the humiliations—how there was no band at the airport, no red carpet, how Tommy had left his spoor in the backseat. Like animals, they had been made to eat with their bare hands. He tried to remember how many bullets had been fired from the old guns. He described the old cars. Did he mention the dog in his bed? Could he have a glass of water? No time, they said, soon this would be over.

  One debriefer turned the DVD in his hand. “Is this high definition?” he asked.

  The other debriefer waved him off. “Forget it,” he said. “That movie’s black-and-white.”

  They snapped several pictures with the camera, but could find no way to view them.

  “It’s broken,” Jun Do said.

  “And these?” they asked, holding up the antibiotics.

  “Female pills,” Jun Do told them.

  “You’ll have to give us your story,” one of them said. “We’ll need to get all of it down. We’re going to be right back, but while we’re gone, you should practice. We’ll be listening, we’ll be able to hear everything you say.”

  “Start to finish,” the other man said.

  “Where do I start?” Jun Do asked him. Did the story of his trip to Texas begin when the car came for him or when he was declared a hero or when the Second Mate drifted off into the waves? And finish? He had a horrible feeling that this story was nowhere near finished.

  “Practice,” the debriefer said.

  Together, they left the repair bay, and then he could hear the muffled echoes of the Minister now telling his story. “A car came for me,” Jun Do said aloud. “It was morning. The ships in the harbor were drying their nets. The car was a Mercedes, four-door, with two men driving. It had windshield wipers and a factory radio …”

  He spoke to the rafters. Up there, he could see birds bobbing their heads as they looked down upon him. The more detailed he made his story, the more strange and unbelievable it seemed to him. Had Wanda really served him iced lemonade? Had the dog actually brought him a rib bone after his shower?

  When the debriefers returned, Jun Do had only recited his story to the part about first opening the cooler of tiger meat on the plane. One of them was listening to the Minister’s iPod, and the other one looked upset. For some reason, Jun Do’s mouth went back to the script. “There was a dog on the bed,” he said. “We were forced to cut brush, the seat had been spoored.”

  “You sure you don’t have one of these?” one asked, holding up the iPod.

  “Maybe he’s hiding it.”

  “Is that true? Are you hiding it?”

  “The cars were ancient,” Jun Do said. “The guns dangerously old.”

  The first story kept coming back into his mind, and he became paranoid that he might accidentally say that the phone had rung four times and the Senator had said three words into it. Then he remembered that was wrong, the phone had rung three times, and the Senator had spoken four words, and then Jun Do tried to clear his mind because that was wrong, the phone never rang, the American President didn’t call at all.

  “Hey, snap out of it,” one of the debriefers said. “We asked the old man where his camera was, and he said he didn’t know what we were talking about. You all got the same gloves a
nd cigarettes and everything.”

  “There’s nothing else,” Jun Do said. “You’ve got everything I own.”

  “We’ll see what the third guys says.”

  They handed him a piece of paper and a pen.

  “It’s time to get it down,” they said, and left the bay again.

  Jun Do picked up the pen. “A car came for me,” he wrote, but the pen barely had any ink in it. He decided to skip to when they were already in Texas. He shook the pen and added, “And took me to a boot store.” He knew the pen only had one more sentence in it. By pressing hard he scratched out, “Here my humiliations began.”

  Jun Do lifted the paper and read his two-sentence story. Dr. Song had said that what mattered in North Korea was not the man but his story—what did it mean, then, when his story was nothing, just a suggestion of a life?

  One of the crow drivers entered the hangar. He came to Jun Do, asked him, “You the guy I’m taking?”

  “Taking where?” Jun Do asked.

  A debriefer came over. “What’s the problem?” he asked.

  “My headlights are shot,” the driver said. “I have to go now or I’ll never make it.”

  The debriefer turned to Jun Do. “Look, your story checks out,” he said. “You’re free to go.”

  Jun Do lifted the paper. “This is all I got,” he said. “The pen ran out of ink.”

  The debriefer said, “All that matters is that you got something. We sent your actual paperwork in already. This is just a personal statement. I don’t know why they make us get them.”

  “Do I need to sign it?”

  “Couldn’t hurt,” the debriefer said. “Yes, let’s make it official. Here, use my pen.”

  He handed Jun Do the pen Dr. Song had been given from the mayor of Vladivostok.

  The pen wrote beautifully—he hadn’t signed his name since language school.

  “Better take him now,” the debriefer told the driver. “Or he’ll be here all day. The one old guy asked for extra paper.” He gave the driver a pack of American Spirit cigarettes, then asked the driver if he had the medics with him.