by J. M. Lee
At three p.m., citizens of Pyongyang poured into the stadium. Women were dressed up in beautiful hanbok, some in jade and others in purple. Men wore Mao suits or military uniforms. The setting sun dyed the stands as darkness crept across the stadium. Spotlights popped on. The audience roared. To grand music, the sun rose above Mount Paektu in the scenery. The words Eternal Sun appeared, and the spotlight shined on the dais in the VIP viewing area.
“The Dear Leader and U.S. Secretary of State Albright have entered the viewing area and are now seated,” intoned the voice overhead.
The head conductor raised his flag. The word Welcome! appeared against a yellow background, in both English and Korean. Applause and shouts rang out. I looked out as music throbbed through the stadium. A yellow sunflower bloomed and turned into a large circle. I calculated the number of petals—eight—and the diameter of the resulting circle—1.25 times greater than the original flower.
At that very moment, my rocket began to shoot sparks and let out a huge boom. The republic’s flag was clearly visible on its side as it shook and shot out plumes of smoke. The audience thundered, raising their hands in the air.
The principle of the rocket could be explained through the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. Δυ = υ ln(m0/m1) + υ0. Δυ was the maximum change of velocity of the rocket. m0 was the rocket’s mass, m1 was the rocket’s mass without propellant, υ0 was the rocket’s initial speed, and υ was the propellant’s jet velocity. Δυ became larger the bigger υ and m0 were and the smaller m1 was.
With a large boom, the rocket shot up out of the scenery into the air, leaving behind sparks. The stadium roared. The rocket grew smaller in the darkness before flickering and disappearing.
According to my calculations, the satellite on the rocket would reach orbit 280 kilometers above ground in twenty-eight minutes and begin to circle the earth.
A flock of white doves flew up in the scenery. My design allowed for 284 doves. At first, 64 flew up, then 220 followed them. 284 and 220 were amicable numbers. 220’s factor is 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55, 110, and 284’s factor is 1, 2, 4, 71, 142. The sum of 220’s factor is 284, and the sum of 284’s factor is 220. Math is beautiful, the way the world is.
The next morning, Father was holding the Rodong Sinmun when I woke. He read a particular article out loud to me.
On Historic Visit to the Republic
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright Changes
American Flag Pin to Heart Brooch
October 24, 2000
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright arrived at Sunan Airport on October 23. After paying respects at the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, where the Great Leader is laid to rest, she entered three hours of talks with the Dear Leader at the Paekhwawon Guesthouse, where she is staying. Afterward, Secretary Albright viewed the performance by the ever-victorious Workers Party at the Rungnado May Day Stadium. At the banquet hall, she appeared without the American flag pin she had been wearing in her initial meetings with the Dear Leader, instead donning a heart-shaped brooch.
Secretary Albright, known for her “brooch diplomacy,” wears pins depicting bees, eagles, and scorpions when dealing with hostile countries, and butterflies when meeting with allies. When the Middle East discussions were stalled, she wore a bicycle brooch, urging continuous advancement. The American flag pin likely signaled her firm position at the talks, while the heart pin suggests her hopes for friendly relations between the countries. However, the precise reason for the sudden change in adornment remains unclear.
The cell door screams as it closes. Banks looks at me with hostility. “1, 11, 21, 1211, 111221, 312211. What do these numbers mean? You wrote them in blood next to the body.”
I don’t answer. He keeps asking questions, glaring at me. I tune him out and think about beautiful things. Numbers and figures, theorems and hypotheses, proofs and solutions, symmetrical expressions. 47 and 74. 47 plus 74 is 121. 39 and 93 reveals an even more profound symmetry. If you add the two, you get 132, which isn’t itself symmetrical but if you flip it, you get 231, and if you add that to 132, you get 363. I look up to see Angela standing behind Banks.
“The numbers themselves, they don’t mean anything,” she tells him.
Banks glances back at her. “It was written in the victim’s blood. At the scene of the crime. It could mean something.”
Angela shoots me an imperceptible smile. “It’s just a sequence of numbers. The first is one. One one. You write that out, and you get eleven. That’s two ones, right? So then the next is twenty-one, which is one two and one one, so that makes it 1211. That’s one one, one two, and two ones, so the next is 111221. And so forth. It just shows that someone with Asperger’s was panicking. In a state of half-suspended animation, the person fled into the world of numbers.”
“Asperger’s? This kid has Asperger’s?”
“You clearly don’t understand the whole picture, although you know quite a lot about this young man,” answers Angela without bothering to look up from her file. “You can’t make him talk. Threats don’t work on him, and your questions don’t, either.”
“How would you know?” Banks snaps.
“People with Asperger’s have difficulties in social situations but they don’t have an issue with language. He’s not going to respond to standard interrogation tactics. Do you see? Stop bullying the patient, please. You can go now. I have to examine him.”
Banks gives up and leaves the room.
I write down a symmetrical expression. I = A. I is me, A is Angela. We both love numbers, particularly prime numbers, and we appreciate symmetry. I can tell we both see beauty in the world.
“Did you kill him?” asks Angela gently. “And did you really commit all those other crimes?”
“No.”
“But you were found at the scene. And you’re wanted by Interpol.”
“I don’t know what to do,” I mumble.
“Why don’t you tell me the rest of your story?” she suggests. “Maybe I’ll be able to help you.”
I hesitate. Should I? Wasn’t it Aristotle who said that you have to reach the fundamentals of something if you want to understand it?
She takes my temperature and squints at the thermometer. “You have more than ten stab wounds,” she continues casually. “Your bones were broken.”
“I can prove why a digon doesn’t exist,” I tell her.
Angela rips out a piece of paper from my medical chart. She hands me a pen. I enter the quiet world of numbers. She studies my work. “Where did you learn this?”
“I learned everything from the streets.”
“How so?”
I tell her it’s a long story. It all happened a long time ago.
THREE FATHERS
SPSD agents burst into our apartment on November 29. They overturned the table, ripped up the floorboards in the bathroom, and threw dishes on the ground. The household’s symmetry collapsed, tipping the balance. I carefully put things back in their place as the agents ripped off wallpaper, rummaged through the closet, and punched holes in the ceiling. They finally found it—a blue book buried deep in the closet. Father’s eyes clouded over. The SPSD officers bent my parents’ arms behind their backs and took them away. They were barely given enough time to put their shoes on. I was left alone in the mess.
The next day, my math teacher arranged to have me stay at the school dormitory. Jae-ha gave me his bed and took the floor.
“Why did they take my parents away?” I asked into the darkness.
“Because of that book, no?” murmured Jae-ha.
When day broke, other students began to glare at me. Whispers floated from person to person—traitor, political offender, Jesus lover, prison. They cut my skin as they flew past.
“Don’t worry,” my math teacher said. “Your parents are probably fine.” His face was grim, though, and his eyes were troubled. Something was happening, but I didn’t know what.
On Sunday afternoon, Jae-ha and I headed to the USS Pueblo for th
e first time in a while. The banks of green grass had yellowed, and the river was quiet. The barren weeping willow branches swept against one another. Fish no longer leaped out of the water. Everything seemed changed.
The senior colonel poked his head out from the top of the bridge. He was grizzled and perhaps a bit more frail. There were no other visitors. We followed him to the bottom of the ship. He wheezed when he talked and let out a dry cough whenever he paused. Jae-ha told him that my parents were taken by the SPSD. The senior colonel’s expression darkened. He led us into the gallery and equipment lock. I took comfort in my routine, reading the confession and joint announcement and studying the communications equipment. The senior colonel went into the cabin and brought something for me. “Take it,” he urged. “It’s Knight Miecher’s notebook.”
“I’d like to meet Captain Miecher,” I said. “I’ll get this back to him.”
The senior colonel nodded. “You did say people are linked together. You can meet anyone in the world through six steps, right? Please get it back to him. But don’t tell anyone about it.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you talk about it, people will think you’re crazy.”
We returned to the dormitory to find our math teacher in his coat, waiting for me. “Gil-mo, you can go home now. I’ll take you.”
Jae-ha trailed after us.
The apartment didn’t seem like ours. We had enjoyed precarious comfort and a delicate peace, but now, it felt unsettled and nerve-wracking. Father was sitting in the living room, defeated and somber. His face was no longer symmetrical, with one eye the color of a plum and a lump swelling on his forehead. He avoided my gaze. “Pack your knapsack. Take only necessities.”
Where was Mother? What did I need? What should I leave behind? I began to gather my belongings. Two pairs of long underwear. Winter pants.
“Take your summer uniform,” Father called.
We weren’t going to be home next summer? Were we ever coming back? I packed my toothbrush, a cup, a pair of worn shoes, a winter hat with earflaps, spare buttons in a round tin, two wooden dice, a compass and protractor, a thirty-centimeter ruler, and a three-meter-long tape measure.
“Just the necessities!” snapped Father. “What do you need all of that for?” He stood up, his joints cracking. On the other side of our torn curtains, four SPSD agents were waiting behind a military truck parked in the dark. Their breaths were white against the night. Father swung a heavy black bag over his shoulder.
“What about Mother?” I asked.
“She won’t be coming with us.”
Where was she?
My math teacher took his glasses off and used his sleeve to polish them. “Gil-mo, the world is a beautiful place. Don’t forget that, all right?”
“It’s beautiful because it’s made of numbers,” I reminded him.
He nodded, then slid his hand in his inner pocket. He hesitated before taking out an old calculator. “When things get difficult, look at the numbers that appear on the screen. You’ll remember that the world is a beautiful place.” He put it in my knapsack.
Jae-ha pulled his gloves off and helped me put them on. The agents yanked my knapsack away and tossed it on the cargo bed of the truck. They pushed me and Father on. The truck began to rattle down the alley. Jae-ha began running after the truck. He held out a hand. I grabbed it. The truck sped up, and his hand was pulled out of my grasp. He tumbled to the ground. “Gil-mo!” he called, his voice cracking. “Take care, Gil-mo!” And then the only friend I had was out of sight. Jae-ha, whose sleeves didn’t cover his wrists because he grew so quickly, whose upper lip was dark with the beginnings of a moustache, whose mastery of go was astounding.
“At least you don’t understand what’s going on,” Father murmured next to me.
He was wrong, though. I understood everything.
Father had lied to Mother and me. He had secretly become Christian, believing in the father in heaven. Everyone in the republic had two fathers: the one who returned home every night, reeking of sweat, only to gaze at his hungry family’s vacant eyes, and the Great Father, who looked over his sons and daughters from the portrait hanging in every home, from the enormous statue on Changgwang Street, from the advertising tower, from everywhere, really, in the nation. But neither man could sate their children’s hunger. My father, I suppose, had needed a new father. He had managed to get his hands on a popular-edition Bible, smuggled in from China and circulated in secret. My ideology teacher told us that fear made people look to God, and reminded us that we must be warriors for the republic and not give in to fear. But everyone was afraid. We all celebrated the Great Father and the Dear Leader because of our fear. Father was afraid, too, and faith revealed itself to him one day, the day he delivered the death of a young factory worker.
The dead man’s mother, instead of wailing and fainting, closed her eyes quietly, her face suffused with peace, her lips moving imperceptibly. After the funeral, my father went up to her. “I hope you won’t mind my asking this,” he said. “Mothers who lose their sons are grief-stricken. How are you able to remain so calm?”
She looked at him carefully. “It’s because I believe he went to a peaceful place.”
Father was intrigued. Two months later, the dead man’s mother handed him a small blue book, and he became a member of an underground church. Without telling anyone, he embraced another father. Even as he secretly prayed to his father in heaven, he remained loyal to the Great Father and the Dear Leader. Over bowls of watery corn gruel, he reminded us that we should be grateful to the Great Father. Mother would ladle milky broth into my bowl and glare at him. “This corn gruel isn’t going to fill us,” she snapped. “What should we be grateful for?”
“For everything,” Father would reply serenely.
I would slurp up the broth and look longingly at Father’s bowl, and he would, without fail, push his bowl toward me, although two servings of corn gruel inevitably gave me diarrhea all night. Once, I woke in the middle of the night for yet another trip to the bathroom. On my way back to bed, I spotted Father kneeling in the dark living room, murmuring quietly. I watched him quietly. A long time later, he stopped talking to himself and glanced at me. “I’m praying for the death I delivered today.”
“Do they come back to life if you do?”
“No, a prayer is a stamp you put on the dead. It helps their souls reach heaven safely.”
Did the dead want to go there? Back in bed, I wondered what happened if the souls wanted to come back. What happened if the dead were delivered to the wrong place?
In the end, instead of sating our hunger, Father’s god had sent us to prison camp.
The truck hurtled through the darkness. Cold air stung my face. Father hunched toward me in an attempt to shield me from the wind, but he was too thin to block much of anything. He took his scarf off and wound it around my neck.
“How could you fool us all like that?” I asked him.
Father spoke haltingly. “I decided to think of the Great Father as the father in heaven and his son, the Dear Leader, as Jesus Christ. So when I thanked the Great Father for feeding and clothing us, I was really thanking God for giving us daily bread. The Dear Leader’s love for the people was, in my mind, Jesus Christ’s love for us. That’s how I was able to remain a loyal Party member.”
I was familiar with the replacement concept. He was substituting a complicated formula for a specific value in an equation. For instance, if (x2 + 2y + 4) (x2 + 2y + 6) = 0, the value of x2 + 2y was substituted as T, making the formula (T + 4) (T + 6) = 0. But it didn’t all make sense to me. “But you became the enemy of the people. You’re an impure element.”
“That is according to the Father’s will.”
“Which father?” I was confused now. “The Great Father?”
“No, the only Father there is. The Father in heaven. He loves us all. He sent His son into the world to wash us of our sins.”
I couldn’t grasp how my frail father, the Gre
at Father, and the father in heaven were different from one another, and who among them was the father who truly loved me. “What kind of father would send his son to this world just to wash us of our sins? Someone like that couldn’t possibly exist.”
“Whether he exists or not isn’t important,” Father explained. “What’s important is the belief that there’s someone who loves us.”
“I’d like to meet this son of his.”
“We’ll be able to,” Father said. “You see, he’s a friend of the poor, the sick, the hungry, and the oppressed.”
Every time the truck halted in front of another door, more people were shoved in. Young women, old men, drowsy teenage boys, and children in arms. They smelled warm. They avoided us, as we now smelled of the cold wind. Nobody spoke or cried. Eventually the warmth in their bodies dissipated and was replaced by the smell of the abandoned. The truck continued into the black night. None of us could tell if the dark mass next to us was luggage or another person. Someone got motion sick and began to heave. Fear and anxiety dribbled from people’s bodies.
HEAVEN AND ITS CONTENTS
We bounced and jostled one another as the truck rattled up an unpaved mountain road. We took in one another’s faces in the dim light of dawn, at lined foreheads, sunken eyes, and broken teeth. The truck came to a halt around noon. We were at the end of the road. The sky hung low, somber and gray. People got up, their limbs stiff and their sleep-deprived eyes bloodshot.
Shabby barracks dotted the gray wasteland. Barbed wire topped the brick walls, and the dirty wooden sign said Penal Labor Colony No. 21. We were at Muryong Prison Camp—this was where political prisoners and impure elements were incarcerated. In the administrative offices, we each received a thin blanket and a single uniform. Our residence was another hour and a half into the camp. Dust bloomed on unpaved roads and clogged my throat.
