The Orphan Master's Son (12 page)

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 heroes 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.”

“I didn't,” Jun Do told him.

“When he woke in the hospital, he asked,
Where's my arm
, and the doctors said,
Sorry
,
but we had to amputate
, and the captain says,
I know my arm is gone
,
where is it
, but they won't tell him. He can feel it, he says, making a fist without him. In the tub, he can feel the hot water with his missing arm. But where is it—in the trash or burned? He knows it's out there, he can literally feel it, but he's got no powers.”

“To me,” Jun Do said, “what everybody gets wrong about ghosts is the notion that they're dead. In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range.”

“Like the Captain's wife?”

“Like the Captain's wife.”

“I never even met her,” the Second Mate said. “But I see her face on the Captain, and it's hard not to wonder where she is and who she's with and does she still think about the Captain.”

Jun Do lifted his beer and drank in honor of this insight.

“Or maybe your Americans at the bottom of the ocean,” the Second Mate said. “You hear them down there tinkering around, you know they're important, but they're just beyond your reach. It only makes sense, you know, it's right in line with your profile.”

“My profile? What's my profile?”

“Oh, it's nothing,” the Second Mate said. “Just something the Captain talked about once.”

“Yeah?”

“He only said that you were an orphan, that they were always after things they couldn't have.”

“Really? You sure he didn't say it was because orphans try to steal other people's lives?”

“Don't get upset. The Captain just said I shouldn't be too friendly with you.”

“Or that when they die, orphans like to take other people with them? Or that there's always a reason someone becomes an orphan? There are all kinds of things people say about orphans, you know.”

The Second Mate put his hand up. “Look,” he said. “The Captain just told me that nobody had ever taught you loyalty.”

“Like you know anything about it. And if you have any interest in facts, I'm not even an orphan.”

“He said you'd say that. He wasn't trying to be mean,” the Second Mate said. “He just said that the military weeds out all the orphans and puts them through special training that makes them not have feelings when bad things happen to other people.”

Through the window, the sun was starting to glow in the rigging of the fishing fleet. And the young woman outside stepped aside every time a two-wheeled, fish-hauling cart came by.

Jun Do said, “How about you tell me what you're doing here?”

“I told you,” he said. “I wanted to show you my wife—she's very beautiful, don't you think?”

Jun Do just looked at him.

The Second Mate went on, “Of course she is. She's like a magnet, you know, you can't resist her beauty. My tattoo doesn't do her justice. And we practically have a family already. I'm a hero now, of course, and it's pretty much a lock that I'll make Captain someday. I'm just saying, I'm a guy who's got a lot to lose.” The Second Mate paused, choosing his words. “But you, you got no one. You're on a cot in the kitchen of a monster's house.” The woman outside made a gesture of beckoning, but the Second Mate waved her off. “If you'd just punched that American in the face,” he said, “you'd be in Seoul by now, you'd be free. That's what I don't get. If a guy has no strings, what's stopping him?”

How to tell the Second Mate that the only way to shake your ghosts was to find them, and that the only place Jun Do could do that was right here. How to explain the recurring dream that he's listening to his radio, that he's getting the remnants of important messages, from his mother, from other boys in his orphanage. The messages are hard to dial in, and he's awoken before with his hand on the bunk post, as if it were his UHF fine tuner. Sometimes the messages are from people who are relaying
messages from other people who have spoken to people who have seen his mother. His mother wants to get urgent messages to him. She wants to tell him where she is, she wants to tell him why, she keeps repeating her name, over and over, though he can't quite make it out. How to explain that in Seoul, he knows, the messages would stop.

“Come,” Jun Do said. “We should get you to the Captain for some stitches.”

“Are you kidding? I'm a hero. I get to go to the hospital now.”