The Orphan Master's Son (25 page)

“No,” he said. “It's just these stitches. They itch like crazy.”

“We'll get those out in no time,” she said. “Can I ask what happened?”

“It's a story I'd rather not tell,” he said. “But it was a shark that did it.”

“Madre de Dios,”
Pilar said.

Wanda was standing next to the Senator's wife. She held open a white first-aid kit the size of a briefcase. “You mean the kind with the fins, that live in the ocean?” Wanda asked.

“I lost a lot of blood,” he said.

They just stared at him.

“My friend wasn't so lucky,” he added.

“I understand,” the Senator's wife said. “Take a deep breath.”

Jun Do inhaled.

“Really deep,” she said. “Lift your shoulders.”

He took a breath, deep as he could. It came with a wince.

The Senator's wife nodded. “Your eleventh rib,” she said. “Still healing. Seriously, you want a full checkup, now's your chance.”

Did she sniff his breath? Jun Do had the feeling there were things she was noting but no longer pointing out. “No, ma'am,” he told her.

Wanda found a pair of tweezers and some finger scissors with pointed, baby blades. He had nine lacerations total, each one laced shut, and the Senator's wife started with the longest one, along the peak of his biceps.

Pilar pointed at his chest. “Who's she?”

Jun Do looked down. He didn't know what to say. “That's my wife,” he said.

“Very beautiful,” Pilar said.

“She is beautiful,” Wanda said. “It's a beautiful tattoo, too. Do you mind if I take a pic?”

Jun Do had only had his photograph taken that one time, by the old Japanese woman with the wooden camera, and he never saw the picture that came of it. But it haunted him, what she must have seen. Still, he didn't know how to say no.

“Great,” Wanda said, and with a small camera, she snapped a picture of his chest, then his injured arm, and finally she lifted the camera to his face and there was a flash in his eyes.

Pilar asked, “Is she a translator, too?”

“My wife's an actress,” he said.

“What's her name?” Wanda asked.

“Her name?” Jun Do asked. “Her name is Sun Moon.”

The name was beautiful, he noticed, and it felt good in his mouth and to say aloud, the name of his wife, to these three women.
Sun Moon
.

“What is this stuff?” the Senator's wife asked. She held up a strand of suturing she'd removed. It was variously clear, yellow, and rust-colored.

“It's fishing line,” he said.

“I guess if you'd caught tetanus, we'd already know by now,” she said. “In med school, they taught us never to use monofilament, but I can't for the life of me remember why.”

“What are you going to bring her?” Wanda asked. “As a souvenir of your trip to Texas?”

Jun Do shook his head. “What do you suggest?”

Distractedly, the Senator's wife asked, “What's she like?”

“She likes traditional dresses. Her yellow one is my favorite. She wears her hair back to show off her gold earrings. She likes to sing karaoke. She likes movies.”

“No,” Wanda said. “What's she like, her personality?”

Jun Do took a moment. “She needs lots of attention,” he said, then
paused, unsure how to proceed. “She is not free with her love. Her father was afraid that men would take advantage of her beauty, that they would be drawn to her for the wrong reasons, so when she was sixteen, he got her a job in a fish factory, where no men from Pyongyang would find her. That experience shaped her, made her strive for what she wanted. Still, she found a husband who is domineering. They say he can be a real asshole. And she is trapped by the state. She cannot choose her own movie roles. Except for karaoke, she can only sing the songs they tell her to sing. I suppose what matters is that, despite her success and stardom, her beauty and her children, Sun Moon is a sad woman. She is unaccountably alone. She plays the
gayageum
all day, plucking notes that are lonesome and forlorn.”

There was a pause, and Jun Do realized all three women were staring at him.

“You're not an asshole husband,” Wanda said. “I know the look of one.”

The Senator's wife stopped tugging sutures, and wholly without guile, appraised his eyes. She looked at the tattoo on Jun Do's chest. She asked, “Is there a way I could talk to her? I feel that if I could just speak to her, I would be able to help.” On the counter was a phone, one with a loopy cord that connected the handset to the base. “Can you get her on the line?” she asked.

“There are few phones,” Jun Do said.

Pilar opened her cell phone. “I have international minutes,” she said.

Wanda said, “I don't think North Korea works like that.”

The Senator's wife nodded and finished removing the stitches in silence. When she was done, she irrigated the wounds again, then stripped off her gloves.

Jun Do pulled on the driver's shirt he'd been wearing for two days. His arm felt as thick and raw as the day of the bite. As for the tie, he held it in his hand as the Senator's wife did his buttons—her fingers strong and measured as they coaxed each button through its eye.

“Was the Senator an astronaut?” he asked her.

“He trained as one,” the Senator's wife said. “But he never got the call.”

“Do you know the satellite?” he asked. “The one that orbits with people from many nations aboard?”

“The Space Station?” Wanda asked.

“Yes,” Jun Do said. “That must be it. Tell me, is it built for peace and brotherhood?”

The ladies looked at each other. “Yes,” the Senator's wife said. “I suppose it is.”

The Senator's wife rummaged through kitchen drawers until she found a few doctors' samples of antibiotics. She slipped two foil packets into his shirt pocket. “For later, if you get sick,” she said. “Take them if you have a fever. Can you tell the difference between a bacterial and a viral infection?”

He nodded.

“No,” Wanda said to the Senator's wife. “I don't think he can.”

The Senator's wife said, “If you have a fever and are bringing up green or brown mucus, then take three of these a day until they're gone.” She popped the first capsule out of the foil and handed it to him. “We'll start a cycle now, just in case.”

Wanda poured him a glass of water, but after he'd popped the pill in his mouth and chewed it up, he said, “No thanks, I'm not thirsty.”

“Bless your heart,” the Senator's wife said.

Pilar opened the cooler. “Ay,” she said and quickly closed it. “What I'm supposed to do with this? Tonight is Tex-Mex.”

“My word,” the Senator's wife said, shaking her head. “Tiger.”

“I don't know,” Wanda said. “I kind of want to try it.”

“Did you smell it?” Pilar asked.

“Wanda,” the Senator's wife said. “We could all go to hell for what's in that cooler.”

Jun Do jumped off the counter. With one hand, he began tucking in his shirt.

“If my wife were here,” he said, “she'd tell me to throw it out and replace it with flank steak. She'd say you can't taste the difference, anyway, and now everyone eats, and no one loses face. At dinner, I'd talk about how great it was, how it was the best meat I'd ever had, and that would make her smile.”

Pilar looked to the Senator's wife. “Tiger tacos?”

The Senator's wife tried the words in her mouth. “Tiger tacos.”

“Pak Jun Do, what's called for now is rest,” the Senator's wife said. “I'm going to show you to your room,” she added with a quiet fierceness, as if she were transgressing somehow by being alone with him. The house had
many hallways, lined with more family photos, these framed in wood and metal. The door to the room where he would sleep was slightly open, and when they swung it wide, a dog leaped off the bed. The Senator's wife didn't seem concerned. The bed was covered with a quilt, and by pulling it taut, she removed the dog's impression.

“My grandmother was quite the quilter,” she said, then looked into Jun Do's eyes. “That's where you make a blanket out of scraps from your life. It doesn't take money, and the blanket tells a story.” Then she showed Jun Do how to read the quilt. “There was a mill in Odessa that printed panels of Bible stories on its flour sacks. The panels were like church windows—they let people see the story. This piece of lace is from the window of the house Grandmother left when she was married at fifteen. This panel is Exodus and here is Christ Wandering, both from flour sacks. The black velvet is from the hem of her mother's funeral dress. She died not long after my grandmother came to Texas, and the family sent her this black swatch. This starts a sad time in her life—a patch of baby blanket from a lost child, a swatch of a graduation gown she purchased but never got to wear, the faded cotton of her husband's uniform. But look here, see the colors and fabrics of a new wedding, of children and prosperity? And of course the last panel is the Garden. Much loss and uncertainty she had to endure before she could sew that ending to her own story. If I could have reached your wife Sun Moon, that's what I would have spoken to her about.”

On the bedside table was a Bible. She brought it to him. “Wanda's right—you're not an a-hole husband,” she said. “I can tell you care about your wife. I'm just a woman she never met on the other side of the world, but could you give her this for me? These words always bring me solace. Scripture will always be there, no matter what doors are closed to her.”

Jun Do held the book, felt its soft cover.

“I could read some with you,” she said. “Do you know of Christ?”

Jun Do nodded. “I've been briefed on him.”

A pain came to the corners of her eyes, then she nodded in acceptance.

He handed back the book. “I'm sorry,” Jun Do told her. “This book is forbidden where I come from. Possessing it comes with a high penalty.”

“You don't know how it sorrows me to hear that,” she said, then went to the door, where a white guayabera hung. “Hot water on that arm, you hear? And wear this shirt tonight.”

When she left, the dog leaped back onto the bed.

He pulled off his dress shirt and looked around the guest room. It was filled with memorabilia of the Senator—photos of him with proud people, plaques of gold and bronze. There was a small writing desk, and here a phone rested atop a white book. Jun Do lifted the phone's receiver, listened to its solid tone. He took up the book underneath it, leafed through its pages. Inside were thousands of names. It took him a while to understand that everyone in central Texas was listed here, with their full names and addresses. He couldn't believe that you could look up anyone and seek them out, that all you had to do to prove you weren't an orphan was to open a book and point to your parents. It was unfathomable that a permanent link existed to mothers and fathers and lost mates, that they were forever fixed in type. He flipped through the pages. Donaldson, Jimenez, Smith—all it took was a book, a little book could save you a lifetime of uncertainty and guesswork. Suddenly he hated his small, backward homeland, a land of mysteries and ghosts and mistaken identities. He tore a page from the back of the book and wrote across the top: Alive and Well in North Korea. Below this he wrote the names of all the people he'd helped kidnap. Next to Mayumi Nota, the girl from the pier, he placed a star of exception.

In the bathroom, there was a basket filled with new razors and miniature tubes of toothpaste and individually wrapped soaps. He didn't touch them. Instead, he stared in the mirror, seeing himself the way the Senator's wife had seen him. He touched his lacerations, his broken clavicle, the burn marks, the eleventh rib. Then he touched the face of Sun Moon, the beautiful woman in this halo of wounds.

He went to the toilet and stared into its mouth. It came in a moment, the meat, three heaves of it, and then he was empty. His skin had gone tight, and he felt weak.

In the shower, he made the water hot. He stood there, steeping his wound in the spray, like fire on his arm. When he closed his eyes, it was like being nursed by the Second Mate's wife again, back when his eyes were still swollen shut and she was just the smell of a woman, the sounds a woman made, and he had a fever and he didn't know where he was and he had to imagine the face of the woman who would save him.