The Orphan Master's Son (68 page)

“Are you going to hook me up to this machine?”

I nodded.

He looked at the autopilot's wires and energy meters. “There's no mystery,” he said. “The actress simply defected.”

“You never stop, do you? You're about to lose everything you own but your heartbeat, and still you're trying to throw us off the trail.”

“It's true,” he said. “She got on an airplane and flew away.”

“Impossible,” I told him. “Sure, a few peasants risk life and limb to cross an icy river. But our national actress, under the nose of the Dear Leader? You insult me.”

I handed him a pair of paper booties. He sat on his baby-blue chair, and I sat on mine, and together we removed our shoes and socks to put them on.

“Not to insult you,” he said, “but whose pictures do you think are on my phone? My wife and children vanish, but then, from far away, photos of a woman and her children appear. Is that such a mystery?”

“It's a conundrum, I'll admit. I pondered it much. But I know that you killed the people you loved. There's no other way.” I pulled his phone from my pocket and used its buttons to erase the pictures. “If an interrogator starts questioning the only thing he knows for sure, then … but please, I am not that person anymore. I no longer take biographies. Only my own story concerns me now.” I dropped the phone into a stainless-steel basin, along with a few coins and my ID badge, which said only “Interrogator.”

He indicated the leather restraints. “You're not going to put these on me, are you?”

“I have to, I'm sorry. I'll need people to know that I did this to you, and not the other way around.”

I reclined his chair, then strapped down his legs and arms. I did him the favor of leaving the buckles pretty loose.

“I'm sorry I didn't manage to finish your biography,” I told him. “If I hadn't failed, I could have sent your biography with you, so when you
reached the other side, you could read who you were and become you again.”

“Don't worry,” he told me. “She'll be on the other side. She'll recognize me and tell me who I am.”

“I can offer you this,” I said, holding up a pen. “If you like, you can write your name someplace on your body, a place they won't notice—on your
umkyoung
, or between your toes. That way, later, you might discover who you were. I'm not trying to trick you to learn your identity, I assure you.”

“Are you going to do it?”

“I don't want to know who I was,” I said.

“I don't even know what name I'd write,” he told me.

I knelt to connect all the electrodes to his cranium. “You know they're telling your story over the loudspeakers,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“I don't know, but since you're not going to be repenting in the soccer stadium tomorrow, I figure they'll have to come up with a new ending for your story.”

“An ending to my story,” he said. “My story's ended ten times already, and yet it never stops. The end keeps coming for me, and yet it takes everyone else. Orphans, friends, commanding officers, I outlast them all.”

He was clearly confusing himself and his story, which is the natural result of certain tribulations. “This isn't the end of you,” I told him. “It's a new beginning. And you haven't outlasted all your friends. We're friends, aren't we?”

He stared at the ceiling as though a parade of people he'd once known were passing there.

“I know why I'm in this blue chair,” he said. “What about you?”

Aligning all the red-and-white wires leading from his skull was like braiding hair.

“This used to be a place,” I told him, “where meaningful work was done. Here, a citizen was separated from his story. That was my job. Of the two, it was the story that was kept, while the person was disposed of. I was okay with that. In this way, many deviants and counterrevolutionaries were discovered. True, sometimes the innocent fell with the guilty, but there was no other way to discover the truth, and unfortunately, once a
person has his story taken, by the roots if you will, it can't be given back. But now …”

Ga craned his neck to look at me. “Yes?”

“Now the person is lost along with his life. Both die.”

I adjusted the output dial of his autopilot. Ga had a strong mind, so I set it at eight.

“Tell me again how intimacy works?” I asked.

“It turned out to be easy,” Ga said. “You tell someone everything, the good, the bad, what makes you look strong and what's shameful as well. If you killed your wife's husband, you must tell her. If someone tried to man-attack you, you must tell that, too. I told you everything, as best as I was able. I may not know who I am. But the actress is free. I'm not sure I understand freedom, but I've felt it and she now has it too.”

I nodded. It was satisfying to hear again. It restored my inner calm. With my parents, I had finally been intimate. And Commander Ga was my friend, despite the lie about the actress being alive. He'd so fully digested it that it had somehow become true to him. By his twisted logic, he was telling me, his friend, the absolute truth.

“See you on the other side,” I said.

He fixed his eyes at some point that didn't exist.

“My mother was a singer,” he said.

When he closed his eyes, I flipped the switch.

He made the usual involuntary motions, eye flashing, arm levitation, gulping for air like a carp at the surface of a meditation pond.
My mother was a singer
were his last words, as if they were the only ones he could trust to describe who he'd been.

I climbed into the next blue chair, but didn't bother with the restraints. I wanted the Pubyok to know that I'd chosen my own path, that I'd rejected their ways. I hooked up my own wiring harness and turned my attention to the autopilot's output dial. I never wanted to remember a thing about this place, so I set it at eight and a half. But then again, I didn't want a lobotomy, either. I adjusted it to seven and a half. And if I was being intimate with myself, I could also admit I was afraid of the pain. I settled for six and a half.

Trembling with hope and, strangely, regret, my finger flipped the switch.

My arms rose before me. They looked like someone else's arms. I heard moaning and realized it was me. A tongue of electricity licked deep inside my brain, probing, as molars are inspected after a meal. I'd imagined the experience would be one of numbness, but my thinking was hyper, thoughts flying. Everything was singular—the gleam of a metal armature, the violent green of a fly's eye. There was only the thing itself, without connection or context, as if everything in your mind had become unlinked to everything else. Blue and leather and chair, I couldn't put them together. The scent of ozone was without precedent, the incandescence of a lightbulb lacked all antecedent. The fine hairs in my nose stiffened. My erection stood abominable and alone. I saw no icy peak or white flower. I scanned the room for them, but saw only elements: shine, slick, coarse, shade.

I became aware of Commander Ga moving beside me. Arms aloft, it was all I could do to roll my head slightly to observe him. He had an arm free from its restraint, and he was reaching for the dial. I saw him turn it to maximum, a lethal dose. But I could worry about him no longer. I was on my own voyage. Soon I would be in a rural village, green and peaceful, where people swung their scythes in silence. There would be a widow there, and we would waste no time on courtship. I would approach her and tell her I was her new husband. We would enter the bed from opposite sides at first. For a while, she would have rules. But eventually, our genitals would intercourse in a way that was correct and satisfying. At night, after I had made my emission, we would lie there, listening to the sounds of our children running in the dark, catching summer frogs. My wife would have the use of both her eyes, so she would know when I blew out the candle. In this village, I would have a name, and people would call me by it. When the candle went out, she would speak to me, telling me to sleep very, very deeply, and as the electricity stropped itself sharper in my mind, I listened for her voice, calling a name that would soon be mine.

IN THE MORNING
,
Commander Ga woke to the roaring engines of an American military cargo jet. The children were already awake, staring at the ceiling. They knew this wasn't the once-a-week flight to Beijing or the twice-monthly grasshopper to Vladivostok. The children had never even heard an airplane over Pyongyang, which was restricted airspace. Not once since the American firebombing raids of 1951 had a plane been spotted over the nation's capital.

He roused Sun Moon and together they listened to it head north, as if it had originated in Seoul, a direction from which nothing was allowed to come. He checked his watch—the Americans were three hours early. The Dear Leader would be furious.

“They're flying low to announce their arrival,” he said. “Very American.”

Sun Moon turned to him. “So it's time.”

He looked into her eyes to see what remained of their lovemaking last night, but she was looking forward and not back.

“It's time,” he said.

“Children,” Sun Moon called, “we're going on an adventure today. Go put together some food for us.” When they were gone, she pulled on her robe and lit a cigarette at the window, watching the American Goliath lower its landing gear over the Taedong and descend toward the airport. She turned to Ga. “There's something you need to understand,” she said. “Where the Dear Leader is concerned, there's only one of me. He has many girls, an entire
kippumjo
of them, but only I matter. He thinks that I reveal all to him, that emotions cross my face without my control, making me incapable of conspiring against him. I'm the only person in the world he thinks he can trust. ”

“Then today, he will feel the sting.”

“I'm not talking about him,” she said. “This is about you. Understand that if I slip from the Dear Leader's grasp, someone is going to pay, and that price will be unimaginable. You can't stay, you can't be the one who pays.”

“I don't know where you got these notions about me,” he said. “But—”

“You're the one with the notions,” she went on. “I think you saw that movie and got it in your head that a noble man stays behind.”

“You're tattooed on my heart,” he said. “You'll always be with me.”

“I'm talking about you being with me.”

“We'll make it work,” he said. “I promise. It will all work out. You've got to trust me.”

“It's that kind of talk that scares me,” she said, and exhaled smoke. “This whole thing feels like some kind of loyalty test. One so sick not even my husband could've thought it up.”

How different it was to have warning that your life was about to change, Ga thought, let alone know the moment it would happen. Didn't Sun Moon understand that? And they had a say in it. He had to smile at the notion that things might, for one morning, bend to their influence.

“That look on your face,” she said. “Even that makes me nervous.”

She came close to him, and he stood to be near her.

“You're coming with me,” she said. “Understand? I can't do it without you.”

“I'll never leave your side.”

He tried to touch her, but she pulled away.

“Why won't you just say you're coming?”

“Why won't you hear what I'm saying? Of course I am.”

She gave him a look of doubt. “My sister, my father, my sister, my mother. Even that cruel husband of mine. One by one, they were stripped from me. Don't make it happen again. That's not how it's supposed to work, not when you have a choice. Just look me in the eyes and say it.”

He did it, he looked her in the eyes. “You said forever, and that's me, forever. Soon, you'll never be able to get rid of me.”

After Sun Moon donned her white
choson-ot
, she hung the red one and the blue one in the back of the Mustang. Ga pulled on his cowboy boots, tucked the can of peaches in his rucksack, and then patted his pocket to
make sure he had his camera. The girl chased the dog with a rope to leash it.

The boy came running. “My bird snare's gone,” he said.

“We weren't going to bring it anyway,” Sun Moon said.

“Bring it where?” the boy asked.

“We'll make another sometime,” Ga told him.

“I bet it caught a giant bird,” the boy said. “One with wings so strong that it flew away with my snare.”

Sun Moon stood before the shrine to her husband's Golden Belt. Ga joined her in contemplating the jewels and golden scrollwork, the way the overall flash of it was bright enough to allow its owner to take any woman in the land.

“Good-bye, my husband,” she said, and turned off the lightbulb that illuminated it. Then she turned to consider for a moment her
gayageum
case, tall and regal in the corner. So it was pure tragedy on her face when she grabbed instead the simpleton instrument called a
guitar
.