The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [107]
In prison, when rocks smashed his hands or a baton came down on the back of his neck, he’d attempt to transport himself to the deck of the Junma and its gentle rolling motion. When the cold made his fingers staticky with pain, he tried to get inside the opera diva’s song, to enter her voice itself. He tried to veil himself in the yellow of the Second Mate’s wife’s dress or pull the cloak of an American quilt over his head, but none of them really worked. It was only when he’d seen Sun Moon’s movie that he finally had a reserve—she saved him from everything. When his pickax struck frozen rock, in that spark, he felt her aliveness. When a wall of ore dust would sweep through a passage and double him over with cough, she gave him breath. When once he stepped in an electrified puddle, Sun Moon appeared and restarted his heart.
So it was that today, when the old Pubyok of Division 42 fitted him with the halo, he turned to her. Even before they’d fastened the thumbscrews to his scalp, he’d taken leave of them and was returning to the first day he’d physically stood in the presence of Sun Moon. He didn’t believe that he might actually meet her until he’d made it out of the gates of Prison 33, until the Warden called for the guards to open the gate, and he stepped through its razor-wire threshold and then heard the gate slide shut behind him. He was wearing Commander Ga’s uniform and was holding the box of photographs Mongnan had given him. In his pocket was the camera he’d watched over and a long-guarded DVD of Casablanca. Armed with these things, he walked through the mud to the car that would take him to her.
As he stepped into the Mercedes, the driver turned to him, shock and confusion on his face.
Commander Ga could see a thermos on the dashboard. A year without tea.
“I could use a cup of tea,” he said.
The driver didn’t move. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.
“Are you a homosexual?” was Commander Ga’s answer.
The driver stared at him in disbelief, then shook his head.
“Are you sure? Have you been tested?”
“Yes,” the driver said, confused. Then he said, “No.”
“Get out,” Commander Ga said. “I’m Commander Ga now. That other man is gone. If you think you belong with him, I can take you to him, what’s left of him, down in the mine. Because you’re either his driver or my driver. If you’re my driver, you’ll pour me a cup of tea, get me to a civilized place where I can bathe. Then you’ll take me home.”
“Home?”
“Home to my wife, the actress Sun Moon.”
And then Ga was being driven to Sun Moon, the only person who could take away the pain he’d suffered in getting to her. A crow towed their Mercedes through the mountain roads, and in the backseat Ga looked through the box Mongnan had given him. It contained thousands of pictures. Mongnan had clipped together inmates’ entrance and exit photos. Back to back, alive and dead, thousands of people. He flipped through the box so that all the exit images faced him—bodies crushed and torn and folded in unnatural angles. He recognized victims of cave-ins and beatings. In some pictures, he couldn’t tell exactly what he was looking at. Mostly, the dead looked as if they’d gone to sleep, and children, because it was the cold that got them, were curled up in hard little discs, like lozenges. Mongnan was meticulous, and the catalog was complete. This box, he suddenly understood, was the closest thing his nation had to the phone book he’d seen in Texas.
He spun the box around, and now facing him were all the entrance photos, in which people were fearful and uncertain and hadn’t quite let themselves imagine the nightmare they were in for, and these photos were even harder to look at. When at last he located his own entrance photo, he turned it slowly, seriously expecting to see himself dead. But it wasn’t so. He took a moment to marvel at that. He studied the light in the trees as they flashed by. He watched the motion of the crow ahead, its tow chain tinkling with slackness before snapping taut. He remembered the eggshells spinning whimsically in the crow that had brought him.