The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [188]
He was stricken anew by her, overcome with the knowledge that in the morning he would have to relinquish her. In Prison 33, little by little, you relinquished everything, starting with your tomorrows and all that might be. Next went your past, and suddenly it was inconceivable that your head had ever touched a pillow, that you’d once used a spoon or a toilet, that your mouth had once known flavors and your eyes had beheld colors beyond gray and brown and the shade of black that blood took on. Before you relinquished yourself—Ga had felt it starting, like the numb of cold limbs—you let go of all the others, each person you’d once known. They became ideas and then notions and then impressions, and then they were as ghostly as projections against a prison infirmary. Sun Moon appeared to him now like this, not as a woman, vital and beautiful, making an instrument speak her sorrow, but as the flicker of someone once known, a photo of a person long gone.
The story of the dog became more lonesome now and melancholy. He tried to control his breathing. There was nothing beyond the light of the candle, he told himself. The glow included the boy, the girl, this woman, and himself. Beyond that, there was no Mount Taesong, no Pyongyang, no Dear Leader. He tried to diffuse the pain in his chest across his body, the way his pain mentor Kimsan had once taught him, to feel the flame not on the part but the entire, to visualize the flow of his blood spreading, diluting the hurt in his heart across the whole of him.
And then he closed his eyes and imagined Sun Moon, the one that was always within him—she was a calm presence, open-armed, ready to save him at all times. She wasn’t leaving him, she wasn’t going anywhere. And here the sharp pain in his chest subsided, and Commander Ga understood that the Sun Moon inside him was the pain reserve that would allow him to survive the loss of the Sun Moon before him. He began to enjoy the song again, even as it grew increasingly sad. The sweet glow of the puppy’s moon had given way to an unfamiliar rocket on an uncertain course. What had started as the children’s song had become her song, and when the chords became disconnected, the notes wayward and alone, he understood that it was his. Finally, she stopped playing and leaned slowly forward until her forehead came to rest against the fine wood of an instrument she would never play again.
“Come, children,” Ga said. “It’s time for bed.”
He ushered them to the bedroom and closed the door.
Then he tended to Sun Moon, helping her to the balcony for some fresh air.
The lights of the city below were glowing beyond their usual hour.
She leaned against the rail, turning her back to him. It was quiet, and they could hear the children through the wall as they made rocket noises and gave the dog its launch instructions.
“You okay?” he asked her.
“I just need a cigarette, that’s all,” she said.
“Because you don’t have to go through with it, you can back out and nobody will ever know.”
“Just light it for me,” she said.
He cupped his hand and lit the cigarette, inhaling.
“You’re having second thoughts,” he said. “That’s natural. Soldiers have them before every mission. Your husband probably had them all the time.”
She glanced at him. “My husband never had a second thought about anything.”
When he extended the cigarette to her, she looked at the way he held it in his fingers and turned again to face the city lights. “You smoke like a yangban now,” she said. “I like the way you used to smoke, when you were still a boy from nowhere.”
He reached to her, pulling her hair aside so he could see her face.
“I’ll always