The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [189]
She shook her hair back in place, then reached for her cigarette, the V of her fingers indicating where it should be placed.
He took her by the arm, turned her to him.
“You can’t touch me,” she said. “You know the rules.”
She tried to pull loose, but he didn’t let her.
“Rules?” he asked. “Come tomorrow, we’ll have broken every rule there is.”
“Well, tomorrow’s not here yet.”
“It’s on its way,” he told her. “Sixteen hours, that’s how long the flight is from Texas. Tomorrow’s in the air right now, circling the world to us.”
She took the cigarette. “I know what you’re after,” she said. “I know what you want with your talk of tomorrow. But there’ll be plenty of time, a forever’s worth. Don’t lose focus on what we have to do. So much has to go right before that plane takes off with us.”
He held his grip on her arm. “What if something goes wrong? Have you thought of that? What if today is all there is?”
“Today, tomorrow,” she said. “A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.”
He let go of her, and she turned to the rail, smoking now. Neighborhood by neighborhood, the lights of Pyongyang extinguished themselves. As the landscape blacked out, it became easier to see the headlights of a vehicle that was climbing the switchbacks of the mountain toward them.
“You want me?” she eventually said. “You don’t even know me.”
He lit his own cigarette. The lights of the May Day Stadium had stayed on, along with the Central Cinema Studio north of town, on the road to the airport. Other than that, the world had gone dark.
“Your hand reaches for mine when you sleep,” he said. “I know that.”
Sun Moon’s cigarette burned red as she inhaled.
“I know that you sleep curled up tight,” he added, “that whether you’re a yangban or not, you didn’t grow up with a bed. You probably slept as a child on a small cot, and though you’ve never spoken of siblings, you probably reached out to touch the brother or sister asleep in the next one.”
Sun Moon stared ahead, as if she hadn’t heard him. In the silence, he could just make out the sound of the car below, but couldn’t guess at what kind. He checked to see if Comrade Buc had heard the car and was on his balcony, but the house next door was dark.
Commander Ga went on, “I know you pretended to be asleep one morning to give me more time to study you, to allow me to see the knot in your collarbone where someone had hurt you. You let me see the scars on your knees, scars that tell me you once knew real work. You wanted me to know the real you.”
“I got those from dancing,” she said.
“I’ve seen all your movies,” he said.
“I’m not my movies,” she snapped at him.
“I’ve seen all your movies,” he went on, “and in all of them, you hair is the same—straight, covering your ears. And yet by pretending to be asleep …” Here he reached into her hair again, fingers finding her earlobe. “… you let me see where your ear had been notched. Did an MPSS agent catch you stealing from a market stall, or were you picked up for begging?”
“Enough,” she said.
“You’d tasted a flower before, hadn’t you?”
“I said stop it.”
He reached to the small of her back, pulling her till their bodies touched. He threw her cigarette over the balcony, then he held his to her lips so she would understand that they would now share and that each inhale would come from him.
Their faces were close. She looked up, into his eyes. “You don’t know the first thing about me,” she said. “Now that my mother, now that she’s gone, only one person knows who I really am. And it’s not you.”
“I’m sorry about your husband. What happened to him, what I did—I had no choice. You know that.”
“Please,” she said. “I’m not talking about him. He didn’t know himself, let alone me.”
He placed a hand on her cheek and stared into her eyes. “Who, then?”
A black Mercedes pulled up, parking to the side of the house. Sun Moon glanced over at the driver, who stepped out to hold the door open for her. The driver no longer wore a bandage, but the bend in his nose would