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By Root 1282 0

nearly every week. It would start innocently enough—a barbed-wire puncture, a cut from the rim of a ration tin—but soon came fevers, tremors, and finally, a coiling of the musculature that left the body too twisted and rigid for a casket. Jun Do’s reward for these achievements was a listening post in the East Sea, aboard the fishing vessel Junma. His quarters were down in the Junma’s aft hold, a steel room big enough for a table, a chair, a typewriter, and a stack of receivers that had been pilfered from downed American planes in the war. The hold was lit only by the green glow of the listening equipment, which was reflected in the sheen of fish water that seeped under the bulkheads and constantly slicked the floor. Even after three months aboard the ship, Jun Do couldn’t stop visualizing what was on the other side of those metal walls: chambers of tightly packed fish sucking their last breath in the refrigerated dark.

They’d been in international waters for several days now, their North Korean flag lowered so as not to invite trouble. First they chased deep-running mackerel and then schools of jittery bonito that surfaced in brief patches of sun. Now they were after sharks. All night the Junma had long-lined for them at the edge of the trench, and at daybreak, Jun Do could hear above him the grinding of the winch and the slapping of sharks as they cleared the water and struck the hull.

From sunset to sunrise, Jun Do monitored the usual transmissions: fishing captains mostly, the ferry from Uichi to Vladivostok, even the nightly check-in of two American women rowing around the world—one rowed all night, the other all day, ruining the crew’s theory that they’d made their way to the East Sea for the purpose of having girl sex.

Hidden inside the Junma’s rigging and booms was a strong array antenna, and above the helm was a directional antenna that could turn 360 degrees. The U.S. and Japan and South Korea all encrypted their military transmissions, which sounded only like squeals and bleats. But how much squeal and where and when seemed really important to Pyongyang. As long as he documented that, he could listen to whatever he liked.

It was clear the crew didn’t like having him aboard. He had an orphan’s name, and all night he clacked away on his typewriter down there in the dark. It was as if having a person aboard whose job it was to perceive and record threats made the crew, young men from the port of Kinjye, sniff the air for danger as well. And then there was the Captain. He had reason to be wary, and each time Jun Do made him change course to track down an unusual signal, it was all he could do to contain his anger at the ill luck of having a listening officer posted to his fishing ship. Only when Jun Do started relating to the crew the updates of the two American girls rowing around the world did they begin to warm to him.

When Jun Do had filled out his daily requisition of military soundings, he roamed the spectrum. The lepers sent out broadcasts, as did the blind, and the families of inmates imprisoned in Manila who broadcast news into the prisons—all day the families would line up to speak of report cards, baby teeth, and new job prospects. There was Dr. Rendezvous, a Brit who broadcast his erotic “dreams” every day, along with the coordinates of where his sailboat would be anchored next. There was a station in Okinawa that broadcast portraits of families that U.S. servicemen refused to claim. Once a day, the Chinese broadcast prisoner confessions, and it didn’t matter that the confessions were forced, false, and in a language he didn’t understand—Jun Do could barely make it through them. And then came that girl who rowed in the dark. Each night she paused to relay her coordinates, how her body was performing, and the atmospheric conditions. Often she noted things—the outlines of birds migrating at night, a whale shark seining for krill off her bow. She had, she said, a growing ability to dream while she rowed.

What was it about English speakers that allowed them to talk into transmitters as if the sky were