The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [208]
“I had my life,” Commander Ga said. “I’ll pass on the rest.”
I grabbed two sedatives. When Commander Ga declined one, I took them both.
From the supply cabinet, I flipped through the diapers until I found a medium.
“Would you like one?” I asked. “We keep some on hand for when VIPs come through. It can save some embarrassment. I have a large right here.”
“No thanks,” he said.
I dropped my trousers and secured mine, using the adhesive tabs.
“You know, I respect you,” I said. “You were the only guy who came through that never talked. You were smart—if you’d told us where the actress was, they’d have killed you right away.”
“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