The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [217]
“Where’s he going?” Wanda asked. “Is he leaving?”
The Dear Leader climbed into the back of the black Mercedes, but the car didn’t move.
Then the phone in Wanda’s pocket beeped. When she examined its screen, she shook her head in disbelief. She showed it to the Senator and Tommy. Ga motioned for the little red phone. Wanda handed it to him, and there was a picture of Allison Jensen, the Girl Rower, in the backseat of a car. Ga nodded at Wanda, and right in front of her, slipped the phone in his pocket.
The Dear Leader returned, thanking Ga for the use of his camera. “Assured?” he asked.
The Senator made a signal, and a pair of forklifts backed out of the plane’s cargo bay. In tandem, they carried the Japanese background radiation detector housed in a custom crate.
“You know it won’t work,” the Senator said. “The Japanese built it to discover cosmic radiation, not uranium isotopes.”
“All my top scientists would beg to differ,” the Dear Leader told him. “In fact, they’re unanimous in their opinion.”
“One hundred percent,” Commander Park said.
The Dear Leader waved his hand. “But let’s speak of our shared status as nuclear nations another time. Now let’s have some blues.”
“But where’s the Girl Rower?” Sun Moon asked him. “I must sing the song to her. She’s who you told me to write it for.”
A cross look appeared on the Dear Leader’s face. “Your songs are mine,” he told her. “I’m the only one you sing for.”
The Dear Leader addressed the Americans. “I’ve been assured the blues will speak to your collective American conscience,” he said. “Blues is how people lament racism and religion and the injustices of capitalism. Blues is for those who know hunger.”
“One in six,” Commander Park said.
“One in six Americans goes hungry each day,” the Dear Leader echoed. “The blues is for violence, too. Commander Park, when did a citizen of Pyongyang last commit a violent crime?”
“Seven years ago,” Commander Park said.
“Seven long years,” the Dear Leader said. “Yet in America’s capital, five thousand black men languish in prison due to violence. Mind you, Senator, your prison system is the envy of the world—state-of-the-art confinement, total surveillance, three million inmates strong! Yet you use it for no social good. The imprisoned citizen in no way motivates the free. And the labor of the condemned does not power the machine of national need.”
The Senator cleared his throat. “As Dr. Song would say, This is most enlightening.”
“You tire of social theory?” The Dear Leader nodded, as if he’d expected more from his American visitor. “Then I give you Sun Moon.”
Sun Moon kneeled down upon the cement runway and placed the guitar on its back before her. In the shade of those who closed the circle around her, she stared silently down at her guitar, as if awaiting some far-off inspiration.
“Sing,” Commander Park whispered. With the toe of his boot, he tapped her in the small of the back. From Sun Moon came a gasp of fear. “Sing,” he said.
Brando growled at the end of his rope.
Sun Moon began playing the neck of the guitar, fretting with the tips of her fingers and plucking with the quill of an eagle-owl feather. Each note sounded discordant from the next, eerie and alone. Finally, in the plaintive rasp of a sanjo nomad, she began to sing of a boy who wandered too far for his parents to find him.
Many citizens leaned in, trying to place the tune.
Sun Moon sang, “A cold wind rose and said, Come, orphan, sleep in my billowing white sheets.”
From this line, the citizens began to recognize the song and the fairy tale it came from, yet none sang the response, “No, orphan child, do not let yourself freeze.” It was a song taught to all the children in the capital, one designed to make some merriment of all the befuddled orphans who scurried through Pyongyang’s streets. Sun Moon sang on, with the crowd clearly unhappy that such a gay song, a children’s song, one that was ultimately about finding the fatherly love of the Dear Leader, should be so gleelessly sung.
Sun Moon sang, “Then a mineshaft called