The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [35]
“You’re welcome to it,” Jun Do told him. “But it doesn’t look like your wife would join you.”
“Oh, she’s a child,” he said. “She’ll do anything I say. Seriously, I’ll call her in here. You’ll see, I can make her do anything.”
“And what about you, you’re not afraid of ghosts?” Jun Do asked.
The Second Mate looked around, newly appraising the house. “I wouldn’t want to put too much thought into how things ended for the Canning Master’s kids,” he said. “Where did it happen?”
“Upstairs.”
“In the bathroom?”
“There’s a nursery.”
The Second Mate leaned his head back and looked at the ceiling. And then he closed his eyes. For a moment, Jun Do thought he was asleep. Then the Second Mate spoke up. “Kids,” he said. “That’s what it’s all about, right? That’s what they say.”
“That’s what they say,” Jun Do said. “But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can’t live with what they’ve done.”
The Second Mate had been a babe in the ’90s, so to him, these years after the famine must have been ones of glorious plenitude. He took a long drink of beer. “If everyone who had it shitty and bit the dust became a fart,” he said, “the world would stink to the treetops, you know what I mean?”
“I suppose.”
“So I don’t believe in ghosts, okay? Someone’s canary dies, and they hear a tweet in the dark, and they think, Oh, it’s the ghost of my bird. But if you ask me, a ghost is just the opposite. It’s something you can feel, that you know is there, but you can’t get a fix on. Like the captain of the Kwan Li. The doctors ended up having to amputate. I don’t know if you heard that or not.”
“I didn’t,” Jun Do told him.
“When he woke in the hospital, he asked, Where’s my arm, and the doctors said, Sorry, but we had to amputate, and the captain says, I know my arm is gone, where is it, but they won’t tell him. He can feel it, he says, making a fist without him. In the tub, he can feel the hot water with his missing arm. But where is it—in the trash or burned? He knows it’s out there, he can literally feel it, but he’s got no powers.”
“To me,” Jun Do said, “what everybody gets wrong about ghosts is the notion that they’re dead. In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range.”
“Like the Captain’s wife?”
“Like the Captain’s wife.”
“I never even met her,” the Second Mate said. “But I see her face on the Captain, and it’s hard not to wonder where she is and who she’s with and does she still think about the Captain.”
Jun Do lifted his beer and drank in honor of this insight.
“Or maybe your Americans at the bottom of the ocean,” the Second Mate said. “You hear them down there tinkering around, you know they’re important, but they’re just beyond your reach. It only makes sense, you know, it’s right in line with your profile.”
“My profile? What’s my profile?”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” the Second Mate said. “Just something the Captain talked about once.”
“Yeah?”
“He only said that you were an orphan, that they were always after things they couldn’t have.”
“Really? You sure he didn’t say it was because orphans try to steal other people’s lives?”
“Don’t get upset. The Captain just said I shouldn’t be too friendly with you.”
“Or that when they die, orphans like to take other people with them? Or that there’s always a reason someone becomes an orphan? There are all kinds of things people say about orphans, you know.”
The Second Mate put his hand up. “Look,” he said. “The Captain just told me that nobody had ever taught you loyalty.”
“Like you know anything about it. And if you have any interest in facts, I’m not even an orphan.”
“He said you’d say that. He wasn’t trying to be mean,” the Second Mate said. “He just said that the military weeds out all the orphans and puts them through special training that makes them not have feelings when bad things happen to other people.”
Through the window, the sun was starting to glow in the rigging of the fishing fleet. And the young woman outside stepped aside every time a two-wheeled, fish-hauling