The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [45]
The old man began again, this time asking not about the Second Mate in the raft, but the Second Mate on the Junma, about how many sharks, how high the seas, whether the American rifles were on safety. The old man was pacing himself, dealing long, slow strings of measured blows, to the cheeks and mouth and ears, switching to the soft body when his hands seemed to hurt. In the candle’s flame, the fingertip hurts, though the whole rest of the body is in the warm glow of its light. Keep the pain in the fingertip and your body in the glow. Jun Do put up his partitions—a strike to the shoulder must hurt only the shoulder and he mentally cordoned that off from the rest of the body. And when the strikes came to the face, Jun Do would adjust his head as the strike was delivered, so no two landed in the same place. Keep the flame on the fingers, keep the fingers in motion, let the rest of you relax in the glow.
A wince of pain crossed the old man’s face and he stopped to stretch his back. Bending this way and that, he said, “There’s a lot of big talk about the war. Practically everyone was named a hero. Even trees have been named heroes. It’s true. Everyone in my division is a war hero, except for the new guys, of course. Maybe your friend became a hero, and you didn’t like that. Maybe you wanted to be one, too.”
Jun Do tried to stay in the glow, but he was having trouble focusing. He kept wondering when the next punch was coming.
“If you ask me,” the old man said, “heroes are unstable and unpredictable. They get the job done, but damned if they’re not difficult to work with. Trust me, I know,” he said, and pointed to a long scar down his arm. “In my division, all the new guys are college types.”
When the glint returned to the old man’s eyes, he grabbed the back of Jun Do’s neck to brace himself. Then came a series of dull blows to Jun Do’s stomach. “Who threw him in the water?” he asked and delivered one to the sternum. “What were his last words?” One, two, three, they came. “Why don’t you know what the Captain was doing?” The fists pushed the air from his lungs. “Why didn’t you radio for help?” Then the old man answered all his own questions: “Because the Americans never came. Because you got tired of that crazy punk and you killed him and threw him overboard. You’re all going to the camps, you know that, it’s already been decided. So you might as well just tell me.”
The old man broke off. He paced for a moment, one hand inside the other, eyes shut with what seemed like relief. Then Jun Do heard Kimsan’s voice, as if he were very close, right in the room. You are the flame, Kimsan said. The old man keeps touching the hot flame of you with only his hands. Kimsan would tell him to also hit with his elbows and forearms and feet and knees, but only his hands touch your flame, and look how it burns him.
“I can’t say I was thinking,” Jun Do said. “But when I jumped, the saltwater on my new tattoo made me panic. The sharks would baby bite, muzzling you before they went for meat, and the Americans were laughing with all their white teeth and those two things became one in my head.”
The old man came back in frustration. “No,” he said. “These are all lies.” Then he went to work again. As the blows came, he told Jun Do everything that was wrong with the story, how they were jealous of the mate’s new hero status, how Jun Do couldn’t remember people’s clothes, how … the flame is tiny. It would take all day to burn the whole surface of your body. You must stay in the glow. You must never go into the darkness, for there you are alone, and people don’t come back. Kimsan said this was the most difficult lesson for Jun Do, because that’s what he’d done as a boy, gone into the darkness. That was the lesson his parents had taught him, whoever they were. If you go into the darkness, if you turn off like that, you could do anything—you could clean tanks at the Pangu paint factory until your