The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [47]
Jun Do kept trying to drop the blood bag, but his hand wouldn’t let go. A person could learn to turn an arm off, so you didn’t feel anything that happened to it, but how did you turn it back on?
“I’m certifying you,” the old man said. “Your story checks out.”
Jun Do turned to him. “What story are you talking about?”
“What story?” the old man asked. “You’re a hero now.”
The old man offered Jun Do a cigarette, but Jun Do couldn’t take it.
“But the facts,” Jun Do said. “They don’t add up. Where are the answers?”
“There’s no such thing as facts. In my world, all the answers you need to know come from here.” He pointed at himself, and Jun Do couldn’t tell if the old man indicated his heart, his gut, or his balls.
“But where are they?” Jun Do asked. He could see the girl rower shooting flares his way, he could feel the Mate’s cold cheek as the sharks pulled him under. “Will we ever find them?”
JUN DO dreamed of sharks biting him, of the actress Sun Moon blinking and squinting, the way Rumina had when the sand was in her eyes. He dreamed of the Second Mate drifting farther and farther into that harsh light. A stab of pain would arrive, and was he awake or asleep? His eyes roamed the insides of lids swollen shut. The endless smell of fish. Shock-work whistles signaled dawn, and he knew night had arrived when the hum of a little fridge went off with the power.
All his joints felt locked up, and taking too deep a breath was like opening the furnace slats of pain. When his good arm could finally reach over to inspect the bad arm, he could feel fat horsefly hairs, the coarse thread of surgical stitching. He had a half memory of the Captain helping him up the stairs of the community housing block where the Second Mate lived with his wife.
The loudspeaker—Citizens!—took care of him during the day. Afternoons, she came from the cannery, the faint scent of machine oil still on her hands. The little teapot would rattle and whistle and she would hum along with The March of Kim Jong Il, which signaled the end of the news. Then her hands, ice cold with alcohol, would disinfect his wounds. Those hands rolled him left and right to change the sheets and empty his bladder, and he was sure he could feel in her fingers the trace of her wedding ring.
Soon, the swelling had gone down, and now it was gunk sealing his eyes shut, rather than inflammation. She was there with a hot cloth to steam them open. “There he is,” she said when his vision was finally back. “The man who loves Sun Moon.”
Jun Do lifted his head. He was on a pallet on the floor, naked under a light yellow sheet. He recognized the louvered windows of the housing block. The room was strung with little perch, drying on wires like laundry.
She said, “My father believed that if his daughter married a fisherman, she’d never starve.”
And into focus came the Second Mate’s wife.
“What floor are we on?” he asked.
“The tenth.”
“How’d you get me up here?”
“It wasn’t so bad. The way my husband described you, I thought you’d be a lot bigger.” She ran the hot cloth over his chest, and he tried not to wince. “Your poor actress, her face is black and blue. It makes her look old, like her time has passed. Have you seen her movies?”
Shaking his head no made his neck hurt.
“Me either,” she said. “Not in this dumpy town. The only movie I ever saw was a foreign film, a love story.” She immersed the cloth in hot water again, then soaked the ridges of all his scars. “It was about a ship that hits an iceberg and everybody dies.”
She climbed onto the pallet next to him. With both arms, she muscled him over and onto his side. She held a jar to him and maneuvered it until his umkyoung was inside. “Come on,” she said, then gave him a couple claps on the back to get him going. His body pulsed in pain, and then the stream began. When he was done, she lifted the jar to the light. The fluid was cloudy and rust-colored. “Getting better,” she announced. “Soon you’ll be walking down the hall to the tenth-floor toilet like a big boy.”
Jun Do