The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [56]
“Take the watch,” Gun said. “I got it from an old man who said it ran perfectly for a lifetime.”
Jun Do set down the watch. When they’d left and the door closed behind them, he asked, “What happened to him?”
“He hurt his foot last year, from a steam line under pressure, something like that.”
“Last year?”
“The wound won’t close, that’s what the foreman says.”
“You shouldn’t have made that deal with him,” Jun Do said.
“When he comes to collect,” she told him, “I’ll be long gone.”
Jun Do looked at her. In this moment he felt truly sad for her. He thought of the men who were lobbying for her, the warden in Sinpo and the old Party boss in Chongwang, men who were right now preparing their homes for her arrival. Had they been shown a photo of her, told some kind of story, or had they only heard over their loudspeakers the tragic news that a hero had been lost to the sharks, leaving a beautiful young wife behind?
Winding the stairwell to the roof, they pushed through the metal door into darkness and stars. The adult dogs were free and skittish, their eyes locating them. In the center of the roof, there was a screened-in shed to keep insects off the sides of dog—rubbed with coarse salt and crushed green peppercorns—hanging to cure in the ocean air.
“It’s beautiful up here,” he said.
“Sometimes I come up here to think,” she said. They looked far out onto the water. “What’s it like out there?” she asked.
“When you’re out of sight of shore,” he said, “you could be anybody, from anywhere. It’s like you have no past. Out there, everything is spontaneous, every lick of water that kicks up, every bird that drops in from nowhere. Over the airwaves, people say things you’d never imagine. Here, nothing is spontaneous.”
“I can’t wait to hear that radio,” she said. “Can you get the pop stations from Seoul?”
“It’s not that kind of radio,” he said and jammed the antenna through the mesh of the puppy warren, the little dogs scurrying in terror.
“I don’t get it.”
Jun Do tossed the cable off the overhang, where they could retrieve it from the window below. “This radio doesn’t receive broadcasts,” he said. “It transmits them.”
“What’s the point of that?”
“We have a message to send.”
Inside the apartment, his fingers worked quickly to hook up the antenna cable and a small microphone. “I had a dream,” he told her. “I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I dreamed your husband had a radio, that he was on a raft, heading into shimmering water, bright like a thousand mirrors.”
“Okay,” she said.
Jun Do turned the radio on and they both stared at the sodium-yellow glow of its power meter. He set it to 63 megahertz, then squeezed the breaker bar: “Third Mate to Second Mate, Third Mate to Second Mate, over.” Jun Do repeated this, knowing that, just as he couldn’t hear, the Second Mate couldn’t respond. Finally, he said, “My friend, I know you’re out there and you mustn’t despair.” Jun Do could’ve explained how to unbraid a single strand of copper from the battery leads, then connect the strand to both poles so it would heat up enough to light a cigarette. Jun Do could have told the Second Mate how to make a compass from the magnet in the radio’s windings, or how surrounding the capacitors is a foil he could flash as a signal mirror.
But the survival skills the Second Mate needed concerned enduring solitude and tolerating the unknown, topics about which Jun Do had some practice. “Sleep during the day,” Jun Do told him. “At night your thoughts will come clear. We have looked at the stars together—chart them each night. If they are in the right places, you’re doing fine. Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past. Do not try to picture people’s faces—you will despair if they don’t come clear. If you are visited by people from far away, don’t think of them as ghosts. Treat them as family, ask them questions, be a good host.
“You will need a purpose,” he told the Second