The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [7]
They’d locked the Japanese man in one of the hot boxes in the drill yard, and Gil was out there now, practicing his Japanese through the slop hole in the door. Jun Do and Officer So leaned against the infirmary’s window frame, sharing a cigarette as they watched Gil out there, sitting in the dirt, polishing his idioms with a man he’d helped kidnap. Officer So shook his head, like now he’d seen it all. There was one patient in the infirmary, a small soldier of about sixteen, bones knit from the famine. He lay on a cot, teeth chattering. Their cigarette smoke was giving him coughing fits. They moved his cot as far away as possible in the small room, but still he wouldn’t shut up.
There was no doctor. The infirmary was just a place where sick soldiers were housed until it was clear they wouldn’t recover. If the young soldier hadn’t improved by morning, the MPs would hook up a blood line and drain four units from him. Jun Do had seen it before, and as far as he could tell, it was the best way to go. It only took a couple of minutes—first they got sleepy, then a little dreamy looking, and if there was a last little panic at the end, it didn’t matter because they couldn’t talk anymore, and finally, before lights out, they looked pleasantly confused, like a cricket with its feelers pulled off.
The camp generator shut down—slowly the lights dimmed, the fridge went quiet.
Officer So and Jun Do took to their cots.
There was a Japanese man. He took his dog for a walk. And then he was nowhere. For the people who knew him, he’d forever be nowhere. That’s how Jun Do had thought of boys selected by the men with Chinese accents. They were here and then they were nowhere, taken like Bo Song to parts unknown. That’s how he’d thought of most people—appearing in your life like foundlings on the doorstep, only to be swept away later as if by flood. But Bo Song hadn’t gone nowhere—whether he sank down to the wolf eels or bloated and took the tide north to Vladivostok, he went somewhere. The Japanese man wasn’t nowhere, either—he was in the hot box, right out there in the drill grounds. And Jun Do’s mother, it now struck him—she was somewhere, at this very moment, in a certain apartment in the capital, perhaps, looking in a mirror, brushing her hair before bed.
For the first time in years, Jun Do closed his eyes and let himself recall her face. It was dangerous to dream up people like that. If you did, they’d soon be in the tunnel with you. That had happened many times when he remembered boys from Long Tomorrows. One slip and a boy was suddenly following you in the dark. He was saying things to you, asking why you weren’t the one who succumbed to the cold, why you weren’t the one who fell in the paint vat, and you’d get the feeling that at any moment, the toes of a front kick would cross your face.
But there she was, his mother. Lying there, listening to the shivering of the soldier, her voice came to him. “Arirang,” she sang, her voice achy, at the edge of a whisper, coming from an unknown somewhere. Even those fucking orphans knew where their parents were.
Late in the night, Gil stumbled in. He opened the fridge, which was forbidden, and placed something inside. Then he flopped onto his cot. Gil slept with his arms and legs sprawled off the edges, and Jun Do could tell that as a child, Gil must’ve had a bed of his very own. In a moment, he was out.
Jun Do and Officer So stood in the dark and went to the fridge. When Officer So pulled its handle, it exhaled a faint, cool breath. In the back, behind stacks of square blood bags, Officer So fished out a half-full bottle of shoju. They closed the door quickly because