The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [97]
As an experiment, the biography was a failure—where was the me in it, where was I?—and of course it was hard to get past the feeling that if I finished it, something bad would happen to me. The real truth was that I couldn’t stand the pronoun “I.” Even at home, in the privacy of my own notepad, I have difficulty writing that word.
As I sipped the cucumber juice at the bottom of my rice bowl, I watched the last light play like a flickering fire on the walls of a housing block across the river. We write our subject biographies in the third person, to maintain our objectivity. It might be easier if I wrote my own biography that way, as though the story wasn’t about me but about an intrepid interrogator. But then I’d have to use my name, which is against the rules. And what’s the point of telling a personal story if you’re only referred to as “The Interrogator”? Who wants to read a book called The Biographer? No, you want to read a book with someone’s name on it. You want to read a book called The Man Who Killed Sun Moon.
In the distance, the light reflecting off the water flashed and danced against the housing block, and I had a sudden idea.
“I forgot something at work,” I told my parents and then locked them in.
I took the subway across town, back to Division 42, but it was too late—the power went out when we were deep in the tunnel. By the light of matchbooks, we all poured out of the electric train cars and filed along the dark tracks to the Rakwan station, where the escalator was now a ramp of stairs, to climb the hundred meters to the surface. It was full dark when I made it to the street, and the sensation of emerging from one darkness to another was one I didn’t like—it felt like I was in Commander Ga’s dream, with flashes of black and buses cruising like sharks in the dark. I almost let myself imagine there was an American car out there, moving just beyond my perception, following me.
When I woke Commander Ga, his fingers were transcribing his dream again, but this time in a slow and slurred manner. We North Koreans do know how to make a world-class sedative.
“When you said you met Sun Moon,” I said, “you mentioned she was on the side of a building, right?”
Commander Ga only nodded.
“They were projecting a movie on the wall of a building, yes? So you first met her through a film.”
“A film,” Commander Ga said.
“And they picked the infirmary because its walls were white, which means you were outside when you saw the movie. And the snow was heavy because you were high in the mountains.”
Commander Ga closed his eyes.
“And the burning ships, this was her movie Tyrants Asunder?”
Commander Ga was fading, but I wasn’t going to stop.
“And the people moaning in the infirmary, they were moaning because this was a prison, wasn’t it?” I asked him. “You were a prisoner, weren’t you?”
I didn’t need an answer. And of course, what better place to meet the real Commander Ga, the Minister of Prison Mines, than in a prison mine? So he’d met them both there, husband and wife.
I pulled Commander Ga’s sheets high enough to cover his tattoo. I was already starting to think of him as Commander Ga. When we finally discovered his real identity, it was going to be a shame, for Q-Kee was right—they’d shoot him in the street. You don’t kill a minister and then escape from prison and then kill the minister’s family and still get to become a peasant in a rural farm collective. I studied the man before me. “What did the real Commander Ga do to you?” I asked him. His hands raised above the sheets and he began typing on his stomach. “What could the Minister have done that was so bad you killed him and then went after his wife and kids?”
As he typed, I stared at his eyes, and his pupils weren’t moving behind the lids. He wasn’t transcribing what he saw in his dream. Perhaps it was what he heard that he’d been trained to record. “Good night, Commander Ga,” I said, and watched as his hands typed four words, and