After they radioed for help, a shore patrol boat escorted them to Kinjye, where many people had gathered at the fish-hauling ramp. There were a couple of representatives from the Ministry of Information and a pair of reporters from Rodong Sinmun and there were some local security guys you’d never meet unless you drank. Steam poured from the new cannery, which meant they were in a sterilization cycle, so the workers sat on downturned buckets, waiting for a glimpse of the man who had fought the sharks. Even the urchins and cripple kids had come to eye the scene warily through the glass of the live tanks, making their faces look large and distorted as schools of aji swam by.
A doctor approached Jun Do with a unit of blood. The doctor searched for a vein in the wounded arm, but Jun Do stopped him. “If you put the blood in this arm, won’t it all leak out?”
“Look, I only treat heroes,” the doctor said. “So I know my way around blood. And where it’s leaking from is exactly where it should go.” Then he ran the line into a vein behind the knuckle, taping it off and handing the bag to Jun Do to hold high with his good arm. The doctor unwrapped the bloody T-shirt, and there was no denying the wound. The shark’s teeth, like flakes of milk-glass, had gone all the way, and when the troughs of flesh were irrigated, visible at the base of each of them was the white slick of arm bone.
To the reporter and minister, Jun Do gave a brief summary of his encounter with American aggression. They didn’t ask many questions. It was corroboration they seemed interested in. Suddenly, before him was the older man with the flattop and busted hands who had taken away the Second Mate. He wore the same gray suit and up close Jun Do could see his eyelids were very heavy, making it look as if he was resting his eyes while he spoke.
“I’ll need to confirm the details of your story,” he said, and flashed a silver badge that bore the name of no agency. There was only an image of a thick block wall, floating above the ground.
Jun Do was led down a path, his good arm holding the blood bag, the other in a sling. Ahead was the Captain, who was speaking with the wife of the Second Mate. They stood next to a pile of bricks, and she was not weeping. She eyed the old man and then Jun Do, then she turned to the Captain, who put an arm around her to console her. Jun Do looked back to the commotion at the dock, his mates gesturing large as they recounted the story, but they suddenly seemed very far away.
The old man took him to the abandoned cannery. All that was left of the high-ceilinged factory were the giant steam chambers, the lonely gas manifolds, and the rusty tracks embedded in the cement floor. Shafts of light came down through holes in the roof, and here was a folding table and two chairs.
On the table was a thermos. The old man sat and slowly unscrewed its raspy lid with hands that worked as if through heavy mittens. Again he seemed to rest his eyes by closing them, but he was just old.
“So are you an inspector or something?” Jun Do asked.
“What is the answer to that?” the old man mused. “I was very reckless in the war. And after we won, I was still ready for anything.” He leaned forward into the light, and Jun Do could see there were many scars in his short gray hair. “I would have called myself an inspector back then.”
Jun Do decided to play it safe. “It was great men like you who won the war and drove out the imperial aggressors.”
The old man poured tea into the lid of the thermos, but he did not drink it—he just held the steaming cup in both hands, slowly turning it. “It’s a sad story, this young fisherman friend of yours. The funny thing is that he really was a hero. I confirmed the story myself. He really did fight off armed Americans with only a fishing knife. Crazy stuff like that gains you respect but loses friends. I know all about it. Perhaps that’s what happened between the crew and the young mate.”
Jun Do said, “The Second Mate didn’t ask for the Americans to come back. He wasn’t looking for trouble, let alone death. You did hear how he was eaten alive by sharks, right?”
The old man didn’t say anything.
“Shouldn’t you have a pencil or some paper or something?”
“We picked up your friend in a raft this morning. This was even before you radioed in about your so-called attack. He had plenty of cigarettes, but he had fumbled his matches and they were wet. They said your friend had been crying over what he’d done, that he couldn’t stop.”
Jun Do’s mind turned on that. That poor, stupid boy, he thought. Jun Do had thought the two of them were in this together, but now he understood he was alone, and all he had was the story.
“I wish that lie you just told were true,” Jun Do said, “because then the Second Mate would be alive, then he wouldn’t have died in front of all of us. Then the Captain wouldn’t have to tell his wife that she’ll never see him again.”
“He’ll never be seen again, you can count on that,” the old man said. Again it looked like he’d gone to sleep. “Don’t you want to know the reasons he defected? I believe he mentioned your name.”
“The Second Mate was a friend and a hero,” Jun Do said. “You should maybe show some respect for the dead.”
The old man stood. “What I should maybe do is confirm your story,” he said, and the first assault that followed was brief and frontal—several snapping blows to the face, and with one arm hurt and the other holding the blood bag, there was nothing for Jun Do to do but take it.
“Tell me whose idea it was,” the old man said. He struck Jun Do once on each collarbone. “Why didn’t you launch him farther south, closer to the DMZ?” Jun Do was somehow trapped in the chair, and two chopping blows to the floater ribs anchored him for good. “Why didn’t more of you defect? Or were you casting him away?” In quick succession, pain flashed in his neck, nose, and ear, and then his eyes didn’t seem to work right.
“The Americans came back,” Jun Do said. “They were blaring music. They wore street clothes, including shoes with silver swooshes. One of them threatened to burn the ship. He had a lighter with a cruise missile on it. They had made fun of us because we didn’t have a toilet but now they made fun of us because we did.”
The old man punched Jun Do directly in the breastplate, and in the fire of his new tattoo, he felt Sun Moon’s face as a burning outline over his heart. The old man stopped to pour more tea, but he did not drink. He just warmed his hands around the cup. Jun Do now understood how it would go. In the military, his pain mentor was Kimsan. The whole first week, they sat at a table, not unlike this one, and contemplated a candle burning between them. There was the flame, small and hot at its tip. There was the glow, warm on their faces. Then there was the darkness beyond the glow. Never let pain push you into the darkness, Kimsan said. There you are nobody and you are alone. Once you turn from the flame, it is over.
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 head throbbed and you coughed pink mist and the sky above turned yellow. You could good-naturedly smile when other kids got adopted by smelters and meat factories, and when you were crouched in the darkness, you could say “Lucky you” and “So long” when men with Chinese accents came.
It was difficult to tell how long the old man had been working on him. All his sentences ran together to make one sentence that didn’t make sense. Jun Do was there, in the water, he could see the Second Mate. “I was trying to grab the Second Mate,” Jun Do said, “but his body would pop and jag and shift, and I knew what they were doing to him, I knew what was happening below the surface. In my hands he didn’t weigh anything, it was like trying to rescue a seat cushion, that’s all that was left of him, but still I couldn’t do it.”
When Jun Do had cordoned off the pounding in his eyes, and the hot blood in his nose, when he’d stopped the split in his lips and the sting in his ears from coming inside, when he’d blocked his arms and torso and shoulders from feeling, when that was all blocked off, there was only the inside of him, and what he discovered was a little boy in there who was stupidly smiling, who had no idea what was happening to the man outside. And suddenly the story was true, it had been beaten into him, and he began crying because the Second Mate had died and there was nothing he could do about it. He could suddenly see him in the dark water, the whole scene lit by the red glow of a single flare.
“My friend,” Jun Do said, the tears streaming down his face, “I couldn’t save him. He was alone and the water was dark. I couldn’t even save a piece of him. I looked in his eyes, and he didn’t know where he was. He was calling for help, saying, I think I need a rescue, his voice calm and eerie, and then my leg was going over the side and I was in the water.”
The old man paused. He stood there with his hands held high, like a surgeon. They were covered with spit and mucus and blood.
Jun Do kept going. “It’s dark, I don’t know where I am, he said. I’m here, I told him, listen to the sound of my voice. He asked, Are you out there? I put my hand on his face, which was cold and white. I can’t be where I think I am, he said. A ship is out there—I can’t see its lights. That was the last thing he said.”
“I can’t see its lights? Why would he say that?” When Jun Do said nothing, the old man asked, “But you did try to rescue him, didn’t you? Isn’t that when you got bit? And the Americans, you said their guns were on you, right?”
The blood bag in Jun Do’s hand weighed a thousand kilos, and it was all he could do to keep it aloft. When he managed to focus his eye he saw that the bag was empty. He looked at the old man. “What?” he asked.
“Earlier you said his last words were All praise Kim Jong Il, Dear Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea? You admit that’s a lie.”
The candle had gone out. The flame, the glow, the darkness—they were all suddenly gone and now there was nothing. Kimsan never talked about what to do after the pain.
“Don’t you see? It’s all a lie,” Jun Do said. “Why didn’t I radio for help? Why didn’t I get the crew to mount a real rescue? If the whole crew worked together, we could’ve saved him. I should have begged the crew, I should have gotten on my knees. But I didn’t do anything. I just got wet. The only thing I felt was the sting of my tattoo.”
The old man took the other chair. He poured fresh tea, and this time he drank it. “No one else got wet,” he said. “You don’t see anyone else with a shark bite.” He looked around the building as if wondering for the first time what kind of place this was. “I’m going to retire soon,” he said. “Soon all the old-timers will be gone. I don’t know what’s going to happen to this country.”
“What will become of her?” Jun Do asked.
“The Second Mate’s wife? Don’t worry, we’ll find someone good. We’ll find someone worthy of his memory.”
From his pack, the old man shook out a cigarette and with some struggle, lit it. The brand was Chollima, the kind they smoked in Pyongyang. “Looks like your ship is a regular hero factory,” he said.
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?”