From below in the courtyard came a whoop, followed by a sound that might have been a laugh or a cry, and Jun Do somehow knew that at the center of these drunk people was the Second Mate’s wife. From above came the clicking nails of dogs standing to take an interest, and he followed the sounds as they moved to the edge of the roof. Even on the tenth floor, the windows managed to capture the sounds, and from all over the housing block came the squeaks of people cranking their louvered windows open to see which citizen was up to no good.
Jun Do pulled himself up and by pushing a chair like a walker, he made his way to the window. There was just a sliver of moon, and in the courtyard far below, he located several people by their sharp laughs, though he could make out only the black sheen of them. He could picture the luster of her hair, though, the glow of her neck and shoulders.
The town of Kinjye was dark—the bread collective, the magistrate, the school, the ration station. Even the karaoke bar’s generator was silent, its blue neon light gone blank. Wind whistled through the old cannery and heat waves emanated off the steaming chambers of the new. There was the outline of the Canning Master’s house and in the harbor was only a single light—the Captain reading late aboard the Junma. Beyond that, the dark sea. Jun Do heard a sniffing sound and looked up to the roof overhang to see two paws and a cocked puppy’s face looking down at him.
He’d lit a candle and was in a chair, covered with a sheet, when she came in, unsteady through the door. She’d been crying.
“Assholes,” she said and lit a cigarette.
“Come back,” a voice yelled from the courtyard below. “We were only joking.”
She went to the window and threw a fish down at them.
She turned to Jun Do. “What are you looking at?” From a chest of drawers, she grabbed some of her husband’s clothes. “Put a shirt on, would you?” she said and threw a white undershirt at him.
The shirt was small and smelled sharp, like the Second Mate. It was murder to get his arms through. “Maybe the karaoke bar isn’t the place for you,” he said.
“Assholes,” she said and smoked in the other chair, looking up as if there was something she was trying to figure out. “All night long they were toasting my husband the hero.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I must have had ten plum wines. Then they started picking sad songs on the karaoke machine. By the time I sang ‘Pochonbo’ I was practically a wreck. Then they were all fighting to take my mind off it.”
“Why would you spend time with those guys?”
“I need them,” she said. “My new husband’s going to be picked soon. I have to make a good impression on people. They need to know I can sing. This is my chance.”
“Those guys are local bureaucrats. They’re nobodies.”
She grabbed her stomach in discomfort. “I am so tired of getting fish parasites and then having to eat chlorine pills. Smell me, I reek of it. Can you believe my father did this to me? How can I get to Pyongyang when I smell like fish and chlorine?”
“Look,” Jun Do said, “I know it seems like a raw deal, but your father must have known the options. Certainly, he picked the one that was best for you.” It felt low and ugly to pass along the line that he’d fed so many times to the other boys—You don’t know what they were going through, your parents wouldn’t have put you in an orphanage if it wasn’t their best option, maybe their only one.
“A couple times a year these guys would come to town. They’d line up all the girls, and the pretty ones, they just”—she leaned her head back and blew smoke—“disappeared. My father had a connection, he always got wind of it, and I’d stay home sick that day. Then he sends me down the coast to this place. But what’s the point, you know? Why be safe, why survive if you’re going to gut fish for fifty years?”
“What are those girls now?” Jun Do asked. “Barmaids, room cleaners, worse? You think doing that for fifty years is any better?”
“If that’s how it works, just say so. If that’s what happens to them, tell me.”
“I have no way of knowing. I’ve never been to the capital.”
“Then don’t call them whores, then,” she said. “Those girls were my friends.” She gave him an angry look. “What kind of spy are you, anyway?”
“I’m just a radio guy.”
“Why don’t I believe you? Why don’t you have a real name? All I know about you is that my husband, who had the maturity of a thirteen-year-old, worshipped you. That’s why he fiddled with your radios. That’s why he nearly burned the ship up reading your dictionaries by candlelight in the toilet.”
“Wait,” he said. “The Machinist said it was the wiring.”
“Suit yourself.”
“He started the fire?”
“You want to know the other things he didn’t tell you about?”
“I would have taught him some English. All he had to do was ask. What did he want it for?”
“Oh, he was full of ridiculous plans.”
“To get out?”
“He said the key was a big distraction. He said the Canning Master had the right idea—make a scene so gruesome that nobody wants to go near it. Then you slip away.”
“But the Canning Master’s family, they didn’t slip away.”
“No,” she said. “They didn’t.”
“And after the distraction, what was the plan?”
She shrugged. “I never really wanted out,” she said. “He wanted the outside world. For me, it’s Pyongyang. I finally got him to see that.”
All the exertion had exhausted Jun Do. He pulled the yellow sheet tighter around his waist, but really, he wanted to lie down.
“You look tired,” she said. “Are you ready for your jar?”
“I think I am,” he said.
She got the jar, but when he reached for it, she didn’t let go. The two of them held it, and the candlelight made her eyes look bottomless.
“Beauty means nothing here,” she said. “It’s only how many fish you can process. No one cares that I can sing except the boys who want to take my mind off it. But Pyongyang, that’s where the theater is, the opera, television, the movies. Only in Pyongyang will I matter. For all his faults, that’s something my husband was trying to give me.”
Jun Do took a deep breath. When he used the jar, the night would be over, and he didn’t want that because when she blew out the candle the room would be as dark as the sea and the Second Mate upon it.
“I wish I had my radio,” he said.
“You’ve got a radio?” she asked. “Where is it?”
He nodded toward the window, and the Canning Master’s house beyond. “It’s in my kitchen,” he said.