I WAS tired when I arrived at Division 42. I hadn’t slept well the night before. My dreams were filled with dark snakes whose hissing sounded like the peasants I’d heard doing intercourse. But why snakes? Why would snakes haunt me so, with their accusing eyes and folded fangs? None of the subjects I put in the autopilot ever visited me in my sleep. In the dream, I had Commander Ga’s cell phone, and on it kept flashing pictures of a smiling wife and happy children. Only it was my wife and my children, the family I’ve always felt I should have had—all I had to do was discover their location and make my way through the snakes to them.
But what did the dream mean? That’s what I couldn’t fathom. If only a book could be written to help the average citizen penetrate and understand a dream’s mysteries. Officially, the government took no position on what occurred while its citizens were asleep, but isn’t something of the dreamer to be found in his dream? And what of the extended open-eyed dream I afforded our subjects when I hooked them up to the autopilot? I’ve sat for hours watching our subjects in this state—the oceany eye sweep, the babyish talk, the groping, the way they were always reaching for something seen with a faraway focus. And then there are the orgasms, which the doctors insist are actually seizures. Either way, something profound takes place inside these people. In the end, all they can remember is the icy mountain peak and the white flower to be found there. Is a destination worth reaching if you can’t recall the journey? I’d say so. Is a new life worth living if you can’t recollect the old one? All the better.
At work, I discovered a couple of guys from Propaganda sniffing around our library, looking for a good story, one they could use to inspire the people, they said.
I wasn’t about to let them near our biographies again.
“We don’t have any good stories,” I told them.
Man, they were slick, with their gold-rimmed teeth and Chinese cologne.
“Any story would do,” one said. “Good or bad, it doesn’t matter.”
“Yeah,” his sidekick added. “We’ll add the inspiration later.”
Last year they swiped the biography of a lady missionary who’d snuck in from the South with a satchel full of Bibles. We were told to find out who she’d given Bibles to and if more like her walked amongst us. She was the one person the Pubyok couldn’t crack, except for Commander Ga, I suppose. Even when I hooked her up to the autopilot, she had the strangest smile on her face. She had a thick set of spectacles that magnified her eyes as they pleasantly roamed the room. Even when the autopilot was in its peak cycle, she hummed a Jesus song and beheld the last room she’d ever see as if it were filled with goodness, as if in the eyes of Jesus all places were created equal and with her own eyes she saw that this was so and thought it good.
When the Propaganda boys got done with her story, though, she was a monstrous capitalist spy bent on kidnapping loyal children of the Party to work as slaves in a Bible factory in Seoul. My parents were addicted to the story. Every night I had to listen to their summary of the loudspeaker’s latest installment.
“Go write your own tales of North Korean triumph,” I told the boys from Propaganda.
“But we require real stories,” one told me.
“Don’t forget,” the other added. “These stories are not yours—they’re the property of the people.”
“How’d you like me to take your biographies?” I asked them, and they didn’t miss the implied threat.
They said, “We’ll be back.”
I stuck my head in the Pubyok lounge, which was empty. The place was littered with empty bottles, which meant they’d pulled an all-nighter. On the floor was a pile of long black hair. I knelt down and lifted a lock, silken in the light. Oh, Q-Kee, I thought. Inhaling slowly and deeply, I smelled her essence. Looking up to the big board, I saw that the Pubyok had cleared my cases, every one of them except for Commander Ga. All those people. All their stories, lost.
That’s when I noticed Q-Kee in the doorway, watching me. Her head was indeed buzzed, and she wore a Pubyok-brown shirt, military pants, and Commander Ga’s black boots.
I dropped the swirl of hair, and rose from my knees.
“Q-Kee,” I said. “Good to see you.”
She said nothing.
“I see a lot has changed since I was conscripted to help with the harvest.”
“I’m sure it was voluntary,” she said.
“Of course it was.” Pointing at the pile of hair, I added, “I was just using my investigative skills.”
“To determine what?”
There was an awkward silence.
“It looks like you’ve got the Commander’s boots there,” I said. “They should fetch a good barter at the night market.”
“Actually, they fit me pretty well,” she said. “I think I’ll keep them.”
I nodded, admired her boots a moment. Then I caught her eye.
“Are you still my intern?” I asked. “You didn’t switch sides, did you?”
She reached out to me. There was a folded slip of paper in her fingers.
“I’m handing you this, aren’t I?” she said.
I opened the paper. It was some kind of hand-drawn map. There were sketches of a corral, a fire pit, fishing poles, and guns. Some of the words were in English, but I could make out the word “Texas.”
Q-Kee said, “I found this inside Ga’s right boot.”
“What do you think it is?” I asked her.
“It might be the place where we find our actress.” Q-Kee turned to go, but then she looked back. “You know, I’ve seen all her movies. The Pubyok, they don’t seem to care about really finding her. And they couldn’t get Ga, or whoever he is, to talk. But you’ll get results, right? You’ll find Sun Moon. She needs a proper burial. Results, that’s the side I’m on.”
I studied the map a long time. I had it spread across the Pubyok Ping-Pong table and was contemplating every word and line, when Sarge came in. He was soaking wet.
“Been doing some waterboarding?” I asked him.
“Actually, it’s raining,” he said. “A big storm’s coming in from the Yellow Sea.”
Sarge rubbed his palms together. Though he smiled, I could tell his hands were hurting.
I pointed at the big board. “I see there was a mass confession while I was out.”
Sarge shrugged. “We got a whole team of Pubyok with time on their hands. And here you were with ten open cases, just you and two interns. We were only showing some solidarity.”
“Solidarity?” I asked. “What happened to Leonardo?”
“Who?”
“My team leader, the baby-faced one. He left work one night and never came back. Like the rest of the guys who used to be on my team.”
“You’re asking me to solve one of life’s mysteries,” he said. “Who’s to say what becomes of people? Why does rain fall down and not up? Why was the snake created cowardly while the dog was born vicious?”
I couldn’t tell if he was mocking me or not. Sarge wasn’t exactly a philosopher. And since Leonardo’s disappearance, Sarge had acted strangely civil toward me.
I returned to the crudely penciled sketch of the Texas village.
He stood there, massaging his hands.
“My joints,” he said. “They’re murder when it rains.”
I ignored him.
Sarge looked over my shoulder. “What do you have there, some kind of map?”
“Some kind.”
He looked closer. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “The old military base west of town.”
“What makes you say that?”
He pointed. “There’s the road to Nampo, and look, here’s the fork in the Taedong.” He turned to me. “This have to do with Commander Ga?”
Finally, the kind of lead we’d been looking for, the chance to crack this case wide open. I folded the map. “I’ve got work to do,” I said.
Sarge stopped me from leaving. “You know,” he said, “you don’t have to write an entire book about every citizen that comes through the door.”
But I did have to. Was anyone else going to tell a citizen’s story, was there going to be any other proof that someone ever existed? If I took the time to learn everything about them, if I made a record, then I was okay with the kinds of things that happened to them afterward. The autopilot, the prison mines, the soccer stadium at dawn. If I wasn’t a biographer, then who was I, what did I really do for a living?
“Am I getting through to you?” Sarge asked. “Nobody even reads those books. They gather dust in a dark room. So quit killing yourself. Try it our way for once. Knock out a few quick confessions, and then come have a beer with the guys. We’ll let you load the karaoke machine.”
“What about Commander Ga?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“His biography is the most important one.”
Sarge stared at me with cosmic frustration.
“First of all,” he said, “that’s not Commander Ga. Did you forget that? Second, he wouldn’t talk. He’s had pain training—the halo didn’t even touch him. Most important, there is no mystery to solve.”
“Of course there is,” I said. “Who is he? What happened to the actress? Where’s her body, her kids?”
“You think the guys at the top,” Sarge said, pointing down to the bunker below, “you think they don’t know the real story? They know where the Americans were hosted—they were there. You think the Dear Leader doesn’t know what happened? I bet Sun Moon was probably standing to his right, while Commander Ga was to his left.”
Then what was our purpose, I wondered. What was it we were interrogating, and why?
“If they have all the answers,” I said, “what are they waiting for? How long can the people wonder why our national actress has gone missing? And what about our national hero, the holder of the Golden Belt? How long can the Dear Leader not acknowledge they’ve mysteriously vanished?”
“Don’t you think the Dear Leader has his reasons?” Sarge asked me. “And just so you know: you don’t get to tell people’s stories, the state does. If a citizen does something worthy of a story, good or bad, then it’s up to the Dear Leader’s people. They’re the only ones who get to tell a story.”
“I don’t tell people’s stories. My job is to listen and write down what I hear. And if you’re talking about the boys from Propaganda, everything they say is a lie.”
Sarge stared at me in wonderment, as if only now did he realize the size of the gulf between us. “Your job …” he started to say. Then he started to say something else. He kept shaking his hands, trying to expel the pain. Finally, he turned to leave, pausing only a moment in the doorway.
“I did my training at that base,” he said. “You don’t want to be anywhere near Nampo during a storm.”
When he was gone, I called the Central Motor Pool and told them we’d need a vehicle to take us toward Nampo. Then I gathered Q-Kee and Jujack. “Round up some rain slickers and shovels,” I told them. “We’re going to fetch an actress.”