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The job of the Second Mate, because he was young and new to the ship, was to retrieve the hooks, while the First Mate, in seven quick cuts, dorsal to anal, took the fins and then rolled the shark back into the water, where, unable to maneuver, it could race nowhere but down, disappearing into the blackness, leaving only a thin contrail of blood behind.
I never imagined such cruelty
“To row around the world,” the Second Mate said. “Only a sexy woman would do that. It’s so pointless and arrogant. Only sexy Americans would think the world was something to defeat.”
“And what if you do make it around the world—how do you wait in line for your dormitory toilet again, knowing that you’ve been to America? Maybe the millet tasted better in some other country and the loudspeakers weren’t so tinny. Suddenly it’s your tap water that smells not so good—then what do you do?” Jun Do didn’t answer him.
Jun Do heard the story as if it were being broadcast from some far-off, unknown place. Real stories like this, human ones, could get you sent to prison, and it didn’t matter what they were about. It didn’t matter if the story was about an old woman or a squid attack—if it diverted emotion from the Dear Leader, it was dangerous. Jun Do needed his typewriter, he needed to get this down, this was the whole reason he listened in the dark.
Jun Do fell asleep at his station, a rarity. He woke to the voice of the girl who rowed in the dark. She’d been rowing in the nude, she said, and under a sky that was “black and frilled, like a carnation stemmed in ink.” She’d had a vision that humans would one day return to the oceans, growing flippers and blowholes, that humanity would become one again in the oceans, and there’d be no intolerance or war. Poor girl, take a day off, he thought,
“To me,” Jun Do said, “what everybody gets wrong about ghosts is the notion that they’re dead. In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range.”
“You know what you are?” she said. “You’re a survivor who has nothing to live for.”
“Where we are from,” he said, “stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.” Here, Dr. Song took a sip of juice, and the finger he lifted trembled slightly. “But in America, people’s stories change all the time. In America, it is the man who matters.
When the dogs returned, the Senator gave them treats from his pocket, and Jun Do understood that in communism, you’d threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.
Wanda said, “I heard a story that in the ’70s an American soldier crossed the DMZ, a boy from North Carolina who was drunk or something. The North Koreans made him a language teacher, but had to stop after he taught all the agents to talk like crackers.”
Nine hours in the back of a crow. The washboard road rattled his guts, the engine vibrated so much he couldn’t tell where his flesh ended and the wooden bench began. When he tried to move, to piss through the slats to the dirt road below, his muscles wouldn’t answer. His tailbone had gone from numb to fire to dumb. Dust filled the canopy, gravel shot up through the transaxles, and his life returned to enduring.
Soon Commander Ga was on the third floor of Building 13, the most modern office complex in the world. Whoosh, whoosh went the vacuum tubes all around him. Flicker, flicker went the green computer screens.
This is trump. The biggest best most beautiful in the world, with a green screen. Not the best. Not even close. Took us backward
