Late that night, Jun Do’s chest hurt, and he yearned to hear from the girl who rowed in the dark. The Captain had told him that seawater would keep the tattoo from getting septic, but Jun Do wouldn’t take the chance of going up top for a bucket and missing her. More and more, he felt as if he was the only one in the world who understood her. It was Jun Do’s curse to be nocturnal in a nation without power at night, but it was his duty, too, like picking up a pair of oars at sunset or letting the loudspeakers fill your head as you sleep. Even the crew thought of her as rowing toward dawn, as if dawn was a metaphor for something transcendent or utopian. Jun Do understood that she was rowing until dawn, when with weariness and fulfillment she could pack it in for sleep. It was deep into the night when he finally found her signal, faint from traveling so far from the north.
“The guidance system is broken,” she said. “It keeps saying the wrong things. We’re not where it says we are, we can’t be. Something’s out on the water, but we can’t see it.”
The line went quiet, and Jun Do reached to fine-tune the signal.
Then she was back. “Does this work?” she asked. “Is it working? There’s a ship out there, a ship without lights. We shot it with a flare. The red streak bounced off the hull. Is anyone out there, can anyone rescue us?”
Who was attacking her? he wondered. What pirate would attack a woman who wished nothing more than to make her way through the dark? Jun Do heard a pop over the line—was it the pop of gunfire?—and parading through his head came all the reasons it was impossible to rescue her: that she was too far north, that the Americans would find her, that they didn’t even have maps of those waters. All true, but of course the real reason was him. Jun Do was why they couldn’t chart a course to rescue her. He reached forward and turned off the receiver, the green afterimage of its dials lingering in his eyes. He felt the sudden static of cool air when he removed his headphones. Up on deck, he scanned the horizon, looking for the lone red arc of her emergency flare.
“Lose something?” the Captain asked. He was just a voice from the helm.
Jun Do turned to see the tip of his glowing cigarette.
“Yeah,” Jun Do said. “I think I did.”
The Captain didn’t leave the pilothouse. “That boy’s pretty messed up right now,” he said. “The last thing he needs is some craziness from you.”
Using a lanyard, Jun Do fished a bucket of water from the sea and poured it on his chest. He felt the pain as a memory, something from long ago. He looked upon the sea some more. The black waves would rise and clap, and in the troughs between them, you could imagine anything was out there. Someone will save you, he thought. If you just hold tight long enough, someone’s bound to.
The crew put down longlines all day, and when Jun Do woke at sunset, they were bringing aboard the first sharks. Now that they’d been boarded by Americans, the Captain was no longer afraid of being boarded by Americans. He asked that Jun Do channel the broadcasts through a speaker on the deck. It would be late, Jun Do warned them, before the naked rower checked in, if that’s what they were hoping for.
The night was clear, with regular rollers from the northeast, and the deck lights penetrated far into the water, showing the red eyeshine of creatures just a little too deep to make out. Jun Do used the array antenna, and rolled the crew through the whole spectrum, from the ultralow booms of sub-to-sub communications to the barking of transponders guiding jet autopilots through the night. He let them listen to the interference caused when the radar of distant vessels swept through them. At the top of the dial was the shrill rattle of a braille book broadcaster, and out there at the very peak was the trancelike hiss of solar radiation in the Van Allen belts. The Captain was more interested in the drunk Russians singing while they operated an offshore drilling platform. He muttered every fourth or fifth line, and if they gave him a minute, he said, he’d name the song.
The first three sharks they brought aboard had been eaten by a larger shark, and nothing remained below the gills. Jun Do found a woman in Jakarta who read English sonnets into a shortwave, and he approximated them as the Captain and mates examined the bite radius and peered through the sharks’ empty heads. He played for them two men in unknown countries who were attempting to solve a mathematical problem over a ham radio, but it proved very difficult to translate. For a while, Jun Do would stare toward the northerly horizon, then he would force himself not to stare. They listened to planes and ships and the strange echoes that came from the curve of the earth. Jun Do tried to explain concepts like FedEx, and the men debated whether a parcel could really be sent between any two humans on earth in twenty-four hours.
The Second Mate kept asking about the naked rower.
“I bet her nipples are like icicles,” he said. “And her thighs must be white with goose pimples.”
“We won’t hear from her until dawn,” Jun Do said. “No use talking about it till then.”
The Machinist said, “You need to look out for those big American legs.”
“Rowers have strong backs,” the First Mate said. “I bet she could tear a mackerel in half.”
“Tear me in half, please,” the Second Mate said. “Wait till she finds out I’m a hero. I could be an ambassador, we could make some peace.”
The Captain said, “And wait till she finds out you like women’s shoes.”
“I bet she wears men’s shoes,” the Pilot said.
“Cold on the outside and warm on the inside,” the Second Mate said. “That’s the only way.”
Jun Do turned to him. “You want to shut up about it already?”
The novelty of radio surveillance suddenly wore off. The radio played on, but the crewmen worked in silence, nothing but the winches, the flapping of ventral fins, and the sound of knives. The First Mate was rolling a shark to cut its anal fin when a flap opened, and from it was ejected, viscous and yolk-covered, a satchel of shark pups, most of them still breathing from sacs. These the Captain kicked in the water, and then called for a break. Rather than sink, they lay flat on the surface, floating with the ship, their half-formed eyes bulging this way and that.
The men smoked Konsol cigarettes, and up on the hatches felt the wind on their faces. They never stared toward North Korea in moments like these—always it was east, toward Japan, or even farther out into the limitless Pacific.
Despite the tension, a feeling came over Jun Do that he sometimes got as a boy after working in the orphanage’s fields or whatever factory they’d been taken to that day. The feeling came when, with his group of boys, he’d been working hard, and though there was still heavy lifting to be done, the end was near, and soon there would be a group dinner of millet and cabbage and maybe melon-skin soup. Then sleep, communal, a hundred boys bunked four tiers deep, all their common exhaustion articulated as a singularity. It was nothing short of belonging, a feeling that wasn’t particularly profound or intense, it was just the best he tended to get. He’d spent most of his life since trying to be alone, but there were moments aboard the Junma where he felt a part, and that came with a satisfaction that wasn’t located inside, but among.
The scanners were rolling through the frequencies, playing short selections of each, and it was the Second Mate who first cocked his head at the tenor of something he’d heard before. “It’s them,” he said. “It’s the ghost Americans.” He slipped off his boots and began to climb barefoot up the pilothouse. “They’re down there again,” he said. “But this time we’ve got them.”
The Captain shut down the winch motor so they could hear better. “What are they saying?” he asked.
Jun Do ran to the receiver and isolated the broadcast, fine-tuning it even though the reception was strong. “Queen to knight four,” Jun Do said. “It’s the Americans. There’s one with a Russian accent, another one sounds Japanese.” All of the Americans were laughing, clear as a bell over the speaker. Jun Do translated. “Look out, Commander,” he said. “Dmitri always goes for the rook.”
The Captain went to the rail and stared into the water. He squinted and shook his head. “But that’s the trench,” he said. “Nothing can go that deep.”
The First Mate joined him. “You heard them. They’re playing chess down there.”
Jun Do craned his neck to the Second Mate, who had shinnied up the pole and was working on unhooking the directional. “Careful of the cable,” he called, then checked his watch: almost two minutes in. Then he thought he heard some Korean interference over the broadcast, some voice talking about experiments or something. Jun Do raced to narrow the reception and squelch out the other transmission, but he couldn’t get rid of it. If it wasn’t interference … he tried to keep his mind from thinking that a Korean was down there, too.
“What are the Americans saying?” the Captain asked.
Jun Do stopped to translate, “The stupid pawns keep floating away.”
The Captain looked back into the water. “What are they doing down there?”
Then the Second Mate got the directional off the pole, and the crew went silent as he aimed it into the deeps. Quietly, they waited as he slowly swept the antenna across the water, hoping to pinpoint the source of the transmission, but they heard nothing.
“Something’s wrong,” Jun Do told him. “It must have come unplugged.”
Then Jun Do saw a hand pointing into the sky. It was the Captain’s, and it was aimed at a point of light racing through the stars. “Up there, son,” the Captain said, and as the Second Mate lifted the directional and lined it up with the arc of light, there was a squeal of feedback and suddenly it sounded like the American, the Russian, and the Japanese voices were right there on the ship with them.
Jun Do said, “The Russian just said, That’s checkmate, and the American is saying, Bullshit, the pieces floated away, that’s grounds for a new game, and now the Russian is telling the American, Come on, give up the board. We might have time for a rematch of Moscow versus Seoul before the next orbit.”
They watched the Second Mate track the point of light to the horizon, and when the light went around the curve of the earth, the broadcast vanished. The crew kept staring at the Second Mate, and the Second Mate kept staring at the sky. Finally, he looked down at them. “They’re in space together,” he said. “They’re supposed to be our enemies, but they’re up there laughing and screwing around.” He lowered the directional and looked at Jun Do. “You were wrong,” he said. “You were wrong—they are doing it for peace and fucking brotherhood.”