The Emperor of Any Place Read online

  “You sounded like you were warning me, like I should be prepared.”

  “If he were coming, I’d be sandbagging the place and planting land mines.”

  “Cool,” said Evan. “Fort Any Place.” He picked through the stir-fry for chicken. He’d eaten all the good bits. He put the bowl down. “But it’s kind of too bad. I thought maybe he’d phoned and said he was homeless and we were going to have to put him up.”

  “I’d take poison first.”

  His father tied off the lines. The sails were raised.

  “So?” said Evan.

  “Huh?”

  “Your father. You learned something?”

  “Oh, right. Well, not much to my surprise, it turns out the man is a murderer.”

  Evan nodded. “Uh-huh,” he said. “What else?”

  “Murder isn’t enough?”

  Evan had heard all this before, and anyway his mind was wandering. “It would be kind of cool if he showed up, wouldn’t it. Like the premise for a really bad sitcom.”

  His father laughed, but it was not the kind of laugh you got from a studio audience. “You obviously weren’t listening closely to what I said.”

  “He’s a murderer. Boring.”

  “It’s true.”

  “I know, Dad. He was in the army, right?”

  “No, the marines. A leatherneck.”

  “Yeah, so killing people sort of comes with the territory.”

  His father’s eyes gleamed. “In a war, yes. But when the war is over? What kind of a guy goes on killing when the fight is officially over?”

  Evan rolled his eyes. “Keep on trucking, Dad, like it’s nineteen sixty-seven.”

  His father acknowledged the reproach with a grin. “Okay, I hear you. I’m ranting. But this is different. This is actually murder.” The smile on his father’s face was a little maniacal.

  “This is what you learned today?”

  “This is what I learned today.”

  “Like, it was on CNN, or something?”

  “Not yet. But that’s not a bad idea.”

  “Dad, stop being mysterious.”

  His father chuckled. He shook his head, returned his attention to the brand-new ship in a bottle. The deranged smile turned into a grimace — indigestion, judging from the stir-fry. He rubbed his chest. Some of the decrepit Day-Glo rubbed off on the heel of his hand. Jimi was fading away to nothing.

  “So are you going to tell me or what?” said Evan.

  His father frowned for a moment, shook his head. “Sometime, maybe.” Then the frown lifted and he smiled radiantly at Evan as if he’d only just seen him and the boy was a miracle. He looked down, gazing, kind of sadly, at the ship in the bottle. He seemed flushed.

  “Dad, are you okay?”

  Clifford shook his head.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Clifford shook his head a second time. “It’s this murder thing. I mean, on one hand, why would I be surprised, right? But, on the other . . . it’s as if, for some reason, I don’t believe it. There’s something wrong with the picture.”

  Evan watched and waited. What picture? But with one last shake of the head, his father seemed to dismiss whatever it was he was thinking about.

  “So,” he said, finding a stash of smiles somewhere and trying one on. But the “so” didn’t lead anywhere. The room was silent. There was just Evan, Clifford, Axis: Bold as Love, and the newly reconstituted USS Constitution.

  Evan came up from the rec room. He was in his sweats and a sopping T-shirt. He’d been working out on the rowing machine, listening to “Angry Workout Mix,” not getting anywhere. That was the thing about rowing machines.

  His father sat in the living room listening to jazz. His favorite chair in the sweet spot between two tall electrostatic speakers. He took his listening seriously.

  “Very mellow,” said Evan.

  His dad looked up and smiled. “Miles Davis,” he said. “Kind of Blue.” He was drinking a scotch. He sat up a bit straighter, paused the sound. “Sorry for getting all bent out of shape earlier.”

  “No prob, Dad. I love it when you get sentimental about the good ole days.”

  “Like I said, sorry.” He swayed a bit as if the music were still playing. “It’s just that I’ve been thinking about Griff a lot lately.” There was something in his voice that made Evan pull up an ottoman.

  “What’s up?”

  “Ah, it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you about it sometime. I’m kind of glad you put me in my place earlier.”

  “Dad, I —”

  “No, no. It’s ridiculous — I’m ridiculous. I know it.” His face got pinched. “The man still gets to me, even now. Like I’m haunted.” Then he pushed the pause button again, let the music out of its box. It floated up into the room, and the stand-up bass seemed to Evan like a boy with a kite — and the kite was Miles Davis on his muted horn out of sight in the air up there.

  “Maybe you should get in touch with him.”

  Clifford seemed for just a moment to consider the idea, but then gently shook his head — or was he just noting the slow rhythm of the song? The window was open. A night breeze stole into the room and was doing a slow dance under the jazz. Evan could feel it on the back of his neck, the sweat on him cooling. He shivered.

  “Dad?” His father looked at Evan. “What’s going on?”

  “Memories,” he said. He leaned forward and patted Evan’s knee, then sank back into his seat. “Just memories.”

  Evan looks out the window at the garden in the rain. He’s standing over the kitchen sink eating a casserole that Mrs. Cope from up the street brought over. Rachel Cope is . . . was . . .

  Start again, Ev.

  Rachel Cope was his father’s gardening buddy. Dad called her his pusher lady, dropping by with bulbs and cuttings and things in plain brown bags. Evan wondered once whether there was something between them.

  “Nah,” said his dad. “Just bulbs.”

  She’d offered to help Evan out with the flower beds. Was he supposed to phone her about that or would she just come? Looking out the window now, at the drenched greenery, Evan isn’t sure which are flowers and which are weeds. He’s not sure what he’s supposed to do about annuals and perennials, except that with perennials, you probably have to do it more often. He isn’t sure what to do about the lawn. Mow it probably. Or get a goat.

  He isn’t sure about this casserole, either. Eating it cold right out of the dish probably isn’t helping. It’s got hamburger in it and a tomato base. That much he can identify. But there are other textures, other flavors — some alien vegetable, strange spices. He stops, stares at it.

  Other people’s food is weird.

  He’s got a freezer full of other people’s food: casseroles, soups, and stews. He’s grateful, but one of these days, he’s just going to have to make himself something he recognizes.

  His father had been building a fishpond in the back. He can see it from the window. There’s just the hole and a pile of topsoil sitting on a black tarp. There’s a rubber liner, folded and waiting, the rain beading on its matte-black surface. A delivery of paving stones arrived only yesterday, all paid for. What do you say to the deliverymen? Nothing. You sign the sheet where the guy says, and you’ve got yourself forty square feet of polished granite.

  He wonders if he should finish the fishpond. The hole and the pile of dirt have been his excuse for not mowing the lawn. How long can he put it off? He doesn’t have anything else to do. Then he wonders if he should just shovel all the earth back into the hole. There’s a pool of muddy water at the bottom of it, like an empty grave.

  Maybe he could put his father’s ashes there.

  Right now they’re sitting in The Box.

  The Box is sitting on the kitchen counter, where he left it when he came back from the funeral parlor. The Box is a plain brown sturdy plastic container, too fat for a cereal box, too short to be laundry detergent — a box that should in no way be sitting on the kitchen counter.


  Dave, a friend of his father’s, helped organize the cremation, the funeral. Evan shared a checking account with his father that they used for household expenses, groceries, random bills, and whatnot. This was clearly the “whatnot” he could never have seen coming. Anyway, there was money, for now. As for the big picture, well, that remained to be seen.

  He was pretty sure everything was his: the house, the car, the savings. He didn’t think his father had some secret lover who would suddenly come out of the woodwork and cause trouble. There wouldn’t be a charity he’d signed all his money over to: the Ship-in-a-Bottle Foundation. At least he didn’t expect so. His mother was long gone. He thought of all those stories of people sitting in a lawyer’s office and learning the horrible truth that they’ve been cut out of the will. He really didn’t expect anything like that. Dad wasn’t one for mysteries. If there was one thing he knew it was that his father loved him more than anyone or anything else. That was pretty amazing.

  And it wasn’t making any of this easier.

  So there was money, apparently; how to get at it was another thing. He needed help. He was over sixteen, an adult. Whoa! That came as a surprise. Driving the car was one thing; settling an estate was something else.

  “If you were from my homeland, you’d be a ward of the state.” This nugget of information came from Olivia Schlaepfer; Olivia who walked her Siamese cat on a leash. Any Place’s resident steampunker.

  “Where are you from?” Evan asked. “A Dickens novel?”

  “No,” she said, as if his question had been serious. “Switzerland.” It was at the brunch after the memorial service. When he first saw her arrive at the chapel, he almost cried at the thoughtfulness of her showing up, even if she was in a studded black leather jerkin, white crinoline, and black aviator boots. She had an ancient black aviator cap on her head, too. She looked like an Oreo. Then she came over to talk to him, and soon enough he really was on the verge of crying — or screaming. “You’re not an adult until you turn eighteen in Switzerland,” she said.

  “Well, good for them,” he said. “I’m an adult here. Children’s Aid won’t take me.” He threw out his hands like What’s a guy supposed to do? Move to Switzerland?

  “So, you’re an orphan,” she said, with a gleam in her eye that suggested the idea seemed attractive, if only in a steampunk kind of way.

  He could correct her on the orphan thing: technically there was a mother somewhere, in England, last he’d heard. But, no, he had no proof of that. “I guess so.”

  She nodded and smiled as if they were sharing a very special secret.

  He did what people advised him to do: the bank manager, Dad’s friend Dave, and nice Mr. Gupta next door. “Family, Evan,” said Mr. Gupta. “In the end, always family. Surely, you must have someone?”

  Mr. Gupta didn’t lack for relatives. How do you explain having no one? Actually, Mr. Gupta, sir, I was born in a test tube.

  A relative.

  Well, there was one at least. So he looked in his father’s address book and was a little surprised to find a series of addresses, all scratched off but for the last: “Hope Manor.” Whatever his father might have said, he always knew where the infamous Griff was. North Carolina, it turned out. Where his father was born and lived until he was Evan’s age, when he turned into Wily Draft Dodger Man and made his way to the True North Strong and Free.

  And so when Evan got up the courage, he phoned.

  The irony of it rushes over him again. Double-digit irony. Irony to the power of ten. The reason Griff was even on Evan’s radar was because of his father going on about him like that. Griff the murderer.

  But that was just Dad being Dad, wasn’t it? Just Hyperbole. (Yet another of the many band names he and the boys had rejected.)

  My father is dead and so I have asked a murderer to come and help out around the house.

  Evan puts down the dish, half eaten. He feels the rumbling in his stomach. Whatever it was Mrs. Cope made for him, he was going to get to taste it again, very, very soon.

  Evan closes the book. Stares at nothing. Then, with an effort, he opens it to the title page again. Twenty copies. That’s all? So this is what: for family and friends only? He closes it. But wait . . . He opens it, confused. How do lawyers get involved with something when there are only twenty copies of it in existence? He shakes his head, flips the page, reads the dedication, flips to the next page.

  A prologue. He hates prologues.

  Why would you say something before you said the something you wanted to say? He closes the book again.

  “Are you going to read it, Evan?”

  He looks up, shields his eyes from the sun. He’s in the backyard on a lawn chair, sitting up to his butt in dandelions. Mr. Gupta is on the flat roof of his carport. Who knows why? He is wearing work gloves.

  “Hi,” says Evan. “What did you say?”

  “The book. You have opened it many times now.”

  Evan stares at the yellow-bound volume, closed again, just lying there. It reminds him of a cat — a very rectangular cat — that jumped up when he was napping and has fallen asleep on his lap. He looks back at his neighbor, shrugs.

  “If you would like something very entertaining, I have just finished a work of science fiction by Mr. Robert J. Sawyer, The Terminal Experiment. Do you know this book?”

  All Evan knows is that he should have stayed indoors. “Uh, no, sir.”

  “Ah,” says Mr. Gupta. “Well, it is a shocker, let me tell you: a murder mystery but also a very interesting treatise on ethical philosophy. Most intriguing.” As Evan watches in horror, his neighbor takes off his work gloves and heads toward the ladder.

  No, no, no! No more help. No more nice people!

  “Uh, thanks, Mr. Gupta. But actually this is something I have to read.”

  That stops him. Thank you, God, if that’s your real name. Mr. Gupta climbs back up the two rungs he had descended and steps back onto the roof. He puts his work gloves on again. “I thought school was out?”

  “It is, but you know . . .” He can’t think of anything to say. “Thanks, anyway, for the offer.”

  “You are very welcome, Evan. The Terminal Experiment. Remember that.”

  “I will. Yeah.”

  “Anytime, my friend.”

  Evan opens the book again.

  What you are holding in your hands is a rare and extraordinary document, not just in its content but in its very existence, the fact that it has survived the journey it has taken. To that end, I owe a debt of gratitude to Sergeant Major Clifford E. “Griff” Griffin II, who rescued the original manuscript and was kind enough to forward it to me, knowing, or should I say, hypothesizing my relationship to Corporal Ōshiro. That this account, written in the dying year of the War of the Pacific, is only now coming to light is another aspect of the miracle. When Griff discovered the manuscript in 1945, he intended to send it to me, forthwith. That was what he said in the cover letter that accompanied the material when it appeared, so surprisingly, on my doorstep, more than half a century later. He apologized for taking so long, but no apology was required. I know how war and its aftermath tend to push aside the best of intentions. The cessation of conflict only lets us see the chaos that war has left behind, and small personal matters are forgotten, as a soldier attempts to find his way back to something like “ordinary” life. That certainly was my own experience. The manuscript had been shoved away somewhere and miraculously not been lost or left behind in any of a number of moves. Picking up stakes is the fate of a lifer in the armed forces, like Griff. So it was only when he was preparing to move into a retirement home, at the end of a distinguished career, that he rediscovered the document.

  I did not know the sergeant major well or for very long. We were, as they say, ships passing in the night. And so it is all the more extraordinary that he remembered me and went to the trouble of tracking me down. For that I am eternally grateful.

  There is a mystery here, however. Griff could not have kno
wn the content of these writings. Isamu’s memoir was written in Japanese. This point is important, as you will see when you come to the end of the story.

  Before you read it, however, let me say a little something about myself. I do so not out of any vanity but only to try to place in context material that will undoubtedly strike the reader as far-fetched, the maundering of a mind set adrift. That might very well be the case! War does funny things to men.

  I have spent my life as a man of science. After demobilization, I became a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I ended up doing a PhD and then followed my mentor, John McCarthy, when he left the Institute to go west in the early fifties. “Uncle John” was a cognitive scientist and among the earliest of a new breed of computer men. He was the one, in fact, who invented the term “artificial intelligence.” I didn’t have to think twice about accepting the invitation to join his staff at Stanford, where the university had created the first technologically focused industrial park to be found anywhere in the world. I am still affiliated with the university as a professor emeritus and a longtime denizen of that industrial park — that hive of activity — known now around the world as Silicon Valley.

  So I think I am safe in declaring myself compos mentis. And therefore you may ask yourself, “Do I believe everything that is written herein?” I can only answer in the affirmative. Monsters, ghostly children, eaters of the dead . . . It cannot be so, you say, and yet it is what it is. I concur with everything Isamu describes, and his description, as you will soon see, is vivid and detailed. Oh, there is a passage in the opening chapter that is clearly fanciful — hallucinatory. Isamu seems to acknowledge it as such, the effect of shell-shock, as we used to call it. But from the moment he arrives on the desert island he named Kokoro-Jima, his refuge and later my own, I can vouch for everything that he saw and experienced there. Indeed, I have added my own recollections, interspersed with his, where I felt further explication might be warranted, fantastical though it might seem. I cannot explain any of it rationally, even now, so many years later. So it is worth repeating: War does funny things to men. Reading Isamu’s account revived in me those long-ago memories. A fear I have never known. A friendship like no other.