The Emperor of Any Place Page 4

  I awoke another time and it was evening. Another day was coming to an end, although how many had passed I have no idea. The birds told one another the news of the battle in excited chatter and shrieks. I sat up and with my good hand tugged at the string around my neck. The little red-and-gold sack came free of my shirt, my omamori: the amulet you gave me on the day we wed, meant to keep me safe.

  Gingerly, I opened the top of the sack and with two fingers slipped out the photo of you, my bride, Hisako.

  I will live, if you will, too.

  It was time, I thought. Your face gave me courage. I tenderly placed the picture back in my omamori and tucked the little sack back into my filthy shirt.

  And so . . .

  I was prepared for anything now. I gathered up my strength and climbed to my feet. I wobbled like a drunken man, then stepped through the vale of bamboo and stood unsteadily at attention, staring straight ahead across the clearing. There were still soldiers there; the cleanup from the massacre would go on long into the night, whichever night it was.

  But no one saw me.

  Their eyes were cast down at the carnage. I would have called out but found I had no voice. I would have gone to them — given myself up, but you, Hisako, you snapped at me!

  “Iie!” you said. “No!” Such a shock. I could have sworn I heard you.

  So I stood there a moment longer, the longest moment of my life. Then I turned and shambled off the other way. I held myself as tall as a limping burned man can, and I waited for the shout, the gunfire, the end, but it didn’t come.

  I am leaving this war, I thought. It is no defeat to live. Isn’t that what you meant when your voice snapped at me from the amulet lying next to my heart?

  It is funny. We have been married so little time that I have never heard you raise your voice except to sing! But I am glad you shouted at me like that, even if it was most impolite of you.

  I came to the brink of the sea. I looked down at the beach below. The tide was in, lapping at the wreckage of the American amphibious landing vehicles. There were landing ramps,3 constructed by the Americans, to scale the bank. The tide was high, a spring tide. One of the ramps floated, the wooden platform torn free from its base.

  A raft waited for me in the floating world.

  I washed up on a shore at low tide. It was early evening. My raft was deposited on a wide strand of beach, littered with all manner of flotsam, the debris of battle: what was left when the war was over but not over. From the fringe of the beach, where the grasses waved in the onshore breeze, I could just make out hungry ghosts watching and waiting, impatiently. I thought to myself, Isamu, beware! When you are good and dead, they will feast on you. But then, before my eyes, children appeared, unraveling from the air, first one, then another, and so on, until there were a number of them — too many to count in my half-dead state. The nearest came to my side, a ghost boy, who might have been nine or ten to look at, if years count for anything in the in-between world. He rested his vaporous hand on my shoulder. And although I could feel nothing, I closed my eyes again with a feeling of peace coming over me. These ghost children will protect me from the other ghosts, I thought. It was not a very rational kind of thought, but it was my last in what had been an endlessly long day.

  1 The Battle of Tinian began on July 24, 1944, and was over in not much more than a week. Over 30,000 American marines landed on an island defended by fewer than 9,000 Japanese soldiers. The Japanese lost more than 8,000 soldiers. Only 313 were taken as prisoners. The Americans lost fewer than 400 soldiers.

  2 On July 31, the Japanese launched a suicide attack, which included many residents of the island, including farmers, women, and children. This raises the question of just how long Ōshiro lay wounded. He spoke earlier of it being the day after the invasion, whereas the suicide attack was seven days later. The suicide attack signaled the end of the invasion, for all intents and purposes.

  3 These ramps were called “doodlebugs” by the Seabees who constructed them: the United States Navy Construction Battalion (CB).

  Evan looks up, stunned, not sure what has roused his attention. The phone. The house phone is ringing. He’s not sure how many times it has rung. He was a long way off. He waits, perfectly still, until the ringing stops, until there is just the rain again, splattering against the window and the wind gusting in the trees like the tide on a distant beach. The water on the sill dribbles down the wall. There is a wet spot on the carpet — a semicircle of darker beige. There is the shimmer of summer lightning, then thunder rumbling, low. He remembers to breathe, looks at his cell phone. It’s just after ten thirty. His friends only know his cell number. It’s too late for robocalls. He leans back against his pillow. Closing his eyes, he sees a raft at sea, a body half dead, an island shrouded in mist heaving into view. And then the phone rings again.

  Leo Kraft?

  Evan remembers the address on the letter. California. It would only be seven thirty there.

  He pushes the covers off, praying that the ringing doesn’t stop. He runs silently to his father’s bedroom at the end of the hall, to the cordless on the bedside table.

  “Hello?”

  There is a hollowness at the other end of the line and then the echoey sound of a loudspeaker announcement. Evan can’t make out the words, but he can guess the location.

  “Evan?” The voice is deep. Not Leo Kraft.

  “Hi.”

  “It’s your grandfather.” There is a pause while he waits for Evan to say something. Evan says nothing. “I’m at the airport.”

  With effort, Evan lines up enough neurons to kick-start his vocal cords. “Which airport?”

  “Is there more than one?”

  “Here, you mean? Pearson International?”

  “That’s it. It’s late. Thought I’d give you a heads-up.”

  “But you were coming —”

  “Next Saturday. I know. That was the soonest I could imagine getting away. Turned out there was nothing stopping me from coming a week early.” He pauses. “The earlier the better, I figured.”

  Evan doesn’t know what to say.

  “I guess I should have called.”

  It’s a prompt, Evan, your turn — say something.

  “Is this inconvenient, son?”

  “No, sir. I was just . . . Sorry. I was asleep.” It’s almost true; the story he left in the other room seems dreamlike to him.

  “I can make my way there,” says Griff. He recites the address and Evan nods, then remembers to say yes. “No need to pick me up. Perhaps, if you’re tired, you could leave a key under the mat.”

  “It’s not locked. The door. We don’t . . .”

  “Right, then.”

  “I’ll be up,” says Evan.

  “There’s no need, soldier. Get some shut-eye. We’ll talk in the morning.” Then he hangs up before Evan can say another word.

  “Shut-eye,” says Evan to the darkened bedroom. “Soldier.”

  Back in his room, Evan slips an old Blue Jays ticket stub into the book to mark his place. He sets it on his bedside table, then some instinct makes him pick it up again, hold it in both hands for one indecisive moment, before slipping it under the bed, out of sight. He clambers into the clothes he’s worn the last three days and makes his way downstairs.

  The house is a split-level: at the entry level, there is a living room, dining room, and kitchen, then up a short flight of stairs to the bedrooms, or down a short flight to the rec room and basement. He’s going to put Griff in the rec room. The couch folds out into a bed. He finds sheets and pillowcases. He and his father have always shared the housekeeping duties. He even remembers clean towels. “You are going to make some woman a fine wife,” his father used to say. He stops at the door as he’s leaving and looks back to see if everything looks right. The rowing machine has been folded up and leans against the wall, out of the way. The free weights are on the dumbbell rack. Exercise is just another thing that’s gone by the wayside.

  There’s a lav
a lamp sitting on the bar in the corner. He walks over and turns it on. He smiles to himself, trying to imagine whether the leatherneck with the gravelly voice will appreciate it.

  He’s looking out the side window of the front door when the taxi pulls up. The rain has slackened some, but not the wind; it punches holes in the willow on the lawn, grabs at the wings of Griff ’s raincoat, as he gathers his briefcase and suitcase from the trunk. The cabbie doesn’t help, doesn’t even crack his door. Then he pulls away in a hurry, spraying the curb, the moment the trunk is closed. What was that about?

  Griff walks up the drive, head lowered against the wind. A fierce gust grabs him, and in the wavering light from the streetlamp, he looks like something Tim Burton might have invented, constructed out of cables and dark matter.

  Now he stops.

  He looks up the driveway toward the carport. Evan wonders what he’s looking at. Standing there, like that, on his own long thin shadow, Griff reminds Evan of that poster for The Exorcist.

  “Oh, shit,” he murmurs to himself.

  The old man shakes his head slowly, turns, and heads up the pathway toward the front porch. His face is disgruntled, stern, and creased like old stone, eroded. Evan wants to lock the door against him. Run around the house and lock all the doors and windows. Pull down the shades. Instead he just steps back three long paces and then two more and waits for the door to open.

  If Griff is surprised to see him standing there, he doesn’t act it. Evan hears his father whispering in his ear. “He has stormed a thousand beaches. He’s used to hostile welcoming parties.”

  “Ah, you’re up,” he says.

  “Hi,” says Evan, nodding. He watches Griff size him up — sees himself through the old soldier’s eyes: lanky, underweight, with a loaf of dirty-blond hair, the sides buzzed, and a vertical tat on his skinny neck that reads: “.44 caliber love letter.” He’s dressed in sprayed-on black jeans, a studded belt, and a wrinkled and torn red T-shirt. It’s the one with the “March of Evolution” on it: an ape following a less hairy ape walking on his hind legs, following a guy with a club in his hands, following one with a spear on his shoulder. Modern man leads the parade, but this one is turned to face the posse and he looks pissed. “Stop following me!” say the words in the balloon.

  Evan is barefoot. And where was it he left his club?

  In the same instant he sizes up his grandfather: under the dripping black raincoat, a yellow golf shirt and tan chinos with pleats so sharp you could cut your finger on them. There’s no bunching at the knees to suggest the man was sitting on a plane or riding in a taxi. Maybe he stood at attention the whole way from Raleigh-Durham. There’s a scar above his right eye, a little white zigzag, where the gray eyebrow hair doesn’t grow.

  Evan takes the man’s raincoat and hangs it up, separating it from what’s already hanging there, his father’s coats and jackets. He watches Griff open the front zippered pocket of his luggage and pull out a clear plastic bag with a drawstring. He takes out a pair of brown cordovans. With tassels. Griff steps out of his shiny black shoes, beaded with raindrops, and into the cordovans. The skin of his arms and face is almost as brown as his shoes and several degrees darker than healthy. His hair is nothing but gray bristle. “Not a buzz cut,” his father’s voice whispers to him. “It’s called a ‘high and tight.’” Evan smiles to himself, remembering his father rubbing his own balding scalp. “The first battleground between the old man and me was the top of my head.”

  Griff holds Evan’s eye as if uncertain where the smile lingering there might have come from. He manages something like a smile, a slight rearrangement of the deep crevices in his face. His eyes are the Griffin-clan blue, except that Griff ’s are darker, clouded by how much they’ve seen. The two of them shake hands stiffly. There’s nothing old about the man’s grip; Evan holds on for dear life.

  He clears his throat. “Was it an okay flight?”

  “No, since you asked. Our ETD was pushed back three times, the coffee was rancid, and there was a mother with a newborn beside me who cried the whole way.”

  “The mother or the baby?”

  Griff does not favor him with a reply. Note to self: Joking doesn’t seem to have any good effect. The look in Griff ’s eye reminds Evan of a word he’s only ever heard in war movies: insubordination. Whoever is accused of it usually ends up in the brig.

  There’s this awkward moment. I should be doing something, Evan thinks. Something other than running away, screaming.

  “We can talk in the morning,” says Griff, taking charge of the situation. “Where do you want to put me?”

  “Uh, the family room,” says Evan. “There’s a bathroom down there, flat-screen TV, a mini-fridge in the bar, and it’s a lot cooler in the summer.”

  “I’m not buying the place,” says Griff.

  “Right. Uh . . . Yeah . . . It’s this way.” Evan holds out his hand, indicating the stairwell, like he’s some goofball bellhop at the Hilton.

  Griff picks up his bag and briefcase in one huge, knotted hand, and with his other hand clamped to the railing, he one-steps his way, old man style, down the stairs.

  “Did I leave the light on in the car?” says Evan.

  The man stops and slowly turns. “What’s that?”

  “You stopped in the driveway and you were staring at the carport. You looked as if you were frowning.”

  “The Ford Escort,” says Griff, shaking his head. He looks peeved, as if there’s something he cannot comprehend. “It just seemed remarkable to me that your daddy and I would end up driving the same damn automobile.”

  Then he turns to go but stops and looks back up at Evan, his face now half in shadows. “Keen observation, soldier,” he says.

  Keen, says Evan to himself.

  Griff stops again at the bottom. “So, shall we say oh-eight-hundred hours for debriefing? Or are you a late sleeper?” Evan would never have guessed that the words “late sleeper” could sound so much like “Satan’s spawn.”

  He shrugs. “Whatever,” he says. “I’m not like on a . . . you know, schedule.”

  “Schedule,” says the old man, turning the ch into a k. From what Evan can make of his expression, the word has a whole different meaning to Griff.

  He turns away. The wall-to-wall carpet says shhh as he opens the downstairs door and shhh as he closes it.

  There was a magic pond. That is what I decided it was. I was so parched, you see — so desperate for water — that until I drank from the pond, it was as if I were not truly alive. I wandered up some path made by animals, crawling part of the way, scarcely able to move at all, hoping that such a well-worn path must lead to water. I parted the rushes with my hands, and there it was, a deep, green pool.

  The air was laced with fine blue dragonflies; the sun glanced off their translucent wings. I sank to the soft earth and, leaning forward, placed my hands in the pond. I lifted the water to my face, gasped at the cool of it, opened my cracked and salt-stained lips to receive its blessing. My hands were smoke-blackened, my knuckles scraped raw, and the water felt like a salve. And my throat . . . Ah, my throat opened to the water like a flower to rain.

  I leaned back on my ankles, my wet hands resting on my thighs. “Tasukatta,” I said to the dragonflies. “What a relief.” Then I raised my hands and, placing them together, bowed reverently to the green pond.

  When I opened my eyes again, my ghostly family of children was there, scattered around the fringe of the pond, their transparent bodies visible behind the reeds, each watching me reverently with the steady gaze of a newborn child upon its mother. I bowed to them all.

  Leaning on my fists, I stared into the shimmering surface of the water. Might it be poisonous? I dismissed the idea. After all, how many times could you die in one day?

  In a glossy-leaved bush nearby, a white-throated ground dove whistled at me and chirped. “Hello, hato-chan,” I said. “Thank you for welcoming me to your island.” The dove paid me not the slightest attention, fluttered to the
ground, and dipped its beak into the water.

  I watched the bird, its plumage so much finer than my own. Ha! I was down to nothing but a loincloth. The bird sipped the water, not six feet from me but undisturbed by my alien presence. And, Hisako, you will forgive me if I admit to you that I had the strangest thought: This bird has lived forever. The dove is fearless because nothing can kill it. “So maybe this sweet water is an elixir,” I said out loud. “Maybe I will live forever, too.”

  In the dappled coolness of this clearing, I dipped my hands back into the pond, but this time I dug down deep into the cold, thick mud. At once I felt the healing in it. I scooped up the rich brown sludge, let it drip and slither down my arms. Tentatively I applied the mud to the raw and suppurated flesh of my torso. There were virulent red patches, hideous abscesses, all along my side. Gently I applied the muck to my afflicted body as though it were an expensive ointment. I breathed through my nose, my lips pressed tightly together to suppress the urge to scream with the pain of touching my skin. Then I sat, cross-legged, closed my eyes, and let the mud do its work. I was alive.

  But you are worried, perhaps, about the other ghosts I saw when first I landed, the ones standing a ways off watching me with red and ready eyes. You are thinking, Isamu, you must have been feverish and confused. But no, it was not so. When first I reopened my eyes, just as I felt the raft begin to move again on the incoming tide, I was startled to see one of the ghoulish creatures only a few feet away. It backed off, its head cast down as if it had been looking for something. I was not fooled. I knew what this fellow was, a jikininki. Slim as an eel it was and slimy, a decomposing cadaver, but with those glowing eyes and the sharp claws needed to tear apart a corpse.

  “I’m not dead yet, jikininki,” I shouted at the creature. It wasn’t much of a shout. My throat was parched. But the ghost stepped back a few paces more, and I could see how sad it was that I was not going to be its dinner. I dug my fingers into the wet sand and with a mighty effort hurled a fistful of it at the ghost. “Go! Scat!” I said. And, slope-shouldered, the thing limped off up the beach. My gentle ghost children watched all this with interest but no alarm. They are a peaceful lot. I climbed to my feet, exhausted from the ordeal, and immediately they crowded close to me. I did not like it, despite their angelic faces. But I decided they were only curious and not a threat.