The Emperor of Any Place Read online

  I heard something. Were they back already? I peered into the jungle, scanning the undergrowth, crouching. I listened under the birdsong for some deeper sound. Then I heard a scrabbling sound from much nearer by. It was coming from the cockpit! Could someone possibly be alive?

  My hand clutched the hilt of my sword; the jikininki were drawn to the dead. But as I knew so well myself, they were also drawn to the almost dead. I slid along the downed plane to look for the hatchway. My eyes were so busy scanning the forest that I tripped, crashing headlong to the ground. I cried out as I fell, and suddenly the air was filled with screaming and flapping, so that I threw my arms over my head, fearing for my life. From the broken cockpit windows, a black flock burst into the steaming jungle air, flying to the nearest branches, cawing like mad, angry to have been disturbed.

  Jungle crows, thick-billed carrion birds, their feathers ruffled; they roosted in judgment, five or six of them. One of them had a long strand of something hanging from his beak, brown and stringy.

  “You are not eating for the memories, are you, crows!” I said, on my feet again and a little embarrassed at having drawn such an ugly crowd.

  I rested my back against the fuselage. The explosion of birds had frightened me. I will not say otherwise. I breathed deeply, swatted at the mosquitoes drawn to my sweat. Oh, I do not like the jungle.

  I looked down at what I had stumbled over. It was a yellow metal box with wide straps attached to it, a backpack of some kind by the look of it, with rounded corners and two sides curving in, giving the thing a thick waist. I crouched to peer at it more closely. There were dials, two of them like eyes; or one was like an eye and the other a closed eye, a keyhole. And where the mouth should have been on this strange yellow face, there was a larger semicircular dial, as if the machine were frowning.

  What was it doing outside the plane?

  One of the crows cawed and fluttered up from its branch, anxious to get back to work in the cockpit and eyeing me with contempt. Jikininki were not the only marauders I was going to have to deal with. I had to get inside.

  I found the hatch right behind where the wing had once been. I tried the handle; the door clicked open. This surprised me, exhilarated me, but also troubled me. I am not much used to planes, but surely, I thought, it should not be easy to open one from the outside like this. Through the slimmest of cracks, I peered into the gloom. The cargo bay was fully loaded. Crates filled the fuselage right to the curved steel ribs of the ceiling. They were all in disarray from the crash. I hoisted myself up and into the plane, silently pulling the door closed behind me and turning left toward the cockpit. The air inside was hot and close, hotter even than the trapped air of the ravine. A fetid odor made me wrinkle my nose. I clambered over the clutter toward the cockpit, making as little sound as possible, although I did not really expect there to be any adversary, really. The crows were not likely to have been dining on anything living. The crates shifted under my weight. I cut myself on a jagged splinter of wood, my attention fixed on the cockpit.

  I passed by six portholes and then ducked through the low doorway that led to the cockpit.

  The men at the controls were already more jungle than human. The cockpit was stifling hot. The men looked well cooked, their skin leathery. And the crows had been hard at work. An eye dangled against the stripped bone of the pilot’s cheek. Through a gaping hole ripped in the underbelly of the fuselage, creeping plants had already begun to climb into the small, enclosed space. The crew, still in their flight jackets, were strapped in.

  There was a book lying on the cabin floor, stained with crow droppings. I knelt to pick it up, despite the mess, so pleased was I to see it. I rubbed the ordure off on the copilot’s leather sleeve. I muttered a word of apology and bowed to him. He made no reply. I could not read the writing inside, gaijin writing, but I could read the numeric figures there: dates, I suspected, and the coordinates of destinations, the codes of airfields. It was the pilot’s logbook, an almost new one with only a couple of pages filled in. Flipping through the many blank pages, how I grinned, Hisako. I had wished to keep some kind of a journal of my experience so that when we were reunited I could share every detail of it with you. Here was that journal!

  All I needed was a writing implement, and I could see the top of what I supposed to be one in the pilot’s breast pocket.

  Gingerly I squeezed between the two dead men. My elbow caught the copilot’s cheekbone and his head fell sideways, held to his neck and collarbone by leathery strands of cartilage. Wincing at the ravaged face, I groaned.

  “Ā, sumimasen,” I apologized, bowing nervously to the copilot. How grievously I was treating him!

  What was I doing here! Get out, I told myself. I have become too used to traveling amongst the dead.

  But was it such a desecration to steal a man’s pen? With shaking fingers, I reached for it. Outside the ragged eyes of the splintered windscreen, there was a fluttering of wings. One of the crows had returned. It squawked at me, spreading its wings in a gesture of defiance.

  “Scat!” I shouted, and with a squawk of annoyance, the bird took off. Again, I turned to the corpse. I reached for the pen and only at the last moment snapped my fingers back.

  What if the body was booby-trapped? As I pulled the pen from the pocket, would the whole plane explode?

  Don’t be foolish, I told myself. Surely that would be impossible unless someone had survived the crash. Which is when my mind registered what my eyes had already seen but not fully taken in.

  The third seat.

  I had walked right past it: the navigator’s station. The seat was empty.

  There was someone out there! I dropped to a crouch and squatted on the floor of the cockpit, with my hands over my head. I felt like a frightened child hiding from his father. I felt incapable of everything. Oh, I had trouble even breathing at that awful moment. I had to think clearly. You see I had forgotten over the last little while what it was like to be at war, to always be thinking of the enemy because, as it had been drilled into me, the enemy was always thinking of me.

  Think, Isamu.

  After a while of listening to the jungle sounds sifting in through the empty window, hearing nothing unexpected, I was able to concentrate on the problem at hand. I came up with two possible solutions: One, the navigator parachuted, either at sea, in which case he was undoubtedly dead, or over land, in which case he might be anywhere on this island. But if he was, I had never seen him nor any trace of him. And if he had seen me and successfully hidden from me, would he, this survivor, not then have taken advantage of the element of surprise and taken my life? As gruesome as this idea was, it made sense.

  Alternately, he might be dead elsewhere on the plane. He might have been attending to something in the tail end of the vessel. Was there a lavatory on the plane? Maybe he had been trapped there and been unable to make it back to his seat. A vile place to die! But then there were not many good ones when you were at war.

  Obviously, I had to investigate. But first the pen. I had heard of booby-trapped bodies, but as far as I knew that was only on the battlefield or in an area where there was likely to be enemy action. What would be the point of rigging up such a thing on a desert island? And why blow up a plane filled with supplies, whatever they were? Food, I dared to hope. More sweet brown sticks — boxes and boxes of them! Still, I was cautious. And then I thought about the crows. They had been at work for some time. If there was a bomb, the crows would have set it off. So I gathered up my courage and plucked the object from the pocket. It was not something I had ever seen before. Perhaps it was not a pen at all. I tried to pull it open. It would not. Then I pushed the knob at the top and a point appeared at the bottom, although it was not a very sharp point — not anything like a nib. I touched it gingerly. It was round. I rolled it along my finger and blue ink appeared. It was a pen, after all! What a story this would be to write in my journal and the object with which I wrote it would be the subject of the story!

  I did no
t find the third crew member in the plane, but what I did find made my blood run cold. At the back of the cargo bay, I found a blanket lying on a pallet and a pillow made up of a folded jacket wrapped in some kind of gunnysack. A case lay on its side, acting as a low table, upon which sat a medical kit, opened. There were bandages and bottles and tubes and ampoules, squeezed dry and empty, lying higgledy-piggledy on the floor. There was also blood — a lot of blood. It stained the floor, the blanket; there were smears of it on the sides of the crates. In one corner there was a ragged pile of bandages and gauze soaked with gore. Brown. Dried. Whoever had turned this place into a hospital ward had left here on his own two feet.

  I sat cross-legged, waiting in the cargo plane. Sitting had not been my first thought. My first thought had been to get out of there and run as fast as my legs would carry me out of the ravine, back to my little home up on the highland overlooking the pretty lagoon, where the air was fresh and the winds kept the mosquitoes at bay. But everything was changed now that I knew there might be someone out there — was someone out there. Had I merely been lucky to avoid being seen, or had the navigator been watching me all along, awaiting the right opportunity to dispatch me?

  No. The crash was recent. And clearly the man was injured. Badly. He’d taken cover. Maybe he had even died from his wounds.

  Not entirely reassured by this thought, I waited for half an hour or more, and my imagination, on any number of occasions, picked out the sound of someone approaching the plane. But as the time lengthened, I felt my nervousness harden into critical doubt. What a fool I was being. I could almost hear my father snap at me. Why are you cowering there, boy?

  I looked around at the crates surrounding me. Many of them were cracked and broken, though they were stacked so densely, I had not seen anything of what they contained. Curious, I got to my feet. Ow! Pins and needles. I hobbled around a moment, shaking out the pain. Then I pushed back the wooden top, careful of the nails that had held it shut until the crash.

  Rifles.

  The cargo plane was loaded with rifles. I pried open another box with my knife: ammunition. I lifted a rifle from the case. They were American firearms, but not so different from my own Arisaka. No chrysanthemum embossed into the steel. I remembered rubbing the cold steel flower with my thumb when I received my first: the chrysanthemum, symbol of perfection. I aimed down the sights of this other rifle and was swallowed by a memory.

  Remember when I signed up for the Young Men’s Corps early in ’39? Ah, no, of course not, for we hadn’t met yet. How strange. It feels as if I have known you forever, my Hisako-chan. Anyway, it was a chance to learn a little close drill, how to fire a rifle and use a lance. I learned how to man an observation post and did so proudly, scanning the skies for enemy planes. As an Okinawan, I had grown up under the scarcely concealed intolerance of the Japanese toward my people, especially the soldiers. Then things changed, as you know. With the war in China, Japan had to conveniently expand its view of what a person of Japanese origin might be in order to swell the ranks of the infantry. They extended citizenship as far as the Ryukyu Islands, my homeland.

  In the Y.M.C. I discovered a camaraderie that I enjoyed. And when the time came, when in any case conscription seemed likely due to the threat of an American invasion, I went ahead and signed up to become a real soldier. You did not want me to. You never said so, but I know. If all young men, everywhere, listened to their sweethearts, would there be any war?

  I lowered the rifle, ashamed. I had never become a real soldier, never a very good one, in any case. But now, it seemed, the war was not over? Maybe now I would get my chance.

  Outside the light had changed. Through the nearest porthole, I could see that dusk was dipping her long fingers into this steep valley, fingers stained like a smoker’s with nicotine. I knew I must get back to my shelter. I most certainly must not get myself trapped in this place of death at nightfall. It came on so quickly. Night, I mean. Well, death as well! I loaded my new rifle and stuffed my pockets with ammo, so that my shorts, already baggy, sagged even more. I tightened the rope belt I had made around my skinny waist.

  I was about to leave when I remembered the crew. What was I to do about them? Nothing! Not right now, at least. Ahhh. How could I bear to leave them to the carrion crows? I stamped my foot. This is foolish, Isamu, I told myself. There is little enough left of them to ship off to the next world. Get a grip! But I couldn’t do it — couldn’t just leave them. I swore and punched one of the crates. Ow! But then an idea occurred to me. The tops of the crates. Yes! With the help of a bayonet, I opened another crate and carried the two tops to the cabin. I managed to block the cracks in the windows. It was not a very effective job, but at least it would keep away the crows. For now. Later? Well, I could not account for later. There were a lot of things to think about, and “later” was not at the top of my list of concerns.

  I opened the hatch just a hair and peered cautiously out into the noisy heat. I waited another moment, then, wiping the sweat off my forehead, stepped down onto the jungle floor. Crouching, moving quickly, and running in a zigzag line, I made it to the thick trunk of a flame tree at the edge of the scar. Catching my breath, I waited. No shots rang out. No one had been waiting out there for me. I was a fool to have wasted time sitting there in that steam bath of a plane. Whoever had occupied the bloodstained compartment had hurried away from there as fast as he could or had stumbled out of there to die. Unless, of course, he was playing a cruel game with me — cat and mouse. Well, if that was the case, I had a weapon now, two weapons: a rifle and the best weapon of all, intelligence! If the navigator had survived . . . well, Isamu will be ready for him. Isamu will be the cat!

  1 In the transcript, Isamu scratched out the original title of this section, so that it is unreadable. I doubt he would have heard the name “Gooney Bird” at this point in time, for he learned it from me.

  Evan wakes to someone walking by his bedroom door. It is a comforting sound, his father going to the bathroom and returning for a little sleep-in. A good idea, thinks Evan.

  Where was he?

  Running. Running with Isamu, waiting for the gunshot that will bring him down. A desert island — hunter or hunted?

  Then he wakes again to reality.

  Kokoro-Jima lies beside him on the bedclothes, open, wings spread out like some grounded yellow bird. The story is bleeding into his life. Hurriedly, he closes it and shoves it under his bed. He rubs his eyes, checks his bedroom door. Closed. Would Griff have opened it? He looks at his phone: 10:33, two hours and thirty-three minutes late for debriefing. So, he is now officially the Devil’s spawn.

  He should get up, but he lies there thinking about this stranger in his house. This man who must be a hundred, or at least — he figures it out on his fingers — at least in his late eighties. And yet he walks tall as if on parade, as if every muscle in his body knows its job, a well-oiled squadron of muscles waiting for deployment.

  He thinks of Griff ’s voice, how disarming it is. How he seems hardly to acknowledge the g’s and r’s and t’s at the ends of words, so that everything sounds softened out, like a box of pastel-colored M&M’s. Except there’s no sweetness, really. It’s as if someone melted chocolate onto ball bearings.

  He was the one who walked by Evan’s room.

  Which could only mean he went into the master bedroom. Dad’s room. “Daddy,” as he referred to Clifford in that chocolate-covered-ball-bearings accent of his. What did he want, looking in Clifford’s bedroom? Who gave him the right to walk around this house?

  “You did,” Evan mutters to himself.

  Then he kicks off his bedclothes, gets dressed, and goes to face the music. To save the old man any need to reassess his grandson, he wears the same clothes he was wearing last night. He’d be used to that, thinks Evan. Soldiers wear the same thing every day, don’t they?

  Griff is in the Dockyard, staring at the shelves of ships in bottles. Evan glances nervously at the worktable, as if the yellow book might h
ave left some memory of itself there. But his father’s worktable has been transformed back into the desk it was, a desk now stacked with file folders, papers.

  On the right side is his father’s old Packard Bell, voted one of the ten worst PCs ever. The screen saver is on. Psychedelia. Griff must have followed Evan’s eyes.

  “I was searching for something like a spreadsheet,” he says.

  “Steam-driven,” says Evan.

  “What’s that?”

  “Dad used to say he had the last of the steam-driven computers.” Then he looks at Griff. “You know about spreadsheets?”

  Griff acknowledges his surprise. “I may be old, but I’m not intimidated by technology.” Evan nods. “And good morning,” Griff adds, then turns to look at the wall of bottled ships. “I was just admiring the fleet here.”

  “Yeah. It was his hobby.”

  “Not surprised. He was one for making model airplanes when he was a boy. Had ’em all arrayed on shelves, just like this.”

  Drawn into the room, Evan looks at the boats. Thinks of telling Griff that it’s not a fleet — it’s a flotilla. He wants to say hands off. He is suddenly possessive of the flotilla. But it isn’t that. He’s just uncertain of this man who has appeared out of nowhere.

  “He’s good with his hands,” Evan says.

  Griff nods. “He sent me one of these here things,” he says.

  “He did?” The incredulity in Evan’s voice makes the old man smile.

  “Yes, indeed. Surprised the hell outta me. But it fell a little short of being what you might call a gift.” Evan sticks his hands in his pockets, waiting for the story — wanting to hear any news of his departed father — just not wanting to beg for it. “It was the USS Chesapeake,” says Griff. “Pretty little three-master.” He picks up one of the boats, tilts the glass to see it better. “Only thing is the Chesapeake had, shall we say, a spotty career.” He puts the bottle back on the shelf, sniffs at the memory, and shakes his head. “You see her first commander, he surrendered that ship to the Brits in an action that started the War of 1812.”