Borderlands 5 (8 page)

War has no rhythm. It’s either total boredom or total insanity. No middle ground. You can count off the boredom with cigarettes and conversation, but then the world explodes and you find yourself on the express train to hell.

When the first wave of Marines came ashore at Okinawa, there was no resistance. The Nips had vanished. Not until we began pushing inland did we find them. They had built pillboxes into the hills, and fortified caves. They rained bullets and mortar fire down on us, and the only way we could get them out was to take each cave, one by one, with flamethrowers and grenades. It seemed like every man, woman, and child was armed and willing to die for the Emperor.

Moze and I were sent in as reinforcements, replacements for the Marines killed and wounded. When we joined up with a unit pressing on toward Shuri, where the fighting was fierce, we dug in at the bottom of a ridge under a banyan tree. The weather had gotten bad. It rained buckets, and the island was nothing but a sinkhole of mud. I thought the tree might protect us from the rain. I looked over at Moze, resting on his shovel.

He’d barely spoken to me since that first night. I had lived through the hell of Leyte Gulf, with the
kamikaze
attacks, and I figured we had a pretty good chance of dying here on Okinawa.

And I also figured it was a hell of a thing, to come this far to die. As I turned over another shovelful of mud, I decided it was time to make my peace with Moze.

“Moze, I’m sorry about the other night.”

He turned and stared at me with those dead, dark eyes.

“It’s just that, well, I guess I do believe. A little.” I chose my words carefully, trying to be tactful.

Moze kept staring at me, but as I spoke, his eyes began to shine. Then he laughed and clapped me on the back. “I knew you’d come to understand! Wait, Ben, and have some faith. By this time tomorrow, you will be dancing under this tree, laughing with joy.”

I grinned at him, but fear clutched my bowels again. Here I was, in a foxhole, facing the desperate and vicious Nips with a crazy man for my buddy.
Oy vey izmeer,
as my Pop used to say.

T
he shelling that came down on us from high on the ridge that night was heavy. Bullets shredded the leaves of the tree overhead and blasted chips of wood off the trunk and branches. Explosions lit up the perimeter with flashes of blinding white light, and the air was filled with acrid smoke and screams. Moze and I fired our guns at the bunker about halfway up, our designated target. Suddenly Moze stopped firing and leaped from the foxhole.

“What in God’s name are you doing?” I shouted. “Get down, Moze. They’re going to kill you!”

He paid no attention to me as he ran out into the muddy clearing in front of the foxhole.

“Watch, Ben! I will dance and pray, all the secret prayers from the
Kabbalah!
I will dance and call out the
Shma
, Yahweh’s secret name. I will dance and pray and share the mysteries with you, and then you will dance, too, just as I promised. Finally, this endless killing will stop!”

“Moze, please! For the love of God, get back here before you get killed!”

But he ignored my frantic pleas.

“Baruch atah Adonai, eloiheynu melech ha’alom,”
he screamed, shaking his fist at the nest of Japs firing down on us. Then he began to chant, swaying back and forth from the waist, praying. His feet churned the mud, splashing a counterpoint to the whine of the bullets, the rat-atat of machine guns, the explosions of grenades.

I was beyond terror, waiting every second to see my friend blown apart in front of my eyes. My friend, who apologized to dummies back in boot camp, was committing suicide. Over and over, I yelled at Moze to get back into the foxhole until my voice broke, and I was shrieking like a girl. The Japs were lobbing grenades at us, and all I could do was fire blindly up the hill and watch my friend as he swayed and chanted and danced in circles, lit up in the strobe flashes of gunfire, wreathed in smoke from all the ordnance exploding around us.

I suddenly realized that the bullets
were
hitting Moze. They made a wet, thudding noise as they hit his body, a whistling clang as they ricocheted off his helmet. His dance became a frenzied spinning, his prayers a terrible song. He fell to his knees and stretched his arms to the sky. A bullet carried off two of his fingers; another took off a piece of his chin.

There was nothing but the howling hell of war around us. The world, including me, had gone mad in swirls of smoke and flame and noise and death. Moze was being shot to pieces out there, and he was still dancing. I could only sit in the foxhole and watch and scream.

All at once Moze stood up, sprinted to the foxhole, and grabbed his rifle. Pointing it at the sky, he let loose round after round. Then he turned on me, brandishing the weapon in my face. I stared back. Half his face was gone, carried away by the Nip slugs, but his eyes burned brightly under his helmet.

“Why aren’t you dead?”  I whispered. “You should be dead.”

I dropped my rifle and crouched down like a dog in the mud at the bottom of the foxhole. Moze scared me more at that moment than I’d ever been scared before—or since. I stared up into the barrel of my friend’s rifle, the beckoning finger of Death twitching for me. If the Lord had seen fit for millions of Jews to die in the German death camps, why would He bother with a
meshugganah
Hasidim and his friend? I waited for the white-hot pain that would end my short life.

“Benjamin, where is your faith?” Moze asked in his sad quiet voice. And I heard him so clearly, above all the fury of the battle.

A grenade exploded not ten feet away from us. The force of the blast was stunning when it slammed into me. The banyan tree crashed down on top of the foxhole, and onto my head. I sank down into a deep, gray void.

When I came to, Moze was lying face down in the mud. My friend had lost his family, his sanity, and finally his life. I had been spared by the falling of this shrapnel-scarred banyan tree. Guilt washed over me, and a desire to avenge Moze pushed me out of the foxhole.

Climbing up through the shattered tree, I staggered to my feet, my ears bleeding and my head pounding.

“NO!” I shouted. I raised my rifle and began firing madly, aiming into the flashes from the Nip guns up on the ridge. I kept firing until the clip was empty. Then I pulled a grenade from my belt, took the pin out with my teeth, and threw it toward the pillbox. The noise of the explosion was deafening, the smoke thick and hot. My throat, already raw from yelling, burned as I gasped for air. Finally, after lobbing two or three more grenades, there were no more flashes.

I spun around and faced the lump on the ground that was my friend a moment or two ago. I fell to my knees beside Moze, to embrace him. But my arms encircled nothing but mud. His body was gone. Unbelieving, I felt frantically around in the black muck, trying to find him. My fingers closed on a scrap of paper, but that was all. I clutched it and kept searching, moving in circles, plowing the mud with my hands.

“Medic!”  I cried in my broken voice. “Medic!”

I don’t know how long I searched for Moze. Bullets whined around me. Grenades exploded fifty feet away, a hail of dirt and metal rattling down on my helmet. I fought off the gray mists that were rolling over me, in a frenzy now to find him, widening my circles in the mud until I passed out again.

Just before my mind went away, I remembered to slip the paper in my pocket.

I finally regained full consciousness a few days later on the hospital ship. I had a bad concussion, ruptured eardrums, and a nasty shrapnel wound in my left leg, but—miraculously—no bullets had hit me.

“Where’s Moze?”  I asked the nurse.

“Moze who?” she replied, looking at me curiously.

Nobody had ever heard of Moishe Abramowicz. But a lot of people had heard of me. Seems as though I single-handedly took out a company of Nips who were hunkered down on the ridge that night. My unit would have been slaughtered if I hadn’t blown their cozy little nest all to hell. I was a hero.
Mazel tov
.

I tried to explain that I wasn’t alone, that Moze had been there, but it did no good. I guess they thought I had shellshock or battle fatigue—they call it post-traumatic stress disorder now—and they let me rave on about my imaginary friend.

I received a Purple Heart. I couldn’t even look at it. But later I did look at the muddy scrap of paper I found that night. It was the
Shma—
the secret name of God. I put it in the box with the Purple Heart.

A
few weeks later, while I was in the hospital in San Francisco, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan was forced to surrender. I saw pictures of the roiling black mushroom cloud reaching up to the skies. I read about this new, unstoppable, terrible weapon that was born to wreak vengeance on the enemy, and remembered Moze talking about evil, how God could end this war with a Joshua.

For a long time after that, I worried about my soul as well as my sanity.

But the Army headshrinkers finally convinced me that I was Okay, that Moze on Okinawa was just a glitch in my thinking brought on by stress, and I went home to New York. I went into the family business—men’s clothing and haberdashery—and business was good. So I got married to a wonderful, beautiful girl named Maxine, bought a house and made babies, all the American Dream stuff that we fought—and a lot of us died—for. Life went on.

But I couldn’t forget Moze. As time went on and my children got older, I began to do some research. I wanted to find out what had really happened to him, and what the muddy scrap of paper meant. I wrote letters to Washington, to other men in Moze’s unit—and I began to read the
Kabbalah.
It took a few years, but I finally pieced the story together. Moze’s unit had indeed been sent to a small camp in Germany, and Moze did go insane and kill a German civilian—and his C.O. sent him back to the States with a Section 8. He died in 1950, in the psych ward at the V.A. Hospital in New York.

Moze had been shipped out in June of ’45—two weeks before I met him in Okinawa. One of his buddies wrote and told me that the day before he was shipped out to New York, Moze had done something very strange. He was allowed an hour each day to exercise outdoors before returning to the prison they had made for him out of the camp Kommendant’s office. That last hour he spent digging with his fingers in the soft earth near the graves. That night, he escaped—only to be recaptured, standing by the mass graves, alternately laughing and weeping.

He raved and babbled on like a demon, the letter read. He said he could make the war be over. Then he’d cry and say his soul was four-footed, or something like that. But, he said he had to save somebody else.

I don’t mind telling you that it was a mighty scary thing, seeing Moze like that. He was always such a nice, gentle guy. Wouldn’t hardly swat a mosquito.

I remembered Moze’s sad eyes, haunted by the dreams that were too horribly true. “I must believe, or my soul is forfeit,” he had said. His family, his sanity, his life were indeed forfeit to this war. But he had his faith.

Faith enough to bring forth a Golem. Not enough to save the world, but enough to protect a friend. Enough for me to understand.

N0072-JK1

STUDY OF SYNAPTIC RESPONSE OF THE ORGANISM TO SPONTANEOUS STIMULATION OF VULNERABILITY ZONES. PHOTOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS.

ADAM CORBIN FUSCO

Sometimes we encounter a story so disturbing, its appeal goes way beyond merely liking or disliking it. The following piece is presented with such dispassionate realism, we could not get it out of our minds. If you have ever read any of the professional journals of the “social sciences,” you will appreciate Adam Fusco’s razor-edged satire.

—A study is made of synaptic response focusing on the laughter vector during spontaneous stimulation of vulnerability zones, popularly known as the Tickle Response. This is to address the question, Why do we laugh when tickled?

—Each subject, in an isolated room with a chair and monitor, was instructed to remove footwear and to place the right foot through a black screen. Subjects were told they were to be tickled on the sole of the foot by a robotic, metal hand. This was done to render invalid any foreknowledge of human interaction and “play” expectations. In actuality, a researcher donned a metallic glove to perform the stimulation.

—During stimulation subjects were shown via the monitor three comedic performances along three modalities: an HBO special of a prominent comedian, a Three Stooges short, and cartoon imagery that contained violence. The laughter response with and without visual input was measured and found to be non-cumulative: it did not increase from visualizing comedic performance, nor was it prevented by administration of sympatholytic drugs (e.g. propranolol, phenoxybenzamine). This suggested consistent, though non-concurrent, neural pathways. Subjects did exhibit increased “openness”—that is, greater sustainability—of response during cartoon imagery. Priapic response in males during tickle stimulation of the foot increased twenty-two percent while viewing imagery of a popular cartoon duck, most strongly when said character was subject to explosive force and in particular if the duck’s bill was displaced or removed from the head altogether. Orgasmic initiation in females increased by ten percent while viewing imagery of a popular cartoon pig when said character wore spacesuits or ballet tutus (the binding referent). These results are correlative.