The Black Isle (39 page)

Thirsting for more, he hunkered low and raised my thighs to meet his mouth, latching my calves against his shoulders and back, and proceeded to lap at the secret me with his probing tongue. Inch by inch, he backed himself up so that I was tilting upside down from him. As I screamed and shivered, the blood and adrenaline rushing down to my head, he gripped my waist firmly and drew me rhythmically toward his hungry mouth until spasms of ecstasy engulfed me so many times that I lost all count. Whenever I surrendered, the world vanished, the war vanished. It was at once my freedom and Taro’s ultimate proof of ownership over me.

We collapsed onto the tatami to retrieve our breaths, both of us covered in sweat. My muscles were limp, but knowing Taro, I knew we’d hardly even begun. Waiting for the sea breeze to cool us, I gazed over at him, and he shot me a heartfelt smile with his watery eyes. With great tenderness, he mouthed, “Momoko.” For a moment, I felt I was staring into Daniel’s loving eyes. Daniel, whose life I was preserving with this betrayal.

Taro’s member was a beast of erotic majesty, grand and aloof. I was magnetically drawn to pay it my respects. As I crawled and licked and nibbled my way down the hairy center line of his torso, gasps escaped from the dark sides of the room. Those gasps were the last things I heard before I succumbed to a familiar fever dream. When his moans grew jagged and I felt him begin to buckle in my mouth, he pushed me away brusquely, and I fell flat, the hard straws of the tatami striking my back.

He smiled:
Not yet
. My lips were tingling—they ached to be kissed, slapped, even bitten. My mouth yearned for a further taste. What I needed was yet more intensity, intensity that would heighten
and
obliterate all my senses, and he knew this. I picked myself up and we charged at each other like hungry animals.

He kissed me deeply while I kept my eyes closed and spread my legs for him, lusting to feel him fill me again. But instead of taking me, he withdrew and there came a sharp crack that left my cheek stinging. From experience I knew it wasn’t his hand but some flat-edged belt. Wet, salty warmth dribbled from my lip, but before I could touch it to see if it was blood, he spun me around and bound my wrists behind my back with his leather belt—this was what had struck me. I wasn’t shocked. There always came the inevitable point at which he decided to claim as much pleasure from me as he could, on his own terms and not necessarily mine.

I opened my eyes to meet his, black and devouring, close to my face.
Trust me
, they said.

At some point, the dream ended. There was a rustling in the shadows, a rustling like lascivious flesh rubbing against the woven grain of the tatami. Evidently one of our spectators had grown agitated. For the first time that night, I worried that a hoary old officer might leap out of the dark and force himself on me, wielding a three-sakura authority that none of the others would dare defy.

The moans and scratching sounds on the tatami grew increasingly incensed, yet nobody paid them the slightest heed. I broke out of Taro’s embrace and gathered up whatever shreds of my clothes were left. I was blushing, deeply, ferociously mortified.

Taro wore a quiet grin, studying my response to the intrusion, amused at my inability to get dressed. I had nothing to wear. He threw me his uniform shirt. I half expected to find a new sakura sewn on his epaulette, awarded like a merit badge for his performance. But there was still just the one. He took his own sweet time pulling on his underwear and trousers, eyeing me all the while. His gaze filled me with mounting dread. Something wasn’t right. Meanwhile, the commotion in the dark continued.

“Make that pervert stop!” I hissed.

“I wondered when you were going to notice him,” Taro said, straightening my collar.

He muttered a few words to his colleagues in the shadows, and somebody brought on the house lights. I dreaded what my eyes would find once the darkness was lifted, but nothing I feared could have topped what was there.

Behind the row of officers stood a pair of shoji-screen sliding doors, installed as part of Taro’s Nipponification of the house. Between the doors was a gap of about an inch. Widened eyes stared sideways through the slit. My legs grew weak, as if this extra spectator tipped the balance of decency, exposing just how grotesque our display had been. This shame was followed, oddly enough, by outrage. The man was a stowaway, an unknown quantity.

Marshalling whatever dignity I had left, I rushed to the screen and pulled it open.

“Daniel!”

He lay on his side, bound and gagged, his bulging eyes terrified to see me moving toward him. One of the tin soldiers was laboring to hold him as he struggled, bucking backward. I knelt down, and cradled his head against my bosom. Even then he continued to fight me. I shushed him as best I could, eroding his resistance until his entire body was overrun by a river of sobs. Holding him, our past came rushing back at me. Our pure, uncorrupted past.

“I had no choice.” I covered his forehead in kisses. “He gave me no choice. I had to so I could see
you
, Dan.”

He turned his face from me, shaking his head and wailing into his gag. He was trying to tell me something, and I was afraid to hear it. On and on he struggled, twisting and roaring, until finally I undid the sackcloth covering his mouth. The boy soldier scuttled away, as if by freeing Daniel’s mouth I had set off a ticking bomb.

“Vi was right—you’re a whore,” Daniel gasped, his voice heartbreakingly weak. His eyes searched me, as if there were one pressing question he’d been waiting to ask. “I
have
to know. Aunt Betsy’s earrings…You stole them, didn’t you?”

“No!” I cried. This was what he wanted to know? “Of course not!”

He shook his head again. “The truth.”

“Dan…I’ll explain later. It doesn’t matter now.”

He stared at me as if my answer confirmed some deep suspicion he’d tried to hold at bay. “Of course it matters!” Somehow he had found the energy to shout. Then, going limp with sorrow, he turned his face away. “I was so
stupid
…”

“Dan, trust me…”

A hand clutched my shoulder. I looked up to find Taro standing behind me, the proud engineer of the night’s puppet theater, marveling at his marionettes. We had hit our marks for him.

“Bravo,” he said in a stage whisper, and launched into clopping applause—ostensibly for us but really for himself. His colleagues followed his example, enthusiastic if slightly perplexed. Taro, feigning the modesty of a master, turned to bow.

I watched him, the very emblem of how his diabolical nation had fought this war: arrogance and base depravity posing as art, as high culture. For too long, I’d submitted to him. For too long, I’d let him manipulate me like a toy. Now this.

Copying Taro’s solemnity, I rose, curtsied, and, as he cast a knowing look at his peers, thrust my foot with great force into his crotch. I didn’t glance back for his reaction. I rushed to the door, where the guests had deposited their swords.

I snatched the nearest one and felt a surge of courage. I couldn’t just run now—I had to use it. Holding it with both hands, I charged at Taro. The officers gasped as I angled the blade at his neck. The air shrieked as I sliced into it. With one startling whip of his arm, Taro knocked the sword out of my hand. Its blunt edge nipped his elbow, drawing blood, but his neck, alas, was spared. His next move was equally swift; he locked me in a choke hold within the crook of his arm, poised to crush my neck at will.

Two of the officers clapped, then stopped when they grasped that this was part of nobody’s cabaret.

“Momoko, it was all going so well,” said Taro. I could feel his rage bubbling to the surface once more. “Why did you have to spoil things?”

I tried to steal another glance at Daniel but Taro held my head tight. All I saw before me were the stony, hostile faces of the Nipponese officers.

Taro’s arm tightened over my throat. I tried to cry out one word—“Daniel”—but the air in my lungs disappeared.

I may have died. I should have died. But my despair was not yet done; history was much crueler than that.

I woke to find myself enshrouded in darkness, my nostrils packed with the scent of mold and wet, mashed-up rot. My body was penned in on every side, not by hard walls but by soft, clayish barriers that yielded to my touch and oozed a warm, foul-smelling stew. My body ached, too weak even to panic. My thoughts swam round in ever-diminishing circles: So this is the end…the end…the end…

Hours later—or was it days?—pairs of unknown hands plucked me from this ditch and threw me onto a stretcher. With whatever vague sense of reality I had left, I saw that I had been sleeping in a communal grave—sharing the hole not only with human remains, but also dogs, rats, and things in between.

I was ferried back to the Wee mansion and given a bath. I remember only that the water was scalding and that afterward it drained brown. That evening, wrapped in a towel, I was presented to Taro, who was perched in his favorite armchair holding a tall, sweating glass of lemonade. He rocked the glass and it trilled with ice cubes and loose floating pulp. My mouth was bone dry and yet, hearing the ice clink, it began to water. But I barely had the strength to stand, let alone grab his drink.

“I’m impressed,” he said. “You simply refuse to die. Your determination is almost…Japanese.”

I gestured feebly at the lemonade. Instead of offering it to me, he brought the glass to his own lips for a long, satisfying quaff. When he saw how I craved the nourishment, he took a few gulps more. His shoulder board was different—there were now two sakuras. He’d been promoted, no doubt thanks to our obscene Kabuki.

“We humans are buoyed along by fantasies, and these fantasies can give us astounding tenacity. For example, at this very moment, you’re hoping for a sip of my lemonade. You think that based on our past…mutual understanding…there is a chance, even if a small one, that I will offer you a sip of my lemonade. Isn’t that right?”

I resisted the temptation to agree or disagree.

“In the same way, I suspect that the merest glimmer of a dream to see your friend Daniel again has kept you alive. Hope is such a touching conceit.” He smiled. “But what if I told you that you can’t have my lemonade?”

Tightening his grip on the glass, he drained the cold, restorative nectar, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down with each gulp. When he finished, he rattled the ice cubes, sucked down the last dribble, and handed the glass to a young soldier, who instantly whisked it away.

“What then?” He smiled. “What happens to that hope?”

“Where’s Daniel?” I said, my voice raggedy and weak.

“Ah, and here we are. Back to your old friend.” He paused theatrically. “I’ve handed him over to Unit Seven Thirty-One.”

“Where?”

“I think the question is
what
rather than where. Unit Seven Thirty-One is a research institution with very long arms—with fingers everywhere. In fact, you’ve been to one of its outposts more than once: warehouse, river, rats…”

“The point…”

“The point, Momoko, is that your friend has been donated to science. At Unit Seven Thirty-One offices around the world, our doctors test the limits of human endurance. They conduct experiments on how the body responds to electricity, frostbite, burns, all kinds of things. For if we want to conquer the world, we have to know how this breakable vessel of life reacts to different conditions. You should see the Korean we’ve preserved in a tank of formaldehyde, cut in half lengthwise while he was still screaming. He gave me my first true glimpse of a broken heart—quite literally. Then there’s brain surgery practice, which I know sounds like a terrible joke. But surgery is an art, and how should artists improve except through practice?

“Sadly, at our local cell we don’t have the equipment for such flights of fancy. We do our best with what’s available locally, and that means we play with sand, knives, fireworks. And rats. Thanks to the work of boys like your brother, we’ve been able to develop very valuable pathogens. Know what those are? Germs. In villages all over China, our doctors have been handing out germs to starving children in the form of milk and noodles. It’s startling how easy it is to break down barriers with a smile and a few compliments—as you know from your first meeting with me. Less startling perhaps is how effective old-fashioned diseases like the plague still are. They never seem to go out of style.

“If you’d wandered deeper into the cold lockers of the warehouse by the river, if you’d simply been
curious
enough, you would have witnessed frostbite studies in action. How does a pregnant woman in wet clothing react in zero Celsius? How does her fetus respond? What about minus ten? At which point does the human body begin to freeze? At which point does the body cease to feel pain when fingers and toes are cut off? What about the arms, the legs? These are all legitimate, scientific questions.”

Taro spoke on and on, but my mind had become a blank. Every thought vanished. I didn’t ask “Why?” or “How could you?” for those were the queries of a steady mind under reasonable circumstances, and neither were present.

I sank to my knees. Had there been any substance left in me, I would have retched, emptying out the crawling sickness curdling in my guts.

“Daniel Wee was an interesting specimen,” I heard him say. “Unlike you, he had a weak spine…”

“Stop…”

“Not literally, I mean.” He smiled. “I’m not
that
scientific.” He paused and grew more solemn. “He begged us to blind him. And we respected his wishes. I never imagined it was possible to die from blindness until I saw him. How he screamed.”

Taro shrugged, as if the man I loved had been nothing more than a fly.

“We gave the two of you a romantic burial. Side by side, like Romeo and Juliet. Maybe you recall waking up next to his body…”

There was nothing left. I had nothing left. No hope, no fantasy, no future. Nothing left to say, nothing left to do.

I had met and fought haunted spirits and bloodsucking demons, but nothing had prepared me for the heinousness of living, breathing human beings intent on destroying their fellow man. With Father and Daniel dead, Li reduced to an unthinking skeleton, and Kenneth almost certainly meeting a fate just as barbaric, I saw no point in fighting on. In the papers and on the airwaves, every report boasted about how Japan was winning the war and conquering the Pacific, that its troops were preparing to invade the United States. How could one person stand a chance against an entire nation of the insane? I was no warrior. I’d been the enemy’s enabler, partaker, even wife.