The Emperor of Any Place (15 page)

I scrambled up the path to my hilltop haven. It was already growing dark, and the woods to either side of my familiar route were a patchwork of shadows, any one of which might contain an armed stranger. I clutched my new rifle at the ready, my finger on the trigger, my eyes peeled. When I reached my compound and saw it was as peaceful as I had left it that morning, I breathed a sigh of relief. I took the flight manual from inside my shirt and laid it down on the low table I had made for myself. I sat cross-legged and took the strange pen from my pocket and laid it ceremoniously beside the book.

A small treasure. But at what price?

Hisako-chan, how I longed to make my first entry, but my mind was like a hive with a honey bear nearby. I was too full of uncertainty, night was coming, and now the night concealed an adversary. Was he only waiting for the cover of darkness to make his move?

No, this was foolish! I had been on the island for over two months, and the plane had crashed some time ago, judging by the state of the crew. I had made no effort to hide, thinking myself alone. A soldier with a plane full of rifles could have picked me off a hundred times over as I combed the beach. I had to calm down, think this through.

My familiar ghosts came to me. I had paid little attention to them, and now, suddenly, for the first time I actually spoke to one of them, the ringleader.

“There is someone else on the island,” I said. “The enemy.”

His ghostly head seemed to nod. Of course he knew! “What shall I do?” I asked. I had no reason to believe they could talk, but then I hadn’t expected the
jikininki
could talk, either. I looked at him closely. He has such a sweet face, Hisako. He must have been a lovely boy when he was alive, I thought. His head continued to nod until it occurred to me that this “gesture” was only brought about by the breeze. “Ah,” I said, waving him away. “What good are you?” Then he seemed to smile even more brightly. The smile itself might have been caused only by the tugging of the wind at his facial muscles, but it looked real enough, for all that. It reminded me of how when a newborn baby smiles, everyone other than the parents thinks it is just gas. The parents know better.

It was a sleepless night, but sometime in the hours before dawn, I fell asleep only to wake up with a start at the raucous squawk of some bird. Peeking around the flap of canvas, my heart pumping, I resolved that my first priority must be to secure my position.

I spent the morning circling the hill to see how well the compound was concealed from view. As I had expected, it was hardly visible at all until you were within twenty yards or so, and then only the peak of the roof. Better still, the roof was really visible only from the steep southwest side, a blocky limestone cliff that a person would be unlikely to climb unless he already knew what was at the top, and even then he’d make a noise doing it. I cut more palm branches to camouflage the sharper edges of the shelter until I was quite sure it was impossible to tell that anything man-made was there.

Unless you were looking for it.

Over my midday meal I contemplated making a fort, but it seemed a great deal of work and all that construction itself might attract undue attention. I pounded my head with my fists, as you have seen me do sometimes. It was as if I had become my own father trying to knock some sense into me! What proof was there that anyone else was alive on the island? The blood-smeared cargo bay of the plane suggested a great struggle to stay alive. To be sure, there was no body, no corpse, but so much blood spilled. Ah . . .

The survivor had obviously taken himself off into the jungle, like an animal, to crawl into a burrow and die. But then I recalled the yellow box, the box I had tripped over. I had no idea what it was, but how could it be outside the plane unless someone had carried it there?

I boiled myself some tea, which I drank from a coconut shell. Whatever the yellow case was, I could not ignore it.

Which is when I decided to rig up an alarm system.

I got to it right away, pleased to have something to do with my hands. My hands have always worked a lot better than my brain! Ah, Hisako-chan, I can almost hear you laughing.

I wove together coarse Manila fiber into long lengths of twine, which I strung, at knee level, across every pathway, every means of access to the compound. The twine was attached to small platforms, packing-case remnants precariously balanced in bushes, loaded with good heavy stones, ready to tip with the slightest nudge. When an intruder tripped the switch, the platforms would tip the stones into a variety of tin basins, hubcaps, suspended sheets of metal — anything clangy that I could find in my store of flotsam and jetsam. I had quite a stockpile of useful material at my campsite.

It took me all of that day to engineer my early warning system, but after a couple of dry runs (without the metal containers in place so as not to make a noise), I stood back, sweaty and pleased at the result. Now all I had to remember was not to trip one of the ropes myself!

I didn’t count on the local wildlife.

I awoke that night to a terrible clattering din, as first one and then a second and then a third of the alarms went off. Was there an army out there?! What a frightful few minutes I went through! But no, some creature that didn’t stick around had tripped the ropes. Probably as frightened as I was, I thought, when I could think clearly again. I imagined a skittish deer running wildly in circles trying to escape a noisy monster that seemed to be everywhere at once.

If the enemy didn’t know where I was before, he most certainly did now!

Again, I hardly slept and woke up knowing there was only one option: it was either the navigator or myself. We were at war, after all — what choice did I really have? And yet how hard it was to imagine hunting this unseen enemy down, matching my wits against an invisible adversary. The truth is, I had just escaped from the war, and I had no desire to go back to it again.

I would look for signs. Yes. Now that I suspected there was someone on the island, I would look with intention, from my platform in the coral tree. There would have to be signs. For that matter, I could always sleep on the platform.

With my binoculars, I could not see down into the ravine, only the thick canopy of that low place. It was in the deepest part of the island, where the island seemed to curl in on itself, like some secret bodily cavity, another chamber of the heart that has become my home. I could not see down into its shadows, but I could see a lot. If there was a survivor, would he not have had to rely as did I on the bounty washed up on the beach? The fact that we had never run into each other might mean that the other had seen me first, but if he had done so, he had not taken advantage of the occasion. It was a mystery.

I looked and saw nothing, and so I took the flight manual up into the coral tree with me to begin this diary. On the cover I wrote out your name and address in Saipan so that if I did not survive and the journal was found, my story and my many protestations of love could be delivered to you.

Slowly and painstakingly, in the neatest and tiniest script, I began to relate the tale of my arrival here and everything that has happened since that fateful day. It was miraculous that this strange pen had so much ink in it. It was splotchy at times, but I prayed it would hold out.

Oh, I looked up at regular intervals, let me tell you. I scanned the island with the naked eye and with the binoculars as well, and then, satisfied that there was nothing worth attending to, I went back to my writing.

This is what my father called procrastination but my grandfather called
ikigai
— my reason to get up in the morning. My grandfather always thought something grand would come of me: that I would write books or make glorious pictures. Well, perhaps he was right after all, for although I am an auto mechanic by trade, I did begin to write this book. And since I had time on my hands stretching out before me at such a luxurious length, I could take the time to think carefully before I wrote anything, not wanting to spoil the limited pages before me. Ah, you are thinking now, if only I had learned how to think carefully before I spoke! In any case, if it is only for your eyes, Hisako, I will tell you that I am pouring into it everything I have learned or felt and all the patient hours
Ojiisan
spent reading with me and teaching me the ways of the written word.

From here on, everything changes.

Over these several days, I have caught you up to this very moment, and I will write henceforth in the present tense. It will make me feel closer to you.

The air is still. I have been writing and watching. When I am in my lookout, the family ghosts cannot get to me. They tend to congregate at the bottom of the tree, looking up, waiting for me to come down. And perhaps because I am in a tree, I have been thinking of a family tree, a diagram, and wonder whether these friendly spirits really are my family, those that have gone before: the ghosts of my ancestors. Then why are they children, I ask myself.

“Why are you children?” I asked the ringleader, just now, before I climbed up here.

He didn’t answer, but he reached out to me, so tenderly, Hisako, I was almost brought to tears. And as I sit here now, a rather extraordinary thought has come over me. I wonder if this family of children I am dragging around with me is
not
made up of those who have gone before but those who are yet to come!

It is later now. Time has passed. I look at the ghosts quite differently. For one thing, it fills me with joy to think that there
might
be a time yet to come: that I will survive and you and I will make a real family one day. A big family!

Is this a foolish idea? Perhaps. I wonder if it is the threat of another being on the island who might at any moment steal my life from me that lends to my musings over this sentimental idea. I can’t be sure. I do know that having this adversary here or even imagining him here brings a new urgency to my writing. I want so much to put my thoughts in order, to tell my story. A simple man thrust into an extraordinary situation.

But isn’t that the story of every war?

As you know, I have not had much schooling, but I learned much at my grandfather’s knee and have read, or tried to, the books that Grandfather lent me. With no motors to tinker with here, I find myself tinkering with ideas, trying to see how they fit together. I allow myself to write upon the page thoughts I would never dare to express to any living soul other than you, who are endlessly patient with me and do not judge me. I know you would be glad to hear whatever nonsense I have to say. Am I not your favorite chatterbox?

The writing pleases me, even more, now that I have told you everything that has passed and we can be here, like this, in the moment. But I cannot pretend to have shaken the idea of the
other.
It works on me, under my skin, an irritant, an unwanted burden. I have survived, found a paradise, only to have the tranquillity of it compromised by this cagey
gaijin.
As the days pass, I can only picture him as very evasive and clever. When I go foraging for food, I feel the presence of him. I feel I am being stalked — stalked even in my dreams, for the kingdom of sleep has been usurped every bit as thoroughly as my island kingdom. I wake dispirited and angry. I try sleeping in the coral tree, but my sleep is interrupted by the terrible fear of rolling off.

Nowhere is safe.

There is a bird building a nest in a tree that I pass every morning on my way down to the lagoon for a swim. I have watched the little golden white-eye fly back and forth with casuarina needles, grasses, and vines. I have watched her settle in her nest, have bid her good morning and wished her good luck with her family. One time, when she was off hunting for food, I even dared to shinny up her tree to take a look: there were two pale bluish-green eggs with red splotches there.

Then, this morning, a dull gray morning, after a particularly bad night of dreams, I saw the golden white-eye not foraging or on her nest but flitting about above it, crying with alarm. I stopped in my tracks, for I saw right away the cause of her distress: a brown snake was gliding up the trunk of the tree toward the nest. No! The snake was too high up for me to do anything but watch it slither out onto the branch and over the lip of the nest, where it devoured her eggs, one by one.

I stood seething with anger, my fists clenched. It is later and I have calmed a bit and have had the time to think about the incident more clearly. I have this to say: the brown snake must eat, too. But nonetheless the event is surely a sign. I know that my rage is not simply for the golden white-eye’s loss, but for my own predicament. I have let an unseen enemy slither into my nest! I am so filled with apprehension that I cannot sleep at night. I have avoided acting out of cowardice, pretending it was only caution. I know I must find out now, once and for all, if I am master of this place. I cannot put off a confrontation for one more day. Tomorrow, Hisako-chan, I will track the navigator down. If this is my last entry, then you know what happened.