The Emperor of Any Place (25 page)

Evan looks up, wide-eyed, no longer sleepy — beyond sleep. He is here in his room and he is there, as well! He is on the island with them. It has only just occurred to him.

Derwood witnessed
him
— Evan — coming into existence: him and his father and nameless other Griffins, the moment Griff stepped ashore on Kokoro-Jima. Who were they: the children
he
would have one day and then their children — that was who.

Preincarnation.

Evan shakes his head at the mystery of it. The desire to look up the word has left him. He just wants to believe in it. Wants to have made this journey — to have walked that white sand beach, even if he was only a little bit more substantial than the air. And then it occurs to him that if Derwood saw Evan and his father popping out of the morning light like that, so did Griff. Maybe it had undone him. What would a man like that think of such a thing?

Did he recognize Clifford when he was born? Hey, I know you . . . Then Evan remembers what Derwood said, how Griff paid the ghosts no heed. Even then. It must have been like practice for having a real family. Don’t look at them. They don’t count.

Evan listens to the quiet.

He lies on his side, rests his cheek on his hands. The penis bone lies on the carpet where it fell, shadowy and strange. Could he use it? He imagines the scenario: Griff stealthily entering the room in the darkness, Evan hearing him, instantly awake, but not moving other than to silently grasp the handle end of the club, miraculously back under the covers where he’d put it. And — just as the old man is at his bedside, reaching out with his murderous big hands — Evan throws off the covers in a flurry, and . . . and . . . the damn club gets caught up in the sheets and does him some serious damage. Evan, that is.

The rescue party: that’s how Griff fits into the island story. Is that how he sees this trip to Any Place? Has he come to rescue Evan in his hour of need? Or has he got a whole other kind of agenda for being here?

There is a hint of sunrise in the room, as if someone had lifted the curtain at the end of the world and the day ahead had seeped out, close to the ground, a crawling kind of thing, not ready to stand on its own two feet. Not anything strong enough to dispel Evan’s dark fear. He turns his lamp back on, but that’s worse, somehow. It’s as if the tight circle of light is no more than a flimsy and rotting bamboo fence, and just beyond it, far too close for comfort,
Tengu
still prowls. He turns it off again, abolishing those feeble walls altogether, but at least allowing him to see more clearly; to see the door, expecting it to open at any moment. He recalls Ōshiro sitting in front of the pit, like a tethered goat.

He thinks: Evan Griffin, tethered goat.

Could he hit a man? Really whack him good?

Hmm. A trap would be way the hell better. He reimagines the door opening and a very old man walking in, only to fall into a pit ingeniously covered by beige broadloom.

The house ticks. Evan closes his eyes, feels the house slow roll on the tide. Then he snaps his eyes open again, like a soldier on watch. He looks down at the book in his lap. Only a few more pages.

Writing this chapter with the benefit of having read Isamu’s report from his coral tree, I am appalled at my foolishness in returning to Fort Ōshiro. He is right. I gave him away, although it was never my intention. It was a long, long time ago, but remembering it now — the sight of that gunboat sitting on its shadow in the crystal-clear water of the lagoon, I was overcome with the kind of animated, crazy-limbed happiness of a child at the fair, just exactly as Isamu described it. In my defense, may I put before the jury of whoever reads this journal that while I was a flight lieutenant, I was a very young man. I shake my head to think of it and my part in what later transpired.

Let me pick up the story on the following day in Tinian, the very island I had observed through binoculars with such longing from that same coral tree. Picture this: a bearded, scrawny, not-yet-twenty-one-year-old staring with amazement at a window. Not amazed at what I saw outside the window but at the window itself! Glass, for God’s sake! There was a weedy bit of grass, a dirt road, and, across it, ragged vegetation dulled by dust. A troop carrier bumped along the road. There had been traffic all through the night, diminishing the pleasure of sleeping in a real bed.

I had been rescued for this?

I couldn’t help asking myself: if it had been a Japanese gunboat that had arrived at Kokoro-Jima yesterday, would I have done what Isamu did, run and hidden? I know I would have.

I showered, reacquainted myself with soap for the first time in over two months. Then I stared into the mirror above the sink and imagined shaving. It wasn’t much of a mirror; it wasn’t much of a beard. It had come in red, though the ragged mop of my hair was the faded brown of barn wood. Under that scruffy beard was the skin of a boy who left his family farm in Plainfield, Vermont, to go to war. No, I liked my bearded self, for now at least. Sooner or later I would be ordered to shave. I would wait until then.

The day before, medical personnel had examined me, expressing astonishment at my health. “You ever think of going into medicine?” one of the doctors asked me, examining my stump. “Come and look at this, fellas,” he added, grabbing anyone around to see my amputation. “Neat as a pin.”

I stared at the stump of my left arm with a mixture of emotions. Loss, of course. Sadness. But also I marveled at how well it had healed. “Is there much work for one-armed surgeons?” I asked the doctor.

He shook his head. “A damn shame,” he said.

There had followed a lengthy debriefing that I have avoided attempting to write about here because it was hours long and full of military-type redundancy, the kind meant to catch you out in a lie. There were times when I felt as if I had been captured after going AWOL rather than rescued, an officer who had been shot down and survived. The Military Intelligence Division was not quick with compliments the way the medical staff had been. But thinking back on that day’s interrogation after a lifetime, I must admit that the hostility I sensed might have been more a product of my own guilty conscience. My narrative — my story — to these hardened inquisitors made no mention of another soul on my island. I owed Ōshiro at least that much: his secrecy. Enemy soldiers had to be rounded up and held somewhere safe. Sequestered. I understood that. I had seen what a lone sniper with nothing to lose could do. And everyone on Tinian knew about suicide attacks. What they didn’t know was Isamu
.
I justified my silence to myself this way: the man was in a prison camp already and not just due to the isolation of the island. A prison seemed to have materialized in Isamu’s head.

A knock on the door brought me back to the present, 0800 hours, Monday, December 11, 1944. I would have to get used to time again. Army time. Or in this case, marine time since they were the ones running the show.

It was Gunnery Sergeant “Griff” Griffin. I invited him to step inside. “Welcome to the Ritz,” I said.

“Officers’ quarters look pretty good to this leatherneck,” Griff said in a friendly enough fashion. “When was the last time you slept in barracks?”

I smiled. “What can I do for you, Griff?”

“Folks here are anxious about the armaments on that plane. They want to move on that right away. Today, if you’re up for it.”

The sooner the better,
I thought. “I’m hunky-dory.”

“Good, then,” said Griff. “We’re lining up vehicular transportation. A chopper would have been best, but there isn’t a big-enough one we can free up, so we’ve lined up a half-track.”

I frowned. “I’m not sure even a half-track will get you down into that gully.”

Griff nodded. “We’ll get as near as we can, and then it’ll be grunt work. It won’t be the first we’ve encountered.”

“I bet,” I said.

“We’re scurrying around to get a lighter operational to transport the M3 over there. That and an LCVP for the troops.”

“Troops?”

“Yes, sir. I’m taking a platoon over.” His eyes firmed up their contact with mine. “We hope to get under way by twelve hundred hours.”

Troops? What was he planning? Suddenly I got cold feet.

“Why the urgency?” I said. “I mean those guns have been sitting there for over two months.”

“With all due respect, sir, we get a little jumpy knowing there’s a stash of rifles large enough to fuel an insurrection just off our port bow a few miles.”

There was no mistaking the guardedness in Griffin’s tone of voice. A day of debriefing had hardened me, and there was no way I wanted this discussion to go any further.

“Forgive me, Sergeant. I see your point. I’ve been out of commission for more than two and half months.”
Stop apologizing,
I told myself.

Griff nodded. His blue eyes were full of accusation. Another commissioned officer might have told him to stand down, might have called him up on charges for looking at a superior officer that way, just on the edge of contempt. But this was a can of worms I was not about to open. Didn’t have the nerve for it. “Let’s get those arms off the island,” I said, wrapping up.

“Yes, sir,” he said, but I was pretty sure he had other plans in mind. And if I wasn’t careful, I might find myself facing a court-martial for willful stupidity.

We agreed on a time to meet, and I closed the door on him. I had a lot of thinking to do and fast. I wanted to get back to Fort Ōshiro one last time, but I was going to have to do it without tipping off its location any more than I already had. I also had to be prepared that this by-the-rules sergeant could probably find the place without any help from me. If he did, I’d have to tell one heck of a story about how I’d managed to build such a fine habitation all with one hand.

I led Sergeant Griffin and his men to the downed Gooney Bird. There was a full weapons platoon of thirty-nine men, plus me as the token O-2 in charge and Gunnery Sergeant Griffin as the real leader, as well as three bomb experts who monitored every step of the way, sweeping for mines and then checking out the downed plane for booby traps. With an armed guard, the transfer of materials got under way and would carry on through the rest of the day, racing against the clock, because it was getting on to mid-December and the sun would set before six. I slipped away as soon as I could.

“Not much good here,” I said, holding up my stump for inspection. If Griff was going to give me any trouble, I would pull rank on him, but he acknowledged the truth of what I was saying, and I made my way up out of the jungle to the beach, where a number of soldiers stood guard near the landing craft, patrolling the beach, having a smoke, waiting. I watched one of them blow smoke into the face of his nearest child ghost. The child only smiled, unaffected by the gesture or the smoke. For a moment its small head looked as if it were smoldering.

I sauntered back to Fort Ōshiro, snapping photographs with a borrowed camera and looking like a tourist. I wanted some kind of record of the place. I took a roll of snaps. Yet another thing that was difficult to do one-handed.

I had cadged a box of pencils and three ledger books from the camp quartermaster, all of which was stuffed in my shoulder bag. I did not expect Isamu to be at the camp, and so I was not too disappointed, or tried not to be, when I found the place empty. I told myself it was wisdom on his part to have made himself scarce.

It was eerie to be back. Only a couple of days had passed, and yet the place felt alien to me. I stood for a moment on the spot where we . . . well, where Isamu had dug the pit and I had badly filled it in. Down below me lay the charred skeleton of a monster. It seemed remarkable now. Being alive seemed remarkable, and I made a solemn promise to myself, there and then, that I would never forget how outstanding it was to be alive.

The compound.

If the suspicious sergeant I’d left back at the Gooney Bird was to take a gander at this place, my story would be sunk. Two hammocks gave the game away. I half thought about taking mine down and trying to give the camp the look of being a solo enterprise. But there wasn’t time. I would have to trust Griff would not come this way, and the best way to assure that was to not dawdle.

I left my presents in the shelter in Isamu’s hammock. There didn’t look to be any chance of rain, but I didn’t want to take a chance. Along with the box of pencils, I left my penknife. But there was more. I had procured — stolen — two bottles of black ink, which I left along with my Eversharp fountain pen, the one I had been given for Christmas on my sixteenth birthday. I wasn’t sure if Isamu had ever seen a fountain pen, but I knew he’d figure out how it worked.

It was the best I could do. I was about to leave, when I opened the topmost ledger and wrote, with the Eversharp:

Arigatō gozaimasu.
Thank you very much.

Then I wrote out my name and the date and my address back home in Vermont. The war would end. Isamu was endlessly resourceful. Maybe he would make it back to Saipan. Maybe he’d write one day. Maybe we would become friends. Right at that moment, the world was full of enormous possibilities.

I turned to go, and there was Isamu in the open doorway of the compound. He bowed, ceremoniously. I bowed back. Isamu entered the fort, his back straight, the little emperor of a little island. I waited as he approached. Saw the moment when his eyes fell upon the things weighing down his hammock. He looked at me.