A Gesture Life

14

NOW AND THEN, I sometimes forget who I really am. I will be sitting downstairs in the kitchen, or on the edge of the lounger by the pool, or here under the covers in my bed, and I lose all sense of myself. I forget what it is I do, the regular activity of my walk and my swim and my taking of tea, the minor trappings and doings of my days, what I’ve made up to be the token flags of my life. I forget why it is I do such things, why they give me interest or solace or pleasure. Then I might get up in the middle of the night and dress and walk all the way to town, to try to figure once again the notices, the character, the sorts of actions of a man like me, what things or set of things define him in the most simple and ordinary way. But I forget the usuals, who his friends might be, his associates; I forget even that he has a tenuous and fragile hold of family, this the only idea that dully rings of remembrance in his heart. He walks at night in the center of town and it is too dark to see even a reflection in the glass of his old store. He’s stopped by a patrol car and asked what he’s doing and he says nothing, I’m not really walking, I’m not really here, and he turns for home with the cruiser slowly trailing him, unintentionally lighting his way.

When I reach the house and close the front door it’s then I think K has finally come back for me. It is the moment I think I feel at home. I am sure I was regarding her last night, her figure naked and pale, loosely enrobed in a black silken flag. The sight of her shook me. I saw her more clearly than I ever had before, as I was not dreaming or conjuring but simply reacquainting myself with her, as I might any friend of my youth. And so she visited me. Last night she lightly pattered up and down the hallway in her bare feet, pausing outside my bedroom door. I knew it was she. I sat up and told her to come in and she stepped to the foot of my lone twin bed. Though she sat down I couldn’t feel any press of her weight, and once again, for a moment, I was almost sure she was a spectral body or ghost. But I am not a magical man, and never have been. I am unversed in the metaphysical, have long become estranged from it, and if this can be so, I believe the metaphysical is as much unversed in me. We have a historical pact. And as deeply as I wished she were some wondrous, ethereal presence, that I was being duly haunted, I knew that she was absolute, unquestionably real, a once-personhood come wholly into being.

“Lieutenant,” she asked demurely, her voice full of penitence. “Did you sleep peacefully last night? I hope you’ll forgive me if I say you look somewhat weary this morning.”

“I do feel weary,” I answered. “Thank you for your concern. But what is it, K? It seems something is on your mind.”

“I’m sorry to ask this once again.”

“Please, K. You may ask me anything.”

“I like to think so, Lieutenant.”

“Well, then?”

“Will we be going away soon, Lieutenant?”

Her question was brand-new to me, but somehow I felt vaguely annoyed by it anyway. Even angry. I said to her, the hairs tingling on the back of my neck, “Where would we be going to, K?”

“I had hoped we would finally travel to all the places we have spoken of. To Shanghai, and Kyoto, and perhaps even Seoul. Or some other place.”

I didn’t answer, and she noticed this and asked if I was upset.

“I’m not upset,” I said, quite tersely, causing her to inch back on the bed. “But I have to wonder, why being here is so abhorrent to everyone but me? We have everything that we require. And much more. We have an impressive house and property in the best town in the area, where we are happily known and respected. We have ample time and quiet and means. I have tried as hard as I can to provide these things, and we have been welcomed as warmly as anyone can expect. Everything is in delicate harmony. And yet still you seem dissatisfied.”

“I am not dissatisfied,” she said, her eyes glassy and full-looking. “But I am anxious, Lieutenant. I do hope we might move on from this place. Nothing is wrong with it, nothing at all. But I know I will not die here. I cannot die here. And sometimes, sir, I so wish to.”

Her words at first confused me, as I thought she was saying this wouldn’t be a suitable place for her to pass over to the next life. But then I realized she meant that it wouldn’t be possible, as if this house were some penultimate trap of living, sustaining her beyond the pale.

“I don’t want you to die,” I said to her, feeling just as suddenly that this is a daily conversation we have, that we have gone over this ground before, and before. So I told her, as I always do, “I want you to live with me forever.”

A faint, sad smile softened her face, and she let slip the black cloth from her shoulders and lay down with me beneath the covers. Her skin was cool and chaste to me, almost sisterly, alabastrine, and I thought I had convinced her to remain yet again, remembering now how many times I had done so, today and yesterday and all the days before that, in a strange and backward perpetuity. I keep winning her over with hardly an argument, though each time an ill feeling comes over me, the soiling, resident sickness you develop when you have never in your life been caught at something wrong, when you have never once been discovered.

I lay back down and closed my eyes to sleep, sure that K would stay with me through the night. But when I woke up in the dim of predawn she was gone, and I put on my slippers and robe and went about the house, upstairs and down and even in the basement, in steady search of her. There were the remnants of a fire in the family room hearth, and I could not remember if I had lit one the evening before (I had been doing so periodically, if carefully, since that sudden conflagration). The scent of moist ash lingered in the air. For a moment I thought it smelled naturally of freshly tilled ground, of just-disturbed earth, but then I realized it was in fact not earth at all I was sensing but water. The scent was of the sea, a warm and gentle southern sea. Then I thought I saw a shadow pass outside the French doors of the kitchen, and being certain it was K, I quickly stepped outside. I called out and waited but there was no answer, no sound at all, not even the movement of wind through the tree branches. From the far end of the property the light of a reflection caught my eye, and with sharp anticipation I went to it, going around the pool and past the small cabana to the part of my property where the lawn ends and the wooded area between my land and the neighbor’s begins. I was quite sure I would find her, or come across the black silken cloth, left in a hurry by her on the ground. But there was nothing but brush and fallen leaves and the silent trunks of the trees. When I looked back across the precious, stately landscape of my property, it seemed I had traveled far miles to the place I was standing, as if I had gone round and round the earth in an endless junket, the broad lawn a continent, the pool a whole ocean, the house the darkened museum of a one-man civilization, whose latent history, if I could so will it, would be left always unspoken, unsung.

When I was once again inside I thought to run the water in the upstairs hall bath, the one Sunny used when she was still living in the house. The faint smell was of a shut-off dampness and mold. As with her bedroom, I had completely gone over the surfaces with spackle and paint, and then had the tiles on the wall and floor regrouted, but the work was still old enough even with the room left unused that it looked quite grim and shabby. A hard crust of greenish scale covered the spigot, which ran very slowly, and over the years the drip had discolored the area around the drain with a watery-edged patch of rust. When I turned on the hot water the tap shook and coughed, and then with a violent spew a stream of reddish-brown liquid began to flow. When it finally cleared I shut it off and flipped down the lever for the drain, but it was slow and I had to wait for some time for the dirty water to swirl down and away before filling up the tub again, nearly right to the top. I stepped out of my clothes and sat in the minerally, prickling water. It was hot enough that I thought my flesh was dissolving, as if I were being rendered away to leave only the hollow drift of my old bones.

I must say I appreciated the feeling. There is something exemplary to the sensation of near-perfect lightness, of being in a place and not being there, which seems of course a chronic condition of my life but then, too, its everyday unction, the trouble finding a remedy but not quite a cure, so that the problem naturally proliferates until it has become you through and through. Such is the cast of my belonging, molding to whatever is at hand. So I dipped my head beneath the surface and could feel the water swell over the edge of the tub and onto the tiled floor but I didn’t care. The intense heat felt so pure and truthful to me, so all-enveloping, that I wished there was a way I could remain within it, silently curled up as if I were quite unborn, as yet not of this life, or of the world, of anything moored to the doings and traces of humankind. I did not want innocence so much as I did an erasure reaching back, a pre-beginning, and if I could trade all my years to be at some early moment and never go forward again, I would do so without question or any dread.

But perhaps the thought itself smacks of innocence, wanting not to know what I know, which is a fraudulent and dangerous wish for most anyone but the youngest child, but particularly for a man who is approaching the farthest region of his life. In fact a man like me should be craving every last bit and tatter of his memory. He should consider the character of all his times whether pleasurable or tragic or sad. He should at last appreciate the serendipity and circumstance and ironical mien of events, and their often necessary befalling. He should, some god willing, take firm hold of all these and call himself among the fortunate, that he should have survived such riches of experience, and consider himself made over again for it, gently refitted for his slow stroll to the edge. But all I seem to think of doing is to stop, or turn around, or else dig in for a sprint, a stiffened, perambling, old-man leap off the precipice. And if I could just clear the first jutting ledges and simply free-fall, enjoy the briefest flying, I should be very thankful indeed.

* * *

BUT PERHAPS RIGHTLY, there is none of that for me. And I recall now that it was K I saw when I finally regained consciousness after suffering the captain’s pistol blows. I was lying on a cot in the empty infirmary, where she was watching over me. I asked her but there was no guard or sentry inside, only she, though two men were stationed outside. Captain Ono had simply ordered her to sit with me, telling her that we should not attempt to leave, and so for several hours she had been changing the bloody dressings on my head.

“The worst is a gash at your scalp, Lieutenant,” she said, touching her own head just above the temple to indicate where. “It’s not too deep, I think. But it is still bleeding. I don’t think you should try to touch it, or even move.”

I wanted to speak but my jaw felt as though it were wired shut, not from injury but from a terrible swelling in my face. The bones around my eyes ached with sharp pain, and I could hardly see her for the poor light and the rheumy tears clouding my vision. They had already put my arm back in its joint. With a firm hand she lifted my head to give me a drink of lukewarm tea.

“You are fortunate to be alive.”

I nodded.

“The captain could have killed you right there and then,” she said. She brushed my short hair with her hand, trying to unmat the dried blood. “I watched through the cracks in the wall. He could have shot you where you lay. He put his pistol at your head and he stood there but he didn’t shoot. Then he looked over at the infirmary, right at the spot on the wall where I was crouched, and he called to me and asked me what he should do.”

“You?”

“Yes. He was staring at me, at the wall right where I was peering out. He said I should tell him what to do. I couldn’t answer him because I was frightened and I thought he was taunting me, that whatever I said he was going to shoot you anyway. I was sure he was going to shoot you. But he waited and then asked me again, and finally I said he should spare you. He backed away, and I thought it was finished. But then he walked over and leaned down on the outside of the wall. He said he wouldn’t kill you, but only if I agreed to his bidding.”

“Which was what?”

She gave him another drink.

“What was it, K?” I said, the tea running down my cheek.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Then you must say.”

“No.”

“Tell me. Please.”

She said quite plainly, “That I would give my life for yours.”

“Your life?”

“Yes, Lieutenant.” She gazed at me coldly, then looked away. “But then the doctor already has that, doesn’t he, no matter what?”

She then let out almost a laugh about it, as if the notion of her life being worth something was ridiculous, which of course it was, absolutely ridiculous. But I was as yet incapable of acknowledging that before her or myself or anyone else. Instead I wanted to tell her that everything about us wasn’t really as it seemed, that nothing was, not even the war, which had never quite arrived and probably now never would, that we — the soldiers, officers, the girls — all had somehow entered an untoward region of stasis from which we would soon find deliverance, that we needed only to persist for a short time longer, that we must hold fast to the general order of things.

I said, “I will protect you.”

K made a noise in her throat, as if to affirm me and rescue me at once. She said, “Please don’t try to be brave for me, Lieutenant. I have not given up anything. Do you think if any of us girls is still living they’ll let us walk out of here when the war ends? That we will go unharmed if they do? In my mind I didn’t give the doctor my life. All he really wanted was a last small concession from me. What was left of my will. So he has that. But the doctor has always had my life and my death. Perhaps now, Lieutenant, he has yours, too.”

I shut my eyes for a moment and tried not to listen. Though she was right, I suddenly didn’t wish to hear such words from her. There was also a seam of anger in her voice but it was the anger that arises from fear as well as mistreatment or injury, and I could tell the doctor was haunting her, his specter making her see him even as she was looking at me. Of course I feared him, too, and the pained creature in me wanted to crawl deep inside a hole at the flash of his memory. But another part of me was drawn to that same receding, that awful, singular stillness of flesh one notices before the first stroke of the knife.

And I said to her, strangely thinking of that, “I remember now, how he said you were with child.”

“I heard him tell you.”

“Is it true?”

“No.”

“He said you were pregnant not by him but by another, even before you came here.”

“It’s not true.”

“Are you lying to me, K? You don’t have to lie to me.”

“I’m not lying,” she said. But she rose, turning away, her arms tight about her.

“Let me see your body, then,” I asked, trying to figure if she were, and trying to believe how it could be mine.

“There’s nothing in me. There can’t be. If there is, then God forgive me for what I’ll do.”

“Let me see you.”

K stood still for a moment, then went over to the lone slatted window. The light from outside was gray and soft; an afternoon rain was falling gently, and in its cast she looked even younger than she was. Like a girl waiting to go play outside. And I thought she was about to leave through it, that she might really try to climb out, though of course there was nowhere to go. But instead she turned and gazed at me for what seemed a very long time. Her expression was not sad or fearful or confused. She untied the string of her baggy trousers and let them fall down at her feet. Her rough cotton blouse hung loosely over her belly, the patch below that showing darkly through the gauzy material. Her calves and ankles were thin, but her feet especially so, the tops of them shockingly bony, reedy and translucent. Though I was weak I sat up, not from desire but because I wanted her to stop. Though I could not say so. She loosened the waist knot of the blouse so that it came open and fell, and then she was wholly naked before the window, coolly burnished, smooth. Her middle seemed no fuller than the rest, which was underfed and thin but still of amazing riches to me. I thought she was the most beautiful statue of herself. I put out my hand and she came to me, not looking at me anymore, and I kissed the tepid skin of her, at her belly and below, and I could taste her, her sharp-sweetness and unwashedness and her living body underneath. My eyes and cheeks felt shattered but I pressed against her anyway, more than I could bear. I was nearly crying from the pain. She did not hold me but she did not push me away. I never meant for this but I could no longer balk, or control myself, and then something inside her collapsed, snapped clean, giving way like some storm-sieged roof, and then I descended upon her, and I searched her, every lighted and darkened corner, and every room.

And yet afterward — I don’t know how long, for time seemed to bend upon itself inside the small ward — we were simply sitting on either end of the cot, not speaking, not meeting each other’s eyes. I could only glance over at her and see how she was bent over her knees and cradling her face in the crook of her arm. Not weeping or moaning, but figured in certain quiet. Almost hiding there, though I was sure — even as young and earnest and fearful as I was — it was not just from me; it was from that place and time, the whole picture and small detail, from the homely, dim structure about us, the squalor of the heavy air, from the ennui and restiveness of the entire encampment, the surreally distant war, and then of course from who I was as well. For in my own way I comprised it, my yearning and wishing and my wanton hope, the sum of which, at end, amounted to a complete and utter fraudulence. For that is, finally, what she would escape if she could, not the ever-imminent misery and horror but the gentle boy-face of it, the smoothness and equability, the picture of someone heroic enough to act only upon his own trembling desire.

One could say, I suppose, that I was a very young man. Which of course I was. But I bring this up not to excuse myself or to try to mitigate my actions or to confess. Rather, I mean it to stand simply as a fact. I was young and callow, but that youthfulness was also inescapably pure. It was wholehearted, and so native to me. Completely mine. And that was the terribleness of it. For I must have wanted her unto death, and I could not bear anyone else having her, and I allowed events to occur because of that feeling, even if it meant I would lose her forever.

I must have fallen asleep, for I awoke to the sound of footfalls outside on the landing. It was Captain Ono, I knew, by the dull ring of his keys. K was no longer with me in the ward room. The captain told the sentries they were relieved of their posts for one hour. One of them barked a response and then they marched away. The captain unlocked the infirmary door and stepped inside. I could hear him going to the examination room, where his desk was, and I tried to get up quickly but I lost balance and had to pause a moment. Then I heard him say, “You are looking quite wonderful this afternoon.”

There was no answer, but he said anyway, “See now, how I’ve brought you something. Some mochi, the last of a box I received last month. They’re hardly perfect, but one can still eat them. Go ahead, they’re for no one else.”

I would have gone right over to them and confronted him but the sound of his voice, the way he was speaking to her almost decorously, froze me. To hear him was to realize how I must have sounded when I was with her, though his tone was elegant, still circumspect, only the least bit attenuated. He knew I was there in the ward, of course, but there was no care of that, as though he truly did own my life, or more, that I wasn’t really living anymore, that I’d never set foot again outside the sick house. I went to the door, which led to a tiny hall, and I could see them there, her sitting on the exam table and him before her on the chair, his back to me.

“I wish for you to eat them,” he said, holding them out. “They come from a venerable sweet shop in my hometown, which is famous throughout the province. My mother sent them to me, and it is amazing that they actually arrived. These last two are quite delicious. You can see one is rolled in green tea, the other in black sesame seeds. If you are bashful we can share. Take one, and I’ll have the other. Come now, or you’ll force me to choose for you.”

The captain tried to make a show of picking one, but she didn’t move or say anything. He held up the box to her again and she could hardly shake her head. He rose then with gravity and I was sure he was going to strike her, but he suddenly embraced her instead, roundly and warmly, clutching her as if he feared he might never see her again. And without realizing it, I found myself in the center of the exam room, mere steps from them. I could have reached and touched his shoulder, the blunt back of his head. I was unarmed and weakened but I could have struck him. And yet on sighting him, on seeing him holding her so, I felt a certain sadness for him, the humane sorrow one has when one witnesses the briefest moment of another’s abandon and self-loss, which is a levity, and a phantom death, and enviable enough.

K was now staring hard at me, her arms stiffly around his back. She was quiet, not trying to hide my presence from him — for he well knew I was there in the room with them and was completely unconcerned, as if I were still his loyal assistant — but directing me, motioning with her eyes that I go to the cabinet of surgical tools and instruments. The wide, rotting planks of the floorboards groaned under my movement, and the captain only said, stepping back from K and hardly glancing at me, “There you are, Lieutenant. I expect when you’re recovered you’ll resume your duties. You’ll remain here a few days. Now leave.”

I didn’t answer him. I was seeing only that one of the cabinet handles had been turned, its steel door unlocked. And then I knew what she was telling me. Here is your moment, Lieutenant Kurohata. Take up the scalpel. Deliver him swiftly from us. Stand in your place and strike him down. And as I was listening to this, finally hearing the silent running of my own heart, the dull submarine click, I found on the leather-lined shelf the honed steel instrument with its crosshatched handle, the pen-like blade lithe and insignificant in my hand. It would be simply like writing his death. And as I faced them the captain was already turned, ready for me, knowing as he always did what I would do next, as if he were my partner and my twin, my longtime synchronist. He had unholstered his pistol and was aiming it at my chest. If he would fire I would fall murderously upon him, to rid her of both of us. But he winced and a quizzical expression rose up in his face, and with his free hand he touched the side of his neck, as if he had just been stung by a wasp or spider. K stepped away from him, in her hand a red-tipped scalpel, one just like mine. He said her name and then it poured from his neck, the wine-dark spew, a bloody epaulet alighting on his shoulder. Falling to his knees, he dropped the pistol. It lay there, darkly lustrous. He sat heavily on his haunches and motioned to me, with genuine wonder, as if I should take his hand.

He fell over then. We could only watch until he stopped moving, the life running out of him and down through the cracks of the floorboards. I wiped and examined the wound after he was dead. It was amazingly precise. K was still holding the blade, standing stiffly above us. She was not exultant; the color had left her face. She had stabbed him with a deep, short incision through the major artery, which had been rent open like an undammed stream. He looked quite peaceful to me then, slighter as he lay, as if the dying had made him youthful.

And for a brief moment, too, I almost felt her hand hovering over me, angled high, and I closed my eyes in anticipation of the sundering edge. She could have stabbed me just as swiftly. For as with any man in the camp, she should have tried to kill me. And if I believed then that she did not do so because she valued me or hoped to be saved by me, I realize now that it was neither of those things. Not at all. She had not hurt me for the same reason that she had given over her body some hours before, not for passion or love, or mercy or humanity, but their complete absence and abasement, such that there were no wrongs remaining, no more crimes, nothing to save herself from.

In an odd way, I think now that K wanted the same thing that I would yearn for all my days, which was her own place in the accepted order of things. She would be a young woman of character, as significant to her father as was his son. She would have the independence that comes from learning and grace. She would choose her kind of devotion; she would bear children and do her necessary work, a true vocation, and she would grow old as I have grown old, though she would look backward with a different cast than mine, a different afterlight. All I wished for was to be part (if but a millionth) of the massing, and that I pass through with something more than a life of gestures. And yet, I see now, I was in fact a critical part of events, as were K and the other girls, and the soldiers and the rest. Indeed the horror of it was how central we were, how ingenuously and not we comprised the larger processes, feeding ourselves and one another to the all-consuming engine of the war.

K leaned on the examination table and doubled over, gagging, still gripping the surgical knife. Nothing came out but some watery spittle. I tried to help her but she pushed away my hands.

“Please,” she said, wiping her mouth with her forearm. “Please, Lieutenant. Don’t touch me.”

“I’ll only ever do so when you wish.”

“Then please…” she said, her eyes sickly, desperate. “I won’t be touched anymore.”

“You will come with me when the war is over.”

“Don’t speak of that,” she said wearily. “I don’t wish to think of it.”

“You will, I promise…there’s nothing that can prevent it. Not even this.”

“I am not going anywhere with you!” She was crying now, suddenly mad. “I am not going with you! Do you hear me?”

“I’ll help you.”

“I don’t want your help!” she shouted. “I never wanted your help. Can’t you heed me? Can’t you leave me be? You think you love me but what you really want you don’t yet know because you are young and decent. But I will tell you now, it is my sex. The thing of my sex. If you could cut it from me and keep it with you like a pelt or favorite stone, that would be all. You are a decent man, Lieutenant, but really you are not any different from the rest. I’m sorry I gave myself to you, not for me but for you. Perhaps it was a second’s hope. For that I’ll be sorry to my death. But if you loved me, Lieutenant, if you truly loved me, you could not bear to be with me. You could not see me like this, you could not stand for one moment longer the thought of my even living.”

“I love you,” I said, in hardly a voice.

“Then show me, Jiro,” she answered. “I’m too cowardly to do it myself. I want to but I can’t. There is his pistol. The guards are going to return at any moment and they will announce themselves. When he doesn’t answer they’ll come in. You must say I killed him just as I did, and that you took his pistol and you shot me. If you cannot do it yourself, then say so now. I’m afraid, but I have nothing left to do. There’s no escape. I know you dream of one but it doesn’t exist. This time won’t end. It will end for you, but not for me.”

K bent and loosed the weapon from him and put it in my hand. She moved back a little, stepping away from the body of the captain. She wasn’t crying anymore. “Jiro. Please. You are a good man. Yes, you are. A good man now.”

The pistol weighed heavily in my hand, as though I’d never held one before. I had shot in training and for practice but never once fired at something living, much less her. But she was right, I knew. It was incredible to think there was a way for us, the hope akin to how a boy might fancy that he could truly fly, perched up high in the limbs of a tree. And he might even fashion paper wings and lash them to his arms, he might feel the airy hollowness of his bones, he might know like the sun the perfect certainty of his flight, and yet his first step tells, it tells with prejudice the rules of the world.

Yet I could not shoot. I could not. Whether for love or pity or cowardice. Then we heard the men returning, and I looked out and saw they were accompanied by a first lieutenant, a hulking, boorish man named Shiboru, who was in charge of the guards. They were but steps away from the stair and landing. I pulled Captain Ono by the neck and sat him up and stuck the muzzle to his wound. Then I fired. K shouted out, in surprise and dread. I dropped the pistol and let him fall dully. Shiboru came running in with his sidearm drawn as I was kneeling beside the captain.

“He’s shot himself,” I said. “Get the large bandages in the cabinet.”

Shiboru looked confused, but I pointed at the cabinet and he complied. I realized it was he who had executed Endo that day. He hurriedly brought the gauzes but when he gave them to me I told him it was already too late.

“How did this happen?” he said, not yet holstering his revolver.

“It was an accident,” I replied, picking up Ono’s gun. “He was playing with the girl. Doing tricks for her. He was switching hands when it went off.”

“What happened to you?”

I told him the captain had beaten me the day before, not explaining any further, and Shiboru naturally didn’t question it. He looked down at the captain’s body and said haughtily, “Only real soldiers should toy with such things. And even then. So I suppose you’re the base doctor now, eh, Kurohata?”

“If the colonel wishes it.”

“Oh, that he will,” Shiboru answered, nodding to the hall. “It seems the old man needs his medicine. He insisted on me coming here and getting the captain. Right off, too, with the needles and all. I suppose you’ll be by daily as Ono here was. I’ll let my men know.”

He snorted when I didn’t answer, and he said gruffly, “He’s in his house. You better go there now. The sentries will take care of this mess. She’ll come with me.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“She’s got no reason to be here. I know what was going on, Kurohata, like everybody else. The doctor, having it special. In fact, maybe you, too? But no more, eh? Everybody’s bored with just the three others. They’re nearly useless now besides. Fucking skeletons. Can’t you fix them up or something? It’s almost better with your own hand. At least you don’t want to throw up when you’re doing it. But this one, she’s a doll. Skinny, but she’s a real beauty. Come here, doll. Come here to your big brother.”

I went to the storeroom to get the vials of the tincture, trying desperately to think of what to do. When I came back the guards were waiting to escort me to the commander’s house, but I stopped at the exam room to try to stall or convince him to leave her to me. It was strange, then, when I looked inside; I thought I saw her gazing at him almost tenderly, with a last human glimmer, and then I knew in an instant how terrible all the rest of it would be. She reached out with one hand and seemed to caress him, but he groaned instead, clutching one side of his face. When he let go there was a fine red line, from the corner of his eye down to his mouth. He started bleeding profusely. She had cut him, but not too deeply, as though she were trying only to mark him. She didn’t move away. Then he punched her hard enough on the mouth that some of her teeth flew out, like tiny white birds.

One of the sentries pulled me along, saying, “Don’t worry, the lieutenant has his certain way.” Outside, through the window, I could see that K had risen up again, bloody-mouthed, and he struck her again.

When I finally finished administering to the commander and returned to the infirmary there was no one there. I had injected him and sat with him as he requested but it still took nearly an hour until he fell asleep. Just before he did he suddenly realized that it was the first time I had administered his medicine, in place of Captain Ono. He wasn’t disturbed or even suspicious; he was already too deep in the thrall of the injection. All he wanted was that I sit beside him as he lay prostrate on his bedpad and gently pat him on the back with a slow, steady rhythm. After a few minutes he began half-humming a sentimental folk song, his faint voice breaking in beats as I patted, so that he sounded almost like an old woman consoling herself at day’s end.

As soon as he was asleep I went directly to the comfort house, but there, too, it was quiet, being late in the afternoon, when the girls were allowed to sleep before the evening and late night. Behind their communal tent I found Mrs. Matsui, crouched over a dented washing pail of gray water, wringing undershirts. I asked if she had seen Lieutenant Shiboru, and of course, K.

She nodded.

I asked where.

“Aren’t you going there, too?” she said, wringing out an undershirt.

“No, where?”

“They’re at the clearing.” She picked at her teeth with her fingernail. She was angry and even a little upset. “A whole bunch of them. I told that bitch this would happen to her. Stupid little bitch. ‘You’re going to get yourself killed,’ I told her, if she goes on like that. Or worse. But now see how it is? It has to be worse. Something worse.”

I ran up the north path by the latrines, toward the clearing, as it was known, which was where Corporal Endo had taken K’s sister. But I wasn’t halfway there when I met them coming back, singly and together and in small groups. The men. It was the men. Twenty-five of them, thirty of them. I had to slow as they went past. Some were half-dressed, shirtless, trouserless, half-hopping to pull on boots. They were generally quiet. The quiet after great celebration. They were flecked with blood, and muddy dirt, some more than others. One with his hands and forearms as if dipped in crimson. Another’s face smudged with it, the color strange in his hair. One of them was completely clean, only his boots soiled; he was vomiting as he walked. Shiboru carried his saber, wiping it lazily in the tall grass. His face was bleeding but he was unconcerned. He did not see me; none of them did. They could have been returning from a volleyball match, thoroughly enervated, sobered by near glory.

Then they were all gone. I walked the rest of the way to the clearing. The air was cooler there, the treetops shading the falling sun. Mostly it was like any other place I had ever been. Yet I could not smell or hear or see as I did my medic’s work. I could not feel my hands as they gathered, nor could I feel the weight of such remains. And I could not sense that other, tiny, elfin form I eventually discovered, miraculously whole, I could not see the figured legs and feet, the utter, blessed digitation of the hands. Nor could I see the face, the perfected cheek and brow. Its pristine sleep still unbroken, undisturbed. And I could not know what I was doing, or remember any part.