by Kōbō Abe
“Help, help, they’ll kill him!” It was Red Jacket, whose ear the girl had struck before. The bleeding had apparently not stopped; the earlobe was red, and swollen to twice its previous size. He tumbled in and fell to his hands and knees on the landing. “The other guy’s being eaten alive by a pack of wild dogs! Help!”
“So that’s where you were.” The adjutant sprang up with remarkable agility, then crouched down again and moistened his forehead with spit. Probably a charm to get rid of pins and needles in the legs; I could remember my grandmother doing the same thing long ago. “Come on down; it’s all right.”
“Help him, for God’s sake—the dogs are all over him!”
“Scout A, what was the meaning of that slipshod report you filed?” barked the insect dealer suddenly, straightening himself up. “You said there were no suspicious characters around here. Isn’t he suspicious? What have you to say?”
“Excuse me, sir,” said Scout A, grinding his teeth. “No one told me he was there.”
“You didn’t ask,” shot back Sengoku.
“I’m partly to blame,” said the adjutant. “I should have warned you that these people might not cooperate.” He walked ten paces toward the storage drums, eyes on the floor. “Look—bloodstains. I was careless to have missed them. Which one of you wounded him?”
“I did.” The girl waved her crossbow aloft for him to see.
“I see. Then everyone here failed to cooperate, and the scout failed in his duty. I’ll leave the question of discipline up to you, Commander.”
“Please, you’ve gotta do something,” begged Red Jacket. “He’s being eaten alive! If he dies it’ll be murder, don’t you see? Please, hurry… .”
“Shut up!” The insect dealer’s neck swelled until it was a match for his great round head. “At this point, do you think a dead body or two more is going to scare any of us? Scout, drag that young punk down here and make him tell you where he hid the girls.”
“He doesn’t know where they are.” The scout’s voice had reverted to a childish squeak. “Nobody knows but the ones who ran off with them.”
Red Jacket chimed in. “If I had any idea where they were, I’d have gone along. Then this never would have happened.”
“Commander, I advise against retracting an order once it’s given,” said the adjutant. He frowned, dropping his head on his chest as if he’d just realized he’d lost his wallet. He retraced his steps back over toward the toilet.
“I know,” said the insect dealer, drawing a converted toy pistol from under his belt. He cocked it, aimed it, and planted both legs firmly. “Now you drag him down here, fast, and you make him talk.”
Broom in hand, the young scout moved toward the landing with a resigned look. Red Jacket rose to his knees, unfastened the chain at his belt, and gave it a shake. Steel bit into the floorboards with a graphic sound that was somehow intensely physical: I flinched, imagining a butcher’s knife carving into bone.
“Stay away,” said Red Jacket.
“You get down here,” said the scout. “Do me a favor.”
“No, you do me a favor.”
“I’m following orders.”
“Lousy traitor.”
“You don’t understand.”
A sharp report rang out, its echoes bouncing around the room like Ping-Pong balls. The insect dealer had fired at the ceiling. There was a smell of gunpowder, like scorched bitter herbs. Red Jacket, wounded once already, promptly collapsed in terror.
“Drag him down here. Make him confess if you have to stick your broom handle up his ass. If he doesn’t, the captain will be in trouble. It doesn’t matter if you kill him. Don’t worry about disposing of the body.”
“The captain will be in trouble… .” What did that mean? The insect dealer’s own words—that firearms change people—came to me; he had fulfilled his own prophecy.
“You’d better get down here,” said the scout. “Or you’ll get killed.”
“I don’t know anything—and you know I don’t know!”
As if his body were drained of strength, Red Jacket came sliding down the ladder, collapsing on top of the blue-sheeted bundle. “There’s a body in there,” warned the scout, at which Red Jacket leaped up, moved several feet off, and collapsed again.
“Get to work,” said the adjutant in a businesslike way. “Just do as you’ve been taught.” The young scout twisted the broom handle in Red Jacket’s gut. There was a wail of pain.
“You’re hurting me!”
“Confess, then.”
“How can I confess what I don’t know! Aagh!”
“That’s enough,” said the girl frostily, glaring at the adjutant with open hostility. A show of indifference would have been better, I thought; the more you let others know how you really feel, the worse off you are.
“I’m afraid an order, once given, can’t be retracted that easily,” said the adjutant. “Bad for discipline. As long as the men are following orders, they’re forbidden to pass any sort of judgment on those orders. Where an order is concerned, there can be no second thoughts, period.”
Red Jacket was weeping. Covered with sweat, the young scout kept on grinding the broom handle into the victim’s belly.
“If he really doesn’t know, then no amount of torture is going to get anything out of him.” The shill had covered his face in dazed disbelief, and was peeking through his fingers at the scene.
“This could take time,” admitted the adjutant, his peregrination around the toilet coming to a sudden stop; he studied the insect dealer’s expression. The insect dealer gave the barest of nods, his face an expressionless mask. “In the meantime I’ll go up to room three—ah, excuse me, I did it again. What should I call that room up over the lift?”
“Anything you want.”
“All right, then—how about Main Mess Hall? It’s easily four times as big as the one by the tangerine grove. Someone will have to keep a sharp eye on the cooking squad; otherwise it would be easy for irregularities to creep in, and any carelessness regarding sanitation can only lead to harm. Unfortunately, tomorrow’s breakfast is fish again. It’s a pity, when we have two former butchers among us, both skilled meat carvers. Excuse me for a moment.”
The adjutant cut across the hold, walked past the storage drums, and disappeared down the tunnel leading into the work hold. It seemed to take ages—a half-hour or more—before he was gone.
“Hey, Komono,” called the shill, to no response. “Make him quit that, will you? Komono, what’s the matter? Are you out of your mind?”
“I’ll make him stop,” said the girl, releasing the safety on her crossbow, and fitting it with an arrow.
I was busy taking steps of my own. Sliding off the encyclopedia, I twisted back and reached out for the Uzi that the girl had left propped up against the toilet. Slowly the muzzle of the insect dealer’s gun rose, aiming straight at me.
“Cut it out… .” He came around and wrested the Uzi away from me. “I haven’t gone mad, much as it may seem I have. I’m all right, I think. Just wait a little longer. I’m thinking… . I know what—I’ll have a smoke.”
He withdrew to a safe place and crouched against the wall; there, with the Uzi across his knees, and his own gun still in his hand, he lit a cigarette. The young scout kept on raising and lowering his arms mechanically, as if pounding rice for rice cakes. He did seem to be letting up a little. Red Jacket went on moaning in time to the movements of the broom; he did not appear to be taking a decisive beating. Hundreds of barbed slugs, or some such creatures, were crawling around on the surface of my paralyzed leg.
“I’m going to go take a leak,” said Sengoku, and headed for the hatch, with a sidelong look at the sheeted bundle. No one had any reason to stop him, and no one did: the pack of wild dogs would do that. The realization that Red Jacket’s partner had gone outside was a bit troubling—but then, it was probably true that he’d been attacked by the dogs. That would take care of him. Puffing on his cigarette, the insect dealer we
nt into a crouch and cocked his gun.
Mentally, in those few seconds I played up and down the keyboard of my brain cells, fast enough to compete in a contest, and made a decision. I whispered to the girl, “Will you do me a favor? Keep it secret.” My voice was so low I could barely hear it myself, but her response was instantaneous.
“Yes.”
“Locker number two upstairs has a switchboard inside. There’s a red lever on the left end, just at eye level. I want you to push it up. Will you do that?”
“What’s the combination?”
“Same as the locker number, two—two right, two left, two right. Just two-two-two.”
“The red lever.”
“Nothing will happen right away.”
For safety’s sake, I had set up the dynamite detonating device in two stages. The panel I had now at my fingertips could do nothing on its own. Contact with the switchboard relay would awaken the slumbering fuse and ready it for reception. My Uzi had been taken from me, but now—if only she managed her task successfully—I would gain a weapon many times more powerful.
The girl went casually up the stairs. Anticipation and nervous tension seemed to make the pain in my leg recede somewhat. When she was halfway up the stairs, the shill shot her an inquiring look, which she answered with a frantic signal.
Naturally, it would be hard for him to understand what she was up to, but at this point the only secret she and I could possibly share would have to concern a way out of the current impasse. He fell in with her. If all went as planned, I had no intention of leaving him in the cold. The insect dealer followed her movements briefly, then showed no further interest. Women are expected to have their own reasons for coming and going, beyond men’s understanding; in fact, men have a duty to pretend not to see. She disappeared safely onto the bridge. I thought of tiny air creatures faced with death. Of schools of whales seeking survival that end up committing mass suicide instead. My vision of eupcaccia tranquillity—had it been only an illusion? Then why was there a merry-go-round in every amusement park worthy of the name? If it could be proved that children on holiday were all schizo, very well; then I would resign myself, and withdraw… .
A destructive pressure now bore on my calf. Had I not been wrapped in the protective bandage of the pipe, the flesh might well have ruptured. It felt like the time my gums were inflamed with toothache. I only wished I could lance it, and clean out the abscess within. Had a surgeon chosen that moment to menace me with his scalpel, I doubted my ability to fend him off. A butcher’s cleaver I would resist to the death; a surgeon’s scalpel could be the tool of my salvation. But this weakening was a sign of danger. The failure of the drugs to arrive probably meant the scout was haggling with a doctor reluctant to prescribe morphine; then again, it could have been that the doctor was taking a long time to dress, or even that the car engine wouldn’t start. Would the doctor go along readily with an amputation? He could always justify it on grounds that it would relieve suffering. If he succeeded in stopping the bleeding, and if vascular suturing went well, and if effective measures to prevent suppuration could be taken, then medical ethics wouldn’t seem to argue against it. Even if the doctor should witness my amputated leg vanishing down the hole with a pop like that from a popgun, followed by the dismembered parts of a corpse, one after another, his ethical propriety would remain unimpeachable.
The girl signaled to me from the parapet.
At last the time had come, just as I had known that one day it would; I had always known, too, that it was something I would have to decide myself, without orders from anyone else. I had put off that decision until now for the same reason that I had refrained from betting with the insect dealer as to whether or not the nuclear war would begin in five minutes. But in a nuclear war there could be no advance warning, which would give the enemy an irreversible advantage. The button could be pushed for only two conceivable reasons: either a sudden, unforeseen accident, or the development of technology which conferred automatic first-strike victory on the user, thus ending the balance of power. That moment could come at any time, without forewarning. By its very nature, nuclear war would begin all of a sudden, and as suddenly be over. The variables are far greater than for an earthquake, making prediction far more problematical. Warnings were unthinkable. Any attack that left room for the operation of a warning system would be subject to the restraining forces of both sides. The launching of the ark would inevitably take place one peaceful day, catching everyone unawares. There was not the slightest reason why that day should not be today. All decisions are arbitrary in the end.
Sengoku came back inside, having relieved himself.
I brought out the remote-control panel from my belt, slid off the safety device, and held my finger quietly on the red button. My conviction was low, but my expectations were high. There would be vast alterations in the flow of the underground vein of water. I might even be able to free myself from the toilet. It would be a lonely, quiet launching, with not a single toast in celebration. This, I thought, was the only way to enter upon nuclear war—before it began. Of those who were aware of the actual outbreak of war, the vast majority would be wiped out; only those whose ears were covered, who remained ignorant, would be able to survive.
24
ESCAPE
A flash. Innumerable whips lashed my skin where it was exposed. Then the hatch exploded, eradicating the oceanside entrance. There was no boom such as I had expected to hear, but my eardrums felt an excruciating pain. The light gave way instantly to black darkness. Power failure. The insect dealer switched on his cigarette lighter, its tiny flame emphasizing the vast darkness. His shadow swayed against the wall; the rest of us were totally invisible. Red Jacket’s groaning stopped. Even if he was still groaning, with the ringing in my ears I could never have heard him.
Next there was a distant echo like a crack of thunder, and the whoosh of wind currents crossing and crisscrossing the ark. It had worked.
A warning buzzer went on and off, feeble in my ears after the roar of the blast. As the one who had installed it, I felt a responsibility to make a statement:
“Looks like a nuclear explosion. That signal is the emergency warning.”
No one answered right away.
“It’s an earthquake, isn’t it?” said the girl in a scared voice. “It’s got to be.”
“For an earthquake, I don’t notice many tremors,” said someone—perhaps Sengoku.
“I hate to say it,” I repeated, “but I do think it’s a nuclear explosion.” I wished I could have the insect dealer do the talking for me. “The system is designed to seal us off automatically in case of a nuclear explosion, by dynamiting all tunnels to the outside.”
“I don’t know what kind of sensors you may be using, but how can you be so certain?” The insect dealer’s light came closer, leaving a wavering tail of flame in the air.
“I’m not; I’m just stating the most obvious possibility.”
Darkness in a room or a cave is of varying dimensions. The darkness of, say, a clothes closet can actually be soothing, not frightening in the least. But the vaster the scale, the more menacing darkness becomes. The custom of burying the dead in coffins might have arisen from the desire to protect them from the uncertainty of large darkness by surrounding them with small darkness. Here there were only seven of us, but it sounded like hundreds of fish gasping in a water tank lacking sufficient oxygen.
“I want to know what makes you think so,” said the insect dealer, thrusting the flame of his light toward me. “It could have been set off by a sudden squall, couldn’t it? There’s a front going by. Maybe your sensor is just too sensitive.”
“It’s far more sophisticated than that,” I said, feeling less and less confident in my ability to outtalk this man whose tongue was his fortune. “It’s computer-controlled. There are pressure anemometers at the northern and southern extremities of the mountain, and when the difference in their measurements is greater than one-third, the computer registers it
as a local, small-scale disturbance without proceeding to the next stage. Other factors taken into consideration are duration of pressure, presence or absence of a heat wave, rate of temperature climb, and, of course, tests for radioactivity… . There’s no way it could be set off by a mere squall.”
Light fell on the tunnel entrance. It was from a large portable lantern hanging from the adjutant’s shoulders, carefully positioned in such a way that his body was visible from the waist down only.
“Excuse me, sir.” His tone hadn’t changed a whit. Nerves of such steely resiliency demanded respect.
“An emergency situation has arisen,” responded the insect dealer. “Possibly a nuclear explosion.” He seemed inclined to affirm that possibility rather than deny it. Flakes of light appeared in the flame of his lighter—a sign he was running out of fuel. “Nuclear weapons are essentially designed to be used in a preemptive strike. It’s common knowledge among military analysts that in all-out nuclear warfare there would be no declaration of war.”
“I’ll go get a lantern,” said the shill, and groped his way upstairs.
“What’s that smell—radioactivity?” It was the young scout.
“No, ding-dong—gunpowder,” said the adjutant flatly. “Powder smoke, it’s called. To a real man it smells sweet as roses.”
“We’ll be safe from radiation in here,” said Sengoku, reassuring himself.
