The Emperor of Any Place

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  He’s telling the story, I decided. And I could see, as he must have been all too aware of himself, that the story would have to come to an end quite soon, for there were only a few pages left in the flight book. So I gave him my second sketch pad and one of my last pencils. Isamu stared at the pages and pages of blankness and smiled for the first time since the death of Tengu. But it was nothing like the smiles I had come to know. It was as if the monster still had its claws in him, for the smile was strained and tinged with grief.

  He had lost something. The monster has stolen something from him. That was as much as I could deduce. I did not know at the time about his talk with the jikininki and how that affected him — infected him: the horror of an abandoned body giving birth to a ghost that must forever eat the stories of others, having no story of its own.

  Isamu had woven mats out of grass for us to sit on when we ate at the low table, a new table to replace the one that Tengu had soiled. One night, when Isamu didn’t seem quite so lost in his thoughts, I reached across the table and tugged lightly at the string around his neck. Isamu produced the omamori but did not open it.

  “Hisako,” I said. “Soon you will see Hisako.”

  Isamu stopped eating. He smiled and turned to stare vaguely in the direction of the island that had been his home.

  “Boy, oh boy, are you going to have a lot to tell her,” I said, making various gestures with my hand that we had come to understand as a form of sign language.

  Isamu nodded. Then he stared straight into my eyes. What was going on down there in those deep brown depths? Did he doubt that help would come? Or did he doubt that there was anything to go home to?

  We worked the Gibson Girl every day, taking turns. And every day I went up to the crow’s nest to look for a sign of rescue. I would wait until Isamu had gone off fishing or on one of his long walks. What I saw on Tinian was an enormous airfield taking shape. Already the Seabees had built one runway at North Field that looked incredibly long, and other runways were under way.1 The place was a constant beehive of activity, day and night. But surely there was someone there who could spare a few hours away from the war effort to slip across the strait and pick up two lost souls.

  1 The first runway was, in fact, eight thousand feet in length. By the following spring, there would be three more. It would be the largest airfield in the world for a time.

  I saw the boat first. It was early morning, first light. The sea was dead calm. The sky blue with pure white cirrocumulus clouds five miles up. A herringbone sky. The boat was anchored two hundred yards offshore at the inner edge of the heart’s eastern shoulder. A small American gunship. The kind we called “devil boats.”

  I raced back to the fort and roused Derwood from his sleep.

  “Come,” I said.

  I watched Derwood run forward when we reached an open spot on the hilltop where I had first seen the boat. I held back, out of view.

  “We’re saved,” said Derwood, turning to me, his eyes huge with excitement. He had thrown out his arms, and his eyes were on fire. I knew what he meant, even if I did not know the words.

  “Yes,” I said. “You go.”

  He ran back to me, like a child at the fair, running back to grab the hand of his kind but slow-moving grandfather, wanting to drag him through the gates into the fairground.

  “You go,” I said to him, and touched his chest. There was no mistaking my intention.

  “You, too. Come.”

  I could not explain to him my fear, the apprehension that had been growing in me for days now. “You go first,” I said. This time I pushed him in the chest with both hands and pointed out to where the ship was.

  Derwood nodded vigorously. “Good plan,” he said. These were words I knew. “I’ll tell them about you,” he added in our complicated sign language. He pointed from himself to me. Slowly I shook my head and watched the color drain from his face.

  “Go. Hurry. Quick.”

  Derwood started to protest. I grabbed and tugged at the hair on either side of my head with frustration. “Go!” I growled. “Go!” I shoved Derwood harder. I knew the man would not stay, for I could see the excitement in his eyes. And sure enough, he went. He raced down the hill waving his arms. He was wearing what he had slept in: pants cut short at the knee, a faded khaki shirt, no shoes.

  I sit in my tree to write this, Hisako. He has gone.

  I’ll take over from Isamu here. I reached the beach in under three minutes and raced out onto the sand waving like mad, yelling at the top of my lungs. I needn’t have worried. There was already a canvas-covered Carley float being lowered into the water. A sailor dropped into the raft and took up the oars. Someone on deck waved at me. Good. I waved back. Until that moment, I seriously worried that the PT boat was a hallucination.

  The sailor turned out to be a marine, though what he was doing on a navy vessel, I would not find out right away. He could have been a tinker or a tailor for all I cared. I waded out to the raft, whooping like a kid at a Friday night football game, and held the craft steady while the marine hopped out into a foot of water.

  “Fella, am I glad to see you,” I said. I took the man’s hand in mine and shook it as I introduced myself. The man’s hand snapped to his brow.

  “Lieutenant Kraft, sir,” he said. “Sergeant Griffin, Sixth Marines.”

  “At ease, Sergeant,” I said, barely able to keep from laughing.

  Then he saw the familiars.

  And I witnessed for the first time the phenomenon of them coming into existence — his own ghosts — growing out of the still morning air. I had almost come to ignore my own flock, always obediently at hand. You have to understand that my own first experience of them was awakening in acute pain to find them hovering nearby like hospital attendants and the jikininki right there as well, much larger — and hungry! Talk about hallucinations! My own tribe of ghosts had come into existence while I was unconscious and so I did not get to see them “born,” as I did at that moment with Sergeant Griffin’s ghosts. It was as if the air coalesced before our eyes, here and there and there and there, on up the beach.

  My eyes darted back and forth between the ghosts and the marine. I watched his hand reach for the firearm in his holster. Then he withdrew his hand, aware of me watching him. Our eyes made contact, and I’m sure my eyes were shining with the kind of brightness one associates with a madman. Without so much as a nod, we seemed to come to a tacit agreement. He would not say anything about what he was seeing — what was snapping into existence before his very eyes. Nor would I. We would ignore it and it would not be there.

  Together we pulled the raft ashore, while Griffin explained how they’d been getting intermittent signals from the island for a few days. I nodded excitedly, but found myself strangely tongue-tied and what I suspected was way too close to the edge of hysteria. What was I to say? Where to start? The Gooney Bird, that’s where.

  “There’s a C-47 in the jungle back there,” I said, pointing southwest. “We went down back in mid-September en route to Mindanao, carrying firearms and ammo.”

  “Survivors?”

  “Just me.” I held up my left arm. “Well, most of me.”

  The marine gave me a stiff-lipped nod. He was not the demonstrative kind, but I could see the respect in his eyes. Eyes that had been searching the beach restlessly when they weren’t looking directly at me.

  “And the shipment?”

  “In good shape, last time I looked.”

  The sergeant smiled, grimly. “Well, I’m guessing the Sixth Marines will make as good use of that consignment as the GIs would have done.”

  “What’s the news from the Philippines?”

  “MacArthur waded ashore at Palo, Leyte, on the twentieth.”

  “Of November?”

  “No, sir. October. They seem to be doing just fine, from what we hear. They’re pummeling the Japs.”

  And there it was. The Japs. Now what?

  I must have given something away because Griffin looked a
t me with his head cocked. “Everything okay, sir?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Guess I’m just . . .” I looked up to the headland. “There’s something I need to get.”

  “You need help?”

  “No.”

  “You want company?”

  He knows. Time to pull rank.

  “No, thank you, Sergeant,” I said, getting the tone of command just about right. “Give me one minute.” I held up my index finger, to make sure he knew what I meant and to make a point. I turned and started to go, then turned again and said, “Make that ten minutes.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Griffin. There was a knowing look in his eye, though what he thought he knew, I had no idea. The marine wasn’t about to risk insubordination, but he was clearly suspicious. He was the sharp-eyed type. And I couldn’t help wondering whether when Isamu saw the boat, Sergeant Griffin had already spotted Isamu. There was no time to waste.

  Isamu was gone. I didn’t dare call for him, in case the sound traveled, but I looked everywhere I could, fully aware of the man waiting down on the beach and a boat filled with sailors who had better things to do with their time than wait on a bearded shipwreck of a flyboy. I got angrier and angrier. Did the damn fool think I would sell him down the river after everything we’d been through?

  On an impulse, I raced over to the coral tree. I looked up to the platform but could not tell if he was on it.

  “You saved my life, Isamu,” I said, staring up into the thorny branches. “Come down. I promise you’ll be treated fairly. It’s time for me to help you. Do you hear me?”

  There was no sound, only some bird flitting about like crazy as if I were going to steal her eggs.

  “Please!” I said. It was a word I knew Isamu understood.

  I waited. I didn’t dare climb the tree in bare feet, nor was there time. Meanwhile his patient ghost family mingled with mine, exchanging furtive glances.

  Finally, I swore, colorfully. It was a word Isamu had heard me use on more than one occasion when I’d stubbed a toe or banged my head into something. A good strong word to indicate I was hurt. Hurt bad.

  Then I sighed and said, “Sayonara, kokoro no tomo.” “Good-bye, my friend.”

  I turned a few yards from the tree and shouted, despite my earlier trepidation about being heard. “Mata modotte kimasu.” “I will be back.”

  When I reappeared on the beach, I was in my uniform, such as it was, the jacket frayed at the cuffs, the pants oil-stained, and my garrison cap looking as if a bird had been nesting in it. I was carrying the Gibson Girl transmitter and one of the rifles from the shipment.

  Sergeant Griffin saluted me snappily.

  I saluted him back. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  I watch the devil boat leave from my watchtower with my friend Derwood upon it. They will be back for the guns. Will I let that happen? Those guns would kill Japanese soldiers. I will have to give this matter significant thought. I will write about it, ask your advice, Hisako-chan. You are so wise — wiser than I am. It will be good to be alone with you again on our desert island. Just the two of us.

  The soldiers will come, and the jikininki will melt into the depths of the jungle. Troops of healthy soldiers would be as intolerable to them as fire. Soldiers are only good to the jikininki dead. Were I to booby-trap the plane, all that I would accomplish would be to feed the undead — these gluttons of other people’s memories. There would be too many to bury, and burying is hard. Harder than fire.

  It is strange, but sitting up in my tree, with the devil boat racing away, only a speck on the wide flat ocean, I realize that I have ceased really to think of the war as them and us. We are all flesh and blood, together. Have not Derwood and I proved this point? We have.

  Together we have vanquished war! Ha!

  From my post in the watchtower, I trained my binoculars on the marine. I saw what Derwood did not see. The marine’s eyes watched him run up to our headland fort, and though the marine could not have seen any sign of habitation from where he stood, there was suspicion in his eyes. Without meaning to, Derwood led the marine directly to me. I will be most careful when they return that I am not anywhere to be found.

  So Derwood and I teamed up to destroy Tengu. But war is not destroyed. This is what I have learned, here on the heart-shaped island. And I have learned that it is good to help the dead on their way to the next world and save them from the ravages of those whose only taste of life is a bitter one, filling them with borrowed memories that fade and leave them hungry for more and never satisfied, never satisfied. Saving the dead from the jikininki has taught me what killing never did.

  I wanted to say to Derwood I will wait for the end of the war. I wanted to say that no prison could be as bountiful as this island. I wanted to say that I trusted Derwood Kraft — trusted him with my life! But war was war, despite what we have accomplished together, and that if war was war, then one man must be the prisoner and the other man the prison keeper. That is the way of it.

  It is sad I could not tell him all this. Sad that although we had learned to communicate so well in the months of our time together, we do not share enough language to speak such complicated thoughts, although I am as sure as sure that this man if any would understand. I wanted to call Derwood my friend. But in the end it is better to say nothing. To do nothing. To wait it out. Wait for the end.

  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.
r />   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.