The Emperor of Any Place

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “‘The end,’ I said.

  “‘Yes. Over. The end,’ he said back to me. I guess Derwood had taught him some English.

  “I wasn’t relieved. I still had that metal box in my breast pocket. I hadn’t come here looking for trouble, but those dog tags . . .”

  Evan watches Griff nod to himself. His eyes fixed on nothing in this room — focused entirely on something that happened to him three-quarters of his life ago, and yet was still here, as clear as anything. Burned into his memory.

  “A strange thing happened,” he says. “The ghost children — his ghosts — all took up a protective position in front of him. They were acting out of some instinct to preserve him, I guess.” Griff ’s face looks as if he is in pain. As if there were other things he could understand, but this — this was beyond knowing.

  “When I read Ōshiro’s idea about them. How they were the children yet to be born. Well, that’s just plain insane, that is. And yet, it made sense, I guess. Not at the time. But when I thought about it later.” He looks at Evan, and Evan nods. “Especially now.” Evan doesn’t nod again, but he knows some kind of a pact just got signed between them. Two people both accepting something on faith.

  “They didn’t even exist yet and yet their DNA did, if you want to call it that. Their future was in this man. And protecting him was as crucial to them as it would be for a mother protecting her baby child. Extraordinary.”

  Griff closes his eyes. Rubs them with his knuckles, opens them again. The unbelief in his eyes, the terrible impossibility of it is something he’s lived with all his life, thinks Evan. Do not hurry the man, he tells himself.

  Griff sighs. “I walked toward Isamu with my gun lowered, but with a pretty damn unsympathetic look on my face. By now, he was inside the gate a couple feet. Not making any attempt to run. I stopped. I guess I’d have been about fifteen yards away. With my free hand, I undid the button of my pocket and fished out the Lucky Strike tin. I held it up for Isamu to see. ‘What the hell is this?’ I asked him, or something like that. I rattled the tin at him, accusingly, so you could hear those dog tags rattle. So there’d be no doubt what I was talking about.

  “And he nodded, looked kind of agitated. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Bury.’ And as he said it, he made this sudden movement.” Griff pauses. “It was the suddenness I noticed, his one hand reaching down as if maybe he had something concealed in his pant leg. I dropped that tin so fast. I had the rifle to my shoulder, aimed at him, my finger on the trigger, before it registered on me what he was doing. He was shoveling — pretending to shovel. Not reaching for a concealed weapon. ‘Bury,’ he had said, and he was miming it for me. He had buried those soldiers.” Griff rubs his steady right hand through the bristle of his hair.

  And Evan says, “And is that when it happened?”

  Griff nods, his eyes wide. “Out of nowhere.”

  “Out of the ground,” says Evan. “He was standing right over the trap. Tengu’s grave.” Griff nods again.

  Evan waits. Then he says, “Go on, Griff.”

  Griff stares at him, rubs his face. Rests his hands on the arms of the chair.

  “I started right in, firing on that thing. I fired again and again, my aim good — perfect — hitting it with every shot, peppering the shoulders and head of the thing. It was mauling Ōshiro, and I just strode right up to it, firing. By now, the upper half of its body was fully emerged. I emptied my rifle into its hide, and when I was out of ammo, threw it aside and drew my service revolver. I fired straight into the damn creature’s screaming face, one eye, then the next, standing at close quarters until finally those talons let go of him. Let go of his bleeding body.”

  Griff pauses to breathe. He sounds dead weary when he speaks again. “Kept on firing, round after round, until with this awful gurgling, the creature slid back down onto the sand. Dead. Again.”

  Evan waits. Then he says, “And it was too late?”

  Griff nods. “As careful as I could, I dragged the fallen soldier away from the churned-up sand — out of the reach of the thing, in case it somehow came back to life.”

  “Ōshiro was dead?”

  “Not quite. Chewed up something awful, but not quite dead. The worst of it was this cruel slash across his throat, leaking blood at an alarming rate.”

  He looks suddenly at Evan, frightened, distrustful. Even now he can’t believe it. Evan nods for him to go on. “I wrapped my hands around his neck,” he says, “and the blood, it just bubbled up through my fingers. I could just barely feel his pulse.” He shakes his head, angrily. “Damn heart,” he says. “Pumping blood out of the body, and I had nothing to stop the wound. Nothing I could do. Then I saw my rifle with the white truce flag tied to it. Letting go for a moment, I tore the flag off and wrapped it around Ōshiro’s neck. But there is this terrible truth about a neck wound: you cannot make a tourniquet. To stop the blood is to close the windpipe. The white flag was drenched red in no time. Even as I tried to stanch the wound, I could see the life slipping away from him. I had seen it enough times to know. I stopped and just sat there on my backside to cradle his head in my arms.”

  Evan waits, watches. Listens.

  “I’ll never forget his dying gaze. There was no anger there. He tried to speak but had no voice. I nodded and nodded. The shock of what had happened finally made way for what had gone before, the moment when he had made the gesture of someone digging. ‘Bury,’ he had said.

  “‘You buried the soldiers,’ I said to him. He couldn’t nod, but I know now that’s what he had been up to. It was all in the book. All those dog tags had been saved, but they were not a murderer’s trinkets. I truly believe that.”

  Griff goes silent. Evan watches him. Waits. Knows there is more. Can feel it, the story, throbbing inside his own blood. It is nothing he can explain. He can only attend this old man.

  Griff makes a strangled kind of sound of anger and anguish, as if he’s seeing the next part.

  “What happened?” Evan asks.

  Griff looks up. “Maybe the strangest thing of all. I was plumb exhausted. Still sitting there, holding him, I closed my eyes. Just closed my eyes. Then I must have heard something, because I snapped ’em open and there were the others. Not the children, those confounded . . .”

  “Jikininki?”

  “Yeah, the flesh-eaters. I’d never laid eyes on them — sure as hell never seen them at work! They’d made themselves scarce when I’d been there with the troops. But now they were converging on him — on the two of us — and I knew well enough what was up. They were approaching from the clearing in front of the broken gate, sniffing the air, drawn to the smell of blood, I guess. I could hear them moan. I lay down the dead man and grabbed up my automatic. I loaded up quick. I fired at them and watched holes appear in their flesh, holes that did not stop them moving in. I kept on firing, again and again, to no avail.

  “Which is when the ghost children closed in. They were there all along, but now they closed in on Ōshiro. One of them stared at me with this knowing smile. It was as if he was relieving me of my duty. As if they were going to take over now. There was nothing I could do, anyway. I backed off. And I watched the ghost children wrap themselves around the dead man, guarding him.”

  Griff blinked tears away, sucked it in. Went on.

  “Those zombies . . . My, but they squealed with rage. God, what a sound! There was nothing of the man exposed to them — not a square inch. They circled the body, gnashing their yellow teeth. Their red eyes filled with this wretched look of sorrow and helplessness and indignation, while these insubstantial children, so much less sturdy than the ghouls in every conceivable way, made a shield of their bodies over him. They had this one power, you see. The zombies would get none of their man.” Griff shakes his head in awe. “Ōshiro and his memories belonged to his own people.”

  Tuesday, July twenty-second. Griff arrived late on Saturday night; he hasn’t even been here three whole days. Evan tries to remember how many days it took the Americans to take
Tinian. There was a footnote in the book somewhere: something like a week, he thinks. Anyway, not long. It feels as if there has been a war here. He’s not sure who won. He would like the book back, and he has no idea where Griff ’s head is about Yamada’s graphic novel. So there is unfinished business — it’s just a question of whether it’s any of his business.

  And then Evan is suddenly crying, weeping. It comes over him like a cyclone, a tsunami of grief. “I hate him,” he sobs. “I fucking hate him!” But his anger only morphs into another wave of grief, as though he will drown Any Place with an ocean’s worth of tears.

  And it subsides. Not gone but in remission. The grief.

  A little war and now a little peace: a lifting of something — some weight. He looks at his cell phone. Just after eight. The earliest he’s woken in a month. He’s not sure what time it was when they called it a day, but he feels rested, despite everything. He climbs out of bed. He needs a shower. A long, scalding-hot shower. There is shampoo. Griff must have bought it. He stands there feeling the streaming water massage his neck and shoulders. He showers until the water starts to cool. Back in his room, he puts on shorts and a plain white T-shirt. A peace offering.

  Griff isn’t in the kitchen. The door to the rec room is closed. Evan goes back into the kitchen. Griff ’s outdoor shoes are there, shining. Evan stands in the middle of the room, listening to the almost-quiet. The windows are open, and the distant hum of the Don Valley Expressway seems to have modulated to D major. A good sign.

  He allows the idea of Griff being dead to take him over. It’s not something he wants; it’s something he fears. The old man had looked pretty gone last night. He might have stormed a lot of beaches in his day, but he wasn’t heavily equipped with weapons to confront big emotion. If he is dead, lying down there in the rec room, Evan doesn’t want to find him just yet or phone the authorities. He’ll try bacon therapy first.

  It works.

  Not fifteen minutes later, the man appears at the kitchen door.

  “Ah,” says Evan. “So you decided to get up at last.”

  Griff shakes his head. “You might try using the splatter guard,” he says. He points at a mesh utensil hanging beside the stove.

  “Hey,” says Evan. “I always wondered what that was.”

  He makes a big bowl of cheesy scrambled eggs and a log pile of bacon. There’s toast and raspberry jam, courtesy of Rachel Cope, a gallon of orange juice and a gallon of coffee. Saturday-morning breakfast on a Tuesday.

  When Evan thinks it’s time, he says, “Can I tell Leo the news?”

  Griff looks bemused. “What news would that be?”

  “What went down out there on Kokoro-Jima.”

  Griff shakes his head. “I’m not giving them permission, Evan, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “Why not? You didn’t do it.”

  Griff sits up straight. He quietly lays his knife down on his plate, then pats his lips with his napkin.

  Oops.

  “Let’s just say that I’m not keen on the idea of reducing war to a comic book.”

  “Have you seen Yamada’s work?” says Evan. “He’s, like, really amazing.”

  “Words in bubbles? It’s a desecration, as far as I’m concerned, however talented he may be. Cheap and tawdry.”

  Tawdry, thinks Evan, and wishes he could draw out a word that well, so that it fills up with meaning. He makes himself nod, not in agreement but so as to show acceptance of the idea put forward, however insanely stupid and narrow-minded it is. He pats his own lips dry of grease. He made a deal with himself before launching into this conversation. He would not

  1. swear;

  2. be cheeky; or

  3. leave the room.

  Griff is watching him closely. When Evan doesn’t speak, he picks up his knife and recommences buttering his toast.

  He’s under the impression that I’m done, thinks Evan. He clears his throat. “Okay, but even if you’re not going to allow the project to go forward, it’d be cool to let Leo know, wouldn’t it? I mean that you’re innocent. I can even corroborate it. I’m an eyewitness. Sort of.” Griff is frowning, which is not like glaring. “You didn’t tell me what happened. I saw it myself and then you filled in the details. That’s got to count for something.” He manages to keep his voice light, as if it’s no big deal. He peers at Griff. He’s helping himself to another cup of coffee, doesn’t look too close to blowing up. There’s a little container of pills he has to take. Evan has never seen it before because they’ve never had breakfast together — never had any meal together. He waits, but he has never been big on knowing when enough was enough. “You’ll end up coming off like a hero, Griff.”

  “I don’t need a cartoonist to glorify the incident.”

  “But he can tell your story. Get it right.”

  “What if I don’t want my story told?”

  Evan considers that, shrugs, and takes the last of the eggs. “Okay,” he says. “Your call.”

  Griff nods. “Damn straight it is, son.”

  Then he sits with a piece of toast dangling from his hand, looking out the window. It’s that kind of thousand-yard stare you see on a person when they have pretty well left the room, so Evan feels free to observe the old man. And that’s when he sees the mask for the first time. It’s so thin and perfectly made that it’s almost lifelike, except that there is a tiny part of it that has flaked off, just under Griff ’s right eye. Maybe the tears Evan saw there last night, ever so briefly, dissolved some of the mask.

  Griff doesn’t raise his voice or look up when he speaks. “You have no idea,” he says. “No idea whatsoever.” Evan watches as another flake falls away from the man’s face. “You think a few pictures say anything about what we went through out there?” His hand with the toast gestures toward the window as if Any Place were a war zone. “You think?”

  “No, sir.”

  Griff snaps his head around to look at Evan, expecting insolence even now, but seeing none. He’s spent a lifetime with boys not much older than Evan saying “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” with respect and an edge of fear. He doesn’t think I respect or fear him, Evan thinks, because he hasn’t spent a lifetime knowing this boy. Too bad. There is no sneer on Evan’s face, no snide remark lurking at the corner of his lips.

  “No, sir,” Evan says again.

  Another tiny flake of the mask falls away. Griff scratches his cheek, and now Evan catches a glimpse of what the mask has been hiding. He waits. The mask — the armor — is crumbling as if it were a thin slip of clay, falling away, but Evan isn’t going to draw attention to it. Let the old man gather up the crumbs of it, sweep them from the table into his fist to dispense with later when he is alone. He isn’t a man who reveals himself too often. This must be hard for him, thinks Evan.

  He goes back to his cold eggs. He looks up to see Griff looking out the window again at the nothing of consequence that happens on a daily basis out there in Any Place.

  “What?” he says.

  “Excuse me?” says Evan.

  “You’re itching to tell me something. Fill me in.”

  Evan smiles.

  “Don’t patronize me, boy.”

  “I’m not, sir. And I know you’re right. I don’t think anything can capture what you went through out there.” He nods toward the outside, the everywhere that stretches from this small place where Evan has spent his entire life. “But maybe there is something that can come of it. Telling the story.”

  “It’s not a story, Evan. That’s my point. A story has some shape to it, a point. War doesn’t have a point. And it doesn’t have a convenient end to it, either.”

  “It doesn’t end?”

  “It ends and then it starts again, and the end of one war inevitably grows out of the war that came before it. There’s no . . . what do you call it . . .”

  “Resolution?”

  “I don’t know. Yeah. That.”

  Evan nods. “So, how about if Yamada could get across this one singl
e truth — just one.”

  “What would that look like?”

  “I don’t know. Just the idea that something looks like it happened one way, but it didn’t really happen that way.” He waits for Griff to counter but sees that he’s not going to. “That it was something bigger than you that killed Ōshiro. Something that can’t die, no matter how many times you kill it.”

  Griff favors Evan with a wry grin. “And y’all think there’s a living soul out there who’ll believe it?”

  Evan nods. “I do. That’s a start.”

  Griff shakes his head, but there is no look of disparagement on his face, just a lifetime of people who didn’t get him — didn’t understand.

  “Listen,” says Evan, leaning forward, his fists on the table, but his voice even and filled with clean clear possibility. “You were talking just the other night about how the truth isn’t what people tell you happened — how it’s something else. Isn’t that what you were saying?”

  Griff nods, but his right eyebrow arches. “You mean you were listening to me?”

  “Oh, yeah. I heard you loud and clear. It’s just that I’m not in the habit of saying ‘yes, sir’ every time I’m told something.”

  Griff laughs. “What I said was, the truth is bigger than the stories people tell themselves and bigger than the lies they live with.”

  “Right, so . . .”

  Griff holds up his hand, a stop sign, a shaky one. “Hold your horses, Evan,” he says.

  Evan nods, and now he knows to stop. For the time being.

  Evan knocks at the Reidingers’ blue door. He hears the muffled shout of Lexie Jane announcing that she’ll get it. The door flies open.

  “Oh, hey.”

  “Hey,” he says.

  She looks past him. “Is it time to do the lawn again?”

  “No,” he says. “Well, yeah, actually it is. But I’m going to do it. That’s not why I’m here.”

  Which is when she notices that his hands are behind his back. Which is his cue to show her what he brought.