The Far Shore

by Paul T. Scheuring

“God’s made of wood,” I said.

  He thought about that for a long time.

  Then he said something that split through me. Rendered the maelstrom above mute, if only for a second. “Then why do you continue?”

  It hung there between us.

  He dug into his pocket, said matter-of-factly: “One can intellectualize all one wants, one can lay blame all one wants, but the truth is, there are only two choices in life: live or die.”

  From his pocket, he drew a small pistol. A Walther. He laid it calmly on the floor between us.

  “I carry it with me every day,” he said, “asking myself in the morning and the evening whether it is worth going on. Every day I ask: is there a point? And for some reason, I don’t pull the trigger. There must be a point, even if I haven’t a clue what it is. There must be some hope in my heart, for something, even if I can’t see clearly what it is. My soul, for some reason, wants to live. Despite…this.” He nodded with some resignation upward, toward the battle.

  He slid the pistol a little closer to me. “I put it to you,” he said, “die or live.”

  I considered that gun. How easy it would be to put it to my eye and squeeze the trigger.

  “Shoot yourself, Mr. Fuck You,” he challenged.

  I dithered.

  He smiled darkly. “It’s the ultimate question, isn’t it? No equivocation is possible. If all is truly lost, you pull that trigger. If you don’t…something has been said in that choice.”

  I didn’t take the gun. But still resisted his logic. Maybe it was just fear that prevented me from taking that gun, pulling the trigger. I said as much.

  He shook his head in disagreement. “Fear, every time, takes the easiest way out. I’m offering you the easy way out. I offer it to us both.”

  We sat there, two men in a dank cellar, communing as we eyed that pistol and the oblivion it promised.

  I recoiled enough, looked away enough, for him to surmise I had made my choice.

  I could sense him nodding, as if to say, with the ultimate begrudging “Me too.”

  He then cast his glance down into his clasped hands. “We still seek something,” he said. “And it is not a way out.”

  The town fell within a matter of hours. By our best assessment, the bitter-enders numbered a half-dozen, holed up in various spots through the town. The oldest of them—of the ones we found, that were intact enough to identify—was seventeen.

  The town was nothing more than craters and dust and exposed basements. Any of the architecture that had once aspired skyward was gone, flattened.

  I shared a moment with the minister once the gunfire had stopped and we together returned to the surface world of scattered, shattered bricks and all-encompassing haze. Nothing more was said between us. He had pocketed the gun once again before we left the basement. Then he headed off with the other civilian survivors of the town, away from the dust and desolation, away from us. Toward the next town perhaps, where they might endure the whole ordeal all over again.

  Why do we go on, brother? What do we expect to fulfill? Now that we know the great terrible secret of man, what do we expect to find? We have, after all, seen the great truth. That life is pain and death is horrible. That is the soldier’s reward for his time on the battlefield: the knowledge that we are trapped between these terrors, though we nevertheless continually seek a state that is otherwise neither life nor death. But what state is that?

  It has been twelve scant hours since I penned these last words. And providence has somehow spoken. The Germans have capitulated! There will be peace! The great machinery of war will finally crank to a halt!

  Everyone is talking about going home, back to America and the cinemas and the girls and the land unscarred by war. We, of course, will carry the Great Truth with us, but it is hard not to get caught up in the elation of the moment. We are going home! Perhaps, as they say, it is darkest before dawn. I honestly wondered if I would be able to endure a single day more on the battlefield.

  So much has been torn open in me these last seven months—but today, in the strange sound of silence out there over the landscape, there is hope.

  So much is moving fast now.

  There have been more developments in just the last six hours.

  Hope will have to wait. My hell is to continue.

  I am being shipped to the Pacific.

  It seems, to hasten the end of the war against the Japanese, various battle elements from ETO will be reassigned to the Pacific Theater effective immediately. I am one of those elements. Can this really be happening? They apparently have a merit system, with credit given for time served, and those that have accumulated the most “merit” are allowed to go home, while those of us that have served shorter stints are destined for more battle.

  If there is any good news, and I am not sure you will necessarily consider this good news, I spoke with my CO and he said we will be joining 10th Army over there. I know we are talking 200,000 men, but given that you are 10th Army we will at least be in the same fight now. Is it possible we may be able to be in the same corps, or at least stationed out of the same hub? I asked my CO if such a thing would be possible. He said that because I am a medic, and not a standard infantryman, there may be more need for me amongst the corps that are already there and in the thick of the fighting as you are. He said if we could demonstrate a need that your battalion, because it suffered greater casualties, has a particular need for additional medics, it would be possible I could be transferred. I told him that this was my wish. I hope you don’t mind.

  He said he would try to make it so. But told me at the end of the conversation it is both a blessing and a curse to be in war alongside a brother. I understand the double-edged nature of that sword. But in some ways I feel like I can only go on if I am beside you.

  Amidst my misery, I take solace in knowing that I will see you. And if it is only for a passing moment, in a staging base, as our units pass one another, that I am able to embrace you, shake your hand, and tell you I love you, that is enough.

  Your brother,

  G.

  XI

  It’s horrible, she thinks, this voyeurism.

  To look uninvited into the workings of another person’s soul.

  At any time it is bad.

  But at their darkest hour even worse.

  It has opened up raw things in her, a strange guilt.

  Could he have imagined his letters would have survived like this?

  Circumnavigating not just the globe—from Europe to the Pacific Islands to this infernal last-chance town—but somehow surviving the arc of time too?

  It is as if his private desolation had been preserved in amber, to be unceremoniously digested, prodded, poked at by strangers.

  His own little personal museum of pain.

  And here she was wandering the halls.

  It is an intimacy she does not want.

  Better just that he’s dead, a two-dimensional “x” from the past that marks the spot.

  Because that’s why she’s here, why she’s come to the hellfires of Centralia.

  She’s on a treasure hunt.

  She just did not anticipate that the ghosts she would encounter along the way would actually speak.

  She downs a lemonade because she feels like she should down something.

  Better that it was a Coors Light—especially in this heat—but you take what you can get.

  If nothing else, she has moved the chains.

  Explained at least some of the confusion surrounding Gray’s death—the whole Europe-versus-Pacific thing.

  He’d been shipped off.

  Pushed again into the fight, though he thought his fight was over.

  And somewhere, in that thirty million square miles of the globe that was the Pacific Theater—98 percent water, the rest tiny tangled dots of jungle—he’d fallen.

  It is too grand a thing for her to conceive.

  So she gets ready to head out.

  She’s thirty minutes behind he
r self-imposed schedule.

  No doubt about it, she’ll have to smoke the rental car back down the hill in the high nineties.

  But she’s thinking it may not require the orgy of 5-Hour Energy she’d originally anticipated it needing.

  She has a different fuel; her mind’s full of all sorts of things.

  She’ll reflect on the letters and what they mean, and how she can use them to advance her quest.

  Better than caffeine, fascination.

  Better than caffeine, mystery.

  She’ll just find Peter, thank him profusely, figure out a way to communicate her progress back to him once she leaves here—

  But he’s nowhere to be found.

  She goes to the kitchen, calls out to him.

  No answer.

  She calls out again.

  Still no answer.

  She dithers briefly, running a hand over the back of her neck, her eyes idly finding the shafts of grass growing through the cracks in the linoleum floor at her feet.

  Then she hears springs.

  Rusty things, barely discernible through the wall, expanding and contracting with tired complaint.

  She peers out through the back door.

  Sees Peter in the backyard, if it can be called that.

  It’s a ten-foot-wide swath of tall wild grass where he’s fought the overgrowth beyond to a standstill.

  He’s rocking back and forth on a decaying metal leisure chair.

  Lost in a letter of his own.

  Rolling his lower lip under his upper teeth, like he’s processing something that, even in his septuagenarian state of hoary detachment, is difficult.

  He looks up, sensing her.

  She says she’s got to be going, begins her spiel of infinite gratitude—

  Guess your grandfather did go to the Pacific, he says, coughing.

  The hangdog eyes: haunted.

  The yellowed paper in his hand: trembling, ever so slightly, as his fingers beneath belie a disquietude, which he’s otherwise trying to hide.

  Letter from my father to my mother, he says.

  Found it amongst a bunch of others.

  June 1945.

  He died on the Fourth of July that same year.

  Didn’t know it existed.

  He looks down at the grass, turns up the corner of his mouth in a weak attempt to dispel the solemnity of the moment, as if to save her a burden.

  She doesn’t know what to say.

  He offers her the letter.

  She tries to demur, but he presses it a little closer to her.

  Your grandfather’s in there, he says.

  XII

  20 June 1945

  Hello, gorgeous!

  How are you? How are the children? I think of you all day every day. I hope you and Peter and Catherine can feel this somehow.

  We are one island closer to Japan. And I am one step closer to home. There is a light at the end of the tunnel.

  Gray is here. Can you believe it? The poor soul got shipped over from Europe. They’ve got him in a different brigade, so I don’t see him too much. We’ll all be going in to Okinawa in a day or two.

  I’ve crossed with him a few times. He’s a different man. We’ve both known his troubles before the War, but it seems his isolation has grown. The War no doubt has changed him, like it’s changed all of us, but he is even more sensitive now, more vulnerable, if that is even possible. Can you imagine what it is like not to have anyone to write home to? You probably can only in part. For a soldier, these letters are a tether to sanity. If I did not have your letters, I have no doubt I would crack under the pressures here. Love, even if it is 4,000 miles away, stabilizes a man, gives him a reason.

  Gray doesn’t have that love. I try to give it to him, but it is hard as we so rarely see each other. I worry what he might do. War spirals a man toward darkness; if he does not have the spark of love in that terrible void, the void takes over, and he is likely lost. I really do worry about him. Men are not meant to go into that void alone.

  One thing I’ve done is put the sunniest guy I could find on him. There’s a guy in his company I know, a Mormon named Bradley Westover. Seems to walk a foot or two above the ground while the rest of us are sloshing along a foot-deep in the mud. Hopefully he is the right sort of distraction for Gray. Sometimes that’s all it takes, right? For someone to make you laugh, make you forget where you are.

  Yes, we’re Okinawa-bound. The marines and army have been engaged with the Japs for two months now on that island. Apparently the feral things are dug into the mountains like rodents. I would be lying if I did not say that this will likely be the toughest fight of the war. They know that this is the last stop before Tokyo, so they will fight to the last man.

  But something tells me I will come through. Maybe it is because I know I still have so much undone in my life. And it is not in the sense of those silly, grand dreams I had before the War. In your youth, you want to change the world. But I’ve had enough of world-changers now, men consumed with the thought that it is their right to foist their beliefs upon the world. We’ve done a pretty good job of turning the world into a moonscape that way, haven’t we?

  My dreams are much smaller now, and I would argue much more noble. Now I just want to retire from the world of men and their designs. Return to you. Spend the rest of my life in exquisite boredom, drinking iced tea in the backyard with you and the children. I have tried many times to picture God in heaven while I’ve been here.

  Every time I have seen that same thing: you and the children are my god, and our backyard, heaven.

  Pray for my speedy return, love. I shall be back to you shortly.

  Love,

  Bill

  XIII

  They sit in the backyard for a while, the occasional waft of smoke migrating through, carrying with it the perpetual drone of the cicadas.

  She returns the letter to him.

  He taps his leg with it.

  A gesture of confusion, of bittersweet reminiscence for things heretofore unknown.

  He considers the tangled, untamed backyard around him.

  You see them in black and white in your head, don’t you? he says.

  She thinks it’s apt.

  Offers a nod because she doesn’t know what else to offer.

  And then something like this puts color to them, and well, what do you do?

  She doesn’t answer.

  Because it’s not her he’s really asking.

  The rental car complains all the way down the hill.

  She’s at ninety, and the three-cylinder vehicle wants none of it.

  Outside, day works its slow pivot through dusk toward night.

  She thanked Peter.

  Told him she’d write with an update on her search for Gray.

  They both knew instantly this was impossible, given the zip-code boondoggle.

  Nor would she call, given that he was phoneless.

  Nor would she reach him in any other manner.

  He was a man on the land, nothing more.

  There were no shortcuts to him.

  Before she had climbed into her car, she’d looked back at him.

  There were a bunch of references made to my grandfather’s troubles before the war, she said. You know anything about that?

  Peter shook his head.

  Then she was in her car and gone.

  Pandora is off the entire time she drives.

  It’s just her and the whirling hum of the tires on the asphalt beneath.

  The wind, too: a nonexistent thing were she not moving; but because of her hurry, it’s roared into artificial existence, resisting the vehicle’s advance, buffeting it, trying to breach the cheap seams and weather stripping around the windows.

  Everything is a high, white noise.

  She feels bad.

  She did not tell Peter about the money.

  She doesn’t know why she feels bad about this.

  The self-condemnation probably goes something along these
lines, were it given words: you used that man, used him for his letters, letters you couldn’t have gotten from anywhere else, and he let you read them, he welcomed you into his home, he made you some prehistoric lemonade, and all the while you verily neglected to share your $16.4 million secret with him.

  (Oh Lily, you are a stinker on so many levels.)

  Also, reading Gray’s letters has suggested to her that her own suffering, those little manias rendered large by too much time spent alone in her head, are in fact something less than little.

  She is a vain, ungrateful thing, she decides.

  Her war was with her weight?

  With her boss?

  And the damage control she tried to do was on behalf of the company?

  On behalf of her own small, cowardly heart, around which she’d built all those ramparts of indifference, sarcasm, and God knows what else?

  (A pebble in the face of a tsunami.

  That was the phrase that stuck with you, wasn’t it?

  [It’s never the one you think it’ll be.

  Weren’t you the one that always highlighted the wrong passages in the textbooks back in high school?

  And once the others got rolling in the classroom conversation, they all seemed of a universal mind, citing a certain group of lines they seemed to have collectively zeroed in on, and here you were, looking at the wrong words you’d highlighted, thinking, How in God’s name did I read the same thing they did and miss so completely?]

  But you respond to what you respond to.

  The pebble in the face of the tsunami.

  Yes, that is strong and evocative.

  All the things she has always wanted to be.

  Defiant for the right reasons.

  Unmovable to the bullshit.

  Taking a stand, a Real stand, against Real things that deserve Real resistance.

  But what was Real for Gray all those years ago was that intense, binary scheme of life and death.

  What is Real in your life, Lily?

  Your soul, yes, is in perpetual battle.

  But your War is not a real one.

  You do not even know what your War is.

  If you take away the small things.)