Shh.
The tiny ring of light that spilled from the flashlight’s hood was like the light of the sun to our dark-acclimated eyes. It was maybe worth a quarter of a candle’s flame, an eighth maybe, but everything took dimension around us.
It was like being awakened from a dream. A whole new language of light, however dim, befell us. Just to see that light, to see that dimensionality still existed out there beyond the mad workings of our brain, chased off half the demons that had so tortured us in the dark. It was as if by light we were given again our humanity.
Gray rocked away from me, made his way across the dusty floor in a half-crouch, half-slide. I couldn’t tell what he was trying to do, but I was too stupefied to speak or react. I just watched him, or the edges of him anyhow, for that was all the muted flashlight allowed me to see. He was this spectral hint of a creature in the blackness, determined after something. A thin sheen of light spilled out onto the floor; he was directing it toward something. I couldn’t make it out from my angle. But moments later, he was back with me. The glow of his palmed flashlight revealed that he’d retrieved the nub of a pencil and a small piece of paper—a Japanese prayer sheet, it appeared—and now held both in his other hand.
I whispered that he should turn off the light. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, but it scared me. That beauty could get us killed if the J’s saw it.
“Soon enough,” Gray whispered.
He pressed the flashlight into the earth, so again only that tiny ring of light spilled out. A millimeter of it, a holy circle in the black.
He put pencil to that tiny scrap of paper. “You don’t make it and I do,” he said, “tell me what you want to tell your people.”
I choked for a half second because I was not ready to think, much less talk, but he was on me. “Now. There’s no time.”
So I told him. I told him about my home in Provo. And my wife and four kids. And my six siblings. And my parents. All of it just came out—it was one of those things where your life passes before your eyes, as they say, but it wasn’t so much that, wasn’t so much pictures in my head as this sense of emotional accounting—here were the people that needed to know, that deserved to know, and I didn’t want any of them left out, didn’t want them to think I was not thinking of them in my final moments…it’s bullshit, you know, to die in a black hole on the other side of the world and to leave the people you love guessing. It felt like my responsibility. If I was a man at all, I would not die that way. You get up close to death and these are the kinds of things you think about.
The funny part was—oh the funny part!—was here I was with my heartbroken soliloquy, tumbling out of me in this rambling nine-hundred-mile-an-hour whisper, and he’s crouched next to me like a stenographer, only he’s got a one-and-a-half-inch pencil, trying to get it all down on a scrap of paper no bigger than his palm, and one that’s got these Japanese prayers on it or whatever it was. He was writing over the top of the prayers! He asked me for an address, a single phone number, you know, maybe to be a bit more realistic about what could be recorded down there in the dark. I gave him my dad’s number, because I didn’t think my wife could handle it if some GI called her out of the blue and told her that her husband had died in a shit-slickened hole.
He scribbled it down, moved to put the piece of paper into his pants pocket.
I told him to wait.
What about you?
He looked at me.
I could see the curve of one of his eyes in the blackness.
A whole constellation of emotions wheeled through that eye.
“There won’t be fallout when I go,” he said.
Then the light winked out.
And the darkness reasserted itself.
I knew we had to make a plan at some point. I whispered this to him.
He said we would wait ’til we could wait no more. He said we could not outrun or outgun the J’s, but maybe we could outwait them. Perhaps our lines could come up and reclaim this territory.
So we sat and the darkness kept us company.
It whirled and spun. Pulsed, gained dimension and lost it. You want to see the infinite? Climb inside a black hole and just wait. Pretty soon you can see to the far side of the universe.
Where those brain tricks became dreams, I don’t know. Probably when they started to make sense. The amorphous dark gave way to the beautifully mundane stress of drilling troops, of paying bills, of raking autumn leaves. Good god, man, the beauty of everyday bullshit!
I awoke five minutes later—or five hours, who knows—to commotion. The scuff of boots rushing across those gravelly floors. It was still black in the tunnel, but the flashlight was there, on its side now, its beam intense as it cut across six inches of ground and splashed against the coral wall.
Gray was gone.
And there was gunfire.
Real, chaotic. Something was going down.
I hadn’t a clue what to do. I was absolutely horrified. Gray had been my tether to reality throughout the whole ordeal. Though I was the officer, he’d been the leader. And he’d disappeared.
He’d left something.
Right there in the beam of the flashlight. His dog tags.
You have to understand, a soldier leaves his dog tags, that’s never a good thing. It’s a move guys pull before they go on suicide missions or don’t think their bodies will ever be found. You know, it’s back to that accounting thing, though in a slightly different way. A guy’s dog tags get sent home, you pretty much know where he went down. That’s the idea, anyhow.
I felt sick. What in God’s name was he going to do?
And of equal importance, what was I going to do? I hadn’t a clue which way was backward or forward, which tunnel led up and which deeper into the earth. But I had to commit, had to find Gray, because at that point he was my shepherd, my only hope.
And so suddenly I was on my feet, running too, into that echoing, earsplitting roar of gunfire. I was so perfectly confused that I didn’t know whether to yell Gray’s name or remain silent, whether to have the flashlight on or off. Was there more chance it’d be him that found me or the Japanese?
And as I ran, a thought reared up in me, as insipid as anything this fetid hole had so far cast at us.
He’d left me.
He’d left me, hadn’t he?
Which was maybe why he’d asked those things about my family. Had gotten their information. Because maybe in that moment he already knew. And he felt guilty in advance, and was trying to make the tiniest of amends for what he was about to do. He knew that he was going to leave me, that I was deadweight to him. Because of my fear, or my injury, or maybe mostly because of the bars I wore. If the J’s have to choose, maybe he’s thinking, they’ll take down the officer and leave the medic. It can be any of a number of things, and it probably doesn’t really matter, because the only thing that did was that he’d made the choice.
People always play their hand when they’re most scared.
And yes, I was pants-crapping scared, but I hadn’t done that. Hadn’t left him.
When the Accounting came—when we were at the Pearly Gates—which would in all likelihood be soon, for both of us—I’d be able to look God in the eye and say I went down scared, yes, but I went down loyal. And Gray, Gray would have to work out his own answer. But God would know. Because God saw.
Maybe that’s courage: not blowing it with God when you’re scared. Staying true.
As I say, these were the thoughts that were going through my mind at the time, but really I was just shit-flying pissed. So I didn’t call his name. I didn’t turn on the flashlight. There was no way out of this except by my own will and guile.
And here’s what happened: the smoke-charred corridors and warrens began to take on the subtlest dimension after a few more turns. Ambient light—yes, nighttime light, but still outside light—the light of real things, of the Moon—was creeping insistently along the walls. It was almost nothing, radiance-wise, but compared to
utter black it was luminous. The Surface World! The promise of it, anyhow, just a little further. I still think of being a kid, when in all your exploratory cocksurety you swim down as far as you can in a lake or a pool, maybe on a dare to touch the bottom, then turn around and race surface-ward with near-bursting lungs. And how, in that last second or two, the Surface is Just Up There, just within reach, rippling with the promise of deliverance, of ecstatic release. You become this mindless, reckless thing, a one-note animal hell-bent on survival. And you just blast right through. And that’s what I did.
I fell tumbling out into the Real World again, that promised land of light, of space illimitable above your head and in all directions. That it was filled with war did not matter for the moment.
But it soon would. Because there were lights first—like artificial eyes, glowing and burning eyes in the night—flashlights furiously searching—and there was the sound of Japanese. The voices were hoarse and sickly, but they were energized, angry. And they were hardly twenty feet from me.
I slammed back into whatever cover I could. I slammed back so hard it knocked my helmet off, which clattered to the rocks.
I was sure I was made.
But they had someone. All those furious incandescent eyes focused on a muddy, exhausted figure at their feet.
I grabbed my helmet from the ground, all the while watching the Japanese and their captured quarry. I could not make out much of him from my position, but it had to be Gray.
And if so, it proved there was a God in Heaven. For the coward had been caught. The one that ran, the one that abandoned me, had received bloody penance.
God was indeed with me that night.
Just not in the way I anticipated.
For as I quietly moved to put my helmet on, I noticed in the thin light of the moon that there was a cross on it.
A red, thick thing backed by a circular field of white.
A medic’s helmet.
And in that moment, I knew. But it was too late. Because they had hefted Gray to his feet. I could see him now. Blood running from his mouth. A bayonet wound, or something like it, painting his pants with a fresh wash of crimson.
The last thing I saw as the dozen or so Japanese soldiers conveyed him away into the night was the shine of my captain’s bars on his helmet.
Or better put, my helmet, on his head.
LILY: We’re going to go again, if that’s okay. If you’d rather not…
BRADLEY: (sniff and a throat clear) No, it’s okay. I’m just in my cups. And I haven’t gotten back into this story in such a long time. So it brings things up. Men don’t, you know, they don’t cry out what they’re supposed to cry out. So they hold it all in for a half damn century and then here you are. Blubbering old bastard in a golf course bar.
BRUCE: No one’s looking.
BRADLEY: (laugh) They’re all looking. Probably loving every minute of it. Well, F ’em. No, don’t F ’em. Carlos, buy ’em all a round. Whatever they want. On the crying guy.
…
LILY: So you realize he’s what, he’s switched helmets with you—
BRADLEY: Sonofabitch in the dark switched out his for mine, so he’s the captain and I’m the medic. That’s half the reason I’ve been searching for him all these years. I want my goddamn captain’s bars back!
BRUCE: Pay back the debt.
BRADLEY: You decide. In the last sixty years I’ve been completely or partially responsible for bringing home the remains of 1,013 men. But not him. I’ve got this niggle that hits me most nights, as I clock out and head home, like I’m leaving for the day before the real work’s complete. One thousand and thirteen families have gotten closure because of what our specific team has done. And never once have I felt that I’ve gotten done what really needs to be done.
…
BRADLEY: I don’t suppose there’s any chance where this is the part where you surprise me…and tell me you’ve actually got a missing piece of information I’ve lacked all these years?
LILY: I’m sorry.
BRADLEY: Well, an old man can hope. Got to, I suppose. Because if he doesn’t, then what the hell’s he still doing above ground?
XVI
She wonders if this means he is alive.
Because while Bradley hasn’t given her the story she wants—the whole of it, what happened to Gray—he has at least placed Gray’s dog tags in the Pacific.
A reason why history would think he died there.
But there’s no body, is there?
Only this open-ended account of a man being spirited away into the night by Japanese soldiers seventy years ago.
An account that does not end with a body.
Is it that this phantom that flitted through various lives but stayed in none of them, that was at once indelible and ungraspable, has not come to rest?
And that the earth nowhere yet holds him?
Is it that he is alive?
Because there is no body.
And when a story goes on long enough—she of all people knows, steeped in fifty hours of TV a week—and the body steadfastly refuses to appear—it’s because the viewer’s being set up for a twist.
You assume he is dead.
Everyone tells you he is dead.
But assume nothing and listen to nothing.
Because there is no body.
And without a body,
there is no death.
These, anyhow, are the thoughts she thinks.
Up to her ankles in the midnight surf.
Oahu is lazy with night behind her.
The sea and sky before her, a void warm and mysterious.
Absent of moon and stars.
The clouds have done this, occluding the light as they wheel ceaselessly in their peregrinations across the tropics.
It is a different sea, she knows, than the one she beheld before.
From her jetty.
That horizon she’d contemplated, that constrictive thing 3.1 miles away, had been utterly obliterated.
She is in fact on the other side of it.
Looking at the backside of yesterday’s horizon.
She is briefly beset by pride.
She has broken the cordon.
The horizon can no longer hold her.
But with that pride comes something else.
An unease.
Was it better, she wonders?
To know the limits of your day and of your world, to know by sight where the possibility of you ends?
Or is it better to never know?
To look into the unseeable and see a field of possibility so vast it has no border?
If there is freedom, it is this dimensionless field of sea and sky, on this night.
And she has yearned for freedom her whole life.
To cast off all bonds, be free of her geography, her coworkers, herself.
But freedom as she perceives it tonight is an utterly blind thing.
It is and must be.
Because freedom in the end is mystery.
One that offers no promises.
Just a cascade of tomorrows that you can only wait patiently to unfurl.
Goddammit.
No, no mystery, not tonight.
She just wants to know.
(Ah, this is why people settle, Lily.
Why people fence themselves into utterly uninspired lives.
Because it is not excruciating.)
Then something shifts.
A strange, lurching vertigo rolling through her.
As if she is both within her story and without.
Like she is watching it on TV from the comfort of her couch.
For the briefest of moments, her instinct is to fast-forward.
Like she could actually do this by a flick of the remote.
To get past this uneasy part.
And get resolution.
Find out what happened to Gray.
And whether there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
(But isn’t the journ
ey supposed to be the point?
[Usually, yes, but not like this, not dead-ended like we are.
The Mormon teased us, but we have no closure.
Our cards have all been played.]
Then let tomorrow unfurl, Lily.
Let tomorrow unfurl.
And tonight, feel those tiny fish nipping at your toes.
They’ve been here this whole time, you know.
Tickling away.)
She vows to do this, to be in the Moment like all the magazine articles and Train Your Brain infomercials say.
She’ll just sit here, feel the tickle of tiny teeth on her toes, let that fill her up, climb up through her legs to the rest of her, let it fill the blackness of the midnight void all around her.
She will be Tickled.
And tomorrow will unfurl when calendar-appropriate, and not a moment before.
And she does this.
For a full moment, almost two.
Then she turns, heads back toward the hotel, leaving the tickling blackness behind, visions of rainbows and Gray once again filling her head.
She sees Bruce at the continental breakfast the next morning.
He is suitably hungover.
When the interview session with Bradley was over at sundown the night before, the old Mormon had politely inquired whether they could give him a ride home.
Bad enough to have a ninety-one-year-old driver on the roads, he said.
Whole ’nother to have a drunk ninety-one-year-old on the roads.
Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, that.
So Bruce had agreed to do so, and after dropping Lily off at the hotel along the way, had gotten drawn up into Bradley’s web once they’d arrived at the old man’s house.
Tropical drinks had turned to brandy.
Reminiscences about World War Two had turned to bawdy tales of women.
And it’s a god-awful thing to hear a ninety-one-year-old talk about women, Bruce says, eyeing his bagel with a decided lack of enthusiasm.
Problem is the old man sees himself in the picture—virile young buck of thirty or whatever he was at the time of the escapade he’s telling you about—and all you see is him, now.
Horrible.
He pokes at his bagel.
The Far Shore Page 19
