The Far Shore

by Paul T. Scheuring

  I was summoned the next day shortly after lunch. It was a strange thing to retrieve the Frank Sinatra album in broad daylight. To walk across the camp with it in full view of the rest of the soldiers and officers. I felt an intense shame. Some of my fellow soldiers, who had listened to and loved that album with me, looked ruefully at me as I passed. Their eyes seemed to say: “Don’t tell that I listened too, Kesuke! Please!”

  When I arrived to Morio’s quarters, he took the album from me, considered it without looking at me. He then produced from beneath his own bed a gramophone!

  I wanted to smile, but given that he was not smiling, I wisely opted to just stand there, board-straight and nervous.

  Shortly thereafter, the prisoner Gray Allen was brought in. Two of my fellow privates—both of whom had listened in reverie to Frank Sinatra on more than one occasion with me—guided the prisoner in, tried not to look like they recognized the album still in Morio’s hand, then were summarily dismissed. Once they’d closed the door behind them, it was just the three of us. Morio, myself, and Gray.

  I looked at Gray. He looked at no one. Morio studied the gramophone as he loaded up the record. Soon, I heard that beautiful crooning voice again:

  I’ll be seeing you

  In every lovely, summer’s day

  And everything that’s bright and gay

  I’ll always think of you that way…

  It was excruciating. Where before those words were a paintbrush, rendering dreamscapes alive in our minds, now all I heard were the tiny scratches and skips between the words, because everything had slowed so incredibly. My eyes were on Morio. And despite himself, it seemed, Gray looked up, gauged Morio. Morio didn’t meet our gaze. He removed his katana from his hip, leaned its scabbard against the table that held the gramophone, and sat. Frank Sinatra, of course, was oblivious to this, continuing along with those skip- and scratch-filled words:

  I’ll find you in the morning sun;

  And when the night is new;

  I’ll be looking at the moon;

  But I’ll be seeing you.

  Morio absorbed the music stoically. Nodded to Gray: “Do you like that? It’s nice to have the comforts of home occasionally, I’m sure.”

  Gray managed a barely discernible movement of the head, somewhere between shrug and nod.

  Morio’s voice was accommodating like I had never heard it be. “Please, be at ease. I assure you, this conversation will be far more casual than the last.”

  Gray smiled wanly. “We’ll see. You started me with a beer last time.”

  “I’m glad you feel comfortable to speak.”

  Gray considered the place around him, but did not respond.

  “You will not be tortured, I promise you,” Morio said. I was really struck by his voice. It was more the voice of a civilian than a soldier. As if the mask of war had been pulled away. It was the voice of a person talking to another person on a street corner, awaiting a trolley.

  “I would like to be frank with you, Mr. Allen. I have had a bit of an evolution in my thought these last few weeks since your interrogation. This war will soon—very soon—be over. It won’t be long until you are on the streets of Japan, not as a prisoner, but a victor.” Morio tilted his head, as if trying to coax a reaction out of the prisoner. Gray looked at him quietly.

  Morio reached over then, to one of those boxes laden with yen, grabbed it, then put it on the table before Gray. “Twenty million yen. Consider it reparation. It could be used for things while you are still in country. People will be desperate. You will be able to have whatever you want. A woman. A good meal. All the things you have been denied.”

  Gray did not do much more than study his hands. He did not, understandably, want to be here.

  “You will not take it then?” Morio asked. “This is not a trick; there are no strings attached. Just a desire, in however small degree, to make good for what has transpired between us.”

  “Money’s the last thing I want,” Gray managed.

  “Why’s that?”

  Gray met gazes with him, his stare hardening, but did not respond.

  Morio surveyed him, the subtle look of disdain on his face. “You have seen things, haven’t you? In the dark depths of pain. In the dark depths of isolation.”

  Gray said nothing, just continued to look back at Morio with a certain silent defiance.

  Morio leaned against the wall, idly cast his gaze out the window and skyward again. Again, the sky out there was devoid of bombers, of their ominous all-pervading sound. And still those eyes searched!

  Finally he said, “I went many years ago to Bodh Gaya, in India. Before the war, as a searcher. The most serious monks from Japan make pilgrimage there, as it is where the Buddha was enlightened. They sit as the Buddha did for long stretches in meditation, alone with their mind, alone in the face of their demons, both physical and psychological. From what I am to understand, the longer one sits, the more excruciating it becomes, and that, strangely enough, is partially the point. For one has to face suffering head-on, see the entirety of it, feel the entirety of it, without resorting to the usual work-arounds we humans are so good at. We are masters of avoiding the real pain. But that apparently is where liberation lies. In that crucible of naked pain in the heart of our minds. Only the bravest go there, and even fewer can hold on once the true pain at the core of our existence reveals itself.”

  Morio leaned his face toward Gray, narrowing the gap between them. “You went there, didn’t you? I sent you there.”

  Nothing in Gray’s mien changed. The only thing I saw was that pure—if very tired—defiance.

  “I wonder if, despite yourself, you have the innate characteristics of a monk. The mind and mettle. It would be a rare thing indeed, a thing of great value to the world.”

  Gray said nothing, and perhaps as a gesture of disrespect, turned his gaze to the box full of yen in front of him as Morio talked. Fingered the bills idly, as if he were thinking of other things, other places.

  Morio’s hand shot out, grasped Gray’s. It was violent. And I could tell by the way the two men’s hands subtly shook, entwined with one other’s, that the grip was intense. “I am talking to you,” Morio hissed. The civility was gone. The menacing Kempeitai was back.

  Gray caught Morio’s gaze again, in a way that indicated he’d heard everything Morio had said. Then ever so slowly, with his free hand he pushed the box of bills an inch or two back across the table to Morio. Again, in that gesture, defiance.

  Morio let go of Gray’s hand, sat back, smiled, almost taunting. “Do you know that a monk, all Buddhist monks in fact, once they are beyond novitiates, take a vow never to handle money again? You protest a great deal, but you show signs. Potential. You could rise above all this,” Morio said with a contemptuous nod to our surroundings—to the camp no doubt, the war, and maybe even the world in its aggregate beyond. “Maybe you already have,” he said, the sentence hanging there, not quite finished, as if it were a proposition, a thought seeking completion.

  Gray eyed him for a long time. “You’re not talking to me,” he finally said. “You’re talking to yourself, and whatever you’ve got to unwind in your own head.”

  “My head is your head. We are not individuals; there’s no such thing. We are dynamics, the same the world over, writ in different bodies. Division is an illusion; we all suffer the same prison.”

  Gray smiled a small wan smile as he looked around Morio’s impeccable quarters. “If that’s the case, how about we trade prisons right now?”

  Morio considered him. Nodded. “We will soon enough. That is assured.”

  “If you’re trying to turn me into a monk, or make up for your sins, it won’t work.”

  “Indulge me. Why is that?”

  “Because I don’t believe. In your god or anyone else’s.”

  “Buddhists don’t believe in God, not as such,” Morio said finally.

  “Don’t try to convert me. Don’t try to save me.”

  “I’m n
ot trying to convert you. I am hopeless in my spiritual pursuits. I’ve amassed too much negative karma to ever properly unwind in this life. But you—I wonder if we accidentally discovered a potential in you. A potential to be a Bodhisattva.”

  “Means nothing to me,” Gray responded.

  “A Bodhisattva is one who has seen through the suffering. One who could gain Nirvana, but instead chooses to remain, until all beings are enlightened.”

  Gray sat with that for a bit. Then eyed Morio in a fashion that said that the brief detente was over. “You’re out of your mind, aren’t you?”

  “I could put you back in Strappado inside of ten minutes. Is that what you want?”

  Gray said nothing.

  “I am trying to be civil,” Morio said. “The choice is yours.”

  Gray shook his head to himself after a moment. “You want to talk suffering, do you?”

  “Exclusively. You serve no other purpose to me. I want to know what you know about suffering. What you experienced.”

  “All I know about suffering is you shouldn’t romanticize it. Suffering is proof the universe is indifferent, nothing more, nothing less.”

  “Suffering is central to Buddhism. The first of the Four Noble Truths is in fact precisely that, that life is filled with suffering.”

  “Pretty dark worldview for a religion.”

  “It’s not a religion.”

  “Well, whatever it is, they’re spot-on. Life is filled with suffering. Wall-to-wall.”

  “The other three Truths, though, indicate to us that there is a way out. That the root of our suffering is our attachments. Our greed for delight, our aversion to pain.”

  Gray absorbed this but said nothing.

  “The way out is the Eightfold Path. A list of proper actions, intentions, and meditation.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got it all worked out.”

  “The furthest thing from it. The Eightfold Path, I understand the words, the principles, but there is something missing in me, something intrinsic. I cannot follow it to any satisfactory degree, despite my very best intentions. I am, in the end, unqualified.”

  Gray gave him a look devoid of pity. “A lot of people feel the same way about the Ten Commandments,” he said. “You want my opinion? It can’t be done. You can’t write up a list of godly behaviors for an ungodly species. We’ll fail every time. And hate ourselves for it.”

  Morio was still. But there was tacit acknowledgment in that stillness.

  “You want my insight into your Four Noble Truths? Like every other list, it’s bullshit. Except that first one. Pain is the only thing we’ll ever know. And as for your meditation, your monks and your Buddha sitting in the face of that pain to find enlightenment, I think that’s the exact opposite of where we should be looking. It is in those few moments when we are not aware of our pain that life is remotely bearable. Even if it’s a lie, a distraction from the torment. It’s masochistic to want more pain when your life already swims in it.”

  “Surely you didn’t feel this way before the War.”

  “The war’s just a louder version of the noise I’ve always lived inside.”

  “You have scars, then.”

  “All of life is suffering, remember?”

  “Then why do you endure?”

  Gray, this man who was so clearly prepossessing, his defiance so crystallized, fell into the briefest but most telltale silences. He needn’t have said anything. Because the silence said enough. He didn’t know.

  Morio neared him. “I want to know what you saw. What you felt and experienced in those darkest moments of pain.” He was an interrogator again. Impatience coming to the surface. A man after the crux of things.

  Gray eyed him, knew immediately that things had changed, that any of the yielding goodwill Morio had indulged him with was largely gone. “I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know what I saw.”

  Morio struck him hard in the temple. It was a horrible sound.

  “You know what you saw. You experienced it. You saw something, you felt something, that made you endure.”

  “You’re out of your head—”

  Morio hit him again. Harder.

  “What did you mean when you said I couldn’t kill what was already dead?”

  Gray seemed to become unwound by the violence. He stammered, “I don’t know—I was just saying things—I was broken—”

  “‘Bullshit!’ as you say! What did you mean?”

  Morio continued to beat him. It was a merciless thing to behold. Confusing. Who was Morio? How did these two things exist in one man—this existential yearning, this pernicious impulse to violence? “What did you mean when you said you can’t kill what is already dead?” he repeated.

  Gray by now was on the floor, trying to pull himself into fetal position, trying to ward off the blows. But Morio would not let him cover up—he shoved Gray’s arms aside, kicked him hard in the chest and throat.

  Gray was drooling a pink stream of blood and spittle, pressing his face into the floor, trying to form words. “I saw—”

  “You saw what?!”

  “I saw—” Gray gasped, his body convulsed. Morio placed the sole of his boot on the side of Gray’s head, pressed it hard down against the floor.

  “I saw—” Gray again said, trying to gain his breath. Trying to give words to something perhaps even he didn’t understand. “I saw I was dead.”

  Morio paused. Kept the boot pressed tight against Gray’s face. “How? What did you see specifically?”

  Gray’s body began to tremble. Something in him was breaking. That pink drool was forming a pool on the floorboards beneath his face. His nose, his lips were smashed ignobly into it. He was a child, the will and carriage of the adult shattered in him. He gasped, winced, groaned. Then words issued forth from him, into the floorboards, into that pool of bloody spittle. It was a panicked cascade of words, like he was no longer capable of choosing them, as if that final split-second editorial defense we all have before committing thought to speech had fully abandoned him. “That I was never alive, you shitsack…and what you were doing then and what you’re doing now is nothing new to me, understand that, understand that shitsack? It’s just a different shape of pain, what you do, with sharper edges, but still the same pain as all pain, made out of the same thing. I already know it to its core; it is the only forever there is.”

  Morio absorbed this impassively. “That doesn’t tell me how that means you were dead.”

  Gray gritted his teeth like he had the most intense headache imaginable. Like he wanted to spit out his guts because they were poisonous. “Oh look, will you? Life is not supposed to be this. Life is supposed to be something else!”

  “What, my wise friend? What is life supposed to be?”

  “Something other than pain, asshole.”

  Each time he gasped in a new breath, he took in some of that bloody spittle, then spat it right back out. It was an unpleasant thing to watch. For me at least. Morio seemed unfazed. “You are withholding something. To have so bleak an outlook, one would welcome death. And yet you endure.”

  “What. Do. You. Want. From. Me?” Every word was frustrated anguish from Gray’s mouth.

  Morio considered him, this man broken beneath his boot. “I have seen men—untold numbers—simply give up under less duress than you. You have some innate defiance in you that refuses. I want to know what it is. What you have that they do not. Think carefully, prisoner, because I want one sentence and nothing more. One concept. If you dither, if you’re vague, I will snap your neck right here. In the face of all the suffering of this world, what gives you reason to endure?”

  Gray grimaced, trying to catch his breath. Morio watched him studiously. I tell you, I was terrified! I was fairly certain Morio was about to kill him.

  Then Gray spoke. The voice was full of resolution. “My reason is hate,” he said.

  Morio considered it. Offered one of his slight, inward smiles. “We finally get to the heart of the matter. Hate
. That is the floor beneath everything, is it?” He removed his boot from Gray’s face.

  Gray, broken, sunk into the floorboards. Resigned to that ignominious pool of spit. He closed his eyes, tried to catch his breath. He nodded. His body trembled. His voice was weak. “I hate the pain so furiously,” he said, “that I would rather go on living in misery than let it kill me.”

  “You won’t let it win, is that it?”

  Gray managed the slightest of nods from the floor. His eyes were still closed.

  “I was wrong about you,” Morio finally said. “You are not a Bodhisattva.”

  He turned to walk away.

  Gray weakly shifted, rolled over, so that his other cheek, dry ’til now, found the pink pool of spittle as well. He was like a pig wallowing in excrement, I thought. No longer repulsed by what repulses normal men.

  Morio nodded vaguely back over his shoulder to me. “You may take him back to the barracks. Then have someone mop the floor.”

  He exited, leaving me there with the prisoner. I crossed to Gray. I was sickened by the whole thing. I just wanted to get him to his feet and out of there, so that I could retire to my own barracks and put the experience behind me. I helped him up. He was unsteady, understandably. It took me some time to get him to the door. It seemed like something had quit in him, like it had taken the entirety of his will to reach the place he had reached with Morio. I wondered if it was not shame that I was detecting, shame that another man had finally broken him. Had finally gotten to the heart of him, despite his best resistance. I had to assist him outside, slinging his arm over my shoulder. I must admit I did not like being that close to the prisoner, for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that he positively stank! Prisoners were not for the most part allowed soap or showers, and so smelled the way we must have as apes before civilization changed all that. Additionally, that pink spittle was still smeared across his head and neck, and I could feel its wetness against my uniform as I supported him. He made no effort to wipe it away. I wondered if he would be dead within a few days. It is always the will that quits before the body. At least that was my experience in the camp in those days.