The Far Shore

by Paul T. Scheuring

  Yet, when we got outside, new things were afoot. Things that would shatter such musings.

  For Morio was there with Isa—the other Kempeitai officer I told you about earlier. They were standing together, some ten yards ahead of us, looking up. Isa was pointing skyward. Naturally, when you see someone pointing toward the sky, you follow their finger, don’t you? I could not at first see what they were looking at, for there was a fair amount of cloud cover up there.

  Then, high up, in one of the windows between clouds, barely discernible against the blue, was the thing that Morio had apparently been searching for in the previous few days.

  A single silver plane. A beautiful shiny pinprick of reflected sunlight.

  It was so high you could not hear its engines, which was unusual.

  It disappeared and reappeared between the clouds. It was mesmerizing. Ethereal. Like a demure angel that wanted to stay far from the earth, unseen.

  “They hit Hiroshima three days ago,” Morio said.

  I didn’t know what this meant, but I knew by the horrible resignation in Morio’s voice that it was very bad.

  The plane, which ’til that moment floated in its effortless perfection across the sky, suddenly jerked hard and fast to its left. It was an abrupt move for what was surely a very large plane. It began streaking away from us.

  Everyone was transfixed. I looked, though, to Morio. What did he know? What did he mean that they had hit Hiroshima? For hadn’t everywhere been hit? The whole of Japan had been bombed mercilessly. And yet she still stood, indefatigable. That was the beauty of the Yamato people. You could bloody them, but you could not beat them—

  Then it happened. It was as if the fabric of reality had been torn asunder. For there was suddenly a brilliant flash to the west of us, across the bay—impossible in its brightness, even more impossible in its size and expansion. It was as if the very sky itself had erupted a quarter mile above the city of Nagasaki there.

  There was no sound, not yet. Only that immense sky-filling flash, slightly blue in its tint, searing our eyes, forcing us to look away.

  I remember two things expressly about that moment—the gasping “no” that came from Morio’s lips a few feet from me—and Gray’s hand tightening around my shoulder. We were communal in our horror.

  Next came the blast wave—a wall of invisible heat that roared through the silence and hit us, driving the air from our lungs. Still, no sound. Only that sudden, silent, intense heat spike: what had been perhaps a seventy-degree day turned into twice that within a split second. You could feel it drying out your sinuses, burning your eyes.

  Then, finally, the sound hit us—first an all-encompassing rumble, as if the atmosphere itself was groaning, followed by a boom so massive it did not seem possible this world could hold it. Windows shattered, buildings shook—nothing was immune. We were indeed communal in our torment. The living, the inanimate, whatever had just been unleashed was undifferentiating in its fury toward us.

  We fell to our knees and butts as much out of fear and supplication as shock.

  We watched as that flash took on new dimension—became a fireball inconceivable in its scope. Its relationship to the land, the way it dwarfed the city below, was the stuff of a child’s drawings. No such proportion had existed before.

  We were uniformly stupefied. We could only watch as the conflagration morphed yet again, a living thing—the fireball becoming a column, its color shifting. Its bottom was brown—the torn viscera of the city, pulverized, scattered for miles in a roiling dust storm—its center amber, its top white.

  As it mushroomed skyward, the most remarkable thing happened. Those clouds that had filled up so much of the sky just moments before parted, as if in a terror equal to our own, as if making way for a predator incalculably more barbarous than any they had borne witness to before on the surface of the world below. The sky itself was afraid. Or so it seemed to me on that day. The clouds literally ran away.

  The heat wave had washed through us at that point. You’d expect that we were covered in sweat, but the heat had been so intense that it’d blasted all the humidity out of the air. What hit us felt like a hundred deserts, arid beyond measure; in hardly a second we’d been desiccated, our skin burnt as if it’d been in the sun for a week, although we only came to understand this in the coming minutes and hours. Afterward, we were all still too shocked to really process anything.

  Gray had let go of me. He had gone to the ground. I thought for a moment he was dead, but momentarily I saw that he was moving. His fingers were clenching at the dirt. That clawed hand, weak as it was, gripped the earth, as if trying to find purchase.

  I could see he was weeping. Those hands, the desperation in them, were like the hands of a scared, crying child clutching at their mother for solace. Trying to fill themselves up with their mother’s love, ensconce themselves in her all-pervading safety, as if it would make the rest of the world and its terrors go away.

  Gray’s mother in that moment, sad as it is to say, was the hot, dry dust of Fukuoka-17.

  Sobs wracked his body. I remember this vividly, because I was not crying, though I knew I probably should be. He was in a way crying for both of us.

  Morio was already on his feet. The camp around us—both guards and prisoners—was stirring, looking around with shocked, confused gazes. Something had changed irrevocably. You could see it in everyone’s eyes.

  Morio and Isa moved away from us without saying a word.

  I’d later learn that they’d followed their first instinct, which was to go into Nagasaki by car to help.

  In their absence there was not much of a command structure in the camp. In the coming hours, whatever Kempeitai and senior officers were there were seldom seen.

  I was in a bit of a daze. I hardly knew what to do with the prisoner. Something in me feared going back into the mines, for it seemed that the explosion had undermined not just the collective sense of reality in the camp, but our trust in the solidity of the earth beneath our feet, or any structure at all, for that matter. Nothing was inviolable. All things were fragile. With this came a sense that rules, orders, duty—notions as inviolable as the earth in the Imperial Army, maybe more so—had fallen away. There was a great, chaotic vulnerability in the air. So I, wanting to disburden myself of Gray as quickly as possible, put him back where I’d found him: in Morio’s quarters. This would never have happened minutes before, with me unceremoniously opening Morio’s door, depositing the still-bloodied prisoner on that still-bloodied floor—that floor that was still waiting to be cleaned! But that order had been given before the bombing. And it seemed suddenly from an archaic time, wholly irrelevant to the new reality we were confronted with. It was no longer about decorum, about hierarchal obligation. It was about survival in a shattered universe, nothing more.

  Now, the hours and days that followed were the worst sort of limbo. As I say, most of the senior officers—the ones who would be privy to the larger context of things—were nowhere to be found. No one—not the common soldiers, not the prisoners—knew what happened. The phone lines didn’t work, and we were not allowed to use vehicles, or leave the camp without express permission from an officer. Which was difficult, because we couldn’t find an officer for the most part! The ones that were still present kept themselves at a good remove, and were evasive when asked about what had transpired. But to a man they seemed scared, like they had seen behind a horrible veil, and had witnessed something too nightmarish to share.

  Interestingly too, as the days wore on, no new flights appeared overhead. This was simply unheard of at this point of the war. No more air-raid sirens, no more anti-aircraft fire. It was as if the rest of the world had disappeared and it was just this sorry assortment of prisoners and low-level guards inhabiting Fukuoka-17 that remained.

  Everyone was speculating. If the Allies had bombs like that, well the War would have to be over, wouldn’t it? No nation in the world could withstand that. But then, the Emperor, he was incapable of surrend
er. Was it that these bombs had been raining—and continued to rain—across the Japanese islands, eradicating everything and everyone?

  It sure seemed like it. For there was no sound outside the gates. No sounds emanating from the city of Nagasaki across the bay. Just a haze of smoke perhaps ten miles wide.

  You cannot help but ask the big questions in circumstances like this. All the things that buffer you from the nakedness of the universe, from god if you want to call it that, are apparently gone. The horizon line between you and ultimate Truth has crowded in, all the way to the perimeter fence of the camp in this case. It was as if we were in here, and the Void was out there, on the other side of the fence.

  What do you do when you stare down that Void? With the annihilation it promises, the final judgment?

  It was the first time I had considered such thoughts. And not the last, as you can see!

  I was scared. Scared of the reality outside the fences—Ultimate or otherwise. The cocksurety of life had evaporated the instant that blast wave washed across the camp. What was left was just that fear. That fear that was made of everything.

  I checked on Gray intermittently. I did this largely because I was more comfortable moving around, fulfilling at least a facsimile of duty, if only to keep busy, to keep from looking outside the fence to Nagasaki.

  Gray didn’t move from the floor. He seemed to sleep and spend his waking hours in the same near-fetal position. It was evident that something indeed had snapped in him, for when he spoke, the conversations were with himself, in hushed, indeterminate words. More often than not there were tears in his eyes. I would leave food with him, if only because somewhere in the back of my mind a judgment of sorts would soon be upon us from outside the gates, whether it be by god’s hand or the Allies’. And small mercies like this might in the end spare me. I even tried to sit with Gray, give him food—it was sticky rice—but the prisoner never seemed to be aware of me. It was just those mad words, those tears, which didn’t fit my picture of the prisoner and the almost preternatural defiance he’d earlier displayed. Gray wept what seemed a lifetime’s worth of tears. I have since seen this in my time as a monk—sometimes the ones who never cry end up having the largest reservoir of tears in them, don’t they? A whole confusing labyrinth of pain that needs unwinding, that needs a catharsis so grand that it’s sometimes violent.

  Late on the second day, there was movement outside the gates. Proof that the world still existed!

  It was Morio and Isa in their staff car. They came in through the gates in silence, meeting eyes with no one. They looked grim. There was a pallor to them, a deep fatigue, like they had not slept. The other guards and myself were eager to know what they’d seen. Everything was informal; the illusion of hierarchy had been shattered along with everything else by the bomb blast. I approached the officers, spoke to them without the requisite prompt usually required. I asked Morio what had happened.

  “It is all gone,” is all Morio said.

  It’s strange, reflecting on it now. It was as if we had been playing make-believe ’til that moment. Boys playing war. But then the real truth of things had visited itself upon us. All the ardor and enthusiasm were suddenly gone; the camp in those hours and days felt like a bunch of boys who just wanted to go home, to the mundane, original calm truths of parents awaiting them at the end of the day, with dinner, a quiet house, a clean bed. That was the real luxury of those dreamy war games boys played in youth—the ones that gave seed to monstrosities like this war—you could go home at the end of the day. The fantasy war engaged in backyards and street corners would just wink out, a lark, no part of the land or anyone’s soul bearing any trace of it. It was bedtime and the sweet boredom of a boy in his house. Everyone wanted that in the camp, you could tell.

  Men began to leave. At first it was the guards, a few of them, who left their sidearms and kogatanas, and simply walked out the gates, without consulting with Morio and the other Kempeitai. Morio and his fellow officers, for their part, didn’t try to stop them. The game was up.

  It was only when a few of the prisoners began to leave, through a seam they’d cut in the fence—an act which elicited no reaction by the Kempeitai—that I knew the War was really over. The Allied prisoners that left, I would later learn, were impatient for liberation, and chose to head out toward a makeshift American airbase that had been hastily set up in Kanoya. They wanted to go home. Everyone wanted to go home.

  But incredibly a majority of the denizens of the camp remained—prisoners, guards, Kempeitai. Maybe it was because they had nowhere to go. Maybe because Fukuoka-17 had become their reality—they didn’t know how to function outside its system of familiar rules. Maybe it was because they feared the world outside the gates, what it had become.

  So, for a few days, Fukuoka-17 became this strange dynamic—Allies and Japanese, cast together, the irreparable sins of war dividing them, the horror of the atomic bomb in a way uniting them. It was this odd limbo, as if everyone was waiting for someone to sort it all out for them, make it all make sense, decide who deserved what accounting.

  Now, I must admit, I did have one final scare, in those first minutes after Morio had returned to the camp. For Morio, after offering that terse, one-sentence explanation of what had happened to Nagasaki, had expressed an intense desire to rest after his sleepless foray into the city. As he headed back to his quarters, I was suddenly beset by that old fear and guilt of the subordinate…for the prisoner was still in Morio’s quarters! Feral and bloody, the floor not yet mopped! Oh, I felt like running, right out through that seam in the fence, running until Morio couldn’t find me.

  But instead, I stood frozen, watched as Morio opened the door, spied Gray curled there on his floor. Morio’s back was to me, so I couldn’t see his reaction. But Morio didn’t move much, didn’t look back, didn’t say anything. He simply went inside and closed the door behind him.

  It was interminable, those minutes and hours that ensued. So much was still shrouded in mystery. What exactly had happened in Nagasaki? What remained? What did this mean about the War? What had the Emperor said or done about it?

  And what in god’s name was the dynamic inside Morio’s hut—with its closed door—with those two men, between whom so much had transpired?

  I sought out Isa first, but Isa was taking no visitors.

  So I schemed, because I had to know the answers to these questions. You must remember, this was the same impatient eighteen-year-old with the wild imagination who had convinced himself there was a Kobayashi-worthy mystery in a prisoner who had smuggled sweet potato vines a few days earlier. Now we were talking about a missing city. A bomb unlike the world had ever seen. Two avowed enemies locked in the same box, with neither emerging. Answers absolutely had to be known!

  So, allowing a few hours for Morio to sleep, if that was what he was indeed doing, I decided to use the pretense of food to justify a visit to his door. I collected some sticky rice and went to Morio’s quarters.

  I knocked and was surprised to hear Morio’s voice tell me to come in.

  When I entered, I saw that Gray was sitting up on the floor, leaned against Morio’s dresser. He was alert, intent upon Morio. The two men apparently had been conversing. They were quite a pair: both men were bleary-eyed, ashen, like most of the fight had been bled out of them. Morio sat on his bed. He did not look good.

  I told Morio I’d brought him food, thought he could use it after his trip into the city.

  Morio took the food with a bit of a wry grin, like he didn’t for a moment believe this was my true motive. “You want to know what I saw,” he said. It was not a question.

  “Sit, private,” Morio said to me. So I sat, on the foot of the bed, near Morio’s still-be-socked feet. The socks, I noticed, were caked with dust and ash, and Morio, the consummate spit-shined Kempeitai officer, did nothing to hide their appearance. The peacock, it seemed, had finally been sullied by war.

  “I was telling Mr. Allen about Nagasaki. So you know, the bomb deto
nated halfway between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works in the south and the Mitsubishi-Urakami torpedo factory in the north. You can tell this because everything in between is dust. You can also tell this because of the patterns you see on the roads. They are like ghosts. You see, the blast, which was near the center, was so intense that it bleached everything, everything that was not shielded by something else. So there are shadows, I guess you would call them. Outlines of what had been standing there when the blast hit. And they are cast across the pavement. Buildings, cars, people. I saw one of a dog. Of course, none of those things remain, only their shadows on the bleached asphalt. And as Isa and I drove around, we found nothing, nothing but those shadows. But their orientation slowly changed as we drove. First, they stretched west, then south, then east as we moved. And pretty soon we understood that they all radiated outward in a massive perfect circle from that point where the bomb detonated. Rings upon rings upon rings of things that once were but are no more.

  “We only found people when we had moved out toward the Koba hills—the backside of the hills, which had been shielded somewhat by the blast. Houses remained there. Buildings. The first sign of life we saw was a flat-bed truck, one of the slow coal-burning ones, moving through the streets, bearing what we thought were a couple of cattle carcasses. A butcher, like us trying to help, perhaps bringing food to where it was needed. But as we came up on the truck, we saw that the carcasses were moving, which was, of course, not possible if they were the usual skinned, slaughtered bodies of cattle. No, we quickly realized they were people—survivors that had been effectively flayed by the blast. Isa and I looked away. I have a very strong stomach, but not that strong.

  “It was not any better when we arrived at some of the public buildings that had been quickly repurposed into makeshift hospitals and receiving areas. Everywhere was charred flesh, skin hanging in sheets. Where before I had pitied those shadows on the asphalt—people that had been vaporized where they stood—I now understood they’d had it easy. The amount of suffering is indescribable and I don’t really want to start. I only know that if the doctors that were there couldn’t help them—and they couldn’t—then a couple of mercenaries like Isa and myself were positively out of place there. So we went about seeing other ways that we could help, which for us was going to those neighborhoods along the fringe of the blast, the ones in which the buildings had not been vaporized, only knocked down. We would look for survivors in the ruins.