by Joe Hart
“Warm thoughts for a cold night, huh?” The man grins and shakes his head. “Do you know the Bible?”
“I’ve read some of it.”
“So you understand the basic balance? Good and evil? God and the devil?”
“Yes.”
“And old Beelzebub himself, he’s about as bad as they come, right?”
“I suppose. In that book anyways.”
The man tosses his head back and laughs long and hard. Zoey watches him, half bemused and half annoyed. “What?”
When he recovers he says, “I like that you think of it as a story in a book. Perspective is good sometimes. Anyway, Satan is evil and cast away from the light, out of God’s good graces as the saying goes. But God’s message is clear. Repent, ask for forgiveness, and redemption shall be given. Life is made up of choices, huh? They get made every day and we have a chance when they come along to do better than the time before.”
“You believe that?”
“Every coin has two different sides. I believe that everyone deserves a second chance.”
“Even the devil?”
The old man gives her another smile. “If he was sorry, then yes.”
The rain pounds harder on the roof and Zoey pulls her gaze from the sculpture to the window once again. After a moment the man rises and goes to the kitchen, returning almost immediately with the pot of soup, two bowls, and spoons. He ladles the soup out evenly, the aroma so thick she wonders if she could survive on the smell alone.
“But even an old optimistic philosopher like me has moments of realism. That’s why I know you need to see me dishing out the food yourself. A young woman can’t be too cautious nowadays, huh?”
She almost tells him she won’t eat, but the scent of the food is intoxicating. And besides, she did watch him ladle it from the same pot. If he was going to drug or poison her he’d be doing the same to himself.
Zoey waits for him to take several bites before picking up her spoon. She looks at the sculpture again, and this time it doesn’t disturb her as much. In fact, for some reason when she looks at it, her mind keeps returning to her conversation with Merrill in the watchtower, before the assassin arrived and sent everything spinning off-kilter. But her stomach finally forces aside thoughts that don’t involve the meal before her, and she begins to eat.
16
The windows of the little house turn ashen and continue to collect rain until the outside world disappears completely into dusk.
Faint thunder rolls across the plains and Zoey listens, the booms like another language older than time.
They’d eaten in silence together, the odd scrape of a spoon on a bowl the only noise. After she’d consumed two helpings, the old man lit several candles dispelling the encroaching darkness and given her one, leading the way to the uncluttered room in the back.
“There’s a lock on the door,” he’d said, motioning to it. “I know that’s the first thing you’d look for. Extra blankets in the closet.” She’d thanked him and he’d studied her then before holding up a finger and moving off into the house. He returned a minute later holding out a tattered paperback.
“The Diary of Anne Frank,” she’d read aloud from the cover.
“I gave it to all my philosophy students, huh? Required reading.” He looked as if he was going to say more but stopped and simply shuffled away to his own room. She’d looked after him before glancing down at the book. As strange as the encounter had been so far she really felt there was no need to fear the man. And leaving on foot during a storm in unfamiliar territory would have been the pinnacle of foolishness. So she’d shut the door and locked it, setting the candle on the bedside table, and began to read.
Now she sits on the floor, back against the bed, candle burned down to nearly nothing, and she races, races against its lessening light, because there are only a few pages left. Her jaw trembles as she reads the last sentences and continues on to the epilogue.
Zoey shuts the book, wanting to hurl it away and hug it close to her chest at the same time. She squeezes her eyes shut.
I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.
A teardrop rolls down her cheek to hang on her chin before dripping to her shirt. All of the beauty and horror coalesce, driving down upon her in that moment like a rockslide on a mountain. Not just young Anne’s story, but her own, everything she’s witnessed: women locked in rooms and cages, fathers killed before children’s eyes, an owl that flew away never to return, a dried husk of a boy in the backseat of a car, and a world gasping for a last breath, a last chance.
And she is it.
She crawls onto the bed, barely getting herself to move, and clasps the pillow that smells of musty cotton and long-forgotten flowers, letting the weight of it all crush her. She smells the clean scent of mountain air mingled with burning hair and skin and feels the button beneath her finger that nearly launched a missile, nearly killed her daughter. She feels her soul waver like the candle flame on the table.
She weeps for everything lost.
And for everything that can be if she’s strong enough.
As her crying quiets and exhaustion pulls her into the depths of sleep, the candle sputters its last and winks out.
She wakes to the dull glow coming from behind a curtained window. Her internal clock tells her it’s well past daybreak, and when she twitches the curtain aside, she sees she’s right. The sky is layered in clouds but bright enough to hurt her eyes.
The main area of the house smells of candle wax and the lingering scent of potato soup, sending a grumble of hunger through her stomach. With a cursory glance around, she knows she’s alone. She listens for the thunk of the old man’s hoe outside but there is only the gentle rush of wind trying to find its way past the windows.
In the kitchen, a piece of paper lies pinned beneath three glass jars of what appears to be stew, as well as a tarnished vehicle key. She moves everything aside and reads the scrawling words written by a hand shaky with age.
Good morning and I suppose good-bye. The canned stew is mostly vegetables with a little venison I traded for sometime ago. The truck outside isn’t much to look at but it runs and drives well enough. There is some gasoline in a can in the back. It should burn. Use it to get where you’re going. Everyone has somewhere to go except me. I’ve already arrived and don’t intend to travel anymore.
Good luck in wherever you’re going. And don’t forget that coins are everywhere, and until you pick them up you can only see one side.
She rereads the last sentence and raises her eyes to the window, standing still for a long time before folding the note away into her pack along with the jars of stew. Outside the wind is much cooler than it was the day before and she guesses if something falls from the sky today it will be snow. There is no sign of the man near the front of the house or behind the vines, only a patch of turned earth and the neat rows of his garden void of any greenery. Zoey bends low and writes the words “Thank You” in the soft earth near the edge of the garden before moving around the side of the house.
The truck’s cab is cold and dank. The passenger window is damaged, unable to close all the way, the seat on that side wet from last night’s rain. But when she turns the key in the ignition, the old engine rumbles to life, an alarming stream of smoke issuing from beneath the hood that eventually dissipates. Placing the vehicle in gear she drives away from the little house, its form growing smaller and smaller in the vibrating rearview mirror. And as she turns onto the highway she pulls to a stop, looking back across the distance.
A second before, she could’ve sworn she saw the old man standing beside the house, one arm above his head in a gesture of farewell. But now he’s gone and there is only the lonely stone house on the prairie.
“Good-bye,” she says so quietly she barely hears, and accelerates onto the highway leading west.
17
Hiraku dreams.
He knows he is dreaming, and that is
perhaps what is most horrible about it all because he has no power to stop it. And knowing it isn’t real makes it hurt no less.
He stands in the entryway to his house. Their house. Can he still call it “theirs” if she is already gone? He tries to back out of the entry, tries to reach behind him and grasp the door to push it open and flee, but the pressure is already there. The pressure is all around him, like he’s standing at the bottom of the sea with all the water in the world crushing, trying to fill the place where his body is. And it’s this pressure that nudges him forward, making him travel into the short hallway and past the sitting room even though he doesn’t feel his legs moving.
Framed pictures glide by on each side, but he doesn’t look, doesn’t have to. He knows them by heart. Here is he and Jiaying holding hands on their first journey to Japan, the cherry blossoms in full bloom behind them. In the next they are smiling on a dance floor, their wedding day almost behind them. And the last are their outlines looking out over the sea at sunset, faceless in the nearing dark, Jiaying more so than him.
Then he is in their small kitchen. He reaches for one of the knives in the butcher block to slit his wrists or throat; even seppuku would be preferable to what he will see down the next hallway and in the little room painted white with blue trim. Always blue, everything blue. Jiaying had always gotten her way. Toys, paint, even carpet, as though she could control what would happen simply by insistence through design.
Hiraku’s arm doesn’t reach out to the blades; he can only feel the pressure holding him back, guiding him down the hall, always guiding. He tries to scream as some of his ink paintings pass by. These were his contributions in planning for the new life that would inhabit their home—boy or girl didn’t matter, he had simply dreamed of a little voice asking him to help hold the brush and show how to make the curving lines as his father had done for him.
The radiation burns on his arms ignite in agony. It is like the day of the accident, the pain unnameable. It shoves him to the border of madness, to the point of not remembering the name of his ancestors or his own. And still he floats toward the door that opens as he approaches. Floor blue, trim blue, walls so white they hurt his eyes, and the crib . . .
He can see it, see the corner as he’s shoved into the room in slow motion.
The spindles are hand carved, snowy and pure like the peak of Fuji in winter.
And their purity only contrasts harder with the red. The blood within the crib that’s like a scream.
He tries to cry out but there is nothing, no response from his mind’s command. He can’t even close his eyes to shut out what he sees. Shut out the white blanket with blue edging and the crimson stain in the center, so small, but shining slick as if there is an endless pool beneath it.
Here it is.
The blanket peels back. Folds away from what’s beneath.
From what’s left of his daughter after the abortion.
Hiraku wakes to his own yell. It is strangled, his throat hoarse and filled with rusted piano wires. The sight is still there behind his eyes even though he sees his cabin in the ship before him. It is still the small, mangled mass of blood and tissue that has eyes and a face and fingers so small he can barely make them out. As always, the dream feels both familiar and alien. He knows he’s had it hundreds of times but each instance is layered with different horrid details that make it seem new. As he forces the dream away, oily nausea squirming through his stomach, he realizes he’s not alone.
Shirou sits in the corner of the small room, his outline familiar enough that Hiraku doesn’t have to turn on a light to know that it’s him.
“You were yelling,” Shirou says quietly.
Hiraku lets out a long, shuddering breath tasting of acid. “Why didn’t you wake me?”
“My grandmother said it was wrong to wake someone in a nightmare. She told me that if you did, part of the person’s soul would be trapped there forever.”
The crimson crib swims into shape behind Hiraku’s eyes and he squeezes them shut, pressing a fist against one temple. “I hope she was wrong.” When he looks across the room again the crib is gone and Shirou’s face is illuminated in the glow of his lighter as he sparks a cigarette. “May I have one?”
“You haven’t smoked in five years.”
“Thank you for keeping track. Now may I?”
Shirou half smiles and tosses him the pack and lighter. Hiraku burns the tip of a cigarette and inhales deeply, the smoke traveling all the way to the bottom of his lungs, and it is like coming home. He sighs, some of the tension easing from him. “What time is it?”
“Early. Three-thirty.”
“I won’t get any more rest tonight.”
They sit quietly, smoking, listening to the creak of the ship around them, its movement like being inside a giant womb.
“The dream. It was her again? Jiaying?”
Hiraku doesn’t move, not even to tap the lengthening ash from his cigarette onto the steel floor. Only once before had he spoken of the dream to Shirou. Years and years ago. It seems like a lifetime.
He finally shifts his gaze to the other man. To the only person he truly trusts in the world. “Yes.” When Shirou only nods he asks, “How many times?”
“How many times what?”
“Have you woken to my yelling?”
A pause. “Many.”
“And you never said anything.”
“No. Sometimes I would sit beside you in case you rose in your sleep. You did that once, remember?”
“Yes.”
“I believe what happens in a man’s mind is his own business. Even his nightmares.”
Hiraku draws on the cigarette again, but the smoke is becoming less sweet and more acrid. His mouth tastes foul and his head swims from the nicotine. “It was her father, you know.” When Shirou doesn’t answer or move, he continues, picking at the wound that’s scabbed over but never healed. It seems easier in the dark. “He’s the one that caused it. The old ways were ingrained in him. The shame it brought him to have a girl during the two-child policy. And he couldn’t try again since Jiaying’s mother suffered complications during her birth.” Hiraku leans forward, stubbing out the cigarette he no longer wants. Maybe it’s the words that have soured his taste for it. “And the shame he passed on to Jiaying.”
“It was common back then,” Shirou says quietly.
“Yes. But I was a fool. I didn’t know how deeply it had grown within her. I remember coming home from the hospital after months of treatment for the burns, the radiation poisoning. She was almost in her second trimester by then, and we knew we were having a girl. I could tell she was not pleased, but I thought it would pass.” Hiraku picks up a folded piece of paper from his bedside table. “When the doctor gave me this, told me about my inability to father a boy, she was there. She didn’t speak on the ride home and when I went for a checkup two days later, she was gone when I returned.”
“She went back to her parents?”
Hiraku nods, staring down at the floor, unable to look anywhere else. “I saw her once after that. I tried to see her at their house and her mother finally allowed me inside while her father was out. The first thing I noticed was how flat her belly was beneath her shirt. When I couldn’t speak, she told me I would receive the necessary papers for our divorce in the mail. I traveled home in a fog and when I went to sleep I had the first nightmare.”
Shirou was quiet for several minutes. “Your daughter.”
“Yes,” Hiraku says, the word raw in his strained throat. The boat moves around them, shifting slightly on the waves. There is the bang of a door in the hallway and a muttered curse.
“Perhaps it was fate,” Shirou says. “I’m sure you’ve thought of that.”
“Yes.”
“The test results on that paper have given many men hope. Hope of rebuilding a future someday. You could do nothing more noble with what’s happened to you.”
“The lives we’ve ended. I sometimes wonder if they’ve been in vain.�
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“So can be said of any great undertaking.”
“But what if we’re wrong? What if there is nothing left when we arrive at the location?”
“What are you talking about?”
Hiraku pauses, glancing at Shirou, the words of the young man from the munitions factory like a thorn in his mind. “Nothing. It’s early and I’m being foolish.”
“Doubt is not foolish as long as it is balanced by hope.”
Hiraku manages to smile. “You always were a philosopher.”
“Not always.”
“Have I asked too much of you, my brother?” he says, recalling how quickly Shirou had wounded the man the day before on the pier, the almost eagerness of his movements.
“Never.”
“I worry I have, and that your soul has suffered for it.”
“Anything harbored in my soul has always been there. I am yours until you have no need of me anymore.”
“I’ll always need your friendship. I only hope we have a chance to regain what we’ve lost of ourselves someday.”
Shirou rises and walks toward the door, ignoring his last comment. Hiraku frowns, wondering silently how much is truly left of the friend he met twenty years ago. How much is left of himself. “Has the word been circulated about what we’re going to attempt?” he asks as Shirou opens the door.
“Yes. We’ve had a dozen men from the city volunteer to join us already. By the time we have enough ammunition, there will be a thousand willing to fight and die. We will overwhelm the compound when we reach it.”
“If the machines at the munitions factory can be repaired, that is.”
Half of Shirou’s face is thrown into shadow by the light from the hall. “If the man who came forward cannot repair them, I will kill him myself for lying to you.”
With that he is gone, the door shutting solidly behind him, and to Hiraku it sounds like the closing of a sepulcher.
18
“No, no, no. This is all wrong.”
Lee presses the creases out of the schematics with the heel of his hand before brushing his hair back from his brow. It is moist from the sweat that beads on his forehead, and though the weather outside is overcast and damp, the air in the factory is humid and clingy like a second skin.
