The Emperor of Any Place (16 page)

Tomorrow is now yesterday, a day of surpassing strangeness. I must try to recall every detail beginning with a tragedy.

I stared at the carcass lying across the sandy path. I was heading to the Pond of Sweet Water to fill my canteen before heading into the jungle to find the navigator or his remains. I was filled with resolve. I was determined not to put off what must be done for even one day longer. I was a warrior, refreshed and ready for anything.

And then this.

It was the sambar doe, or what remained of her, for she had been savaged. Her neck had been slashed, her belly torn open. Few innards were left to be seen. Her belly was concave. Whatever had done this to her had feasted on offal, nothing else. Flies gathered on her lifeless eye.

In a nearby grove, several
jikininki
gathered, watching me.

“Did you see this happen?” I demanded.

A curious sound emanated from the wounds in their heads where a real person’s mouth would be. Sniggering. They were sniggering at me. “What? You find this funny?” I shouted at them, my fists on my hips.

“It washed up on the beach,” said one.

“Large,” said another, holding out its arms. “As large as the largest bear.”

“No, a great cat — a tiger,” said still another.

“Tigers are striped,” squalled one of them, cuffing the last speaker across the chest. “I ate a man who had seen one, once. This . . . this thing was black as mud.”

“Brown.”

“Claws,” said the first. “As long as a human’s hands.”

“And the beak of a mighty sea eagle.”

“Pah!” I shouted, striding toward them angrily. “It was him, wasn’t it — the American. He is the monster that did this?”

They all shook their heads; they agreed on that, if nothing else.

“Pah!” I said again, spitting at their feet. “I will find him. He will pay for this!”

One of them dared to approach me. “This is good,” it said. “We are pleased to see you filled with revenge.” That should have been a clue, but it is only now in writing this down that I see what I could not then see in my rage.

I spit again, and turning on my heels, I tramped up the path, only to stop again. My hands flew to my mouth in horror. The fawn. A young buck by now, with little bumps of horns coming in. He also had been mutilated.

The
jikininki
sniggered and howled at me.

It had to be the
gaijin.
The monster the
jikininki
described was like nothing at all — they couldn’t agree amongst themselves on what it looked like. Nothing else had changed on the island but for the American’s arrival! So, in a way, their stories were true; there was a monster here.

As I departed, I looked around, expecting to see the flesh-eaters descend on the corpses of the deer to clean up. They made no move. Obviously, they only dine on human remains. And that reminded me of my only other conversation with one of the
jikininki.
If it was memories they were after, did this mean that deer have no memories? I cannot say. They remember where the water is sweet and the twigs are tasty. I said a silent prayer for the dead deer and then pushed on through to the pond, where I filled my canteen and ducked my head in the clean water to cool down the heat of anger that burned my cheeks. I had to be cool: keep control over the intense emotion burning inside me. Focus it.

I knelt at the pond’s edge, my sopping hair falling across my face, until I smoothed it back with hard hands, strong and browned by the sun. Yes, Hisako, my hair is long now after so many weeks, and if you had seen me there kneeling by the pond at that moment, you would have probably gasped, for I must look like a wild man. There was something evil loose on the island — my island! — and I had let myself be distracted from it. I was distracted no longer.

I was a soldier again.

I had to root out this foul thing and destroy it. And then I must somehow contact the imperial forces. There was a planeload of arms, ready for use. How could I have ignored this fact for so many days? What’s more, there was probably a radio on the plane. I knew little about radios, but, as you know, I have a way with machinery of all kinds. Yes! I would make contact with whatever was left of my compatriots. I would be a hero.

Ah, you will have noticed, Hisako, with your sharp eye, that I have drifted into the past tense again. These are things I was going to do. That’s what I thought at the time. But life can be strange, indeed. Read on.

I bounded to my feet and set off. My ghosts hovered near me. I saw fear or even panic in their eyes. They understood and although they could do nothing to help me in my quest, I felt better to have them there. They were my family, and I would need to be brave for them!

Silently I found my way into the gully to the downed supply plane. It was early, and the silver fuselage was draped in shadows and wet with dew. Fearlessly I approached it, my every sense alert. I noticed right away that the yellow box was gone, and days of pointless speculation were resolved in a moment. I had whiled away my time writing to you, and in the meantime a monster was out here, only waiting for Isamu to come to life, to act, to do what had to be done. It was now only a matter of following its path, tracking it down.

I hurled open the hatch to the plane, explored it from stem to stern, no longer afraid of anything, filled with holy wrath. When I left the plane, the carrion crows were gathered in the trees, unable to carry out their ravaging of the crew due to the barricade I had put in their way, but drawn to the smell nonetheless.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Shriek at me as much as you want.” Then without thinking, I raised my new rifle to my shoulder and fired into the trees. The crows flew up again, enraged. I only laughed. I no longer cared if my quarry knew where I was. Let him! Let him shake in his boots! Waiting and hiding had achieved nothing. Frighten the enemy into making a mistake, I thought: that was the way of it. Show no fear. Show no mercy.

I searched the ground outside the plane, my vision sharpened by grim determination. And sure enough, I found a path, recently used. I followed it up the shallow southwest side out of the gully that led to high walls of limestone. I peered up through the canopy. The walls were pocked with holes, caves. He is hiding there even now! Oh, the navigator might be rapacious when it came to defenseless deer but petrified to face a man. Did he have a scope trained on me that very minute? I no longer cared.

It was suddenly all so clear. No wonder I had seen hide nor hair of this monster. I pictured him now, a fearful, simpering, timid thing. The very thing I, Isamu, had become but was no longer. It was good to feel this fury. I felt more alive than I had for ages.

I climbed a rugged path between the rocks.

Stooping, I found a torn length of shoelace. A hundred yards on, my fingers plucked a ragged scrap of bloodied bandage caught on the thorns of a twisted, leafless tree, growing out of a crevice in the rock face. I sniffed the bandage. It was rank. I looked ahead to where the path met the sky. If I listened hard, I could hear the wind in the rocks ahead, and was that . . . yes, waves; this path must lead to the lower southwest flank of the island, a part I had not explored because it was so rocky and probably would yield little in the way of anything I needed. Now this barren place harbored the
only
thing I needed.

I climbed on. Stopped. Listened. There was another sound now, a whirring, mechanical sound. I slid my hand along a steep wall of cliffside, looking down at my feet with every step, so as not to dislodge a stone, and then quickly up again, feeling the wind cool on my face as I neared the trailhead. The whirring grew louder as I crested the hill. Then it stopped. Had he seen me? I flattened myself against the rock, cold at so early an hour. Then I inched forward. When I was not fifteen feet from the cliff’s edge, something fluttered into my view, bobbing on the wind. A kite. A yellow-and-blue box kite. I blinked.

A kite?

I slithered back along the stone face and peered down upon a beach at low tide, a long strand trailing out into the ocean, the very tail end of the heart. My eyes followed the kite’s string down, down, down to where it was lost to view behind a rocky overhang. The trail turned back on itself and carried on toward the sand, maybe sixty or seventy feet below. Edging along the path, I reached a place where, by crouching, I could see the kite string again and now the man at the base of it.

He was sitting below me, with the strange yellow box between his knees. He was turning a crank on the top of the box. His left arm tried to keep the box from jiggling, and I could plainly see the filthy-looking bandage at the end of his arm where the man’s left hand should have been.

Aha!

Such a revelation! The man could not shoot. Not a rifle, anyway. Not with only one hand. He stopped cranking and wiped his forehead with his useless arm. The
gaijin
was lean, almost skeletal. I could count the ribs and vertebrae on his sunburned back. Several familiars gathered near him, shivering transparently in the low sun, watching him like mourners at a funeral ceremony. I turned to my own ghosts. They trailed behind me on the path, waiting. I looked into the eyes of the nearest one. Did he shake his head? It was hard to tell. When the sun is flat on them, they are hardly there at all. But it did not matter, in any case. I moved farther down the path until I could see the man in partial profile. He was bearded, with sunken cheeks, and ragged hair bleached to a dull tan by the sun.

This was my enemy? This helpless wretch disemboweled a sambar and her child? It could not be so. But this was no time to ponder such improbabilities. I had to keep my mind sharp and my mission clear.

The scarecrow man was completely unaware of me. I raised my eyes and looked up at his kite high out over the water, buffeted by breezes, straining at the line. Then he started to turn the crank again. In a flash of inspiration, I realized what it must be: some kind of emergency signaling device.

I had to do something right away. I raised my rifle. There was a scope. Closing one eye, I brought the man into focus with the other. The muscles of his stringy neck were strained with the effort, his face grimacing. How long had he been at it? Was it already too late?

I could feel my resolve slipping away. He had only one arm. Yet I had to stop him. That was all. Stop him and then take him as a prisoner. But how was I to look after a prisoner? Indecision was tearing my rage apart at the seams.

I ran down the narrow path toward the beach, recklessly now, for the real man did not fill me with fear the way the idea of him had. I kept my eye on my quarry, still quite a way below me and well out on the sand. The path hairpinned again and then fizzled out altogether, never a real path to begin with, so I leaped from rock to rock and doubled back behind him. Finally I reached the beach and stood on the sand, my rifle raised, ready to fire. The outcrop shielded me from the sun. I stood in its shadow, cool and collected. Through the scope, I could now see a belt and holstered handgun lying on a knapsack beside the man. So even with one arm, he could still prove deadly. Surely he had no idea of my presence, or he would have tried to shoot me already. One of his ghosts lazily turned its head and saw me. It kept its eyes on me but made no effort to warn its host. Even his ghosts see no hope of his survival! I sank to one knee, the rifle raised again at a target less than thirty feet away. A target that had no idea he was being marked. He would be dead before he heard the rifle’s report. He would never know what hit him.

But I stopped, again. My breathing was ragged from the climb and the excitement and from the dreadful purpose of my assignment. If a message had already gone out and if the
gaijin
could somehow make their way here, when they found no one, would they not search for him — the sender of the signal? I imagined the island swarming with troops. That would never do! But if I could take him as a prisoner, I could use him to ransom my own life.

Behind my bared teeth, I let out a silent roar of frustration that would have rung out against the steep cliffs like an air-raid siren had I given it voice.

I raised the rifle again, took aim —

And it was then that the creature jumped.

He must have climbed onto the overhanging rock above my head and out of my line of sight, because suddenly there was a black blur before my eyes and in front of me landed a monstrous thing, larger than a demon bear, completely unaware of me, loping toward his unsuspecting victim only a scant few yards away.

The man must have heard something. He turned and fell to one side, while his one good hand tried to escape from the contraption between his legs. He shouted just as the creature jumped.

And I fired.

He’s back. Evan glances at the time on his phone. He was miles away, years away, across an ocean, on the outskirts of a war, on an island that was half dream, half nightmare.

“Demon bears?” he says to himself. “Really?”

But the story is getting under his skin. He can’t think of anywhere farther away from Kokoro-Jima than this place, and yet something of Ōshiro’s fear is in him. It’s not as if Evan is there on that faraway shore; more like the demon is
here.