The Emperor of Any Place (23 page)

“It will come back,” I said to him as I watched a shovelful of sand fall across the blackened corpse.

He seemed to understand me and stopped his digging, and with his good hand patted my shoulder. “No, we’ve done it, Isamu-san. It is over.” I nodded because I knew the words “no” and “over,” and because he expected me to agree with him, but I was full of uncertainty. That is when I left and walked down the hill to the beach. It is as if something of me died in the night.

I look out to sea. It is a dull day, the sea calm, exhausted, tired of the moon always tugging at it, not wanting to always be coming in or going out and never getting anywhere. I stand at the lip of the tide and feel my feet sink a little into the sand with every halfhearted sip of the waves that slips by my ankles.

I’m not sure how long I have been standing here, but I suddenly become aware that I am being watched. I expect it is Derwood — that he has come for me. For one terrible moment, I even think he has come to kill me, now that the danger of the monster has passed. The terror is exhilarating. So I do not turn right away, confident that after all we have gone through, he will not shoot me in the back. I want to look out upon the weary sea, drained of its color, not even made lively by the squawking of the gulls on this strangely quiet morning. I close my eyes. Some small dark part of me almost wants him to pull the trigger.

When I do finally turn, my ghostly children are waiting patiently just beyond the water’s edge, and beyond them is a small cadre of
jikininki. They have come for me,
I think. They seem to know something I don’t. But I am not afraid.

“What is it?” I say. I fold my arms impressively and stand as straight and tall as I can, not wanting them to get any fancy ideas. “Have you come to make a petition to the Emperor of the Island?”

One of them, the nearest, says, “Our own emperor wishes to speak to you.”

“Ho! So you have a leader? I thought you were one and one and one?”

“I am not the leader,” says another of the creatures, coming forward but not closer than the gentle lapping of the tide. Water, it seems, is another element that does not agree with them. “We borrow words from the stories of those who have died so that we may converse with those who are living. If we must. I am first among the dead you see before you.”

“So converse with me, first of your tribe!” I say to the creature in a jaunty voice. My depression of earlier has lifted a little. As dark as my depression may be, at least I am more alive than these miserable creatures! It is almost entertaining to watch them pulling away from the tide with their faltering steps, not able to bear even the frothy hem of the incoming water. It has risen past my ankles. The tide is turning, and I half think I might stand here and watch these miserable fellows have to withdraw farther and farther from me up the shore, as the sea climbs inch by inch up my body. I will stand there unmoved by them or by the sea until I am claimed by it.

“A word with you,” says the one who calls itself the first. “But I cannot raise my voice so loud as to be heard above the tide.” I relent. I unstick myself from the suction of the wet sand and march up to where the
jikininki
congregate. My diary and writing implement sit on the sand. I move them farther up the shore and put a rounded stone on them so they do not blow away. Already, I am hungry to write this scene in those pages. I shall write it as if it is happening before your very eyes.

“What is it you want?” I say it in a most regal voice so that they hear I am not anywhere near ready to become fodder for their ravenous appetite.

“Perhaps, if you knew more,” says the first, “you would look more kindly upon our . . . our needs.”

I know what their “needs” are and cannot help but turn up my nose. Still, I would speak to them. “Go on, king of the ghouls,” I say imperiously.

The ghoul king, or whatever it is, looks around at its ghastly companions. “I am the first. Not the king, not the leader, for we have no leader, no followers. I arrived in this place before anyone else, that is all. That is all that distinguishes me. I have been here the longest.”

At that moment one of my ghosts, the boy who always ventures nearest, suddenly slips his hand in mine. I look to see if he is afraid, but he does not seem to be. It is hard to tell if he has any sense at all of what is going on. The first of the
jikininki
glowers at the ghost boy, flinching. They seem to find the companion ghosts distasteful.

“There was a first body to float up on this island,” says the
jikininki
spokesman. “A fisherman whose boat had overturned in a storm.”

“But if he was dead,” I say, “how did you learn how he died?”

“Dying was among his memories,” says the
jikininki.
“His last thought. His topmost memory.”

I should have known better than to ask.

“His body lay there for a great long time, for there was no one here to attend to him, to do what
you
do and send him on to the Afterlife, or to do what we do and consume what he had been, taking up his story and making it our own.

“He lay there long enough that I grew from him. Not his ghost, you see, but the ghost of what would never be, though I had no sense of that, at first. I stood looking down on his rotting corpse, abandoned on the beach, picked at by other scavengers — the crabs that had come ashore with him, the gulls and carrion crows, but still not entirely decayed. And something in me, some instinct, led me to understand what I must do.”

“Please spare me the details!” I say. The demon bows slightly, as if I truly am an emperor. “And in time other corpses arrived?”

“Other corpses, yes. And with each corpse fresh memories. And it might have stayed that way, with just me here — the island all my own, alone, providing many stories for my consumption — but then there was a war at sea and the dead floated in, too many to count. And while I feasted, there were so many corpses — more corpses than I could get to — so other
jikininki
came into existence as had I, rising as a dreadful need out of the corpses. The need for their stories not to be lost.”

The thing bows to me and says no more.

“That’s it?” I ask. “This is supposed to win me over?”

But the first of these monsters seems to have forgotten I am there. Its nose is raised in the air, and when I look around, it is true of the others as well; seven or eight of them all sniffing and turning this way and that, until finally one of them starts marching in its ungainly gait along the beach in a northward direction, and soon enough the others turn that way, too.

And a horrible thought occurs to me.

“Derwood!” I call out. Something must have happened to him. He slipped while he was filling the hole and fell, skewering himself on one of the bamboo spears. The boy child clutching my hand stares up into my eyes, smiling, unconcerned about anything, not of this world and free of all of its horrors. I gently extricate my hand from his so as not to disturb the wraith, and bowing slightly to this glowing child and to each of his kindred, I take my leave, pick up my diary and pen, and race after the
jikininki,
soon passing them and dashing up the hill toward my home and my only friend on this strange and impossible island.

I filled in the pit we had dug, which was now a grave for
Tengu.
The work was hard and my improvised prosthesis was next to useless. I ended up kicking dirt into the hole as much as shoveling it. By the time Isamu returned, I was sitting cross-legged on the ground, rubbing an unguent into my aching and bruised stump. The contraption I’d constructed as a metal hand had chewed my forearm up something terrible. All that was visible of the pit was a square-shaped depression of churned-up sand, a few inches lower than the surface of the ground. I had decided that I would shovel or kick sand into the hole on a daily basis, a little bit at a time, and then roll one of the steel oil drums over it to compact it. In time, I hoped, weeds would grow in and grass, until no evidence of the hole could be seen at a casual glance and the blasted thing in it might gradually be forgotten.

Isamu seemed distant, as if something had snapped. I called to him and smiled, glad to see him back — glad of some company — but my greeting barely registered on his face. He took the shovel without seeming to notice the work I’d done and headed from the compound without a word. I could only assume another corpse had washed ashore. I’d leave it to him; I was too tired to bury anything else right now. I stood and stared down at the square of sandy soil that marked
Tengu
’s resting place. I smiled grimly to myself. Burned and buried. We had granted the creature both rites, as if he were both Eastern and Western.

Sadly I watched Isamu withdraw into himself over the next few days. My own relief at being free of the monstrous creature buoyed me to no end. I cooked nice things for Isamu that he ate but without delight. I sang his favorite songs to no apparent success. My voice is not much, I’ll readily admit, but it used to get a laugh out of him and now he seemed not to hear.

One evening, after we had eaten, he tried to talk to me. I listened intently but, knowing so little Japanese, I could only make out that he was talking about
Tengu
in relationship to the two of us. He would point at the monster’s grave and then at me and himself. His eyes would inquire of me if I understood, and when I shook my head, he would throw up his hands and go off by himself.

He slept late a lot, which was not at all like him. Then one morning I awoke and found his hammock empty. I went about my morning ablutions trying not to worry.
His spirit will come back once the horror has truly passed,
I thought. I had watched men wander around after a battle, seen the same vacancy in their eyes. They were alive but what was there to celebrate? I’d flown supplies into Guam that past August, after the Americans took back the island. There were more than seventeen hundred men to bury and some six thousand men officially injured, but I saw injuries in the eyes of men who wore no bandages. It was as if being alive was an affront to the dead. As if being alive only meant there was going to be another opportunity to die; that they had been saved only to prolong the agony. We have a name for the illness now: post-traumatic stress disorder. It was called shell shock back then. Whatever you call it, it’s not something you can put a bandage on.

The day that Isamu left early, I worried enough that by midafternoon I made my way up into the coral tree and scanned the island, hoping to catch sight of him. The sun had passed to the other side of Kokoro-Jima before he made an appearance. He was walking along the beach carrying the Gibson Girl.

Isamu built a new box kite. He had thin wire, a whole roll of it, wire that would be perfect as an aerial. He had hidden the wire from me, but now he produced it, and together we set about making the distress beacon operable. In the end it was Isamu, the stronger of the two of us and certainly the most dexterous, who cranked it enough to get the light on the top glowing. He cranked it like a man possessed.

This is good,
I thought.
He is ready to get out of here. Ready to go home.

Then we waited. Isamu wrote; I drew: plants, flowers, rock formations. It was as if the Gooney Bird had been my own personal
Beagle,
bringing me to this tiny island, and I must record the flora and fauna here just as Darwin had done a hundred years ago on his grand tour. I wasn’t sure what Isamu was doing. I recognized his ballpoint pen as belonging to my pilot, Pete Laski. It was a new invention but tended to jam unless you held it pretty well straight up and down. Flyboys used them, because the lower pressure in the cabin made the ink flow just fine. I asked Isamu what he was writing, but what could he tell me?

He’s telling the story,
I decided. And I could see, as he must have been all too aware of himself, that the story would have to come to an end quite soon, for there were only a few pages left in the flight book. So I gave him my second sketch pad and one of my last pencils. Isamu stared at the pages and pages of blankness and smiled for the first time since the death of
Tengu.
But it was nothing like the smiles I had come to know. It was as if the monster still had its claws in him, for the smile was strained and tinged with grief.

He had lost something. The monster has stolen something from him. That was as much as I could deduce. I did not know at the time about his talk with the
jikininki
and how that affected him — infected him: the horror of an abandoned body giving birth to a ghost that must forever eat the stories of others, having no story of its own.

Isamu had woven mats out of grass for us to sit on when we ate at the low table, a new table to replace the one that
Tengu
had soiled. One night, when Isamu didn’t seem quite so lost in his thoughts, I reached across the table and tugged lightly at the string around his neck. Isamu produced the
omamori
but did not open it.

“Hisako,” I said. “Soon you will see Hisako.”

Isamu stopped eating. He smiled and turned to stare vaguely in the direction of the island that had been his home.