Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  “It’s dangerous, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. It might take a while.”

  “You’re holding something back from me.” Lynn sighed. “I know. The more I know, the harder it gets.”

  “I just can’t talk about it.”

  She sighed more emphatically and rolled onto her back.

  “I can’t fight with you about this anymore. You come home with these mysteries, you get depressed. I can tell it’s dangerous, but you won’t tell me why.”

  “Do you want me to not tell you at all?”

  “I want you to tell me everything. You tell me half the problem, and you’re just sharing your misery. I can’t help you.”

  I used to pretend that I really wanted to tell her the truth and couldn’t. Things got easier when it became automatic. I needed my lives compartmentalized, and when they mixed, no matter how hard I tried to control the mixture, it was explosive.

  Lately I didn’t tell Lynn much of anything. Since being chosen as the Judge and working for Mr. Bishop, I didn’t have much to share. I didn’t want to talk about the war. Even in my letters during the war I’d avoided the details of the fighting. I’d shut Lynn out of three-fourths of my life. No truth too small to be concealed.

  She looked at me, brown eyes glassy in the dark, and touched my arm with her hand. “Did you go to the doctor?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s fine. It’s nothing. He said it will go away in time. Just scars from the gas the Japs used.”

  I held her gaze. She kissed me and slid her hand across my chest. Her body was hot beneath the blanket, and she sighed again, differently than before, and pressed herself against me. My hands sought the softness of her breasts. I kissed her and felt her fingers trailing down the scars on my side and stomach. I was tired and sore, but I found the energy for this.

  I figured if closed my eyes, I would picture Annie Groves, so I kept them wide open. I stared into Lynn’s eyes and experienced her as my wife. It was brief and intense, and when we finished, we lay sweating and smiling on the unmade bed, my legs over hers. The fan turned slowly on the ceiling overhead. There was a night chill lingering in the air. Lynn’s breasts were jeweled with her sweat.

  “I’m glad you’re all right,” she said. “When you’re gone, I worry about you. The longer you’re gone, the more I worry.” She stretched her arm lazily across the bed. Her fingers laced into the salted blond hair at my temple.

  “Don’t go,” she said. “This mystery or whatever it is. Don’t do it.”

  “No one else will,” I said. It wasn’t a lie.

  “Please,” she said, and her face was so twisted up with sadness that I resented it.

  “I’ll try,” I said at last. “Maybe I can do it all from a desk.”

  She kissed me again. The gratitude in her eyes might have melted a softer heart. She slept in my arms, but I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, thinking about everything but her.

  While Lynn snored, I returned to those first days on the Home Islands. They spilled out of my head and flowed across the ceiling in overlapping projections of films playing all at once. As soon as one scene came into focus, the next intruded and began playing over top.

  We came off the landing ramps and shared horrors on a scale impossible to conceive in advance, sacrifices unbearable, piling one atop the other in strata of tangled metal and slain men. I fought hard and killed men and witnessed great heroics by my brothers and by the Japs. The company suffered heavy losses. Many were killed getting off the beach. All of us were wounded.

  We climbed the ragged cliffs and beyond, into the wasteland, where no building or tree stood as it was before. The ground was blackened. Here and there we took cover behind the slumping masonry of a workshop or collapsed chimney.

  The Japs we found were maniacs. Blinded and deafened by the bombs. Some couldn’t even stand, but they fought us until we were close enough to see their burned faces. We battled with a single man crouching behind a pile of slag for nearly ten minutes. When we finally killed him with a hand grenade and overtook his position, we realized the slag was a blackened Jap tank. Bully forced open a hatch, and a gust of steam billowed out. The crew was cooked in there like pork in a Dutch oven.

  The civilians came at us just as hard. Old men, women, and even children hurled bombs at trucks and attacked us at night using knives and farm tools. There were no orders about killing the civilians, but it was commonplace, even among my squad. The slightest suspicion and we killed them. What else could we do? We couldn’t chance leaving them at our backs.

  After two days we were covered in soot from the atom bombs. The Jap civilians were so small compared to us, so tiny and underfed. We had phrase books, but there was no communicating with them. Not by words. They did not react to us as if we were merely an invading army. They screamed and ran from the sight of us. Children wailed long after they’d fled from view.

  The next day we left the ruins and passed into a dense forest. The trees blotted out the sky, and the air was cool and rich with strange, flowery smells. Monkeys called out warnings as we approached, and the singing birds fell silent whenever we drew near. It was disquieting. Even when there were no buildings to betray the Japanese architecture, I could feel the difference. I did not recognize the insects that crawled upon our arms or the plants that we passed by.

  The morning of the second day in the forest I climbed a tree and gazed out at a nearby hill. A huge bird took flight. It seemed golden in the morning light, and its wings beat slowly over the tops of blue-green trees that lent the air their perfume. The strangeness of the place was oppressive. In that moment I felt as if I stood in prehistory or upon the face of another planet.

  The next day our task was to capture a hill to create an opening for the regular Army. We took the damned hill after a bloody battle with armed Japanese civilians - school children and their teachers . We worked alongside the few prisoners we took to bury all the dead and then we made them help us cut a road for the trucks.

  The Army used the road, but refused to advance past Kushikino. There was more hard fighting ahead. It was street fighting with long artillery duels and messy block-to-building engagements that reminded me of the awful newsreels the Soviets smuggled out of Stalingrad. The Japs just didn’t want to quit on Kushikino.

  Tanks finally arrived from the reserve division, and these broke the stalemate. We were too weary to cheer or wave. The column of tanks ascended the path into the mountains, and we followed to clear out the artillery positions. The Japs had built an entire complex of tunnels in the mountains facing Kushikino, and so it took several more days of heavy fighting.

  Our entire division, or what remained of it, followed the tanks north and came upon the mountains as a flood. We broke into smaller units, companies at first and then platoons, and we streamed into the foothills and up the slopes, north toward Kagoshima Sendai. It was our final objective to cut off southern Kyushu from the north.

  We passed into the place where the second atomic bomb had fallen. By then we’d learned of others, falling in support of the Army and the Anzacs. Seven in all. This dead place was just another small town without even a name on our maps. It was once an airfield and mustering point for a Japanese division; now it was a charred valley of melted trucks and roads covered in ash.

  As we passed through this valley, we took on the character of the ruins. Soot once more covered our faces and clothes. The whites of our eyes and our teeth stood out against the black of our faces. We fought for a day in the ruins of a hospital against a militia of half-blind burn victims. These men had not moved from this ruined place since the bomb had fallen weeks earlier.

  They were like the feral survivors of a shipwreck stranded on an island long ago. Even as they fired at us, we could see they were dying from the bomb’s poison. Their heads were wrapped in soiled bandages, and their mouths were bloody and toothless. Even so, they killed several in our platoon. Even the invalids, hidden away in ditches and concealed beneath toppled wa
lls, laid hammers against the firing pins of artillery shells to take their toll in blood.

  We were glad to leave that valley behind on the following day. We climbed out, up a misty mountain road bracketed by cliff and a forest fallen and scorched by the heat of the bomb. We overtook a large group of refugees without warning. The elderly and mothers carried their livelihood in bundles upon their backs. Their children marched along behind them like ducklings. The children cried at the fearsome look of us, and the women spoke curses I could not understand.

  “Oni! Oni! American!” one woman said. Her face was livid with burns. The bird-squawk of her voice carried down the line, and others shouted it. “Oni! American!”

  As the cry spread, there was a great commotion, and many of the women hurled their children over the side of the road and off the mountain. The poor tots screamed in fear, and their tiny bodies tumbled into the mist shrouding the valley below. Their mothers were silent and leaped to join their sons and daughters. We witnessed suicides so often that we were rarely moved by them, but this was different, absolute nihilism.

  We panicked and tried to stop them. Some men pleaded and stood in their way; Bully desperately searched for his phrase book. I fired my pistol into the air, but this only sent more of them charging off the cliff with their sons and daughters.

  “Oni! Oni!” the remaining women called after us as we continued past the refugees, into the mountains, into an alien world, precious and fragile, glimpsed and now ending.

  We never fought for Sendai. Our company was kept out of it to rest and refit. We bivouacked and gained back some of the weight we’d lost. They brought us mail, and we read our letters and tried to laugh about what we’d just been through. I wrote back to Lynn. I tried to imagine myself a tourist rather than an invader and did a lousy job describing the sights and smells of the country. I wrote her about the mist in the mountains and the huge bird that seemed to be made of gold. I lay in a hammock at night, beneath a mosquito net pilfered from a Jap house, listening to the strange hum of the insects and the rustle of rats in the grass.

  The morning after Sendai fell, a jeep drove up the muddy track to our tents. It was a runner from Battalion HQ. He was a skinny sort, with a big Adam’s apple and a warbling voice. He had orders to bring me, alone, to the HQ in the new Sendai airfield.

  The airfield was just being built, mostly tents and a single observation tower with a radio mast. Fuel and supply trucks were convoying from the south. The close-air-support planes that had helped us during the fight for Kushikino were re-based here. The pilots were tanned and clean, smiling like film stars, imports from some island airbase we’d probably hacked for them out of a godforsaken island jungle three months ago. I couldn’t resent them. I’d seen what happened if they had to bail out and the Japs got them. Even the farmers would cut them to pieces and string them up.

  Colonel Ainsley’s command tent was dimly lit and smelled of lamp oil. There were two men seated at a table so small, it was surely intended for children. They hunched over a pair of black radio sets, focused on the dials and their notepads of white paper to the exclusion of everything else in the world. Several Marine officers were conferring around a map table representing the area of operations of V Amphibious. I recognized Ainsley by the bronze egg of his bald head. He stood with parade posture beside his map table. I couldn’t tell if he was listening to or ignoring the officers discussing the disposition of the Japanese forces.

  “Sergeant Cord,” said Ainsley without even looking at me, “you’ve been requested by someone else. Give him what he needs.”

  “It’s good to see you.”

  I sought the source of the voice in the dimness of the tent and came face-to-face with a duplicate. Another Warren. It was a startling thing to be reminded of what I was. Only in the throes of war was it possible for me to forget my immortal nature.

  The man smiled in a friendly manner and extended his hand to me. “Lieutenant Milo Gardener.”

  Scant years separated us, but this Lt. Gardener, dressed in the uniform of an Army Paratrooper, distinguished himself by a deep scar running from his jaw up to the severe part in his pomade-flattened hair. He seemed softer than I imagined myself. Paler. He did not seem the brutal sort made for war, and yet he was relaxed and confident in greeting me.

  “This is against the Covenant,” I said, though I shook Lt. Gardener’s hand.

  “It’s good you take your duties as Judge seriously. I know well enough you don’t generally enforce it on the battlefield. That’s partly why I’m here. The Covenant has been broken, seriously, and I am here to execute the orders of General Shiftman. Are you familiar with him?”

  I knew of Shiftman. An elder Gideon, forty years out of the Pool, he hid his identity behind dyed blond hair and a ridiculous Victorian beard. He was as vain as them all, pompous, a poor strategist, but he held his lips close to the ear of FDR and probably Truman. He was one of the driving forces behind the separation of the Air Force from the Army in 1941. He was all mixed up in the atomic bomb business as well. It was disconcerting enough to meet a fellow Warren in person, but to meet one who served a master like Shiftman was a particular stripe of unpleasantness.

  “What do you want, Lieutenant?”

  “I am new to the theater and need a man familiar with its perils. A man I can trust and who understands what is at stake. No one fits the bill better than you.”

  “Excuse me, sir. How about you quit playing me like a piano and tell me what’s at stake?”

  Gardener took out a small leather-bound diary from his breast pocket. I could see that its pages were stuffed with postcards and photographs and bits of newspaper. From its pages he handed me a small, yellowing photograph. It was a gauzy military portrait of a young Japanese man in an officer’s uniform of the Imperial Army. He was handsome and impeccably groomed. He posed with the confidence of the Japanese military aristocracy. I turned the photograph over but could not read the Japanese characters on the back.

  “Lt. Col. Tomo Ishii,” Gardener explained. “I’ve pursued him from Europe, believing him to carry secrets that imperil the fabric of our country. Proof of what we are, to begin with. Our ships and men hounded him on a long journey through the unkindest parts of the globe. I lost his trail only recently. I hoped him dead, but he has resurfaced here.”

  “Kyushu?”

  “Here,” said Gardener. “In the prisoner holding camp near Winton Beach, his military ID was collected and logged. But he’s not in the camp. I’ve been over those sick and miserable creatures a half dozen times. But I think I know where we can find him. I need you to help track him through this unfamiliar terrain.”

  “I’m a Marine, not a tracker.”

  “West of Sendai, in the mountains that stand between the Marines and the Imperial Army. Difficult terrain and dangerous times. His unit maintains a fortified military hospital, formerly a lumber mill, in the forests of Mt. Kansen. We must recapture Ishii before he can retreat to the safety of his unit there.”

  “What is this unit?”

  Lt. Gardener’s lips tightened into a thin frown, and he gazed down at his hands. “Unit 731.”

  “I’m not familiar with that unit,” I said. “Commandos?”

  “I wish these were only men of arms.” Gardener brushed away a buzzing fly. “Long ago you and I shared a primitive morality of absolutes. We believed in the concept of pure good and pure evil, a childish notion that does not account for the nuances of reality. Sergeant, Unit 731 is that rarest thing, without nuance or gradation. It is pure evil.”

  Gardener took the photograph back from me and regarded its face.

  “And Lt. Col. Ishii brings them the seeds of our destruction.”

  A car honked out on the street. I was unsure whether I was awake and remembering the war or asleep and dreaming my memories. It was still dark outside, but on the cusp of dawn. I carefully rolled Lynn onto her back and got up from the bed.

  I padded across the hall, catching a glance of my blue-g
ray face in the mirror as I pissed into the dark void of the toilet by memory. As I emerged back into the hall, a loud jangle brought me wide awake. The phone was ringing in the living room. I stubbed my toe on the way to answer it, falling onto the couch and grabbing at my throbbing big toe as I cradled the receiver to my ear.

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Casper Cord.” The voice was a whisper.

  “Yes, who is this?”

  “Listen to me. They’re coming for me. I don’t have much time. Listen to me. I know what it is.”

  “Who is this? Tell me who it is, and I’ll listen.”

  “Beau Reynolds.”

  I wasn’t fond of hearing from duplicates, least of all ones that I’d just sent back to the soup.

  “Mr. Reynolds, you’re not supposed to be using that—”

  Distant shouts and barking dogs echoed down the phone line. An involuntary thrill of anxiety prickled my neck and arms.

  “They’re coming. I can hear them. They brought the dogs. Oh, Christ.” There was a sound like a chair or bed being moved. “It won’t hold them. This place is under lockdown. It’s ...”

  “Where are you?” My throbbing toe was forgotten. I scrambled in the dark for pen and paper. “What’s the address?”

  “I’m in Spark. It’s ... there are no people here anymore. The duplicates are ...”

  “What?”

  “They’re doing something with the Pool. Digging. I don’t know what ... it’s not important.”

  Loud impacts against hollow wood. Shouting voices very close now. Dogs barking so loudly, it was difficult to hear Beau Reynolds, but the panic in his voice was clear enough.

  “I’ve been through to the other side.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Splintering wood. The loud clatter of the telephone being dropped.

  “The blackness that gnaws at you! The memory that was taken out of our heads! I’ve been through!” Beau Reynolds shouted. “It goes all the way through.”