The First Immortal

by James L. Halperin

  When the prisoners arrived at the eastern mouth of Tokyo-Wan, or Tokyo Bay, the Japanese at the camp were shocked to learn so many had died. Transported under similar conditions, their own soldiers had arrived at their destinations alive and functional. Japanese soldiers were smaller, but size had had little to do with it. Unlike these boys, they’d been mentally prepared for the ordeal, had known how long the journey would take and what would be waiting at the end of it.

  It was the fear, Ben decided. Fear of the unknown had killed so many of them.

  April 12, 1945

  The POW camp had no name; in Japanese culture, to name a place was to honor it. The allied prisoners at Futtsu came to refer to it as Purgatory, yet compared to the Asahi Mara, the camp was almost decent.

  “Good morning, Smee-tee-san.”

  Ben bowed and offered the austere young colonel a polite and equally mispronounced answer to his strained English greeting. “O hiyo gozaiymas, Yamatsuo-sama.”

  As they seated themselves, Hiro Yamatsuo’s face remained expressionless, but Ben imagined the colonel had just winced with his eyes. “Smee-tee-san,” he said, “we will please use English. I fear we Japanese will—how do you say?—find it of use soon.”

  This was Ben Smith’s seventh “interview” in the twenty-one months since his compulsory audience under the supervision of Futtsu’s ranking officer. No other prisoner except the camp’s ranking allied officer, Colonel Lawrence Rand, and of course Epstein, to voice his almost-daily complaints, had met with Yamatsuo so many times. In their first encounter, this same man had savagely used every psychological weapon short of physical torture to press Ben into providing whatever information he had. Even though Ben felt his knowledge would be of minimal value, he had refused to say anything. But he’d continued to treat his captors with appropriate and consistent respect.

  Since that first meeting, these interviews had become increasingly and inexplicably pleasant. Now that so much time had passed since his capture, Ben could only surmise that the officer simply liked him.

  He also found himself appreciating the subtle duality contained in so much of what Yamatsuo said and did. The deference he exhibited by insisting on “Engrish” was closely coupled with a pragmatic explanation of why this might be beneficial: a conspiratorial yet seemingly guileless admission that the Japanese were losing.

  But while he considered this Japanese taisa now treating him with such cordiality, a jumpy Moviola danced inside his forehead. The stop-start action was not unlike the images viewed through a hand-cranked nickelodeon, yet the stutterings and lack of color somehow made the impressions all the more real:

  It is the day after their ragtag company—the survivors, anyway-disembarked from the floating sewer. The office is the same as Ben and Yamatsuo occupy now, but instead of being comfortably seated on a futon, Ben stands at the open door, facing inward, next in line for interrogation.

  Before him a nearly catatonic “Little Sparks” Grogan, seaman first class and second level radio operator, sits in something that looks much like a deck chair from a western-style cruise ship. His forearms are bound to the side rails with heavy twine. Taisa Yamatsuo sits to his front in a similar chair. Beside Little Sparks stands Socho (Sergeant Major) Teshio, ominously holding a pair of needle-nosed pliers.

  This taisa, this colonel now pouring tea for Ben, barks interrogatories to the socho, who repeats them to Grogan in broken English. But the seaman comports himself well. His replies are a continuing monologue of name, rank, and serial number.

  Teshio looks to Grogan, then to his taisa, who nods his head with an abrupt snap. The sergeant wheels instantly upon the bound sailor, grasps the index fingernail on Grogan’s hand with the pointed-end pincers, and in a single, shockingly quick motion, jerks it from the boy’s hand.

  Grogan’s scream is like no other sound Ben has ever heard before.

  Holy mother of God! Ben refuses to even consider the possibility that he himself might be next in line for such treatment. Is it because Little Sparks is the only radioman who survived the sinking? Do they think his position made him privy to special information? Or are they using Grogan to strike fear into the rest of them?

  Whatever their reasons, the Japs don’t stop. It takes twelve minutes for the sailor to lose all ten fingernails. Ben vomits twice. The screams, the hopeless agony, and the courage Grogan shows despite his anguish, fill Ben with a hatred he’d never suspected possible within himself. For the next three nights he will dream of nothing but strangling Yamatsuo. This dream is not a nightmare.

  The hate might have faded over time, except for one thing: Little Sparks had died from a secondary infection six days later, and Ben’s loathing for his present host had planted deep roots in hard clay.

  “Domo, Yamatsuo-sama,” he said, forcing a polite smile.

  “Hiro-san,” the colonel corrected. “It will soon be inappropriate—is that the word?—to address me as a superior.”

  Ben made no immediate reply. What the hell could he say? Finally, ignoring the implications of the question’s context, he responded, “Yes. As I believe you meant it, ‘inappropriate’ is the correct word choice.”

  Both men sat in motionless silence for several seconds, each waiting for the other to offer the next disclosure.

  Yamatsuo handed him a tattered photograph of a young Japanese woman standing next to an American who looked vaguely like Ben; a little shorter perhaps, but the resemblance readily apparent. “My niece, Hatsu,” Yamatsuo said, “my older brother’s daughter. And that’s her fiancé. Last time I saw Hatsu, she was nine years old, and even this picture is from 1941. Of course I have never met him.”

  “Of course.” Aha! Ben thought. Maybe the prick treated him differently because he looked like Yamatsuo’s nephew-to-be.

  “Her future-husband fights Germans in Italy, I imagine, while she waits, along with the rest of my brother’s family, in Arizona. At one of your internment camps.”

  “I see.”

  Yamatsuo poured o cha, a translucent greenish-brown tea, into tiny earthenware cups. He presented a cup to Ben, and then, as if in response to an unuttered, mordant joke, he asked, “How will it be for me, Smee-tee-san? What will you Americans do to officers of such a place as this?”

  Interesting. The bastard was assuming the Americans would be after revenge. A small portion of Ben’s mind danced in ravenous anticipation of meting out retribution to his tormentor; perhaps driving him to suicide by wielding the weapon of dishonor: Yeah Hiro-san, you evil cocksucker The allies’ll probably march you naked through the streets of Tokyo, before they tear you limb from limb. But as Ben considered the notion, he realized that he could never, must never, utter such words.

  Still, Yamatsuo must have glimpsed something terrible, even wolfish, as it flashed behind the young sailor’s eyes. He stiffened. “Perhaps it will be more honorable for me to commit seppuku. Life without dignity is no life. Is it not better to know one’s time of dying rather than to wait for it? As you Americans say, you can’t live forever…”

  At that moment, Ben no longer saw Yamatsuo as his foe but, for the first time, as a pathetic fellow human being.

  Every act of kindness or spite was like a boulder pitched into an endless sea. The ripples dispersed and widened. Forever.

  He looked deeply into Yamatsuo’s steel-gray eyes. “I’ve never said that. I know of nothing more precious than life, Hiro-san. To my mind, it is always too soon to die.” It was the most honest statement he’d ever made to the man. Ben was surprised, but only mildly, by the conviction behind his own words.

  August 16, 1945

  Ben crouched so he could speak to the sailor writhing in pain on the sticky, septic floor. Before treating symptoms, he had to address the boy’s fear. “Dysentery,” Ben said, his voice calm with a soothingly detached sympathy, “but not too bad, I think. Bobby, I know you feel god-awful, but I promise you’re gonna be okay. Just keep drinking this. A small sip every five minutes or so. If you drink it too fast, i
t’ll make your diarrhea worse, and if you don’t drink enough, you’ll dehydrate.”

  Ben hardly felt healthy himself. Like every other prisoner at Purgatory, he scratched constantly from lice and insect bites. He often coughed up blood; diarrhea and nausea were relentless. Many of the prisoners would be physically and emotionally scarred, some crippled, but not Ben; escape from this lost-time world seemed certain to him now. Standing six feet two inches tall, he now weighed 133—twelve pounds more than he’d weighed back in February.

  Over the past several months, life had actually been improving for the allies. No longer did they endure routine interrogation, isolated incidents of torture, or solitary confinement. The guards actually gave them their Red Cross medicine. The food was better now, too, and far more plentiful. Yesterday they’d been fed twice; once more than their captors.

  “The Nips know they’re losing,” Epstein had speculated to Ben a few weeks earlier. “They’re treating us better to hedge their bets.”

  Ben had not responded to Carl. There’d been no complicity in any of his conversations with Colonel Yamatsuo, but he saw no purpose in revealing insights gained and subjecting himself to difficult questions about how he’d acquired them. Even to Epstein. Besides, he’d thought, there was always the possibility that Yamatsuo was feeding him bad information.

  They’d already passed twenty-five months at Futtsu, and throughout the entire hell-time of the POW camp, Ben had never even allowed himself to consciously remember the dreadful voyage that brought him to this place.

  This place. My God. How had mankind managed to fall down such a rat hole? What had gone wrong to create a world where people became shelf stock? They were being kept alive only because if they were disposed of, allied retribution would be more costly than the meager food or care they received. It seemed as if evolution had all been for nothing—like maybe it had started running backward.

  Now Ben watched in morbid fascination as Carl Epstein closed a gruesome wound on a semiconscious British sailor with safety pins. Ben said: “This is almost enough to make one rebuke Darwin. It’s like we’re regressing—becoming more like animals.”

  Epstein shook a head seemingly too large for his jockeylike body. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “No. Of course not. Evolution’s real enough, but this place—sometimes it makes me question everything.”

  Finishing his grim work, Epstein turned around. His face had come suddenly alive, as if their surroundings no longer mattered. “Then in light of your acceptance of Darwin’s theory,” he teased, “how do you explain the Christian view that when an ape dies, that’s all there is for him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Epstein grinned. “I can only imagine how the first human felt about arriving in heaven to receive his eternal reward and wondering what the hell happened to his parents.”

  Ben laughed. “Look, I only know what the Bible says about heaven. I haven’t actually been there, and neither have you.” But he already knew what was coming next.

  “I suppose those fellows who wrote the Old Testament have? Ben, every early Christian denomination once contended that the earth was the center of the universe. Many upheld that view centuries after scientists refuted it. The notion that our souls live forever evolved from the same place: our own self-centered egotism. Remember, the human brain is massively complex; capable of astounding feats of creativity and self-deception. And unfortunately, no one will ever be able to disprove the existence of an afterlife.”

  Ben shook his head, offering no reply. He simply asked, “Carl, what made you decide to become an atheist?”

  “Let me quote you a passage I memorized a few years ago,” Epstein said.

  “Okay.”

  “‘Disbelief,’” Epstein began, “‘crept over me at a very slow rate but at last was complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.’”

  “Who wrote that?” Ben asked.

  “It’s from Charles Darwin’s autobiography.” Epstein flashed a self-satisfied smirk.

  Ben fell silent for a long moment and considered his words carefully. “Look, Carl, I agree everlasting punishment for disbelief is a detestable doctrine, but not too many people I know would call it Christianity. I don’t pretend to embrace any particular organized religion; at least not every tenet of one…”

  Epstein arched bushy, Groucho-like eyebrows at Ben.

  “Hold it,” Ben continued. “Just because I’m not a good churchgoer doesn’t mean I think organized religion’s bad, or somehow evil. Few Americans endorse every law we’ve ever passed, either. But most of us still support our country. Things have happened to me, Carl, recently, that convince me there’s power in the universe we can’t begin to comprehend.”

  “Oh really? Like what?”

  “When I was floating in the ocean after they sank us,” Ben said, “I felt myself leaving my body. I saw my grandparents’ faces. I’m sure of it. It was more than a dream.”

  “Yeah,” Epstein agreed, “it was a full-fledged fucking delusion!” Yet even as his friend mocked him, Ben saw the gratitude in his eyes. After all, to a man who harbors no hope of reincarnation, life is infinitely precious.

  And both men were well aware that Epstein owed his to Ben.

  In spite of Ben’s stubborn refusal to “accept reality and denounce religion,” Epstein had to admit that his new aide-de-camp was scientific in his methods; the boy kept meticulous records of his cases and had learned a lot about medicine. Ben even managed to teach him a few things.

  “I’ve noticed,” Ben told him over a year before, “that the more they think we’re doing to help them, the faster they recover.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in magic.”

  “I don’t, but the power of suggestion’s as real as any science. Faith is a mighty force.” When there was nothing more he could do, Ben would give the sick sailors handmade salt tablets, or rainwater colored with ground clay, and over time it had become apparent, even to Epstein, that the placebos possessed a measurable remedial power.

  “Sometimes,” Ben had said to him, “you just need to spend a little time, talk, and listen. Show a suffering man that you understand what he’s going through and give him some hope. It’s amazing how much that helps. Caring and hope are as contagious as any disease. I trust you won’t mind if I try to infect some of your patients.”

  Epstein thought: Yes, there is a mind-body connection. Of course! That must be why so many doctors fall for mysticism.

  But he’d offered nothing more than a smile and an acquiescent nod. Carl Epstein knew when to quit.

  Most of them, including Ben, had begun to get mail through the Red Cross. His had been a three-page letter from Alice. Most of the events she’d described had occurred the day before she mailed it; some that very morning. From this he could infer that she must have been writing at least every other day, knowledge as valuable to him as the letter itself.

  “Ted and Connie Fiske received notification from the Army yesterday,” she’d written. “They opened it with dread, but read with great relief. We now anticipate Toby’s return from Italy in about two weeks’ time, with a Purple Heart and a bit of shrapnel in his left buttock. Apparently he’s fine other than that. They expect he’ll be off crutches by the time he gets home, and within a month won’t even be limping. It will be wonderful to see him again. We are all looking forward to the reunion…”

  Although the letters had never reached him, Alice implied that his fiancée had written faithfully. “…You might already know from her daily bulletins, but if my letter reaches you first, I’m sure you’ll be happy to learn that Marge re
ceived another promotion at the steel mill yesterday. At this rate, she’ll soon supervise the entire accounting department. She does fret over how you’ll feel about her working, but I’ve assured her that you’ll approve. Anything to help the war effort, right? Of course she intends to quit the moment you return to us. She misses and worries about you constantly, as we all do, and says the work helps keep her mind distracted…”

  It was barely noon and Ben had read his mother’s letter five times.

  He daydreamed about Marge and their last night together, the night they’d broken their vow to save themselves for their wedding day. “What if I never see you again?” Marge had said to him. “I’ll need the memory of you, Ben.” But he knew her concerns had been more for him, for his memories; memories that might help keep him alive for her. They’d rented a hotel room, shared a glass of wine.

  The first attempt had been clumsy. But it was sweet and close and without the self-consciousness that so often interfered with pleasure. By morning they’d taught each other what to do. The teaching had been mostly wordless, but the lessons well-learned. The number of times they learned them assured that: four times in all.

  Four times that Ben would relive ten thousand times each.

  Colonel Rand interrupted Ben’s reverie to ask him, and several other soldiers and sailors, to gather every able-bodied prisoner into the central courtyard. “Got an announcement to make,” he said.

  “Yes, sir… Oh. Yes sir!”

  When Ben got there, the courtyard was packed with all but a few of the 344 allied personnel still alive at Futtsu.

  The officer began the speech, his smile too obvious. Ben’s heart soared before Rand uttered the words: “The commandant just told me, uh, the Japanese finally surrendered to us. About thirty-six hours ago. We’re goin’ home, boys, war’s over.”