by Unknown
“What happened here?” I held out the first aid kit to one of the refugees. All it contained was a few Band-Aids and some iodine, useless for injuries like these.
“They attacked us when we tried to take a shortcut across a field.”
That was probably a lie. They hadn’t cut across the field. They’d been stealing.
The woman with the chest wound shuddered violently and breathed her last as we stood there watching helplessly. The same thing would probably happen to the rest of them before first light.
But I had a far bigger problem. When the sun rose, my family would have nothing to eat.
Next morning, my son wore himself out looking all over our little home for Siesta. If I tried to step outside, he whimpered fearfully. My wife stood in the empty kitchen, staring into space with an irritated look. Finally she took a carving knife from the drawer.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to find a farmer and get some food.”
“Are you crazy?” I tried to take the knife away from her.
“Let me go. I won’t threaten anyone. It’s for protection. Who knows what they’ll do to me if I’m carrying food?”
I sighed. It was true. Things really were that bad.
“Don’t worry, I’ll go.” I grabbed the cars keys and went outside.
A middle-aged man with thinning hair walked up to me as I was getting in the car.
“Thank you for last night.” He bowed politely.
“What happened?”
“They didn’t make it. But at least you tried to help. We won’t forget it.”
Even in the midst of tragedy, some people were still human. Not demons who would take someone’s beloved dog, beat him to death, and eat him.
As I drove toward the village, wondering where I might find a farmer willing to sell me some food, I noticed a man standing at the edge of a field under the blazing sun. He was holding a sharpened spear fashioned from a length of bamboo.
My jaw dropped as I got closer. It was the potter who lived down the street. I was careful to avoid his eyes as I passed. Farther down the road was the home of a farmer I’d met once or twice. I pulled up in front of his garden.
A voice called from somewhere in the corn. “Oh, it’s the baker.”
“Excuse me. Might I possibly buy food from you? Some people forced their way into my house and made off with everything we had. They even took our dog. If you could spare us a little, just enough for my son. I’ll pay you generously, of course.” I kept bowing obsequiously as the farmer came closer.
“No, no, that’s not necessary.” Always gentle and taciturn, he seemed to be groping for words. “I don’t need money, but a favor if you could. I need you to stand guard. I’ll make it worth your while.” He glanced at something on the ground near my feet.
A bamboo spear. I remembered the woman from the night before and shuddered. This was just the kind of weapon that could have dealt someone a wound like hers.
“The fire brigade and some boys from the youth association got together and whipped up three hundred of them. We can’t work the fields with people trying to run us down or sneak up and whack us over the head. If we don’t stand our ground, they’ll pull the crops up, no matter if they’re not ready to harvest. I can’t see stabbing anyone, even in self-defense. Throttling chickens is bad enough. Can’t work, either, with one of these in my hand.”
“What would I do with it?” I squatted and picked up the spear.
“I’m not saying you have to use it. Just stand guard with it. They’re sure to stay away. Then me and the missus can work without worrying. The pumpkins and eggplant are going to rot if we don’t get them in.”
“Kind of like a scarecrow.”
“Something like that.” The farmer smiled.
I accepted the primitive weapon and took up a position at the edge of the field. I had discovered the truth: no one was going to sell me an ear of corn, no matter what I offered.
I looked down the road and saw another man with a spear coming toward me. It was the owner of Le Lagon, a small hotel in our neighborhood. He looked like a proper mercenary with his camo shirt. When he saw me, he acknowledged our shared mission with a bow.
“Things are bad, aren’t they?” I said by way of reply. I looked closer at his shirt. My throat tightened. The camo pattern was spattered with blood.
“What happened? Are you all right?”
He thrust his chin out proudly and smiled.
“I got a young one. An old lady surprised him trying to steal her potatoes. He slugged her and ran off. When I yelled at him to stop, he pulled a knife on me. I had to run him through.”
He stood legs apart, spear planted on end in the road, chest thrown out like some old samurai. I was speechless. All I could do was gape at him.
“Let me tell you something, Hashimoto. There’s no shame in living like a mouse. A man can stand behind a counter and kiss the customer’s ass. ‘Very sorry, it won’t happen again.’ ‘Yes, I’ll do exactly as you say.’ That’s life. But to defend your wife and children, you do whatever it takes.”
I spent the rest of the day by the road, holding my spear while the sun roasted the top of my head. Luckily I didn’t have to use my weapon, and as the light was fading, a few young men from the fire brigade arrived to take over for the night.
The farmer gave me two rice balls, some pickled eggplant, and an ear of boiled corn.
When I got home and told my wife what I’d been doing, and showed her what I’d earned for it, she smiled gently for the first time in days.
“You stood guard. Good for you. Be careful, though. You can’t just stand around with a spear. You have to know how to use it.”
My heart froze. My wife woke our son up and fed him steamed corn and a rice ball. I let the food sit. I didn’t feel like eating. She pushed the rest toward me.
“Come on, eat up. You’ll need your strength when the time comes. Don’t worry about me, I don’t need it.” She smiled affectionately.
Morning came sunny and cloudless again. The sky had the deep blue of autumn, but the sun had lost none of the heat of summer. I idly pictured a helicopter passing overhead, parachuting big packages of food and medicine. Sure enough, soon after that a helicopter did pass by, but it dropped no packages. It was heading straight for the shattered metropolis. It wouldn’t be dropping supplies there, either. It was a broadcast helicopter, on its way to capture scenes of starvation and violence for the titillation of people watching safely at home.
I still couldn’t grasp what was happening. Even if there was no relief from abroad, people wouldn’t have to risk their lives to steal food if the rest of the country pitched in to gather supplies and distribute them equally. It wasn’t as if Japan was facing a food shortage like the one Okada always warned us about.
The little tent village in front of our house was gone. Probably they had given up trying to survive here and had pushed on toward Nagano. But people kept trudging in from the direction of Kofu.
The news showed rescue teams reaching emergency shelters on the outskirts of Tokyo. Now the death toll was five thousand. That didn’t mean five thousand had died, it was just the number confirmed. There was nothing said about the breakdown of order and the shortage of food.
I set out for another day of security duty. When I reached my post and got out of the car, I heard a strange, high-pitched mewling that sounded like an animal in distress. Late at night, when footsteps sounded on the road outside our house, Siesta had often whimpered like this.
The sound seemed to be coming from a cabbage patch by the road. I crept closer. Someone, probably the fire brigade, had dug a deep pit a few feet off the road. I peered over the edge. A man and a woman, clad in blood-soaked T-shirts and jeans, lay at the bottom. They were impaled on sharpened bamboo stakes.
A booby trap. Who could h
ave done such a thing? A pit of sharpened stakes in the middle of a cabbage patch?
“What now?”
“Nothing. They’re done for.”
I turned to see two fellow guardsmen from the neighborhood, standing in the road behind me.
“I don’t have to listen to this noise. Let’s get on with it.” One of them was the owner of the pension that had been torched. He picked up a shovel and started slinging dirt into the pit.
“Not on my property!” The farmer’s wife came out of the house, yelling and distraught. “Get rid of them somewhere.”
“No way I’m going to touch those things,” said the other mercenary.
“You think I want to?”
The farmer’s wife chanted a Buddhist prayer as they busily filled the pit with dirt. The mewling sounds eventually ceased.
“Maybe we should put up signs warning people about the pits,” said the pension owner with a wry chuckle.
“Yeah. If they ignore them it’s not our fault.”
That afternoon I brandished my spear for the first time. A family came up the road from the direction of Kofu and began badgering the farmer’s wife to sell them food. They looked like they hadn’t eaten in several days. The woman refused the man’s repeated demands, and he was about to use his fists on her and her elderly father-in-law when I stepped in with my spear. To my relief, the family turned heel and left immediately. Carrying a weapon didn’t make me feel safer. Just threatening someone with it, much less having to use it, is terribly stressful for a normal person.
I drew night duty the next day. For the first time I used my weapon. A refugee pulled a knife on me, and I gave him a spear thrust. It certainly had an effect. I wondered what would happen to the man as he staggered off, still clutching a whole stalk of corn. I let him go. I was too terrified by what I’d done, and too conscience-stricken, to move.
When dawn came, the farmer paid me with a rice ball, some pickled eggplant, and a small portion of cooked soybeans. I returned home, gave the food to my wife, and went to bed immediately. I was due back on duty in the afternoon, but I stayed in bed.
At first my wife worried that I was ill, but when she realized I was afraid to go back, she stared down at me with contempt.
“You’re completely irresponsible. You can lie there without a care in the world while your family starves. If you don’t care about me, fine, but what about Hiro?”
I shook my head. “Don’t say that!”
She started in on me then, screaming like she did before. I couldn’t handle it; I got up and slapped her. She stared at me for a few seconds, dazed, and turned and ran downstairs. Seconds later she came pounding back. When I spun round to face her, she gave me a crack on the head. She was wielding a rolling pin. She bounced it off my skull a second time.
“Weakling! You can’t kill a stranger, but you can kill me and Hiro?!”
I covered my head with my hands and ran downstairs onto the terrace. The picnic table and chairs where we used to enjoy family barbecues were still there. Thick strands of that hated kudzu plant were twining up their legs.
Kudzu. That was it. Okada had said you could extract starch from the roots. The refugees who risked their lives to steal crops didn’t know it. I looked out from the veranda. Now everything seemed to be blanketed in a sea of vivid green. I raced to grab the shovel and started digging as fast as I could. The thick white roots dove deep into the soil. Ecstatic, I brought a bundle of roots into the kitchen, washed them, pureed them in the blender with water, and filtered the milky liquid. Heated on the stove, the result was a thick, translucent starch with a unique sweetness, like arrowroot.
My son loved it. My wife did, too, and smiled, a smile I’d given up hope of ever seeing again.
“I hope you don’t expect us to survive on this morning, noon and night.”
“Come on, things won’t be like this forever.”
“Then how long do we have to wait? When and how is someone going to help us?”
My wife took over for me that night. I stayed up till morning holding our son, who fell asleep crying for his mother.
She returned next morning laden with an astonishing amount of rice and worm-eaten beans and corn. To me, her youthful face was all the more attractive when she was angry. I wouldn’t have been the only one who thought so. I had an idea I knew what she’d done to earn this much food.
As a last resort, women have something they can always sell. I felt a mixture of anger, sadness, and resignation as she stripped off her black T-shirt, threw it on the floor and went upstairs. But when I tossed it dejectedly into the washing machine and started the water, I froze with disbelief. The water was stained bright red. What I’d thought was sweat was something else entirely.
My wife wasn’t hurt. The blood was someone else’s. She’d earned the food, but not the way I imagined. I wasn’t sure which was worse.
I went quietly upstairs. She was already asleep, cradling Hiro. Her breathing was deep and powerful, like a lioness after the kill.
That was four days ago. Since then, my wife has stood guard over the fields eight hours a day. Things are getting better all the time. Today, for the first time, a truck arrived from Nagano and distributed toilet paper, vacuum-packed rice, and canned food. But the supplies were strictly for the refugees. The locals were told to rely on their own resources. For the transplants in the pension district, there was nothing. Well, at least things haven’t settled down yet. Standing guard is the only way we can earn our food.
Yesterday my wife came home looking overjoyed. She had found the woman who murdered Siesta, and beaten her legs with a club until the woman was unable to stand.
I’m beginning to notice an unmistakable look of pride in the faces of the farmers. It’s the mercenaries, with no farming skills, who are bathing in blood to protect them, and being fed by them.
Okada was right. The farmers have the upper hand after all.
The rumor now is that people from Tokyo are bringing disease with them. The news was reporting it too, until two days ago, but then suddenly stopped talking about it. It’s a taboo subject, like the breakdown of public order.
But things can’t go on like this indefinitely. In a week everything will be better. I’m sure of it.
I’ll be digging kudzu roots again today. I never touch the rice and corn and beans my wife brings home. Surviving on kudzu starch alone is the only thing I can do to preserve my self-respect as a human being. But I’m dizzy all the time. The diarrhea is terrible. I keep getting these bruises, I don’t know why. Maybe it’s one of those diseases people are talking about.
Still, I believe things will get better. Very soon, now. After all, this isn’t a real food shortage.
“Hideki didn’t speak any English,” Spense said laboriously as they made their way up the narrow, poorly lit stairs. “Didn’t care to. So I took him under the wing, so to speak. Helped him make his way.”
Philip K. Marks tried to control his breathing as they tackled the third flight of stairs, but he was feeling his age. And weight. He contemplated the unfairness of things: having forgotten half his life for reasons he had also forgotten, he’d had the usual middle-aged epiphany and gone sober, started walking. And still he huffed and puffed up the stairs, and he wondered why all of his acquaintances lived in walk-ups. And then he wondered how one upgraded his acquaintances to people who lived in buildings with elevators.
“How’d you communicate?” Marks said, careful to mask his shortness of breath.
Spencer rolled his broad shoulders. He was a tall, dark-skinned man in well-used, oily overalls, rail thin except in the belly, where what appeared to be a swallowed basketball ballooned the front of his clothes. “We said a lot just bein’ in a room, you know? Ain’t that hard.”
The fifth floor was a long time coming between Spense’s arthritic knees and Marks’s labored breathing. When it t
ook Spencer a few moments of struggle to unlock the door to apartment 5B in the dark, stifling hallway, Marks was grateful for the opportunity to collect himself.
The apartment was a five-room railroad. The door opened into the kitchen, which was a large room with very few cabinets and little counter space, dominated by a grease-encrusted old behemoth of a stove, a gas-on-gas model that was also the heat source for the apartment. A water heater had been wedged into the space between the refrigerator and the stove, and a large wooden table filled the center of the room. The walls were an unfortunate shade of yellow, the floor was thick vinyl tile in a shade of holiday green, and Marks found he couldn’t look at both simultaneously without getting queasy. The rest of the apartment, three rooms like a wide corridor leading into darkness, somewhere in the gloom past the stove.
At first Marks thought two people were seated at the table. One was an elderly Japanese man with long silver-black hair, dressed in blue boxer shorts, black socks, and a white sleeveless undershirt. A teacup sat in front of him, a spoon neatly on a folded napkin next to it. There was a slip of paper on the other side of the cup, characters written on it—Japanese or Chinese or something, Marks assumed—in a firm, steady hand.
The other at first appeared to be a young woman in lingerie, but she was unmoving, staring blankly, her hands palms down on the table.
“Jesus,” Marks said, frowning and hunching down a little to get a lower angle. “Is that a mannequin?”
“Doll,” Spencer said, his voice suddenly darker and choked. “Sex doll. They call ’em Dutch Wives.”
Marks stared at the doll. It was the most realistic sex doll he’d ever seen or imagined. Even the eyes looked right, at first. Staring at them he was filled with a sense of dread, a panic welling up from his belly, making his bowels squirm. But out of the corner of his eye she looked like a beautiful woman wearing a teddy and thong, her hair mussed, her makeup perfect. The face had a vaguely Asian cast to it, and the figure, beneath the wrinkled and stretched lingerie, was flat and childlike with only the barest hint of maturity.