The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2016 (retail) (epub)

  I do not know who came up with the term maruta. It is possible that its usage preceded us, though I do not recall hearing it used in those introductory days. The first time we saw them we were in the hospital ward, where they looked like any patients, supine under clean sheets changed daily. The second time we saw them it was at the prison ward, where they looked like any prisoners, uniformed and wary. Both times, I remember the brief hush that fell over us as we registered exactly what we were being shown before we were briskly ushered away. By the time we were given full rein over our research, we were using the term, counting up the beds, tallying our maruta in preparation for our next shipment, always by train at night. Indeed, I believe it was a cargo transfer that I witnessed that morning on the train to Harbin.

  I was asked to accompany the inspection of such a cargo just once. Woken abruptly, I was summoned by an officer who, for this occasion, had driven his private jeep. Throughout the ride, I had been bleary, my mind cottony with sleep, and once I gleaned the purpose of the trip—a preliminary health scan—I shut out the chatter and arrived unprepared for the secluded station, the small squadron of military guards patrolling the length of the curtained train, the cargo’s white tarp peeled back to reveal twelve prisoners strapped to planks and gagged by leather bits.

  My first reaction was morbid fascination, my mind unable to resolve the image of these people packed like this, and the term maruta acquired an appropriateness that struck a nerve. I began to laugh, a sputtering sound that elicited a disapproving glance from the officer who pressed me forward. How they managed to survive I could not imagine. Trembling with exhaustion, they lay in their thin prisoners’ clothes, wet and stinking of their own unirrigated waste, until one by one they were unstrapped, forced to stand, their movements minced by the shackles that still bound their hands and feet. No one protested, the only shouts coming from the guards as they stripped and prodded them, the tips of their knives shredding their garments, exposing them first to the cold, then to the water as a pair of soldiers hosed them down.

  Had I been able to, I would have abandoned my post, and perhaps I made as if to do so, for the officer gripped my arm, his placid face nicked by repulsion, though it was unclear by whom or what. As the water dripped away, and the maruta were toweled off, I was led to the nearest plank, where four women, now manacled together, sat shivering. They were all in their twenties and thirties; their eyes were black with recrimination and their bodies so violently pimpled by the cold I could hardly palpate them. The second plank was an all-male group, each man, wiry with work, radiating humiliation so primal my own hands began to shake. The third and final plank was a mixed group, perhaps a family. One woman grew so agitated by my attempts to minister to a limp girl, I barely registered the man pulled from the train and added to the cargo. This new prisoner was my age, in good health and spirited enough to have risked the curtains to “spy” from the train window. He was brought to me to be tranquilized, and though I must have complied, I remember nothing else, only the leering heat of the soldiers snapped to attention behind me, and then later, the vague relief that flooded me when the next day I stepped into my ward and did not recognize a single face.

  Lumber mills?

  I do not believe anyone was so naïve.

  —

  Pingfang’s operation expanded with the war, its defensive function superseded by its natural twin: the development of biological weapons. This offensive capability had been pursued from the start, mostly in the form of small-scale tests surreptitiously deployed as creative endnotes to our ongoing anti-insurgency missions, but it did not peak until the war took that fatal turn west. By then, many of us had been dispatched to newly conquered regions or strategic teaching posts back home, but news continued to reach us, mostly as rumors but sometimes through odd details we recognized in otherwise ordinary news reports. As the war entered its last throes, Pingfang rose in importance. By the time Germany began its retreat, Pingfang, already anticipating a Russian offensive, had begun testing, for example, the human threshold for the northern freeze. How they planned to use the data I do not know. With so few resources and so little infrastructure left, there would have been no way to manufacture, let alone distribute, any new equipment. Why these tests struck me as crueler I also do not know. Perhaps the obvious brutality of the method touched my conscience. Or perhaps it was simply a defensive reflex, the mind’s protective instinct that indicts another in the attempt to save itself. After all, had I been in their position, I too would have likely carried out these experiments, meticulously freezing and thawing the living body to observe the behavior of frostbite or assess the tactical viability of a literally frozen troop. While some of us still insist on our relative humanity, I do not believe we can quibble over such fine points as degree.

  I, for one, return to the fact of the cargo inspection, and it was this that finally drove me from my practice, a quiet family clinic discreetly set up for me after the war. Despite promises, we had become an inconvenience for the university, and the director had found ways of paying us off. For a while the setup suited me fine. The clinic, bankrolled by the director, yielded enough to survive on, and I was able to keep to simple diagnoses and treatments. Even so, the body does not forget. A clammy arm, a quivering lip—my hands, once recruited for their steadiness, began to jump.

  So fifteen years ago, following my wife’s death, I ventured to F City. At the time China had just normalized its relationship with Japan, and my two colleagues and I, having respectively come to a similar juncture, found ourselves reunited at the K noodle shop known to connoisseurs for its duck. To say we were surprised would be an understatement. It took us a moment before we could attempt a greeting, our old hearts fluttering like scattered chickens. Once again we ate with a greediness we dared not explain and parted with a gaiety that consoled us. But I believe we would have preferred to have sat apart, if not for our curiosity and relief that this moment, dreaded and yearned for, had finally come to pass. Since then, we have had an unspoken agreement to reconvene on the same day every October, the fateful month we boarded the Nippon Maru.

  —

  Only once did S and I manage a sustained conversation. That day I had gone in search of a colleague, T, a man of considerable promise, who had taken to visiting the female prisoners. Soft-spoken and decorous, he had become the most vicious among us, his increasing notoriety forcing us to take turns to restrain him. But T was not in the prison ward that day, and I made my way to headquarters, thinking he had gone to request more “matériel,” but nobody had seen him there either. I was about to retrace my steps when I glimpsed S emerging from a restricted office, slipping a sheaf of papers into his laboratory coat. When he spotted me, he paused but made no attempt to explain himself. Instead he fell into step with me, convivially opening the door to the underground passage that connected all the buildings in Pingfang.

  “Who knows what’ll happen to him now,” I said, trying not to glance at the papers.

  “T?” S shrugged. “Who’s going to miss him?”

  “He could have had a whole career—a whole future.”

  “Future?” S looked at me. “You think this is going to last?”

  “I don’t think that’s anything we’re in a position to say.”

  “What? That we’re going to lose?”

  “Look.” I lowered my voice. “We’re just following orders.”

  “And you expect the world to be sympathetic?”

  “What choice do we have? T, on the other hand, is being excessive.”

  “And you think that makes you different from people like T.”

  “I’m saying the world will have to consider that.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  I was silent. It was true: The world had no obligations. What chance did we have in what was likely going to be a Western court? True, we were obeying orders, but we were the ones carrying them out; we could not look at our hands and plead innocence, dusting them off the way our superiors did
, passing off their dirty work, expecting it returned to them perfectly laundered “for the sake of the medical community.” From the start this had been an untenable situation we were expected to make tenable; forced to be responsible for what I felt we should not be, I had become resentful. I began misnotating my reports. Small slips, easily dismissed until the accumulation became impossible to ignore. Instead of 匹, the counter suffix for animals, I began writing 人, the counter suffix for humans. I worked systematically, substituting one for the other with a calculated randomness befitting Pingfang. I glanced at his laboratory coat. “I suppose it depends on if anyone finds out,” I said.

  “We all have to do what we have to do, don’t we?” S patted his coat, grinning.

  “After all this, maybe they’ll have no choice but to protect us,” I said.

  S did not disagree. “There may already be interest in the matter beyond our small military and government,” he replied.

  And he was right. That was more or less how it played out, with the Cold War descending on the infernal one, and the Americans, fearful of the Russians, agreeing to negotiate with our Lieutenant General for sole access to our research, the objective being the advancement of their own secret bio-program stymied by medical ethics. The result? Our full immunity in exchange for all our data, human and otherwise.

  —

  Few historians have unearthed, let alone published, evidence of Pingfang’s abuses. Those who have, have been divided over the problem of numbers. At one end, Pingfang’s casualty rate has been estimated at several thousand. At the other end, the number hovers closer to two hundred thousand, mostly Chinese but some Russian and Japanese deaths as well. I believe both figures tell a certain truth. While it is true that our furnaces saw no shortage of logs in their five years of operation, our goal was never mass extermination. Our tests, contingent on the human body, its organic processes and upkeep, were costly, and even our field tests, aerial or on-site, were limited to small villages and hamlets optimally secluded for tracking our data. But Pingfang cannot be confined to its five years of operation. Its construction took two years, fifteen thousand laborers, six hundred evictions; and afterward, when surrender triggered the destruction of the compound, whose walls were so thick special dynamite was needed, the final blasts were said to have released only animals, common and uncommon, the only witnesses to escape alive. And the gain? Militarily, history has shown the regrettable results, with reports of odd casualties surfacing now and again, if only in the half-light of prevarications. Medically, it is harder to assess, our research having pushed our field to the cutting edge, landing many of us influential positions in the pharmaceutical sector, where some of us are still directing the course of medicine, or the money in medicine, in not insignificant ways.

  The irony of it all is how well we ate within those walls, our maruta fed better than us to maintain optimal biological conditions. This prurient coupling of plenitude and death, so lavish in its complicity, has lent a kind of heat to my memory of Pingfang, compressing its eternity into a vivid blur coalesced around two towering chimneys, their twin shapes always looming, gone the moment I turn to look. These days it is this collusion of the mind with Pingfang’s irreality that terrorizes me, the fog of the entombed past threatening to release a hand, a face, a voice.

  My colleagues are more fortunate. Our annual meals seem to have done them good, churning up old soil, mineralized by the years, the new exposure letting them breathe. I, on the other hand, find myself hurtled back to people and places lost in time but not lost to me. At my age it is time, not space, that is palpable, its physicality reminding me of the finality of all our choices, made and lived.

  This morning they deemed the story of the straggler a hoax. Captain Nakahira Fumio, whereabouts irrelevant.

  So it goes, all of us subject to the caprice of time as it releases not what we hoped for but what it does before it closes its fists and draws back, once again withdrawing the past from the present. And perhaps that is as it should be. For what would I have done? Would I have risked showing myself, braving the eyes of idle journalists, braving those of my son? I have not even had the courage to visit my wife’s grave.

  —

  I mentioned S to my colleagues for the second time last year. After the first time, I should have known better, but the urge had taken hold of me. Over slivers of duck prepared to our specifications, I once again gave my account of the papers he had stolen, the exchange we had had. As before, they listened patiently, commenting on his courage, his uncanny foresight and reckless integrity, wondering how they could have forgotten such a character. Again, I described his solitariness, the way he had observed us—so quietly, so persistently—until they finally remembered, not the man himself, but the previous time I had given this account. Should he have exposed the papers? I asked. As before, my colleagues turned on me, asking me why I returned to this, what stake I had in these moot moral questions, nothing but a masochistic exercise—was I certain I hadn’t made him up?

  I defended myself, reminding them that we had each mentioned one person the other two hadn’t been able to recall, and frankly, I said, wasn’t the point to see if we could imagine it—another life, another self—because look at us, I said, year after year, three old men uselessly polishing stones.

  The silence was prickly. For the first time we parted uneasily, our forced gaiety failing to hide what we must have all been dreading. Indeed, the last few times we convened, we had gone through our menu of memories rather mechanically, and despite our appetites, our bodies had grown less tolerant of the fowl’s fattiness, and I am not sure that we haven’t lost our taste for the bird now that we have exhausted our staple of remembrances. Perhaps at our age it is only natural to want that release, to move once more in time with the clock.

  As for S, he may as well have not existed the way things turned out; he never exposed those papers. Yet he had offered me a chance, and perhaps that is my final offense. I did not take that chance. Instead I carried on, watching, as the world marched on—another war, another era—with fewer of us left every year to cast a backward glance.

  So perhaps this is why I continue to return, tantalized by those moments during which it might have been possible to seize the course of our own actions. Because, you see, we all had that chance. That day, just before we walked to the chimney, we had performed a surgery. I was at the head of the table, logging the charts, while T glided the scalpel over the body’s midline. Y, my noodle shop companion, was tracking the vitals, calling out numbers, the beat of the pulse measured against the ticking of the clock, as the body underwent all the characteristic spasms—the fluttering of the eyes, the shaking of the head—the once warm flesh rippling with tremors as the skin grew clammy, its tacky surface soon sliding beneath our gloved hands, as we wrestled the mutiny of the body. Perhaps if Y had stuck to procedure. But, you see, Y was monitoring the vitals; he was looking at the body, its special condition, and it occurred to him that he should be tracking not one pulse but two—the second, unborn beat. So he pressed his fingers in; the maruta bolted up. Fixing her eyes on us, she opened her mouth, stilling us. Few of us had acquired the language beyond the smattering of words we kept in our pockets like change, but we did not need language to understand her, her ringing voice a mother’s unmistakable plea reminding all of us of our primary duty: to save lives, not destroy them.

  Needless to say we did not save anyone’s life in that room that day. Instead we went on to complete a record number of procedures, breaking down bodies, harvesting our data, the brisk halls and polite examination rooms only reinforcing the power of omission as we pushed to meet the demands of a war that had heaved us over one edge, then another, leaving us duly decorated but as barren as the landscape we left behind.

  As for S, his story began irrecoverably to diverge from ours the day he slipped the papers from the office. While the rest of us hunkered down, he continued to plan and plot, imagining a justice that seemed inevitable. When the war ended
and the proceedings began, he too must have waited, hoping and fearing that justice would find itself. But the sentences never came, and he, more than any of us, must have felt its weight doubled back on him. Yet he never disclosed the papers. Instead he stowed them away, perhaps planning to donate them someday to one or another bookstore frequented by frugal university students. Then, fifteen years ago, he retired to a house in the rural outskirts of a city, where an old cedar gives its shade to a backyard visited by birds in the spring and blanketed by snow in the winter. There he spends his days tending to the saplings he has planted behind the shed, where he keeps the papers stashed in a crate of old textbooks. Now and again his mind wanders to the crate, and he marvels at his own resistance, the unrelenting human will to preserve itself.

  But today, with spring softening the breeze, and the birds abundant in the yard, he finds himself compelled to visit the papers. After all these years, it is a wonder they have survived, slightly yellowed but otherwise intact, and he places them on a workbench he keeps outside the shed. In this light, the pages are clear, and the neat script, painfully familiar, has the power to jolt him, once again invoking the face of the woman, her wide eyes and gaping mouth, silenced by the wet sound of the fetus slapping the slop bucket. For days he had smelled it, the sweet scorched scent drifting beneath the common odors of cooking and laundry and disinfectant, and he inhales, filling his lungs, as he steps back into the shed, pausing to appreciate his rake and shovel, the long-handled hedge shears now corroding on the wall. Reliable for so many years, there is comfort in this decay, evidence of a long life granted the luxury of natural decomposition. He untangles a knot of rope, empties the crate that had held his papers. The rope is sturdy, as is the crate. He drags them to a spot beneath the arching cedar and sets the crate’s open face squarely on the ground. He briefly wonders if his colleagues will meet this year. He hoists the rope, faces the wall. Once again creepers have scaled it, their dark leaves ruffled by a breeze eager to spread the fragrance of the neighborhood’s peach and plum blossoms. He grips the rope; the crate wobbles, and while I never tested the precise time it takes for air to be absorbed by the lungs, the brain to starve of blood, and the body to cease its struggle to save itself, I am hoping that, in that duration, I will be able to wrest from myself the snatch of consciousness necessary to remember once more my siblings and those ducks that swam in the pond back home.