by Tad Crawford
“This is an impossible island,” Pecheur said to me. “We have to program for fierce currents, towering waves, and an enormous undertow.”
It cheered me to hear him speak of continuing the project, but within another few weeks, he stopped speaking of what he planned and hoped to do. He looked shrunken in the wheelchair, fatigued and sallow.
“I can’t keep my mind off this,” he said, gesturing toward the large basin. It held a roundish island about five feet in diameter that rose to a mountain peak with flanks covered by rain forest. Palm trees stood in thick clusters near the skirt of beaches, but there was no ocean, and nothing in the tableau moved.
I stood quietly beside him. I didn’t have to speak because both he and I knew what he said was true. He didn’t rest easily in his sickbed and always wanted to come here.
“I’ve been having a lot of thoughts,” he said.
“Yes?” I wondered if he had someone in mind who might help us finish his work or, less likely, if he had decided to admit that it would remain incomplete.
“I’d like you to go to the island.”
“Without you?”
“Yes.” He smiled wanly. “I’d like you to go and report back to me. Tell me what you find there.”
I didn’t want to go. I didn’t know what he hoped to discover there; I would simply be visiting a place of desolation. But I also respected whatever drew him to the island. He had so often let himself be guided in this way.
“Shouldn’t I stay here and help?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Go and tell me what you discover.”
I made plane reservations and chartered a boat with an experienced captain, but Pecheur returned to the hospital. Day after day, as I debated whether to stay with him or go as he wished, he weakened. Soon he lacked the strength to move or speak. In the end, the decision was taken away from me. Pecheur died. I postponed the trip. And even my grief at times was pushed aside by the funeral arrangements and innumerable other practicalities that became my responsibility.
I made certain that he was buried as he wished, beside his wife, on a promontory overlooking the Atlantic. To his wife’s headstone I added the date of her death. His headstone merely has the name he chose, Pecheur, and the dates of his birth and death. Behind the graves stands a grove of pine trees, old and tall and green in every season. The surf breaks on the beach below, and the breezes carry the scent of the pines and the ocean.
Pecheur made me his heir and his trustee. I owned the Floating World, the building that housed it, and many other properties and assets. The model boats remained on their pedestals in the glow of the spotlights. I liked to walk among them and study the intricacy of their details and the fineness of their workmanship. At one point, curious about Pecheur’s name for the shop, I discovered that the floating world was about far more than illicit pleasure. Called ukiyo in Japanese, it grew out of the Buddhist concept of a world filled with pain and came to mean the transient and unreliable nature of our world, how fleetingly it floats in the illusion of time. I decided to turn the building into a museum and open it to the public.
Pecheur had been involved in supporting many causes, and I continued his good work. As the trustee of his foundation, I donated money to feed the hungry, to support dance companies and orchestras, to remove mines from old battlefields, to make small loans to impoverished people who dreamed of being entrepreneurs, to fund scholarships, to fight diseases, to preserve the environment, to aid the elderly, and much more. I tried as best I could to support scientific research that would advance Pecheur’s dream of harmonizing the forces of nature.
Often I returned to the third-floor gallery and studied the model of the island with its volcano. I hired programmers to make waves beat against the reefs and a dark cloud of smoke billow above the peak, but the essential mystery Pecheur sought eluded me. Sitting at the controls, I wanted to take the next step. I kept recalling his request that I visit the island. If he had lived, I would certainly have gone, but even now, after his death, it felt like something unfinished. I didn’t want to go for myself but I wanted to do it for Pecheur. Finally, hoping that the trip might be more pleasant than I imagined, I chartered the boat for a two-week voyage, rebooked my plane tickets, and readied myself to leave.
22
The four black bears came at night. I woke to the sound of huffing and grunting and a familiar pungent scent, like hay drying in a barn but much stronger. Propping myself up on my elbows, I managed to open my eyes and saw the bears prowling around my room.
“What’s going on?” I demanded.
“Do you always sleep with the lights on?” asked one of the smaller bears.
“Scared of the dark?” jeered another who, as far as I could tell, looked exactly like the first.
“Who let you in?”
“You left a key for us,” said the first. “Don’t you remember?”
“That’s ridiculous.” I sat upright. “I didn’t leave keys for anybody.”
“Then how did we get in?” he asked.
No answer came to mind, which didn’t mean he was right. I had been in a deep sleep and hadn’t really awakened yet.
One of them sniffed at my foot, then licked it, and I jerked away.
“Cut it out.”
“Did he say, ‘Cut it off’?” asked the second bear in his jeering tone.
“Mind your manners,” said one of the larger bears. I could tell from the timbre of the voice and the gentleness of the admonition that she was the mother of the two smaller bears.
The biggest bear—he must have weighed six hundred pounds—stood up on his hind legs. Obviously this was the father, so my visitors were not a sleuth of random bears but a family.
“It’s a matter of mutual obligation,” the huge bear said in a deep, gravelly voice.
“Whose mutual obligation?” I asked.
“Yours and ours.”
“What obligations can we possibly have? I don’t even know you.”
The mother bear put a large paw on my leg to hold me in place.
“What are you doing?” I asked her.
“We have to eat you,” the father bear replied.
“Eat me?”
“Yes.”
I squirmed as more paws pressed me down on the mattress. A tongue wetly touched my foot, and I felt the gnawing of sharply pointed teeth.
“Why?” I asked, suddenly awake in a way I had never been before. I couldn’t believe what he was saying, yet there they were in my bedroom. And one of them had my foot in his mouth.
“We’re famished.” His dark eyes had a mournful look.
“You don’t look famished,” I answered. “Judging by your size, it looks as if you’ve been eating plenty.”
“We really have no choice.”
“You do have a choice,” I pleaded. “Look in my refrigerator. Eat what’s there.”
“We already looked,” said one of the smaller bears. “Who can live on a few bottles of beer and a jar of pickles?”
I felt teeth closing like a vise on my foot. I tried to shake free, but I couldn’t move. My heart leapt in my chest. Then a terrible pain shot up my leg. I raised my head just enough to see blood pouring from my ankle and the two small bears chewing on my severed foot.
“Stop!” I screamed. “It’s not too late. You can leave and I’ll go to a hospital. I’ll say I had an accident. I won’t tell anybody.”
“Shut up,” one of the small bears said in a disrespectful tone.
“That was bony,” complained the other small bear as he yanked at the flesh of my right arm. I could feel the furrows left by his teeth and the wetness of my blood pouring forth. Other jaws ripped a chunk from my left thigh and more blood pooled underneath me.
“I don’t want to die,” I whimpered.
“Don’t think of it as dying,” the father bear said with an encouraging tone. “Think of it as becoming one of us. Your flesh will nurture us. You’ll become part of us.”
“
I don’t want to be a bear.”
“And we will become more human.”
“But you’re bears!” I screamed in confusion and pain.
“Better to say that we’re not fully bears,” he replied. “And you’re not fully human.”
“But you’ll be alive and I won’t.”
“Don’t be so literal,” one of the smaller bears said as he licked rivulets of blood from his dark lips.
“At least let me be cooked,” I pleaded, hoping for any delay.
“You think you’re the only one making a sacrifice?” asked the smaller bear. “You think we like eating people, cooked or otherwise? My mealtime favorites are berries, herbs and grasses, insects, and maybe an occasional rat or rabbit.”
To be devoured piece by piece flooded me with terror. It would be better to be already dead, not living in the expectation of further torment.
I was about to reply when powerful jaws clamped on my femur and ripped my leg away from the trunk of my body. A spray of bright-red droplets covered the white walls and ceiling.
“Forgive us,” said the largest bear.
A tongue licked my cheek, teeth touched against my fleshy stomach. Soon I would have no face, and my entrails would be spread across the carpeting. I must have gone into shock at last, because the pain began to lessen.
Then I was floating near the ceiling of my room. Beneath me the bears were gnawing on my remains. I was peaceful there and untroubled by such fleeting thoughts as there could have been more to my life, I might have achieved more, or I might have been a better husband. If I could have done things like that, maybe I would have opened the fridge, poured tall glasses of golden beer, passed them from paw to paw, wrestled the bears to exhaustion, demanded back my keys, or even asked for their forgiveness for reasons I couldn’t quite bring to mind. In any event, I was no longer worried about the body that once contained me. Just thankful that it had served me well, and for the extra roll of flesh around my middle that would help relieve their terrible hunger. I didn’t understand the bears, but the beauty of it was that I no longer had to.
23
Harmony, good fortune, and, above all, fertility are the unicorn’s gifts. Easily able to outrun its pursuer and avoid net, trap, or arrow, the unicorn will come tamely from the deepest forests to rest its horned head on a virgin’s lap. Though neither man nor woman, I am a virgin of sorts. In my heart most of all. If the unicorn judges me unworthy, let his horn enter my navel and rip its way to that heart. Or let it rest its head in my lap and make me as I once was. Removing my garments, I reveal my scar. All day I wait, watching but seeing nothing. At twilight the rustling begins, close to me on one side and then the other, circling, coming closer until the darkness brings the moon and stars quivering above me.
From the log of Cheng Ho, admiral of the western seas, voyage of the fifth armada
24
The small, hunched man peed in the waves rushing over his feet. In the wash of the silver moonlight, I could see that he was naked. The first long spurt subsided and his flow trickled to a halt. He tugged a few times on his penis and let his hands drop to his sides, then remained like a patient sentry looking out over the moonlit ocean.
“Where … ”
I couldn’t say more, at first, through my parched throat. My head throbbed.
“Where am I?”
I spoke louder on my second try.
The man turned to face me. Now I could see that he was Japanese and very old, perhaps eighty or ninety, with a sparse goatee and long, unkempt white hair fringing his bald pate. He couldn’t have weighed even a hundred pounds. Wrinkles puckered his face and the skin below his navel draped in loose folds.
“You don’t know where you are?”
I could barely understand the strange, slow drawl in which he spoke English.
“No,” I gasped.
“Clever, very clever.”
“Why?” My voice came in a whisper.
“Where is your uniform?”
I shook my head.
“What is your unit?” he asked.
Again I didn’t understand him and shook my head.
“You were separated from the rest of them?”
“Yes,” I replied, recollecting a ship and a crew.
He walked a few steps closer to me and looked me up and down, his dark eyes at once stern and suspicious.
“Liar.” He nearly spit the word.
“What?”
“You are,” he paused, “a deserter.”
“From what?” I managed to ask.
“You don’t know?” He looked crafty, disbelieving.
“No.”
“There were others with you,” he asserted.
“Yes, the crew.”
“They sent you here.”
“No.”
“Give me their position and numbers.”
“I can’t.”
“Tell me!” He stepped forward and raised his voice.
I tried to lift myself up from the sand but felt too weak. My body ached everywhere.
“Water,” I said, “please.”
The man kicked the moving water so it splashed in my face.
“Where are they?” he demanded.
“Water. I can’t speak.”
Shaking his head, the man reached to pick up a plastic bottle without a top and handed it roughly to me. I tipped it up so the little water gathered in its bottom wet my lips, tongue, and throat.
“Where are the others?” he said again.
“Dead,” I spoke louder now, “drowned. Or maybe they were rescued. I don’t know.”
“Are they on the island?”
“I don’t know. What day is it? ”
He stood above me, studying me, not answering.
“How long have I been here?” I asked.
“I pulled you from the water three days ago,” he said. “I protected you from the sun with that.”
He pointed behind me. Turning painfully, I saw a small lean-to.
“Now you answer my questions,” he continued. “Navy?”
“What do you mean?” I couldn’t believe I had been unconscious for three days and this strange man had saved my life.
“Was it a navy boat?”
“No.” I began to remember more. “I chartered the boat. A storm came up, a typhoon with a spout of spinning water that would have knocked down a skyscraper. It broke the boat apart. I don’t know what happened to the others. I guess I was washed ashore here.”
“Chartered?”
He could hardly pronounce the word. I suspected he had no idea what it meant.
“I rented the boat. It didn’t belong to me.”
“I could have killed you many times.”
I almost laughed. This minuscule man … why would he even think of killing me? Yet his eyes expressed a certainty that worried me.
“What are you saying?”
“You look like the enemy.”
“What?”
He gestured toward my face and body. I realized that I wore nothing and was as naked as my rescuer. The waves crashed and receded a few feet from us.
“You speak his language. Even if you have no unit and no uniform, you may be a spy.”
“I’m the survivor of a shipwreck!”
“So you say.”
“Thank you for rescuing me.”
He considered this for a little while and then spoke more calmly.
“I will treat you as a noncombatant for now.”
“Where is the war?” I asked. Slowly I managed to sit upright.
“Everywhere.” He gestured toward the bright constellations above us.
Could a war have begun in the last few days?
“Who is at war?”
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“What is your country?”
“The United States.”
“You are at war with Japan.”
I looked at him for a smile, a hint that he joked with me.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Since 1944.”
“Haven’t any boats landed here in all those years?” I asked.
“If I saw boats or planes, I hid in the rocks. There are caves.”
“The war ended in 1945.”
“You are mistaken.”
“In August 1945 the emperor surrendered. Japan became a peaceful country, a democracy.”
He smiled at the impossibility of what I said.
“You have no radio?” I asked.
“The emperor would never surrender.”
“Terrible bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cities were destroyed, and more than a hundred thousand people lost their lives. Then the emperor surrendered.”
“No bomb can destroy a city.”
“Even Tokyo was destroyed by fleets of bombers that came again and again. It was leveled.”
He smiled a superior smile, his face silvery in the bright light of the moon. Obviously he judged me to be a lunatic or a liar.
“Why don’t you see battleships or bombers anymore?” I probed.
“Here we are victorious. The war has shifted to other sectors. Perhaps you Americans are fighting us in California or Arizona.”
How could I convince him? If I had a radio, a television set, or access to the Internet, I could have shown him a new world beyond his imagining. Or if I could go to a library, innumerable books would prove what I said. But neither the surf nor the moonlight contradicted him or supported my version of the facts.
“Even if you are a soldier or a spy,” he went on, “you may be able to help us.”
“There’s someone else?”
“Yes, my prisoner.”
“Prisoner? Who is he?”
“A member of your armed forces.”
“How long has he been a prisoner?”
“Since 1945,” he answered in a matter-of-fact way, “but you will be my guest.”
“What kind of help do you want?”
“You will see.”
If he had been alone, I might not have gone with him. It was the promise of meeting this other, the prisoner, that made me stand and walk unsteadily behind him as the surf rushed in foaming crescents over the moonlit beach.