The Far Shore

by Paul T. Scheuring

  “If you are going to get anything out of the men, it is now. Where before you were the antagonist, now you are the liberator, the one who can free them from the isolated, twinned horrors of incessant pain and unrelenting mentation. They practically beg you to relieve them of themselves. Their pain, too, but mostly they just don’t want to be alone. They would rather you take a cane to them than to be alone a moment longer with their minds.

  “I can say, incredibly, Gray asked for nothing. As usual, he did not speak a word. His body slowly swayed, spasmed in that sickly denervated way, little insentient ripples coursing through him uncontrollably; his hands, forearms and shoulders effloresced with orange, purple, yellow hemorrhages. Sometimes, if a man says nothing else at this stage, it is, ‘Kill me.’

  “But the subhuman, he did not.

  “It seemed, though it was impossible to know with those supremely distant eyes, that he intended to persevere.

  “But for what? For an incredible revelation came my way from some of my other Kempeitai officers.

  “Now, you must understand, I can confidently say that this man had made it to the ninety-ninth percentile of endurance. But again, why?

  “This is what happened. One of my fellow officers came along, and said he’d gotten an interesting perspective on our prisoner. There were two things of note: first, he’d gone back to that particular helmet Gray had been wearing when he’d been caught, and taken a more thorough look at it. Caught in the webbing was virtually none of Gray’s dark hair, but instead various strands of red hair. It seemed likely that Gray was not the one usually wearing this helmet. But what was more illuminating was what came out of another interrogation session, in one of the adjacent units, in which one of the other prisoners was being interrogated, a soldier apparently from the same battalion as Gray. That prisoner caved quickly under interrogation, and to my colleague’s inquiries about Gray—who we were quite interested in—the prisoner not only gave us Gray’s full name but indicated that he was, without question, a medic. One who apparently was a bit of a loner, or an ‘odd bird,’ the term I believe they used. A man that was seemingly uninterested in the conduct of the war. A man with scars.

  “Now, this could have been misinformation. A subordinate protecting a superior. But given that Gray had a certain amount of medical equipment on him at his detention, along with the matter of the red hair in the helmet, I was inclined to think that the ‘odd bird’ theory was probably the right one. He was perhaps a little bit crazy. And maybe it was not cause or loyalty but instead their close cousin madness that drove him to endure the torture with that pained stoic silence. What gave him that defiant strength was something within—something unknown, which he resisted with a half-sane fury.

  “We tend to project our own manias onto others. But in a lot of ways that is what I am supposed to do as a Kempeitai investigator. I am to try to get into their heads, dissect their methods, motivations. Which means combing your own mind for reasons one might do the things they do. You can only identify it—or at least suspect it—if it has expression, however weak, within you too.

  “Between you and me, I actually became more interested in him at this stage, though I would never say as much to my fellow Kempeitai. For all intents and purposes, the prisoner was worthless as a source of intelligence, worthless to the war effort. But the war at this stage, I think you can agree, is equally worthless. A most supreme entropy has taken hold. No amount of loyalty or sense of duty will hold the effort together. We are bound to shatter into chaos, and only from that chaos will something new be built. It is only through obliteration that truths will finally be perceived.”

  As you can imagine, this was quite difficult for an idealistic eighteen-year-old to hear. Here was one of the vaunted Kempeitai, effectively quitting on the war effort. Demeaning Japan and her fate. I told him, respectfully, that I could appreciate his position (though I did not), yet I was nevertheless still beholden to my own sense of duty. I felt obligated to do my part for the war effort, not to question it.

  “You say ‘war effort.’ I say ‘saṅkhāra.’ Does that word mean anything to you? I don’t suspect it would. It’s a Pali word. Pali was the language used in writing the original Buddhist texts over two millennia ago. Saṅkhāra is any compound or object or dynamic—as small as a mite or as large as a war effort—that has come to be because of the countless preceding conditions, seen and unseen, that have given birth to it.

  “You know what the Buddha’s last words were? ‘Saṅkhāras are subject to decay. Strive with diligence.’”

  Morio went to the window again. Looked up at the sky again. It was almost a tic, I thought. A subconscious compulsion. As he considered the now-darkened shroud of night, there was this strange pained glimmer in his eyes. “This war effort is subject to decay, isn’t it? It’s winding down, falling apart, shattering around us. So how do we ‘strive with diligence’? Is it to march blindly on as you want to, loyal to the end, striving to prop up what cannot be propped up, to somehow save that which marches irrevocably toward oblivion?”

  I felt sick. There’s no other way to put it. This man was in charge of important things! The soldiers depended on him. The mine, with its considerable output, depended on him. These were not insignificant things. And to have such profound doubt, a doubt that bordered on truculence, well, somewhere in the back of my head I was scheming as he talked, thinking of who else I could go to, another Kempeitai perhaps, and inform them that Morio was no longer trustworthy in his role. And that was probably being too kind! The truth was, he needed to be removed, punished, incarcerated, if not worse!

  Seeing that his musings were gaining no purchase with me, Morio sat back, ran his tongue along one side of his molars. “I went back to this prisoner. I had been instructed to kill him, put a kogatana in his jugular and be done with it. But I wasn’t ready to do this yet. I had questions of a different sort. Of no use to the war effort, but of potentially great value to me.

  “He had been in Strappado for a day and a half. Needless to say, no one had endured that long. Just to behold his body, the way weak tremors occasionally still spasmed through it, the way his head hung like the lifeless head of a duck in a shop window, the way the musculature of his arms and shoulders had lost all recognizable shape, and now appeared as sausage might, an indeterminate discolored mixture of loose flesh and fat and sinew beneath the translucent skin—it bespoke a body yielding itself, against design, millimeter by millimeter, to gravity. As if things were shifting—the essence of him if nothing else, his will—slowly sinking through the length of him, trying desperately to escape to the floor, the earth, to be rid of this torment forevermore, even if it meant the body disintegrated in the effort.

  “That is what the body said.

  “Again, the body is the species. It does not lie.

  “But his eyes—those things within which the current of the individual can be perceived, those things that differentiate one man from another, elevate him from merely a member of the species to airy individuality—they bespoke something different. They were glazed over, unblinking, focused on the half-space between things. There was no fight left in those eyes. But there was perseverance. How, you probably wonder—as I did then, and I do now—are the two different?

  “I asked him a few rote questions, not expecting answers. Who was he, with his medic’s uniform, his commander’s helmet, and German dog tags? Was he mad? Was he a fool? Which was he?

  “Of course, no answer.

  “I maintained a dispassionate mien outwardly, but inwardly I was a bit desperate. I wanted to know so much about him. About his condition. About this perseverance he displayed in the face of suffering. Because I readily admit that I was suffering, that I am suffering, though you would disagree with me, private, over the reasons for it.

  “Is the war effort so different from the Strappado, private?

  “We are trapped as he was by larger architectures of madness, aren’t we? With no hope of escape. Other than death. W
e cannot run from our posts. We are expected to die here. If we run, we will be killed. And the longer the war goes on, the more the Allies shred our population with firebombs. How do we persevere? Without fighting?

  “How do we face that knowledge, that psychological pain, that horror isolated in our heads? How do we face a death most imminent?

  “As I say, we project our manias onto others. Perhaps in this man, in his forbearance to pain, there was an answer.

  “It was a long time that we occupied that room together. Everything about him lifeless but those eyes, which were near dead, too; and me, ostensibly the one with all the power in the room, but strangely insecure too. For I had questions. Questions not expected from a Kempeitai.

  “Finally, within, I summoned the courage. Outwardly, I was still the formidable, even Kempeitai officer.

  “I asked him, ‘Why is it you hold on?’

  “Again, no answer.

  “‘You have no information to protect, I know that,’ I told him.

  “His reply remained one of silence.

  “‘Then why do you hold on?’ I asked. ‘Why don’t you speak? Why do you endure what needs not be endured?’

  “It was like talking to a corpse. Which gave me a thought.

  “‘Maybe it is that you want to die? Is that your aim?

  “And lo, private, I got a response! Not words, no not by a long shot. But his foot moved ever so slightly, the first volitional thing I had seen from him in over a day. And his eyes shifted. They were still enigmatic, without content, but they moved! Like he had heard me.

  “I seized on this. ‘Is that it?’ I asked again. ‘Is it that you want to die? That you want us to kill you?’

  “His lips were swollen. Purple from the beatings. But they formed a few words:

  “‘You cannot kill,’ he said.

  “‘What is already dead.’

  “I, of course, didn’t know what he meant by this. I would assume it was a resigned despondency, as if he had already long ago accepted his fate. But why give voice to it now, if he had endured the rest of the sessions without so much as a word?

  “I pushed him to speak more. I wanted to see into his pain, understand that thing within that endured, that confronted and processed the abject agony that he was ensconced in. I wanted to understand how he related to it, persevered in the face of it.

  “But he was done talking and fell asleep shortly thereafter. He snored as if he had not slept in days. And in all likelihood, he had not.

  “I dismissed for the most part his words to incoherence, to the half-rendered thoughts of a man suspended between life and death, pain and numbness, sleep and wakefulness.

  “I returned to my quarters. Sat reflective, as I increasingly do as the end of this war, and likely the end of me, draws near. I find solace in the daizōkyō. The sutras of the Buddha. Particularly the Prajñāpāramitā Sutra. The ‘Perfection of Wisdom’ Sutra. I read the translation, reflect on how a wisdom might somehow be forged from this ultimate lost cause we find ourselves trapped within. How can we escape what cannot be escaped? The suffering—mental and physical—of the moment. The assured imminence of death. We are prisoners verily, private. You and I, just as much as he is. The war will eat us. Our doom is cemented by fate. How does one proceed in the face of that?

  “Then I was struck, later in my readings that night, by another exhortation of the Buddha. He says, in order to gain Nirvana, the escape of enlightenment, we must die before we die.

  “We must die before we die, private. What does that mean?

  “You see that it parallels in concept what the prisoner said, right? Again, I readily acknowledge that I am a desperate man, one projecting hopes into places and upon individuals where no such hope likely exists. But that is desperation. We implore the universe for answers, for deliverance, but forget that the universe is not some airy thing beyond our apprehension, but instead is composed in its most immediate form of the very people and circumstances before us. We cannot find truth in our own heads. At least that is my experience. We are meant to seek, engage, be filled up with wisdom from sources far more attuned to the truth than ourselves. We must die to our egos; that is my feeling. I believe that is what the Buddha meant when he said we must die before we die. We must die to the idea that we can alone find the truth. That through our own mentation we can arrive at an answer. My own experience as an interrogator pretty much confirms this. A man left alone with his own thoughts is consigned to the harshest prison reality can devise. We must die to that prison. We must die to ourselves. We must become empty, a vessel for the universe to fill with its wisdom.

  “It is this sort of thinking that motivates my interest in the prisoner. This and this alone. Perhaps he, in his methodical, patient endurance of pain, possesses answers. The ability to endure, to resist the crushing onslaught of existence on the mind and body.

  “And for him to intimate that he has already died…before he has died…I want to know what that means. Is this, despite its sullied, black circumstance, an example of what the Buddha meant?”

  Morio surveyed my face. I was still uncomfortable with his metaphysics, and I think it was apparent in my face. Morio tilted his head, narrowed his eyes ever so slightly, a 10 percent smile on his lips. “You think that I am far off-base, that I am focusing on the wrong things. Isn’t that so, private?”

  “Respectfully, sir, I’m a bit confused whether you came to a conclusion regarding the prisoner and the smuggling of the potato vines.”

  “You’re still on that!”

  “It is why I came. Respectfully, I am naive to metaphysics. I am only here to discuss my duty and what is actionable within it. In other words, why he smuggles this food. Truly. If I am not mistaken, gathering by what you’ve thus far divulged, neither you nor I has actually confronted him on the matter. And, in my opinion, that is a mistake.”

  “So you, then, of the two of us, are the more focused investigator, I am to take it. The more useful one. The more perceptive one. I am the one that is missing everything that is right beneath his nose because his head is in the clouds, pondering the imponderables. Is that right?”

  I was not about to agree with him. I felt if I did not demur in a demonstrable fashion, he would nevertheless take that as tacit assent. Which he did. He nodded, that 10 percent smile flattening.

  “The prisoner, as you know, has spent the last number of weeks in the mines. I was able to convince command that he was potentially of operational value to us as a medic to the prisoners. I’ll tell you what. We’ll bring him in, you and I. And we will see who extracts information more relevant to the bigger picture.” He turned to his books at that point, did not meet my gaze again. “Dismissed.”

  I got to my feet, obediently moved to the door. Exited. He followed behind me. Resumed looking skyward as I walked away.

  I wondered then if it was not bombers he was looking for when he looked up, but answers.

  Before I got too far, though, he said one more thing. “Private. Do me a favor when you return for the interrogation. Go to your tatami beforehand, roll it up, lift the loose floorboard beneath it, and retrieve the Frank Sinatra album you have stored there. Bring it with you next time you come.”

  I tell you, everything changed in a flash! I left with a small, proper nod, but I had been upended within. For the last few minutes of our conversation, I’d felt sort of sorry for the man, in the sense that he’d lost his bearing, at least in my estimate. That fear had gotten the better of him, and he was questioning everything in a fashion that did no one any good, especially the war effort. It was probably akin to intellectual shell shock. He’d poisoned his own mind playing nightmarish scenarios over and over again as to how the war would end, but I didn’t see it. Probably in no part because I was a private and these things—the setbacks of the effort—weren’t told to us. And for good reason, as I was soon to learn! No, in my estimate, one should be a soldier, because that was what one was: a soldier. And as such, one kept their head down
and didn’t ask questions, didn’t trouble the effort with irrelevant fear-based flights of the soul. But when he revealed that he knew about the Sinatra album, I became horrified. He indeed knew the relevant things, the operational and actionable things that were going on in the mine and barracks around him, however small. As I mentioned before, to have such contraband could put me on the wrong side of a beheading.

  Needless to say, I did not sleep well that night, for Morio seemed in many ways both unhinged and unknowable. I was convinced his metaphysical ponderings were sincere, but as I said before, operationally beside the point. For a Kempeitai officer who had spent the entirety of the war punishing soldiers for intransigence amongst other things, for crimes of putting the self before the war effort, he would now seem to be guilty of the very same crimes. The money in his barracks. The candid apostatical speech against the war effort. The selfish existential focus that overlooked or accepted that a prisoner was breaking the rules. The fact that he had such actionable knowledge and didn’t act upon it. It was a dereliction of duty on a lot of levels. He was not one to be trusted. He spoke too much of the prison of the mind (a view I didn’t share at the time), which told me that his mind was probably precisely that to him. A cage that held a fearful, desperate creature. Such a man was perhaps more dangerous than any Kempeitai officer had any right being.