Terminal Island

by John Shannon

  Even at this range, Captain Adler could see there was a lot of blood on him, and he wouldn’t let Maeve look.

  “He’s moving okay,” was all he would say after he’d shouldered the uniformed cop aside to take the binoculars himself. Then he grabbed the uniformed cop and used the packset microphone on his shirt to alert the police cars at the barricade and scramble an ambulance.

  “Just a precaution,” he tried to lie, but she wasn’t fooled.

  * * *

  Joe Ozaki had led Jack Liffey down a metal staircase that circled the inside of the tower and then out a door where they had to jump about three feet to the ground. Jack Liffey was worried about Gloria Ramirez, but he comforted himself that a last look seemed to show that her bleeding had stopped and she was breathing regularly.

  “It doesn’t have to go this way,” Jack Liffey said.

  “Of course it does.” There seemed a tremendous energy pent up in the man in the jumpsuit—he almost vibrated with it—but Jack Liffey couldn’t identify the source. “Follow now.”

  Despite his fear, Jack Liffey took a deep inhalation of the outside night air with both lungs and couldn’t help glorying in the sea air, even with its overtones of oil sump, coke dust, and rotting fish. He wondered if he’d ever take breathing for granted again, but he guessed that the novelty would soon pass and, within a few minutes, he’d stop thinking about it—if he was still alive in a few minutes, of course. He again could see the Christmas lights up on the big ranch houses on the Palos Verdes Hills, a gesture of celebration from a faraway world.

  “I don’t suppose Christmas means anything to you,” Jack Liffey said.

  “Does it to you?” The man’s voice was tight now, as if his vocal cords were stretched to near breaking.

  “Sure. All the exciting wrapped gifts. The smell of the tree. That enormous anticipation as a child. Nothing very religious, except you can’t really escape the mangers and Magi.”

  “My father was a Baptist. Can you believe it? He adopted the religion of the people who ruined his life.”

  “So what about all those Buddhists in Vietnam? Did you do them proud?”

  He stopped in his tracks and stared hard at Jack Liffey. “You know nothing.”

  “I know you did what you thought was your duty. Even me, and I just sent codes over a radio.”

  “I used a knife,” Joe Ozaki said. “It was very personal and direct. Can you visualize lopping the end off a Christmas ham at one blow?”

  “I’d rather not. What do your samurai books say about some poor warrior who gets stuck with an evil master? You know, a master who makes the poor guy go against his code of honor?”

  “The situation is not supposed to arise.”

  “That shows how realistic the code is.”

  “I did things. That’s my business.”

  “Talking to a friend can help you let some of it go.” He felt fatuous, like some sheltered advice columnist trying to soothe someone with real trouble—two missing legs, a terminal disease, serious jail time—but he didn’t know what else to say.

  Joe Ozaki was leading him eastward from the tower, back toward the village, but, at the same time, toward a low building not far away, boarded up and surrounded by rusting machinery. A seagull gave its sad, shrill cry in the dark. Jack Liffey had thought birds weren’t supposed to cry at night, but he didn’t know why he thought that. The chocolaty rumple of the cloud cover was still reflecting the orange security lights on the northern flank of the island.

  “DIOOC intel interrogated the villagers that I took prisoner,” Joe Ozaki said abruptly. “I stopped taking prisoners when I realized that they never survived the process.”

  “Process. You guys had some really quaint words,” Jack Liffey said drily. “So in the end you disobeyed your orders out of a sense of humanity.”

  “It was better just to kill them.”

  Jack Liffey wanted to offer him a crumb of respect, some last shred of integrity, but he worried the man was well past anything like that. “Look, life threw you a curve. You did the best you could with two bad choices.”

  Joe Ozaki looked up at the clouds, as if there might be some reply there, but maybe he was just looking. “There is always an honorable choice.”

  “That’s not my experience. There’s the devil and the deep blue sea.”

  “There is always seppuku.”

  “That’s what we call hara-kiri, isn’t it?”

  “Seppuku is the formal Chinese word, but it is the word the Bushido used.” Joe Ozaki stopped and turned to face Jack Liffey, then drew a crude sword out of his waist. It wasn’t one of those long, shimmery, steel samurai swords, all elegant weaponly perfection. It didn’t even have a handle. It looked like a raw, sharpened length of a car’s leaf spring. The man held it by a wad of paper tied to one end.

  “Man, I am not going to sword-fight you,” Jack Liffey said.

  “Of course you’re not. You offered to be my friend. You’re my kaishaku.”

  “What’s that?”

  “In Europe it might be called a second.”

  Jack Liffey didn’t want to face the obvious. “Who are you going to fight?”

  His companion only smiled a tight smile and beckoned him between what might once have been two large diesel engines, now just rust and decaying rubber hoses. What looked like a boarded-over door on the low building opened easily. They went inside, and Joe Ozaki lit a kerosene lantern. It was a strange room that the lamp revealed, like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces lost. A lopsided china cabinet stood against one wall, and stacked on one shelf were a handful of plates and cups. An old rocker, losing the stuffing from its seat. A ladderback chair. A cooking pot. A Japanese wall hanging of split bamboo, with the image of a heron. All of it appeared generations old, rescued from thrift stores. Or rescued, Jack Liffey realized all at once, from thieves.

  “You’ve reassembled your father’s possessions.” This was Joe Ozaki’s nest on the island.

  “What little remains, merely fingers pointing back at his life. Don’t mistake the fingers for the life. All this is of no value whatever.”

  From a side room he retrieved a lacquered tray with several objects on it and a chest. He took them both outside, and Jack Liffey followed to watch him set them both gently in a cleared rectangle about the size of a double bed, against the side of the building. High streetlights along the road nearby cast a faint, even illumination over the smoothed soil. He went into the building once more and brought out a low, tippy-looking bench, no taller than his ankles, which he set before the tray. He sighed once, as if something was now complete.

  Joe Ozaki stripped off the top half of his black jumpsuit to show a chiseled bare back with flanks that narrowed impossibly to a tiny waist. There was a long-healed wound running the full height of his back in a scar with crude stitching dots on either side, as if his spine had been surgically removed. On closer inspection, a section of the scar near the bottom still seeped a little, as if it had never healed.

  He opened the chest and took out a folded white kimono. Very slowly, Joe Ozaki worked himself into the kimono with what seemed a kind of ceremony. A lot of preparation had gone into this playground, and Jack Liffey still didn’t want to acknowledge to himself what it meant, though inside he knew.

  “Can we talk about this?”

  “Talk is past. I’ve made a mess of my life. Let’s hope we may be given another.”

  “We all make a mess, Joe. I know I have. Mess is just being human. You want to know the great big hole in your Bushido philosophy? It’s so big you could drive a bus through it.”

  That got the man’s attention, and he stood very still, listening, the breeze fluffing the loose white robe like a giant, flightless bird.

  “It’s all duty and blame and pride. I told you before—there’s no place in it for ordinary human love or forgiveness or mercy. It can’t even cope with a simple act of human weakness without touching off some absurd spectacle of self-destruction. What good i
s all that inhuman rigidity?”

  “It preserves a sense of honor in the world.”

  “You think that goofy novelist Mishima was honorable when he killed himself up on that roof at the military school? Wasn’t it because Japan wouldn’t renounce its pacifism? The whole country dismisses him. They call him a crank.”

  Joe Ozaki held out the two-foot-long sword. “This is yours. Hold it by the paper. Traditionally you must hold it out of my sight until it is needed. It has no virtue or quality as a weapon. When you are through with it, discard it, for it will be tainted.”

  Jack Liffey looked down at the crude knife he had been handed. He’d almost withdrawn his hands to let it drop, but the aura of ceremony had been too great, the pure force of the man’s will. The blade looked quite sharp for two-thirds of its length, and a sheaf of handmade rice paper was tied around the last third of the steel, where the haft should have been.

  “Joe, I beg you.”

  “I must compose myself now. Stand to my left, please.”

  The man spread his arms and, in one movement, sat gracefully on the low bench, crossing his legs in front of him. He bowed to the tray and picked up black chopsticks to eat some pickled vegetable from one of the little bowls. Then he took two sips of something from a tiny cup. Jack Liffey could smell alcohol on the air and guessed it was probably sake. A bird passed overhead, like an omen, and it gave a shrill, sarcastic cry, a crow. A night of far too many birds, he thought.

  “Joe, please tell me what’s happening.”

  “You will know what you need to know.”

  Joe Ozaki picked up a bamboo brush and gently pulled a sheet of paper toward himself on the tray. He made a number of false starts and discarded several sheets before beginning to write. Jack Liffey leaned in to read.

  He dipped the brush repeatedly in a bowl of black ink to pen an elegant, vaguely Asian-looking script. Obviously he had never taught himself kanji or even the phonetic katakana, because his poem was in English and in Roman characters.

  At night both

  Good and bad die

  Under the bruised eye.

  Night’s our reward, our counterweight,

  One crow asoar,

  A confessor for

  Rumors of the coldest day in history.

  A chill swept through Jack Liffey as the other man took two more sips of the sake from the small, reddish-clay cup and then finished it off with his head thrown back. Then he leaned forward and, one after the other, tucked the long lapels of his kimono under his knees on the earth to hold his head forward.

  “Joe, I beg you …”

  “You will see your duty, Jack Liffey. No creature must be permitted to suffer.” He untied the plain belt and opened his kimono in front so his muscled belly was bare. He reached to the tray where Jack Liffey had not noticed another knife, shorter than the one he held behind his back, this one also handleless but pointed. Joe Ozaki wound the blunt end with sheet after sheet of the rice paper and then gripped it with both hands and brought the blade around toward himself.

  “Joe, don’t don’t don’t. You have too much to live for.” The hackles on Jack Liffey’s neck rose. He considered pushing the man over, grabbing for the knife, but he knew how strong and determined Ozaki was. He’d just make a mess of things.

  The man bowed low once, made some short prayer, and Jack Liffey hoped against hope that it would stop in some elaborate joke right there, or maybe only a kind of ritual mimic of seppuku. Then Jack Liffey’s whole body jolted with the electric shock of what he witnessed. The man had yanked the knife straight into his belly. It was all in one motion and accompanied by the obscene butchery sound of steel through meat, plus a suppressed whimper at the end. Jack Liffey was frozen in place and couldn’t move. He couldn’t see the small blade any longer, but by the motion of the man’s arms he could make out a hard, horizontal cut from left to right, a pause, and then a desperate tug upward.

  Reflexively, he closed his eyes on the horrible spectacle, praying something would happen to undo these moments, but he couldn’t keep his eyes closed for long.

  The way the man’s kimono was tucked, he rested in a slight forward bow, rocking a little. A kind of groan came from Ozaki’s throat, and he set the bloody knife down gently in front of him. In the half light in front of the kneeling figure, Jack Liffey seemed to see something spill out of the man, but he couldn’t look, couldn’t concentrate. He felt himself yawning, his vision narrowing to a tiny cone. An avoidance of any thinking, only a kind of mental idling.

  “Now, Jack Liffey. Strike my neck. The pain is great.”

  He was paralyzed. He couldn’t believe he was actually standing there holding a ritual killing knife. The thought of hacking off someone’s head was just out of the question, yet this man was obviously suffering terribly.

  “I can’t do this, Joe. Can’t you just shoot yourself?”

  “This is the way it is done,” he said with immense patience, gritting his teeth.

  “This isn’t fair.”

  “I am already dead. What are these on the ground? These are my intestines. Take your swing. Try to strike hard enough to cut through the spinal cord, but not so hard that you completely remove my head. That is the way it is done.”

  Jack Liffey sensed a trembly panic spreading through him. He felt the weight of the big blade dangling from his hand. How could he do this obscenity? But how could he let the man suffer?

  “Jack Liffey, now, please.”

  A police car brought him to the command post at the hillside park above the old ferry building. He had already told an ambulance driver where Gloria Ramirez was handcuffed and about her injuries. Captain Adler helped him out of the car, making a face at the blood on his clothes.

  “I’m afraid Ken Steelyard is dead,” Jack Liffey said. “So is Joe Ozaki. I think Gloria Ramirez will be okay.”

  “She’s being seen to.”

  “I’ll be okay, too,” he said numbly, “and five billion other souls. Christmas Eve.”

  Maeve managed to squeeze through the surrounding ring of officers and ran to hug him. “Daddy!”

  He was startled by her voice. He looked up and saw Ornetta tugging his own father uphill, stringy and frowning, as if she’d adopted the old Nazi as another blood relative. It didn’t really make any sense to him, but his mind was already far into overload.

  Adler offered him a pint bottle of J & B. Jack Liffey looked at it for a long time but finally shook his head. “I’ve already broken too many rules tonight. Have you ever done something you thought you could never do?”

  “Passed the captain’s exam the fourth time I tried.”

  Jack Liffey smiled for just an instant. “I have no context for tonight. Christmas Eve.”

  “Christmas proper,” he corrected. “It’s twelve-thirty. You look pretty tired, fellow. Why don’t you save the talk for back at the station.”

  “Uncle Jack! Here’s your dad.” Ornetta had finally made it through the crowd, towing the old buzzard behind, and Declan Liffey stood there, watching him sheepishly. The old man reached out and put a hand awkwardly on his son’s shoulder. In a moment he took it back and surreptitiously wiped it off on his pants. Blood was everywhere. “It’s real good to see you, Jack. We were all worried.”

  “Thanks, Dad.” Despite the surrounding of family, he felt utterly bereft. Something had returned him to childhood, if just for that moment. And only his mother would have done for comfort. He felt trapped in some dark, unchanging moment, and he just wanted the cops to lead him away and punish him. He had desecrated Christmas. And probably Bushido, too.

  It wasn’t fair, he thought, to be suspended between two moral codes, believing in neither one.

  A few days later he found himself alone in a spartan two-man cell in the new Twin Towers jail downtown, having missed Christmas altogether and unable to make bail on the charge of involuntary manslaughter. Ridiculous charge, he had thought as the DA announced it to him. Involuntary was the one thing it hadn’t bee
n. Bail—he might as well pray for a white Christmas. Any zeros beyond two put the figure out of the question for his bank account.

  He’d had plenty of solitude to think about what he’d done, or been forced to do, and still hadn’t found a way to return to a sane and normal universe. He watched his fingers drum on the steel table, trying to figure out if his own will was working them.

  The weird stainless steel cell wasn’t helping much, like something carved out of a single block of ice. The table and bench combination, the one-piece toilet, the shelf bed belonged to a very strange, shiny, austere world. But what made him most uneasy was the fact that the tiny slit window with wired glass showed him nothing but a concrete block wall, and he had no way of orienting himself in the universe. Even a few stars would have done it, or a glimpse of one of the downtown buildings, but it was like coming unglued from the earth. It was a habit he had picked up long ago and couldn’t break: he always kept a compass and a simple altimeter in his car so he would know roughly where he was on the surface of the earth and which way he was facing.

  After two days of solitude—mostly footsteps and harsh voices during the day, and wet coughs, groans, and rage-fed cries all night long—he had three visitors, one right after another. First, a reasonably polite guard who looked about fifteen came to fetch him. They were all trainee sheriffs. The boy brought him down to a barren room that contained a brushed aluminum table and two chairs of the same stuff that looked like they had just been delivered from the same world that had invented his cell.

  He sat with his hands folded docilely and waited for a long time, and then the weasely little balding man he recognized as his public defender came in. The fellow made a display of his hurry, like a doctor annoyed that you were bothering him with a simple cold. He slapped open an aluminum briefcase and consulted the papers in it, probably trying to remind himself of Jack Liffey’s name.