Girl Takes The Oath

by Jacques Antoine

  “Have you ever been in a fight with someone as good as you?” CJ asked.

  The expression in her eyes made the girls cringe, until Emily caught herself and made an effort to compose her face. She had fought against several people as good as she was, and had even wished at moments that they would take her life away, granting her the serenity she craved. But some tie to the world, to a friend or a loved one, always brought her back to the restless self-assertion necessary to prevail.

  “There’s no one as good as me,” she muttered darkly, “because no one is as evil as I am.” She thought, but did not say, “And because I am prepared for death.”

  Her lonely, mysterious admission hung in the still, humid air, like a soap bubble, drifting tremulously, ready for the lightning to burst it open and consign its meaning to dim memory. No one dared speak for a long moment, but no lightning came.

  “Now can we get back to work?” Emily finally said, looking directly at CJ. “It’s closing in on oh-six-hundred.”

  Back to top

  Chapter Six

  A Mysterious Message

  Tateishi Park was empty at that hour of the morning, warm and humid even in November. Mount Fuji glistened in the distance, its white cap shimmering in the haze over Sagami Bay, the crater of the volcano still sleeping after three centuries, a restless image of eternity. Perry shuffled along the edge of a tidal pool, looking for a skipping rock, when he heard Cho’s voice calling to him.

  “I appreciate the view of the mountain,” Perry said, “but did we really have to come all the way out here?”

  “That’s for you to decide,” Cho said, “once you’ve heard what I have to say.”

  “This seems a bit too ‘deep throat’ for a line officer, if you ask me.”

  “All I know is I got a message from a sub-driver accompanying Carrier Strike Group Nine, when they were in Guam. Very clear instructions, if you know what I mean, to give you this in private.”

  Perry glanced at the slip of paper in his hand. “It means nothing to me.”

  “I swear, if this isn’t righteous, and I get hung out to dry over it, I’ll be coming for you.”

  “Me? What the hell have you gotten us into?”

  “All he said was I owed it to her, you know, your girl, and it could be a matter of life or death.”

  “All who said?”

  “Leone, you know, the sub captain.”

  “Holy crap. Do you think it has anything to do with the hi-jinks you and Kuragin got her mixed up in at Chinhae?”

  “Hey, that wasn’t my fault. You know what a blustering idiot Kuragin can be when he’s had a few.”

  “So then it was just a bar brawl? Nothing more sinister?”

  “I didn’t say that, and I haven’t said anything about this to anyone, not the Shore Patrol, not the Admiral, nobody. That’s the way she wanted it.”

  “Said what, Cho? Spit it out.”

  “Well, it was kind of Kuragin’s fault, or at least I thought so at the time. I mean, if he hadn’t been so loud, we might have been able to slip out of that gin joint unnoticed. I didn’t think we’d been marked beforehand. But, it’s just…”

  “Just what?” Perry roared.

  “It’s just that these guys seemed too coordinated for something that’s supposed to be spontaneous. Kuragin started yelling something to me from the bar, where he was apparently negotiating with one of the locals about a jazz club he wanted to take us to, when two guys hit him from behind, for no reason I could figure. Then they’re kicking him before he can get off the floor, so I get out of the booth to help him, because what else am I supposed to do, just leave him there?”

  “And Emily, where’s she during all this?”

  “I thought she stayed in the booth, but I guess she must have followed me out. Anyway, I pull the two guys off Kuragin, and before I know it, like six more guys, big dudes too, looking like dockworkers or something, they’re all over us, and the whole fight spills out a side door into the alley. At one point, Kuragin gets upended into a dumpster and hits his head, or something—he ended up needing a few stitches—and he’s kinda stunned by the blow, and I’m thinking we’re in for the beating of our lives… and over what? The next thing I know, no one’s trying to hit me anymore. Actually I’m wedged in next to some banana crates or something, sort of upside-down, and what’s left of them are circling around her, like at least four guys. A few others were already lying in a heap across the alley. Anyway, right about then I could swear one of them says something in Chinese. My Mandarin’s not so good, but I think he said “riben guizi.”

  “What’s that mean?” Perry asked, his face ashen with anticipation.

  “Guizi is just slang for foreigners, you know, devils or demons. But riben is the term for the Japanese. The guy’s telling them to get the Japanese devil, like they’d been expecting to find her there.”

  “Holy crap. What did you do?”

  “Me? What could I do? I was all wedged in, man. Besides, she settled with them all by herself. That girl really is like some sort of demon in a fight. I mean, there I am, watching the scene upside-down, and the biggest guy grabs her from behind in a bear hug, and one of the others has a sack he’s gonna put over her head. And it looks like she’s not even resisting, like she’s gonna let them carry her off.”

  Slack-jawed and saucer-eyed, Perry listened to this part of the story without breathing.

  “I’m not entirely certain what happened next, how she did it, some sort of joint-lock, but the big guy lets out this shriek, and she’s managed to pry one hand off and twist it down hard—man, she must have strong hands, but you’d never guess it just to look at her—anyway, this guy who’s like twice her size goes tumbling into Kuragin’s dumpster. And his arm and shoulder are totally bent the wrong way. Meanwhile, the guy with the sack tries to kick her in the face, and she just ducks under his kick, and hooks his foot with hers when he tries to bring it down again. Then she jerks him forward with it, and he’s screaming like she’s tearing him in half or something, ’cause he ends up in this hideous split. Man, that had to hurt. It hurts just to think about it. Anyway, when he falls towards her, she chops him across the throat, and I really don’t know how he could have survived a blow like that. The next thing, I must have blacked out, or something, or maybe she was moving too fast for me to see clearly, but she just mowed the rest of those guys down, like they’re tall grass. At one point, it’s like she’s spinning through the air at these two guys, kicking and striking at them, but I get a look at her face and it’s totally placid, like nothing out of the ordinary is going on. I’ve never seen anything like it. Sometimes I think I just hallucinated the whole thing.”

  “Goddamn it, Cho. How the hell could you idiots take her to a place like that?”

  “Hey, don’t blame us. And thank God she was there, ’cause she really saved us. And it’s the strangest thing, when I think back on it, because she was totally fierce in that fight, you know, like there’s nothing too nasty for her, snapping elbows and knees, smashing guys’ faces against hard things. I mean, it’s like she broke those guys… and then she’s helping me up, and I look up into those eyes, and it’s like practically a religious experience. But I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, right? They’re so dark and deep, and looking into them is so calming, like serenity itself, but with this unsettling feeling that if you looked deeper, if you could see all the way to the bottom…”

  “You might see the very fires of hell,” Perry added. “Yeah, I’ve been there.”

  By this point, the two of them were standing side by side at the edge of the same tidal pool, gazing blankly at the ancient volcano across the bay. Gray storm clouds in the background spread out behind the broken cone and Perry shifted over a few feet to try to imagine what an eruption might look like. Of course, the storm didn’t stretch high enough to complete the illusion, but Perry took some comfort from it anyway.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked, waving the slip o
f paper in his hand. “Can you at least tell me what the characters mean?” he asked after another moment’s silence.

  “Like I said, my knowledge of Mandarin is pretty sketchy. It could be a name, but this character seems to mean cicada.”

  “Cicada? You mean those big insects?”

  Cho shrugged.

  “Leone said your team is catching a ride with Strike Group Ten to the Persian Gulf.”

  “How the hell… nobody outside the SEAL chain of command is supposed to know about mission plans.”

  “I don’t pretend to know anything about how you guys operate,” Cho said, with a shrug. “Leone insisted on face to face hand off only. No phones, emails, nothing. He seems to think a SEAL in Kabul will contact you.”

  “Damnit, Theo,” Perry muttered under his breath.

  “If you get me burned over this, man…. I only agreed because it’s her, you know. So don’t screw it up, whatever the hell it is.”

  Perry growled.

  “You hungry?” Cho asked to change the subject. “There’s a good noodle house on the other side of the park.”

  ~~~~~~~

  “Do you really have to go to this thing, Em?”

  “I don’t have to go, CJ. I want to go,” Emily replied as they crossed King George Street.

  “But it’s gonna be so boring.”

  “Look, guys, it’s not like I’m asking you to come.”

  “But Zaki and McDonough are meeting us,” Stacie said.

  “That’s okay. I’ll catch up with you guys later.”

  “They’re not gonna like it, Em. You know how they can be.”

  “I’ll be fine. It’s just a lecture. Plus, you can bet Bauer and his pals wouldn’t be caught dead there.”

  The girls stared at her imploringly at the corner of Prince George Street, all to no avail. As on so many other occasions, she resisted their entreaties, though perhaps now with more than the usual regret. The sweetness of friendship makes its own demands on the heart, and Emily felt the risk of not deferring to it more at that moment than before. She glanced down the block and saw what she expected: a dark sedan idling by the curb.

  “Fine,” Stacie said. “We’ll be at the Ram’s Head. There’s one of those jug bands playing tonight, you know. McDonough is really keen to see ’em.”

  “I’ll try to get there before ten. Wait for me, okay?”

  Once the girls had gone, Emily motioned to the sedan. When whoever sat in it didn’t respond, she considered whistling as if they were a taxi, but thought better of it, though she still couldn’t resist playing with them just a little bit, and crossed the cobblestone street. When she got within a few yards, she could see the driver shaking his head in disbelief. A tap on the window got him to lower it.

  “Hi, Ed,” she said, with a big smile plastered across her face. “I’m glad you guys have got my back.”

  “This is serious business, Miss Tenno.”

  “Can I assume there’s no extradition order yet?”

  Braswell growled under his breath.

  “Look, fellas, I don’t mean to give you a hard time. Well, maybe I do a little bit. But, here, let me make it easy on you. I’m heading up to St. John’s to hear a lecture on Romantic Poetry, and then I’m meeting friends at the Ram’s Head—that’s over on West Street.”

  Fully pleased with herself, she turned her back on them and strolled along the last block of Prince George Street, which led directly to the broad front walk of the college. The former Governor’s Mansion, now McDowell Hall, one of two classroom buildings, loomed at the top of the hill, dominating the front campus, three stories of brick topped by a belltower with a gold dome—though the gold had been replaced by yellow paint in a more budget-conscious era. Lawns on either side of the patterned brick walkway rolled gently away into the twilight, anchored by romanesque buildings. The north lawn had been the scene of two ignominious defeats for her company in comically over-publicized croquet matches, at the hands of shaggy college students dressed in straw hats, seersucker pants and Hawaiian shirts. The decades-long tradition of those matches, at its best a congenial and mutual mockery, eventually led to a warming of relations between the Brigade and the Johnnies, as the students were commonly known.

  The quadrangle on the far side of McDowell overlooked the back campus, an enormous lawn stretching all the way to College Creek, flanked on one side by an ancient-looking gymnasium and on the other by a low-lying, modern structure. The steady stream of students and faculty, and perhaps even a few townies, heading down the steps to Mellon Hall, and Francis Scott Key Auditorium, showed her the way.

  ~~~~~~~

  “ ‘Bacchic night falls, full of stars, and but little concerned about us’—these are the poet’s words,” said the lecturer, a younger man than Emily expected, in a dark, ill-fitting suit, probably the only one in his closet. “Night is Hölderlin’s word for our spiritual isolation in the world, for the feeling of abandonment, that the gods have left us. But the night is full of stars, which is to say, it shelters the light that might eventually illumine our days. It is dark and darkening, but not marked by despair.”

  In the low light of the auditorium, a little more than half the seats filled, Emily could see her fellow lecture-goers clearly, some paying close attention as the lecturer explained that the night shelters our spiritual aspiration, others whispering among themselves, attention wandering to less somber subjects. Her own attention faded for just a moment as she considered the sloping floor of the hall, and wondered how it might sound if pranksters dropped a few hundred marbles in the back row and allowed them to roll freely.

  “If philosophy is understood as the rational exploration of human values—in other words, if it restricts itself to cheerful, daylight assumptions about human possibilities—it may not be able to appreciate the full meaning of Night.” The lecturer paused to look up from his notes, and seemed to lose his focus for a moment, scanning the audience until he met Emily’s eyes. After a moment, she made a face at him and he turned back to his notes, flustered. Off to her right, on the end of the curving row in which she sat, a hint of movement and a whisper—when she turned to look, two Asian girls, students she supposed, giggled and turned away, only to turn back a second later with furtive smiles.

  “In Plato’s Republic, Socrates hints at something ‘beyond being,’ which he names the Good,” the lecturer continued. “By contrast, Aristotle’s first principle is pure intelligibility, a mind which thinks nothing but its own thinking. A few centuries later, Plotinus concedes Aristotle’s point, the world is intelligible to rational man, but only because it’s highlighted against a more primal horizon that must itself be beyond intelligibility.”

  As strange as Aristotle’s notion of divinity seemed to her, Emily found the Plotinian idea of a sheltering horizon comforting, a sort of confirmation of her recurring feeling of the darkness lurking in her own heart. The meaningfulness of things is not simply a matter of their intelligibility, she mused. Other eyes watched her, and when she scanned the audience, she noticed no other midshipmen, no other uniforms. The attention of several young people, obviously students—uncombed hair, loose clothes, blue jeans and rumpled shirts—bent her way intermittently, though their interest hardly exceeded the most casual curiosity.

  On the other hand, the whispers of the two Asian girls betrayed something steadier, deeper-rooted. It was hard not to let it distract her from the lecturer’s explanation of the tension between rationalism and mysticism in medieval theology. By the time he reached the modern era, and the German romantics, she could sense where his argument had to end up.

  “ ‘For to the lost, she is holy, and to the dead, but herself stands firm, eternal, the freest spirit’,” he said, quoting from Hölderlin again. “But what sort of freedom is this? Surely not the freedom of modern political life, with its self-serving antitheses between constraint and individualism. The poet’s freedom speaks from the terror of spiritual isolation, and the distant call of a courage that may not have
been seen for millennia.”

  “Of course,” Emily thought. “Which means he has to call for some sort of return to the ancient gods, to Dionysus and Demeter. It’s easy to say, but what does it actually mean? How would one even live like that?”

  Later, standing on the edge of the milling crowd in the lobby, alone by a large ficus tree spreading along the floor-to-ceiling windows that formed one wall of the building, Emily tipped her head to Ed Braswell and his partner, who lounged by the main entrance with studied non-chalance. He frowned and gave his head a subtle shake, as if signaling to discourage her from drawing attention to their presence. On the other side of the room, the two Asian girls caught her eye again, one timid, the other bold, both curious about her. When she smiled at them, they scurried over, one pulling the other by the hand.

  After a moment of nervous giggles and ridiculous modesty, Emily decided to break the ice for them.

  “Did you enjoy the lecture?”

  “No,” the taller one replied, pulling her long, straight black hair over one shoulder in a bit of dramatic showiness. “It was too mystical for me.”

  “I used to have hair like yours,” Emily said. “I miss it.”

  “Did you have to cut it for the Navy?”

  “I suppose I would have had to, but I’d already cut it before then,” she said, reflecting on the fraught circumstances of some of her haircuts. “I can guess from your accent that you’re not from around here.”

  “No, you are right. I am from Nanjing.”

  “If I may be permitted to inquire, how did you find your way to this obscure outpost of civilization?”

  “It is not easy to get into university in China these days.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Emily said. “But isn’t this place a peculiar choice? I mean, it’s so small, and so much about western things.”

  “My father wants me to learn about the west,” the quieter girl said. “He says it might be useful for business.”