A magazine cover sounds like a lick of fire when opened.
William Koppenborg had lived so few adult years before giving himself to God that he could not reliably recollect them. He had never been with a woman, never seen one unclothed. Men who prospered in the priesthood found ways of defusing their lust. His own method was to visualize dirt pitched into a hole, his desire buried beneath tons of earth. When he saw Fresh Meat’s first image—a woman naked except for high heels, her body lean and shiny, squatting above a disembodied penis veined like the trunk of a bald cypress—his lust clawed itself from its grave.
He turned page after page, wincing at paper cuts though he saw no wounds. His testicles ached. His pulse accelerated. His penis, forever a dangling, excretory tube, inflated and nudged at his thighs.
It caused trouble during services. He prided himself on believing what he preached—it helped him muster the volume required by the whang and whoosh—but his excogitations on saints and apostles were no match for the lips, nipples, and labia shrouding his brain like a fungus. Members of his congregation thrice interrupted a sermon to ask if his reddening face was a sign of heart distress. That was not it at all. It was terror one of them would notice the erection tenting his slacks.
Inside the closet was a first aid kit, one he’d never opened prior to this deployment but with which he’d recently become familiar. In addition to the gauze, the kit contained medical tape, which Father Bill began using to fasten his penis to a thigh. When the organ grew erect during services, as it always did, he would feel the sting of adhesive against stretching skin and would recall the pained faces inside Fresh Meat. It was not pain they felt. He knew that now.
Knowing little about sex, he began envisioning warped mechanics. The photo of a woman with her fist inside another woman’s vagina: Father Bill imagined two women in the front row of his congregation, one’s hand shoved far enough into the other to tug out ovaries, intestines, and kidneys while the receiver shuddered orgasmically. The photo of a woman with her lips sunk halfway down a penis: Father Bill imagined a male and female in the hangar bay engaged in the same, except the man pushed until his penis broke through the back of the woman’s neck, shattering vertebrae, while the woman’s jaws kept working, biting off the penis, sinking her teeth into steaming bowels.
On and on, Fresh Meat’s flashbulb instants taken to bestial conclusions of ecstatic mutual destruction, They were the visions of Bosch or Dalí or Goya, a gallery of carnal monstrosity that told Lieutenant Commander William Koppenborg he was becoming a monster too.
He tried everything to make the thoughts go away. He howled his hymns. It did no good, He’d led congregations through “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” hundreds of times, but every line seethed with sinister double meaning, none more than the first. Let all mortal flesh keep silence was Father Bill’s plea for his sweaty visions to begone.
In the final months of deployment, his obsession fixed itself on one woman. He called her My Sweet, and she seemed to accept the term of affection, smiling at his grandfatherly warmth. My Sweet was young, but then again, weren’t they all? She’d begun to doubt her place both aboard Olympia and in life and had arranged private counseling with Father Bill. My Sweet’s skin was smooth and golden; he imagined it tasting like pancakes. My Sweet’s lips were plump as sausages; he imagined her gasp of pleasure as he bit them off, squish, squish, squish.
When she spoke, he edged closer, hungry to create with her one of the multilimbed flesh beasts seen in Fresh Meat. Each time he believed he might touch her, a shadow draped over him. Jesus Christ on his cross, watching to see if his holy soldier could resist temptation. Father Bill’s very faith was on trial. Jesus had his forty days in the Judaean Desert; Father Bill had his six months at sea.
Historically, only the most devout received such trials, and of that he was proud. Pain, after all, could be mastered, if you had a sharp box cutter and plenty of gauze.
“Man overboard! To muster, all hands! Time: plus two!” the XO shouted.
He needed to move. Arriving late for emergency muster carried consequences, even for old sailors like him, He pulled on his pants, snug over his bandaged thigh, then folded the garbage bag so it did not leak a drop of blood before inserting it into a second bag. He left the closet, shoved the bags deep into a trash bin, and left for his muster station, where he would stand alongside men whose gods did not find them worth challenging: the minister, pastor, rabbi, imam, and worst of all, the ship’s psychiatrist—“the Psych” he was called—a handsome, muscled, mustached fellow who probably forged sex monsters with different women at every port.
Father Bill entered the tight steel hallway and adopted the easy stride people expected, despite the pulsing wounds in his thigh. Sailors thundered to their stations. His gaze sought out the rare women and lingered upon their rocking hips and swaying breasts—fresh meat not even navy uniforms could conceal. None of them were My Sweet; nevertheless, he reveled. Let all mortal flesh keep silence, keep silence.
Some Kind of Bird Flu Thing
It was 0640 Hawaii-Aleutian time when the man-overboard call went out. Master Chief Boatswain’s Mate Karl Nishimura, one of three master helmsmen aboard Olympia, was not scheduled to report to the navigation bridge for thirty minutes. He sat at ease—or as close to ease as Nishimura ever got—with three other khaki-clad officers in the CPO mess on 03 deck.
The 1MC crackled to life. Sailors less acquainted with Executive Officer Bryce Peet might not have picked up the nuances of his voice, but Nishimura sure did. The XO was livid, and no wonder: this was the third man-overboard alarm in a fortnight, a cry-wolf routine that, aboard a behemoth like Olympia, was liable to get someone killed.
Minutes earlier, it had been a typical breakfast. In other words, Nishimura was uncomfortable. The CPO mess had the best eating on the boat, palatable chow served on actual tablecloth-covered four-tops. Adding to its Anytown, U.S.A., feel were diner-style condiment caddies and a TV, kept blaring 24–7. The CPO mess was also a place of jocular ball-busting, a pastime that made Nishimura wary.
He did not need the Psych digging into his memories to understand why. To make it into this room, one had to know their naval history, and that likely included Imperial Japanese Navy admiral Shōji Nishimura of Leyte Gulf fame. No relation to Karl Nishimura, of course, but the surface similarities were enough to have hounded him as a cadet. If he read people’s smirks right—grins tied off the second he walked into a room—the derision lived on in today’s young, racist seamen, of which there were still too many.
He tried not to dwell on it much. It had been a decade since anyone had pulled their eyelids into a slant or called him Jap. His sensitivity to his otherness mostly emerged in groups like this, where men, lips loosened by greasy food, expressed testosterone by poking at one another’s sore spots.
The morning’s conversation revolved around what Crash and Salvage Leading Petty Officer Ronaldo Ribeiro called “the weirdness” of Olympia’s strike group. Thanks to the safe waters between Hawaii and San Diego, the strike group’s submarine and frigate had stayed at Pearl for refit and repair, leaving the carrier with a truncated retinue of three destroyers, a supply ship, and the guided-missile cruiser Vindicator.
“Hickenlooper’s going in circles out there,” Ribeiro said. “Totally out of formation.”
“Navigational maneuver?” Cryptologic Technician Darrell Millichamp posited.
Ribeiro wiped up yolk with toast, “Not like any I’ve seen. Loop-de-loops.”
Safety Officer Waylon Leneghan chuckled, “We’re not being downsized anymore. They can quit showing off.”
“And the Pollard? It’s just plain gone.” Ribeiro trilled the Twilight Zone theme.
“Gone?” Millichamp asked. “What do you mean gone?”
Ribeiro washed his toast back with coffee. “Gone as that toast. I climbed the island to see for myself. They’re booking thirty-three knots back to Pearl.”
Leneghan laced his fingers behind
his head and burped, “Wouldn’t mind a U-turn back to Oahu. Eighty-two-degree beaches, wahines swishing grass skirts.”
Ribeiro chuckled. “Put it in Veevers’s Idea Box.”
CMC Bertrand Veevers, a man so tightly wound he made Nishimura seem like a beatnik, had been the boat’s in-joke of choice for the past half year as he’d promoted the anonymous suggestion box he’d had installed outside his cabin. The Idea Box had received plenty of suggestions, all right, and as a result, Veevers’s rants about disrespect had become a major source of enjoyment for nonrates and officers alike. Except Karl Nishimura, of course. Anything outside of code made him sweat.
Millichamp nodded his way, “What do you say, Saint Karl? You’ve made more of these runs than us. You ever seen a tin can act like Pollard?”
Nishimura paused, and right on cue, the three officers made nominal efforts to hide their grins. As surely as the straitlaced helmsman had earned the nickname Saint Karl, so had his studied hesitation been dubbed the Nishimura Delay. Nishimura knew his rep. Every question given sober consideration, whether asked about enemy attacks in the Persian Gulf or which brand of toothpaste to buy from the ship store. The Nishimura Delay was a habit pounded into him in grade school, where classmates mocked mispronunciations he’d inherited from his Japanese father.
He donned a mask of good humor when gibed about the Nishimura Delay, but in truth, it stung, which made him ashamed of a boyish delicacy that had no place in the navy. He regaled himself with the knowledge he would not need to keep delaying much longer. He was forty-three years old, and though he knew it would surprise the men at this table, he’d decided to cash in his twenty-year military retirement.
His exhaustive understanding of navy life had begun to trouble him. Ask him anything about Olympia and he’d have the answer, as if the boat were his firstborn rather than a $20 billion, nuclear-reactor-powered hunk of mobile oceanfront real estate. Funded in 1968, launched in 1975, and commissioned in 1976, CVN-68X, a.k.a, USS Olympia, a.k.a. Big Mama, was the second-oldest Nimitz-class carrier in the USN, with thirteen deployments under its belt. As large as a skyscraper set on its side, capable of moving seven hundred nautical miles a day, and with a flight deck as busy as a medium-sized airport, Olympia was a storied titan, if one nearing the end of her service. This might be her final voyage; fitting then, Nishimura thought, that it would be his final voyage as well.
Big Mama had served with distinction in such operations as Desert Shield, Enduring Freedom, and Iraqi Freedom. How could a sailor doubt the virtue of missions so rousingly titled? Nishimura could. His distrust of the military-industrial complex had steadily grown over two decades. Blame a Japanese American heritage that included both sides of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki quandary. Blame a job that involved steering the boat, the big-stick component of any carrier’s show of force. He did not enjoy acknowledging the carrier was a weapon, the largest the navy had, and that every one of her five thousand souls were but cogs inside the triggering mechanism.
Nishimura knew the life cycle of a carrier better than he knew his own, and it was time for that to change. The question that plagued officers like Ribeiro, Millichamp, and Leneghan—what the hell would they do in the private sector?—did not vex Nishimura. He did not care. He’d hold construction signs. Bag groceries, Whatever it took to spend more time with his family.
Few people aboard Olympia even knew Saint Karl was married. Trained on cautionary tales of sailors getting fingers ripped off by machine parts, Nishimura did not wear a wedding band. He rarely spoke of his husband, Larry, a Black man from Trinidad, whose full-time job in their Buffalo, New York, home was caring for their five kids, whom they’d adopted after the children’s father and mother, Nishimura’s older sister, had been killed in a robbery. Why didn’t Nishimura speak of Larry more often? It wasn’t that they were gay.
Three nights ago at Benny’s Hula House in Honolulu, he’d been seated outdoors among drunk sailors who, once they’d tired of gawping at surfer girls, had segued into slurring proudly about the families they’d soon be seeing. It was an opportune time for Saint Karl to praise Larry and their children: Atsuko, Chiyo, Daiki, Neola, and Bea. If he hadn’t been stone sober, he might have. Perhaps he’d learned it from a cold father, but he’d always felt it improper to discuss his loved ones—so soft and vulnerable—among men who, in one way or another, were trained to kill.
It was the same each time he deployed. He was one Karl Nishimura when boarding Big Mama, his ASU sharp as a trowel inside a clothing bag and eyes welling as Larry and the children waved bon voyage from the dock; he was another Karl Nishimura stepping back onto that dock six months later. Embracing his family, he’d feel he’d become a stranger. Did his legs shake from mal de débarquement or from anxiety over whether he’d remember how to hold a child, give a kiss, or eat food unseasoned by a soupçon of jet fuel? He felt himself become a worse Karl Nishimura year by year, month by month, day by day.
A question fit for CMC Veevers’s Idea Box: How do I hold on to myself way out here?
It felt terrible to have your heart hardened. So he continued to save his tenderest emotions for his family, eschewing sailors who reached out in goodwill. On this deployment, the boat’s top eyes in the sky, Air Boss Clay Szulczewski and Mini Boss Willis Clyde-Martell, had both made entrées of friendship. Meet us for cards? Partake in these mind-blowing cigars? Sit with us on the admiral’s bridge catwalk just to watch the submerging sun paint the whitecaps?
Open your heart?
He tidied his lips with a handkerchief before replying to Millichamp.
“I served on the flagship for the fiftieth D-day celebration,” he said, “Strict flotilla formation. We didn’t have active status like Pollard, but we had a frigate ignore her orders and start doing figure eights. Could have caused real damage.”
“What was the beef?” Ribeiro asked. “Signal intercept?”
“Human error.” Nishimura shivered inside his military dress: no two words spooked him more. “It came down to an E-3 in the engine room who thought the Normandy invasion was a government hoax.”
“And that was his protest?” Leneghan cried. “Christ on a cracker.”
“I think Saint Karl’s got it,” Millichamp sighed. “Especially on the home stretch of a half-year deployment. I think someone on Pollard went Section 8. Some of these young kids start realizing the freedom they’re about to get back and can’t handle it.”
“Whole lot of people can’t handle it,” Leneghan grunted.
There was silence at that; television chatter heroically filled the void. Leneghan had come close to saying aloud what plenty of sailors aboard Big Mama must be thinking. For ten days now, Captain David Page had occupied a bed in sick bay, a bizarre capstone to an otherwise clockwork deployment.
Nishimura believed aircraft carriers, overstuffed by design, had room for exactly one secret: whether or not their ship actually carried nukes, Anything additional acted as a corrosive acid. On a ship, rumors spread more quickly than colds. Captain Page had been found polishing doorways at night with his underwear. Captain Page would not quit singing Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time.” Captain Page was dying.
Funny, but dangerous, Lowered confidence meant lower morale, which meant lower concentration, and that affected everyone. The hierarchy of a carrier strike group was not as complicated as its titles, ratings, and pay grades suggested. Each ship in the CSG had a captain, and those skippers, along with the CAG (commander, air group) reported to the CSG’s admiral—in this instance, Admiral Jamison Vo, currently aboard Vindicator. If Olympia’s skipper had been at death’s door, one of the ship’s MH-60R Seahawks would have whirlybirded him to dry land. But by all reports, Captain Page was alert and responsive in sick bay. He simply wasn’t up.
It was, in a word, weird, The same brand of weird being exhibited by Hickenlooper and Pollard. Perhaps everyone in the CPO mess was thinking the same. The silence blanketing Nishimura’s table unfolded across others, and the background burble
of TV news crystallized into actual words.
“What I have in my email here is the document you heard Press Secretary Shellenbarger reference. It includes the list of rescue stations, Lee? Get me a super with these rescue stations, stat.”
Navy ships broadcast news around the clock through open-channel receivers. Most sailors had their favorite reporters, and due to the boat’s noise, that favoritism revolved around physical attractiveness. A preponderance of men lusted after an NBC analyst stationed in Afghanistan, and though Nishimura did not know who straight women preferred, he could not imagine it was this coiffed dolt, whose preening mannerisms seemed antithetical to everything a sailor stood for. His name, Nishimura believed, was Chuck Corso.
Corso did not look as good as usual, His tie ran sideways, as if it had been yanked on. On his forehead, right beneath what looked like a small patch of missing hair, were dark spots that might be blood. Shadows moved irregularly across his haunted face, and the picture vibrated from a jostled camera, Watching, Nishimura knew a new kind of seasickness, wondering if a physical struggle was taking place near the reporter’s desk.
Corso’s red eyes strained at his laptop.
“I want everyone watching at home, or wherever you are, to approach this list with caution. With these ghouls, I’m just not sure who we can trust.”
Safety Officer Waylon Leneghan: “Did he just say ghouls?”
“The document says,” Corso continued, “that this is a ‘swiftly evolving event’ and that ‘federal, state, and local partners’ are working together with the WHO to ‘keep information flowing.’” Corso looked up. “That means absolutely nothing.” He looked back down. “The president, they say, is in a ‘secure location,’ receiving regular briefings on the situation, and is ‘reviewing our national capabilities.’ Boy, that’s an ominous phrase, ladies and gentlemen.”
The Living Dead Page 19