When I was once again inside I thought to run the water in the upstairs hall bath, the one Sunny used when she was still living in the house. The faint smell was of a shut-off dampness and mold. As with her bedroom, I had completely gone over the surfaces with spackle and paint, and then had the tiles on the wall and floor regrouted, but the work was still old enough even with the room left unused that it looked quite grim and shabby. A hard crust of greenish scale covered the spigot, which ran very slowly, and over the years the drip had discolored the area around the drain with a watery-edged patch of rust. When I turned on the hot water the tap shook and coughed, and then with a violent spew a stream of reddish-brown liquid began to flow. When it finally cleared I shut it off and flipped down the lever for the drain, but it was slow and I had to wait for some time for the dirty water to swirl down and away before filling up the tub again, nearly right to the top. I stepped out of my clothes and sat in the minerally, prickling water. It was hot enough that I thought my flesh was dissolving, as if I were being rendered away to leave only the hollow drift of my old bones.
I must say I appreciated the feeling. There is something exemplary to the sensation of near-perfect lightness, of being in a place and not being there, which seems of course a chronic condition of my life but then, too, its everyday unction, the trouble finding a remedy but not quite a cure, so that the problem naturally proliferates until it has become you through and through. Such is the cast of my belonging, molding to whatever is at hand. So I dipped my head beneath the surface and could feel the water swell over the edge of the tub and onto the tiled floor but I didn’t care. The intense heat felt so pure and truthful to me, so all-enveloping, that I wished there was a way I could remain within it, silently curled up as if I were quite unborn, as yet not of this life, or of the world, of anything moored to the doings and traces of humankind. I did not want innocence so much as I did an erasure reaching back, a pre-beginning, and if I could trade all my years to be at some early moment and never go forward again, I would do so without question or any dread.
But perhaps the thought itself smacks of innocence, wanting not to know what I know, which is a fraudulent and dangerous wish for most anyone but the youngest child, but particularly for a man who is approaching the farthest region of his life. In fact a man like me should be craving every last bit and tatter of his memory. He should consider the character of all his times whether pleasurable or tragic or sad. He should at last appreciate the serendipity and circumstance and ironical mien of events, and their often necessary befalling. He should, some god willing, take firm hold of all these and call himself among the fortunate, that he should have survived such riches of experience, and consider himself made over again for it, gently refitted for his slow stroll to the edge. But all I seem to think of doing is to stop, or turn around, or else dig in for a sprint, a stiffened, perambling, old-man leap off the precipice. And if I could just clear the first jutting ledges and simply free-fall, enjoy the briefest flying, I should be very thankful indeed.
* * *
BUT PERHAPS RIGHTLY, there is none of that for me. And I recall now that it was K I saw when I finally regained consciousness after suffering the captain’s pistol blows. I was lying on a cot in the empty infirmary, where she was watching over me. I asked her but there was no guard or sentry inside, only she, though two men were stationed outside. Captain Ono had simply ordered her to sit with me, telling her that we should not attempt to leave, and so for several hours she had been changing the bloody dressings on my head.
“The worst is a gash at your scalp, Lieutenant,” she said, touching her own head just above the temple to indicate where. “It’s not too deep, I think. But it is still bleeding. I don’t think you should try to touch it, or even move.”
I wanted to speak but my jaw felt as though it were wired shut, not from injury but from a terrible swelling in my face. The bones around my eyes ached with sharp pain, and I could hardly see her for the poor light and the rheumy tears clouding my vision. They had already put my arm back in its joint. With a firm hand she lifted my head to give me a drink of lukewarm tea.
“You are fortunate to be alive.”
I nodded.
“The captain could have killed you right there and then,” she said. She brushed my short hair with her hand, trying to unmat the dried blood. “I watched through the cracks in the wall. He could have shot you where you lay. He put his pistol at your head and he stood there but he didn’t shoot. Then he looked over at the infirmary, right at the spot on the wall where I was crouched, and he called to me and asked me what he should do.”
“You?”
“Yes. He was staring at me, at the wall right where I was peering out. He said I should tell him what to do. I couldn’t answer him because I was frightened and I thought he was taunting me, that whatever I said he was going to shoot you anyway. I was sure he was going to shoot you. But he waited and then asked me again, and finally I said he should spare you. He backed away, and I thought it was finished. But then he walked over and leaned down on the outside of the wall. He said he wouldn’t kill you, but only if I agreed to his bidding.”
“Which was what?”
She gave him another drink.
“What was it, K?” I said, the tea running down my cheek.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Then you must say.”
“No.”
“Tell me. Please.”
She said quite plainly, “That I would give my life for yours.”
“Your life?”
“Yes, Lieutenant.” She gazed at me coldly, then looked away. “But then the doctor already has that, doesn’t he, no matter what?”
She then let out almost a laugh about it, as if the notion of her life being worth something was ridiculous, which of course it was, absolutely ridiculous. But I was as yet incapable of acknowledging that before her or myself or anyone else. Instead I wanted to tell her that everything about us wasn’t really as it seemed, that nothing was, not even the war, which had never quite arrived and probably now never would, that we — the soldiers, officers, the girls — all had somehow entered an untoward region of stasis from which we would soon find deliverance, that we needed only to persist for a short time longer, that we must hold fast to the general order of things.
I said, “I will protect you.”
K made a noise in her throat, as if to affirm me and rescue me at once. She said, “Please don’t try to be brave for me, Lieutenant. I have not given up anything. Do you think if any of us girls is still living they’ll let us walk out of here when the war ends? That we will go unharmed if they do? In my mind I didn’t give the doctor my life. All he really wanted was a last small concession from me. What was left of my will. So he has that. But the doctor has always had my life and my death. Perhaps now, Lieutenant, he has yours, too.”
I shut my eyes for a moment and tried not to listen. Though she was right, I suddenly didn’t wish to hear such words from her. There was also a seam of anger in her voice but it was the anger that arises from fear as well as mistreatment or injury, and I could tell the doctor was haunting her, his specter making her see him even as she was looking at me. Of course I feared him, too, and the pained creature in me wanted to crawl deep inside a hole at the flash of his memory. But another part of me was drawn to that same receding, that awful, singular stillness of flesh one notices before the first stroke of the knife.