Terminal Island (26 page)

Then, all of a sudden, he felt some internal part of him rip from the exertions. He could feel it instantly, as if his rib cage had torn from its mountings. He shouted out at a fiery pain, and then felt a dizziness, as if he'd taken a whiff of some intoxicant. In one more bout, the coughing seemed to blow itself out and left him becalmed in some strange universe. He lay and breathed very slowly, bringing his shirt over his nose and mouth. His breathing was odd, lopsided in a new way, but it was serving better than it should, and he realized all at once what had happened.

“I was hoping to save you for later,” he said aloud. She was up on an elbow, fretting at him with those wonderful, dark eyes, black with no centers.

“I think my bad lung just popped, reinflated itself,” he explained for her. He smiled. “Sorry, Doc. I beat you to it.” It felt strange, like walking hard on a leg that you had grown used to favoring. The extra air was exhilarating, even with so much dust around. He hadn't felt dizzy-drunk like this in a long time.

“Air is good,” he said.

“Jack!”

There was a rasp of danger in her voice, and he forced himself to sit up on the traveling black mound. There it was ahead, that same faint round radiance approaching, a featureless entry into another tower. For just an instant he pictured the two of them tumbling off the edge, plummeting in the cataract of carbon dust straight toward two giant screws, both grinding away. He pushed the image away. If they made it onto this catwalk, assuming there was a catwalk, they wouldn't be doing any more conveyors, that was for sure. There would be a red door out of the tower, and they would just have to risk the goodwill of Joe Ozaki.

He pushed himself onto his knees. All his thrashing had managed to dislodge a lot of coke and give them a shallow plateau. “Can you get onto your knees?”

“I'll try.”

He could hear her stirring behind him over the light rumble of the machinery.

“Oooh,
that hurts. I'm up.”

“Give me your hand.” She clung to the one he offered, slippery with dust, and there wasn't a drop of sweat to help with the grip, every bit of moisture absorbed by the powdering of coke. She took his wrist in both her hands, relying on him. This time he was planning to thrust his free arm through the railing and catch it in his armpit, grabbing for anything he could, and then use all his strength to try to hurl her up onto the catwalk. But he didn't see how he could do it if her legs couldn't push off and give him some help.

“I need all the kick you've got left in you,” he said.

“I don't know about my left, but the right's willing.”

“Piece of cake,” he said. His eyes never left the opening, and he inhaled to air himself out, full-lunged for the first time in months. The O of pale luminescence widened slowly like the iris of a lens, and he was relieved when he made out the edge of a catwalk on the right, just like the last tower. “I can see the railing. We're home free.”

“I'm scared, Jack. I'm feeling weak.”

“One last heave. Hang on like fury.”

He kept drawing in those big, satisfying breaths, not used to both lungs yet, and he heard a whimper of pain behind him. He realized the blood loss was catching up with her, and he just hoped she didn't go into shock.

The conveyor began to shudder beneath them as the opening drew steadily closer. He felt one annoying hammer in his knees, a roller well out of alignment with the others.

“Get set!”

He had his left arm thrust out in front of him, anticipating. He grabbed, misjudged, and felt the steel rail hit him hard above the elbow, but his hand flailed around for something to grasp just as support fell away beneath his knee and he started to drop. A wave of panic took him over as it became clear neither of them had the strength for this maneuver.

“Push hard!”

Then some inexplicable force sucked them up, some giant magnet above that grabbed them both and yanked them aboard the catwalk. He couldn't believe she had that much power in her legs, but he lay for several moments enjoying their safety as the panic abated. When he moved his head slightly, he saw blacked-out tennis shoes, and then a human shadow in a ninja suit, backing away cautiously.

“Thank you, Joe,” Jack Liffey said softly. As far as he could tell, Gloria had passed out.

“There is no distinction to be made between the battlefield and one's own kitchen,” Joe Ozaki said in one of his gnomic riddles. “Courage is present or it is not.”

“I'll take the kitchen,” Jack Liffey said. But he wasn't sure whether he'd said it aloud. He was too dazed.

“All time is within us now.”

The dark figure came close again and squatted down to handcuff Gloria Ramirez to the catwalk railing.

“I require you to come with me,” Joe Ozaki intoned to Jack Liffey.

Twenty-two

The Coldest Day in History

One of the cops barked in surprise, his eyes pressed hard to his big, electronically amplified night-vision binoculars. Others, in the crowd below, holding vigil with their own binoculars, seemed to be reacting to something, too.

He showed up first as a tiny figure trotting hard along the approach ramp that curled onto the bridge. It was only because the bridge was at an angle to them that they could see him at all. Like any short suspension bridge, the roadway rose steeply, so he would remain invisible to the line of police cars blocking the shore end until he crested the middle, which was still half a mile ahead of him, two hundred feet above the channel.

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 is 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.”