“Is it Tom? Or a fictional character of Tom’s?” Pekka asks.
“Does this mean you win the bet?” Randy asks.
“If only I can figure out how to collect on it,” Cantrell says.
AFLOAT
* * *
A BROWN MIASMA has settled across the Bismarck Sea, smelling of oil and barbecue. American torpedo boats hurtle out of this reeking fog, their fat hulls barely touching the water, their giant motors curving white scars into the sea as they line up their targets: the few remaining ships in Goto Dengo’s troop convoy, whose decks are now covered with a dark mat of soldiers, like moss on an old rock. The torpedos spring into the air like crossbow bolts, driven by compressed gas from tubes on the boats’ decks. They belly-flop into the water, settle to a comfortable depth where the water is always calm, and draw bubble trails across the sea, heading directly for the ships. The crowds on the ships’ decks fluidize and gush over the edges. Goto Dengo turns away and hears but doesn’t see the explosions. Hardly any of the Nipponese troops know how to swim.
Later, the airplanes come back to strafe them some more. Swimmers who have the wit and the ability to dive are invulnerable. Those who don’t are dead very soon. The airplanes leave. Goto Dengo strips a life preserver off a shattered corpse. He has the worst sunburn of his life and it is only midafternoon, so he pilfers a uniform blouse, too, and ties it around his head like a burnoose.
The ones who are still alive, and who can swim, try to converge on each other. They are in a complicated strait between New Guinea and New Britain, and tidal currents rushing through it tend to pull them apart. Some men drift slowly away, calling out to their comrades. Goto Dengo ends up on the fringes of a dissolving archipelago of maybe a hundred swimmers. Many of them clutch life preservers or bits of wood to stay afloat. The seas are considerably higher than their heads and so they can’t see very far.
Before sunset, the haze lifts for an hour. Goto Dengo can clearly fix the sun’s position, so for the first time all day he knows west from east, north from south. Better, he can see peaks rising above the southern horizon, slathered with blue-white glaciers.
“I will swim to New Guinea,” he shouts, and begins doing it. There is no point in trying to discuss it with the others. The ones who are inclined to follow him, do: maybe a few dozen in all. The timing is right—the sea has become miraculously calm. Goto Dengo settles into a slow, easy sidestroke. Most of the others are moving in an improvised dogpaddle. If they are making any progress at all it is totally imperceptible. As the stars begin to come out, he rolls over into a backstroke and gets a fix on Polaris. As long as he swims away from that, it is physically impossible for him to miss New Guinea.
Darkness falls. Dim light is shed by the stars and by a half- moon. The men call to one another, trying to stay bunched together. Some of them get lost; they can be heard but not seen, and those in the main group can do nothing but listen to their pleadings dwindle.
It must be around midnight when the sharks come. The first victim is a man who had lacerated his forehead on a hatch frame when scrambling out of a sinking ship, and who has been bleeding ever since, drawing a thin pink line across the sea, leading the sharks straight to them. The sharks do not know yet what they are dealing with, and so they kill him slowly, worrying him to death in small bites. When he turns out to be easy prey, they explode into some kind of berserk rage that is all the more fantastic for being hidden beneath the black water. Men’s voices are cut off in mid-cry as they are jerked straight down. Sometimes a leg or head will suddenly burst free from the surface. The water splashing into Goto Dengo’s mouth begins to taste of iron.
The attack goes on for several hours. It appears that the noise and smell have attracted some rival shark packs, because sometimes there is a lull followed by renewed ferocity. A severed shark tail bumps up against Goto Dengo’s face; he hangs onto it. The sharks are eating them; why shouldn’t he retaliate? In Tokyo restaurants charge a lot of money for shark sashimi. The skin of the shark tail is tough, but hunks of muscle are hanging out of the torn edge. He buries his face in the meat and feasts on it.
When Goto Dengo was young, his father had owned a fedora with English writing on its ivory silk liner, and a briar pipe, and tobacco that he bought through the mail from America. He would sit on a rock up in the hills and snug his fedora down to keep the chilly air from the bald spot on top of his head and smoke his pipe and just look at the world. “What are you doing?” Dengo would ask him.
“Observing,” father would say.
“But how long can you observe the same thing?”
“Forever. Look over there.” Father pointed with the stem of his pipe. A thread of white smoke piped out of the mouthpiece, like a silk thread being unwound from a cocoon. “That band of dark rock is mineral-bearing. We could get copper out of there, probably some zinc and lead too. We would run a cog railway up the valley to that flat spot there, then sink an angle shaft parallel to the face of the deposit… “ Then Dengo would get into the act and decide where the workers would live, where the school would be built for their children, where the playing field would be. By the time they were finished they would have populated the whole valley with an imaginary city.
Goto Dengo has plenty of time to make observations this night. He observes that severed body parts almost never get attacked. The men who swim most violently are always the first to get it. So, when the sharks come in, he tries to float on his back and not move a muscle, even when the jagged ends of someone’s ribs poke him in the face.
Dawn arrives, one or two hundred hours after the previous sunset. He has never stayed awake all night long before, and finds it shocking to see something as big as the sun go down on one side of the planet and come up on the opposite. He is a virus, a germ living on the surface of unfathomably giant bodies in violent motion. And, amazingly enough, he is still not alone: three other men have survived the night of the sharks. They converge on one another and turn to face the ice-covered mountains of New Guinea, salmon-colored in the dawn light.
“They have not gotten any closer,” one of the men says.
“They are deep in the interior,” Goto Dengo says. “We are not swimming to the mountains—only to the shore—much closer. Let’s go before we die of dehydration!” And he plunges forward into a sidestroke.
One of the others, a boy who speaks with an Okinawan accent, is an excellent swimmer. He and Goto Dengo can easily outdistance the others. For most of the day, they try to stay together with the other two anyway. The waves come up and make it difficult even for good swimmers to move.
One of the slower swimmers has been fighting diarrhea since long before his ship was sunk out from under him and was probably dehydrated to begin with. Around midday, when the sun is coming straight down on top of them like a flamethrower, he goes into convulsions, gets some water into his lungs, and disappears.
The other slow swimmer is from Tokyo. He’s in much better physical condition—he simply doesn’t know how to swim. “There is no better time or place to learn,” Goto Dengo says. He and the Okinawan spend an hour or so teaching him the sidestroke and backstroke, and then they resume swimming southwards.
Around sunset, Goto Dengo catches the Okinawan gulping down mouthful after mouthful of seawater. It is painful to watch, mostly because he himself has been wanting to do it. “No! It will make you sick!” he says. His voice is weak. The effort of filling his lungs, expanding his ribcage against the relentless pressure of the water, is ruining him; every muscle in his torso is rigid and tender.
The Okinawan has already started retching by the time Goto Dengo reaches him. With the help of the Tokyo boy, he sticks his fingers down the Okinawan’s throat and gets him to vomit it all up.
He is very sick anyway, and until late at night cannot do anything except float on his back and mumble deliriously. But just as Goto Dengo is about to abandon him, he becomes lucid, asking “Where is Polaris?”
“It is cloudy tonight,” Goto Dengo
says. “But there is a bright spot in the clouds that might be the moon.”
Based on the position of that bright spot, they guess the position of New Guinea and resume swimming. Their arms and legs are like sacks of clay, and all of them are hallucinating.
The sun seems to be coming up. They are in a nebula of vapor, radiant with peach-colored light, as if hurtling through a distant part of the galaxy.
“I smell something rotten,” says one of them. Goto Dengo cannot tell which.
“Gangrene?” guesses the other.
Goto Dengo fills his nostrils, an act that consumes about half of his remaining energy reserves. “It is not rotten flesh,” he says. “It is vegetation.”
None of them can swim anymore. If they could, they wouldn’t know which direction to choose, because the mist glows uniformly. If they picked a direction, it wouldn’t matter, because the current is taking them where it will.
Goto Dengo sleeps for a while, or maybe he doesn’t.
Something bumps his leg. Thank god; the sharks have come to finish them.
The waves have grown aggressive. He feels another bump. The burned flesh on his leg screams. It is something very hard, rough, and sharp.
Something is projecting out of the water just ahead, something bumpy and white. A coral head.
A wave breaks behind them, picks them up, and flings them forward across the coral, half-flaying them. Goto Dengo breaks a finger and counts himself lucky. The next breaker takes what little skin he has left and flings him into a lagoon. Something forces his feet upwards, and because his body is just a limp sack of shit at this point, doubles him over head-first into the water. His face strikes a bed of sharp coral sand. Then his hands are in it too. His limbs have forgotten how to do anything except swim, and so it takes him a while to plant them in the bottom and lift his head out of the water. Then he begins to crawl on his hands and knees. The odor of rotten vegetation is overpowering now, as if a whole division’s food supplies had been left out in the sun for a week.
He finds some sand that is not covered with water, turns around, and sits down on it. The Okinawan is right behind him, also on hands and knees, and the Tokyo boy has actually clambered to his feet and is wading ashore, being knocked this way and that by incoming waves. He is laughing.
The Okinawan boy collapses on the sand next to Goto Dengo, not even trying to sit up.
A wave knocks the Tokyo boy off-balance. Laughing, he collapses sideways into the surf, throwing out one hand to break his fall.
He stops laughing and jerks back sharply. Something is dangling from his forearm: a wriggling snake. He snaps it like a whip and it flies off into the water.
Scared and sober, he splashes the last half-dozen steps up onto the beach and then falls flat on his face. By the time Goto Dengo reaches him, he is stone dead.
Goto Dengo gathers his forces for some period of time that is difficult to measure. He may have fallen asleep sitting up. The Okinawan boy is still lying on the sand, raving. Goto Dengo gets his feet underneath himself and staggers off in search of fresh water.
This is not a proper beach, merely a sandbar maybe ten meters long and three wide, with some tall grassy stuff sprouting out of the top. On the other side of it is a brackish lagoon that meanders between banks, not of earth, but of living things all tangled together. That tangle is obviously too thick to penetrate. So, notwithstanding what just happened to the Tokyo boy, Goto Dengo wades into the lagoon, hoping that it will lead inland to a freshwater stream.
He wanders for what seems like an hour, but the lagoon takes him back to the edge of the sea again. He gives up and drinks the water he’s wading in, hoping it will be a little less salty. This leads to a great deal of vomiting but makes him feel slightly better somehow. Again he wades into the swamp, trying to keep the sound of the surf behind him, and after an hour or so he finds a rivulet of water that is actually fresh. When he has finished drinking from that, he feels strong enough to go back and carry the Okinawan boy here, if need be.
He gets back to the beach in midafternoon and finds that the Okinawan is gone. But the sand is all churned up by footprints. The sand is dry and so the footprints are too indistinct to read. They must have made contact with a patrol! Surely their comrades must have heard about the attack on the convoy and are combing beaches for survivors. There must be a bivouac in the jungle not far away!
Goto Dengo follows the trail into the jungle. After he’s proceeded a mile or so, the track crosses a small, open mud flat where he gets a good look at the footprints, all made by bare feet with enormous, bizarrely splayed toes. Footprints of people who have never worn shoes in their lives.
He proceeds more cautiously for another few hundred meters. He can hear voices now. The Army taught him all about jungle infiltration tactics, how to creep through the enemy’s lines in the middle of the night without making a sound. Of course, when they practiced it in Nippon they weren’t being eaten alive by ants and mosquitoes the whole time. But it hardly matters to him now. An hour of patient work gets him to a vantage point from which he can see into a flat clearing with a stagnant creek wandering through it. Several long dark houses are built on tree-trunk stilts to keep them up out of the ooze, and roofed with bushy heaps of palm fronds.
Before he finds the Okinawan, Goto Dengo needs to get some food. In the middle of the clearing, white porridge is steaming in a pot over an open fire, but it’s being tended by several tough-looking women, naked except for short fringes of fibrous stuff tied round their waists and just barely concealing their genitals.
Smoke is rising from some of the long buildings too. But to get inside one of them, he would have to clamber up its heavy, slanting ladder and then worm through what looks like a rather small doorway. A child, standing inside one of those doorways with a stick, could prevent an intruder from coming in. Hanging outside some of the doorways are sacks, improvised from lengths of fabric (so at least they have textiles!) and filled with big round lumps: coconuts, possibly or some kind of preserved food set up to keep it away from the ants.
Perhaps seventy people are gathered around something of interest in the middle of the clearing. As they move around, Goto Dengo gets occasional momentary glimpses of someone, possibly Nipponese, who is sitting at the base of a palm tree with his hands behind his back. There’s a lot of blood on his face and he’s not moving. Most of these people are men, and they tend to carry spears. They have those fringes of hairy stuff (sometimes dyed red or green) concealing their private parts, and some of the bigger and older ones have decorated themselves by tying strips of fabric around their arms. Some have painted designs on their skin in pale mud. They have shoved various objects, some of them quite large, sideways through their nasal septums.
The bloodied man seems to have captured everyone’s attention, and Goto Dengo reckons that this will be his only chance to steal some food. He picks the longhouse farthest away from where the villagers have gathered, clambers up its ladder, and reaches for the bulging sack that hangs by the entrance. But the fabric is very old and it has rotted from the damp of the swamp, and maybe from the attacks of the hundreds of flies that buzz around it, and so when he grasps it his fingers go right through. A long swath of it tears away and the contents tumble out around Goto Dengo’s feet. They are dark and sort of hairy, like coconuts, but their shape is more complicated, and he knows intuitively that something is wrong even before he recognizes them as human skulls. Maybe half a dozen of them. Scalp and skin still stuck on. Some of them are dark-skinned with bushy hair, like the natives, and others look distinctly Nipponese.
Sometime later, he is able to think coherently again. He realizes that he does not know how long he might have spent up here, in full view of the villagers, gazing on the skulls. He turns around to look, but all attention is still focused on the wounded man seated at the base of the tree.
From this vantage point Goto Dengo is able to see that it is indeed the Okinawan, and that his arms have been tied together behind the
tree trunk. A boy of maybe twelve is standing over him, holding a spear. He steps forward cautiously and suddenly pokes it into the midsection of the Okinawan, who comes awake and thrashes from side to side. The boy’s obviously startled by this, and jumps back. Then an older man, his head decorated with a fringe of cowrie shells, takes a stance behind and beside the boy, showing him how to hold the spear, guiding him forward again. He adds his own strength to the youngster’s and they shove the spear straight into the Okinawan’s heart.
Goto Dengo falls off the house.
The men become very excited and pick the boy up on their shoulders and parade him around the clearing hollering and leaping and twirling, jabbing their spears defiantly into the air. They are pursued by all but the very youngest children. Goto Dengo, bruised but not damaged by the fall onto the mucky ground, belly-crawls into the jungle and looks for a place of concealment. The women of the village carry pots and knives towards the Okinawan’s body and begin to cut it up with the conspicuous skill of a sushi chef dismantling a tuna.
One of them is concentrating entirely on his head. Suddenly she jumps into the air and begins to dance around the clearing, waving something bright and glittery. “Ulab! Ulab! Ulab!” she cries ecstatically. Some women and children begin following her around, trying to get a look at whatever it is she’s holding. Finally she stops and centers her hand in a rare shaft of sunlight coming down through the trees. Resting in the palm of her hand is a gold tooth.
“Ulab!” say the women and children. One of the kids tries to snatch it out of her hand and she knocks him flat on his ass. Then one of the big spear-carrying men runs up and she hands the booty over to him.
Several of the men now gather round to marvel at the find.
The women go back to working over the Okinawan boy, and soon his body parts are stewing in pots over an open fire.
SHINOLA