Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (35 page)

At length, my other arrangements having been made, I booked a flight to Tokyo, and drippingly emerged from the Potomac to hail a cab to Dulles Airport. Then we spent forever in a glittering race with a huge sunset, I keeping mentally sharp the while by attempting to fathom what possible arrangement of recombinant light and particles could be creating the interesting illusion, visible each time we banked, of a black dot in our wake.

On the ground again in what my watch claimed was still yesterday and the calendar called tomorrow, having collected my ruggage amid bright flash floods of exotic noise and the next millennium’s amoebal designs, I hailed another taxi. Rising skyward again from the bustling lobby of my elegant hotel, I showered, shaved, and donned fresh linen, wanting to put my best foot forward. Then, summoned at last by the telephone call I had been waiting for from first hasty toweling to last pat of my tousled hair, I sank once more, in a majestic silence, to the lobby, where I was expected at the bar.

Only the most compelling sense of duty had brought me to Tokyo, for the expense of setting all this up had been fantastic. Scarred by the blast and poisoned by radiation sickness, the last survivors were dying off like brown grass in a drought. Soon there would be none left, and I would have no one on whom to discharge my obligation. Still, one
would be enough; would serve. Gordy N. Notcutter or no, I was only a single individual, and could not hope to sacrifice the remnants of my health on every last one of them.

Then or later, it never occurred to me to inquire this one’s name. All I’d been told was her gender, which pleased me obscurely despite a lifetime of making no distinctions on that count, and that it was the Nagasaki bomb she had survived, which pleased me for reasons not obscure at all. Mind, if I’d been so obliged by either time or pocketbook, I’d have settled for Hiroshima. At times, beggars aren’t the only ones who can’t be choosers. But while Hiroshima would have been good, it wouldn’t have been
as
good; so I had thought on the plane, paraphrasing a smiling man whose name I no longer recalled, although I was fairly sure that he’d been one of the only two friends I’d ever had. In any case, throughout the complicated business of arranging the affair, my one unalterable stipulation—which complicated matters a good deal, as so many of them had had their eyeballs melted at the instant that the century’s new God had said “Let there be white light"—had been that she couldn’t be blind. How could I look into her eyes for confirmation that my quest had succeeded, if there was nothing to look back?

As I crossed the lobby, I saw a cordon of Tokyo policemen in dress uniform beyond the hotel door, clearly on hand for the visit of some foreign potentate or other. An ambulance was pulling away. In the bar, a young doctor in a white coat waited, a bottle of Suntory whiskey before him. His face peculiarly strained, he cut short my attempts at quasi-collegial small talk.

“We have put her in a room upstairs,” he told me. “We believe no one knows it was her in the ambulance, or why we brought her here. But if you are going to do this at all, you must do it quickly. She is sinking fast.”

“How old is she?” I asked, somewhat idly. After all, it didn’t make that much difference, and she would have to be fifty at least.

“Her age? Fourteen.” Seeing my startled glance, he shook his head before my surprise could yield to the natural indignation of any man who has spent an exorbitant sum of money to do good and been cheated anyway. With crimped lips and averted eyes, he explained his mistake: “She
was
fourteen. She is sixty-four.”

“Shall we go?” I said.

Now it was the turn of the doctor’s eyes to widen somewhat. “If you feel ready. Forgive me—I thought perhaps you would want a restorative first.”

“I think that showing up with alcohol on my breath would be disrespectful of the occasion, don’t you?” I said brusquely, not troubling to explain that I never touched spirits and had always found others’ need for artificial stimulation a mystery. “The sooner the better, and the best is right now.”

Swooshing me back up to a floor higher than my own, the doctor led me to a door that he then opened, indicating that he would wait outside. With a nod, feeling every last one of my seventy-six years, I stepped over the transom.

It was August 9,1995. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the forgotten second bomb, whose target had been chosen when I pushed a blindfolded man toward a wall map with a bit of chalk in his hand. From a bed across the room, two dark eyes stared at me like beads from a necklace long since scattered. Despite an opened window and the strong smell of saline and newly sprayed antiseptic that hung in the air like a cloud, the smell of suppuration was stronger.

Bringing my hands together, I inclined my tousled head slightly.
“Hajimemashita”
I said,beaming. “
Dozo yoroshiku.”

In attempted response, her lipless mouth may have trembled, though so slightly I had the illusion that its rims had merely been stirred by a faint breeze from the window. But her facial muscles were clearly too weak to form words—or, for that matter, close her mouth, which gaped like one more of her wounds. That suited my purposes, but I was saving her mouth for last.

Stripping off my recently donned clothes and joining her on the bed, I straight-fucked her first, her jellylike flesh ebbing and then liquefying under me until good Priap reported a strong chance that he was bestowing his favors on the rubber sheet below. Snorting and turning her over with a quick jerk of one hand, I parted the bronze, green, and blackened remnants of her buttocks, and Priapized her wasted anus—or so I can only hope. For all I know, my good king’s first thrust might well have
made literal a vulgarism I deplore, and simply torn her a new one; ha, ha.

Yet by now the thing below me might as well have been a puppet with sawdust and goo leaking out of it, and I knew time was running short. Scrambling from the bed and hauling her off it too, I dropped her on the floor on what were probably her knees. As I yanked her head back, we stared at each other, and I saw what I needed to see. To the screams of an exalted populace, my good Priap proclaimed himself the Emperor Priapus I; a moment later, a small bag of rot and broken chalk fell dead at my feet. Turning to my clothes, I reached for my vial of Laggilin.

It was empty.

Behind me, the door opened. Perhaps because my breathing had grown noisy at the sight of the Laggilin-less vial, the Japanese doctor’s voice sounded inhumanly quiet.

“Are you finished with her, X-San?” he asked.

“Finished?” I said indignantly, turning six-foot-plus of leonine, still demi-royal Anglo-Saxon nudity to face his puny form. “Of
course
I’m finished, man! The woman’s
dead.
What on earth would I do now? Why, she wouldn’t even have been able to-”

“You are an American, X-San. Under the circumstances, given her native city and your track record, I thought it unwise to jump to conclusions.”

“That’s disgusting,” I said, starting to get dressed. Clearly, this fellow didn’t understand at all; East is East and so on, I suppose. Thrusting the empty Laggilin vial into my trousers pocket, I glanced around for my shoes. “I need to find a drugstore quickly,
quickly
;” I told him. “Is there one in the hotel?”

Apparently he didn’t hear me; he was looking down at the body. Now he said an odd thing: “She waited for you, you know. Or perhaps I should say watched for you.”

“For me? That’s preposterous,” I told him, for I was not so vain as to believe that Good King Priap’s fame had ever penetrated so far as Japan. “How would she even know of me?”

“She did not know it would be you. She didn’t know that you had been at Los Alamos—that you had helped to build the bomb. Still less did she know that it was you who pinned Little Boy’s tail on the city where she was a schoolgirl.”

“Oppenheimer did that,” I grunted, feeling the lack of Laggilin begin to tell. “All I did was blindfold him with a lab coat and spin him around three times first.”

“I stand corrected, X-San. But be that as it may, she always believed that an American would come. She assumed that it would be a man. She hoped he would feel shame.”

“Shame?” I was puzzled. “Do you mean before, or—after? Because I saw her eyes, and-”

“It made no difference,” he interrupted me. “She knew that she’d be dead in moments. In any case, with her injuries, she should have died thirty years ago. And in fact, so far as we can tell"—he was looking at me steadily now-”she
did
die thirty years ago. All except her eyes.”

“What
?” I roared, as my spine rose beneath my shirt.

“By every medical indication,” he said, “she was a corpse. We have not fed her since 1965. But something kept that corpse’s eyes alive, in defiance of every law of nature. We believe that they were waiting to see you.”

“And you call yourself a
doctor
?” I bellowed. “That’s ridiculous nonsense! Either she was dead or she was alive. It’s not possible to be both!”

“I didn’t call myself a doctor, X-San. You did. But you are better proof than this woman that it is possible to be both. After all,
she,”
with a nod at the thing on the floor, “and thousands like her, kept death alive in
you
for half a century. And here you stand.”

“Don’t talk rot to me!” I roared. “I’ve got a heart condition. It’s quite dangerous. The truth is, I should probably never have come here at all! Now call me a cab and get me to a drugstore where they speak English and stock Laggilin
right away,
do you hear me? Or do you want a dead American scientist on your conscience?”

He didn’t answer immediately. In the course of my career, I’ve often found it interesting to watch Asians cry. One never knows what will provoke their tears, or precisely when they’ll stop. He had been gazing down at the body as he wept, but now he looked up again.

“Are there really no lengths to which Americans will not go,” he asked, “to prove that they cannot be damned—not by their own God, and not by anyone else’s, either?”

I was stunned. “
Damned?
Have you gone
mad
?” I shouted. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. For
Christ’s sake”
letting a profanity escape my lips for the first time in my life, “you don’t understand at all. Why do you think I came here? Look into her eyes! Thanks to me, she died
happy”

As the true extent of Priap’s final act of generosity overcame his mind’s lack of familiarity with our Western concept of benevolence, he was briefly speechless. Finally, he spoke:

“As she lived, X-San! As indeed she lived. Oh, it was a great privilege to be a bomb survivor, believe me! To us, they were like thousands of Beatles who did not need to make music—you had provided that. Their mere existence wiped out
any possibility
of war guilt on our part, for all that you will still find the thoughtful words ‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ inscribed by some of your compatriots in the visitors’ book at the Hiroshima memorial itself. Then again, we should not complain: at least they care enough to visit! Indeed,
her
one regret, in the days before all of her died but her eyes, was that she had not been a Hiroshima victim. Oh, don’t misunderstand—Nagasaki was
good,”
he assured me. “It just wasn’t
as
good.”

Laggilin deprivation had begun to make it difficult for me to speak. “If you aren’t a doctor,” I gasped, feeling something red scorch my nostrils, “who
do
you work for?”

He looked nonplussed. “The same people you do, X-San. You must know we’ve gone global.”

“But if you—don’t approve of American tourists,” I said, still bewildered by his previous speech and sweeping my paw around the room in increasingly violent arcs, “then why did you arrange this?”

“X-San, you will forgive me—and many others—for hoping this is not permanent,” he said. “But for fifty years and three days now, and into the foreseeable future, yours has been the country that the planet is for.”

“Why, you ungrateful-”

At that point, though, the Laggilin wore off, as I had known it WOuld. First, I belched fire.

Seizing him around the waist with a paw grown large enough to easily encircle it, I ate him in one gulp.

Then I belched fire again.