They sat in Yuuhei’s quarters, Yuuhei propped with his back against the wall on his futon mat. He was still extensively bandaged, but one arm was out of its sling and he looked altogether better, if not recvered. Eiji sat on a floor cushion by the open window. Yuuhei held a glass of shochu and a lit cigarette in the same hand, since the cast prevented the other from reaching his mouth. When he blew puffs of smoke from his nostrils the breeze from the window seemed to push it back into the room rather than drag it out. Eiji too had a glass of the clear liquor. The big, expensive, officer-grade bottle he had brought for Yuuhei on the floor between them was three-quarters full.
“I have to be careful with these damned things now,” Yuuhei said, gesturing with his chin at his cigarette, “or the bandages burn.”
“What do you look like, under there?”
“Eh,” Yuuhei shrugged, “you’ll have to tell me. I’m going to be scarred all to shit. Damn near lost this eye.”
Eiji raised his eyebrows. “I was wondering if it was still any good under there.”
“Still works,” Yuuhei nodded, “but you’ll see the scar,” he drew an imaginary line with his thumb from his hairline down his forehead, across the bandaged eye, to his jaw, “cut the eyelid and everything.”
Eiji winced.
Each took a sip from his glass.
“Have they decided what they’re going to do with you yet?”
Yuuhei shifted his glass awkwardly to take a pull from his cigarette. Smoke curled from his lips and back into his nostrils. “One thing’s certain. Not getting my commandership. Not that I give a shit at this point – even if I had known it was coming, you know I’m not the type to get on my best behavior just because someone’s got a carrot dangling in front of my face.”
Eiji nodded.
“I don’t think I’m going to prison. They had guards in the hospital just outside my door. One day they weren’t there anymore. One day the debriefers were spitting less tough-talk. I haven’t heard anything definitive, but my guess at this point is they’re just gonna rotate me back in right where I was.”
Eiji nodded. Yuuhei laughed spitefully.
“The bureau ball-breakers and their interrogations,” he shook his head, laughed again. “The Kolsivite interrogators worked me for something like fifty hours at a stretch. Most of these injuries are from that, not from anything that happened fighting. They were going to kill me.”
He took a drink.
“Soldiers’re all involved in killing in some way or another. Some indirectly, some hands-on. But I have seen that it takes a special breed to be an interrogator. They’re warped fucking individuals. Probably on our side too. That’s what I kept thinking – I wonder how different this would be in the reverse? Probably not at all. It’s the whole nature of tactical intelligence. It’s like juicing an orange. They peel you and squeeze out whatever they can use, then burn your useless rind. That’s what was coming.”
Yuuhei closed his eye, and sat in silence for a moment. He took a deep, tired breath, and his face contorted with pain
“When I went out there, Eiji, I swore I didn’t give a shit what happened to me after… after Eiko. I didn’t. I don’t really now, either. But I’ve been somewhere else, been through something that makes you not you. Been through something that doesn’t give a shit if you give a shit. I didn’t tell them anything but my name and rank. That’s the truth. But mostly it’s because I had nothing to tell. All the plans and troop movements I could remember related to events in the past, battles that had already happened.
“They were going to start taking fingers and toes, an ear or an eye, skinning limbs, when those poor bastards were sent to get me out. I could feel it all coming, and I could hear it happening to others through the walls. The screams, Eiji. The screams. You can’t even tell yourself that the chicken-skinned motherfuckers are bluffing, not because they’re so convincing, but because you’ve actually just listened to them do what they’re threatening to someone else. Because of that, they don’t have to make any special effort to frighten you when they talk; they’re even deliberately melodramatic and corny at times. And sometimes,” he looked out the window, “sometimes you hear someone go. Just like that. It builds to a crescendo, and then you hear a certain something – it’s hard to name, exactly – and after that it’s quiet. Inevitably quiet. The truth is, when I charged into their base with no regard for my own life, I did it because I assumed that I was going to die pierced by bullets, run through with a spear, or cut in half with a sword. Not,” he grit his teeth, took a breath, and a pair of tears spilled one after the other from the corner of his uncovered eye. “Not like that.”
Eiji sat listening silently. Yuuhei didn’t say anything else for several minutes.
“You wouldn’t think you could do the things you and I have done, Eiji – kill people in face-to-face combat – and still be a naïve child. But I was. You are too, if you don’t take some time to consider that there are specialists who have studied the art of causing suffering, irreparable bodily harm, disfiguration, without killing. Just like we’ve studied strategy and the art of killing quickly and without exposing ourselves to attack, they’ve studied the art of pain and mental submission without killing. They drink coffee, eat snacks, smoke cigarettes while they torture you. They are lazy about it. That’s control. Pain and irreversible damage without the threat of death. What we do is send people to hell. Ill fate, as you said. We struggle together with them on the brink of the pit, and try to push each other in. Kill and earn our right to go on living.
“What these people do is build a wall around the pit, then they set about doing things to you that you’ve never imagined having to live through. They get you to try to crawl toward that pit, to beg for death. That’s the point. And when they send you there, even when they’ve decided to do it, they lower you in by millimeters. I heard it, over and over. Hoping you’ll let something else valuable go on your way out. Or maybe it’s scientific. Maybe they learn something from seeing so many people die that slowly. But they must be the worst thing this war has created, Eiji. It’s one thing to fight and kill a person who is fighting to kill you. But to render someone helpless, and give them something beyond pain—” he broke off suddenly.
Eiji said nothing. Half of Yuuhei’s cigarette was a tower of ash. He tapped it into the ashtray on his lap, the ice sloshing and rattling in his glass.
“Existence is horrible.”
“You’re back here now.”
“Part of me,” Yuuhei said. He took a drag. “Part of me. What you don’t know yet is that existence is horrible. You have only to lose. And I don’t just mean Eiko. I mean yourself. Your body and your composure. Your health, your freedom from pain, your relative mental stability. All of it that you think constitutes you, that you think, no matter what, I will have this until I die. It’s not just that you can lose it. It’s that someone can take it from you. Consciously, meticulously, and irrevocably. Someone who still has it themselves and doesn’t give a damn about whatever justice you might think they are violating by doing so. Who will sleep soundly after they’ve done it. Who is supported in doing it by a whole government infrastructure.”
He shifted where he sat.
“And now these bureaucrat debriefs. They want to sweat me for details, talk about court martial, discharge, prison. They don’t realize how civil they’re being.”
“Can you really go back out there?”
Yuuhei shrugged, to the extent that the neck brace and cast would allow. “It does give me The Fear sometimes.”
The Fear. Eiji hadn’t heard this term in a long time – he’d nearly forgotten about it. They used to talk about it at the academy a lot. Irrational, paralyzing. One of the drill commanders said it was what happened when you looked the war in the eyes, thought too deeply about what it was. Thinking about what it meant, what it was for, was fine. No one ever got the fear from that. It was thinking about what it was, in the most literal and detailed terms. The means and not the meaning. And when you got it, it wasn’t that you couldn’t fight, it was that you couldn’t do anything.
“Have you told them that?”
“What would be the purpose, Eiji? I get flashes of it, I don’t carry it. I tell myself I was captured because of what I did. I remind myself that I was never captured fighting on the front lines following protocol. I tell myself the odds of it happening now are the same as they were before.”
“Hm.”
“But the truth is, and this is what bothers me – all you have to do is survive a defeat. That’s how most prisoners are taken. That’s how all the other guys in that hellhole got there. They’re the last men standing on the losing side in a battle. That’s us, if it ever happens. I know you see that.”
“There is suicide,” Eiji offered, “or to continue fighting until you are killed, even after defeat.”
But Eiji had to admit that he had never really thought about it. Suddenly something as simple as getting yourself killed on the battlefield didn’t seem like it could be willed to happen, once the battle was over and you were surrounded. You could make sure you had a grenade or a fresh clip, or your sword in hand ready to do it yourself. But did he do this? Did anyone really think about it?
Yuuhei finished his thought for him.
“By the time you realize that you have to do it, they’re already stopping you. Because they’ve got a better idea. That’s what he said…” Yuuhei’s voice cracked. He paused, a flash of helpless anger crossing his face. He took a breath. “I had lifted my sidearm to kill myself. The barrel was already pressed up under my chin. It was already there. I remember it. It was still hot. It burned me, and it scraped my skin – I’d shaved too close that morning. That would have been my last thought – that I shaved too close that morning and the hot metal stung. I hesitated though. And then a spearman struck me right here,” with his good hand, he tapped his broken forearm lightly. “Broke the bone and knocked the gun out of my hand. And that spearman, he said, I have a better idea.”
He tipped his glass of shochu back and finished the rest in one gulp, frowning. “If it happens again,” he said after a pause, “I’ll be faster.”
Eiji sipped at his glass and said nothing. He realized that Yuuhei was speaking from experience now about something for which he himself had no frame of reference but imagination.
Yuuhei set his glass down on the floor and ran his fingers over the bandages on his forehead. Eiji got up from his seat to take the bottle over to Yuuhei. He poured him another glass.
“Thanks,” Yuuhei said. He dexterously slipped another cigarette from its pack and into his mouth with just his one hand. “One other thing,” he said, “and then we can stop talking about this.”
“You know, I don’t mind.”
Yuuhei shook his head, striking a match to light his cigarette. “No, no. I have nothing else to say. I am telling you this more for your sake, or maybe because you have been a friend to me for some time now and I feel like you are in a position to understand me, whatever happens from here. I did it because of Eiko,” he turned his head to stare through the rippling smoke and out the window. “I think in a way I lost consciousness. I wasn’t thinking thoughts you could express as human speech. They told me she died in a firefight. Cause of death: gunshot wounds, blood loss, head trauma. Next thing I knew, as stories go, I was in the middle of the Kolsivite encampment with my sword drawn and blood all over me and a ring of Kolsivite spearmen around me. Or maybe the rage I felt forbids me from remembering it clearly… or maybe I can remember it fine, but I’m blocking myself from expressing it. But I was angry. I’m not as angry now. I had one comforting thought, one tiny hard grain of solace in my being, while they were torturing me, when I realized how slowly and horrifically I was going to die.”
“What was that?” Eiji’s eyes were wide with interest.
“Eiko died in a firefight. Cause of death gunshot wounds.”
It was silent a moment. Yuuhei took a breath. “The reason I tell you this is because I think in a way it might be good that they’re not going to give me that commandership.”
Eiji raised an eyebrow. “I don’t see the connection.”
“I’m not taking any prisoners after this. I will go back and fight and kill all I have to. The moment a man surrenders I am taking his head off or putting a bullet in it, or both. If they want prisoners, my squad-mates or superiors can take them. I will not accept surrenders, or hold them for transfer. I want no part of that.”
Eiji was going to bring up the potential trouble Yuuhei could get into if anyone reported his refusal to follow protocol on the battlefield, up to being sent to military prison, but he thought better of it.
“They won’t realize, most of them,” Yuuhei sucked air through his teeth and nodded to himself, “how civil I’m actually being.”
END OF CHAPTER
On to Chapter Three
