J. Ballard - Empire of the Sun

He stared at the pilot, for once glad of the swarm of flies interceding between himself and this corpse. The face of the Japanese was more childlike than Jim remembered, as if in his death he had returned to his true age, to his early adolescence in a provincial Japanese village. His lips were parted around his uneven teeth, as if expecting a morsel of fish to be placed between them by his mother’s chopsticks.

Numbed by the sight of this dead pilot, Jim watched the youth’s knees slide into the water. He squatted on the sloping earth, turning the pages of Life and trying to concentrate on the photographs of Churchill and Eisenhower. For so long he had invested all his hopes in this young pilot, in that futile dream that they would fly away together, leaving Lunghua, Shanghai and the war forever behind them. He had needed the pilot to help him survive the war, this imaginary twin he had invented, a replica of himself whom he watched through the barbed wire. If the Japanese was dead, part of himself had died. He had failed to grasp the truth that millions of Chinese had known from birth, that they were all as good as dead anyway, and that it was self-deluding to believe otherwise.

Jim listened to the artillery barrages at Hungjao and Siccawei, and to the circling drone of a Nationalist spotter plane. The sound of small arms fire crossed the airfield, as Basie and the bandits tried to break into the stadium. The dead were playing their dangerous games.

Deciding to ignore them, Jim continued to read his magazine, but the flies had swarmed from the corpses further along the creek and soon discovered the body of the young pilot. Jim stood up and seized the Japanese by the shoulders. Holding him under the armpits, he pulled his legs from the water, then dragged him on to a narrow ledge of level ground.

Despite his plump face, the pilot weighed almost nothing. His starved body was as light as the children in Lunghua with whom Jim had wrestled when he was young. The waist and trousers of his flying overall were thick with blood. He had been bayoneted in the small of his back, and again through the thighs and buttocks, then thrown down the bank with the other aircrew.

Squatting beside the body, Jim snapped the key from the Spam tin, and began to wind off the lid. Once he had eaten he would use the can to dig a grave for the Japanese. When he had buried the pilot he would walk to Shanghai, regardless of the games the dead were playing. If he saw his parents he would tell them that World War III had begun, and that they should return to their camp at Soochow.

The hot jelly of chopped ham bulged within its mucilage of melted fat. Jim washed his hand in the canal, and used the lid to cut a modest slice. He raised the meat to his mouth, but spat the fragment into the water. The greasy flesh was still alive, as if carved from the body of a breathing animal. Its lungs and liver quivered in the can, still driven by a heart. Jim cut a second slice and placed it in his mouth. He could feel its pulse between his lips, and the fear of the creature in the moments before its slaughter.

He picked the slice from his lips and stared at the oily meat. Living flesh was not meant to feed the dead. This was food that would devour those who tried to eat it. Jim spat the last shred into the grass beside the Japanese. Leaning across the corpse, he patted the blanched lips with his forefinger, ready to slip the morsel of ham into its mouth.

The chipped teeth closed around his finger, cutting the cuticle. Jim dropped the can of meat, which rolled through the grass into the canal. He wrenched his hand away, aware that the corpse of this Japanese was about to sit up and consume him. Without thinking, Jim punched the pilot’s face, then stood back and shouted at him through the swarm of flies.

The pilot’s mouth opened in a noiseless grimace. His eyes were fixed in an unfocused way on the hot sky, but a lid quivered as a fly drank from his pupil. One of the bayonet wounds in his back had penetrated the front of his abdomen, and fresh blood leaked from the crutch of his overall. His narrow shoulders stirred against the crushed grass, trying to animate his useless arms.

Jim gazed at the young pilot, doing his best to grasp the miracle that had taken place. By touching the Japanese he had brought him to life; by prising his teeth apart he had made a small space in his death and allowed his soul to return.

He spread his feet on the damp slope and wiped his hands on his ragged trousers. The flies swarmed around him, stinging his lips, but Jim ignored them. He remembered how he had questioned Mrs Philips and Mrs Gilmour about the raising of Lazarus, and how they had insisted that far from being a marvel this was the most ordinary of events. Every day Dr Ransome had brought people back from the dead by massaging their hearts.

Jim looked at his hands, refusing to be overawed by them. He raised his palms to the light, letting the sun warm his skin. For the first time since the start of the war he felt a surge of hope. If he could raise this dead Japanese pilot he could raise himself, and the millions of Chinese who had died during the war and who were still dying in the fighting for Shanghai, for a booty as illusory as the treasure in the Olympic stadium. He would raise Basie when he had been killed by the Kuomintang guards defending the stadium, but not the other members of the bandit gang, and never Lieutenant Price or Captain Soong. He would raise his mother and father, Dr Ransome and Mrs Vincent, and the British prisoners in Lunghua hospital. He would raise the Japanese aircrew lying in the ditches around the airfield, and enough ground staff to rebuild a squadron of aircraft.

The Japanese pilot made a small gasp. His eyes tilted, as if trying to revolve like those of the patients whom Dr Ransome revived. He was barely clinging to life, but Jim knew that he would have to leave him beside the canal. His hands and shoulders were trembling, electrified by the discharge that had passed through them, the same energy that powered the sun and the Nagasaki bomb whose explosion he had witnessed. Already Jim could see Mrs Philips and Mrs Gilmour rising politely from the dead, listening in their concerned but puzzled way as he explained how he had saved them. He could imagine Dr Ransome shrugging the earth from his shoulders, and Mrs Vincent looking back disapprovingly at the grave…

Jim sucked the blood and pus from his teeth and quickly swallowed them. He slipped on the damp grass and slid into the shallow water of the canal. Steadying himself, he washed his face. He wanted to look his best when Mrs Vincent opened her eyes and saw him again. He wiped his wet hands on the cheeks of the young pilot. He would have to leave him, but like Dr Ransome he had only a few seconds to spare for each of the impatient dead.

As he ran through the valley towards the camp Jim noticed that the artillery guns at Pootung and Hungjao had fallen silent. Across the airfield a column of trucks had stopped by the hangars and armed men in American helmets were climbing the staircase of the control tower. Flights of Mustangs circled Lunghua in close formation, their engines roaring at the exhausted grass. Waving to them, Jim ran to the perimeter fence of the camp. He knew that the American planes were coming in to land, ready to take away the people he had raised. By the burial mounds to the west of the camp three Chinese stood with their hoes among the eroded coffins, the first of those aggrieved by the war now coming to greet him. He shouted to two Europeans in camp fatigues who climbed from a flooded creek with a home-made fishing net. They stared at Jim and called to him, as if surprised to find themselves alive again with this modest implement in their hands.

Jim climbed through the fence and ran down the cinder track to the camp hospital. Men with spades stood in the cemetery, shielding their eyes from the unfamiliar daylight. Had they dug themselves free from their own graves? As he neared the steps of the hospital Jim tried to control his trembling. The bamboo doors opened and a swarm of flies fled through the air, their feast-days done. Brushing them from his face, over which he wore a green surgical mask, was a red-haired man in a new American uniform. In his hand he carried an insecticide bomb.