Chang-Rae Lee - A Gesture Life

“What are those, Captain Ono?” I said sharply. “Will you inform me, sir, as I have little idea.”

The doctor grinned, the corners of his mouth tight, half-appreciative of the acuteness in my voice. “What are they indeed, Lieutenant! What do you think the Home Ministry has been promoting all these years, but a Pan-Asian prosperity as captained by our people? Do you understand what that really means? I can see you don’t. We must value ourselves however and wherever we appear, even in the scantest proportion. There can be no ignoring the divine spread of our strain. You, it is obvious, are helplessly concerned about the girl — that one female body, there in the infirmary. There is something to this, no doubt. But I am not confined to such thinking. I don’t care about her. She is not of any consequence, except as a kind of rare vessel of us, to be observed and stewarded. For the present time she is important to me, and when she is no longer I shall give her over to you, to do with her what you wish, whether you would bed her or journey the world with her or drown her at the shore. But as long as you see the banner there, Lieutenant, you shall keep to the duties I’ve set out for you and retain her in the manner I command. I raise it for you and you alone, and you will heed it without hesitance or prejudice.”

“I cannot promise such a thing, sir,” I said stiffly, stepping forward slightly. “And I cannot let you visit her tonight, or on any future day.”

He stared at me incredulously, searching my face, and then laughed, surprising me, as I thought he would rage and explode at my insubordination.

“You are an immense fool,” he said. “I almost feel sorry for you. What do you think you are doing, protecting her honor? I suppose you imagine she’s your maiden, and you her swordsman. You do, indeed. And you also think that I’ve been saving her these last few days in anticipation of some memorable evening?”

“She said you had not visited….”

The captain shook his head, grinning again, though he was not amused. “The girl is telling stories, and you are believing them. Did she tell you how much she thought of you, too, how much she loved you?”

“She never professed such things.”

“Perhaps she suggested how she would like to meet you again, after the war?”

When I didn’t answer, the captain scoffed and said grimly, “Shut up now. Or better yet, go away. I can’t stand to look at you. Your presence is demoralizing me.”

“I will not let anyone else go to her, sir.”

“No more of you, Lieutenant!” he shouted, waving his hand. “You had permission to address me freely but now you will silence yourself and leave me.”

“I wish her to be my wife. I will marry her when the war ends. I have already decided this.”

The captain stared at me with an expression of pure disgust, as if I had violated every law and code of his living. “You have ‘decided’ this, Lieutenant? So you have already had your sweet trifle with her, I suppose; you have taken her there on her dirt bed?”

“I will love her,” I said as fiercely as I could, though the words immediately rang shallow and distant. “No matter what you say.”

He laughed terribly. “Even if I tell you she is pregnant? Oh indeed, yes. I suppose she must have tricked the commander about her menses. It doesn’t matter now. I’m letting the pregnancy go, in fact, to see how long she’ll stay that way, once she begins servicing the whole of the camp. She was pregnant before even I was able to take my pleasure. Before anyone here had her. Who knows who her real master is? The commander and I certainly aren’t. So now you can fancy yourself to be her foster lover, her foster groom, as it were. And then stepfather to her child, if it ever comes to be….”

But before he could finish speaking I tackled him square in the gut and the force of the blow knocked the wind out of him. He lay for a moment beside me trying to get back his breath, then rose slowly to his knees. I wanted to get up to strike him but my right shoulder seemed to shear like wet paper when I put weight on my hand, and I knew it had completely separated. The pain was severe enough that it didn’t feel like much of anything when the captain punched me in the belly. I watched, numbly estranged from myself, as he unholstered his service revolver and struck me again, once or twice or several times. He then pulled back the hammer and placed the cold ring of the barrel end to my forehead. He seemed very close, as if he were peering into me. He had no malice or rage in his face, simply a plain expression of purpose. I passed through then to another reach of bodily suffering, the pain already become a thing memorial, an insolvent fever in the tissue and bones.

AROUND THE TIME that Tommy was likely born, I began to entertain a certain waking nightmare. Sunny was of course long gone, having departed many months earlier without leaving a forwarding address or phone number. I knew she had taken up with Lincoln Evans, living with him (and probably others) in a squalid flat down in the city, though I no longer had either cause or interest in finding her. I didn’t care to see what was becoming of her. I was saddened, of course, but also in good measure angry, hurt by the completeness of her departure, as if she were a night’s guest at any roadside inn, the room hastily checked out of with that rumple of early morning disorder and abandon. I had offered her all that I possessed or could muster, the run of my house and my business and the willing graces of my town, which I must say is what it felt like in those last days just before I sold to the Hickeys. The streets and sidewalks of Bedley Run truly seemed as much mine as any person’s, their almost affirming solidity underfoot, bouncing me along on my diurnal way.

The dream, if I can call it that, would come to me at the end of the working day, in the last hour between six and seven when there were never any more customers or calls from salesmen and I was hungry and enervated and in a state that must be a kind of retail beatitude, a mind of placid emptiness and vulnerability. Somewhere in my thoughts I knew that Sunny was close to term, sustaining herself in whatever unhealthful and meager manner, and I summoned an image of myself as a physician, old and wise and sure, who ran a tiny free clinic on the ground floor of a tenement building in the city. Each day until dusk I would treat the ills, both trivial and grave, of the modest neighborhood folks, attending with patience and close application every complaint of cough and rash and ache, gently and somberly addressing the more serious indications, my corner windowed office known all over as a kindly haven, the seat of good Doc Hata of Whatever Street.

And so on a typical day of full appointments with the sick and injured and scared, who should walk in but an adolescent girl, unescorted, safeguarding with one hand an immense belly in that tender, cupping way, asking if she might see me immediately. My beleaguered but generous-spirited receptionist would try to explain the tight schedule, indicating the overflowing waiting room, but I’d come out in my white coat and her sallow face would brighten, the simple sight of me enough to lend some calm and relief. But just then the girl would shudder, momentarily swoon, and tip like a felled tree into the arms of the nurse, saying weakly that her water had long ago broken. We rushed her into the back room and laid her down, and when I lifted her long skirt the baby was already showing itself, not by its crown but with a tiny, perfect foot, unwrinkled and pink. I was alarmed but not nervous, as I was a doctor of long experience, having turned many a breech fetus and safely delivered a near-equal number. And yet this time I felt myself faltering, the little body inside somehow unfathomable to me, unreadable, my hands stricken with a sudden numbing weakness. I thought then to attempt a breech delivery, but here, too, I seemed to forget the delicate procedures. I still couldn’t sense the baby’s contours, the hip, the shoulder, the orientation of the head, and when my nurse warned that the foot was turning color, grayish blue, a hard tick of panic set off in my chest. The girl was writhing in pain, unable to listen to me and pushing too much, pushing when she shouldn’t have been, and as the precious minutes passed, the foot grew grayer and bluer and I knew I would have to open her up and lift the baby out. The girl was now delirious with pain. The nurse placed in my hand a shiny blade, and I realized then that it was a travesty and I was not a surgeon, that I had never cut into living flesh. That I was a fraud and a coward and should not have coveted and accepted as I had done the confidence of people, their singular regard and trust.