Emily Mitchell - Viral - Stories

They are looking down at something in the ditch.

Karl is behind them, so he cannot see their faces, and they have not heard him approach; he is perhaps twenty-five feet from them, but the wind blows away the sound of his footsteps. He hesitates. He does not want to seem to have been sneaking up on them. They are armed, after all.

Then, while he is deciding what to do, he sees one of the sentries nudge the other with his elbow: hey, watch this . From the holster on his belt, the man draws out his pistol. With a big exaggerated movement that uses his whole arm, he aims it at something in the stream bed in front of him, something Karl cannot see.

Karl stands rooted to the spot. His throat has gone dry. Is it an animal the man is aiming at? A tin can stuck in the ice? The man is still poised as if he’s going to shoot, as if he’s looking for just the right angle from which to fire.

After a little while, the other man seems to grow uncomfortable. He reaches over and pushes the barrel of the pistol down toward the ground. The first man laughs and holsters his gun. Then both men turn and walk back toward their posts at the main gate.

Karl, standing in the dark, watches them come toward him. He thinks that at any moment they might see him. But the darkness is full now and they pass by about fifteen feet from him without knowing it.

When they are gone, he approaches the place where they had stood. He looks down toward the stream. And he sees, as he expected, as he hoped he would not, the children.

In the spilled arc light, he can just make them out: May and a boy about her age. They are absorbed in looking at the great blue-white icicles that are hanging over the entrance to the culvert. They have noticed nothing.

May looks around when she hears his footsteps coming down the bank. Her eyes are wide in the dimming light. Karl grabs her by the hand, yanks her around to face him.

“Don’t you ever, ever run off like that again,” he says. He takes both children by the hand and marches them up the bank and back across the snowfield to where they sleep.

Leigh sends the boy, Ken Ozu, back to his family and puts May to bed early as punishment. She cries herself to sleep and they sit there listening to her cry, talking in whispers.

“Where did she go?” Leigh asks.

“She was looking at the icicles.” Karl sees again the children at the culvert mouth, the guards. He takes a breath and when he lets it out, it is a sob.

Leigh looks at him.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

For a moment he considers telling her. But what good would that do? Later, he thinks, later, when they are no longer in the camp, when they are somewhere far away.

“I’m fine,” he says. “Just tired. Just. ” He does not know what to say next.

She looks at him like she doesn’t quite believe him.

“Well, let’s go to bed,” she says. And so they do.

In the end, he does not tell her. In fact, he tells no one until many decades later when a PhD student from Berkeley called Julie Chen asks him for an interview. Leigh is four years dead by then, from cancer, and the young woman seems friendly, earnest. She reminds him of May when she was a student, before she moved to Michigan and started her own family. He is not sure why, finally, he decides to speak of what he saw, but once he starts it feels like he’s been waiting all this time to tell it.

• • •

When he’s finished, Julie Chen sits silent.

“You never told anyone this before?” she asks at last. Karl shakes his head.

“I never told.”

“Why not?”

“I was afraid. Until then I did not know that people could do that, make a joke of killing. I mean, I’d read about such things in the newspaper. But I must not have believed them. I think this is what I learned at that time. People are capable of any bad thing.”

“Yes,” Julie says. “I think I understand.”

Karl looks at her: her lineless face, her beautiful, well-made clothes. She has grown up in a time of nervous plenty. No, in spite of what she says, she doesn’t really know what he is saying. He could try to tell her this, but it wouldn’t do any good. Instead, he should just pray that she never learns to perceive her own unknowing.

“And what about the questionnaire?” Julie asks. “What did you decide to answer in the end?”

For a moment Karl, whose mind wanders off quite easily these days, hesitates.

“The. what?” he asks.

“The questionnaire. Did you answer yes or no to the last two questions?”

“Oh,” he says, “I answered yes and yes . Then I applied to work outside the camp so I could take my family away from there. We lived in Iowa for a while.”

“What about the young men who answered no and no because of you? What happened to them?”

“They were sent to Tule Lake or other places like that.”

“You must feel pretty bad about that. ” Julie Chen says. “You encouraged them but they were the ones who got in trouble.”

“No,” Karl says. “I don’t feel bad. You see, I answered yes and yes and I was allowed to leave the camp. But the young men, the ones that had no wives or children yet, it was different for them. The ones who answered yes and yes , they were conscripted to the army. They were sent to Europe to fight. They were given very dangerous missions. Many of them were killed. But the no-no boys, as they were called: they had a hard time but at least they did not die.”

“So something good came of it,” Julie Chen says. Then she realizes how foolish this sounds. “I didn’t mean. ” she says. “I’m sorry.”

Karl shrugs. He watches her as she makes her notes. Inside him, he can feel a swirl of white and cold begin, and hear the lowing sound of wind, even though the day outside is bright and still. Here are the pools of arc light; the gray hunch of mountains to the east. He’s carried them around with him all this time. He can see again the man drawing his gun, aiming it. There is nothing he can do to stop it.

First, before we begin, find a comfortable position. You can be sitting in a chair or lying down on the floor or on a bed. You can be on your side or on your back or on your stomach. Whatever is right for you. Whatever you prefer.

Once you find your position, let your head rest easily and let your hands fall open. Allow your arms and legs to relax so that you can feel how they are supported by the surface beneath you. Release the muscles in your shoulders, your neck, your back. Relax your forehead. Let your breathing slow.

Is all this clear? Remember: this is about finding the pose that is right for your body. As long as you are comfortable, you can even stand up if you want. At least, I suppose you could, I don’t see why not, although that would be kind of unusual. I don’t want you to worry about it too much, and I certainly don’t mean to imply that something as trivial as the position in which you decide to sit or lie will affect your ability to get the full range of benefits meditation can provide. That isn’t how it works. I mean, do you really think that if there was someone who couldn’t lie down or sit in a chair because of a disability, that he or she couldn’t access his or her deeper states of consciousness? I think you should probably examine the prejudices that underlie that assumption as soon as you are finished meditating.

So whatever you would like: sit, stand, lie down. I suppose you could stand on your head if you wanted, although why you’d want to do that, I’m not sure. Once, I taught a guided meditation class at a local community center and there was a man who came every week, a young man with piercings and tattoos in Celtic-looking patterns all over his torso that you could see because he never wore a shirt in class, and who always arrived carrying the same courier bag covered with the logos of punk bands from the 1980s, bands that he could not possibly have been old enough to see live or even to have bought their music while they were still recording. Each week, while he was sitting on his mat waiting for the class to start, he would be smiling smugly to himself like he had discovered the secret stash of endorphins at the heart of existence, and then when class began and I would say that part about finding whatever position suits you best, he would — this is really true — flip up into a shoulder stand and stay like that the entire time.