I, for one, return to the fact of the cargo inspection, and it was this that finally drove me from my practice, a quiet family clinic discreetly arranged for me after the war. Until then, the setup had suited me. The clinic yielded enough to survive on, and I was able to keep to simple diagnoses and treatments. Even so, the body does not forget. A clammy arm, a quivering lip: my hands, once recruited for their steadiness, began to jump.
So eight years ago, following my wife’s death, I moved to this city in northern Japan. At the time, China had just normalized its relationship with Japan, and my two former colleagues and I, having respectively come to a similar juncture, reunited at a small noodle shop known to connoisseurs for its duck. It was our first contact since the war, and it took us a moment before we could attempt a greeting, our old hearts fluttering like scattered chickens. Once again we ate with a greediness we dared not explain and parted with a gaiety that consoled us. But I believe we would have preferred to sit alone with our meals, if not for our curiosity and relief that this moment, dreaded and yearned for, had finally come to pass. Since then, we have had an unspoken agreement to reconvene on the same day every October, the fateful month we boarded the Nippon Maru.
* * *
—
ONLY ONCE did S and I manage a sustained conversation. That day I had gone in search of a colleague, T, a surgeon of considerable talent, who had taken to visiting the female prisoners. Once soft-spoken and decorous, he had become the most unruly among us, his increasing notoriety forcing us to take turns restraining him. But T was not in the female prison ward that day, and I made my way to headquarters, thinking he had gone to request more “materiel,” but nobody had seen him there either. I was about to retrace my steps when I glimpsed S emerging from a restricted office, slipping a sheaf of papers into his laboratory coat. When he spotted me, he paused but made no attempt to explain himself. Instead he fell into step with me, convivially opening the door to the underground passage that connected all the buildings in Pingfang.
“I don’t know what will happen to T after this,” I said, trying not to glance at the papers peeking from the coat.
“You mean after the war?” S shrugged. “Who cares?”
“He could still have a career—a future—if he’s careful.”
“Future?” S looked amused. “Where do you think this war is going?”
I lowered my voice. “We’re just following orders.”
“And you think the world will sympathize?”
“What choice do we have? T, on the other hand, is being excessive.”
“And you think that makes you different.”
“I’m saying the world will have to consider that.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
I was silent. It was true: the world had no obligations; what chance did we have in what was likely going to be a Western court? True, we were obeying orders, but we were the ones carrying them out; we could not look at our hands and plead innocence, dusting them off the way our superiors did, passing off their dirty work and expecting it returned perfectly laundered “for the sake of the medical community.” From the start, this had been an untenable situation we were expected to make tenable; forced to be responsible for what I felt we should not be, I had become resentful. I began misnotating my reports. Small slips, easily dismissed, until the accumulation became impossible to ignore. Instead of 匹, the counter suffix for animals, I began writing 人, the counter suffix for humans. I worked systematically, substituting one for the other with a calculated randomness befitting Pingfang.
I glanced at S’s laboratory coat, the stolen papers tucked beneath. “I suppose it’ll depend on if anyone finds out.”
S patted his coat. “We all have to do what we have to do, don’t we?”
“After everything, they’ll have no choice but to protect us,” I said.
S did not disagree. “The matter may also interest others beyond our small military and government,” he replied.
And he was right. That was more or less how it played out, with the cold war descending on the infernal one, and the Americans, fearful of the Russians, agreeing to negotiate with our lieutenant general for sole access to our research, the objective being the advancement of their own secret bioprogram stymied by medical ethics. The result? Our full immunity in exchange for all our data, human and otherwise.
* * *
—
FEW HISTORIANS have unearthed, let alone published, evidences of Pingfang’s abuses. Those who have done so have been divided over the problem of numbers. At one end, Pingfang’s casualty rate has been estimated at several thousand. At the other end, the number hovers closer to 200,000, mostly Chinese but some Russian and Japanese deaths as well. I believe both figures tell a truth. While our furnaces saw no shortage of logs in their six years of operation, our goal was never mass extermination. Our tests, contingent on the human body, its organic processes and upkeep, were costly, and even our field tests, aerial or onsite, were limited to small villages and hamlets optimally secluded for tracking our data. But Pingfang cannot be confined to its five years of operation. Its construction took two years, 15,000 laborers, 600 evictions; and afterward, when surrender triggered the destruction of the compound whose walls were so thick that special dynamite was needed, the final blasts are said to have released merely animals, the only witnesses to escape alive. And the gain? Militarily, history has shown the regrettable results, with rumors of biological weapons and unexplained outbreaks surfacing now and again, if only in the half-light of prevarications. Medically, it is harder to assess, our research having pushed our field to the cutting edge, landing many of us influential positions in the pharmaceutical sector, where some of us are still directing the course of medicine, or the money in medicine, in not insignificant ways.
The irony of it all is how well we ate within those walls, our maruta fed better than us to maintain optimal biological conditions. This prurient coupling of plenitude and death, so lavish in its complicity, has lent a kind of heat to my memory of Pingfang, compressing its eternity into a vivid blur coalesced around two towering chimneys, their twin shapes always looming, gone the moment I turn to look. These days it is this collusion of the mind with Pingfang’s irreality that terrorizes me, the fog of the entombed past threatening to release a hand, a face, a voice.
My colleagues are more fortunate. Our annual meals seem to have done them good, churning up old soil mineralized by the years, the new exposure letting them breathe. I, however, find myself hurtled back to people and places lost to time but not lost to me. At my age it is time that is present, its physicality reminding me of the finality of all our choices, made and lived.
This morning they deemed the story of the straggler a hoax: Captain Nakahira Fumio, whereabouts irrelevant.