In my car in the parking lot, I sat for a few minutes with the engine running before I drove away. A particular sight was arresting me — and not of Tommy or Sunny. Rather, it was an otherwise insignificant notice: that group of Middle Eastern men who had opened the temporary Halloween store just the week before were already dismantling their modest, homespun window displays before Halloween had even arrived, stripping the shop. I was on my way out but stopped to watch them for a moment. They did not appear too upset or disturbed, just went about their work the same steady way as they had begun it. I felt badly for them, of course, knowing that they must be losing a decent amount of money, and that they were presumably stemming their losses with this very quick closing. They were again out in front of the place with ladders, unsticking the paper banners and signs, and I noticed inside the store a teenaged boy and girl sitting at chairs and working beside each other, the girl folding up various-sized squares of black cloth, Halloween table linens and napkins, and placing them in boxes. The young man wasn’t as serious as the girl (his twin sister?), in fact he was clearly enervated by the task and was effortfully closing up each small box, fitfully running a tape dispenser across the tops. He was talking to her, but it seemed in a haranguing sort of way, his jawbone working continuously. There was a short stack of the taped boxes beside him, which he kept kicking lightly with the side of his foot. The girl, a slender young woman with high, wide-set eyes, wouldn’t be annoyed by his attitude. She steadily made her way through a heaping, messy bin of the dark fabric. She would take each piece and shake it free of its haphazard folds and smooth it down flat on her lap, then begin to fold it again from corner to corner. The boy finished sealing a box and, having no others, watched her diffidently. She was picking another square of cloth from the bin and beginning her procedure, when he reached over and meanly picked at it, causing it to fall to her feet. She paused, then retrieved it and started over. But again he messed up her work. This happened twice more until finally the girl took the cloth and shook it open and placed it over her own head. The boy was confused. She sat there with her face covered in black, and he yelled at her once and then rose abruptly and left her.
The girl remained there, under the veil, unmoving for some time. And as I sat parked in the mostly empty lot in the long shadow of the mall, I felt I understood what she was meaning by her peculiar act, how she could repel his insults and finally him by making herself in some measure disappear. As if to provide the means of her own detachment. It was because of this notion — as well as the simple cloth itself, similar enough to the swath Sunny once found in a lacquered box in my closet — that I remembered the girl again, Kkutaeh, the one I came to call simply K, and the events in our camp in those last months of the war.
* * *
AFTER THE KILLING, and the execution of Corporal Endo, it was unusually quiet in the camp. It was then that K was placed under my care. This under direct order by the doctor, Captain Ono. He determined that she was despondent and suicidal, and possibly dangerous to others, particularly to the other girls. I had no reason to doubt his appraisal as I hadn’t observed her or spent any length of time with her, nor would I have disagreed with him had I believed otherwise. He found me one afternoon doing paperwork and called me out into the small clearing behind the infirmary, where our medical wastes and other garbage were discarded. He said gravely, “I have determined that the girl (he always called her this, never referring to any of the others) is a risk and should be quarantined periodically. What will happen is that I will let the intervals be known to you, and under my authority you will remove her from her service and examine her thoroughly.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “But what shall I examine her for?”
“For infection and disease,” he said sharply, staring at me as if I were a total fool. “You will prepare and treat her if necessary. I expect her to be free of illness when she comes to me. Keep her and isolate her beforehand.”
“Here in the infirmary, sir?”
“Where else, Lieutenant! Come up with something, can’t you? For all I care you can use the surplus supply closet. In fact, that will do. You’ll lock her inside, of course. Do you understand, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir,” I told him, though not being completely certain of what he was actually ordering me to do. I stood waiting at attention, but he was silent. I could normally “remove her from her service” for medical reasons, with his permission, of course, but to select her out regularly, and only her, before indications of an illness or malady was unusual indeed.
“Resume your duties,” he muttered, turning to go back inside the infirmary. He paused at the door. “Another thing. About the sign.”
“Sir?”
“So that you know when to get her ready. I don’t want to have to speak to you every time. In fact from now on I want to minimize such contacts between us. I’m too busy to be supervising you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then what shall it be?” he said sternly.
I had no hint of an answer for him, and I shuffled my feet. He then looked somewhat pleased, while regarding me.
“Well, it should be that then.”
“Captain?”
“Since this will now be a critical responsibility for you, Lieutenant, perhaps it ought to be fairly obvious, so that you won’t have any confusion and waste my time.”
“Yes, sir.”
“In this spirit, then, you will look out each morning for a black flag.”
“Pardon me, sir?”
“A black flag. What do you think, Lieutenant? I will affix it on the front of the infirmary. I suspect even you will be able to notice this.”
“I believe I will see it clearly, sir, yes.”
He waited for me to respond further, as if he hoped to provoke me with his choice of sign. But I remained at attention, not meeting his piercing eyes, trying as hard as I could to imagine myself far away from him and this place, perhaps swimming in the quiet sea that lapped the shore of Rangoon. I had been thinking lately of that posting, which was mostly a last, brief R&R for us as we awaited transport to a more forward base. I remembered having the thought then in the glowing dusk on the beach that the war, oddly enough, was not so awful; that a young man uncertain of himself could find meaning amidst the camaraderie of his fellows working in such shared purpose, and that in fact there was no truer proving time for which he could hope. And yet it seemed everything fell away whenever Captain Ono addressed me, all my carefully built-up perception of things, and in the sorry depletion I could feel the searing, rising surges of what must be pure enmity. I have never quite shown this expression, and I did not then with Captain Ono.
“Look for it, Lieutenant Kurohata,” he finally said, and with a flit of his surgeon’s hand he turned and left me.