Their quarters are thatched huts that accommodate twenty lice-tortured men arrayed on the floor on straw mats. No officers, all enlisted men, all older than Zeno. In the dark they whisper about wives, girlfriends, the Yankees, a trip to New Orleans, Christmas dinners; the ones who have been here the longest report that during winter they lost multiple men every day, that their lot has improved since the Chinese took over the camps from the North Koreans, and he comes to learn that anyone who fixates—who talks nonstop about ham sandwiches, or a girl, or a certain memory of home—is usually the next to die.
Because he can walk without trouble, Zeno is assigned duty as a fireman: he spends most of every day gathering wood to heat black pots hung over the fireplaces in the prisoners’ kitchen. Those first weeks they eat soybeans or dry field corn boiled to a paste. For dinner there might be wormy fish or potatoes, none larger than an acorn. Some days, with his wounded forearm, it’s all Zeno can do to gather a single load of wood, bundle it, drag it into the galley, and lie down in the corner.
Panic attacks come on late at night: slow, constricting things in which Zeno cannot breathe for terrifying intervals and from which he worries he will never recover. In the mornings intelligence officers give speeches in broken English about the perils of fighting on behalf of warmongering capitalists. You are imperialist pawns, they say, your system is a failure, don’t you know that half the people in New York are starving?
They pass around drawings of Uncle Sam with vampire teeth and dollar signs for eyes. Anybody want a hot shower and a T-bone steak? All you have to do is pose for some photos, sign a petition or two, sit in front of a microphone, and read some sentences condemning America. When they ask Zeno how many B-29s the U.S. Army keeps at Okinawa, he says, “Ninety thousand,” probably more airplanes than there have ever been in the history of the world. When he explains to an interrogator that he lives near water, the interrogator makes Zeno draw the marina at Lakeport. Two days later he tells Zeno that they lost the map and makes him draw it again to see if he draws it the same way twice.
* * *
One day a guard summons Zeno and Blewitt from their barracks and leads them behind the camp headquarters to the rim of a ravine the prisoners call Rock Gully. With the barrel of his carbine he points at one of the four isolation boxes there, then walks away. The box looks like a big coffin made from mud, pebbles, and cornstalks, with a wooden lid latched over the top. Seven feet long and maybe four high, it’s big enough that a man could lie down inside, and possibly kneel, but not stand up.
Loathsome, abhorrent, repugnant: the smell as they approach surpasses adjectives. Zeno holds his breath as he undoes the latches. Waves of flies rise out.
“Holy Christ,” breathes Blewitt.
Inside, tucked against the far wall, is a corpse: small, anemic, pale blond. His uniform, or what’s left of it, is the British battle-dress blouse with two huge chest pockets. One of the lenses of his eyeglasses is cracked and when he raises one hand to thumb them higher on his nose, Zeno and Blewitt jump.
“Easy,” says Blewitt, and the man peers up as though encountering beings from another galaxy.
His fingernails are black and cracked and, beneath the seething flies, his face and throat are veined with filth. It’s only when Zeno turns over the lid to set it down that he sees that, scratched into every available inch of its underside, are words. Half in English, half in something else.
?νθα δ? δ?νδρεα μακρ? πεφ?κασι τηλεθ?ωντα, reads one line, the strange printing sagging to one side.
Therein grow trees, tall and luxuriant.
?γχναι κα? ?οια? κα? μηλ?αι ?γλα?καρποι.
Pears and pomegranates and apple-trees with their bright fruit.
A throbbing starts in his chest. He knows this verse.
?ν δ? δ?ω κρ?ναι ? μ?ν τ? ?ν? κ?πον ?παντα.
And therein are two springs, one of which sends its water throughout all the garden.
“Kid? You gone deaf again?” Blewitt has climbed into the box and is trying to lift the man by his armpits, his face wrenched away from the odor, and the man is simply blinking through his broken glasses.
“Z? You planning to pick your nose all day?”
* * *
He gathers what information he can. The soldier is Lance Corporal Rex Browning, a grammar school teacher from East London who volunteered for the war, and he spent two weeks inside that box, sentenced to “attitude reorientation” for trying to escape, and was let out for only twenty minutes a day.