He had no pity for the enemy anymore. In this place, compassion would be as superfluous as an overcoat, but he wondered if, when the war was over, it would come upon him all at once, strike him as stealthily as a torpedo.
Every time he was in port, changing ships in Cairns or Port Moresby, he sent paintings to Washington. There was no shortage of war to draw and paint, but, also, he was losing his ability to distinguish what was important. He spent hours painting a single oil drum, put that loving portrait of a rusty cylinder in the same crate as a painting of a full sea battle as though they were equals. He’d lost track, a bit, of his task: the essence or spirit of war. If such a thing existed, it couldn’t be drawn or painted. You might as well paint a picture of the earth’s molten core or of a starless corner of the night sky and say, This is the earth, this is the sky.
He painted the sea with nothing in it, just a blue horizon, sent that, too. No word came to him about whether or not his superiors were pleased with his work, his wandering chronicle, but neither did word come that he was to be reassigned.
* * *
—
In October, Jamie landed on an atoll recently reclaimed from the Japanese and stayed for a while in the tented camp there. He painted a row of Corsairs out on the baking-hot runway that had been made by crushing and smoothing coral, millions of years of work by tiny animals, into a flat, hard surface. When he swam in the sea, he wore sandals made from tires salvaged off crashed Japanese planes so the living, uncrushed coral didn’t slice up his feet.
In November, he went to Brisbane, stayed in a vast camp of tents and huts set up in a public park, purple with blooming jacaranda and pungent with eucalypts. He sat in cinemas and bars and didn’t draw or paint anything at all. Several letters from Marian found their way to him there, all from back in the summer. She had a friend. She liked London. She liked the flying. She wrote:
I’m ashamed to say I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I’ve always needed to feel I had a purpose, and now I have an undeniable one. Is this why people have wars? To give themselves something to do? To feel a part of something?
He thought he might eventually tell her about seeing Sarah in Seattle, but for now he preferred to keep their encounter inside a shell of privacy, away from judgment or any need to explain what it had meant, or not meant. He struggled to write anything meaningful at all to Marian. What could he tell her? That the war had crushed and smoothed him into a different substance entirely, something hard and flat? Apparently he was a person who could watch men drown and feel no pity. He’d been present for every minute, every second of his own life, and he hadn’t known himself. He’d thought he could paint the war and not belong to the war. He’d fancied himself an observer, but there was no such thing here.
A few times he started a letter to Sarah but gave up. One evening, he went to a brothel, chose a small, redheaded girl. The next night he went back, chose a different girl, fleshy and blond. It didn’t help. He didn’t go back.
After the war, he thought, he would know what he wanted to tell Marian. After the war, he would find Sarah again.
* * *
—
A few days before Christmas, as dawn broke, he was asleep aboard a troop transport in a convoy, crowded in with Marines being sent to make a landing somewhere.
Six miles away, a man—the commander of a Japanese submarine—looked through a periscope. He had been following the American convoy for most of the night. Through the periscope he saw a disk of dim sky and black sea, the faint shapes of ships. He focused on a destroyer, relayed the bearing and angle to an officer. He must aim not at where the ship was but at where the ship would be. The trajectory of the destroyer was one line sketched across the blank indigo ocean. His submarine’s course made another line; the torpedoes would connect the two with elegant yet unpredictable geometry.
Though dawn had broken, the water was still saturated with night when the three torpedoes passed through it. They all missed the destroyer （the captain’s range was slightly off）， but two hit Jamie’s transport. The initial impact didn’t kill him, nor did the explosion that broke through the hull, pulling up a geyser of water. He survived long enough to feel a sudden crush and violent churn of salt water, the other bodies against his, the pressure that squeezed his lungs, broke his eardrums. Heat billowed past like a wind. He thought he was swimming toward the surface, that the rippling pane of sunlight was almost within reach, that he was about to burst up into the air. And he did see light coming closer, but it was only the blooming glow from the exploding boilers. He didn’t quite feel terror as he died—there wasn’t enough time. Nor did he feel anything resembling acceptance, nothing like peace. He didn’t think of Marian or Sarah or Caleb, or of his paintings or Missoula, though he might have, if he’d lived a few more seconds. No satisfaction came to him at having found, at last, the spirit or essence of war. He was almost as bewildered as if he were still an infant on the Josephina, plunged into an incomprehensible world of fire and water.