The Witness

By Jonathan Callahan

True story, more or less: On the morning of July 28, 1945, an errant B-25 bomber emerged from a thick fog hung low over midtown Manhattan and plunged into the Empire State Building’s seventy-ninth floor. The explosion expelled elevator-car-operator Betty Lou Oliver from her car and left her badly burned. After receiving preliminary first-aid she was placed by emergency-aid workers on the seventy-fifth floor into another elevator—whose shock-weakened cables promptly snapped and sent her on a nearly-eighty-floor plummet to the building’s sub-basement. She survived the fall.

**

April, 1945

—Still but okay: granting it’s maybe your basic meat-and-potatoes ethical dilemma, concedes Oscar Oliver, Torpedo-man, Third-Class. He swallows, resets his stein atop the single wet ring its base has deposited on the unvarnished teak. —What’s the difference? For me, ultimately. In terms of how I ultimately decide to act?

—The difference?

—Yeah. I mean, does it really matter whether these are not necessarily uncharted? In terms of as philosophical waters? I’m wondering.

—Does not matter. Matters absolutely nil, is exactly my point, O. Doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t matter whether it matters for you or anyone else whether it matters or if there’s a fucking difference between whatever you even just said. Ultimately. Cept to the one person on the planet who gives a shit what you decide. Just pick something and quit blowing what still strikes me as a potentially salvageable night out there on the town, as they, as they say in other parts … his over-the-shoulder gesture broadly indicates the bedlam just beyond the bar’s patio, the beachside thoroughfare like some vast kaleidoscope projecting patterns of raucous young men in lieu of colored light, the bands of land-hungry seafolk who troop the boulevard in search of native treats… —if you weren’t fucking set on spending the rest of it staring into your beer.

T-M,3C Richard Phurst shakes his head, vigorously rubs his nose, eyes a white-skirted waitress’s dark legs as she sways past into the noodle-bar’s deeper gloom. His stein is down to mostly suds.

—Look, says Phurst, —you want my advice? … Pretend you do. I say forget the whole thing. As in don’t think about it. Lose the memory.

Oliver shakes his head. —And what, he says, —just pretend nothing even happened?

Phurst’s hand goes up in a later era’s crossing-guard’s traffic-halting semaphore.

—Not pretend, man. Pretend’s got nothing to do with it. You don’t have to pretend shit. Pretend means you actively do something with your brain. What I’m saying is you’re already doing too much. He leans back, runs a finger down the robust jutting eminence of jaw—I’m proposing more like the opposite of that. Do less. Don’t think about this shit. You’re already thinking too much is the real problem.

—I don’t see how not thinking about it’s gonna—

—Cause what’s the point of thinking bout a problem you can’t solve? Like remember how Floyd would, he’d be out there on the grounds at like 0400 every morning before PT doing the shit with where he’s trying to jump up and touch the basketball rim only he’s fucking as tall as my mom when she’s not wearing shoes, and this is a small woman, O, Sicilian, maybe I never told you, the height’s on my pop’s side, plus she’s starting to hunch, which I’m saying there’s no fucking way he’s touching that rim whether he jumps one time or ten thousand. Or a million. And plus too if you wanna talk about faithful, you have been serving God and Country with plenty of faith, is something to remember. If you’re looking for something to remember here.

—

—No need for that look, Oliver.

—What look? There’s no look.

—Okay, there’s no look. I’m experiencing, I’m getting fucking ecstatic visions of a certain facial expression—which is still on your face as I speak, by the way—okay now it’s gone. But that was, that was a fucking look on your face there, a second ago.

—A look conveying what, did it look like?

—How the fuck should I know, it was your look: you tell me. Hey, Miss? Excuse me, Ma’am?

The hostess, half-empty pint-glasses perched and tottering, tray borne on one open palm, currency flapping from a pocket of her apron, pivots, squints back into the light.

—Nother round, the same?

She nods. Phurst returns a nuanceless wink.

—No look! All I’m saying is, seems like your advice is just to act like this isn’t a problem that’s kind of important to me, cause maybe in your opinion it shouldn’t be, or it’s, well, it’s inconvenient. And you’re saying because it’s a problem with no easy solution I’m supposed to just give up or like quit trying to find one through the application of, of rigorous dialectic. Seems like an easy way out, you know?

—No. Wait, what? What I’m saying, it’s a stupid fucking problem that only a panty pisses his first night away of shore leave on, is what I’m saying. That you should fucking exercise discretion when deciding what’s important since let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die, which this is the fucking Bible, am I right?

Oliver smooshes his face between both hands, puffs out a half-belch/sigh. Phurst reaches across the table as if to grip his shoulder or execute some similar fraternal gesture, prematurely withdraws.

—Just remember this, though. Leaving aside the fact you seem to be kind of blatantly overlooking—i.e. there’s at least a decent chance she could leave you over this, right? This is something you’ve considered? And even if you work out some kind of understanding, the wife’ll, well she’ll be in a whole lot a hurt she isn’t feeling now—shit she has no reason to feel, ever—if you do decide to open your mouth—

—Yes, but I detest a lie.

—And this is from the book too?

—Well? Marlow’s got a lot of valid insights. Especially the further he gets up the riv—

—So you’re saying, what you’re saying is it’s more important to you that you not be stuck with the discomfort of telling a lie than it is for you to spare her, the woman you supposedly love a little pain that she only ever feels as a result of knowing about your fucking up. And this is, this is noble, O? You tell her what you did, she’s gonna hurt. The other hand, who hurts if you don’t tell her? Only you, right? One way to look at it.

Oliver nibbles his left lower lip and watches nodes of pale bluish light shiver along the surface of what’s left of his pint. Above him criss-crossed strings bearing crepe-papered lantern-globes representing the full spectrum of primary colors rustle in a light coastal trade. Higher, rows of tiny white light bulbs line the ceiling’s bare beams. Phurst tilts the bowl to his lips, drains the last bit of broth, shoves the porcelain vessel aside, balancing his chopsticks on-rim. Out over the water to the north and west, a host of twinkling lights striped with a few deep-probing beams breaks up the dusk over Espiritu Santo’s Big Bay.

Phurst grunts and shoves back from the table.

—Piss.

Oscar swallows what’s left of his ale.

So then never tell her about that last stretch of opium nights before the Tirante took him north from Pearl Harbor for contested seas, because to tell her is to risk hurting her in a way that she has not been hurt before. To lie is to spare her some needless suffering. Is therefore an act of mercy, kindness—of maybe even love.

Except now, wait:

Supposing the situation were reversed, supposing Betty’d gone and done something like this to him (which, by the way: what if she has? during the lonely months Oliver’s been away at sea? The notion burns, except how could it? How can he suffer with suspicion and still dare not to admit the hideous things he’s done?), is it really true he’d rather never know? Seems sound to posit that, given the choice between hurt and no-hurt, he’d choose to avoid the hurt. Only that word “choice” is the problem, here, no? He wouldn’t really have much of a choice, would he? The supposed “choice”’d already be made for him. She’d choose to spare him all the hurt. So that the question really seems to be, Would Oliver, in his betrayed wife’s position, accept this deal whereby the choice to choose between hurt and no-hurt has been exchanged for the protection from hurt that is no longer his to choose? Oliver’s viscera guess that, given the choice between pain and its absence, he’d rather take the pain than have the ability to do so taken from him. In which case he would rather know, now wouldn’t he?

Only how can he know?

The Oliver who can sit here drumming the fingers of both hands in an obsessed tattoo along converging curves of his lingering stein—and where the hell’s this hostess?—this Oliver, the Oliver who is here in the dingy little Filipino noodle-shop, facing north, lights of naval activity flickering out to sea, the strip aclamour with riotous R&R, this Oliver imagines two other, discrete Olivers in obverse situations:

First we have the Oliver who, upon returning home from an at-times harrowing but also thoroughly chaste naval deployment aboard the U.S.S. Tirante that took him from Pearl Harbor up the shallows off Kyushu’s southwestern coast, through the Straits of Tsushima, patrolling the Pacific Theater’s last hot spots in East China and Yellow Seas, navigating deep waters depth-charged and radared by maniac Nips with nothing left to lose at this point, death as honor, no surrender and so forth, returning to the wife he’s dreamt of during what shut-eye he can snatch (his dreams unhaunted by opiate visions culled from a particularly epic shore leave in the den of sin), the young wife whose olive skin, if his memory’s not embellishing things here, almost does glow in the weak light of the candle they’ll sometimes place on the second-hand dresser set beside their creaky little bed, the woman, his wife, glows… this Oliver, returning home, is told the truth: that she has not been alone in this bed, someone else has breached their tiny sanctum, cramped and shabby, sure, but theirs, a shared sacred space for two; someone else has seen and felt and been enveloped in her glow… and the pain this Oscar would without question pitch into and keel about in, the bleak fathomless pain of knowing——

Well but then there’s the second Oliver who returns home to this same beloved wife and is told nothing, tucks into the very same sheets (possibly even unwashed, though this seems unlikely, Betty Lou being fastidious to the point of light obsession), and comes together with the body (even the soul?) he doesn’t know’s been with somebody else, and so ignorantly reprises what he thinks is the very same joy and wonder of perfect intimacy, enters a euphoria of reunity that he can’t possibly know is tainted and false—and so this Oliver, therefore believes himself still able to experience an unmarred bliss that the other Oliver will never feel again, and by so believing does obtain it—

But still, the original Oliver, old beerless ruminative Oliver, this Over-Oliver here in the Subic-Bay hole with his fingertips more or less pounding their accelerated pattern on the mug, this Oliver thinks he would still rather be the first guy, wrecked by the truth, than the happy incognizant fool.

But why?

Somehow Oliver, who shares neither his wife’s Catholicism nor Faith, has this bizarre sense that the answer depends on whether or not there is a God.

A tap on-shoulder rouses him: the waitress bearing foamy ales. No sign of Phurst.…

Depends on God, really. Well, not God. No such Being/ Entity/Thing. But say, an Eye, or a Ceiling, some sort of Limit that tells us whether a thing ultimately matters or not.

Because, now, hold on, wait a second, in spite of what he’s just admitted to himself, Oliver is back to thinking that since there is no giant Eye/Limit/Ceiling or God—he sure as hell’s never seen Him—no all-Seeing Third Party aloft to track the motions of morally purblind men, puttering through their choices and acts and blunders and lies, no one there to bear witness in the way that Oliver here has speculatively done with imagined Olivers #1 and 2—then what does it matter how ugly a lie might look?—There isn’t anyone to see it.

No one to see or know except for the deceiver himself—who’s accountable to Whom? And since this potential-deceiver’s decision therefore comes down to a simple choice—to inflict or spare suffering, right?—can’t it be argued that to take what he’s done and stuff it down into a dark place where it might rankle and burn him for the rest of his years but never threaten to inflict anything on anyone else—specifically his poor little luminescent Betty Lou, who’d get to go on believing in their unblemished utopia, preserved and just as perfect as it had been then, before Sam dispatched him East to serve—well, wouldn’t this be sort of noble, brave, heroic? … No?

Oliver drinks deeply, a long cool rich hoppy draught, and leans back, actually nodding a little to himself. Maybe old Rich Phurst is actually right: Betty will never know what he, Oliver, has done, and to tell her would be to make her hurt where she didn’t hurt before. Telling the truth here would be indulgent, exculpatory for him, maybe, but a further wrong against his wife.

Except now—gahhh!—Eye or no Eye, even if there is no One to see—no God, no Over-Oliver, no Anybody—the scene of Oliver #2, ignorant cuckold, in bed with the wife who’s suffering through excruciations of guilt in order to sustain for him the illusion of innocent bliss is still somehow grimed over with a stinking slick black muck that ruins the whole thing whether Oliver 2 or Anyone Else knows it’s been ruined or not. Oliver’s fist comes down on cheap wood, sloshes a bit of beer on his forearm. It would be ruined, he knows it would be. Who cares if no one knows or sees?

Oliver scans the dimness for Dick Phurst but still can’t spot him. The wind’s begun to whine out on the street, is that—yes, a sailor’s cap has taken flight, swoops past, no bare heads to be spotted though: someone’s out of uniform tonight. Humidity tinged with sudden chill. Oliver looks out over the dark water sequined with variegated light. The morning after next the Tirante will return to sea for one last northward patrol before setting course for Honolulu’s Pearl Harbor, and after that, back home….

Not a month’s passed since the night Oliver and his crewmates waited in vain off Oniki Saki to receive radioed response from the U.S.S.Trigger, with whom Triante’d been ordered to rendezvous, a ship on which many of Triante’s crewmembers, Oliver included, had served only last year. Verbatim from the one printed eulogy he’d managed to get hands on: With surface ships there are survivors, messages, bits of wreckage, bits of memory to be stitched into cohesive last narrative; with submarines there is only the deep, the silence.

And what had it been like, Oliver wonders, to feel the impact of that depth charge, torpedo, or mine, to feel the collision-alarm’s siren-shriek knife through you, ship upending instantly, air pressure increasing, loose gear precipitation from what used to be below, eyes locked on the depth gauges even as needles yield to wheeling mania, the rushing floodwater’s roar, the groan and creak of Trigger’s caving frame, the pounding and the futile cries of eighty-nine doomed men… down, down, down, until the steel shudders and crumples in on you, the last few meters of consciousness almost too heavy to bear… and what would he see in those final seconds—what would he want to see? Beauty? Truth? God? Love? Nothing at all? Once more he envisions their relative positions switched, for a moment: suppose it were her dropping in the doomed sub, him safe at home in Manhattan, lonely during the long hours operating his elevator car in the Empire State Building, rising and falling gently through another day’s listless wait, one more crossed-off calendar square, crossing his fingers against every newswire.… If Betty Lou were the T-M,3C, what would he want her, falling through those final darkening seconds, to see?

If a light shines down at spectra we’re never given to see, secretly illuminating the labyrinths of our lives, if a hidden radiance gleams from every instant, motion, action, thought tunneling through time… an Eye, looking down, might witness something hidden from our eyes… but would it even need to see? If the light is there, does it ever have to be perceived?

What Oliver decides is as clear and bright to him as the colored glass twinkling from the surface of his pint, and he knows, when his ship returns to port, if he does make it home, if he’s ever granted another evening in the little candle’s flickering glow, husband and wife together again in their tiny quiet sacred space, well, he knows how he will choose.

 

Jonathan Callahan’s first book, ‘The Consummation of Dirk’, won the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction and was published by Starcherone Books in 2013. Callahan grew up in Honolulu, studied fiction at Sarah Lawrence, and taught writing at SUNY Purchase for a year. Currently, he lives and works in Fukuoka, Japan.

‘The  Witness’ is taken from Jonathan Callahan’s collection ‘The Consummation of Dirk’, with permission from the author. It first appeared in Unsaid, Vol. 5 (2011).