It’s not easy telling a person something you know is going to make them cry, let alone doing it with an audience. And if Jin Yonabaru is in that audience, you’re up shit creek in a concrete canoe with a hole in the bottom.
Last time it had come out sounding too forced. I was trying to think of a better way to say it, but I couldn’t come up with anything short and sweet that would let Rita know that I was also experiencing the time loops. Maybe I should just tell her that. Hell, I didn’t have any better ideas.
I’d never been particularly smart, and what little brains I did have were preoccupied with trying to figure out why I hadn’t broken out of the loop according to plan. I’d done everything just as Rita told me, but here I was on my 160th day before the battle.
The sky over the No. 1 Training Field was as clear the 160th time as it had been the first. The ten o’clock sun beat down on us without pity. PT had just ended, and the shadows pooled at our feet were speckled with darker spots of sweat.
I was a total stranger to this woman with rust-colored hair and skin far too pale for a soldier. Her rich brown eyes fixed on me.
“So you wanted to talk. What is it?”
I was out of time, and I was fresh out of bright ideas. I’d have been better off taking her aside before PT. Too late now.
I looked at Rita and said the same bit about green tea I had before. Hey, that didn’t go so bad this time, I thought. Maybe she’s not going to-oh, fuck.
Tears streamed down Rita’s cheeks and dripped from the point of her chin, then splashed as they landed in the palm of the hand I held out to catch them. I was still hot from exercising, but the tears burned like 20mm slugs. My heart was pounding. I was a junior high school student asking a girl to the dance. Not even battle pumped my blood pressure this much.
Rita clutched the bottom of my shirt, squeezing so tight the tips of her fingers were white. On the battlefield I could see every move coming before she made it, but here I was clueless. I’d programmed myself to dodge a thousand Mimic attacks with ease, but what good was my OS when I really needed it? My mind wandered, looking for an out. I wondered if my shirt was sweaty where she was grabbing it.
The last time, I had stood like a park statue until Rita regained her composure and spoke. Maybe after ten more trips through the loop this would all be routine. I’d know just what to say to soothe her as I held her gently against my shoulder. But that would mean reducing my interactions with the one and only person in the world who understood me to a rote performance. Something told me it was better to just stand there and take it.
Yonabaru was gaping at us like a tourist in a zoo gapes at a bear who has suddenly stood up and begun to waltz. At least I’d finally found a situation that would shut him up. Ferrell politely averted his eyes, but only halfway. And that was more or less how the rest of the platoon behaved. Fuck me. I was the dancing bear. Don’t stare. Don’t say anything. Just throw your money in the can and move along.
What was it you were supposed to do when you were nervous- picture everyone naked? No, that was for speaking in public. In training they taught us to hold ourselves together by thinking of something we enjoyed. Something that made you happy. In battle, this would probably be one of those happy things to think back on, so why was it so nerve-racking now? If God had an answer, He wasn’t talking.
I took Rita by the wrist. She looked lost.
“I’m Keiji Kiriya.”
“Rita. Rita Vrataski.”
“I guess I should start with ‘Nice to meet you.’”
“Why are you smiling?”
“I dunno. Just happy, I guess,” I said.
“You’re an odd one.” Rita’s face softened.
“Let’s make a break for it.” My eyes glanced over her shoulder. “My two o’clock. You ready?”
Rita and I sprinted away, leaving the men on the field scratching their heads. We slipped past the chain link fence bordering the training grounds. The breeze blowing off the sea was cool against our skin. For a while we ran for running’s sake. The coastline lay far off to our left, cobalt-blue waters spreading beyond the meaningless barricade of barbed wire that lined the beach. The ocean still blue because we had fought to keep it that way. A patrol boat cutting a course parallel to our own trailed a white wake along the sharp line that divided sea and sky.
The deep shouts of the soldiers faded. The only sounds were the roar of the sea, the faraway shuffling noises of military boots on concrete, my too-loud pounding heart, and the sigh of Rita’s breath.
I came to an abrupt halt and stood dumbly, just as I had before we started running. Rita couldn’t cut her speed in time and came crashing into me. Another OS slip-up. I took a few awkward steps. Rita stumbled as she regained her balance. We held on to each other to keep from falling. My arm was wrapped around Rita’s body and hers around mine.
The impact risked breaking any number of regulations. Her toned flesh pressed against me like reactive armor. A pleasant scent assaulted my senses. Without my Jacket, I was defenseless against any stray chemicals that chanced into the air.
“Uh, excuse me.” Rita was the first to apologize.
“No, my bad. I shouldn’t have stopped.”
“No. I mean, excuse me, but-” she said.
“You don’t have to apologize.”
“I’m not trying to apologize. It’s just-would you mind letting go of my hand?”
“Ah-” A red ring stood out on Rita’s wrist where my fingers had gripped her skin. “Sorry.”
To me, Rita was an old friend, a companion of many battles. But to her, Keiji Kiriya was a stranger she’d just met. Nothing more than an ashen silhouette from another time. Only I remembered the relief we’d felt when we stood with our backs pressed against each other. Only I had experienced the electricity that flowed between us when our eyes met in implicit understanding. Only I felt a sense of longing and devotion.
Before I joined the army, I saw a show about a man in love with a woman who’d lost her memory in an accident. He must have gone through something like what I was going through now. Hopelessly watching all the things you love in the world being carried away on the wind while you stand by powerless to prevent it.
“I’m-well…” I didn’t even know what to say to her this time, despite the previous loop.
“This your clever way of getting the two of us out of there?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Good. Now where exactly are we?” Rita spun on her heel as she took in her surroundings.
We stood in a wide space bordered on one side by the barbed-wire barricade and a chain-link fence on the other three. Weeds sent shoots of green through the cracks in the concrete that covered the roughly ten-thousand-square-meter enclosure.
“The No. 3 Training Field.”
I’d managed to take us from one training field to another. Smooth. I’d been spending too much time with Ferrell. His love of training bordered on serious mental illness, and it had started to rub off on me.
Rita turned back to me. “It’s kind of bleak.”
“Sorry.”
“No, I like the emptiness of it.”
“You have unusual tastes.”
“Is that even a taste? The place I grew up was hopelessly empty. We didn’t have any oceans, though. The sky out here is-it’s so brilliant,” she said, her head tilted back.
“You like it? The sky?”
“Not the sky so much as the color of it. That shimmering blue.”
“Then why’s your Jacket red?”
A few moments of silence passed between us before she spoke again.
“The sky in Pittsfield is so washed out. Like the color of water after you’ve rinsed out a paintbrush with blue paint in it. Like all the water in the ground rushed up in the sky and thinned it.” I gazed at Rita. She looked back at me, rich brown eyes staring into mine. “Sorry. Forget I said that,” she said.
“How come?”
“It wasn’t a very Rita Vrataski thing to say.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I do.”
“Well, I thought it was nice,” I said.
Rita opened her eyes wide. For an instant, they flashed with a glint of the Full Metal Bitch. The rest of her face remained still. “What’d you say?”
“I said it sounded nice.”
She looked surprised at that. A lock of rust-colored hair fell to her forehead, and she raised her hand to play with it. I caught a glimpse of her eyes from between her fingers. They were filled with a strange light. She looked like a girl whose heart strings had begun to unravel, a child whose lies had been laid bare by the piercing gaze of her mother.
I broke the awkward silence. “Is something wrong?”
“No.”
“I wasn’t making fun of you. It’s just something I wanted to say. Guess I didn’t get the timing right.”
“We’ve had a conversation like this before in an earlier loop, haven’t we? But only you remember,” Rita said.
“Yeah. I’m sorry.”
“No, it doesn’t bother me,” she said, shaking her head.
“Then what’s wrong?”
“Tell me what you’re planning.”
“Well, there’s a lot I still don’t understand,” I said. “I need you to explain how to end the loop, for starters.”
“I’m asking what you’re planning to do next so I don’t have to think about it.”
“Are you kidding?” I asked.
“I’m dead serious.”
“But you’re Rita Vrataski. You always know what to do.”
“It will be fun being the one outside the loop for a change.”
“Not much fun for me,” I said. I wondered what she meant by saying “will”; I thought she’d been freed from the loop already, after 211 times through thirty hours in Florida. I opened my mouth to ask, but she interrupted.
“I think I’ve earned the right to sit back and watch,” she said. “I’ve had to handle enough shit as it is. It’s your turn. The sooner you accept that, the better.”
I sighed. “I know.”
“Hey, don’t blame me.”
“Well then, it’s still a little early, but my next stop is the cafeteria. I hope you’re in the mood for Japanese food.”
The cafeteria was noisy. In one corner, a group of soldiers was seeing who could do the most push-ups in three minutes. Another group we walked past was playing gastronomic chicken with a mystery liquid that looked like a combination of ketchup, mustard, and orange juice. At the far end of the room some guy was singing a folk song-or maybe it was an old anime theme song-that had been popular at least seventy years ago, complete with banjo accompaniment. One of the feed religions had originally used it as an anti-war song, but that wasn’t the sort of detail that bothered guys who signed up with the UDF. The tune was easy to remember, and that’s all it took to be a hit with a crowd of Jacket jockeys.
Let’s all join the ar-my!
Let’s all join the ar-my!
Let’s all join the ar-my!
And kill ourselves some things!
I’d watched all this 159 times. But since I’d been caught in the loop, I hardly noticed a thing about the world outside my own head that didn’t directly pertain to my way out of here. I sat quietly in a small, gray cafeteria, devoid of sound, methodically shoveling tasteless food into my mouth.
Even if tomorrow’s battle went well, some of the soldiers here wouldn’t be coming back. If it went poorly, even fewer would return. Everybody knew it. The Armored Infantry was Santa Claus, and battle was our Christmas. What else for the elves to do on Christmas Eve but let their hair down and drink a little eggnog.
Rita Vrataski was sitting across from me, eating the same lunch for the 160th time. She examined her 160th umeboshi.
“What is this?”
“ Umeboshi. It’s ume-people call it a plum, but it’s more like an apricot-dried in the sun, and then pickled. You eat it.”
“What’s it taste like?”
“Food is like war. You have to experience it for yourself.”
She poked at it two or three times with her chopsticks, then threw caution to the wind and put the whole thing in her mouth. The sourness hit her like a body blow from a heavyweight fighter and she doubled over, grabbing at her throat and chest. I could see the muscles twitching in her back.
“Like it?”
Rita worked her mouth without looking up. Her neck tensed. Something went flying out of her mouth-a perfectly clean pit skidded to a halt on her tray. She wiped the edges of her mouth as she gasped for breath.
“Not sour at all.”
“Not at this cafeteria,” I said. “Too many people from overseas. Go to a local place if you want the real stuff.”
I picked up the umeboshi from my tray and popped it into my mouth. I made a show of savoring the flavor. Truth be known, it was sour enough to twist my mouth as tight as a crab’s ass at low tide, but I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of seeing that.
“Pretty good.” I smacked my lips.
Rita stood, her mouth a stern line. She left me sitting at the table as she strode down the corridor between the tables, past throngs of soldiers, and up to the serving counter. There, Rachel spoke to a gorilla of a man who could reach up and touch the ceiling without so much as stretching-the same gorilla from the 4th whose fist my jaw had encountered all those loops ago. Beauty and the Beast were understandably surprised to see the subject of their conversation walk up to them. The entire cafeteria could sense that something was up; the conversations dimmed, and the banjo music stopped. Thank God.
Rita cleared her throat. “Could I get some dried pickled plums?”
“Umeboshi?”
“Yeah, those.”
“Well, sure, if you like.”
Rachel took out a small plate and started piling it with umeboshi from a large, plastic bucket.
“I don’t need the plate.”
“I’m sorry?”
“That thing you’re holding in your left hand. Yeah, the bucket. I’ll take all of them.”
“Um, people don’t usually eat that many at once,” Rachel said.
“That a problem?”
“No, I suppose not-”
“Thanks for your help.”
Bucket in hand, Rita walked back triumphantly. She thunked it down in the middle of the table right in front of me.
The container was about thirty centimeters across at the mouth- a tub big enough to serve about two hundred men, since nobody ever wanted more than one-packed halfway to the top with bright red umeboshi. Big enough to drown a small cat. The base of my tongue started to ache just looking at it. Rita went for her chopsticks.
She singled out one of the wrinkled, reddish fruit from the bucket and popped it into her mouth. She chewed. She swallowed. Out came the pit.
“Not sour at all.” Her eyes watered.
Rita passed the barrel to me with a shove. My turn. I picked out the smallest one I could find and put it in my mouth. I ate it and spit out the pit.
“Mine either.”
We were playing our own game of gastronomic chicken. The tips of Rita’s chopsticks quivered as she plunged them back into the barrel. She tried twice to pick up another umeboshi between them before she gave up and just skewered one on a single stick, lifting it to her mouth. The fruit trailed drops of pink liquid that stained the tray where they fell.
A crowd of onlookers had begun to gather around us. They watched in uneasy silence at first, but the excitement grew palpably with each pit spat out on the tray.
Sweat beaded on our skin like condensation on a hot day’s beer can. The revolting pile of half-chewed pits grew. Rachel was off to the side, watching with a worried smile. I spotted my friend from the 4th in the throng, too. He was having such a good time watching me suffer. Each time Rita or I put another ume in our mouths, a wave of heckling rippled through the crowd.
“Come on, pick up the pace!”
“No turnin’ back now, keep ’em poppin’!”
“You’re not gonna let this little girl show you up, are you?”
“Fuck, you think he can beat Rita? You’re crazy!”
“Eat! Eat! Eat!”
“Watch the doors, don’t want nobody breakin’ this up! I got ten bucks on the scrawny guy!” followed immediately by, “Twenty on Rita!” Then someone else cried out, “Where’s my fried shrimp? I lost my fried shrimp!”
It was hot, it was loud, and in a way I can’t explain, it felt like home. There was an invisible bond that hadn’t been there my previous times through the loop. I’d had a taste of what tomorrow would bring, and suddenly all the little things that happen in our lives, the minutiae of the day, took on new importance. Just then, being surrounded by all that noise felt good.
In the end, we ate every industrially packed umeboshi in the barrel. Rita had the last one. I argued that it was a tie, but since Rita had gone first, she insisted that she had won. When I objected, Rita grinned and offered to settle it over another barrel. It’s hard to say whether that grin meant she really could have gone on eating or if the overload of sour food had made her a little funny in the head. The gorilla from the 4th brought in another full barrel of the red fruit from Hell and placed it in the middle of the table with a thud.
By that point, I felt like I was made of umeboshi from the waist on down. I waved the white flag.
After that, I talked with Rita about everything-Yonabaru who never shut up, Sergeant Ferrell and his training obsession, the rivalry between our platoon and the 4th. For her part, Rita told me things she hadn’t had time to get to in the last loop. When not encased in her Jacket, the Bitch wore a shy smile that suited her well. Her fingertips smelled of machine grease, pickled plum, and a hint of coffee.
I don’t know which flags I’d set or how, but on that 160th loop my relationship with Rita deepened as it never had before. The next morning, Corporal Jin Yonabaru didn’t wake up on the top bunk. He woke up on the floor.