I don’t believe that we will be lifted up                  and transfixed by radiance. One incandescent dusky world is all there is.       —Edward Hirsch, “Incandescence at Dusk” Chapter 1 Beneath a sky burned vaporous white the men marched as they had the day before and would the day after and the day after that. The dust from those who had passed before imbued the humid air with a granularity and phantom mass—a resistance—as manifest as the weight of exhausted muscle. They marched along a gradual incline where the dust stirred in thick currents at their feet and they marched along a straightaway where the dust glowed in a white nimbus. Then the loose-columned group bunched to a stop where the road passed through a field of dry cogon grass. Jack stumbled into the man ahead of him but he did not look up from the sun-impacted road. The faint staccato of the Japanese officer at the front of the ranks came to him from a great remove. He stared across the road. A blackened sedan jutted from a swale of burnt grass. One tire still smoked. Something dark was smeared on the crazed windshield. At the bottom of the swale shone the brackish mud of a carabao wallow. A dead Filipino lay there. His uniform was stretched tight as sausage casing over his body. His pant pockets were turned out. The smell of water and rot was unbearable.

A guard waved a fixed bayonet. Jack saw he’d stepped from his column toward the wallow. He felt a tug on his belt as Conrad pulled him deeper into the ranks. They were ordered to sit. Conrad steadied him as he kneeled. The dust was powdery and white. It settled like a particulate of the heat. Jack breathed shallowly. An ache sharpened with each expansion of his ribs. His breast pocket held a deck of cards with a divot prised free where shrapnel had struck. A light breeze threshed through the high grass. The men stilled. Not far from the wallow two Japanese guards squatted with their tin mess kits. They ate their lugao with the same famished intensity that the American and Filipino POWs fixed on them. Near two hundred eyes tracked the boiled rice paste from kit to mouth, took in the glint of water trickling from canteen to tongue. This went on for what seemed a long time. The guards wore woolen field caps with a gold star sewn to the front and cloth panels that protected their necks from the sun. The barrels of their Model 38s jutted above their shoulders, the bayonets burnished silver. They were always careful to clean them, Jack thought.