***
For a long time those interested in the Silver-Crested Winter Crane had a hard time finding a home online. They were ridiculed when they ventured onto the terrain of serious bird-watchers, many of whom believe the crane to be apocryphal or extinct. Yet they found themselves equally unwelcome at cryptozoological forums devoted to Sasquatch, Bearwolves, and the fanged Puerto Rican goat-mutilating Chupacabra; the crane was perhaps too innocuous—it lacked glamour. So other sites developed, first in Japanese, but increasingly in other languages as well, featuring cell phone photos or video clips of blurred white birds in motion. Eventually clear pictures were posted too, lauded by some as proof of the bird’s existence, derided by others as the result of clever photoshop editing. Online, the bird has flourished. The internet reports proliferate, as if the crane is reproducing, thriving in its new habitat, moving through blogs and jpegs and chat rooms in as yet mysterious migratory patterns . . .
***
The Queen and the trapper lived happily together for many years until, one day, the trapper spotted a familiar bird drinking at a stream. He hid behind a tree and watched it, remembering the bird he had set free once, and remembering his nameless emotion at seeing the snared creature beat its wings and snap its bloody beak. And then he found himself thinking of his wife. Not as she was now, but as she had been when he opened the door of his hut and discovered her sitting there at his table, trembling slightly, watching him with terrified eyes and a smile like a grimace. She had reminded him of a wounded animal that had lost its senses and seemed ready to fly straight into the jaws of its pursuer.
The trapper followed the crane down the stream, moving silently from tree to tree, and as the evening waned and the light failed, he was shocked to see the bird making its way along the path to his hut. It opened the latch with its beak and stepped through the doorway. But when the trapper followed it inside, he found only his wife, waiting for him as always.
(All of this had been planned by the River God. Jealous of the love between the trapper and the Queen of the Moon, he had lured her with fast-moving trout to a point in the stream near where the man was setting his trap.)
The man said nothing to his wife, but he could not rid himself of a strange suspicion. Finally he was unable to resist: before dawn, when his wife rose as she always did and left the hut, he followed her into the woods, moving as stealthily as if he were hunting a wild animal. But the Queen sensed him behind her and, circling back, surprised him just as dawn broke. She opened her mouth to speak, perhaps to curse him for his betrayal, perhaps to forgive him for it, perhaps to say farewell. But before she could speak her red lips lengthened into a beak and her voice became a bird’s sad call. Then she hopped out of reach and flew into the brightening sky.
She didn’t return that night, or the next. And although the trapper searched for her by day, and waited for her in his hut at night for weeks, then months, then years, she never returned.
***
The common Japanese crane is often called “the bird of happiness.” Sighting it is supposed to bring good luck. What, then, is the Winter Crane? What does sighting it bring?
***
Bedrosian packs his things. First thaw will come soon. He’ll be back next year, he says. He doesn’t see the trip as a failure. He feels—although he realizes it’s illogical—that each time he fails to locate the bird it brings him closer, as if each search is blacking out another section on a map until, finally, only one bright square will remain, and in the center of it a Silver-Crested Winter Crane, waiting.
***
Midway between the cities of Fukuoka and Kitakyushu, next to the elevated highway, there is a love hotel called The Winter Crane. To be visible to drivers, the seven-story hotel has added a three-story façade which rises high enough so that the white neon characters for “Winter Crane,” two stories high themselves, appear at eye level as you course along the highway. Passing the luminous white words, you experience—if you are among those who have found themselves becoming obsessed with the bird—a little jolt, as if the car has suddenly accelerated, even as you laugh at yourself for imagining, if for only a second, that a love hotel might offer some clue to the existence of the crane.
The hotel lobby presents straight-faced its chipped and faded burlesque of opulence: plaster statuettes—nymphs, satyrs, cupids—are arrayed in curtained alcoves; a fountain squirts weak jets of water at a prodigiously endowed Poseidon ringed by mermaids; Romanesque columns erupt at random spots from the imitation marble floor. In the center of the lobby a board displays lit photographs of the rooms above. There are fantasy rooms made to look like torture dungeons from old B movies, or like science-fiction space capsules; there are rooms devoted to individual Disney characters: the Pooh room; the Minnie room. Other rooms reproduce actual places, from offices to subway cars. To select a room, you push a button below the picture. The picture goes dark. Then an elevator speeds you to your floor, and blinking bulbs in the carpet point you down the hall to a light flashing urgently above your door, as if imploring you to hurry through before you’re locked out forever.
(A curious feature of love hotels is that they are completely keyless. Once the door closes, a faint click can be heard: you are now sealed inside. When you want to leave, you insert bills into a machine near the entrance, and the door unlocks. In love hotels, there is no coming and going, no trips down the hall to the ice machine, no visits to your neighbor’s room. You are trapped with your partner in your chosen dreamland until you’re ready to step outside again; no second thoughts are permitted.)
Airplane lavatories, minotaurs, ergonomic reclining dental chairs, flying elephants: the hotel, you realize, is a world, boxed into faded compartments that smell like cigarette smoke. Wherever you look—in the lobby alcoves, in the patterned wallpaper, in the carved headboards—you will find replicas of things real and imagined, terrifying and adorable, that belong to the world outside, but no matter how long you search there in The Winter Crane Hotel, you won’t find a single Winter Crane.
***
The pretty tour guide leads the seniors deeper into the forest, her brass buttons winking as she moves in and out of leaf-shadow. Her pumps are treacherous here on the path, with its irregular dips and looping tree roots; and they make her ankles ache besides. She tries not to look like she’s walking carefully. Behind her, the seniors march, sure-footed, tireless. She’s grateful for the peace and quiet after all that talking on the bus. Today’s group is, as always, cheerful and gregarious; they treat her like a granddaughter. On the drive from site to site some of the women will offer her food from their bento boxes; some of the men will flirt harmlessly. She likes them, likes her job, but the break is welcome. Of course, she can’t stay silent forever: at predesignated points along the trail she’s required to stop and, nearly whispering, as though the Winter Crane might be waiting around the next bend or behind that mottled clump of bushes, point out interesting features of the landscape. This has all been precisely timed and scripted. The tour service knows, after all, that to lead people on a hike through the woods without any real hope of ever sighting their quarry, they will be disappointed; so it’s made into a nature trek, offering its own value. The bird is not forgotten, though: here and there the tour guide recites parts of the myth, as when they finish crossing a footbridge above a river famous locally for trout fishing, a spot perhaps not unlike the one where the River God in the tale rose up angrily and transformed the Queen of the Moon into a crane. She finds herself getting animated as she recounts the story, maybe even a little carried away; and, looking from face to face, she can see that they’re enjoying hearing the familiar tale again too. Then they’re off again, down the path. Sometimes the seniors tend to linger, enchanted suddenly like children by the most ordinary thing: a spider suspended between bamboo trunks; a glittering shelf of sunlit rock; a butterfly the crisp color of a fall leaf. She keeps them moving, though. They’re on a tight s
chedule: after the crane hike it’s a two-hour drive to Ryuganji, where the dragon painted across the curved ceiling is said to move—a rippling of red scales, a subtle undulation—if viewed with believing eyes while lying supine, head pointing south, on the temple’s stone floor.
Diorama: Retirement Party, White Plains, 1997
“All these strangers in my house,” Karmala said, stopping in the doorway. “It’s like that weird dream feeling, where everything’s— Wait. I do know some people.”
Or she thought she did. She thought she spotted, among the guests, faces from her childhood, almost unrecognizable now: a cabal that had conspired to wither and bulge and gray together, disguising themselves with age.
“All right. Here we go.”
She pulled Lucas through the living room.
“Remember, don’t say anything about my job. To anyone. Just, I work in an office. That’s all you know.”
“Why would anyone ask about your job?”
“These people have known me since I was little. They’ll ask. And they’ll be good at it. They know how to solicit data from informants.”
“I don’t think anybody cares what you do for a living. Except maybe your parents. Which you should tell them. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Or I mean it is but.”
“Shut up. And I’m serious: be on your guard.” She leaned into the kitchen. “There’s my mother.”
“I’m going to find a drink somewhere,” Lucas said. “I need a prop in my hand so I look like I belong here.”
Her mother was injecting pink paste into an olive.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Oh! Look who’s here. How are you, sweetie?”
“Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”
“Yes, well, I asked you first.”
“I’m not the one who just got out of the hospital.”
“Why won’t you answer the question? Is something wrong?”
“I’m just saying I think we should be talking about you. The one who’s recovering. It’s normal to ask, Mom.”
“Okay: you’ve asked. Now answer my question. How are you? Is there something I should know about?” She set the olive aside, started on another.
“You win. I’m fine. Absolutely fine.”
“See? That’s all I wanted to know. Come here.”
She let herself be hugged, remembering her mother frail under hospital sheets to reignite empathy.
“Where’s Dad?”
“You’d have to go look. He could be anywhere. Hiding, probably.”
“Lucas is here,” she said.
“Where? I don’t see him here. He’s not going to say ‘hello’?”
“He’s hiding too. He’s afraid of you.”
“Afraid of an old woman. Tell him to be polite and get in here. He’s a guest in our home.”
“You’re not old.”
“I’m not young. My husband is retiring. That makes me old by default. Go get Lucas. Tell him I don’t bite. And tell him I just got out of the hospital. Then he’ll have to come.”
“He knows,” she said over her shoulder.
Head bowed, drink in hand, Lucas was huddled with a middle-aged history professor whose name Karmala couldn’t remember. His hair had fallen from behind his ear, curtaining his face, but from the woman’s touched, consoling look Karmala already knew the expression there: brooding, dark-eyed, theatrically intense, as he complained about Hollywood—a former film student, he’d recently decided, on principle, never to make a film—or about the loss of genuine feeling in modern society. Or possibly about Karmala herself.
“Hi,” she said to the history professor. “Sorry.” She led Lucas away by his sleeve.
Long and waifish and depleted by myriad sorrows, Lucas was the type that some women—although not Karmala—found irresistible. She’d liked him for something else, something she hadn’t been able to put her finger on. She’d recently decided that there’d never been anything to put her finger on in the first place. She’d fooled herself again. The problem with Lucas was that he valued his own suffering so highly, yet he had no sensitivity to the suffering of others.
“My mother said go talk to her.”
“Your mother scares me.”
“You say that and then you spend an hour telling her your tales of woe.” She let go of his sleeve at the kitchen doorway.
“Tales of woe.”
“As in ‘woe is me.’”
“I know what ‘woe’ means.”
She pushed him into the kitchen and went looking for her father.
No matter what Lucas claimed, she was ninety-nine percent sure he wouldn’t actually harm himself once she left him. He treasured his imagined pain too much to spoil everything by making it real. He’d be slouching in someone else’s arms inside a week.
She thought she spotted her father going down the hall, but was snatched aside before she could reach him. A silver-haired woman in a kaftan held her at arm’s length with both hands and looked her over. She said Karmala wouldn’t remember her, but she’d changed her diapers when she was a baby. To help her poor mother. Always so smart for her age. Colicky. Would not stop crying. Drove her mother nearly insane. But smart. And here she was, all grown up. What was she doing now?
“I work in an office,” Karmala said.
By the time she got to the hallway her father—if it had been her father—was gone.
She got a drink, pink and carbonated in a plastic cup. Pink liquid, pink paste in olives: since when had her mother become pink-fixated? Was it pre- or post-hospital?
She was stopped by more people she didn’t recognize but who seemed to recognize her. She was told how big she’d gotten, as if she were still growing. She looked like her mother, she was told. She looked like her father. She looked like both of them. Nobody said that she looked like neither of them. Or that she looked like herself.
Where were those stuffed olives anyway? There were trays with plastic cups all over the place, but she couldn’t find her mother’s hors d’oeuvres anywhere.
“Don’t look but do you see that guy?” Lucas had come up beside her.
She looked. Liver-spotted skull, red suspenders. He didn’t seem like a professor. He seemed like he had wandered in by mistake.
“Who is he?”
“Well now that you’ve given me away. He’s been telling me war stories. I’m not kidding. I asked him how he knew your dad and he said they were army buddies or something. Except he got captured and your dad didn’t. Said he never talked about it and then spent ten minutes talking about it. He wouldn’t stop. I mean it was interesting, though. Screenwriting material, if I was still doing that. You could build a whole movie around this guy’s experience. Better than The Deer Hunter because it’s true. It just . . . It kept making me feel like he was trying to tell me something. Like the only way to understand life is to get captured and eat dandelions every day.”
“I doubt if that was the worst part.”
“No, the worst part was that some of his Jap guards were nice guys. Actually nice to him. That, apparently, was the worst part. He can’t forgive them for that. Japs. His words, not mine. Imagine air quotes.” He told her to imagine them because he refused to actually curl his fingers into quotation marks. He thought they were too literal and therefore devoid of irony.
“Maybe it’s good for you to hear about other people’s misery. Real misery, not the pretend kind.”
“Nice. Thanks.” He tapped her cup with his in a toast and stalked off.
Her father had one story about the war in the Pacific: he’d parachuted into Borneo, hoping to contact the tribe there, already, at eighteen, a budding anthropologist, craving fieldwork without knowing yet what fieldwork was. Below him a village. Abandoned, as it turned out. Tools left behind in the dirt. A museum diorama, minus the people. It was the biggest disappointment of hi
s life. That was his story. He never talked about if he’d killed, or whom he’d killed, or how many he’d killed.
Karmala noticed for the first time a wheelchair, half-hidden behind the legs of guests.
“Charlotte.” She went over and squatted beside her.
“I’ve been watching you flit around,” said Charlotte. “With my one eye.” She had a bandage taped over the other.
“I like it. Very swashbuckling.”
“I’m a cyclops here in the corner. Scaring everyone away. See how they all avoid me.”
“I hate to tell you this, but they avoided you before the bandage. Your reputation intimidates people.”
“It never intimidated you.”
“Well, I’m not people.” She grasped Charlotte’s hand.
“My darling.” Her one eye was wet but old people’s eyes were often wet—rheumy was the word—and her expression, anyway, was unsentimental.
“You never call me Karmala. I just realized that.”
“It’s a lovely name. But I don’t think I ever forgave your father for not naming you after me. It was the least he could have done.”
“I always pictured you as a spider when I was a kid. Kind of creepy. Because of Charlotte’s Web. Even though Charlotte—the character Charlotte—was nice.”
Her rheumy eye was surveying the room. “Your father doesn’t look happy.”
Karmala turned, saw her father surrounded by grinning people holding plastic cups.
“Does he ever?”
“Worse than usual, I mean. I think you’d better go rescue him, my darling.”
She started across the room. Her father looked the way he always looked around people: skittish, tentative, faintly alarmed. The only time he didn’t look this way was with immediate family. Or students. She’d seen him lecture once and had felt first surprised and then furious to see him so amiable and openhearted with a roomful of people she didn’t know.
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