by Rohan Wilson
‘You have a call.’
I drag the mat over my head.
‘Rin, you have a call.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Would you like me to take a message?’
‘Wait,’ I say and wipe my eyes. ‘Who is it?’
‘Dieter Brown.’
Dieter. Our head of security. I wipe my nose on my sleeve. ‘Okay.’
‘I can take a message if you like.’
‘It’s fine. Put her on.’
She must be outside. In the background the sound of old fuel-running engines. ‘Rin,’ she says and a car howls. ‘Sorry, I saw you were in town today. I thought I better call you.’
‘Dieter—’
‘I know. It’s Friday. I know.’
‘You’re supposed to be with Jayce on Fridays.’
‘Yeah I know. There’s this whitehat thing. He’s gonna be pissed if I miss it. Point is, you need to hear what I gotta say.’
‘Hear what?’
‘I’ve found her.’
A few moments of quiet pass. ‘Emi Usami,’ I say.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes, ma’am. I spent the morning checking it out. It’s her.’
‘Are you, I mean, are you certain?’
‘Shit. I can see her through the window.’
I rub my throat. I rub my mouth.
‘She looks just like the pictures,’ Dieter says. ‘Why don’t you come see for yourself? I’m in Brooklyn. Sending the address now.’
A satellite feed appears, floating in front of me, marked with a pin. Atlantic Avenue. Where the road splits at the junction with Eastern Parkway.
‘Now or never,’ Dieter says. ‘Come talk to the woman.’
‘All right,’ I say. ‘All right.’
This is stupid and I know I ought to turn around but the Xanax are making me passive. It’s raining and the water plume of the traffic is red as wine in the tail lights. I don’t feel connected to any of it. My head is stuffed with cotton. A live image on the screen embedded in the front seat of the cab shows water surging over the dryline at Battery Park. Water is not supposed to surge over the dryline—they built the dryline specifically to keep the water out. It occurs to me that the lobby of my building might flood and I’m wondering if the elevators will work this time and then I’m wondering what it’s like to drown in freezing seawater when the cab comes to a halt. The total onscreen is two hundred and seventy-three dollars. I authorise it on the company account like everything else in my life.
Outside on the corner, Dieter stands in the rain holding a clear plastic umbrella. She’s turned up her coat collar against the weather and pulled her sleeves over her hands. Friday nights, she usually takes her son to coding classes. I think she felt the motherly tug of empathy when I told her about Houston and Michael Trevino and the reason I changed my hair. Mothers seem to have a larger sense of suffering than most people. What I’m saying is, this is not her job. She’s only doing me a solid. Worse—she could lose her job if Alessandra ever found out she looked into our past. So if Dieter’s a little pissed at being here on a wet Friday night in winter, I think it’s fair play. She crosses the street among the mostly driverless traffic that, by its programming, pulls up to let her pass. She holds the umbrella over my head as I step out of the cab and stand looking up and down the street.
‘Over there,’ she says.
It’s a small antiques store jammed in a row of taller buildings. A neon sign that reads SALE hangs in the window glass. Stencilled in gold letters above the door We Buy & Sell. I look around. The great iron racks of fire escapes. Double-height buildings of red brick, painted board, or breeze block. Shuttered windows. An animated billboard playing a loop from Gutterball. I look at Dieter.
‘Hell of a neighbourhood,’ I say.
‘You better believe I brought my gun.’
‘You sure it’s her?’
‘Sure as I can be. Short of straight out asking.’
‘Okay,’ I say and I look across at the store. ‘Great.’
The pink neon paints the wet pavement. We pass a few moments in silence.
‘You going in there?’
‘I’m going.’
‘What’s wrong with your eyes?’
I blink a few times.
Dieter looks at me hard. ‘Everything okay?’
‘I just, ah, I had some bad news.’
‘Oh shit.’
‘I guess I was crying …’
‘But you’re okay?’
I clear my throat. The rain rattles on the umbrella. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Listen. You gotta ask her, right? You gotta ask her at least?’
I nod.
‘So go on. Talk to the lady. See what she has to say.’
Cars roll by raising curls of water. Wipers wash back and forth. ‘What do we have on her?’ I say.
‘Usami? Sixty-three years old and no health cover—I guess there ain’t much money in antiques. Ah, let’s see … apartment over in Midwood. No registered vehicle. No registered firearm. She ought to rethink that last one.’
‘So, she’s a broke old lady who sells junk?’
‘You want my advice? Pay the woman. That’s all you gotta do.’
I look along the stream of cars and I look at Dieter. ‘Altcoins,’ I say.
‘Altcoins. Keep it clean. No traces.’
‘No traces.’
‘I don’t want your mother finding out what I did here.’
‘That makes the both of us.’
Dieter is laughing.
‘What?’ I say.
She laughs. ‘Yes, ma’am. We all scared of that woman.’
I cross the street to the store. At the entrance I stop to brush the water off my trench coat and put on my glasses. Maybe she won’t see how red my eyes are. I push the door.
Inside, it’s warm and smells of dust. It takes a moment for my brain to catch up with the rest of me and I stand, feeling dizzy and swaying in the doorway as the Xanax kick. Varnished wardrobes and desks and chairs. On every flat surface smaller sets of shelves stocked with miniature paintings, porcelains, and mirrors framed in wood. A lot of it Japanese. Edo or Meiji period. There are panelled byobu painted up with images of tigers and dragons and misty mountains. There are katana and wakizashi paired on stands. The feed from my glasses lists possible price ranges in bright yellow figures above each piece. It highlights a kimono hanging against the wall as similar to one I’d bought a few months ago.
A woman in a black apron is watching me.
‘Wet enough for you?’ she says. ‘Me, I’d probably rather it snowed.’
I close the door and stand, swaying slightly.
‘Not that it ever snows anymore.’
‘Sorry, I’m looking for someone,’ I say.
‘Someone who?’
‘Emi Usami.’
She straightens up. ‘Well that’s me all right. If you’re selling I’m happy to take a look but I can’t promise anything.’
‘My name’s Rin Braden.’
We shake hands. The woman is staring. Her eyes flick from my hair to my face and back to my hair. ‘Have we met before?’ she says.
‘Excuse me?’
Her smile fades into a quizzical sort of frown. She’s short and dark. Her face is spotted with age. She holds my hand a little too long.
‘You remember me?’ I say.
Her frown deepens.
‘I came through Two Worlds adoption agency in ’53,’ I say. ‘Through from Japan.’
Emi Usami’s expression changes. She drops my hand and steps back.
‘I can’t talk about that. Not any of it.’
I look out the window. On the opposite corner Dieter is standing with her umbrella up. I think about waving her over. This might get difficult. ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘I appreciate your position. You had clients that—’
‘Clients to whom I owe a legal duty.’
‘Right, I understand that.’
‘
And they would sue me into the dirt if I broke it.’
‘I just want to know,’ I say. ‘I just want to know who my birth mother was. That’s all. Just a name.’
Emi Usami snorts. She says, ‘Baka ja nai.’ She drops her head. When she looks up she is angry. ‘Alessandra Braden,’ she says. ‘That’s who your mother is.’
‘So you remember me.’
‘She adores you,’ Emi Usami says and touches her chest. ‘Don’t break her heart.’
I press my lips together. It will break her heart if she finds out. I believe it. Alessandra sees only pain in exhuming the lost and gone. My Japanese mother—my birth mother—is dead. I know it, I live with it. Alessandra wants me to heal and move forward and become the person I was fated to be.
Trouble is, I can’t.
‘Alessandra can tell you what you want to know. That’s her business. I was only the agent.’
‘She won’t tell me a thing,’ I say. ‘She destroyed every document we had. You’re the only other person who knows.’
All at once the clocks in the room begin to strike the hour. Clocks on the wall, desk clocks, grandfather clocks. Bells chiming in every part of the room like the test firing of an alarm. It’s startling. The noise is immense. I glance around in a sort of wonder. Emi Usami merely stands as before, watching me, as if the room is dead still.
‘You speak Japanese?’
I blink and steady myself. ‘Hai,’ I say over the noise.
‘Sugoi desu ne. Okikunata ne.’
‘Hai.’
‘Cho kirai.’
‘Arigato.’
Emi Usami nods. Her eyes have a glint, a sparkle. ‘Okasan no yonimieru,’ she says.
You look like your mother.
The clocks ring, counting the hour, and then one by one they die and soon the room holds only the sound’s silvery after-image. I breathe in and breathe out.
I have one memory of my birth mother. She’s lying on a tatami mat in a beam of sun and her hair is white and her eyes are closed and I’m shaking her by the shoulder but she will not wake. The Rin in the past, the child Rin, can’t be sure if this is a game or if something’s wrong. She shakes her mother and her mother doesn’t move. More and more, I suspect it’s a memory of my mother’s death. Was I there when my birth mother died? Where was my father? These are questions that feel like holes in the middle of me.
Emi Usami reaches up and takes a thread of my hair. She runs it back and forth in her fingers. ‘It’s a lovely colour,’ she says. ‘Not quite white. More like platinum.’
‘Thank you.’
She watches me with old narrow eyes. ‘Your mother kept her hair more yellow than white.’
‘I remember her hair. Not much else, but I remember her hair.’
She walks away to the counter. On the bench sits a mechanical register and whether it is part of the operation here or whether it’s for sale, I can’t be sure. Emi Usami leans by the register and yanks a stool from somewhere and sits. She rubs her knees.
‘My parents,’ she says, ‘they came to New York because they hated how the Japanese worked. Not even worked. How they slaved. Like they’d lost their own will. Grown hollow. They hated that hollow-eyed look the working Japanese had.’
‘Hard work never killed anyone.’
Emi Usami sticks her hands behind the bib of her apron. ‘Ms Braden, if I tell you what you want to know your mother will take everything I have. She’ll send her lawyers in here. Her private detectives. My parents will have come to America for nothing.’
After a suitable time, I say, ‘I can pay.’
‘Five hundred thousand,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘To protect myself.’
I try to hold her gaze and correct the slight sway I’ve picked up. As the CYC corrections officer training manual would tell you, it’s important to maintain authority through a confident bearing. ‘You’re right to be worried about my mother,’ I say. ‘She has no pity for anyone. If she knew I was talking to you, she’d raise hell. Even if I learned nothing, she’d punish you just for talking.’
Emi Usami seems unsettled by this. Her mouth tightens.
‘Fifty thousand,’ I say.
She lowers her head and when she looks up her eyes have grown sad and wet and she gazes at me with a kind of compassion. ‘She has certainly done a job on you. You poor, poor girl. Dragged you away. Dragged you away from home. Driven you half crazy.’
‘What home did I have? I was an orphan.’
Emi Usami shakes her head.
‘Alessandra gave me everything. She loves me.’
Still shaking her head, Emi Usami snorts. ‘Loves you. Yes. It had to be you and only you, no matter the cost.’
‘All the more reason for you to be careful,’ I say.
She huffs. ‘Grown up to be your mother’s girl, haven’t you?’
‘I just want a name. You can give me a name.’
‘Money gives birth to money,’ Emi Usami says. ‘Money gave birth to you.’
The clocks tick. My head is full of pressure.
‘I told you,’ she says. ‘Five hundred thousand.’
‘One hundred thousand. And Alessandra will never know. No one will ever know. I guarantee it.’
Emi Usami taps her apron bib about where her heart is. ‘You’re going to kill me. An old woman with nothing.’
She looks at me for a long time. She’s leaning across the counter on her elbow and opening and closing her hand. There’s a gravity to her that seems to bend the light in the air behind. Then she presses a mechanical key on the register and the drawer shoots out like a trap and she reaches down and gathers up a pair of older model glasses.
‘Put it in here,’ she says.
A piggy bank arrives in a puff of magic smoke. It snuffles and hops around the counter. As long as it’s untraceable, I don’t care what it looks like. I drag out the funds from my account and feed them in the coin slot on the pig’s rump.
‘All right,’ Emi Usami says, looking at her balance. ‘All right. That’s good. That’s good.’ She smiles. Her eyes become very narrow. She inscribes some characters in the air with her finger. It’s a name, an ordinary name, written in kanji. It hangs, glowing blue like fairy dust.
I read it aloud. ‘Sakurai Misaki.’ It has no weight in my mouth.
‘That’s your mother,’ she says.
Sakurai Misaki. The character for sakura is the uncommon kind. Sakura. Cherry blossom. It’s ancient and ornate. I suppose it’s beautiful, but it’s just a name. There’s no history to give it feeling.
‘I’m offering you that because I played a part.’ Emi Usami says. ‘I went along with it when I shouldn’t have.’
I’m looking at my mother’s name and thinking about my own, because I realise that my birth name must have been Sakurai Rin, and I’m murmuring it to myself, Sakurai Rin, Sakurai Rin, like the lyrics to a song, and a few seconds pass before I register what Emi Usami has said. I look up.
‘You shouldn’t have?’
‘Is Alessandra a good mother? Does she care for you?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘It had to be you, no one else. She demanded it.’
Alessandra had always said it was because she knew, when she saw me at the orphan school, in my pinafore, in long socks, she knew we were meant to be together. She said it was love at first sight. If Alessandra had wanted a particular kid, she would have found a way to get them. That is not a shock. I’d seen her spend ugly amounts of money for a single bonsai tree she wanted, for a painting, for a bottle of sake, even one time for a chef she flew in from Barcelona for his gambas al ajillo. If she wanted me, she would have spent and spent until it happened.
‘Money gives birth to money,’ Emi Usami says.
My trench coat is dripping water onto my jeans. My socks are wet through and I only just notice. What a strange thing, I’m thinking. How had I not realised? I see Dieter checking her wrist across the street and looking towards
the store. For a moment none of it makes sense. I’m here in a shop full of wooden furniture and clocks and samurai swords. I’m dizzy. I can’t figure out what I’m doing here. Rin Sakurai. Is that who I am? Sakurai Rin-san?
‘Here’s the problem for you, Ms Braden.’ Emi Usami lays an old knotted hand on the counter and gazes hard into my face. ‘If you start investigating that name, you’re going to find something Alessandra doesn’t want you to find.’
‘What? Find what?’
‘To begin with, how many laws we broke by relocating you here.’
‘It’s not illegal to adopt a kid who needs a home.’
‘A child with a parent? To a foreign family? Japanese law is perfectly clear on that matter. And we broke it.’
‘I didn’t have any parents.’
Emi Usami wipes her mouth to hide a smile. She’s enjoying herself. Yeah, and I’d be pretty chuffed with a hundred thousand in my account too. ‘You should have stayed home tonight,’ she says. ‘You’re going to regret coming into my store.’
‘Listen. Thanks for helping out. Really. I hope you enjoy spending my money.’
I’ve got one hand on the door when she says, ‘Let me spoil the surprise for you.’
Maintain authority, I’m thinking. Don’t look back.
‘Your mother,’ she says. ‘Sakurai Misaki. She’s alive.’
I look back.
YAMAAN ALI UMAIR
PART 3 OF RECORDED INTERVIEW
Date: 16 February 2074
Duration: 10 minutes
Location: Liverpool Street, Hobart
Conducted by Inspector Jin Lee and Senior Constable David Martin
INSPECTOR LEE: Go back a bit. Just what precisely were you doing inside the Port Arthur Historic Site?
YAU: As I have told you, hiding from my cousin.
INSPECTOR LEE: On your own?
YAU: On my own. Yes. By myself. Just me.
INSPECTOR LEE: You said your cousin was still in the training centre.
YAU: Why aren’t you asking me about Hassan Niyaz? I witnessed what happened to him. I can describe everything that happened.
INSPECTOR LEE: We’ll get to that. Right now I’m asking about your cousin. You said your cousin was still in the training centre?
YAU: He was. The last time I saw him.
INSPECTOR LEE: So you ran all the way to Port Arthur because your cousin, what’s his name …