The Finder

by Will Ferguson

  My mother always said it was no fun hiding jelly beans for me on Easter morning, because instead of charging about pell-mell as other children were wont to do, I would move through thoughtfully, methodically, removing each candy one by one. What she didn’t understand was that the color of the jelly beans was so at odds with their surroundings that very little searching was required, although a few times I did indeed pretend to be fooled, if only to make her feel better; she was so much more excited about Easter than I was. “Ooo, you didn’t think to look inside the teapot, did you!” In fact, the teapot was one of the first places I spotted; it had clearly been moved—I could see at a glance that it was sitting slightly off-center on its doily, all but screaming, “In here!” That teapot, by the way, purchased in advance of a would-be Royal Visit (canceled when the bombs began to go off across Belfast), was the most valuable thing in our flat, worth quite a bit today, I imagine, if it hadn’t been thrown out with everything else after my mother died and the landlord foreclosed. I was in Indonesia by then and heard about the funeral too late and too far away to make a difference. I wonder if my da showed up. Not that it mattered. That hideous teapot with Princess Anne’s toothy grin stretched across it most likely ended up in a landfill somewhere, buried under other discarded items along with the jelly beans my mum stored in it after I was too big for Easter. Or maybe it wasn’t discarded. Perhaps that teapot sits in a secondhand emporium, collecting dust, waiting to be rediscovered, the petrified jelly beans still tucked within. Wait long enough and everything becomes a relic.

  When her memory started to go, my mother would joke that one of the advantages of this slow erasure was that she was now able to hide her own Easter eggs. Only much later did I realize that Easter was meant to be a celebration of life restored, not a crass treasure hunt. I’d always thought it was a holiday of the lost and found.

  I grew up on Shankill Road, which, I imagine, means nothing to you—or everything, depending on your degree of familiarity with the niceties of Northern Ireland. The flat I was raised in is still there, but the missing house, farther down, must surely have been replaced by now. It’s been so long since I’ve been home, I really can’t say. Named for a king, so I was. William the Third on his snow-white horse, a drawn sword pointing ever forward. No surrender!

  The missing house—it should probably be rendered in capital letters, the Missing House, such was its import—was haunted, or so it was whispered. But it wasn’t really haunted and it wasn’t really missing. It was in disarray. The working-class ruins of a family bungalow, it stood swaybacked and forsaken at the far end of the Shankill, on the dreariest stretch of the dreariest street in the dreariest part of Belfast—and that’s saying a lot.

  The Missing House had been destroyed, not in a spasm of sectarian violence, but over a perceived slight to one of the Loyalist paramilitary groups that prowled the Protestant reaches of Belfast in those days, and still do for all I know. A bullet-like bottle with burning rag attached had exploded through one of the windows, had turned the house into a hollowed husk, a burnt-out shell on the edge of an empty lot. The roof had partially collapsed, whether from smoke damage or water wasn’t clear, and the burnt wood lay amid slabs of plaster, with sodden mounds of drywall heaped in peaks along the floor. Charred furniture. Light fixtures dangling like eyes without a socket. It was beautiful, in its way.

  The day everything changed I couldn’t have been much more than eight or nine. It was threatening rain—it was always threatening rain; Belfast is a city held captive by the weather—and I was walking home in the worst kind of darkness, the darkness that comes from broken streetlamps. Whistling an elaborately brave tune, trying to stir up some courage, I hurried past the gawping maw of that missing home under the light of the only streetlamp left. My mum had sent me for chips and mushy peas, a treat of some sort, though I can’t remember the occasion, and I was clutching the newspapered package to my chest, whistling, whistling. It’s funny. Even now, the smell of damp newsprint will hurtle me back to that moment, to that ruined house, to the warm embrace of mushy peas and a single streetlamp, flickering.

  It was that lone streetlamp what did it.

  Among the ruins of the missing house, I spotted… something. A glint of… something. Probably just a shard of glass or a bit of broken metal, but—what if? That’s where stories begin, isn’t it, with the question: What if? What if the world is secretly filled with wonders? What if the miraculous lies hidden among the everyday quiddities of life? And what if that gleam wasn’t glass, but a diamond ring? A jewel, a pearl, a polished gem? It could be anything. Ruined buildings are a trove for treasure hunters. I stopped, and with that I overcame my fears—forever, as it turned out. I crept into the cavern of that fallen house and from the debris I extracted my reward: a single, one-pound coin. I can still feel the weight of it in my palm.

  The sky was heavy, I remember that. Pushing its darkness down on the city. And when I ran back to that pool of light on the sidewalk, coin in fist, newspapered dinner now tucked tightly under my arm, I felt something shift, like a vein under the skin. All down the street, squares of yellow light glowed through drawn curtains, the homes resembling an Advent calendar from which the chocolates had already been gouged. Row housing: two floors stacked atop each other, a single bare bulb above the entrance to ours. My mother had left a light on, would be waiting, fretfully, for the sound of my key in the latch, would be watching the door, wondering if I was too young for such errands.

  Beyond these row houses, at the end of our street, another light glowed liquid in the night. The local newsagent, and that is where I hurried. I purchased a one-pound National Lottery Lucky 7 scratch card and then ran home to deliver my gift. “It’s for me mum,” I had told the shopkeeper. “She’s feeling lucky.” He shouldn’t have sold it to me, but he did, and with a kindly smile as well, one that might easily have been mistaken for pity.

  My mother’s careworn face, trying to smile. She had set the table, just the two of us; I remember that as well, how heartbreaking it was to eat mushy peas and chips on a linen tablecloth with folded napkins and complete place settings. She was always doing things like that, cleaning the house for hypothetical visitors or setting a full table for takeout, sending me on errands in my best blazer, hair spritzed and combed, trying through some sort of magical gesture to keep despair from gaining a handhold. Yet she never thought to dust. I think maybe her eyesight was going by that point. Our house smelled of mice, though I only ever recall dead ones, behind a dresser, in the back of the closet, and so on.

  A one-pound coin? That was milk for our tea. That was a sticky bun to share or a can of tinned spaghetti, a newspaper with want ads to pore over. It was any one of those. What it wasn’t was a game of chance purchased on a whim. I could see a flash, not of anger, or even displeasure, but what I can only call anticipatory pain. Those who expect the worst of life are rarely disappointed, and any ire my mother may have harbored quickly subsided, and with a soft voice—she was from Ballymena, my mum, and carried the Scots-Irish lilt even then—“Let’s have a look then, see how close we came.”

  She scratched out 100 pounds on that one-pound ticket.

  That wasn’t milk for our tea, that was a new floral scarf for her, a school satchel for me. That was dinner for two at the Europa Hotel, where we ordered dessert even though we were full and she laughed and her eyes brimmed and I made her laugh and we toasted with cranberry juice, for luck and a steady eye and a coin among the ruins. I had seen my mother smile before; I had never seen her beam, and for that one evening we could pretend that this was the life we were meant to have, a life misplaced along the way, one of chandeliers and proper silverware, not a rictus home that smelled of mice where the doilies hid the age of the fabric.

  At times I wonder, had that scratch card revealed not 100 pounds but TRY AGAIN, how differently my life might have turned out. I might never have left Belfast, might still be ensconced on Shankill Road under pewter skies. Perhaps it was the Devil who
placed that coin in the ruined home. If not the Devil, a trickster god of some sort.

  You ask how I came to find myself on Hateruma Island? It started in Belfast. I was carried forth on tidal currents, on dark oceans.

  My mother died, as they do, and I drifted to Southeast Asia, as you might. Bangkok. Malaysia. Bali. Seoul and Shanghai, eventually washing up here on the shores of Okinawa, where I quickly set myself up in that liminal world, somewhere between night and day, heart and loin, pandering to the appetites of American servicemen. I specialized in finding girls who looked younger than they actually were, presenting them in dimly lit rooms as though they were children, which I suppose they were, though not in the legal sense. Amphetamine-numbed encounters. Blackmail follow-ups. I take no pride in any of this. It is simply a statement of fact. I was wounded, and in my pain sought to wound others, if only to have someone to share the burden. I could see the shabby future that awaited me and self-medicated myself back into the present, into a holding pattern above a closed runway as the fuel ran low.

  Okinawa City is a giant claw game with gears exposed. The clang and clangor, the ricochet and tilt-a-whirl lights. I was spiraling downward and I knew it, was sampling the very wares I was meant to be peddling, both chemical and physical, was finding it harder and harder to look those young girls in the eye—most of them with the smell of the earth and the sea still clinging to their cotton kimonos; they came from whatever the Okinawan equivalent of the Shankill was, these girls, as I paid them their pittance and pocketed the rest. There were yakuza to be bought off, supplies to be purchased, my own jangled nerves to be assuaged, even as the spiral sucked me deeper, drew me downward.

  What rescued me from the whirlpool was not a sudden conversion, no Saul-to-Paul epiphany, but a chance encounter on a deserted beach with a man who came from nowhere in particular. A prophet of sorts. He spun me the tale of Lazarus, of lives restored, of dead men rising.

  “I have a proposition,” he said. “A proposal, and a modest one at that.”

  What happened now seems preordained, as befits my Presbyterian roots. Perhaps I am a Calvinist at heart, after all. The man on the beach unwrapped a strange narrative of parallel worlds, of baubles hanging in plain sight.

  He told me that I would make a lot of money, and that I would disappear. Those were his very words: “I present to you the opportunity to earn a great deal of money, and to then disappear.”

  Part of a nefarious international organization, or so he said. Shadowy contacts. Vague assurances. An offer of lucre and a new life. This was the seduction he trapped me with over sugarcane drinks in a bamboo bar. “You will make a lot of money. And you will disappear.” It was the possibility of reinvention more than the money itself which proved irresistible. Perhaps it was the Devil I was hearing, true and good now, whispering in my ear, my own desires echoing back at me.

  I would once again be searching for lost things. That was how I justified it, ranging from one end of Japan to the other, liberating an ancient calligraphy set from a Kyoto monastery, retrieving a samurai scroll from Sado Island or a Gutenberg Bible from Nagasaki, a relic of Japan’s doomed Jesuit incursion wrapped in silk and stored in a temple until it became forgotten. My job was to un-forget such things, to extract them from life’s tendrils. I wasn’t stealing, I was restoring. Bringing things back to the light.

  There is a rich market for objects thought lost, now found. But there is a richer market for thieves, and only too late did I realize that I was not as invisible as I fancied. Somewhere along the way, I had triggered a trip wire of some sort and I found my regular avenues and corridors of escape blocked. It began with a police raid, sidestepped only when I caught the silent throb of approaching lights in a shopwindow. They had sent four patrol cars to catch me, had failed—but only just. There is no shame in admitting I was unsettled by what was happening. Contacts who failed to show. Cars with tinted windows that were parked across from whatever low-end inn I was currently habituating. I slipped through side doors, took overnight buses, avoided airports, even considered back-alley plastic surgery at one point—but my face has never been memorable, and I knew it was not me per se, but the trail I left behind that had tipped off—who exactly? Interpol? Perhaps. More likely the International Crimes Agency, an anagram of CIA, appropriately enough, though not, as far as I know, associated with espionage of any kind. The ICA is the strong arm of Interpol. It shares data and pools its resources with other agencies, whether it be Scotland Yard or the FBI or XYZ. I never took the ICA seriously, assumed they were just another bureaucratic make-work project in the endless alphabet soup of organizations that were doing their best not to catch me.

  I hadn’t counted on a certain agent, however. A tenacious and wholly unlikable person I came to hate with a passion worthy of a better cause. Let’s call her Agent Rhodes, because that’s her name. Gladys Rhodes, to be precise, and honestly, who names their daughter Gladys these days? (Though I understand she goes by “Gaddy,” hardly an improvement.) I know her name because she showed it to me—inadvertently, mind you; but still, it doesn’t say much for her powers of subterfuge, does it? I spied the name when she pushed herself past me, rather rudely, I must say, flashing her badge at a luckless hotel night clerk. She was asking about me, or rather, the name I was then currently traveling under. Here I was, her prey, standing right beside her, and she never knew! Heightened observational abilities would not appear to be her forte, either. One wonders how she was ever accepted into the ranks of the ICA in the first place. Fortunately, that hostel-like inn was a frequent habitué of dissolute gaijin such as myself, and the night clerk didn’t recognize me—we do all look alike—or chose not to, anyway, discretion being the better part of valor. And so I slipped away while she was waiting for the clerk to slowly pull out the guestbook and laboriously flip through the pages to locate my room and presumably a key.

  She is a thoroughly unattractive person, our Ms. Rhodes. Thin-featured, pinch-faced, I would say, were I less charitable. Tall, true, but brittle as a bag of pigeon bones. Some may claim to find the anemic look attractive; I do not. I imagine she smells of Vicks VapoRub and loneliness. It’s an unattractive nature, more existential than physical. Beauty may be skin deep, but true ugliness comes from the core. A holiday would do her wonders, I am sure.

  At first I found it almost comical, then merely tiresome, the way she was constantly circling the playground like a feckless beagle, sniffing the trail, trying in her clumsy way to flush me out. Comical, then annoying. Then worrisome. Then aggravating. I caught glimpses of Gaddy Rhodes and her flyaway hair across many a crowded floor. (And really, could a six-foot skeletal blond call more attention to herself in a country like Japan? Here’s a tip: wear a wig.) Over time, her constant presence began to frazzle my admittedly frail frame of mind. She became, not my nemesis exactly, but my banshee, wings folded, voice screeching its relentless wail, a death foretold. In Ireland, banshees are considered folkloric harbingers of fate. But I assure you, they are quite real. They come in the guise of thin-faced women brandishing badges.

  Under the gaze of her banshee eyes, my carefully constructed network began to collapse. I was harried, harassed, hounded at every turn. As one deal after another fell through and former confederates began to turn, I realized I was trapped—not just in Japan, but in Okinawa. That’s the problem with islands; you are always surrounded. I could feel my banshee drawing nearer, and in desperation I sent her an offer, a proposed truce, shall we say, left in a locker in Naha City. She had the staff break through the padlock with metal cutters, expecting a terra-cotta bodhisattva saint inside; instead, only a letter containing a gentlemanly proposal: I wish to come in from the cold. If you provide me with immunity, I will provide you with names. Her reply, posted in an online want ad, as arranged, was simple and to the point. OFFER DECLINED. What she wanted was not concessions but complete capitulation, unconditional surrender, as the Yanks had after they’d obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, reducing the populace to shadows s
tenciled onto city walls. That’s who I was up against. A pale crusader who would not let me rest. A heart like Hiroshima.

  Cornered in Okinawa City, bank accounts frozen, with no access to a means of escape, I went all in for a final payday: a royal tomb, rumors of riches, a willing buyer. I had been reduced to the role of common grave robber. All for naught. There was no treasure. Only femurs and broken clay. Such is life. Problem was, I had already accepted initial payment, the rest due on delivery. But there would be no delivery. Dragging a rucksack filled with money and hunger—and a gun, let’s not forget the gun; easily purchased in the alleyways of ill repute that fan outward from the US Army base—I was crossing a street that was palpitating with American servicemen, palpitating and salivating both. I was trying to fight my way into the First Chance, Last Chance Saloon, something of an institution in Okinawa City, even if it has been inflicted by the scourge of country music. I was going there to return the money, try to buy some time, when what did I see, floating like a halo above the mutton-headed mob? That damnable pale hair, those sour features, my would-be banshee.