* * *
Here with Kanae, we are closer to the sea where the wind is picking up, where the rain has finally started to fall, she can hear it pinging—gently for now—on the thin roof of the love hotel, and she is lying straight as a board while beside her Fumikaze is curled into himself, facing her, sleeping such a silent sleep; he hardly makes a sound as the air enters and exits his body, and she is frowning in the dark because there should be no peace allowed around her, no stillness like his tender repose admitted into this room.
So she is sliding herself out of the bed, she has never been so quiet, she is crossing this tiny cubicle of a room with its garish colors and questionable fabrics and she begins searching the floor line, eyes roaming over the piles of clothing, the little humps of their discarded slippers, tracing along the blurred outlines of the objects and chair legs, until . . . there it is, her purse, and she tiptoes over to it, rummaging inside while sliding across the carpet into the bathroom, and it doesn’t take her long to find what she is looking for; she has her hand around the tiny sewing scissors and she closes the door behind her, gently now, not even a tell-tale click, and now the light is on and it takes her a long moment but eventually she is able to raise her head and look herself in the eye.
She forces herself to stare, scissors wrapped in the flesh fold of her hand, and there is not a sound from the outer room, not a sniffle, not a sigh—and what a surprise it is to discover Fumikaze’s untroubled sleep, she had imagined him a restless man, she had envisioned insomnia, even drinking or chain-smoking, some vice cultivated in the valley of his loneliness, some reason for her to feel sorry for him, but there is truly none and she can only stare at this reflection in the mirror. This sixty-something woman with those gray-brown eyes and slender nose, those lines like folded tissue paper at her eyes—and now her eyebrows are raised in surprise, are asking this woman in the mirror to stop playing her game, to get over herself, to take a real inventory of her person, because her face is giving nothing away.
“You have opened your hands and dropped it all,” she whispers to herself in English, wanting to put something between herself and the silent sleeper, but this change in language isn’t enough, she wants different words, only words that she herself could understand, made-up words that could become a physical apology, something she could pick up again and carry with her into Alec’s hospital room, an object she could place in his hands and all would be erased.
Remember the three sorries, they used to tell their children, and the children would stare back at them, faces sometimes still twisted in anger or broken with sorrow, bodies tense and curved, but they were easy children and they would wait and listen to be reminded about saying sorry, feeling sorry, and the third and most important sorry of all, showing sorry. And so Kanae is counting now, on her fingers, in the thick yellow light of this bathroom, counting off each sorry with a little huff, hoping that in repetition she will make them come true.
Oh, we hear it now, the rain is coming down outside and these rowdy drumbeats get her up off the edge of the bathtub and climbing inside of it, pushing back the sliding window so the burst of hot air strikes her face, blows her hair off her shoulders, but this isn’t enough so she pushes back the metal screens, pushing hard because they stick and then it’s on her, the hard rain, the early lashing of the coming storm and she closes her eyes and this is helping, this is taking her out of herself. And so she lets it beat against her, wondering for a moment if the noise might wake Fumikaze but, no, it can’t, it won’t, not tonight, not when she needs this violence for herself and sharing it would only make it all so hollow.
“You have opened your hands and dropped it all.”
Has she said this? Nothing is less certain because she is nothing but a statue now, frozen with her mouth a little open and her eyes closed tight, and maybe she isn’t even with us anymore, not for now, she has let enough of herself slip out through the window that she is now nearly as peaceful as that sleeping body in the other room.
Just a short distance from our statue is the ocean and its surface is a froth of movement, all those waves made by the winds, the same winds that are bringing up the denser, cooler water from the depths, churning our Pacific and making it something else entirely as the storm grows. No longer gathering, this storm is actually upon us, already driving along the beaches and moving across the edge of the island, ready to hedge its way inland, and there—hear it?—the first of the thunder. We haven’t even noticed the lightning, but now Kanae’s eyes are open and she is moving and she has purpose and we can only watch her again.
The scissors are still inside her closed fist and she brings them up into the light; they are small and dull but they will do, and so she is facing that mirror-woman again and pulling up a lock of hair, it only takes a snip, a heavy pressure from her fingers to cut through these hairs. Snip. Again. Snip. Again. Around and around her salt-and-pepper head, not caring about the length except that it all must go, and the scissors flash with a bolt of lightning and the hands tremble as the crack of thunder splits the sky. But she is still cutting and turning her head and reaching backward for those hard-to-reach pieces, and eventually—how long did it take her? Maybe twenty minutes?—it is all gone. Just a cap remains, curling toward her head with the damp of this night.
The memory is painful but she lets it come and she lets it sit beside her in this tiny space, and she can feel his hands again on her neck and ears, a steadying balance on her shoulder as he took the scissors and did as she’d requested . . . because they were young, not long married, no children yet, and they would take their baths together in the evenings, spend hours in a half-light nakedness and it seemed impossible there could be so much pleasure from only two bodies, two finite volumes of skin on skin. And he used to cut her hair back then, because she kept it simple—long and straight, it was the fashion—so he would comb out her damp hair and place the blade of the scissors against her naked back and trim as straight a line as he could.
She nicks an earlobe, not on purpose, only her fingers have begun to shake, despite the warmth outside, our Kanae is cold, there are goose bumps along her arms and up to her now-naked neck, so she tosses the scissors into the trash and closes the window now, sliding gently, muting the storm outside. Then she sweeps the hair as best she can, scraping with her fingers along the edges of the sink and rinsing it all away and in the same movement she dries her hands and turns off the light, purse over her shoulder, and now she is back in the other room, standing over this sleeping form, this peaceful gentle man, who has no idea what she has done and that she is about to leave this room, is about to take his car and leave him stranded in this dingy place in order to get back to her own, to get back to herself and to our little town, to make herself do what she should have been able to do when our story began so many days ago.
* * *
We are not many people but the neighborhood is joined together tonight, we are placing sandbags along the riverbank, protecting the old onsen from the water that will surely come, the flooding can be strong along this little stream when the great rivers up higher in the mountains swell and overflow, and so I am here to help as well, I have brought a tall thermos of tea down for the young men who are carrying such heavy loads, and for the women who are helping too, there is Old Hoshi pretending to carry sand, there is his daughter following him, wishing he would go back inside, you will get sick in this weather, she is telling him, you are shaming me, is what she doesn’t dare to say.
The rain is heavy and the trees whipping their thin branches through the air, and so those who are not working at the edges of the stream, those who are not bagging sand out of the back of a truck, are huddled up here under the eaves of the onsen building, on this small veranda with its slender benches and lonely vending machine, we are just a handful of women and some teenagers, those not quite old enough to help in the dark and the rain, but old enough to still be awake, we are standing out here in the darkness, and we are passing along what we’ve heard so
far about the typhoon and if it has damaged our little town.
“The road out to the high school is impossible already.”
“I heard that Kawakami’s farm lost an outbuilding.”
“Some tourists are stranded at the yakiniku restaurant—aren’t they lucky?”
“I heard the hospital had to put in another generator.”
And here it begins again, this mention of the hospital brings everyone to attention, because you must remember, this is Kanae Endo’s childhood neighborhood, she grew up just two houses from the onsen, when there were only a handful of old homes on this road on the outskirts of Komachi, and we have all known her since she was little, we have followed her life some, her marriage to a foreigner being an event to remember, her keeping that foreigner in our town instead of disappearing after him like so many other women, no, Kanae somehow managed to make him one of us, and then, of course, Alec has been such a perfect foreigner—he has never surprised us in the wrong way.
“Have you heard what they are saying?”
“It’s terrible, the poor man.”
“Does anyone know what he has?”
“Has anyone seen her?”
The teenage girl’s eyes are open wide, the tops of her high cheekbones glowing in the damp and the moonlight and she wants to know what we’re talking about, she is whispering to her granny, Misako Ishimura, she is asking what is this all about, and her granny is whispering back to her, and now I must really interrupt, even if I have been standing in the shadows and some of these people will have forgotten that I am really here.
“Are we really sure she hasn’t been to the hospital?”
There are nods and chatter.
“But I mean have you seen Chester-Sensei? Have you asked him about it?”
“What are you getting at, Azami?” There is a pitch of high laughter; Misako has always had a horrible witchy laugh. Then she half-whispers, “Anyway, surely you should know, Azami, you old fox!”
The teenagers look at me again and now I must smile at them as Misako giggles and makes her silly allusions, I must smile at them as I have been smiling at the children since I became old enough to frighten them—before, when we were all just children, I was the one who was frightened and would have to run away.
There is a boom of thunder overhead and one of the tree limbs shakes itself free from the tree and drops to the ground, startling Old Hoshi finally once and for all even if it missed him by several meters, and he makes his way up to the porch and collapses onto the bench in his dirty wet clothes, his sleeves are rolled up to his elbows and his pant legs rolled up to the knee, his ropey little calves flex as he bounces his legs, twitching a little, wanting a drink no doubt, and I offer him a cup of warm tea and he thanks me, not seeing me.
“But you remember, Hoshihara, certainly you know all about it . . .”
He is squinting up at Misako, his mouth open as if this will make him hear her better.
“You went to school with Azami, wasn’t it silly how she was teased?”
He looks at me now, wiping the water from his forehead with the back of his hand and drinking the tea in one gulp.
“Oh, we were silly children, of course,” Misako is saying, mostly to her granddaughter but loud enough for everyone to hear. “Children are naturally cruel, and there were so many stories back then, you young people know nothing of our folktales, but anyway . . .”
She is prattling now, speaking too much, the teenagers have turned their bodies away from her, the young mother is only half-listening while she changes her baby’s diaper, looking over our heads to check on her husband off with the other workers, and I am still smiling, ready to laugh if I must, ready to be sillier than Misako can even imagine, but Old Hoshi is still staring at me and I feel my skin crawling now, I feel that urge to find the nearest tree and climb up into it as high as I can go, but he is only asking for another cup of tea and waving his hand at Misako for quiet, pretending to some male authority he no longer has, and so I pour him another but he reaches for my wrist so quickly I don’t have time to pull away, and then he is holding tight and whispering up at me.
“You’ve turned out all right, but you’ve kept your place.”
Before I can stop myself I have turned my hand around and let my fingernails grip his skin, I am holding on as sharply as I can and Old Hoshi has started to laugh, he is leaning his head back and shaking his hand free, laughing and shouting now, “Well, you still have a vixen’s bite.”
I roll my eyes because this is an old drunk, and everyone knows it, and whatever he has said he has only said to me, and it doesn’t matter anymore because I have moved quickly to the other side of the veranda, I am pouring tea for two young men who have come up to take a break, and behind me Misako is still laughing her silly laugh but she is no longer telling the children about my grandmother’s superstitions, she is talking about the television and her favorite variety show, about her favorite old pop singer, and how she’s sent in her money to win tickets to see him, to be a part of the audience, and luckily just then the storm surges above us, it’s a kind of mercy, it silences her and then we are all staring out into the darkness and watching the men crouched over the edge of the stream, watching them slip a little in their haste, watching them continue to pile the sandbags and we are hoping now, hoping that it will be enough because this storm is about to show us what it’s worth.
* * *
Here we are on the morning of the third day, if Alec were at home he would be preparing for a lesson with Mr. Nagakutsu, drinking tea perhaps, staring out the window of his study into the garden, at the way the wind would be pushing at the rows of flowers and how each gale might rip another handful of petals from their bases and lash them against the leaves of another tree to make it appear that the leaves were bleeding, and he’d get up and find Kanae, wake her even, and make her come to the window and show her this moment of beauty from the storm.
Instead, Alec is slipping out of his hospital bed and moving into the hallway, it is early enough that the night nurses are still on duty, just finishing up their reports and tidying the desk and getting their patient reports ready for handover to the day staff, and so he glides past them and at the bend in the corridor he bows good morning to a very old woman shuffling near the fire doors, he is looking right and left, the woman’s back is to him, no one else is coming from either direction and so he opens a door and enters an old, unused X-ray room where sometime in the middle of the night, just before going to sleep, he stashed his street clothing in one of the empty cupboards. Just to be sure, Alec pushes a chair up against the door and then he is slipping out of his hospital trousers and t-shirt and into his slacks and button down, and he is wriggling his toes in his hiking sandals, which feel so stiff and rough against the bottom of his feet after these days of wearing slippers and going barefoot.
A noise. People have stopped just outside the doorway, and judging from their voices it is a young couple—oh, Alec knows these sounds, the woman is giggling and the man has made some compliment about her eyes which makes Alec smile, because it is always the eyes, compliment a woman’s eyes and she will think you have complimented her character, her soul.
“You’ll save me from the trauma of the day,” this young man is saying, a touch of poetry in his inflection. “Your face is alive, it changes everything.”
“But I can’t have lunch with you today, I have to help Tsuruta Sensei with paperwork.”
The young man’s silence is sharp and immediate and Alec waits for the woman to enter it, to try to shuffle it away, but she doesn’t and Alec is intrigued, even today, and so he closes his eyes and wonders at this couple and who they might be and whether their story is an interesting one.
The young man speaks first. “His patients aren’t serious cases, he doesn’t need you to cheer him up.”
Laughter, then a coy response, “What time are you off tonight?”
Before Alec realizes it, the couple has moved along and he is alone again i
n his hiding spot, shivering a little but not from the cold because this room is hotter than the rest, its air conditioner turned off, but Alec wipes the sweat from his forehead with a clammy finger and rests a moment against the door. Just the exertion needed for this secrecy has made him tired. And so he leaves his flimsy hospital garments in a wadded ball in the trash can, slips back into the hallway, and takes the stairs down to the front entrance, this is his biggest gamble, he will not go completely unnoticed, someone will remember him leaving this morning, he just hopes that by then he will be far enough away.
“Chester Sensei,” nods a sleepy taxi driver.
“Ohayō gozaimasu,” he responds with his own quick nod, still walking. Good Morning. Not an honest statement.
It is time to take stock—the small incision in his side aches, but only a little, his head is feeling tender, his hands are trembling, his stomach is wondering vaguely about some food, and he knows the painkillers he swallowed after his chess game with Shingo will only last for a few more hours, and he will be on his own again, just as he was last week, with this everything. How bad can it be?
Alec stops quickly at the local Family Mart to buy some potato salad, a sandwich and a bottle of ice cold green tea, but over near the magazine rack there are two housewives discussing the cancer-fighting properties of green tea and Alec nearly laughs in their faces, nearly falls against them in his sudden mirth, but he keeps himself tucked over, tightly pulled in, he is nearly invisible, and in a few minutes he is out the door again and walking back toward his home.
Fog Island Mountains Page 7