Plum Rains

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “When, please? Forty-seven minutes ago?”

  “Is that how long she’s been gone?”

  “Yes.”

  Sayoko brought a hand to her jawline, rubbing at a patch of dry skin there. Texture of a thin autumn leaf. Falling apart, she was.

  “She’s gone.”

  After a pause, the robot said, “I don’t think so. She didn’t take anything with her. Not even a small bag.”

  “I need to tell my son.” Sayoko’s wrist monitor squawked in response to her rising blood pressure. “No. He’ll be angry if I interrupt. Better to speak to his secretary. I need to speak to her.”

  “Sumimasen. I don’t know how to help with this, Sayoko-san.”

  “Just call her, will you?”

  “Certainly. What’s her name?”

  What’s her name.

  “We talk about her all the time.” Sayoko heard herself: We. She and Anji-chan.

  What’s her name.

  “What’s her name?” she asked the robot.

  “I apologize. I am not familiar with this woman or her name.”

  But this was ridiculous. She could remember names from forever ago. The other night she had barely tried and suddenly the old Chinese shopkeeper’s name had come to her. But that didn’t help now.

  As if to prove how much clearer the past was than the present, because the doctors always said it was so, didn’t they?—you lost the recent past first, the people you just met, even names for common objects around you, tip-of-the-tongue moments, it was normal—Sayoko challenged herself to recall the other names: the headmaster. The police chief and his wife.

  “Excuse me?” the robot asked. “Sayoko-san?”

  Lee Kuan Chien. But none of the others. Those retrievals failed.

  The faces were even foggier. And that was worse. A name was only a name. You changed your name. You hid behind an alias, if need be—during the war, many people had been forced to do that. Or a fortune teller told you that your name was bad luck and you gave it up: why not? A name reflected a situation or a hope and both those things changed. So little could be relied upon in this life.

  But a face and a voice: those were precious. Those were forever. Except when they weren’t.

  Don’t take their faces from me.

  And the voices. But see? That was linked to the words they’d used. And she’d been speaking this second tongue, this imperial tongue, for so long. First a game and a skill; later a bridge; finally, a mask that couldn’t be removed. There was no way to remember the sound of her mother without hearing Atayal, and that language would never be fully hers again.

  “Her name, please?” the robot asked, still waiting.

  “Anji knows her name.”

  The robot remained discreetly silent.

  Sayoko said, “I’ve met her. She’s been in this house. She works for my son.”

  “Perhaps we only need to know your son’s department at the ministry.”

  Well, that was the easiest question in the world. That was something she told people all the time, anyone who asked, because she was proud of her son’s success at the bureau. The bureau of something. Sayoko was now drawing a blank.

  The robot waited. Sayoko waited.

  After a while, it said, “I can call anyone Anji-san has called from the house recently. That may lead us to the person with whom you’d like to speak.”

  “No.” She couldn’t hold it in anymore. “No, no, no.” The warm feeling spread across her lap, then cooled immediately in patches, followed by another warm, surrendering gush. “I can’t—” But it was too late. Damp. Itch. Most of all: humiliation. Why had Anji done this to her? Why had they all done this to her?

  The robot said, “I can find other ways to reach your son directly.”

  “Please, no.”

  “If it upsets you, I won’t.”

  She was so used to people—her son, nurses, “helpers”—refusing to heed her that when the robot didn’t insist, it surprised her.

  “I trust you,” she said.

  After a moment she added, “That’s what trust is. You obeyed me, or you responded kindly to me, and now I will trust you.” She corrected herself. “Except that trust isn’t based on one experience only.”

  Though she knew that it could be. It could be based on repeated examination of a single experience but it could also be based on a feeling.

  “But you trust me. Thank you, Sayoko-san.”

  “Please don’t misunderstand me,” Sayoko said. “It isn’t always simple.”

  From outside the condo door came the faint sound of two men walking and talking animatedly. A jangling sound of keys or a squeaky toolbox. She recognized one of the now-fading voices: the maintenance man who occasionally came to unclog her kitchen sink. They sounded excited or upset about something. But it was too late to go to them and ask for help; and what would she ask? That they remember the name of her son’s secretary? That they hire a relief nurse?

  “Excuse me,” she said to get the robot’s attention, because there was nothing to call it—him. Only robot. “Do you recall word for word everything I told you two nights ago?”

  Maybe she hadn’t told him so much. Maybe he hadn’t been fully functioning enough to store it. Every device she’d ever known crashed, went on the blink, lost things. And he was only hours out of the box, still updating or adjusting or learning, or whatever it was.

  “Recall?” it asked. “I don’t have to recall it. I have all of it recorded.”

  Its torso lit up and she immediately said, “No, no, no, I don’t want to see myself,” and then he darkened the image but kept playing the audio and there it was: the train wreck of her indiscretion. She was horrified, but also curious. Her voice. Is there any person who doesn’t wince at the sound of her own voice?

  But she didn’t tell the robot to stop playing the audio.

  Lee Kuan Chien. Laqi.

  And the mention of Headmaster Takeda. That was the name she hadn’t been able to remember a moment ago. And the policeman. She hadn’t heard his name in the recording yet but it came to her anyway: Tendo. Of course. One certain memory parted the leaves for the next. Take a step. Another. The names were all there. And if she closed her eyes, listening to her calm voice from the night before, some of the faces came to her: Lee Kuan Chien’s, certainly. And for a precious moment: her mother’s.

  It was like strong drink entering her veins, a warm blanket over cold feet.

  “Hanako Kono,” she said with dignity now. “That’s my son’s secretary’s name. At the bureau.”

  She kept her eyes closed. The itch between her thighs felt more bearable. Her breaths grew deeper and more assured. She would ask the robot to completely erase the story, but she wanted to hear it all the way through, one more time, her own words, because those words were linked by gossamer threads to other stories, in the shadows.

  After the recording ended and she opened her eyes, the robot said, “I can help you . . . remember things.”

  She shook her head.

  “I can help you . . . store things. Things that others need not hear or see. If you trust me.”

  She shook her head again.

  Misunderstanding, it said, like a student admonished, “Trust is not established after only one experience. Thank you for explaining that to me, Sayoko-san. I did not misunderstand your comment.”

  Its voice was so earnest, which reminded her again that she was not only trying to make it say or do things, she was also guiding its development. Moment to moment. If it misunderstood how to read humans and trusted the wrong people, it would be in danger.

  She feared its power but feared harming it even more. It was a good thing, an innocent thing. People took advantage of innocence—she had learned that, unfortunately. The robot would not survive long without guidance.

  It added a m
oment later: “The Atayal language, from the highlands of northern Taiwan. I’ve now accessed some indigenous recordings, if you’d like to hear.”

  It was too much. Not yet.

  “But how?”

  “There are recordings from the past and also from the present, used by scholars and by new generations of Tayal people who are returning to the ancestral tongue. The language is still spoken.”

  “Oh,” she said, trying to control her emotions. “Is that so?”

  “The most common language in the region is Mandarin, but there are still scant numbers of people who have passed down Japanese from the old period, and also a growing number of children who are learning Atayal.”

  “I see.” She knew that after the war a second wave of Chinese culture had overtaken the island, but she couldn’t imagine those new people and how they had shaped the places she’d once known. For her, the highlands would always be indigenous first, Japanese second, and not a place where people lived now, but where they had once lived.

  “Laqi,” the robot said, practicing again, tuning the pronunciation slightly. It had been her name, for a while. And because he had accessed the pronunciation just now he began to voice it in a new, more precise way. La-qi, soft and breathy, catching slightly on the second syllable, like it came from the back of the throat.

  “Is that correct?” the robot asked. It must have noticed a change in her expression because it said, “I apologize. Is that not correct?”

  “It is correct,” she told him.

  For he had said it perfectly and she would not mind at all if he said it again.

  “La-qi.”

  7 Angelica

  Her phone. She could call for help with her phone.

  Except she couldn’t.

  But she could use the phone for light at least. She pulled it out of her pocket and pressed. Nothing. But that made unfortunate sense. She had let it drain completely on purpose. She had planned to plug it in at the corner tech store, so she had the charging cable in her pocket as well. That did not help here.

  “Help!” She banged on the elevator doors again and then pounded a few feet higher, realizing she was now halfway between floors, her voice muffled to those who might be passing, above.

  She had dropped, yes. She was between floors, yes. But she was not buried. The feeling of weight on her limbs was only tiredness, the spike of adrenaline draining out of her after the shock of the short plunge and all the lights going out. There was nothing actually pressing on her, nothing entombing her. Physically, she was absolutely fine. Unlike the episode in the street just two days ago—ridiculous; how she wanted to forget that stupid incident—she had not even fainted.

  She leveled her face, tried to look ahead—at nothing—and rubbed the back of her neck with one hand.

  This is not, she told herself, a storm. This is not being buried in the rubble of a concrete-block house suddenly blown down in a typhoon. You are not cold, and you are not injured, and you are not without air or struggling for breath in any way, and there is no rain, and you will not be here for a night and a day and another night. This is only an elevator. And because you are a grown woman you can tell yourself these things. You can use logic to avoid all-out panic and embarrassment. You can and you must.

  Even so, when she heard voices above her, outside the elevator shaft, tears sprang to her eyes. She called back immediately: “I’m here! I’m stuck!”

  One of the voices enunciated loudly, sounding almost bored: “It’s a malfunction. We have a maintenance team here. We will reboot the system.”

  Put off by the man’s lack of alarm, she called back, “The elevator dropped!”

  “No, no,” the voice responded. “It’s not dropping. It’s completely safe. The system is just off-line. Wait a moment, please.”

  She heard a whirring, then silence again, followed by a side-to-side shudder. She crouched even lower and backed into the corner, arms against two walls of the elevator for stability, just in case.

  Minutes passed.

  “It’s dark!” she called out. She was feeling the imaginary weight on her chest again.

  They didn’t answer. She could hear the two voices talking to each other, working, unhurried, annoyed by the system failure. Then finally: “We’re coming back.”

  “Hey!” she shouted upward.

  “It’s all automated. We can’t do anything until it reinitializes.”

  “Please, don’t leave me in here!”

  “We have to go to another floor. Excuse us.”

  Jangle of something: keys, tools, toolbox. Voices fading again.

  Black. Blacker than black.

  She’d learned no tricks from her experience being trapped as a child—nothing about counting a thousand bottles of beer on the wall or telling stories or reciting prayers. She’d learned only that you can’t count on people to come back when they say they will.

  Her brother Datu had said, I have to go. She had begged him not to, looking up through the splattering night rain toward his face for what might be the last time. He had nothing to give her. She was mostly buried, only one shoulder and arm free, and he had moved rocks and rebar as best he could, but after an hour’s work his fingertips were cold and bleeding, without much to show for it. She was still trapped. He could not free her and the typhoon was still blowing, the wind almost deafening.

  But what about Lola and the baby?

  He had not answered for a moment. When she pressed him again, he howled. I had to help you. I couldn’t look for them. It’s too late, don’t you see that?

  And he was not just scared but angry. Angry at her, for being the reason he had been pulled in several directions, for being forced to choose, for the reason he would always feel guilty.

  The entire front of the house, where Lola and their baby sister Marta had been sleeping, had been washed out to sea. The estuary dividing their house from the other buildings down the shore was completely flooded. They were cut off from the little church where their parents and two older sisters had gone to pick up emergency food and supplies a second time, because the first time they’d arrived to find everything already taken—half of the supplies stolen outright. The whole coast, they’d find out later, was similarly ravaged, including the village an hour away, where two uncles, an aunt, and several cousins lived—or had once lived, until that night.

  I have to go.

  Her parents should have been able to get emergency supplies and make it back before the storm struck. The house should have held up better in the storm. These were all thoughts that occurred to her only later, in nursing school, understanding what corruption does to a country: how it riddles it with so many holes that things collapse, and systems malfunction, and water rushes in, and life itself dissolves in front of your eyes. And yet a country was like a father who had beaten you, or a mother who ignored you: you hated it and you loved it, at the same time. You tried to get away and yet you couldn’t stop dreaming about going back. You clung to the only connections you had. You clung even more fiercely because the threads were so thin.

  Nena, stop crying. I can’t get you out without help. I have to go.

  The men fixing the elevator had no idea she was having a particularly stressful week and was now on the verge of panic. They had no idea that the woman trapped in the elevator might have her reasons for hating the dark, closed spaces, abandonment. They had no idea she had experienced trauma—that simplistic overused word, which ignored the fact that most people are resilient, that most people learn to live alongside their traumas, minor and major; but then again, we are nothing but the sum of our experiences, whatever jargon you ascribe to them.

  They had no idea. But people rarely do.

  She could not see into Datu’s heart, try as she might, to know what he’d felt that night and day and the next night; his guilt over the other family members he—they—had been unabl
e to save; how he’d felt in the years that followed. She could not know how he felt even now, with this shared history between them.

  She could not see into anyone’s heart. She used to think it was possible, as a nurse: you looked, you touched, you listened. But now she knew. You missed more than you saw. She no longer believed that she could understand the innermost workings of the people with whom she spent every day, privy to their most troublesome frailties, their most private moments, their deepest sense of shame. Many of her clients had been mysteries to her.

  This thought brought her back to the present, to Sayoko, which was good and right. Sayoko was the truly vulnerable one—not her. Hopefully, Sayoko had not even registered the passage of time and was not needlessly worrying or disoriented. Twenty minutes, she had told Sayoko. Just as her brother had said: I’ll be right back.

  But Angelica was losing herself in the melodrama of these last few days, which on a practical level was only a symptom of a larger problem. One person could not watch an older woman twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Things happened. One simply needed . . . help. But not automated help. Not like this elevator—what a joke—less reliable than the traditional thing it had replaced.

  No, she did not need that kind of help—a medicine worse than the sickness it was meant to cure.

  The voices came from above.

  “It’s ready to go. Lights on in a moment, prepare for movement. You ready?”

  A ridiculous question.

  “Ready,” she called back, wiping her eyes and trying to sound unbothered. In her own country, she would have expected an apology, but here she would be expected to give one. Sorry for the trouble and thank you. “Osoreirimasu.”

  Back at the condo another forty minutes later—quick stop at the corner store, where they had been completely unable to find anything wrong with her phone—it was as if Angelica had missed nothing at all. She’d entered the condo, breathing heavily from climbing the stairs (no more elevators today, thank you) to find Sayoko and the robot just where she had left them.