Plum Rains

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  She didn’t feel ready for the change of subject, but she tried her best to sound unflustered. “It went very well. The results should arrive any day now.”

  “Good,” he said, nodding briskly. “I received an immigration form, asking questions about your employment renewal. Perhaps normal, but I got an unfamiliar message after submitting. Unresolved, it said.”

  Her heart was in her throat all over again. “What does it usually say?”

  “Accepted. Or maybe Pending. I don’t recall last year’s form, exactly.”

  Angelica hesitated, not wanting to make any request for Itou’s help, while knowing that any visa hang-up could be just as disastrous as being replaced by Hiro. If Hiro had his way, she wouldn’t work for Sayoko. But if she ran afoul of the entire foreign worker system, she’d never work for any Japanese client again.

  She got up her nerve to ask. “Shouldn’t we find out if there’s a problem?”

  “The automated message said we’d hear more in time, if there is anything to hear.”

  “But maybe . . .” Angelica tried. “Perhaps you could contact them directly.”

  “Doubtful.”

  “Or perhaps you know someone personally, in the right office?”

  “That isn’t the way.”

  The rebuke was clear.

  “But you said you did well on the language exam,” Itou added more gently. “So, there will be no problem. We shouldn’t second-guess them. And we have our hands full already with Mother, and with her birthday party. Let’s not forget that.”

  She was not surprised, later, when Itou asked for permission to go into Angelica’s bedroom—really, his room of course—to console himself with the beloved instruments of his youth. He always asked first. She watched him take the step stool from the kitchen, heard the bedroom door open and the light rattle of glass as the high cabinet was opened. She turned toward the sink, washing the last of the dinner dishes, pretending not to listen, as if he were doing something private and secret. She knew he was self-conscious about his musical abilities, or lack thereof. Then she heard his slippered feet padding down the short hallway, the opening and closing of his bedroom door. He’d always talked of improving the condo’s already decent soundproofing, to spare anyone from having to listen to his playing.

  Angelica was holding the last teacup under the stream of warm water, soap bubbling on the back of her hand, when she heard the clarinet’s first tentative note: a low, reedy, warm tremolo. Not unflawed, but beautiful. The imperfection was perhaps the reason for its beauty. She hoped he knew that, and that he wasn’t too embarrassed when his clarinet hit a wayward note.

  Then again, she did not know this type of music. She’d grown up with choir, a little folk, a little pop, Latin dance tunes. Not what Itou played.

  Perhaps she was wrong. Maybe that off-note had been purposeful, a foot placed in an unexpected direction, a chance leaning toward something unattainable: the sound of wanting something you can’t have. For a moment, the music made sense to her, even if she had no words to explain what she was hearing. Maybe there were no words, and that was the point.

  She kept listening, eyes shut, water still running.

  What had Hiro said, in a concerned voice, on their way back from Ueno Park last night, head turned toward the busker? “There. That.”

  What had Sayoko said in response? “Yes.”

  Yes. I know.

  A voice at her shoulder startled her: “Anji-san.” She dropped the cup in the sink.

  It was Hiro. Too close. Torso at her back. Shoulder even with her shoulder. Head leaning over her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I only came to ask—”

  Then Hiro saw the broken shards of porcelain, and the water, now pink, running down the heel of her palm and her wrist as she lifted it. She hadn’t even felt the slice.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “The pieces are sharp. Careful. Please let me help.”

  “No,” she said, and she felt the sob well up, the emotion dredged up by the plaintive sound of Itou’s clarinet now surging out of her as the pink water darkened and as the vertical gash on her hand turned brighter red.

  “You may need stitches,” he said. “Let me evaluate.”

  “I don’t need anything. Leave it.” A few sobs escaped, though she bit down on her lip, inviting more pain, to stop the flow of her self-pitying tears.

  It wasn’t a deep cut, but it was in a place hard for Angelica to bandage on her own, though she tried. After several minutes of twisting and fussing, and spoiling one large square bandage that would not stick to her damp palm, she conceded.

  “You did not clean or dry it sufficiently, Anji-san,” Hiro chided merrily, starting over. He applied the bandage and wrapped a thin piece of white gauze around it. His fingers moved with delicacy, and he had known to stop his typical chatter for most of the procedure. But perhaps this was less due to the thoughtfulness than the fact that they were both still listening to Itou’s clarinet, the sounds muted by the closed door.

  “Thank you,” Angelica said under her breath, cradling her wrist in her other hand, when Hiro had finished.

  They didn’t rise from the table. She thought he was only waiting for her to go first, but then she decided that wasn’t true.

  Hiro said after a moment. “It hurts.”

  “No, it’s fine. It will heal quickly.”

  “Not your hand. The music.”

  Angelica hesitated. Had she understood him? She said, “It does hurt. And it doesn’t. Maybe like all beautiful things.”

  “It does and it doesn’t,” he repeated. “Does skin feel that way?”

  She considered. “It doesn’t hurt at all, usually, unless something is wrong.” But then she thought about it: the feeling of sun almost too hot on bare skin, a plunge into cold water, a tickle or an itch and the moment that itch is scratched, all the sensations of lovemaking, the permeable barrier between brief discomfort and bliss. Two faces of one coin, perhaps. “A little bit of hurting isn’t so bad.”

  He seemed worried. “Maybe I don’t need skin. Maybe there are other ways to evoke the same feelings.” He didn’t sound convinced.

  She was surprised again when Hiro turned to face her and asked, “Have you ever loved?”

  “Have I ever loved? Of course.”

  “Who?”

  She did not owe him much, but in exchange for bandaging her hand, she felt she at least owed him this: the human connection he so clearly craved, the briefest of truces.

  “My family and my friends,” she answered. “I still have a brother.”

  “He is important to you.”

  “I love him very much. More than anyone else. Without him, I wouldn’t have . . .” How to explain, when the truth about Datu was complicated and not always flattering, and none of Hiro’s business anyway? “I might not have made it, after the rest of my family died.”

  “So, he took care of you.”

  She hesitated. The simple answer was, yes. That’s all she had to say; that’s all she had to think. Yes. But she’d paused too long already. He was smart enough to know there was no simple answer and no one-syllable truth.

  “What about the rest of your siblings?”

  She sat further back in her chair, putting distance between them. “How do you know there were others?”

  “It would have been typical in your generation. Forty years ago, the average Filipino household would have had five or six members—”

  “Don’t,” she interrupted. “Don’t try to know me that way. Don’t assume.”

  He hesitated. “Do you not assume?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “I am curious about Datu.”

  Angelica had never said her brother’s name.

  He said, “Do I have your permission to learn more about him?”

  Angelica’s voice tightened. “D
o you need my permission?”

  “No.”

  “So why do you ask?”

  “Because humans often regard the past as private, even when experiences are communal and facts are easily discoverable.”

  “That’s because the past is private.”

  “In the case of Sayoko,” he said, not even bothering to refute her statement, “she guards some details of her past more than other details. Choosing whether to remember or forget, whether to share or withhold is a way for her to reward or punish, to connect or to assert power. That is logical, from the human perspective. Often, stories are the last thing a person owns—or thinks she can own—after she has lost everything else.”

  Angelica liked Hiro even less when he began to sound like a psychologist, or a shaman. She didn’t want to hear his lofty reflections. She was stuck on the word “discoverable.”

  “So if you ask, and a person doesn’t like you digging around, do you stop?”

  “No. I am telling you this now in order to be honest.”

  “Because honesty is also what you think humans prefer or simply because pretending to be honest gets what you want?”

  “I’m confused, Anji-san.”

  She laughed under her breath. “I don’t believe that for a minute.”

  After a moment, Hiro said, “I see. You endured a difficult childhood together.”

  “How can you know that?” she said, voice rising with alarm.

  “The records begin in 1997, with the Red Cross—”

  “You have no right to know that.”

  Hiro’s face-panel lights dimmed momentarily, then brightened. “Then perhaps I am mistaken. Your names are common, as are Pacific typhoons. Errors are possible.”

  Silence now, except for Itou’s muffled clarinet.

  Hiro tried again, voice lower, apologetic. “I struggle to understand why my compatibility with Sayoko-san does not predict our compatibility. You have more in common with Sayoko-san than either of you realize. In fact the parallels are surprising and perhaps this feeds my inappropriate curiosity. We are pattern-seeking creatures—”

  She interrupted, “You should stop messing with things that aren’t your business—”

  “We are all pattern seekers, and we need to be, Anji-san. Not only robots. All forms of higher intelligence. We try to match shape to shape, story to story. We find pleasure and meaning in repetition and variation, whether in the varying anatomies of life-forms or the melody of a song like the one Itou-san is playing. It is the only way.”

  When Angelica said nothing, he continued. “Facing the past has made Sayoko-san thrive following a period of emotional dormancy. You seem to require a state of half-knowing. Perhaps it is only that you are different ages, with different needs. Perhaps someday you will be more like Sayoko-san, and then you and I will get along better.

  “In the meanwhile I do apologize for offending you, Anji-san. I have developed to meet one woman’s requirements best. And isn’t that what people mean when they talk about devotion?”

  When the music stopped, Hiro said, “Good night, Anji-san.”

  He rose silently and walked away. She had not realized, until he had startled her at the sink, that he had gained the ability to walk without squeaking or clicking, or maybe he had always been able to do so. She knew little about his abilities, and even less about his motivations. But she was not completely sure of her own, either—or anyone’s. How far will we go to better our circumstances? How far will we go to protect ourselves, or those we love?

  13 Sayoko

  “Sayoko-san.”

  She heard the voice and saw the eye slits pulsing dimly behind Hiro’s transparent visor. He was crouched at her bedside, head angled close to hers.

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Excuse me, but no.”

  Hiro had woken her up, and this time not with the wails of a colicky newborn, but with the worried sighs of a confused adolescent, if that’s what he was now: anxious, sensitive to rejection, glumly fascinated by the pleasures and lies of adulthood.

  “Did something happen?”

  He did not answer. She knew that he was withholding, trying to work something out, trying to avoid worrying her as well.

  “You never finished your story, about Daisuke.”

  “It’s too late. Another day.”

  “But you may forget.”

  She hesitated before answering. “I don’t think so. My mind is feeling sharper.”

  She could make out his silhouette, shifting as he settled back onto his heels. He did not withdraw to the corner of the room.

  After a while, he said, “They always come for the stranger, don’t they? The hunters came for Daisuke.”

  “Eh?” She was too old for these long nights.

  “They felt they must remove the threat, the one who was different.”

  “No, no, it didn’t happen like that.” She yawned, eyes closed, and just as she opened them again, she saw his slits dim and brighten again, mirroring her as closely as his design would allow.

  “He was safe, then.”

  “No,” she said.

  “When I ran away into the park, you did not feel I was safe.”

  “That’s true.” She felt tranquil slumber retreating just beyond reach.

  “Because I am a stranger, and different, and not safe,” Hiro said. “Like Daisuke. But you protected him.”

  “That’s right.” Sayoko thought this would be enough. She thought he would, at last, go into sleep mode.

  “But it wasn’t enough to keep him safe.”

  “Well, no.”

  “Did he have a long life?”

  “No, regretfully. But—”

  “But?”

  “But I cannot say that he did not have a good life. Long is not always good, and short is not always bad. It is only short.”

  She had begun to tell the story that first night merely to comfort him when he wailed. She had continued it to hold fast to the memories. Sharing was useful, still—it brought forth images, words and pictures nearly forgotten.

  But there was something else, and it was more urgent: the need to continue Hiro’s development. Happy endings did not teach everything that a developing mind must learn. Sad endings did not impart everything that was true and beautiful about the world. The only story that seemed true was one that had no simple and definite end, one that kept going, like the seasons themselves: bright winter followed by plum rains followed by typhoon season followed, at long last, by bright winter again. The problem with her life was that the rains, for her, had been so long—decades long. Whether something good might come of enduring was not yet certain.

  But she was sheltering Hiro too much from the facts of this world.

  As she had protected her son by refusing to share anything that might stop him from fitting in as a young man, that would damage his career at middle age, that would make him think less of his family. And to what end? Her own son did not know her.

  “I will tell you,” Sayoko finally said, “what happened to Daisuke. We were across the bridge, and far from home.”

  They were on the shadier side of the river, on a path far above the water.

  “Which way now?” Daisuke asked. “We must find a safe way back to your village.”

  She had not reckoned seriously with the return trip. She had not thought about walking most of the trail back, without light. She had not realized how long it would take to get this far, or considered that the only other route across the river, without using the splintered swing bridge, required walking many hours upriver to a better bridge or downriver through territory that was not only unfamiliar, but peopled by non-kinsmen.

  It would be risky to walk that way without a band of hunters and peacemakers, men who would be recognized as distant cousins, as bearers of gifts in times past or as
emissaries. Walking with a Japanese man, one could easily be misunderstood. If Daisuke was not safe in her village, he was even less safe in villages with no police substation at all.

  Also, she was not sure she could find the way in the dark. She would not know what to do if they came upon startled hunters or scared a large animal in the bush. Why had all these facts been so far from her mind? Ah yes: young love, and youthful self-absorption. She had wanted to be with Daisuke, and then she had wanted to flee from him and from everyone else. She had never thought more than a few steps ahead.

  She tried now to explain to Daisuke the problems of route, territory and kinship as the high walls of the riverbank darkened, green turning to gray, then black. He listened and did not castigate her. He gave her water to drink, picked the splinters out of her shin and patted the length of it, reassuring himself it was not broken.

  For Laqi, returning along the broken bridge was the better alternative. Even in the dark.

  But he said no. He doubted it would hold their weight. He regretted having crossed it in the first place.

  Rummaging in his sack, he drew out some dried fish jerky which he placed in her open palm.

  “We must find a place to sleep and then tomorrow we can find a way back. Your grandmother will worry,” Daisuke said, misinterpreting her expression, thinking it was only fear, rather than sadness. The truth was that no one had worried about her for a long time.

  They walked just inland from the riverbank, into the abandoned village. He asked questions: Where are the people? Why all the empty houses?

  She remembered the time of sickness, not long ago, when several people had perished in her own village. On this side of the river, many more villagers had died. She had heard it said the people on this side resisted the colonial authorities even more than her own people had. The survivors had moved upstream, further distancing themselves from the Japanese substation and Japanese school.

  “There,” Daisuke said, pointing out some abandoned houses: open doorways, weather-stained bamboo walls, dirt floors, shadows. A bad smell tainted the air.