Plum Rains

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “Okay, okay,” Rene nodded, impressed but still pushing. “You’re sure that’s all you’re going to give me today?”

  “Can’t I catch my breath?”

  “Sure thing.” He reached forward and touched her shoulder, fingers kneading slightly, then took a step further back, strong arms folded over his chest. “Tell me about your birthday party.”

  Sayoko leaned hard on the cane, brow furrowed. “We don’t make much of birthdays the way you do. I never even had a birthday the first half of my life.”

  “But you’re special now, at this beautiful age,” Rene said. “You’re going to get lots of attention. Are you prepared for your celebrity status?” He handed her a glass of water and encouraged her to drink. “I read these birthday stories in the newspaper all the time. You know what they always ask: What’s your secret?”

  As Sayoko passed the glass back, a worried look crossed her face. “I don’t have any secrets.”

  “The good ones. That’s what I’m talking about,” he said, beaming. “What do you eat? Do you pray? How many hours do you sleep?”

  She pursed her lips. “I will have to plan something to say.”

  “Just be yourself.”

  “No, that won’t do. They will expect something formal. They’ll want answers. You’re right to warn me. Thank you.”

  Rene shook his head, still smiling. He was only bantering. He hadn’t meant to trouble her. But she seemed to be taking his comments to heart, realizing for the first time that she would be interviewed and people would want to know about her life merely because she had lived so long.

  Angelica, still listening, felt a pang of sympathy for Sayoko. Groups bothered her, and noise. It didn’t help to tell Sayoko a place or an event was meant to be festive. And this was worse than the typical holiday or coerced outing: she would not only be attending, she would be in the spotlight. She was not a woman who liked to perform. The birthday party was a public relations nuisance for all of them. But it was something more for Sayoko: a test of some kind.

  To lighten the mood, Rene gestured toward Hiro, who was standing next to Sayoko, tapping her forearm absentmindedly—if a robot could be absentminded.

  “He’s playing you like a piano,” Rene laughed. “Why’s he doing that?”

  Lately, Sayoko had been putting up with this new habit of Hiro’s, allowing him to tap her arms, shoulders, and even the back of her bare neck with the sensitive fingers of his new hands.

  “Oh, it’s just something he has to do. Calibrating the sensors, he says. I don’t mind, except that now he’s touching lighter and lighter. It gets ticklish.”

  Hiro stopped tapping, hand flat against her forearm. “Is ticklish bad?”

  Sayoko paused, thinking. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s not pleasant.”

  Hiro recoiled. “I’ve been hurting you?

  “No, no. Ticklish doesn’t mean painful. It can be uncomfortable or pleasant—it all depends. But it’s not pain. It’s just different.”

  Hiro took another step back, pulling his arms into his trunk and crouching slightly, so he looked smaller.

  Angelica, always on guard for some change in Hiro’s behavior, took note. Curious. Hiro was sensitive about this issue of touch more than anything else. She noted the vulnerability, though she didn’t know what to do with it. Do with it? That wasn’t like her.

  She had never thought of vulnerabilities as opportunities. But only yesterday, coming face to face with Hiro’s cruelly exquisite Pinoy feast, she had promised to outlast him, to defeat him. It was hard to hold onto the rage, especially in the presence of other people who didn’t seem to find Hiro the slightest bit monstrous. But she would try.

  Rene turned away from Hiro and faced Sayoko more squarely. “This guy tells me you plan to walk around the park without any chair at all before the snow comes. What do you think about that?”

  “Did you tell him that, Hiro?” Sayoko asked.

  Hiro stayed in his slight crouch, voice soft. “I didn’t say that, Sayoko-san.”

  Rene flashed another smile. “I was teasing you, mister. Do you know what that means? I was making it up. I didn’t bring a gift for Sayoko-san’s birthday, but I’ve got something for you, buddy.”

  Rene went to the hallway, where he’d hung his leather jacket, and came back with a blue scarf. He approached Hiro slowly, the way one would approach a shy child or an unfamiliar dog. He held out the scarf, and only when Hiro didn’t resist, wrapped it around the robot’s neck.

  Hiro bowed in silent gratitude.

  Sayoko was delighted. “I don’t think he’ll ever take if off now.”

  Angelica envied the reception given to Hiro at every turn. Others took him in such easy stride. Rene was charmed by him. When the reporters came with their cameras for Sayoko’s birthday, and when the entire nation saw the high-level ministry bureaucrat and his mother with her helpful, convenient machine, everyone would want a Hiro of their own.

  Rene had another client he always saw later in the afternoon, an older man who lived near Ueno Park. When Angelica found out that he spent the time between appointments in the park, eating his packed lunch, she assured him he was welcome to spend his free hour at their kitchen table.

  Today she sat with Rene as he ate couscous from a portable lidded bowl, followed by an orange he peeled at the table, conscientiously catching every shred and seed. He offered her some of the couscous, but it didn’t appeal to her. She drank herbal tea, hoping it would settle her stomach, eyes fixed on his large hands with their pink palms and finely manicured nails digging into the peel, releasing the pleasant aroma of citrus.

  “She’s motivated this week,” Rene said, nodding in the direction of the living room, where Sayoko and Hiro were chatting quietly. “She can do more than she thinks she can. That’s often the case.” He seemed to be measuring his words. “She seems a little different, in other ways.”

  “How so?”

  “She doesn’t flinch. I try to touch all my clients, but she’s always reacted a bit, like she doesn’t want me to get too close. I figured—you know.”

  “That she’s racist?”

  He laughed. “Partly that. But some people are just more skittish. Have you noticed?”

  “Yes,” Angelica said. She thought of the times Sayoko had pulled away from hair braiding or winced at unexpected contact, even a hand placed too suddenly on a shoulder.

  Rene said, “You never know what they’ve been through.”

  “Well, I don’t think we have to assume . . .”

  “Not assuming anything,” Rene said. “Just wondering. By the time a person is a century old, they’ve covered a lot of ground. War, trauma, accidents, abuse—you live that long, it happens.”

  Angelica felt exposed for some reason: for not having noticed enough, for not knowing.

  “I’m not saying there’s any problem,” Rene assured her. “I’m just saying it’s a good thing. She’s less jumpy now. It can’t hurt, right? That’s why I asked about how the robot was touching her. Do you think he’s really doing it to calibrate his fingers?”

  “What else?”

  “Maybe he’s using it to desensitize her. Maybe he noticed what I noticed, and he’s doing his own kind of therapy.” When Angelica didn’t respond, Rene took it the wrong way. “Or maybe I’m just being foolish. Never mind.”

  Angelica got up to refill her tea.

  “Let me get that,” Rene said. “You’re on your feet all day.”

  “Do I look that tired?”

  He was too polite to answer. She must look terrible.

  When he sat back down after pouring hot water for her and cold water for himself, he said, “I’m sorry I won’t be around when she’s ready to try the park on foot.”

  “You’re leaving Tokyo?”

  He glanced down, separating the remaining orange
segments with care, delicately pulling off white threads of pith. “It’s time.”

  Angelica knew he had a wife and family in France. “Are you going home?”

  He shook his head.

  “Europe at least?”

  “BZ,” he said.

  She thought she’d misheard him. “You? Alaska?”

  “That’s right.”

  “My brother Datu lives there.”

  He just nodded: no pretending to be pleased by the coincidence, no “I’m sorry,” or “I’ll look him up.”

  She pressed him, “Don’t you have children, Rene?”

  “Four.” He smiled.

  She hadn’t met anyone with more than one or two children for as long as she could remember.

  “All the more reason to take a good paying job,” he said.

  “But don’t you know what happens there?”

  His face fell. She noticed, for the first time, a few kinks of white hair threaded through the curly black. “I’ll be in health services, not working directly with mining or refining—”

  “It’s not just the miners who get Masakit. You know that, right?”

  “—and no one gets the bird flu anymore, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “No, they’ve made sure of that. The remedy was worse than the disease. They killed everything up there and left the whole place poisonous.”

  His tone was getting more strident. “I’ve got a strong constitution. I never even catch colds.”

  She’d heard the “constitution” line from others. That was Datu’s attitude. You didn’t have to last long to get the big bonus: two years. Stick around another year and every two weeks, the savings would keep growing. That’s for fixing up the house. That’s for the fishing boat. That’s for five or ten more years of retirement, someday soon, especially if you went back to a place like Sierra Leone or Cebu, where a person could live decently on just hundreds a month. Front money paid back, minimal expenses, they’d be in good shape after three years and ready to go home.

  The BZ hadn’t been running long—maybe it was coming up on four years now, Angelica thought. The first fortune seekers, if they were being careful and not greedy, should be back home already, or soon. So why hadn’t Angelica read any stories about them in the weekly Pinoy papers? Why didn’t they know anyone personally who had made his money and booked his return flight?

  It wasn’t her place to hassle Rene with those questions. The last time Angelica had given someone advice about jobs, it had been Yanna, convincing her to come to Japan. Since then, Angelica had tried never to counsel anyone else about where to move, what risks to take or avoid. Everyone needed to make their own peace with what had to be done.

  But not this man: so full of life, so giving with others. Able to talk to a robot like he was a living person. Able to make even a sober old Japanese woman giggle.

  Rene twisted his wrist to show her the small screen. “You want to see a picture of my kids?”

  “No,” she said. She knew his children must be beautiful, like him. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  He leaned back in his chair, surprised. But his recovery was swift. He laughed again like she’d just told him a joke. She refused to laugh back.

  “Rene, don’t go to Alaska. Please.”

  He looked down at his empty bowl, replaced the lid with a snap, and gathered up his things, not smiling now.

  “They say it’s a good living there,” he said. “I’ve seen pictures.”

  She knew the litany from Datu’s emails. It wasn’t life. It was a simulation of life. And it was simulation that had caused all these problems: the need to surround ourselves with things that were not real, with things that were toxic, with things that could turn malevolent, when we could have reality instead, humanly flawed as it was, subject to storms and cruelty and want. But at least not poisonous.

  “Hey,” he said. “I worked in Dubai three years. Never saw my kids, the whole time I was there.”

  “The BZ is different.”

  “Yeah, different pay. Three times as much. Enough to pay off debts and send more home.”

  She reached across the table and pulled up a map on her phone. Most of the BZ wasn’t labeled, but the largest buildings were. “What do you notice, Rene?”

  He obliged her, nodding, and in the same gesture, glancing at his watch, not because he was running late, but because this conversation had grown uncomfortable. She should stop now. Any other week, she would have stopped. No one had tried to talk her out of going to Japan. No one had tried to talk her out of borrowing money from Uncle Bagasao. She wouldn’t have listened, anyway.

  “What I see is lots of work for people like you and me.” He indicated the seven major hospitals.

  “There are too many,” she said. “Too soon, you’ll be a patient instead of a therapist.”

  His face was unfamiliar now: no longer any trace of that bright smile. “You think I don’t know that?”

  “They stop paying you when you can’t work anymore. Do you know that, too?”

  He put his hands on his thighs, ready to stand up. “Yes, I do. But they can’t take away the signing bonus, you know?”

  “It’s not all that much. The two-year bonus is the thing, and there’s no guarantee—”

  He didn’t want to hear about how she reckoned the odds. He had his own wager to place. “I gotta think of my kids. I’m a father, you understand?”

  “But a good father—” she started to say, and knew as soon as she said it that she’d gone too far.

  “Don’t tell me what a good father is. I don’t regret a thing. And I don’t resent that those four children are depending on me.”

  She couldn’t stop herself. “But what about you?”

  “You still aren’t getting it. Of course it will hurt. But it will hurt because I have something to lose. Angelica, do you have anything to lose?”

  It was like a punch in the stomach, leaving her without words.

  Rene seemed to regret the question immediately, because he lowered his voice, but the anger still smoldered. “Hurting a little for my kids’ sake means I did all right. Don’t tell me I haven’t lived my life.”

  He managed to stand up before she could see the tears in his eyes, but he couldn’t hide the quick swipe of his large hand across his cheek.

  “Remind Sayoko tomorrow that I said happy birthday.”

  She followed him to the door and waited as he pulled on his jacket: scent of leather, light cologne. She would continue to smell Rene for days, now that Hiro had inherited his lovely scarf. Hiro followed behind, watching from the doorway.

  “Rene—” she started, and then reconsidered. If she couldn’t do this one thing for a person standing in front of her, not somebody already buried, not somebody an ocean away, not someone already hounded by gangsters . . . then she couldn’t do anything. She’d said too much already.

  He reached out and shook her hand in the way he always did: one hand, and then the other up her arm, cradling her elbow—a clasp that always made her feel steadier, briefly safe.

  “Rene,” she said again. “What will you tell your wife, from the BZ, when things get hard?”

  He gently released her arm and gestured toward Hiro, giving him a thumbs-up and an unconvincing wink, before pushing his hands into his pockets. “I will tell her what every man tells the woman he loves. I will tell her every day that I am absolutely fine.”

  She had known, yet just as Hiro had said, she had not wanted to know. She had refused to know.

  The knowledge was like pain that operated on a gradient, waxing and waning. They always asked patients, On a scale of one to ten, how would you say the pain is? And there were people who immediately jumped to eight or nine for everything. But not Sayoko. And not Angelica herself. For her, pain was rarely acknowledged to be above a three. Admit any more
and you’d have to do something about it. Plus, go any higher and you weren’t leaving room for more serious problems, later.

  She did not want to cry wolf. She knew that things could always get much, much worse, and this didn’t make those future realities any easier, yet there it was. Her temperament, her fear, based on the past and projected forward, the darkness doubling. She’d lost nearly everyone. There was only one person left. The whistling in the cave ahead was fainter, and the rope between her and the only thing she could count on, more slack.

  As soon as the door closed she walked past Hiro, who was still wearing the scarf. He followed her toward the kitchen and stood by, a momentarily unemployed sentinel.

  She ignored him, sat down, and typed on her phone.

  Datu, how are you, really?

  She reread it. It wouldn’t be enough to flush him out. How do you tell someone you’ve known forever that it’s time, finally, to stop lying?

  She sent a second message. There is no point in telling me you’re fine. I don’t believe it. I know you’re lying to protect me. But there’s nothing to protect.

  And still she thought: with enough money, anything was possible. No doubt it cost something to come back early. It always cost to break a contract. If people weren’t trying, perhaps that was because no one had loved them enough, no one had made them see the light or given them the help they needed to get out. If he had to buy his way out of something, she could help him. If he was too sick to work, they could reject the free hospice in Alaska and find an affordable alternative in the Philippines. Bribes could work wonders. Personal contacts mattered. Money talked.

  She had her own problems: red-flagged visa, unplanned pregnancy, a rival preparing to replace her. But these complications seemed petty next to Datu’s. He’d always found trouble, but he’d never been trapped. She was now realizing, all too late, how hard it is to save someone so hopelessly buried.