Too late. Akiko’s heart constricted with quick fear, and her palms broke sweat. What would Takagi say? Takagi was a woman who went to jail. She was tough. She could take on men like John and argue with them. Other than that, Akiko knew little about her. What if Takagi refused to help, or called John, or sent her away? She hadn’t quite thought this through, but it was too late. She sat back and plugged the Walkman into her ears. Clearly there were times when it was better not to think.
Bobby Joe Creely was singing as the bus spiraled up the ramp onto the web of cloverleaf overpasses that laced the heart of Tokyo. Just outside the bus window, over the edge of the embankment, the office buildings hugged the freeway like the tall walls of a narrow gorge. They were so close she felt she could reach out and run her fingers across their facades. As the bus passed slowly by, she could see right into the row upon row of identical windows, into the sickly fluorescent-lit cubicles, crammed with desks spilling paperwork, where office workers, dressed in dark-colored office smocks, hunched over the desks or shuffled from one desk to another.
The beginning of a mournful tune, plucked from Bobby Joe’s low, slow guitar, made Akiko shiver. It was her new favorite song, and she had studied all the words, looking each one up in the dictionary. Bobby Joe started to sing.
On the midnight train,
The lonesome train ...
The bus shuddered, as if to the music, straining against the tight curve of the on-ramp. It wasn’t a midnight train, Akiko thought, but it was just as good. Better, even. Because it took you to the airport.
You can’t feel no pain,
You can’t heal no pain ...
That used to be true. It wasn’t anymore.
You been hurt so bad
You been cryin’, you been sad
That part would never change. You can’t change what has already happened, she thought. But the future ... Up and up the bus spiraled, until the ramps of the viaduct fed onto the expressway that led out of the city.
So you pack your bags
Without a word of good-bye,
And you don’t care if he never even knows
The reason why ...
Akiko smiled. Finally she’d done something—something worthy of the women in Bobby Joe’s songs. And it pleased her to think that John would never know the reason why, that right now they were headed in opposite directions, and that in a couple of hours they would be passing each other in midair, somewhere, she figured, several thousand feet over the frozen tundra of Alaska.
12.
The End of the Year
SHÔNAGON
Things That Are Near Though Distant
Paradise.
The course of a boat.
Relations between a
man and a woman.
JANE
I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember
the images that I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo.
They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my
memory. I wonder how people remember things who don’t film,
don’t photograph, don’t tape. How has mankind managed to
remember?
Chris Marker, from Sans Soleil
First I quote Chris Marker, who is a filmmaker of note and also a fan of Shōnagon. I think about him a lot when I’m editing. Then I tell you that suspended by her leg, the dead cow spins, drained but still dripping from the mouthlike wound that bisects her throat. Then, as though in response to some unearthly cue, the wound gives a muscular throb, and a bright-red geyser springs upward from the floor. The wound opens, wraps its lips around the thick red stream, greedily sucks in the blood. When it’s finished and the blood’s all gone, the mouth closes and the lips seal—satisfied, seamless. The cow is thrashing, frightened, but whole again. Alive and kicking.
I do it again. And again. Twisting the dial, shuttling the tape backward and forward, running my finger across the cusp of life and death, over and over, like there’s a trick here, something that if I practice I might get good at. Sucking life back into a body. Sometimes when I think about it I cry.
Last night, the police came. The neighbors upstairs complained about the screaming.
“Lady said it sounded like there was animals being slaughtered down here or something,” the cop reported.
“Yes,” I agreed. “She’s right.” I showed the scene to the cop and his partner, two big, beefy Polish guys from Long Island; like most cops on the Lower East Side, they commute from the suburbs to police the inner city.
“How can you watch that stuff?” the cop said, screwing up his baby face.
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “How can you eat it?” I rewound the tape, sucking the screams back into the cow’s throat, along with the blood.
“Hey, that’s kinda neat,” said the cop’s partner. “Like you’re God or something.” He shook his head, suddenly somber. “I’ll tell you, I sure wish I could do that sometimes.”
“Yeah,” I agreed again. “So do I.”
I came back from Quam resolute. I would edit my video. The act would redeem my insufficiency, my lapses, my sorrow. But the sorrow is too severe, and the guilt too intransigent.
It costs six hundred dollars a week to rent the crappy editing decks and the monitors. I’ve had all the Beta masters dubbed down to VHS work tapes and striped with time code. Projecting ahead and calculating the costs of a final on-line edit, I realize I’ll be broke by the end of the month. Assuming I can edit something together at all. So far, all I’ve been able to do is run the footage back and forth, replaying the images until they substitute themselves for memory, until nothing exists except what remains on the screen.
At night, though, the displaced fragments float to the surface. I shuttle back, dream the baby is alive, I feel him kicking. The body remembers.
It is cold in the apartment. I finger Mom’s nickel, call Sloan. There’s no answer, just his machine. I try his cellular; nothing. I hang up, don’t leave a message.
I watch Rose sleep, the camera (my eye) tracing her baby-soft skin like a surrogate digit. Belly, ribs ... Bunny lifts her shirt.
I call Bunny, speak to John.
“Bunny’s taken the girl down to Texas for a spell,” he tells me. “To visit her folks. Said they both needed a change of air.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Awful sorry ’bout what happened,” he concludes.
Okay, I’ll buy that. Here’s what I conclude: John is an awful sorry but essentially decent man who participates in inhumane and mechanical mass slaughter and the corruption of his own daughter. His son, Gale, is a dangerous fool, yet some of what he says about recycling livestock feed makes good ecological sense, however unappetizing it may sound. Of course, some of what he says makes no sense at all. And some of what he practices, like implanting hormones and feeding offal back to cows, could be downright deadly. Nothing is simple. There are many answers, none of them right, but some of them most definitely wrong.
I phone Sloan again, leave a message this time. Still no answer.
I watch Bunny’s hand as she strokes Rosie’s curls. The bedroom is dark and close, feels clandestine; like a flashlight, the wavering ray of the sun gun finds Bunny’s face, illuminates it. I ask her questions: When did you notice? Why didn’t you do anything? Watch her slippery eyes slide away, so practiced in evasion. But then she gives herself a little shake and raises her head. She looks into the camera, focuses. Like a beam, she meets my gaze; she tells me everything. Secrets are like ghosts, she says. It’s like livin’ with ghosts....
Words that haunt, slice open my own abscesses of shame and dread.
Names leak into the air, hang around like a refrain. My litany: Suzie Flowers. Helen Dawes. Lara, Dyann.
It’s cold in the apartment, but I shiver and sweat. I’m losing it. Haven’t bathed or changed my clothes in a week.
Ghosts require ceremony. Like the babies, carefully named, then buried up on Cemetery Hill.
Name is very first t
hing. Name is face to all the world.
“Product of conception” was my baby’s name, before he was tossed into an incinerator.
My son. He had a face, a penis, he sucked his thumb.... If he’d had another week or two, he could have opened his eyelids inside my inhospitable womb.
If he’d had another week or two, he might have survived outside it.
The phone rings. I lunge for it, knock it over. Scrabble on the floor to pick it up again. Sitting on the floor, legs splayed, I hear, “Takagi-san? Akiko desu. Ueno Akiko desu.”
A woman’s voice, muffled, disembodied. “Who ... ?”
“I am Akiko ... Ueno,” she said, clearer now, in English.
“Akiko?”
“I am sorry to bothering you....”
“What is it? Is something wrong?”
“No. Not wrong, but ...”
“I can barely hear you. Where are you?”
“I am sorry to bothering you, Takagi-san,” she said, raising her voice. “But in your fax ... you said, Please do not hesitate ... if I need help ... ? I am calling to you from inside of the airplane.”
“Airplane? What airplane? Where are you?”
There was a pause. “I think ... it is over Alaska.”
She was on my doorstep about eight hours later, then in my living room, standing there awkwardly because I’d moved out all the furniture to make room for the editing equipment. I dragged in a kitchen chair and she sat down next to the monitor, which displayed the image of Bunny, perched on her fence. It was a funny juxtaposition.
Akiko was exactly what I’d imagined Ueno’s wife to be. Petite and shaking.
“I’ve left him,” she had told me in the cab from the airport. Now I gave her tea, asked her why.
“He hit me,” she said simply. “Many times. And kicked me too. But I got used to that.” She spoke in quiet, polite Japanese and kept her eyes fixed on her hands, which were folded in her lap. “Then he did something that was wrong. He shouldn’t have treated his wife like that.” She looked up at me. “Totemo yurusenai. I can’t forgive him.”
I nodded. I had no idea what she was talking about. “Does he know where you are?”
“No. I ran away. He has been in New York, you know. He said something about the editing of the program?”
I grimaced. “Yeah, he took the show away from me.”
“I’m sorry. I thought if I could warn you in time ...”
“You did,” I told her. “There was an accident.”
She looked concerned. It was sweet of her. “Were you hurt?” she asked.
“Yes.” I shrugged. “But I’m getting better.” I smiled at her. “And thank you. At least we tried.”
She smiled shyly back, then looked at her watch.
“He should be getting home to our apartment soon.” There was nothing shy about her smile now. “I wonder what he’s thinking.”
“Did you leave a note?”
“No. Nothing.” She paused, then said in halting English, “I pack my bags without a word of good-bye.”
She looked up at me and asked if she’d said it right. I told her she had. “It’s from a song,” she explained.
I dragged out an extra futon, gave her towels, and she took a quick shower. Then we went out to dinner.
“I’m not eating meat these days,” I told her. “If that’s okay with you?”
Akiko nodded. “John made me cook every recipe in your programs,” she said.
“No; really? Even the Coca-Cola Roast?”
“That was one of the best ones,” she said. “Anyway, I never liked meat so much to begin with.”
We ate at a Chinese restaurant just off Mott Street, where the chef fashions mock beef out of wheat gluten, drenched in a black bean sauce. It is indistinguishable from the animal itself.
“What are your plans?” I asked her as we were finishing dinner.
“I want to make a trip,” she said. “I want to go to Louisiana. I have wanted to visit there ever since I saw the program about the family who adopted the Korean children. It was one of my favorites. I gave it very high marks.”
“Thank you.” I was flattered. “If you’d like, I can call them for you. Maybe you could even stay with them.”
“Yes, I’d like that.” She paused, then tried another line in English. “I want to ride lonesome midnight train, please.”
“Okay,” I said. “The train is much more interesting. I’ll help you buy your ticket.”
“Thank you.”
“And after that?”
“So desu ne,” Akiko said, smiling her shy smile. “I’m going to have a baby.”
It felt like a punch in the stomach.
“I just lost one,” I said. I couldn’t help it. The words just happened.
Akiko flinched. “The accident?” she asked. I nodded. “I didn’t know. I’m so sorry,” she whispered. I shook my head, managed to hold back the tears.
“Don’t be,” I told her. “I’m getting used to it. I’m happy for you. Is it John’s?”
Akiko nodded. “Of course,” she said. “He raped me. Just before he left for Colorado.”
Over the next three days, she told me the whole sordid story of her marriage and her struggle with fertility. And I told her mine. We spent the days walking, from Battery Park all the way up to Harlem and back, crisscrossing the island. I was worried that the exercise would be too strenuous for her—she looked so fragile—but she assured me that she could see her baby very clearly and knew just what it was doing, what it needed. I assumed this was some Japanese idiom at first, then realized that she meant it quite literally.
“She has limb buds,” she said, closing her eyes.
We had ducked inside Macy’s to warm up for a moment, and Akiko sat down to rest on a bench just inside the door.
“Her spinal cord is just beginning to form. It shimmers through her skin.” She opened her eyes and smiled. “Her heart is beating. She looks like a sea horse.”
Her gaze drifted past me, to the busy shoppers milling through the scarves and belts and accessories.
“Since we’re here,” she said apologetically, “do you think we could go inside for just a little while? I like department stores. I like to look around.”
She asked about Colorado, so I showed her some of the footage on the editing deck. She was interested and listened carefully.
“So that’s the deal,” I told her. “It’s good footage, but I can’t seem to edit it. It’s too complex, you know? I can’t find the story.” I ejected the tape and powered down the decks. “Maybe I should just leave it for a while. Come back to it in a couple of months....”
“You are not at all what I expected,” she mused, watching me intently. She sounded almost disappointed.
“You mean the way I look?” I asked, surprised that she’d expected anything at all.
“Well, yes, that too. You are surprisingly tall.” She looked down at her hands. “I am afraid this may sound rude,” she said, “but I expected someone more ... shikkari shiteru. Tougher. More resolute.” She looked up hopefully. “Do you remember the song sung by Mr. Bobby Joe Creely? You used it in the program about the Beaudroux family. It’s called ‘Poke Salad Annie’?”
“Yeah, I know it....”
“‘A woman who is carrying the straight razor’ ... that’s what I expected you to be.”
She was good for me. When I saw her off at Penn Station, she gave me a timid hug and promised to return in a couple of weeks. I was sorry to see her go. But as I rode the subway back downtown, I felt a bubble of anticipation tickle my gut. It took me a moment to figure it out, but then I knew. I was ready to edit.
GRACE
The little cabin was clean and cozy. They had washed the curtains and put a bouquet of fresh-cut winter-flowering jasmine in a vase on the dresser. The scent was heady. Grace stretched the sheet taut and made a neat hospital corner, then tossed the comforter in the air, letting it billow over the bed.
“Mom!” Joy glared a
t her. The eyebrow ring made her broad, tranquil face look fierce.
“What?”
“You’re kicking up all the dust. I just swept.” She chased the fleeing dustballs with her broom. Grace watched her. Joy was her least tranquil child. Maybe that’s why she needed the ring, to disrupt the placid facade.
“Sorry.” Grace paused. “Joy, it just occurred to me. Did you get your eyebrow pierced so you could look fierce?”
Joy rolled her eyes and leaned on the broom. “Mom, lay off the ring, will you?”
“Joy, really!” Grace sat down on the edge of the bed. “You did it over a year ago and I’ve never said a word. It’s your face; you can do what you want with it. But I’m curious.”
“I got it pierced to bug you.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, but it didn’t work, did it? Anyway, I like it. It looks good. Exotic.”
Grace cocked her head and examined her daughter more closely. “Exotic. Exotic is good?”
Joy looked up from the floor, where she was crouched over the dustpan. “Yeah, exotic is good. And extreme too. That’s real good.”
“Your dad and I aren’t exotic, I guess.”
“No, Mom.” Joy was laughing now.
“Who’s exotic?”
“Jane Takagi is exotic. Did you see her tattoo?”
“She said hi, did I tell you? I told her about the Juilliard audition, and she said you should call her when you get to New York. She sounded real impressed.”
My Year of Meats Page 31