by Leo McKay
He is a prim, excessively well-groomed man with soft features and big, round eyes.
“Nichols-san,” he says when she enters his office. Unlike the staff room, which still looks like there has just been a strong earthquake, Takeuchi’s office is as tidy and proper as ever. He must have been running around putting things back on shelves even as they were falling.
He does not mention the earthquake or ask her how she is. He merely sits with a scrubbed-looking face, his expression pleasant, his head cocked alertly to the side, waiting for her to say something.
“Mr. Takeuchi,” she says. At least she’s regained the ability to say that much.
He looks at her steadily.
She apologizes for such short notice, but tells Takeuchi she is not well enough to teach today. Except for the few weeks she was away last year, she has not missed a day of work. Takeuchi is not happy – though his permanently blissful expression will never show it. Meta surmises his unhappiness from the long silences that punctuate his speech, but he puts up no argument about her leaving.
She walks the whole way home. The temperature has risen enough to melt almost all the snow. Nothing anywhere speaks of the morning’s earthquake. Businesses are all open. With the snow gone from underfoot, people rush headlong down sidewalks. Taxis and trucks and buses and scooters and buggies and bicycles and motorcycles choke the streets.
It takes almost an hour to walk from her college to her apartment. When she enters the hallway on her floor, she hears shrieking. High, desperate, wordless cries fill the hallway.
“Gai, gai, gai, gai!” The sound is so desperate and animal-like that it takes her a moment to recognize it as Yuka’s voice. She knows that Yuka’s boyfriend is a black belt in some martial art or other, so she quietly opens the door to her own apartment and rummages in the kitchen for a weapon. She finds a vase that has been drilled from a conical stone. She removes the dead flower from its centre and feels the weight of it steady her right fist.
She knocks on Yuka’s door, but there is no answer. When she twists the knob, she finds the door is unlocked, and pushes it forward. The screams turn louder. “Gai! Gai! Gai!”
Meta imagines Yuka standing over a bloody body with a knife, stabbing, stabbing. There is a sound like a fist impacting flesh. She removes her shoes in the genkan, carefully steps up onto the tatami, and goes down the short hallway to the living room. The furniture is upset. Things are not where they should be. There are pieces of clothing spread about. The earthquake has strewn laundry and dishes and small appliances everywhere. A place has been cleared hastily in the middle of the floor. Yuka lies on her back with her eyes thrown wide open. The thick, hairy body of a naked man lies face-down on top of her. She is staring at the ceiling, screaming from between lips that stretch back to show her rear teeth. “Gai! Gai!” Her bare legs are bent at the knees and spread wide apart. The man’s head is covered with curly black hair that is longer on top, but shorn close at the back of the neck. The shoulders, arms, back, buttocks, and legs of the man are swirled over with little black curls. The hairy buttocks pull up and thrust forward again. “Gai!” Yuka cries.
Meta is frozen in place, paralyzed as much by her fear of being suddenly discovered as by what she’s seeing.
The man has his face buried in Yuka’s neck. At first Meta thinks he might have his teeth clamped on Yuka’s flesh, but he turns his head sideways to reveal his profile: pale white skin covered to just below the eyes with a thick black beard.
Yuka bends her neck up and looks at Meta. For less than a second, her face registers surprise. Then she lowers her head back to the floor, and her facial expression changes. As though to make clear to Meta exactly what is going on, she begins to speak in English: “Yes! Yes! Yes!” she cries.
Meta’s heart is racing ahead of her, she gulps air to keep up. She goes inside her own apartment and is suddenly clobbered by exhaustion. She’s been through too much today, and it is only mid-morning. She takes a bottle of apple juice from the refrigerator and sits at the table to drink it. Twice muffled, by her own door and then Meta’s, Yuka’s screaming is still audible. She switches on the radio to try to blot it out. The earthquake has thrown a few things out of place in her apartment. Some toiletries in the bathroom have been knocked off a shelf. Dishes that had been on the counter in the kitchen have fallen into the basin. She goes into the bedroom and slides the shoji closed. She takes off her clothes and crawls onto the futon, pulls the quilts over her head, but Yuka’s voice still reaches her. She lies for what seems like hours with “Gai! Gai! Gai!” echoing in her head. It is such a low sound now that it could almost be her imagination, her memory of having stood in the living room over the naked couple. It seems she’ll never be able to sleep, and then, suddenly, she wakes up.
Her doorbell is ringing.
She looks at the clock. It is two o’clock in the afternoon. She throws on some clothes and goes to the door, peers through the peephole, and sees Yuka, her body distorted, her head seemingly hundreds of metres above her feet.
Yuka comes in and sits at the table. Meta fills a pot with water and sparks the burner without saying anything.
“He’s gone,” Yuka says. Meta is sick of talking about this guy. Now that she’s finally laid eyes on him, and in such ridiculous and yet somehow terrifying circumstances, she wants to talk about him even less.
They sit in silence for a while, the pot beginning to rumble on the stove. Yuka is obviously there to talk about something, and Meta does not want the conversation to begin. She’s said enough about Yuka and her relationship to the man who beats her. She doesn’t want to say any more. Yuka’s very appearance now, in a flawlessly pressed pleated skirt and white blouse, seems a lie. It hides the fact that she’d spent the morning on her kitchen floor, howling like an animal.
“He went to Kyoto,” Yuka says.
“Kyoto,” Meta is surprised. She’s known people to go to Kyoto on holiday, but it is usually at Obon or Golden Week, two popular holiday times.
“He gave me letter.”
Meta takes a page of delicately patterned bone-coloured paper from Yuka’s hand. It is of a quality meant for traditional calligraphy work.
Dear Yuka, it begins.
I have tried to understand myself and failed. I don’t know why I strike out at you. There is some rage in me that I cannot understand or control. I’m sorry for every terrible thing I’ve done to you. In the past I thought that being sorry would be enough, that if I could reach down to the farthest depth of sorrow, I would find a place there to begin again and rebuild a me I want to be. This is obviously not working.
I’ve tried therapy, I’ve tried immersing myself in ki. I’ve sat seiza in the temple at our dojo until I had no feeling in my body below the waist. I always return to do you harm.
I’ve talked to my sensei, and he knows a temple in Kyoto where the monks will welcome me and teach me to open to myself. There is something in me, hiding. Something that doesn’t want me to see it. It is some first principle of myself that I have yet to know. I feel that if I can get a glimpse of this thing, maybe I can use it as the cornerstone of a new person I know I have to become.
I’ll be gone for some time, maybe up to a couple of months. Maybe longer than that, if that’s what it takes.
I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing this for me, because I love you.
“He gave you this today?” Meta says.
Yuka nods.
“When does he leave?”
“He’s gone now. Maybe he’s on bullet train now.”
“Did you know he was thinking about going to Kyoto?”
Yuka shakes her head.
“Are you surprised by this?”
Yuka leans forward for emphasis. “Very surprised,” she says. “And about this letter.” She takes back the paper and scans it quickly, finds the sentence she wants, near the top. She turns the paper so Meta can read and points at the place where she wants her to look. It is the sentence that says, I don’t know
why I strike out at you.
“What is this sentence mean?”
Meta glances back through the letter. She is so tired of the violence in Meta’s life that she does not even want to explain what “strike out at” means, but she feels relieved at least that this bully is leaving for a while.
“I’m glad he’s going away,” she says. “You deserve a holiday from him.”
The apartment is in a four-storey walk-up behind a supermarket on Quinpool Road in Halifax. It is directly across the hall from Colleen’s place, and looks out into the courtyard of the building, so that Jackie can let the girls outside to play and still keep an eye on them from the window.
It has been over a year since they’ve moved from Albion Mines, and almost a year that they’ve been in their own place. Kate is now settled in well to her new school, although the end of the last school year had been difficult. They’d moved in the middle of the year and the girls were still confused and angry over their father’s death. The publicity surrounding the explosion had put Kate on display among her classmates. Melanie has made friends with a little boy from down the hall, and attends daycare when Jackie and Colleen’s work schedules do not allow one or the other of them to take care of her. Colleen’s predictions of great sales figures for Jackie at Gregor’s have turned out to be optimistic, but Jackie likes the store’s management, and she is able to make more money than she did in Pictou County.
It’s eleven o’clock on a Friday. The girls have been asleep in their room for hours. Christmas is on the way. Jackie has the tree set up in a corner of the living room, where she’s been watering it for days. But despite the girls’ begging, she refuses to decorate so early.
Colleen sits across from her at the kitchen table. There is a box in front of them, its lid on the floor at their feet. She and Colleen are both tipsy, a word that just moments before had them giggling when Colleen had used it. They’ve had a couple of eggnogs each, the kind the dairies sell in milk boxes around this time of year. They’ve spiked it with Captain Morgan rum.
Colleen found the box in a closet in the bathroom and brought it out as a joke. “Look at this!” she shouted at the first thing she found inside. It was a school photo of Jackie from Grade 8 or 9. It showed her hair feathered away from her face in the style that was popular at the time.
They both laughed at the picture, but Jackie is uneasy about digging through the box. A lot of what is inside is Arvel’s, and she is in no mood for tears at the moment. She has been focused on the present and the future since she’s moved to Halifax. The past is a place she is in no hurry to revisit. She has made a plan to bring the girls to their grandparents’ in Albion Mines right after Christmas Day and the commitment to make that trip has got her thinking she’ll have had more than enough of the past by the time New Year’s rolls around.
“Come on, let’s put this away,” she begs Colleen. She picks up the lid and makes a move to replace it over the box. When Colleen intercepts and puts the lid back on the floor, Jackie gives in and takes another sip of rum and eggnog. The mixture is rich and cloying. She can feel her system getting clogged with it.
Colleen is poking through the contents of the box with an almost scientific mixture of indifference and intrigue.
“Birth certificate, confirmation,” she says. Her cheeks are flushed with the rum.
“Hmm … What’s this?” She flattens a newspaper clipping against a bare section of the tabletop.
Jackie recognizes the photo of Arvel and Santa. “Oh, come on, Colleen,” she says with some real frustration. “I don’t feel like going through this stuff.”
“Is this Arvel?”
Jackie sighs, slouches resignedly, nods. “It’s Arvel,” she says. “And take a look at Santa. I’m pretty sure that’s his father.”
Colleen looks intently at the photo.
“I don’t even think Arvel knew that was his father in the photo. I wonder if his family has a copy of this.”
“Unbelievable!” Colleen exclaims. She has already moved on to the next treasure. This one is a colour photo of Jackie on Melmerby Beach.
“Is this you?” Colleen asks. “You look amazing!”
Jackie snatches the photo away from Colleen. “You know damn well this is me! And don’t sound so surprised that I look good!”
This was Arvel’s photo, taken years ago. They must have been eighteen or nineteen at the time. They had gone to Melmerby Beach on Canada Day. She remembers Arvel taking the picture, and she remembers him almost gasping at it when it came back developed.
Like children, they had brought a bucket and shovels. Jackie remembers the two of them digging a big square hole in the sand. Arvel said, “This will be the foundation of our new house.” She rested her cheek on the warm sand at the side of the hole and put a hand down into the moist coolness their digging had uncovered. “I want to live right here,” she said. And she had meant it. She did want to live there. Right there on that exact spot on Melmerby Beach. There had been crowds of people around all day, on the sand and in the water. But after supper, the beach cleared off. They found themselves alone, back on a remote patch of sand with no one else around. Arvel folded the blanket over them and they snuggled up together, face-to-face, lying on their sides. He pressed his hips into hers and she felt her whole body as a flame. She reached down into his trunks and put her hand on his penis. She pushed the crotch of her swimsuit aside and brought him gently inside her. They lay there for what seemed like hours. Each propped on an elbow, facing the other, moving together so slowly and gently and magically.
The sun went lower in the sky. The sand and sea went the same colour of spilled gold. Arvel got up, and she sank back into the sand and drifted off to sleep. She woke up with his voice calling to her. The waves were dark and foamy and the sky above them had turned a dark and solid unstained blue.
Arvel called her name again, but she could not see him. When she sat up and looked around, over her shoulder, she found him behind her in the sand, near the edge of a swath of coarse grass, the sun behind him. All she could see was his silhouette. He’d gone to the car and got the camera. He was asking her to smile. She put a hand up against the light, to shade her squinting, and he snapped the shutter.
She does look beautiful in the picture. Beautiful in a way she is sure she has not looked since. It is the beauty of innocence that the photo has captured. She had been lying in the sand foundations of her dream house, and was now smiling not only for the camera, but for someone she loved.
Colleen must be able to tell from the expression on Jackie’s face that she’s in no mood for joking. She picks up the lid of the storage box and points at the word written there: memories.
“Let’s go out on the balcony,” Jackie says. She drops the picture back into the box and crosses to the sliding glass doors of the balcony.
They both stand coatless, sweaterless, in the cold air of winter. Below them, the building’s courtyard is lit with a sprinkling of snow. Directly across, a woman has neglected to draw the curtains on her bedroom window. They watch her shamelessly as she slips out of her clothes, pulls a warm-looking nightgown over her head, and turns off her light.
Jackie puts a hand on the iron railing of the balcony and waits for the cold of this night to push away the memory of that warm day so long ago. Memory seems a rotten trick to her. It’s unfair to be confronted now with these sweet thoughts when so much between her and Arvel had gone wrong since. What hurts most is knowing he went to his death unhappy, with their marriage a wreck. Though she knows it’s a stupid notion, she feels as though it was she who condemned him, sending him out of his own house as she did, just before he died.
She scans the windows of the apartments opposite, but all the windows are black.
“It’s freezing out here,” Colleen says. She puts an arm around Jackie’s shoulders and guides her back inside.
The bed is large without Dunya in it, but Ennis understands that Dunya is somehow doing what she needs to do. Whether he fully
understands her actions, or whether she even understands herself, she needs time and space to herself. She sleeps on a futon in the front room downstairs and spends most days sitting quietly, gazing out the front window.
The extra room in the bed seems to have freed him up to dream. His whole life he has never remembered much about his dreams, but frequently now he awakes with a vivid image that has stayed with him. One night he dreams two full dreams and remembers them both. They both are more like memories than dreams.
One is short, little more than an image. It is the memory of a fight Ennis got into in Grade 7, and strangely, the dream is not from his point of view. He sees it through the eyes of the teacher who broke it up, Sister Catherine. After dragging Ennis to the office by the ear, she turns away from him, steps back into the hallway, and slams the principal’s door behind her. The stiff folds of her starched habit crinkle and rustle in the silent hallway as she walks. When she has made her way to the staff room and shut the door behind her, she closes her eyes in frustration and exclaims, “That pig-headed little brat!” Overcome with disappointment in herself, she whispers into clasped hands, “Father, forgive me,” and performs the sign of the cross.
The next dream is about something that happened when Arvel must have been only nine or ten years old, an incident Ennis has forgotten until now.
The family is having a picnic by the riverside at Iona Park, past Eureka. Arvel and Ziv are fighting over the last bottle of Pepsi from the old red Coleman cooler. After pulling the Pepsi bottle back and forth between them with the cap still on it, Arvel wrests the bottle from Ziv and pops the cap with an opener that is riveted to the side of the cooler. The shaken bottle explodes with foam, soaking the two boys, who both spring back from the spray. Arvel is first back at the bottle, now less than half-full. He grabs Ziv, who is already soaked, puts him in a headlock, and empties the rest of the Pepsi over his head. Ziv begins to cry and runs back toward the river.