by Ruth Ozeki
Part III
Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand “flying” as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being.
To grasp this truly, every being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments in time, and at the same time they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being.
—Dōgen Zenji, Uji
Nao
1.
It took me a week to read all of his letters. His handwriting was difficult because the characters all ran together, and I didn’t understand a lot of the terms he used, but I was determined. Every evening as I wound my great-uncle Haruki’s watch, I thought about his whispered stories, and they haunted me and filled me with shame. Every morning, when I woke up early to do zazen, these were the words that crowded through my head as I sat on my cushion:
“What a fool you are, Yasutani Naoko! A coward, who cannot even withstand a little bit of ijime by children who are equally as pathetic as you! What they did to you is just a peanut compared to what your great-uncle endured. Haruki #1 was only a couple of years older than you, but he was a superhero, and brave and mature and intelligent. He cared about his education and he studied diligently. He knew about philosophy and politics and literature, and he could read books in English and French and German as well as Japanese. He knew how to shoot himself in the throat with a gun, even though he didn’t want to. You, Yasutani Naoko, are pitiful compared to him. What do you know about? Manga. Anime. Sunnyvale, California. Jubei-chan and her Lovely Eyepatch. How can you be so stupid and trivial! Your great-uncle Yasutani Haruki #1 was a War Hero who loved life and peace, and still he was willing to fly his plane into a battleship and die to protect his country. You are a sad little bug, Yasutani Naoko, and if you don’t get your shit together immediately, you do not deserve to live another instant.”
Now that I think about it, I can understand that I was probably very hard to be around after I got back from the temple. I was mad at myself but I was even madder at my dad. I mean, I was a girl and still pretty young, so I had an excuse for being lame, but my dad was a grown-up man and had no excuse. He was supposed to go to the doctor over the summer and get better, but as far as I could see, he was exactly the same or worse, and I could tell my mom thought so, too.
One day, right after I started reading the letters, there was a kanji that I couldn’t find in the dictionary. I copied it out as best I could, and that night I showed it to my mom and asked her what it meant. She said it was an old-fashioned word, and she rewrote it the modern way and we looked it up together. The next time I had trouble, I asked her again, and soon I was making a list every day and asking her for help every night, which made my reading go a lot faster. One night when we were sitting at the kitchen table, she asked me what I was working on and if it was a project for school. Dad was out on the balcony, smoking, and I knew he couldn’t hear us, so I decided to tell her about H #1’s letters.
She looked surprised. “Your great-grandmother really gave them to you?”
Her question made it sound like I’d stolen them or something. “Yes, she really gave them to me. And they’re really interesting. I’m learning a lot about history and stuff.” I hated that I sounded so defensive.
“Have you shown them to your dad?”
“No.” Now I was really regretting that I’d told her.
“Why not? They were written by his uncle, and I think he would want to read them, too. Your dad knows a lot more about his side of the family than I do. You could read them together.”
Okay, this pissed me off. I didn’t want to show them to my dad. He didn’t deserve to see them, and besides, I figured she was just trying to unload me on him as part of his so-called rehabilitation, or mine.
“If you don’t want to help me, fine. I’ll figure it out on my own.”
This was a pretty snotty thing to say, but instead of getting mad, she reached her hand across the kitchen table and laid it on my wrist, kind of holding me in place. “Naoko-chan,” she said. “I love helping you. It’s not that. I know how difficult all this has been for you, but don’t be too hard on your father. He’s a good man and I know deep down you love him. He’s trying really hard, and you should, too.”
If she hadn’t been holding my arm down at that moment I would have jumped up and thrown something at her. She didn’t know anything about how difficult stuff was for me or how hard I was trying! And I totally didn’t believe her about my dad, either. She was lying. He was sitting on the balcony on his bucket with a cigarette, reading a manga, and I could tell by her tired face and the nervous way she looked at him that she didn’t think he was trying hard at all.
But she was right about one thing. I still loved him. I thought about her suggestion in bed that night and realized that maybe I did want to tell him about the War and Haruki #1. Dad was named after him, and if he knew how brave and cool Number One was, he might get inspired to turn things around.
So the next day when I got home from school, I decided to show him the letters. He was sitting at the kotatsu, folding a Japanese rhinoceros beetle from a page of The Great Minds of Western Philosophy. On account of what I’d learned about Number One, I was a little bit more interested in philosophy now.
“What are you folding?” I asked.
“A Trypoxylus dichotomus tsunobosonis,” he said, holding it up and showing me its great pronged horn.
“No, I mean, what philosopher?”
He turned the insect over, squinted, and started to read, rotating the body to follow the line of words around the folds and edges. “ ‘. . . existent Dasein . . . comes to pass in time . . . historizing which is ‘past’ in our Being-with-one-another . . . handed down . . . regarded as ‘history’ in the sense that it gets emphasized,’ ” he read, and then he smiled. “Mr. Martin Heidegger-san.”
For some reason, this really pissed me off. I didn’t know anything about Mr. Martin Heidegger-san or understand what he was talking about, but I recognized his name from one of H #1’s old philosophy books, so I knew he must be important, and here was my dad, turning Mr. Heidegger’s great mind into a bug. That did it. It was time my dad learned what a contemptible being he was.
“You know your uncle Haruki studied philosophy for real,” I blurted out. “He was in the Department of Philosophy at Tokyo University. He didn’t sit around at home all day playing with origami like a child.”
My dad’s face went pale and still. He put his beetle on the table and stared at it.
I knew my words were harsh. Probably I should have stopped there, but I didn’t. I wanted to inspire him. I wanted to snap him out of it. I slapped the letters on the table in front of him.
“Jiko Obaachama gave me his letters. You should read them, too, and maybe you’ll stop feeling so sorry for yourself. Your uncle Haruki Number One was brave. He didn’t want to fight in a war but when the time came, he faced his fate. He was a navy second sublieutenant and a true Japanese warrior. He was a kamikaze pilot, only his suicide was totally different. He wasn’t a coward. He flew his plane into the enemy’s battleship to protect his homeland. You should really be more like him!”
My dad didn’t look at me or the letters. He just kept staring at his beetle. Finally he nodded. “Soo daro na . . .”140
His voice sounded really sad.
Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.
2.
School started again. In Japan, September is only halfway through the school year, and so I was still in the same class with those stupid, hypocritical kids who had ignored me to death in the first semester and then pretended to be sad at my funeral. But this semester I decided things were going to be different. I was not going to let them bully me anymore or break my spirit. I knew I could always stab old Reiko in the eye again, but I didn’t want to resort to physical violence
if I didn’t have to. Instead, I was going to use my supapawa that Jiko taught me. I was going to be brave and calm and peaceful, like her and Number One.
When I walked into school that first day back, my heart was pounding, but the fish in my stomach felt strong and powerful like a dolphin or a killer whale. The kids must have noticed the difference, or maybe they sensed Number One’s ghost hovering next to me, and even though nobody seemed overjoyed to see me, at least they didn’t punch me in the face.
With nobody torturing me, my focus started to improve, and I was able to concentrate on my studies. Classes were still boring, but after reading Number One’s letters, and seeing how smart he was and how much he liked studying, I felt ashamed of my ignorance. Of course, you could ask what’s the point of having an education if you’re just going to fly your plane into the side of an enemy aircraft carrier? That’s true, but I felt it wouldn’t kill me to learn something before I died, and so I started to apply myself, and you know what? School got more interesting, especially science class. We were studying evolutionary biology, and that’s where I got fixated on extinctions.
I don’t know why I found the subject so fascinating, except that the Latin names of the dead life-forms sounded beautiful and exotic, and memorizing them helped keep my stress levels down. I started with prehistoric sea cucumbers, and then moved on to the brittle stars. After that, I did jawless fishes, and then cartilaginous fishes, and finally bony fishes, too, before starting on the mammals. Acanthotheelia, Binoculites, Calcancorella, Dictyothurites, Exlinella, Frizzellus . . .
Jiko had given me a bracelet of pretty pink juzu beads, kind of a starter set, and for every dead species I would move a bead around, whispering their beautiful names to myself during recess, or walking home from school, or lying in my bed at night. I felt a sense of calm, knowing that all these creatures had lived and died before me, leaving almost no trace.
I wasn’t so interested in the dinosaurs and ichthyosaurs and stuff because they’re kind of a cliché. Every elementary school kid goes through a phase of dinosaur love, and I wanted my knowledge base to be more subtle than that. So I skipped over the great lizards and in November, just around the time I’d started on the extinct Hominidae, my dad committed suicide again.
3.
I need to back up a little, to September 11, in order to really explain this properly.
September 11 is one of those crazy moments in time that everybody who happened to be alive in the world remembers. You remember it exactly. September 11 is like a sharp knife slicing through time. It changed everything.
Something had already started to change in my dad. He was complaining about insomnia, and even his sleeping pills weren’t working, or maybe he wasn’t taking them. I don’t know. He still went out walking at night, and my eyes still popped open in the dark just in time to hear the metal bolt clank shut and his footsteps scuff down the outside corridor. Plastic on cement. I didn’t have to go out after him anymore. I just followed him in my mind.
But the big change happened on September 11. It was about a week after I gave him Haruki #1’s letters, and I woke to the sound of the television in the living room. The volume was low, but the sirens and the fire engines were loud enough to wake me. I looked over to where Mom and Dad slept. I could see Mom’s shape, but Dad’s futon was empty. The digital clock said 10:48 p.m. I got up and went into the living room.
He was sitting on the floor in front of the TV, wearing boxer shorts and an undershirt, with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. On the screen was the image of two tall, skinny skyscrapers against a bright blue city sky. The buildings looked familiar, and I sort of recognized the skyline. I knew it wasn’t Tokyo. Smoke was coming out from the sides of the buildings. I stood in the doorway and watched for a while. At first I thought it was movie, but the picture stayed the same for too long and didn’t do anything. It was just these two skyscrapers leaking smoke into the air without any music or soundtrack except for the low voices of newscasters in the background.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Dad turned around. In the light of the TV, he looked sick. His face was pale and his eyes were glazed. “It’s the Boeki Center,” he said.
I grew up in America so I recognized the name, but I couldn’t remember exactly where it was. “Is it New York?” I asked.
He nodded.
“What happened?”
He shook his head. “They don’t know. A plane flew into one of the buildings. They thought it was an accident, but then it happened again. There, look!”
On the screen was the shaky image of a plane disappearing into the face of the silver building. It slipped in like a knife going into a stick of butter. A cloud of flame and smoke burst out from the side. Where did the plane go?
“That was the second plane,” my dad said. “Now they’re saying it’s a terrorist attack. They’re saying it’s suicide bombers.”
The light from a spurt of flame reflected on his skin.
“There’s people trapped inside,” he said.
I sat down next to him. Flames and black smoke leaked from the wounds in the building. Bright scraps of paper blew out of the holes and sparkled and twinkled like confetti in the air. Tiny people waved things from the windows. Small dark shapes dropped down the sides of the shining building. I reached for my dad’s hand. The shapes were alive, they were people, too. Some of them had suits on. Like my dad’s. I saw one man’s necktie.
Above the sirens and the honking car horns, I could hear the voices of the people standing on the street near the camera. They were speaking English. A man’s voice was calling, Clear the road, clear the road. Some other guys were talking about a helicopter that was hovering over the towers. Was it going to try to land?
And then a woman screamed, and then everybody screamed, and a man started crying out, Oh my god! Oh my god! over and over, as the first tower fell. It went straight down, disappearing into itself, into a white cloud of smoke and dust that rose up and swallowed the world.
People were running down the street. They were hurt. They were trying to escape. Oh my god! Oh my god! Time passed, and then the second tower fell.
I held on to my dad’s arm. We sat there, side by side, and watched until dawn. One after the other, the towers fell. Over and over, we watched them. When I left for school, he was still watching. When I came home, he was still watching.
4.
He became obsessed with the people who jumped. That first night we saw them, small dark human shapes, dropping down the sides of the buildings, and we kept expecting to see them again on television or in the newspapers, but instead they disappeared. Did we just imagine them? Was it a dream?
For the next couple of weeks, he hunted for them on the Internet. He stopped walking. Late at night, I’d wake up and see him sitting at my desk in our bedroom, staring at the computer screen, running searches. He said the government and the networks were censoring the images, but finally the picture of the Falling Man showed up. You’ve probably seen him. The photograph shows a tiny man in a white shirt and dark pants, diving headfirst down the slick steel side of the building. Next to that gigantic building, he’s just a small, dark squiggle, and at first you think he’s a piece of lint or dust on the camera lens that got onto the picture by mistake. It’s only when you look closely that you understand. The squiggle is human. A time being. A life. His arms are next to his body, and his one knee is bent, like he’s doing an Irish jig, only upside down. It’s all wrong. He shouldn’t be dancing. He shouldn’t be there at all.
From my futon on the floor, I watched my dad watching the photograph. He would sit with his nose inches from the screen, and it looked like he and the Falling Man were having a conversation, like the man had stopped falling in midair for a moment to consider my dad’s questions. What made you decide to do it? Was it the smoke or the heat? Did you have to decide or did your body just know? Did you jump or dive or just step into the air? Did the air feel refreshing after the heat and smoke? How does it
feel to be falling? Are you okay? What are you thinking? Do you feel alive or dead? Do you feel free now?
I wonder if the Falling Man answered.
I know what me and Dad would have done if we’d been trapped inside those buildings. We wouldn’t have even needed to discuss it. We would have found our way to an open window. He would have given me a quick hug and a kiss on the head before he held out his hand. We would have counted to three just like we used to do in Sunnyvale, standing on the edge of the swimming pool when he was teaching me how to not be afraid of the deep water. One, two three, and then at exactly the same moment we would have jumped. He would have held on to my hand really tight as we fell, for as long as he could, before letting go.
5.
What would you do?
Does falling scare you? I’ve never been afraid of heights. When I stand on the edge of a tall place I feel like I’m on the edge of time, peering into forever. The question What if . . . ? rises up in my mind, and it’s exciting because I know that in the next instant, in less time than it takes to snap my fingers, I could fly into eternity.
Back when I was a little kid in Sunnyvale, I never thought about suicide, but when we moved to Tokyo and my dad fell down in front of the train, I started thinking about it a lot. It seemed to make sense. If you’re just going to die anyway, why not just get it over with?
At first, it was all pretty much a mind game. How would I do it? Hmm. Let me think. I know kids who cut themselves, but razor blades are messy and bleeding takes too long. Trains are messy, too, and some poor slob would have to clean up all the guts and stuff, not to mention there’s that fine that your family has to pay. It wouldn’t be fair to Mom, who works really hard to support us.
Pills are hard to get and how would you know if you’d taken enough? The best would be to find a nice place outside in nature, maybe a steep cliff that goes straight down into a deep ravine where nobody would find you, and your body could just decompose naturally or the crows could eat you. Or, better yet, a steep cliff into the sea. Yes, that’s a good one. Near to the little beach where me and Jiko had our picnic. I could probably even see the small bench where we sat and ate our rice balls and chocolate together. From the top of that cliff, the beach would look as small as a pocket. I would think fondly about Jiko and how she taught me the uselessness of fighting a wave, and that would be a nice last thought to have as I jumped off the edge of the world and went flying toward the ocean. It’s the same big Pacific Ocean where Number One crashed his plane into the aircraft carrier. That’s nice. The jellyfish would eat my flesh, and my bones would sink to the bottom, and I would be with Haruki forever. He’s so smart, we would have lots to talk about. Maybe he could even teach me French.