by Ruth Ozeki
“Do you think this is funny?”
He held up his hand to deflect the harsh light. “Not at all,” he said, squinting. “Please . . .”
She obliged, turning her head away.
“I’m serious,” he said, as he receded into the dimness. “Maybe we don’t exist anymore. Maybe that’s what happened to Pesto, too. He just fell off our page.”
3.
Outside in the tall cedar tree by the woodshed, the Jungle Crow raised its shoulders against the heavy rain. The wind whipped through the boughs, ruffling the shiny black feathers. Ke ke ke, said the crow, scolding the wind, but the wind couldn’t hear over the din, and so it didn’t answer. The branch swayed and the crow tightened its talons, preparing to launch forward and fly.
4.
“You sound even crazier than I do,” she said.
“Not at all,” he said. “On the contrary. We just have to approach this problem logically. Take it step by step.” There was something careful and deliberate in his speech that made her uneasy.
“You’re baiting me,” she said. “Stop it.”
“If you’re so sure the words were there,” he continued, “then you have to go find them.”
“That’s ridiculous—”
“The words were there,” he said. “And now they’re gone. Now, where do missing words go?”
“How would I know?”
“Because it’s your job to know?” He had been directing his remarks to the ceiling, and now he turned to face her. “You’re a writer.”
It was perhaps the cruelest thing he could have said.
“But I’m not!” she cried, her anguished voice rising to compete with the wind. “I used to be, but I’m not anymore! The words just aren’t there . . .”
“Hm,” he said. “Maybe you’ve been trying too hard. Or looking in the wrong place.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe they’re here.”
“Here?”
“Why not?” He gazed back up at the ceiling. “Think about it. Where do words come from? They come from the dead. We inherit them. Borrow them. Use them for a time to bring the dead to life.” He rolled onto his side and raised himself up on one arm. “The ancient Greeks believed that when you read aloud, it was actually the dead, borrowing your tongue, in order to speak again.” He moved his long body over hers, reaching toward the oil lamp on the bedside table. He cupped his hand over the tall glass chimney to blow out the flame, and for just a moment, the light shining from below, up onto his face, cast the deep sockets of his eyes into skeletal shadows. “The Island of the Dead. What better place to look for missing words?”
“You’re freaking me out . . .”
He laughed and then blew across the funnel of the chimney. The room went dark and the acrid scents of kerosene and smoke rose like ghostly leavings.
“Sweet dreams,” he whispered.
5.
What if I travel so far away in my dreams that I can’t get back in time to wake up?
“Then I’ll come and get you.”
What does separation look like? A wall? A wave? A body of water? A ripple of light or a shimmer of subatomic particles, parting? What does it feel like to push through? Her fingers press against the rag surface of her dream, recognize the tenacity of filaments and know that it is paper about to tear, but for the fibrous memory that still lingers there, supple, vascular, and standing tall. The tree was past and the paper is present, and yet paper still remembers holding itself upright and altogether. Like a dream, it remembers its sap.
But she holds her edge, pushing until the fibers give way, like cambium to an ax blade, like skin to a knife—
The boughs part then, revealing a path that winds and twists, growing narrower and narrower, leading her into an ever-thickening forest. The rain has stopped now. Crickets chirp. The fragrance of temple incense, cedar and sandalwood, lingers in the air.
In the distance, something catches her eye amid the leaves—a pixelation, a form, a figure? Hard to say. It darts from limb to limb. A bird? The pixels cohere, darken, and the image dissolves. She strains after it and then remembers. Maybe you’ve been trying too hard. She stops trying.
Sometimes the mind arrives but the words don’t.
Sometimes words arrive but the mind doesn’t.
Where are these words coming from? She stops walking, too. She sits down on the thick forest floor in the roots of a giant cedar. The mossy humus forms a cushion underneath her, cool and damp, but not unpleasant. She crosses her legs.
Sometimes mind and words both arrive.
Sometimes neither mind nor words arrive.
A spider drops on a silvery thread from the branch overhead. A faint breeze stirs the treetops. Dew and rain cling to the leaves and ferns of the understory. Each drop holds within itself a small, bright moon.
Mind and words are time being. Arriving and not-arriving are time being.
Something moves in the periphery of her vision. She turns her head and sees a heel. The heel is clothed in a dark sock, and next to it is a second, matching heel, dangling a meter or so above a pair of cheap slip-on loafers, which have been left neatly aligned upon an emerald green tussock of moss. She looks up at the silent bodies hanging in the shadows from the limbs of trees and knows this is wrong, but she can no longer stand up and run. Her body is as heavy and helpless as the hanged men, rotating slowly in the slush-thick currents of air.
Or is it water? Yes, she is swimming now. She is cold and swimming, and the sea is black and thick and filled with debris. She starts to sink and the ceiling of sludge closes over her.
Sounds merge and separate, coalesce and differentiate. Words shimmer, a darting cloud of tiny minnows ripples beneath the surface of the water. Ungraspable. We sleeptogether in onelargeroom laid outin rowslike smallfishhungtodry . . .
But something’s gone wrong with the words in time—syllables linger, refusing to dissipate or fall into silence—so that now there’s a pileup of sounds, like cars colliding on a highway, turning meaning into cacophony, and before she knows it, she is adding to the din, wordlessly, soundlessly, with a cry that rises from her throat and goes on and on forever. Time swells, overwhelming her. She tries not to panic. Tries to relax and hold herself loosely, resisting the instinct to tense and flee. But where would she go? She remembers Jiko’s elevator. When up looks up, up is down . . . But there is no up. No down. No in. No out. No forward or backward. Just this cold, crushing wave, this unnameable continuum of merging and dissolving. Groundless, she struggles to the surface.
Feelings lap at her edges like waves on the sand. Jiko holds out her glasses, and Ruth takes them and puts them on because she knows that she must. The murky lenses smear the world, as fragments of the old nun’s past flood through her: spectral images, smells and sounds; the gasp of a woman hanged for treason as the noose snaps her neck; the cry of a young girl in mourning; the taste of a son’s blood and broken teeth; the stench of a city drowned in flames; a mushroom cloud; a parade of puppets in the rain. For a moment she vacillates. The words are there at her fingertips. She can feel their shape, could grab them and bring them through, but she also knows she can’t stay much longer. In a split second, she makes a decision, and opens the fist of her mind and lets go. She can’t hang on to the old nun’s past and still find Nao, too.
Nao, she thinks. Nao, now, nooooo . . .
With a flip of its tail, the fish slips away, but she follows, doggedly, her arms and legs moving through the water in time to some distant music, like a synchronized swimmer in an old film reel, until exhaustion overwhelms her, cracking the world into a kaleidoscope of fractal patterns—recursive limbs and glinting wavelets—that spin and then reorganize themselves into a mirrored room with a round bed and a zebra-skin coverlet. Good, she thinks. I must be getting close. She looks for Nao in the mirror, a logical place, but sees only a reflection of herself that she does not recognize.
“Who are you?” she asks.
Her reflecti
on peers out at her and shrugs, causing the surface of the mirror to ripple like a pond when a stone drops into the water. The ripples settle, and her reflection is replaced by another, slightly different, which isn’t her, either.
“Do I know you?” she asks.
Do I know you? Wordlessly, her reflection apes her.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
What are you doing here? the reflection echoes, mutely.
“Why are you mocking me?” she asks.
Her reflection replies by unhinging its jaw. Its mouth gapes, bloodred, dripping with saliva—a terrible orifice. When it cracks a smile, the earth shudders, and from inside its tunnel-like throat, a long, forked tongue shoots out, rears up, and writhes like a snake about to strike.
“Stop it!” she cries, and just then she notices the young girl, standing behind her in the mirror. The girl is naked except for a man’s shirt, which she wears unbuttoned. A necktie hangs loosely around the collar. Their eyes meet, and the girl starts to button up the shirt, but when Ruth turns, the girl is already gone and the zebra-skin bed is empty.
Don’t be fooled! her reflection howls as the room explodes into a vortex of mirrors and light.
“Wait!” she cries, but just as her edges begin to dissolve into the blinding brightness, she sees out of the corner of her eye something quick and black, a gap, more like an absence. She holds her breath and waits, not daring to turn and look at it directly. The small black gap starts to preen as its pixels cohere, and then she hears a faint, familiar cawing.
Crow?
The word appears on the horizon, black against the unbearable light, and as it comes closer, it starts to turn and spiral, elongating its C to create a spine, rounding its O into a sleek belly, rotating its R to form a forehead and a wide-open beak. It stretches wide its Wings, flaps them once, twice, thrice, and then, fully feathered, it starts to fly.
It’s her Jungle Crow come to save her! She pulls herself back together and follows as it flies from limb to limb, but she’s on the ground and the terrain is rocky. When she slows or stumbles, Jungle Crow stops to wait, cocking its head and watching her with a beady black eye. It seems to be leading her somewhere. She hears traffic in the distance, clambers up a rocky incline, and finds herself in a sprawling city park, overlooking a wide pond. The edges are overgrown with lotuses and rushes but the middle is clear. It’s dusk, but a few pastel-colored paddleboats, shaped like long-necked swans, still crisscross the glassy water, leaving smears of pink and blue and yellow in their wavering V-shaped wakes. A broad asphalt path rings the pond, punctuated with stone benches at regular intervals like the hours on a clock.
A man is sitting on one of the benches, underneath a weeping willow, feeding a mangy flock of crows who flap and strut and vie for bread. Crow lands at the man’s feet, scattering the others and raising a small cloud of dust. She follows and sits down on the bench next to him.
He straightens and then bows his head in a tentative greeting. “Are you the one I’m waiting for?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” she answers. She takes a better look at him. He’s a middle-aged guy in a shiny blue suit, but the evening is warm and he’s taken off the jacket and folded it neatly, draping it over the back of the bench. He’s wearing a short-sleeved white dress shirt and a butterfly tie.
“Are you a member?” he asks.
“A member?”
“Of the club . . . ?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh.” He looks crestfallen. He checks his watch.
She notices a shopping bag at his feet.
“Briquettes?” she asks, and sees him shrink back in alarm. “Funny time of year for a barbecue.” She stares out at the pastel-colored paddleboats floating on the lake. They have long, graceful necks, in the shape of question marks, and soulful swan eyes.
The man clears his throat, as though something has gotten stuck in it. “Are you sure you’re not the one I’m waiting for?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Perhaps you’re here to meet someone, too?”
“Yes,” she says. “I’m here to meet you.”
“Me?”
“Yes. You are Haruki #2, aren’t you?”
He stares at her. “How did you know?”
“Your daughter told me.” She’s working on a hunch, on a wing and a prayer.
“Naoko?”
“Yes. She, uh, said you might be here.”
“She did?”
“Yes. She wanted me to give you a message.”
He’s suspicious now. “How do you know my daughter?”
“I don’t,” she says, thinking quickly. “I mean, we’re . . . pen pals.”
He looks her over. “You’re a little old to be her pen pal,” he says, bluntly.
“Thanks a lot.”
“I didn’t mean . . . ,” he starts to say, and then another thought occurs to him. “Did you meet her online? Are you one of those online stalkers?”
“Of course not.”
“Oh, good,” he says, relaxing. “The Internet’s a toilet bowl. Excuse my language.” He throws a small chunk of bread to the crows, as his attention turns inward. “We never thought it would turn out like this . . .”
They watch the birds fight over bread.
“It’s okay,” she says. “Actually, I met her walking on the beach. It was after a storm.”
“Oh,” he says, nodding. “That’s good. She should spend more time outdoors. We used to go to the beach quite often when we lived in California. I worry about her. She dropped out, you know.”
“Of school?”
He nods, and tosses another scrap of bread to the crows. “I don’t really blame her. She was getting bullied. They were posting horrible things about her on the Internet.”
He sighs and hangs his head. “I’m a programmer, but there was nothing I could do. Once stuff is up there, it sticks around, you know? Follows you and it won’t go away.”
“Actually, I’ve been having the opposite experience,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll search for something, and the information I’m looking for is there one minute, and then the next minute, poof!”
“Poof?”
“Obliterated. Wiped out. Just like that.” She snaps her fingers.
“Obliterated,” he says. “Hmm. Where are you getting these results?”
“Well, mostly on the island where I live. We’re a bit behind the times, and our connection with the world is a little iffy.”
He raises his eyebrows. “That’s an interesting idea,” he says. “I’ve always thought time was a little iffy, myself.”
It’s nice sitting on the park bench and chatting with him, but a sudden constriction in her brain tells her that her time is almost up. She shakes herself and tries to focus. “Do you want to hear your daughter’s message or not?”
She sees him wince, but then he nods. “Of course.”
“Okay.” She turns on the bench to face him, so he will know she is serious. “She says to tell you please don’t do it.”
“Don’t do what?” he asks.
She points to the shopping bag at his feet.
His gaze follows her finger, and his shoulders slump. “Oh. That.”
“Yes, that,” she says, sternly. “She worries about you, you know.”
“Does she?” A tiny glimmer of some emotion shows in his face, but dies just as quickly. “Well, that’s why it’s best just to get it over with, so she can get on with her life.”
His answer makes her angry. “Please forgive me for saying so, but you really shouldn’t be so selfish.”
He looks surprised. “Selfish?”
“Of course. She is your daughter. She loves you. How do you suppose she’s going to feel if you abandon her? It’s not something she’ll ever get over. She knows what you’re up to, and if you go through with this, she intends to kill herself, too.”
He slumps forward, resting his elbows on his knees and covering his face with his hands. The coll
ar of his white shirt is damp with sweat and she can see the outline of his sleeveless undershirt through the fabric. His shoulder blades move like the wings of a newly hatched bird, scrawny and spastic, not terribly useful.
“Do you really believe that is true?” he asks through his fingers.
“Yes. I’m certain. She told me. She’s planning to kill herself, and you’re the only one who can stop her. She needs you. And we need her.”
He shakes his head slowly from side to side, and then rubs his hands over his face. He stares out over the pond. They sit for a long time, watching the cheerful boats. Finally he speaks.
“I don’t understand,” he says. “But if what you say is true, I can’t take the chance. I’ll go home and talk to her . . .”
“She’s not at home. She’s at the bus stop in Sendai. She’s trying to get to the temple. Your grandmother is—”
“Yes?” He looks up at her, expectantly, but his expression quickly turns to concern. “Are you all right?” he asks. “You look very pale.”
There’s so much more she wants to tell him but the words won’t come. Her brain is tightening, and her time is almost up, but there’s something else she must do, if only she can remember. She stands, and a wave of vertigo overwhelms her. The mangy crows at her feet caw and squabble, demanding more food. She looks around for Jungle Crow, who seems to have vanished.
“Crow!” she cries, as gravity fails, and the world releases her from its embrace, tilting out from underneath her, while she is blown back.
A storm of moonlit petals. A temple graveyard at night. Wind whips the ancient cherry tree, stripping petal from limb and filling the darkness with a pale confusion of blossoms that swirl around her shoulders and settle on the old stone tombs. The wooden memorial plaques chatter and tap like the rotting teeth of ghosts, and in the wind she hears a voice, which is not quite a voice, but more an impression. “It is only when the moon is nearly full . . . ,” it seems to say, this voice that is not quite a voice but more like a haunted breeze across the neck of an empty bottle. Why here? she asks. She looks down and realizes she is holding the old composition book in her hands, carefully wrapped in creased wax paper, and suddenly she remembers. She knows her way through the temple grounds to the altar in the study. She knows where the box rests, high on the shelf, and it takes her no time at all to unwrap the white cloth, lift the lid, and slip the packet with the booklet inside. She hears a noise and looks up to see the old nun standing in the doorway, watching. Behind her is the garden. She’s wearing black robes, and when she stretches out her arms to enfold the world, her long sleeves billow. Longer and wider they grow until they are as vast as the sky at night, and when they are big enough to hold everything, Ruth can finally relax and fall into her arms, into silence, into darkness.