Floating City

by Kerri Sakamoto

  Reiko had not come. Had she gone home? And where was the rest of his family? Where were Baby Yuri and Aki?

  He recalled glimpsing them near the door to the stairwell, or maybe it was Baby Yuri crawling alone there, grabbing at the handle. He’d thought to stop his son, but Uri was introducing him to someone. Surely Aki with her watchful eye was hovering close by. But a security guard was approaching him now. The man reported an alarm had sounded at the base of the tower: someone had gone down the stairs and out an emergency exit. The room stopped for a moment, then swirled faster and faster in its rotation. Frankie wheeled to face the window, but it had turned to a skyline of buildings. He ran to the elevator and pounded the button with his fist, and miraculously it came. The doors opened and swallowed him up and the descent began, too slow into the night.

  When the snow stopped falling as quickly as it had appeared, Frankie found Aki a short distance from the tower. Squatting, praying. Her rapid breathing pumped steam from her lungs. “No, no, no,” she was crying.

  Once the wind had subsided, she’d come to where she’d last spotted Baby Yuri. But there was nothing there. All signs had vanished. Had the snow tricked her? She’d run around and around, searching.

  Frankie slumped down in the dusting of snow and looked up to the tower. Mama! he cried, but nothing came out and no one came down. Help me, Mama!

  Hannah appeared, pulling him under her purple wings. “Oh, Frank,” she whispered. “They’ll find him.” There was a swarm of people now, policemen, firemen.

  But still no Yuri.

  Mama, he cried again, eyes dry as bones.

  Momoye had given up waiting for the elevators. So many people were trying to leave. She went to the stairwell and began to climb down, as quickly as she could, which was slow, and counting each step. Down, down, down the same steps Baby Yuri had descended and Taiji had climbed. Finally she reached the bottom: two thousand, five hundred and seventy-two. She knew right away, no matter how the numbers were added and divided, four was the answer. Outside was her Frankie, lost in the night, calling after Baby Yuri. The boy would not be found. He was gone.

  The search went on all night, circles of light flashing over the open terrain around the tower. It was broadcast on television and radio, more clearly than ever before, images and voices unghosted by shadows or echoes, because of the tower’s 350-foot-high antenna. Frankie sat with Aki in the tower as it turned, waiting for news they knew would not come. They sat like rags hanging onto the last rung, though they sat high in the sky.

  Police came on horseback, scouring bushes and deserted waterfront lots to find the missing boy. But his footprints in that one night of April snow had immediately melted away, sunk into the earth. The newscasters could not help but remark that the rich and powerful Mr. Industry had not been able to keep his son safe.

  Frankie was cursed. Cursed. Twice over; maybe more.

  CHAPTER 12

  Man in the Tower

  In autumn, migrating birds flew into the sides of Cloud Tower every night: swallows, starlings, pigeons, seagulls, blue jays. Hundreds dropped from the sky to form a garish carnival feathering the base. They’d been confused by the powerful lights shining out from the tower.

  In the spring, the search was officially abandoned and Reiko returned to Tashme. She left only a note and the rose brooch; its red glaze had completely peeled away.

  Good bye going home, she’d written in her childish hand. He could not blame her.

  * * *

  —

  Frankie looked up from his desk in the rotating office, and there in the clouds was Baby Yuri: his tiny eyes peeking out. Two round cut-outs of clear sky through cloud. There’d been nothing of Frankie or Reiko in the creature, no reason, no self-discipline: mystery was all.

  It was late afternoon and Frankie was overtaken by exhaustion. He let his head drop onto his desk, cheek and palms resting on the ledger sheet. He was sure he could feel the tower rotating with the Earth away from the sun. Since meeting Bucky, he’d banished from his imagination the foolish idea of sunrises and sunsets that all the world embraced.

  Frankie roused himself, slapped his cheeks and noticed the rows of numbers blotted onto his hands. Out the window, the view had turned ninety degrees.

  Frankie’s blocks of high-rise buildings weren’t growing as fast now. The Chairman was gone and so were his old associates. It wasn’t as easy to seed a path past permits, zoning restrictions, union regulations. Below, his wall of high-rises was broken only by that narrow strip of land belonging to the old fisherman who wouldn’t sell. His decrepit boat leaned at water’s edge. An eyesore: Uri’s word. Frankie’s eyes smarted from all the looking at it and willing it to be gone.

  Even after some years, Cloud Tower was still the tallest structure in the world. With Reiko gone, he’d moved himself in, setting up simple living quarters. It was and would be, as Uri pronounced at its opening, majestic and lasting.

  Behind Frankie’s stacks of accounts payable, accounts receivable, forms and contracts lay a batch of unsorted letters, one of which was from Augusta, on behalf of herself and Julia. Aki arrived that afternoon to fish it out for him and make him open it. He stood up when he saw her, thought to embrace her but stopped himself. He surprised himself how happy—relieved—he was to see her. It had been months. He thought to ask about their mother but didn’t.

  The letter—addressed as it was to Frankie Hanesaka, someone he no longer was—had been buried, willfully passed over. The letter was dated almost a year ago.

  “They’ll be arriving next week,” Aki told him.

  “To live?” Frank asked. At last, to live. He let out a sigh, some small part of him longing for the days when he sat as his little sister’s audience of one.

  “To visit,” Aki said. He looked over the letter, which was written in a graceful hand. At the end it read:

  Dear Brother, Can you please pay us back our money as soon as possible?

  Your loving sisters,

  Augusta and Julia

  p.s. We saw your Tower on the television.

  Below that, a sum written out carefully in dollars and cents. As if he hadn’t grown that little molehill into a mountain. As if he hadn’t done that for them, for the whole family. As if he weren’t their brother, their flesh and blood.

  But the money, they claimed, was needed now that High Hope’s Theatre was sinking. It was not a large amount, and interest was not requested. Merely a shoring up of hopes for the theatre to continue. Repairs to the roof and stage were needed as well as new folding chairs for a new season that would include a production of Three Sisters. They were thrifty enough to get their wardrobes from the local Sally Ann, but both Julia and Augusta needed special orthopaedic shoes because of painful bunions.

  Frankie folded up the letter and put it inside his desk drawer. He resisted the impulse to tear it up.

  “You will pay them back, won’t you, Frankie?” Aki asked with her one good eye fixed on him. “It’s not very much. Not for Frank Hanes.”

  * * *

  —

  After Reiko left, there’d been no reason for his mother and Aki not to move in with Frankie. But they had not, and he had not asked them to. And though he kept paying the bills, Momoye refused even to stay in Tomorrow Living for Today High-Rise Apartments. Where would she go? Back to Tashme with the girls? Back to that ghost town?

  She had ventured out with a shadow of her old gumption. Her pigeon-toed steps had grown shorter without Baby Yuri to chase. Her handbag swung from the crook of her arm. There was nowhere to plant her feet, except on the road hugging Frankie’s wall of high-rise after high-rise with their gated drives. Its end was out of sight. He hadn’t even thought to build sidewalks. Cars honked and swerved around her. She kept on; after a while, it was difficult to tell how long she’d been walking or how far she’d come: what time of day was it? Her shallow gumption drained with the daylight. She remembered marching into Port Alberni to barter her bottles of sake for food. The shame of
it all. What would her mother have said, seeing her like this? An old woman long past her time: a few coins jangling in her purse, a son and grandchild gone, and no one to look after her. Her brother had deserted their mother for New World adventures. Frankie had done the same.

  Taiji had often scolded Momoye for giving Frankie more than his fair share. He’s worth more than the rest of them put together, she’d once retorted. The girls had heard; Yas too. It was the truth and she couldn’t take it back.

  Then, a break in the wall: no gate, no high-rise wedged against the next. A lake breeze and opening of light. She stepped off the road. Before her lay a stretch leading down to the lake strewn with rocks and sand, chunks of concrete and asphalt, and bits of garbage. Not so different from the stretch on the Alberni Strait the day she and Taiji had cast off in their house.

  There at the shore, alongside a dock half sinking into the lake, was moored a small ship with a rusting hull. A man with a whorl of white hair sat on its slanting deck. He waved as she stepped closer and uttered something she couldn’t understand. It was English dipped in a strange sea. He was an old man, older than her.

  “Hello, there,” he beckoned, and slapped his palm on the side of the ship. Jim, he called himself, Captain Jim. He was a fisherman. Momoye knew fishermen, of course; she’d grown up by the sea, lived on it. Fishermen didn’t talk much, which suited her. He limped to greet her, inviting her aboard.

  The ship had once been a fire tug, he explained, then part freighter, part passenger ferry. Inside was different from the rust and flaking paint outside: larger, grander, straight up and down, level, over and across. It had last been a restaurant with its kitchen in its middle, and all around, from bow to stern, stood tables plated with dust, candles burnt to stubs. There’d been music and a dance floor pocked by ladies’ high heels.

  “Nobody comes now,” he said. “The party’s over.”

  He set out a chair for her on the crooked aft deck, facing the lake and the setting sun. He sat on another chair and cast a line into the harbour. Every day, he told her, a trout or a walleye. By sundown, he was grilling fish for the two of them.

  “This,” Momoye said, pointing to the wall and then to the tower above, “my son make.”

  * * *

  —

  Frankie waited by the elevator. He was nervous. He hadn’t seen his youngest sisters in years. Augusta, his tap-dancing, singing Augusta who’d kept him company when no one else would. Yet when it counted most, she’d left him. When he’d done so much for her, for all of them.

  He paced the floor in circles. They were late.

  He paced over his glass floor. Tempered glass, two and a half inches thick and a layer of air inside. One thousand, one hundred and twenty-two feet up and he could see dots below that he knew were the tops of children’s heads.

  Two columns on the newspaper’s Metro page and a picture of three bandy-legged girls at the foot of his tower. Some woman they interviewed claimed the children were suffering from rickets in the shadow of his buildings: tired and listless, failing tests in school from not enough sunlight. He and his sisters had been bandy-legged, but no one had cried out for them. Everyone was blaming everything on his buildings. Others built tall buildings, yet he was the one they singled out. Trees were tall; mountains were tall. He’d been the city’s Rising Son; now it was back to Jap, go home.

  Maybe Reiko was right to leave. Way back when, bony-ankled little Augusta would tap her tap shoes together on the floorboards of their Tashme shack, chanting There’s no place like home.

  Frankie squatted down on his glass floor. It was solid, unbreakable. Down below him, the dots dispersed, and he saw a sleek, white head catch the sunlight. Could it be? Bucky? A thousand feet below? Magnified as if by the thick lenses of his own eyeglasses. He was holding his blue megaphone.

  * * *

  —

  Julia and Augusta stood at the base of Cloud Tower, where Aki had brought them. “At the feet of the giant!” said Augusta. She backed her heels against the tower and stretched herself tall. “How many of us would it take to reach the top?” A hundred, a thousand, standing on each other’s shoulders? Everything in the big city was high, out of reach, even on tippy-toes. It was, the sisters supposed, not so different from living among the mountains. But it wasn’t until they rode the train east right through the centre of those very mountains—a magician’s trick—that they fully took the measure of their dimensions. In the city, the sisters were mice without tails, looking for tunnels to pass through.

  Voices of children came straggling around the bend. “You are my sunshine!” they chirped. A ring of mothers clasping the hands of pale toddlers and cane-wielding elderly was forming around the base of the tower. Aki recognized the families who lived in two old tenement buildings near the fish shop where she now worked. Cramped cold-water flats that decades ago housed returning soldiers from the war and their families. The buildings were separated by a dusty, rusting playground filled with broken see-saws and swings that rattled in the wind. Laundry hung out, but never seemed to dry because there was no sunlight in the shadow of Frankie’s high-rises and the Chairman’s expressway. Only gloom.

  “Please don’t take my sunshine away!” Augusta sang out, tuning her voice an octave down from the general chorus; her swollen feet were sluggish but tapped cheerfully on the pavement.

  Sad-eyed, furrow-browed mothers stood by their crooked-limbed children, all of them singing. The children were munchkins from The Wizard of Oz waiting for the wicked witch to be gone. Augusta had read of the real lives of the Singer Midgets of the movie, paid half for their half-size. It seemed the world shortchanged small people. Strapping American airmen had dropped the bombs on the small people of Hiroshima, after all: small as ants seen from the planes above.

  A woman approached, her hair a dark wave cresting around her head, her eyes so wide and fixed they were not to be escaped. “Will you help us help the children?” she asked, then held up a flyer: a child’s crayoned orange circle and rays blazing over happy faces beneath.

  Augusta dropped some pennies into the donation box. To think her pennies had helped build this tower.

  A clipboard with a place to sign her name appeared too.

  “We have to stop them from building more high-rises. We could have trees and sunshine here. A park by the lake for children to play.” Behind them, photographers were snapping pictures of the mothers and their children.

  “Stop who?” Augusta asked, though she feared the answer.

  The woman tilted her chin to the top of the tower, way up to its impossibly highest point, teeny-tiny in the sky, to where Frankie might be looking down on them.

  * * *

  At last Frankie heard their voices, still girlish and chatty. They burst through the doors.

  “Frankie!” Augusta sighed. She took deep breaths. “We were so tired, we had to stop between the fifty-first and fifty-second floors. We had a picnic on the landing!”

  And there was Julia. They looked so old to Frankie. Old girls, with long hair streaked with grey. Round shoulders and thick waists in frilled dresses. Aki hung back behind them.

  “Julia didn’t want to take the elevator,” said Augusta. “I told her it was safe, of course. Frankie built it!”

  “Two thousand, five hundred and seventy-two steps,” Julia announced. “Mama won’t approve. You could divide it by four.”

  Then, shyly, they embraced him, one by one.

  “You look distinguished,” Augusta said. She gave her curtsy and they all laughed. They were the same after all.

  He led them to his office. Augusta stopped in front of the sign that read FRANK HANES and traced it with her finger. “No wonder you didn’t get our letters,” she tsk-tsked. “They were for Frankie Hanesaka.”

  They looked him over as he had them: his fine clothes, his fine desk, the view.

  “You’re King of the Castle,” Augusta laughed. Though not everybody liked the king, they’d noticed.

  After
only a moment, Augusta took a step closer. No use beating around the bush. “We need our money please, Frankie,” she said politely.

  Frankie was silent. He stiffened and took a step back. It was up to him to look out for and after them. He was first-born and only son. All they knew was to follow one after the other like the months they were named for. They hadn’t changed, just gotten older. They provided him the measure of how far he’d come, just how high up he’d pulled himself. High Hope’s was no hopes on the edge of No-Jap Land. They needed a moment to flounder without him before they’d understand.

  “We’re staying with Mama,” Julia said quickly. So he’d know they didn’t come to freeload. “Down there.” She pointed where Frankie’s wall lapsed. “With Captain Jim.” How happy they’d been climbing aboard; something new and old at the same time.

  Frankie shot to the window. “That boat?”

  His mother with the old fisherman? Had she tethered herself to that wreck? To spite her own son?

  “The money,” Julia pleaded before she might be shushed. “Please, Frankie.”

  Frankie wasn’t listening. Instead, he hurried them all onto the elevator. Down through the sky, pulled to Earth. Through the service exit around the back of the tower to avoid the protesters. Down the street, under the belly of the expressway, and out to the lake. He didn’t look back to see where they were, but he knew they were following. Then he reached that unsightly strip of land that yawned with its beggarly mouth between the sleek high-rises he had built.

  He strode onto the tumbledown dock and found his mother sitting on the boat as if in her chair on Alberni Strait. The old fisherman wasn’t in sight.

  He hadn’t seen or spoken to her in months. But now here she was aboard a wreck with a stranger, not even a Japanese. She could never be without a man, he knew that, even at her age. She’d latch onto any man to survive. Just as she had to Taiji.