Rosa and Thom began shoveling sweet potato into their mouths, licking meat juice off their fingers, and yelling out QuizUp answers.
“Quiet!” Ingrid warned.
“But this guy’s tenth in the UAE for science!”
“How was the drive?” Walter asked his protégé.
I felt my chest seize up. Before Dwight could answer, I cut in. “Fine,” I said quickly. “Very straight. The road. Normally I get sick, but I didn’t. And Dwight was very safe.”
Dwight gave me a strange look. “Beautiful drive,” he said. “We saw that super-tall tree, we went to a super-nice Applebee’s, we passed that super-famous mental asylum.”
En route, Dwight had told me that the low bridges we were passing under were originally intended to prevent buses from using the road, so buses with black people in them couldn’t get to the beaches. Did I see?
I watched him take an enormous bite of corn.
Robin looked at the swimming pool, stood, walked to its edge, and scooped out an orange cricket with his hand. “Got to look out for our insect friends,” he said to me as he settled back down. “I don’t swim either.”
“‘Don’t’ means ‘can’t,’ in Robin’s language,” Nat said loudly.
Ingrid looked at her with a strained expression.
It surprised me that there might be something so simple that Robin had not mastered.
“He doesn’t like getting his head underwater,” Ingrid added. “Not even in the bath. I think he must have had a bad experience when he was younger, but he says he doesn’t remember.”
“Water’s not my element,” he said. “I like solids and I like voids, not something that runs through your fingers.”
After lunch we went to the beach on bikes, except Nat, who went with Dwight in his car. Walter led the way. The tarmac was so smooth it was almost creamy, so different from the disfigured New York roads. My eyes narrowed against the sun, sweat creeping into them, making my vision blurry. I hated riding bikes. Susy had neglected to provide instruction, so I had had to teach myself so as not to be teased by other kids, but I’d never been confident doing it. The power lines became white flashes overhead, thick and noodly, then fuzzing back again to golden thinness. With the afternoon sun on my back, I could see my distorted shadow following Walter, Ingrid, and the twins in formation ahead of me. Robin brought up the rear.
We arrived at the kind of wide-open beach that has a big sky above it and a certain kind of feeling that you only get before an ocean. Very flat, with mirror-wet sand right up against the lip of the water, like a polished floor that gleamed for miles. There were dunes behind, figures standing, fishing, but mainly flatness. We had reached the edge of a place, the vastness of water with no world visible beyond it. I walked arm in arm with Dwight. I had momentarily, thanks to cycling, which had occupied both hands and brain, forgotten what I’d found and started to relax. Dwight was listening to Walter talk about the medical waste—hypodermic needles supposedly infected with AIDS—that had washed up all along the Atlantic coast in the summer of 1988, known as “the syringe tide.” For a moment, as I held on to Dwight’s strong arm, it was bliss.
“You can imagine our ancestors landing on this sort of beach, can’t you, Thom?” Nat was staring out toward the horizon, ignoring talk of AIDS.
My heart sank, remembering, and I released my arm from Dwight’s.
Ingrid took Nat into the ocean to wet her feet. Thom stood observing and kicking the water. Rosa headed to the vacant lifeguard lookout, climbed up, and jumped off over and over till she collapsed. The rest of us set up on the sand. Robin stayed safely back from the water, a little way from me. Dwight sat between us in a wetsuit he’d produced from his car, on a body board covered in sand that was attached at the ankle. I eyed the white-blond fur matted on his legs, dusky with sand, as he sucked all the red out of a watermelon slab he’d bought from a fruit seller in the car park. Walter snored gently behind me.
Dwight took a picture of us in those positions. His record is public, so I can still see it. This was the exact moment that I found Mizuko’s Instagram. I spent almost the whole holiday in this frozen position, my head bent low over her life in miniature. You can see me holding my device like this in Dwight’s picture, holding it in one hand, index finger poised on the other, as if poking pins in a voodoo doll. I can see in my downcast eyes that I am starting to fade. Or that the solid world around me, the reality of it, is starting to slide away, like wet sand sinking beneath the water. I have no idea what’s about to happen, but I’m walking into it anyway. Writing this, reliving it through the pictures I still have, I feel like I am walking into that ocean and it gets slowly deeper and then suddenly there’s a drop and the temperature of the water changes before I’m ready; my footing slips, and before I have a chance to take a breath I’m under.
15
* * *
It would be another fortnight before I would meet her for real. Walk home with her, feeling as if I were still in the shallows, not knowing how deep in I already was. After the tension in the café and the sobering talk by the Sugihara survivor, alcohol was welcome and accentuated that feeling of marvellous chance. Mizuko and I drank far more than I was used to over the course of our first evening together, so that I remember it now as a series of lights and darks, as if I were being driven through an underpass that took us from outside the café on Broadway right to her bedroom. 1020 is an unlikely, dark, dive-y pub. Columbia students play pool and darts, and you can sit either in dimly lit little booths or at a long bar. We sat in a booth. For a date, the vibe is a bit off, but I reminded myself that we weren’t on a date. If anything, it felt more like an interview—a mock one in which she didn’t really have a job to give me and I was pretending that she was someone I’d never met before.
First we discussed my being new to the city, the lecture and bits that had particularly moved us; then we talked about how she got inspiration for her characters and her writing, about both her novel in progress and her short stories, for which she was prepared to sacrifice friends and family, which is how we got onto her childhood, her mother, and why she was in New York. At some point the mock interview got tangled into a strange loop or Mobius band, so that I was still the one role-playing being the candidate pretending to want the job but now also asking her questions with answers that I already knew. Everything she told me about herself I knew in outline already. Because of that, and maybe because of the alcohol, I heard it all as if she were speaking in a foreign language. It was exciting to hear her real voice rather than simply reading her captions, but it was less like normal listening than like sonar, charting our strategic positions, my nearness to whatever the next thing was. I knew that if she stopped talking, it might prove to be the end of the evening, but she seemed happy to talk and talk and talk and for me to be silent. By the end, my vision was blurry and my hearing had narrowed around a single, slightly painful note. All I could make out was the sound of her voice hovering above the words, high and searching like a mosquito’s, threatening silence wherever it landed.
The silence finally came when I asked about exactly how she used her own life in her writing, intending to impress her with my reading of I-novels, the popular Japanese confessional genre, after which she said nothing for a long time.
At last she said, “For me it’s different. It’s how I get back at my mom. As far as she’s concerned, I’ve spent the last year not teaching or writing but playing a game on my phone in which I am the manager of an ice cream parlour and then collecting my Himura pocket money every month. I refuse to discuss my writing with her after the reaction she had to ‘Kizuna.’”
She said the word like I knew what it meant—like I knew it was a title, and the title of one of her stories. I felt my face burn with embarrassment at just how well I knew “Kizuna”—I could have recited parts of it to her. A small part of me did register that it was an arrogant assumption. Still, I decided I needed to appear innocent.
“What’s ‘Kizuna’?�
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“It’s a short story I wrote that went viral.” She sniffed. It continues to impress me how fluently Americans, even immigrants like her, speak of their achievements. “It means something like ‘Human Ties,’ or ‘The Ties That Bind.’”
“Okay. Wasn’t that the word of the year or something after the tsunami?”
“Exactly. Good knowledge. It can mean anything from the bond between parents and their children to the love you feel for an ex or the duty you feel to your country. Not just positive ties, either. I’m bound to my mother, for example. After it came out, she would have disowned me, except that it would have meant more bad press for our family. She’s usually numb to anything but what outsiders think. She wouldn’t care if I was upset, but she cares when other people who don’t know us get upset. Anyway, if it did hurt her, then it was justified revenge.”
I knew what this meant. At the root of Mizuko’s revenge, and at the heart of the “Kizuna” story, like every other she wrote, was her nameless, faceless father. Hiromi Himura had kept the paternity secret from everyone. It wasn’t obvious to me from looking at Mizuko that she wasn’t all the way Japanese, but Mizuko had always been sure she wasn’t.
“I’ve signed up to some DNA-matching websites. I’m sure I have relations all over the place in Europe. I know he was a gaijin.”
This was a word that I knew meant “outside person,” a foreigner.
“Why won’t she tell you who he was?”
“Or is.”
“Yes, is. Maybe.”
Mizuko snorted and closed her eyes as if this were both too simple and too complex a question to answer. “I’ve given up trying to work that out.” She shrugged, shook her head, then bit her lip. “I don’t know whether it’s out of loyalty, an insistence on her privacy, or whether it used to be about that and now it’s something else. Like pride or stubbornness. Or after ‘Kizuna,’ when there was so much public scrutiny of her firm.”
“You don’t think maybe she’s just gone so long not speaking about it that now she can’t speak about it, even if she wants to?”
Mizuko’s eyes darted from the floor to meet mine. I could see she was irritated by what I had said.
“I don’t know that you need to be so compassionate. It was probably an affair, and she still has some misplaced loyalty to him or is afraid of the fallout. He’s probably a well-known, well-respected person with his own family. Either way, she has put his needs—whoever he is, for whatever reason—first, above mine. That’s not what parents do. Parents should make everything as good as they possibly can for their offspring. The next generation, right?”
I thought I should make a concerned face. I felt I should, as a sympathetic stranger, tell her that it was surely untrue, Hiromi’s prioritisation of Mizuko’s father, but I didn’t. Instead I said, “Yes. It sounds like she has really fucked you over.”
She looked surprised. “You think so?”
I nodded.
“No one else ever says that. Ever. They always try to reassure me that she loves me more than anything or crap like that. They don’t know her like I do. They just think of their own mothers, who are all soft and cuddly, and they can’t imagine it. It’s a weird thing to do, right? It’s not like she still sees him or anything. It’s not like it’s still going on, the affair or whatever. I used to spy on her all the time, and she was never in touch with any men, ever. She never had another boyfriend, so maybe she still loves him, but she just seemed to want to be on her own always.”
I nodded again.
“And it made me so angry, you know? So fucking enraged that even though I was right there in front of her, pleading, she wouldn’t just snap out of it. Her flesh and blood. But . . . I mean . . . it doesn’t matter. I’ve given up wishing it could be any different. I keep my expectations low.”
I closed my eyes. I didn’t know how to show her how I understood. Saying “I know” seemed too small, but neither was it the right time to tell her my version of her story.
I wondered if it would be too strange to recite a passage of “Kizuna” to show her what a good student I was:
You come into your family, into a moment in history, and there has been a conversation going on in the room for so many generations before you entered. For a while, when you are still unable to lift your head, the conversation carries on over it. This is when you must listen and store it for when you can finally understand it as language, because very soon, when you are on your legs and learning shapes and patterns, to turn noise into meaning, the conversation will stop and you won’t know why.
“If she’s looking after his needs and her needs, then I have to look after mine.” She ground the cap from her beer bottle into the soft wood of the table. “And if she puts their needs first, over me, then I can put mine over hers.” The bottle cap skidded along the table and onto the floor. “She thinks it belongs to her before it belongs to me, but I remember the first thing they taught us on the summer course here, and it’s the first thing I tell the students that I teach now: you own everything that happens to you.”
I nodded. I wanted to stand and swear allegiance.
“I don’t believe in family secrets—any secrets, actually.”
“Me neither.”
After that first night, I always maintained a vocal critique of Hiromi, but secretly I felt that it was better than Mizuko realised. Hiromi’s straight refusal meant Mizuko had a clear target for her rebellion. Hiromi was silent on one subject, with a definite outline. Better that than to have so many stories and so many contradictions that the outline kept changing and swallowing everything like a swarm of locusts. With Susy there was never a clear line to rebel against, and so I could never get angry.
Though the circumstances were so strikingly similar, sometimes almost overlapping, like Mark claiming to work for a bank owned by Himura Securities, our childhoods had produced very different results. She had always been defiant and angry, a rebel, whereas I had always been quiet and shy, a peacemaker. I picture Mizuko as a child, in a garden, surrounded by overturned plastic chairs, toys scattered everywhere, a fabric Wendy house pushed over, a ransacked paddling pool upturned, and a decapitated head flung far from its hobbyhorse stick. If I’d met Mizuko then, I would have wandered around after her with a toy dustpan and brush, cleaning up. Putting everything back in its correct box. To entertain myself as a kid I would make up rules for games to be played with a theoretical group of children. I never intended to play them, and the children weren’t even imaginary in a companionable way; it was just an exercise in constructing miniature worlds that I had sole dominion over. I once pinned the rules of a theoretical water fight to the fridge. I made them up and stuck them there one summer when I had no one to play with and Susy was occupied with drawing in another part of the house. When I told Mizuko about this, she gave one of her rare real laughs and made me promise to show her the list one day, which I’m including here in case it’s still funny:
WATER FIGHT RULES
1. No water inside house
2. Only ½ of a team allowed inside at any one time
3. Time outs are allowed only every ¼ hour
4. The following weapons may be used:
Water pistols
Plastic bottles/cups
Hose
Water bombs
5. If someone is hurt, the game STOPS
6. No wetting of people on the same team as you
7. No wetting of non-water-fight participants
8. No wetting of clothing/electrical items etc.
“Who were the non-water-fight participants if there weren’t even any real participants?” Mizuko asked.
I shrugged, and she laughed even more.
“I like you.”
I felt high, or in a state of shock, as if a lorry had braked just in front of me and I’d narrowly avoided death, had felt the air pressure change as it bore down on me within a centimetre of my face and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. For a second I could not tell whether my
blood had run cold or I had become extremely hot.
I couldn’t say it back, so instead asked, “Well, is it my turn now?” I meant, of course, to tell her my story, a version I’d streamlined to be the mirror image of hers, but she assumed I meant more drinks.
We were on our third round at 1020.
As I went to the bar to order our fourth, I wondered how best to demonstrate that we were kindred spirits.
When I got back to our booth, I praised her question about the diplomat and his rebellion.
“You say it like it’s not for you.”
“What isn’t for me?”
“Rebellion. Disobedience.”
“I know everyone is supposed to go through that phase, but I think I’ve only just reached mine and am starting to test my boundaries.”
I hoped this wasn’t too suspect, too like a come-on. I wanted to become intimate, but I wanted to advance by degrees, like the darkness that was descending outside. I wanted her not to know what time it was and not to know that I had anything in mind until it was in hers too.
“The thing about Sugihara’s rebellion,” she said, “is that he had to disobey orders coming from far away because he met those people face to face. It would have been pretty easy for him to turn them down if their appeals had been electronic. If they’d had the kind of border control we have now, it would have been impossible. Imagine throwing a stamp out of a train window. But you’d hope anyone would feel sympathy if they actually saw someone face to face, pleading for a chance.”
“You’d hope so.” I left a pregnant pause, flared my nostrils just a little too much, maybe. The pause became another silence.
“Do you ever miss Japan?”
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