Further along she surveys the concrete embankments and oyster beds, the market where her grandmother used to buy sea urchins and seaweed. Then all at once the chaos stops. Everything looks normal again. The wave did not reach Ume’s house.
The car stops too finally, and Mizuko emerges. She wears so many layers and such enormous ski gloves, just visible moving underneath the camera perched on her head, that she seems to walk in slow motion, like an astronaut. Ume refuses to be padded up again. “I’ll die soon anyway!” she says. Beside her granddaughter she is all bobbing, knotty bulges. The abandoned house is more eerie than Mizuko had imagined. They hurry, taking the ihai—memorials for dead ancestors displayed on the butsudan—and wrapping them in newspaper. There are dead flowers and the remnants of offerings and putrefied remains. Mizuko has to assure her grandmother that the remains are not Kathleen, who then, not in the footage but as a fictional twist in the story, bounds up to them, feral but happy they have tracked her down.
When Mizuko returned Ume to Tokyo, clutching the remains of her old life, her mother was furious. Ume was also upset, because Hiromi was so furious that she felt guilty. After Mizuko returned to New York, Ume wrote a suicide note, apologising to her living family and deceased ancestors for being a burden and having to live with her daughter in her tiny apartment built for one. In the real suicide note, this lament was only the preface, however, to three long pages expressing her grief over the suspected fate of Kathleen. Sometimes I wonder whether Mizuko contracted the parasite then, and had lived with it all that time until it finally reached her brain.
Ume was found hanging from a tree in the park Mizuko used to play in near the house. She was cut down just in time, but not before someone took a picture from an overlooking apartment block and put it online. It looks weird. Like a surrealist tableau created by the wave. Hiromi sent a picture of Ume’s suicide note to Mizuko, telling her it was all her fault for unsettling her grandmother with the trip to get Kathleen. Enraged, partly worried that it was true, Mizuko then used the episode, and much of the suicide note, in her short story. When it was published, given the themes, critical attention turned from the writing to Hiromi’s company, which designed aids for Japan’s elderly population living alone.
Mizuko argued that there was a point to the exercise beyond the creation of a story. She said that Ume was unhappy living with Hiromi and wanted to save Kathleen. Hiromi countered that had they waited, those who had lived in the evacuation zones were gradually being allowed to return to their homes for two supervised hours to retrieve personal items. Mizuko stubbornly pointed out that the personal items they had retrieved, such as Ume’s photo albums and ihai, would have had to fit into a 45-litre, 70-centimetre square plastic bag, and indeed, there is a line in “Kizuna”: “Kathleen was too big for a plastic bag.”
When the GoPro film finished, she looked at me, raised her eyebrows, and said, “I know right.” She would send me the file if I liked.
The next thing I remember is lying next to her in bed. I snapped awake at the noise of a water bottle changing shape in the dark. It must have been on her bedside. Her elbow was poking into my back. The skin on her legs touched my legs and was alien smooth, not as if she had removed any hair but as if none had ever grown there. The smoothness told me that I had neglected to shave mine. I felt a loop of her long hair touching the back of my neck like the tufted end of a brush. I felt her heat behind me, through my shirt.
Her breath, its milky smell, and her other smell, which I wasn’t sure of the origin of yet, like burning wood. I lay there for a few seconds in a trance, taking in my physical proximity to her body. As I tried to imagine what it looked like at that moment, too scared to wake her up by turning over, I remembered the nightmare I had been having. A body: back of a man, facedown in thick mud starting to crack and fissure. A ghost had entered the room with the plastic snap of the bottle and had gone again in the infinitesimal space between the snap and my starting awake.
Something light but sharp pounced on me, and I screamed.
“Cat,” Mizuko murmured from her sleep.
We had not drawn the drapes across the two windows in the room, which allowed me to take in my surroundings in the dim light from the streetlamps below. I lay there staring at the teeth marks from the catch on the chain around her neck, Ume’s ring on the chain, which had slid around to the back, onto the sheet between us, trying to piece together the sequence of the evening from the details I still had. As I lay, a pink, dreamlike glow seeped into the room, gradually turning a bright, chemical red. The light inched towards the bed, slowly picking out our two bodies—developing us, I thought, the way photographs used to be made—until it was daylight and everything had its normal definition. It became hotter and hotter as I stared at the two pinpricks in her neck where her necklace had imprinted itself.
This is just happening so naturally, I told myself. I just have to keep pressing on each link to get to the next; I don’t have to know where it’s going.
16
* * *
I suppose this is the halfway line. The line at which I should have stopped. If I scroll back in time to the Hamptons, I can return to that exact moment of dissolution—when the obsession began. When I looked up from my phone, my mind only partially returned to my body beside the Atlantic, a moment after Dwight’s picture had been taken.
Thom, Nat, and Ingrid were exiting the water and coming back up the beach.
“What’s the point of having a stinger if you die right after using it?” Thom asked, shouting as he ran towards us ahead of his mother.
“You die nobly—on your sword,” Robin answered.
“Rubbish,” Nat said angrily, stomping on the hot sand. “You can help another bee that’s in distress. Instead of ignoring them and leaving them to die, you can sting on their behalf.”
I didn’t see what looks passed between them, but Nat did not sit down with the rest of us. She carried on marching back up the beach towards the car.
According to Ingrid, the ocean was dangerous and not for swimming in. Splashing only. And even at Walter’s house we kept a sharp knife by the pool so that we could cut Rosa or Ingrid out by the hair if necessary. It was only for them, since the rest of us didn’t swim or didn’t have the kind of luxurious hair that would get sucked into a filter.
“No,” Ingrid had assured me, inspecting mine with a frown, “you’ll be fine.”
“But Mommy and me might drown,” Rosa gloated, stroking her ponytail.
Every day of the holiday, the knife glinted in the sun. Rosa flipped up and over like a dolphin or pointed her bottom in the air and flailed her legs for us, and we all waited for her hair to get stuck and for her to drown. She was, I noticed, consistently splashing Dwight, teasing him, or trying to get his attention in some way. Thom preferred to lie on the sun-bleached wood, resting his face on the water, alleviating the itch of a bad insect bite, enjoying the rim of water around his cheeks and the band of dryness around that. He got me to try it with him. He said it was hard to tell after a while what felt dry and what felt wet because what felt normal changed around.
He did this experiment for as long a stretch as he could without running out of breath or scalding his belly on the hot wood. It was true; the wet and dry worlds inverted so that your body felt like it was floating in water and your head felt as if it had poked through into another atmosphere identical to ours.
The argument about bees/stings/swords seemed to have concluded with some kind of commitment to more family bonding time. Ingrid announced over breakfast that the children were banned from playing games on all devices for the rest of the holiday. Rosa narrowed her eyes.
“Dog Genius?”
“Not allowed.”
“Animal Planet?”
“Verboten.”
“What’s the Word?”
“Nope.”
“Uno and Friends?”
“No way. We’re going to play real games.”
Rosa was skeptical. “Like
what?”
“Hide-and-seek. I spy. Chess and backgammon, Scrabble . . .” She looked to Robin for help.
“Cards,” he added without interest.
“But we don’t know how to play chess and backgammon,” Rosa cried, wringing her hands as if this were the worst idea she’d ever heard.
“We’re going to teach you,” Nat warned. “And Dwight and Alice can teach you some real games, I’m sure.”
Unimpressed, Rosa walked straight past her grandmother and, keeping her eyes level, dropped like a stone into the swimming pool. She held, Robin realised too late, his phone in her hand.
“If we can’t use them, neither can you!” she shrieked as she resurfaced, throwing the waterlogged device onto the side.
Robin didn’t say anything for a moment. Even Rosa went suddenly quiet, realising she might have gone too far. Slowly he stood, drawing himself to his full height. His plasticine chest hardened.
“I’m going to count to three,” Robin hissed. “By three I want you out of that pool and standing. Right. Here.”
Rosa’s eyes widened in fear. She looked to her mother for help.
“One.”
Rosa splashed around in a frenzied way, unsure whether to get out and run for it or to stay in the relative safety of the pool, where her father did not go.
“Two.” Robin began to advance toward her.
Rosa took a deep breath. She plunged under the surface and towards the deep end.
“Careful of the filter!” Ingrid screamed. “Her hair!”
“Three.”
Rosa did not surface. Robin stood at the edge of the pool, a black shadow on the water, waiting.
We all held our breath. I wondered if Rosa had actually finally got stuck. Ingrid ran towards the knife and hovered anxiously. Robin removed his watch, flung it toward the grass.
Suddenly there was a loud splash, then a whoosh as displaced water cascaded onto the deck.
“What are you doing?” Ingrid screamed. “You can’t swim!”
At the midpoint of the pool, his feet found the bottom and his head emerged. He pushed sopping black hair back from his eyes. Rosa clung to the lip of the pool at the far end, but Robin ploughed through the water towards her, not swimming but battling against the water as if he were running. He grabbed Rosa by the back of her T-shirt and then held her under one arm, shrieking and wriggling like a fish, as he climbed up the ladder, shirt heavy with water, his jaw tight. We were all standing up, Nat in open-mouthed amazement, Dwight and Walter at the edge of the pool. The only sound was Rosa’s shrieking. Robin carried her around the decking, water slopping onto sun-soaked wood, and out of sight. Very suddenly the shrieking stopped.
“We used to play parlor games,” Nat offered, though no one was listening, “like murder. Jane Stanton used to play the camouflage game. You hide things in a room by disguising them as other things. So, for example—”
There was a loud thud, a second in which nobody moved, and then an earsplitting cry.
Ingrid dropped the knife and ran.
The rest of us—me, Dwight, Walter, Nat, and Thom—continued eating in silence.
Unlike in New York, where life is extruded from the confines of cramped apartments and out onto the street, things can be hidden in the Hamptons. Each hedge venerated privacy. Where life was visible, it was meticulously groomed and well supervised. Compared to the city, I had few observations to put in my journal except ones concerning Walter’s home and the people I observed on Main Street. That afternoon there was a queue five blocks long, which snaked around a corner into a car park, for Hillary Clinton’s book signing. Nat had bought three copies of the memoir, Hard Choices, and insisted we join the line. The others had gone to play tennis at the Maidstone Club and left Nat, Rosa, and me in line for Hillary signing copies of her memoir in the bookstore. Rosa had a sprained arm. She had, Robin said, slipped from his grasp and fallen straight onto concrete.
We stood and shuffled, stood and shuffled, in silence, with Nat spotting people she knew, or knew the names of, in the line.
“You don’t want to go there anyway,” Nat informed me without explanation.
“Where?”
“The Maidstone.”
“I don’t?”
“You wouldn’t fit in so well there. It’s an unspoken thing, but it’s a thing.” She looked as if she wanted me to press her on it, so I refrained.
I thought this might instead be the time to tell her what I knew. How often do you discover something these days—in the age of information blah blah—which only you know about? And how often, in this same age, when you find out something that no one else knows about, is it possible to keep that thing a secret?
When I finished telling her, I looked up, my cheeks burning, and she studied me for a moment.
“And she’s a writer, this Mizoozoo girl?”
The line moved forward and we moved with it.
“Mizuko. Yes.”
She licked her lips slowly, rocking. I could see she’d remembered the correct name perfectly. “All the writers I ever met working for your grandmother were absolutely terrible people.”
“Oh?”
“They didn’t care about anyone but themselves.”
I felt my pulse quicken.
“In fact, I’m suspicious of anyone who wants to be a writer,” Nat continued.
“Oh?”
We took another step forward in line. “Silvia and I knew so many.” She took a deep breath. “Most had houses right around here. Capote, Steinbeck, Matthiessen . . .”
“That’s cool,” I said slowly, unsure if it was true or how the dates squared.
“It wasn’t like it is now,” she said, noting my hesitation. “Now it’s all hedge-fund types, but back then your grandmother and I used to get invited out here to stay with all these well-known writers. It was all artists, writers, low rent, quiet. Not anymore. Now you see those little wooden signs everywhere, stuck in the grass around the mansions.”
These signs shamelessly listed exactly how many millions per acre were for sale behind impenetrable foliage. I had noticed them too, but Nat loved reading them aloud whenever we passed them. She was again scanning the line for people she knew or knew of. I felt like she was studiously avoiding my eyes, and I sensed the conversation was closed.
We walked home, which tired Nat out, and had leftovers for lunch, just the three of us.
“What should I do about the match, then? What should we do, I mean?”
“We? We don’t need to do anything,” Nat said stoutly. “You, on the other hand, need to get rid of it. Delete it. Shut it down. Pretend you never saw it. You didn’t see it. It’s not your business to know. It was probably a mix-up anyway.” She was smiling a fixed smile. “I don’t think this is something we should trouble Ingrid with. Or Robin. Not right now.”
“But what do you think it means? Is he . . . did—”
“The sun is so benevolent,” Nat announced, tucking into leftovers from the barbecue.
I nodded slowly. Evidently the Rooiakker name was more important to her than who Robin might have been in a past life.
“When did you last visit Silvia, by the way?” Her voice was edged with something cruel.
“The day before we left, I think.”
Nat did not look convinced. “Have you forgotten you’re a Hare, not a Rooiakker?”
When the others got back from playing tennis, Rosa, who’d perked up at the prospect of meeting Hillary Clinton and been ecstatic when she’d got to shake her hand as Nat handed her the two books and I stood awkwardly by resisting the urge to take a picture, now grew pale and silent. Ingrid had the same fixed smile as her mother. Walter, Dwight, and Thom charged about with a ball, oblivious to the tension. Robin, who’d taken his book to the club and abstained from sport in general, and I were the only ones who did not join in the “real games,” which Ingrid was determined would go ahead despite Rosa’s sprained arm. I sat on a lounger, furtively reading everything about or by Miz
uko I could find, and Robin talked on a Bluetooth headset using Ingrid’s phone, or did crosswords on his iPad on a sun lounger he had dragged to the end of the deck. The sensation that had plagued me after graduating, of being on the outside of some mystery, peeking in, returned. Each day I moved deeper and deeper into the white glow of Mizuko’s world, gripped it harder and tighter in my hand. Each link in the chain led me to greater certainty. I looked up the mother, Hiromi Himura. Her company, the site explained, enabled elderly people to continue living alone in their own homes. It offered services for Japan’s senior citizens that included
Intelligent reminding
Telepresence
Data collection
Surveillance
Mobile manipulation
Social interaction
Occasionally Robin would get up from his lounger and stand, legs planted far apart, pointing a silver digital camera at things. He wasn’t, I soon realised, taking normal holiday snaps, not of the kids or Ingrid. He was pointing it at odd stuff. The materials of Walter’s house. Paving stones. Interesting cracks. A coiled fern. I saw him standing very close to the big tree where the twins had made the garden for the frog and the snake, and I asked him what he was taking a picture of.
“Bark,” he had answered. “Beautiful. Come look.”
I stepped gingerly, my feet bare in the grass, beside him.
“And look how it speaks to these,” he said, indicating a series of Donald Judd totems that made up Walter’s art collection. “No embarrassment about taking up physical space. Perfect and complete. Timeless.”
I nodded, unsure what to say. He wasn’t taking pictures of me or anything, yet somehow it made me feel uncomfortable. He brought a very specific attention to things that made it possible to show something in a substantially different way. He insisted on taking me through his album of shadows, leaves, bricks, pipes, all taken during the vacation so far, his head right next to mine as he hit left, left, left. Up close, he explained, the bleached wood beside the pool could look like a desert landscape, the folds of a towel became a mountain. His photographs reminded me of nothing so much as Mizuko’s. They focused in on things or found odd juxtapositions—an inhuman way of seeing, or a way of seeing that meant some things that should have seemed human looked wan and bloodless, and others, which weren’t human, were suddenly animated, as if Robin had entered them.
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