by Tobias Hill
Honeymoon diary, first day. The taxi-driver wore two wedding rings. This is what he said:
‘Hotel Angeline, of America’s wonderful Second City. Now get the hell out of my cab, you fucking Nips.’
The airplane was so beautiful. The food came with the sashimi in one package and the vegetables in another, everything clean. The clouds look like a world without any waste. I wanted to stop the plane and step out and rub cloud on my hands and face. It must be cold and smell of iron, like snow. Los Angeles smells only of cars.
The taxi-driver’s shoulders were freckled like the skin of a salmon and red hair grew on his upper arms. When he insulted our country, he didn’t even turn his head. I think he was shamed by his own anger. I have never heard such an insult. Not even on TV.
I was crying when Shinzo helped me out of the car. He said nothing to the driver. A garbage truck, black and yellow like banana meat, was parked in front of the Hotel Angeline. In the tourist brochure there was no garbage truck and there were baby palms in European pots. Shinzo had to carry our luggage from the taxi himself. He said nothing, not then and not later. We went and stood by the Pacific Coast Highway. Over the lanes of traffic we watched the ocean dance in its skin of sequins. After a short time Shinzo pointed to where Japan must be. We sat on the dirty rocks which are not like Malibu Lagoon and we waved until the hotel manager found us. He was wearing a silver suit and he looked unhappy. He took us into the Hotel Angeline, up to the honeymoon suite. The air-conditioner has baby angels painted on it.
I think perhaps Shinzo is a weak man.
*
Honeymoon diary, second day. The honeymoon suite is pretty and clean. I have been sitting by the balcony window for twenty minutes, practising my English. From the window I can see this:
Ocean. Palm trees with swan-necks of white paint. An empty space where young black men are playing basketball. They are graceful as dancers. Two tall girls are watching them from a high window. A stall, selling sunglasses for $3.99 and juice for a dollar. Bougainvillea flowers in front of a pizza delivery and a thin dog chained in the back. Green hills in the middle-distance. Mountains up above them. There will be coyotes out there. Roads like snakes of cars. Some have fins, some are the colour of champagne. Some are green as the chartreuse my mother drinks on Thursdays when she plays mah-jong. A dark haze in the low air which is the same colour as barley dust at harvest: the exhaustion of a great city. Is Los Angeles bigger than Tokyo?
Shinzo sleeps like a dead man. His hollow cheeks are painted with sweat. My husband, my father’s heir. My father says he is a good businessman. They sell umbrellas all day from the factory, and at night they drink together in the kind of bars where the owner is called ‘Mother’ and only salarymen go. Now he has me, he should not go to those places. Not until I have a child. That is the custom.
Last night we made love. My husband has the hands of a rice-field frog, cold and moist. Under the soft skin, his desire is clumsy and cruel. Like something kept too long in a narrow cage. He hurts me. I have been his wife for three days and he was not my choice.
Soon I will order an American breakfast. Then I will wake Shinzo and he will miss the smell of miso soup which I cook well. Then we will make love again, although I am still sore. Then the choices will be mine. We can go to Hollywood and Universal Studios, and then to Sunset Boulevard where I will spend my husband’s money. He will be quite bored but he will say nothing, because he is a coward. It is my honeymoon and I will buy American clothes in the city of the angels.
*
Honeymoon diary, third day. My mother said that Los Angeles was not a good place for a honeymoon. She said to visit Europe. She said there is no love in America now, only hate. It is a dying country, she told me. But I needed to make a choice very much.
When I was six I already knew about my insult. I don’t remember who told me first but I remember my mother told me again that year, and I already knew. She told me at breakfast, without listening to her own words. The steam from the miso soup covering her face. It was her shame as well, that she had given the family no boy. I was hers. But I was the shame.
This is what I saw today: Universal Studios and a young actress in a car with green wings. A movie in an American movie-theatre. Beverly Hills where the streets are red with flowers and the houses are too large for real people – only temples should be so big. A Mexican skirt in Olvera Street. It has purple thongs and I bought it. Shinzo was not bored at all. He likes watching me, he watches the way I move.
After shopping he took me to see a movie by Walt Disney. There were seats in the theatre – at home in Tosa there are no seats in the movie theatre – and outside was the actress and the beautiful car. In the movie theatre Shinzo stroked my hair, very gently. He is trying very hard.
No one walks in Los Angeles, only the street people. There are more types of car than people and the air is sweet and grainy with their smoke. There are cars from all over the world and the sound of them is everywhere, like the noise of oil cicadas at home in the summertime.
When we came back to the Hotel Angeline I wanted to show my Mexican skirt to the hotel manager, but he was talking to a woman on the telephone. He was angry, and so his face was full of blood. He didn’t greet us.
Now Shinzo is in the shower. He is singing an American song. He knows all the American songs from his salaryman karaoke evenings. Sometimes he teaches me the words, which are strange and not English at all but American. He is kind and he has a good heart. But he is weak.
My father is a brave man. The Aomori family is old and respected on our island of Shikoku. When my father was young all the families in the prefecture wanted to marry him in. But when he was seventeen, he volunteered to fly a cherry-blossom plane in the war against America. He was the only son. The family would die to save the country.
And then the war ended so suddenly, so that they didn’t want kamikaze pilots anymore, only businessmen. Now my father is an old man, but his voice is still filled with strength. I love him very much. I would not let him be hurt. It was not planned that he should die so young; and it was planned that I should be born alone. An only girl-child. A shaming of my ancestors and the death of a name. My father deserved a son.
But now my father and mother have found Shinzo, who loves my body and who has taken my name. My death will not be shameful now. My father will die happy, and so I must be happy. I must try to be happy for everyone.
Now Shinzo is watching the TV news. His body is fish-white and thin but quite fine. On the TV a reporter is showing how police kick black people in slow motion. Do Japanese policemen kick people? I think my mother is wrong. America is full of death, but there must be love too. I will make love.
Honeymoon diary, fourth day. I must have a boy-child soon. I want my father to see it before he dies. I wish Shinzo was a stronger man. I am not sure I want him to be the father of my children. It is wrong to think this on our honeymoon.
Today the hotel manager gave us a surprise present – a free car for two days. The speed is measured in miles and the colour is pink. The hotel manager says this is because it is the honeymoon-suite car. Shinzo says it is primer paint. I think it’s pretty. The hotel manager says we should go out to the desert for a few days, to Disneyland or further. But I want to see Los Angeles. It excites me. The buildings are made of mirrors and sun-glass and they are sharp as knives in the sun.
After the car, I telephoned my mother in Tosa. Her voice sounded dusty and tired. My own voice echoed like a stone in a well. She asked what Americans are like when they are in America. I told her they are more emotional than Koreans. She asked me if I was being a good wife but I didn’t smile at that. I am not a good wife. I just carry a name, like a baby that never breathes or smiles.
For lunch I had ice-cream at Denny’s Diner. Shinzo had eggs and sausage, and there was a fight between two women. I didn’t feel scared because women fight on TV all the time. The colours were bright, like a Hollywood movie.
My ice-cream sundae h
ad syrup and maraschino cherries on top. Then there was English Breakfast ice-cream, coffee wafers and lemon sorbet, and underneath it all there was Coke. I was almost to the lemon sorbet when a woman started screaming behind me. A small man with a beard on the end of his chin jumped up next to Shinzo. He hit the table with the heels of his hands.
‘Cat-fight, by god!’ he shouted. Then everyone was clapping and whistling. I turned round and there were two waitresses. One had straight yellow hair like corn silk and she was kneeling on the floor and coughing. The other waitress had very dark skin and she was thin, but also strong, because she was holding the bigger woman up by the hair. The black woman was shouting. ‘Tell me again, you fucking white trash, was they just doing their job?’ Then, ‘You going to call them? Hey, I’m going to kill them. You going to call them, trash? Why not? They’re your stinking pigs.’ Her forehead was bleeding and she kicked at the woman on the floor. Then she let go of the blonde hair and stood staring at nothing. Her mouth was sad, as if she was about to cry. Quickly the blonde woman got up. There was a tall glass of fudge syrup on the bar with a silver spout on top. The blonde woman picked it up and hit the other waitress in the mouth with it. All her teeth broke. When she bent over blood and syrup came out together, brown and red. Then we left.
Shinzo is quiet now. He thinks about the women’s fight in a different way from me. I watch it like TV. For him it is more real. That is why he is so weak.
It’s hot today. There is a man juggling outside the Universal News Agency and his sweat has made his clothes into a second skin, black and red and blue. No one gives him money today. None of the cars stop. America is full of hatred, but we are Japanese. This afternoon we will drive the honeymoon-suite car and see the whole of Los Angeles.
Honeymoon diary, fourth or fifth day. We are going home now. A man from the Japanese consulate found us airplane seats. It is midnight or later. From the window I can see stars and the wing, which is only an absence of stars. I can see the whole city below, drawn in light. Around it are the big darknesses of the desert and the ocean.
There is a string of fire in the west, where the factories are, and one north of Sunset Boulevard. But most of the fire is in downtown. There are no noises up here, no smell of burning, so it looks quite pretty. When we were lost the noise was terrible. A city coming apart. Maybe whole families have been killed, fathers and children.
Shinzo is asleep now. I have put a blanket over him. He is my husband and I must care for him.
First of all there were two explosions, but Shinzo said that they were car tyres melting in the heat. We were trying to find Olvera Street again but then we came out onto Colorado Avenue. Next to Tower Records was a pet store with the alarm-bells ringing. Shinzo stopped the car.
The store was called Anything Except Aardvarks and there was a rabbit with long ears sitting in the doorway. The shop window was smashed, and a boy was standing in it. He was black and there were patterns shaved in his hair like dog-teeth. He was watching us and saying something. Then another boy came out by the door. He had black hair and tanned skin. He had a macaw parrot in his arms, cradled like a baby. He kicked the rabbit out of his way and both boys ran down the street.
The rabbit sat in the gutter. I wanted to get out but Shinzo wouldn’t let me. A woman stopped and tried to catch it, but it ran down the street, like the boys. Someone said they would call the police, and so we left. We drove away, and soon there were trunks of black smoke quite near, to the south and east. People were running in packs, like dogs. There was a giant painting on a wall of Presley and Monroe. Then Shinzo got lost.
Now he is sleeping and I wish he would stay asleep, like a dead man. In the departure lounge I slept on the floor and dreamed of our families. They were alive, like trees, and their skins were cold, like Shinzo’s. Then I woke up, crowded on the floor with hundreds of other people. I watched Shinzo sleeping. He is the carrier of my name. He repulses me.
There was a beautiful car on fire on Colorado Avenue. It was a black Jaguar, very old, and someone had poured red paint on the roof and set fire to the paint. There was a Korean, too. He was standing in front of his grocery store and asking people not to steal from him. His English was not very good and some girls were laughing at him, but nobody had broken into his store yet.
I was excited and not so scared then, because nobody noticed us. It still felt like TV. I lit a cigarette with the honeymoon-suite car lighter and asked Shinzo where we were going.
‘We are going to the hotel. Then we will leave this terrible country,’ he said. His hands kept slipping around the steering wheel because he was sweating too much. He turned south and bumped against a fire hydrant. Water burst into the air and came down on the car with a slap. Shinzo whined quietly, like a child who does not want to be heard. He turned around and drove down a side-street. When I told him we were going the wrong way, he commanded me to be quiet in very masculine Japanese. I sat back and let the cigarette curl into ash.
The side-street was full of cheap motels and small movie-theatres showing films about naked women. Outside them three girls were playing dodgeball in the road. There was nobody else.
‘Wait here. I’ll ask them the way,’ said Shinzo. He pressed the car horn softly and started to get out, but the girls ran away. Then Shinzo got angry and hit the horn again, harder. It echoed between the buildings with their mirrored glass and sharp edges.
‘A mad country!’ he shouted. ‘Foreigners are animals who kill for food. Shit, why did we come here? We should have gone to Hawaii.’
I stubbed out the cigarette. I told him Los Angeles had been my choice. He looked at me and began to get scared again. Then we heard shouting. The girl-children had returned with lots of other people.
‘Chinks! Hey, rich Nips!’ they were shouting. There were many young black people, like the ones who were playing basketball days ago. Now they had shopping-trolleys full of food. One boy picked up a pineapple and threw it at the honeymoon-suite car. It hit the roof with a bang, then rolled down the windscreen. There was a dent in the metal above my head.
Shinzo sighed – not tired, but terrified. He tried to start the car and it stalled. Everyone laughed and now there were more people. They kept throwing food, but most of it missed. An egg hit my window and I screamed. I told Shinzo to start the car, but it was dead. A fish hit the windscreen and left a trail of white slime. Then all the people were chanting and throwing eggs and fruit. It went on for a long time. Shinzo tried to put his head between his knees, but his seatbelt held him up. He covered his face with his hands instead and wept.
Something in me died, then. He was disgusting. I knew I wouldn’t have his child. Then a can of food hit the windscreen and it broke into thousand diamonds.
I was leaning over Shinzo and trying to start the engine. Then there was the whoop of police cars and a megaphone. The crowd shouted louder and threw more cans. I had to hide under the seat. There was red juice or blood on my hands. I shut my eyes and sang children’s songs, and when I looked again, most of the people had gone. The police cars were in front and behind us. A policewoman was knocking on Shinzo’s door. She looked very worried. I think she had been there for a long time.
I wonder what it is in me that has died. Not my family, that passes away so easily. What do I have left? After my father dies, I will divorce Shinzo. Can I do that? Then there will need to be work, maybe in a school, or kindergarten. I will play with the children and pretend they are mine. It is the children in me that have died. I am not so young, and I will be divorced. No one will marry me again. I have been married for five days.
The paramedics gave Shinzo sleeping medicine. I asked them to take us to the hotel first, to pick up our luggage. The manager was gone and the door had been kicked in. It was evening. I went and stood over the traffic of the Pacific Coast Highway while they searched for our possessions. From the bridge, the ocean was on fire all the way to Japan.
Losing Track
Past the last billboard is where the
desert starts. Off the blacktop, onto the dirt. The sidewalks just tail away. No one comes out here.
‘No one hears the trees.’
‘What?’
I don’t say anything.
‘There are no trees, Calvin. Keep walking.’
‘Okay.’
I look up to read the board as we go under. Harry Connick Jnr is playing the Excalibur. I hear a dog bark, way back. There’s so little noise out here. No one hears the trees fall. I keep walking. I’m trying to write in my head.
‘Good boy. Just walk. You make me happy when you walk. I’m happy, you’re happy. Happy campers.’
I’m trying to remember the skyline behind me. It has no buildings or mountains or trees. Just neon. I miss it. I’m measuring off the yards away from it. I don’t know when to stop. Walk (scrub grass, packed earth). Listen (chuff and trudge of dirt). Feel. I can smell ginger.
One time, I was getting dinner in Circle-K, it was after the midnight shift and nothing left except BeenFeest burgers and a Yahoo. Socrates the shop boy, he’s telling some guy they got no cappuccino Haagen-Dazs. One minute they’re arguing and the next he was shot.
I read in a book that a bullet travels faster than sound; you don’t hear it till it hits. First the feeling, a kick in the guts, then the sound. Like a joke. Bugs Bunny with his face all burned black, and then a little flag coming out of the gun, BANG! Socrates laying on the freezer-cabinets, saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry, in his Latino voice. Blood icing up pink on the cold glass.
I want to hear it first, is what I want to say. If I get shot ever. People get shot all the time in Vegas.
‘Okay Calvin, you got the job. Congratulations. I tell you what they tell me. Which is: you dress nice, you never screw the customers, and you never, ever, screw the company. Oh, and take the wrist-watch off. You don’t want to wear that in the Palace.’
That’s Sebastian. He’s Management. There’s marlins stitched into his silk necktie. Knuckles raw. When he talks his hands curl up and the knuckles go white. He likes the way I deal.