by Alex Austin
Hugh lifted his hands to shape a basketball. He shot.
“Air ball,” shouted Takumi.
“Extend your wrist, Dad,” advised Hitoshi.
Here they had lived. Rushed out that green door into a thousand fiery mornings. Hammered that Spalding into their dark court. Sprang on impossibly smooth strong legs to shoot and block and pass. Never pass in the air. Protect the ball. Head fake.
Their first home. Their only home.
Setsuko and Hugh had moved into the house when the boys were still infants. It was not an easy time. The boys were colicky and refused to sleep on the same schedule, leaving one always awake. One time this went on for four days. Setsuko did not sleep, not any sleep that Hugh had seen. She spurned Hugh’s offers of help. He couldn’t feed them anyway, and they cried in his arms. Setsuko never complained. Not once had she even sighed at these impossible responsibilities. After four days, the babies settled back into their normal sleeping patterns, which was for both to sleep for two to three hours. Now Setsuko slept, Takumi nestled on one side of her, Hitoshi on the other. How still and silent all three were, like moonlit winter snow. When the babies woke to be fed, it took nothing else than their stirring to wake her from her first sleep in one hundred hours. She sat up and fed Hitoshi first, singing to Takumi to conciliate him.
She had a beautiful singing voice, but Setsuko only sang for their sons.
Hugh peered over the side gate. The valley oak had grown enormous, its branches formed an umbrella over the entire yard. Deep into the north end of the property remained the stump of the mulberry tree, which Hugh had cut down, holding his boys’ shoulders as they took turns using the chain saw to reduce the fallen limbs to firewood.
“I do not want to pick up their fingers,” Setsuko had said as she watched in stony dismay.
“They’re fine,” said Hugh, who in actuality controlled their every movement. But they had to be taught, and this is what Setsuko could not quite grasp. To teach them about the world required going out into the world, chasing its mysteries, following the stream to its source, the owl into its cave, that will-o’-the-wisp into its swampy domain.
Hugh leaned over the gate, tempted to lift the latch, four inches beneath his fingers. He wondered if the old hay bales remained. Perhaps a weathered arrow sticking out of the painted target. He craned his neck.
Weeds grew tall. Junk and plastic storage boxes of various sizes, the largest the length and shape of a coffin, were visible like islands among the sea of weeds.
From the backyard, his sons called out to him.
“Hold on, guys,” whispered Hugh, tapping his hand on the rusted metal gate and feeling for the latch. So simple, but . . .
Sighing, Hugh stepped away from the gate and walked to the front steps. Planters on either side once held stunning arrangements of flowers, but now housed only weeds and a few gladioli. In the dirt by one of the sad plants, a small American flag, discolored and tattered, no doubt left by a real estate agent on some distant Fourth of July, fluttered. Hugh looked for the doorbell but it had been torn out. The blinds were drawn. It was possible that the house was unoccupied, but equally possible that some frightened elderly person was peering out through a crack in the blinds.
As he stood on the step, the house seemed to recede.
He understood clearly why he had not previously returned to the neighborhood and home. There was nothing here for him, nothing to be derived, no sons to be found. He turned to walk away, but glanced once more at the little American flag. Hugh bent down and plucked up the flag by its stem. Beneath the faded red, white and blue, he read:
Nakamura Realty. Beneath the name was a phone number.
Hugh turned his head toward the loud rumble of a muffler. The old primed Camaro was stopped halfway down the block. The car did a slow K turn and drove away. Even through the tinted rear windshield, the driver’s long black hair shone.
Was he being followed? It seemed like it, felt like it. He remembered other times, distant times, when he thought someone was tracking him. A stranger seen at too many places during the course of a day. A woman at a bar smiling too generously. Intense eyes in the rearview mirror, eyes looking for his eyes.
Hunted like game. But no one ever took him down.
Well, who doesn’t have their run-in now and then with paranoia?
Chapter 10
Fingal’s Cave/16
AN ODD ENCOUNTER
Yuudai guided Sumiko from the Marina del Rey restaurant, where they had dined and danced, to the nearby cove.
“Mother’s Beach,” said Yuudai, gesturing at the pale, narrow crescent of sand bordering the dark glassy bay. “Water’s shallow. No waves. No riptides. Safe as a bathtub. Also cruelly known as Stretch Mark Beach.”
“I don’t understand,” said Sumiko.
Sumiko’s English was more advanced than Yuudai’s Japanese, but she was challenged by idioms and wordplay. Yuudai took her hand and puffed out his belly. He held her hand to his skin and separated her fingers. “Marks left when the woman’s skin stretches during pregnancy. Stretch marks.”
“Ah, sutoretchimaˉku.”
They wrapped their arms around each other, shrugged off their shoes and stepped into the still-warm sand. It was July and in Los Angeles it had been in the nineties during the day for the last two weeks. It was mild compared to a Tokyo summer, and perfect beach weather, but Sumiko, wary of the sun, would only go to the beach in late afternoon, and even then hide beneath an umbrella. How relaxed she seemed now, sunbathing at midnight. Not once had she mentioned her guilt.
When Katashi asked if she would be alone in Los Angeles for the art exhibition that featured one of her photos, she had lied to her father. Too many times had she voiced her regret to Yuudai, dulling the brightest moments of their stay.
At those moments, too, Sumiko would survey their surroundings and hint at something more. Her father may have been ailing, but “he took care of business . . .”
At the water’s edge they stopped, swaying to the music that slipped from an open door of the restaurant like a bird escaping from a cage. On the bay, the night-lights of a hundred boats danced like fluorescent sea creatures. Yuudai dug his toes into the moist sand, took Sumiko’s arm and guided her out into the shallow water. Holding hands, they walked in the warm bay toward a shadowy bulkhead that ran down the beach and into the water. Beyond the bulkhead was a lit dock, on which a dozen shiny sea kayaks stretched out in all directions like seals on a jetty. The bulkhead throwing a convenient shadow on the sand, Yuudai and Sumiko lay down beneath the dark pilings. Yuudai offered his chest as a pillow.
“I would like to capture this,” said Sumiko, gesturing at the shimmering lights on the gentle water. She framed the scene with her arms.
“Night or day?” asked Yuudai.
“Night. Yes, night.”
“We’ll come back.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Pessimist,” he whispered, kissing Sumiko’s nose and then her lips, shaping them to his. But realist was more accurate. Sumiko knew there wouldn’t be time. She’d need tomorrow night for packing. She had no instinct for pretending.
He took off his shirt, laid it on the sand and unpeeled Sumiko’s jeans. She trusted him wholly, had from that night in Tokyo when they danced, and he fell in love with her grace, soft laughter, slender beauty—and self-possession. There was no other word for it.
Yuudai held his hand against Sumiko and stared back across the beach at the restaurant’s picture windows where the dancers were so densely packed and their movements so similar that they appeared as one organism. At one of the docks, a boat was tying up, its hull tapping rhythmically against the wood.
Yuudai rapped his hand on the sand in time with the tapping boat.
He knew that if not for her father, Sumiko would leave Japan to be with Yuudai in America, but how to break her father’s spell?
“Let’s go for a swim,” said Yuudai to Sumiko.
“All right.”
>
Yuudai took off his jeans. Sumiko slipped off her T-shirt. They crept across the sand, staying in the bulkhead’s shadow. They slipped into the water like amphibious creatures tired of the obstinacy of land. At first, the water was too shallow for them to swim, so they crawled, digging their fingers into the mud and sand, their bodies floating on the water’s surface. Every few yards, the bottom pulsed as the stingrays and flatfish darted from cover. Eventually the water became waist deep, and they let loose the seabed. Sumiko had swum on her high school team. Yuudai had to labor to keep up with her, but it was not long before they reached the rope and buoys that signaled the limits of the bathing area. They clung to the rope. Yuudai held his hands up and dropped to the bottom. His feet touched in an instant. The water reached his forehead, just deep enough to drown. Bending his knees, and then straightening, he resurfaced. With arms resting on the rope, they clung to each other, kissing hungrily, faces sinking into the sea until they remembered their breaths. The water had the faint smell of oil, and he tasted it on Sumiko’s lips. A pelican swooped down out of nowhere, skimming the surface, its huge whiteness unexpected. Sumiko stared into Yuudai’s eyes as he slipped off her panties. She wrapped her legs around him. His hand barely clasped the rope.
Yuudai’s toes brushed the sea bottom as he stretched to hold Sumiko’s weight and still breathe. He thrust into her, lost himself in the firm silky body until unable to hold back his ejaculation, he stepped forward to keep his balance and felt a prick to the arch of his foot. “Fuck,” he said, slowly releasing her.
“What is it?”
“I stepped on something.”
“Are you cut?”
“Damn, I think so.”
“Glass?”
“Not glass. A ray, I think.”
Sumiko’s eyes went big. “A ray bit you?”
“No, no. A stingray They don’t bite, but their tails have stingers.” Yuudai held to the rope, lifted and bent his leg. He drew his fingers across the spot that burned. “My foot will swell up. I might get sick. We better go in.”
Sumiko nodded. She turned over and swam on her back, watching Yuudai as he thrashed angrily at the sea that had ruined the moment.
As they dressed, Sumiko said, “I want to kill it and eat it.”
“What do you mean?”
“The stingray that bit you.”
“It didn’t—I don’t—”
Sumiko tossed down her clothes and walked back toward the bay.
“Don’t be crazy.”
But she was already in the water, diving, disappearing.
He dropped down on the sand, inspecting his foot.
Fifty yards from the beach, near the rope where their lovemaking had been thwarted, Sumiko disappeared.
“Come on. It’s funny, okay. But enough’s enough.”
She appeared on the surface, swimming toward the shore. Nearing the shore, she stood up, the boat’s lights sparking off her wet black hair.
To her chest, she held something gray and the length of a man’s shoe. It was only when she was upon him that he realized it was alive and vibrating. She gazed at Yuudai, lifted the stingray to her mouth and bit. Blood flicked across her cheeks.
“Sumiko!”
She dropped the wriggling wounded stingray to the sand, where it was quickly coated like a fillet in batter.
In Sumiko’s womb, the little fish swam toward its intended.
Kazuki leaned back, cradled his head in his interlocking fingers. Setsuko gave birth to Sumiko but Sumiko in turn gave birth to Setsuko’s truest self.
Chapter 11
Stretched out on the lounge chair, Hugh listened to the songs that seeped out of his home’s screen door. To the beat, he twirled the little flag, his souvenir from a dream.
An hour passed. The sun dipped beneath the western ridges. The insects set to with their call and response. His little chipped statue of Buddha, which sat upon the stump of a scrub oak, found the evening’s last direct light.
A glint of sunlight blinded him. To block the ray, Hugh held up the flag and it was then he noticed the typo: Nakamura Reality. Reality?
Hugh leaned from the lounge chair and jammed the flag into the dirt. A few minutes later, he picked up the flag and took out his cell phone. It was past six, but real estate firms kept late hours.
“Good evening,” answered a honey-voiced woman.
“Is this Nakamura Realty?” asked Hugh.
“No, you’ve reached Nakamura Reality.”
“Not real estate?”
“We are a fabrication company. The film industry mostly.”
“Props and stuff.”
“Yes, props and stuff.”
“Sorry.”
“Are you looking for a realty company?”
“Not—well, yes.”
“I highly recommend PB Realty. I don’t have their number but they’re listed and you can find them online.”
“PB Realty. Great. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
The phone went dead.
Hugh twirled the oddball promotional item for a few seconds, stuck it back in the dirt, but then retrieved it.
Later, he sat up in bed, holding a Lunesta between his thumb and index finger. The little gray tablets were almost invisible at night. He would use them for a month at a time and then stop cold turkey so as to meet the requirement of his health insurance, which would only allow renewal of the thirty-pill prescription every sixty days.
Before the Lunesta was Fuguelle, which promised restful sleep but delivered mostly comforting delirium. After taking the drug, he would bring the Buddha inside, set it on the floor before the couch and stare at the figure until it danced and multiplied into dozens of damaged Buddhas, each whispering a wonderful story, offering him access to the secrets of the universe. Though far from meditation, the state was comforting and freed him for a while from thoughts of his sons and Setsuko.
He took the sleeping pills and loathed them, for the price of his broken sleep was the nightmare, whose mutable terrain changed not at all its draining frustration. In the dream he could not find his way to the place of his appointment, where the consequences of his absence would be disastrous. Each logical step toward his destination—seen in the distance—led absurdly away from that destination. Each street, each corridor, each path, though as familiar as the length of his arm, tricked and betrayed him. Every turn was wrong, every door was the wrong door, every certainty was uncertainty. He ran in bewilderment through these implacable settings, pulverized into helplessness—a helplessness and uncertainty that would come upon him in waking hours like a flash of gout.
But this was not the dream’s ultimate horror—
. . . Apparently extracted from the dream, sitting on a luxurious sofa, Hugh gazed at a television on which Takumi and Hitoshi, perhaps three years old, clawed from inside the screen in a paroxysm of pain and terror, mirrored in their faces. “No, Daddy,” they begged, tears streaming. “Come get us!”
“Mr. Mcpherson? Mr. Mcpherson, are you awake?”
A woman’s voice, vaguely familiar. The smell of bleach and urine. His right thumb nagging his fingers, one by one . . . This little piggy goes to market. This little piggy stays home. This—
Hugh opened his eyes. The woman attached to the voice smiled down at him, brown eyes in a round brown face.
“There you are,” she said. “Remember me?”
He spotted the silver name tag on her white jacket: “Yes,” he whispered. “You’ve been very kind.”
“I try,” said Miranda.
The black letters on the silver nametag smeared as she leaned into him. “Here, just a little water.” She lifted his head and pressed the plastic cup to his lips. The cool water trickled down his throat.
“Groggy?” she asked.
He remembered that he’d awakened before. Several times. He’d awakened and then—blank. He nodded.
“Well, you should be. Would you like some breakfast?”
“Breakfas
t?”
Hugh glanced at the IV in his left forearm. He pressed his right hand against the mattress. He rose a few inches.
Miranda eased him back. “If you stood up, you’d fall down.”
“My sons . . .” said Hugh.
Miranda’s lips tightened and her forehead lined with concern. She knew the truth, and she knew that Hugh did also.
Later, the young man with the gleaming shaved head came in. He looked like his sons might look when they reached their twenties. He stood at the foot of the bed; above his head, on the television, stock market quotes zipping across the base of the television screen. Securely on the far right the date. July 22. Hugh had been in the hospital for five days.
“It’s not just found in soldiers returning from combat,” the young man had explained in an earlier consultation. How earlier? A day? Hugh could not remember. Repressed memories. Glucocorticoids. Neuronal damage. Depression.
Hugh recalled swimming furiously, shouting his sons’ names with liquid breath. The sea was everywhere; his sons were nowhere, the realization piercing his brain like a bullet.
“Did you bring the paper?” Hugh asked.
“Yes, but—”
Hugh held out his hand. From his briefcase the young man withdrew a newspaper and handed it to Hugh, who merely lay it on his chest.
“Nothing?” asked Hugh.
“I’m sorry, Hugh.”
Hugh tapped the paper as if keying in a password. He opened it, turned a page, saw the photo. Again he recalled the numbing vastness of the ocean as he searched for their forms, black as night in their wet suits.
“Nothing,” said Hugh, as he looked up from the paper to the dark eyes of the expressionless woman who stood in the doorway behind the young man. Hugh tried to hold her gaze.
“Setsuko,” Hugh called out, but his voice did not appear to reach his wife’s ears, for she turned away.
He popped in the pill, took a sip of tea and lifted the book he would read until sleep.
Before he opened to the dog-eared page, he thought of the letter, the real letter. He wondered if it had made its way across that vast ocean. Was Setsuko at this moment breaking the seal or had Kazuki tossed it into the sea?