Nakamura Reality

by Alex Austin

  Hugh slept until dawn, awakening to a pain on his side. He yanked out the book, which had lodged between his arm and chest. His sleep had bent the hardback’s cover and wrinkled its pages beyond redemption. He tossed the disaster to the floor.

  In the kitchen, he quartered two oranges and ate them from the peel, spitting the seeds in a plastic grocery bag. He boiled the water again and had high-fiber maple and honey oatmeal. After eating, he was alert enough to realize that he stank. The accumulation of the ocean and the exertion. He took a shower, put on fresh jeans, made another coffee and went out bare-chested into the backyard. The sun was breaking over the eastern ridge. He watched the hills light up.

  A couple of rabbits nibbled at the weeds. Sometimes deer would be there, walking from the higher elevations to the creek. Hugh glanced along the path that paralleled the stream, which fed into a deep wide rock pool. Something moved in the water, maybe one of the brown trout that were illegal to fish. The fish, no, a hand broke the surface. A body unfolded. The morning light struck a slender tapered back, raven hair spreading across the smooth white shoulders. Hugh rose, dropping the coffee cup.

  A woman swam face down, her butterfly strokes taking her to the far end of the pool.

  “Setsuko—” cried Hugh.

  The pool was no more than twenty feet across and ten wide. The body turned underwater like a screw, quickly reaching the far bank.

  “Setsuko!”

  The swimmer’s arm came out of the water. The long, elegant fingers dug into the moist soil. She pulled herself onto the bank, and then scampered into the brush, almost on all fours, the way an animal would escape.

  Hugh ran down the path along the creek, halting at the rock pool. He looked for movement within the brush. It was insane to think the swimmer had been Setsuko. He hadn’t even seen her face. Some back-to-nature hippie chick taking a cool morning bath. Hugh strode along the bank to where the water resumed its slow flow in a shallower area, the creek clogged with deadwood and rocks. He picked his way across the debris, realizing he was barefoot. He walked toward the spot where the woman had disappeared. Something stirred in the brush.

  He looked back at the pool, where several small brown trout glided a foot beneath the surface, passing over a motionless crayfish and disappearing into clouds of sediment stirred up by the swimmer. Hugh climbed the slope, scanning the ground for broken twigs, footprints, signs. Through the trees, a house was visible, one of those dark stone houses that from the road might be taken for a rock formation. Solid as a fort and uninviting, along the sides, a wall of bamboo. A path appeared.

  He felt a prick of pain. A trickle of blood appeared beside his right toe. He thought about returning to the house for his shoes, but the woman would be long gone by then. On either side of the path, the brush was thick. Despite the open wound, he sprinted along the path.

  As he ran barefoot, his heartbeat rising to the effort, the adrenaline flowing, he felt the urge to remove the rest of his clothes, to run naked on the hard dirt in pursuit of the woman who would not be Setsuko. He ran several hundred yards and stopped, panting and dripping sweat, his ears abuzz, his skin tingling. Flat initially, the path now sloped upward, vanishing into a thicket of briars. He must have kicked something as he ran, for his left toenail bent up at a right angle like an empty clam shell. He pinched it in his fingers and tore, flicked it into the brush as he walked forward into the thorns. They had not grown there naturally. They were not rooted. Someone had cut them up and stuffed them in the path as a barrier. He looked around for a stick, found a divining rod and stuck it into the clump of briars. As he worked it out, a radio played, and the odor rose of roasting fish. He dislodged the barrier. One hundred feet down the path, under a scrub oak, several men sat around a small fire. The men looked like the day workers who waited outside the post office. Not old, but aged, not worn, but weary. As he walked closer, they turned to him, their eyes sharp and defensive. He expected to see the woman hidden among them. But there was no woman, just the old homeless man whom Hugh had seen along the highway, now huddled in a blanket and roasting two small fish, identical even to their split bellies, on a spit.

  Chapter 12

  Kazuki glided past the slender thighs of a pubescent girl, swaying like a reed in the shallow end of the pool. He slid his hands across the second step and pushed, so that he rose with an explosion of water. Grabbing the silver rail, he yanked himself to the deck. He walked on the warm stone, halting a few feet from the lounge chair to tilt back his head, grab his hair and twist. He faced the sun for a few seconds, grateful for its cancerous rays, then strode to the shade of his umbrella. He toweled off, waved away a beautiful hostess and dropped to the chair. He felt feverish. The swim hadn’t helped. He lifted his glasses from the laptop, asleep on the hardwood table, checked the thick lenses for smudges and jerked them on. He swiveled sideways on the chair, poked the touchpad. The screen lit up. Kazuki read through the scene of Yuudai’s first meeting with Katashi. Satisfied, he scrolled ahead seven years.

  Bone dry, the rock pool. Ducks, frogs and crayfish disappeared. Along the cracked brown track, James and Brent silent, Yuudai divining. Fifty yards, not a drop, not a river, not an ocean. Did you? . . . Feel it, boys? Feel it soften? Vegetation thicken. Prehistoric. Cautious. Snake rattle. Fan palms.

  Before a bundle of broken branches, Yuudai hunched down, pressed his hand to the earth and felt moisture. Glancing beyond the interlaced branches, he saw a glistening. He pointed and urged the boys to move closer. Though it was a hardly a yard in diameter, the little pool seemed miraculous. As they moved toward it, their feet sank into soft earth. When they were two yards away, a second pool revealed itself, something moving at the bottom. Flashing claws threw off a brilliant orange light. Two crayfish, either mating or consuming one another. For a closer look, Yuudai had his sons gather dead branches and lay them down over the first pool. Crossing on the dead branches, they hunched down before the second pool to see the crayfish. The creatures were a good four inches long. Yuudai snapped off a twig and touched a claw. The creature scuttled back under cover of a fallen tree. In the silence insects buzzed and birds chirped. From deeper in the woods, came a shout: “Iidesuyo!”

  Yuudai jumped to his feet.

  “What’s the matter, Dad?” asked Brent.

  “Did you hear it?”

  “Hear what?” asked James.

  Yuudai pivoted, listened for the voice. “There,” he said, pointing in the direction of a fan palm.

  “Look,” said Brent, gesturing at the pool where the larger of the crayfish had reappeared.

  Still listening for the voice, Yuudai slowly turned to Brent. Merely the echo of a memory, thought Yuudai, turning his attention to the crayfish. Dropping to his haunches, he instructed James to keep the crustacean occupied with the twig while Brent grabbed its tail. Is there a claw on his tail? No. No claw. No stinger. The boys were thinking of scorpions or stingrays . . . James stuck the stick in front of the crayfish, its protruding eyes darting about, and it pinched the stick. Brent dipped in his hand and pinched the crayfish by its tail. The boys laughed. The crayfish flashed its claws. It wasn’t brilliant orange out of the water, and was not the monster crayfish that had first appeared to them. Brent set it on the mud.

  “Iidesuyo!”

  Yuudai jumped up.

  “Dad, it went back in the water.”

  “Look, it’s digging a hole.”

  But Yuudai could not take his eyes from the quivering fan palm, stabbed, uprooted and flung aside by the horns of a triceratops.

  Kazuki pushed back his chair and rose. He walked over to the far side of the pool with its view of the Pacific. A mile from shore, the enormous yacht motored north. Had the story reached the point where Brent and James would be taken from Yuudai? The crayfish had disappeared in the little pool, perhaps dug in under a rock or broken branch. The boys would plead to be allowed to catch it one more time, and though it was getting dark in the noxious dry swamp, where radioactive isotope
s had seeped into the soil, Yuudai, ignoring his hallucination, would urge them to recapture the crayfish. They dug their smooth slender hands into the muddy bottom of the pool. Laughing in the warm dusk, they reached deeper until the mud was up to their elbows. How deep could the crayfish bury itself? Could it rip through the underlying bedrock? Was it a real crayfish at all? Titanium claws, digital brain . . . Wincing, Kazuki remembered that he’d used a mechanical crayfish in Enrique The Freak, though the crayfish, central to one of the twins’ stories, should have been saved for—was promised to—Fingal’s Cave. He steadied himself against the rail, closed his eyes and drew a long breath. For most things his memory was no better than average, but he could summon up his own words as if they were projected before him on a teleprompter. He scrolled the pages of the books he had written during the last ten years for other errors of inclusion. For everything his grandsons had told him, he had one intention, which was to supply the raw material for Fingal’s Cave. But he had drawn in the detail accidentally, as one practicing casting from the shore might snag a fish by its tail or fin. Without intention, an echo of his error, he pinched a strand of his still damp hair and drew it to his lips, nibbling and tasting chlorine. On the periphery of his vision, through the crawl space of his not completely closed eyes, the strands were like steel cable. Whether he stood there a minute, an hour or one hundred years, he was uncertain, but when he stepped back, his hands shaking like those of an alcoholic deprived of his next drink, he watched the last page of Enrique the Freak crawl into the rafters like the final credits of a movie. He had found no other betrayals in the thousands of words, yet something gnawed at him. Had he transformed an artifact of his grandsons’ experience into a shape that he no longer recognized? Had a memory stored in the Fingal’s Cave neural network seeped into a nearby other and donned a disguise? Had he given away his secrets in potentially decipherable code?

  What a drag it is getting old.

  How did you know it so young, Mick?

  Kazuki glanced at his fingers, which held something that he did not recognize. A spider’s web? No, a dozen strands of his hair ripped from his scalp. Although it may have been the sun reflecting off the bougainvillea, the tips appeared red. He drew the strands apart. Closer to white than silver, but for the odd still-blond thread. Many thought it dyed, but he was born with a Viking’s hair, his brows and beard yellow, too. A freak, he kept it close-cropped as a youth, and it drew little attention. In the 1960s he let it grow like everyone else, and as his reputation as a writer grew so did his hair, longer and wilder, going years without an inch trimmed. It was the mane of a lion, or the costume of a Kabuki actor. When Setsuko was a toddler, Kazuki would get down on all fours and flop his hair forward to the floor. Setsuko would crawl under it as if behind a waterfall. She would laugh as she poked and peeked through the strands. He watched her enchanting face as if a god who had parted the clouds to look down from heaven.

  Gimme a head with hair / Long beautiful hair / Shining, gleaming, / Streaming . . .

  But though inseparable from his image, there were times it seemed a burden. He wore it with the feeling he was carrying someone on his shoulders.

  He tied a knot in the strands and snapped the wen against the rail. How old would Setsuko be? Forty-four? Yes, forty-four on November 17. His daughter was no fan of birthdays. She wanted no part of them or any other anniversary. He never forced them on her. There were no special days, each day the same in its emptiness. Her aversion began with her mother’s death. She was eight, and would be ten before she ventured out from under the black umbrella of shock and despair. Ten before she truly looked again at the world. He tried to make her life joyous, but she smiled rarely, laughed never. She asked for nothing, he gave her everything.

  But not enough. Huck Finn paddled all the way from Los Angeles to Tokyo.

  The big yacht was gone.

  Kazuki swung the knotted strands like a weapon. Released. It whirled like a bolo, stretching and thickening as it flew above the walkway and beach, a monstrous propeller, whipping and blowing the sand into a yellow tidal wave that fell upon and covered the sea.

  Kazuki returned to his laptop. The muddy pool would not open up like the earth under the singing Persephone, and Hades’s golden chariot would not take the boys away.

  Not yet.

  Chapter 13

  Hugh parked the Volvo, crossed PCH and climbed halfway down the stairs to the beach when a voice called him from the memory he had packed like a box lunch for the journey.

  “Hey, Buddha.”

  Standing at the top of the steps, Hanna grabbed the rails and swung up one leg. Lines of text ran across the ball of her foot.

  “I’m sorry about the other day. About Kyle, I mean.” She fingered her black lip stud. Her hair was now red with a blue streak.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Hugh.

  “I didn’t know he was home. The sneak was hiding under the newspapers. Scared the shit out of me.”

  “Newspapers?”

  “Kyle has been collecting newspapers to sell to the Chinese. He heard they’re paying big money for cardboard boxes. He figures newspapers will be next. Anyway, he’s got them stacked up five feet high all around the trailer. He’s got little tunnels in there. He’s like a gopher.”

  Hanna dismounted from the rail and scampered down the steps, stopping two steps above Hugh. She stuck out her hand. “Hanna.”

  “Hugh,” he said, taking the soft weightless fingers.

  “We’ve met before.” She giggled. “I mean before before. The Peace & Love, right?”

  “We did, briefly.”

  “Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Eric Clapton?”

  “It’s the haircut,” said Hugh.

  “Do me a favor?” She glanced at her shoulder, where a beige bra strap ran across the pink skin. She stuck a finger under the strap and sniffed.

  “Smells funny. Does it smell funny to you?”

  “No,” he said, taking a perfunctory sniff. “It smells laundry fresh.”

  At the top of the stairs appeared a family composed of two heavyset women and a half-dozen children. They were loaded like pack mules and catching their breath. The oldest child, a boy of nine or ten, carried a watermelon and was doubled over with the weight. As the boy climbed down, the melon slipped from his grasp, falling toward the hard steps.

  Hugh flung himself forward and grabbed the watermelon, his knuckles brushing the concrete.

  “Gracias!” said one of the women.

  “Do you want me to carry it for you?” asked Hugh.

  “No, I got it,” said the grinning boy, taking the melon. “My hands were just slippery. Thanks, mister.”

  Hugh stepped aside as the family descended the steps and tramped across the beach, the boy twice turning back to nod and smile at Hugh.

  “Pretty good goalie,” said Hanna. “Down for another swim?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Mind if I tag along?”

  She jutted out her hip and nibbled her lip. “I don’t want to be rude,” said Hugh, “but I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “Kyle’s not around, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  Hugh looked toward the point. The ocean was flat. Twenty surfers floated motionless, dead in the water. The storm had not yet generated the promised swell.

  “I have some reading I want to get done.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “I don’t want to talk.”

  “That’s cool by me. You never talk anyway. Well, I knew you were silent, and now—” She pointed toward the boy with the watermelon. “—I know you are strong and flexible.”

  “I’m really—”

  “Please?”

  “I only have one towel.”

  “Oh, that’s a real dilemma,” she said, tugging at her ragged red bangs and then tapping her lip ring.

  She followed him as he trod down the beach, halting near the lifeguard stand.

  He set his bag down, r
emoved his towel and spread it on the sand, anchoring it with two nearby rocks. He took off his sandals, putting them beside the towel, and then removed his T-shirt, conscious of Hanna staring at his chest and back, not quite as hairy as an ape. For some women it was a turn-on, for others it was repulsive. Except for the bouquets of hair at his nipples, her boyfriend, Kyle, was sleek as a porpoise. Hugh folded his T-shirt and tucked it in the bag. He took out his sunscreen, rubbed a layer on his face and offered it to Hanna.

  “No thank you. I’ve sworn off that stuff,” said Hanna smartly.

  Hugh powered the cell phone, floating for a few seconds on Radiohead’s oceanic melody. There were no messages. Setsuko had not called. His sons had not texted from heaven . . .

  “Man, that’s an old phone,” commented Hanna.

  “I get the same calls,” said Hugh.

  “Maybe you wouldn’t if you had a new one.”

  Hugh flipped the phone shut, dropped it in the gym bag and took out Kazuki’s book. As he was driving to the beach, thinking about the woman in the rock pool—his morning mirage—he remembered the brown trout and the crayfish. It occurred to him that there was something about crayfish in Enrique. Mechanical crayfish. The narrator was describing a dinner at a bizarre restaurant and mechanical crayfish was one of the items on the menu. With his sons he had hunted crayfish, and there was that one day . . .

  He planned to skim for twenty minutes before dogearing the page, returning the book to the gym bag and then going for the long swim. He opened to Chapter Seventeen. He read a page and then thumbed backward.

  Hanna cleared her throat, her eyes begging attention. So ignored, a puppy would yelp.

  “I told you . . .”

  “I know, I know. Can I read one of your books?”

  Hugh thumbed the pages of Enrique. So there was a crayfish—so what? He handed her Kazuki’s book.

  Opening to the first page, Hanna read aloud, looking into his eyes every few sentences to gauge his interest, just as he had done when he read to Takumi and Hitoshi as they settled into their bunk beds. In the morning, Setsuko read to them in Japanese, but at night it was Hugh reciting English. He read from Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. The Grimm stories were dark, violent and erotic. The Andersen tales were romantic, filled with lost love and small heroisms. When he read the stories to the twins, he felt he was weather-coating their emotions for storms to come. Their favorite was “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” which told the story of the one-legged toy infantryman who fell in love with the beautiful paper ballerina doll who sat on a nearby mantle, both residents of a child’s bedroom. Pushed from the room’s windowsill, the soldier fell into a toy boat floating in the gutter and traveled miles and miles to sea. But eventually, he found his way back to the bedroom and his beloved ballerina. Yet he had only a moment of fulfillment before the willful child tossed him into the room’s fireplace. As the soldier melted, a breeze from an open window blew the ballerina too into the fire. The toy soldier melted into a heart. The ballerina consumed but for a single spangle.