Nakamura Reality

by Alex Austin

  More than once as he closed the book, his sons in their steady sleep, he thought of how happy he would be to die like that with Setsuko. Immolated, reduced to symbols. He never told her. She would have laughed.

  Hugh would swim farther than he ever had. He would swim until he couldn’t swim anymore and then he’d swim some more just to be safe. In his imagination, he projected the effort, felt the sea in his eyes, mouth and throat.

  Hanna read aloud, “Any attempt to hide or cover the body, for example when guests came over, would break the lease. The landlord advised against inviting children into the apartment, not that the children would be disturbed by the sight, but because even the best-behaved sometimes get into mischief, occasionally putting their own lives in danger. Any damage to the chamber would be his responsibility. He agreed, knowing he constructed this arrangement or had he was the question . . .”

  Hugh pressed the back of his hand across one eye and then the other.

  “Are you crying?” asked Hanna.

  “For Christ’s sake, no,” he said sharply, but his body trembled. As if he might fall, he leaned into her. His tears pooled in the hollow of her shoulder, transformed for an instant into Setsuko’s hollow, Setsuko’s breast. When the boys sucked from her, the clear milk was indistinguishable from her skin, leaving her ruby red nipples like islands.

  “I fucked up.”

  “It’s okay,” she whispered. “We all fuck up.”

  He wanted to spill it all out to her. How he had left his sons alone in a dangerous sea, and upon returning found them gone. How he had swum a mile from shore searching for his sons among the dark, tangled kelp. How he had begged God to perform one more trick. How he had lost his fucking mind.

  But he only repeated Hanna’s words. “Yes. We all fuck up.” But some more than others.

  His chest heaved as if to throw off a weight, and he realized his arms were around Hanna, his lips pressed to her neck as if there he might find a nipple and a drop of mother’s milk. He whimpered and then it was done. Drawing away from Hanna, who grimaced with disappointment, he met a nearby older woman’s disapproving stare. Hanna more than the tears, he supposed. Hugh drew up a laugh like phlegm, bellowing as if the funniest joke in the world had just been told.

  The older woman, who nibbled a sandwich, a bright red slice of tomato hanging out like a second tongue, eyed him now with pure hostility. Her tomato slid out from the sandwich and dropped to the sand. She looked at the tomato and then back at Hugh as if it were his fault. Old men with young girls, enough to make a sandwich explode. But Hanna’s presence made suicide an even less likely interpretation, Hugh thought, and to confirm his old goat status, he patted Hanna’s thigh, remembering wondrously how muscle felt beneath smooth cool skin.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  Hugh nodded, drawing back from the girl, gathering himself.

  “I broke up with Kyle,” said Hanna.

  “Congratulations.”

  “It was time for a change.”

  “New horizons.”

  “I knew it was a mistake. From the beginning, I felt like I was giving up something to be with him. My independence, I guess. Kyle spouts all this hippie stuff, but he’s the jealous sort. Well, you know that. But I got something too, and not just drugs—I’ll bet that’s what you were thinking.”

  Hugh shrugged. She wanted him to consider her, to open up a Hanna file in which the pages of her life would accumulate. Despite their age difference, it was not such an odd choice. At the café, she had seen him numerous times silent and composed, but hardly unapproachable, for he would answer any question put to him. But he neither started nor entered conversations. He would be a good listener, she must have thought. He might have secrets. He wore a wedding band, but he was not married, common knowledge at the café, for he had mentioned it once (perhaps to the plumber), and in the P&L such things echo forever. As all could see, he had no girlfriend. He was likely kind, and not bad looking. He had a trouble-free car and a kept-up house. Oh, what a prize!

  Hugh didn’t ask about and Hanna didn’t disclose the additional benefits Kyle offered beyond the implied drugs.

  Last night, she explained, she slept over at a friend’s. In the morning, she hitchhiked back to the trailer. She came back to tell Kyle that she was moving out, but he wasn’t there. She didn’t have anywhere to move out to anyway, though.

  She was fishing for shelter. Hugh would be dead before the afternoon was over, so what difference would it make if she squatted at his place for a couple of days? When the rent became due it would become her problem. But how would it strike the cops? How would it look in the newspapers to his students? To their parents? It was one thing to sit on a blanket at the beach, but it would be spun as a middle-aged teacher shacked up with a girl barely out of her teens.

  “If it was night, I could show you something,” said Hanna.

  “Oh, Hanna, don’t—”

  She pointed at the sky. “Right straight over there is Hercules.” She swept her arm to the right. “Over there is Ophiuchus. That means the ‘serpent bearer.’” She dropped her arm. “That’s Scorpius.” She laughed. “Of course, you can’t see them now. But tonight that’s where they’ll be.”

  “How many are there?” asked Hugh.

  “Eighty-eight, just like the keys on a piano,” said Hanna. She gazed across the sky as if she were seeing all of them.

  A cool breeze touched the back of his neck, and it was seconds before he realized it was Hanna’s hand. “How’s that feel?”

  “Nice, but—”

  “Do you live in a house, Hugh?”

  “I can’t give you shelter.”

  She asked more leading questions, but Hugh turned to the sea’s unfolding. Offshore, a pelican glided one hundred yards, sharply plummeted and smashed into a boil. Greeted by a couple of foraging gulls, the bird reemerged with a plump fish thrashing in its reddening bill. The surfers carved their trails. Hanna picked up the book and read, her voice competing with the crashing waves and crying birds.

  “. . . Enrique descended the dimly lit flight of stairs whose tubular enclosure narrowed with each step at a rate that soon he would have to be a mouse to continue. Not being a mouse, he stopped, turned around, and preparing to retreat drew an astonished breath, for he saw that the tube diminished equally in the direction from which he had come. Easier to be a descending than an ascending mouse, he pivoted, hunched his shoulders and dropped another step. The cohort of odd sounds that had drawn him to the passage rose again and was quickly gone. Tucking into himself, Enrique went down a dozen more steps until the passage ended in a small door offering three doorknobs of different shapes: round, square, triangular (Enrique wasn’t sure that a doorknob could be anything other than round, but he couldn’t think of alternative descriptors). He chose the doorknob shaped like his face, grasped the knob tightly and turned. The knob resisted. For his second try, he chose the knob with the shape opposite his face. The knob turned like a pinwheel, but was clearly unattached to a lock. But the third knob did the trick. The door swung open. Enrique shielded his eyes from the dazzling golden light of a huge heap of gilded bones. Peeking through his fingers, fearing he’d stumbled on the lair of a carnivorous monster, he laughed with relief. Not bones but brass instruments: trombones, trumpets and tubas, piled disreputably atop one another, like the discarded shells of crustaceans after a summer feast. Curtains covered each side of the enclosure for the instruments, but above them only sky. One of the curtains stirred and the odd sounds that had drawn Enrique to the passage swelled again. Ah. The brass were being played by the lips and tongues of innocent winds. Enrique dislodged a trombone from the pile. He put it to his mouth to blow, and something sweet dripped from the mouthpiece. He let it drizzle on his tongue but then sucked vigorously. He drained the trombone of its nectar, cast it aside and picked up a tuba. It too was filled with the sweet liquid, which flowed into his mouth in a succulent stream. Emptying the tuba, he blew a triumphant note, and then gr
abbed a trombone—”

  “This is pretty freaky stuff,” said Hanna.

  “Keep going,” said Hugh, who could not remember reading the passage, but now found the words utterly compelling.

  “All right, let’s see . . .

  “. . . Enrique sorted through the instruments, drinking from each one’s lips as a hummingbird might gather its nectar from a thousand flowers . . .”

  “Try it, guys. It’s really good.” Hugh held the tubular stem of the plucked honeysuckle flower to Takumi’s lips. Takumi sucked lightly and then forcefully, his cheeks drawing in. The flower emptied, Hugh pulled it from his son’s mouth. “More!” said Takumi. “Try it, Hitoshi. Better than candy!”

  For an hour Takumi and Hitoshi drank from the wild honeysuckle. He had told the boys not to mention sucking the juice to their mother. The story was nowhere in the world, yet it had found its way into Kazuki’s novel, transmuted, but recognizable. Or had Kazuki himself drunk from the honeysuckle as a child? It was foolish to think one had a monopoly on experience. There were no two things without correspondence if you were intent on finding it. Or perhaps the boys had told their mother, and Setsuko told her father. That was the most likely explanation, and yet— not as if they had eaten wild mushrooms—but still, they would not tell their mother that. What had been Kazuki’s source?

  Hanna set down the book. “You know, I’m easy to live with.” She slid her hand across his. He pulled away, his train of thought broken.

  “As I said, I’m a teacher.”

  “Well, I’m hardly your student.”

  “There’s a principle involved,” said Hugh with sad slyness. “I’ll loan you some money.”

  Hanna licked her black stud. “I don’t want money.”

  Hugh took the cool Gatorade out of the gym bag and offered it to her. She shook her head languorously, while laying her hand on Hugh’s shoulder.

  “I’m going to go for a swim,” he said, sliding from under her hand.

  “I’ve made you uncomfortable,” sighed Hanna.

  “I came down for a swim.”

  “You want me to leave?”

  “If you like . . .”

  “I can take a hint,” said Hanna. She walked a few feet away, turned and smiled at him and then continued toward the stairs, off to solve her own problems. Maybe to start a new life, but most likely to move back in with Kyle and keep the old one going.

  Good-bye, Hanna.

  Good luck with your astronomy career. See you in the heavens.

  There, too, he would see his sons, if he didn’t see them now.

  For that was the long-shot hope. The last chip on the wheel’s green slot.

  One more chance to believe.

  Hugh waded out and dived, skimming the bottom. He pulled himself through the silence. An arm’s length ahead, sand spurted as a stingray abandoned its disguise. Hugh swam without rising to breathe. Sixty seconds. Seventy seconds. His blood pulsed. The biggest sound in the big sea. He swallowed the swell of his tongue, a trick he’d learned as a boy in the creek behind their home. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness . . .

  I’m ready, sons.

  His lungs burned as he drew a few oxygen molecules from the stale air. A strand of kelp whipped by his face. A second strand struck Hugh’s chest, like a man making a point. And then he was in it, a tangle of slick smooth snarled tubes, which should have embraced him, but instead provoked a drunken brawl. As he struggled in the kelp like a fish in a collapsing net, his movements drove the mass to the surface, where it popped up like a space capsule, his inhalation a cheer from ground control. He kicked to stay on the surface, working to extract his upper body from the kelp until he realized he was battling the water like someone learning to swim. The kelp was gone. He turned 360 degrees, scanning the rising swell. He turned on his back and stared at the sky until his breathing became regular. Someone blew a whistle. Someone called. He looked toward the shore, saw no one that saw him.

  One hundred yards away, a boat motored parallel to shore. It moved slowly, visible one moment, hidden by a swell the next. Behind him, the whistle blew.

  Ignoring the whistle, Hugh swam west toward the slow-moving craft, which seemed oddly familiar to him. He had seen the boat somewhere, sometime. He was tugged now by a current that took him toward the surfers. One hundred yards away, the first wave of the set rose. The pack maneuvered in anticipation. Pressed to their boards like lovers, they paddled tenderly, waiting for the sign to attack. The wave rose higher and drew into itself, moving faster now, casting off light and signaling to the experienced where it would crest. Hugh swam hard to keep his distance, but the current pushed him closer. With certainty, the pack broke. A dozen of the strongest arms broke free of the others and paddled furiously to reach the wave at its height. Unable to turn away, Hugh watched the sea hollow out before the wave’s base as the water was sucked into the form. Twenty surfers met the wave and turned, now soaring down its face.

  A surfer rocketed toward him. If Hugh could leap like a dolphin, he could catch the surfboard’s tip in his chest, if lucky, piercing his heart like a spear. He would rise to his sons. But he could only watch as the surfboard passed overhead and he fell beneath the wave. Below the surface, the sea turned in on itself, unleashing gravities that pulled him in a dozen directions. He was helpless but couldn’t open his mouth to let it fill him, to let the sea fill him. When he came to the surface he was encased in a cloud of bubbles, in the midst of the surfers who, having missed the first wave, were preparing for the next. No one saw him or no one cared. The second wave was not far off.

  In a moment, the lifeguards would spot him among the surfers. He dived, trying to get beneath the boards. If he could just swim until the wave passed overhead, he could lose the surfers and could continue out to sea. He pulled himself ten feet down, kicking hard and pulling forward. A boat’s motor whined. If he could reach the boat, swim into the propeller.

  Where are you, sons? Take my hands. Take me.

  Just as his breath was exhausted, the wave passed, its force shaking him. He waited five seconds and rose to the surface. As he broke, a light flashed. He turned to its source and saw the boat coming toward him at an oblique angle. On the bow, two boys kneeled, clutching the gleaming safety rail. “Hitoshi! Takumi!” Hugh cried as the boat closed on him. Treading water to suspend himself, he waved his arms frantically. “Sons!” he cried again. The boys, releasing the safety rail, pointed downward at the hull. Hugh gazed in bewilderment as something solid struck him.

  Chapter 14

  For three hours straight, Kazuki wrote, unaware of the sun’s passage or the transformation of his hotel’s pool.

  Yuudai and his eight-year-old sons ascending Yosemite’s Half Dome during autumn’s first and unexpected snowfall:

  For two hours the flakes melted on the stone, but by the time they reached the rope ladder to draw themselves up the final hundred yards, the snow stuck to the granite. Yuudai looked up to see Brent’s foot come out from under him—

  Yuudai and his nine-year-old sons shooting guns in the Mojave:

  Brent rocked back on his heels from the force of the .38’s explosion, but the rusted can remained unmoved. “One more shot, Dad, please?” pleaded Brent. James stood nearby with Sumiko, steely eyed. “It’s James’s turn,” said Yuudai. “It’s okay, Dad,” responded James. “Let Brent try again.” Brent grinned and raised the gun . . .

  Kazuki stopped, aware of an atmospheric shift. When he looked up from his laptop, there were hundreds of beautiful young men and women dancing and preening to thunderous music. A banner had been strung across the pool proclaiming Mid-Week Pool Party. Behind an elevated table, a DJ sat at the controls of a massive sound system.

  Returning to his room, Kazuki ordered a beer and a shrimp cocktail from room service. His work was done for the day, but his thoughts remained with the story, especially its unresolved ending. Fingal’s Cave was d
ivided into three books: The first chronicled Yuudai’s relationship with his father. The second book followed Yuudai’s journey to Japan, his surreal attempts to obey his father’s guilt-ridden schematic for reparation and his meeting and love affair with Sumiko. The remainder of the second book told the story of the marriage, the birth of the twin sons, Yuudai’s relationship with Sumiko’s family, the Itos, the argument with Katashi Ito—whose ties to the Yakuza, the American had slowly discerned—and the subsequent return of Yuudai and family to America. Many pages of the second book were devoted to Yuudai’s exhilarating but dangerous adventures with his sons, Brent and James, and the growing estrangement between Yuudai—an evolving adulterer—and Sumiko. It was toward the end of the second book that Yuudai would lose his sons and begin his difficult and painful journey to untangle the great mystery of their disappearance.

  The third book.

  With the completed manuscript, he could approach Hugh in good conscience. The novel would not only explain the inexplicable, but provide solace to the inconsolable, for it would give Hugh back what had been taken from him, if not in flesh, at least in words indestructible. But it would do all that only if Kazuki could solve the problem of the ending . . . But if Kazuki didn’t or couldn’t finish . . .