Nakamura Reality

by Alex Austin

  He started writing Fingal’s Cave almost ten years ago, but abruptly stopped, and locked away the first rough chapters. He thought about those scenes many times, but he evaded responsibility by launching into one new book after the other. True escapist fiction.

  Kazuki finished off his beer, though he had not touched the shrimp. What the hell, he would order another beer. But as he picked up the phone to call room service, Mendelssohn interrupted. Kazuki looked down at his cell phone’s caller ID:

  Nakamura Reality.

  Chapter 15

  One more time. Hugh’s stomach heaved. He spewed into the frothy yellow puddle. On the far shore, a small brown foot shoveled sand over the mess.

  “Oh, God,” rasped Hugh.

  “You’re going to be all right, sir.”

  Hugh licked his tongue across the roof of his mouth, gathered the residue of the vomit and coughed it onto the sand. A young man with bright blue eyes and several days’ growth of blond beard straddled Hugh’s torso. On the service road that led to the beach, flashing red lights penetrated the bougainvillea and cactus.

  “Best you get checked out,” said the young man. “The paramedics will take you to emergency. Better to be safe than sorry, boss.”

  Hugh touched the throbbing lump on his forehead. “Please let me get up,” he said to the young man with lifeguard stenciled on his orange trunks. The young man stepped away as Hugh got to his feet. A dozen beachgoers surrounded him. He pushed through the stubborn spectators.

  “Where did the boat go?” asked Hugh, walking to the water’s edge and scanning the horizon. He touched his hand to his chest and winced. A streak the texture and color of ground beef ran diagonally across his left breast. Blood welled at his touch. Two paramedics jogged up and scuffled with him as they attempted to get a blood-pressure cuff around his arm. One shone a penlight into Hugh’s eyes.

  Later, Hugh would wonder if he responded at all, for separating him from his inquisitors was that seascape of the Oceanside Beach where his sons had died. Beyond the frozen cresting waves glided a boat. The same boat he had seen moments ago carrying the apparitions of his sons.

  Hugh pulled away from the paramedics.

  “Did you bring me in?” he asked the blue-eyed lifeguard.

  “Only the last ten yards. A swimmer grabbed you.”

  “Did you ask—the swimmer?”

  The lifeguard’s attention had been drawn elsewhere. Hugh tapped his arm. The lifeguard met his gaze.

  “Ask what?”

  “About the boat?”

  The lifeguard glanced at the paramedic and rolled his eyes. “No, I haven’t had time. I’ll make sure I do that.”

  “Which one was it?” Hugh gestured toward the pack.

  “I told you he wasn’t a surfer. And he didn’t stick around.”

  “Someone had to have seen the boat.”

  “You just got slammed by a surfboard. What’s with you and this boat?” asked the lifeguard.

  The paramedics spent another ten minutes trying to persuade Hugh to visit emergency, but Hugh refused. Shrugging, the paramedics gave him a sheet listing the warning signs of a concussion and then marched off. The crowd had long dispersed, except the watermelon boy who stood beside him gazing toward the unseen boat.

  “What’s your name?” asked Hugh.

  “Apollonius,” said the boy.

  “Did you see it?”

  “The boat, you mean?”

  “Yes, the boat that was out there.”

  “There were a couple of boats,” said the boy.

  “This one was big, really aero—fast-looking.”

  “Maybe I saw it.” He shrugged. “I think I did.” The boy’s shy eyes and drawn lip said uncertainty. He had not seen it. Only Hugh had seen it.

  “Apollonius,” shouted the boy’s mother, “vete aquí.”

  The boy looked toward his blanket, “It’s okay, Mom. He’s my friend.”

  The mother frowned and said something to the other woman, who stared at Hugh.

  “My mom’s afraid of kidnappers. She thinks they’re everywhere.”

  Hugh shivered. He pulled his forearm to his mouth and blew on the goose bumps. “She’s right. A parent can’t be too careful.”

  “Do you have children?” asked Apollonius.

  “I—I have two boys.”

  “How old are they?”

  “They’re . . . they would be . . .” He veered from the calculation. “They’re gone.”

  “Where did they go?”

  Hugh shook his head hopelessly.

  “Were they kidnapped?” asked the boy.

  He thought the parents paranoid who drilled fear into their children, making them run from every stranger’s smile. How many kidnappers were out there? Plenty, maybe. Children snatched up and hidden in nondescript houses, high-fenced backyards. To satisfy some freak’s pleasure. There were other motives, too, so common as to be considered the price of living in some places. Not pedophiles so much as thugs terrorizing families for ransoms. He had several Mexican children in his classes, sons and daughters of the upper class, who were in the United States because of that real threat.

  “Did the boat take them?” asked Apollonius.

  Hugh glanced down at the boy. “The boat?”

  “I guess,” said Apollonius.

  “No, the boat didn’t take them.”

  “Who did?’ asked the boy, bristling with concern.

  Hugh gestured toward the sea.

  Apollonius frowned. “A different boat?”

  “No. My sons drowned.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Yes, both.”

  Apollonius dug his foot into the sand. “That’s bad. Do you go see them sometimes?”

  “See them?”

  “At the cemetery.”

  Hugh shook his head. “I—we didn’t get to bury them. Their bodies were never found.”

  “So maybe they’re not really dead.”

  Hugh couldn’t respond.

  “Maybe the boat did take them,” said the boy.

  “Maybe,” said Hugh softly. He gazed at the ocean, searched for the boat that was merely a memory. One hundred yards out, a horizontal black bar unfolded across a length of sea; a parallel rule appeared along the water’s edge. Page three. In the hospital room, someone had handed him the newspaper with the story. The roiling sea, the fragile surfers, the sleek yacht. “Page three,” the gift-giver had said.

  Page three . . .

  Who had been that messenger? The nurse Miranda? No, not her.

  “Appolonius, ven a comer su bocadillo.”

  “Well, see you later. Sorry about your sons.”

  “Apollonius—the man who pulled me out of the ocean . . .”

  “You mean the lifeguard?”

  “No. There was another man. Surfer—no, swimmer.”

  “Oh, yeah. I saw him.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Pretty tall, like you. Skinny. Tattooed like crazy.”

  “What kind of tattoos?”

  “He had this cool tiger on his back.”

  The boy’s mother called out again.

  “Later,” said Apollonius.

  Hugh returned to his towel. A half mile away a party boat crawled north, a huge catamaran swiftly gliding across its wake. The boat at Oceanside wasn’t a sailboat, but a cabin cruiser or a speedboat. There was something futuristic about it, almost fantastic. Of course, the boat he had seen today could simply be the same model as the one he had seen at Oceanside. There were probably hundreds of them. Or was it just a memory? A memory on which he had imposed his lost sons. Hugh scooped up a handful of sand. The sand rippled as a buried bee broke the surface.

  A young woman walked by, glancing at the stunned bee and then at Hugh’s forehead. He had forgotten about the wound. His forehead throbbed, wanted ice.

  Perhaps his sons had gotten dragged into the boat’s propeller. He had read how large objects could become lodged against a hull, stay the
re for hundreds of miles. Or perhaps tangled in kelp, and the kelp caught on the propeller. There were nets, too. It would explain why the bodies were never found. But in his vision today, his sons were pointing at the hull—to tell him what? That their deaths were a measure more complicated than he supposed?

  At the crossing, where he stopped to wipe off his feet and put on his sandals, an old primed Camaro was parked on the roadside with its hood up. A man was leaning over the engine and smoking a cigarette. He wore baggy, low-slung jeans, aviator sunglasses and a wrinkled dress shirt, sleeves stained with grease marks. He glanced at Hugh, who nodded to him as he sat on the guardrail. As Hugh wiped the sand from between his toes, he looked at the man’s profile. He had a firm jaw, broad, protruding cheekbones and long straight black hair. His lips were fine, but his nose bent and blunt as if it had been broken a few times. He turned and smiled at Hugh. He could have been of South Korean descent or Japanese. He looked something like his sons would have looked if they had reached their midthirties. Something else though. Not just a resemblance to his sons in an imagined future, but also a resemblance to someone in the past.

  “How you feeling?” asked the man.

  “Yeah, better. You saw what happened?”

  “You almost bought it.”

  “Were you the one who pulled me out?”

  “I look like someone who goes in for that hero shit?”

  Hugh slipped on his sandals and stood up. The man set a chrome cover over the air filter. He held up a chrome nut and said, “Call this a wing nut. You know why? Because it has little wings on it.” He drew the nut in an arc above his head. “Butterfly, same kind of word. Like butter flying.” He grinned. “Back to your nest, little bird.” He screwed it down and turned back to Hugh, wiping his hands on a rag, though his fingers appeared spotless. The Camaro’s engine compartment was in cherry condition.

  “Hey, you got your light,” the man said, pointing to the highway.

  Hugh glanced back at the blinking walk sign. “Thanks—what’s your name?”

  The man seemed to give it a moment’s thought. He smiled. “Jason.”

  “Hugh.”

  “Cool.”

  “You happen to live in Studio City?” asked Hugh.

  “You’re going to miss that light, boss.”

  As Hugh reached the north side of the intersection he looked back to see the young man getting into his car. He’d taken off the shirt. His back and arms were covered with the full-body tattoos that the Japanese call iridenzi. In the center of his back was a tiger.

  “Hey, Jason,” shouted Hugh, but the Camaro’s owner had started his engine and gone like Speed Racer.

  Hugh stared after the vanished car. Hugh was sure that he had encountered him before. If he could remember the context, he would remember the young man, but the context eluded him.

  Chapter 16

  When he returned home from the hospital twelve years ago, Setsuko had asked him where he wanted to put the newspaper, which he would just as well have left on that unmade bed if Setsuko hadn’t taken it. He told her to put it into the black sea chest he’d had since college.

  As Hugh slid the trunk from his bedroom closet, he tried to recall when he’d last opened it and for what reason. Perhaps to deposit the pink slip for the Volvo or a copy of an income tax form. He’d taken nothing out in years, certainly not that paper. There was no solace in that angry sea or the misnamed inset photos of his sons. But returning from Topanga Beach, he again considered that strange boat. It had remained offshore all the time that he and the boys had waited. It was there when the boys entered the water. But when Hugh returned to find his sons, the boat was speeding off. He would not allow himself hope, but he wanted to know more about that boat. If he had its name . . . He set the trunk beside his bed and snapped back the latches.

  He remembered the trunk overflowing with a lifetime’s paperwork, but it was less than half full. He sorted through the envelopes, canceled checks and faded memorabilia. CDs and ancient tapes. High school and college degrees. Warranties, loan papers and instruction manuals. Setsuko had taken the boys’ documents: the report cards and birth certificates, the sports plaques and medals. She’d taken the photographs too, all of them. He suspected she’d burned them—for what was the point of these two-dimensional memories, false positives of life.

  He envisioned the San Diego paper as if it lay before him. The headline: Brothers Missing in Surfing Tragedy. The large photo of the angry sea at Oceanside, the insets of Takumi and Hitoshi, their names reversed, and in the upper left of the photo, the boat. He dug deeper into the trunk’s contents. In ten minutes he’d dug through to the bottom, scratching the ribbed silky fabric. He leafed through everything again, turning each item upside down, snapping and shaking. For a moment, one item held his attention: a glossy brochure for a cemetery, High Meadow.

  For years the salesperson had called him to make her low-key pitch: “We have the most beautiful sites and very affordable.” Hugh remembered playing with her, asking inane but not unbelievable questions. What was the history of the land? Were there any Indian burial grounds nearby? Was the ground hard or soft? Clay or loam? What sorts of insects were there? What kinds of birds? (He didn’t like crows or vultures.) How often was the grass cut? Did they employ a night watchman? Was a gravesite ever marred by graffiti? Did they bury atheists at the same depth as Christians or did they give them short shovel? He had thought that the salesperson, Gina, would sooner or later catch on to his whimsical game and stop calling, but Gina had stamina. No matter how outrageous his questions, she would try to answer or say she would research it and get back to him. He did not think she ever got the joke, but if so she hid it well. Eventually he gave up jokes, but after all his joking, he didn’t have the heart to tell her he wasn’t interested. In that lush season of young manhood and success, who can take the grave seriously? And so he put her off with innumerable excuses. He could not remember when Gina stopped calling. He could not remember when the Thursday ritual ended. He wondered if she were still out there, pitching her plots. He would be surprised. Her voice was meek and frail and he imagined her then as a woman in her late sixties, perhaps earning a deserved discount on her own grave.

  He tossed the brochure in the trunk, closed the lid and shoved the chest back into the closet.

  In the kitchen, he waited for the teapot to whistle.

  Perhaps Setsuko had not followed his instruction or perhaps she had taken the newspaper with her when she left.

  How difficult would it be to get another copy of the newspaper? He could go to the university library. Perhaps it was available online. Again, he imagined the picture of the surf, the boat. There was a name. There might be a serial number, some sort of registration.

  The newspaper was called the San Diego Sol. A bright-yellow smiling sun above the title.

  Hugh slipped his cell phone from his pocket and dialed information. The operator informed him that there was no listing. She suggested the San Diego Union.

  “No, I’m sure it was the San Diego Sol. Do you have a phone number for a San Diego newsstand?”

  “Do you have a name, sir?”

  “I don’t know. San Diego News?”

  “I’ll try.”

  She came back with, “Here is your number.”

  “What paper?” asked the gravel-voiced man who answered the phone at the newsstand.

  The tea kettle pealed. “Hold on,” said Hugh.

  “Hey, I’ve got customers.”

  Hugh stretched to turn off the flame. He repeated the name.

  “Christ, that paper’s been out of business for years.”

  “I’d pay $100 for a copy of the July 16, 2000, edition.”

  “You kidding me?”

  “If you can find one, any condition, call me. Here’s my number.”

  Hugh hung up, and not bothering with the tea, walked into his living room and flopped on the couch, feeling tired and heavy, weighted by the awareness of how quixotic were his tho
ughts. Taken, which opened the possibility that—

  Impossible.

  Never once in the years since their disappearance— death—had such a thought occurred to him. But now a vision in the sea, a memory . . .

  What could he really see of the boat in the photo?

  Quixotic.

  But clearly his sons were pointing at the boat’s name. A delusion, meaning nothing or meaning everything.

  He gazed across the room at the bookshelf built when he moved into the house. It held perhaps five hundred books, mostly paperbacks. The exception was the row of Kazuki Ono’s novels, the dust jackets still shiny and bright on the hardcovers. When Hugh and Setsuko, three months pregnant, had left Kazuki’s Tokyo home for America, the author had ceremoniously presented Hugh with his first five novels, each dutifully inscribed to his son-in-law. In turn, Hugh had purchased each new novel as it appeared. Deadpan All The Way, Kazuki’s first book, was on the far right; six novels to the left was Living in Camus, which Hugh read shortly after the birth of the twins; two books farther left was Hugh’s favorite, Riding, Riding, Riding, an eight-hundred-page labyrinth attacked by as many American critics as it was lauded by European critics for its strings of coincidence. The Euros maintained that the novel was structured to evoke seriality, a theory that all events are connected, and that coincidences are the visible signs of the interconnection. In the year the twins entered kindergarten, Riding was a best seller for six months. Enrique the Freak, at the moment in the bottom of his gym bag, would complete the collection. Hugh thought of the book, Hanna’s recitation. The passage that had so much brought to mind the memory of his sons’ sipping honeysuckle returned to him with inexplicable urgency—Enrique sorted through the instruments, drinking from each one’s lips as a hummingbird might gather its nectar from a thousand flowers . . .”