Nakamura Reality

by Alex Austin

  “I want to see my sons,” said Hugh. “You promised the truth.”

  “Do you remember a woman in Tokyo named Nanami?” asked Kazuki.

  “Yes,” said Hugh.

  “You knew her before you met my daughter.”

  “That’s right. But I told Setsuko—”

  “That you would never see her again.”

  Hugh nodded.

  “You kept your word?”

  Hugh made a fist, smacked his thigh. “I want my sons.”

  “I need two more days. In two more days you’ll see your sons.”

  “I need something now,” said Hugh.

  “Do you want it all?” asked Kazuki.

  A shadow passed over the two men, but looking up, Hugh saw only empty sky. “Look here,” said Kazuki, taking out his wallet. He withdrew a stiff square from the wallet and handed it to Hugh.

  In the photo, their faces were at least a year older than the day they had disappeared. Their hair, which had fallen below their ears, was shorn.

  “They cut each other’s,” said Kazuki. “Clipped it all off in protest, like the Irish singer. If that’s not enough, you’ll find it all at your former house.”

  “Hitoshi,” whispered Hugh, eyes fixed on the image. “Takumi . . .”

  “Two days. Two days to finish,” said Kazuki.

  Chapter 43

  Without taking sleeping pills, Hugh slept well, waking with the energy of a ten-year-old boy. In the morning, he put on his sneakers and shorts and ran three miles. He ran through the hills and then on the roadside, and then back into the hills. It was his rule that when he ran, he never rested until he finished the distance. He pushed on, through watery legs and burning lungs. He ran with drink strapped to his hip and his ear leashed to an iPod, Radiohead playing at maximum volume. Today, Kazuki’s promise replaced the lyrics of every song.

  The last leg of his run was the most difficult. For seventy-five yards, the path climbed a bare hill, the slope increasingly steep toward the summit. During the final ten yards his breathing became pure pain, his heart a burnt-out motor, his legs leaden. But today he ran the uphill stretch as if he were bounding across the moon. By the end of his cool-down, it was seven A.M., and though there was plenty of light, the sun hadn’t yet broken above the eastern crest. He uncapped the bottle and drank so thirstily that he choked. He spewed the green liquid over a listless lizard that vibrated for an instant and then returned to its torpor.

  Sitting on the ground, Hugh assumed the yoga position that he had learned ten years before while sitting beside a woman with a serene face and breasts like half loops of rope.

  Who had set him on the path to the truth? These were the things that God did, when God was around. He took out the picture of his sons in Japan. Their shorn heads made them look like Buddhist monks. How did they adapt to the Japanese language? How did they do in high school? What were their first girlfriends like? Did they play sports? But of course they played sports. Basketball, he supposed, although they were good baseball players, too. He envisioned a continuum of activities, and he saw them growing along the continuum. The sun broke over the hills behind him, its warmth on his back. Flashing across the hills to the sea, the sunlight exposed a wide white line advancing toward the shore. Did they ever surf again? He imagined of course that they would have. He traced their faces with his finger.

  “All,” Hugh murmured. Kazuki had said all. You’ll find it all at your former house. Kazuki was not supposed to call him until late afternoon. He had plenty of time.

  Hugh parked in front of the Studio City home. Was there an occupant to let Hugh inside the home? What was all?

  Hugh got out of the car, walked to the front door and knocked.

  No answer. No movement.

  He knocked again, producing the same result.

  As he unlatched the side gate, he heard a loud car engine. He glanced over his shoulder but saw nothing on the street.

  He entered the backyard, pausing to examine the old valley oak. The crook of the tree was twenty feet from the ground and he couldn’t see the planks.

  He knocked on, and then tried the handle of, the back door.

  He wouldn’t break into the house. He knew a way in.

  On the south side of the house, Hugh kneeled before the crawl space. It was covered by wire mesh, along which several fat green caterpillars crawled. He pulled off the caterpillars, which spewed cool, electric-green juice over his fingers, and lined the insects at his feet, where they withered and darkened. A baby rat or mouse wobbled by, crying as if poisoned. Unhooking the mesh, Hugh poked his head into the opening and scanned. To his right was the bathroom, its copper pipes glowing. If he crawled straight forward, he’d be under the hallway. The outer wall of the third bedroom would start twenty feet forward. The closet would be six feet from the path below the hallway. He put one hand inside the crawl space and felt the cool coating. It wasn’t dirt or dust, but a soft gray particulate, almost like powder, perhaps to tamp down the dry earth. He touched it like a cat testing water, his fingers curved so that the least amount of flesh would be polluted.

  Hugh shimmied through the opening. He stretched his arm back to grab the flashlight, but his hand closed on air. He raked his fingers across the ground, but the flashlight had disappeared. He considered backing out and searching, but he noticed that light spilled into the crawl space from cracks in the floor and elsewhere. He wouldn’t need the flashlight. He crept forward, his fingernails unearthing lumps of rat shit beneath the dust. As something scampered across his periphery, he lifted his head and rammed his skull on a cross beam, from which protruded a gleaming nail. He crawled another ten feet. The space went pitch black, as if a dense fog were rolling through. Hugh heard more scampering, longer flights. A sheet of light appeared a short distance away. Hugh scuttled toward it. Now four sheets of light, a rectangle of light outlining the trapdoor. He crawled beneath it. Turning on his back, he rested his head against the ground, bent his arms and raised his hands, fixing his palms on the wood. He pushed, but it held fast. Drawing up his knees, he shifted his position for leverage. He arched his back and exhaled as if on the last repetition of a bench press. The wood groaned and gave a little. He pushed harder. Above, something shifted, fell with a clunk. He pushed the panel higher until he saw a row of shirts and pants hanging above. He hooked his hands on the carpeted floor and pulled himself through the opening.

  A large cardboard box lay on its side, its contents having spilled across the closet floor. Hugh picked up a tiny worn leather football from the heap of sports equipment. He pressed it to his lips, smelled the fragrant leather, inhaling forcefully to find the oil of his sons’ fingerprints.

  Clutching the ball, he crawled from the closet. The cedar bunk beds lay unmade, the pillows ruffled, the sheets tangled. Baseball bats, fishing poles and archery sets leaned against the walls, whose pale green surfaces were hardly visible beneath the dozens of glossy posters: gravity-defying skateboarders, berm-hugging dirt bikes, azure-tunneled surfers. Hugh picked up a shirt, pulled it to his face, found the scent of his sons, and within that, their freshly washed skin and hair.

  Everything was back.

  He got no farther than the living room when he had to stop and lean his back against the divider that had served as the family’s bookcase. The air was filled with his sons’ movements: the spurts on all fours, the great leaps from floor to couch, the thump of their elbows and knees as they wrestled on the carpet.

  It was all there. Everything that Setsuko had purportedly given away: the skateboards, bicycles, radio-controlled cars, baseball bats, footballs and spinning rods.

  At the end of the hall the door was closed on the small den that Setsuko had used as a studio. Hugh touched the handle. She liked him to knock first. He knocked and then opened the door. He did not expect to see her, and yet . . .

  The easels, the brushes, the finished and unfinished work, all had been returned. Hugh picked up one painting, but set it down when he saw the one b
ehind. He held up the watercolor, a seascape: “Mother’s Beach.”

  Kazuki had gathered it all, as if it might restore what was taken away. Hugh set down the painting. He walked from the studio into the kitchen where he drew a glass of water. On the table was a key, unused a decade, but remembered.

  Standing at the garage door, Hugh fit the key into the padlock, finessed the rusty tumblers and removed the lock from the latch. He raised the door, watched the spiders scramble as light filled the cluttered space that had never held one car, much less two. Tricycles and skateboards, deflated rubber pools, bassinets and mechanical rockers, model planes and punching bags, fire trucks and model train tracks. In the center of it all, open path around its perimeter, was a Plexiglas storage container the length and shape of a coffin. Hugh ran his hand along the slick surface, but like one of those crashed alien spaceships, it offered not a seam. Would it open by itself? A skeletal green hand slither out? But, wait, it was not strange at all. Why should it be strange? Hadn’t he bought it?

  Hugh hunched down, located a round indentation on the forward face and pushed. The top yawned as if awoken from a decade of sleep. Hugh peered at the container’s contents.

  He was fathoms below the water’s surface, slowly rising toward the light, which was not the light of the sun, but a softer, ivory light.

  Inside the Plexiglas box, fitted as if reversed forks whose tongs intertwined, were Hitoshi’s and Takumi’s surfboards. Hugh lifted the top one, Takumi’s. He ran his hand along the smooth bottom, followed the curve of the fins and pulled the board to his lips. He then lifted Hitoshi’s, pressed his hand to the painted palm tree bent under the wind. Holding the two boards to him as if they were his living sons, he gazed at the open traveling case. From this Kazuki had created Enrique’s magical chamber, out of which Hugh had now escaped.

  Chapter 44

  As Hugh turned south on Pacific Coast Highway, the shadows of palms swept the Volvo’s hood and the loose end of a nylon strap, lifted by the onshore breeze, tapped against the windshield as if counting the fleeting silhouettes. Tick, tick, tick.

  Hugh bought the car rack at Val Surf on Ventura Boulevard. He was pleased to see that the surfboards on display hadn’t changed in ten years, when last he and the twins had toured its rows of Roberts and Channel Islands boards, stroking the Rustys and Losts, debating the merits of each surfboard shaper, like wine enthusiasts judging vintages— still the same size, still the three fins.

  In his backyard, Hanna watching, Hugh set his sons’ surfboards on the ground and scraped off the dried wax, hard like an old man’s stubble. He rubbed on the new, still sold under the brand name Sex Wax, which set him giggling like Scrooge on Christmas morning, free of the spirit world, back in the hurly-burly. Two hours later, he held the boards at arm’s length and thought that his boys would appreciate his effort.

  Was he not entitled to his whim?

  He brought the surfboards into the house for the night and placed them on either side of his bed. Kazuki had called him as promised, and reiterated his promise to reunite him with his sons. Without a milligram of drug, Hugh fell asleep, for he had sailed into calm waters.

  Yet whatever the mix of fiction and reality, it had led him to the truth. He may have wandered off on a fictional path, but its terminus was reality.

  Hugh was to meet Kazuki at Mother’s Beach at four o’clock, and his sons, Kazuki seemed to promise, would arrive subsequently.

  Along the coast, it was a perfect afternoon. Hugh drove with the windows down, luxuriating in the cool breeze, drawn to the dazzling moves of the surfers at the endless breaks. Atop the rock seawall, departing beachgoers appeared, faces serene, sated, arms flecked with sea salt. Minutes later the Santa Monica Pier appeared like a sluggish barge, but soon sharpened, its thicket of amusements thinning until the Ferris wheel and roller coaster revealed their spokes and tracks and cars. He and the boys must have spent one hundred days on the pier, striding past the rides to the pier’s farthest reaches, where they baited up and dropped their lines. These things they had done and would do again.

  He exited PCH at the California Incline and continued south along Ocean Avenue, past the sleek hotels and restaurants, and soon into the Venice funk and flow. As he approached Marina del Rey, he glanced at the muddy canals where Takumi and Hitoshi had seined for bait, now bordered by a rainbow of exotic houses. Turning onto Via Marina, where dozens of sailboats glided across the wide expanse of the channel, he saw at the harbor’s entrance the biggest yacht in the world. It looked as if it were stuck, heaving violently as it tried to break through the protective jetties.

  At Mother’s Beach, the car’s clock read three forty-five as Hugh pulled into the same parking space as when he had met with Albert. As before, the seniors were cooking, perhaps dinner but not much different from what they had been cooking for lunch. Waves of smoke carried the rich odor of the charred meat and barbeque sauce. There were a few more visitors on the beach, more families. But it was so similar as to be the week before, and Hugh supposed, the week before that. He looked for Kazuki, but his ex-father-in-law was nowhere to be seen. Ten yards from the tide line, where Hugh, Setsuko and the twins had encamped, Hugh set down his gym bag and towel. He returned to the car, removed the surfboards and carrying one under each arm, walked back to his chosen spot.

  “No surf here,” said a boy of twelve or thirteen, sitting nearby with his mother, who was offering him a red pail and yellow shovel.

  “It comes up later in the day,” said Hugh with a wink.

  Hugh stuck the boards in by their tails. He spread out his beach towel and sat cross-legged, facing the barbeques and parking lot. He didn’t doubt that Kazuki would show up, just as he didn’t doubt that his boys would follow. Minutes passed. If Kazuki were late, he would call. Hugh opened his gym bag, dug through the gear for his cell phone, and finally dumped the contents on the towel. He couldn’t have been so careless as to leave the phone at home. No, must be in the car. It would take two minutes to run to the parking lot and get it. He rose, looked around. He considered whether he would take the surfboards with him or leave them by the blanket. He could walk backward: well, not backward, but he would turn from time to time to check on the boards. But if some swift-footed urchin grabbed one, well . . . This was the mistake he had made twelve years ago at Oceanside. He thought nothing would happen in his absence, and yet everything had happened. He had left his post. He looked toward the lifeguard stand. He stood up and called out.

  “Hey, lifeguard!”

  The lifeguard glanced at him. “Would you watch these boards for a minute? Just want to get my cell phone.”

  The lifeguard adjusted his sunglasses.

  Hugh jogged past the seniors, the barbecues, and the Mother’s Beach sign. As he reached the parking lot, “Paranoid Android” played softly. Someone was calling him. He reached his car in time to hear his recorded message, but by the time he opened the trunk and found the phone, the recording had stopped. The caller had hung up. As he checked his recent callers, a car pulled alongside him. Parked close. Bright red. Sports car. The call had been from an eight-hundred number. The sports car’s driver’s door opened. The door tapped the Volvo’s body. Hugh closed his trunk.

  “Sorry,” the woman said, stepping out between the cars, bending to check Hugh’s as if for damage. She turned and stepped toward him. “I try to be so careful.” He glanced at her, saw that she was pretty and radiant in her summer dress. She was wearing a light, flowery fragrance that carried memories within its scent. He dismissed her concern with a shake of his head, but she smiled at him with glistening lips and asked him a question. He peered into the green eyes, so fixed on his, so interested in him. But it did not happen that way. It did not happen that way. Forgive me. But it did not happen that way. Forgive me. But it did not—he stepped back from the woman. He couldn’t answer her question. He hadn’t heard her question. He strode back past the Mother’s Beach sign, the barbecues, the seniors. His feet sunk into the warm sa
nd. The letters shimmered in his mind’s eye like a heat wave.

  Sandy.

  Hugh envisioned the car coming toward him. The silver-framed license plate: CSNDRA, though he never addressed her, never thought of her—only the diminutive, Sandy, not Cassandra. Never Cassandra. He saw Sandy’s face through the windshield. He should turn, run back to his sons, break the promise to meet one more time before he left with his family for Japan. She was visiting a cousin in San Diego. Ten minutes, come on. He knew what she hoped. One more chance to convince him of what he had drunkenly suggested. Fool. But Sandy smiled at him and the smile contained the promise that once more he would touch that lovely neck, the pearls of her spine, the slender waist and long thighs. Hear her silly giggle, taste the spearmint on her tongue, answer her bad riddles, submit to her insatiable desire. Unearth what he had buried for Setsuko.

  Hugh walked down to the tide line, where he stopped before a weathered stanchion rising from the sand like a rotting arm in a horror movie. His arm snapped back. He smashed his fist into the inoffensive wood. His knuckles flecked with blood, Hugh screamed at nothing more substantial than the ghost of a memory. He could not summon her face, her frost-green eyes, her ever-parted lips, her aquiline nose and ears that stuck out tauntingly through the blonde strands. No, he could not recall—