Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  Mother sighed. “I didn’t want you getting your hopes up. Let’s see if he answers first, I thought, see if he’s interested in you at all. I wanted to spare you the disappointment.” She lifted her hands in a helpless gesture and let them fall. “Whoever would have thought he would just turn up here?”

  There was a pause, a breathless, significant silence.

  Then Hiroshi’s father said, “Just think about it.” He looked at his watch. “Time for me to go.” He got up painfully, took a sheet of notepaper from his pocket, and gave it to Hiroshi’s mother. “That’s my telephone number at the hotel. Or I could come back again tomorrow.”

  Mother took the note but didn’t say anything. Father stood there for a moment, undecided—a big man who made the apartment look even smaller than it really was—then left. They could hear his shuffling, cumbersome footsteps out on the stairs long after he had closed the door behind him.

  It was a good thing the new school year began in April in Japan, but only after the summer holidays in the US, since it meant Hiroshi would have almost five months to get used to his new life.

  Mother didn’t cry as they said good-bye at the airport. All she said was, “It’s a new time in your life now.” In the end she had accepted the money Hiroshi’s father had offered her and given up the job at the embassy. The first thing she wanted to do was go on a long trip to see the cherry blossoms in Hokkaido, then take a ship to Okinawa. After that she might work for Mr. Inamoto in his office, where there would finally be a use for her knowledge of English. Time would tell.

  “Inamoto’s taking advantage of you,” Hiroshi scolded her.

  “I can’t just sit around the house,” his mother protested. “Especially not now that I’m all on my own.”

  Hiroshi’s flight left at a little after three in the afternoon. It was by far the longest journey he had ever made in his life. For the first time he got to feel what people meant when they talked about jet lag. When they landed in Atlanta, he was woken from a deep slumber and felt it must be the middle of the night. He had to wait there four hours, battling his lack of sleep, before he continued on a tiny little plane to Alexandria, Louisiana, a short-hop flight of barely two hours. When they landed there, it seemed to him that it must be morning, but instead night was just falling.

  His father was waiting for him beyond the customs gate and was visibly overjoyed. He talked on and on at Hiroshi, asking how the flight had been, whether there had been any trouble (well of course not; here he was, after all), how his mother would get on without him (he called her Miyu, which sounded strange to Hiroshi), and so on and so forth. When they left the terminal building, he nodded up at the huge neon sign on the roof and said, “I reckon they’re just boasting when they call it Alexandria International Airport. There’s not a single international flight starts from here. They don’t even fly anywhere near the country’s borders.”

  They climbed into a gigantic sedan, a Chevrolet about the size of a small boat. Hiroshi’s father drove very slowly and carefully. Hiroshi found this reassuring at first, but then he noticed his father flinch as another car cut in front of them. Then he understood that his father wasn’t actually a very good driver, no doubt because of the brain surgery. After that he didn’t find it quite so reassuring.

  They went to what looked like a really fancy restaurant, where Hiroshi was surprised to see the whole menu was nothing but hamburgers, absolutely enormous ones that were served on big plates, the top bun lifted off and set to one side. They helped themselves to ketchup, mayonnaise, and all kinds of other sauces he had never seen before, and then the idea was to put the whole thing together and eat it.

  “High school doesn’t start until fall,” his father explained. “You’ll have to have got used to all this by then.”

  “I know,” Hiroshi said, staring at his glass. He had ordered a medium cola, which turned out to mean more than half a liter. There was certainly a great deal to get used to here.

  His father lived in an unassuming but very roomy house in a quiet side street. The room he had gotten ready for Hiroshi was larger than the whole apartment in Tokyo; it was also the only room in the house that didn’t have a single piece of Japanese furniture, not a single silk painting or rice-paper screen. Instead, the walls were covered with photos of cowboys breaking in wild broncos, of urban skylines, and a night launch of the space shuttle. One of the shelves held a blue-green baseball, a mitt, a bat, and a few more things that must have had something to do with sport, but what exactly Hiroshi couldn’t begin to fathom.

  “This is all to help you settle in,” his father commented.

  What took the most getting used to was the unusually soft bed. Hiroshi had slept on a futon his entire life and felt like he was going to sink into this wallowing mattress. When midnight had come and gone and he still hadn’t got a wink of sleep, he climbed down onto the carpet with the bedcovers. There, he finally fell asleep, exhausted from the long flight.

  Over the next few days, whenever they were out and about, Hiroshi tried to work out just what it was that was so new and strange about the town. It wasn’t only the streets, which were so much wider than Tokyo’s narrow alleyways, and it wasn’t only that the people looked different. No, there was something else.

  Hiroshi took a while to figure it out. He knew that Alexandria, Louisiana, was a big American city, but as he went around town, he had the sense he was in an oversized campsite. It wasn’t that the buildings were on wheels (though he found out later there were some of those as well), but that they all looked terribly temporary, as though they had just been dropped down any which way in the landscape. As though nobody wanted to take the trouble to figure out where exactly the buildings should stand. As though a storm might come along at any moment that could sweep all the houses away and leave only the tarmacked streets behind so that the townsfolk could just build more houses.

  He was also baffled to see that most of the time there was nothing to show where one property ended and another began, that the lawns simply flowed into one another from neighbor to neighbor. It was an astonishing sight for someone who had grown up in the middle of Tokyo, where it wasn’t unusual to find that even if an apartment had a balcony, it would be easy to lean over the railing and touch the wall of the next building. Hiroshi also saw well-tended gardens with neat picket fences, but in the neighborhood where he and his father lived there was no such thing. Where he lived, people thought you had a garden if you had ploughed over the wild meadow grass and put down a lawn instead.

  “This is a good neighborhood,” his dad declared when Hiroshi told him one day about everything he had noticed. “Okay, so land is cheap. But our neighbors are fine people. I’d rather not spend my money on a house in some trendy district.”

  Dad didn’t have a job. He still spent a great deal of time with doctors, and he was allowed to park in the handicapped parking spots. Other than that, he mostly collected books about ancient Japan. He occasionally got called in to advise a museum or a gallery somewhere in Louisiana or even farther afield when they were preparing an exhibition about Japan, maybe of the famous “floating world” woodcuts or the picture scrolls from the Heian period, or paintings from the Muromachi period. He kept the posters and catalogs for all the exhibitions he had been involved in and was always proud to point out when he was thanked by name.

  He asked Hiroshi to help him work on his rudimentary knowledge of Japanese script. Many evenings they would sit together late into the night, hard at work with expensive brushes and vast sheets of paper. Hiroshi had never written with a brush before in his life, just with ballpoint pens like everybody else. When they worked together like this, Hiroshi noticed his father had trouble retaining new information, recognizing patterns, and learning unfamiliar movements. There was no other way to say it: Dad was clumsy. Awkward. But he was very involved with Hiroshi. He was interested in him in a way no Japanese father Hiroshi had ever seen or heard of
was interested in his son. It was so unusual and such a good feeling that Hiroshi never tired of their evenings together.

  All the same Hiroshi realized he was hardly a good teacher. He himself didn’t understand many of the things his father wanted to know. When should they use kanji script, and when hiragana, and when katakana? Why write this word this way but not that one? He didn’t know either; that was just the way it was. Force of habit. As soon as you tried to make a rule to explain it, you were guaranteed to run across an exception the next moment.

  Hiroshi found the Roman alphabet to be much more logical. Asian writing was all about simplifying pictures down to their barest lines to stand for words, so that one picture might have nothing at all to do with the next, and they were so abstract that there was no hope of recognizing what they were supposed to be. By comparison, the Western method of building a word up from simple individual parts seemed a much better way of going about things.

  He liked the way computers represented information even more. They could get by with just two states, which didn’t even require any particular symbols. It could be 1 and 0, or on and off, or high and low—it made no difference. Not only was it the most basic system imaginable, but it had also proven itself to be the most powerful, since it could be used to represent absolutely everything—not just words, but sounds, images, films, and so on.

  Hiroshi gradually got to know the neighbors on their street. Dad practically burst with joy every time he got to introduce him, saying, “This is my son.” The funniest part was how hard he tried not to look as though he was bursting with joy—and how badly he failed.

  One evening, as they were sitting there with their brushes, Hiroshi asked him why he had chosen this town in particular. What did Alexandria, Louisiana, have that other cities didn’t?

  Dad nodded thoughtfully and set the brush carefully aside. He had to think for a while before he answered. “After my operation,” he began at last, “I wasn’t good for much of anything. My dad called me ‘the cauliflower’ and the doctors had pretty much given up on me.” He folded his hands in his lap and stared at a spot in the middle of the tabletop. “But there was one therapist who never gave up on me. She kept on coming. Day in, day out for a long, long time, until finally I began to show one or two signs of progress.”

  Hiroshi looked at him, his brush hanging motionless in his hand. “What kind of progress?”

  “Progress like being able to say a word so that people could understand it, like closing my fingers around an object if she put it into the palm of my hand. That kind of progress.”

  “Oh,” Hiroshi said, shocked.

  Dad gave a crooked grin. “Actually, I only know that because she told me later. It took a while for my memory to come back, but bit by bit I put my life back together, thanks to her help. And just when I thought maybe I could get back on my feet, she came along and told me she was getting married and moving away and that she was all kinds of sorry.”

  “Oh,” Hiroshi said again. “And then what?”

  “I said, ‘So where are you moving to?’ ‘Alexandria,’ she said. ‘That’s where my fiancé works.’ ‘Good,’ I said, ‘then I’m moving to Alexandria, too.’ ” He looked at Hiroshi and shrugged. “And that’s why I’m here.”

  “But you must have been in pretty good shape if you could move to a new city like that,” Hiroshi said.

  “Oh no. I still needed nursing during my first two years here, and then a housekeeper for the next two years after that before I could live like this.” He sighed, and it was a sound of deep contentment. “But it was the best thing I could have done. I’m so glad I got away from my family.”

  Hiroshi nodded and shuddered at the same time. “My mother told me what happened back then. The way your father…” And then he stopped speaking. For the first time he realized that old man had been his other grandfather.

  He really didn’t have much luck with grandparents.

  “They’re still dreadful people, the ones who are left,” his father said. “I see them as little as I can. They think my brains aren’t right, but let me tell you: they’re the ones with no brains. My brothers and sisters have more money than they could ever spend in a lifetime, but whenever I’m visiting they spend the whole darn time complaining. There’s always some company trying to pull a fast one on them, taking away their market, chipping away at their share price or I don’t know what. The way they yell and holler and carry on, you’d think they were at war. But they’re billionaires, all of them. Even if they’ve never had a happy day in their lives.”

  At that moment Hiroshi remembered his great idea. It was difficult to think of the people his dad was describing as his uncles and aunts—he’d never met them in his life—but from what he heard, his family sounded terribly afraid of losing their money someday.

  Hiroshi spent a long time thinking about this. He finally came to the conclusion that they were afraid because there were so many poor people in the world. If everybody was rich, and if being rich was just the way things were, nobody would have any reason to worry about losing their wealth—they wouldn’t even be able to imagine what that might mean. Being rich would be like breathing. There’s enough air in the world for everybody to be able to breathe for a lifetime. Which is why most people never worry that there might not be enough air one day. If he managed to make everybody in the world rich, then all the fear and worry over money would vanish, along with all the unpleasant things that happened because of those fears.

  Hiroshi understood English pretty well, in no small part because of all the time he had spent at the English-language movie theater and watching DVDs of American films. But his pronunciation was still awful. When his dad noticed Hiroshi hadn’t made any improvements after a month, he declared, “We’ve gotta do something about this.”

  “I’ll learn,” Hiroshi objected. “Just give it time.”

  “If we give it time,” his dad replied, “then your bad habits will just take root. I’m not going to let you go through life mangling every word you speak.”

  And so he dragged Hiroshi along to see the therapist who had brought him back to the land of the living. Her name was Sylvie, and she didn’t look like half the miracle worker that his father had said she was. In fact, she was a fat little woman with washed-out brown hair and a great big hook nose. At first, she was just as flat-out against his father’s idea as Hiroshi was himself. That wasn’t her field of work, she said.

  “Well, why don’t you just go for a change of pace, Sylvie?” his father said, suddenly charming in a way Hiroshi wasn’t used to.

  So Hiroshi began to visit her four times a week and spent three-quarters of an hour—although it always seemed much, much longer than that—repeating nonsense syllables, letting her correct even the tiniest mispronunciation, singing English sentences out loud, coughing and gargling words in his throat, and shouting them at the top of his voice. It was astonishingly hard work, but he found the progress he made was just as astonishing. One day that summer he was at the city library and a librarian there said, “I bet you’re from Seattle or somewhere near there. I’ve got an ear for that kind of thing.”

  “I’m from Seattle,” Sylvie declared with a grin when he told her about it. “I guess that means we can stop now.”

  Dad wanted to know what he had told the librarian in reply.

  “I almost said yes,” he admitted, “but then I couldn’t bring myself to say it.”

  “That’s good,” said Dad. “You don’t need to deny your roots.”

  When Hiroshi finally started high school, he saw his father had been right to insist on a clear accent. Americans seemed to be a colorful mix of every nation in the world—although nearly half of the kids at his school were white, there were just as many who were black or Asian so that Hiroshi didn’t stand out a bit. Because pretty nearly everybody looked different, the teasing and name-calling was instead based on the way they
spoke. The ones who suffered most were the children from those Mexican immigrant families whose English was rudimentary.

  The classes themselves weren’t particularly hard, and that was putting it mildly. In fact, Hiroshi would have had to make a conscious effort to get a bad grade. So, from the very start he ranked among the best students. The only subject where he was below average was sports. First, because he had never enjoyed sports, and second, because he was still smaller and weaker than most of the other boys. Sure, he was tough, but he wasn’t strong. He ran slower than the others, he was always the first to knock the bar off on the high jump, and he never even bothered to wonder whether he would be picked for the football team. None of that mattered, however, since Hiroshi Kato turned out to be the best baseball catcher Alexandria High School had ever had. He caught every single ball thrown by every single pitcher during the whole four years he was there, and he never dropped a catch.

  Hiroshi had always had good reflexes, and of course his father had spent hours on end throwing him balls that summer. American dads did that sort of thing with their sons. But the balls his dad threw were really no challenge, and they certainly didn’t count as training. No, what nobody at school ever found out was that Hiroshi had cobbled together a computer-guided pitching machine that could throw him two hundred balls in a row at every conceivable curve and speed. He practiced and practiced with the machine until he could tell instantly how any ball would fly. By the end of the summer, he could run through the stock of balls five times in an evening and not let a single one through to the net behind him.

  However, he never got to be any good at the moments of direct physical confrontation, such as when he had to block home plate. And he was always too slow to react when there was a rundown to tag. And when it was his turn to run, he couldn’t even make first base. So although the coach was full of praise for Hiroshi, he always tagged on a stern warning that it was no good harboring dreams of going professional. Hiroshi earnestly reassured him there was nothing he wanted to do less.