“Back to town. We’ll run Hiroshi back home, and then…” She turned to him, suddenly brisk and attentive. “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten which dorm you’re in.”
“MacGregor House,” Hiroshi said. He had the strangest feeling he was standing outside the whole scene, watching it like a theater performance.
“That’s one of the new halls down by the river, isn’t it?” James asked.
“Yes.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding curtly.
They got in—Charlotte in the passenger seat, and Hiroshi in the back. For such a military-looking vehicle, it was laughably luxurious. The upholstery was pale creamy leather, every switch and button was gilded. He almost felt guilty about climbing in all covered with sweat and dust.
“How was the training session?” Charlotte asked.
James made a face as he set his GPS. “To tell you the truth, kind of frustrating.”
Then he slipped into gear and roared away. The engine was loud enough to be a military model; Hiroshi couldn’t catch a word the two of them said to each other in the front. Not that they said a great deal. James seemed to be the type who enjoyed a good sulk. Hiroshi didn’t care. It was good just to sit back and enjoy the ride instead of having to make any effort. His feet throbbed and his skin itched. He yearned for a shower, as hot as possible. In an American college dorm that wouldn’t be especially hot, alas.
For a moment he felt weak and worn-out. But when he looked at the woman sitting in the seat in front of him he felt strong again, invigorated by the connection he knew they had.
Staying power. That was what he needed now.
5
On Saturday morning Charlotte showed up at Brenda’s family home wearing her oldest clothes. The big move was about to get underway. They would start by moving the furniture Brenda had chosen to take with her and get it set up in her new apartment so that she would have somewhere to put the rest of her belongings, which were still in the student dorm. Brenda’s room was in Warren Towers B, one of the huge dorms on Commonwealth Avenue, and she had declared flat out she was finally fed up with the commotion of living in the giant tower.
It was cloudy for the first time that week but promised to be a warm day all the same. They were sure to break a sweat. Which would do them good, Charlotte told herself. She had spent all Friday working on an assignment that was due the following week and hadn’t managed to write so much as ten lines. She had been utterly unable to concentrate. Her thoughts were all over the place. She wondered whether she might be getting her period, but she wasn’t due yet—and she didn’t normally feel like this. Most of the time her only symptoms were a slight queasiness and the need to sit and watch a tearjerker on TV with a hot-water bottle on her tummy.
So her thoughts were all over the place because of James. Which was obvious, really. On Thursday night, for the first time since they had started dating, he had failed to get an erection, which had shaken him to the core. It had happened at the worst possible moment, too. After she had showered, the two of them had gone to bed and snuggled for a while, and all of a sudden Charlotte had felt such an urgent need to feel him inside her that she surprised even herself. And that’s when it happened. She had to say kind words and reassure him it didn’t matter, that that wasn’t why they were together—all the usual platitudes—and he must have felt all the while that she didn’t mean any of it, that she could have screamed in frustration.
On Friday she was hounded by fantasies of strange men. As she went shopping that morning, she noticed more shapely male buttocks in half an hour than she had all last year. As she stood in line at the checkout, she found herself wondering what would happen if a woman hit on a man. She would have followed any man home who tried to chat her up, but other than the usual timid glances, nothing happened at all.
“Hi, Charlotte,” said Brenda’s brother Ian. He was backing a rental truck carefully into the driveway. “Hire me!” said the bright red letters on the side.
She returned his greeting. Ian was three years older than Brenda, which had been an enormous age difference back in Delhi. Now he was working toward a degree in church music, though nobody would ever have guessed that from his tumble of carrot-colored curls and muscular build.
He climbed out, shook her hand, and said, “I thought you were bringing James.”
“James can’t come,” Charlotte admitted. “He…has to help his father.” That’s pretty much a textbook example of making excuses for others, she thought to herself as she said it.
Ian just raised his eyebrows and said, “Uh-huh.” He couldn’t stand James, never had been able to. Brenda had once told Charlotte he’d said that a berk with a billion dollars is still a berk.
Brenda came into view and flung her arms around Charlotte, thereby saving her from the unpleasant task of defending James’s behavior.
“Oh my goodness, I’m so excited!” she exclaimed. “Just think—when I shut the door behind you guys tonight, I will be all on my own for the very first time in my life! I cannot believe this!”
“Well,” Charlotte pointed out, “there’s always Susan.” Susan was the upstairs tenant.
“She’s not here this weekend. That’s what makes it so exciting…Hi, Gwen. Juanita. How sweet of you to come.” Brenda set off to welcome the new arrivals.
Gwen was a plump girl—to put it kindly—with nut-brown corkscrew curls and a breathless laugh. She was from Maine, and the very first thing she ever told a new acquaintance was her parents lived on the same street as Stephen King. She studied design with Brenda. Juanita was something like the anti-Gwen, a wiry, stern-looking woman who could have been typecast as a librarian. She was majoring in American literature and always seemed to be about to pull a checklist out of her bag and start ticking off items.
Brenda’s parents appeared next. They shook all the helping hands, and her father said, “This is a big day for us. I can finally order myself a pool table.”
It was his British way of trying to crack a joke. In fact, Brenda had told Charlotte, her parents were having a hard time coping with the empty nest now that both their children had left home.
Ian had opened the loading doors on the rental truck and had the gray packing blankets and webbing straps at the ready. He strode over to his sister and said, “Do you realize it’s going to be quite a an undertaking to get your wardrobe downstairs? We’ll need two strong guys, because there’s only room for two people on the staircase.”
Brenda looked alarmed. “What if I ask Dad—”
“Forget it,” Ian interrupted. “I don’t want a repeat of what happened when he slipped a disk last year.”
Charlotte was just fumbling for the words to explain that, at least in theory, they might have another man for the team, when he walked up as though on cue. Dr. Thomas Peter Wickersham was strolling across the lawn in shabby overalls, carrying a pair of work gloves in one hand, and wearing a Boston Red Sox cap on his head. He looked good, really good. Why had she turned down his dinner invitation? She could have kicked herself. Charlotte blinked in surprise. What was wrong with her? What was she thinking?
He spoke to Brenda’s father first. “Prof. Gilliam?”
“The very same,” he said.
“I thought on my way here that it was a campus address.” He held out his hand. “Thomas Wickersham. I teach paleoanthropology.”
“John Gilliam, medicine. This is my wife, Elizabeth…” Brenda’s father stopped short. “Excuse me, but are you here because my daughter is moving out?”
Wickersham looked around and pointed to Charlotte. “This young lady lured me here today,” he explained. “She told me there was excavation work to be done.”
Dr. Gilliam snorted with laughter. “That’s very nearly the case. I would be interested to hear your conclusions.”
Then Wickersham shook everyone else’s hand. When he came to Brenda, he said, “So you’
re the one who’s moving? I’m pleased to meet you.”
“I can’t believe it,” Brenda squealed. “Charley roped her prof in to help?”
“To tell the truth, I insisted,” Wickersham corrected her. “For entirely selfish reasons.”
“You volunteered for selfish reasons? You’ll have to explain.”
“I’m still in debt. I have to help out with at least another twelve moves before I’m in the clear—and it seemed best to get it over and done with before I’m too old.” He looked around. “I hope there’s enough stuff to fetch and carry. Moving a student’s gear sometimes only counts as half.”
“Don’t you worry,” Ian broke in. “We’ll start with the showstopper.”
“Excellent,” Wickersham said delightedly. “What’s it to be? A piano?”
Brenda broke into fits of giggles.
“It’s a wardrobe our grandfather built,” Ian explained. “The old man made it practically all of a piece. All we’ve been able to do is take the doors off the hinges. I have no idea how they ever got it up to the second floor.”
“Maybe they built the house around it?” Wickersham suggested.
“I might have thought so, except I remember us moving here.”
“So it’s a geometry puzzle.” Wickersham pulled on his gloves. “Fascinating. Let’s get to work!”
The two men heaved the massive heirloom down the stairs, one step at a time, and when they finally got it into the truck, they high-fived with brio. By the looks of it, they had become friends for life. Meanwhile, Charlotte, Gwen, and Brenda were carrying cardboard boxes full of clothes down to the truck, bags full of bed linens, lamps, Brenda’s guitar, and every imaginable kind of kitchen appliance. Juanita stood in the back loading it all neatly and efficiently so that not an inch of space went unused. And then an armchair. And then this. And then that. There seemed no end to the furniture and belongings Brenda had stowed away in the house.
“It’s all my fault for never be able to resist a bargain,” she admitted despairingly.
But somehow they finally got everything stowed and strapped down. Wickersham asked Brenda to ride along with him so that she could show him the way. Charlotte already knew the new address and would give Gwen and Juanita a ride. Ian drove the truck on his own. Brenda hugged and kissed her parents as though she never expected to see them again. Then the convoy set out.
Brenda had spent a long time looking at apartments before choosing. The new house was nothing special at first glance: a blue clapboard house on a quiet street, standing in a large orchard garden. Inside, though, it was a treasure trove, its airy, well-proportioned rooms full of lovingly crafted details. Some days you could smell the Atlantic from here. The upstairs tenant was a woman about ten years older than Brenda who worked as a programmer. She was on a temporary contract in Boston and due to return to Chicago in two years, after which Brenda could decide whether to rent the whole house.
Ian was already there. He had a key and was carrying things inside. Charlotte, Gwen, and Juanita joined in. Wickersham and Brenda turned up much later and were laughing merrily as they climbed out of the car. They seemed to have enjoyed their ride enormously. Charlotte felt a surge of envy, which was absurd, of course. Wickersham had wanted a date with her; what was he doing now having such a good time with her best friend? She had to close her eyes for a moment. What on earth was wrong with her? Was she going mad?
After he’d spent the whole week prevaricating and telling himself that Rasmussen had said there was no need, on Saturday morning Hiroshi got to work tidying up his room after all. Tinny music blared from his old clock radio as he wiped surfaces, straightened things on shelves, and ran the vacuum cleaner over everything, wondering all the while what Rasmussen wanted from him. Why did it have to be a face-to-face meeting? Wasn’t that usually the prelude to telling someone they were fired? That would certainly be one way to “renegotiate the contract,” as Rasmussen had phrased it over the phone.
But if that wasn’t it, then what was it all about? The Wizard’s Wand had been simple enough to invent. He had just wanted to know whether he could make money off something like that. And he had, although not vast sums. Even if Rasmussen thought it was good work, Hiroshi didn’t plan to spend his life inventing electronic gizmos for some corporation. He had bigger plans. Much bigger. So today’s meeting was hardly likely to lead anywhere. It would be interesting, however, to meet one of these legendary investors, who were regarded with reverence and awe at MIT. Half the students he knew dreamed of having a bright idea to pitch to an investor, and making their fortunes that way.
If only he had started cleaning earlier. By late morning his stomach was rumbling, since he had hardly eaten breakfast. He sat there, looking around the room in dismay. It stank of the cleaning fluid’s artificial lemon scent. It stank of dust. It stank of the overheating motor on his vacuum cleaner. And it looked worse than ever. He realized glumly there was no way to make up in one morning for what he had spent months—even years—neglecting. The dust bunnies he had chased out from under the bed! And the greasy streaks on every surface—wherever had it all come from? And why on earth did he own so much stuff? Somehow that seemed to be the root of all the other problems, since the dust liked to gather in the cracks and gaps in between, and he could never get the vacuum cleaner in there. Maybe there was some new invention just waiting to be discovered, to fix this problem? Could be worth thinking about.
How odd. Back when he had first flown to America, he had carried all his belongings in a single suitcase and a tote bag. And now? He shuddered at the thought of the day he would have to move out. All the boxes he would have to pack, cart around, and unpack.
He peered into the box of stuff to be thrown away. Not much there. The real trouble was there were so many things he didn’t need right at the moment but that he might one day. Until that day came they just lay around taking up space; in a room this small it didn’t matter where you tried to stow them, they were always in the way. He’d been hard at work all morning, had picked up practically everything he owned and put it somewhere else, and the room still looked just as it had when he started—like a junk shop. This was embarrassing. Here he was, with plans to change the world, and he couldn’t even clean his room.
He had left his door ajar and it suddenly swung open. Rodney stuck his head inside inquisitively. “What kind of unnatural practices are you indulging in here?”
Unnatural? Well, he wasn’t far off. Hiroshi felt worn ragged.
He decided to share his latest philosophical insights with Rodney. “The basic problem of cleaning is that cleanliness is an unattainable goal—all we can actually do is reduce the dirt to an acceptable level. On the other hand, that’s not so bad. In fact, there’s no such thing as dirt. Dirt is merely matter out of place.”
“That’s an original thought. But not yours.” Rodney stepped into the room carefully, picking his way between stacks of old magazines and dustpan sweepings. He shuddered visibly at the sight of all the mess. “Didn’t you say you were expecting a visitor today?”
“Why do you think I’m doing all this?” Hiroshi followed Rodney’s gaze, and then he shuddered as well. The gaming console he hardly ever used. All the magazines he kept, even though each one had two interesting articles at most, that he never got around to clipping out. The spare parts from various projects, the loose screws, the boxes full of wire…and ballpoint pens everywhere, mostly broken.
“Oh wow!” Rodney called. “Masters of the Universe! You had that in Japan, too?” He reached for the notebook, but Hiroshi was quicker—he shot out of his chair lightning fast and put his hand on it before Rodney could open the cover.
“Private?” Rodney guessed.
“Very,” Hiroshi assured him.
“I see.” Rodney nodded and tapped the picture on the cover. “I had one almost like that. Long time ago.” He looked around. “On the other hand, what
is a Master of the Universe? Master of All the Stuff—now that would be a real superhero.”
“Master of All the Stuff?” Hiroshi echoed.
Rodney grinned and turned to the door. “I think I’ll let you get on with it.” He scooted out.
Hiroshi looked down at his old notebook. That had been a stupid overreaction; Rodney wouldn’t have been able to read a word of it anyway, since it was all in Japanese. He opened it up and looked at the columns of hiragana, some hastily scribbled, some written with care. Master of All the Stuff. A silly joke, but for some reason it stuck in his mind. The trick was to be able to master stuff. At the moment his stuff had mastered him, made him clean it, look after it, haul it all over the place. He had bought all these things, but instead of them belonging to him, he belonged to them. And what nonsense it was to feel nostalgic about the days when he had crossed continents with nothing more than a suitcase. Whose fault was it he couldn’t do that today? His, and his alone. He could choose to change it anytime. He could become the master, the lord of all things, simply by deciding to be.
His moment had come.
He swept everything from his bed onto the floor. The space he had cleared was roughly enough for two suitcases. More than back then, but it would do. He waded through the sea of possessions cluttering his room and fished out what he would pack into those two cases. It wasn’t easy. He had to make some tough decisions, sometimes downright brutal.
At last, a small heap of clothes lay on the bed—just what was really worth wearing, and a few books. A few mementos, his computer of course, and one or two other things. Everything else could go. Without stopping for second thoughts, Hiroshi unrolled all the trash bags he had and shoved everything that still lay on his floor inside. He tied them tight. Since there weren’t enough of them, he used the cardboard boxes as well. Then he fetched the cart from the basement, hauled all the bags and boxes downstairs, and threw it all into the trash in the courtyard.
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