I was staring from a plane window. Not hung in the grip of a giant crow, dangled above a void.
A smiling flight attendant asked if I wanted chicken or fish.
“Chicken, please.”
I peeled back the foil cover and ate. The clarity of each forkful. Meat to mouth. Chew. It was blissfully terrible. Real. The teriyaki sauce tasted like it had been painted on with a brush used to creosote a garden fence.
I said, “My father used to creosote the fence.”
The woman sitting beside me said, “Ben.”
“At the end of summer.”
“Do you want tea, Ben?”
“He used to let me prise the lid off the tin.”
The woman beside me took the tea from the flight attendant. She put the cup on my plastic tray. I ripped open a pack of sugar and poured, watching the granules melt into liquid. Then I asked the woman next to me if I could have her sugar because I knew she drank her tea without a sweetener.
She put her hand on my forearm. She was crying. It seemed perfectly ordinary that she was sat in the seat next to me. Lydia. I had two sugars, and she had none.
四十三
SHE SAID UFOS would come from the sky and rescue him. There would be ships of light riding down the stars.
She promised.
The planet of eternal life.
Koji sat on his apartment roof for two nights. Sleeping in the day and waking at dusk to follow the few suns bright enough to outshine the Tokyo glare. When he was a boy he watched lumps of ferric rock streak above the rice paddies. And his grandmother would tell him the story of Kaguya-hime. The moon princess. The beauty too precious for earth.
He watched the blue sky flood the dark.
How the moon sank like a white stone.
He felt the city wake on his skin. Rumblings of the first trains, the empty carriages. Then the carriages filling, crowding. All those bodies pressed into a single mass. He pictured the silent commuters moving without the train. A rectangular puzzle of heads and limbs hovered above the tracks.
Her breath on his palm.
The soft blonde hair.
He watched the crows, gliding, swirling the thermals on a wing beat. He saw the purple flash of their shiny feathers.
If he died here they might take his body into the sky.
But there was no time for that, and the crows spiralled down to alight in the bare branches of the cherry trees in the car park.
While he was hiding on the rooftop, a demolition team had bored holes into the concrete pillars of the foundations. Men carrying reams of cables and detonators. Priming the lower floors with explosives.
All morning he listened to the engineers talk to each other through megaphones. Echoes counting minutes, seconds.
Then it went very quiet, and he heard a siren.
Crows took flight from the trees, and although Koji was lying on hard concrete, when the building dropped away it seemed as if the whole world was falling, and it was he who was rising.
跋
WE TREK THE bare hills behind San Diego, following signposted trails across broken mantle, paths along creeks that chatter with streams. We head out at dusk, when the sun has abated and the air has cooled to a pleasant walking climate.
Lydia still had my old hiking boots in a box at the back of her garage. It was the first thing we did, hike a rocky peak. After she walked me off a plane from Japan, hand on my elbow, guiding me through Los Angeles airport like the fragile infirm I was.
I am.
Driving along the Pacific Highway.
Reassembling the world.
The fragments.
My ex-wife at the wheel, that savage beauty in her windblown hair, talking.
Explaining.
How she’d packed her bag within minutes of receiving the call from Japan. That a man from the US consulate had met her at Narita airport and told her what she already knew about Mazzy. About me. She’d followed the man through an express customs channel, past the barriers, to where drivers held up name cards and parents hugged their returning children.
From the back seat of a car she watched the scenery emerge, and then fade. Thickets of bamboo. Retail outlets and factories. Hard to see what was outside the window when all she could think of was Mazzy.
This much I know.
That Yamada had called me when I was on the way back from Nikko. News about a body in the woods at the foot of Mount Fuji. A blonde girl. Slight and pretty. I answered the phone, I’m told. Spoke with him and confirmed that I understood. That Mazzy was missing. An hour later I got off the train, I presume, and erased my identity, a capital city of its population.
My daughter.
Later that afternoon Yamada picked me up from Ikebukuro station. Alone. A train guard pulled me off a carriage after passengers reported a man sitting on the floor and screaming. They dragged me into an office, took my phone and rang Yamada, the last name in my call history. I spoke to him, he said, with a clinical detachment. He said I was organised and calm. Practical. That I communicated with people at the embassy and the police station.
I have no memory of this, just his word.
He said I was compos mentis when we stood in a sterile morgue lit by sodium bulbs. That I spoke with Larissa’s father, and from a photo posted on his daughter’s Facebook page of a themed Hello Kitty room in a love hotel, we’d deduced where our children were and sent in the police to kick down a door.
The body on the table in the morgue, pale under the strip lighting, was a Lithuanian girl who worked in a hostess bar.
Larissa was found on the bed, and Mazzy on the bathroom floor. The MDMA in their bloodstream was tainted with baking soda. The door was locked from the inside, yet both the girls had been arranged into the recovery position. This, the police couldn’t explain.
But it had saved their lives.
Not until I was zipping along the highway to San Diego, all that sky and sea on the windscreen, the tears streaming down Lydia’s cheeks, did I fully comprehend where I was.
Who and when.
That the hand in mine was Mazzy’s.
I told Lydia to pull over. I opened the door and jumped out. Father and daughter stood and hugged on the edge of the road, buffeted by the wind of passing cars. Over and over she said she was sorry and I cradled her head and apologised and held her tight as the trucks hammered along the interstate.
That I could have lived my life without this feeling. To hold Mazzy this close. My precious baby. The little girl I carried and fed. The toddler on my shoulders who marched me around the garden and sang nursery rhymes and laughed and cried and slept in my arms.
I am the man she has brought back from the void.
The father resurrected by his daughter.
**
Lydia has arranged for me to stay with her colleague, Dr Gayle, a combat veteran with electric blue eyes and silver hair. A man with a single ear and a burn scar melting down his neck. He told me to call him Gayle. I have a room in his converted barn, the kind of building you might still see on the edge of a prairie, hay piled in the loft like gold.
Rather than sitting on the psychiatrist’s couch, I’m clearing a fire break for his insurance company, trimming back the scree.
“Grounding,” he calls the therapy. “A smart cut on your hand sure proves the now.”
He has thick, calloused palms, and together we chop wood on the hillside. For the last week I’ve woken at sunrise and swung an axe. When Gayle rests from chopping wood he swigs water from a bottle clipped to his belt. On the first day I asked if his canteen was US army issue and he laughed and told me it was on sale at Walmart.
He also told me about Agatha Christie. How she vanished from her house for eleven days before turning up in a hotel with no recollection of where she’d been.
“She’d suffered a fugue.”
“And she was fine?”
“In perfect physical health. Yet a week and a half was missing from her mind.”
Gayle counsels soldiers with post traumatic stress disorder. Teenage boys who picked their flung limbs from tree branches. Men who battle in dreams of war that appear more real than the bed they wake.
“The kids come back from service, a brotherhood of fear and violence in deserts and mountains, squalid mud towns with mines in the alleyways, and then sit alone in a room.”
We work in the mornings and talk in the afternoons. Occasionally he’ll stop and rest, lean on the axe handle and speak.
“You thought she was gone.”
He asks me to question him. Not to eschew his prognosis with silence.
“That you’d lost her.”
From the moment on the train, when Yamada had rung me about a body, my missing daughter, I’d invented a new reality.
“Your brain redesigned perception. You functioned. Walked and talked. But reprogrammed the world.”
Gayle talks about a college student in New York. A girl in a sports bra and running shorts, presumed kidnapped or murdered, who turned up swimming in the Hudson. Three weeks of her life absent, gone. There was video footage of her buying food in a convenience store, talking with the clerk.
“Total amnesia.”
“But I have a memory.”
Gayle unscrews his canteen and passes it over. He watches me drink, chewing on a blade of grass like a farmhand.
“I interviewed a vet who’d been a truck driver in Baghdad. Lost a friend in an ambush on his convoy. Carried the guilt from that day on because he didn’t get out of his rig and fire the Glock he had in his glove box. Last year he sets out for DC to visit a dying friend. Four days later he wakes up in the back of his car. In Denver. Dehydrated and scared. Convinced he’d just been driving around a desert in Iraq, lost in a sandstorm.”
I pass Gayle the water and wipe my forehead.
“Do I know what was real?”
“Maybe you ran. Maybe you sat gibbering on a park bench.”
“Yamada said my bike was missing.”
“And you left the note on Mazzy’s door.”
I’d been back to my apartment. This was a fact. That I’d walked into an empty room. And if I did scan the rooftops, the teeming streets, I’d ignored the crowds and constructed a city absent of others, my daughter included, because I didn’t have the power to lose her.
“Again.”
“A fugue in defence.”
We cut more wood.
“Armour.”
**
We clear a ring of scrub around the barn, tramping noisily to shoo away the rattlers. Gayle works in total focus, as if each saw stroke or axe fall were his last. Sweating, but clear-headed, I tell him that I feel good. Centred is the word I use. Whatever I mean by this. He says that a bushfire in the next valley would burn down his house.
After the labour we sit on the porch and drink iced tea. And talk some more. He tells me what Yamada told him, that even when Mazzy had been let out of hospital, I was walking a vacuum.
“You sat with her, but didn’t accept she was there.”
We got to the love hotel minutes after the police had smashed down the door. I rode with Mazzy in the ambulance, held her hand. I’m told.
“Nothing came up on your MRI scan.” Gayle scans the neurologist’s report, the graphs and charts. “No lesions or brain damage.”
I pour him another iced tea.
“But this is normal for psychogenic amnesia.”
“It felt as real as this.” I gesture at the sky, cars glinting on the highway. “The clink of ice cubes in your drink.”
He looks at the landscape. Californian born, eyes the colour of the sea. Fancifully, I picture his grandfather swinging a pick, panning a muddy river.
“It is unusual,” he admits. “The clarity of recall.”
Gayle asks me about the days leading up to Nikko. He explains that fugue states are often primed by the reappearance of persons or events from a past trauma, and I tell him everything. What I can. About Kozue. The hitch-hike and the affair. He makes notes as I talk, his pencil scratching away.
“You have any photos?”
“Of Kozue?”
“Kozue.”
I don’t. He makes more notes, and I tell him to stop writing. I go into the barn and open my suitcase. I take out the bundle of paper and carry it onto the deck.
“She made this.”
He unwraps the gift. Carefully. The cup looks very delicate in his cracked palms, the black lacquer finish, the gold leaf pattern. “It’s exquisite.” He turns it once, and then passes it back.
Kozue had fetched the cup down from a shelf in her studio and wrapped it in rice paper. She made me promise to never let anyone else drink from it.
“You think I invented this woman?”
He shakes his head. I hold the cup in two hands. I can feel the weight of her touch in the rim. Her fingers shaping the circle. I pour some iced tea from my glass into the cup, and drink, before wrapping it back into the paper.
Gayle studies my every move, and I tell him I had to know what happened to her.
“That I hadn’t fucked that up too.”
He says I’m wrong.
“What time’s your daughter coming over?”
**
Mazzy eats with me at night. She bought me a new pair of hiking boots a few days ago, knocking on the kitchen window.
Mazzy.
“It’ll be dark in an hour.”
It seemed remarkable.
“You still want to go.”
Standing there with the dangling boots.
“Mom said we have to take a stick, in case of mountain lions.”
Lydia drives her up around sunset. Sometimes we chat with Gayle. The four of us talking it out. Sympathy and anger. Not blame. I hold Lydia in high reverence, not that I ever didn’t, for listening to my vain pursuit of Kozue, the woman I’d found, and lost, when I was missing her.
And my precious Mazzy. Patient with her dysfunctional parents. Her father. Then talking about her anger, the emotion flowing from her like an exorcism. How she followed me from the apartment into Roppongi, and then saw me chasing Yuki up the street in Shibuya.
I explained, I think. And she understood.
I hope.
Gayle controls the three of us like a conductor. He understands, and skilfully ignores, my awarenesses of his methods. He contends that I sought out Kozue because the daughter was beyond her father. Because I was alone. That the Yokohama gig and the ecstasy was Mazzy’s way of punishing me, and perhaps herself, for not showing affection, love.
Although I know the limits of counselling, the coffee table chat with strategic words, the meetings are medicine. Therapy. We’ve sat and defined the fact and fiction of our family dynamics, the denial and delusion. Moreover, the discussions have realigned and confirmed my own consciousness. Not a Descartes self-hood of knowledge and understanding, but an awareness of identity from sensation and perception. The startling now. My beloved daughter, right there.
After we talk and hike, we eat. I chop and wash vegetables, prepare salads. Pleasure in arranging food on the plate. Juice bursting from a ripe tomato. Touchable, visceral life. I went fishing with Lydia’s brother at the weekend. In the surf on the edge of the booming Pacific. I watched the breaking waves, how the water folds and shatters, rebuilds.
Sometimes I think of Tokyo, gathering fragments, clips of reality hidden within the fugue. Sitting in the car with Yamada and watching a stop light change to green. Signing a form in the police station. Another father in another country. What poor man got news of his baby girl.
I’m afraid of falling into myself, of losing it all, that I might wake up in an empty city. So I talk to Gayl
e or drive into town. I walk the domed shopping malls and buy peppers and aubergines. Aspire to an ordinary man doing the groceries. I drink coffee and eat doughnuts, pick up magazines and read the gossip columns.
It wasn’t until yesterday, when I was strolling with Gayle along the boardwalk in Del Mar, eating ice cream and watching the great Pacific in riffled motion, that I actually cried. We sat down on a bench beneath a rocky bluff, and I sobbed like a little boy. Embarrassed to be in tears before a fellow professional, a grown man. I put my head in my hands as he leant a solid palm to my shoulder, an encouragement.
**
We’ve cut and sawn for a week. The blisters on my hand have sealed over, the muscles in my arms and back taut.
I stand on the rickety porch watching toy figures paragliding in the next valley, fluorescent chutes riding the thermals. Flyers with faith in their equipment, the laws of nature. I see the first pale stars, high above the white peaks. Distance. I think about the cults I’ve studied, the groups of people gathered around fantastic beliefs. Comfort in the void. Whatever the fairy tale hatched to save them from the cold, they have each other.
Gayle comes out from the barn and surveys the pile of chopped brush. “I bet we cleared an acre already.” He collects his notes from the table and closes the folder. “We’ll have to call up for a permit to burn it though.”
I follow him back inside to the kitchen. He stands in the doorway to his study, the eclectic library arranged onto walls of pine shelving. He pulls down books and reads the jacket notes. Celtic fables and Greek mythology. Psychology texts. Series of journals on forestry and fishing. Thrillers and old westerns. Each night he thumbs through them while I rinse the glasses, as if an embedded, familial routine.
“Thing is, I can’t tell you half of what happens in this story.” He holds a dog-eared paperback with a cowboy on the cover. “But if I turn to any page, I know the scene. The exact feeling.”
He watches me slotting cutlery in the rack, nodding.
He returns the paperback and runs his finger along spines on another shelf.
I carry on with the dishes. Rainbow suds and gleaming plates. The precise heft and weight of each knife and fork, and the sudden enormity of my own presence.
Tokyo Page 18