by Carrie Asai
I woke up around six and lay in bed, next to Hiro, staring at the ceiling. I could hear the sounds of the highway out the window. I wondered where we were in San Diego. I wondered if Detective Wachter was still on the job and if he was, would he help me out?
Hiro finally woke up. He propped himself on his elbow and smiled at me, the coy way the boys do in movies the morning after they’ve slept next to the girl of their dreams. I felt acutely like I was in a scene at that moment—that this moment had nothing really to do with me.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hi,” I said.
He kissed me. I blinked. I felt nearly ready to cry. I should have been feeling something delicious and wonderful, but I felt hollow and cold. He grabbed for me, but I backed away.
“How about some morning stretches?” I asked.
He sat up. “Okay,” he said slowly.
Hiro led a peaceful set of tai-chi-type movements. It was nice, actually. Quite therapeutic to slowly circle my hands in the grasp-sparrow’s-tail and push-and-press-forward moves. Hiro was still a good teacher.
When we finished, I sat back down on the bed, eager to do some more training. My body felt rickety and sluggish, but the stretches had really reawakened my desire. I wanted to kick and jab and move.
“So,” I said. “I guess I am still interested in training.”
“That’s good,” Hiro said, his eyes sparkling. “So you still want a sensei, eh?”
“Maybe,” I said, although I wasn’t sure if I wanted it to be Hiro. “Do you have the next mission for me?”
“Mission?” he asked, surprised.
“Yeah. You know…be invisible, accept death, harness your brainpower. That stuff.”
“I don’t have any other missions for you,” Hiro said quietly.
“What?” I said.
He sat down next to me. “You’ve learned everything you can from me. In my opinion, your journey is nearly complete. Now you know your enemy.”
“I do?” I said. And then I realized—I did.
“Huh,” I said.
“You’re free,” Hiro said. “In fact, I should be learning from you.” He looked at me with such desire. I bit my lip. Hiro had just told me, flat out, that I was better than he was. I wondered if in many ways I had been attracted to Hiro because he was my teacher, because he was wiser than I was. But now…who was Hiro? Who was he in relation to me? Was I now better than he was? End of story? Was that enough for me?
It wasn’t.
Hiro bent down and reached for the edge of my T-shirt, wrapping his arms around my waist. He drew me closer into him. I could still smell the ocean in his hair.
He started kissing my neck. It felt strange and slippery. His hands slid up under my T-shirt. His legs gripped me closer to him.
I pushed him away.
Hiro looked up. “What’s the matter? Don’t you want…?”
I couldn’t answer. How could I explain this?
“I…,” I started. Then I lowered my eyes and shook my head.
Hiro searched for a clue in my face, and then suddenly he realized. “I see,” he said. “Oh.” His voice sounded choked.
I wished there were words to express how I was feeling, but I was so confused. We looked at each other for a while, not speaking. Finally my eyes dropped to the ground. I couldn’t get the spark back. As hard as I tried, as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t.
“I just don’t know,” I mumbled.
“I don’t understand,” Hiro said. “Why did you want to…on the sub?”
“I’m not sure, okay?” I said, frustrated. “Maybe it was a mistake.”
“Oh,” Hiro said sharply. “A mistake. I see. I’m just a mistake to you.”
“No…,” I said, still not looking at him. “That’s not what I mean. But…I don’t know if I want to do this.”
“Well, what do you want?”
That was a good question.
“All I know is that I don’t want this,” I said, my voice low and dead.
Hiro sighed loudly and turned away.
I flopped back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. I heard Hiro rustling around in his bag. Finally he turned back to me. I was shocked to see that his face looked red and glossy—as if he’d been crying.
“There are many things I’ve given up for you,” he said. He almost sounded angry.
“Look, I’m sorry….”
“You don’t even realize,” he said. His tone of voice turned from anger to hopelessness. “The things I’ve done…. Heaven, it’s not all good. I’m not all good.”
“Come on,” I said, sitting up. “That’s ridiculous. You’ve gotten away from that. That’s why you’ve come here. You told me so last night! Even if we can’t be together in the way you want, you’ve still escaped from…from that over there in Japan. Right? I mean, even if we can’t be…you know…like that with each other, it still doesn’t mean this has all been for nothing.”
Hiro sighed loudly. We didn’t speak again for a while.
“I still want to help you,” he said softly. “I want to help you find your mother.”
“Thanks,” I said, although I wasn’t sure if I wanted his help.
Hiro groaned, sensing my hesitation. “I’m going out for a little while,” he said.
And before I could say anything, he slammed the door.
I lay back on my pillow and bit the edge of my hand. Then I stared out the window at the happy, warm San Diego sun and tried to think of nothing. I stared at it for so long that I started to get big, blinding spots in front of my eyes.
9
I decided to call Detective Wachter for help with my mother. He’d been willing to assist me when I was in jail. It was worth a shot to ask him for support in this crazy situation. I looked up the number for the San Diego police station in the phone book and punched in the digits.
“Heaven Kogo,” he said when he picked up the phone. “I had a feeling you’d be back. That uncle of yours couldn’t hold you for long, huh?”
I prayed he wouldn’t ask any questions, and he didn’t. I explained about my mother. “Do you think there’s any way that I could track her down?”
“Hmmm,” Wachter said. “Do you know who your father is?”
“Well, no,” I said. “Not my birth father.”
There was a long pause. Finally he spoke again. “I know someone at UC San Diego who’s working on something like this. He uses his research more for antiterrorism reasons, but he does a lot of stuff with the police and could probably run a couple of tests on you. Let me call him and see when he’s available.”
“Great,” I said, wondering what these “tests” would be.
We arranged that he would pick me up in his car about three hours later. Hiro reappeared in the hotel room, avoiding my eyes, still looking miserable. I wondered how in the world we were going to stay in the same room together after this. I told him about Detective Wachter and that I’d be starting the investigation.
Immediately he said, “I want to go with you.”
“No, really, you don’t have to,” I argued. I wanted to do this by myself.
“No…I want to,” Hiro said. He looked up at me imploringly. “Please.”
“Fine,” I growled, annoyed. I didn’t know why I was so upset with Hiro. After all, without him, I wouldn’t even have been in San Diego on this great search for my mother. Still, I found myself wanting to leave him behind. I was scared that if I trusted him for too long, he’d only end up disappointing me.
I waited at the curb. Hiro and I stood together but with a space between us. Detective Wachter pulled up and honked his horn. I ran to get in the front seat. Hiro slumped in the back.
“You’re looking a little thin,” he said.
“I was at a spa for a week,” I told him. “Strict diet. Then I got seasick. Don’t ask.”
I gave him a once-over. Tall, square jaw, sorta Dick Tracy–like. He wore a Lacoste shirt and Dockers pants. Sort of a mix between a cop and a soccer dad.
“You look exactly the same,” I told him. Hiro sat in the back, silent. He was still feeling awkward about our conversation in the hotel room.
We drove to a squat-looking lab building of the UCSD campus. Inside, I sniffed. “It smells like school,” I said. “It’s funny—whatever country you’re in, school smells the same.”
While Detective Wachter pressed on ahead of me, Hiro didn’t leave my side. We passed a lot of identical-looking classrooms: each of them had a blackboard, a desk, tables, and lab equipment. I peeked into one room and saw various animals in cages. In another there was a guy with electrodes on his head, walking on a treadmill.
“Lots of testing done here,” Wachter said.
I shot a look at Hiro. I could tell he was still hurt and annoyed. One part of me wanted to take his hand and reassure him that things would be fine. But another part of me didn’t.
We came to a doorway; through it I could see a slew of cameras, computers, printouts, papers, and giant screens. A man sitting at one of the computers with some weird goggles on his eyes didn’t look up as we came in. Finally Wachter cleared his throat. The guy ripped the goggles off his face, causing some of his hair to stand up haphazardly from his skull. He smiled crookedly at us. One eye was slightly bigger than the other. He looked like he could have stepped off the set of The X Files.
“Heaven, Hiro, this is Professor Clarkson,” Wachter said.
The professor stuck out his hand. He studied my face very carefully. “Interesting,” he said.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he replied, shaking his head quickly. He looked at me again, his eyes widening. “You have an interesting face, that’s all.”
I felt like a lab rat. Hiro gave me a small smile for support.
“She’s searching for her birth mother,” Wachter explained. “There is evidence that her mother is in San Diego and gave birth in the area. Is that right, Heaven?”
“I think,” I said.
“Okay, this is what we’re going to do,” Clarkson said, bustling around, moving papers from one table to another. He finally found what he was looking for: a wand-shaped camera.
“There is a technique that has been used for quite some time now, called biometrics. It’s a method of scanning parts of the body in order to ‘identify’ you. You might remember the facial recognition systems used at the Super Bowl in 2001?”
I shrugged, not knowing too much about football. And 2001 seemed about twenty million years ago.
“That’s right,” Hiro said. “Video cameras were scanning and analyzing every face that went through the gates to go to the game.”
“Yes,” Clarkson said. “Instantly those hundreds of thousands of people who went through the gates were put into the facial recognition system. This is how it works: Your face is scanned into a digital camera and the distances between certain parts of your face, like your eyes, nose, and mouth, are computed. If there is a face already stored in the system that matches, the computer calls it up.”
I nodded. This sounded like something from Star Trek or Terminator.
“So that’s the first thing we’ll do,” Clarkson said. “It’s possible that your mother is not in our system, and this technology isn’t perfect yet, so we might find matches that aren’t her. But we have done a lot of secret scanning in the San Diego area—in banks, in sports arenas, et cetera—so many people are in our database.”
“Cool,” I said.
“Professor Clarkson works with the police quite often,” Wachter said behind me. “This device has really been put into place to prevent terrorism, and it’s helped us catch a fair number of criminals.”
“Hopefully my mother’s not a criminal,” I said, making a joke. No one laughed.
Clarkson had me stand about two feet in front of some type of digitized instrument. He stared into it for a long time. I heard a lot of weird beeps coming from it.
“What’s it doing?” I asked.
“Try to stay still,” he said. “It’s measuring you.”
Next Clarkson asked for a small sample of my hair. “We can use this to match your DNA with that of people in the area. At the moment, certain hospitals have DNA records of all the patients who have passed in and out of them over the last ten years.” He held up a tiny piece of metal. “See this?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said, squinting.
“This is the size of the chip that can analyze your DNA versus our catalog of DNA in seconds.”
“Whoa,” I said. I wasn’t a particularly sciencey kind of girl, and I wasn’t a big science-fiction reader. This stuff seemed absolutely over the top.
Clarkson also instructed me to put my handprint on an electronic pad and speak clearly into a digital recording device. “Banks are beginning to use voice-recognized PIN numbers,” he explained. “We have a log of different voices that match up to different people in the system. There’s a chance that the different intonations of your voice will match your mother’s—that happens often. One sister gets access to the other sister’s accounts. Mothers to daughters’, too.”
“That doesn’t seem very safe,” I said.
“Well, as I say, the technology isn’t perfect yet,” Clarkson said. “But we will have a very good chance with all of these different tests to narrow down your choices to maybe a hundred or so.”
“A hundred?” I said. I’d have to go through a hundred people?
“But then we can narrow the results down further,” Wachter interrupted. “We can get hospital records of who gave birth in San Diego less than twenty years ago. If those records match any of the names on our list, you could be down to only a few choices.”
“It’s a good thing I’m a little under twenty,” I said. “My birthday’s in about a week.”
“That might help us, too,” Clarkson said. “We might be able to pinpoint at what date the people on the list gave birth.”
“Although,” Hiro said, “who knows if your birthday is really your birthday, right?”
“That’s true,” I said. My father had always said April 8 was my birthday, but what if he’d been making things up?
Which led me to think briefly of something else. I was here looking for my birth mother. But who was my birth father?
I saw out of the corner of my eye that Hiro was gazing at me with lust and hurt. I shot my eyes away. How could he love me if he didn’t have any idea who I was?
I sat in a chair while Dr. Clarkson fiddled with his computer, pulling up records, making matches. His brow furrowed as he squinted at the screen. I heard my voice from the recognition sample echo again and again. He tried it against several women’s voices. None of them sounded like mine.
Finally he pulled out a list of about twenty-five names. “I was able to access the hospital records database online, and so I did the match,” he said.
I looked at the list. None of the names jumped out at me.
“Basically what you’re looking at is a list of women who gave birth nearly twenty years ago in the San Diego area and who have either been in the hospital since, had their face scanned by a video camera, or used voice-activated PIN numbers.” He shuffled around a bit.
“I can’t guarantee that any of these people is your birth mother,” he said. “And I can’t guarantee that any of these people even still live in the San Diego area. But this is the best technology we’ve got at present.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Yes, thank you,” Hiro said.
I left, feeling a little nonplussed. “It’s creepy to think that we’re being watched and scanned and monitored at every second of the day,” I said. It was like Masato’s house—all those video cameras.
Wachter studied the list. “I can run this through our address finder back at the station. We’ll find out where these women live and get their phone numbers. It’ll take about five minutes.”
Back in front of the station, Hiro froze in his tracks. I followed his gaze. There was a guy across the street, talking on his cell phone, star
ing at us.
“Who is that?” I asked. He looked familiar.
“I don’t know,” Hiro said. He scuttled inside.
I peered out at the guy. Where did I know him from? He was really glaring at Hiro. Was he someone from the dojo or something?
I sat down on a chair in the station as Detective Wachter went into his office to pull up some files. Another detective came through the front door, and a whoosh of warm air streamed in from the outside. I glanced at the cell phone guy. Still there. And in the split second the door was open, I heard him say something very loudly.
“Listen, Kaori….”
“Kaori?” I whispered. I looked out again. The guy was gone.
“What did you say?” Hiro asked. He rubbed his hands together quickly.
“Nothing…,” I said, trailing off. There could be thousands of Kaoris. I looked out the window again. Maybe I didn’t know that guy. I couldn’t place him. My haragei wasn’t indicating that he was super-dangerous.
It was probably just a coincidence.
Hiro jiggled his leg and up down. “Relax,” I said, annoyed. “What are you so keyed up about?”
“I’m just uneasy, that’s all,” Hiro said. “Something doesn’t feel right.”
Wachter called me into his office, telling Hiro to stay outside. I shrugged at him and walked in alone.
He shut the door. “Here’s the list,” he said. “It’s narrowed down to about fifteen people. I don’t know what happened to the others; I was only able to get about four additional addresses. I can give you the addresses for the other six people, too, if you want, although it looks like three of them have relocated across the country and the other three live at least eight hours away.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking the list, barely looking at it.
“I want to talk to you about something else, though,” he said. “Teddy.”
“Teddy?”
“Yes.” He looked at me suspiciously. I shivered for a moment, then stared him down. Wachter didn’t know that I’d let Teddy go willingly. He thought that Teddy had threatened me, been wise to the action some other way, and brushed me off.
“Have you seen him?” he asked.