“It’s another email,” Sophie is saying into Gilly’s strapped on earpiece.
Gilly sits on the gunwale of a skiff, joined by other surfers, on their way out to the big waves off Maverick Beach in California. Boards are strapped to a T-top that towers over the boat’s driver. As they bounce in the chop, the boards slap against each other, threatening to knock themselves loose and fall onto the occupants of the skiff.
Gilly pulls the mike attached to his headpiece toward his mouth and looks ahead at the bank of low clouds off to the West, what’s left of a violent storm out in the Pacific that gave these waves their initial power. He feels the gentle warmth of the sun on his skin, but the air is cool. He is amazed that he can hear Sophie on their wireless hook-up, but figures the reason behind it is the cell tower on the cliff at nearby Pillar Point Air Force Station.
“Bog?” Gilly asks.
Gilly will keep it short because of the crackling on the line, no doubt caused by the small boat’s erratic movements in the surf. The whole idea of this was to have Sophie following the real time mapping of the surf from her position on the beach in order to advise him. While it is still too early in the season for the truly big world class waves topping out at twenty-five meters, today’s surf is moderate to rough, running four meters or so.
Maverick is known for being surfed in January competitions by only an elite group of big wave surfers, and while Gilly doesn’t consider himself even remotely among them, the unusual conditions of the surf at this time of year easily became the pretext for getting away from the risk of staying on campus. The secret behind Maverick’s big waves is the unusual rock formation beneath its surface, its bathymetry, a long sloping ramp to the surface that slows the propagation of the center of waves while troughs on either side speed them forward, creating a u shaped wave that moves with reckless force.
“Artie and Ethan. They’ve been hurt.” A second or two goes by as her voice cuts out, but he does hear something about a hospital.
Sophie wags her hand at a couple of birds waddling their way across the sand toward her sandwich. She sits at the bottom of a two hundred foot sheer cliff, among the rocks on a wide semi-circle of beach. Holding binoculars to her face, she can see Bog’s far off boat as it rhythmically crests wave after wave in the distance. She knows that there are spectators at the top of the cliff watching the boat and surfers as well.
Gilly had considered Bog’s first message about Paris. They had discussed it, he and Sophie, and very nearly decided to go with Rashida, Megan and Kina when they took off for France. Sophie was afraid Gilly would become too involved and place himself in danger. The discussion between the two had quickly run in the direction of Sophie convincing Gilly not to go.
But Gilly would soon know the details of the email from Bog and that would change things. Gilly signals the boat’s skipper, who cuts the outboard. Stepping over to the T-top to grab his board, he wiggles it out from beneath the others. Standing at the side of the boat with his foot on the gunwale, Gilly stares for a moment at the waves breaking not far ahead. Finally, he lets fly with the board, which slaps on hitting the water.
Gilly follows the board quickly and dives head first into the white capped current.
Asobi’s flight to Osaka was uneventful, but explaining her return to her parents had been anything but. She got herself nowhere. On the one hand she didn’t want to worry them. On the other she didn’t want to come off as a complete loon. That really left her without much to say. So she appeared vague. They assumed it had something to do with a bad breakup, that she was looking to connect with old friends for consolation. Her parents knew the reason couldn’t be her studies at Stanford. Asobi had been at the top of every one of her classes her entire life. There was literally nothing beyond her capability to understand.
It bugged Asobi to think of getting spooked by a bicyclist colliding with her at Stanford. But because of the incident, she took seriously the encrypted emails she was getting from Bog. They put her on edge. They made her jittery.
Asobi is glad to be out of the house and away from her parents. She has fled to the highly commercialized Namba nightlife district of Osaka, which is all bright lights and busy streets full of upscale shopping and endless crowds. She looks over her shoulder constantly, not really knowing what to expect, but expecting it nonetheless.
Asobi fights her way through the dense retail of the old shopping districts to stand at the bottom of the Namba Parks commercial development. Before her are cute ornamental carts displaying flats of flowers and house plants for sale. She looks up at a staircase rising to the next level. A banner sign with the words Namba Parks in decorative iron arches over the top of the stairs. To her right is a corridor that runs into the heart of the retail part of the development. Namba Parks is a blocks long complex shoe horned into the site of the former Osaka sports stadium. Its design is a complicated pattern of eight set back and rising floors dressed with layer after layer of landscaping, creating the overall impression of a public park where in fact none exists.
The well-tended trees and shrubbery wave in the evening breeze. Asobi involuntarily turns up the collar on her red wool coat with her white cotton gloved hands. She then flips her long, straight tresses out of the collar where they have become trapped. She does this somewhat awkwardly, because of the gloves. Asobi turns, taking in the crowd, tons of ordinary looking people privileged to take an evening walk to shop in one of the city’s tonier locales. If there is a threat somewhere out there, she doesn’t see it among the prams, young couples, and after-hours office workers.
Asobi enters the quickly ascending development on the ground floor. Its walls curve and rise to the full eight story height of the building, striped in differentiated layers of earth color, creating the impression of a tall, bulging curvilinear cavern. Upper balconies are dressed in curtains of hanging plants that droop several floors. Each side of the cavern mimics the other. They bend and turn together, as if designed by the natural flow of water. Glass skywalks connect the sides at different levels. An angular blue office tower looms above the cavern space, windows bright in the inky night sky.
A twenty foot tall ornamental Christmas Tree installed on a center island lies immediately ahead of Asobi. The tree is decorated in thousands of tiny white lights, accented by vertical bands of illuminated red, gold and lavender. A white star sits at the tree’s apex. A man stands nearby. Her extends his arm while holding his phone, taking a picture. It’s chilly, but Asobi notices that the man has no coat.
Over the course of the next ninety minutes Asobi is in and out of stores of different kinds: specialty, clothing, department, kitchen, women’s, shoe, jewelry and perfume. She takes one of the central lifts to the top floors. She looks over the restaurants there, checks a posted menu or two, and then winds her way down, floor by circuitously laid out floor, past various cleverly arrayed, landscaped terraces and rooftop gardens.
Finally, leaving, she finds herself on a broad, curving outer stair. The City of Osaka is brightly lit and spread out before her. To the right of the stairs are trees and landscaping running down the hill. The trees are deciduous and have already lost their leaves. They stand forlorn, stark, crooked and frozen in shopping center up lighting. To the left is a wall that curves with the stairs, vines falling all along the top and down the side of it. There are railings of thick steel along both sides of the stairs, a decorative pedestrian street light illuminating her way just ahead.
Asobi, tiring, pauses at one of the short landings for a second to take in the view. A gust of wind comes along and blows her hair out, wildly. She raises a hand to smooth it back down, glancing back up at the stairs behind her, but there is no one there. Asobi plants her foot on one of the rectangles of stone that make up the stairs, grabbing the railing, stepping down and past a large shrub that has overgrown the low wall separating the stairs from the landscaping on the hillside. Asobi first thinks an errant branch from the big shrub ha
s somehow snagged her coat, but she then looks down.
It’s not a branch.
It’s a hand. And it’s an arm. And, in a split second, it’s a man, the man without a coat, the man from before, the man by the Christmas Tree. The man is pulling on her hard and she at first bangs into the railing. But he pulls again, using two hands this time, and knocks her off her feet. This is enough to pull her even further, this time under the railing, over the low wall, and into the bushes.
If Asobi ever thought she needed to, she would have done something to prepare for this. There is another man there as well, and suddenly he is pulling on her too. She hears clinking and guesses that one of the men may have a set of metal cuffs. Their first aim must to be to subdue and control her enough to be able to apply the cuffs.
But for what real purpose she wonders?
There is nowhere, anywhere, in Asobi even a tiny bit of surrender. Ever. Her mind just doesn’t work that way. There is no degree of violence that she cannot contort her flailing body into, as she fights to free her arm and grab her father’s taser from the pocket of her coat.
Asobi jerks the taser upward at the man and pulls the trigger, not knowing what to expect. The pistol shaped taser fires and abruptly makes loud, fast clicks as it discharges into her assailant’s face. The man’s face contorts involuntarily and convulsively, cutting his voice off in mid cry.
The other man, the one holding her left arm pulled behind her back, lunges for the taser and strikes her right arm instead. As his buddy silently falls backward, the second man hits her right again, with the result that the taser goes flying. Asobi rolls herself into the guy and smashes her hand, now a fist, into his face with a dull thud. This doesn’t appear to do much damage, but her left arm is suddenly free.
The guy slaps at her, connecting, and uses his advantage in size and weight to move on top of her. He positions his legs to either side of her torso and starts to rise up just in time to be confronted by Asobi’s projecting left hand. Too late he starts to pull his arms up to shield himself from the spray of the can of aerosol aimed directly at his face.
Asobi doesn’t hesitate to squeeze the trigger furiously, not letting up.
Instantly there follows a string of Japanese curses, an unending flow of them, and the man is wiping furiously at his face. Asobi pushes him off and jackknifes herself away. She clambers to her knees and stands up weakly, wobbling on her feet, her hair and her red coat now smeared in dirt and leaves.
Asobi notices that still has the spray can in her hand so she steps over to the first man, the one she tasered, and unloads the rest of the spray into his unconscious face, making sure that his awakening will be as unpleasant as possible. She looks around, concerned to retrieve her father’s taser, but it is lost somewhere in the leaves and mulch. Finally deciding to leave, Asobi passes the crying man going back to the stairs. Seeing him there inspires a thought. Asobi steps back and sweeps her booted foot in a wide arch, hitting the man full in the back of the head, so hard that she hears a crack and watches him go down.
It is suddenly very quiet. In the silence that follows Asobi gathers herself up. As she ducks under the railing to get back to the stairs she looks up to see a couple. They’re just standing there on the next landing, staring, not saying or doing anything. She sees lights bobbing and weaving near the top of the stairs. She takes this to mean that there will be more people coming and that she had better be on her way as quickly as possible.
The stone steps have short risers, making it easy for her to fly down them two at a time, her red coat flapping and sailing as it chases behind her graceful figure. At the end of the stairs Asobi takes a long sloping walkway that cuts back across the field of view from the stairs. Without slowing, she looks up and sees the same couple, still standing there, looking at her.
Ms. Shimada disappears from their view, just as the night is joined by a siren’s sound.
Chapter 54
On Fire Page 53