Nakamura Reality Read online

  THE PERMANENT PRESS

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  Excerpts from Nakamura Reality have been published in carte blanche, Rose and Thorn Journal, Black Clock, Apeiron, This Literary Magazine, Heavy Feather Review and River & South Journal.

  Copyright © 2016 by Alex Austin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Austin, Alex—

  Nakamura reality / Alex Austin.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-57962-409-5

  eISBN 978-1-57962-450-7

  PS3601.U8544N35 2016

  813’.6—dc23 2015040870

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book is dedicated to my agent,

  Claire Anderson-Wheeler.

  Prologue

  OCEANSIDE, CALIFORNIA

  Hugh Mcpherson glanced at his watch. Thirty minutes.

  The waves weren’t getting any smaller. Slabs of water, rhinos the surfers called them, which didn’t stop dozens of thrill-seekers in black wet suits from stepping into their path.

  Kneeling on the sand, a short distance from Hugh, his sons, Takumi and Hitoshi, gazed mutely at the scene. Although there were surfers not much older or taller than the twins, none were quite as young as eleven, none with their slender builds, none with their narrow shoulders. If Setsuko had seen the surf, she wouldn’t have considered letting their sons go in. But his wife had remained at their Oceanside time-share condo, feeling ill, attributing it to the take-out dinner they ate on the two-hour drive down from their Studio City home, where their suitcases were packed to take their real vacation, a month of summer at her father’s house in Tokyo. A month of rain and humidity . . .

  After Setsuko made known that she wasn’t going to the beach, Hugh made the phone call, and then showered.

  Leaning back on his beach towel, Hugh scanned the path of a seasoned surfer as he soared down the steep front of his wave, cutting white tracks, sending up sparkling jets. For such big surf, the water was beautiful—light green and transparent. A bright, warm day under baby blue skies. Hugh pried the lid off his coffee and sipped the flavorless 7-Eleven brew.

  “They aren’t that big,” said Takumi, five minutes older than his twin and the more assertive of the two.

  “What if we stay close to shore, Dad?” asked Hitoshi.

  “Just catch the wash,” added Takumi.

  “Let’s just wait,” Hugh responded.

  Hugh drew out a box of donuts from his gym bag, opened it and offered the jelly-filled cakes to his sons. Hitoshi took one, but Takumi declined. As Hugh chose one for himself, a seagull swooped down and settled a few yards away. Hugh closed the box, set it on the blanket and bit into his cake. “Not like we’re swimming. We’ve got the boards,” insisted Takumi.

  Hitoshi clapped his brother’s shoulder. “We’ll stay close together.”

  “We’ve surfed bigger waves at Topanga,” added Takumi.

  “Way crazier than this,” said Hitoshi.

  “I know, I know,” Hugh admitted.

  “What’s so special about today then?” asked Takumi.

  Yes, what was so special . . .

  A cadre of surfers soared down a wave’s slope like rocket streamers.

  “Nothing,” snapped Hugh.

  “Why did we come here then?” asked Hitoshi.

  “You’re always telling us how good we are,” said Takumi.

  “You are good,” Hugh said with conviction.

  “Then why can’t we go?”

  Hugh set down his half-eaten donut on the box and pointed. “Look at the size of that wave.”

  “We wouldn’t take that wave. We’re not stupid.”

  “Of course not, but . . . it’s not just one wave.” Feeling a flutter of air, Hugh twisted to see the gull, Hugh’s half-eaten donut in its beak, taking off.

  “Hey!” said Hugh, reaching for the bird but catching only air. Sighing, he shoved the donut box in his gym bag. The boys seemed not to have noticed the theft.

  “We’ll stay close together.”

  “Let’s give it time,” said Hugh.

  Groaning in disapproval, they worked their torsos out of their wet suits, revealing the smooth fair skin, identical down to the freckles on their shoulders.

  Twenty minutes.

  Sipping his coffee, Hugh leaned into his sons, thinking he would hear their whispers of consolation, but they were silent, staring at different horizons. His head felt heavy, feverish. He closed his eyes for a moment, hoping to slip an oncoming headache. The clap of a wave breaking close to shore sounded sharply like a gunshot, taking away his breath. He swallowed, drove his hand through his hair and laughed stupidly. Relax. Relax.

  Hugh squeezed Takumi’s shoulder. “How do cheesesteak sandwiches sound when we get home?” he asked. Even the mention of food usually got them out of their funk, but Takumi merely shrugged. Hugh grinned and kissed Hitoshi’s cheek. “Cheese-steak sandwiches and onion rings?” Hugh asked. Hitoshi scrunched his nose, but nodded. Hugh turned to Takumi, who pulled away as Hugh mussed the long black hair.

  “You’re excellent surfers. My two little rippers,” said Takumi, mocking the words Hugh had said but a week ago.

  Nearby, the marauding seagull mewed insistently. If Hugh told the twins he had to go back to the car and ordered them not to go into the water while he was absent, they would obey him. He was confident of that. But could he be sure that they wouldn’t scurry back to the parking lot? Something might happen while they waited. Sand in Hitoshi’s eye. A shard of glass rising from the beach to open Takumi’s foot.

  Fifteen minutes.

  He gazed helplessly at the ocean, wishing he were Poseidon who might calm it with a flutter of his hand.

  Carrying a surfboard, a boy in a wet suit walked by their towels, skirted a man with a tripod taking pictures, stepped into the surf and then turned back and waved. The twins stared jealously. The boy was a small girl.

  “Dad?” said Takumi.

  “Look,” said Hitoshi, pointing at the line of surfers, “that wave is nothing!”

  It was not nothing, but it was by far the smallest wave of the morning.

  “The surf report was right,” said Takumi.

  “Can we go now?”

  Hugh peered beyond the surfers to where a sleek cabin cruiser—the design strikingly futuristic—motored. The boat rose and fell on the swells that formed along its trajectory. But the waves were not so big that the boat vanished. The swells were flatter now. The sea was shaping itself to Hugh’s desire.

  He followed another set of diminishing waves. It was not an illusion. The sea had calmed. “I think we’re OK. Go for it.”

  “Yes!”

  Beaming, they slipped back into their wet suits and folded the Velcro leashes around their slender ankles. The leashes were made for thicker limbs and though wrapped their tightest still had play.

  Carrying his coffee, he walked with his sons into the surf. He was hip deep, and the backwash was enough to knock him off balance. The chaotic waters reflected sunlight in a hundred directions, poking holes in his vision like a kaleidoscope. To Hugh’s right a man stood in the water with a boom box on his shoulder, the crack of the waves breaking up an odd fragile cover of an old famed song.

  Five minutes.

  Takumi and Hitoshi threw themselves onto their surfboards and paddled into the wash.


  “Catch one for me,” Hugh said, though he wasn’t sure they could hear him over the thundering waves. Through his eyes, compounded like a fly’s, he followed their lithe bodies as they fought through the surf, paddling parallel, nosing down to penetrate the broken waves.

  They faced a set that carried surfers. They broke through the base of the first wave, disappearing as the comber rose up to curl and collapse. Hugh saw them again, just as the second wave struck. They made it through the third and took their place among the dozens of other surfers on the flat water, waiting for the next set. Hugh watched all the surfers drift to the right. A wave formed, rising. The twins paddled side by side forcefully, belying their age and size. Together they turned, shooting forward as the wave lifted them until they were on the crest, held in suspension for an instant and then rocketing down, soaring the wave’s infinite face. Crouched, they cut right and then left with dazzling synchronicity. As the wave folded and crashed, they rode parallel to the shore and then rolled off their boards, disappearing into the froth, above which a pelican shimmied as if caught in a crosswind.

  When the twins reappeared, they turned their boards around and started paddling out again. He caught the fierce smiles. In their wet suits, they could stay in the water for hours, and they would stay until he returned. As Hugh backed toward the beach, he stumbled in the backwash and dropped his coffee cup, which seemed to bound joyfully atop the waves. Following the Styrofoam as it skipped seaward, Hugh had an inchoate urge to call back his sons, but the tick of his watch drowned the shout in his heart.

  Time.

  As Hugh approached the parking lot, with a view of the sun-bleached broken trestle that had given the surf spot its name, a vintage red Mustang roared down the access road. He pictured a woman at the wheel, unsettling green eyes, parted lips, body posed against naked red leather. As the car came closer, he glanced down at the New Jersey license plate that read CSNDRA. Momentarily confused, Hugh lifted his eyes to the driver, who smiled broadly.

  By the time Hugh returned, most of the surfers had moved farther out, where the swells had regained their early morning size. He scanned the black wet suits, looking for the smallest. Beyond the surfers, the futuristic boat now roared with power as it motored west, showing its stern to the enormous waves. He walked to the water’s edge and called their names. The ocean’s roar drowned his voice. He would not have been able to reach them with a bullhorn. The surfers were fighting against a current that threatened to pull them off the break. The set came. The first was the largest he had seen all day.

  A dozen surfers turned their boards toward the shore and paddled to get ahead of the wave. Hugh tried to pick out his sons from the other surfers being lifted on the swell like chips of wood, half failing to catch it. For a few seconds, the pack was invisible. The second wave rose. More surfers strove to take this one, arms windmilling, heads raised like beasts sniffing their prey. When the third wave came, it was enormous. The remaining surfers were determined to ride the monster. Hugh saw his two boys turn their boards to shore and paddle furiously.

  Lodged ten feet high on the face, they stood up and shot sideways, moving fast. Spreading apart as the wave carried them shoreward, they cut trails, carved the rushing slope. Touched by their skill, Hugh breathed sharply and caught the scent of the Mustang’s interior—her scent.

  Fuck.

  As they toppled off their boards, Hugh yelled for them to come in. They were close enough to have heard, but, ignoring him, they turned away and lay on their boards, stroking seaward. He strode through the backwash, knees pummeling the frothy shattered waves.

  “Takumi! Hitoshi!” Hugh shouted. “Goddamn it, come in!” The next wave was the largest of all, a violent unforgiving watery claw. The air rushed from his lungs. Come in! Come in!

  Hugh dove. He drew himself to the bottom and swam. Thirty seconds later he surfaced for a breath, coming up within the fury of a collapsed comber. He kicked to stay in place, bobbing like a cork as he strained to see his sons among the distant pack. “Takumi! Hitoshi!”

  He dove again, remaining underwater until his lungs burned. As he surfaced, a current gripped him and ripped him seaward as if he were a weightless rubber inflatable. Get beneath it. Get beneath it. Diving, he fought his way down three feet, six feet, ten feet, until his fingers clawed the dark seabed. The riptide’s grip relaxed. For twenty seconds, he swam perpendicular to the current and surfaced again. He was no more than twenty yards from the pack. He spotted the two small wet suits. His boys were flat on their boards, turning now to get in front of the rushing wave. He screamed their names, and in coming about for the wave, they showed their faces.

  Not his sons’ faces. Not his sons. Hugh bobbed on the water’s surface, his heart forgetting to beat as he scanned the surfers for their familiar forms. Not there. Not there. Where then? A massive wave rolled toward him carrying a dozen surfers. Where then? He pressed his hands to the sides of his head as if to hold his skull together. He dove into the sea that hid his sons.

  Chapter 1

  TWELVE YEARS LATER

  “Tonight at Huddle’s Books, we are honored to have Kazuki Ono, who joins Dickens and Orwell, Kafka and Pynchon—and precious few others—as a novelist whose name has become an adjective.”

  The crowd that jammed Huddle’s, a small, independent Pasadena bookstore, applauded. Many of the hundred or so fans raised copies of Kazuki’s Enrique the Freak above their heads and banged them like tambourines, the sound echoing raucously off the store’s high ceiling. Though almost giddy with excitement, the fans were careful not to drop the numbered tickets that would allow them to queue up and meet the author after he read from his latest work.

  In the rear of the bookstore, Hugh drew ticket ninety-nine down his unshaven cheek. He had arrived late so as to be camouflaged by the crowd. Across the room his ex-father-in-law, Kazuki, whose sight was never good, wouldn’t recognize him—more than ten years had passed—but should he happen to walk by and see Hugh, the author known as the Lion of Osaka would surely roar. With luck, the crowd would disperse by the time ninety-nine stepped up and asked for his favor.

  Since his sons’ deaths, Hugh had followed Kazuki’s work like a fly on a window pane searching for a way out, for in his fiction Kazuki might forgive the most untenable of his characters. But in all eight novels since the tragedy, there had been nothing connected with Hugh or his sons or his wife, no character’s mistake that paralleled Hugh’s horrific mistake. No message, no pardon. He had bought Enrique the Freak earlier in the day but hadn’t read a page.

  He no longer expected to find consoling words—only a simple favor.

  Hugh glanced down at his book and turned up the back cover. The rainbow grid that overlay the blurbs and biography framed Kazuki’s photograph, a head dominated by the mass of now mostly gray hair, though it had been freakishly blond in his youth, a rare pairing of rare genes. A face with the same bone structure as his daughter’s, Setsuko’s.

  It was a resemblance that had struck Hugh wordless when he first met Kazuki nearly a quarter century ago in that quiet candlelit restaurant in Tokyo’s Roppongi District. Then, as much as now, from photos, Hugh was familiar with the narrow, fine-featured face, but he was unprepared for its luminous beauty, a light that seemed only available in cinema close-ups.

  It had been five years since Hugh had seen Kazuki in person. Kazuki had appeared at this same bookstore with Sleepwalkspace, his eleventh novel. Hugh attended that night, too, listening to Kazuki read in his hesitant English, a mark of typical Japanese modesty, for, in truth, Kazuki’s English was perfect.

  As on that night five years ago, Hugh had come tonight to ask Kazuki to take a letter to Setsuko, for since she’d returned to Japan, hardly a month after the tragedy, and the subsequent divorce having been decreed final, there had been no further communication between them. Hugh’s phone calls had gone unanswered, his e-mails declared undeliverable, his letters stamped return to sender, unopened. That letter too had met no better
fate for on that night as Kazuki read from his novel, Hugh heard the soul-shaking voices of his sons, as if they were perched at the author’s feet, telling their story in counterpoint. Though its source a delusion, the guilt pressed Hugh’s chest like a hundred fathoms of sea and he fled, letter in hand.

  Now the bookstore’s owner signaled for Kazuki, who stood at the rear of the platform, to come forward. The crowd erupted with applause as the author stepped on the stage, still looking trim and athletic at seventy. At his side, he held his novel.

  Kazuki bowed several times, smiling. He closed his eyes and the applause tapered off as he stepped up to the microphone.

  He began, “Thank you. During my promotional tours, I visit many large bookstores: vast bookstores, I might say. Most are part of chains, which is simply the nature of bookselling these days, and I have no complaints about the way my books are treated. But there remains something special about an independent bookstore like Huddle’s, where can be found the obscure and the masterpieces, terms not mutually exclusive. This is a house of words.”

  The crowd applauded.

  “Now in this house of words I would like to add a few more of my own.” He lifted his book, set it on the podium and opened it. “Enrique the Freak, Chapter One.

  “I leased an apartment in the Hatsudai District. The landlord explained that as a condition of the lease, the body would be kept in the living room as I—” Kazuki paused, and then repeated his last two words as if to reassure the audience that they were hearing correctly. “—as I had been kept by the previous tenant. He would be visible, floating in liquid nitrogen in a Plexiglas chamber, but the mechanisms for his maintenance would be silent. The building’s electricity supplied power, but in the event of a power loss, an emergency generator would take over. There was no need to pay special attention to the chamber, as the dust and grit could be removed with a common household cleaner.

  “Any attempt to hide or cover the body, for example when guests came over, would break the lease. The landlord advised against inviting children into the apartment—not that the children would be disturbed by the sight, but because even the best-behaved sometimes get into mischief, occasionally putting their own lives in danger . . .”