Nakamura Reality Page 2

  The floor shifted beneath Hugh’s feet so that he had to grab the bookshelf to steady himself.

  Kazuki went on: “Any damage to the chamber would be his responsibility. He—” Again Kazuki paused, and then repeated, “He agreed, knowing he constructed this arrangement or had he was . . .”

  Kazuki looked up suddenly, as if someone in the audience had jeered. He tilted back his head. His eyes danced around and his mouth fell open. As the audience murmured around him, Hugh clasped the bookcase, bracing for the targeting finger and the terrible accusation: You dare! Murderer of my grandsons!

  But Kazuki said nothing. The crowd, following Kazuki’s gaze, turned their faces toward the high ceiling and a soft clapping. Above them, a seagull beat its wings as it calmly circled the assembled fans. The bird didn’t seem to be seeking a way out, and there was no sign of how it had gotten in, but though all eyes were on it, the seagull vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared.

  Offering the crowd a bemused smile, Kazuki returned to his reading, not noticing that one of the audience, too, had gone missing.

  Chapter 2

  As the car descended the 101 freeway’s steep grade from Pasadena into Burbank, the lights of the San Fernando Valley spread uniformly across the basin to the distant shadowy face of the Santa Monica Mountains. As Kazuki gazed studiously, he searched the seat for the pill he had dropped. No bigger than a pencil point, the tablet eluded his normally sensitive fingertips. The bottle from which he had shaken the pill rested in the console and contained a month’s worth of the drug, but Kazuki resisted the easy way out, hunting with as much diligence as he would an elusive word. Soft, soft, soft, ah, hard on the buttery leather. Nipping the tablet, he swallowed the damn thing. With luck, the drug would keep the abdominal pain at bay for a few hours.

  A burst of hot white fire appeared to the south, as a rocket rose in the night sky, exploding into dozens of silver streamers, which in turn fragmented into ten thousand multicolored sparks.

  “That was a big one,” said his driver, Jack, as the boom of the primary explosion rattled the windows, followed by the small artillery of the streamers and the chattering of the final firecracker-like bursts.

  Under the dying lights, Kazuki snatched the ivory envelope from the dashboard and turned it over. He traced the handwritten letters of his daughter’s name. He glanced up as another explosion unsettled the night. Setsuko, Hugh and the twins had lived only a few blocks away from the theme park. Twice Kazuki had visited the house with the bright green front door, basketball hoop above the garage, the trough of neglected rose bushes. Hitoshi and Takumi racing down the sidewalk on their Big Wheels.

  Kazuki sighed, “It was a good crowd.”

  “They’re all good crowds, Kazuki. They love where you take them.”

  Kazuki smiled and studied the envelope again. “The woman who gave you this couldn’t describe the man?”

  “She was trying to keep her place in line. She said he seemed nervous,” Jack responded.

  “It’s his handwriting,” Kazuki said.

  “I thought I might have seen him . . .”

  The car raced past the Los Angeles River, channeled here in concrete. Kazuki fumbled with the controls on his door.

  “Open the window?” asked Jack.

  “Please.”

  The window slid down and the car dropped below the speed limit. A warm wind perfumed with jasmine and citrus whipped up Kazuki’s hair and took his breath. Pinching the envelope at one corner, he thrust his hand into the rushing air. His hand vibrated and the envelope made a frightened whistling sound like a trapped bird.

  Chapter 3

  Pushing back an avalanche of soft drink bottles, Hugh grabbed his gym bag, packed with beach gear and topped with several paperback novels, slammed his trunk for the last time and set off for the beach.

  As he passed a shabby trailer that had parked in the same spot for weeks—his rehearsal time—its door opened and a woman wearing a lip ring, black stud large as a marble, stepped out.

  “You got a cigarette, babe?” she asked.

  “I don’t smoke,” said Hugh, staring blankly at her, though he had seen the young woman a dozen times.

  “You could carry a pack anyway, for the needy,” she said with a grin. “Going swimming, huh?” she added, glancing back as if to see the Pacific, but the trailer, parked at an angle to the road, blocked any view of the ocean.

  “Yes,” said Hugh softly.

  She licked the stud and pushed her hand through unkempt blue hair streaked with red like an arrow’s fletching. “Your routine, right?”

  “That’s right,” said Hugh, slowing a little, perhaps losing five seconds. He now resumed his quick pace. “Later.”

  “Have a nice day, Buddha,” she laughed.

  Hugh raised his hand above his shoulder and waved good-bye.

  Hanna was the name of the woman at the trailer. Her boyfriend’s name was . . . Kyle, yes, Kyle. They were a couple he’d heard arguing regularly at the Peace & Love Café three miles north. Once when Kyle went to the café’s restroom, leaving Hanna and Hugh on the deck, he’d spoken to the young woman. Then she made an almost tearful apology for their loud and personal spat. Hugh lied and said he hadn’t noticed. She accused him of being too polite, and then asked him what was the worst thing he had ever done in his life. The very worst thing. Before he had the chance to decline to answer, she declared that his worst was nothing compared to hers. But by then, Kyle had returned. With a pleasure to talk to you, she truncated the conversation. Hanna had noticed his beach “routine.” So what? All the better.

  On Pacific Coast Highway, the summer traffic stuttered. A few thousand feet above the sea, a small buzzing airplane pulled a banner: I don’t always drink beer, but when I do . . . A homeless man, barefoot, bearded, ragged and stained, walked by, reviling invisible enemies.

  At the crosswalk, Hugh pressed the yellow button that eventually would stop the traffic. He pressed it twice more for luck. Sometimes the walk sign would not appear for ten minutes, but today the lights changed almost immediately, clearing his path across the highway. He was almost through the crosswalk when a siren sounded behind him. He turned to see a boxy, red ambulance, lights flashing, barreling out of the canyon.

  Hitoshi! Takumi!

  Hitoshi! Takumi!

  The ambulance maneuvered south through the frozen PCH traffic, the lights and sound gone so quickly—the twin rivers restored so swiftly to their flow—that it might never have been there.

  Beyond the birds-of-paradise, trashed bougainvillea and ice plant, the Pacific spread as tight as a child’s skin. A wave smacked the shore, growling as it rushed back over a million pebbles. At the break, fifty surfers sat frozen on their boards waiting for a set. Beyond the surfers, a kayaker paddled past a buoy, and then slowed against the vast sea.

  Reaching the steps that led down to the sand, Hugh smelled the tar of the dark brown logs bordering the stairway. When he left the beach, he would sit on the wood to wipe the sand off his feet, the timbers’ heat radiating through his buttocks. In the wood someone had painstakingly carved the Wilde quotation that Hugh read a year ago, and now whispered in his ear as if by a ghost:

  Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head and listen to silence. To have no yesterday and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

  Hugh glanced down to where the inscription should be, but wasn’t. Someone had ripped out the seductive words.

  Except for surfers, Topanga beach, strewn with flea-infested rotting kelp and innumerable rocks, drew few visitors—a handful of canyon residents, Europeans, Hispanic families, boys and girls bathing naked like flower children or in their drooping underwear. It was to this beach that Hugh had brought the boys to learn how to surf, and to which he had returned to end his life.

  Setting his gym bag down a short distance from the stairs, Hugh spread his towel and found four rocks to hold down the e
dges, though the wind was negligible. He stood up, sucked in a lungful of ocean air and touched the waistband of his bathing suit. He undid the cord’s bow, yanked the ends tighter and retied the nylon. Satisfied with the snug waistband, he took a step toward the ocean, and then remembered that Kazuki’s new novel was in the gym bag.

  In the hours after Hugh had seen Kazuki in the Pasadena bookstore, he read Enrique the Freak in one sitting. Having heard Kazuki’s words about danger and children had given Hugh hope that this time Kazuki had tossed some crumbs of forgiveness his way. It was that possibility that caused Hugh to retreat from personally delivering the letter. For a few hours, each turned page promised some new perspective on his responsibility for the death of his sons.

  Beyond the passage that had raised his hopes at the reading, the book offered Hugh no pardon. No child, no children, appeared. He discerned no parallel to his own life. No hint that Setsuko might have forgiven him. Lacking that reprieve, rehearsals were over.

  How would the police, who would undoubtedly find the gym bag, interpret Kazuki’s book? Would they draw a motive from the dog-eared pages? He meant to toss it, but there it lay. He picked it up, looked toward the trash can. No.

  Hugh returned the book to the bag and faced the sea.

  A set of modest waves had drawn the surfers into frenzied paddling. Rising on their boards in one seamless motion, the quickest broke from the pack.

  The kayaker, too, turned shoreward and rode the wave.

  Hugh walked across the beach, striding a tangle of kelp attracting ten thousand gnats and landing on something that enveloped his foot for an instant, but was not there when he drew his foot away. A red-tipped tentacle gave away the creature: a jellyfish melting under the California sun.

  Kurage.

  Little more than a month after Hugh and Setsuko returned to Japan from Los Angeles, Setsuko, based solely on her late period, pronounced that she was pregnant, subsequently confirmed by a test. Did he want her to abort? she asked flatly. He recognized that his only answer could be no, and to that response she said, “Good, because I will not, even if we part.”

  “Part? I want to marry you!”

  Though Hugh had dated Setsuko for almost two years, he had not met with nor spoken to Kazuki Ono, who seemed always to be otherwise engaged. Now her father would find the time, Setsuko reported after telling her father of the engagement. For his first meeting with Kazuki, Setsuko, who was not invited to the tête-à-tête, had given Hugh some guidance. Her father would not try to speak much English, but would make use of a translator, though he had little need of one. The translator would allow her father to study Hugh. Her father’s purpose wasn’t sinister, Setsuko assured Hugh, but simply his way of fixing his encounters in memory. She advised Hugh that everyone her father met was fair game for his craft. It might only be a facial tic, odd mannerism or an unusual pronunciation that Kazuki would absorb for later use, but sometimes it would be the person’s character or charm. On occasion, he’d tote the whole person back, though likely that person wouldn’t recognize himself—melded, transmogrified—down the road. Numerous times, her father had confessed his practice to Setsuko: a writer had nothing to mine but the world he encountered. He must always haul around his flashlight and pick.

  Jack the translator, also Kazuki’s driver and confidant, was a Brit with a ready smile, a string of jokes and a grip that warned his leaden hand could break every bone in yours. Jack had picked up Hugh from his apartment, a block later saying, “Take his only daughter, will you, mate? Ono’s got fans among the Yakuza—big fans.” Hugh just laughed.

  “There’s Mr. Ono waiting for us,” said Jack, nodding toward a table in the hotel’s restaurant, where a tall man with a mane of golden hair had risen, bowing to Hugh when he reached the heat of the candle. Hugh met the bow, and then the flood of brown eyes.

  “Good evening. Thank you for coming,” said Kazuki in English.

  “It’s my pleasure to be here,” said Hugh in Japanese.

  “Please sit down. What do you drink?”

  “Biru,” said Hugh.

  To a server, Kazuki said, “Two beers.”

  “Scotch and water,” said Jack.

  After the drinks came, Kazuki spoke in Japanese with Jack, ignoring Hugh. The conversation was too fast-paced for Hugh to understand much, though he mentioned Hugh’s name several times. The isolation ended when the server brought sushi. Exotic dishes—blowfish, sea urchin, eel-heart soup—followed by huge bloody steaks and rice and more drinks. It was after they were sated and the desserts lay on the table untouched, that the serious questions began. They were of two general categories: the first, Hugh’s biography. Kazuki seemed especially interested in Hugh’s father with the unusual given name of Pirie.

  An Irish name, explained Hugh, which was one of the few legacies Pirie received from his own father, for Pirie’s father and mother had been killed in a car crash when Pirie was six. After their parents’ deaths, Pirie and his brother went to different relatives, for one family couldn’t care for both. Hugh’s father grew up a quiet, studious, shy boy who expected nothing less of the world than chance mayhem and loss. Pirie married a childhood sweetheart, had Hugh and then another boy. Pirie didn’t overtly forbid Hugh from doing anything, but whenever Hugh left the house, whether to go to school or play baseball in the park, Hugh was aware of the fear and sadness in his father’s face, that certainty that the worst had not yet passed, and he was in for something more. It was with that in mind, that Hugh avoided most of the risks of childhood and adolescence. He had not jumped off roofs. He had left the willing girls alone. He had not gotten drunk or smoked marijuana. The modest risks he took were out of his father’s sight. All this changed when he went away to college, beyond his father’s melancholy smile. He let loose. He liked it, not being fearful each time he did something new, not afraid of hurting himself or someone else.

  “Is that why you traveled to Japan?” asked Kazuki.

  Hugh forthrightly confessed that it was a bit of a lark. What is life if not an adventure? Kazuki’s stony response compelled Hugh to add that he too had writing ambitions— screenwriting. Hugh had a writing partner in Los Angeles . . . looking for ideas . . . Teaching English in Japan was, of course, just temporary.

  Kazuki nodded.

  To all questions, Hugh told the truth, and then Kazuki moved to the second field of inquiry: Hugh’s relationship with his daughter, eventually asking the blunt question that would draw the lie. His daughter had met Hugh while she attended the English school. She was seventeen at the time. Had Hugh been intimate with Setsuko while he was teaching her?

  “No,” Hugh replied, his heart beating fiercely, for this was the lie that he and Setsuko had agreed upon, though never before had she told her father the smallest lie.

  “Good,” said Kazuki. “I would find that hard to accept.”

  It was done. No, not quite.

  “Two months ago my daughter went to Los Angeles to attend a cousin’s wedding that I could not attend myself.”

  Hugh nodded.

  “Did you meet with her in Los Angeles?”

  Yes, for this was defensible, but yes, too, was betraying Setsuko who had not known of Hugh’s intentions to fly to Los Angeles until he walked up to her in the airport. In truth, he hadn’t known himself until the night before her flight.

  “No, I did not,” said Hugh.

  “Have you ever heard the fable of the Jellyfish and the Monkey?” asked Kazuki, after a few more questions of minor importance.

  “I’ve never heard any stories about jellyfish.”

  Kazuki sipped his beer, smiled and said, “Long, long ago, in old Japan, the Kingdom of the Sea was governed by a magnificent king called Ryn Jin, or the Dragon King . . .” Kazuki paused and looked away, his gaze fixing on the restaurant’s broad window through which poured Tokyo’s night light. The glass shuddered as if from a blast of wind, and the lights undulated like lights on an unsettled sea. Turning back to Hugh, Kazuki smiled gently
. “Oh, it’s a long story. Not worth the effort to get to the end. Another round, hey? Let’s talk of your plans . . .”

  On another night, Hugh would ask Setsuko about the fable, which involved a hard-backed jellyfish, kurage, whose lies to the king resulted in the king’s servants slamming kurage with their sticks, “. . . so thoroughly was the poor creature beaten,” explained Setsuko, “that he turned into a gelatinous, transparent pulp. And that is how the jellyfish we know came into being.”

  Driving Hugh back to his apartment, Jack played a tape of a British rock group called the Squeeze.

  “I hope you were straight with Kazuki,” said Jack. “Otherwise you might find yourself waking up as a jellyfish.”

  Hugh swam for a moment more in that memory and then with his heel covered the dissolving creature under a mound of sand.

  An hour from high tide, the rocks were barely visible. He stepped keenly, trying to retain his balance as he made it knee deep. He was about to kneel when a wave rolled through him, bringing a sudden jolt of pain. Fuck. He dropped, kneeling on the rocky base as if acclimatizing himself to the water. His hands out of sight, he clawed up two medium-sized rocks with both hands and shoved them into the bathing suit’s pockets. Rising with his hands on the waist of his slumping bathing suit, he walked seaward, every step painful and precarious. The water was only two feet deep, but the rocks were too thick for him to pick a path through the sand bottom. It was heaven to reach the deeper water and dive into the shock. He swam underwater, past a few large, mossy boulders that would wreck a surfboard. He labored with the weight of the rocks, glad that if he stopped swimming, he would sink.

  The waves that had energized the surfers broke over him. So as not to be thrown back, he dived, feeling the ocean’s surge stroke his spine like loving hands. Underwater, the rocks, moved by the crashing waves, crackled like voices in a crowd. He saw the surfers’ legs encased in bubble wrap. He surfaced, a surfer rocketing toward him.