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  Hugh swam with long strokes, keeping his face in the water for three strokes, breathing on the fourth. His lower body sank with the weight of the rocks, so that he had to kick hard throughout the cycle. He did this for one hundred strokes, and then turned over and gently kicked, catching his breath, smelling the salt-drenched air. He swam another hundred yards, floated again, and looked back toward the beach. The shore was a crescent, the surfers distant. Several pelicans glided silently overhead. He gazed at their awkward beauty.

  The buoy was another twenty yards away. He would rest there for a moment, before regaining the energy to start the long swim, which would take him beyond the vigilance of the lifeguards, little concerned about strong swimmers, who could take care of themselves. And he would take care of himself.

  Hugh took another stroke and reached the buoy. He clung to the cold metal ball and felt his weight disappear. He needed to gather strength for the last stretch, by the end of which his energy would have been drained to zero. He kept his eyes seaward, bobbing rhythmically and trying to remember that black morning’s details, which would function as the sedative administered before the general anesthetic.

  He pushed off the buoy and swam toward the memory.

  Ten minutes later, he dug the rocks out of his pockets, held them to his chest, opened his mouth and gave himself to the sea. As he dropped his arms, glad for the end of his exertion, and sunk one, two, three feet beneath the surface, he heard a soft rhythmic clapping. Someone swimming, swimming effortlessly. He hoped the swimmer would not notice him. He saw through the distorted lens of the deepening water a body pass above, undulating like a sea creature and then melding with the liquid. Elbows locked at his hips, still holding the stones, Hugh lifted his forearms to draw himself ever downward into the dark green depths. He sucked the water into his throat, urging his lungs to take it, inverting the way a woman urged her womb to release a baby. The forms came toward him like the shadow of something below. The forms closed on him. Two swimmers, he thought. No. Go away. I want no help. But then he saw that the swimmers were his sons. Takumi was on the right. Hitoshi on the left. Their hair floated above the beautiful expressionless faces. Takumi held something in his hand. Held it out to Hugh. Small, rectangular, ivory-colored: the final letter Hugh had sent Setsuko, the final communication that he expected her to turn back, as she turned back all the others, unopened, unread, unconsidered, deleted.

  Hugh took the envelope, which was soft, falling apart. He drew his fingernail along the top and the envelope sprang open. The letter floated out, the ink blurred and streaming.

  Dear Setsuko,

  I loved you and our children. Since I lost them— and you—my life hasn’t meant much so what I’m doing seems almost easy. Please forgive me, Temperate Child. I think you will . . .

  Chapter 4

  Kazuki Ono opened the balcony door of his suite at the Olympic Hotel on Santa Monica’s famed beachfront, and scanned the horizon. One hundred miles from shore, the pale blue cloudless sky met the placid sea. To the southwest Santa Catalina rose from a misty shroud. A mile from shore, a low-slung oil tanker slunk north, sounding its horn while a dozen pleasure boats buzzed merrily in its wake. On the beach an umbrella or two rose, a blanket unfolded, a fat man sprinted into the cool green sea. Closer, beneath palm fronds still as stones, a pack of ancient joggers smeared on sunscreen as they broke their sweat.

  He considered the day’s schedule. Later in the morning, he had an appointment with the studio, where he would listen to preposterous plans for turning his new book into a feature film. He had learned to smile when they suggested this or that director, this or that star. Rarely did anything come of any of it. One book had been turned into a film, and the film had not been very good. In the afternoon, he had an appointment to view some paintings from a Courbet-inspired artist whose subject was cancer victims and schizophrenics. In the evening he had another book signing for Enrique the Freak. There was also some research to do for the new book. Jack would drive him.

  Kazuki had written much of the novel, Fingal’s Cave, in Japan, and his intention was to complete it during his time in Los Angeles. There were gaps to be filled, chapters to be rearranged, scenes that required a firsthand look at the settings, a few coincidences for which to arrange plausibility, scenes to add, scenes to cut. The inevitable rewriting. The inevitable rewriting of the rewriting, ad infinitum, ad nauseam . . .

  But most daunting was the ending. For Katashi to suffer for his actions, his grandsons must be dead. His actions were surely immoral, though at the time he had spun it as his duty. He simply wanted what was his and there was no getting around it. But if the boys were truly dead, why put their father, Yuudai, through the anguish? Yuudai already had paid the price for his immorality and foolishness. Why should he pay a second time? And what of Sumiko? Usually Kazuki didn’t give a shit about happy or tragic endings. The world went on or more to the point didn’t go on, for wasn’t every individual’s death the death of the universe? That was the fine print in the contract. However, Fingal’s Cave had purpose beyond an evening’s entertainment. It wasn’t just the fictive dream that Kazuki had to worry about.

  Kazuki’s stomach growled. He hadn’t planned on getting up so early, and room service was late. He sat at the balcony’s table, turned on his laptop and opened his journal. The writing was in kanji and hiragana, but as he read from the journal, he translated into English and input English text into the laptop. He usually didn’t translate to English until his books were finished, but this time he was translating on the fly. In Recent Documents, he clicked on Fingal’s Cave.

  Page one appeared.

  Fingal’s Cave/1

  HERB

  A few distant lights sputtered on as the plane neared its target, which from an altitude of thirty-two thousand feet was clearly visible beyond a few scattered cumulus clouds. Extraordinary only in its untouched landscape—for the city, like four other potential targets, had escaped the nightly bombings so that the damage of the plane’s unique weapon could be accurately measured—the town waited like an unsuspecting lab animal about to undergo a deadly experiment, trusting that the benign neglect of previous days would continue into the indefinite future.

  At 8:10, the final turn of the screw now in the capable hands of bombardier Major Ferebee, Colonel Tibbets thought briefly and irritatingly if not quite regretfully about the name he’d painted on the aircraft’s nose, Enola Gay, his mother’s Christian name. In minutes, the plane would release a gravity bomb containing 130 pounds of Uranium 235 on the city of 350,000, and the results wouldn’t be pretty. He wasn’t sure his mother would appreciate the intended honor.

  In the rear of the Enola Gay, tail gunner Technical Sergeant Herb O’Keefe fought the pounding at his temples, the ache of incomplete knowledge . . .

  “Yuudai?”

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “The mother’s hiding these little plastic dinosaurs on the café’s patio. The daughter, maybe four years old, puts her head down on the table, covers her eyes. Mama hides the last toy, and yells, ‘Iidesuyo.’ Right? ‘Iidesuyo!’ The little girl jumps up, laughs. Runs all over the place looking for those dinosaurs. She finds them—one on a window sill, another under an old newspaper, another stuck in a bush. Every damn time she finds one, she laughs like crazy. Like she’s having so much fun that I, that I—”

  Yuudai waited several minutes until—

  “Yuudai?” said his father.

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “The mother’s hiding these little plastic dinosaurs on the café’s patio. The daughter, maybe four years old . . .”

  His father had repeated the truncated story six times since Yuudai had entered the hospital room, where Herb had drifted in and out of consciousness for four days. Whether his father’s vignette was memory or a dream, Yuudai couldn’t say, but he thought his father was somehow comforted by it, for the buckled cheeks and creased forehead seemed to smooth and catch color, though it may have been the glow of the monitor.


  Running his finger along the punctured artery of the bone-thin forearm, once as thick as the sweet spot of a Louisville Slugger, Yuudai wondered if Herb himself in some dim neuronal corner knew the story’s end. A worn man before his first heart attack (aged fifty), an impaired man before his first stroke (aged fifty-seven), Herb had lumbered on far longer than any of the doctors had predicted. Though repeated like a looped tape, the anecdote was a marvel, thought Yuudai, for Herb’s speech and thoughts had become increasingly garbled, and in the last six months impossible to penetrate. It was his third stroke and the scattered family was flying in.

  “Yuudai?” the doctor had asked, uncertain that he had this red-headed Caucasian’s name correct.

  I’m Irish, kiss me.

  Yuudai rolled out his own oft-repeated story.

  An enlisted man, Herbert O’Keefe had been the assistant tail gunner on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, though Herb swore that the officers had not told him beforehand the nature and potency of the weapon. When the bomb missed its central target and fell on a hospital, Herb saw in the cataclysm that this bomb was . . . different. Troubled and then profoundly depressed by his part in the mission, Herb left the military and spent his life trying to make amends from his Boston home. He tithed his salary to send money to Japanese charities, studied the country’s history and culture, fought the racism, the incessant three-letter slur that flowed through America in the postwar years, and gave his children Japanese names. But he had never gone there, never gone back. To that he left his youngest son, Yuudai, who after his father’s first heart attack, was made to vow that when death took Herb, Yuudai would scatter his father’s ashes over the site of the hospital that the bomber had inadvertently made ground zero, devote himself to healing the wounds of that tragic day and mix his blood with a Japanese maiden’s.

  A Japanese maiden that Yuudai would marry, bring back to America—and keep safe.

  “Yuudai?”

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “The mother’s hiding these little plastic dinosaurs on the café’s patio. The daughter, maybe four years old . . .”

  Chapter 5

  Hugh staggered from the sea. Bent and shaking like a sick old man, he hid his face in his hands while water streamed from the bulging pockets of his bathing suit. He flopped on the tide line and coughed up the acidic seawater. Crawling back from the yellow pool, he dropped his head to his forearms, pressing his face to the clammy shivering skin.

  The mewing of the gulls and the clap of the waves vanished. Hugh felt far from the sea, and yet he was looking out at the sea, scanning the horizon for the twin swimmers, his sons. The ocean turned grainy and white, and the sounds returned as if from a speaker drawing closer to his ear. He pushed to his knees. His stomach convulsed and vomit filled his throat and mouth. He clamped his lips, but the hot salty mix gushed out, splattering and mingling with the resurfaced jellyfish. Hugh scuttled sideways and collapsed again.

  It was another ten minutes before Hugh rose and walked back to his towel.

  He was a coward. Neither his boys nor the letter had been there. He did not believe in ghosts. He did not believe in visits from the spirit world. The only things left of his boys were the empty tethers. His sons had been swept out to sea, probably devoured by sharks to become a delicacy for the Japanese.

  Digging his fingers into the sand, Hugh glanced away from the surf. Coming up the beach was Aaron, one of his students. Most of the kids he taught chose Santa Monica or Malibu, but occasionally Hugh would meet an outlier at Topanga.

  “Hey, Mr. Mac,” said Aaron, halting six feet from Hugh’s towel, his gaze over Hugh’s head.

  “Oh, hello . . .”

  “This your hangout?” asked Aaron.

  “Yes, I guess. Yes.” Hugh looked around. “I like this beach.”

  “Like that commercial, huh? Find your beach,” Aaron said with a tight knowing smile.

  “You’ve been swimming?” Hugh asked.

  “No, I don’t go into the sea. I can’t swim or anything. I stay out.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Hey, can I get my story back?” asked Aaron.

  “Your story?” asked Hugh.

  “Yeah. The one I wrote about my grandpa.”

  The second story Aaron wrote for the class. Yes, the grandfather’s job as hit man for a Mexican drug cartel, until he erred and killed the boss’s son, subsequently vanishing and presumed dead.

  “I passed all the stories back,” said Hugh.

  “Maybe I was absent.”

  “Then I would have put it in the class tray. You know, on the bookshelf.”

  Aaron shook his head. “I looked.”

  “I don’t know then. You should have asked at the end of the semester.”

  “Yeah, well I was sick . . . You think maybe it’s still there?”

  “I don’t know—you’re sure I didn’t—”

  “Maybe you could check,” suggested Aaron.

  “Drop by my class in the fall,” said Hugh, tired already of the request.

  “I ain’t going to be around in the fall.”

  “Maybe I could mail it to you.”

  “That wouldn’t work. Couldn’t you get it?”

  “You mean like today?”

  “Yeah.”

  Hugh said, “I don’t even know if the school is open.”

  “Would you try?”

  “Look Aaron, I may not have kept it. Maybe in a day or so . . .”

  A hand fell on Aaron’s shoulder. The nails were bright purple. Anna, Anna of the sleepy brown eyes and Fuck Like A Porn Star stenciled on her notebook’s spine, Aaron’s sometimes girlfriend.

  “You were way out,” said Anna to Hugh.

  “You saw me?”

  “Didn’t know it was you. Just someone swimming far out. I thought you weren’t going to come back.”

  “Cheaper than flying to Hawaii,” said Hugh, forcing a grin.

  Anna glanced back over her shoulder. “I don’t like to swim.”

  “You and Aaron both, huh? That’s too bad. It’s great exercise.”

  “But you get wet.”

  “True,” said Hugh flatly, not sure that Anna was making a joke.

  “So, you going to get me that story?” asked Aaron.

  “Why is the story so important?”

  Aaron rubbed his knuckles across his chin. “I just don’t want anyone to read it.”

  “I have read it,” said Hugh.

  “Sure, you. But nobody else. That was the deal.”

  “I still don’t understand—”

  “It just is,” said Aaron.

  “Give me your phone number. I’ll call you.”

  “About what?”

  “If I get by the school and can find your story.”

  “Why couldn’t you?”

  “If I go by the school, I’ll get the story. I’ll call you.”

  “Call Anna, okay?” Aaron made two fists, rapped them together. His face colored as if embarrassed. “I got to take a piss,” he said, walking toward the restrooms.

  Anna watched Aaron for a few seconds and then shifted back to Hugh. She gave him a tight-lipped smile, shrugged her shoulders and dug her fingers through her hair. She faded into the seascape.

  A drop of seawater dripped from Hugh’s nostril, and another behind it. He caught the flow with the back of his hand. He should have prepared himself. He should have expected the life force to play a trick or two.

  A bullet was not so susceptible.

  But a bullet could not be an accident.

  In the fall semester, a student wrote a story in which the teenage narrator, bullied by schoolmates, committed suicide. Hugh didn’t think that the writer, an easygoing friendly girl, was writing about herself, but her story galvanized the students. Hugh spent the remainder of the class making the case against self-destruction. In subsequent classes, Hugh returned to his admonition whenever he could. If he committed an identifiable suicide, h
is students would label all his earnest arguments as bullshit. What would stop one— or more—from following his example?

  Though today he had missed his mark, it had to be death by misadventure.

  “What are those?” asked Anna.

  “Pelicans,” said Hugh.

  A half dozen of the birds flew by. Anna’s head swiveled as they skimmed the ocean for a hundred yards, one by one dropping almost violently into the sea. Her eyes drifted away. Aaron was coming back, walking with martial precision, each step the same length and same duration.

  “You ready?” asked Aaron upon reaching her.

  “Uh huh . . .”

  “You give him your number?” Aaron asked.

  Anna got out a pen and paper and scribbled her number. Aaron watched as she gave it to Hugh and he tucked it in his gym bag.

  “Have a nice day,” said Anna.

  Hugh smiled good-bye and watched them as they climbed the steps to the exit road. He would not be surprised to see them hitchhiking north on Topanga, Anna with her thumb out, Aaron ten yards away, pretending he wasn’t with her and ready to run to the car the moment it stopped, deflating the faux Samaritan.

  Hugh dug his fingers into the sand and considered another immediate try at offing himself. But suicide took energy and the ordeal had left him drained.

  There was a hurricane off Mexico. A swell was coming. If he were lucky, tomorrow the sea would rage. He wouldn’t fuck up his suicide twice.

  If Setsuko ever read the letter, she would understand that he kept his implied promise, even if it took two tries . . .

  Hugh set his gym bag into the Volvo’s open trunk. He lifted the yellow beach towel, backed up a step and snapped it. A volley of sand stung his face. “Shit,” said Hugh, releasing the towel and clapping his right eye, as if it were not too late. He waited a moment for the tears to clear the particle of sand, bending his head so that the drops fell to his toes. On his white trunks he saw a blue smear. He scraped it with his fingernail. He lifted his hand. A bit of ivory-colored paper sat under his nail.