Nakamura Reality Read online

  He lifted his head to the roar of a truck speeding around the first bend of the canyon. With two quick steps, he could end the stupidity now.

  Do it. Do it—

  “Hey, boss,” said a new voice. “How long have you been parked here?”

  “What?” asked Hugh, still considering the truck, the road, the distance, the time, barely conscious of another voice that seemed to come out of the past.

  A hand tapped his shoulder. Heart beating terrifically, he turned to a bare-chested man, Kyle.

  “I asked how long have you been here?”

  “Couple hours,” said Hugh.

  Kyle looked away and smirked as if to a companion.

  “You see Hanna?”

  “Hanna?”

  “My old lady. Blue hair. Pretty. Tats. You know her, man. You talk to her all the time.”

  “I don’t think so. Sorry.” Hugh stared after the truck, now turning north on PCH. With his thumb, he worked the sliver of paper from under his nail.

  “You never saw her here?” asked Kyle.

  “We said hello,” replied Hugh, looking back toward the sea.

  “Where’d she go?”

  Hugh shrugged.

  “You don’t know?”

  “We barely spoke.”

  “She invite you in the trailer?”

  “We said . . . hello.”

  Kyle again gave the self-assured smile to his invisible friend and then drew back his shoulders. He had a boxer’s stomach, lean arms and clothesline veins. A motorcycle crackled and roared as it accelerated into the canyon, its chrome shedding sunlight. Hugh felt the engine’s throb in his chest. The motorcycle disappeared around the first curve.

  Hugh gazed at the sliver of paper, rolled it between his fingers and then flicked it to the dirt. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. He slammed the trunk, brushed by Kyle and slid into the car. Another breath, another two steps, and he would have been beyond magical thinking and assholes like Kyle.

  The interior was a sauna. In the rearview mirror, Kyle walked toward Hugh’s open window.

  “We weren’t finished talking,” Kyle snarled.

  “Yes, we were.” Hugh fished in his pocket for his keys.

  Kyle swung the driver’s door open. “You ain’t going nowhere,” said Kyle, bracing the door open with his leg and grinning.

  Hugh shoved the key in the ignition. Kyle reached across him for the key. With his left hand, Hugh grabbed the man’s wrist. With his right hand, he clasped the elbow, but he hesitated to apply pressure. Kyle’s grin faded.

  “Hey, Mr. Mac!”

  Anna and Aaron sprinted across the boulevard toward him. “Can you give us a ride?” Hugh released Kyle, who drew back from the door, rubbing his forearm and staring hard at Hugh, who had all but forgotten him.

  Never let a student get into your car.

  “Sure. No problem. Get in,” said Hugh.

  Chapter 6

  The morning fog clearing, Kazuki watched the huge yacht, perhaps two hundred feet in length, inch northward. It dwarfed the nearby sailboats, which followed the vessel like pilot fish follow their shark, white sails billowing against the bright blue sea. Turning away from the festive scene, Kazuki walked back into his suite. He had canceled the appointment at the studio and had spent the morning in his room.

  He sat down and tapped the touch pad.

  When Yuudai next met Sumiko, at a club in the Shibuya ward of Tokyo, he was singing Elvis Costello’s “Alison” through a defective karaoke stage microphone, so that his aim, his voice at least, was never true. Drink in hand, Sumiko approached him and tried heroically to speak English. Yuudai’s limited Japanese and Sumiko’s severely limited English were not much of a disadvantage in the thunderous club, to which Yuudai had come with a group of associates. Sumiko too had come with friends, but after Yuudai and she met, they were alone most of the night, laughing at each other’s language deficiencies and their equally clumsy dancing. They left together shortly before midnight, after which the trains no longer ran. She allowed him to accompany her back on the last train. A quarter hour into their ride, Yuudai pointed questioningly to what seemed to be a castle, strung with dazzling lights.

  “It’s a Love Hotel,” Sumiko said. It was not quite what the phrase seemed to indicate, she explained. It was not for prostitutes but for lovers who could not afford their own apartments.

  On the following Saturday night, Sumiko showed up by herself at the club. Though she sat with Yuudai, she seemed solemn, thoughtful, not quite there. Prompted by his friends, Yuudai sang: “. . . isn’t you, isn’t me, search for things that you can’t see, goin’ blind, out of reach, somewhere in the vasoline.” He sang it well, and for such a sad song, it made Sumiko happy. Once again they took the train home together. He got off at her stop, though he would have to walk a long distance to get to his apartment. They were both still a little high, and in a small park he challenged her to climb a tree with him. He swung into it easily. She refused his helping hand and climbed up herself. They sat in the thick limbs of the core, staring out through the leaves, listening to the wind whistling through the branches. Sumiko’s hair hung against the heavy wood like water cascading over black stone, and Yuudai felt the universe turn as if he were at its very center. The moonlight was broken by a cloud of crows falling on the park. The wind of their flapping wings lifted Sumiko’s hair, and the branches above shivered as the birds settled into the tree, cawing resolutely. Japanese crows will sometimes attack people, warned Sumiko.

  “We can’t let them know we’re here,” she whispered in Yuudai’s ear. “We must be quiet and still.”

  Something flashed by the window. Kazuki looked up to see a huge seagull alighting on the railing. Kazuki’s queasiness had passed and he remembered the uneaten pastry on the balcony table. He stood and shouted, but the untroubled bird hopped within inches of the pastry.

  Kazuki slid back the screen door to see the bird snatching the pastry in its beak. The bird beat its wings to take off, but the jelly-filled pastry was heavier than the seagull had anticipated. Its take-off was delayed a microsecond, just long enough for Kazuki to grab its tail. The bird cawed and flapped its lustrous wings. Was he only imagining the seagull to be the same color and size as the one in the bookstore? Odd, but no matter. Kazuki tore the pastry from its beak, tossed the bird into the air and chewed slowly on the sweet’s perimeter. Returned to his laptop, he typed:

  As Yuudai tried not to fidget, he saw out the corner of his eye that Sumiko in her immobility and silence had vanished into the branches and leaves. No crow would see or hear her, nor any other agent of destruction. If she chose to hide from him, he too would never find her. Yuudai dug his nails into the bark. Inches from the gnawing hand, a huge crow studied the worms beneath the white skin. The bird’s lust thickened like congealed blood. Not much risk, hop, hop. As Yuudai squirmed indecisively, a three-foot tongue, as if from a Komodo dragon, shot the darkness, coiled the crow’s head and retracted swiftly. As the remaining crows, alert to some inchoate danger, took flight, Sumiko found Yuudai’s mouth with hers, moved his lips to draw his words.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “Because I am sure.”

  For an hour they caressed among the branches. When they returned to earth, Yuudai pointed to the fallen crow.

  “Would it have attacked?” asked Yuudai.

  “Maybe,” said Sumiko.

  “Keep your distance, vicious birds,” said Yuudai, putting his arm around her waist and pressing his lips to her ear. “What else shouldn’t get too close? Snakes? Lions?”

  “Anyone or anything that tries to take what I love.”

  “Anyone?”

  “Even you,” answered Sumiko with a laugh.

  “Setsuko . . .” murmured Kazuki, his plea flying like an arrow over ten thousand miles of dark ocean and a quarter century of turmoil to pierce and tumble a lock in a Urayasu townhome. Setsuko walked into his memory, closed the door behind her. She dropped the key on the crooked brass finger above t
he entranceway table, beneath which she nudged her shoes. Usually when she entered her home this late, her lips were set in a pensive frown, but tonight, at two A.M., she was smiling. Even when she saw her father standing there, waiting up for her, relieved but disappointed, the smile didn’t vanish.

  “I was getting worried,” Kazuki admitted.

  “I should have called.”

  “Are you all right?” Kazuki asked.

  “Oh, I’m very good,” said Setsuko.

  She moved quickly toward him, kissed him. Her perfume was faint, overwhelmed by another scent: a man’s cologne.

  “Are you working?” asked Setsuko, sliding away, glancing toward her father’s writing desk, the old electric typewriter humming.

  “Never past midnight,” said Kazuki. “That’s when the words fly off the page to do their own mischief.”

  “They’re not too loyal?”

  “A dozen I trust.”

  Setsuko smiled. “So, what’s the new one about?” she asked.

  “I could ask the same of you,” replied Kazuki.

  “Do you want to know?”

  Kazuki shrugged, took in his daughter’s beauty. “It’s based on a folktale I once read to you when you were five or six.”

  “The Jellyfish and the Monkey.”

  “No.”

  “The One-Inch Boy.”

  “Not close.”

  “Hanasaka Jiisan?”

  “Let me reflect,” said Kazuki.

  “The Mirror of Masumi,” said Setsuko brightly.

  “Right you are.”

  “How far have you gotten in it?”

  “The end . . . of the beginning.”

  “The hardest part.”

  “To get right,” said Kazuki.

  “Have you eaten?” she asked.

  “Have I—” Kazuki shook his head. He had not eaten and had forgotten. His stomach was giving him trouble, but he had to eat. He knew that.

  “I’ll make you something,” said Setsuko. As she walked toward the kitchen, she called back, “He’s an American.”

  Chapter 7

  Aaron had gotten into the rear seat, but Anna chose to sit up front with Hugh, slinging her oversized handbag into Aaron’s hands. They drove silently through the canyon, but on the downgrade into Woodland Hills, Anna unbuckled, twisted backward and fussed with Aaron about extracting some garments from her handbag.

  “Please put on your seatbelt,” said Hugh.

  “One minute, okay?”

  A bright ball of fabric flew into Anna’s lap. Hugh glanced at his passenger as she pulled a sundress over her bathing suit.

  “Seatbelt now.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  In the mirror, Hugh saw Aaron slip on an oversized white T-shirt.

  “Seatbelts?” asked Hugh.

  Groans of compliance. Both students rebuckled noisily.

  A block south of Ventura and Topanga, Hugh waited behind a disabled bus with its hazard lights on, discharging passengers into 110-degree heat. Expressionless riders stepped into the hard sun. The older ones held shopping bags from Ralph’s and Rite Aid; the young lugged bulging backpacks.

  “Can you take us to Reseda?” asked Anna.

  “Oh, I don’t think, I . . . I don’t have much time.”

  “Ten minutes on the freeway,” said Aaron.

  Spotting a break in the traffic in the outer lane, Hugh maneuvered around the bus, drove toward the busy intersection.

  “Please,” said Anna. “can you take us?”

  Reseda. It’s a long day living in Reseda . . . The boys liked the song. He remembered playing it loud as they drove, drove where? . . . And I’m free, free fallin’ . . .

  “Yeah, I’ll take you,” said Hugh, moving into the intersection, tempting an eastbound SUV that had ignored the light to T-bone him. Hugh accelerated, skimming by the asshole.

  “Nice,” said Aaron.

  “Thanks.”

  The onramp to the 101 was jammed. They inched forward.

  Hugh gazed beyond the line of cars to the San Gabriel Mountains, all but the nearest peaks smeared by the summer haze. Lousy snowboarding, really, but hardly an hour’s drive. Surf in the morning, cut the slopes in the afternoon. They had done that a half-dozen times . . . Hugh drove forward twenty feet, braked, remembered patchy snow, complaints—but the morning had been fine . . . in the sea. He drove forward, braked, and envisioned his young sons swimming toward him, holding out the letter. It didn’t mean anything. The letter was on his mind, so of course it would flutter into his imagination. He glanced down at his bathing suit. The dark streak remained, but its source could have been one of countless things floating in the sea: oil, tar . . . shit.

  As Hugh drove forward another twenty feet, he realized the two passengers entitled him to the ramp’s carpool lane. He checked the rearview, cut into the left lane and accelerated. A few cars back, another vehicle followed his example, its engine roaring. As Hugh merged onto the freeway, he glanced again into the mirror; Aaron had twisted in his seat to view something.

  “Sick,” said Aaron, who appeared to be looking at a primed Camaro not quite tailgating them.

  “How long have you had this car?” asked Anna, as Hugh maneuvered into an outer lane.

  “Six years.”

  “It’s nice. What kind is it?”

  “Volvo,” declared Aaron.

  “I’ve never heard of a Vovo.”

  “Volvo,” corrected Aaron. “Swedish. Solid steel frame. Weighs over two tons. It’s a little tank.”

  “How much did it cost?” said Anna, gazing out the window.

  Aaron didn’t respond, and Hugh didn’t feel like discussing the price of cars.

  On one of the snowboarding outings to the San Gabriels, Hugh, Hitoshi and Takumi had rolled a giant snowball, put it in the trunk. So fast was the drive back to their Studio City home that the snowball had hardly lost an inch in diameter. In their backyard, they tore the snowball apart and had a snowball fight as the thermometer hit ninety.

  After Setsuko left, Hugh had stayed in the leased house for two more years, unable to clear out what remained in the boys’ room. Setsuko had taken the skateboards, bicycles, radio-controlled cars, baseball bats, footballs, spinning rods and surfboards to Goodwill, but Hugh was reluctant to part with the less recyclable: the wheel-less trucks and toy soldiers who refused to stand upright, the dim laser swords and the soft, stained pliable playthings of their early childhood. Each night for two years, he settled in the room, choosing a toy to touch and smell, as if he might find his sons’ anima within the polymers.

  Takumi and Hitoshi were dead, but he could not stop searching for them.

  The ritual, which in truth became what he lived for, might have continued indefinitely if it weren’t for the new profession. In the Sunday paper, he read a story about a teaching program for professionals who wanted a second, meaningful career. As he contemplated the idea, the word meaningful seized him. If he had lost his own children, perhaps he could help others. Yes. Yes. He passed the required tests and applied to a teaching program designed to put him in front of a classroom within six months. At the end of the six months, a school hired him.

  The change prompted the move from their home. When he began the teaching program, he called the Salvation Army. It was springtime, and while the workers hauled out the donations, he sat in the backyard watching swallows build their inverted nest in the eve of a neighboring house. When the Salvation Army had finished, Hugh went back into the house, which now seemed vast, infinite. He was afraid if he didn’t leave, that one day he would lose himself forever in its depths.

  His first short-lived move was to a Warner Center apartment, but the walls closed in on him like a treacherous room in an old science fiction movie. In a long line at the supermarket, he overheard a couple discussing Topanga, where seclusion could be found without forgoing access to the city. Within two weeks, he’d signed a lease on a small house and moved in.

  He hoped the new career a
nd home would divert his thoughts, and for some time they did. Controlling classes of thirty-five students, hormones raging, personalities sharpening, ethnicities clashing, guiding them through the thickets of English grammar and idiom, providing solace for the homesick (they were all from other countries, most at war), sympathizing with the lovesick (of course, he likes you. That’s why he kicked you.), and ministering to the real sick (put your head down for a while. Get an icepack from the nurse. Juan is doing what, Parisa?) left scant time to dwell on guilt or to tour memory. But as the years passed and dealing with chaos became routine, the specter of his sons’ deaths entered the classroom, sitting in the back of the room like some cynical observer. Whom are you trying to fool? Who teaches your children? When Pouya and Adel, Camille and Natasha spoke, he heard Takumi and Hitoshi, but the observer laughed and asked, “Do you forget your own children’s voices? Do you forget your own children’s suffocated screams?” His students were not his children. He had not marched these children from life. His sons’ deaths were the abyss that he couldn’t crawl out of.

  He even tried upping the ante: on weekends for the last five years he taught at homeless shelters in downtown Los Angeles. He taught for free and gave the children every blessed ounce of his energy. But even in exhaustion, the memories haunted him.

  Good deeds would not buy him salvation.

  He had not returned to the Studio City house since the day he moved out. Was there anything left of their life there? Might he find his sons there as he had found them in the ocean? It would be a mere fifteen-minute drive after he dropped his students in Reseda . . .

  “Are you married?” asked Anna.

  Hugh snapped out of his reverie. “No. Why?”

  “You’re wearing a wedding band.”

  Hugh glanced at the tarnished gold band that he had never removed. “I was married.”

  “She die or something?”

  “No . . . nothing like that.”

  “Where’d you meet her?”

  Hugh hesitated, but then muttered, “Japan. I was teaching English—to adults. She enrolled in my class.”