A Tale for the Time Being (14 page)

5.

She sent off the email, sat back in her chair, and glanced at the sky soldier watch, which was sitting on top of her untouched manuscript where she had abandoned it hours
earlier. Her heart sank. It was after one, and the entire morning had vanished. And then, if that wasn’t bad enough, she heard the sound of tires, rolling up the driveway.

6.

Time interacts with attention in funny ways.

At one extreme, when Ruth was gripped by the compulsive mania and hyperfocus of an Internet search, the hours seemed to aggregate and swell like a wave, swallowing huge chunks of her day.

At the other extreme, when her attention was disengaged and fractured, she experienced time at its most granular, wherein moments hung around like particles, diffused and suspended in standing
water.

There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below,
creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.

This blissful state was one that Ruth seemed to recall enjoying, once upon a time, when she’d been writing well. Now, no matter how hard she tried, that Eden eluded her. The spring had
dried up, the pool was clogged and stagnant. She blamed the Internet. She blamed her hormones. She blamed her DNA. She pored over websites, collecting information on ADD, ADHD, bipolar disorder,
dissociative identity disorder, parasites, and even sleeping sickness, but her biggest fear was Alzheimer’s. She’d watched her mother’s mind dwindle, and she was familiar with the
corrosive effect that plaque can have on brain function. Like her mother, Ruth often forgot things. She perseverated. Lost words. Slipped in and out of time.

The car belonged to Muriel, and now she and Oliver were sitting in the kitchen, having tea and talking about garbage. Ruth, who had gone downstairs to be polite, sat between
them, mildly bored, listening to their conversation and fingering the stack of letters from the Hello Kitty lunchbox. On the table, next to the lunchbox, sat a battered tube of Lion Brand Japanese
toothpaste, the excuse for Muriel’s drop-in. She’d found it on the beach washed up below Jap Ranch and brought it right over.

Ruth disliked drop-ins. When she first moved to the island, she was astonished that people would just drive on in for a visit without calling or emailing first. Oliver found the custom even more
unsettling than she did, and once he had even hidden in an old refrigerator box in the basement when he heard the sound of tires coming up the gravel, but the tactic hadn’t worked. The guests
had just let themselves into the house and sat down at the kitchen table to wait, and when Ruth returned from her errands, she found them there. She offered them tea and wondered out loud where
Oliver was.

“Oh, he’s not here,” they told her.

They chatted and sipped their tea while Ruth tried to ascertain the purpose of the visit. A while later, she heard a furtive sound in the basement, and then Oliver appeared at the door.

“Where have you been?” she asked, suspicious and annoyed that he’d stayed away for so long, leaving her to deal with the situation.

“Oh, out. In the forest,” he said, brushing cobwebs from his hair.

Eventually the guests left, and she pressed him, and finally he confessed.

“You mean you were just sitting down there?” she asked.

He nodded, looking a little sheepish.

“In the box? The whole time?”

“It wasn’t that long.”

“It was hours! What were you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Were you listening to us?”

“A little. I couldn’t really hear.”

“So what were you doing?”

He shook his head, managing to look both bewildered and a little bit smug. “Nothing,” he said. “I was just sitting there. It was nice. And cool. I took a nap.”

She really wanted to be mad, but she couldn’t be. It was just his nature, and so she laughed instead. Relieved, he laughed, too.

It was his nature, just as drop-ins were a part of the nature of the island. However odd and unnerving the custom might be, when guests showed up, you invited them in for tea.

The discovery of a tube of Lion Brand toothpaste was interesting, and it was kind of Muriel to share it, but the conversation had turned to the half-life of plastic in a gyre, which Ruth found
tedious, so she turned her attention to the letters. She spread the pages out on the table, unfolding each one and peering at the inscrutable kanji. At the very least, she might be able to decipher
an address. Even the name of a prefecture would help. Oliver and Muriel talked on, although it was not quite a conversation they were having, Ruth noticed. Rather, their exchange sounded more like
a session at an academic conference, two professors taking turns at the podium presenting information that they both knew, and more or less already agreed with.

“Plastic is like that,” Oliver was saying. “It never biodegrades. It gets churned around in the gyre and ground down into particles. Oceanographers call it confetti. In a
granular state, it hangs around forever.”

“The sea is filled with plastic confetti,” Muriel affirmed. “It floats around and gets eaten by the fishes or spat up onto the beach. It’s in our food chain. I
don’t envy the anthropologists, trying to make sense of our material culture from all the bright hard nuggets they’ll be digging out of the middens of the future.”

The last letter was thicker than the others. It was wrapped in a packet made of several layers of oily waxed paper. Carefully Ruth unpeeled it, laying the sticky paper to one side. Tucked inside
and folded into quarters was a thin composition book, the kind a student might once have used in university to write an essay exam. She unfolded it and looked inside, expecting to see more of the
cursive Japanese script, but to her surprise, the alphabet was Roman and the language was French.

It was Oliver’s turn. “Anthropologists of the future—” he had started to say, when Ruth interrupted.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I hate to change the subject, but does anyone read French?”

7.

She showed them the composition book and they took turns trying to read it, but they didn’t get far.

“So much for bilingual education,” Muriel said. She glanced at her watch, put her reading glasses away, and started gathering up her things. “Try calling Benoit.”

Ruth didn’t know Benoit.

“Benoit LeBec,” Muriel said. “He’s the dump guy, Québécois, goes to A, drives the forklift . . .”

“A?”

“AA,” Muriel said. “But nothing’s anonymous on this island, so they just call it A. His wife works at the school, and I know he’s a big reader. His parents were
literature professors.”

She reached for the mangled tube of Lion Brand toothpaste that lay next to the barnacle-covered freezer bag.

“Have you called Callie about that yet?” Muriel asked, pointing to the bag, which had begun to off-gas as the barnacles slowly died.

“No,” Ruth said, ruefully. She’d meant to, but she was finding it harder and harder to pick up the phone these days. She didn’t like talking to people in real time
anymore.

“Well, I happen to know she just got back from a cruise and she’s on-island for a while. You might want to call her before these guys get too much more dead.”

Ruth felt a stab of remorse. “Should we have tried to keep them alive? I never thought . . .”

Muriel shrugged and stood. “Probably doesn’t matter, but call her anyway. She might be able to tell you something.” She’d changed her mind and left her toothpaste on the
table, and now she waved her hand somewhat magisterially in its direction. “I’ll leave that with you, then,” she said. “Curatorially speaking, I feel it’s a collection
and should all stay together.”

They walked her out to her car. Today Muriel was wearing a ratty men’s cardigan sweater over her long skirt and gum boots, and as Ruth watched her struggle to lever her body down the porch
steps, she thought about Nao’s description of the old ladies in the baths, how they came in so many shapes and sizes. Ruth was feeling her age too, in her knees, in her hips. In New York,
she’d walked everywhere and never had a problem getting enough exercise. Here on the island, she mostly drove. She thought about her old neighborhood in the East Village, the coffee shops,
the restaurants, the bookstores, the park. Her life in New York still felt so vivid and real. Like Nao’s Sunnyvale.

. . . a jillion miles away in time and space, like the beautiful Earth from outer space, and me and Dad were astronauts, living in a spaceship, orbiting in the cold blackness.

It was only four o’clock, but outside it was already growing dark. The rain had let up, but the air was still wet and cold. They walked across the sodden grass. Oliver held the car door
for Muriel, when a sudden movement overhead caught his attention. He glanced up and then he pointed.

“Look!”

On the bough of the bigleaf maple, in the crepuscular shadows, sat the singular crow. It was glossy black, with a peculiar hump on its forehead and a long, thick curved beak.

“How odd,” Muriel said. “It looks like a Jungle Crow.”

“A subspecies, I think,” said Oliver. “
Corvus japonensis
. . .”

“Also called a Large-billed Crow,” Muriel said. “How very odd. Do you think . . . ?”

“I do,” Oliver said. “He just showed up one day. I’m guessing he rode over on the drift.”

“A drop-in,” Muriel said. She knew about their aversion to drop-ins. She thought it was funny.

The crow stretched its wings and then hopped a few feet along the bough.

“How do you know it’s a he?” Ruth asked.

Oliver shrugged, as though her question were immaterial, but Muriel nodded.

“Good point,” she said. “He could be a she. Grandmother Crow, or T’Ets, in Sliammon. She’s one of the magical ancestors who can shape-shift and take animal or human
form. She saved the life of her granddaughter when the girl got pregnant and her father ordered the tribe to abandon her. The father told the Raven P’a to extinguish all the fires, but
T’Ets hid a glowing coal for her granddaughter in a shell and saved the girl’s life. The girl went on to give birth to seven puppies, who later took off their skins and turned into
humans and became the Sliammon people, but that’s a whole other story.”

She braced her arm against the frame of the car and slowly lowered herself into the driver’s seat. Ruth offered a hand, supporting her elbow.

The crow watched the proceedings from its branch. When Muriel was safely inside, it stretched its beak and emitted a single harsh caw.

“Goodbye to you, too,” Muriel said, starting the engine and waving her hand in its direction.

The crow cocked its head as the car moved slowly down the long, winding driveway, growing smaller and smaller until it disappeared around a bend, amid the towering trees. Oliver went to the
garden to pick greens for dinner, but Ruth stood there by the woodpile a while longer, watching the crow.

“Hey, Crow,” she said.

The crow cocked its head.
Ke
, it replied.
Ke, ke.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “What do you want?”

But the crow didn’t answer this time. It just stared back at her with its jet-black eye. Waiting. Ruth felt sure the crow was waiting.

1.

It’s hard to write about things that happened a long time ago in the past. When Jiko tells me exciting stories from her life, like when her idol, the famous anarchist and
anti-imperialist terrorist Kanno Sugako, was hanged for treason, or when my great-uncle Haruki #1 died while carrying out a suicide bomber attack on an American warship, the stories seem so real
while she’s talking, but later, when I sit down to write them, they slip away and become unreal again. The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist? It feels like it exists, but where is
it? And if it did exist but doesn’t now, then where did it go?

When old Jiko talks about the past, her eyes get all inward-turning, like she’s staring at something buried deep inside her body in the marrow of her bones. Her eyes are milky and blue
because of her cataracts, and when she turns them inward, it’s like she’s moving into another world that’s frozen deep inside ice. Jiko calls her cataracts
kuuge
which
means “flowers of emptiness.”
⁵⁵
I think that’s beautiful.

Old Jiko’s past is very far away, but even if the past happened not so long ago, like my own happy life in Sunnyvale, it’s still hard to write about. That happy life seems realer
than my real life now, but at the same time it’s like a memory belonging to a totally different Nao Yasutani. Maybe that Nao of the past never really existed, except in the imagination of
this Nao of the present, sitting here in a French maid café in Akiba Electricity Town. Or maybe it’s the other way around.