A Tale for the Time Being (40 page)

“Dad vomited and passed out. He’s at N—Hospital in T—Ward.”

What else was there to say?

I was thirsty. I went to the refrigerator to get a glass of milk, but the smell from Dad’s throw-up got mixed up with the taste of the milk so I had to pour it down the sink. The milk made
a thick white puddle on the stainless steel that trickled down the drain, leaving a pale film. I turned on the taps to rinse it off with water, and then washed the glass and wiped down the sink. I
thought maybe I should clean up Dad’s mess while I was at it, so I got a bucket and a mop from the balcony. The smell was still sick-making, so I tied a clean dish towel around my mouth and
nose and went into the toilet.

The vomit was clear but kind of yellowish, with melting white lumps in it that looked like little sugar candies. One of the paramedics had noticed them, too. He’d put on rubber gloves and
scooped up a whole bunch of them with a little scraper from his kit and put them into a tube with a stopper.

“Is your father taking any medications?” he asked me.

I didn’t know. The other paramedics were trying to get my dad and the stretcher down the narrow hallway. The man looked quickly around the base of the toilet and then in the trash can.

“Do you know where he kept his medicines?” he asked.

I didn’t want to get Dad in trouble, so I didn’t say anything.

“It’s important,” the paramedic said.

I pointed to the medicine cabinet and he opened it, but there was nothing inside except for the usual stuff: aspirin, Band-Aids, some laxative and hemorrhoid cream, and a bunch of my mom’s
hair products.

The other medics were wheeling my dad out the door.

“Where’s the bedroom?”

I led him down the hallway. The curtains were drawn, so the room was pretty dark. The only light was coming from the computer in the corner and my Hello Kitty screensaver that was making
everything pinkish. The pinkish futon was lying on the floor, neatly laid out, like someone had just gone to bed and then gotten up again because they’d forgotten to turn off a light. Next to
the pinkish pillow was a glass, and a half-empty pitcher of water, and an empty bottle of pills. The paramedic put the bottle into another plastic bag and headed toward the door. He turned back and
gave me the card and then looked at me closely.

“You okay?”

“I’m okay,” I said in the faraway voice that didn’t sound like mine. I tried to smile at him, but he was already out the door and running down the corridor.

The vomit on the floor had dried up a little. I went back into the kitchen and got an empty guava juice carton from the trash and cut it open with a pair of scissors, and then I used the edge of
the cardboard to scrape the goo off the floor and into the toilet. I’ve seen enough cop shows on TV to know that I was destroying evidence, but I didn’t need evidence. I knew what had
happened, and I knew everyone would be happier if we just pretended like it was an accident. Silly Dad. Careless Dad. Accident-prone Dad. Then I thought of something else.

I put the guava juice carton in a plastic bag and went downstairs to throw it in the garbage can on the street. When I got back to the apartment, I locked the door behind me. Volume I of The
Great Minds of Western Philosophy was sitting on the table, but he had finished the Hellenists a long time ago, so I knew something was wrong. I found the note tucked inside the chapter called
“The Death of Socrates,” on a sheet of my Gloomy Bear stationery, folded neatly in thirds. I pulled it out. There was no name on the note, so I wondered if he meant for me to find it,
or Mom, or both of us, or maybe he just wrote it for himself. I didn’t want to read it just then, so I folded it back up and put it in the pocket of my school blazer.

Here is what I thought: If I read this note and he is already dead, then I will know that he was serious this time and really meant to die, and it was my fault for being harsh and mean to him.
And if he isn’t already dead, then reading the note might kill him, and it will still be my fault.

It made no logical sense, but that’s what I thought at the time, and I knew that whatever I did, I would feel crummy. I was still wearing my school uniform. I went to the bedroom and
changed into jeans and a hoodie, transferring the note to my sweatshirt pocket, and then went back to the toilet to finish mopping up. Two nasty Toilet Incidents in one week. Weird.

Mom called from her office. She’d been in a meeting. She made me describe what had happened and exactly what I’d seen, and then she made me read the name of the
hospital and the address and phone number off the card. Then she asked me if I was going to be okay by myself.

“Of course,” I said.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “Did Dad leave you any food?”

“I’m not hungry.” Probably I would never eat again.

“I’ll call you from the hospital. Wait for me. Don’t go out.”

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

I wanted to tell her about the note but I didn’t know if I should.

“What is it, Naoko?” Her voice was strained. She wanted to get going.

“Nothing.”

We hung up. I took the note out of my hoodie pocket. Maybe I was wrong. It wasn’t addressed to anyone, so maybe it wasn’t a note at all. I unfolded it. There were two sentences on it
in my dad’s passionate manic handwriting. The first one said this:

I recognized the sentence. It was what Socrates said to his friend Crito just before he drank the poison hemlock. Crito was stalling, trying to get Socrates to hold off a little
longer. He was like, “What’s the big hurry? There’s still lots of time. Why not hang out and have some dinner and enjoy a couple glasses of wine with us?” But Socrates was
like, “Forget it. I don’t want to feel like an idiot. Let’s get this over with,” and so he did. Dad really liked that story and told it to me one afternoon. He had some
theory about how it exemplified the Western Mind, but I didn’t know what he was talking about. I just remember he pronounced Crito like Kuritto, and I liked the way it sounded. Like a cracker
breaking in half, or crickets in the grass.

Underneath the first sentence was a second.

A horrible thought occurred to me. I went back into the bedroom. Hello Kitty glowed pinkly at me from the screensaver, but when I woke the computer up, Hello Kitty disappeared,
and I was staring at the bursera hentai website, at the page with my panties for sale. I had forgotten to clear the cache in the web browser. He must have seen it. The auction was over. Someone
named Lolicom73 had won. I looked at the bidding history. It had reached a peak and flattened out, but in the final hour, a new bidder named C.imperator had jumped in, and there was a flurry of
raising and counter-raising, but with just two seconds to go, Lolicom73 beat C.imperator’s last bid.

Lolicom73 was the proud owner of my panties. C.imperator had lost. I went to the bathroom and leaned over the toilet and threw up, but at least I did it neatly into the bowl.

I went back into the living room. The note was still sitting on top of the book where I’d left it. I picked it up and crumpled it in my fist and threw it across the room, but it just
bounced off the sofa and landed on the rug. I wanted it to be a rock or a bomb. I wanted it to blow a huge hole in the middle of our living room or blow up the whole stupid building. But I
didn’t have a bomb, so I picked up Volume I of The Great Minds of Western Philosophy instead and heaved it at the glass balcony door. It was a heavy book, but the glass was strong, and the
book bounced off and landed facedown on the floor. This made me even madder, so I picked it up again, only this time I opened the sliding door before I threw it. As I watched the Hellenists go
sailing out over the balcony rail, pages fluttering like the underfeathers of the last archaeopteryx, I felt a tremendous sense of relief. I listened for what seemed like many moments for the tiny
thud to come.

“Hey!”

I froze. The voice was coming from the street below.

“Hey! Don’t try to hide yourself. I know you’re up there!”

It was a young female voice and it didn’t sound too angry, so I stepped onto the balcony, and peered down over the rail. A pretty round face looked up at me. It was one of the hostesses
who lived in the neighborhood. I recognized her from the public baths. She always had a smile for me, and now she recognized me, too.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. She was holding the book in her hands. “You drop this?”

She looked uninjured so I nodded.

“You should be more careful,” she said, like it was no big deal. “You could kill somebody.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice still wasn’t working very well, so I don’t know if she heard me or not.

“I’ll just leave it here, okay?” She placed it on the low cinder-block wall that ran between the sidewalk and the building. “You better come down and pick it up or
someone might take it.” She looked at the title. “Or maybe not. Anyway, I’ll just leave it here, okay?”

“Thank you!” I whispered, but she had already rounded the corner and disappeared.

They pumped Dad’s stomach to make sure they got all the pills out, and he didn’t die after all, and in fact, it wasn’t even close. Mom got home from the
hospital and told me he was going to be fine. I didn’t tell her about the note in Socrates.

When Dad was discharged, we all sat down in the living room for another heart to heart, or maybe you could call it a family debriefing. Dad spoke dully, like he’d memorized his lines and
didn’t believe them. He apologized to me. He said it was an accident, that he was so tired, but he couldn’t sleep. He lost track of how many pills he had taken. It wouldn’t happen
again. He didn’t mention the note or the auction.

My mom watched his performance carefully, and when he got to the end, she sounded so relieved. “Of course it was an accident,” she said, appealing to me. “We knew that,
didn’t we, Nao?”

She turned back to Dad and started scolding him. “Silly Papa! How could you be so careless? From now on, Naoko and I will keep all your medications safe for you and you must ask us if you
need a pill. Isn’t that right, Nao-chan?”

Don’t drag me into this, I thought, but I just picked at my split ends and nodded. I couldn’t bear to look at either of them. After the debriefing was over and Mom went to bed, I
handed Dad a sheet of Gloomy Bear stationery, folded neatly in thirds. It looked exactly like his Socrates note, and he turned pale and opened and closed his mouth like a dying fish.

“You better read it,” I said.

He unfolded it and read. It was two sentences long. When he finished, he nodded and folded it up again. “Yes,” he said. “You’re right.”

Here’s what my first sentence said:

And here’s the second:

Sometimes you have to say what’s on your mind.

That night, when my parents were finally asleep, I sneaked into the bathroom with a pair of scissors and the electric clipper my mom bought to give Dad haircuts when he still
cared about grooming and personal hygiene and employment and stuff. In the cold bathroom light, I chopped off my hair in chunks. It took me a long time to cut it all off until it was short enough
to buzz. I plugged in the electric clipper and turned it on. It was so loud! I switched it off quickly and listened, but there was no sound from the bedroom, so I closed the door and wrapped the
clipper in a towel to muffle the sound of the motor. When I was done with the buzzing, I cleaned up all my long hair and hid it in a paper bag in the trash, then wiped the sink with toilet paper. I
covered my bare head with my hoodie and crawled back into my futon. It was such a weird feeling, and I had to keep reaching up to touch my head.

I sat zazen under my covers for the rest of the night, and as soon as the sky grew light, I got dressed and left the apartment. I was wearing my hoodie under my school blazer, which is totally
against the rules, but I had to hide my naked head. Since it was so early, I bought a can of hot coffee from a vending machine and went to sit on the stone bench in the temple garden to kill some
time. The monk came out to rake the gravel. He glanced up and saw me. Maybe he understood what I had going on under my hoodie because something passed between us and he nodded to me. I set my can
of coffee on the bench and stood up and pulled my hood off, and then I bowed to him, a proper Buddhist bow, with my palms pressed together, nice and deep like Jiko taught me. When I straightened
up, I saw he’d stopped raking and was returning my bow properly, too. That made me feel good, and it’s why I like monks and nuns so much. They know how to be polite to everyone,
regardless of how fucked-up she might be.

I waited until I knew the last bell had rung, and then I jogged the rest of the way to school. There was no one in the playground. I slipped through the empty corridors as silent as a ghost
until I reached my classroom. Since I still couldn’t walk through walls, I threw open the door instead. Sensei was in the middle of roll call, but I didn’t bother to apologize for
interrupting or for being late. Some of Reiko’s gang started to snicker when they saw me, and I caught the words “auction” and “panties” and “bottom line.”
I figured that everyone in the class had heard about the Panty Incident and had been following the bidding over the last few days. It was an all-class project.

But I ignored the whispering and marched to my seat. Maybe it was the hoodie under my blazer that signaled something was different, or maybe it was my erect posture, like a soldier marching to
battle, or maybe the energy of my
supapawa
cast a spell over them and struck them dumb. One by one they fell silent. I reached my desk, but instead of sitting down on my chair, I climbed
up on it and then onto my desk, and I stood there, tall and straight. Then, when everybody was looking, I flipped back my hoodie.