A Tale for the Time Being (6 page)

“I still say this should have been my find,” she said, pulling a rain parka on over the sweater. “But maybe it’s better you got it, since at least you can read some of
the Japanese. Good luck. Don’t let yourself get too distracted now . . .”

Ruth braced herself.

“. . . How’s the new book coming, anyway?” Muriel asked.

3.

At night, in bed, Ruth would often read to Oliver. It used to be that when she’d had a good writing day, she would read aloud what she’d just written, finding that
if she fell asleep thinking about the scene she was working on, she would often wake with a sense of where to go next. It had been a long while, however, since she’d had a day like that or
shared anything new.

That night, she read the first few entries of Nao’s diary. When she came to the passage about perverts and panties and the zebra-skin bed, she felt a sudden flush of discomfort. It
wasn’t embarrassment. She was never shy about this kind of thing, herself. Rather, her discomfort was more on behalf of the girl. She was feeling protective. But she needn’t have
worried.

“The nun sounds interesting,” Oliver said, as he fiddled with the broken watch.

“Yes,” she said, relieved. “The Taish
ō
Democracy was an interesting time for Japanese women.”

“Do you think she’s still alive?”

“The nun? I doubt it. She was a hundred and four—” “I meant the girl.”

“I don’t know,” Ruth said. “It’s crazy, but I’m kind of worried about her. I guess I’ll have to keep on reading to find out.”

4.

Do you feel special yet?

The girl’s question lingered.

“It’s an interesting thought,” Oliver said, still tinkering with the watch. “Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“She says she’s writing it for you. So do you feel special?”

“That’s ridiculous,” Ruth said.

What if you just think I’m a jerk and toss me into the garbage?

“Speaking about garbage,” Oliver said. “I’ve been thinking about the Great Garbage Patches recently . . .”

“The what?”

“The Great Eastern and Great Western Garbage Patches? Enormous masses of garbage and debris floating in the oceans? You must have heard about them . . .”

“Yes,” she said. “No. I mean, sort of.” It didn’t matter, since he clearly wanted to tell her about them. She put down the diary, letting it rest on the white
bedcovers. She took off her glasses and laid them on top of the book. The glasses were retro, with thick black frames that looked nice against the worn red cloth cover.

“There are at least eight of them in the world’s oceans,” he said. “According to this book I’ve been reading, two of them, the Great Eastern Patch and Great Western
Patch, are in the Turtle Gyre, and converge at the southern tip of Hawaii. The Great Eastern Patch is the size of Texas. The Great Western is even larger, half the size of the continental
USA.”

“What’s in them?”

“Plastic mostly. Like your freezer bag. Soda bottles, styrofoam, take-out food containers, disposable razors, industrial waste. Anything we throw away that floats.”

“That’s horrible. Why are you telling me this?”

He shook the watch and held it up to his ear. “No reason. Just that they’re there, and anything that doesn’t sink or escape from the gyre gets sucked up into the middle of a
garbage patch. That’s what would have happened to your freezer bag if it hadn’t escaped. Sucked up and becalmed, slowly eddying around. The plastic ground into particles for the fish
and zooplankton to eat. The diary and letters disintegrating, unread. But instead it got washed up on the beach below Jap Ranch, where you could find it . . .”

“What are you saying?” Ruth asked.

“Nothing. Just that it’s amazing, is all.”

“As in the-universe-provides kind of amazing?”

“Maybe.” He looked up with an astonished expression on his face. “Hey, look!” he said, holding out the watch. “It’s working!”

The second hand was making its way around the large luminescent numbers on the face. She took it from him and slipped it on her wrist. It was a man’s watch, but it fit her. “What did
you do?”

“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “I guess I wound it.”

5.

She listened to the watch ticking softly in the dark, and the sound of Oliver’s mechanical breathing. She reached over to the bedside table and felt for the diary. Running
her fingertips across the soft cloth cover, she noted the faint impression of the tarnished letters. They still retained the shape of
À la recherche du temps perdu
, but they had
evolved—no, that word implied a gradual unfolding, and this was sudden, a mutation or a rift, pages ripped from their cover by some Tokyo crafter who’d retooled Proust into something
altogether new.

In her mind’s eye, she could see the purple ink scripting sinuous lines into solid blocks of colored paragraphs. She couldn’t help but notice and admire the uninhibited flow of the
girl’s language. Rarely had she succumbed to second thoughts. Rarely did she doubt a word, or pause to consider or replace it with another. There were only a few crossed-out lines and
phrases, and this, too, filled Ruth with something like awe. It had been years since she’d approached the page with such certainty.

I am reaching through time to touch you.

The diary once again felt warm in her hands, which she knew had less to do with any spooky quality in the book and everything to do with the climate changes in her own body. She was growing
accustomed to sudden temperature shifts. The steering wheel of the car that grew sticky and hot in her grip. The smoldering pillow, which she often woke to find on the floor beside the bed where
she’d flung it in her sleep, along with the covers, as though to punish them all for making her hot.

The watch, by contrast, felt cool against her wrist.

I’m reaching forward through time to touch you . . . you’re reaching back to touch me.

She held the diary to her nose again and sniffed, identifying the smells one by one: the mustiness of an old book tickling her nostrils, the acrid tang of glue and paper, and then something else
that she realized must be Nao, bitter like coffee beans and sweetly fruity like shampoo. She inhaled again, deeply this time, and then put the book—no, not a schoolgirl’s nice pure
diary—back on the bedside table, still pondering how best to read this improbable text. Nao claimed to have written it just for her, and while Ruth knew this was absurd, she decided she would
go along with the conceit. As the girl’s reader, it was the least she could do.

The steady ticking of the old watch seemed to grow louder. How do you search for lost time, anyway? As she thought about this question, it occurred to her that perhaps a clue lay in the pacing.
Nao had written her diary in real time, living her days, moment by moment. Perhaps if Ruth paced herself by slowing down and not reading faster than the girl had written, she could more closely
replicate Nao’s experience. Of course, the entries were undated, so there was no way of really knowing how slow or fast that might have been, but there were clues: the changing hues of ink,
as well as shifts in the density or angle of the handwriting, which seemed to indicate breaks in time or mood. If she studied these, she might be able to break up the diary into hypothetical
intervals, and even assign numbers to them, and then pace her reading accordingly. If she sensed the girl was on a roll, she could allow herself to read further and more quickly, but if it felt
like the pace of the writing was slowing down, then she would slow her reading down, too, or stop altogether. This way she wouldn’t end up with an overly compressed or accelerated sense of
the girl’s life and its unfolding, nor would she run the risk of wasting too much time. She would be able to balance her reading of the diary with all the work she still needed to do on her
own memoir.

It seemed like a very reasonable plan. Satisfied, Ruth groped for the book on the night table and slipped it under her pillow. The girl was right, she thought as she drifted off to sleep. It was
real and totally personal.

6.

That night she dreamed about a nun.

The dream took place on a mountainside, somewhere in Japan, where the shrill cries of insects broke the silence, and the nighttime breezes in the tall cypress trees were fresh and restless.

Amid the trees, the graceful curve of a tiled temple roof gleamed dully in the moonlight, and even though it was dark, Ruth could see that the building was falling down and close to ruin. The
only illumination inside the temple came from a single room adjoining the garden, where the old nun knelt on the floor in front of a low table, leaning in toward a glowing computer screen, which
seemed to float in the darkness, casting its silver square of light onto the ancient planes of her face. The rest of her body receded into the darkness of the room, but Ruth could see that her back
was curved like a question mark as she bent toward the screen, and that her faded black robes were old and worn. A square of patchwork fabric hung around her neck, like the bib an infant might wear
to protect it from spills. Outside in the temple garden, the moon shone through the sliding doors that opened onto the veranda. The curve of the nun’s shaved head gleamed faintly in the
moonlight, and when she turned her face, Ruth could see the light from the monitor reflected in the lenses of the glasses she was wearing, which had thick, squarish black frames, not unlike
Ruth’s own. The nun’s face looked oddly young in the pixelated glow. She was typing something, carefully, with arthritic forefingers.

“
S o m e t i m e s u p . . .
” she typed. Her wrists were bent like broken branches, and her fingers curled like crooked sticks, tapping out each letter on the
keyboard.

“
S o m e t i m e s d o w n . . .
”

It was the answer to Nao’s elevator question. She hit
RETURN
and sat back on her heels, closing her eyes as though dozing. After a few minutes, a little icon on the
side of the screen flashed and a digitized bell sounded an alert. She sat up, adjusted her glasses, and leaned forward to read. Then she began to type her reply.

Up down, same thing. And also different, too.

She entered her text and sat back again to wait. When the bell sounded, she read the incoming message and nodded. She thought for a moment, running her hand over her smooth head, and then she
started typing again.

When up looks up, up is down.

When down looks down, down is up.

Not-one, not-two. Not same. Not different.

Now do you see?

It took her a while to type all this, and at last when she hit
ENTER
to send her message, she looked tired. She took off her glasses, placing them on the edge of the low
table, and rubbed her eyes with her crooked fingers. Putting her glasses back on, she slowly uncurled her body and stood, taking her time. When her feet were steady underneath her, she shuffled
across the room toward the sliding paper doors and the wooden veranda. Her white socks glowed brightly against the dark luster of the wood that many feet, many socks, had polished until it gleamed
in the moonlight. She stood on the edge and looked out at the garden, where old rocks cast long shadows and the bamboo whispered. The smell of wet moss mixed with the scent of incense burned
earlier in the day. She took a deep breath, and then another, and raised her arms out to her sides, spreading the wide black sleeves of her robes like a crow stretching its wings and preparing to
fly. She stood like this for a moment, perfectly still, then brought her arms together in front of her body and started swinging them back and forth. Her sleeves flapped and filled with air, and
just when it looked like she might take off, she appeared to change her mind, and instead reached around and clasped her fingers behind her, pressing them into the small of her back and attempting
to arch her spine. Chin tilted upward, she examined the moon.

Up, down.

The smooth skin on her shorn head caught the light. From a distance, where Ruth stood, it looked like two moons, talking.

1.

Timing is everything. Somewhere I read that men born between April and June are more likely to commit suicide than men born at other times of the year. My dad was born in May,
so maybe that explains it. Not that he’s succeeded in killing himself yet. He hasn’t. But he’s still trying. It’s just a matter of time.

I know I said I would write about old Jiko, but my dad and I are having a fight and so I’m kind of preoccupied. It’s not really a huge fight, but we’re not talking to each
other, which actually means that I’m not talking to him. He probably hasn’t even noticed because he’s pretty oblivious to other people’s feelings these days, and I
don’t want to upset him by telling him, “Hey, Dad, in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re having a fight, okay?” He’s got a lot on his mind and I don’t want to
make him even more depressed.

What we’re not really fighting about is me not really going to school. The problem is that I screwed up my high school entrance exams, so I can’t get in anywhere good, so my only
option is to go to some kind of trade school where the stupid kids go, which is so
not
an option. I don’t particularly care about getting an education.
I’d much rather become a nun and go live with old Jiko at her temple on the mountain, but my mom and dad say I have to graduate from high school first.

So right now, I’m a ronin, which is an old word for a samurai warrior who doesn’t have a master. Back in feudal times, samurai warriors had to have lords or masters. The whole point
of being a samurai was to serve a master, and when your master got killed or commited seppuku
³²
or lost his castles in a war or something, that was it.
Snap!
Your raison d’être was gone, and you had to become a ronin and wander around having sword fights and getting into trouble. These ronin were scary dudes, kind of like what
the homeless guys living under tarps in Ueno Park might turn into if you gave them really sharp swords.