Bicycle Days (29 page)

He didn’t move much those first few days. The local doctor who had first treated him said that two of his ribs were broken and his sternum was bruised. There were cuts and scrapes all over his body. The doctor suggested at least a couple of weeks of complete rest. So Alec stayed in his room alone. He listened to the two girls downstairs while they cleaned the house over and over again, Occasionally they would come upstairs with their damp cloths and dusters, but he would gently shake his head and they would turn and hurry down the stairs, whispering to each other. He kept the window closed. The room grew musty and began to smell of his own body. He tried to read the copy of
A Handful of Dust
he had brought with him but found himself skipping whole paragraphs. Usually he just sat by the window, feeling the heat of the sun through the glass. When it grew dark and his reflection appeared in the dusty panes, he would quickly turn away.

He tried to reduce everything to the bare essentials. He wanted certain feelings, but not others. Pain was all right. The brutal shock of it seemed more real than anything else. He
didn’t run away from pain. Sometimes he even looked for it, hungered for it: he sat up too quickly or rolled over onto his stomach. There was never any waiting time. Pain washed over him in an instant, taking his breath with it. He watched his hands as they gripped the futon, the skin whitening around the scabs that had formed since the accident. His fingers were long and slender, graceful even in this condition, and he found himself unable to look at them without thinking of the years he had spent studying the piano, his mother on the bench beside him, eyes closed, listening to the music and tapping her foot in her own determined way.

His mother. Suddenly she was back, their life together unrolling like a scroll until it was right there in front of him, scene by scene, his own faulty Chopin filtering through the background. An ocean of memory, each wave a moment, rising up and then cresting, about to break. And him, a child again, her little boy. There was no turning away from it.

She called them “bicycle days”—those days when she was teaching him to ride his bicycle in Central Park. Those days when she raced along beside him, laughing, one hand at the small of his back, the other hovering above the handlebars. She flew him like a kite, not letting him go until the wind was just right, until she was sure there wouldn’t be an accident. But even then she never stopped running. Even when he was off and riding, thrilled and wobbling, he heard her behind him, keeping up, her heels frantically skipping and knocking against the pavement until it sounded like hailstones coming down around them. The noise was beautiful—the blood sounding in his ears, his rushing breath, her sharp heels and sudden, girlish laughter. A kind of music playing as they rode round and round, past park benches filled with other mothers and their children, all of them smiling, pointing, watching the blond woman run behind her child to catch him if he fell. But he never fell, never even thought he would. Every afternoon for a week she was there for him. She said she loved those bicycle days, the way they made her feel like a girl again. She said she had never had such a good
time. And it seemed to Alec as he listened to her that nothing that good could ever stop, that all days would be bicycle days, and that he need only turn his head to find her there behind him, her arms outstretched, reaching for him as he rushed round the park with the wind in his face.

I
t was morning, five days or a week later. Alec woke just after sunrise, shivering. The room was cold and no longer smelled. He sat up slowly, his ribs stiff and painful from sleeping, and saw that someone had opened the window during the night. A mottled brown leaf rested briefly on the ledge before a light breeze floated it into the room. He reached over, picked it up, tracing with his eyes the veins and tiny holes in its surface. Fall had come without his even noticing. He thought of Rip Van Winkle then, wondered what the old man had really felt in the moment of waking under the tree, whether there was any chance he had felt somehow cheated and angry, not that he had slept for so long, but that he ever had to wake up at all.

Crumpling the dry leaf until it was dust, Alec got slowly to his feet. He walked the short distance to the window, looked out at the familiar patch of land. The cherry trees stood naked of their blossoms like soldiers in civilian clothes. Beneath their protection, the valley eased and stretched itself down toward the river,
the rice paddies splayed like fingers. Already the air was filled with noise. Birds had picked up where the crickets had left off, their quick whistles making a carnival of the morning stillness. A raven picked and jumped its way through the neat rows of the vegetable garden. A breeze rose from the valley and lapped against the house. Alec felt it strong and then faint on his face.

He slammed the window shut. Time seemed to stop with the sound, and he felt it happening all over again—the frustration growing inside him, rising like heat. He tried to think about other things, about what he would say to the girls downstairs to make sure they didn’t open the window again, or even come upstairs. He turned around and heard his own breath of surprise when he saw Grandmother kneeling in the far corner of the room where she and Grandfather had slept. She was ironing, light bursts of steam rising now and then about her small gray head. She didn’t look up. Alec glanced at the spot on the tatami where he had thrown his dirty clothes, but it was bare. And so was the rest of the floor. Everywhere, the room had been made neat and clean. He looked behind him at the windowpanes, saw that they were no longer coated with dust. When he turned back to face her across the room, he heard her humming softly to herself, the same sad notes as before.

He took a few steps toward her kneeling form, then stopped, not sure what he wanted to say or do. She kept her face hidden from him, and he wondered if she was even aware of his presence. For a moment, he thought he might ask her to leave, tell her that it was important for him to be alone. Her humming grew stronger then, the notes reaching out and caressing him. And he felt suddenly and fiercely ashamed in a way he had not felt since he was a boy. Shame, warming and then burning his cheeks, pushing him forward.

He was almost close enough to touch her when she finally looked up at him. Her eyes found his without traveling anywhere else, as if she had focused on them long ago in her thoughts. Led by their own sense of sight, her hands moved with sureness, coaxing heat from the iron, creating breaths of steam.
As he looked at her eyes Alec knew that he had expected them to appear lost in some way, filled with grief and regret and a deep longing for something irrevocably changed. Eyes touched with the sadness of the notes she hummed, eyes as unsteady and hopeless as the old-woman’s legs that had given up supporting her. Eyes of a life that was all past now, all memory, its moments crowding the house until there was no room left for the living.

Grandmother set the iron down on its heel, removed the smooth shirt from the board on which she had been working. It was his shirt, and Alec understood in the instant it took her to fold it that her eyes weren’t questioning anything just then, they were filled with doing. And he felt suddenly as if he could look right through them and deep inside her and know that she wasn’t taking any of the emotional and physical realities of her life apart, wasn’t analyzing them, but accepting them as each moment required. The way Grandfather had done. And for a moment it was as if the old man were back with them, as if he and Alec were fishing again, their thin rods swaying like reeds in the wind as they stood waist-deep in the rushing river, balanced and waiting for whatever came next.

The room seemed very clear as Grandmother reached behind her and brought out a plastic washbasin with a freshly ironed towel and yukata inside. Alec took it with a slight bow of his head and knew without seeing that her eyes were still on him as he got slowly to his feet and went downstairs to bathe.

A
lec stood outside the wall of glass doors that led into Tokyo Station. He held his back rigid to ease the pressure on his sore ribs. People hurried past him, some glancing twice at the few scabs still visible on his hands and arms. An arc of late afternoon sunlight reached him through a sliver of space between the surrounding skyscrapers. He basked in it, feeling with his hands the warmth in his hair, wondering what he should do next. He had taken an earlier train than the one he had told Mrs. Hasegawa he would be on. No one knew where he was. Lifting his small duffel bag with care, he walked into the street to hail a taxi.

The broad gravel path that led to the Meiji shrine was long and curving, a sickle-shaped brushstroke of white. On the right side of the path leading in, the peaked rooftop of Harajuku subway station could be seen above the stone wall surrounding the
shrine grounds, standing resolutely amid the hiss and clatter of arriving and departing trains. Occasional shouts and blasts of rock music came from the student-filled streets beyond. Like a breeze, the raucous energy scaled the stone wall and crossed the gravel path, only to be blocked out by a band of trees that, like the path itself, curved round and out of sight. Signs were posted here and there, marking routes through the woods. Alec recognized the sign he was looking for and turned onto a rocky dirt path that ambled between the trees like a dried-out streambed.

Beneath the canopy of leaves, the world became a darker, more restful place. The air was cool with moisture. Alec breathed deeply as he walked, only vaguely aware of the other people he saw through the trees. There were not many, and most of them appeared to be on routes different from his. Only two people, a couple, were on his path, to one side of it, huddled together beside a tree. They looked up, startled, when he passed, and Alec saw the gleaming blade of a knife in the man’s hand. But he noticed it then, a heart freshly carved in the trunk of the tree, blank and ready for the two lovers to claim it with their names.

He walked on. Eventually the woods fell away to reveal a small pond, its surface scattered with hand-size lily pads. Brightly colored carp surfaced continually, leaving the lily pads trembling in their wake. Separated from the pond by another path, a grassy embankment led up to a tea house. The sun seemed to have stopped its descent for the moment and now sat just above the eaves of the house, tingeing the bare wood a delicate, pale orange. A young man with a neatly trimmed mustache had balanced his easel on the grassy slope just below and was trying to paint the scene before the light changed. Alec considered going up to take a look at the man’s work, but then thought better of it. If he took too much time, he would lose what was left of the day’s light.

Another sign directed him onward. He crossed a wooden footbridge and continued along the path. The embankment on his right turned to woods again. He saw several people ahead of
him, but they were all leaving, heading in the direction of the shrine itself or back up toward the entrance to the grounds.

The sign announcing the iris garden was painted with colorful flowers, only some of which looked like irises. Behind it the land dipped to form five evenly spaced planting rows, now almost indistinguishable beneath a tangle of weeds and dead vegetation. Along the rows and on into the distance, unrecognizable flowers raised their withered bodies, looking like meager tombstones in a horticultural cemetery. About twenty feet ahead, a bald man knelt amid the mess, digging into the earth with a trowel. His white T-shirt was ragged and stained, and his black cotton workpants were rolled up to his calves. Alec had not moved from in front of the painted sign. Several times he looked from it to the rows of withered flowers to the bald man with the trowel, who he supposed was the gardener. Finally he walked along the path to where the man was kneeling.

“Please excuse me,” he said in Japanese, “but I am looking for the iris garden.”

The gardener continued digging, occasionally using his free hand to pull weeds from the ground. Alec set down his duffel bag and waited, looking at the shiny back of his bald head. He tried again.