Lord of All Things (9 page)

Then a woman boarded the bus who must have been an old acquaintance, since Yumiko called out a loud “Hello!” Maybe they had dunked one another in water as children. In any case, they started chatting away quite literally like long-lost friends and simply tuned Hiroshi and Charlotte out. At last. Hiroshi had hardly been able to contain his impatience.

He leaned over to Charlotte and asked softly, “What’s wrong?”

It was a moment he would remember for the rest of his life. How she turned to face him; how she looked at him with eyes like windows to infinity, like the mouths of bottomless wells, like black holes. How, when she spoke, her voice sent goose bumps up and down his spine. She said, “It was so unbelievably old!”

What? Hiroshi wanted to ask. The knife? But he couldn’t say a word. The sound of her voice had frozen every muscle in his body.

Charlotte didn’t say another word all the rest of the way home. She just stared blankly ahead, letting them lead her by the hand. When they got back home, Hiroshi told her, “We’re flying to Minamata tomorrow. For a week.”

Charlotte nodded, but it didn’t look as though she had really understood. Hiroshi watched as she and Yumiko walked through the main gate, then he went home himself. He had the nagging feeling he had done something wrong, though he couldn’t for the life of him think what it might have been.

The next day they had to get up hideously early to catch their flight to Minamata. They were flying to see his grandparents, which Hiroshi wasn’t looking forward to, and to celebrate the Bon
festival, which he didn’t really care about. What he liked was the flight itself.

But he didn’t like getting up and getting dressed when he still fuzzy with sleep, or leaving the apartment block in the dead silence of the night as the streetlamps shone yellow above them. He could hardly believe there were cars driving around at that hour, even if there were only a few. Perhaps they were going to the airport as well. And he had never seen the metro so empty.

When at last they had boarded their flight, Hiroshi noticed for the first time that there was a section of the plane with larger seats than the rest, wider seats with more space around them, and that it was curtained off from the other passengers before takeoff.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“First class,” said his mother.

Their seats were quite close to the front, so Hiroshi could peer through a gap in the curtains and see the passengers up there being served larger trays with better food.

“That’s how rich people travel,” his mother explained. “First class is much, much more expensive than what we pay. For the same flight—just think about it—and it’s not as if they arrive any quicker than the rest of us. It’s sheer stupidity!” She shook her head in disapproval. “It’s just because they’re snobs. They can’t bear the idea of sitting next to normal people for two hours.”

At ten o’clock they landed in Kagoshima. From there they took the train to Minamata, where his grandparents were waiting for them at the station. Hiroshi was still so elated by the flight—by the sight of the huge clouds piled up around them and the tiny landscape down below—that he hardly noticed the obligatory greeting ritual, the kisses, and the talk of how much he had grown. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad this time around.

Dr. Suzuki joined them for dinner. He had been treating Aunt Kumiko for years and was practically one of the family by now. He drank a great deal of sake and never tired of telling anyone who would listen how wonderful it was that Aunt Kumiko had lasted so long, especially given how serious her poisoning was. Hiroshi huddled in his chair and concentrated on his food as the doctor talked and talked. He didn’t want to hear any of it. He couldn’t see anything wonderful about being sick for a whole lifetime, lying in bed incontinent, and screaming as though tormented by a thousand demons. He shuddered at the thought that such a thing could even happen, that the smallest particles of matter in existence could do that to a human being. That Aunt Kumiko was the way she was because she had liked to eat fish so much, and there had been just a few more atoms of mercury in the fish than was good for her. Just a few of the wrong atoms in the wrong place could cause convulsions and make a person forget everything she had ever known. Could there be anything more dreadful? And there was nothing anyone could do about it. Atoms were too small even to see. He had read a great deal about it. You could inhale mercury without even noticing. And that wasn’t the only atom that could be dangerous; there was a whole zoo of them—cadmium, plutonium, arsenic, sodium, chlorine, and many more.

The next day he swallowed his fears and went to Aunt Kumiko’s room. She wasn’t screaming any longer; she was just lying there, and as he stepped closer to her bed she did something she hadn’t done for a very long time. She turned her head as though she wanted to look at him. But her gaze wandered away; perhaps it had just been a chance movement. Hiroshi stayed until the feeling of revulsion had passed, and he began to feel sorry for her.

Afterward, he crept out of the house and roamed the neighborhood, looking for the places where he had played on holiday as a little boy. The town had changed so much that he couldn’t find most of the spots, and the ones he did find were no longer any good for games. A little stream where he and another boy had built a dam with mud from the bank had been filled in, and a supermarket stood right where it had been. It was a sad sight.

He thought of Charlotte and how she had screamed at the shrine. At that moment she had sounded the way Aunt Kumiko used to, just as terrified. Hiroshi used to feel his aunt was looking into a pit full of demons. That was how she had screamed, too. Hiroshi would have liked to have known what it meant. What Charlotte had seen when she had touched the obsidian dagger. Perhaps it wasn’t even possible to explain something like that to another human being. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t said anything. He was momentarily gripped with fear that Charlotte might end up like Aunt Kumiko. But he quickly thought of something else.

Over the next few days they were all very busy with the festival of the dead. As always, Hiroshi got the job of writing signs displaying the names of all the ancestors, the dead forebears they would remember. Plates were set out on every free surface in the house, and the women stood in the kitchen making dish after dish of all the treats the dead family members had liked best when they were alive—as far as anyone really remembered such things. Then they set the food out on the plates to welcome the spirits when they came. The whole house smelled of good things to eat, and they told a lot of stories, including quite a few Hiroshi had never heard before.

Then they went out to the street festival and watched the dances, which were meant to put the ancestor spirits in a good mood. On the last evening they went down to the river with everyone else and set little paper boats on the water with lanterns in them, then watched as the glimmering lights twirled and swirled together into one vast, twinkling pattern. It drifted slowly away and eventually vanished in the distance; tradition had it that this would help the wandering souls find their way back to the underworld.

Hiroshi tried to come up with a rough estimate of just how densely populated the underworld must be if it really did contain all the souls of all the human beings who had ever lived. The numbers he arrived at made him feel quite dizzy. Had anyone ever considered what might happen if those souls decided not to stay in the underworld any longer? What if one day the underworld were to fill up? But as far as he could see, nobody truly believed anymore that the souls of the dead were really there with them at the Bon festival. It was just a tradition, a chance for the family to get together.

“It’s good that you’re staying on a few days longer this time,” Grandpa said the next morning.

Mother explained that there hadn’t really been any choice.

“Oh, yes,” Grandma chimed in. “Everything’s always booked solid right around the Bon festival. “All of Japan is traveling.”

Everybody agreed it had been a good idea to stay on a few extra days. Hiroshi was the only one who couldn’t wait to get back home, and he bit his lip rather than say anything of the kind.

By the time they got home, Charlotte was no longer there. Ambassador Malroux had been called away quite suddenly, they learned, and the whole family had simply packed their bags from one day to the next and left.

One day before. They had missed one another by the narrowest of margins.

Hiroshi stood there thunderstruck as his mother told him the news from the embassy. The previous ambassador, Bernard Beaucour, would be back next week. Jean-Arnaud Malroux had simply been standing in for him while he was ill. Charlotte was gone. And she hadn’t even written him a good-bye letter.

“Now you see,” Hiroshi’s mother said with bitter satisfaction. “You were only ever a toy for her. That’s what rich people are like.”

Hiroshi told himself Charlotte wouldn’t even have been able to write him a letter, since she didn’t know how to write Japanese. He told himself that was the only reason, that it had just been a matter of bad luck. But it eventually dawned on him that Charlotte could have written him a letter in English. She had lived in India; of course she knew English. And she knew Hiroshi studied English in school, that he watched films in English, that even if he couldn’t speak English very well, he could certainly read it.

In the end he had to admit that if Charlotte had really wanted to, she would have been able to leave him some message. But no message came. He would have to live with that.

“Who knows what all that was about,” his mother said one evening when she was in a philosophical mood.

All the same, Hiroshi told himself, Charlotte had helped him toward his great idea. If it had been about anything, perhaps it had been about that. He would forget about Charlotte and concentrate completely on his idea so that one day, when he was grown up, he could make it reality. And since in order to do that he would have to have good grades, from that day onward he became a model student.

TRAVELS

One day when he was fourteen years old, Hiroshi came home from his after-school cybernetics study group to find a man sitting at the kitchen table. He was a Westerner, a big beefy man, somehow bloated, even ugly. He sat at the table with his legs crossed clumsily, and it looked as though he had been sitting there for some time talking with Mother all the while. And for some reason, Mother’s eyes were damp.

“Hiroshi,” she said quietly, “this is your father.”

“For real?” Hiroshi replied, but in fact he knew the moment she said it that it was the truth. In that instant he remembered everything Charlotte had told him about his father—as well as how she had told him, how she had read the feelings from his penknife. In some way he couldn’t explain to himself, he felt as though he had known this man forever even though he had never seen him before in his life.

All the same, it was a most peculiar situation. How do you behave around a father who you have always thought was dead? What do you do when all of a sudden he’s sitting at the kitchen table, looking like a failed medical experiment?

Hiroshi shook his hand tentatively and said, “Hello, nice to meet you.” For the first time he wished he had paid even half as much attention in English class as he always did in computer studies, physics, and all the other sciences.

His father explained in awkward, almost incomprehensible Japanese that he used to speak the language much better, but that unfortunately…

Then Mother broke in and said, “John, you can speak English to him. So that he finally understands why I always wanted him to learn it well.”

So to everyone’s relief, John Maynard Leak switched to his native language and told them what had happened in his life.

Turning to face Hiroshi, he explained that he had eventually recovered from the brain operation, though the doctors had not expected such a thing to be possible. For several years he had been completely helpless and required round-the-clock care. But then a committed physiotherapist had helped him regain enough independence that he could live on his own, well away from the family mansion, and he had hardly anything to do with his family these days. His father had died, and his brothers and sisters had insisted on buying him out so they could carry on the business on their own.

“I never wanted to have anything to do with the business anyway,” he said, waving his hand dismissively and very nearly knocking a glass of water from the table. “They can worry about all that if they want and play at being billionaires, but I couldn’t care less about any of it. They think they got a good deal, but I have everything I’ll ever need, and if you ask me the deal was all in my favor.”

He went on to tell them he was still undergoing treatment and on various medications, that he still had to do exercises with his therapist and so on, but despite all that he had been fit enough to travel to Japan. He was visibly proud of this, and when Hiroshi could see how happy his father was to have made it there to be with them, he felt the first spark of affection, felt how this big, clumsy man loved them. Hiroshi realized that the puffy features must be a side effect of the medication he was taking, knew the scars on his scalp were left over from that delicate brain operation. If he looked past all that, though, and made the effort, Hiroshi could recognize the man he knew from the old photographs.

“And so here I am,” his father continued. He looked at Hiroshi’s mother as though he were about to say something she hadn’t heard yet either. “And I came to ask Hiroshi whether he wants to come to the US to get the best possible education.”

Mother’s face fell. “What’s wrong with the school he’s at here?”

Father shook his head gently. “I’m talking about what comes after that. He could go to MIT, to Stanford, to Yale, Caltech.…They’re the best universities in the world.”

Hiroshi was gasping for air and couldn’t say a word. He felt as though he were standing in front of a door that was swinging wide open to show unimaginable vistas.

“Why?” his mother asked sharply. “There are some excellent universities in Japan as well, and Hiroshi could certainly get a spot at one of them if he took the trouble.”

“He certainly could,” his father said soothingly and folded his hands to show he meant no offense. “But look at it this way: I was never able to be there for my son. If I can at least help him go study, then all my money will finally have been good for something.” He leaned forward. “And as I’ve said, I’d like it best of all if you could both join me.”

Clearly they had already discussed this before Hiroshi came home, because his mother shot straight back, “No! How many times do I have to tell you? Once was quite enough for me.”

“It won’t be like it was back then. Nothing like it.”

“I belong here. I didn’t know it then, but I do now.”

Only then did Hiroshi realize the curious thing about his father’s sudden appearance. “Mother,” he butted in, “how did he find us?”

Then Hiroshi learned that his father had hired a big international detective agency, and that it hadn’t been hard to track them down. He also learned that the first thing his father had done with the address the agency gave him was to write a long letter. One of the things he had said in the letter was that his father—the man who had wanted to kill Hiroshi before he was even born—was dead. Mother had written a reply, sent him photos of Hiroshi, and told John all about him, about his hobbies and the grades he had been getting in school in the last few years.

“Why did you never tell me about this?” Hiroshi asked.

Mother sighed. “I didn’t want you getting your hopes up. Let’s see if he answers first, I thought, see if he’s interested in you at all. I wanted to spare you the disappointment.” She lifted her hands in a helpless gesture and let them fall. “Whoever would have thought he would just turn up here?”

There was a pause, a breathless, significant silence.

Then Hiroshi’s father said, “Just think about it.” He looked at his watch. “Time for me to go.” He got up painfully, took a sheet of notepaper from his pocket, and gave it to Hiroshi’s mother. “That’s my telephone number at the hotel. Or I could come back again tomorrow.”

Mother took the note but didn’t say anything. Father stood there for a moment, undecided—a big man who made the apartment look even smaller than it really was—then left. They could hear his shuffling, cumbersome footsteps out on the stairs long after he had closed the door behind him.

It was a good thing the new school year began in April in Japan, but only after the summer holidays in the US, since it meant Hiroshi would have almost five months to get used to his new life.

Mother didn’t cry as they said good-bye at the airport. All she said was, “It’s a new time in your life now.” In the end she had accepted the money Hiroshi’s father had offered her and given up the job at the embassy. The first thing she wanted to do was go on a long trip to see the cherry blossoms in Hokkaido, then take a ship to Okinawa. After that she might work for Mr. Inamoto in his office, where there would finally be a use for her knowledge of English. Time would tell.

“Inamoto’s taking advantage of you,” Hiroshi scolded her.

“I can’t just sit around the house,” his mother protested. “Especially not now that I’m all on my own.”

Hiroshi’s flight left at a little after three in the afternoon. It was by far the longest journey he had ever made in his life. For the first time he got to feel what people meant when they talked about jet lag. When they landed in Atlanta, he was woken from a deep slumber and felt it must be the middle of the night. He had to wait there four hours, battling his lack of sleep, before he continued on a tiny little plane to Alexandria, Louisiana, a short-hop flight of barely two hours. When they landed there, it seemed to him that it must be morning, but instead night was just falling.

His father was waiting for him beyond the customs gate and was visibly overjoyed. He talked on and on at Hiroshi, asking how the flight had been, whether there had been any trouble (well of course not; here he was, after all), how his mother would get on without him (he called her Miyu, which sounded strange to Hiroshi), and so on and so forth. When they left the terminal building, he nodded up at the huge neon sign on the roof and said, “I reckon they’re just boasting when they call it Alexandria International Airport. There’s not a single international flight starts from here. They don’t even fly anywhere near the country’s borders.”

They climbed into a gigantic sedan, a Chevrolet about the size of a small boat. Hiroshi’s father drove very slowly and carefully. Hiroshi found this reassuring at first, but then he noticed his father flinch as another car cut in front of them. Then he understood that his father wasn’t actually a very good driver, no doubt because of the brain surgery. After that he didn’t find it quite so reassuring.

They went to what looked like a really fancy restaurant, where Hiroshi was surprised to see the whole menu was nothing but hamburgers, absolutely enormous ones that were served on big plates, the top bun lifted off and set to one side. They helped themselves to ketchup, mayonnaise, and all kinds of other sauces he had never seen before, and then the idea was to put the whole thing together and eat it.

“High school doesn’t start until fall,” his father explained. “You’ll have to have got used to all this by then.”

“I know,” Hiroshi said, staring at his glass. He had ordered a medium cola, which turned out to mean more than half a liter. There was certainly a great deal to get used to here.

His father lived in an unassuming but very roomy house in a quiet side street. The room he had gotten ready for Hiroshi was larger than the whole apartment in Tokyo; it was also the only room in the house that didn’t have a single piece of Japanese furniture, not a single silk painting or rice-paper screen. Instead, the walls were covered with photos of cowboys breaking in wild broncos, of urban skylines, and a night launch of the space shuttle. One of the shelves held a blue-green baseball, a mitt, a bat, and a few more things that must have had something to do with sport, but what exactly Hiroshi couldn’t begin to fathom.

“This is all to help you settle in,” his father commented.

What took the most getting used to was the unusually soft bed. Hiroshi had slept on a futon his entire life and felt like he was going to sink into this wallowing mattress. When midnight had come and gone and he still hadn’t got a wink of sleep, he climbed down onto the carpet with the bedcovers. There, he finally fell asleep, exhausted from the long flight.

Over the next few days, whenever they were out and about, Hiroshi tried to work out just what it was that was so new and strange about the town. It wasn’t only the streets, which were so much wider than Tokyo’s narrow alleyways, and it wasn’t only that the people looked different. No, there was something else.

Hiroshi took a while to figure it out. He knew that Alexandria, Louisiana, was a big American city, but as he went around town, he had the sense he was in an oversized campsite. It wasn’t that the buildings were on wheels (though he found out later there were some of those as well), but that they all looked terribly temporary, as though they had just been dropped down any which way in the landscape. As though nobody wanted to take the trouble to figure out where exactly the buildings should stand. As though a storm might come along at any moment that could sweep all the houses away and leave only the tarmacked streets behind so that the townsfolk could just build more houses.

He was also baffled to see that most of the time there was nothing to show where one property ended and another began, that the lawns simply flowed into one another from neighbor to neighbor. It was an astonishing sight for someone who had grown up in the middle of Tokyo, where it wasn’t unusual to find that even if an apartment had a balcony, it would be easy to lean over the railing and touch the wall of the next building. Hiroshi also saw well-tended gardens with neat picket fences, but in the neighborhood where he and his father lived there was no such thing. Where he lived, people thought you had a garden if you had ploughed over the wild meadow grass and put down a lawn instead.

“This is a good neighborhood,” his dad declared when Hiroshi told him one day about everything he had noticed. “Okay, so land is cheap. But our neighbors are fine people. I’d rather not spend my money on a house in some trendy district.”

Dad didn’t have a job. He still spent a great deal of time with doctors, and he was allowed to park in the handicapped parking spots. Other than that, he mostly collected books about ancient Japan. He occasionally got called in to advise a museum or a gallery somewhere in Louisiana or even farther afield when they were preparing an exhibition about Japan, maybe of the famous “floating world” woodcuts or the picture scrolls from the Heian period, or paintings from the Muromachi period. He kept the posters and catalogs for all the exhibitions he had been involved in and was always proud to point out when he was thanked by name.

He asked Hiroshi to help him work on his rudimentary knowledge of Japanese script. Many evenings they would sit together late into the night, hard at work with expensive brushes and vast sheets of paper. Hiroshi had never written with a brush before in his life, just with ballpoint pens like everybody else. When they worked together like this, Hiroshi noticed his father had trouble retaining new information, recognizing patterns, and learning unfamiliar movements. There was no other way to say it: Dad was clumsy. Awkward. But he was very involved with Hiroshi. He was interested in him in a way no Japanese father Hiroshi had ever seen or heard of was interested in his son. It was so unusual and such a good feeling that Hiroshi never tired of their evenings together.

All the same Hiroshi realized he was hardly a good teacher. He himself didn’t understand many of the things his father wanted to know. When should they use kanji script, and when hiragana, and when katakana? Why write this word this way but not that one? He didn’t know either; that was just the way it was. Force of habit. As soon as you tried to make a rule to explain it, you were guaranteed to run across an exception the next moment.