The Metaphysical Ukulele (13 page)

I looked closely at the robot. It was the very same type of robot I'd had as a small child. It was also identical to the robot I'd brought with me from California, the one that had been in my hotel room prior to the maid coming in to clean.

To fill the space between Stephen and I while Ogawasan swam her final four laps, I told him about the maid and my robot. Stephen said nothing while I talked. When I finished, he quietly stood, walked around the pool, and spoke to the parents. Their conversation was in Japanese. I couldn't understand the words. I could understand the tenor of the discussion. Stephen accused. The parents defended. The volume of their voices escalated. The mother's face flushed a tomato red. Stephen pounded his open palm with a closed fist. The father raised his hands above his head in a multi-lingual gesture of frustration. Stephen resolved matters by yanking the robot out of the little girl's hand.

He turned and headed back around the pool. The parents remained seated. The little girl neither spoke nor cried. She simply glared at me.

Stephen handed me the toy robot. “Perhaps it would be better if we took this ukulele lesson up to my room. Ogawa-san
can join us when she's done swimming.”

I kept my eyes on the girl, my hands on the robot. I nodded in agreement.

To show off, I played a ukulele rendition of “Ode to Joy” for Ogawa-san. I was using my travel ukulele with its plastic fretboard and plywood soundboard. The image of the small, robot-less girl lingered in my memory. It blended with the forced joy of the song. The music sounded like the rust on the Picasso sculpture in front of the Cook County Courthouse. Ogawa-san sat primly on the corner of Stephen's hotel-room bed. Her ukulele lay across her lap, strings down. Her folded hands rested on the back of her ukulele. Her eyes watched my fingers.

When I finished the song, Ogawa-san spoke to me in what I thought was Japanese. I looked to Stephen to translate. He said the same words. I told him I didn't understand. They both made the request again, louder and slower. “Liszt,” they said. “The ‘Liebestraum.'” I didn't know the piece at all, much less on the ukulele. I played a slow rendition of Patsy Cline's “Crazy,” mixing melody with rhythm hopefully with enough emotion to mask my ignorance. Stephen and Ogawa-san sat patiently through it. Ogawa-san spoke to Stephen at the end. Stephen asked, “Do you know any traditional Hawaiian songs?”

Given a few minutes, I could have found “Aloha Oe” somewhere on the fretboard. The two had already humored my performance of “Crazy.” I wanted something more.
I played “Papalina Lahilahi,” first in the upbeat tempo it was written in, and second sadly, slowly, like the song of a doomed island.

Afterward, the lesson began in earnest. I taught Ogawasan the key of G. It has the easiest chords for someone who already knows guitar. She impatiently hurried me through them, until I showed her how to find “Ode to Joy” within those basic G and D chords. She attacked the fretboard, plucking mistimed and mistaken notes, eventually finding fragments of the song that lingered within.

This seemed to be enough for her. She focused intensely, almost obsessively, on her search for the arrangement within the chords, pausing only to mutter something to Stephen. Stephen stood to usher me out of his room.

“Wait,” I said. “One more thing.”

Ogawa-san stopped her plucking and looked at me. To show her that I did, in fact, know her work, that I understood it somewhat, I showed her the diminished chord. Played on its own, it's unimpressive. Played three times in succession, moved down one fret with each strum, it makes the sound that cartoons use to portend doom. BUM BUM BUM.

I struck the chords and smiled. Ogawa-san glared at me with the same face as the robot-less little girl.

Stephen said, “Ogawa-san will grant your interview tomorrow.”

Tomorrow. The day I was scheduled to leave the Japanese seashore.

The concierge recommended I visit the town's aquarium. This gave me the idea of supplementing my possibly futile interview attempt with a travel piece about the Naoshima seashore. Something like, “The minute you arrive, you feel you've stepped into paradise. It's like a Mediterranean village with a Japanese twist. The villagers are warm. The service in the local establishments is impeccable. The beach is seconds away from everything, and the gentle surf of the cove is perfect for kids. As an added attraction, you can visit the village aquarium and watch the playful dalliance of seals, dolphins, and sea otters.”

In truth, the aquarium seal was anorexic. He lay flat on the concrete edge of the pool, barking softly and incessantly. The dolphin floated in the middle of the pool. He didn't react in any way to the teenage boys who banged fifty-yen coins against the aquarium glass and screamed for him to swim. I bought a more-than-four-days-dead fish for a hundred yen and tossed it over the tank to the dolphin. He drifted to the surface of the water, pushed the fish with his nose, and gradually descended away. The dead fish floated on the surface.

As I left, the sea otter made eye contact with me. He rubbed his fingers and dove, swimming straight for me. He spun in the water and stared at me. If there had been a translator available, she may have clarified that the sea otter wanted me to take him back to California with me.

That night, Ogawa-san left her window as open as her curtains. She sat on her bed, playing ukulele. Her fingers danced through “Ode to Joy.” Not just the brief, two-minute chorus that I'd played, but all four movements. I watched the kiwis on the hill tremble in the wind and listened to Ogawa-san's ukulele.

Like the night before, the maid emerged from the hotel's back door with a saggy-bottomed produce box. She scuttled down the hill toward the sea. I raced out the door to follow her.

She darted through the kiwis, well ahead of me, whipped through town as if unseen by the tourists out for beer, karaoke, last-call love affairs. She hopped onto the foot of the jetty. I nearly caught up to her there. Once on the rocks, she was too quick. She bounced across them with the grace of a mountain goat. The rocks were slick. The soles of my shoes were slicker. The spinning white light at the end of the pier alternately lit my path and blinded me. By the time my eyes were able to readjust to the dark, the light slapped me again. Sea spray whipped up to my left. The cove to my right invited me to dive in, swim the calm waters back to shore. I continued to follow the maid.

She stopped at end of the pier, just below the spinning light. One by one, she tossed the contents of her box into the sea on the rugged side of the pier.

The box was half-empty by the time I met her. Below the spinning light, underneath its blinding beam, the moon was enough to cast a pallor on the scene. Her box was, indeed,
full of food. Brown heads of lettuce dripped onto squishy tomatoes and spongy cucumbers. Gray scallops seeped out of the gaping mouths of their shells. Lobster heads looked alive with insects crawling among the congealed brains. Old strawberry shortcakes stained their cellophane wrappers, brown cream separated from the fat, strawberries dried and wrinkled like the heads of dead babies, sponge cake hardened and crumbling, mold wrapping around it all. The maid tossed all the rotten food into the same spot in the sea. A dolphin had come to meet her. He splashed and played in the food, smacking it with his tail, spinning around it, turning one spot of the water into a festering stew. The maid continued to toss the food to the dolphin.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.
“¿Que pasa?”

“
El pescado sabe
,” she said. She explained that she and the fish had struck a deal. She mentioned something about translation—
traducir
—but I didn't follow. She told me it all had to do with the Hotel Sakura—the Hotel Iris, as Ogawa-san had called it—and the missing man, the one who had tried to swim to safety. The maid said she would prove that Ogawa-san had been stealing her stories. She would show everyone. The fish would help her.

She continued to throw the rotten food into the sea. The dolphin seemed to tire of the sandbox. He swam away, or at least down. “
Mire
,” she told me.

So I watched. The wind skipped across the surface of the water. The rotted food bobbed and dissolved. The colors of the mush the dolphin had created swirled together in a
moonlit silver and broke apart. The maid stared at the ocean.

Gradually, something began to creep to the surface. It looked like a corpse in a desiccated state similar to the food the maid had tossed. It was the torso of a man wearing a tattered gray suit. His round, bald head hung limply from a decomposing neck. The maid pointed and screamed, “¡
El traductor! ¡El traductor!
”

The next morning, my time and money had run too thin. I had to check out without, it seemed, a Yoko Ogawa interview. I spent the morning working on a story of my time at the seashore, hoping it would suffice. I wrote about the armada of red umbrellas, the slick rocks of the jetty, the anorexic seal, the immaculate sushi bar, Ogawa-san furiously typing across the courtyard, my wind-up robot pacing on a hotel desk, the maid, her thefts and claims of theft. When I finished, I packed my bag and headed out. I took no time to assess what items may have been left behind involuntarily.

“The maid. She was an elderly woman.” I imitated her slumped posture for the concierge. “She never stopped moving. Spoke Spanish.”

“I know of whom you speak. She lives in town. She used to be a maid here.”

“She doesn't still work here?” I asked.

“We keep telling her that,” he said in his flawless English.

“And Ogawa-san?” I asked

“She checked out early this morning.”

I walked through all the hallways looking for the maid. I slumped under the weight of my backpack. Sweat formed where the straps of the pack rubbed against my chest. The maid was nowhere to be found. I went to the seashore for a final look. It was crowded as ever, umbrellas jostling one another, kids racing along the rocks of the jetties, couples staring into one another's eyes. No sign of the maid or Ogawa-san.

A spotless American approached me, holding a handful of pages torn from a notebook. As he got closer, I recognized him as Stephen. “Ogawa-san left this for you,” he told me. “She wrote the interview herself. I translated.”

“Thank you,” I said. I shook his porcelain hand. He turned and walked away. I headed for the train that would take me off the island, to the Kōnan Airport.

As the train whipped through the lush hills, I stole my first glance at the notebook pages Stephen handed me. The letters swirled around the page as if spun from my own thoughts.

A crisp sun shone on the Naoshima seashore. The tide was out, and the jetty was half exposed, a jagged edge against the surface of the sea. Children ran across the slick rocks of the jetty and launched into the calm waters.

Ukes for the Little Guy

As a small child, Sean Carswell tried to turn everything into a ukulele. Broom handles, armadillo shells, the cardboard box his sister's Barbie arrived in, the remains of a bat José Cruz broke in a spring training game. He'd even make miniature ukuleles out of beetle shells and toothpicks and give them to his sister, for her dolls. The small ones gathered dust in dollhouse corners. The human-sized ones usually crumbled under the tension of strings tightened to some facsimile of tuned.

When Sean Carswell butted heads with his second grade teacher, a woman who began the year as Miss Sunday and ended it as Mrs. Matthews, his mother tried to turn the obsessive uke building into a survival mechanism.

A beginning of the year Miss Sunday nurtured a classroom environment that was very friendly for the slowest students. No question was too stupid, no problem too simple to repeat infinitely. Sean Carswell would finish all the math problems in his textbook while Dave Gast struggled with the first one: 15 + 6 =, raising his hand repeatedly, summoning Miss Sunday first 15 times, then 6 times, for a total of, as he
figured it, 156 times. Sean Carswell would read to the end of the class read-along while Caryn Paige stuttered across the word “knot” every time it reemerged: surprised anew with each occurrence, perpetually pronouncing the “k.” A silent letter was too much for Caryn's developing brain. At this rate, she'd never learn to properly misspell her name.

Once finished with his math or reading, a seven-year-old Sean Carswell didn't know what to do with himself. Sometimes, he'd fume. He suspected his classmates knew better. Dave Gast may struggle over 15 + 6, but he damn sure knew that, when his Pee Wee football team had five field goals and added a touchdown to it, their score would become 21. At least until the extra point was converted. Caryn probably was a bad reader. Sean Carswell felt she would have been a better reader if every other boy in the class didn't shower her every mistake in sighs and moon eyes. Sean Carswell supposed that none of his classmates were as dumb as they acted in Miss Sunday's class. They just knew Miss Sunday would make them do less work if they acted stupid.

Sean Carswell was in agony. He sought wisdom from the stories overheard in his living room. His brother and sister watched television when the TV worked. Sean Carswell only watched when it was broken, when his father and a buddy and a six-pack of Stroh's huddled in the living room corner, seeking a blown picture tube and telling stories. Old Ronnie Crilly told Sean Carswell's father a story about trouble at work. Ronnie said, “I was going out of my skull, so fucking bored, when I finally decided that, if shit wasn't going to go
down, I was gonna start some.”

Sean Carswell learned more in this vocabulary lesson than he had in six weeks of Miss Sunday's lists. He decided that he would start some shit the next time he was going out of his skull, so fucking bored. The opportunity emerged around Thanksgiving time. The class was expected to trace their hands and draw a turkey out of the tracings. Poor little Dan Shock could not figure it out. Should the head of the turkey go on the thumb or the pinkie? Obviously, for Dan, the pinkie was the answer. If Ronnie Crilly were commenting on the situation while the Stroh's disappeared and the broken picture tubes multiplied, he'd say, “The kid couldn't find the ass end of a turkey.” Sean Carswell knew better than to say this. But with his turkey drawn and his next day's homework complete, with every book on the library's second grade reading list read and reported on—even that damn Paddington bear, torturously dull but the last thing on the list—and all of his Scholastic points accumulated, with no beetle shells or toothpicks or cardboard boxes or broken bats handy, with Dan Shock still engaged in the turkey-head argument with Miss Sunday—an argument that would surely last until lunchtime—Sean Carswell felt he had no choice but to stand from his chair, walk across the room, and punch Dan Shock in the mouth.

Much to her embarrassment on this day, Sean Carswell's mother was a teacher at this backwater, swampland elementary school. All were called before the principal: Miss
Sunday, Mrs. Shock, Mrs. Carswell, Sean Carswell, and Dan Shock with his brand new fat lip. Miss Sunday gloated. She and Mrs. Carswell did not get along. Perhaps, Miss Sunday felt a sense of vindication. Mrs. Carswell's other two, her eldest son and young daughter, were poster children for the school. The male one an exceptional athlete, the female so cute she was a heartbreak waiting to happen. Both were appropriately unmotivated students. Not like young Sean Carswell. Who did he think he was with all his books and his memorized multiplication tables and his obsessive talk of ukuleles? For Miss Sunday, Sean Carswell's misbehavior was his mother's comeuppance. Glee emanated from the edges of her words as she described the assault on poor little Dan Shock and his pinkie-headed turkey.

Dan Shock sat in his little chair with his fat lip jutted out in a mixture of pain and humiliation. Mrs. Shock was, well, just shocked by it all. Mrs. Carswell expressed an adequate sense of remorse. Only Sean Carswell refused to play his role. He sat cross-armed and snarling. If this slow parade of stupidity continued, he'd sock ‘em all in the mouth.

This wouldn't do for Principal Cowling. Suspension, particularly of a teacher's son, was not a scenario under consideration at this point. He proposed, and it was agreed upon by five of the six parties present, that Sean Carswell should spend his class time taking notes instead of reading library books and punching his classmates.

So note-taking was piled upon the indignity of a rural Florida public school education.

Sean Carswell's mother gave him a spiral notebook that a fourth grader failed to rescue from lost and found in a timely manner. Sean Carswell began taking notes. He documented all of the activities of the classroom. In the evening, he sat at the kitchen counter while his mother prepared a meal of whatever innards were on sale at Harry's Meat Market. Let's say on this one particular Wednesday night, dinner was pan-fried chicken livers with macaroni and cheese and canned green beans. Sean Carswell's brother and sister sat in front of the television, arguing over whether they'd watch
Eight Is Enough
or
The Life of Grizzly Adams
when primetime finally rolled around. This argument could last for hours, so Sean Carswell's brother and sister began it hours before the actual programming began. His father watched the evening news, somehow unperturbed by the failing picture tube that cast the world according to Walter Cronkite into an alien green pallor.

Sean Carswell read the day's notes:
We are reading about the Jamestown settlement. Caryn Paige thinks it is the “jam is town set, set, set, emmm.” Paul Fulmer falls deeper in love with every word Caryn can't read. I hope someone else will get to read the next paragraph. I may be old enough to drive before Caryn gets through the word “Pocahontas.”

“How long did she let Caryn read?” Mrs. Carswell asked.

“Three or four hours,” Sean Carswell said.

“No,” Mrs. Carswell said. “You're not going to get me on that one.”

“It's true. I read all the way up to the Civil War before
she stopped pronouncing the ‘h' in John Smith.”

Mrs. Carswell smiled and looked at her husband. He was the one who had given the kid this sense of humor.

Sean Carswell skipped ahead to the math notes:
Dave Gast has to figure out what 3 × 5 equals. The sum was 15 when Miss Sunday asked him yesterday. Could it be the same today? Is it possible for his brain to hold the equation 3 × 5 = 15 for twenty-four hours? The answer is no. Will he guess every number he can think of until he hits fifteen? Yes. His guesses so far: 35, 2, 17, 99, 26, 57, and 83. I know why Miss Sunday is so interested in the number 15. It's because…

Sean Carswell stopped before reading the mean statement that followed.

Mrs. Carswell turned the chicken livers in the pan. Sean Carswell's brother and sister's argument devolved into name calling. Walter Cronkite and Mr. Carswell worried about inflation together. Outside the Carswell household, the popular kids in Sean Carswell's second grade class plotted new ways to sabotage their education.

The next day, Miss Sunday insisted upon seeing Sean Carswell's class notes. She forgave everything until she arrived at the line, “
I know why Miss Sunday is so interested in the number 15. It's because each of Miss Sunday's butt cheeks are 3 × 5 inches wide
.” Another rendezvous was scheduled with Principal Cowling.

This session's compromise was much more agreeable to Sean Carswell. To Miss Sunday's chagrin, Principal Cowling suggested
that Sean Carswell should be allowed to build ukuleles in the back corner of the classroom once all of his day's work was finished. This may have been the defining moment for the future carpenter-turned-author.

He convinced his mother that he needed a knife to shape the neck. His mother dug up an old, rusted number she'd found in a garage drawer when she moved into her house. She rubbed the blade against the concrete floor until it was dull enough to be bullied by a butter knife. Sean Carswell took the dull knife back to the garage and massaged it against his father's sharpening stone until it was equally as sharp as the pocket knives half of the boys in school wore in their back pockets. He carried the knife and an old two-by-four to school the next day.

Take a moment now to picture Sean Carswell in the back corner of his elementary school classroom, sitting at a tiny workbench that his janitor buddy, Earl, constructed for him out of a one-legged card table. A column of obsolete textbooks bound together with duct tape replaces one of the missing legs; the gym teacher's abandoned disciplinary paddle replaces another. The final corner is propped up by the cubbies where students store their lunches and, on the one cold morning of the year, their windbreakers. The seven-year-old Sean Carswell may look, in your mind's eye, like the current version of the man. His gray hair would glisten under the school's fluorescent lights. His classmates would be dazzled by his sweet goatee. His seven-year-old hands
would be covered in scars and cracks like the alligator-skin purse a swampland hunter makes for his second-favorite girlfriend. We'll have to revise this, somewhat. Turn some of that gray (though not all; our best intelligence dates the graying of Sean Carswell's hair to his kindergarten year) into a blond bowl cut. Shave the goatee and imagine against all better judgment a chin. Shrink him to kid size. Create your own montage of him whittling down the two-by-four into the neck of a soprano ukulele while Dave Gast slaughters mathematics and Caryn Paige builds speed bumps between every written word. This montage should include Sean Carswell running the neck through a pencil box, then gluing the pencil box together to serve as the uke body. The next shot will show Johnny Wilkinson breaking all of his classmates' pencils when he's bored with the diamonds Dan Shock cuts out of construction paper while imagining Valentine hearts. Sean Carswell will respond by breaking Johnny Wilkinson's long pencil in half, sharpening both ends, and turning it into a ukulele bridge. An additional scene will include Miss Sunday becoming Mrs. Matthews and spending an entire school day with a slide show of wedding pictures and stories of a honeymoon spent at the Bithlo stock car races. The last shots chronicle the completion of the ukulele: finish nails absconded from neighborhood construction sites being glued down for frets; eye bolts shoplifted from Ace Hardware being transformed into functional tuners; and, finally, fishing lines being strung on the masterpiece.

Everything changed at recess once the ukulele was built. Sean Carswell took to entertaining the rabble with original songs about the issues of the day: six's fear of seven, footprints in the butter, Dwayne the Bathtub (who's dwowning), and the cross between an elephant and a rhinoceros. Mrs. Matthews was far from ecstatic about the evolution of Sean Carswell's ukulele, but she was happy with the crowd at recess. Some students sat cross-legged in a semicircle around Sean Carswell. Other students twisted and hopped and shook and spun around in movements that seven-year-olds like to call “dancing.” Sean Carswell leaned against the monkey bars, strumming and singing. No one seemed to need monitoring, which freed up Mrs. Matthews to smoke with her fellow second grade teacher, Miss Shore, and fantasize about the day when Miss Shore, too, would become a Mrs. Something Else.

Only, on this Thursday, long before Sean Carswell's brother and sister would start their fight over whether to watch
What's Happening!!
or
CHiPs
, Sean Carswell started singing the classroom favorite: “Mother May I? (Spell Cup).” A lull came over the conversation between Mrs. Matthews and Miss Shore. The last refrains of the song were belted out in a call-and-response style. Sean Carswell sang, “Mother May I?” His classmates sang out, “C-U-P.”

Miss Shore asked, “What's that kid singing?”

Mrs. Matthews listened.

Sean Carswell improvised the ending a bit. This was a schoolyard favorite. Instead of “mother,” he called out the
names of his classmates, singing, “Todd Hoagland may I?” while the class sang, “C-U-P.”

“Mark Bishop may I?”

“C-U-P.”

“Wendy Sturman may I?”

“C-U-P.”

“Mary Lynn Honeycutt may I?”

“C-U-P.”

Miss Shore giggled. Mrs. Matthews contemplated putting an end to the song. But she'd just started a cigarette.

Sean Carswell ran through all the names of his classmates except Rodney Butler's. That name elicited hesitation. Rodney was the only genuinely slow kid in the class. He was always a risk during this song because, one recess period not too long earlier, Judy Flynn asked to see him pee and he obliged. Both were sent to the principal. Neither returned to school for two weeks. With no other names and the refrain coming around so quickly, Sean Carswell acted without full deliberation. He sang, “Rodney Butler may I?”