The Lake, the River & the Other Lake

by Steve Amick

  “Already,” he said, “I am knowing I will want many souvenirs of this place.” He pronounced souvenir as the French would. “I already am knowing how much I will think fondly of this Michigan—even though I am only here a few days already and I am leaving not for many months!” He laughed at this, and she thought, unkindly, that if she’d passed outside the vehicle and heard his shrill laugh, she’d have assumed it was a woman laughing. “Ah!” Excitedly, he dug into his pocket. “Another souvenir, from a long time before.” He produced a little plastic disk and handed it to her. It was an old key chain, with well-rubbed Japanese characters on one side, and clear on the other. There was a very real-looking cherry blossom encased inside.

  “When I told my mother this is the profession I wished to pursue, I did so with a variance of the truth. My mother is a kyoiku-mama. There are no monkey businesses with her.”

  Brenda stared at him a moment, wondering if he’d picked up thisterm from her dad, who was always saying “monkey business,” and had in fact said it more than once in conjunction with this very project.

  But Miki went on. “As you are knowing, the cherry blossom is almost sacred in our culture. Let us at least say that we are adoring it. Very much, the cherry blossom. But that is perhaps not enough for a kyoiku-mama, so I told her I saw botanical genetics as an opportunity to becoming a respected, prosperous, leading man in my field, while at the same time providing a boon to our people, both for their soul and their stomach. I show her articles about how the government will always support research that will improve food production for Japan. I spoke of how one makes oneself invaluable, professionally, through constant steps of extreme specialization—very much like genetics itself. Natural selection. But that was not my real thoughts, my primary thoughts. My main reason.” He grinned mischievously, as if he’d pulled a fast one on his mother.

  “Which is?”

  “Which is, since I was a small boy who ran off on his own one day during a school excursion to the Imperial Gardens . . .” He took the key chain back, waggling it (is that what those characters said maybe, Imperial Gardens?), and slid it under the microscope and flicked it on. “. . . And was scolded and shamed on the bus ride home, when they found me lying in the grass between the cherry trees—a snowing of blossoms, like the breathing in the mountains when you fill your lungs. They smell to me like running without shoes in rain. They are the softness of the neck of a loved one you dream again for many years, in your sleep.” He laughed. “But these are not reasons you speak to a kyoiku-mama. These are reasons you keep in your heart only.”

  She’d never heard a man of science speak like this. His unscientific words, and perhaps his close proximity in the confining space, made her feel, for a moment, strangely unscientific, too. She put her eye to the microscope, and told herself not to look at him until she could catch her breath.

  17

  HE HADN’T TRULY REALIZED how disorderly and dusty he’d allowed the parsonage to become until he heard the bang of the screen door being knocked upon.

  It wasn’t just the kitchen and the stacked, crusted dishes and the fall-where-it-may approach he’d taken to the living room—all that he’d been conscious of and had meant to get to very soon. But it was everywhere, a recurring surprise that greeted him even in the less trafficked rooms, including the study where he intended to set up the machine, and so it was really only when he brought her in there that he saw again how cramped it was, with piles of books on the floor and scattered letters and a flank of dead or doomed potted plants underfoot. He’d managed to get over to the window one day, squeezing through the disastrous maze, and unhooked the plants from where they hung, intending to take them to the bathroom shower and let them soak, but he never got that far.

  “My wife passed just a few months ago.” The moment he said it he regretted it: certainly a young woman today would think him a Neanderthal, a sexist throwback, unable to keep his house clean without his wife’s help. But he hadn’t meant it that way exactly. He just meant that his life was a mess, that he’d been grieving, and all physical movement felt slowed by the sluggishness of depression; that everything felt topsy-turvy and who knew where even the plants should go?

  But “Oh” was all she said and he saw her gaze drift up to the engagement photo he kept above the desk, he in his chaplain’s uniform, Mary looking strikingly like a young Katharine Hepburn. It was black-and-white, but he always remembered it as being color, she looked that vibrant. Posed behind her, he was all Adam’s apple and teeth, and he could remember, just looking at it, the exact feeling of disbelief he had when he realized that this woman was about to marry him.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said. “She was very pretty.”

  Then she let her backpack drop to the floor and knelt down beside the big computer box, sliding the dead plants out of the way to make room, and added, more quietly, “And obviously also a really, really good housekeeper . . .”

  At first, he couldn’t believe she’d said it. But her smile, half-shielded now by her hair as she opened the box, seemed so tentative and unaffected, not the brazen sneer of some boat brat, some mocking teen, more the awkward attempt of the first day of school, of trying to make friends. He watched as she pulled the components from the box, each wrapped in plastic bags, like the giblets in a store-bought turkey, and he tried to remember the last time anyone had made even a small attempt to give him a ribbing. It had to be back before Mary died. Probably, it was Mary herself who’d last done it.

  It was kind of nice, someone ribbing him.

  THEY WERE SITTING SO CLOSE, he could smell lilac on her, and something sweet—the fudge shop?—and he fretted a little that he might be giving off an odor of which he was unaware; that she might think he smelled like an old person and wrinkle up her nose the moment she went on her way.

  When she had it all hooked together and humming, she asked him what he wanted to do first: go over the software capabilities or set up his e-mail? Since he didn’t know what the software capabilities were, he suggested they go with the latter. “I think that’s the main thing Ben, my son, wants me to do,” he told her. “The e-mail.”

  She sat very still and waited, then turned to him. “What do you want to do? This is for you, all right? Not your son.”

  “Well, e-mail still, I guess. Sure. I’d like to be able to e the kids.”

  She broke out laughing. “‘E’ them? Where’d you get that? ‘E’ them!”

  He wasn’t trying to be funny, but obviously that wasn’t the term. “Send them an e-mail, I mean.”

  She told him it was a noun and a verb; that he should simply say, “E-mail them.” The next confusing thing was when she asked him to select a user name. Of course, he told her Eugene Aaron Reecher.

  But she wasn’t keen on that, either. “It doesn’t have to be your name exactly. You’re not filling out forms for the government. Besides, if it’s not weird enough, somebody might already have that name.”

  “My name? But I’m me. Somebody else can’t take over me—”

  “You can make up something fun. Like ‘RadRev’ or something.”

  He thought about it for a moment, studying that photo of his wife, then told her he’d probably prefer to just be who he was. “Eugene Reecher,” he said. “Or just Gene Reecher.”

  “I’m saying there may already be a Eugene Reecher. We can try . . .” She sounded doubtful and disappointed, like he wasn’t any fun. That’s me, he thought. The old stick-in-the-mud.

  “Hey,” he suggested. “My initials spell out EAR. That’s kind of fun, isn’t it?”

  She said she didn’t even have to check on “EAR.” There was no way that wasn’t already being used. “Besides, there are times you don’t want to be real obvious who you are.”

  He couldn’t imagine a situation in which he would prefer to hide his identity from his kids, but the girl seemed to know what she was talking about, so he gave it some more thought. Next, he suggested using John 8:7, one of his favorite verses, but wh
en she saw how he wanted to use a colon, she said it wouldn’t work. “Besides,” she said, “you don’t want to disguise your name that much. You don’t have to change your name to John or anything.” He let it go but had to wonder if she’d ever heard Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.

  Ultimately he went with reecher 81757, the numbers being the date he first made love to Mary. The girl was still partial to RadRev, but she stopped fighting him, entering it for him, saying, “Yeah . . . your birthday’s always good. You can’t forget those.”

  He didn’t clarify for her, but he was a little taken aback: either she hadn’t done the math or he looked only forty-four to her. He knew that was impossible. More likely, she hadn’t done the math and hadn’t really bothered looking at him closely.

  And after they’d struggled through that whole obstacle, he next learned he had to come up with another name. This would be his password. She told him he didn’t have to tell her this one, that it wouldn’t appear onscreen when he typed it in, but to really think it over first. “Your password’s got to be something you can always remember,” she said, “but this one shouldn’t be real obvious to anyone else. So not your birthday or your kid’s birthday or your wife’s first name or anything. Think about it.”

  He thought about it and then he typed in CLIFFHEAD, the name no one ever used anymore for the bootlegger’s place, that white elephant of an estate out on Fifel Drive. And sure enough, the letters did not appear but ran across the screen as a line of asterisks, like the stars on a general’s chest, like the top secret code for something very, very confidential.

  She consulted the giant poster of instructions again. Open in front of her like an unwieldy map, it blocked his view of her completely. “Okay . . . You’ve got some kind of package deal here with this ISP . . . They’ve got some setting options you have to decide on . . . ‘Step eight,’” she read. “‘Screens.’” Collapsing the instructions, she tossed them to one side, disdainful, but there was something odd about the way she asked him, “Want to put any kind of screens on this?” Her gaze seemed diverted—overly blasé, as if contrived.

  If she was nervous about asking him about screens, he had no idea why. Because he had no idea what this screen business was all about. “But mine already came with this TV screen, right?” He rapped his hand against the glowing blue glass and his wedding ring made a loud click.

  She snorted a laugh, though he hadn’t been making a joke. “Screens is a stupid name, no doubt, but it’s just some dumb name made up by this server you’re pre–signed up for. They mean filters, really. It’s settings you pick if you want to filter out certain content. Like . . . if you have a grandchild who might get online. Like maybe something’s too . . .” She was searching for the word, or one she felt comfortable saying, so he helped her out.

  “Racy?”

  “Yeah. Racy or whatever. Something gross you really don’t want popping up.”

  He tried to imagine either Ben or Abbey having enough time to come visit anytime soon. And the grandkids were both too young to travel alone.

  “It’s optional,” she said. “We can skip it, if you want.”

  “Well, I guess I believe in open forums. I don’t believe in censorship. I believe that if someone’s seeking sin, he’ll find it, regardless.”

  “So . . . no filters?”

  “I don’t think so. Not to start out.”

  “Cool,” she said, nodding. “That’s very . . . modern of you.”

  This amused him, being called modern. He wondered what his son would make of that. Or Mary. She was the one who insisted, finally, that he prod the board of trustees into purchasing a color TV for the parsonage when the black-and-white died. This was only in 1988.

  The girl was still working on the settings, typing away.

  “Just out of curiosity,” he said, after a long moment, “how racy does it get?”

  She shrugged as if there was no real answer to this and kept clacking away at the keyboard. “You see all kinds of stuff. It’s pretty unavoidable. But it’s no biggie. You just ignore it.” She flashed him the kindest smile, as if to say everything would be just fine.

  THAT NIGHT HE SENT HIS FIRST E-MAIL. There was no response, but he didn’t expect one right away. Ben was probably busy.

  His first incoming e-mail appeared on his screen about five minutes later, unprovoked, uncalled for. He wondered for a second if it was that Spam junk mail garbage the girl had warned him about. The sender’s name was FuG16. He wasn’t sure he was supposed to open it—he thought of viruses, kiddie porn—but curiosity got to him and he “clicked” on it, as she’d shown him. It said:

  Hi! Tell me if you got this!

  R U enjoying the 21st century now?

  HHOJ

  (BTW, that means "Ha Ha Only Joking.")

  Send back.

  K.

  PS. BTW means "by the way."

  ;-)

  It was the girl.

  The way she’d written it, with those clever slangy shorthands and the playful jesting, it felt like he was back in high school, passing notes in class. He had to admit, he liked it.

  18

  THE AGE FACTOR definitely played a part in what had happened to him. He wasn’t denying he’d probably been ill-equipped to handle it properly. By the time he was nineteen, Noah Yoder had been described in Newsweek as “the richest person in America who can’t buy a drink.” The search engine he’d initially designed as a science fair project in the eleventh grade, now called Yoman!® was, at the time that article was written, worth a hundred million dollars. By the time he could drink, it was more like a billion, and, along with several tasty purchases that year, he’d begun construction on a twenty-room glass-and-metal summer home designed by none other than F. M. Mishuki to resemble, slightly, a shipwreck. Mishuki had never been to Michigan, not until they broke ground for construction, so to get a feel for the place, he said he’d been playing the “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” in his studio while he drafted. The wreck happened two or three years before Noah was even born, but he was pretty sure it was an ore boat, with lines much flatter than this spired and angular thing, and that it had gone down in Lake Superior, which was a whole other peninsula away. But when he actually saw the drawings, it put him in mind of that final scene in that really old movie, Planet of the Apes, the toppled torch jutting out from the sand, and regardless of Gordon Lightfoot or any of that, thought it was just cool as shit.

  There was a tower, from which his guests could take in a panoramic view that stretched out into Lake Michigan, well past the defunct lighthouse on the point and the entire squiggle of that weird little river and the orchards to the north, the other lake, to the east, an emerald set in the green-spired ring of pines, and to the south, the disorder of the village and the older, meager cottages, but also the bounding range of forestland that ran far to the east and south, and the rest was haze. He’d been given, as a joke housewarming present from Richard Branson, an actual antiaircraft gun, taken off a Japanese carrier. It was permanently plugged, filled with ladlefuls of molten steel now fused to the barrel, and could never fire, but the scope still worked and could be aimed at things for interesting investigations.

  During construction, the builders started referring to it as Noah’s Ark. The local paper even used that as a headline once. He called up and chewed out the editor for that, smoothing it all over by buying a year of advertising (as if Yoman!® needed anything but the broadest branding now—Super Bowl spots, maybe). What he didn’t appreciate was the snickering irony—it felt like they were calling it Noah’s Folly, or something—but also he worried about the religious overtones. If false rumors were started that the founder and CEO was a doomsday nut, bunkering himself in some way, going Waco, Yoman!® stock could take a beating. The market was fickle that way.

  But that was three years ago. And now, at age twenty-four, things had slipped drastically. He was trying to keep up a brave front, but the truth of it was, the fiscal year ending ri
ght before 2001 had been a disaster. He was now, probably, only some sort of a millionaire, and it was unclear how long he’d be able to hold on to any of this.

  He had ideas of course. All kinds of new projects he hoped to develop. But the panic was on, and which one to pour everything into? That was the question. The golden days of dabbling were gone. He had to pick a lifeboat and hop in.

  The metal Mishuki chose for most of the house was gleaming cold-rolled steel, burnished with rough swirls from an orbital sander and, he had to admit, driving around town, not the usual building material for a home in Weneshkeen. But it was left untreated intentionally. The idea was it would corrode and patina a far subtler rust-brown, which it did, looking much more satisfyingly shipwreck-y after the second winter. Initially, Mishuki had even floated the idea of affixing actual barnacles, farmed from some shipyard in Tokyo, but that had seemed to Noah a little much. Besides, it would get weathered and gnarly enough in no time. It didn’t need any help.

  The first summer, though, it was blinding, and the sheriff actually showed up, twice, warning Noah that there had been complaints. In mid-afternoon, the boats on the river got the worst of it, and late afternoon, it reflected a shaft of sunlight directly down the main drag, like the death ray beamed from the evil villain’s lair in some bad sci-fi movie. A few people supposedly got into a few scrapes in their cars and were blaming it on the reflection from his house, but Noah got the idea the sheriff was talking about old people, and old people were always looking for any excuse for their lousy driving.

  He asked the sheriff, very politely, he felt, what exactly he should do about that. He knew he wasn’t breaking any laws. The whole thing was up to code. They’d seen to that the year before, his lawyer and financial adviser, Tony, convincing the members of the town council that rezoning his lot was in the town’s best interest, that having an original Mishuki would be a source of honor and a point of interest for years to come. Tony pointed out that there were similar little towns downstate, near the Indiana border, where there were modest little Frank Lloyd Wrights that were now boasted of on official signage at the towns’ entryways. “Not to mention,” he told them, “the importance of Mr. Yoder himself.”