The Angels of Our Better Beasts

by Jerome Stueart

  The park at dusk. She turned immediately to Togetsukyo Bridge. Other people walked about the park now, so it was more difficult to find the figure he would have been creating. There was no rush of the body now; he’d synced it with the rest of the evocation. She watched, aware of time passing.

  It was a woman. She wore a yukata, a cotton kimono, with maple leaves on the sleeves, which meant she was unmarried. She saw Yumi, or appeared to, as she would see any wine taster. The woman was young, beautiful, but she walked in that older way, her shoulders drawn in, her head down, her eyes flashing only to the sides, occasionally to the subject she walked toward. There was a simple beauty in this that Yumi found herself liking even more than she expected, this being the object of attention, the reason the woman came from the bridge. In the midst of all other people milling about, one direct line flowed straight to her, pulling an important event closer and closer. This was already an improvement over the peaceful scene of Moon Over Tokyo Through Fall Leaves; it had an event—an urgency.

  The woman pulled her hands from her kimono. She began talking, but there was still no sound. Yumi tried to make out the words. The expression on the woman’s face was flirtatious, demure. She wanted you to follow her. And the images did. When the woman turned her back and started to return to the bridge, Yumi found herself walking along beside her. Again the woman was talking. Her bright red mouth moved, her eyes darted and connected with Yumi’s as if with a needle’s precision. Then the woman blurred, smeared across the park’s landscape, and smudged away. There was a strange pull then—a yank from the middle of Yumi’s stomach—and then Yumi was back, alone and frustrated, in her kitchen.

  She threw the lotus glass into the sink where it broke. She felt like one of the people who first tried the piku for memory loss, because every memory of herself and Masato came back to betray her. She sobbed standing, holding herself up by placing her hands flat on the kitchen island. She sniffled and opened her eyes. At least she was not maddened from the memories. She hoped that the feelings would just disappear.

  They did not. She found them creeping up on her as she created perfect travel arrangements for happy couples at work. She kept the feelings low in her belly, feeling them seep upwards in her chest at times when couples would look at each other or talk in that coded way couples have—those unfinished sentences, those looks—and when they reached out and took each others’ hands, a subtle, unconscious gesture, Yumi turned to her computer to find a better deal for them.

  >?

  She could not confront Masato about this, though her instincts told her that he loved the woman on the bridge. She was old-fashioned, she was demure, she was quiet, she was painted up like a geisha. Masato was in love with history, with the past. And there was really nothing Yumi could do about that.

  I am a modern woman, she told herself. At one time, he loved me because I was modern. At one time, he loved the new things, the modern. Somehow, living with her in the house, he had changed his tastes for more than just art.

  Over the next six months, she thought about what she might do. Options. She could become the woman he wanted. She could leave him and find someone younger. She didn’t think he would be changing anymore—he’d settled into his final personality.

  She continued having lunches with friends, talking at breezy cafés about books and movies and going to her friends’ baby showers and wedding showers and walking in the parks by herself at dinner.

  It was in a small park that summer when she saw something happen that made her decide to confront Masato. There was a black dog running through the park with a red leash flying behind it like a scarf. His tongue was out, his legs raced across the grass. She laughed when she saw him, and she laughed more when she saw the young couple running after the dog, calling, “Shiloh, Shiloh, Shiloh, come back.” The man and woman were both young, in their twenties, and they ran as hard as they could, the man ahead of the woman, both racing for Shiloh. They called out directions to each other: Go that way, head her off by the bush; I’ll take this path and meet her around the lake; she’s headed toward the ice cream vendor! Yumi watched as they tried to catch her. The dog appeared joyful; the couple did not seem worried. They laughed. Shiloh tangled herself up in children, playing with them and knocking them down, and licking their faces until the couple found her again. At that moment, Yumi burst into tears, not knowing quite why at first. She moved under a tree and hid her face with her arm.

  >?

  She drove to the winery that afternoon. Her husband had been working feverishly on a new set of wines. She did not see him on the floor of the winery, so she walked past Taro and Kichi to his office. They called out, “He doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

  I am his wife, she thought. I disturb him all the time.

  She walked into his office, a small room with a shoji screen hiding a small sink and a desk with no pictures on it. His coat was draped over the chair, but he was not there.

  Taro was behind her. “Yumi, he wanted to be alone in the piku-ma.” The room of memory, where the piku was stamped—where it was copied for every bottle of plum wine.

  She turned and looked at Taro; his eyes had aged. She could tell. The edge of his voice had gotten older.

  She said, “He’s not alone, Taro. We can be honest about that.”

  “What?” Taro said as she pushed him to the side and walked to the piku-ma.

  The piku-ma had warnings on the sides of the doors referencing the delicate process, the possible contamination. She did not knock; she tried the handle and went in.

  Masato stood with his back to the door. He leaned down over a microscope. The room was blue, like sky all the way around. He looked up suddenly. “Yumi?”

  She closed the door behind her.

  He sighed as if destiny had been decided for him—or a decision made at least. Five bottles of wine sat on a white table in the centre of the room. To the left, a black, elastic cap hanging from wires—the brain-scanning equipment, what gathered the images, as far as she knew. On the right side of the room, other computers and imaging equipment. She didn’t understand it. She just knew that this was where the woman came from. This was where she lived. This was where Masato stood now with his arms open, walking to the table. He picked up a bottle and pushed a lotus glass toward her side of the table as she approached him.

  “I want you to see my masterpiece.” He opened the bottle. “Moon Over Tokyo Through Fall Leaves has changed a bit. We have renamed this Another Tokyo in Fall Twilight, 1947.” He grinned.

  This other woman had made him younger, Yumi thought.

  He poured her a glass. “Try it for me. I want you to see something special.” He held the glass out to her.

  She shook her head. “I didn’t come to drink the wine.”

  He sensed her uneasiness but insisted. “Drink the wine first, and then we can talk about anything you want to talk about.”

  She shook her head again. “Masato.”

  “Yumi, it’s important to me. Please, for me. Drink the wine.”

  But she didn’t want to meet the woman who could speak now. Oh, she had already imagined all the phrases, the sweet ways that a geisha could talk to a man, what she might be saying to Masato—and now, where she might be leading him. And what was that pull in her stomach? Would there now be a physical reaction to Time-Wines? Was he creating the wino-version of a cheap thrill? Was this piku’s new direction? Or was this a new product for Masato to enjoy?

  In his hand, the lotus glass quivered. What was he doing with such a young woman anyway? She set her purse down on the table. “I don’t want your wine,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. Why was it that she felt as if she were asking her father for greater privileges? She flushed with embarrassment.

  Masato lowered his hand. “I wanted to share with you something important to me, Yumi.”

  “I already know the evocation. I’ve seen
her.”

  He looked puzzled. “Her? I don’t understand. This is the first set of bottles opened with the new wine. It’s very changed from Moon Over Tokyo, though that was obviously the base.”

  “I tried the wine in December, at toge.”

  He frowned. “It was unfinished. I wanted you to see it when it was finished.”

  “I don’t want to see it at all now.”

  He was silent. “Did you notice the soldiers?”

  “I noticed the girl, the geisha.”

  “Of course, that is the main selling point. But did you notice that there weren’t any soldiers around? Did you watch the edges of the evocation?”

  He lifted the glass again. “Try it now. See what I’ve created here. It’s a ten-minute transport.”

  “Tell me who she is and why you created her.”

  He still seemed lost. As if he didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “She’s a geisha,” he said, lowering his arm again. He sighed, probably the clearest sign of guilt. He was no doubt remembering the images of this affair.

  “Is she also a real woman, someone you know here in San Francisco?”

  He set the glass on the table, took a few steps back. “I was hoping you’d understand.”

  “Well, I’m doing pretty good for a kid, I think.”

  He looked at her. Boy, did he look old now, and caught and guilty, and just a little bit angry. But she was angry, too, now; she could feel it rise up into her cheeks, into her fists.

  He said, “You have missed the whole thing. How can one person see the same images as another and miss the point? We are like two people who have come to a mountain, and I am breathing in the greatness of the view while you are looking at the hardship of the trail back down. Our memories will diverge there, and I can’t give you feeling, no matter how hard I try.” He walked to the computer screen and opened a file.

  She felt ignored, and so she repeated her inquiry. “Who is she?”

  A picture came up on the screen of an old man, Masato’s grandfather. “Junro Nakashita helped create a Japan that never was.”

  She waited for him to come back to the real issue. He distracted her with history lessons and stories. “I’m not interested in your grandfather—”

  He nodded. “Nor in anything that doesn’t have a movie tie-in, that doesn’t sell you a purse or shoes, that doesn’t have a musical soundtrack. I know. It’s a weakness in you. But now you will listen for a moment, and even if you do not understand what I tell you, I will have said it and given you the picture of the mountain.”

  He talked for a long time about Junro and how he collaborated with Americans to rewrite Japan’s history during the Occupation. He stood for a while, and then he sat for a bit and she stood for a while, and then she got tired because the shoes she’d worn were not good for standing in. She knew that eventually he would have to talk about the geisha so she sat down. He waved his hands a lot in front of him and she noticed how wrinkled the backs of his hands and wrists really were. When did that happen?

  “I had a chance then,” he said in what she thought was his conclusion. She was tired and upset, and it was taking everything she had to keep in her tears. “A Japan that could have been,” he said. “The soldiers aren’t there, Yumi; I erased them. The American presence isn’t there; I erased that. For ten minutes there is no Occupation, and I can build from there. I can create a whole series of wines that lets someone experience this new-old Japan. I don’t know how it would have been different. I can only think of ten minutes at a time. But one day, I will think of twenty minutes, and then an hour.” He paused.

  He was all caught up in himself, wide hands, wild eyes—eyes that reminded her of times he looked in her face and loved her. She didn’t want a wine to say it for him again and again—she wanted those eyes and those words for her, now.

  “Is she here in San Francisco? Did we move here because she’s here?” She tapped her heels on the floor.

  “Yumi!” he yelled at her and rushed at the table. “I am talking about something important! I’m reimagining history.”

  She stood up now, backed away from his face. “I’m talking about something important, too. Where are you? What do you do at night? Why are you so concerned about the past? I’m going to grow old, too, waiting for you. Why are you making women in the wine? I don’t care about history. I don’t care about Junro. It’s in the past. Why are we here in America if you hate America so much?”

  “I don’t hate America. You’re not listening to me. I can’t explain it well. But there is something new and wonderful about being there, in that park in 1947, and being free.”

  She thought of the dog, the couple; how they raced after Shiloh, how they cared enough to pursue and not get distracted, to not give up; how they planned, how they ran around every obstacle to get back to her. How they wanted something and ran to get it.

  He lifted the glass again. “Just for a moment. See this other world.”

  She took the glass from him and threw it on the floor where it shattered and spilled. “That’s what I think of your other world. You can’t even live in this one.”

  She turned her back on him, crying, crying and wanting to make it through the door before he could say that she was weak and young.

  How Magnificent is the

  Universal Donor

  Jacob stumbles from the elevator on the fourth floor of Sanctuary Hospital. He’s in a hurry, and feels guilty that he’s been detained for three hours at a press conference helping the Deputy Minister field questions. He can still see the lights from the steady cams, purple spots erasing the hospital walls. The white hallways seem suddenly quiet. His short stride makes it look like he’s running, and his beard is hiding clenched lips. He stops at the door to room 423. The sheets of the bed are neatly folded. They moved him.

  Back in the hallway, he inhales and scans the patient screen, but doesn’t find Harlin Moybridge anywhere on the list. It’s probably just a mistake. He turns and looks around to find anyone who can tell him what’s going on. A blonde-haired nurse in a cool blue uniform stands leaning over a desk. The desk lamp highlights her neck, and her skin looks like white fire. When he asks where they’ve moved Harlin Moybridge, she checks the desk, a flat screen where she moves documents back and forth with the tip of her finger.

  “Oh, Mr. Moybridge,” she looks up. “Your husband died this morning.”

  He stares in disbelief. Dead? “He was just in for tests,” Jacob says. “Look. There’s been a mistake. I would have been called.”

  She looks hurt, sad for him. She glances back to the desk. “They called you.”

  “They didn’t.” His voice is higher than normal.

  “It says that you were contacted, and made arrangements to see the body.”

  “Where’s the body? I’d like to see it.”

  She looks back down at the desk, flustered. “It says . . . it says you’ve already seen the body.” Now she looks up, as surprised as he is. “You came in at ten am—two hours ago.”

  It didn’t matter that he insisted he didn’t come in. There it was in the records. Harlin always said that when it’s in your medical records, it’s scripture.

  “How did he die?”

  She scans the records, tells him, “He tested positive for BBD.”

  “He didn’t,” Jacob says evenly.

  “You received the letter in the mail and came in for tests for BBD. Obviously there was reason to suspect your husband had the disease. Those initial tests are rarely wrong.”

  “Rare,” he says, “but not impossible.”

  The Beijing Blood Disease, or Baby Dee as it is popularly known, is not normally fatal. Since more than 40 percent of the population has it at any one time, it is rampant, but transfusions seem to keep those infected in check. But Harlin Moybridge has the strongest immune system he’s ever
seen.

  “I never been inoculated, never had flu shots, never been sick. I’m fine, and they hate that,” Harlin once told him. He smiled, arched his back and spread his shoulders. “I’m on a black list somewhere because I don’t take their damn shots.” No antibiotics, no synthesized medicines ever entered his body. His father made sure that none of his kids got shots. He was a homeopathic doctor, but his children were fine examples of health. He faked the shot records himself, enough to get his kids through schooling.

  “They don’t like people who say they don’t need doctors,” Harlin said. “It’s a scam, you know. To make you need ’em. They want you to need ’em. It’s about control. But everybody’s smart enough to take care of themselves.” It’s that rebellious streak that Jacob loves. And wasn’t Harlin proved right? At fifty-six, he was in perfect health, robust, full of life. He could have given any man twenty years younger a run for his money.

  “I don’t have Baby Dee,” Harlin said when he opened the letter. “They just want me in the hospital.”

  Like a subpoena, a summons from the World Health Organization is pretty much unbeatable. Jacob read the letter. It indicated Harlin was a “health risk to society.” Baby Dee is contagious. He was to report to the hospital for more tests and possible treatment. “They loved my blood. They envied it. Dadgum ’em, they’d never seen finer blood than mine. The bastards!” When he was angry, his Texas drawl really showed.

  Everyone has to give a blood sample, just a tiny needle’s worth, at the front of every supermarket, a quick, nearly painless touch. This ensures that on a continuous basis, every person who needs food is screened. Harlin balled up the letter and threw it across the room. “From now on, you buy the groceries.”

  “It’s a mistake,” Jacob told him. “It must be. We’ll go down to the hospital, and we’ll retake the test and we’ll show them that they got yours mixed up with someone else’s.”