Ruth searched his eyes. What did he want her to say? Was he on her side after all, was that it? “Yes,” she said. “Terrible.”
He looked away then, patted her hand and set it free. He lifted the snifter to his nose, took a deep breath and then set the glass down. “Ruthie”—and he hesitated, went for her hand again—“Ruthie, I’ve been meaning to ask you … you know I’ll be leaving in two weeks?”
Ruth nodded. Her heart began to accelerate. She was acutely conscious of the pressure of Irving’s hand on her own.
“I’ve got this place I’m renting in Key West—greatest weather on earth—it’s about three blocks from the beach. Big open room, windows all over the place. Hemingway lived there one winter.”
She nodded again.
“Look,” he said, watching her from deep within the folds of his hooded eyes, “what I’m saying is this: I want you to come with me. Live there—rent free, no obligations.” He paused. “With me.”
She couldn’t help herself, the names just leaped into her head: Ruth Thalamus, Mrs. Irving Thalamus, Ruth Dershowitz-Thalamus. She saw herself at his side in New York, cruising the literary salons, sashaying into Bread Loaf on his arm, saw herself in bed with him, all that hair, those strong white New York teeth. Her pulse was racing, her eyes were bright. And then she thought of Saxby, sweet Sax, with his fish and his shoulders and the way he smiled out of the corner of his mouth, thought of Thanatopsis House and Septima, of Laura and Sandy and all the rest. She was queen of the hive: this was her home. “You’re sweet, Irving,” she said finally, “and I’ll always love you. You’ll always be my best friend, my mentor, my advisor—”
Irving had retreated behind his eyes, the meager bunch of his lips. “But—?”
“But”—she sighed, and she could look down now, and up, she could scan the room before she came back to him, all the time in the world—“but I can’t leave Sax.”
The first call the following morning was from Marker McGill. He had a deal for her and he wanted to know what she thought of it. He’d gotten an offer from a major publisher—he named the house—for a $500,000 advance against a fifteen percent royalty, first serial rights going to one of the leading women’s magazines—he named it—for $75,000, to run in three installments. How did that sound?
And so, here she was, a guest of the Fortunoffs, contracts in the mail, new clothes spread out on the bed, a journalist on her way to the hospital to interview Hiro Tanaka and take some notes. It was warm, but she would wear the coat anyway—the fall season had begun, after all—and yes, she thought she would highlight her hair just a bit, to bring out some of the reds and golds. Then she would slip into her stockings and heels, don the new suit, collect her tape recorder, notepad and pens, and call a cab. There would be photographers outside the hospital and she would look smart for them—seductive, yes, attractive, yes, but in a mature way, a chic and businesslike way. She was a journalist now, after all—like Joan Didion, like Frances FitzGerald—and she had an image to maintain. Journalism—and she said it aloud to herself as she stepped into the shower—it was a noble profession.
At the hospital, ruth reconfirmed that the saga of hiro Tanaka was still very much in the public eye. There were reporters everywhere, pumping hospital staff, lawmen, doctors, nurses, even the janitors, for word as to Hiro’s condition. He’d refused steadfastly to speak to anyone—not even his court-appointed attorney and translator. He was suffering from septicemia (which had elevated his temperature to 104 degrees), shigellosis and hookworm, and he was facing twenty-two criminal charges brought by the State of Georgia and twelve others at the hands of the INS.
Ruth posed for photos on the hospital steps—not to be mercenary about it, but they were money in the bank—but she brushed off the reporters. Why give them anything? This was her story now. She was aware of the trouble Hiro was in and she felt bad about it, and she knew that some people—the Jane Shines of the world—would say that she was being mercenary, capitalizing on his misery, sailing out the courtroom door while he was left holding the bag. Especially since the charges against Saxby had been dropped and she’d been given immunity, as per her arrangement with Abercorn and the district attorney. But that wasn’t it at all. That was just a malicious distortion of the facts. Of course she felt bad for Hiro, but as she rode up in the elevator she tried to harden herself just a little. No one had asked him to jump ship or take up residence on her front porch, after all—they had to understand that. He had to understand it. And if she’d agreed to testify in exchange for immunity, she was going to go up there and do everything in her power to convince them how innocent Hiro was, how the whole thing was just an escalating series of misunderstandings, how he was nothing more than an overgrown boy, an innocent, a naif, how all he really wanted was to live in a walk-up in Little Tokyo and blend in with the crowd. It wasn’t criminal, it was pathetic, that’s what it was.
She found her way to Hiro’s floor. The nurse on duty, a short black woman with cornrow braids and earrings that were like paperweights, gave Ruth the sort of double take she might have lavished on a Di or a Fergie or Donna Summer herself, and then led her past a bored-looking deputy and into Hiro’s room. Hiro was propped up in bed, looking wan, his skin and the whites of his eyes faintly yellowish, as if they were tarnished. His face, which seemed impassive, dead, the face of a stone Buddha, came to life when he lifted his eyes to Ruth’s. “Rusu,” he said, and though he was depressed, though he was hurt, sick and defeated, he couldn’t disguise his pleasure, and he gave her a quick fading glimpse of his crooked smile.
Ruth had no illusions about the story—Hiro’s story. Her story. It probably had a half-life of about three days. It was one of those things that for some unfathomable reason gets the whole country worked up to a fever pitch and then dwindles away to nothing, yesterday’s news, a dim glimmer in the collective memory. She knew that. But she was confident she could get the book done in six months—it was her own story, she was on the inside of it—and rekindle that glimmer into a spark. And so did her publisher, obviously. The reporters out front were giving them publicity you couldn’t buy. “Hiro,” she said, and she crossed the room to him.
She took a seat beside the bed. There was a silence. The deputy poked his expressionless face in the door and then took it away again. “How are you feeling?” she said finally, and she dug around in her purse for the little gift-wrapped box of sweet bean cakes she’d brought him. “I brought you something,” she said, setting the package on the table. The deputy stuck his face in the door again, then he moved into the room, striding purposefully, and he took the package from the table and held his hand out for Ruth’s purse. “Ah’m not gone frisk you,” he said, “but Ah’m watchin’,” and then he returned to his station.
“So, how are you feeling?” Ruth repeated. “They treating you well? Is there anything I can get you?”
Hiro said nothing.
“How about your grandmother? Do you want me to write her? Phone her?”
Hiro didn’t respond. There was another silence. After a long while he turned his mournful eyes on her and said: “You lie to me, Rusu.”
Now it was her turn. She waited.
“In the house,” he said, and his voice sounded parched, dried up, torn out by the roots, “you are the one. You tell them I am here.”
So that was it. She wasn’t going to have to defend herself over the boat and the swamp and Turco—apparently that was lost to him. He was taking her back to Tupelo. All this time he thought she was the one who’d betrayed him. “No,” she said.
“Yes. You never have any idea to take me to mainrand.”
“No. It was Saxby. He saw you there on the porch and he went to the police without telling me. I never knew till it was too late.” She lowered her voice. “I did want to help you. I do. I still do.”
He gazed out the window. They were five stories up. There was nothing to see but dead clouds in a dead sky. “I’m tired,” he said after a moment.
S
he wanted to tell him not to worry, that everything was going to be all right, that she’d look after him and get her father to help and Dave Fortunoff too—he was well connected in Savannah—but she couldn’t. She felt awkward. He looked terrible. The deputy was watching her. “Okay,” she said, rising from the chair, “I understand. It’s all right. I’ll come back tomorrow, okay?”
He glanced up at her, struggled to lift his hand from the sheets and spread his palm in valediction. “I say goodbye now.”
She felt for him in that moment, a quick sharp flooding of the glands, and she bent forward to touch her lips to his cheek, guard or no guard. “See you tomorrow,” she said.
He never answered.
The City of Brotherly Love
The dreams were of things he couldn’t admit, dreams OF torment and horror and hate. They came at him as he drifted in some disembodied realm where colors flashed in his eyes and faces bled into one another without reason or chronology. And a hiss, always a hiss, as of the air rushing from a punctured lung. He saw Chiba become Wakabayashi and Wakabayashi become Unagi and felt the slap of their multiple hands. He saw his mother at the bottom of the pond, her ravaged fingers, the rictus of her mouth, and the hiss became a scream, silent and prolonged. He saw Ruth and her face was the face of his captors and tormentors, and it was their hate that burned in her eyes. And then he saw himself, and he was at the bottom of the dead black endless American swamp, his flesh gone white, flaking, dropping from the bone, and then he was rising, apart from himself, above them all, rising toward the trembling aqueous light of the surface.
He emerged on a room in a hospital in the bright light of day. Above him floated a bag of clear liquid that fed its way through a tube and into his arm. He tried to lift his arm but found that he couldn’t. There was a man at the door, a long-nose in uniform. A nurse—she was a Negro—hovered over him. “Well,” she said, “at last. Feeling better?”
Better? He was feeling nothing, nothing at all. He’d been swallowed by the crocodile and he’d been living in its belly. He looked at the nurse and saw the grinning mouth and the serrated tail and his eyes fell shut and the dreams rushed over him again.
In the morning—at least they told him it was morning, and for lack of any standard against which to measure the information, he took their word for it—the great gift of consciousness was restored to him. Or perhaps it wasn’t such a gift after all. He saw the long-nose at the door and understood, without recalling the details perhaps, but in a syllogistic way, that he’d failed, that he was a prisoner once again, that the world and his life within it were hopeless. A doctor examined him, asked inane questions: How did this feel? Did he know where he was? Who he was? It felt bad. He was in the custody of the hakujin police. He was a happa, a butter-stinker, half a long-nose. He didn’t bother to answer.
In the afternoon another long-nose appeared, very well dressed, and introduced himself as his legal counsel. With him was a Japanese—a non-butter-stinker, pure bred, a member of the august and nonpareil Yamato race—the first such Hiro had laid eyes on since making his leap from the wingdeck of the Tokachi-maru. He was short and soft, this Japanese, with a puffy face, closely cropped hair and glasses that were too big for his head. His name was Hanada and he spoke with a northern accent and a breeziness that seemed inappropriate to the situation. But then the long-nose began to speak and Hanada-san became a machine, interpreting the hakujin’s words in a flat mechanical voice. Hiro, he explained, was too ill to go to court—there was no question of that—and so he would be arraigned here at the hospital, via videotape. (And sure enough, even as he spoke, three more butter-stinkers edged into the room, two fondling briefcases and another balancing a video camera on his shoulder.)
Hiro wanted only to hide himself. He was defeated, humiliated, a failure like his hopeless mother and his hippie father. He refused to speak to any of them, in English or Japanese. The first long-nose, his counsel, listened to a lengthy list of charges and entered a plea for him: Not guilty.
Well, yes, of course he wasn’t guilty—that went without saying. Not guilty of any of their meaningless charges, anyway. What he was guilty of was stupidity, naïveté, guilty of thinking the Amerikajin would accept him in common humanity. He was wrong, and that was his crime. He had failed, and that was his fate.
The reporters came in the evening, and he experienced his one moment of weakness, the moment in which he wavered and came close to abandoning his resolve. They wanted his story and for a moment he wanted to give it to them, to rub their long noses in it, for a moment he imagined that story appearing in the newspapers and on TV, and somewhere, somehow, stirring Doggo from his slumber, and he imagined his father coming to his rescue like a cowboy on a horse. But it was stupid. Foolish. The burned-out core of a dream—ashes, that was all it was. The deputy held the reporters in the hallway while they fired their questions. Hiro looked up at the clamor of voices, and he turned his head away.
And then Ruth came. She was there in the chair beside the bed with the long white legs that had captivated and enslaved him and she was a reporter too. He looked into her eyes and saw that she didn’t know him at all. She swore she hadn’t betrayed him—it was Saxby, the bōifurendo, the butter-stinker: he should have known!—and he softened, almost broke. But she wasn’t his Rusu, she didn’t care, not really. She was playing another role, using him as she’d used him before. He told her he was tired. He told her goodbye.
What Ruth didn’t know, what the attorney didn’t know or the butter-stinker at the door or the nurse either, was that Hiro had a plan, that he wasn’t down and defeated yet: he would escape them all, and he knew it and drew strength from the knowledge. They’d fed him the typical things, the Amerikajin Jell-O, the peach halves, the macaroni and cheese, but they hadn’t given him chopsticks, hadn’t given him a fork or a knife. They gave him a spoon, a poor pitiful thing not three millimeters thick. But it was rigid and cold and it would serve the purpose. He hid it under his pillow.
He waited for night. For the long pulsing dimly lit hours when the nurses tread with a lighter foot, when the stabbings and shootings and gang fights taper off and the terminal patients settle in for their grim solitary vigil. This was the hour when the hakujin guard, like the guards before him, would close his eyes, for just a minute …
Yes. And throughout the day, when they left him to himself, when the guard at the door followed a pair of legs and buttocks down the hall or let his eyes go slack with a dream of food or sex or violence, when the nurse was changing bedpans or doing her nails or crouching over a tuna-paste sandwich in the nurses’ lunchroom, Hiro had been honing the cold stiff handle of his spoon against the concrete wall behind his bed. Just a stroke at a time. Swish. Swish, swish, swish. It was the hardest steel and it made the softest, most loving whisper. Yes. And now it was a spoon no longer: it was a shiv, a blade, a samurai’s sword.
There was plenty of time, he told himself, no need to rush. Do it right. Do it with honor and dignity and elegance. He sat up in bed and braced himself against the wall. His hair was a mess, he knew it, and he regretted it. And his skin too—he wished he’d thought to ask Ruth for a bit of powder or rouge, anything to give him a little color. But he’d been sick, starved, hunted and abused: what could they expect? He wetted his fingers and ran them through his hair, again and again, until it lay flat. The guard sat in a chair just outside the door. His shoulders were slumped and his head propped up against the doorframe. If he wasn’t asleep, he might as well have been.
What was it Jōchō had said?—In a fifty-fifty life or death crisis, simply settle it by choosing immediate death. Fifty-fifty. It was a joke. If only it were fifty-fifty, if only he had that much optimism, if only he had the foolish serenity he’d attained in the moment of his plunge into the oily black Atlantic. Ninety-five, he thought, ninety-five to five, all stacked the wrong way. It was a small matter, wasn’t it?
He honed the blade once more, a deadly whisper, steel against concrete. While we live, dea
th is irrelevant; when we are dead, we do not exist. There is no reason to fear death. A small matter. He studied the back of the guard’s head, the arm that hung limp in the muted light from the hallway, and then he drew in a breath, lifted the thin cotton hospital gown to expose his hara and felt for the place, for the kikai tanden, for the spirit awaiting release. He held that breath and turned the blade, turned the shiv, the sword, to his flesh. One beat of the heart, two, and then he drove it in with all the strength he had.
It was like a punch, a terrible hammering blow, but worse, far worse, hot and invasive, a pain like nothing he’d known: he’d swallowed molten lead, burning lava, he was nothing but sweat and a brain. And a will. He drove deeper and he couldn’t stand it; he slashed across, dragging the blade, hacking, and his arm locked with the shock of it. Again and again, forcing himself, digging deeper, on the edge of blacking out. And then he was giving birth, his own pale intestines bulging at the hole he’d torn in himself, the heat and the pain and the limp still arm of the guard still framed in its pitiful light … and the smell rose to his nostrils then, the heat of his blood and the corrupt rank fecal stench of the mud, the mud that had cradled him and brought him down …
And then suddenly he felt his hara lift—it wasn’t actual anymore, it wasn’t wet and hot and heavy in his hands, it was as light as air. He was going, but not to the city of Mishima and Jōchō, not to the city of his ojisan and his mother and all the generations of samurai and kamikaze and the pure unimpeachable Yamato race. No. He was going to the City of Brotherly Love: there, only there.
He closed his eyes. He was already home.
Acknowledgments
A portion of this work first appeared in Rolling Stone.
The author would like to thank the following for their assistance: The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; the University of Southern California; Tom Rohlich; John McNally; Rob Jordan; Kevin McCarey; David McGahee; Marie Alix; Clarence, Sarah and Dodds Musser; and Len Schrader.
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