I’ve asked her to leave him. I’ve asked so many times. They’ve been married eight years.
Maybe you’ve noticed how hard I try to be a pessimist. In each potential heart attack between words, I try to brace myself like a wise cynic. I tell myself to keep my sails up and full of wind and batten down the hatches.
It doesn’t help. Probably because I’ve got too much going on at the same time (heart shifting to windpipe, etc.). But I’ve got to try, at least put on a show of trying to protect myself. Even if I’m the only nitwit in my audience of one.
Maybe it’s easier with chemical reinforcements. Then again, maybe it isn’t. That shit has the tendency to encourage hope. But so do sunny skies. And clouded-over skies. And the cries of feral roosters. Nabi herself, dammit. Every time I try to steel myself against the possibility that her fidelity will tear my hull right through, acegirl just won’t let me. She just keeps showing up. She’s not here now of course. But cha, you know what I mean. Why did she persist, however intermittently, in showing up? This was something I couldn’t ask myself too often, lest I think how many Saturdays she spent baking brownies for Meals On Wheels.
Nabi didn’t have Harvard grades or Harvard money. She got stuck at Bermuda College with a job as a teller while I ran off chasing literary greatness. Martin was already at BRMS. He found some banking to do each Wednesday with clockwork regularity. And now, although he spends more time abroad than at home, it’s as if those Wednesdays are a limit his wife can’t cross. He was there and I was gone, that’s a fact.
There is no limit that those who set their minds to it cannot undermine. Not the law, not the ethics of industry, not even mortality. Aetna was comfortable with that, as am I. Nabi never even let it occur to her.
Middle of Hamilton. No parking around for miles. Small me and smaller Erik are sent into the crowded post office with the historic mission of collecting a package for Masami. We say good afternoon to the black lady at the counter, who replies by shouting over her shoulder, Miz Okada’s package, somebody! Small Erik says cheerfully, Hey, how’d you know? Clerk eyes us like we’re snot: Just a guess. And everybody in the place busts out guffawing. I mean everybody. I mean loud.
On some visceral level, even Erik understood. The joke was us stupid mongrels thinking we could pass for the ordinary Bermudians we were. Humiliated, the little bugger started sniffling. No one noticed except me. I took his sticky hand and scowled at the clerk, which she found amusing. I scowled at the white guy who came out of the back room with the package. He said, Here you go, sensei, and laughed some more.
Sometimes when medium-sized me lay awake stewing over this, I wished I’d said in booming Japanese: Erik-Katsuo, please carry this important package for our mother. Only you are strong enough.
I never said any of that shit. I snatched the stupid package and we mooched out. Erik wondered why a grown-up would call me sensei, and I tried to explain he’d meant it as an insult; an inappropriate word flung at us to show that we stick out just like inappropriate words stick out. Erik didn’t get it. Small and enraged me couldn’t articulate it properly, so I told him to shut up about it and we never spoke of it again. Maybe Erik would’ve whined to Barrington; that would’ve been just like Erik. But Barrington wasn’t around, probably schmoozing over cocktails. That would’ve been just like Barrington.
I forbore to whine, but I did unburden myself to my best friend. Nabi scowled and said she didn’t really get it either, but she’d never laugh at me like that. Mean like that. Cross her heart and hope to die and stew and fry. And she took my sticky little hand.
Such behavior was a constant in our small-to-medium years. I mean this habit Nabi had, which never did her any good: standing up for me when I got picked on. Black kids said, What are you, what’s the matter with your eyes? White kids said, There’s no such thing as a black He-Man/astronaut/paleontologist. And Nabi made off on those lot. She gave harder verbal licks than any teacher. She even wagged her finger and invoked Jesus Christ. When girls left her a note asking why she hung out with a bookworm, she showed me the thing and announced in the middle of US History: Because Kenji in’t a tired wuffless bimpert like you lot. She got instant detention.
And when I ask myself what I bring to our beautiful conspiracy, I might come up with laughs, luxury, and listening. I might come up with nothing on sepulchral days like these. Or everything I do come up with feels like so much tissue paper. As I sink lower and lower, sometimes I try pretending Bull’s Head Shreds was my idea.
I sat in my Cambridge apartment with a cheapo-Office-Depot shredder. Preparing to leap the Atlantic for the last time, not a single sure thing headed my way, I systematically destroyed all drafts of unpublished crap that I’d accumulated during my Harvard BA, MA, and PhD studies.
That’s a lot of crap. I said as much to Nabi through the phone I balanced on my shoulder while my dissertation decomposed before my eyes. “Girl, if I had a dollar for every fackin piece of paper I’m put in this fackin thing, fifteen fackin years of fackin freezing off my fackin ass, I’d be a fackin billionaire, that’s what. Driving me full fullish. Listen, this is me: dissolving bit by bit the structure of the previous world into the night in which all cows are black.”
A paraphrase from Hegel. Nabi ignored Hegel. She was deep in thought. She said, not really having any idea what she said, “Bye, go head. Cows are smelly. Ever driven by Spittal Farm on a hot day? Lord have mercy.” Then she fell silent.
Next time she spoke, she got serious. She made me serious too. Guess you’d call that inspiration. We’d say we did it so we could reap the fruits of our own sweat. For my Harvard years were years of pure drudgery for Nabi. She wanted something of her own, and when she spoke of it, for the first time in our long history she sounded desperate.
I was on the first flight I could find. At the airport I heard my name outside of Customs, and there was acegirl shoving her way through the crowd behind the waist-high barrier. I remember someone yelled at me for dropping all my stuff in the middle of the floor, but I was in her arms and we were sobbing over the barrier like a Casablanca audience. Then I remembered the bag with the illegal drugs in it lying on the floor in the middle of the airport, tore myself away from her (still bawling), grabbed my stuff while Nabi shoved her way the other way. We collided in the sun (waterspouts still going), but we didn’t kiss until we were in the Furberts’ Honda with the sunshades up. Our first time.
Only then could Nabi stop shivering enough to drive. The flat on the seashore, I’d just bought it on the web. It had no furniture. Martin was off the island, so Nabi stayed. We slept on the quilt she’d bought me when Harvard said hey why not. In the morning I presented the full sum of the capital for our business venture.
I told Nabi the money’s mine. Deep down she believes I got it from Masami. Masami, who heard of our Grand Opening from some obsequious colleague, assumes the startup money came from Barrington. This is because Barrington is a born sucker. Barrington thinks I bullied Erik into a clandestine loan. Erik is certain every resource within a million miles of the Caines family, I mean down to the last penny, is monitored with supernatural precision by none other than Masami.
I didn’t need to say a word. Speculation jumped on the hamster-wheel of familial dysfunction. Nobody knew my other partnership, which began in Boston and is still lively and plump, was underway long before Bull’s Head Shreds.
Nabi made the arrangements. Lawyers, equipment, staff, certification. That stuff comes easily to her. We went through dozens of names. Natty Shreds, Serious Shreds, Docta Shredd. We went with Bull’s Head Shreds when she found premises near Bull’s Head parking lot in Hamilton. My father’s sister had a niece on her husband’s side whose oldest kid was pretty good at graffiti, so I had him do a logo. Mean-looking silver bull with horns like scimitars. These days Nabi does all the work. I go in when she needs help or we can’t stand to be apart another minute.
The rest o
f the time, I’m supposed to nurse my literary habit. For some reason she’s all but positive that someday one of my critical analyses will be a bestseller. In the meantime I’ll have Bull’s Head Shreds to see me through and my best friend rooting for me. That’s the way she put it.
Do you see why I believed nothing would ever come between us? Do you understand why I took it for granted, why some Friday nights all but killed me?
You may find this hard to believe, but cheating on Nabi never occurred to me. There was the agony of pining. There was Zohytin. That’s all.
Baby used to say (he wasn’t Baby yet, he was @USA so far away) certain projects dump hot pepper on your creative juices, then there’s no stopping them. Like his Thomas Hardy thing so long ago, poor sight. “The Art Of Vanishing” (never thought of it like that till Baby said!), that was one of those things. It’s just so funny how these things happen. If I hadn’t done all this, I wouldn’t have got inspired to think about Bull’s Head Shreds diversifying! Already!
“All this.” Like buying a bare hard drive in town & getting a program called Macrium that’d turn it into a bit-for-bit, bootable clone of any other drive (must do before messing around!). Like sending off for a “write blocker,” a little machine that lets you read somebody’s drive without changing anything on it (harder than it sounds). Never know when I might need that, plus it looked so cute & every forensic technician has one. Bought some books too (The Hacker’s Manual), & in an hour I learned how to get somebody’s bank account number off their computer.
I still couldn’t tell if there was any meat in that rumor (CAM trying to sock it to HSBC). Guess I coulda looked harder, lingered a second longer just for the purpose. But the whole thing was like cannonballing into the ocean, knowing I was gonna be absolutely freezing & the current might be strong enough to yank off my bikini if I didn’t outwit it, out-think the current, come on Nabi-girl. I don’t think I blinked the whole time, Lord forgive me but I loved every minute!
Saturday already! Another busy one. Since Wednesday I’m been wanting to sit down with my book, but I’m hardly sat at all! Not complaining, mind you (Thank You Jesus for this day). Sang this morning with Mt O choir at Farmers’ Market down Botanical. Lunch with M at Masterworks cafe. Honey was all happy, it was sweet. Too shy to join choir himself, Lord bless him, but he loves our singing.
I told him I’m starting a feasibility study on hard drive shredders. Martin said a HDS would be a great way “to get one up on the competition.” Lord, I had to laugh. Competition? There’s only one other shredding place on the whole Island, & it belongs to those sweetiepies up de country who told me the best secure collection bins to use. Anyhow, a HDS makes sense. I mean eventually. There’s more old computers out there every day, & all of them know too much. But getting a HDS to Bermy? When you count shipping & customs (better find something to sit on, Lord), you could be looking at $100,000, depending on the shredder’s features. But before I could get into all that, somebody from Argus came over & said hi. (I think he’s from Argus. M’s got so many people saying hi I’m been lost track.) Then Honey was dying to know where we’d found “All For Jesus,” which he’d just heard us sing for the first time. Then the reading for this week’s Bible Study, etc, etc.
Back on Wednesday night I was with K. Lord, I was bushed! We wanted to take out Ethelberta, but Baby saw I was too tired. We flopped out in the jacuzzi without even turning on the jets. Kenji rubbed my back, God bless him, & I rubbed some of that special soap into his hands (he was hauling drop-off boxes for me all afternoon). I got on my “favorite topic” (K calls it): HDS! I was still on it when we flopped out on the couch. Baby asked which HDS I like the most (like we’re talking about shoes or suitcases, Lord bless him!), so I told him what I need to do & he said, “What’s a feasibility study, Nikkou?”
Sweetie wanted all the details even though he don’t have a clue how these things work. Suppliers, dimensions, where we might put the machine, how many customers we’d need to make it worth buying. Baby was lying down with his head in my lap when I mentioned the $100,000. But even after I said it, he just kept looking at me with total complete trust. Blew me away. I mean it. Kenji’s beautiful dark eyes. Total complete trust.
He asked good questions too. Stuff I hadn’t thought of yet. Like would customers want their old HDs leaving their offices? Somebody’s HD has their passwords on it & that. As Baby put it, it’s “total direct access to whatever.” Point being that companies who handle lots of personal data might want the shredder to come to them. Instead of their old HDs rambling thru Hamilton where anything can happen.
“Idgit on a bike,” said K. “Horse & buggy gets spooked by our girt red truck & there’s an accident. People’s hard drives all spread out in the street.” I asked him was he saying we gotta shell out another $100K for a MSU truck that might as well shred paper too while we’re at it? We want a truck that big, we’re gonna have to wrestle government. Was he saying we need ALL of that if we want a HDS to make money?
K thought for a sec & said, “I know you can do it if you want to. But if you’re not just asking me for moral support, if you really want a serious answer to that question, your feasibility calculations will get a lot more complicated. If you really want an answer, you have to see the question thru to its very end, wherever it may be.”
Obsession comes so easily to K. Even so, what he said right then was true. Cutting corners is a bad idea, Nabi-girl, especially in this case. Still, I felt like whining, Yeah but don’t we want it NOW??
I didn’t. Got caught up. Checking out his eyes. To have anybody smile at me like that, no not just anybody. That complicated man. That brooding, abstract, impulsive man. While all that’s going on is me. About trucks with shredders in them. My book knows how Kenji loves. He loves like a volcano, his love is explosive & comes from way down deep, so sweet & urgent it hurts us both sometimes. All of that was in his look, & well I overflowed, God bless my secret love, I forgot everything that was running thru my head. Clones, shredders, banks, dead people, all of it just flew away. I sat there playing with his hair, we didn’t move or say nothing, & I knew I was bushed but I forgot that too & overflowed & started singing. This song I hadn’t thought about in forever. Forgot the words too, just the tune, real soft, I couldn’t stop it. That Jah Cure song about longing. I don’t know why that song. But Kenji’s smile grew into a great big grin, so I kept singing, & the more I sang the more I flowed. & Kenji, Kenji glowed. My restless lover with the crystal-cavern eyes, lying still and all unguarded right there underneath my hands. My Kenji, he just glowed.
I got to St. George’s around two the next day. Saturday, I believe. Doreen opened the door. My jaw dropped. The cats were gone.
“Ever spent the night with twenty-three dead cats? Try it for a couple weeks,” she said.
Creepy. Disgusting. Insanitary. I get it. But the cats were gone.
“There were more in the bedroom. Like sleeping in a freak show. I couldn’t take it anymore. Felt like part of the collection.”
Czarina, the favorite, was nowhere in sight.
“Couple guys in that building have a truck. Took them to the dump. Best two hundred bucks I ever spent.”
Now I’d never know.
I had to admit the absence of the cats left me better equipped to notice things. Like the flowery cushion in the recliner. Myrtle’s library: a pair of dining chairs with paperbacks on them. All crime novels, all black authors. Above the loveseat were three mildewing images. Stern-faced Myrtle in her younger days. Front Street in the 1930s, lined with horse-drawn carriages and cars with befringed canopies. A drawing of a woman in a long, dirty dress, her head wrapped in cloth, a slave.
To the left of the dining set was a small kitchen. At the back of the kitchen was a door.
“My room. We’ll start there.”
It was full of plastic bins and little plastic
filing cabinets. No bed or dresser; they’d gone to the cottage long ago. Doreen said, “Why let them sit around when they could make some money?”
Thus began her search for Myrtle’s will and my quest for anything that might shed light on Aetna’s life.
I tried to draw Doreen out, fishing for a deeper sense of her and through her of her mother. I didn’t get far. We talked horror movies and American football, savage spectacles that could amuse us both for hours. But for the most part she was taciturn. She focused on her task with what Hardy would call the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play. Sometimes she’d mutter something to relieve the tedium of decades’ worth of BELCO bills, album after album of unfamiliar faces.
“There’s a system here,” she said. “I just get that feeling. Everything’s filed in some way that put it all at Momma’s fingertips. If we figure out what she was thinking, it’ll all start making sense.”
It didn’t.
“Keep it in neat piles,” she said. In case her relatives wanted a crack at it. “They get one week to decide, then it goes to the incinerator. Gonna rent out this whole place.”
Nobody would want that threadbare, cat-infested place. I didn’t say anything, but my eyes were starting to water. I was knee-deep in bulletins from St. Peter’s, some of which were older than I am. We had yet to find anything of interest. And Doreen was sidestepping my questions. If anything, she and Myrtle grew more and more mysterious.
For one thing, I thought, as a sneeze threatened and died, why would Masami and Barrington have anything to do with anyone who lived like this? The sneeze rose up and conquered. I sprayed Bingo cards everywhere.
“Had one of those coming for about an hour,” said Doreen.
The occasion wasn’t right for martinis. But then Doreen’s sense of propriety was skewed all over. She made furious martinis. A lesser man might’ve started swaying after only one. We drank on the doorstep and listened to the birds. A puff of breeze, the first cool whiff of evening.
Drafts of a Suicide Note Page 10
