“Yeah. The other kids wouldn’t stop giving her grief for it either. Like they can’t handle being around someone without knowing. It scares them.”
I nodded but didn’t respond. One of my third years was like that, keeping his death secret. When he first came to the middle school I thought he did it to get attention, to be the mysterious kid. Now the other kids had lost interest, and I wondered sometimes when everyone else was chatting and teasing each other whether he wished he’d just gone ahead and told. It’s too late now; it would be an anticlimax.
Andrew adjusted the angle of his camera by half a degree or so. “Okay, here we go. Tetrapods, take one. Fifteen seconds.”
A lone streetlight shone down on the row of giant concrete jack-like objects that line the pier, creating intense highlights and shadows. I’d always loved the tetrapods, and Andrew recently had the idea to photograph them at night, under the light of the moon and that one lamp, the waves breaking on the irregular shapes.
“My name is Ukawa Shizuka. I will die by tetorapodo,” I recited quietly.
“Hmm?”
“One of my second years. Didn’t I tell you?”
“Death by tetrapod?” He laughed. “I don’t think you did. Damn it, that came out all black. I’ll try twenty-five seconds.”
“You know what’ll happen,” I said after he clicked the shutter open. “Someday some idiot who thinks he’s funny or trying to prove something will drag her out there, just to scare her. And she’ll fall.”
“Don’t tell me you’re turning into one of those people.” The camera clicked. “Ah, that’s a little better. I’ll try thirty and see if it’s too bright.”
“I’m not.” I stood up and took a couple of steps toward the water. “But no one can deny that it happens sometimes. It’s the price we pay for knowing, isn’t it?” Maybe the manner isn’t changed—although the flux of “suicides” just after the machines were first invented is used as evidence that the technology did alter the reality—but it’s generally acknowledged that the time of death may be changed by knowing. After all, the imprints are insensitive to time. They gave up on getting a “when” reading a decade ago.
I could sense Andrew shrug behind me. I hate shrugs. I walked down a couple more tiers toward the waves. I never spend a lot of time thinking about the death readings—what’s the point?—but the first day of the new school year always stirs up uncomfortable wonderings. So many kids, bright eyed and fidgeting with their new middle school uniforms, one by one telling me the way they’ll die. It’s not real to them, out in this tiny village, thinking they’ll all live forever no matter what their reading says. It’s a game: What’s jishin in English, Rae-sensei? What’s densha no jiko? I’ve had to learn the Japanese for all sorts of gruesome phrases, but I’m still often at a loss to translate the name of some obscure disease. That “fall down stairs” girl—Miyako, was it?—will be surrounded by a gaggle of giggling girls whenever they climb the stairs to the first-year classrooms, but none of them are really picturing what it would be like for her to fall—snap!—and never move again. But all the protests and arguments against the readings are passé by now. It turns out that, confronted with explicit knowledge of our mortality, most of us don’t know anything to do besides spend most of our time ignoring it.
“Okay, thirty’s too bright. I’m gonna try twenty-seven. Then maybe we’ll move closer?”
“Sure.” I swallowed and focused my eyes on the misty green lights on the water. The camera clicked.
“What’s your favorite word in Japanese?” I asked a little while later, after the camera was packed up and we stood listening to the water.
“Shionari,” came the answer without hesitation.
“Shionari?”
“It’s the sound of the waves breaking.”
“Oh.” I listened to the shionari that permeated our silence. “One kid asked me that today. A break from all the normal questions and I didn’t even have an answer. Sounds like you would have been prepared.”
“Points for creativity to the kid. I thought yours was kekkyoku.”
“Kekkyoku,” I repeated, considering. “I just like the way it rolls through your throat, all those velar stops. But how could I tell a room of seventh graders that my number one favorite word of their language is ‘in the end’? That’s pretty boring.”
“I dunno.” He stretched his arms up to the sky, arching his back, then turned and flashed me a smile. “Nowadays, it seems like a pretty important word.”
“He never talks about her to me anymore,” I remarked to Marie the next week over our traditional tendon, tempura and rice, while carefully transferring my two shrimp tempura to her bowl and requisitioning her sweet potato and pumpkin.
“Is that a bad thing?”
“I guess not. I feel like he used to work her into the conversation every few sentences.”
She ripped the tail off the shrimp. “Maybe he picked up on how much it bothers you.”
I laughed. He doesn’t pick up on any subtle social signals, as best as I could tell. “Nah. He’s such a guy.”
“Maybe they’re having problems.”
I was almost mad at Marie for giving validation to what I tried to brush off as a ridiculous hope. Almost.
“You should totally make a move.”
I groaned and loaded my chopsticks up with rice, which promptly fell back into the bowl. I tried again. Chopsticks are not for the impatient. “I totally should not. You know what I think about that.”
“That car accident of hers could happen when she’s ninety. You can’t keep waiting.”
“I know…”
“Hey, you know what you should do? You should get one of those love readings, you know? Find out if it’s ever gonna happen.”
“Yeah, great idea.” I laughed. “You know those things are a scam. I’m not looking for false hope here.” I spooned the mix of seven spices into my small bowl of udon noodles and stirred.
“Eh, they’re right sometimes, aren’t they? I don’t see why we can predict death and we can’t predict anything useful.”
“Death isn’t useful?”
“It’s just gloomy, man. Great, I’m gonna die from heart failure. Doesn’t everyone die from heart failure? Your heart stops, you die. My COD’s a total cop-out. And I got a kid this year, cute kid, real rebel type. Says he’s gonna die from a gunshot. Why should I know that? I can almost hear the shot going off whenever I look at him. And he’s all proud, you know? He’s got one of those T-shirts and everything showing it off.”
I nodded as I slurped the noodles. “The first week of classes always gets to me too. The first years are just so young.”
“Yeah.” Marie shrugged, as though to dislodge the whole topic from her shoulders and let it drift to the floor. “Anyway, one of my friends from back home got a love reading and it said she’d marry a doctor, and then she put the moves on this really smart guy friend she liked and they’re together now. And he’s got a PhD.”
I laughed. “In what?”
“I dunno, Russian lit or something. Who cares? He’s a doctor, technically.”
“And that’s not self-fulfilling at all.”
“Come on, the deaths are self-fulfilling too sometimes—everyone knows that.”
“Not everyone knows that,” I argued, although I didn’t necessarily disagree. “It’s a controversial theory. The imprints left by—”
“Don’t start talking to me about superpositions and time being an illusion and imprints left by the future. I gave up trying to understand all that years ago. Anyway, if the way we die leaves an imprint we can read, then why shouldn’t other things? It just seems logical.”
“I dunno.” I gulped my tiny glass of water and guiltily pushed the button to call over the waiter. “Guess our bodies are more deeply affected by the way we die than by whether we marry a doctor.”
“Maybe our blood is. Have they tried looking in other places? Hey”—she laughed—“do you think if I got a Pap smear
, they could tell me whether I’ll finally hook up with Jeff at the party this weekend?”
“Uhh…” I glanced up at the waiter, who had just appeared—the cute one with floppy hair and a silvery belt—and smiled. “Ee-to, mizu o, onegaishimasu.”
Marie shot me a sheepish grin when he’d gone. “Come on, you know he doesn’t speak any English. Lord knows, if the waiters here speak English….well, I’ve said worse.”
I jumped slightly as my phone vibrated in my pocket and pulled it out to find the small graphic of a panda waving its arms indicating a new e-mail. From Andrew.
“Hey,” it read. “Check this out, isn’t it sweet? A random note from a student: ‘Dear Andorew Sensei, You are good teacher. I like learn English with you. Thank you for English. I enjoyed. You are nice smile. Please enjoy from now. Saki Satou.’ Ahh, sometimes being a teacher is worth it…”
I must have been smiling like an idiot down at my phone because Marie poked me with her chopstick. “Hey, earth to Rae. He propose to you or something?”
I rolled my eyes. “No, just a cute note.” I read it to her.
“Kawaii,” she agreed. “Maybe you should get his attention by writing him a note. Dear An-do-rew, I like make out with you. You are nice ass. Please we sleep together from now.”
The waiter deposited a pitcher of water on our table. I glared at Marie, repressing my giggle.
“Arigatou,” I said to the waiter. Marie mumbled her thanks as well.
“Not funny,” I said when he’d gone. “I’m not doing anything to get his attention while he has Lizzie.”
“Then you’ll both spend your lives waiting.”
“I know,” I repeated, stirring the broth remaining in my udon bowl and watching the orange spice swirl. “I know.”
Two of the tetrapod pictures came out really well, and Andrew and I disagreed on which came out better. I set my choice as my desktop background, and so it was against the backdrop of ghostly angled shadows under a triangle of white light that the IM window popped up a couple of days later.
“Something’s happened. Can you come down here?”
My heart stopped.
The car accident?
My fingers had no idea how to respond.
“What happened?” I typed finally, unsteadily.
“Fire.”
Fire? “I’ll be right there.”
Andrew’s neighborhood, a fifteen-minute drive along the winding mountain roads from mine, was buzzing as I drove though the narrow main street toward his small house. I hopped down from my car and met him in the doorway. “What happened?” I asked again.
His face was set oddly. “Fire,” he whispered. “I can’t follow everything people said to me. But they keep saying Satou.”
“Satou? Someone you know?”
He leaned on the side of the house, looking so drained my arms ached to hug him.
“I have a few students with that name.”
“With fire readings?” Or falling down stairs, suffocation, burns… it’s not always so straightforward.
“I don’t think so. But—”
“Then they should be okay, right?”
He shook his head. I waited, listening to the vague sounds of bustle and gossip from the main street. It felt like the sky had darkened even in the minute I’d been out of the car, from dusk into night.
He turned and walked into the house, and after a brief hesitation I followed, slipping out of my shoes in the entryway. “Ojamashimasu,” I whispered before following him into the living room, thinking for some reason of the group of laughing third-year girls who had forced their way into my house the week before, shouting ojamashimasu over my protests that no, this was not a good time. Just because you announce that you’re about to intrude doesn’t make the intrusion okay, I’d wanted to tell them.
The memory amused me, but this wasn’t a time to be amused, so I shook it from my head. Andrew had vanished into the living room and I followed. He silently held out a folded piece of pastel yellow notebook paper with a design of giraffes in the corner. I took it from him.
“Dear Andorew Sensei,” it began. Of course, the random note he’d shown me. I stared at the swirly signature. “Satou… But you said she’s not—”
“She’s not anything. She’s the girl who won’t tell.”
I found myself sitting down on the couch. “Do you think she—”
“I think she was killed. I heard people talking.”
“So… now—now we know, I guess.” It was all I could think to say. What do you say when a twelve-year-old child dies? “I mean there’s—her family must have known she was a fire. They would have taken all the normal precautions. There’s no way that this could have been avoided even if… you know, if she’d told.”
“Read it again.”
Andrew’s voice was slow and measured. Too measured. I looked down again at the cheerful paper in my hands.
I enjoyed. Past tense.
The room felt cold.
“Should you show this note to someone?” I asked what felt like fifteen minutes later but was probably about three.
“I don’t know. What’s the point?”
“You don’t know what it means.”
“Don’t I?”
I cringed at the edge to his voice. “You—no, you don’t. She could have… first years have barely learned the past tense. There’s no reason…”
My words were too empty, and I stopped. Andrew sat down beside me, his head in his hands, then stood back up.
“Why?” he asked. There was no answer, so I gave none. “Why this girl? Why? There are other fires, or whatever exactly she was. There are others, and they’re just kids, and they live with it like everyone else. They buy those fucking pencil cases with the kanji for fire written in flames and they think it’s cool and funny and a little bit scary but whatever, they live because that’s what kids do.”
He faced the large front window now. I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard him spew so many words in such quick, passionate succession.
“Why was she different?” He spoke more softly. “So quiet, and she wouldn’t tell, didn’t look scared, just shy and like it was none of our business. I thought it must be an STD or something, you know, one of the ones kids get really teased for. Fuck.”
“Andrew, you don’t—you don’t know…”
“I know, okay? Everyone was at the other end of town at the temple tonight for the festival. Everyone. Her family. Everyone. I was there too when we heard.”
The normal night sounds of spring were beginning to creep in through the glass, so out of place.
He sat down again, next to me, inches from me. “Why Saki Satou? Why would she carry this burden so much more heavily than the rest of us? What did she understand that we don’t?”
“I—” The framing of his question made no sense to me. “She… didn’t. Nothing. She… I don’t know.”
Silence. Crickets from the flooded rice fields outside.
“Stay here tonight.”
My chest twisted into a knot.
“Just… on the futon. I just want company.”
I nodded. Neither of us spoke as he pulled the rolled futon out of a closet. It was too early for sleep, but he didn’t say another word, and neither did I. His breathing from the mattress above my futon swirled with the night sounds of the Japanese countryside and covered my whirlwind of thoughts like a soft blanket.
The next day all the teachers in all the nearby schools had flyers on our desks detailing the fire. I skimmed the Japanese characters. Saki was, it confirmed, a fire death. She was, it confirmed, the only casualty.
My students had all heard, of course, but over the course of the week the level of laughter and banter in the halls crept back toward equilibrium. “What else are they gonna do?” Marie commented over coffee and strawberry parfaits. I shrugged. What else had I expected? Andrew’s question still circled in my mind. No one hinted that the fire wasn’t an accident. Andrew kept the little yellow note in an
envelope next to his bed, and for some reason I instinctively didn’t mention it even to Marie. After a few days, the other teachers in my staff room stopped talking about the fire too. “Kekkyoku,” I’d heard the art teacher comment, “shiin-yochi wa na, shou ga nai yarou.” The other teachers around his desk nodded knowingly.
In the end, death predictions always come true.
Kekkyoku, yes.
But why now?
I crouched down to sit on the edge of the long cement jetty, then stretched my legs and rested them against the slanted spoke of a tetrapod. The hazy sun beginning to sink over the low green mountains seemed magnified, giant, covering the sky like an anime sun. Andrew perched on the one next to me, leaning down to capture a close-up of the breaking waves shining in the last sunlight of the day. We hadn’t spoken of Saki in almost a month.
“Ki o tsukete ne,” I warned as he shifted positions. Be careful. He turned over his shoulder to look at me.
“Why? I’m not gonna get my obscure liver disease from falling into the water.”
It was an old, worn argument that he knew perfectly well. You can break your neck. You can feel pain. You’ll be wet and cold. Death isn’t everything. I didn’t need to say it.
He would only bring up his reading if he wanted to talk about something. I waited. One… two…
“I can’t break up with Lizzie.”
… twenty-three. My stomach lurched.
“I love her.”
I felt a thud in my chest, like someone kicked me. “I… I know that. Of course you love her.”
I could have counted to fifty in the next silence if my brain were working. Nothing but shionari.
“Nothing real is supposed to change because we know,” he continued finally, the words dropping toward me like smooth stones he’d turned over and over and over in his mind. “Just the routine precautions. I promised myself nothing would change because I knew. That I wouldn’t leave her just because it’s terrifying, knowing. Knowing there’ll be no warning. Nothing, just a crash and a phone call, out of nowhere.” His voice broke, just a tiny bit. “I… I promised myself I wouldn’t punish her for it. Damn it, I promised her. But it’s hard. It’s—it’s hard and only getting harder, every day, when she’s so far away in America and… every night I wonder whether I’ll find her online in the morning or not. God if it were me, if I were her, I’d…”
This Is How You Die Page 20
