Way up in his techno-nest, Javon flickers Hello.
She turns to us, glances at her watch. “I’ve got seven minutes until Senior Improv. Go.”
Kyle shifts on his feet. “Uhh . . . umm . . .”
She holds up her hand. “Kyle, let’s take it from the top. And this time, expunge all prehistoric grunts from your vocabulary.”
Kyle nods. “Yeah, well, see, Dr. Jacobson wants Jonathan to do this little tune at graduation.”
“Yes, I know all about it,” Miss Yan-Ling says, glancing at me. “You’re performing ‘Crossing the River Styx’ by Pinky Toe. A wonderful choice. What do you need from me?”
“Well, see, I’ve got some ideas for staging—like, you know, some of that philosophical theater stuff you’ve been teaching us.”
“Can you please be more specific?”
Kyle rubs his chin. “Like that Stanislavsky dude says, live the part. Reach inside your caveman self. I mean, we wanna make it real and spontaneous. Who wants to see Jonathan just standing there with a guitar?”
Miss Yan-Ling smiles. “It’s wonderful that you’re taking initiative, Kyle. Konstantin Stanislavsky was one of the theater’s greatest creative thinkers. Ideas are nothing if they do not achieve fruition through action. Are you all on the same page with this?”
Kyle nods. “Me and Javon agree one thousand percent.”
“The question is, does Jonathan agree one thousand percent?”
All eyes shift to me. Miss Yan-Ling’s are friendly and pert, Kyle’s are parallel lasers. I can even feel Kong glaring at me from the back shadows. Up in the control booth, Javon has stopped messing with the lights. Steady purple.
Damn! In the deck of life, thickness is the highest trump card.
“One thousand percent,” I say.
Kyle turns the lasers off.
Miss Yan-Ling smiles maternally, even though she’s only about eight years older than us.
“Wonderful!” she says. “Kyle, you are now the producer of Jonathan’s segment of the graduation ceremony. Do I need to see storyboards?”
“Nah,” Kyle says. “It’s simple.”
“Well, keep me posted on all major decisions. Is that all?”
“Um,” Kyle says. “Jonathan wants to play the Ric.”
“The Ric? Oh, you mean the Rickenbacker guitar. But that’s not really possible . . . it’s more of a . . . you know, it’s quite valuable . . . a museum piece, actually . . . hmmm . . . if anything were to happen . . . the liability . . . I don’t see how . . . but then again . . .” She sighs. “Let me think about it.”
Because of the Kenny G’s incredible acoustics, Javon overhears every last stuttered syllable. Each time Miss Yan-Ling changes thoughts, he changes lights. In the course of fifteen seconds, he flashes the whole spectrum at her, but she’s too full of pondering to notice.
“With all due respect,” Kyle says, “if anybody’s gonna play the Ric, it oughta be Jonathan.”
Miss Yan-Ling eyes me sadly. “Yes, it ought to.” She reaches out and squeezes my shoulder. “Jonathan, how are you?”
“Phenomenal.”
She sighs. “I loved how Telly used to stroll down the hall strumming his guitar. But I’ve never heard you play.”
I’m about to say, “I fully suck,” when Kyle breaks in.
“Trust me, Carlos Santana would take notes.”
“Wonderful,” Miss Yan-Ling says. “I can hardly wait to hear you perform.” Then she exhales dramatically. “Oh, go ahead. Play the Ric. Just don’t damage it.”
“Guaranteed,” Kyle says.
She glances at her watch. “Oh my god!”
“Wait,” Kyle says. “We’re gonna need a prop from one of the old musicals.”
Miss Yan-Ling’s already halfway down the stage stairs. She waves an arm, meaning, I think, “Go ahead.” But it might mean “No time to discuss.”
“Thanks!” Kyle shouts as she races up the aisle and out the door.
A grin spreads across his face. Up in the control room, Javon rolls some knobs and the whole stage begins to spin in a Ferris wheel of prismatic light.
“Show’s on,” Kyle says, grabbing my arm and bumping my fist. “You, me, all us thicks—and the Velcro Kong—we’re gonna make history here at Taft High School.”
He beats his chest gorilla-style.
I’m thinking:
Dear Lord, please get me out of my life.
Buy me a ticket to the nearest monastery.
All I want to do is till the broccoli fields.
Chapter 24
“Today,” David says, “we will travel to some dark places. We will talk about death. And life.”
“Wait, man,” I say, “you will talk about death and life. I’m gonna sit here and take notes.”
David says, “I’d rather this be a dialogue, Jonathan.”
I shrug. “Okay by me.”
“Did you read those pages of the inquest report?”
“Yeah.”
Which is true. No Transition Theory this time. Just old-fashioned reading.
“Tell me, Jonathan, what was the state of the Pacific War in April 1945?”
“Well, uh, everything was kind of desperate, building to the grand finale, like in a movie.”
“True,” David says. “We were a few months away from dropping the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the surrender aboard the Missouri. But those few months were like facing a wounded tiger that rises one last time to kill, and kill in a frenzy.”
“You mean those last battles?”
“That’s right,” David says. “Those last battles—Iwo Jima and Okinawa—were among the most fierce naval engagements of the war. My ship, the Gabriel Trask, served on radar picket duty—the front lines—during both. On April sixth, 1945, off Okinawa, the Japanese launched an air attack against the U.S. fleet. We were hit by a suicide plane.”
“You mean a kamikaze?”
“Yes, a kamikaze.”
“Jeezus.”
“I remember that day, Jonathan, more clearly than yesterday.”
“Hey,” I say, “that’s a bloodcurdling cliché.”
“Call it what you will,” David says, “but it’s true. I can run the whole day through my mind like film through a movie projector. I see it all. Vividly.”
“What do you see?”
“Well, for example, during breakfast that morning, our cook, Isaac Jackson, spilled boiling grease on his hand. He went off to sickbay and came back wearing a bear-paw-size bandage. We all laughed, because now all he was qualified to do was stir the mush. And I remember the sunrise—an explosion of red and orange. You know the old seaman’s saying:
Red sky at morning,
sailor take warning.
“And standing on the bridge gazing at Okinawa Island through binoculars. Seeing how ultra blue the water was, how lush green the hills. And thinking, here I was, looking at paradise—and calculating whether our shells could reach its shore. Just before eight o’clock—”
“You mean oh eight hundred hours?”
“Yes, Jonathan, that’s how we said it. Just before oh eight hundred hours, the Klaxon sounded.”
“Klaxon?”
“The ship’s siren, sounding general quarters.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“We scrambled to our battle stations. To the northeast, at about ten o’clock—meaning angle of altitude—we saw a hornet’s nest of attack planes. I had command of the forty-millimeter guns. As the planes began to dive, going mainly for the big prizes—the carriers Enterprise and Bunker Hill—we opened up. One plane split off, climbed nearly straight up, and dove at us.”
“Whoa!” I say. “What’s that feel like?”
“It’s a hypnotic thing, Jonathan. For a moment, I just stared. The idea of self-annihilation is totally foreign to the Western mind.”
“Not totally,” I say. “Suicide happens here, too.”
“Yes, it does, Jonathan. But in our culture, taking your life is more an act of Ya
nkee individualism. To be ordered to annihilate yourself for an abstraction like duty or country, without a fighting chance, that is alien to us. Think how different that pilot was from me and my crewmates. He was locked inside his cockpit. No parachute. No landing gear. Death was his destiny that day, and he knew it. We, on the other hand, were fighting for our survival. Our motive was much stronger.”
“Maybe it’s not that simple,” I say. “Maybe he didn’t really want to die.”
“He probably didn’t, Jonathan.”
“So you shot him down?”
David nods. “While we were blasting away, a second plane was sneaking around to the east, hoping to hide in the sun. It banked—a rather beautiful chandelle—and came straight at us, low, no more than ten or fifteen feet off the water. We could see the torpedo strapped to its belly. See the dot that was the pilot. Zooming in on us.”
“Hey,” I say, “killing is something I could never do.”
“Oh yes, you could,” David says. “That dot may have been a human being, but one with a mind bent on our destruction. We gave him all we had. Poured lead into him—there’s a bloodcurdling cliché for you. But we couldn’t bring him down.”
David is back there, aboard his ship. He holds his fists together. They shake in staccato:
“Blekkity-blekkity-blek.”
“Ka-blam!” I say.
David lowers his hands. “He slammed straight into us. The explosion knocked me to the deck. When I looked up, the sky was filled with churning black smoke. Everything smelled of fuel oil and exploded gunpowder. Fire crews were rushing about. We were in full damage control.”
“But nobody got killed, right?”
“Oh, there was plenty of carnage, Jonathan. We sustained about forty dead and wounded. You’re thinking of the men directly under my command. No, none of them was badly hurt. We’d been insulated by the heavy-plated armor in the gun nests. In that sense, we were lucky, for the time being.”
“Did you start sinking?”
“The possibility of sinking was very real,” David says. “I could see the captain on the bridge, through the smoke. He shouted: ‘Lieutenant Cosgrove, is your crew intact?’ I gave him a thumbs up. He shouted: ‘Do whatever it takes to keep us afloat.’ So I took my gunners down the ladders, through the smoke, to where the hull was damaged.”
“How do you stop a ship from sinking?”
“You begin by sealing off the damaged compartments. Then you get the submersible pumps going.”
“Shouldn’t you have stayed up on deck and shot down some more kamikazes?”
“We had other gun crews, Jonathan. The captain weighed his options and made the call. We were needed below.”
“Were those guys your friends?”
David starts to speak. Stops. It’s not an easy question for him.
“An officer does not befriend the rank and file, Jonathan. But even today I could tell you every man’s first, middle, and last name, where he was born, where he lived, who his girlfriend was. I’d served with them night and day for more than three years. But I didn’t think of them as my friends.”
“But all those pictures—didn’t you take them?”
“Yes, I was quite a shutterbug in those days.”
“Seems like they were your friends.”
“They were more like my family, Jonathan. As their commanding officer, I was responsible for them.”
“Are they the same guys listed at the back of the inquest report?”
“Yes.”
“So what happened?”
“We ran the hoses topside. Started the pumps. Filled the damaged compartments with empty ammo cans, for flotation. The captain’s plan was to crawl to a nearby island base called Kerama Retto, get patched up, then limp to Pearl Harbor for repairs.”
“Long way to limp.”
“Yes, but we were too busy trying to survive minute by minute to think about that. Remember, we were fighting two battles.
One above the water line—wave after wave of kamikazes—and one below, against the sea.”
“Could you hear all that stuff going on outside, like the planes buzzing you and all that?”
“All too well.”
“Were you scared?”
“Yes, Jonathan. I remember standing up to my waist in seawater, thinking, Here’s where I’ll die. This is my tomb.”
“What did you do?”
“I put my fears aside. Buried them.”
“You can do that—bury your fears?”
“You have to, Jonathan.”
“What was it like down there, in the bottom of the ship?”
“Well, imagine going down an old mineshaft, hearing it creak and strain, knowing it might cave in at any moment. But we had a job to do. You can’t think about yourself; you’ve got to think about the entire crew.”
“Was it dark?”
“No, we had lights. Our generators still functioned.”
“What about all the dead guys? Did you dump them in the ocean?”
“You mean, did we commit them to the sea? No. A tender came alongside. They were moved to a transport vessel, to be returned to the States for proper burial.”
“What about the wounded guys?”
“They were moved to a hospital ship, the USS Relief.”
“But you guys survived? I mean, your ship did.”
“Yes, Jonathan. The Gabe was a casualty, not a fatality, of the suicide raid at Okinawa on April sixth.”
“What about . . . ?”
David holds up his hand. “Enough for today, Jonathan.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Me too. My hand’s about to break off.”
“Let’s save our strength for next time. We have deeper places to go. Darker places to swim.”
“Adios,” I say.
“Adios, Jonathan.”
Chapter 25
On my way down the corridor, I poke my head into room 114.
“Hey, Agnes.”
She’s sitting in her wheelchair, bundled in a bathrobe. The TV flashes colored shadows onto her face. On the screen, a model-perfect brunette is screaming tearfully at a model-perfect man. They fall into each other’s arms and kiss.
Agnes grins at me. “Float a turd.”
Of all the greetings in the world, this is now my favorite. “Float a turd” flings open a door and shouts that life is full of irony and madness. Is both beautiful and stinky.
We should all say it, from the president and Cabinet on down. Make it our national greeting.
Float a turd, everybody!
“Hey, Agnes, what do you mean, ‘swimmers in the dark’?”
Her eyes brighten.
“You must free them.”
“Free who?”
She points at me. “You know.”
“No, actually, I don’t.”
“It’s why you’re here. To free the swimmers in the dark.”
“Agnes,” I say, “I’ve got a confession: I don’t always get you.”
She grins. “I’m ninety-nine years old. I want to be an angel.”
“Hey,” I say, “maybe you can do your oracle thing for me sometime. You know, let me know how it all turns out.”
She meets my eye. “Never give up.”
“Maybe sometimes,” I say, “you have to.”
“No, never,” she says. “Never, ever, ever.”
“But . . .”
The TV draws her back. The soap opera couple is still kissing. They’re talking-kissing, kissing-talking. Cheeks polished with tears. Eyes lit with smiles.
Someday, I want to write for the soaps. It seems pretty easy.
“Adios, Agnes. Float a turd.”
Chapter 26
Today’s a good day for Katie.
Her breathing tube stays coiled around the valve of her oxygen tank.
She’s wearing knee-torn, ass-defining jeans. Nice bellybutton. She slips on her gray cross-country hoodie. The team logo, a sprinting cheetah, is on the front, and “Katie” is stamped on the ba
ck.
She stands before the mirror and slips the Beyoncé wig over her bald head. Adjusts it. Brushes the hair as if it were real. Teases the bangs. Puts on sugary lip-gloss. Brushes color onto her cheeks. Then she slips on some glasses and becomes Miss Hot Librarian.
Personally, I’d like to check out a book.
But it’s time to go to work. She grabs her laptop, and we rush down the corridor.
“Hey, Yolanda. Hey, Robert.”
She stops in every room. Everybody welcomes her.
She wants to know the most trivial stuff.
“Did you eat your sliced tomatoes?”
“Did you fill out that form?”
“Did you write that e-mail to your son? You want me to write it for you? Okay.”
She bangs out the e-mail on her laptop, fires it off. Fast and easy. Like me, she believes in spontaneous writing. No pauses. Not even spell check. Done. Gone.
The old, nontechie residents are mildly shocked by the suddenness of her accomplishments. To have a burden lifted so quickly and easily. They beam their gratitude.
And she can’t leave me out of it.
“Jonathan has a poem for you.”
I read the rhyming crap from the Delphi library. Kipling. Longfellow. Whittier.
I bring my copy of Leaves of Grass and read Walt Whitman.
I even read a few of my own.
Or . . .
“Phil, sing ‘Danny Boy,’ and Jonathan will play along.”
We’re standing in room 135. Phil’s an amped-sales-exec-golfer type. Still has all his hair. He’s been at the Delphi about sixteen weeks, same as me. At first, he had no time to be sick. Got dressed for work in his starched Nordstrom shirt and vintage slim-fit pants. Hair gel. Shiny tasseled shoes. But after a few days the tasseled shoes disappeared and the slippers came on. The hair gel disappeared. His shaving got sketchy—little islands of stubble appeared. Till finally he’s just sitting here, in his bathrobe, watching the sky drip. The IV drip.
Katie’s done some research. Knows Phil used to sing tenor in some glee club. Loves Irish and Scottish songs.
She pats his shoulder. “Hey, how does it go? ‘Danny boy . . . something, something.’”
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