A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

  Ruth looked at the sturdy red book with its tarnished gilt title embossed on the cover. It was lying on top of a tall messy stack of notes and manuscript pages, bristling with Post-its and wound with cramped marginalia, which represented the memoir that she’d been working on for close to a decade. À la recherche du temps perdu, indeed. Unable to complete another novel, she had decided instead to write about the years she had spent taking care of her mother, who’d suffered from Alzheimer’s. Now, looking at the pile of pages, she felt a quickening flush of panic at the thought of all her own lost time, the confused mess she’d made of this draft, and the work that still needed to be done to sort it all out. What was she doing wasting precious hours on someone else’s story?

  She picked up the diary and, using the side of her thumb, started riffling through the pages. She wasn’t reading, in fact she was trying not to. She only wanted to ascertain whether the handwriting continued all the way to the end, or if it petered out partway through. How many diaries and journals had she herself started and then abandoned? How many aborted novels languished in folders on her hard drive? But to her surprise, although the color of the ink occasionally bled from purple to pink to black to blue and back to purple again, the writing itself never faltered, growing smaller and if anything even denser, straight through to the very last, tightly packed page. The girl had run out of paper before she ran out of words.

  And then?

  Ruth snapped the book shut and closed her eyes for good measure to keep herself from cheating and reading the final sentence, but the question lingered, floating like a retinal burn in the darkness of her mind: What happens in the end?

  2.

  Muriel examined the barnacle growth on the outer freezer bag through the reading glasses she kept perched on her nose. “If I were you, I’d get Callie to take a look. Maybe she can figure out how old these critters are, and from that you can calculate how long the bag’s been in the water.”

  “Oliver thinks it’s the leading edge of drift from the tsunami,” Ruth said.

  Muriel frowned. “I suppose it’s possible. Seems too quick, though. They’re starting to see the lighter stuff washing up in Alaska and Tofino, but we’re tucked back pretty far inland here. Where did you say you found it?”

  “At the south end of the beach, below Jap Ranch.”

  No one on the island called it by that name anymore, but Muriel was an old-timer and knew the reference. The old homestead, one of the most beautiful places on the island, had once belonged to a Japanese family, who were forced to sell when they were interned during the war. The property had changed hands several times since then, and now was owned by elderly Germans. Once Ruth heard the nickname, she stubbornly persisted in using it. As a person of Japanese ancestry, she said, she had the right, and it was important not to let New Age correctness erase the history of the island.

  “Fine for you,” Oliver said. His family had emigrated from Germany. “Not so fine if I use it. It’s hardly fair.”

  “Exactly,” Ruth said. “It wasn’t fair. My mom’s family were interned, too. Maybe I could lodge a land claim on behalf of my people. That property was stolen from them. I could just go there and sit in their driveway and refuse to leave. Repossess the land and kick out the Germans.”

  “What do you have against my people?” Oliver asked.

  Their marriage was like this, an axial alliance—her people interned, his firebombed in Stuttgart—a small accidental consequence of a war fought before either of them was born.

  “We’re by-products of the mid-twentieth century,” Oliver said.

  “Who isn’t?”

  “I doubt it’s from the tsunami,” Muriel said, placing the freezer bag back down on the table and turning her attention to the Hello Kitty lunchbox. “More likely from a cruise ship, going up the Inside Passage, or maybe Japanese tourists.”

  Pesto, who had been twining himself around Muriel’s legs, now jumped up onto her lap and took a swat at her thick grey braid, which hung over her shoulder like a snake. The end of the braid was secured with a colorful beaded elastic, which Pesto found irresistible. He also liked her dangling earrings.

  “I like the tsunami narrative,” Ruth said, frowning at the cat.

  Muriel flicked the braid behind her back, out of the cat’s reach, and then rubbed the white patch between his ears to distract him. She peered at Ruth over the top of her glasses. “Bad idea. Shouldn’t let your narrative preferences interfere with your forensic work.”

  Muriel was a retired anthropologist, who studied middens. She knew a lot about garbage. She was also an avid beachcomber and was the person who’d found the severed foot. She prided herself on her finds: bone fish hooks and lures, flint spearheads and arrowheads, and an assortment of stone tools for pounding and cutting. Most were First Nations artifacts, but she also had a collection of old Japanese fishing floats that had detached from nets across the Pacific and washed up on the island’s shore. The floats were the size of large beach balls, murky globes blown from thick tinted glass. They were beautiful, like escaped worlds.

  “I’m a novelist,” Ruth said. “I can’t help it. My narrative preferences are all I’ve got.”

  “Fair enough,” Muriel said. “But facts are facts, and establishing the provenance is important.” She scooped up the cat and dropped him onto the floor, then rested her fingers on the latches on the sides of the lunchbox. Her fingers were decorated with heavy silver and turquoise rings, which looked incongruous next to Hello Kitty. “May I?” she asked.

  “Be my guest.”

  On the phone, Muriel had asked to inspect the find, so Ruth had repacked the box as best she could. Now she felt a kind of tension in the air, but she wasn’t sure where it was coming from. Something in the formality of Muriel’s request. The solemnity of her attitude as she removed the lid. The way she paused, almost ceremonially, before lifting the watch from the box, turning it over and holding it to her ear.

  “It’s broken,” Ruth said.

  Muriel picked up the diary. She inspected the spine and then the cover. “Here’s where you’ll find your clues,” she said, opening it to a section somewhere in the middle. “Have you started reading it?”

  Watching Muriel handle the book, Ruth felt her uneasiness grow. “Well, yes. Only the first couple of pages. It’s not that interesting.” She took the letters from the box and held them out. “These seem more promising. They’re older and may be more historically important, don’t you think?” Muriel laid down the diary and took the letters from Ruth’s hand. “Unfortunately, I can’t read them,” Ruth added.

  “The handwriting looks beautiful,” Muriel said, turning over the pages. “Have you shown them to Ayako?” Ayako was the young Japanese wife of an oyster farmer who lived on the island.

  “Yes,” Ruth said, slipping the diary below the table and out of sight. “But she said the handwriting’s hard even for her to read, and besides her English isn’t so good. She did decipher the dates, though. She said they were written in 1944 and ’45, and I should try to find someone older, who was alive during the war.”

  “Good luck,” Muriel said. “Has the language really changed that much?”

  “Not the language. The people. Ayako said young people can’t read complex characters or write by hand anymore. They’ve grown up with computers.” Under the table, she fingered the blunt edges of the diary. One corner was broken, and the cloth-encased cardboard wiggled like a loose tooth. Had Nao worried this corner between her fingertips, too?

  Muriel shook her head. “Right,” she said. “It’s the same everywhere. Kids have terrible handwriting these days. They’re not even teaching it in schools anymore.” She placed the letters next to the watch and the freezer bags on the table and looked over the collection. If she noticed the missing diary, she didn’t mention it. “Well, thanks for showing me,” she said.

  She heaved herself to her feet, brushed the cat hair from her lap, and then limped off toward the mud room. She’d gained s
ome weight since her hip replacement and still found it hard to get up and down. She was wearing an old Cowichan sweater and a long skirt, made out of some rough peasant fabric that covered the tops of her gum boots when she put them back on. She stomped her feet in the boots and then looked up at Ruth, who had come to the door to see her off.

  “I still say this should have been my find,” she said, pulling a rain parka on over the sweater. “But maybe it’s better you got it, since at least you can read some of the Japanese. Good luck. Don’t let yourself get too distracted now . . .”

  Ruth braced herself.

  “. . . How’s the new book coming, anyway?” Muriel asked.

  3.

  At night, in bed, Ruth would often read to Oliver. It used to be that when she’d had a good writing day, she would read aloud what she’d just written, finding that if she fell asleep thinking about the scene she was working on, she would often wake with a sense of where to go next. It had been a long while, however, since she’d had a day like that or shared anything new.

  That night, she read the first few entries of Nao’s diary. When she came to the passage about perverts and panties and the zebra-skin bed, she felt a sudden flush of discomfort. It wasn’t embarrassment. She was never shy about this kind of thing, herself. Rather, her discomfort was more on behalf of the girl. She was feeling protective. But she needn’t have worried.

  “The nun sounds interesting,” Oliver said, as he fiddled with the broken watch.

  “Yes,” she said, relieved. “The Taishō Democracy was an interesting time for Japanese women.”

  “Do you think she’s still alive?”

  “The nun? I doubt it. She was a hundred and four—” “I meant the girl.”

  “I don’t know,” Ruth said. “It’s crazy, but I’m kind of worried about her. I guess I’ll have to keep on reading to find out.”

  4.

  Do you feel special yet?

  The girl’s question lingered.

  “It’s an interesting thought,” Oliver said, still tinkering with the watch. “Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “She says she’s writing it for you. So do you feel special?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Ruth said.

  What if you just think I’m a jerk and toss me into the garbage?

  “Speaking about garbage,” Oliver said. “I’ve been thinking about the Great Garbage Patches recently . . .”

  “The what?”

  “The Great Eastern and Great Western Garbage Patches? Enormous masses of garbage and debris floating in the oceans? You must have heard about them . . .”

  “Yes,” she said. “No. I mean, sort of.” It didn’t matter, since he clearly wanted to tell her about them. She put down the diary, letting it rest on the white bedcovers. She took off her glasses and laid them on top of the book. The glasses were retro, with thick black frames that looked nice against the worn red cloth cover.

  “There are at least eight of them in the world’s oceans,” he said. “According to this book I’ve been reading, two of them, the Great Eastern Patch and Great Western Patch, are in the Turtle Gyre, and converge at the southern tip of Hawaii. The Great Eastern Patch is the size of Texas. The Great Western is even larger, half the size of the continental USA.”

  “What’s in them?”

  “Plastic mostly. Like your freezer bag. Soda bottles, styrofoam, take-out food containers, disposable razors, industrial waste. Anything we throw away that floats.”

  “That’s horrible. Why are you telling me this?”

  He shook the watch and held it up to his ear. “No reason. Just that they’re there, and anything that doesn’t sink or escape from the gyre gets sucked up into the middle of a garbage patch. That’s what would have happened to your freezer bag if it hadn’t escaped. Sucked up and becalmed, slowly eddying around. The plastic ground into particles for the fish and zooplankton to eat. The diary and letters disintegrating, unread. But instead it got washed up on the beach below Jap Ranch, where you could find it . . .”

  “What are you saying?” Ruth asked.

  “Nothing. Just that it’s amazing, is all.”

  “As in the-universe-provides kind of amazing?”

  “Maybe.” He looked up with an astonished expression on his face. “Hey, look!” he said, holding out the watch. “It’s working!”

  The second hand was making its way around the large luminescent numbers on the face. She took it from him and slipped it on her wrist. It was a man’s watch, but it fit her. “What did you do?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “I guess I wound it.”

  5.

  She listened to the watch ticking softly in the dark, and the sound of Oliver’s mechanical breathing. She reached over to the bedside table and felt for the diary. Running her fingertips across the soft cloth cover, she noted the faint impression of the tarnished letters. They still retained the shape of À la recherche du temps perdu, but they had evolved—no, that word implied a gradual unfolding, and this was sudden, a mutation or a rift, pages ripped from their cover by some Tokyo crafter who’d retooled Proust into something altogether new.

  In her mind’s eye, she could see the purple ink scripting sinuous lines into solid blocks of colored paragraphs. She couldn’t help but notice and admire the uninhibited flow of the girl’s language. Rarely had she succumbed to second thoughts. Rarely did she doubt a word, or pause to consider or replace it with another. There were only a few crossed-out lines and phrases, and this, too, filled Ruth with something like awe. It had been years since she’d approached the page with such certainty.

  I am reaching through time to touch you.

  The diary once again felt warm in her hands, which she knew had less to do with any spooky quality in the book and everything to do with the climate changes in her own body. She was growing accustomed to sudden temperature shifts. The steering wheel of the car that grew sticky and hot in her grip. The smoldering pillow, which she often woke to find on the floor beside the bed where she’d flung it in her sleep, along with the covers, as though to punish them all for making her hot.

  The watch, by contrast, felt cool against her wrist.

  I’m reaching forward through time to touch you . . . you’re reaching back to touch me.

  She held the diary to her nose again and sniffed, identifying the smells one by one: the mustiness of an old book tickling her nostrils, the acrid tang of glue and paper, and then something else that she realized must be Nao, bitter like coffee beans and sweetly fruity like shampoo. She inhaled again, deeply this time, and then put the book—no, not a schoolgirl’s nice pure diary—back on the bedside table, still pondering how best to read this improbable text. Nao claimed to have written it just for her, and while Ruth knew this was absurd, she decided she would go along with the conceit. As the girl’s reader, it was the least she could do.

  The steady ticking of the old watch seemed to grow louder. How do you search for lost time, anyway? As she thought about this question, it occurred to her that perhaps a clue lay in the pacing. Nao had written her diary in real time, living her days, moment by moment. Perhaps if Ruth paced herself by slowing down and not reading faster than the girl had written, she could more closely replicate Nao’s experience. Of course, the entries were undated, so there was no way of really knowing how slow or fast that might have been, but there were clues: the changing hues of ink, as well as shifts in the density or angle of the handwriting, which seemed to indicate breaks in time or mood. If she studied these, she might be able to break up the diary into hypothetical intervals, and even assign numbers to them, and then pace her reading accordingly. If she sensed the girl was on a roll, she could allow herself to read further and more quickly, but if it felt like the pace of the writing was slowing down, then she would slow her reading down, too, or stop altogether. This way she wouldn’t end up with an overly compressed or accelerated sense of the girl’s life and its unfolding, nor would she run the risk of wasting to
o much time. She would be able to balance her reading of the diary with all the work she still needed to do on her own memoir.

  It seemed like a very reasonable plan. Satisfied, Ruth groped for the book on the night table and slipped it under her pillow. The girl was right, she thought as she drifted off to sleep. It was real and totally personal.

  6.

  That night she dreamed about a nun.

  The dream took place on a mountainside, somewhere in Japan, where the shrill cries of insects broke the silence, and the nighttime breezes in the tall cypress trees were fresh and restless.

  Amid the trees, the graceful curve of a tiled temple roof gleamed dully in the moonlight, and even though it was dark, Ruth could see that the building was falling down and close to ruin. The only illumination inside the temple came from a single room adjoining the garden, where the old nun knelt on the floor in front of a low table, leaning in toward a glowing computer screen, which seemed to float in the darkness, casting its silver square of light onto the ancient planes of her face. The rest of her body receded into the darkness of the room, but Ruth could see that her back was curved like a question mark as she bent toward the screen, and that her faded black robes were old and worn. A square of patchwork fabric hung around her neck, like the bib an infant might wear to protect it from spills. Outside in the temple garden, the moon shone through the sliding doors that opened onto the veranda. The curve of the nun’s shaved head gleamed faintly in the moonlight, and when she turned her face, Ruth could see the light from the monitor reflected in the lenses of the glasses she was wearing, which had thick, squarish black frames, not unlike Ruth’s own. The nun’s face looked oddly young in the pixelated glow. She was typing something, carefully, with arthritic forefingers.