by Ruth Ozeki
I hope you are doing well, too. I have been following your work on your website, and it seems you have no need of my services, but if you ever do in the future, I hope you know you can ask me.
Your friend,
“Harry”
Nao
1.
Wow. I’m really going to miss you. It’s crazy, I know, since you don’t even exist yet. And unless you find this book and start to read, maybe you never will. You’re just my imaginary friend, at least for now.
Still, I feel like I would recognize you if I passed you on the street or caught your eye at Starbucks. How weird is that? Even if I wimp out and decide not to leave this book someplace for you to find, even if I decide maybe it’s better if you only exist in my mind, still I feel I would recognize you in a heartbeat. You may be only make-believe, but you are my true friend and you’ve helped me. I really mean that.
So anyway, as you can see, I’m running out of pages here, so we’d better wrap things up. I just wanted to tell you what happened after old Jiko’s funeral, and let you know what’s going on with me and my family so you don’t have to worry too much. On the way home from Sendai, my dad actually took me to Disneyland, even though it’s kind of a weird thing to do after a funeral, and I’m already too old to get superexcited about shaking hands with Mickey-chan. But it was really fun anyway, especially watching my dad in Futureland, riding through the ice cavern asteroid fields at the speed of light in pursuit of the Death Star.
And speaking of stars, one night about a month after we got home, my dad and I went out for a walk to that little park by the Sumida River, and we sat on the swings and watched the stars above and the dark water of the river flowing by. Feral cats were slinking through the shadows, eating garbage. In the darkness, swinging back and forth, it was easy to talk about difficult things. We talked about the stars and the size of the cosmos, and about war. We’d just finished reading Haruki #1’s secret French diary earlier that day. My dad got this graduate student who was studying French poetry at the university to translate it for us, and we were reading it together, and for the first time I was learning how evil people can be. I thought I understood everything about cruelty, but it turns out, I didn’t understand anything at all. My old Jiko understood. That’s why she always carried Haruki’s juzu beads with her, so she could pray to help people be less cruel to each other. After the funeral, Muji gave the juzu to me, and now I carry them all the time, too. They’re pretty intense beads, dark and smooth and heavy with all the prayers from H #1’s and Jiko’s fingers that have gone into them. I don’t know any prayers, so I just make them go round and round and say blessings in my head for all the things and people I love, and when I run out of things I love, I move on to the things I don’t hate too much, and sometimes I even discover that I can love the things I think I hate.
At the end of the secret French diary, on the night before he died, my great-uncle actually wrote about his suicide mission, and me and my dad were surprised to learn that he had made up his mind not to crash his plane into the enemy aircraft carrier after all. He couldn’t get out of going on the mission, so he decided to fly his plane into the waves instead. Of course, this was totally top secret. He knew his commanding officers would execute him for treason if they found out his plan to purposefully miss his target, and he wanted to make sure that his mother and his sisters got the compensation money that the government was supposed to give to the families of dead pilots who gave their lives for their country. It made a lot of sense to me. He was like the Crow Captain. He didn’t want to support a war that he hated, and he didn’t want to cause any more suffering, even for his so-called enemy. When I read this, I felt a little bit ashamed, actually. I remembered how I used to ambush Daisuke-kun and beat him up, and also how I went forth as a living ghost to stab my enemy Reiko in the eye. I started to feel so bad about this, I decided I would apologize if I ever saw them again, which I probably won’t. Daisuke and his mom moved away, and since I stopped going to school, I don’t see Reiko anymore.
Anyway, when we read about Haruki’s decision to fly into the waves, my dad totally lost it. We were at home, sitting at the kotatsu, and he was reading the translation out loud to me, and when he got to that part, he put down the page and made this loud snorting noise that sounded a bit like a gigantic sneeze, only it wasn’t. It was an explosion of sadness. He stood up and went into the bathroom and shut the door, but I could still hear him crying in a deep, gulping way. This is weird, right? To hear your dad totally fall apart? I didn’t know what to say, and of course it freaked me out because when your dad’s already tried to commit suicide a bunch of times, this kind of thing makes you nervous. But eventually he came out again and started to cook dinner like everything was back to normal, so I dropped it, but later that night, when we were in the park and swinging in the darkness, I asked him why he’d gotten so bent out of shape, and he told me.
It was all connected to his job in Sunnyvale and how come he got downsized. I was still pretty young when that whole thing happened, so I didn’t understand it at the time. All I knew was that he was designing interfaces for a computer gaming company, which seemed pretty cool to me.
“My interfaces were really good,” he said. “They were so much fun. Everybody enjoyed playing them.” He had this wistful, faraway look in his eyes. “We were prototyping first-person operator perspectives. They called me the Pioneer of POV. Then my company signed an agreement with a U.S. military contractor. They were going to apply my interfaces in designing weapons controllers for soldiers to use.
“Wow,” I said. That sounded pretty cool, too. I didn’t say so, but he heard it in my voice. He dug the plastic toe of his slipper in the bare patch of sand below the swing and brought it to a stop.
“It was wrong,” he said, leaning his body forward into the chains that held up the swing. “Those boys were going to kill people. Killing people should not be so much fun.”
I stopped swinging, too, and hung there next to him. My heart was pounding, pushing the blood into my cheeks. I felt so stupid and young, and at the same time something was cracking open inside me, or maybe it was the world was cracking open to show me something really important underneath. I knew I was only seeing a tiny bit of it, but it was bigger than anything I’d ever seen or felt before.
He got off the swing and started walking. I followed him. He told me how he fell into a deep depression and stopped sleeping at night. He tried to find someone to talk to about his feelings. He even went to see a California psychologist. He kept bringing up the issue at work, too, trying to convince the members of his development team to let him program some kind of reality check into the interface design, so that the poor pilots would wake up and understand the madness of what they were doing, but the military contractor didn’t like this idea, and his company and team members got tired of hearing about his feelings, so they fired him.
He sat down on a cement panda and held his face in his hands. “I was so ashamed,” he said.
I couldn’t believe it. I stared at him, sitting all hunched over on the panda’s head, and I felt like my heart would burst with pride. My dad was a total superhero, and I was the one who should be so ashamed, because the whole time he was being persecuted for his beliefs, I was just pissed off at him for getting himself fired and losing our money and ruining my life. Shows you how much I knew.
He was still talking. “. . . so that’s why I cried today, when I read Uncle Haruki’s diary. I understood how he felt, you see? Haruki Number One made his decision. He steered his airplane into a wave. He knew it was a stupid, useless gesture, but what else could he do? I made a similar decision, also stupid and useless, only my plane was carrying our whole family. I felt so sorry for you, and for Mom, and for everyone, on account of my actions.
“When 9/11 happened, it was clear that war was inevitable. They’d been preparing for it all along. A generation of young American pilots would use my interfaces to hunt and kill Afghani people and Iraqi p
eople, too. This would be my fault. I felt so sorry for those Arab people and their families, and I knew the American pilots would suffer, too. Maybe not right away. At the time those young boys were carrying out their missions, it would all feel unreal and exciting and fun, because that’s how we designed it to feel. But later on, maybe days or months or even years later, the reality of what they’d done would start to rise up to the surface, and they would be twisted up with pain and anger and take it out on themselves and their families. That also would be my fault.”
Restless, he stood up from the panda and shuffled over to the chain-link fence that surrounded the playground. I followed. A little gate led out onto the high angled concrete embankment of the river. We sat side by side on the slope and watched the swift dark current of the river sweep by. I knew he’d thought about drowning himself in these waters. I knew he was thinking about the times he’d come here to die. He reached over and took my hand.
“I let you down,” he said. “I was twisted up with my guilt. I wasn’t there for you when you really needed me.”
I held my breath. He was going to bring up the Panties Incident. He was going to confess that he’d been bidding on them. I tried to pull my hand away. I really didn’t want to talk about it, but how could I escape? After all, I’d asked him a tough question and he’d given me a true and honest answer. I owed him. So when he asked me how my panties had gotten up on that burusera hentai website and what had happened in the video, I took a deep breath and told him everything. I know he and Mom had talked about my ijime, but I don’t think he ever realized how bad it was. I could see it made him sad, but it also really pissed him off.
“Thank you for telling me,” he said when I’d finished. There was a hard edge in his voice but I knew he wasn’t mad at me. It sounded more like he’d made up his mind about something. He stood up and pulled me to my feet, and we walked home in silence, stopping once at a vending machine so he could buy me a Pulpy. He seemed really preoccupied. I don’t know what he’s planning to do, but ever since that night, he’s been back working at the computer like a fiend with a raison d’être.
He’s stopped reading The Great Minds of Western Philosophy completely, and spends all his time programming, which really is his superpower. I mean, there are lots of superheroes with different superpowers, and some of them are big and flashy, like superstrength, and superspeed, and molecular restructuring, and force fields. But these abilities are really not so different from the superpower stuff that old Jiko could do, like moving superslow, or reading people’s minds, or appearing in doorways, or making people feel okay about themselves just by being there.
Anyway, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, except that I thought you would like to know. My dad seems to have found his superpower, and maybe I’ve started to find mine, too, which is writing to you. And before I run out of space, I just want you to know that me and my dad are really okay, now that I finally know what kind of man he is, and even though we haven’t actually discussed the topic of suicide, I’m pretty sure that neither of us is thinking along those lines anymore. I know I’m not, anyway. As soon as I’ve finished these last pages, I’m going to buy a new blank book and keep my promise, which is to write the whole entire story of old Jiko’s life. It’s true she’s already dead, but her stories are still alive in my head at least for now, so I have to hurry up and write them down before I forget. I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.
And maybe you’ll be glad to know that for the first time in my life, I really don’t want to die. When I wake up in the middle of the night, I check to see if H #1’s sky soldier watch is still ticking, and then I check to see if I’m still alive, and believe it or not, sometimes I actually feel scared, like Oh my god, what if I’m dead! That would be terrible! I haven’t written the story of old Jiko’s life yet! And sometimes when I’m walking down the street, I find myself thinking, Oh, please don’t let that stupid Lexus careen out of control and run me over, or that crazy hentai burusera salaryman with the comb-over stab me with a penknife, or that guy all dressed in white who looks like a cult terrorist drop a bag of sarin gas in my subway car . . . at least not until I’ve finished writing old Jiko’s life! I can’t die until I do that. I have to live! I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!
That’s what I find myself thinking. At least until I finish writing her story, I absolutely don’t want to die. The thought of letting Jiko down brings tears to my eyes, and I guess you could say this is a big improvement in my state of mind, to actually be worried about dying like a normal person.
And here’s one last thing. I just learned something very encouraging. I learned that old Marcel Proust didn’t write just one book called À la recherche du temps perdu. He actually wrote seven! Amazing, right? À la recherche du temps perdu was an incredibly long story with thousands of pages, so he had to publish it in a bunch of different volumes. And the very last volume is called Le temps retrouvé, which means Time Regained. How perfect is that? So now I just have to keep my eyes open and try to find an old copy of Le temps retrouvé. I’ll take it to the crafty shop in Harajuku and see if I can get the lady who works there to send it to the hacker to do another book-mod for me, and then I’ll write old Jiko’s story in that.
Hm. You know what? On second thought, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll actually try to learn some French so I can read Marcel’s book, instead of throwing out all the pages. That would be cool. And as for my old Jiko’s life story, I think I’ll just buy some plain old paper and get started.
Ruth
1.
She closed the book.
She’d reached the end. The final page. She was done.
Now what?
She looked at the clock. The red numbers glowed, 3:47 a.m. Almost four o’clock. The woodstove in the living room had long gone out and it was cold in the house. If she were at Jiko’s temple, she would be getting up to go sit zazen in an hour. She shivered. Outside the bedroom window, the cold, black night pressed against the pane, and only the single bright spot of her headlamp, reflected in the glass, kept it at bay. She could hear the wind in the bamboo, and the sound of a tall tree creaking. Next to her, Oliver slept soundly, his lips making a little pu-pu-pu sound. The injured cat, in the box on the floor next to his side of the bed, was silent. He must be sleeping, too.
She’d woken inexplicably an hour earlier, and after lying awake for a while, unable to get back to sleep, she’d picked up the diary. Before she knew it, she was reading the penultimate page. Only one more to go. She’d hesitated then, wondering if the pages would suddenly multiply again, but they didn’t. She turned the final page. The words continued, she read them to the end, and then at the bottom of the page, they stopped. There was no doubt about it. There were no more words and no more pages.
Books end. Why was she surprised?
She thought back to the mystery of the missing words. Had she somehow found them and brought them back? It wasn’t as crazy as it sounded. Sometimes, when she was writing, she would lose herself in a story so completely that the next morning, when she opened her document file and looked at the manuscript, she would find herself staring at paragraphs that she could swear she’d never seen before, and sometimes even entire scenes that she had no recollection of writing. How did they get there? It was an uncanny feeling, usually followed by a quick upsurge of panic—someone has broken into my story!—which often turned into excitement as she read on, leaning into the monitor as though it were a source of light or heat, trying to follow the strange new sentences as they unscrolled in front of her. Vaguely, vaguely she’d begin to recollect, the way you might recall a mothlike image from a dream, her mind groping peripherally, askance, shy to face the words full on, for fear they would flutter off into the netherworld, just beyond the pixels, and vanish there. Out of sight, out of mind.
But what had happened this time was dif
ferent. She hadn’t been writing; she’d been reading. Surely a reader wasn’t capable of this bizarre kind of conjuration, pulling words from the void? But apparently she had done just that, or else she was crazy. Or else . . .
Together we’ll make magic . . .
Who had conjured whom?
She seemed to remember Oliver suggesting this once before, but she hadn’t really appreciated the importance of his question. Was she the dream? Was Nao the one writing her into being? Agency is a tricky business, Muriel had said. Ruth had always felt substantial enough, but maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she was as absent as her name indicated, a homeless and ghostly composite of words that the girl had assembled. She’d never had any cause to doubt her senses. Her empirical experience of herself, as a fully embodied being who persisted in a real world of her remembering, seemed trustworthy enough, but now in the dark, at four in the morning, she wasn’t so sure. She shuddered, and the sudden movement made her aware of all the places where her body touched the bed. Better. She made an effort to feel the warmth and weight of the comforter against her skin, the cold air on her face and arms, the beating of her heart.
The diary, too, still felt warm in her hands. She stared down at the red cloth cover. Was it her imagination or did the fabric look more worn than it had when she first found it? She turned it over. There was a dark spot on the back where the cat had drooled on it. She held it up to her nose. The bitter scent of coffee beans and sweetly fruity shampoo had faded. Now it smelled of wood smoke and cedar, and faintly, too, of mildew and dust. She traced the gilt lettering on the spine, and then opened it up, quickly, to the last page, as though to catch it off guard.
