Floating City

by Kerri Sakamoto

  “Canada,” Mr. Fujimoto guffawed. Mrs. Fujimoto returned to fill their teacups.

  “The followers are waiting for another miracle.”

  Just as Frankie’s mother had said.

  The followers claimed that the man revived by the Priest years before survived the Hiroshima bombing and fled to join his mother in Nagasaki, only to die in that blast three days later.

  “Foolishness!” Mrs. Fujimoto muttered from behind them. “Koga is drinking too much.”

  “Does he say if the Priest came back to Japan?” Frankie asked.

  Mr. Fujimoto scanned the letter and shook his head.

  * * *

  —

  Mr. Fujimoto did find Frankie a job. Then another and another. First, he washed dishes in the neighbourhood diner. He stacked the dishes too high and toppled them. Then he hauled buckets of pitch deep down to the basement incinerator of an eyeglass factory, but the fumes made him sick. Then he laid bricks for a building going up in the city. He told Mr. Fujimoto and the man who ran the construction crew that he knew how. How difficult could it be? He watched the bricks get buttered on their ends and tapped down onto the bed of mortar with the tip of the trowel’s handle. Like so. The bricklayer was Italian, small and broad; he had been laying bricks in Toronto for twenty years and seemed to speak only these two English words: Like so. Frankie nodded, he nodded, then left.

  Up went Frankie’s wall, brick by buttered brick. By day’s end, his back ached from bending down and he blinked away the mortar dust in his eyes. The bricklayer returned to inspect the work, scraping his trowel across the wall. Frowning, he raised his small, broad foot and gave a kick. Down it went, like so, lower than Mr. Fung’s wall of coins before the fire sank the floating hotel.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Mr. Fujimoto sat down in the kitchen beside Frankie and declared, “Today it is.”

  Today he would give notice to his employer of eight years, Mr. Uri Slonemsky. He would recommend Frankie to be the new gardener at the Slonemskys’ Rosedale home.

  He knew Mr. Slonemsky’s dismay would be mild: lately he’d been unhappy with the way Mr. Fujimoto was cultivating his irises. Instead of sleek and slender, the blossoms burst forth thick and bulging but quickly withered. As the years went on, Mr. Fujimoto grew less inclined to restrain whatever seedlings sprang up from the earth. No bonsai for him. Mr. Slonemsky, however, was an architect: nip the buds, trim the roots and uproot what didn’t conform. Keep life in check.

  To help the ragtag groups of men arriving from the internment camps, Mr. Fujimoto had consistently turned to the Jews. No one else would hire the Japanese. Only the Jews extended a helping hand, having received so few themselves. Often Mr. Fujimoto had turned to a Mr. Gross, whose tire company now employed twenty Japanese, or to a Dr. Geist, who had just hired Mr. Fujimoto’s youngest son (and Frankie, for a day). The nervous boy barely needed to speak at work, placing magnifying stickers onto bifocals with his dexterous fingers.

  At his firm, Mr. Slonemsky now employed two Japanese apprentice draughtsmen, and at home a part-time housekeeper, in addition to offering room, board and pay to one gardener for a lifetime if so desired, as long as the dry garden remained dry and his irises flourished.

  On the evening before Frankie was to begin his new job, his last under Mr. Fujimoto’s roof, the two walked among the chrysanthemums. Atop their fibrous torsos, the petals were plump, and the filaments within seemed to pulse and hum as Frankie made his way below. Even the shortest flower in the forest stood just over the men’s heads. He brushed aside a petal that drifted down to tickle his face, then another and another. One gigantic blossom quivered in the windless air and bent its head to Mr. Fujimoto’s ear, just as a streetcar rumbled two streets away. Mr. Fujimoto quickly ushered Frankie out of the forest, as if an alarm had sounded.

  Inside the house, he patted Frankie’s shoulder. “Take good care of Mr. Slonemsky’s garden,” he said, “and you’ll be set.” His gaze wandered out the hall window. He hastily disappeared into the bedroom where six Fujimotos, including his wife, were already slumbering.

  Frankie packed his few belongings back into his small suitcase. For life. Mr. Fujimoto meant Frankie would be set for life. On the floor below, all was quiet. But Frankie was too listless to sleep.

  He took off his clothes and stood before the filmy mirror that hung on the closet door. A dark face stared back at him. He wanted to see his mother there but saw only himself and the Priest—at least what he recalled of the Priest in his mother’s photograph. He’d always been darker than his mother or sisters; than Yas, even when he’d been out on the logs under the sun. Swarthy. This face was too big to go with his small, sinewy body. Frankie’s penis was crooked, hung more to the left, his one shoulder fell lower than the other. Then he turned around and twisted to see himself. Was the Mongolian spot growing again, sprawling wider across his backside?

  Since Mr. Koga’s latest letter, the Priest had lurked in Frankie’s mind. Wherever he might be. Frankie was waiting for him to show himself, just as his followers were.

  He slipped into bed with a letter from Reiko. She chatted on about who else had departed the camp and who had stayed. Not much else.

  How was the baby? Did she feel it inside her? he wondered. Was there pain? Itching? Was it heavy? How could one body stretch to hold another? The truth was, he was asking himself why it had to sprout so soon.

  He wrote back that he was taking on a new job. A temporary job until he could find the right one. Regardless, he could save toward a down payment on a house and, soon enough, would send for the whole family.

  Frankie had never met a Jew before. Mr. Fujimoto called them Ku-ichi, for the numbers nine—ku—and one—ichi—equalling ten, or ju.

  Everyone in this big city seemed to know more than Frankie did. Even those he first sized up to be less than him. At the diner, the other busboys didn’t speak proper English, yet they knew how to scrape and stack in one quick movement. The bricklayer knew how to butter and grout. In the butcher shop, there was a chart to show what cuts came from where on the cow. He saw the ads in magazines: Here’s How: Helps You Get Ahead by Showing You How. What Every Auto Mechanic Wants to Know. How to Become a Live-Wire Builder. You had to have the know-how to get a job and make money. You had to have the know-how to earn respect, to be a man.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Iris Isle

  In Rosedale, Frankie passed houses grander than any up the hill in Port Alberni or any he could imagine. They were mansions, really, sitting squarely and proudly on their sprawling trimmed lots, some behind iron gates. The Slonemsky house was different; it was from another time and place. From the future. He almost walked past it, set back as it was among tall cedars and birch trees. Frankie could think of no name for its shape. Its gold brick facade was rounded like ocean swells with double doors set deep in the centre. The roof slanted up towards the rear. Frankie stepped around the side of the house to glimpse the back, which rose up a storey and down a storey into a steep ravine.

  A housekeeper let him in the front door. She was Japanese, he assumed, but would not look Frankie in the eye and said barely a word. She motioned for him to wait in the living room, which seemed also to be the dining room. The entire back wall of the house was glass framed within enormous wood beams. A wave of blue sky and greenery crested over him.

  He sat down but then got up to walk around, taking the measure of the large, oddly shaped space. A curving ramp rose up to one level and wound down to another. He felt exposed and confined at the same time; with no corners he had no place to hide. Frankie went to the window and gazed down through the trees and up at the distant blocks of the city visible just above their leaves. He became aware of someone behind him: a fresh scent, faint humming. He felt grimy. Should he turn, offer his hand, say something?

  “Come this way,” the man said, opening a glass door onto a stone terrace. Frankie followed him out, across the terrace and down a sloping path. On
one side was the dry garden Mr. Fujimoto had mentioned. On the other, a spacious lawn fringed by maple trees and a towering spruce. Then down more steps to a pond. A mass of bladed leaves budding with purple floated at the centre of it. Easily a hundred such blooms. Irises. Each regal and dignified as a queen. The same flowers his mother had planted in Port Alberni instead of roses, when they still lived on land.

  Frankie felt the breath leave him: here was his dream, dreamed and brought to life. A floating garden.

  Only now did Frankie let himself scrutinize the man. A trim figure in creaseless clothing—white shirt and grey pants; eyes carved far back beneath the overhanging cliff of his brow; thick coils of greying dark hair springing upward but precisely trimmed. Sandalled feet. He had to be a little younger than Taiji, though it was hard to tell. Mr. Slonemsky.

  The man extended a long hand, smooth, unlike Taiji’s weathered palms and scarred fingers. A hand that no doubt had only lifted a pen or pencil in its lifetime.

  “Welcome, Frank. Uri Slonemsky.”

  Frankie took the hand, strong despite its slenderness. Of course his dream belonged to someone else—a man rich enough and smart enough to make it come true.

  Not long ago, Frankie was patting his own back for coming out on top of old men with fewer chances than him. The reflection of the iris isle wavered in the pond. Here was his failure held up to show him he was worthy only of tending someone else’s success.

  “This was made for my wife.” Mr. Slonemsky glanced back up to a second-floor window where a blind seemed to flicker. “She loved the irises in Kyoto.”

  To which Frankie could only nod. He knew so little of Japan.

  “The whole house was for her. The rock garden was for me.”

  Frankie’s eye wandered back up to the house.

  “It’s a kidney,” Mr. Slonemsky said. “The house is shaped like a kidney.”

  Frankie had eaten kidney beans in the livestock barns on the PNE grounds in Vancouver. How could he forget the mealy tastelessness? A bean, an organ. Soon he’d be living and working in one.

  Mr. Slonemsky, this man speaking with Frankie, was a Jew, the first Frankie had ever met. Ku-ichi. Germans had rid the world of millions of them; Americans had done away with hundreds of thousands of Japs. Yet Mr. Slonemsky owned all this, could build and plant and do as he pleased.

  Jews didn’t usually live in Rosedale, Mr. Fujimoto had told him. No Japs either, of course, unless they slept in the basement, attic, or if they were lucky the coach house, emerging to sweep and till by day. There’d be no bartering of fresh-brewed sake in this neighbourhood.

  Back in the living room, Frankie began to notice the things inside it: miniature buildings with miniature people planted within. Might he one day be one of those busy people on his way in or out? Some buildings looked familiar, others he’d never seen the like of: a rectangle with clear glass on all sides. A tall, thin structure with rippling walls and tiny box windows. Two towers of pleated gold glass joined at the bottom. Then a kind of dome, a network of thin sticks with green nodes, like a space-age vessel just landed. He didn’t dare touch, but he was tempted.

  “Toothpicks and dried peas,” Mr. Slonemsky said.

  * * *

  —

  The morning after he moved in, Frankie ventured into the living room where Mr. Slonemsky was looking up to the second-floor balcony and the closed bedroom door, then at the watch on his wrist. “My Hannah, she won’t come out today,” he sighed to Noriko, the housekeeper. Then he slipped out the front door.

  He did the same the next morning and the next and the next. Frankie had yet to meet Mrs. Slonemsky.

  Frankie slept in a spacious room below, half sunken into the ground. Through the half window, he glimpsed the slender feet of his new boss—sometimes in fine shoes with leather soles as thin as paper—step past to the back garden on his return from work at dusk. Those feet would pause, sometimes rock from ball of foot to heel as their owner gazed down the slope, Frankie assumed, at the irises.

  Mr. Fujimoto had left instructions for Frankie on the desk in his quarters. Frankie was to row out to trim the iris heads the instant they began to shrivel. Mrs. Slonemsky could not bear to watch them die. He was to tend the shrub garden, then the pond, and feed the carp. He was to keep the dry garden dry and free of any debris, to rake fresh circles in the gravel surrounding the rocks every morning. The large grey rocks sat like castaways within the waves.

  He was not to alter anything without permission. The irises were in full bloom, lush and muscular, delicate and busy, sheathed in long, slender leaves. If only his mother could see this! But May was almost done. In the coming weeks, he would dread the first creep of brown into their dangling purple, golden-furred petals that might upset the unseen Mrs. Slonemsky. But for now, the tick-tock of time and season slowed just looking upon the flowers. Frankie imagined her gaze on him from her shuttered window, as he carried out his duties. Mr. Slonemsky assured him that the irises brought his wife pleasure. If only Frankie could prolong their blooms and coax her from behind her shutters.

  In the newspaper, Frankie spotted an ad for a revolutionary new fertilizer: Miracle-Gro. He found the bright green box on a hardware store shelf. Making miracles grow more beautiful each day, it said.

  Frankie’s job was not undemanding. No sooner had he finished raking the dry garden than more twigs and leaves fell; a strong gust of wind could easily scatter the fine gravel across drawn lines. Every other morning, he rowed a small boat fifty feet to the isle and tended the irises without stepping ashore for fear of trampling the dense grove. He ladled water from the pond and reached in deep to nip weeds and debris.

  In the evening, Frankie watched from his basement window, imagining Mrs. Slonemsky twinned with him two storeys above at her sill. Under a spotless full moon came a soft splash, then a sudden rustling on the isle. Blossoms shuddered, stalks snapped. Frankie rushed out with his flashlight. He’d been chasing away raccoons, foxes, stray dogs or cats since he’d started working here.

  He grabbed the oar from the boat at water’s edge and waited. A shadow slid across the water. Frankie waved the flashlight. Beside him, neatly laid out, ready to be stepped into, lay a shirt, suit and tie. A splash snapped his beam back to the pond. A head surfaced, silvery sleek as an otter in front of him. Frankie stepped back, not sure what he was seeing.

  “Man overboard!” a voice called out. A white-haired man, stout, naked and pale rose from the pond, wading toward the bank. “Such a glorious night!”

  Above them, a window scraped open. “Bucky!” called Mr. Slonemsky. “Good to see you!”

  “And you, captain!” Blue eyes flashed in Frankie’s light: round and magnified amid the midnight blue sky, water dotting the glasses the swimmer had just then put on.

  Abruptly the light inside the window was extinguished. Frankie apologized, haltingly.

  “No need,” the man said. He smiled to reveal a chipped front tooth. “I was taking a midnight swim. I was homesick for my own isle.” He paused. “I feel quite wonderful now.

  “Would you?” The man grasped Frankie’s arm and hoisted himself up onto the bank.

  Above them, the moon hung full to bursting.

  “There’s the North Star.” With his head tilted skyward, the man squared his feet wide apart and held his arms out from his bare sides. He gestured for Frankie to do the same. He closed his eyes. He seemed to lean ever so slightly to one side like a banking plane. “You’ll feel it in a few moments, in your left foot, a slight pressure.”

  Frankie felt the cold sweep under his arms as he lifted them. He closed his eyes, and for an instant he imagined his left foot press down as the right side lifted ever so slightly. Did he feel it? He wasn’t sure.

  “The earth is moving with us aboard.”

  Frankie opened his eyes. The man was walking away in his shirttails carrying the rest of his clothes and shoes; he waved without turning back. “Goodnight!” He was heading toward the old coach house at the end of
the property. Frankie had thought it abandoned.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, Frankie found the visitor sitting beside the dry garden in his rumpled suit and tie. “Pea gravel washes back if it rains,” he said, turning a bit of stone between his fingers. “Grit has square bits of granite. The patterns stays longer.”

  Frankie nodded.

  “Bigger dowels, farther apart should do the job.” Through thick glasses strapped all the way around his head, he studied Frankie’s rake, then studied Frankie himself. “That way you could accomplish more with less effort.” He held out his hand. “Call me Bucky.”

  After mowing the lawn in the afternoon, Frankie came upon Bucky with lengths of wooden rods strewn in the grass around him. He asked Frankie for a handsaw, a hammer and nails and a drill, along with some nuts and bolts.

  Hours later, Frankie found Bucky balancing on a strange structure, a network of the rods, coming together in triangles on all sides, a latticed dome, three feet high. He held out a hand.

  “Come aboard, my dear boy. It will hold.”

  It did hold: nothing but triangles of narrow wooden rods supporting three hundred pounds or more between the two of them.

  “But how?”

  Bucky’s eyes grew larger behind his glasses. “Compression and tension hold it all together. The bending moments are negligible in such a structure,” he said. He held Frankie’s arms and began to bounce on the balls of his feet. The two bobbed up and down together.

  “A spider web can float in a hurricane because of its lightness and strength.”

  Frankie lost his footing and tumbled off.

  * * *

  —

  In the evening, Frankie found the two men lying on the grass amid a scatter of empty wine bottles, half-eaten bread and cheese. Side by side they gazed upward. Bucky raised a twig to the sky and the stars. He sat up and whittled some notches into it. “This is how the first navigators found their way home.”