The Dead Are More Visible

by Steven Heighton

  “Faster, Sensei! Don’t stop.”

  “I need to stop.”

  “Walk a lap,” she instructed. “After, we can walk back to the flat. You can have a bath and a rest again.”

  “A rest,” I said, grinning as I gasped. “Right.”

  DIALOGUE 9: LOVE & THE ROMANCE

  “I am in love with a young gal. I fell in love with her.”

  “You didn’t. You got a fancy. You imagine that you are in love.”

  “My affection is deep-seated. She has the countenance of an angel.”

  “You are infatuated with her. Your mind is clouded.”

  “What? How dare you!”

  “You fell into the snare of love. Cupid has snared you.”

  “Not at all! She has a fine figure, a lovely face, an alluring smile. She has so many personal charms. She walks like a duchess.”

  “Is that all? Has she good sense, intelligence? Has she good education, good breeding? What of her social position? Has she any big brothers? What kind of man is her father?”

  “I know only that I love her dearly. Do not trifle with my love. My life without her would be a life of misery. And what is life without love?”

  “You are a shapeless romantic. She may reject you.”

  “Yet for her, would I chance all.”

  “Shame on you! Friend you speak non sense.”

  ——

  He had come to behave toward the boss with a befitting respect

  “Do you have another book of matches?”

  “Here, Sensei, you can light it with mine.”

  “You can call me Curtis, Ms. Eguchi. I mean, here we are.”

  “I prefer to say Sensei, even so.”

  “And you still prefer I call you Ms. Eguchi.”

  “Sō desu. There, you see. So easy to light you up.”

  Even after nine months of this, it was hard to say when she was joking. Her manner was deadpan. Her voice was even, low, and hoarse. Yet during the day, if the phone by the bed should ring and she grabbed it (and she always would, signalling me to be silent), her greeting voice was the standard public female voice of Japan: a breathless treble full of obliging little hiccups and bubbles, all service and subordination. Then she would hang up and, with no apparent self-consciousness, reassume the femme fatale baritone.

  “I think maybe I should go back to my place,” I said. “I have to teach at the other school, a sub class, first thing.”

  “Ah, cheating on the side. Is that the phrase?”

  “Close.”

  “You are welcome to stay, Sensei. Stay another hour. It’s early. Here.”

  I laughed as if being tickled. “You again.”

  “How is that?”

  “Deeply unethical. Hang on a sec.”

  “There’s none more in the pocket, I think. Don’t you worry.”

  “Packet. You’re not worried?”

  “Stay, just so. There.”

  “But gaijin all have AIDS—that’s the rumour. And that we’re fertile.”

  “But I am not, Sensei.”

  “You mean, at this time of the …?”

  “In my life. I did want them when I was young. Quite a bit. They never came.”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Eguchi.”

  “Now, I could not have them even if I could. I’m a business. And a divorced one. Nobody marries such a woman. Nobody even takes her for the date.”

  Except, I thought, gaijin. I wondered whom I had replaced and who would eventually replace me at the school.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Eguchi. I think they’re fools.”

  “O-seiji desu yo!”

  “No—I’m really not flattering you.”

  “You’re improving, Curtis. Sensei.”

  “This time I want you to look at me the whole time.”

  I kissed her eyes and tasted kohl.

  To describe one’s inner feeling

  Genki (GENG-KEE): n. or adj.: phonetically eloquent word for vigour, health, high-spirited energy. “How are you today, Curtis Sensei?” “Genki da yo!” I’m well. Excellent. Fit as a butcher’s dog. No English word quite substitutes and I know that for the rest of my life, whenever I feel the way I feel today, genki is how I’ll want to describe it. It’s that kind of day: autumn sky swabbed free of cloud, smog, or the faintest vapour, hardwood leaves in full ignition, the sun bestowing heat in a mood of mellow generosity, unlike summer’s violent excess. As I walk, heels snapping, from station to school through the bamboo grove in this elating air, I recall similar days, years ago in my own abandoned country. Sounds carry in clear air and at dusk on fall Saturdays you would hear the caroming hollers of boys playing road hockey on distant streets in all directions compassing outward, while we—the kids of our street, at the navel of the known world—conducted our own passionate match. It seemed the whole universe was at play.

  Working briskly, I conclude the lesson (Word Order in the English Sentence) after some fifteen minutes and announce that it’s recess, which it will continue to be till the end of class time. Few, if any, of the students can tell time, but even they seem surprised that the lesson is over. Nor will I be giving homework. I will not withhold this day from them. The cold rains of early winter, I’ve heard, will soon arrive.

  I agree to be the spinner in a game of tanuki. Standing in the middle of the yard, eyes shut, I pirouette on my heels while the children run off. On the backs of my eyelids they register as a sonar map of scattering laughs and squeals. My right arm sticks straight out as I spin. When I come to a stop I open my eyes, yell “Freeze!” Whichever child I’m pointing at is out and stays frozen. Eventually only one child—today Rocky—remains.

  I retreat to the fence beside the bamboo grove and lean back and light a cigarette, which I don’t finish. The air is that sweet to inhale. On the east side of the schoolyard, under a rank of mature beeches, Yukon crouches, gathering the gold and yellow leaves layered in a windrow against the fence, layers deepening even now as the wind culls further flurries from the boughs. When I emerge some time later from thoughts of lobbing a football with my father in such weather—striving for and never quite achieving that ideal, high-floating, hosanna spiral—I see she’s deputized her little acolytes George and Dorothea to help. I break up a minor fight (Edmund Oyama vs. the Phantom), reconvene the kids and organize a game of animal tag (all animal names to be yelled in English), and still Yukon persists with her project. From time to time she glances over, pretending not to look. Clumsy, comic espionage. I smoke another cigarette, this time finishing the job.

  People will tell you, “I don’t want a child because it just seems wrong to bring a child into a world like this.” High-minded horseshit, in my view. A cut-rate cliché. When has it not been a troubled world? People have children or don’t have them for their own selfish reasons, and that’s fine and natural. No need to dress up the option as a philanthropic gesture.

  For a long time I used that same excuse myself. At teachers’ college and in the years after, in the States and Mexico and two Asian countries. With several women who were interested in complicating our connections, maybe for worse, maybe better, who could say? It meant the end of those affairs, and now, instead of being generationally webbed into the world—which no longer sounded like a trap—I found myself peripheral, placeless, the owner of an accent nobody could pin down, a citizen of departure lounges and unfurnished rental units.

  As I pivot my toe on another dead butt, Yukon slowly approaches. George and Dorothea trail. Something is up. Normally Yukon will run up to me, abruptly stop, take my hand, speak gravely. Now in her cupped and sunlit hands something is hidden. She holds it near her chest with great care and ceremony, as if it’s a robin’s egg, or a living chick. She extends her hands. They open slowly. I see a yellow rose. She peers up at me with a squint, the sun in her eyes, a shy grin. “Here, Sensei.” I bend closer, reach out: it’s a rose of yellow leaves. She has foliated the leaves in tight, concentric circles, perhaps around a pinecone or a stone or a plum
pit. The full shape and the involutions are convincingly floral. A living flower out of dead leaves. I take it from her gently. A red hair-tie near the bottom seems to hold it together. I grip it there, pinched tightly, to hold it together.

  Phrases for emergency

  “I am looking for my son and daughter. Have you seen them anywhere?”

  “I have not. I have been hiding.”

  “Hiding! Friend, this is no time to hide!”

  “Who would not be afraid at such a time?”

  “Only think of the needs of your neighbours! Many call out for your help!”

  “I will aid you in looking for your children, then. I resolve to help.”

  “I am grateful.”

  “When did you last set eyes upon them?”

  “This morning, when they left for the school.”

  “Where would they have gone at the sound of the sirens?”

  “To the shelter, it goes without saying! But the shelter lies in ruin.”

  “Is there anywhere else they could be?”

  “Perhaps in the forest. Perhaps they have hidden there.”

  “Shall I come to assist in your search?”

  “I should be much obliged. I should not like to search for them alone.”

  “In next to no time we shall find them!”

  “Come, let us proceed now.”

  “We shall. Be of good cheer.”

  The floating world

  I may have been jilted professionally, but not sexually, not yet. On Monday, when I went into the school to empty my small desk—and to inform Eguchi that I would be flying to Canada within the week and would need my final paycheque before then—she suggested, awkwardly but frankly, that I should stay with her at least a couple of times before I left. In spite of the firing, I was too amused, and maybe flattered, to turn her down. Men are easily flattered; I should have seen that she was merely feeling in advance the loneliness of a vacant bed. She would not have admitted that she hated sleeping alone, but I knew it. Always, after the night’s last sex and cigarette, we would turn away from each other and lie back to back, space between us, to fall asleep, but when I woke up in the small hours she would be furled into me, face on my shoulder or pressed into my nape, sleeping hard.

  Actually—be honest—I felt the same way about sleeping alone. Actually, in my sleep, I did the same thing as she did. Pressing myself into her, my heart full.

  On a cold night of rain, the prospect of a good dinner and drinks and then sex and twined sleep—belly pleasures shared with a keen partner—stirs an expectancy under the heart that’s a facsimile of real love. For drifters and outsiders, that may have to do. The night before my flight out, we had an excellent dinner at Brain Noodle, hot sake, appetizers, sashimi and chanko nabe, all on her yen, then I walked her home through the rainy streets, sharing her umbrella, which I held. She slipped me a windowed pay envelope as we walked, hips jostling. “I thought it would be better to give it to you now, rather than afterward … after tonight. In the morning.” Behind her fogged glasses her look was as deadpan as ever, but her tone was distinctly droll. I laughed, a little drunk. I took the envelope and said, “I can’t stay until morning, though. I wish I could. I still have some packing to do and I have to be at Narita at ten.”

  That night the sex sustained itself not just on the knowledge that this wouldn’t be happening again, but also, I felt, on a covert fuel of aggression. She slammed her body against me, worked me mercilessly with her mouth, refused to let either of us rest, all the while locking me into a sexual staring match that was unnerving after almost a year in Japan, where I was no longer used to maintaining eye contact for more than a second, even with her, a lover. Now her gaze was more like an assailant’s. You forced me to fire you, her eyes seemed to say. I didn’t want to. I wanted this to go on. But my school is too important to risk. I found that I was angry too, my bites and sucks and thrusts and clutchings all forceful, rough. A firing is like a jilting; even if you fully understand the reason, in your gut you feel panic and anger.

  For a long while we couldn’t exhaust that anger and desire, but at last, after an orgasm that for me was almost painful, as if pulled into being by the roots, I collapsed and we lay side by side, staring into space, for now too tired even to smoke.

  “I’ll need to go now,” I told her. “Soon, anyway.”

  Her voice was amused: “Go means ‘to come,’ you know. In Japanese we say ‘to go.’ Iku.”

  “I think you told me that once. They don’t mention that in my primer.”

  “I suppose you will forget your Japanese.”

  “I don’t think so—not anytime soon,” I said honestly. “You’ll remember to say goodbye to my students for me? Especially the Saturday kids?”

  “Of course. I’ll say that you are called off by a family emergency.”

  “Which is hilarious. I have no family.”

  “You will have.”

  I propped myself on an elbow and looked at her—she did not look back—and it struck me that she was right. Somehow she knew it and, just then, so did I. The facsimile of love, however convincing, would no longer do.

  I lay back down, emptied, my whole body in a flaccid state.

  “I won’t forget all my Japanese,” I said, staring down at my pale paunch, still growing despite all the running and sex. “I’ll always remember how to say ‘corpse.’ ”

  “Ah, yes, your lesson book. You asked. I intended to tell you. I know the one.”

  I turned to look at her again. In the near dark I could see how the makeup had smudged around her eyes.

  “There was a scandal about that book. I was at a university then and people spoke of it. One of the professors was an officer at the war, and afterward he was imprisoned by the Americans, I can’t recall the reason. But the other professor, Okubo I think he was named—”

  “That’s it—Dr. J. Okubo.”

  “He was against the war. He was a pacifier, in the university. So, he was imprisoned as well, but throughout the wartime, by the imperial government. And then in the big firebombing, his wife and children were killed. I can’t recall how many children now. Maybe not his wife. But the children, yes—maybe three. It changed him. And the later bombings too …”

  “Hiroshima,” I said, “and …”

  “Sō desu. He began to write books, history books, novels and the poetry, even this language book you use. He said Japan was not the aggressive one, but a victim. At the American occupation, they called him the whitewasher and forced him to depart the universe.”

  “University.”

  “Of course. But he kept on writing.”

  “I suppose Japan was a victim,” I said. “You can be a bully and a victim.”

  “Aliens would weaken the purity of the Japanese race and culture, he believed. He believed the aliens should not remain here.” She paused for a moment. “I think that both of those professors have now passed along. I have not heard of that book for a long time. Difficult to find, I think.”

  “I’ve gotten to like it. Most of the time, it seems completely normal.”

  “That’s Japan,” she said.

  “That’s any place,” I said.

  We fell asleep and I only woke at dawn, with Ikuko (her first name, which, out of respect for her wishes, I never used aloud) wrapped around me. She was warm and smelled wonderful. It took some time to disentangle myself so I could get up and clumsily dress and rush out to hail a cab to the station. She didn’t see me to the door. Nor did she say goodbye. As the gloom of a wet December dawn crept through the apartment, she pretended to sleep, her face turned into the pillow and hidden by her hair and her hand.

  Lesson 12

  As the sun rose on that summer morn, the city lay in ruin, with the dead all about. The survivors felt a loneliness so great, words may not describe it.

  Omoikiru

  On the long flight east over the Pacific, passing under the sun and abridging the day, then the night, I skimmed through the final les
sons of Japanese for the Beginners and Those Who Would Be More. I was exhausted, but sleep was nowhere. At one point I took Yukon’s rose of yellow leaves from my carry-on bag. I was trying to keep it fresh in a baggie; it was already starting to wilt. On airline postcards showing a tiny 747 leading a vee of Canada geese across a clear autumn sky, I wrote a note to Eguchi and, care of the school, to Yukon.

  The professors’ final lesson was equipped with the usual vocabulary lists, lexically obsolete dialogues, and ordinary sentences alternating now and then with odd ones. The living mourners remained, yet the house seemed empty with the corpse gone off. Now and then I was distracted by the in-flight film—Working Girl—but as I reached the book’s last pages, my attention quickened at the sidebar definition of a verb I’d encountered on several occasions, never grasping the meaning. I’d meant to ask Eguchi about it. Omoikiru, the sidebar explained, is a compound verb formed out of the infinitives omou, “to think,” and kiru, “to cut.” Therefore, “Omoikiru” has the meaning: “to cut off all thought of something”; “to surrender the hope”; “to resign oneself to the inevitable.” I put my head back, closed my eyes and wondered—what else?—how I and billions of other non-Japanese speakers had ever gotten by without the word. For example: To see again those I have cared for is impossible; there is no help for it but to “cut off all thoughts.”

  [ A RIGHT LIKE YOURS ]

  He is short but he has shoulders and I think he wears the flattest shoes going, cheap sneakers of some kind, and that is attractive, that he doesn’t try to elevate himself in any way. His look is shy though, maybe cold, with green eyes that don’t meet your eyes but look at your mouth or chin in the same way as, when you’re in the ring, the other girl will stare a little below your eyes. So maybe he does it to practise. Always be in the ring, Webb Renton tells us.