“In the U.S., he cut the first notch into his cane—Issei. It was not an old cane with seals and stamps from climbing Mount Fuji and from his other pilgrimages. No more Japanese stuff. We start numbering here. From One. Our parents are Two. Nisei. I’m Sansei. There are already a few Yonsei. American generations. What for we’re keeping track? At Gosei, will something ultimate happen? Four to get ready, and five to go.
“In 1941, they had a fox hunt. Executive Order 9066 came down. Barbwire hatchmarked the shadows of foxes running through tule fog. A Buddhist church that got an okay from the government as not pro-Japan hid him. For disguise, they shaved his head and hung a chain of beads around his neck.
“The fox is without a home; I’m without a home. My mama-san took me up to my room and shut the door—I thought she was going to tell me about sex. She told me that I had been raised by whites. She showed me photographs. She wasn’t lying. She had newspaper clippings about a mass family murder. Done with a plantation machete. Come over here. Look at the house through these long willow leaves. I escaped alive. I saw the moon shine red through hanging leaves. There was blood on the full moon.”
What is he telling me? Is this a confession of murder? Or has he spilled a plan for future doing? His family is dead for real or in his heart? Had he, as a scared child, run out into the willows to get away from the machete killer? Or did he mean, with a machete in his hand, he crept up to the house? To cut down his white foster mother, or his mama-san. The killer son. A murderer’s confession would sound like this, evading or trying to transcend the worst, that is the actual macheteing. Wittman wanted to say, “What? Will you speak up please?” But if you ask for clarification, you’ll interrupt the murderer into silence. You can’t say, “What?! You did what?! Murder?!” Yes, a confession to murder would be part of a civilized conversation. Wow, a chronic mass murderer of not just one but maybe two families, a white family and an A.J.A. family. An Eagle Scout business-suited type like Lance, that’s the type that kills his whole family, and the neighbors say, “He was such a quiet boy.” They think that being quiet and being good are the same thing. Sunny’s face was avid with sympathy. She was participating in cosmopolitan life-and-death events.
“Why?” said Wittman. But to be able to answer why, a criminal has to have done the highest philosophical thinking. Usually you have to be satisfied with a money or sex motive. “What would anyone have against your parents?” Lance must be exaggerating. Wittman had met his mother, a Japanese-American church lady in a pillbox hat, gloves, and a camel-hair coat.
“That A.J.A. family mortified me. I drew swastikas on fences all over the neighborhood. I didn’t mean Nazis. I had a box of colored chalk, and it was fun to get those angles right. The mama-san and papa-san made me walk back through town with rags and clean off the fences, and apologize. Gomenasai. They followed me, and if anybody came out to see what we were doing, they bowed. Gomenasai. Gomenasai. They took a picture of me bowing.
“To make memories, I need documentation. At every house, there was a Life magazine open at the same picture: a jap soldier with his chest and stomach cut open, the slashes in the shape of a cross, according to the caption. His guts had been pulled out, intestines and heart placed at the center of the cross. It wasn’t that horrible, really, unless you read the caption. He looked asleep with a smoking white fluff on his stomach; it was sort of pretty like a flower.”
Wittman planned to survive the weekend, then go to the library and look up newspapers for—when?—1953?—a mass murder by machete. And the weather report would have what phase the moon was in.
“They’ve got a death wish out for me,” said Lance. “The mama-san and papa-san held an autumn service to my memory. You weren’t invited? You didn’t mourn me? From school, they invited the registrar, who didn’t show, and our housemother, who did. You don’t remember a fall semester when I didn’t come back from summer vacation? You didn’t miss me? I didn’t meet you yet, Sunny, and we might never have met. There’s a stone doll of me in the churchyard among the other rock babies with red bandanna bibs. Tonight, I’m going to tell you where I was instead of dead. I was traveling to learn if ex-Japanese in other countries call themselves Issei, Nisei, Sansei, or if those are American words. I was sitting in the sun on one of the thousands of Molucca-Sulu islands, and looking out at the next island. For the fun of it, I was about to try swimming to it when a copra boat came along, and I hitched a ride. We passed that island, which seemed bare and uninteresting anyway, and landed on another one. I understood the boatman to say he would come back for me on his route. But he never came back.
“Days went by. No boat. I walked around and around. I could not see the tourist island I’d been on, nor any other land. I introduced myself to people, who said, ‘Yes, there’s a boat; it came once a long time ago, and it will come again.’ I asked where was the boat I came on? They got excited—that was the boat. Why hadn’t I held it for them? They sat on the ground to get over their disappointment. ‘How long do we have to wait?’ I asked, but their idea of time is not precision movement. I sat with them facing the sea, like Mondo Cane cargo cult. Three Frenchmen came along the beach. I asked them and they asked me about a boat. They’d been on that island years too long, they said, and the time has come for action. We cut bamboo and tied it together, and built two rafts. The islanders pointed their clove and cubeba cigarettes north, whence migrations of human beings and animals drifted. We paddled for a long time, and stopped on an island, but no people on it. Two of the Frenchmen went back. With the third Frenchman, an old man, I found many inhabited islands, but each with a smaller and poorer population. I left my aging old partner on an island with only one family. ‘A ma puissance,’ he said.
“I rowed and floated alone and nowhere until I met a boat filled with people. ‘Room for one more,’ they said. I left my raft, and went with them to Marore, which is the border-crossing island in the Sangihe Talaud Archipelago. But no airport, no harbor with ocean liners. A crew of Pilipinos from Mindanao, stranded for three years, told me that some years ago, a man who looked like me, a young German, came here on his way north in search of faith healers. He bought a canoe, but never rowed out of sight. The wind and sea kept returning him to the island, and at last wrecked him on the reef.
“One evening I was sitting on a pier, and eating fish jerky. A piece dropped in the water. A man with white hair dived for it, and ate it. He stayed beside me to watch the sunset. ‘You live like us,’ he said. ‘No hotel.’ I watched many sunsets with him. Mr. Sondak was his name. On Holy Saturday he said, ‘Our food is your food. Our water is your water. Our hunger is your hunger. Our stories are your stories.’ I must have been in very bad shape. That was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. I wept on the sand. He was welcoming me to remain forever on that island as my home. And give up thinking about how to get to the international airport at Jakarta or Manila.”
Oh, that was beautiful. Wittman saw an island where people speak in verse, where a poet sings you a welcome to his tribe and gives you a place in its myth and legend. He asked Lance to say the mele again, and pictured its lines:
Our water is your water.
Our food is your food.
Our hunger is your hunger.
Our stories are your stories.
“But one day,” Lance continued, “I walked further inland than I had walked before on any of the islands, probably through the neck of an isthmus—and entered a city again. Civilization, ho-o-o!” The cry of the wagonmaster on the Firesign Theater album. “The next thing I knew, I was riding in a taxi—Teksi, the letters on the door and roof said—racing for the airport. A Garuda plane flew overhead, and I panicked that it was my plane, and I’d missed it. But I caught Pan Am to Tokyo, where I changed planes. I waited at the boarding gate for seven hours, and took the plane to Honolulu, where I didn’t leave the terminal during the stopover until takeoff for San Francisco. I’ve had it with islands. We shouldn’t go to Asia even for vacations. We get turned around. I
got made into a Kibei. A Returnee to America. Never leave, Wittman. The next time I’m curious about foreign lands, I’m traveling to Vegas or Reno. I came back in time for late registration, though most of the classes I wanted filled up already. And too late to stop my memorial service. It is absolutely necessary that I build the fox a home—in Oakland, here between these willow trees by this stream. It will be large enough for the two of us, Sunny, to use as a gazebo or a gatehouse. It will be so elegant and expensive that the fox will stay put. The stream will run; the fox will not run. The fox has come home. Here.” He touched the ground with both hands. Very stoned heads will touch the earth—they dash out of the building and lie down on the street—and be well, okay. “I’m going to throw a fox-viewing party in a tent that covers the lawn. A flap rolls up. On a night when a moon is in the stream and a moon is in the sky, we’re going to see the fox follow this stream, and step here under the willows. The fox will enter his house between doorposts of my design.”
Wittman turned green and red with envy and admiration; a person of his generation that knows better than to make war its adventure was having himself an interesting life. Experiences befall this friend even when he means to be on vacation as a tourist. Japanese brought a fox; Chinese brought pigs and goats. And Executive Order 9066 has given to Issei, Nisei, Sansei their American history. And places: Tanforan, Manzanar, Tule Lake, Arkansas, Sand Island. And righteous politics, the Sansei’s turn to say No and No to loyalty oaths and to the draft. We ought to give A.J.A.s a deep gomenasai apology without them having to ask. If only he hadn’t been but a toddler at the time, Wittman would have gotten on the train that took people who looked like himself away. There had been a Chinese-Mexican kid who had done that to be with his friends.
How to kill Lance and eat his heart, and plagiarize his stories? As a friend of the hero, you’re a sub-plot of his legend. When you want to be the star. And wear a beret. And go on vision quest, for which a Young Millionaire can afford plane rides to the other side of the world. The minimum-wage earner—the unemployed—goes for a walk in the park, where Wittman Ah Sing has had vision enough. Everything that comes in—that’s it. Foolish ape wants more vision.
“You still want to fight?” Lance asked.
“Don’t think you’ve talked yourself out of it. I want to kill you and eat your heart, and plagiarize your stories. Businessman.”
Lance got the insult. Ranked and cut low. He put up his fists. Wittman hadn’t been in all that many fights, but people putting up their dukes looked like they learned from boxing movies. He was too embarrassed to prance.
“Don’t fight,” said Sunny. “Please don’t fight. I’m leaving right now if you fight. Do you want me to leave, Lance? Or do you want me to help? If I help, it’s two against one. We don’t want to outnumber him two against one, do we?”
The willows hung their branches down like weeping cherry trees in their green seasons. And into the moon-bright scene on this gibbous night walked Taña, the pretty girl in hot pursuit, who parted the willow-tail curtains, and said, “Oh, I didn’t know there was anybody out here. Is the ground marshy over by you?”
Well, they had to stop for introductions in case everybody hadn’t met everybody. “So you two have met,” said Lance. So their attachment shows. Ignored, the married couple faded away.
“You knew I was out here,” said Wittman, “and you came pursuing me.”
Paying no nevermind to swampiness, she stepped right on over to him, and sat down on a log, which would moss-stain her skirt. She had bound up her hair with somebody’s necktie, and another tie belted her waist—a piratess of hearts. “To find a certain type of interesting person at a party,” she said, “go outside, and there he’ll be, all by himself, smoking a cigarette, next to the garbage cans.”
Girls who hide from the party are usually crying, and they are unsocialized wallflowers. Let that about the garbage cans go.
Too bad Lance hadn’t built his shrine yet; it would be nice to go with her inside a hideaway the size of a Chinese bed. He took a-hold of her hand, and pulling her behind him, led her on a twining walk. Here and there on the grass lay sleepy bodies, girls in skirts, moth wings and daisy petals. They were the fairies of a midautumn’s night; they were a slain family. Taña caught up beside him; they walked together holding hands, his every finger between her every finger. He stopped, pushed her hand behind her, her other hand caught between his chest and her breasts. A hug dance. “Let go,” she said, and he, laughing and shaking his head no, kissed her. “So that I can put my arms around you,” she said pleadingly. Oh, he had to let her do that for a while. Then he pulled her arm down, and, holding swinging hands some more, walked her to the porch. He embraced her by the waist, and lifted her up onto the balustrade. “Sidesaddle, ma’am?” he said. He lit up a cigarette. She took it from him and smoked it too. They were taking turns on his last cigarette.
She looked like Dale Evans as the girl singer with the Sons of the Pioneers. Dale used to wear an off-the-shoulder Mexican blouse, and looked like Marilyn Monroe but not so unstrung. Roy hadn’t buttoned her up yet. Roy Rogers always wore his plaid shirt buttoned to the top, and tucked his jeans inside his boots.
Wittman leaned against a post, pushed his pretend hat back, put his boot on the footrail. “I do admire a lady who rides sidesaddle, Taña. Taña De Weese. What kind of a name is that?”
“I don’t know, I’m sure, Wittman. Wittman Ah Sing. What’s your other name? I should think Wittman is just your American name.”
Yes, that’s all it is.
“My middle name is Chloë,” she said.
“My other name is Joang Fu.”
“What does it mean? Joang Fu.” She said it with that American uplilt that makes Chinese sound good, hearable, not lost inside somewhere.
“I don’t ask you what Taña Chloë means. Why do you assume that my name means dick?”
“ ‘Of course it must,’ ” she said. “ ‘My name means the shape I am—and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.’ ”
Our fool for literature is utterly impressed by her allusiveness.
He poeticated her in return. “ ‘By a name I know not how to tell thee who I am.’ ”
“Joang Fu is a secret name, isn’t it? Have you given me your secret name and power over you, Joang Fu?”
“No, that’s a white-man superstition. Do you throw the Ching? My name is number sixty-one, which they translate Inner Truth. You can look it up.” I am True Center. Core Truth. Truth is a bird carrying a boy in her talons. She can look it up for herself. He hoped nobody Chinese was eavesdropping. Can’t stand hippy dippies who trade on orientalia.
Taña leaned her head against her post and sighed. “Happy?” she asked moonily. She cracked him up. He’d found him a girl with that certain alienation.
“Happy,” he said, playing along. People who aren’t too smart, the ones who live by song lyrics, and who don’t know their current events, those people can be happy. Yeah, he felt high, and he knew the difference between being happy and being high, neither of which is as good as joy.
“Do you like parties?” she asked. Oh, she is so understanding. She must sense that he takes celebrations seriously. He’s profoundly dionysian and has standards. Too sensitive to be inside yukking it up. She hadn’t asked, “Do you like this party?” She said, “Do you like parties?” Is she ready to listen to my shyness party by party? He can tell her how he hated playing Young Affordables. She hasn’t heard them talk about him, has she? “He’s nowhere near his first million.” “He believes in voluntary poverty.” “No, he’s just plain cheap.” But he mustn’t come off as afraid of parties. He went to them. To be a no-show, you have to get it scandaled about that you don’t go to parties for interesting lone-wolf reasons, and definitely not because you weren’t invited. Show up, be tested. And you be cool; defensiveness is the worst of personality emanations. “He’s so defensive.” He has to let her know how dionysian he c
an be. Yes, he can be very dionysian, such as the time he rode the motorcycle through the French doors.
He said, “Now, me, what I feel about parties … to tell you the truth, I do and I don’t like … I mean, it depends on what kind of party … the kind that … like paranoid … well, not really paranoid.…” It was coming out inarticulate, but that’s okay. Hang down your head like sad and blue James Dean, dead already. Like your brains are too heavy. Feelings so deep that there are no words honest enough to express them. The words the world has are not good enough. His head hung ponderous, his hands a-pockets. The girl on the balustrade leaned over to peer up at his face. She reached out, and pushed aside the dark forelock. Girls’ hearts break to pull James Dean’s head up by the forelock. Yes, he was bowed before her. O gravitational pull of physical bodies. Felled by her. She slid off the railing, and stood before him. His head lowered helplessly toward her upturning face, and nudged at her lips to part, come on, come on, give, until she began the kissing. She was short enough to have to reach for it, and he was tall enough to have been only nodding, just thinking, nodding off, listening to some music of his own.
Taña talked and kissed at the same time, “Do you like partying now? How do you like the party now? Do you like partying with me? You do like to party, huh?” He would enjoy hearing what this girl’s instinctively said sex words were. Breathing with catches in her throat, she went on to say, “I like this party. I like partying with you. You know what I wish, though? I wish that all night long you had been thinking about me, that you had been looking for me years ago before we met, and you’ve found me at last. You maneuvered to be invited here. Tonight you followed me from room to room, didn’t you? You flirted with gorgeous girls, but they weren’t me. I walked by and I made you look away from them. I made you dissatisfied. Whenever I looked up, there you would be staring at me. You were contemplating me. You went into the library, thinking I was there, and you looked behind the curtains. The toes you had seen under there might have been mine. You notice everything about me. You went out through the balcony doors, and saw me crossing the lawn in the moonlight. And you climbed down the fire escape, and caught me here. On the vine-covered veranda. As I was about to leave, you caught me in your arms. Now, tell me that happened. Tell me that was what you did. You chased me, and caught me in your arms. And hold me in your arms.”
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International) Page 17
