* * *
• • •
And then one afternoon, Kunihiko showed up to Eiju’s door, without preamble or explanation or rationale.
He wore sweats and a sleeveless tee. The most casual I’d ever seen him. He carried a tote full of groceries on one arm and a paper sack full of vegetables in the other.
He stepped past me, unspeaking, and set them on the counter. Eiju caught his eye, and then mine, but he didn’t say anything about it.
Wordlessly, Kunihiko fished around for pans in the kitchen cupboard. He felt around for chopsticks, a spoon, and a measuring cup. I leaned on the counter beside him, watching, and every now and again he glanced my way.
Eventually I said, How do you know where everything is?
All Japanese stock their kitchens the same way, said Kunihiko.
I didn’t know that.
No one expected you to. Where’s the spatula?
Where the real Japanese keep theirs.
You really aren’t funny, said Kunihiko.
I know. But listen, what the fuck is going on?
Kunihiko only frowned at me. He shook his head.
Nothing, he said. I’m just here to help.
Really?
Really. Same as always.
No. It’s not that simple.
But it can be, said Kunihiko, sighing, looking at his feet. If you let it, then it really can be that simple. I can just be here. Helping.
That’s the easy way out, I said.
You’re not wrong, said Kunihiko.
He nodded. Then he extended his hand.
Truce? he asked.
He really was just like a kid.
Shouldn’t I be asking you that, I said.
I was an asshole, said Kunihiko. It wasn’t right.
You were.
I’m serious.
So am I.
Can you both please shut the fuck up, said Eiju. I thought you already had a goddamn boyfriend, Mike.
Kunihiko started back in on the eggs, slicing tomatoes and onions and tofu, spooning in a little potato starch, and whipping it all into something like a frittata, before we slipped it in the oven. We flopped down and zoned out by the television. Eiju groaned at a shitty dub of Rush Hour 2. Twenty minutes later, we forgot about the casserole, burning the whole fucking thing, and we ate all of it anyways.
* * *
• • •
Another memory: Stuffing shit into the car before a drive to California, to see the coast, Eiju lifts my mother and sets her in the back seat. She screams, laughing, and a Black neighbor beside us peeps through her blinds. When she sees that it’s just my parents, she waves her hand at the three of us.
* * *
Another memory: It’s a long drive to San Francisco, and we only stop once, at the motel. The front desk lady is brown. She smiles with all her teeth. When my mother asks us to pull some ice from a machine down the hallway, Eiju takes me with him, half-asleep, carrying me on his shoulders, running at full speed as I carry the bucket screaming.
* * *
Another memory: Our first night in the motel room. It’s so hot that I can’t sleep; the air conditioning doesn’t work. When I can’t get comfortable in my sheets on the floor, I leave them for the carpet. When I can’t get comfortable on the carpet, I take off my shirt, and then my pants. When I start crying, Eiju leaves the bed with my mother to sleep on the floor beside me. Ma finds me cradled around him in the morning. She asks why we thought this would make us any less hot.
* * *
Another memory: Eiju flips through photos on the floor, asking me if I look like his father or my mother’s father. I shrug, because I don’t know. He tells me that someone will tell me if I don’t decide early on.
It’s the ears, he says, tugging on mine.
* * *
Another memory: My mother attempts to flip a pancake on the motel room’s hot plate, and it lands on the floor tile. Over the past two days, we’ve watched fuck knows how many roaches sprint across it. My mother’s eyes never leave the pancake, and, out of nowhere, Eiju appears from the next room over, peels it off the ground, swallows it whole.
* * *
Another memory: My parents, washed from the heat and sprawled across the carpet, turn the radio to a station playing D’Angelo. Eiju leaps from the floor, where he’s lying with me, and grabs Ma by the shoulders. But she isn’t surprised by the suddenness: her body tenses, for half of a second, before they fall into a slow dance. Eiju croons the chorus of “Brown Sugar.” Eventually, they bring their serenade to a circle around me, falling, laughing.
* * *
• • •
One day, I was lying on the sofa, dozing, and Eiju just stared. I asked what he was looking at.
My son, he said.
Stop that, I said.
Okay, he said, and I knew I’d regret saying that for the rest of my life.
* * *
One day, I found another notebook by Eiju’s bed. It was full of lists, half-scribbled in English, like the one in the bathroom. I put it back where I found it. Then I changed my mind, stuffed it in my duffel.
* * *
One day, Eiju asked me to walk him to the Shinto shrine a few blocks from the apartment.
Not to be a dick, I said, but it’s a little late for religion.
Shinto is for everyone, said Eiju. You dick.
Our pace was slow, but the afternoon was, too. Bikers wheeled around us. Pedestrians didn’t even glance our way. Once we made it to the shrine, I walked my father up the steps, holding his elbow, toward the bell and the podium, and when I stopped just behind him, he turned my way.
What the hell are you doing, he asked. Get up here.
I started to say something, but then I didn’t. I joined him.
Standing beside him, I saw how small he’d gotten. My father had shrunk. Eiju’d become feeble.
Do you know how, he asked, and I told him I didn’t.
You used to know, said Eiju. You used to love coming to the shrine.
He walked me through it: we washed our hands, made our offering.
Bowed twice.
Clapped twice.
Bowed again.
Now, said Eiju, make a wish and ring the bell.
Why are we ringing it?
So the gods can hear you, said Eiju, and he wouldn’t meet my face as he rang it.
He stepped to the side while I grabbed the rope.
Big guy like you, he said. They should definitely hear it.
So I rang it.
I thought about wishing, and my mind went blank.
But I rang, and I rang, and I rang.
* * *
Some nights, Kunihiko slept over on an extra tatami mat by the door, and other nights he didn’t. Eiju called it Kunihiko’s big wet dream. And the first time the kid heard that, he blushed furiously, intensely, but he didn’t deny it.
Now, the lights were off above us. Snores floated in from Eiju’s bedroom. Kunihiko and I lay head to head, arms crossed.
Mike, he said, and I looked up.
It’ll be all right, said Kunihiko. Really.
Yeah, I said. You’re doing a great job.
Mike.
Really. You’re taking the whole thing well.
That’s not what I mean, said Kunihiko.
* * *
The next morning, we ate eggs over rice. Kunihiko and I cooked side by side. And afterward, Eiju nodded as Kunihiko holed up in the bathroom.
That boy’s a fool, he said.
But you really should listen to him, he said.
Then Eiju burped, explosively, monstrously, shaking the living room.
He wore the most stoic look on his face. And then I started laughing, and then he started laughing, and then Kunihiko came sprint
ing out of the bathroom, asking what had happened, what the hell had gone wrong.
* * *
Later, Kunihiko and I sat across from Eiju on the floor when he asked the kid if he ever thought he’d get married.
Kunihiko looked at me. I shrugged.
Before he could answer, Eiju said, I didn’t.
But Mike’s mother changed my mind, he added.
I’m not saying you have to, or that you should, he said.
Both of you, said Eiju. There are people out there that’ll change your mind.
* * *
Eventually, Kunihiko fell asleep. Eiju and I watched his chest rise and fall beside us. The kid would shudder, every now and again, from his shoulders to his calves, but he never opened his eyes. His body settled right back into silence.
* * *
I was scared, said Eiju, a little later.
I thought he’d fallen asleep.
That’s why, he said.
Why what?
You know what, said Eiju.
I was scared, he said. So I ran. That’s why I came home.
I watched Eiju’s toes. I stared at his thighs.
You could’ve told me earlier, I said.
It would’ve been too hard to understand, said Eiju. I didn’t understand it. And you were a baby.
A teenager isn’t a baby.
You were a baby.
You could’ve tried.
No, said Eiju. We thought it’d be better that I didn’t.
We, I said.
It was Mitsuko’s idea.
Both of you.
And she was right, said Eiju. As usual.
We told ourselves we’d know when to tell you, said Eiju. We’d know when the moment was right.
But you never did, I said.
I’m telling you now, said Eiju, looking my way. The moment is now.
* * *
• • •
But then there was the night that the three of us stood on the pier in San Francisco. We’d finally made it. Ma, Eiju, and I couldn’t afford to do anything but walk around, so that’s what we did, and Eiju cobbled together the change in his pockets for three hot dogs. When it turned out that he was short, my father told us to wait while he walked back to the car. I paced beside my mother while she smiled at the seller, a white guy. He didn’t smile back.
When Eiju made it over, the white man told him that he was still short by a dime, and he tossed Eiju’s loose change back across the wooden counter.
I’m told that, in Japan, my father was a fighter. Here was a man who would box over nothing, raising his fists at anyone.
But that day, Eiju only smiled. He collected the rest of his change, taking his two hot dogs from the stand.
Ma and I walked behind him. She gave me a look, and that look said to shut the fuck up. So I did that, and we reached a bench by the pier, and my mother took a bite of one hot dog, and I took a bite of the other.
When Ma offered Eiju a bite of hers, he shook his head as if he couldn’t even imagine it.
When I lifted mine for my father, I expected the same result. He gave me a clear look.
But then he opened his jaws wide and took a huge chunk out of it, nearly downing the thing in one bite, and my knuckles, too.
* * *
• • •
And then, and then, and then.
* * *
One night, I woke up for a piss, and I heard the silence.
* * *
Of course we knew it would happen.
I knew it would happen.
And he knew it would happen.
* * *
So it happened.
* * *
Kunihiko wasn’t there when I found him, but he was the first person I called.
* * *
Then I called Taro.
* * *
Then I sat beside my father.
* * *
He wasn’t cold, exactly. He’d gone in his sleep. I hadn’t known that people actually did that, that this was something that actually happened to people.
* * *
Before Taro arrived, I called Ma. Stepped outside. The sun shone on the balcony. Some kids bounced a ball in the alley. It would’ve been late afternoon in Houston.
When my mother answered, almost smiling into the phone, I thought that things would be okay, they would probably work out, and I almost kept my father’s death to myself, I hadn’t heard hope in her voice for so long.
But I thought of Eiju.
The promise.
* * *
Ma didn’t scream. Her breathing caught for a moment. And then she was speaking regularly again, talking in measured tones.
She asked if I was all right, and I told her that I was.
She asked where we were, and I told her that it’d happened in the apartment, we’d both been sleeping.
Good, she said.
Good, I said.
So it could’ve been worse, said Ma.
I opened my mouth, and a dry sound came out.
* * *
Listen to me, she said. You stay with him. You don’t need to call anyone else. Call someone if you need help, but I’ll take care of the rest. The important thing is to stay with him, while you can.
You won’t get this moment again, she said. Do you hear me? This is the last time you’ll get to do this, and you’ll wonder why you were thinking about so many other things. I’m telling you this because I know. Do you understand?
I understand.
Are you sure? she asked, in Japanese. Michael?
I am, I said, in Japanese. I’m okay.
Good, said Ma. I’ll take care of everything else.
* * *
When my mother hung up, I stared at my father.
I lay down beside him and put my hand on his chest.
His arm was loose, and I swung it over mine. I lay there, in my father’s arms, for ten minutes, fifteen, until there was banging on the door, yelling for me to let them in.
* * *
• • •
Ma handled all of the arrangements that she could on her end. She contacted his family, his sister, and that sister’s side of the family. Taro dealt with the authorities. But it turned out that Eiju, the prince of chaos, had laid everything else out.
There was a plan for where he wanted to be cremated and what he wanted done with his ashes afterward. A third to his family in Kyushu. A third spread out in Osaka. A third for his son, if he wanted them, and if not, those could go just about anywhere.
Everything was handled. All I had to do was deal with it.
* * *
Kunihiko manned the bar. He didn’t even ask.
Just tell me when you’re good again, he said. I’ll be here.
Yeah, I said.
Don’t rush back, he said. As much time as you need.
Yeah, I said.
* * *
Taro walked me through all the paperwork, all the administrative tasks. Natsue walked me through everything else. She said she didn’t want to see the body, didn’t need to. She’d known Eiju well enough.
* * *
I didn’t have to sign the bar over for six months, like he’d said. The rent was paid up until then. After that, I could keep the lease going or turn it over.
* * *
You’ll make money either way, said Natsue.
That doesn’t matter, I said.
Natsue was polite enough not to respond immediately, but then she did.
Of course it matters, she said. He’s gone. But you’re still here.
* * *
• • •
Eiju didn’t want a ceremony at the temple or any of that shit, so there wasn’t a ceremony. He explicitly wanted everything to go on as normal.
* *
*
There was a thing at the bar, and Kunihiko hosted it, but I told him I wasn’t going, not to expect me, and I didn’t disappoint.
* * *
That night was my first alone in the apartment. Tan showed up with a bag of convenience store food.
When I asked how he’d found me, he said Kunihiko told him.
We ate karaage and rice on the sofa, sipping beer, not talking about much. When I asked about his mother, Tan told me she was doing fine. He talked about his job. He talked about the weather. He talked and talked to fill the void, and he didn’t ask what my plans were, or where I planned on going, or what I planned on doing, and when Tan stopped talking, I said, I’ll be gone for a little while.
Okay, said Tan.
* * *
Before he left, he put a hand on my face and gave it a scratch.
He said, I’ll see you later.
Memorial Page 21
