Chapter 4

Kazuki Ono opened the balcony door of his suite at the Olympic Hotel on Santa Monica’s famed beachfront, and scanned the horizon. One hundred miles from shore, the pale blue cloudless sky met the placid sea. To the southwest Santa Catalina rose from a misty shroud. A mile from shore, a low-slung oil tanker slunk north, sounding its horn while a dozen pleasure boats buzzed merrily in its wake. On the beach an umbrella or two rose, a blanket unfolded, a fat man sprinted into the cool green sea. Closer, beneath palm fronds still as stones, a pack of ancient joggers smeared on sunscreen as they broke their sweat.

He considered the day’s schedule. Later in the morning, he had an appointment with the studio, where he would listen to preposterous plans for turning his new book into a feature film. He had learned to smile when they suggested this or that director, this or that star. Rarely did anything come of any of it. One book had been turned into a film, and the film had not been very good. In the afternoon, he had an appointment to view some paintings from a Courbet-inspired artist whose subject was cancer victims and schizophrenics. In the evening he had another book signing for Enrique the Freak. There was also some research to do for the new book. Jack would drive him.

Kazuki had written much of the novel, Fingal’s Cave, in Japan, and his intention was to complete it during his time in Los Angeles. There were gaps to be filled, chapters to be rearranged, scenes that required a firsthand look at the settings, a few coincidences for which to arrange plausibility, scenes to add, scenes to cut. The inevitable rewriting. The inevitable rewriting of the rewriting, ad infinitum, ad nauseam . . .

But most daunting was the ending. For Katashi to suffer for his actions, his grandsons must be dead. His actions were surely immoral, though at the time he had spun it as his duty. He simply wanted what was his and there was no getting around it. But if the boys were truly dead, why put their father, Yuudai, through the anguish? Yuudai already had paid the price for his immorality and foolishness. Why should he pay a second time? And what of Sumiko? Usually Kazuki didn’t give a shit about happy or tragic endings. The world went on or more to the point didn’t go on, for wasn’t every individual’s death the death of the universe? That was the fine print in the contract. However, Fingal’s Cave had purpose beyond an evening’s entertainment. It wasn’t just the fictive dream that Kazuki had to worry about.

Kazuki’s stomach growled. He hadn’t planned on getting up so early, and room service was late. He sat at the balcony’s table, turned on his laptop and opened his journal. The writing was in kanji and hiragana, but as he read from the journal, he translated into English and input English text into the laptop. He usually didn’t translate to English until his books were finished, but this time he was translating on the fly. In Recent Documents, he clicked on Fingal’s Cave.

Page one appeared.

Fingal’s Cave/1
HERB

A few distant lights sputtered on as the plane neared its target, which from an altitude of thirty-two thousand feet was clearly visible beyond a few scattered cumulus clouds. Extraordinary only in its untouched landscape—for the city, like four other potential targets, had escaped the nightly bombings so that the damage of the plane’s unique weapon could be accurately measured—the town waited like an unsuspecting lab animal about to undergo a deadly experiment, trusting that the benign neglect of previous days would continue into the indefinite future.

At 8:10, the final turn of the screw now in the capable hands of bombardier Major Ferebee, Colonel Tibbets thought briefly and irritatingly if not quite regretfully about the name he’d painted on the aircraft’s nose, Enola Gay, his mother’s Christian name. In minutes, the plane would release a gravity bomb containing 130 pounds of Uranium 235 on the city of 350,000, and the results wouldn’t be pretty. He wasn’t sure his mother would appreciate the intended honor.

In the rear of the Enola Gay, tail gunner Technical Sergeant Herb O’Keefe fought the pounding at his temples, the ache of incomplete knowledge . . .

“Yuudai?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“The mother’s hiding these little plastic dinosaurs on the café’s patio. The daughter, maybe four years old, puts her head down on the table, covers her eyes. Mama hides the last toy, and yells, ‘Iidesuyo.’ Right? ‘Iidesuyo!’ The little girl jumps up, laughs. Runs all over the place looking for those dinosaurs. She finds them—one on a window sill, another under an old newspaper, another stuck in a bush. Every damn time she finds one, she laughs like crazy. Like she’s having so much fun that I, that I—”

Yuudai waited several minutes until—

“Yuudai?” said his father.

“Yes, Dad?”

“The mother’s hiding these little plastic dinosaurs on the café’s patio. The daughter, maybe four years old . . .”

His father had repeated the truncated story six times since Yuudai had entered the hospital room, where Herb had drifted in and out of consciousness for four days. Whether his father’s vignette was memory or a dream, Yuudai couldn’t say, but he thought his father was somehow comforted by it, for the buckled cheeks and creased forehead seemed to smooth and catch color, though it may have been the glow of the monitor.

Running his finger along the punctured artery of the bone-thin forearm, once as thick as the sweet spot of a Louisville Slugger, Yuudai wondered if Herb himself in some dim neuronal corner knew the story’s end. A worn man before his first heart attack (aged fifty), an impaired man before his first stroke (aged fifty-seven), Herb had lumbered on far longer than any of the doctors had predicted. Though repeated like a looped tape, the anecdote was a marvel, thought Yuudai, for Herb’s speech and thoughts had become increasingly garbled, and in the last six months impossible to penetrate. It was his third stroke and the scattered family was flying in.

“Yuudai?” the doctor had asked, uncertain that he had this red-headed Caucasian’s name correct.

I’m Irish, kiss me.

Yuudai rolled out his own oft-repeated story.

An enlisted man, Herbert O’Keefe had been the assistant tail gunner on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, though Herb swore that the officers had not told him beforehand the nature and potency of the weapon. When the bomb missed its central target and fell on a hospital, Herb saw in the cataclysm that this bomb was . . . different. Troubled and then profoundly depressed by his part in the mission, Herb left the military and spent his life trying to make amends from his Boston home. He tithed his salary to send money to Japanese charities, studied the country’s history and culture, fought the racism, the incessant three-letter slur that flowed through America in the postwar years, and gave his children Japanese names. But he had never gone there, never gone back. To that he left his youngest son, Yuudai, who after his father’s first heart attack, was made to vow that when death took Herb, Yuudai would scatter his father’s ashes over the site of the hospital that the bomber had inadvertently made ground zero, devote himself to healing the wounds of that tragic day and mix his blood with a Japanese maiden’s.

A Japanese maiden that Yuudai would marry, bring back to America—and keep safe.

“Yuudai?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“The mother’s hiding these little plastic dinosaurs on the café’s patio. The daughter, maybe four years old . . .”