Chapter 11

Stretched out on the lounge chair, Hugh listened to the songs that seeped out of his home’s screen door. To the beat, he twirled the little flag, his souvenir from a dream.

An hour passed. The sun dipped beneath the western ridges. The insects set to with their call and response. His little chipped statue of Buddha, which sat upon the stump of a scrub oak, found the evening’s last direct light.

A glint of sunlight blinded him. To block the ray, Hugh held up the flag and it was then he noticed the typo: Nakamura Reality. Reality?

Hugh leaned from the lounge chair and jammed the flag into the dirt. A few minutes later, he picked up the flag and took out his cell phone. It was past six, but real estate firms kept late hours.

“Good evening,” answered a honey-voiced woman.

“Is this Nakamura Realty?” asked Hugh.

“No, you’ve reached Nakamura Reality.”

“Not real estate?”

“We are a fabrication company. The film industry mostly.”

“Props and stuff.”

“Yes, props and stuff.”

“Sorry.”

“Are you looking for a realty company?”

“Not—well, yes.”

“I highly recommend PB Realty. I don’t have their number but they’re listed and you can find them online.”

“PB Realty. Great. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

The phone went dead.

Hugh twirled the oddball promotional item for a few seconds, stuck it back in the dirt, but then retrieved it.

Later, he sat up in bed, holding a Lunesta between his thumb and index finger. The little gray tablets were almost invisible at night. He would use them for a month at a time and then stop cold turkey so as to meet the requirement of his health insurance, which would only allow renewal of the thirty-pill prescription every sixty days.

Before the Lunesta was Fuguelle, which promised restful sleep but delivered mostly comforting delirium. After taking the drug, he would bring the Buddha inside, set it on the floor before the couch and stare at the figure until it danced and multiplied into dozens of damaged Buddhas, each whispering a wonderful story, offering him access to the secrets of the universe. Though far from meditation, the state was comforting and freed him for a while from thoughts of his sons and Setsuko.

He took the sleeping pills and loathed them, for the price of his broken sleep was the nightmare, whose mutable terrain changed not at all its draining frustration. In the dream he could not find his way to the place of his appointment, where the consequences of his absence would be disastrous. Each logical step toward his destination—seen in the distance—led absurdly away from that destination. Each street, each corridor, each path, though as familiar as the length of his arm, tricked and betrayed him. Every turn was wrong, every door was the wrong door, every certainty was uncertainty. He ran in bewilderment through these implacable settings, pulverized into helplessness—a helplessness and uncertainty that would come upon him in waking hours like a flash of gout.

But this was not the dream’s ultimate horror—

. . . Apparently extracted from the dream, sitting on a luxurious sofa, Hugh gazed at a television on which Takumi and Hitoshi, perhaps three years old, clawed from inside the screen in a paroxysm of pain and terror, mirrored in their faces. “No, Daddy,” they begged, tears streaming. “Come get us!”

“Mr. Mcpherson? Mr. Mcpherson, are you awake?”

A woman’s voice, vaguely familiar. The smell of bleach and urine. His right thumb nagging his fingers, one by one . . . This little piggy goes to market. This little piggy stays home. This—

Hugh opened his eyes. The woman attached to the voice smiled down at him, brown eyes in a round brown face.

“There you are,” she said. “Remember me?”

He spotted the silver name tag on her white jacket: “Yes,” he whispered. “You’ve been very kind.”

“I try,” said Miranda.

The black letters on the silver nametag smeared as she leaned into him. “Here, just a little water.” She lifted his head and pressed the plastic cup to his lips. The cool water trickled down his throat.

“Groggy?” she asked.

He remembered that he’d awakened before. Several times. He’d awakened and then—blank. He nodded.

“Well, you should be. Would you like some breakfast?”

“Breakfast?”

Hugh glanced at the IV in his left forearm. He pressed his right hand against the mattress. He rose a few inches.

Miranda eased him back. “If you stood up, you’d fall down.”

“My sons . . .” said Hugh.

Miranda’s lips tightened and her forehead lined with concern. She knew the truth, and she knew that Hugh did also.

Later, the young man with the gleaming shaved head came in. He looked like his sons might look when they reached their twenties. He stood at the foot of the bed; above his head, on the television, stock market quotes zipping across the base of the television screen. Securely on the far right the date. July 22. Hugh had been in the hospital for five days.

“It’s not just found in soldiers returning from combat,” the young man had explained in an earlier consultation. How earlier? A day? Hugh could not remember. Repressed memories. Glucocorticoids. Neuronal damage. Depression.

Hugh recalled swimming furiously, shouting his sons’ names with liquid breath. The sea was everywhere; his sons were nowhere, the realization piercing his brain like a bullet.

“Did you bring the paper?” Hugh asked.

“Yes, but—”

Hugh held out his hand. From his briefcase the young man withdrew a newspaper and handed it to Hugh, who merely lay it on his chest.

“Nothing?” asked Hugh.

“I’m sorry, Hugh.”

Hugh tapped the paper as if keying in a password. He opened it, turned a page, saw the photo. Again he recalled the numbing vastness of the ocean as he searched for their forms, black as night in their wet suits.

“Nothing,” said Hugh, as he looked up from the paper to the dark eyes of the expressionless woman who stood in the doorway behind the young man. Hugh tried to hold her gaze.

“Setsuko,” Hugh called out, but his voice did not appear to reach his wife’s ears, for she turned away.

He popped in the pill, took a sip of tea and lifted the book he would read until sleep.

Before he opened to the dog-eared page, he thought of the letter, the real letter. He wondered if it had made its way across that vast ocean. Was Setsuko at this moment breaking the seal or had Kazuki tossed it into the sea?

Hugh slept until dawn, awakening to a pain on his side. He yanked out the book, which had lodged between his arm and chest. His sleep had bent the hardback’s cover and wrinkled its pages beyond redemption. He tossed the disaster to the floor.

In the kitchen, he quartered two oranges and ate them from the peel, spitting the seeds in a plastic grocery bag. He boiled the water again and had high-fiber maple and honey oatmeal. After eating, he was alert enough to realize that he stank. The accumulation of the ocean and the exertion. He took a shower, put on fresh jeans, made another coffee and went out bare-chested into the backyard. The sun was breaking over the eastern ridge. He watched the hills light up.

A couple of rabbits nibbled at the weeds. Sometimes deer would be there, walking from the higher elevations to the creek. Hugh glanced along the path that paralleled the stream, which fed into a deep wide rock pool. Something moved in the water, maybe one of the brown trout that were illegal to fish. The fish, no, a hand broke the surface. A body unfolded. The morning light struck a slender tapered back, raven hair spreading across the smooth white shoulders. Hugh rose, dropping the coffee cup.

A woman swam face down, her butterfly strokes taking her to the far end of the pool.

“Setsuko—” cried Hugh.

The pool was no more than twenty feet across and ten wide. The body turned underwater like a screw, quickly reaching the far bank.

“Setsuko!”

The swimmer’s arm came out of the water. The long, elegant fingers dug into the moist soil. She pulled herself onto the bank, and then scampered into the brush, almost on all fours, the way an animal would escape.

Hugh ran down the path along the creek, halting at the rock pool. He looked for movement within the brush. It was insane to think the swimmer had been Setsuko. He hadn’t even seen her face. Some back-to-nature hippie chick taking a cool morning bath. Hugh strode along the bank to where the water resumed its slow flow in a shallower area, the creek clogged with deadwood and rocks. He picked his way across the debris, realizing he was barefoot. He walked toward the spot where the woman had disappeared. Something stirred in the brush.

He looked back at the pool, where several small brown trout glided a foot beneath the surface, passing over a motionless crayfish and disappearing into clouds of sediment stirred up by the swimmer. Hugh climbed the slope, scanning the ground for broken twigs, footprints, signs. Through the trees, a house was visible, one of those dark stone houses that from the road might be taken for a rock formation. Solid as a fort and uninviting, along the sides, a wall of bamboo. A path appeared.

He felt a prick of pain. A trickle of blood appeared beside his right toe. He thought about returning to the house for his shoes, but the woman would be long gone by then. On either side of the path, the brush was thick. Despite the open wound, he sprinted along the path.

As he ran barefoot, his heartbeat rising to the effort, the adrenaline flowing, he felt the urge to remove the rest of his clothes, to run naked on the hard dirt in pursuit of the woman who would not be Setsuko. He ran several hundred yards and stopped, panting and dripping sweat, his ears abuzz, his skin tingling. Flat initially, the path now sloped upward, vanishing into a thicket of briars. He must have kicked something as he ran, for his left toenail bent up at a right angle like an empty clam shell. He pinched it in his fingers and tore, flicked it into the brush as he walked forward into the thorns. They had not grown there naturally. They were not rooted. Someone had cut them up and stuffed them in the path as a barrier. He looked around for a stick, found a divining rod and stuck it into the clump of briars. As he worked it out, a radio played, and the odor rose of roasting fish. He dislodged the barrier. One hundred feet down the path, under a scrub oak, several men sat around a small fire. The men looked like the day workers who waited outside the post office. Not old, but aged, not worn, but weary. As he walked closer, they turned to him, their eyes sharp and defensive. He expected to see the woman hidden among them. But there was no woman, just the old homeless man whom Hugh had seen along the highway, now huddled in a blanket and roasting two small fish, identical even to their split bellies, on a spit.