Chapter 12

Kazuki glided past the slender thighs of a pubescent girl, swaying like a reed in the shallow end of the pool. He slid his hands across the second step and pushed, so that he rose with an explosion of water. Grabbing the silver rail, he yanked himself to the deck. He walked on the warm stone, halting a few feet from the lounge chair to tilt back his head, grab his hair and twist. He faced the sun for a few seconds, grateful for its cancerous rays, then strode to the shade of his umbrella. He toweled off, waved away a beautiful hostess and dropped to the chair. He felt feverish. The swim hadn’t helped. He lifted his glasses from the laptop, asleep on the hardwood table, checked the thick lenses for smudges and jerked them on. He swiveled sideways on the chair, poked the touchpad. The screen lit up. Kazuki read through the scene of Yuudai’s first meeting with Katashi. Satisfied, he scrolled ahead seven years.

Bone dry, the rock pool. Ducks, frogs and crayfish disappeared. Along the cracked brown track, James and Brent silent, Yuudai divining. Fifty yards, not a drop, not a river, not an ocean. Did you? . . . Feel it, boys? Feel it soften? Vegetation thicken. Prehistoric. Cautious. Snake rattle. Fan palms.

Before a bundle of broken branches, Yuudai hunched down, pressed his hand to the earth and felt moisture. Glancing beyond the interlaced branches, he saw a glistening. He pointed and urged the boys to move closer. Though it was a hardly a yard in diameter, the little pool seemed miraculous. As they moved toward it, their feet sank into soft earth. When they were two yards away, a second pool revealed itself, something moving at the bottom. Flashing claws threw off a brilliant orange light. Two crayfish, either mating or consuming one another. For a closer look, Yuudai had his sons gather dead branches and lay them down over the first pool. Crossing on the dead branches, they hunched down before the second pool to see the crayfish. The creatures were a good four inches long. Yuudai snapped off a twig and touched a claw. The creature scuttled back under cover of a fallen tree. In the silence insects buzzed and birds chirped. From deeper in the woods, came a shout: “Iidesuyo!”

Yuudai jumped to his feet.

“What’s the matter, Dad?” asked Brent.

“Did you hear it?”

“Hear what?” asked James.

Yuudai pivoted, listened for the voice. “There,” he said, pointing in the direction of a fan palm.

“Look,” said Brent, gesturing at the pool where the larger of the crayfish had reappeared.

Still listening for the voice, Yuudai slowly turned to Brent. Merely the echo of a memory, thought Yuudai, turning his attention to the crayfish. Dropping to his haunches, he instructed James to keep the crustacean occupied with the twig while Brent grabbed its tail. Is there a claw on his tail? No. No claw. No stinger. The boys were thinking of scorpions or stingrays . . . James stuck the stick in front of the crayfish, its protruding eyes darting about, and it pinched the stick. Brent dipped in his hand and pinched the crayfish by its tail. The boys laughed. The crayfish flashed its claws. It wasn’t brilliant orange out of the water, and was not the monster crayfish that had first appeared to them. Brent set it on the mud.

“Iidesuyo!”

Yuudai jumped up.

“Dad, it went back in the water.”

“Look, it’s digging a hole.”

But Yuudai could not take his eyes from the quivering fan palm, stabbed, uprooted and flung aside by the horns of a triceratops.

Kazuki pushed back his chair and rose. He walked over to the far side of the pool with its view of the Pacific. A mile from shore, the enormous yacht motored north. Had the story reached the point where Brent and James would be taken from Yuudai? The crayfish had disappeared in the little pool, perhaps dug in under a rock or broken branch. The boys would plead to be allowed to catch it one more time, and though it was getting dark in the noxious dry swamp, where radioactive isotopes had seeped into the soil, Yuudai, ignoring his hallucination, would urge them to recapture the crayfish. They dug their smooth slender hands into the muddy bottom of the pool. Laughing in the warm dusk, they reached deeper until the mud was up to their elbows. How deep could the crayfish bury itself? Could it rip through the underlying bedrock? Was it a real crayfish at all? Titanium claws, digital brain . . . Wincing, Kazuki remembered that he’d used a mechanical crayfish in Enrique The Freak, though the crayfish, central to one of the twins’ stories, should have been saved for—was promised to—Fingal’s Cave. He steadied himself against the rail, closed his eyes and drew a long breath. For most things his memory was no better than average, but he could summon up his own words as if they were projected before him on a teleprompter. He scrolled the pages of the books he had written during the last ten years for other errors of inclusion. For everything his grandsons had told him, he had one intention, which was to supply the raw material for Fingal’s Cave. But he had drawn in the detail accidentally, as one practicing casting from the shore might snag a fish by its tail or fin. Without intention, an echo of his error, he pinched a strand of his still damp hair and drew it to his lips, nibbling and tasting chlorine. On the periphery of his vision, through the crawl space of his not completely closed eyes, the strands were like steel cable. Whether he stood there a minute, an hour or one hundred years, he was uncertain, but when he stepped back, his hands shaking like those of an alcoholic deprived of his next drink, he watched the last page of Enrique the Freak crawl into the rafters like the final credits of a movie. He had found no other betrayals in the thousands of words, yet something gnawed at him. Had he transformed an artifact of his grandsons’ experience into a shape that he no longer recognized? Had a memory stored in the Fingal’s Cave neural network seeped into a nearby other and donned a disguise? Had he given away his secrets in potentially decipherable code?

What a drag it is getting old.

How did you know it so young, Mick?

Kazuki glanced at his fingers, which held something that he did not recognize. A spider’s web? No, a dozen strands of his hair ripped from his scalp. Although it may have been the sun reflecting off the bougainvillea, the tips appeared red. He drew the strands apart. Closer to white than silver, but for the odd still-blond thread. Many thought it dyed, but he was born with a Viking’s hair, his brows and beard yellow, too. A freak, he kept it close-cropped as a youth, and it drew little attention. In the 1960s he let it grow like everyone else, and as his reputation as a writer grew so did his hair, longer and wilder, going years without an inch trimmed. It was the mane of a lion, or the costume of a Kabuki actor. When Setsuko was a toddler, Kazuki would get down on all fours and flop his hair forward to the floor. Setsuko would crawl under it as if behind a waterfall. She would laugh as she poked and peeked through the strands. He watched her enchanting face as if a god who had parted the clouds to look down from heaven.

Gimme a head with hair / Long beautiful hair / Shining, gleaming, / Streaming . . .

But though inseparable from his image, there were times it seemed a burden. He wore it with the feeling he was carrying someone on his shoulders.

He tied a knot in the strands and snapped the wen against the rail. How old would Setsuko be? Forty-four? Yes, forty-four on November 17. His daughter was no fan of birthdays. She wanted no part of them or any other anniversary. He never forced them on her. There were no special days, each day the same in its emptiness. Her aversion began with her mother’s death. She was eight, and would be ten before she ventured out from under the black umbrella of shock and despair. Ten before she truly looked again at the world. He tried to make her life joyous, but she smiled rarely, laughed never. She asked for nothing, he gave her everything.

But not enough. Huck Finn paddled all the way from Los Angeles to Tokyo.

The big yacht was gone.

Kazuki swung the knotted strands like a weapon. Released. It whirled like a bolo, stretching and thickening as it flew above the walkway and beach, a monstrous propeller, whipping and blowing the sand into a yellow tidal wave that fell upon and covered the sea.

Kazuki returned to his laptop. The muddy pool would not open up like the earth under the singing Persephone, and Hades’s golden chariot would not take the boys away.

Not yet.