Chapter 13

Hugh parked the Volvo, crossed PCH and climbed halfway down the stairs to the beach when a voice called him from the memory he had packed like a box lunch for the journey.

“Hey, Buddha.”

Standing at the top of the steps, Hanna grabbed the rails and swung up one leg. Lines of text ran across the ball of her foot.

“I’m sorry about the other day. About Kyle, I mean.” She fingered her black lip stud. Her hair was now red with a blue streak.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Hugh.

“I didn’t know he was home. The sneak was hiding under the newspapers. Scared the shit out of me.”

“Newspapers?”

“Kyle has been collecting newspapers to sell to the Chinese. He heard they’re paying big money for cardboard boxes. He figures newspapers will be next. Anyway, he’s got them stacked up five feet high all around the trailer. He’s got little tunnels in there. He’s like a gopher.”

Hanna dismounted from the rail and scampered down the steps, stopping two steps above Hugh. She stuck out her hand. “Hanna.”

“Hugh,” he said, taking the soft weightless fingers.

“We’ve met before.” She giggled. “I mean before before. The Peace & Love, right?”

“We did, briefly.”

“Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Eric Clapton?”

“It’s the haircut,” said Hugh.

“Do me a favor?” She glanced at her shoulder, where a beige bra strap ran across the pink skin. She stuck a finger under the strap and sniffed.

“Smells funny. Does it smell funny to you?”

“No,” he said, taking a perfunctory sniff. “It smells laundry fresh.”

At the top of the stairs appeared a family composed of two heavyset women and a half-dozen children. They were loaded like pack mules and catching their breath. The oldest child, a boy of nine or ten, carried a watermelon and was doubled over with the weight. As the boy climbed down, the melon slipped from his grasp, falling toward the hard steps.

Hugh flung himself forward and grabbed the watermelon, his knuckles brushing the concrete.

“Gracias!” said one of the women.

“Do you want me to carry it for you?” asked Hugh.

“No, I got it,” said the grinning boy, taking the melon. “My hands were just slippery. Thanks, mister.”

Hugh stepped aside as the family descended the steps and tramped across the beach, the boy twice turning back to nod and smile at Hugh.

“Pretty good goalie,” said Hanna. “Down for another swim?”

“Mostly.”

“Mind if I tag along?”

She jutted out her hip and nibbled her lip. “I don’t want to be rude,” said Hugh, “but I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Kyle’s not around, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Hugh looked toward the point. The ocean was flat. Twenty surfers floated motionless, dead in the water. The storm had not yet generated the promised swell.

“I have some reading I want to get done.”

“That’s all right.”

“I don’t want to talk.”

“That’s cool by me. You never talk anyway. Well, I knew you were silent, and now—” She pointed toward the boy with the watermelon. “—I know you are strong and flexible.”

“I’m really—”

“Please?”

“I only have one towel.”

“Oh, that’s a real dilemma,” she said, tugging at her ragged red bangs and then tapping her lip ring.

She followed him as he trod down the beach, halting near the lifeguard stand.

He set his bag down, removed his towel and spread it on the sand, anchoring it with two nearby rocks. He took off his sandals, putting them beside the towel, and then removed his T-shirt, conscious of Hanna staring at his chest and back, not quite as hairy as an ape. For some women it was a turn-on, for others it was repulsive. Except for the bouquets of hair at his nipples, her boyfriend, Kyle, was sleek as a porpoise. Hugh folded his T-shirt and tucked it in the bag. He took out his sunscreen, rubbed a layer on his face and offered it to Hanna.

“No thank you. I’ve sworn off that stuff,” said Hanna smartly.

Hugh powered the cell phone, floating for a few seconds on Radiohead’s oceanic melody. There were no messages. Setsuko had not called. His sons had not texted from heaven . . .

“Man, that’s an old phone,” commented Hanna.

“I get the same calls,” said Hugh.

“Maybe you wouldn’t if you had a new one.”

Hugh flipped the phone shut, dropped it in the gym bag and took out Kazuki’s book. As he was driving to the beach, thinking about the woman in the rock pool—his morning mirage—he remembered the brown trout and the crayfish. It occurred to him that there was something about crayfish in Enrique. Mechanical crayfish. The narrator was describing a dinner at a bizarre restaurant and mechanical crayfish was one of the items on the menu. With his sons he had hunted crayfish, and there was that one day . . .

He planned to skim for twenty minutes before dogearing the page, returning the book to the gym bag and then going for the long swim. He opened to Chapter Seventeen. He read a page and then thumbed backward.

Hanna cleared her throat, her eyes begging attention. So ignored, a puppy would yelp.

“I told you . . .”

“I know, I know. Can I read one of your books?”

Hugh thumbed the pages of Enrique. So there was a crayfish—so what? He handed her Kazuki’s book.

Opening to the first page, Hanna read aloud, looking into his eyes every few sentences to gauge his interest, just as he had done when he read to Takumi and Hitoshi as they settled into their bunk beds. In the morning, Setsuko read to them in Japanese, but at night it was Hugh reciting English. He read from Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. The Grimm stories were dark, violent and erotic. The Andersen tales were romantic, filled with lost love and small heroisms. When he read the stories to the twins, he felt he was weather-coating their emotions for storms to come. Their favorite was “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” which told the story of the one-legged toy infantryman who fell in love with the beautiful paper ballerina doll who sat on a nearby mantle, both residents of a child’s bedroom. Pushed from the room’s windowsill, the soldier fell into a toy boat floating in the gutter and traveled miles and miles to sea. But eventually, he found his way back to the bedroom and his beloved ballerina. Yet he had only a moment of fulfillment before the willful child tossed him into the room’s fireplace. As the soldier melted, a breeze from an open window blew the ballerina too into the fire. The toy soldier melted into a heart. The ballerina consumed but for a single spangle.

More than once as he closed the book, his sons in their steady sleep, he thought of how happy he would be to die like that with Setsuko. Immolated, reduced to symbols. He never told her. She would have laughed.

Hugh would swim farther than he ever had. He would swim until he couldn’t swim anymore and then he’d swim some more just to be safe. In his imagination, he projected the effort, felt the sea in his eyes, mouth and throat.

Hanna read aloud, “Any attempt to hide or cover the body, for example when guests came over, would break the lease. The landlord advised against inviting children into the apartment, not that the children would be disturbed by the sight, but because even the best-behaved sometimes get into mischief, occasionally putting their own lives in danger. Any damage to the chamber would be his responsibility. He agreed, knowing he constructed this arrangement or had he was the question . . .”

Hugh pressed the back of his hand across one eye and then the other.

“Are you crying?” asked Hanna.

“For Christ’s sake, no,” he said sharply, but his body trembled. As if he might fall, he leaned into her. His tears pooled in the hollow of her shoulder, transformed for an instant into Setsuko’s hollow, Setsuko’s breast. When the boys sucked from her, the clear milk was indistinguishable from her skin, leaving her ruby red nipples like islands.

“I fucked up.”

“It’s okay,” she whispered. “We all fuck up.”

He wanted to spill it all out to her. How he had left his sons alone in a dangerous sea, and upon returning found them gone. How he had swum a mile from shore searching for his sons among the dark, tangled kelp. How he had begged God to perform one more trick. How he had lost his fucking mind.

But he only repeated Hanna’s words. “Yes. We all fuck up.” But some more than others.

His chest heaved as if to throw off a weight, and he realized his arms were around Hanna, his lips pressed to her neck as if there he might find a nipple and a drop of mother’s milk. He whimpered and then it was done. Drawing away from Hanna, who grimaced with disappointment, he met a nearby older woman’s disapproving stare. Hanna more than the tears, he supposed. Hugh drew up a laugh like phlegm, bellowing as if the funniest joke in the world had just been told.

The older woman, who nibbled a sandwich, a bright red slice of tomato hanging out like a second tongue, eyed him now with pure hostility. Her tomato slid out from the sandwich and dropped to the sand. She looked at the tomato and then back at Hugh as if it were his fault. Old men with young girls, enough to make a sandwich explode. But Hanna’s presence made suicide an even less likely interpretation, Hugh thought, and to confirm his old goat status, he patted Hanna’s thigh, remembering wondrously how muscle felt beneath smooth cool skin.

“You okay?” she asked.

Hugh nodded, drawing back from the girl, gathering himself.

“I broke up with Kyle,” said Hanna.

“Congratulations.”

“It was time for a change.”

“New horizons.”

“I knew it was a mistake. From the beginning, I felt like I was giving up something to be with him. My independence, I guess. Kyle spouts all this hippie stuff, but he’s the jealous sort. Well, you know that. But I got something too, and not just drugs—I’ll bet that’s what you were thinking.”

Hugh shrugged. She wanted him to consider her, to open up a Hanna file in which the pages of her life would accumulate. Despite their age difference, it was not such an odd choice. At the café, she had seen him numerous times silent and composed, but hardly unapproachable, for he would answer any question put to him. But he neither started nor entered conversations. He would be a good listener, she must have thought. He might have secrets. He wore a wedding band, but he was not married, common knowledge at the café, for he had mentioned it once (perhaps to the plumber), and in the P&L such things echo forever. As all could see, he had no girlfriend. He was likely kind, and not bad looking. He had a trouble-free car and a kept-up house. Oh, what a prize!

Hugh didn’t ask about and Hanna didn’t disclose the additional benefits Kyle offered beyond the implied drugs.

Last night, she explained, she slept over at a friend’s. In the morning, she hitchhiked back to the trailer. She came back to tell Kyle that she was moving out, but he wasn’t there. She didn’t have anywhere to move out to anyway, though.

She was fishing for shelter. Hugh would be dead before the afternoon was over, so what difference would it make if she squatted at his place for a couple of days? When the rent became due it would become her problem. But how would it strike the cops? How would it look in the newspapers to his students? To their parents? It was one thing to sit on a blanket at the beach, but it would be spun as a middle-aged teacher shacked up with a girl barely out of her teens.

“If it was night, I could show you something,” said Hanna.

“Oh, Hanna, don’t—”

She pointed at the sky. “Right straight over there is Hercules.” She swept her arm to the right. “Over there is Ophiuchus. That means the ‘serpent bearer.’” She dropped her arm. “That’s Scorpius.” She laughed. “Of course, you can’t see them now. But tonight that’s where they’ll be.”

“How many are there?” asked Hugh.

“Eighty-eight, just like the keys on a piano,” said Hanna. She gazed across the sky as if she were seeing all of them.

A cool breeze touched the back of his neck, and it was seconds before he realized it was Hanna’s hand. “How’s that feel?”

“Nice, but—”

“Do you live in a house, Hugh?”

“I can’t give you shelter.”

She asked more leading questions, but Hugh turned to the sea’s unfolding. Offshore, a pelican glided one hundred yards, sharply plummeted and smashed into a boil. Greeted by a couple of foraging gulls, the bird reemerged with a plump fish thrashing in its reddening bill. The surfers carved their trails. Hanna picked up the book and read, her voice competing with the crashing waves and crying birds.

“. . . Enrique descended the dimly lit flight of stairs whose tubular enclosure narrowed with each step at a rate that soon he would have to be a mouse to continue. Not being a mouse, he stopped, turned around, and preparing to retreat drew an astonished breath, for he saw that the tube diminished equally in the direction from which he had come. Easier to be a descending than an ascending mouse, he pivoted, hunched his shoulders and dropped another step. The cohort of odd sounds that had drawn him to the passage rose again and was quickly gone. Tucking into himself, Enrique went down a dozen more steps until the passage ended in a small door offering three doorknobs of different shapes: round, square, triangular (Enrique wasn’t sure that a doorknob could be anything other than round, but he couldn’t think of alternative descriptors). He chose the doorknob shaped like his face, grasped the knob tightly and turned. The knob resisted. For his second try, he chose the knob with the shape opposite his face. The knob turned like a pinwheel, but was clearly unattached to a lock. But the third knob did the trick. The door swung open. Enrique shielded his eyes from the dazzling golden light of a huge heap of gilded bones. Peeking through his fingers, fearing he’d stumbled on the lair of a carnivorous monster, he laughed with relief. Not bones but brass instruments: trombones, trumpets and tubas, piled disreputably atop one another, like the discarded shells of crustaceans after a summer feast. Curtains covered each side of the enclosure for the instruments, but above them only sky. One of the curtains stirred and the odd sounds that had drawn Enrique to the passage swelled again. Ah. The brass were being played by the lips and tongues of innocent winds. Enrique dislodged a trombone from the pile. He put it to his mouth to blow, and something sweet dripped from the mouthpiece. He let it drizzle on his tongue but then sucked vigorously. He drained the trombone of its nectar, cast it aside and picked up a tuba. It too was filled with the sweet liquid, which flowed into his mouth in a succulent stream. Emptying the tuba, he blew a triumphant note, and then grabbed a trombone—”

“This is pretty freaky stuff,” said Hanna.

“Keep going,” said Hugh, who could not remember reading the passage, but now found the words utterly compelling.

“All right, let’s see . . .

“. . . Enrique sorted through the instruments, drinking from each one’s lips as a hummingbird might gather its nectar from a thousand flowers . . .”

“Try it, guys. It’s really good.” Hugh held the tubular stem of the plucked honeysuckle flower to Takumi’s lips. Takumi sucked lightly and then forcefully, his cheeks drawing in. The flower emptied, Hugh pulled it from his son’s mouth. “More!” said Takumi. “Try it, Hitoshi. Better than candy!”

For an hour Takumi and Hitoshi drank from the wild honeysuckle. He had told the boys not to mention sucking the juice to their mother. The story was nowhere in the world, yet it had found its way into Kazuki’s novel, transmuted, but recognizable. Or had Kazuki himself drunk from the honeysuckle as a child? It was foolish to think one had a monopoly on experience. There were no two things without correspondence if you were intent on finding it. Or perhaps the boys had told their mother, and Setsuko told her father. That was the most likely explanation, and yet— not as if they had eaten wild mushrooms—but still, they would not tell their mother that. What had been Kazuki’s source?

Hanna set down the book. “You know, I’m easy to live with.” She slid her hand across his. He pulled away, his train of thought broken.

“As I said, I’m a teacher.”

“Well, I’m hardly your student.”

“There’s a principle involved,” said Hugh with sad slyness. “I’ll loan you some money.”

Hanna licked her black stud. “I don’t want money.”

Hugh took the cool Gatorade out of the gym bag and offered it to her. She shook her head languorously, while laying her hand on Hugh’s shoulder.

“I’m going to go for a swim,” he said, sliding from under her hand.

“I’ve made you uncomfortable,” sighed Hanna.

“I came down for a swim.”

“You want me to leave?”

“If you like . . .”

“I can take a hint,” said Hanna. She walked a few feet away, turned and smiled at him and then continued toward the stairs, off to solve her own problems. Maybe to start a new life, but most likely to move back in with Kyle and keep the old one going.

Good-bye, Hanna.

Good luck with your astronomy career. See you in the heavens.

There, too, he would see his sons, if he didn’t see them now.

For that was the long-shot hope. The last chip on the wheel’s green slot.

One more chance to believe.

Hugh waded out and dived, skimming the bottom. He pulled himself through the silence. An arm’s length ahead, sand spurted as a stingray abandoned its disguise. Hugh swam without rising to breathe. Sixty seconds. Seventy seconds. His blood pulsed. The biggest sound in the big sea. He swallowed the swell of his tongue, a trick he’d learned as a boy in the creek behind their home. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness . . .

I’m ready, sons.

His lungs burned as he drew a few oxygen molecules from the stale air. A strand of kelp whipped by his face. A second strand struck Hugh’s chest, like a man making a point. And then he was in it, a tangle of slick smooth snarled tubes, which should have embraced him, but instead provoked a drunken brawl. As he struggled in the kelp like a fish in a collapsing net, his movements drove the mass to the surface, where it popped up like a space capsule, his inhalation a cheer from ground control. He kicked to stay on the surface, working to extract his upper body from the kelp until he realized he was battling the water like someone learning to swim. The kelp was gone. He turned 360 degrees, scanning the rising swell. He turned on his back and stared at the sky until his breathing became regular. Someone blew a whistle. Someone called. He looked toward the shore, saw no one that saw him.

One hundred yards away, a boat motored parallel to shore. It moved slowly, visible one moment, hidden by a swell the next. Behind him, the whistle blew.

Ignoring the whistle, Hugh swam west toward the slow-moving craft, which seemed oddly familiar to him. He had seen the boat somewhere, sometime. He was tugged now by a current that took him toward the surfers. One hundred yards away, the first wave of the set rose. The pack maneuvered in anticipation. Pressed to their boards like lovers, they paddled tenderly, waiting for the sign to attack. The wave rose higher and drew into itself, moving faster now, casting off light and signaling to the experienced where it would crest. Hugh swam hard to keep his distance, but the current pushed him closer. With certainty, the pack broke. A dozen of the strongest arms broke free of the others and paddled furiously to reach the wave at its height. Unable to turn away, Hugh watched the sea hollow out before the wave’s base as the water was sucked into the form. Twenty surfers met the wave and turned, now soaring down its face.

A surfer rocketed toward him. If Hugh could leap like a dolphin, he could catch the surfboard’s tip in his chest, if lucky, piercing his heart like a spear. He would rise to his sons. But he could only watch as the surfboard passed overhead and he fell beneath the wave. Below the surface, the sea turned in on itself, unleashing gravities that pulled him in a dozen directions. He was helpless but couldn’t open his mouth to let it fill him, to let the sea fill him. When he came to the surface he was encased in a cloud of bubbles, in the midst of the surfers who, having missed the first wave, were preparing for the next. No one saw him or no one cared. The second wave was not far off.

In a moment, the lifeguards would spot him among the surfers. He dived, trying to get beneath the boards. If he could just swim until the wave passed overhead, he could lose the surfers and could continue out to sea. He pulled himself ten feet down, kicking hard and pulling forward. A boat’s motor whined. If he could reach the boat, swim into the propeller.

Where are you, sons? Take my hands. Take me.

Just as his breath was exhausted, the wave passed, its force shaking him. He waited five seconds and rose to the surface. As he broke, a light flashed. He turned to its source and saw the boat coming toward him at an oblique angle. On the bow, two boys kneeled, clutching the gleaming safety rail. “Hitoshi! Takumi!” Hugh cried as the boat closed on him. Treading water to suspend himself, he waved his arms frantically. “Sons!” he cried again. The boys, releasing the safety rail, pointed downward at the hull. Hugh gazed in bewilderment as something solid struck him.