Chapter 16

When he returned home from the hospital twelve years ago, Setsuko had asked him where he wanted to put the newspaper, which he would just as well have left on that unmade bed if Setsuko hadn’t taken it. He told her to put it into the black sea chest he’d had since college.

As Hugh slid the trunk from his bedroom closet, he tried to recall when he’d last opened it and for what reason. Perhaps to deposit the pink slip for the Volvo or a copy of an income tax form. He’d taken nothing out in years, certainly not that paper. There was no solace in that angry sea or the misnamed inset photos of his sons. But returning from Topanga Beach, he again considered that strange boat. It had remained offshore all the time that he and the boys had waited. It was there when the boys entered the water. But when Hugh returned to find his sons, the boat was speeding off. He would not allow himself hope, but he wanted to know more about that boat. If he had its name . . . He set the trunk beside his bed and snapped back the latches.

He remembered the trunk overflowing with a lifetime’s paperwork, but it was less than half full. He sorted through the envelopes, canceled checks and faded memorabilia. CDs and ancient tapes. High school and college degrees. Warranties, loan papers and instruction manuals. Setsuko had taken the boys’ documents: the report cards and birth certificates, the sports plaques and medals. She’d taken the photographs too, all of them. He suspected she’d burned them—for what was the point of these two-dimensional memories, false positives of life.

He envisioned the San Diego paper as if it lay before him. The headline: Brothers Missing in Surfing Tragedy. The large photo of the angry sea at Oceanside, the insets of Takumi and Hitoshi, their names reversed, and in the upper left of the photo, the boat. He dug deeper into the trunk’s contents. In ten minutes he’d dug through to the bottom, scratching the ribbed silky fabric. He leafed through everything again, turning each item upside down, snapping and shaking. For a moment, one item held his attention: a glossy brochure for a cemetery, High Meadow.

For years the salesperson had called him to make her low-key pitch: “We have the most beautiful sites and very affordable.” Hugh remembered playing with her, asking inane but not unbelievable questions. What was the history of the land? Were there any Indian burial grounds nearby? Was the ground hard or soft? Clay or loam? What sorts of insects were there? What kinds of birds? (He didn’t like crows or vultures.) How often was the grass cut? Did they employ a night watchman? Was a gravesite ever marred by graffiti? Did they bury atheists at the same depth as Christians or did they give them short shovel? He had thought that the salesperson, Gina, would sooner or later catch on to his whimsical game and stop calling, but Gina had stamina. No matter how outrageous his questions, she would try to answer or say she would research it and get back to him. He did not think she ever got the joke, but if so she hid it well. Eventually he gave up jokes, but after all his joking, he didn’t have the heart to tell her he wasn’t interested. In that lush season of young manhood and success, who can take the grave seriously? And so he put her off with innumerable excuses. He could not remember when Gina stopped calling. He could not remember when the Thursday ritual ended. He wondered if she were still out there, pitching her plots. He would be surprised. Her voice was meek and frail and he imagined her then as a woman in her late sixties, perhaps earning a deserved discount on her own grave.

He tossed the brochure in the trunk, closed the lid and shoved the chest back into the closet.

In the kitchen, he waited for the teapot to whistle.

Perhaps Setsuko had not followed his instruction or perhaps she had taken the newspaper with her when she left.

How difficult would it be to get another copy of the newspaper? He could go to the university library. Perhaps it was available online. Again, he imagined the picture of the surf, the boat. There was a name. There might be a serial number, some sort of registration.

The newspaper was called the San Diego Sol. A bright-yellow smiling sun above the title.

Hugh slipped his cell phone from his pocket and dialed information. The operator informed him that there was no listing. She suggested the San Diego Union.

“No, I’m sure it was the San Diego Sol. Do you have a phone number for a San Diego newsstand?”

“Do you have a name, sir?”

“I don’t know. San Diego News?”

“I’ll try.”

She came back with, “Here is your number.”

“What paper?” asked the gravel-voiced man who answered the phone at the newsstand.

The tea kettle pealed. “Hold on,” said Hugh.

“Hey, I’ve got customers.”

Hugh stretched to turn off the flame. He repeated the name.

“Christ, that paper’s been out of business for years.”

“I’d pay $100 for a copy of the July 16, 2000, edition.”

“You kidding me?”

“If you can find one, any condition, call me. Here’s my number.”

Hugh hung up, and not bothering with the tea, walked into his living room and flopped on the couch, feeling tired and heavy, weighted by the awareness of how quixotic were his thoughts. Taken, which opened the possibility that—

Impossible.

Never once in the years since their disappearance— death—had such a thought occurred to him. But now a vision in the sea, a memory . . .

What could he really see of the boat in the photo?

Quixotic.

But clearly his sons were pointing at the boat’s name. A delusion, meaning nothing or meaning everything.

He gazed across the room at the bookshelf built when he moved into the house. It held perhaps five hundred books, mostly paperbacks. The exception was the row of Kazuki Ono’s novels, the dust jackets still shiny and bright on the hardcovers. When Hugh and Setsuko, three months pregnant, had left Kazuki’s Tokyo home for America, the author had ceremoniously presented Hugh with his first five novels, each dutifully inscribed to his son-in-law. In turn, Hugh had purchased each new novel as it appeared. Deadpan All The Way, Kazuki’s first book, was on the far right; six novels to the left was Living in Camus, which Hugh read shortly after the birth of the twins; two books farther left was Hugh’s favorite, Riding, Riding, Riding, an eight-hundred-page labyrinth attacked by as many American critics as it was lauded by European critics for its strings of coincidence. The Euros maintained that the novel was structured to evoke seriality, a theory that all events are connected, and that coincidences are the visible signs of the interconnection. In the year the twins entered kindergarten, Riding was a best seller for six months. Enrique the Freak, at the moment in the bottom of his gym bag, would complete the collection. Hugh thought of the book, Hanna’s recitation. The passage that had so much brought to mind the memory of his sons’ sipping honeysuckle returned to him with inexplicable urgency—Enrique sorted through the instruments, drinking from each one’s lips as a hummingbird might gather its nectar from a thousand flowers . . .”

He envisioned Takumi’s pretty lips on the honeysuckle stems.

“Try it, Hitoshi. Better than candy!”

Displacing the honeysuckle, the scent of marijuana, an odor that after the sun went down wafted through the canyon like mist, seeped through his open screened window. Pushing off the couch, Hugh peered through the window into his backyard.

Hanna sat on the patch of crabgrass beside his vegetable garden and fed apple slices to a rooster standing between her legs. In her other hand, she held a lit joint. She wore cutoff jeans and a wrinkled green blouse, the tails knotted at her little belly, the canvas for a plump tattooed infant, likely Jesus. Her tan skin glowed, but couldn’t hide the pitted hollows of her cheeks. She opened her mouth wide to pick something resistant from the gap between her two top front teeth. She weighed maybe ninety pounds, not much more than his sons. Her eyes were pale blue, pretty. She wanted to be an astronomer.

As Hugh approached, she rid herself of the bird, wiped her fingers on her jeans and turned. “Why that bruise looks awful. Are you all right?”

“Yes. I was swimming . . . a surfboard.” He tried to smile, but her presence unsettled him. He didn’t have visitors.

“Put raw meat on it. That helps,” she said.

The rooster struck out for the garden, attacking the mesh that kept the birds and rabbits out of the blueberries and tomatoes. The sun hung above the crest of the farthest hill, still spreading its warmth down the canyon. High above, a hawk circled.

“How did you find my place?” Hugh asked.

She stuck out her tongue and moistened the black lip ring, as if it were a plant that needed watering. “I followed your trail.” She laughed. “Asked around the café. Alphonse the plumber told me he did some work for you. I walked up here.” She offered the joint to him.

He waved the offer away.

She took a long drag, looked around. “This is like paradise. Adam and Eve, you know?” She picked up the open penknife lying beside her foot and closed the blade. She offered the joint again. He shook his head. Hanna grinned. “You going to expel me and my rooster from the garden?”

“I’ve got my routine, you know . . .”

“Oh, I know,” Hanna said, grinning.

Ten minutes later, Hugh flopped down in his lounge chair, pressing an ice-filled sock to his forehead. He took the sock away to adjust the ice.

“Looks like a kiss,” said Hanna. She sat on the second chair, lay back, closed her eyes and beamed. The two of them were stretched out like his own parents in their backyard lounge chairs, drinking iced tea and nibbling from a shared bowl of snacks.

Hanna hiccuped, laughed and opened her eyes. She leaned to one side, smiled and tapped Hugh’s shoulder.

“This is nice, you know?”

“I have work to do, Hanna.”

“You always say that. You a workaholic?”

She pulled at her blouse, letting the air in, and then rolled over on her stomach and nestled her head against her arms. He hadn’t noticed her perfume before, a flower child fragrance that smelled like raspberries cooked for a pie. Hanna laughed to herself and then raised her head. “You think they make you work in hell?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“In case I go there.”

“You won’t.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just know it.”

“Well, do they?”

“Some circles.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Hell has circles. A circle for gluttons. A circle for the carnal. A circle for suicides.”

“That’s it?”

“No. There are many circles. And in some, the sinners work.”

“Well, I’ve never worked. Never had a job.”

“Princess Hanna.”

“Hardly. If I needed something, I’d steal it. When I was fourteen, sixteen, I’d steal things all the time, and never get in trouble. They’d always let me go, like I couldn’t have done whatever it was I did. Even if someone saw me, they didn’t see me. I was young, blonde and pretty.”

“A get-out-of-jail-free card.”

“That’s it.” She laughed. “You ever steal anything?”

Dogs bark, boys steal. But in his father’s domain, theft was not a prank. His father had never stolen anything in his life, not an apple off a tree, a fallen apple even. Once, he and his father had been walking and came upon a five-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk. As Hugh stopped to pick it up, his father said leave it, that the person who lost the bill might come back to look for it, and that person surely needed it more than Hugh needed it. Hugh argued that it would be a person other than the owner who found the money and took it. Pirie didn’t bend. We can’t be responsible for that person’s actions, his father said, only for our own. His father was balsa wood in the face of the physical world but his morality was granite. He would no more pick up a stranger’s coin than a strange woman at a bar.

Hanna slipped off her lounge chair and sat at the bottom of Hugh’s. They watched the hawk circle.

“Did you?”

“I suppose . . .”

“So what happened?” she asked, leaning back and resting her head against his thigh.

He nudged her away. “No.”

“It feels so nice.”

“I mean it, Hanna. I don’t want you to.” But his leg felt carved away where her head had lain. One stupid thing jostling another stupid thing for attention. He was afraid that if she touched him again, he’d have her on the ground.

“You don’t like me?” she whined.

“I’d rather you sat in the other chair.”

Hanna pushed against Hugh to get up. The heat of her hand sunk into his leg, radiated to his groin. His throat constricted.

“It wouldn’t hurt you to get a job,” he said, hoping to divert his own thoughts. “You wouldn’t need Kyle then. You could take night courses at the community college. If you want to be an astronomer, do something about it.” Be all you can be. Could he be any more banal?

“Who’s gonna give me a job? Work experience: zero, zilch.”

“Make something up. Say you worked at one of those chain stores that went out of business. They won’t check.”

“I guess . . .”

“It slips away.”

“What does?”

“Everything. You go for a cup of coffee and it’s gone. The whole world vanishes in an instant.”

“Then why bother?”

“Don’t be lazy.”

“Okay, I’ll look for a job, maybe. Happy?”

Hugh nodded, thinking again of the boat. That was his job now.

She brightened. “You read a lot, huh? I see you reading at the P&L. What books should I read?”

“I don’t know. Frankenstein, maybe.”

“Frankenstein? I don’t want to read that.”

“You might be surprised.”

“What’s that story about the guy who goes down to hell to get his girlfriend?”

“Why all this interest in hell?”

Hanna waved her arm. “The flip side of paradise, isn’t it?”

“Orpheus,” said Hugh.

“I like that story. I’m glad he did that. I mean, get her back.”

“He didn’t get her back. Orpheus’s wife, Eurydice, was to follow him out of the underworld, but Hades ordered Orpheus not to look back at her until they both reached the upper world. Just as they were almost there, just as they had it made, Orpheus fucked up. He looked back. Eurydice disappeared then, never to be seen again.”

“Why did that guy who ran hell—what’s his name?”

“Hades.”

“Why did Hades not want him to look back? Why did Hades have that rule?”

“You have to follow the rules, in this world or the next.”

“Maybe he’s like Kyle. Kyle tells me to do things all the time. He doesn’t care about them being done. He just wants to see I follow his orders.”

A fly landed on Hugh’s arm, jumped to his neck, then his cheek. He swatted, missed and imagined that he’d squashed it. The fly relocated to the back of his hand, then his arm again, where he could feel each leg snagging the hairs. Why had he left the beach that day—even for a minute? What the fuck was he thinking? If he had stayed. If he had stayed . . . He touched his forehead. He recalled the boat’s looming hull, the letters that would not emerge from the jumble and blur.

He breathed in the urine-scented air of his hospital room. His head floated above the pillow. He stretched the rattling paper to quiet it, but it would not be still.

A soft pelt and then another. Hugh glanced at the bright green leaves of the dollar tree, then at the fallen ones on the ground. The fallen were pale brown and pale red. One turned redder.

“What the hell?”

“Accident,” Hanna said, setting aside the knife, as she too watched the drop on her wrist form and fall.

“I don’t want you doing crazy things like that. You can’t be here if you’re going to do things like that.” Be here? Why did he say that?

“Jesus, it was a mistake. You never cut yourself?” She licked her finger, drew it over her wrist’s red smear and lay her arm on her leg. Cross-hatching spanned her wrist . . . Beneath the cutting, Hanna’s veins looked as narrow as kite string.

She offered him a shy grin. “I won’t do it again. Promise.”

Hugh sliced the clove of garlic and tossed it into the pan with the tomatoes, mushrooms and oil. The P&L closed at two P.M. He’d have to drive to the café on Ventura to get on the Internet. He would feed her before he embarked on his research.

“Nice table,” said Hanna, fingering the wood.

Hugh nodded. The table was a bamboo and glass construction that Setsuko had chosen and Hugh had inherited after the break-up. The table and chairs had to be twenty years old but showed no sign of weakening except for a few broken strips of raffia. He remembered Setsuko sitting across from him, knife held in her long uncolored fingers, cutting up the boys’ steaks into perfect half-inch squares. She obsessed about what they ate and how they ate it. No canned anything, everything fresh with strict ratios of vegetables to grains, fruits to meat. Meat separated into safe symmetrical pieces. If Hugh slipped in a treat, something sweet, something processed, it would be the cold shoulder for days.

“That smells good.”

“We’ll eat and then I’ll drive you back down.”

“I love Italian food,” she said, pretending not to have heard. “Mexican, of course. Thai, too. You know those flat noodles with lobster sauce? Yum. The only thing Kyle and I eat is Top Ramen and those plastic cans of soup, which is all right. My mother was a good cook. Roast beef and potatoes. She tried to teach me to cook, but I never listened. I didn’t want to know, just seemed like something else I’d have to do if I ever learned it.”

“That’s very . . . practical.”

Hanna yawned and stretched her arms. Her shirt rose on her belly. Hugh glanced away and lit the gas under the pot of water. In the days following his return from the hospital, when Setsuko still seemed capable of forgiveness, there were several nights when the passion was as strong as during courtship. It started with Hugh talking about the boys, and Setsuko coming on to him as if out of a dream. She would go to sleep afterward, though Hugh would lie awake, touching her hair, breathing in her delicious scent, pressing his lips to her cool arms.

One night Hugh dragged her to a support group, composed of people who had lost sons and daughters. They listened to other people’s stories and they were all painful, but had no bearing on their own loss. They were just stories and Hugh knew that this was true for all the others. But the others had at least buried their children. Even the ones that had been in horrible automobile accidents like the couple who were driving home from buying Christmas presents when a tractor-trailer plowed into them, compressing the rear half of the car to three feet and the two children to shadows. They buried shadows. But better shadows or skeletons than . . . nothing.

But on that night, too, Setsuko and he had made fierce love. Hugh pushed away from the memories.

He opened a bottle of white and set it on the table with two glasses. He asked Hanna if she liked wine and she nodded. He filled the glasses and then set down the plates.

“You’re not going to lay a napkin on my lap?”

She seemed transparent, not hiding anything, and yet he wondered if it was a clever mask. Perhaps she and Kyle plotted to rob him in the night. She’d leave the door open, and in the morning his money and valuables and Hanna would be gone. Hugh twirled the linguine onto his spoon.

“Why do you do that?”

He put the linguine in his mouth and chewed, enjoying the texture of the tomatoes and the earthy taste of the mushrooms.

“The pasta doesn’t trail over your chin,” replied Hugh.

“I always thought it was just showing off. You know, the way people do these little things so others will notice them. The way they always want the pepper ground over their food, or their martinis dry.”

She drew up a forkful of the pasta and shoved it in her mouth. “Wow, this is good,” she said, her mouth open, the pasta gushing out, childlike. He didn’t watch her eat after that, staring at the reddening sky. She cleaned her plate, leaned back and burped. Hugh expected her to draw out a toothpick and pat her stomach. No, he didn’t desire her.

“Shit,” said Hanna, jumping up.

“What? What?”

“Pecky. I forgot about my rooster.”

He followed her outside.

“Here, Pecky! Here, Pecky!”

Hanna dashed about the yard, looking under bushes, behind trees. Ten yards down the path, a small coyote emerged from the underbrush, its head turned away. It didn’t move, perhaps assuming it couldn’t be seen in the shadows. Hugh walked to the path, held his finger to his lips. The coyote remained frozen. As Hugh drew closer, the coyote turned, its mouth filled with rooster.

The coyote made eye contact, and keeping Hugh in view, started walking away. It didn’t seem in a hurry, as if it knew that Hugh had no chance of catching it. Hugh walked slowly and tried not to panic the animal, which kept its distance. The animal stopped again and Hugh charged forward. The coyote didn’t move. Would it turn into Setsuko as in some magic-realist tale? But the coyote remained a coyote as Hugh slammed into it. The animal took three quick strides and vaulted into the shadows.

“Dad, let’s chase it!” shouted the twins.

“Go, right, Takumi! Left, Hitoshi!”

“What’s happening?”

Hugh picked up the bedraggled but live rooster and carried it back to its mistress.

Holding her rooster in her lap, Hanna sat on the couch and watched television as Hugh cleaned the dishes. By the time he was finished Hanna was asleep. The rooster watched Hugh with interest and admiration.

Hugh turned on the local news. Budget cuts. A brush fire near the Getty. A picture of the surf at Trestles. The reporter announced that for the next few days the surf would be enormous. Seven- and eight-foot swells were coming. The video showed surfers and Boogie Boarders. There would be a riptide.

He watched Hanna and the rooster, wondering if the rooster might shit on her. It would get cold later. He put a blanket over Hanna and the rooster, who winked at Hugh.

He would let her sleep and wait until morning to search the cloud.

In the dream, Hugh was teaching. The class was unruly and he was being observed, officially observed, though the observer was not to be seen. He had nothing to teach. No lesson plans. The observer who could not be observed was taking notes. If he could get the children in their chairs. He yelled a few words in Farsi.

“Gooshkan! Book Sha!”

A young Israeli girl, perhaps eleven but younger looking, raised her blouse, revealing her belly. It was covered in intersecting lines. Another girl, Indian, blushed and cried out, “Mr. Mac! Mr. Mac! Look what she’s doing!” “Please put that down,” said Hugh. “You can’t do that. Cover yourself.”

The students were marching in single file. There had been a fire alarm. But they weren’t marching toward the physical education field, but toward the library. From which flames were shooting.

Hugh coughed up blood. The observer was angry. “Where are your lesson plans?”

A hand moved across his thigh, the touch hard, insistent. It wasn’t a dream touch. He recognized the thing beside him as a body, its contours firm, but giving. The calf bone against his.

His penis hardened and she moved to it. He remained still as she wrapped her hand around him—lips at his ear.

“Let me, huh?”

“No,” he said turning away. “Go to sleep, Hanna. Just go to sleep.”

But Hugh did not sleep.