Chapter 35

Fingal’s Cave/34
THE ARROW

“. . . For their fifteenth birthday,” said Katashi, “I presented Brent and James with mountain bikes and took them and my daughter on a holiday to a cousin’s farm.

“For a day or two they were happy enough riding the bikes through fields and over hills, but on the third day, while exploring my cousin’s barn, they found a store of sports equipment, including sets of bows and arrows. Brent sorted through the gear.

“‘We should leave it alone,’ said James. ‘Mom wouldn’t—’

“‘Stop worrying,’ said Brent. ‘Pretend Dad is here.’

“A quarter mile from the house in an open field, they set down their bikes, shouldered their quivers and set their bows. Brent and James emptied their cases, but for one last arrow in Brent’s: a hunting arrow. High above, a seagull floated.”

“‘Bet I can hit it,’ said Brent.

“‘No way.’

“Brent withdrew the arrow and gazed at the razor-sharp, blue-steel tip.

“‘Let’s retrieve the arrows,’ said James, darting away.

“Brent set the hunting arrow, drew the cord and aimed,” said Katashi, miming the action of his grandson.

“‘Now,’ Brent whispered, sliding his fingers from the bowstring. He watched the arrow climb. Closer. Closer. There! But no, the arrow passed before the bird, reached its apogee, turned, floated for an instant, and then gathered speed. The arrow would strike the ground at 150 mph.

“‘Did you see that?’ asked Brent, glancing toward his brother, who had vanished. Brent’s heart leaped as he saw James one hundred feet away, beneath the very spot where the hunting arrow would fall.

“‘James!’ he screamed, and it was to that fearful cry that their mother, who had come out of the house to summon the boys to breakfast, responded.

“Brent dropped his bow and ran toward James, who plucked his arrows like a child picking dandelions.

“‘Get out of there!’ screamed Brent. ‘Arrow!’

“But James merely lifted his head to look toward his brother. Nor could he have seen the now-invisible arrow, racing through unavailable time.

“‘James, cover!’ Brent shouted. The sound was hardly more than a handclap. Protruding from James’s neck, the shaft was still vibrating as Brent took his brother’s weight, and pulled the arrow from his brother’s throat, which uncapped the artery. Brent screamed, as did Sumiko who ran toward them. Holding the arrow and drenched in his brother’s blood, Brent looked up at his approaching mother and then plunged the shaft into his own heart.

“Screaming for help, Sumiko fell to her knees beside her dead and dying sons. She cradled their heads in her lap, tried to breathe life back into James, listened to Brent confess what had happened. She pressed her hands to their wounds, but with all her strength and all her great will, she could not save them. Unless—”

Katashi covered his mouth, breathed into his hand. He bent his head. His hand floated up as if weightless.

“When I came out, I found my grandsons alive and my daughter dead, an arrow through her heart. James and Brent were unwounded but swore to what had happened.

“‘She vanished, Grandfather. And then I saw above me the gull circling. There was the sound of an arrow flying and then the scream of the gull, the arrow in its breast. It fell, spun, but never landed. And then beside us was our mother with an arrow in her heart, and James and I unwounded.’”

Katashi put his fingers to his lips, tore out a smile. “Can one turn back time? Can one turn herself into another thing? Or was this an elaborate lie my grandsons had come up with to explain a terrible deed or mistake.” The smile flickered, went out. “I only knew that my daughter was dead.”

Yuudai drove his hand through the stupid red locks, still wet from the sea. He had wanted to crush Katashi, but Yuudai was the one squeezed of life.

Katashi glanced down at the puddle, which appeared to be spreading across the floor and gaining depth. It’s coming for me, he thought, the water wants me. Wants me back.

Katashi put his hand on Yuudai’s, uncurled his fingers from the knife’s handle. Katashi held the blade’s hilt in two hands, centered the blade over his own midsection.

Someone knocked on the door. Yuudai turned.

“Dad?” asked a soft voice through the wood.

Fingal’s Cave/Epilogue

The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg hypothesized that narrative is rooted in hunting societies, derived from the hunter reading the clues of his invisible prey: scat, spittle, trails, fur, odors, entangled feathers, broken twigs. In deep forests or vast prairies, the hunter must instantaneously recognize and decipher from the track such subtleties as the trail’s age, the animal’s gender and even its emotional state. The hunter had to assemble the whole from the part, a complex and demanding process that the historian found traceable to “the narrative axis of metonymy.” The hunter told a story based on the all-but-invisible signs, a sequence of causes and effects that was nothing less than a plot. In a nutshell, Ginzburg argued that the hunter’s story told over the millenniums led to the invention of writing, which generated the myriad forms of the reading of shit, blood, piss, pus, guts, fur, feather and stink. From piss to Proust, but never escaping that old tale: No mystery, no narrative.