Chapter 43

Without taking sleeping pills, Hugh slept well, waking with the energy of a ten-year-old boy. In the morning, he put on his sneakers and shorts and ran three miles. He ran through the hills and then on the roadside, and then back into the hills. It was his rule that when he ran, he never rested until he finished the distance. He pushed on, through watery legs and burning lungs. He ran with drink strapped to his hip and his ear leashed to an iPod, Radiohead playing at maximum volume. Today, Kazuki’s promise replaced the lyrics of every song.

The last leg of his run was the most difficult. For seventy-five yards, the path climbed a bare hill, the slope increasingly steep toward the summit. During the final ten yards his breathing became pure pain, his heart a burnt-out motor, his legs leaden. But today he ran the uphill stretch as if he were bounding across the moon. By the end of his cool-down, it was seven A.M., and though there was plenty of light, the sun hadn’t yet broken above the eastern crest. He uncapped the bottle and drank so thirstily that he choked. He spewed the green liquid over a listless lizard that vibrated for an instant and then returned to its torpor.

Sitting on the ground, Hugh assumed the yoga position that he had learned ten years before while sitting beside a woman with a serene face and breasts like half loops of rope.

Who had set him on the path to the truth? These were the things that God did, when God was around. He took out the picture of his sons in Japan. Their shorn heads made them look like Buddhist monks. How did they adapt to the Japanese language? How did they do in high school? What were their first girlfriends like? Did they play sports? But of course they played sports. Basketball, he supposed, although they were good baseball players, too. He envisioned a continuum of activities, and he saw them growing along the continuum. The sun broke over the hills behind him, its warmth on his back. Flashing across the hills to the sea, the sunlight exposed a wide white line advancing toward the shore. Did they ever surf again? He imagined of course that they would have. He traced their faces with his finger.

“All,” Hugh murmured. Kazuki had said all. You’ll find it all at your former house. Kazuki was not supposed to call him until late afternoon. He had plenty of time.

Hugh parked in front of the Studio City home. Was there an occupant to let Hugh inside the home? What was all?

Hugh got out of the car, walked to the front door and knocked.

No answer. No movement.

He knocked again, producing the same result.

As he unlatched the side gate, he heard a loud car engine. He glanced over his shoulder but saw nothing on the street.

He entered the backyard, pausing to examine the old valley oak. The crook of the tree was twenty feet from the ground and he couldn’t see the planks.

He knocked on, and then tried the handle of, the back door.

He wouldn’t break into the house. He knew a way in.

On the south side of the house, Hugh kneeled before the crawl space. It was covered by wire mesh, along which several fat green caterpillars crawled. He pulled off the caterpillars, which spewed cool, electric-green juice over his fingers, and lined the insects at his feet, where they withered and darkened. A baby rat or mouse wobbled by, crying as if poisoned. Unhooking the mesh, Hugh poked his head into the opening and scanned. To his right was the bathroom, its copper pipes glowing. If he crawled straight forward, he’d be under the hallway. The outer wall of the third bedroom would start twenty feet forward. The closet would be six feet from the path below the hallway. He put one hand inside the crawl space and felt the cool coating. It wasn’t dirt or dust, but a soft gray particulate, almost like powder, perhaps to tamp down the dry earth. He touched it like a cat testing water, his fingers curved so that the least amount of flesh would be polluted.

Hugh shimmied through the opening. He stretched his arm back to grab the flashlight, but his hand closed on air. He raked his fingers across the ground, but the flashlight had disappeared. He considered backing out and searching, but he noticed that light spilled into the crawl space from cracks in the floor and elsewhere. He wouldn’t need the flashlight. He crept forward, his fingernails unearthing lumps of rat shit beneath the dust. As something scampered across his periphery, he lifted his head and rammed his skull on a cross beam, from which protruded a gleaming nail. He crawled another ten feet. The space went pitch black, as if a dense fog were rolling through. Hugh heard more scampering, longer flights. A sheet of light appeared a short distance away. Hugh scuttled toward it. Now four sheets of light, a rectangle of light outlining the trapdoor. He crawled beneath it. Turning on his back, he rested his head against the ground, bent his arms and raised his hands, fixing his palms on the wood. He pushed, but it held fast. Drawing up his knees, he shifted his position for leverage. He arched his back and exhaled as if on the last repetition of a bench press. The wood groaned and gave a little. He pushed harder. Above, something shifted, fell with a clunk. He pushed the panel higher until he saw a row of shirts and pants hanging above. He hooked his hands on the carpeted floor and pulled himself through the opening.

A large cardboard box lay on its side, its contents having spilled across the closet floor. Hugh picked up a tiny worn leather football from the heap of sports equipment. He pressed it to his lips, smelled the fragrant leather, inhaling forcefully to find the oil of his sons’ fingerprints.

Clutching the ball, he crawled from the closet. The cedar bunk beds lay unmade, the pillows ruffled, the sheets tangled. Baseball bats, fishing poles and archery sets leaned against the walls, whose pale green surfaces were hardly visible beneath the dozens of glossy posters: gravity-defying skateboarders, berm-hugging dirt bikes, azure-tunneled surfers. Hugh picked up a shirt, pulled it to his face, found the scent of his sons, and within that, their freshly washed skin and hair.

Everything was back.

He got no farther than the living room when he had to stop and lean his back against the divider that had served as the family’s bookcase. The air was filled with his sons’ movements: the spurts on all fours, the great leaps from floor to couch, the thump of their elbows and knees as they wrestled on the carpet.

It was all there. Everything that Setsuko had purportedly given away: the skateboards, bicycles, radio-controlled cars, baseball bats, footballs and spinning rods.

At the end of the hall the door was closed on the small den that Setsuko had used as a studio. Hugh touched the handle. She liked him to knock first. He knocked and then opened the door. He did not expect to see her, and yet . . .

The easels, the brushes, the finished and unfinished work, all had been returned. Hugh picked up one painting, but set it down when he saw the one behind. He held up the watercolor, a seascape: “Mother’s Beach.”

Kazuki had gathered it all, as if it might restore what was taken away. Hugh set down the painting. He walked from the studio into the kitchen where he drew a glass of water. On the table was a key, unused a decade, but remembered.

Standing at the garage door, Hugh fit the key into the padlock, finessed the rusty tumblers and removed the lock from the latch. He raised the door, watched the spiders scramble as light filled the cluttered space that had never held one car, much less two. Tricycles and skateboards, deflated rubber pools, bassinets and mechanical rockers, model planes and punching bags, fire trucks and model train tracks. In the center of it all, open path around its perimeter, was a Plexiglas storage container the length and shape of a coffin. Hugh ran his hand along the slick surface, but like one of those crashed alien spaceships, it offered not a seam. Would it open by itself? A skeletal green hand slither out? But, wait, it was not strange at all. Why should it be strange? Hadn’t he bought it?

Hugh hunched down, located a round indentation on the forward face and pushed. The top yawned as if awoken from a decade of sleep. Hugh peered at the container’s contents.

He was fathoms below the water’s surface, slowly rising toward the light, which was not the light of the sun, but a softer, ivory light.

Inside the Plexiglas box, fitted as if reversed forks whose tongs intertwined, were Hitoshi’s and Takumi’s surfboards. Hugh lifted the top one, Takumi’s. He ran his hand along the smooth bottom, followed the curve of the fins and pulled the board to his lips. He then lifted Hitoshi’s, pressed his hand to the painted palm tree bent under the wind. Holding the two boards to him as if they were his living sons, he gazed at the open traveling case. From this Kazuki had created Enrique’s magical chamber, out of which Hugh had now escaped.