~ Masks ~
The teahouse, a bamboo structure with many airy rooms connected by walkways and curved bridges, allowed customers views of the pond and gardens while cleverly obscuring views of the tea drinkers in other rooms. A carp splashed in the black waters where reflected lantern light undulated like liquid moons. Palm fronds danced on light breezes tumbling down the mountainsides. Tiles resembling fish scales covered the roofs. Tiles imprinted with chrysanthemums capped the peaks of the roofs.
The teahouse cocooned him. Hid him. His hands kept stealing in and out of his trouser pockets, checking that his yen notes and coins hadn’t slipped out onto the bench. He waited.
Tatters of last night’s dream clung with him, fluttering in his consciousness as vividly as an actual memory. In the dream he was standing at the back door of the barracks bungalow. With the knowledge that comes with dreams, he knew he’d grown up, while everyone else had not. A lawn mower groaned somewhere on the dream barracks and he woke up with a tumescent penis. He took care of that.
He hadn’t heard a lawn mower since he and his father had moved to Japan. The noise was lost from memory until the dream revived it. This realization didn’t sadden him.
A petite woman surprised him when she appeared at his side, and in a whispery voice asked him what he’d like. In Japanese, he told the hostess he was waiting for friends.
He must have misspoken for she brought a chubby clay teapot and two blue and white cups to the table. She placed a kettle of water on the burner attached to the table. Ken smiled at her. She bowed and backed away.
He imagined Mrs. Watanabe saying, We apologize. We are sorry to arrive late. We hope you were not waiting long. She apologized often—for the weather, for his misunderstandings, for her notion that her English was flawed—making him uncomfortable on her behalf. He imagined himself saying, No. I got here a second ago, knowing that they would know it was a face-saving lie, and Yasuko would give him a special grin, signaling that he’d said the proper thing.
Worried that he’d chosen the wrong room in which to wait for the Watanabes, he crossed a walkway to the most remote tearoom. When his eyes adjusted to the darkened room, he saw a Negro soldier. The soldier reached across the table and extended one finger. The Japanese woman seated across from him placed her hand beneath his finger, and slowly pulled her hand away so his finger stroked the back of her hand once, lightly. She rested her hand on her lap.
Ken made his way back to the room he’d waited in originally. The three Watanabes turned toward him, faces full of concern.
“I went to the wrong room,” he said.
“We apologize for the inconvenience,” Mrs. Watanabe said.
He looked at Yasuko who gave him a big, American-style smile. The afterimage of the soldier’s dark strong hand and the ethereal small one floated in his mind’s eye. He slid in on the bench beside Yasuko.
Mrs. Watanabe said something to Mr. Watanabe causing him to nod. He ordered salted watermelon seeds and dried plums. Mr. Watanabe orchestrated the conversation with excruciating politeness and precision, asking Ken what he thought of the tea, the humidity, the dried plums. He passed the conversation to his wife, who invited Yasuko into the discussion. The pattern exhausted Ken. His hand crept to Yasuko’s side and found her fine-boned hand, squeezed it gently. She squeezed in answer while telling her mother that yes, she believed it was possible for one to write pleasing haiku using English, however a degree of the poem’s sublimity might be lost, and therefore, the English language was more suited to the freedom of Shakespearean blank verse.
“Ah, I am getting value for the bucks at girls’ school!” Mr. Watanabe’s eyes glittered. Everyone laughed.
Ken laughed longest, relishing the moment when he was going to inform Wizard he didn’t understand the Japanese as well as he’d imagined.
Mr. Watanabe doused the green leaves in the clay teapot with hot water from the large kettle for an additional steeping, implying they were going to enjoy another round of tea, and Ken would have more time to sit beside Yasuko. The Watanabes weren’t disguising unpleasant feelings about Ken. Look at them laughing, treating him warmly, and nurturing his relationship with Yasuko. No booby traps buried here.
He waggled a chopstick, creating the optical illusion that it was flexible, as if it were made of rubber. Only Yasuko appreciated this trick, so he laid the chopstick down. He’d teach her how to do it when her folks weren’t around.
“When we are in Japan, we do so miss our friends and relatives residing in California,” Mrs. Watanabe said to Ken. “Oddly, when we are in L.A. we pine for Japan. Don’t you miss your mother greatly?”
“Um, I, sort of...” Ken removed his hand from Yasuko’s. He noted that the tealeaves floated in the same position as if skewered on an invisible axle as he turned the teacup, turned the teacup. “My mom. It’s a long story. She was fulfilling her filial duty. She committed suicide.” His great discomfort with this lie, at least, was authentic.
Yasuko’s parents murmured consolations in Japanese.
Yasuko clasped his hand. “Losing one parent is a misfortune. Losing two would be a disaster. Could we possibly meet your father, the Colonel Paderson?”
Mr. Watanabe grimaced over some bitter tea. Mrs. Watanabe, smiling tightly, laced her fingers together as if to prevent an “unexpected” something from escaping.
“He’s just a captain,” Ken said. “He’s real busy with stuff. He’s working on a top-secret investigation. It’s impossible to meet him. He’s never home.”
The smile wilted on Mrs. Watanabe’s face. Ken felt his own face flush hot as he followed her gaze, and it brought him to his and Yasuko’s hands entwined on the table top. He released her hand.
“I heard you take correspondent courses for your schooling. I think you are a hard worker to study without a teacher,” Mrs. Watanabe said.
“It’s not too hard.”
His face deadpan, Mr. Watanabe contributed: “Yasuko will be happy to return to her school and hit her books this coming semester. She will depart for L.A. in two days to register at school, and meet her student advisor. She is enthusiastic. She will make long memories with this evening.”
Ken looked to Yasuko for an explanation. She would not meet his eyes. She pushed something into his hand beneath the table.
“Ken!” At the sound of his name, he pulled his hand away from Yasuko’s as if scalded.
“Dad, what are you doing here?”
Mr. and Mrs. Watanabe rose from the bench and bowed deeply—too deeply, in Ken’s opinion, for a gaijin warehouse man. Paderson watched until the Japanese couple completed their bowing ritual, and then he extended his right hand.
Mr. Watanabe shook Paderson’s hand, again bowing.
“What a fortuitous coincidence. We were talking about meeting you,” Mr. Watanabe said. “What a pleasure it is meeting you. Please sit with us and drink tea.”
“You hate green tea,” Paderson said to Ken.
“No, Dad. You do.”
Ken was biting down swear words, trailing his father who chopped out long strides through the darkness, where ghosts of steam escaped fissures in the earth.
Captain Paderson barked, “Double time it, double time it, soldier.”
“You didn’t have to embarrass me like that. They were being extra nice to you.”
“You’re lucky I didn’t whip your butt on the spot, wise guy.”
“I thought you were in Nagasaki.”
“I thought you were with Abernathy. You lied to me.”
“You lied to me first. You said you were going to Nagasaki.”
“That was misinformation for Operation Valiant. Why did you lie?”
“Because I don’t want to have to beat you up.”
Paderson halted, lifted his shoulders by millimeters. Ken stopped too, poised on the balls of his feet a few paces behind his dad. A fertile, eternal silence. Then Paderson continued onward saying, “I forbid you to see that girl and her Jap family again.”
“She’s Issei. She doesn’t count as a real Japanese.”
“You have your orders.”
“How come it’s OK for you to be with a Japanese girl, but I can’t?” The question stung his tongue. He couldn’t fool himself that Wizard had been wrong. Although the Watanabes were being kind, civil, and the consummate hosts, they’d had no intention of allowing their daughter to become involved with him.
“I’m not with a Japanese girl,” Paderson countered.
“Yeah, you were. That night I went to the bonfire, there was a naked girl in your room.”
Paderson kept walking, throwing his words over his shoulder. “I paid her. I didn’t love her.”
“You don’t love anybody. That’s why Mom isn’t with us.”
Ken felt dizzy. His knees buckled. His dad lurched forward, waving his arms, trying to find handles in the air. The ground wrenched beneath them. Father and son splayed their legs, and watched each other as earth’s tectonic plates readjusted. Roof tiles clinked when they slipped free, broke and settled under the eaves of homes and shops. For a millisecond, other than the slapping of mineral water against the ofuro stonewalls, the night world was unnaturally noiseless. And then the dogs took up barking.
“Come on. The earthquake’s over.” Paderson’s heartbeat could be heard in his throbbing voice.
“I know.” Was the earth still moving or not, or was he moving? It was impossible to tell. His imagination never forgot the sensation of blood and fluids sloshing within his own skin, which was what tremors felt like.
“What the...?” Paderson exclaimed, pointing into the jungle brush to the right of them.
Ken turned to glimpse the cloud shape his father saw at the edge of the path. It tumbled in front of them, and climbed up a low bough.
“Albino macaque,” he told his father. And once again he wondered how it came to be that he knew so much more about this world than his father did.
Thanks to the earthquake-resistant shelving system, the warehouse sustained negligible damage during last night’s tremors. The doorframe had been knocked askew, and a ceramic hanging chopstick holder Wizard stored his silver-tipped chopsticks in had popped off the wall and shattered on the floor. Ken kicked green ceramic shards against the wall.
“Throw those away,” Wizard said distractedly.
Ken sighed, but gathered up the green shards nevertheless, and grabbed a length of twine from the trashcan. Neko twisted in the air, failing to snag the twine Ken whipped at her, always out of the cat’s reach. He made her run in circles and dive under the desk, and pounce this way and that way. Ken broke his concentration when Wizard emptied a drawer full of blank forms into a trash box. Neko sunk her front claws into Ken’s hand, biting him while rabbitting her back legs, instinctively trying to disembowel her victim.
“Ouch! Stupid cat.” He smacked her snout harder than he’d intended.
Neko slunk into a corner where she daintily licked her paw, feigning disinterest in her tormentor and his string.
Ken waited for Wizard to tell him he’d been asking for it and got exactly what he deserved from the cat, but instead Wizard said, “A wise man used to counsel me not to chew on what’s eating me.”
Ken ignored the invitation to unburden his mind.
Wizard continued throwing away unused forms, and reorganizing the contents of his file cabinet. Stacks of new material requisition and control forms, with fewer lines to fill out and only two, not multiple, copies attached, bound with the kind of twine Ken had been taunting the cat with lay on the desk.
“Put those in this drawer,” Wizard said. He pointed to the stacks on his desk.
“I ain’t your slave.”
“I’m not your babysitter. Be useful, be friendly, or be gone.”
“What’s got into you lately?” Ken carried one stack to the file cabinet and let it drop noisily into the empty drawer.
Wizard made a pitying smile.
“I sat all damn morning in the bamboo forest waiting for Sikung to show up, but he never did!” It burst out in a gush, and Ken felt immediate relief, relief and remorse, too, for acting like a prick toward Wizard. And his cat.
“Sikung Wu left yesterday morning for the Pan American Gerontology Congress in Brasília.”
“You mean the new city in Brazil?” he asked.
“That’s the one.”
A rag ball of questions jumbled up. Finally, Ken asked, “Does Sikung speak Spanish?”
“Yes, and Portuguese, the national language of Brazil.”
“What’s geron lodgie?”
Wizard explained the meaning of gerontology. He explained that Sikung Wu was a keynote speaker at the conference. He explained that gerontologists were interested in applying Western scientific tests to measure and document the effects of chi gung on the quality of life of elderly...
Sikung Wu’s words, nonsensical-seeming then, came back to Ken. During their last meeting in the bamboo grove, the master had said: Your body is a vessel of your history and a premonition of your future. Practice chi gung each day or you will lose yourself. Chi gung is yours. It is something you can take everywhere. It costs nothing. It weighs nothing. No one can steal chi gung from you. In light of Wizard’s news about the master’s journey to Brasília, the remembered lecture rang of finality.
“When’s Sikung coming back?”
“I haven’t the foggiest.” Wizard cleared a space on the desk and wiped the surface with a cloth. He divvied the contents of a bento onto two plates. “Practice what he’s taught you.”
“That’s boring. I want to learn how to flip somebody.” He flipped a chopstick into the air and caught it.
“That’s peculiar,” Wizard said thoughtfully. For a moment, he intently inspected a memory or a half-forgotten idea. Seated, he duck-walked his wheeled chair over to the door.
Takuya walked by the door with a baseball mitt in one hand and the mask of Shishiko swinging at his side.
There was nothing to be said that both Ken and Wizard didn’t already know.