The Earthquake Bird (6 page)

The local newspaper had prepared a piece about Lucy the Tragic Mute Genius. There is one thing above all that Lucy has never
been able to tolerate and that is presumption about Lucy. So complacent, so unquestioning they wrote their fantasy about her
loneliness, her reach for chess as a desperate last hope of communication with the world. Lucy had taken up chess precisely
because there was no need to speak. Check can be communicated with the eyes and eyebrows. If some pedant insists on the use
of the word, it can be written on the back of the hand. So at the prize-giving ceremony she opened her mouth and spoke clearly
but casually into the microphone, “Thanks,” as if she had been speaking every day. Checkmate. Except that she had only cornered
herself. Once she had spoken again, it was impossible to rediscover the silence.

At secondary school, Lucy made a friend, her first and only friend until she left home at eighteen. Her name was Lizzie. Although
Lucy was speaking now, the other children had long ago pronounced her weird. Lucy accepted weirdness as her definition and
quite naturally took to her role of friend to other weirdos. Lizzie was as gangly as Lucy was stumpy. Even at eleven, she
was as tall as the tallest teachers. She had long, lank hair and a thin, sad face. They made each other look stranger but
they had plenty in common. Lucy played the cello and Lizzie the trombone. Sometimes they played together during the ten-minute
breaks between lessons. They would find a corner of a classroom or the playground and play simple duets based on pieces stolen
from the school orchestra, or songs they heard on the radio. They were a freak show and, naturally, people stared, sneered,
sometimes teased. But no one ever tried to stop them.

They had nothing to complain about. They enjoyed being left on their own. Name-calling from these bumpkins couldn’t wound.
They made many attempts at inventing their own language, though they usually failed. But in French class they bounded ahead
of the other pupils. Lucy and Lizzie read Asterix books, copied words out of their French dictionaries, spoke together in
French. Where they didn’t know the vocabulary or grammar, they invented it and pronounced it with French accents copied from
Debbie Harry on
Top of the Pops
. They truly believed they were speaking French, though now Lucy wonders if any French person would have understood a word
they said.

But it was not enough to satisfy Lucy. (Was anything?) The secret language was not sufficiently secret to guarantee total
separation from others. And anyway, Lizzie was always taking time off school because she thought she was sick. Over the years
she contracted cancer, arthritis, lumbago, flu, meningitis, gout, dengue fever, and more. Lucy knew Lizzie couldn’t have had
all of them but she suffered as though Lizzie did. Lucy was as strong as an ox and lonely without her friend.

While Lizzie’s imagination traveled through the pages of a medical dictionary, Lucy’s fervor was for the atlas. She kept the
meager family map and atlas collection under her bed with a flashlight. She studied a country every night, its mountain ranges,
rivers, and, most of all, its language. A school trip to the British Museum led to Lucy’s epiphany. She saw the Rosetta Stone
for the first time, and realized the weak point of her education. The Roman alphabet. While the other teenagers chattered
around her, Lucy stared at the stone. The hieroglyphics tantalized her with their hidden meaning but she knew there was a
message there for her. The message was that she should learn a language that no one she knew would be able to read, never
mind speak.

Lucy left Yorkshire and went to London to study Japanese. She chose London because after enduring her small town at the edge
of England it didn’t occur to her that there could be anything better than its exact opposite, the capital. She selected Japanese
after some deliberation. Chinese required the study of over six thousand characters whereas Japanese used a paltry two to
three thousand. On that point China was in the lead. But the map won the day. Japan was slightly farther away from England
and that was an important consideration. Japan was almost as far as you could go without starting to slip around the globe
toward home again, unless you went to Australia, but that didn’t count because they spoke English. There were no tears, only
relief on all sides. Most of the brothers had left home and this had pushed Lucy and Miriam uncomfortably close. George had
died of grief for Noah two years before, in the arms of a woman who wasn’t Miriam, and that was that.

At university Lucy made the exciting discovery that her body ran most efficiently not on her previous diet of fish fingers,
Eccles cakes, or even raw cooking apples, but on a regular intake of alcohol and sperm. It made her healthier, happier, and
more intelligent. She went for men who were already drunk when they met her, for they would not be put off by her strange
eyes. She found that her eyes gave the drunkard something to focus on. Her academic grades soared. It became easier and easier
to learn the kanji and fun to practice writing them out. After three years and a lot of sex, Lucy could barely remember the
names of the seven (six) brothers and considered herself ready to graduate.

She didn’t contact Miriam. She decided she would only speak to her mother if Miriam called or wrote first. Miriam never did.
So when Lucy left her cozy hall of residence and set off for Japan, there was no need for an explanation.

She found an apartment and worked for several companies, editing documents, translating presentations and instruction manuals.
Finally, four years ago, she settled in her current position. She became a translator and editor for a small industrial translation
company. With no understanding of engineering, electronics, or even electricity—though she was born under a changing lightbulb—Lucy
spent her days putting Japanese sentences into English, twisting the words so that the end went at the beginning, articles
and plurals appeared, vagaries became specifics.

And here my story drew toward its happy conclusion.

Tokyo was more than Lucy could have hoped for. Too big ever to be found there, too noisy to have to listen to anything, too
expensive to worry about saving any money. And under the chaos, a cool and quietly beating heart. An organ that pumped blood
through stooping centenarians, three-year-old Nintendo whiz kids, office workers with no time for meals or sleep, and university
students with all the time in the world.

Teiji was asleep before I’d finished. Actually, he fell asleep just after I’d started. I knew, but I didn’t stop because I
saw that my story was becoming a nice lullaby for him. I didn’t think it rude of him to sleep; he had realized as soon as
I’d started to speak that his question was not going to be answered, at least not that day. And it was all for the best. If
he’d known I was a child murderer, he might not have loved me anymore.

K
ameyama puts his elbows on the table, clasps his hands under his chin.

“I’ve asked you the same question ten times. Let me put it to you again. Why did you argue with Lily Bridges? What had happened
to cause the incident witnessed by your neighbor?”

“I was angry. I told you.”

“Why?”

I don’t want to lie. I like to be truthful but any truths I tell will get me into trouble, and so honesty is out of the question.

“Nothing much. Some trivial thing.”

The day I went apartment hunting with Lily left me uncomfortable. She had reminded me of my childhood and caused me to wonder
where I was. Teiji arrived at my apartment early that evening. A few hours had passed since I’d parted with Lily and I was
almost grounded again in Tokyo. Lily was beginning to seem like a strange ghost from the past. I couldn’t understand why I’d
mentioned the hike. I regretted inviting her and hoped it would rain so the trip would be canceled.

Teiji took a shower. I listened to the water pouring over his body, occasional knocks and clinks as he reached for soap or
shampoo, his feet on the floor when he climbed out. I heard the towel rub back and forth across his neck, back, legs. He cleared
his throat a couple of times. The plughole gurgled and the bathroom door opened. I looked up at him. Water slipped from his
black hair as if it had lost the power to be wet, as if it were droplets of mercury. A couple of rubs with the towel and his
hair was almost dry. And then he came to me and rested his head in my lap. He looked up at me with one eye as I stroked his
hair. The other eye was squashed against my thigh. He reached out one arm and groped around on the floor for his camera. His
fingers touched it. He lifted it and, without moving his head, looking up at my face through the viewfinder, clicked the silver
button, smiled at me. He hung the camera around his neck, where it belonged. I leaned over and kissed him.

But Lily’s words were heavy in my thoughts and I couldn’t force myself not to speak of them.

“Teiji, why do you take so many photographs? You don’t sell them. You don’t even put them on your walls.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then, “Don’t you like them? I try to give you ones I think you’ll like.”

Teiji’s voice is coming back to me, faintly, but it’s there in my ears.

“Yes, thank you, I do. But there are so many more. I don’t understand why.”

“I just take them. It’s a habit.”

“But there’s no final purpose?”

“I’m collecting them.”

“For what?”

“My collection.”

“Teiji, what
is
your collection?”

“All my photographs.”

He moved to sit behind me with his legs around mine. The camera swung forward and hit the back of my head.

“Do you want me to stop taking photographs?”

“No.” I wished I hadn’t started this. Damn Lily, making me question the very thing that had drawn me to Teiji. He had no answers
for me. I knew that already.

“Because I wouldn’t.”

“I know.”

“Why are we talking about this?”

“I don’t want you to stop taking pictures at all. I just wonder why you don’t try to do something with them.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know. Such as selling them.”

“I don’t need to. If I needed the money, I’d sell them, but I don’t because I have a good job that pays me enough money.”

Teiji dashed off an hour later to do the evening shift at the restaurant. I was left feeling foolish for starting such a stupid
conversation. But something was still bothering me, and it wasn’t just Lily’s questions about what Teiji should do with his
pictures. It was the thought of those two boxes in his flat. Stacks and stacks of photographs that recounted years of his
life, perhaps back to his very first camera. He never showed me any of them. I couldn’t see why and I couldn’t stop wondering
about it. He sometimes gave me pictures containing images of Lucy, but nothing from before Lucy. I knew so little about Teiji.

What
did
I know? That destiny led Teiji both to photography and to the noodle shop. I knew certain facts about him. He grew up near
Kagoshima on the southern edge of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s biggest islands. He was born in the shadow of Sakurajima,
an active volcano on its own island, that spewed dark smoke and rumbled deeply like a far-off highway at nighttime. Until
he was nine years old he thought that it was normal for mountains to behave in such a manner and lived in hope only of seeing
a glorious eruption one day. In the meantime, he spent his days whizzing through the countryside on an old bicycle. His mother
made his lunch. She pressed hot rice into fat triangles, pushed a sour plum into the center of each, and covered them in dark
seaweed. When they had cooled, he stuffed them into his pockets and set off along the country roads, careering this way and
that, but with the volcanic island never far from sight. To celebrate his first day at junior high school, Teiji’s father
gave him an old camera. Teiji took it with him on his long bike journeys. It hung around his neck and bumped up and down as
he cycled. He shot pictures of the volcano from every angle.

His other favorite subject was water. He would wander to the sea’s edge and take off his shoes to paddle. Teiji could never
quite believe in water or smoke and felt sure that if he photographed them, they would not appear in the picture. He took
photos of his toes through the water’s rippling surface, expecting to see an image only of his toes. When the pictures were
developed he rushed to the shop to collect them. Then he took them to the sea to compare the image with reality. Sometimes
he could not decide which was the image and which was real. He knew he would have to take more pictures until he found the
answer. Soon he forgot the volcano island, though it was always there, making smoke, sending it out and up into the sky.

When Teiji was fourteen his father died. Teiji and his mother moved to Tokyo where his mother’s brother ran a noodle shop.
His mother began to work there and Teiji helped out at weekends. He was slender but he was strong and proved helpful in moving
delivery crates, lifting furniture to sweep the floor. But he could not rest without the sea and often walked down to Tokyo
Bay. The water there was gray in the day and black at night. He wandered through corridors of concrete and neon, confused
by the hugeness of the buildings, the number of people. The city moved like thick, dirty water but Teiji could not find its
source. He walked the streets night and day, hoping to capture an answer with his camera. At seventeen he dropped out of high
school and went to work full-time in the noodle shop. He spoke little to his mother and uncle, but he worked hard and no one
complained about him. Then his mother died.

This is the story Teiji had told me on another dark night, with a few embellishments of my own. There is much that he never
shared. Did he miss his mother? Perhaps. The boxes in his room contained photographs of his whole life. But he never showed
them to me and now that I was finally finding the courage to steal a secret look in those treasure chests, I planned to search
for something else. I didn’t see the pictures that told of his childhood.