The Electrical Field (16 page)

“Ne-san.” I gave a nod but he didn’t seem to catch it.

“Ne-san.” He stilled my hand, the one holding the knife. I looked up. Stum had that uncomfortable look, the one that asked that I speak for him, that I take the lead as always. But this time it fell away, and he held my eyes steadily.

“Ne-san. There’s someone I want you to meet.” I was filled with dread, sinking into humiliation, and I felt my face droop into pleading—
No, don’t do this, not just now
—that he ignored. Just as I had ignored him, pushed him from my breast, refused to be his mama; refused my baby brother his heart’s desire.

“Ne-san, this is Angel.” A woman appeared from behind, angling around him through the passageway between living-room and kitchen. Not nihonjin, I saw that immediately. Small and dark, with a thick body; a young face, a pretty face with neat features, all in their place. She held a hand out to me. The hand gripped mine, sure and hard, my fingers strangled within it.

The evening passed as in a dream—the way I often felt when strangers entered my home. Their names, their voices made my own home strange to me. And now Stum a stranger to me as well. This too-long dream was interrupted by fits of utter clarity in which I heard Papa’s faint groans upstairs, louder than ever; heard my own slow inhaling and exhaling
as the only other familiar sound. What a fool I was to think I could live out my life in peace, resigned to everything.

“Miss Saito—” The girl’s voice seemed to pierce the air with its unfamiliarity, its strangeness in my ears, at my table, the accent I couldn’t place.

“Please, it’s Anne,” I said, as warmly as I could. I managed a smile, crooked on my lips; I felt it tremble.

“It’s really Asako,” said Stum eagerly. “I call her Asa.” He smiled stupidly with the lie. Only Eiji ever called me Asa. “Or ne-san. Which means older sister.”

“It’s more respectful,” I said. She was looking at me as if there was something to see. Involuntarily I wiped my mouth with my napkin.

“In the Philippines, where I’m from”—she paused to drape her hand across her breasts possessively—“we say
a-te.
To show respect.” She smiled, and her dark face lit up from within. “You see, we’re not so different, are we?” Stum was beaming too, gazing at her with a special light come over him that I’d never seen before. It changed him utterly. I melted away, nothing but air between them. Hastily I got up to refill Stum’s bowl of rice.

“Asako”—she called my name out to the kitchen tentatively, trying it out—“your brother is very good at what he does.” I heard giggles. When I returned to the table, she was holding her hands up, daintily cupped, level with her breasts, as if squeezing milk from them. “He’s so quick. He does twice as many as the others in an hour. He can last for longer shifts, too. I have to bring the boxes quick for him.” I tried to imagine the two of them, in a place I’d never seen—a barn I’d once envisioned, with endless cages and trays and troughs.
Somehow, very very clean and antiseptic. The only sound the blurry chirp of thousands of newborn chicks, a city of them, to be separated into male and female. Stum a giant among them, with a gentle giant’s hands reaching down among them.

After dinner, we stood side by side at the kitchen sink. She insisted on helping, plunging her hands into the dishwater. Stum hovered listlessly at the table, looking anxious, watching me as if he didn’t trust I wouldn’t harm her in some small way. She wasn’t so delicate, I thought, watching her from the corner of my eye as I wiped each dish she plopped on the rack. Young, but not so young. Occasionally her long hair, a brown the colour of rust, grazed the dishwater and dipped in.

“Did Tusomotu tell you how we met?” As she stumbled over the name, her smile dropped. “I’m sorry, I never seem to get it right. Tu-so-mo-tu,” she repeated, still wrong. She glanced at Stum lurking in the doorway. They both giggled. “He can’t say it right either,” she said. “Asako, you say it,” she urged. “He says you’re the only one who says it in the proper Japanese way.”

“Tsutomu,” I said quietly.

“Yes, that’s it. Tsutomu,” she repeated even more quietly. She paused with her hands in the dishwater, full of thoughts. I saw my brother’s name resting there on her lips.

We sat back down at the table for dessert, waiting for the water to boil for tea. Outside it was growing dark, but I could not bring myself to draw the living-room drapes against the night and the electrical field.

“He didn’t tell you, did he?” Angel, young person that
she was, was growing more excited as the evening wore on. “One night the electricity went off. Everything stopped. The lamps, the heat, everything. It was all dark and quiet, except for the chicks. Their chirping got louder and louder. They didn’t want to stay where they were put. They were taking over!” She laughed loudly. “For the first time in that place, I was frightened. Tsutomu, he didn’t want to stay where he was put either. So we sat together in the dark, waiting for the lights to come back on, with all the chicks screeching in our ears. Can you imagine?” She laughed again, then stopped abruptly, seeing my face—my face, which must have been frozen in horror or pain or fear, I don’t know which. An awkward silence fell, a silence that I knew Stum was unable to bridge. I struggled to speak but before I could she was already chattering again, like a nervous squirrel.

So the evening wore on, with the girl’s animated chatter, Stum’s beaming face as he listened and nodded, adding here and there to what she said. They rushed to fill one another’s plates, their hands on fork handles brazen, anxious to touch one another. It was another Stum who offered me a second slice of pie, not the one who usually sat glumly at my table, expecting me to do every last thing for him. I had to look away, to look down, anything to hide my face from them until the shadows inched across the room. Her laughter rose out of those shadows, full of glee in the moment. Before I knew it, Stum was reaching to turn on the living-room chandelier.

“Stop!” I ordered, and they both turned to me, she surprised, perhaps shocked, at the harshness in my tone, the anger. He fearful that some unflattering truth would be revealed about me, about him, about us both. My hand was
up in the air, to do I don’t know what. My throat felt raw and my face was wet, telling me I’d shouted or cried out. I wiped my tears with my napkin and got up, smiling into the dark. “Those bulbs are out,” I muttered; some such thing. “I’ll get some candles.” I went into the kitchen, fumbling in the drawers I kept so orderly, desperate to recall where I’d kept a stub of a candle left from a special dinner years ago.

Then Stum was at my side—I smelled him, that whiff of shoyu and ginger on his breath. “It’s all right, ne-san,” he said, gently as a feather floating down through the air. “We’ll be going now.” The girl’s voice came again out of the darkness, chirping behind him but subdued. “Thank you so much, Asako. The meal was delicious.”

Then they were gone. They’d called their goodbyes from the door and, when it closed, that quiet clasp of the door by its frame swept away my breath so that the house, this cage with its unbearable loneliness, was suffocating. It would soon be even lonelier, if that was possible.

I sat by the window for hours into the night. I was waiting for a visitor; longing for company. Sachi, Chisako, Eiji, I don’t know who. No one came. The driveway was empty and the streets were bare. A car went by on the concession road; I watched its tail-lights wink in the distance. I found myself humming an old tune from camp days. “I’ll Be Seeing You” playing on my lips, the melody off; those words, it was not my story. I clutched at Eiji’s photo, staring into his face. Answer me, I demanded. Tell me. Then I laughed at myself.

Often I feared wearing out my memories of him, silly as that seemed. Looking too much might wear him thin. And
even I could tire of him. Like anything—a picture, letter, card, a stub from a concert or a ride ticket. The sweat from my fingertips was acidic, eating away, little by little. I would not share him with anyone, hardly at all; only with Sachi. Her I could not resist telling sometimes, though she never seemed satisfied with what I told.

I always knew how lucky I was, how blessed. No one ever had to tell me that. To have had a brother who loved me—how many could say the same? Chisako seemed to understand, to appreciate, perhaps because she never had a brother; she was an only child. I could hear her telling me, “You are lucky, Saito-san.” Lucky. Even a child did not love freely, she told me. It was obliged to love you. How else could it survive? She cupped her breast in one hand, showing me that this was all Tam or Kimi ever needed of her. Even a man, she told me, a man with his needs, when he closes his eyes you could be anyone, she said, shutting her own eyes. But a brother. Nothing, no one, made him love me.

I’d had my happy moments when I did not feel alone or left behind. There had been days when I felt hopeful. When was the moment it all changed? Of course, I knew. It was when Eiji left me.

Only Eiji had that power over me, to make me feel I was not alone in this world, that it held some promise for me. He tricked me, that was the awful truth of it.

I
AWOKE TO FIND
the covers flung back, myself still dressed, my clothing twisted, and Eiji’s photograph on the floor by my bed. I felt achy and spent, as if my body had been spirited away from me in the night, God knows what done with it. From the grey light it seemed very early yet, and so I stole into the bathroom to fill the tub, careful not to wake Papa.

As I shed my clothes, I noticed that the clasps that held up my stockings had left their imprint deep and red on my thighs. I let the water run hot to melt the grit of the past day from my body, though I’d done nothing to exert or sully myself. With a shock, I saw that my feet were filthy. Had I wandered off in the night after all? Made a fool of myself? Done things I could not now remember?

Then, in the midst of my panic, I remembered: I had walked barefoot through the moist grass in the backyard,
briefly, just before the detective’s visit. But that had not been yesterday, but two days ago; I hadn’t bathed in that long. What was happening to me?

Slowly I let my heart ease out of its panic. I lowered myself into the scalding water, giving in to the heat, and as I did, Eiji came back to me as he had in my dream.

He was showing me Japan, for the hundredth time, waving out at the ocean, way far away, and still I couldn’t see it. There was the long thin line between the sea and the sky, and his hand uselessly flapping before it. “I’m going!” he was shouting. “I’m going!” Now he was waving both hands, jumping up and down. Not like my Eiji.

“I’ll leave you all behind!” he cried. He looked different: his eyes wide and big, a crazy light in them. For an instant I couldn’t be sure it was him. His hair hung in a stranger’s thin, brownish locks.

No, no!
I tried to shout back, but my throat was blocked. “What about me?” I hoarsely cried at last, only to be swallowed in the roar of wave after wave. Eiji was leaving me, moving into the water. I started to run to him, but behind me Papa was struggling in his wheelchair through the sand, faintly calling:
Nani-yo, nani-yo
. That soft, senile, blameless voice.

“Eiji!” I screamed. “What about Papa?” When I looked again, Papa had toppled over in his wheelchair and was squirming pitifully, like a crab.

Eiji stared blindly. Not seeing me, not seeing Papa. “Papa?” he shrieked wildly, as if I should know the answer to my own question. “If Papa had never left Japan, we wouldn’t be here! We’d be there!” Again he waved his hand out to sea.
Then he glared angrily. I understood. It wasn’t me he was angry at. I caught up to him then, and pulled him from the water onto the sand; he dropped like a clumsy, newborn animal, legs splayed. “Don’t you see, Asa?” he sobbed. Sobbed as I’d never heard him, not even in his last days, as he lay suffering. “Don’t you see?” The waves kept coming, roaring like lions, one drowning in the next. Then, in the way of dreams, Eiji was gone. Vanished.

There was only Papa struggling on his side, half out of the toppled wheelchair, his bony legs and arms treading air uselessly, calling me. Then he too was gone, and I awoke.

The bathwater had grown cold around me. I splashed my face to regain my senses, and called my name sharply—
Asako!
—scolding myself, pulling myself up out of the tub. I dried my body off quickly, chafing myself, if only to jolt myself to attention.

What a peculiar dream, I thought. And it struck me as I slipped into fresh clothes how deceptive dreams were: how they played tricks on you to make what was familiar turn strange, even though they were of your mind’s own making. How Papa was there in the wheelchair he would not be confined to until years and years later; when in those Port Dover days he was rolling and manoeuvring logs at the mill and falling into the water every so often, after a night of drinking. That beach was the beach of my childhood, where Eiji had taught me to swim, but the waves were high and rough instead of slow and rolling. How angry Eiji was with me in the dream, angrier than he’d ever been in real life.

As a girl in Port Dover, I believed that dreams were magic; that they could tell me the secrets I longed to know.
I thought they foretold the future. How naive I was. Dreams told me nothing new; nothing I did not already know. But they sharpened my memory, making me more certain of how things happened.

“Look!” Eiji would say. He would point and point, just as he had in the dream, at some silly speck on the horizon. He was only a boy, after all. Eiji snuck me out late at night, when the saws at the mill where Papa worked were shut down. The sea spidered up to my toes, creeping higher and higher in the dark. I screamed at its icy black touch. Screamed as I did on the ride at Hastings Park. I was a child, and I did not stop myself. I remember the flash of Eiji’s fierce smile in the night each time I screeched. He shushed me but he liked it; he enjoyed my fears, in his special way. He was not cruel. Eiji liked to watch my fears rise with the tide, then chase them away himself; to see the rush of relief there on my face.