The Electrical Field (26 page)

Now it was I who could barely keep up with Yano. His pace matched the fury of his thoughts. “I wouldn’t know those kind of men,” I started to say, but Yano had even
moved ahead of me, so that I had to scurry to catch up. He was briskly rounding the south tower.

“There was a change,” he said. “I didn’t know it then. But now … it was a month ago, that’s when it started. Right, Asako?” He turned to me. How I longed to shake him free of his ignorance, his self-delusion, to tell him Chisako had been carrying on with her friend for many months now. From back in December, with that first insignificant gift of the rose inside the glass dome. Through the winter, when the trees in that tiny wood had drooped with ice and I’d seen the car windows steam up in no time from the heater. But I could not. It was up to Chisako to fill in those details, not me, I thought irritably. Why I should have to answer such questions was beyond me. It seemed I was trapped for ever in this situation, bound up in the concerns of others. Though I felt sorry for Yano—and, I suppose, Chisako—they really had nothing to do with my life.

Yano had moved on yet again. He was shaking his head in agitation. “We’re so full of shame, aren’t we, Asako? We hide away, afraid that they’ll lock us up again. That’s it, isn’t it?”

I could think of no way to respond. I nodded my head sadly, knowing whatever I said would have no effect on him. “That was such a long time ago, Yano,” I said. “Things have changed in thirty years.”

“Chisako saw it in me,” he said, not hearing me, not a word. “It isn’t attractive, Asako. Especially in a man. I don’t blame her.” He tugged his fingers through his coarse hair. For the first time that morning he gazed directly into my eyes, and it unnerved me, seeing myself there in his. I could not
help thinking of Chisako thrilling to her own reflection in Mr. Spears’ eyes. “I can see it in you too,” Yano was saying. “You hide in your house taking care of Papa and little brother. You should get on with life. Have your own family. How old are you now, Asako?”

I struggled to contain the indignation I felt. “My age is beside the point,” I said. I tried to stay calm, reasonable; not to say anything I might later regret. “You can make all the excuses you want for her, but Mr. Spears did not make Chisako do anything she didn’t want to.” I barely paused to ponder what I was inflicting on Yano. “She thinks she’s better than us,” I found myself further declaring. I heard a vibration in the air, as if we were gliding over an earthquake. “But she isn’t,” I said. “Not one bit.” I saw Chisako then, her eyes closed, in that private, forbidden world with him, her Mr. Spears. A world that I, no matter how close I came to it, no matter what I witnessed with my own two eyes, could not touch, or tell of with any true feeling.

“When you spoke with Mr. Yano, did he know about the affair, Miss Saito?” the detective was asking me. I might have imagined a change in his tone, ever so slight. It made my living-room seem small, just the two of us in it.

“Of course,” I replied.

“You know that for a fact?”

“Of course he’d suspected for a long time. A man knows his own wife, detective,” I declared brazenly, slightly impatient with him. He must know these things, I thought; I’d spied the wedding band on his finger at our first meeting. “He must have gone to her with his suspicions, don’t you think?”

“I see,” the detective said, but he wasn’t writing anything into his notebook. “What did you argue about with Mr. Yano, Miss Saito?”

“That woman is mistaken,” I said, keeping the disdain from my voice. I thought for a moment. “I slipped on a patch of mud at one point, I think, and Mr. Yano helped me catch my balance,” I said. “That must have been what she saw. People jump to all sorts of conclusions,” I added irritably.

“True enough.”

“She got it completely mixed up,” I said.

“Is that right?” the detective remarked. A laziness seeped into his tone. “How so?” He glanced at me almost absent-mindedly, doodling, it seemed, in his notebook. His heavy lids appeared to droop. I was about to explain that, though we’d spoken that morning, it had in fact been the night before that Yano and I had words.

I was about to say that it had been late, creeping past my bedtime, following the afternoon I’d met with Chisako. I’d rarely been out at such an hour; the darkness had a different quality, a density that pressed in on me. Yano was late coming out with the dog for its nightly walk. I recall seeing every house lit up in the row across the way, and growing cold waiting in the biting wind that swept across the field that night. The wind wound and howled around me, tossing up the flaps of my coat, and when the dog came it bellowed strangely with each gust, and I strained to be heard above it all: I shouted each loathsome word louder and louder, as loud as I could, to make Yano understand. The secret torn from my throat, cast to the wind. How grateful I was for the cover of night. After it was done, and I saw, even in the dark,
that Yano had grasped my meaning, I felt purged, having done my duty. I had no doubts; no doubts at all. For I knew what Chisako expected of me, hoped of me, though it had remained unspoken. Limp, will-less doll, limp before her desires, she needed me to act for her. To clearly speak them.

I resolved to leave him there with his thoughts; not to exert any influence on him as to how he might now act. But as I stepped away his hand gripped my shoulder, close to the neck, where the bones meet; I felt it through my sweater and raincoat as he pulled me back. “Chotto.” Wait.

“I don’t believe you,” he said into my ear, as biting as the wind. His hand still holding my shoulder. I thought his breath would be foul, curdled, but it wasn’t. He pinched me tighter when I didn’t answer. Of course he’d already known, I told myself. Long before. A man knows his wife. He knows. He shook me, and finally I struggled free.

“Mixed up?” the detective was saying to the confusion on my face. “You said Mrs. Frean got things mixed up. What did you mean, Miss Saito?”

Now I truly was confused. For it occurred to me that Mrs. Frean probably could not have seen that night when I wrested myself from Yano’s grip, because it was too dark. Her lights had been on, which only turns the night to slate beyond your window, once you look past your own reflection. Perhaps it had been the next day, that morning, when she saw us and assumed we were arguing.

We’d been circling, circling, once, twice, three times around the field, looping the towers. I’d grown tired. We’d halted at the north tower. Suddenly Yano grabbed hold
of the steel rails and shook, shook with all his might, so that a rattling echoed into the thickly clouded sky. I looked away and fixed my eyes on Mackenzie Hill in the distance, as one steady, immovable thing, expecting Yano to stop after a few seconds. But he kept on, as if trying to uproot the whole tower.

I stood there stupidly, not watching, but hearing the rattle go on, and his hectic, laboured breath. As I backed away, he finally stopped, gasping: “Why did you tell me? Why?” Quietly, but there was violence lurking in those words, on their underside. He came close, sickly sweat rolling off his face, his neck, splotching his jacket at the armpits. He held out his hands to me and there were faint lines of blood pressed into them. “Stop, stop!” I cried out.

“Why? Why did you tell me?” He stood there, gasping still. I feared another of his seizures coming on.

“I thought you knew,” I stammered.

He shook his head in a resigned yet frightening way. “You should have left it to Chisako.”

I shrugged innocently. “I didn’t mean to … I thought she’d already told you—” I was a child fretful with excuses.

“What do I tell my girl and my boy now?” he asked weakly, plaintively. “What do I say?” Like Chisako, almost begging me, in her helplessness, to do something.

“Tell them nothing,” I said simply, seizing my chance to be strong. “Leave them out of it.”

“How can I?” Yano held onto the beams of the tower again, but this ime only to stop himself from wobbling. “We’re a family.” The sky was suffocating; its thick clouds would neither move nor dissipate.

“Yesterday,” he said, slowly regaining himself, “it was you waiting for me,” and he jabbed his thumb towards me, then at his chest, to make his point. I felt the old irritation return. He shook his head again, in that manly way that shows regret for an action that must be taken, whatever the consequences. He lurched towards me and I stumbled back in alarm; he grabbed me roughly by the shoulders, but at the same time his body leaned into me, drained and weakened. I must have cried out, tried to push him away, and perhaps that was the instant witnessed by Mrs. Frean. He steadied himself, then released me.

“I don’t blame you for telling me, Saito-san,” he said, with a ruthless eye, as an untrusting stranger would, protecting his own. “I wish you hadn’t. I didn’t need to know. But it’s done.” He shook his head again, in that same way. Muttered, half to himself. I knew the words but I did not then understand what he intended by them. “Mottai-nai,” he’d said. What a waste. What Mama would say when Papa threw out scraps of leftovers, when we had so little to begin with.

“Miss Saito.” The detective’s voice intruded once again. This time he was wide awake, and suddenly insistent. “You’ll have to speak up,” he said. He sat forward, his notebook on his knee. He’d been scribbling away. He paused. “So you told him?”

“Yes, but he already knew,” I said. My heart was beating fast now, and I felt warm, feverish. “He knew,” I insisted. I clung tight to those words, Chisako’s words. “A man knows—”

“His wife. Yes, you said that.”

For a moment everything slowed, and I saw it all with clarity. I saw Yano’s expressionless face in the darkness of that night. I stared at the detective as if he were Yano himself. “He might have thought he didn’t know,” I said carefully, determined to sort this out; understanding things for the first time myself. “But he did,” I said with conviction. “He did.” I calmed myself with this insight. Yet my heart was still pounding in my chest, pounding in its cage.

The detective was truly agitated now; he blinked several times, trying to comprehend something in his head; he inched so close to the edge of the chair that I thought he’d fall off. “Miss Saito, tell me if you can, please. Did Mr. Yano become angry when you talked to him about this?”

“The first time, yes, you could say—”

“You spoke to him more than once?”

I nodded and continued, determined to keep my train of thought. “The second time he was more resigned. But angry then too, I think.” It was difficult to sum up, even as I saw how impatient the detective was. Angry, not angry—it wasn’t that simple.

“Miss Saito, did you know that he’d bought a gun?” The detective was staring so hard at me that it was difficult to concentrate. My heart went on, no less violently.

“Not then I didn’t,” I said. “If I’d known … Of course, I read about it in the newspaper.”

“Was Mr. Yano angry enough to use that gun?”

“I really couldn’t say. I couldn’t imagine …” I trailed off. A gun, a gun. I tried to comprehend. The detective was about to ask another question, but I forged on. “I wasn’t afraid of him,” I offered, and I could feel my heart skipping,
pounding randomly, and myself seeping away in those missed beats. “He wasn’t dangerous,” I said, frantic to convince him. “I’m sure he wasn’t. Not at all.”

The detective seemed not to hear me. “Did he know about the lot in the woods, Miss Saito?”

“I wasn’t afraid,” I repeated, sternly, I thought, but my voice veered high and away. “Do you understand?”

The detective shifted back in his chair; smiled in a kindly yet forced way, to calm me down. But the falseness of his smile only made me more desperate.

I tried to recall the feel of things, the sounds that night, my voice and his, but the wind, the dog’s howl, everything buzzed deafeningly in my head, like a threat. The detective’s face blurred. His questions churned relentlessly in my mind; without logic, without meaning, they buzzed into the hive. For if Yano had not known about the parking lot, I tried to think—if he’d not known where to find Chisako and Mr. Spears, if he was enraged enough, desperate enough … Did I tell him? Did I know he’d bought a gun from Canadian Tire? Had I seen him take it from his trunk, or put it in? Had I seen him lead Tam and Kimi to his navy Pontiac that afternoon? Had I imagined it, dreamed it? For couldn’t I see them now: two little soldiers dutifully climbing into the back seat of that car? Could he do such a thing? Was he capable? What had I seen? What did I know? What had I done?

“I’m sorry, detective,” I stammered stupidly. “I’m quite tired now,” I heard myself say, with surprising calm. “Exhausted, in fact.” Behind my words, the hive was a fierce whirr. Behind that, a distant sound, a familiar rattle and creak. The clunk of a car door shutting; footsteps. “If we
could continue another time, when my brother, Stum—”
Stum
was all I could think.
Stum. Tsutomu. Tell me what I know. What to say.

“Miss Saito?”

“Yes?”

“Did you tell Mr. Yano about the parking lot?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” I sputtered. I wanted to cry, to scream; I groped for some release but I was dry, dry.

But then Stum, my Stum, my Tsutomu was there with me. Traipsing into the living-room, paper bag rolled under his arm, the twang of the screen door behind him. Gazing at me, not with suspicion. Neither timid nor irked, but tender. Loving. Towering above me, the two men shook hands. Stum had never stood so tall, so straight. My ototo-san. I was exhausted. I felt the tears coming. Soon. I longed for sleep.

Stum sat down opposite the detective, faced him. “Yano knew about the parking lot,” he said. “He knew everything. For a long time. Months maybe. Yes sir. He told me so.”

Stum shut the door and at last the man was gone. I could only stare numbly at a patch of carpet, lost in its minute canyons. I watched my brother’s feet shuffle over that patch, halting before me. Such a familiar sight, those broad, stubby feet in their worn, stretched brogues. Shoes I’d bought for him. Beloved sight. I could not raise my eyes to him. “Ne-san,” he gently prodded. Then, finally, I was violently seized: I sobbed and sobbed. What had I done? A monster, that was what I was, what I’d always been. I could not stop.
No, ne-san, no. He knew, he knew, it wasn’t your fault. Asako.
The words drifted
down as I sank, a dead weight. I was drowning, drowning; a sensation I knew so well; slipping away, but I would not reach out, not this time.