The Electrical Field (30 page)

The light, what there was, was leaving. Sachi sat down, planting her bottom right on the patch, guarding a treasure. Another game. The clouds had bloated up grey, smothering most of the sky at the top of the ravine. The creek rushed on with a low roar. I wanted to ask how long she would stay,
but was afraid of the answer. I wanted to take her by the hand, back to my home, tuck her in my bed, but knew she would not come.

Around us, the air was crackling. I thought I saw the exact moment of day turning to night. It wasn’t, as I’d always believed, a light put out, the sun gone; it was a seeping in of the dark. It filled in the pale of Sachi’s face right there before me. She laid that dark face in my lap again. She was hugging something to her stomach, tucked in the waistband of her pants. She wriggled in my arms and I heard a click then the tinny voices that had echoed through the ravine. Singing, wobbly and messy, but I knew the song; the melody wore through: it was the tune Sachi had hummed at my bedside. Abruptly the
lala lala la
stopped, and voices started up, thin and childish—a boy’s and a girl’s, giggly and self-conscious.

The tape clicked off. The ravine was stiller than before. Sachi huddled into my lap, pressing the tape player into my stomach; I caressed her, and she let me.

I recalled the day when I’d heard them practising those lines, so shy, fumbling for things to say, when really they never needed to string together much. That wasn’t the way they communicated. But I could not help feeling the envy leak into me, wishing I had Eiji’s voice in a box to keep me company, to bring my picture to life now and then. To help me remember my blessings. I wanted to tell her this. The darkness had reduced us both to shadows, and I felt a kind of safety in
that, a freeness. To feel the damp creeping cold of night, the brush of grasses, to hear the creek flowing onward and the prickle of sounds, and to see nothing. I was not afraid.

“You have your memories,” I whispered in her ear. “Hold on tight to them, and Tam will be with you always. His love. His secrets. I know. Believe me.” I did believe it myself, for hadn’t Eiji lived with me always, all these years? And yet my words sounded hollow and false. A silly old woman’s romance.

She stayed a lumpy shadow in my lap. I didn’t know if I’d reached her. If I’d convinced her, after all those times feeding her my romantic ideas, that this time I was being as true as my heart knew how. My arm was growing numb under her weight but I had no wish for her to move away. I leaned down to touch my chin to her forehead.

“Tell me a story about Eiji,” she said softly, just when I thought, from the rhythm of her breathing, that she’d fallen asleep. She surprised me, touched me, thinking of Eiji at such a moment. But it wasn’t the first time.

“Another time.” I tried to ease her up gently. “It’s time to go home now.” I scanned the ground for the flashlight to take us back.

“No,” she said. “Tell me a story. A happy one about Eiji. Please, Miss Saito.”

I paused.

“Please?”

This time, I would not fail her. I knew the story to tell.

“Eiji, you know, loved the ocean,” I began. “In the summer, he went in the water every day in Port Dover. Every day, rain
or shine. He taught me how to swim there.” She already knew this but it didn’t hurt to tell her again, to remind her.

“When they moved us to the camp, Eiji missed the ocean so much.” How many times in summer had I looked out my window at the electrical field, squinting at the reedy grasses swept in waves by the wind. How many times had I seen Eiji there in the grasses, treading them like a current.

“One summer day, we discovered a river not far from the camp. He was so bata bata he couldn’t keep still; he was like you,” I said, nudging her. I recalled how his body had twitched and burned with unspent energy in bed next to me those first nights in the camp; it was the energy he had always used up in the ocean. “The river made him happy.” I remembered those days—carefree, running through the orchard, away from the rows of ugly shacks, down to the river. There was nobody to stop us, nowhere to escape to; we were already nowhere, deep inside the mountains. I felt Sachi stir against me.

“I ran back and forth, back and forth,” I told her, laughing at myself, recalling the bridge that went over the river, and the sensation of my hand in the air, waving each time Eiji’s head came up. Of course, there was that shadow spidering up my back—Sumi Iwata, Yamashiro-san, four or five years older than me, running behind; Sumi with the bucket she’d have on her arm for some chore or other, chasing after me, asking about Eiji’s favourite songs and colours and dishes. How erai she made me, so tired when she’d catch me saying “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “green” one day, then “Skylark” and “blue” the next, and badger me to tell her which it was.

One day—it may have been the last day of summer—Eiji
made me come down from the bridge. Our first September there, and I felt fall lurking in the edge of the breeze.

“Last chance.” He winked. He liked that I was tough, that my skin wasn’t pearly and delicate. It didn’t matter that I was afraid. I wasn’t that fragile; he could toss me into the current.

“I won’t make it, I won’t.” I could hear myself pining for Eiji’s attention, for his protection. As foolish as all those other girls who watched him.

“I’m scared, nii-san. Nii-san!” I tried to tell him, tugging at his arm. Saying it out loud, as I could not now. Now when there was no one, no older, stronger brother, so that I could be the weak one. He smiled back, fearless for me.

“You, urusai, ne?” he threw back over his shoulder. But I wasn’t a nuisance, I wasn’t, I knew that.

“It’s only water, Asa. Look, just water making bubbles.” The river was rushing forward, on and on. Where it came from I didn’t know; it had no start or stop and I had to cross it. How could my small body resist that force for even a minute? But Eiji would not let go of me.

“All right,” I said finally. My soft giving in to him. The things he could make me do. The things I thought terrified me.

I remember him making me climb on his back. I was heavier than at Port Dover, and even he groaned under my new weight, small as I was. We inched towards the water, tottering, I watching his feet, his toes, clenching the rocky ground that led to the shore of the river. This shore was different from the ocean, where the water rose to greet you in a frightening embrace. This water surged past you, shunned you without a care. I felt the goosebumps rise on his skin
against me, and it was contagious; they rose on my chest and arms, wherever his skin touched mine. In my middle I felt that familiar pulsing, gaping: my mystery.

“Nii-san,” I whispered, desolate. He ignored me. “Nii-san,” I said again, for comfort. The water foamed, inched icily over our bodies, and then suddenly the ride tumbled us, speeding faster than anything, thrashing us. I heard tiny screeching cries: gulls circling, or Sumi on the bridge, I didn’t know which. I saw Eiji’s head disappear into the bubbles, then come up, and I felt my body alone, bobbing, pushed and pulled. I didn’t try to cry out, because Eiji was there in front of me, but we were no longer linked.

“Asa!”

“I’m all right, I’m all right,” I cried, giddy to be feeling strong, my head high above the surface. I spied the bank of the river and it was not far.

“Asa!” Eiji’s eyes, frightened eyes, disappeared under the water. He was afraid, my nii-san was afraid. For the first time I was seeing that.

“Nii-san! Nii-san!” I screamed.

His head bobbed up as if separated from his body, then down again. Then there was nothing but those fists of current churning over him.

“Pull him up, pull him up!” Sumi’s voice from above, urgent, commanding.

I remember filling with strength, despite the numbing cold, the fear. Repeating her words to myself as I went down seconds after him, wriggling every muscle in my body, lashing out my arms in the murky water.
Pull him up, pull him up
, the voice went again, half my own. I remember curving my
hands as Eiji had taught me, cupping the current like balls in my palms, throwing them aside until I reached him. He grabbed my hands, held them tight, his fingers gouging mine, and I loved that, how our arms resisted the water that beat at them. He smiled at me, coming up to the bank, and the water bubbled around his teeth as he coughed.

“You see, Sachi,” I said now. “I saved him. I saved my brother.”

I remember pulling ourselves out of the water and collapsing onto boulders on the shore. The air so dry and crisp there in the mountains that it cracked your throat and skin. The children I had thought were gulls flocked like hungry orphans; Sumi had come down from the bridge, her bucket somehow lost. I recall only then glimpsing the blood leaking from his toe onto the rocks. He’d scraped his toe on the bottom, hard. I winced at it, we all did except Eiji, seeing how the nail was half off. But I smiled a secret smile at that bit of blood, the brightest colour there, knowing it was why he had gone down, the only reason.

That was the best day of my life. I knew it then, even with Sumi there. I never took Eiji for granted, not for one second. That was a gift to me: knowing that so young, in the moment. It didn’t take me years to come to. “He could have drowned,” I told Sachi.

“It’s a happy story, isn’t it?” I felt a surge of strength in my limbs folded under me on the damp grass, remembering how I’d taken his arms and fought the current. Behind Sachi and me, the creek seemed to roar louder. Sachi was very still in my lap, so I gently nudged her. “Isn’t it?” I asked again.

“Yes. You saved him,” she said limply, without emotion.

“What is it?” I whispered, after a moment went by in silence. “What did I say?” I’d fallen short once again. Hadn’t I told the right story?

“Then how did he die?” she asked. “If you saved him, how did he die?”

“That was another time,” I stuttered, grateful once more for the darkness. “Another time.” Sumi’s voice commanded me again:
Pull him up, pull him up.
But she hadn’t been there that last time, in the night; no one was there except Eiji and me. I didn’t need to pull him up; he was strong that night, though I fought him and my nightgown was heavy in the current. He pulled me up, as always. For the last time.

“You didn’t save him. He’s dead,” she said. “All you have is that old picture.”

“That’s not true, I—” I could not find the words to tell her that I had his love. His love.

“You keep telling that story when you know it isn’t true. Can’t you say what really happened?” She slipped from my arms, and in the darkness I made out the scramble of her figure as she struggled to stand over me. “I would never lie about Tam. No matter what.”

The confusion of her words—I did not understand, yet I knew she was accusing me of something, and at the same time herself too. Of something awful, something that could never be taken back.
There are things you don’t know
, she’d told me, long ago it seemed. I was drowning in the darkness and I wanted to let go, to push off for ever.

“I didn’t save Tam and you didn’t save your brother.” Her voice came out of the darkness, which made her words seem truer.

Didn’t save your brother. Didn’t.

I stumbled to my feet, my cold, damp skirt flapped against my thighs.

“I told Tam,” she said. “I showed him and he told Yano.” Her voice was firm, solid in the marshy blackness. She was walking away from me, deeper in, towards the sound of the creek. Somewhere, somehow, the dog was scampering behind. I tried to follow the tinkle of its collar, tripping after the sound. Once again she paused and turned back, the barest tinge of light drawn to her face.

“I saw them in the parking lot. Tam wouldn’t believe me so I took him there. I made him look. I dared him.” I could imagine the purring of the car’s engine; they left it running even in summer. That would have drawn Tam and Sachi in. The radio would be on with some old song Chisako sang along to, the words not quite right with her accent. The memory of it all. How you felt your breath so tight inside your stomach and chest, rising up, and you felt the tininess of a world inside a world, inside your skin, your breath. Not wanting to stay but not able to move, and the car chugging gently on the spot with the music. Until she sat up in the back seat, her hands climbing up to repin strands of hair. There was no mistaking who it was, even if you didn’t see her from the front. Nobody else had hair like that, so long and so black, and nobody else twisted it up like so, into a fat, spiralling roll. Her mouth caught in the rearview mirror, opening and closing over the words of the song.

Then he came out of the car, sliding along the seat, never showing much of himself, wily and so tall. You’d see only the back of him, but you’d catch the gleamy nape of his neck
before he tied his tie back on, that creamy whiteness, the strangeness of a stranger, a hakujin, a kind of man you’d never in your life known or even been close to. The dark colour of his hair that was not quite black, not quite straight but wavy. He never turned to you, but slid into the front seat of the eely car and closed the door without slamming it, knowing how hard was enough because it was his car. I never saw his eyes, the eyes that Chisako glimpsed herself in.

“It was a dare. That’s why I did it.” She still had that adult calm.

In a second she would be gone. What could I say, what could I do to make her stay with me? “It was because of me,” I at last whispered into the dark. “I told Yano about the woods. About Chisako. I told him.”

She wouldn’t listen. Now, when I was speaking the truth, what I’d hidden from myself. “I showed Tam his mom in the woods, with that man,” she said, steadfast. And Chisako’s face came to me then, as she turned in the car once, for a brief second: her makeup smudged, her hair fallen, her face drawn down, anxious, and drained. She was the old Chisako after all, plain in the end. I thought of the sandwiches, the triangles left behind, half-eaten. The other things they did not clean up.