The Electrical Field (33 page)

“I know what you’re thinking, Asako,” Kaz was saying, and I looked up but he was hardly paying attention, still staring off at his trees.

“You think, why would anybody want to stay there?”

“Yes,” I said, all the while thinking of Sumi. The bucket in the crook of her arm when she came out of the woods that time, with Eiji behind, when all day long I’d been looking for him, missing him. Sumi held out her bucket and it was brimful of matsutake. She held out her hand with one of the mushrooms in it, the first time I’d seen one whole, just picked. “Look,” she said, and she pressed her finger into it to show me how easily their tender flesh bruised. They hid in the woods at the bases of trees, or in patches of shade. For your mama, she said, take it, holding the monster ear at the
stem, reaching for my hand—just like Angel taking my hand, planting something there. Sumi knows all the best places, Eiji said. Sumi giggled.

“Kirei, ne?” Kaz said. Pretty. “What do you call that place? A shangri-la?” He laughed. “Folks there don’t seem to age much.”

The mushroom ear sitting in my hand, black gills on the underside, breathing and listening in the woods. Paying attention when nobody else did. Sumi gave it to me with the finger-bruise she’d made on top of it. I didn’t want it, didn’t want it touching me, but I took it just the same.

“Natsu’s auntie looks the same age as her, like her ne-san. Natsu didn’t like that.” Kaz shook his head. “Didn’t like that.” Now he was frowning at his trees.

“It’s the air,” I muttered. “It’s so cold and dark. Here the sun can make you old, weatherbeaten.”

“So, so, so.” Kaz trudged off. I saw how his shoulders had already become rounded, like a woman’s. Before he might have given a stiff little bow, a respectful smile at the ground, before leaving.

It was enough that I knew, I told myself. I knew they’d be there if I went back. If I went back today, I’d find those trees in the orchard with their blossoms, the very one Eiji snapped a branch from. The very one, all pretty from the road a ways off. Kaz was dreaming, of course; no doubt remembering only those blossoms he knew in Japan as a boy. I understood those kinds of dreams. The dreams that hid away secrets, kept them behind a closed door, closed even to yourself.

“Did Eiji love someone?” Sachi had asked, sitting on my
porch one day after school, when I wanted her company to last. Startling me.

After a moment I smiled. “Of course. He loved me,” I told her, with the confidence of one who does not doubt her place in the world, the value of her person.
Eiji loved me.

“I know, Miss Saito,” she giggled, laughing at me. Tapping on that closed door. “But I meant, did he love somebody?” She said it differently that time.
Somebody.
“Did he,” and she giggled once more, “did he have a girlfriend?”

She wouldn’t take my hands, or let me take hers for long. I couldn’t blame her, mine were old and ugly—for the longest time, the oldest thing about me was my hands. They were sticky, and they ate away at my picture. But Yano’s hands were always dry and warm, not like the rest of him. When he put my picture back on the night-table with care. Setting down my poor, sickly Eiji with such care. So unlike Yano.

“Everything would have been different,” Yano declared sadly, so sure of himself, so convinced of how things worked in the world. “Ne, Asako? We would be different people. We might not be here.” He flung his arms up, as he had countless times on our walks through the field. “I’d be educated.” What I’d heard a hundred times from him, but he went on. “Wouldn’t have got shipped to Japan.” He was touching his hand to the tops of my things throughout the room, planting his prints in the dust.

“They didn’t make you go,” I told him.

He rested his hand on my dresser, palm down. “Coerced, Asako! Coerced!” I waited for that hand to curl, to clench into its fist, but it stayed open on the dust.

“I know, I know,” I murmured, regretting my few words.

He seemed to brighten. “But then I never would have met my Chisako, would I?” He smiled. My Chisako.
My.
“And she …” He paused, lifted his hand, and returned to my bedroom window, unusually quiet. Looking out at Mackenzie Hill. I waited but he would not say more.

“What? What about her?” I prodded, desperate for him to say it.

He seemed not to hear. He wouldn’t answer. I didn’t dare prod him more. He returned to my night-table and picked up my Eiji again, staring at him. In a second he started up, out of nowhere, shouting, filled with rage, spitting on my picture: “Your brother would be alive today, Saito-san! That’s what! He’d be alive!”

I almost cried out, but nothing came. He fell silent then, understanding instantly that he’d gone too far. I did not cry at him that he was wrong, wrong; that I could blame no one but myself, that I had never meant for Eiji to come after me that night to the river, though I knew he would, as he always did. I went out to the river, not knowing why then, as I knew now: it was so Eiji would come for me, for me and no one else. I was a child, wanting his attention when it was slipping away, grasping for it any way I could. I could not tell Yano that I threw myself in at the first sound of Eiji coming, fooling myself that I hadn’t been waiting, when the truth was that I would have run back dry as a bone, slipped into bed without waking a soul, if he hadn’t come. The water was cold that night, colder than in the day, the current dark with pummelling fists. I didn’t struggle against him when he came in after me; I let myself get beaten back by the fists, into his strong arms, angry arms. But he’d come for me, I told myself,
for me. I could not tell Yano how after, in bed, Eiji couldn’t get warm. I gave him all the blankets and he couldn’t get warm. All night he was ice when I dared touch him, and by morning he was hot, burning. The cloth turned sickly warm on him in seconds each time I cooled it, wrung it out.

I would not let Sumi near. Not her or any of the other girls who came knocking at all times of the day, when what Eiji needed was rest and quiet. When just to lie there took all his strength, and his breath came out of him like bits of broken string. Even when he was fading away, I didn’t let her in. At the end, after the Reverend Hashizume said his part, after the chanting and after everyone went home, when Eiji’s men friends took the box to the edge of the camp and sent Mama and Papa and me away, I made sure Sumi left too. I crept back in the night, and watched and smelled him burning in the pine wood with the grass underneath. I waited until Papa came with the cocoa tin that we would take with us no matter where we went. We’d never leave Eiji there, never.

I did not tell Yano it was me, selfish, hungering child that I was. It was me wanting the world my way, never to change, ever. It was my fault, all my fault—not the war, not the government, not some hakujin stranger named Mackenzie.

Yano brought me no comfort, none at all, he and his reckless anger meant for someone else. I felt him behind me, felt him around my shoulders, lurking near, wanting to leave but not leaving; his sweat was rising, his nervousness. For him, for Chisako, for Sachi and Tam, I would keep it all to myself; I would not say a word. I would not fling my own anger back. I vowed to myself, I bit my lip until it bled. But in the final moment I couldn’t help myself. When he was almost gone I
stopped him, there at the foot of my stairs, in Stum’s plaid shirt I’d lent him to cover himself. I called down with the words on my lips to tell him he’d been made a fool of.

It was Stum at my shoulder. Stum putting his jacket around me, not Yano. The sun was bright in my eyes. “Asa, what are you doing out here? Angel’s waiting.”

I nodded, but could not move.

“Angel’s waiting,” he repeated gently. There was something in Stum’s voice. His taking care of another’s feelings. I’d never heard it before.

Out in the electrical field that morning Yano had said, “You shouldn’t have told me, Asako.” He was thinking of Chisako, protecting her from himself, as he no longer could. He must have known everything then and there. He knew his wife, knew how things might turn out long before that December morning four years earlier when he first moved them in; when his boxes toppled out front, and he kicked at them until bright clothing lay strewn across the snow as Chisako watched from the window with Tam and Kimi.

Stum tucked the jacket close to my neck, though the air was mild. I let him lead me back to the building. His touch reminded me of the last kind thing Yano had said to me. The last time he would think of me and only me.

“Things would have been different for you too, Asako,” he had whispered in my ear. “I know.”

We drove back on a different road—the scenic route, Stum called it. He drove slowly this time, after I mentioned a new dizziness in my head, passing groves of trees on both sides,
then empty fields fringed with birch trees pitched away from the road. I pressed close to the window to see them, the papery bark that flaked sadly from their trunks. Stum and Angel sat quietly in front, Angel unusually so. Stum, his two hands on the wheel, his jacket back on, the jacket he’d draped over my shoulders just an hour earlier. he’d never done such a thing before; Angel must have shown him. The look of it on him now, filled out where it had drooped on me, I don’t know why it struck me; he was a man, my brother, different from before, and yet not so different.

I felt a tickle on my palm but there was nothing there; perhaps the ghost of Angel’s fingers planting a baby chick in it. Perhaps a tiny feather I couldn’t see. I’d watched them at work, the two of them. Stum standing very still at a table, feet apart, concentrating, hands busy and small over the boxes, under the hanging light. Angel bringing in the carts, taking out the boxes to be sorted, feeding them to each sexer, taking them away, this box here, that box there. Angel had to be wrong when she said the creatures became part of your hand. One day out of their shell, they were so soft you could crush them. How could you forget and mistake them for part of your own big, ungainly self? The noises they made—the pipping, Stum called it—the males deep and rich, the females thin and clear; they reminded me of my dream. In an instant I knew my dream had not been a dream; the swish and whisper I’d taken to be Tam and Sachi revisiting me, they’d come from the room next door, from Stum and Angel in his narrow twin bed in the early morning when my sleep had been shallow.

In the front seat Angel was doing what Stum had taught
her, in slow motion, her hands like puppets. Scooping up one imaginary chick in her right hand, another in her left, dipping its head down, turning up its bottom with her thumb.

“Ah,” Stum interrupted.

Angel glanced back at me. “I forgot this part,” and she gave a tiny squeeze and a scratch. “So you can see.” Clearing away its business, I guessed. She seemed to tighten her grip and give a push and a squeeze at once; then she wriggled her thumb about with its fingernail, grown long like Stum’s.

“Inside there’s a little mark—”

“Invisible to the untrained eye,” Stum added, smirking.

“So tiny,” said Angel, squinting at her thumb where she held it pressed to her palm. “If it’s raised and shiny like a ball, then it’s—”

“A rooster.”

“If it’s flat and faint, then it’s a hen.”

“She’ll be the first girl sexer in the area,” Stum told me, beaming. Keeping one eye on the road, he reached over just as Angel was picking up a fresh chick. He stilled her working fingers and thumb.

“Look.” He pointed at her cupped hand. “That one’s no good. Two marks.”

“That means it’s male and female in one,” Angel explained. Their eyes seemed to twinkle, a secret between them.

Stum looked back at me. “It happens sometimes, ne-san. You have to watch for them. Go on,” he urged Angel.

Angel grimaced, holding onto that poor unseen chick until Stum nudged her shoulder. She closed her eyes and squeezed hard for several seconds. I saw the imaginary chick in her fist choke, saw a flutter of feathers.

“See, not so bad,” said Stum, smiling, in some way proud, I suppose. Slowly, gingerly, Angel placed the lifeless chick to one side, into a third box, and pushed it away. She pushed them all away, and let her head fall, with a sigh that wasn’t quite a sigh, onto Stum’s shoulder. “You didn’t know your Tsutomu could be so cruel, did you, Asako?”

Stum was watching me in the rearview mirror, worried that all this might have upset me, that I hadn’t taken it in the right spirit. I shook my head. “No, I didn’t know.” I settled back in my seat. But without thinking, I blurted, “But think of all the ones he lets get away. Seven hundred and ninety-nine in one hour.” They both laughed at that, at the little joke I’d made. On a whim, without pausing to ponder how funny my remark might be, to wonder if I’d make a fool of myself. They went on laughing a little too long, I realized; laughing at themselves, I suppose, at their delight in each other.

The thought of the two of them tucked away in that dark room where soon enough you understood everything that happened or could happen inside it, what you could expect, day by day. The cycle of things, the routine. And yet. It dawned on me that this was how they fell in love. Sharing a worker’s specialized knowledge, a secret from the outside world, a secret of life under the dim light of hanging bulbs, the shadow cast by the rice-paper wrapped around them; an indescribable smell, the
pip pip
of newly hatched chicks. Girls here, boys there. It was simple, really.

I
AM DEEPLY GRATEFUL
to my wonderful, brilliant friends who encouraged me in writing this book. For their helpful comments, I thank Richard Fung, Dalia Kandiyoti, Ruth Liberman, and, for her close readings and unerring judgment, Ellen Geist. I thank Helen Lee, Deborah Viets, and Lynne Yamamoto for their invaluable support.

My especial appreciation to Teruko Sakamoto for the inspiration and insights; to Gordon Hideo—who bought me my first typewriter—for the lessons in perseverance; and to Laurie Michi for the bolstering cheer.

Many thanks to my intrepid super agent Denise Bukowski for her relentless enthusiasm and stalwart support. Thanks to my editor, Diane Martin for the deft touch, as well as to Gena Gorrell, Charis Wahl, and Mr. Ryuji Nakahara.