The Electrical Field (7 page)

“Ne-san, ne-san!” My eyes flickered open. What? What? It was Stum, Stum shaking me, gripping my wrists, twisting as if I were dangerous. What was wrong with him? I saw myself caught again in his eyes, grey and fallen. I sat up. “What?” I said again, the word blurring on my lips. Stum’s pyjamas were rumpled, as if he’d been roused from sleep himself.

“What is it?” I repeated, bleating in my own ears, catching up. We were still, arms locked. His hands were warm and moist on the undersides of my forearms. “It was a dream. A dream, that’s all,” I muttered, just realizing it myself. Stum looked startled. As if it were beyond him to fathom that I might dream, that there were things unspeakable by day. I struggled from his grasp.

“Abunai!” he cried, pointing with his eyes to my lap. There was a noise, a tinkling. “Abunai! Watch!” He released my arms and stepped back. I looked down to find Eiji’s portrait in my lap, the glass broken, jagged, in pieces in the lamplight.

A
FTER I CLEANED UP
the stray bits of glass, I went into the bathroom and locked the door. I switched on the light and faced myself in the mirror, just like that. For the first time in a long while, more than a glance to make sure there was no mess. Tonight I saw the skin at my temples thinned and veined with my bitter thoughts. Mottling there and under my eyes, even across my hands.

As a young girl I stared in the mirror for hours and never got on with things. When I saw my short nose growing wide across my face, I pinched and pinched to stop it. I knotted strips of rags around my knees at night to make them grow straight instead of bowed like Mama’s.

I watched Eiji change in a way that made me lonely. I told myself it was because they made us leave Port Dover, leave Vancouver Island; it was because they sent us to the camps in the mountains and we’d had to leave the ocean
behind. But it wasn’t just that. I remember the moment when I knew. It was a small thing, really, when he turned to someone else and not to me, even when I called for him. It was like summer turning to fall, a sudden creeping chill.

In the next room I heard Stum rummaging around again, knocking up against the wall, then finally settling down. I turned off the light and came down the stairs. I saw a shadow where I’d muddied the carpet during the day, but when I came close it disappeared. I ran my hand over it, and for a moment reminded myself how much I cherished my home. How grateful I was to have escaped the dark upstairs in the city that wasn’t much better than our shack in the camp. After nine years of watching Mama’s bowed legs climb those crooked steps and seeing her arrive breathless at the top; of smelling another family’s smells drift up through the floor.

I went to my window and sat down. The darkness was turning back my reflection even as I strained to see beyond it to Sachi’s house. Upstairs, Stum’s bedroom door opened, then the bathroom door closed. Comforting noises I lived with day in and day out. I could not help wondering: if he leaves, when he leaves, what would become of me?

The sound of him, his voice when we first moved here after Mama died. So high it made you grit your teeth at its girlish softness; no edge, no bottom. He was not the slightest bit like Eiji; not handsome at all, not strong. He was a boy of twelve or thirteen, miserable at first, missing his mama who’d always kept him close, missing his Chinese friends in the city. His face was shapeless, shy to show itself. But it did soon enough: those grotesque sprouts of black hair not quite
whiskers, pimples erupting ripe and angry, as if contagious. I couldn’t stand to be near him. So helpless in his body; everything showed in his big doughy face. I was twenty-eight then, already past my bloom. It wasn’t up to me to fill him in, to tell him about his own private parts, what he should know himself.

Of course, he had his yearnings. I poured bleach on those yellowed stains on his boxers each week. When they first appeared, I said to myself: it’s a sign. Soon he’ll be out nights, girls will call, he’ll be gone, gone. Leaving me alone with my bitter, plain memories. The paisley of my bedspread as I folded it back each night looked faded and limp. But for years, a sign was all it was; nothing more. I saw Stum’s eyes drawn to my breasts, watching them, wondering; the mystery I held for him. The way Papa and Eiji had been for me. The lingering of his fingers on my hand when we passed dishes across the table. He was wondering, I knew, what it would be like to hold a woman. I pulled my cardigan together in front and gave him a chore to do. I saw the lost gaze, the not knowing where to look; I’d taken his anchor and set him adrift. How relieved I was when he’d go out to rake leaves or shovel the walk, overgrown in his winter jacket. He’d be panting, ready to burst.

I now heard Stum’s slippered feet, slow and lumbering, coming down the steps. Walking like a man, I thought, a man all settled in life. Almost like Papa used to be. Stum had filled out since those early days, of course, but his hands, his fingers had stayed small and slim as a boy’s. That was what Kaz had noticed, Kaz Fujioka, who first took Stum to the hatcheries.

I looked up to find Stum at the foot of the stairs, holding Eiji’s picture. I resisted the urge to snatch it from him. Without glass it was unprotected. It was all I had left of him.

“Wish I’d known him,” Stum said, coming closer, but without the wistfulness, the sadness you’d expect from almost anyone saying such a thing.

“You did. You did know him. I’ve told you.”

“Not the way you did,” he insisted. He made a low, disbelieving snort. “I was a baby. I hardly remember.” As he paused, I moved to ease the picture from his hands, surprisingly strong for being slender.

“But there was something,” he murmured, not quite letting go. “I remember the two of you, how you … how you’d leave me behind.” He seemed bothered.

I laughed, brushing a crease from my skirt. I thought I felt a prick of glass under my hand, but nothing was there. Finally I took the photograph from him. “Like you said, you were just a baby,” I reminded him. I crossed the room with Eiji’s photograph and slid it inside my notebook of clippings for safe-keeping, then closed the drawer with a loud jostle. “It’s late, I’ve kept you up.”

But he went on, in a far-off voice. “I remember how well you got along,” he said. “Sometimes ne-san …” I felt his eyes on my back; my hands froze on the drawer handle. “Sometimes I was jealous.”

Such nonsense, I thought. Not another word, I warned, if only in my head. “You were only two,” I said, hearing how frugal my words sounded, how ungiving. “Eiji used to toss you up in the air,” I added after a moment.

“But what about you, ne-san?”

I began bustling around, moving a knick-knack one inch this way, then that. “You were too heavy for me back then,” I said with a strained laugh. “I was just a girl, a skinny girl. Not like now.” It was true I became skin and bones once Eiji was gone, nothing but worry and grief; I hardly touched Stum. His little-boy arms, grown thick before they grew long, they tugged at my neck the last day in the camp. He pointed to the big suitcase at our feet, carefully packed with Eiji’s tin. Stum thought that we were leaving him and Mama behind and they’d have to live there for ever. He didn’t trust that we’d send for them soon enough.

“It’s late,” I said again. I was waiting for him to go upstairs, or to slink out to the backyard, as he sometimes did before going to bed. But he did not.

Then it occurred to me, seeing him stand there in the middle of the room, empty-handed. A doughy boy, little islands in his face, born too early, too late, born at all. He was like me: jealous of someone he could never catch up with, not now.

My face must have lit up or reddened at this thought but Stum took it for something else. He rushed towards me from the middle of the room and suddenly he was very close, his head held against my breast, resting just so, his hands gripping my arms.

“Ne-san!” He said this with urgency, with all his yearning. Not even my name, but ne-san, always ne-san. I felt a warm circle above my breast where he breathed. In and out. “Ne-san,” he said very low, wavering, as if he was scared of me; for me. I could not push the words away. “Something wonderful has happened to me. A woman.” He stopped.

There was a long period of silence in which I was to say: Yes, ototo-chan, my little brother, tell me all about her. But I did not. I felt his breath catching, his head too heavy and large against me, his hands growing clammy around my arms. The scent of him rose in my nostrils. He released me.

I could not bring myself to look at him; I could only stare ahead, out the window into the night. I thought of Sachi at her window, wallowing in the darkness, waiting for Tam. Then, strangely, Chisako’s smooth, unmarked skin, as she’d held up her blouse, flashed in my head, too too pale.

“For you too, ne-san,” Stum said. So solemn I could have laughed, but I didn’t. “It will happen someday soon,” he said.

I myself knew it was too late. I’d waited too long, instead of not long enough.

I never asked Stum where he’d been that night, or who his friend with the car was. Those twin questions popped into my head as I lay in bed under my covers. Then Sachi’s voice entered my thoughts, its sweetness turning sly:
Miss Saito, will you miss him when he’s gone?
Even as she knelt before Chisako’s powdery blood.

The night grew cold before I could fall asleep. My feet were ice; they kept me half awake, two blocks of ice that would neither sink nor melt. I curled up smaller and smaller in the middle of my bed, vast at night, the edges dropping off: a single bed whose twin was in Stum’s room, but I was alone in it. I remembered how it felt to sleep two to a sagging bed, the particular warmth of another body beside mine, the glow around it, like burner rings that held their heat no matter how cold it was. I saw him sometimes, I made
out his shape. I watched Eiji’s shape rise on one side of me, and the cold swept in. It crossed the room and paused at the door, but did not turn its face to me.

There was more news Monday morning, ten lines.
Missing man bought gun.
A clerk at the Canadian Tire store remembered
an Oriental man, nervous. “I showed him how to use it,”
he said. Yano’s name, the name of the street, the neighbourhood, they rose in blotches that spread until I could read no more. I tried to envision Yano approaching the store counter, as I had seen him a hundred times come towards me after spotting me on my morning walk around the electrical field, arriving sweaty as if he’d stepped in from the rain. But his hands would be dry as he rubbed them together; I heard them, like sandpaper. I tried to imagine a gun, long and dark, notched in intricate ways, a thing I’d never seen in real life, laid across those thick, parched palms. I could not. Much less picture it held up by those hands I knew, pointed at Mr. Spears’ chest, at Chisako’s heart.

“I told you it was him,” Stum said when he came down later than usual, clucking his tongue. His face was puffy, thick with too deep sleep, too rich dreams. Another thing different.

“They’ll find those kids any day now,” he said carelessly. He pointed his finger to his head and let out a sound twice, an explosion. His mouth a gun, then a reckless smirk. Across the kitchen table I caught the spray of it like poison. I threw the paper aside and stood up.

“You!” I shouted. “Shut up!” I tasted the words, bitter, metallic. But I was crying out for Sachi, for Tam, for Yano.
For myself. Stum’s face went white. He wasn’t used to his nesan like this.

“Baka!” I picked up the newspaper and swatted him like a fly. “Stupid!” I screamed. A little nothing flapping in my face. Now he was quivering with fear of his ne-san. His big cruel ne-san from years past. I’d cut him down to the little boy that he was, that he’d always be. But in an instant the newspaper I’d rolled in my hand was snatched from me. My palm burned cold-hot. He waved the paper over my head.

“You can’t treat me that way!” he seethed. “Not any more.” He backed away, throwing the paper to the floor beside me, trampling it. “I’m not your little boy, your baka-tare-bozu, not any more!”

He pointed to the table in the living room where Eiji’s photo usually sat. “Just because I’m not him!” He kept staring there. “I’m no different.” He pounded his fist on the table. “No different!”

“You’ll be late,” I said calmly. He was late, much later than usual. He stopped then, looked at me as if he might grab me and try to shake something out. But he didn’t; his body slumped, hinges loose and broken.

“All right, ne-san. All right.” He walked out, shutting the front door behind him, leaving behind his thermos of green tea and the lunch I’d packed.

It wasn’t that I believed Stum about Yano and the children, even for an instant. I wasn’t convinced that he did, himself. I’d only wanted to jolt him. I’d wanted to hurt him, that was it. Return him from the carelessness of his dreams, whatever, whoever was in them, to our life, to me. I wanted him across
from me at meals, in bed at night in the room next to me; wanted to feel my fingers pressed by his on the edge of a plate as it passed to his side of the table, as if his life depended on it, as it used to.

I retrieved the newspaper from the floor, brushing off the dust of Stum’s footprints. The look of those names in print, the names of our streets. It was disturbing and yet, I had to admit, somehow thrilling. To be exposed in this way.

I took my scissors, glue, and notebook from the cabinet drawer, clipped out the article, then carefully pasted it down. Once again I wrote in the date above the clipping. Already four days since the first news. I felt the thickening ripple of pages. It was growing. I turned back to the previous clipping and looked into Yano’s face, that homely face. I saw how false the picture was. Tam and Kimi huddled in the middle, Chisako at their side. In earlier days. Pitched to one side as the timer clicked in, Yano could be a family friend, a visitor, even a distant uncle, except for the terrible resemblance between father and daughter.

I looked into his eyes as hard as I could—Yano’s eyes that could be unreachable, angry.
Look within Buddha’s deep waters to be healed, to forgive.
This phrase came into my head from long ago, from Reverend Hashizume when I was a girl in camp. To forgive what? Wherever he was, Yano had done nothing, that much I knew.