No Names, page 29
The next thing I know, Daniel’s there, kneeling by my side, hand on my back, not saying a word. How horrible that he had to witness this. I’m so ashamed.
It’s been maybe a week since I smashed the guitar. It was like destroying a part of myself. I still haven’t left this archetype of a house, though when I hear Daniel go outside, I’ve started wandering around the other rooms. From the window I watch him with two dogs herding sheep. I watch him while at the same time trying to avoid the general view. The vastness of the ocean and sky freaks me out. Ocean, right smack in the face. And sky, sky, sky. It’s way too much. A giant mountain oppresses. It dominates what looks to be a small island that we’re on. Other islands in view have similar crazy high peaks.
Daniel brings a meal to the room three times a day. It’s good of him. More than good. At first, I didn’t touch any of it. Now, I’ve started eating some. I eat the white bread at breakfast, the black bread at lunch, and the boiled potatoes at dinner. I can’t stomach the stinky cheese, pickled herring, lamb, or cabbage. He offers the food, never coaxes. And he talks about things like the weather without expecting me to respond. I try to make my presence an absence, though I probably just come off as sullen, resentful.
After breakfast this morning, Daniel comes to the threshold of the room to tell me he’s going to sail across to Tórshavn, on the main island of Stream Island, for supplies. Would I care to come along? I don’t answer. “That’s fine,” he says. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”
Once I see him sail away, I venture out of the room. I go sit in the middle of the floor of the main area of the house. I sit there a long time, petting both dogs. This feels good. They are good. Some kind of collie, maybe. He calls them Goofy and Pluto.
Musical instruments rest on a shelf above me: a violin, a flute, a concertina, a guitar. There’s also an upright piano in the corner furthest from the windows. Some of the keys are chipped, others missing ivory altogether. Weird for a pianist to have a piano in that condition, but then he hasn’t played it since we’ve been here. All the instruments look really old. I hadn’t thought I would want to touch a guitar again but now I find that I do. I avoid the temptation by studying the bookcase. Most of the books are not in English. I take down one I know and have loved, Moby-Dick, and start reading from the random page I open to. Whales are calving.
But the guitar pulls like a magnet. Eventually, I get up off the floor and stand there studying the craftsmanship, wondering how old it is, where it came from, who made it. I reach up to the shelf in slow motion. I tap the soundboard lightly. I balk a couple times before lifting it down and carrying it over to one of the benches by the window. There I sit, holding the curved wood against my torso. I hold it for a long time without playing. In the end, I can’t stop myself. I start strumming as soft as possible, making almost no sound at all. Then I pluck a few notes, twisting the tuning pegs as I do. When I get the instrument as close to tuned as it’s going to get, I breathe deep and begin playing for real. A song comes automatically, like a miracle. It’s no song I’ve ever played before, or even heard. It’s not improv, though, or not only improv. Definitely a song. No tight form like punk or even mainstream rock, but still, a song. As if it’s coming onto the strings from the wind flowing through the open window. Maybe this is what the Aeolian harp Pete used to talk about is like? Music from someplace beyond intention? In the wind? From the spheres? Some undersong, as Daniel would say, of the universe? Variations I couldn’t ever think of consciously come to me. I lose myself in the music, and that feels almost good at this time when feeling good was a forgotten thing. The words, too, come from somewhere else:
Even through forgetting,
I remember you.
Even blind,
I watch you
Return from unknown latitudes
And then with all my strength,
And then with all my will,
I try forgetting you.
And then with all my strength,
And then with all my will,
I show you how to never go
To unknown latitudes …
Maybe the fifth time through, Daniel appears out the window, mooring the boat. My first impulse is to stop, to get back to the room and pretend I’m asleep. But something tells me to stay with the music. No, not something: I have decided this. In a minute, Daniel enters with a wooden crate piled high with supplies. He looks over at me and smiles, like he’s trying to make it not a big deal that I’ve finally emerged from someplace way farther away than the other room. I nod and assemble something resembling a smile. I’ve decided this: to nod, to smile. I continue playing. I’ve decided this. I want to let Daniel into my life. Yes, I’ve decided this.
Pale sausages sputter among potatoes, onions, and cabbage in a cast-iron skillet. Daniel serves it onto big blue-and-white plates, slabs of butter melting over everything. We sit down together for the first time. He looks so content. He holds his knife in one hand, fork in the other, and digs in. Not since the fancy hotel with him and Gwen have I felt hunger like this. I find myself wanting to tell him everything that I’m starting to feel and starting to remember. But I can’t. Can’t will it.
He handles my silence well. He speaks into it: “You don’t have to make any decisions, and I don’t want to make a speech, but I want you to know that you of course may leave this island whenever you wish. Simply ask, and I will take you. I also want you to know that you may stay as long as you wish.”
I’m trying to understand his kindness, his generosity, his love (as hard as it is to accept, that’s what it is, love). None of which I deserve. I lift a flaky piece of potato with my fork to my mouth. I place it on my tongue. The buttery morsel brings me into the here and now. For the first time, I look Daniel in the eye and tell myself, Stop being such a freak, try acting like a normal human being, and so I say, “Thank you.” This scrap of gratitude is the first thing I’ve said in forever. I’m not sure if I mean it, or really, I’m not sure what I mean by it, or maybe it’s just that I don’t know what it means to be grateful.
He takes a swallow of the thick, black beer. “Don’t mention it. I brought you here because I thought, given everything, it may well be the best place for you. Solitude, nature—you know.” He kind of sighs and laughs softly at the same time. “Besides, my friend, you have no passport, so I couldn’t exactly send you home, and I wasn’t so sure it was a good idea to take you to your embassy in Copenhagen, given the state you were in.”
Hadn’t realized my passport went missing.
After dinner, I want to help out. It hadn’t occurred to me before. Now I make another decision. A small one, yet still, a decision. I take the sponge—real sponge out of the ocean—from Daniel and start washing the dishes. He looks surprised, then steps aside. I’m completely caught up in the task of moving the sponge over the plates and scrubbing the silverware. Simple as the work is, it feels good to be doing something useful. Daniel dries, placing the plates on a rack above the cabinets, the silverware in a drawer. There’s beauty in these everyday things and in his simple movements that I would’ve never noticed before. Every detail of the kitchen and of life suddenly and miraculously seems to have meaning.
When we’re done washing up, more than anything I want to return to the guitar. I ask if that would be okay. He laughs and tells me of course it is. I don’t have to ask. He sits in a wooden chair nearby, reading Kierkegaard, a name I recognize from a Great Books list Mrs. Homer once handed out. I always meant to read the whole list but never did, barely made a dent in it. Sitting with Daniel like this, I almost feel like a real human being.
When I get into bed my body starts feeling real for the first time in a long, long time. I take off the pajamas Daniel gave me and touch my face, my throat, my ribs, my thighs, lightly, lightly, lighter than even tickling. It feels like when I was about to drop my body into the crowd at a concert, that trembling, though much fainter. It’s not too long before I can’t stand it—it being the very fact of having a body. I get up, leave the room, and float through the moonlit house. But I’m no ghost. I’m a person. I head into Daniel’s room. He never closes the door or the curtains. He’s wearing only pajama bottoms, lying there on his left side on top of the covers, bathed in moonlight, sound asleep. Looks like he’s cast in silver. I don’t hesitate, I get into bed with him, I wrap myself around his back. I’ve got to hold onto his body or else I’ll fall away from everything. I hold on tight, pressing into him. This is real: my body, his body, my body against his body. The warmth is a gift. He smells clean as mountain air. He stirs, then reaches around to touch my unshaven cheek.
My own breath feels hot coming off his neck. I whisper, “You can do whatever you want.”
He loosens himself from my grip and rolls over to face me. He takes my head between his hands, holds it there, looks into my eyes, and tells me in a voice as calm as the moonlight filling the room, “I don’t want to do anything to you, do you understand?”
Pathetic that I don’t know any other way to express what I want or need, or even how to want or need. Now it seems urgent for me to have Daniel know me, to know me beyond dead, to know my desire. I pull him in so we’re chest to chest, belly to belly, crotch to crotch. I bury my face in the depression under his jaw, taking a long, deep breath. I lick at the hair curling down behind his ear before resting my lips on his earlobe and whispering, “I understand, I do,” as I press my whole body into his.
NOVEMBER 1979, MARIKO
Dearest Keiko,
Bless you for coming all the way from California for Richard’s funeral. You are the only family I have, as well as my truest friend. We did not get a chance to talk alone together, or rather, at that time I could not talk with anyone beyond formalities.
Richard never really recovered from the shock of Peter’s death. That is my opinion, not the doctors’. They describe a series of coronary artery spasms, or silent heart attacks, over the year after Peter died, leading to the final myocardial infarction, or heart attack. I blame myself in part. After Peter died, I became withdrawn and angry and was not caring for him as I should have. It was as if I had become one of the ikiryō from the tales of our childhood. Indeed, I felt as if my disembodied spirit was scouring the earth ceaselessly to avenge Peter’s death, even as my living body stayed within my home. I cursed the day we ever came to Hallein and the day he met his friend Mike.
At times, I wasn’t sure I could carry on. I pitied myself. Pity and anger, an ugly alliance if ever there was! It took you to remind me that my own mother carried on after losing both husband and son in a single day, and that I carried on after losing father and brother.
Thank you, dear cousin, for inviting me to come stay with you. It would be lovely to celebrate the new year with you. As for moving back to California? I don’t think so. At least not now. I feel that I am meant to stay here.
With All My Love,
Mariko
AUGUST 1994, MIKE
I know what Isaac’s about to ask. My mind tries disappearing into the swirling stripes—what I think geologists call striations?—of the salt walls that enclose us.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” His features flicker in the light reflecting off the walls.
Silence and silence and silence, until it can’t go on any longer without me being massively sanctioned by whatever powers of justice rule the universe. I answer, blunt as a hammer, “Yes.” One sound, one syllable, one word to express fifteen years of grief.
He burrows his collapsing face into my chest and starts sobbing. Thick grief for a man he never met.
I owe him more. I gather strength. I pat his back, a kind of emotional filler. In fits and starts I try to tell something resembling a story. I fake cough before beginning: “That’s when the No Names ended. That’s when I went—I mean, when Daniel brought me—to the Island.”
Isaac and I stay in the sparkling white space, him holding onto me as I try fitting together fragments of me and Pete and the No Names. I’m not sure how long the telling takes, only that when I’ve done as much as I’m able to do the light’s almost gone.
Isaac lifts his head and stares past me, eyes narrowed. I move a little ways away. He shakes his head. “I hate her for this. Her keeping this secret. It’s why she and I have always lived together in mortal combat.” His eyes widen. He aims his gaze at me. “What right did she have?”
The ancient image of the girl—the one I think would become his mother—lying under Pete in the sumacs resurfaces.
Why would she do this to her own son?
I’ve got to respond. I owe it to her, to him, to the universe. I leave his arms and step away. “Look,” I begin, rubbing my face, “it was one of those high school parties. Down by the river. They didn’t know each other. The school was all about cliques, all about where you came from. You know—the Heights, the Flats. They never got together again after that.” This is so vague and so stupid sounding. I step back toward him and place my arm around his shoulder. “She has her reasons, I’m sure.”
He shakes his head again, this time fast. “She always has her reasons. It’s all about power with her. Power over me. And now, power over him—a dead man. Noble as fuck. I even asked her if she knew you guys in high school and she said she didn’t.”
“Okay, okay. But now you do know. You know, and so you’ve got to try and get past this.” Me dispensing advice—especially this advice—now that’s a laugh. “If not for your mother’s sake, for your grandmother’s.”
His face has fallen into shadow. “Grandmother?”
I wasn’t going to bring Mrs. Lac into this, but in all the mess it suddenly seems important, as if somehow it will verify all the rest. I nod, telling him, “She has no idea. She has no idea about you.”
“Holy shit.” His voice seems to lighten. He blows his nose on the back of his hand—just like Pete—and wipes it on the salt floor. “Can we go see her?”
It’s my turn to shake my head. “If you want to meet her, you need to go by yourself.” I can’t explain to him or even myself the look she gave me in the hospital all those years ago, how final it was. Even if she said she wanted to see me—and if I believed she really did—it would be wrong. Isaac’s not a gift for me to give to her. It was too much like playing God, me telling him she exists, even if this god is only a god of mistakes.
“But Pete—I mean, my dad—was your boyfriend, right?”
That word seems as accurate as any. “Yes, he was.”
AUGUST 1994, ISAAC
I’m no longer me. Which isn’t necessarily such a bad thing.
I take Mike back to the house for his car. When he gets off the bike, he gives me my grandmother’s address. I don’t tell him I already know it. He crosses the street to his car. I don’t invite him in because I know he’d say no thanks, and besides, I want to get going. Haven’t even taken my helmet off.
I call out, “Where you staying?”
“Arkadia,” he laughs.
I look at him, puzzled.
He gets in his car and is pulling out before I get a chance to ask for more specific contact info. Then, jittery as a cokehead, I kickstart the bike and tear on out of the Heights. I’m going to meet my grandmother. “My grandmother,” I say out loud. It’s got a sweet ring to it that even a sarcastic bastard like me can love.
The sun’s going down. Long shadows cover the house that only yesterday was to me just the house of one of the guitarists for the No Names. The windows are lit. I practically bounce up the front walk and ring the bell. No answer. I wait, ring again. A third time. Every light is on, though it doesn’t look like anyone’s home. Maybe she’s in the back of the house and doesn’t hear me? I go around to the backdoor and knock. I can see right into the kitchen. No one there either. I press my face to the glass.
The instant I turn away from the door, I’m a monkey glimpsing the shadow of a snake, frozen and freaking out at the same time. Thousands upon thousands of TV and movie images have conditioned me so completely that it’s like genetic, my reaction to a pistol in my face. I know for certain that every moment of my life that has led to this one has been an absurd mistake. I put my hands up—also like I’ve been conditioned to do. A woman’s holding the gun on me. She’s Asian, about five-seven, slim, late forties/early fifties. These details in case it ever comes to me having to ID her.
“Face down on the ground,” she orders. She has a foreign accent.
As I fall on my knees, I whimper, “I’m just looking to talk with Mrs. Lac.”
“So you can what?” she asks with a laugh. “So this time you can ask her permission to rob her house?” With her foot, she pushes my shoulder down. “Didn’t you get everything you wanted the last two times?”
I’m now flat on my stomach, stammering, “I don’t know anything about that, I swear.” I get how she could think that, though, me like a burglar looking in the window, casing the place. She nudges the nose of the gun against the base of my skull, and I yell, “I’m her grandson! I’m Mrs. Lac’s grandson!”
With her free hand she pulls me by the head of hair. “What did you say?”
I barely manage to repeat, “I’m … I’m Mrs. Lac’s … I’m her grandson.”
She draws a sharp breath. She jerks my head to the side, examining my face.
I’m sweating, trembling. In a last-ditch effort to keep a bullet from exploding any future thoughts that might be crawling around in my brain, I blurt out the improbable facts of Copenhagen, the Færoes, Michael on the Island, until finally I’m begging, “Please, believe me!”
After long silence, she says, voice barely audible, “I am Mariko Lac,” the gun now aimed at my face, “and my son has no children.”
“It’s a long story.”
“And you look nothing like him.”
Never seen a picture of him, but I certainly don’t look anything like her. Even as I’m feeling the very real possibility of dying right here, right now, knowing my grandmother is Asian gives me a weird satisfaction. I’m blown away by the fact that, even genetically—not to mention socially or sociologically, ethically or ethnically, psychically or psychologically—we know next to nothing about ourselves, or at least I know next to nothing about myself.
