A Tale for the Time Being (48 page)

“That one,” I said, pointing to the bag next to the door.

“Oh. Right. Yes. Of course.” He picked up the bag and glanced at me, and I could tell he was wondering if I’d looked inside. I turned away and went into the kitchen.

“Ittekimasu . . . ,” he called, but there was a catch in his voice, like he wasn’t sure.

Ittekimasu
is what you say when you know you’re coming back. That’s literally what it means: I’m going and I’m coming back. When somebody says
“Ittekimasu” to you, you’re supposed to answer “Itterashai,” which means: Yes, please go and come back.

But I couldn’t say it. I stood next to the sink with my back to the door, picturing him standing there with his shopping bag full of charcoal briquettes and his Nick Drake songs. Time Has
Told Me.
Day Is Done.

He must have thought I hadn’t heard him the first time, because he said it again, “Ittekimasu!”

Why didn’t he just leave! A moment later, the door clanged shut.

Liar
, I whispered, under my breath.

That was last night.

I didn’t need my dad after all. I caught the last train to Sendai and then transferred to the local and managed to get to the town closest to the temple. The buses had stopped running for
the night, but even with the hentai’s money, I didn’t have enough for a taxi up the coastline to Jiko’s village, so I sat on a bench in the dinky little station and waited. I
thought about calling the temple. I could imagine how the ringing of the phone would break the deep, dark silence of the night, and it seemed wrong, so I texted instead. I knew nobody would answer,
and I really felt like talking to someone, so I wrote all these pages to you. I knew you wouldn’t answer, either. I guess I fell asleep then.

The sky was just turning grey when the stationmaster woke me up and showed me where to catch the bus. I got a hot can of coffee from the vending machine, and now I’m waiting here for the
first bus to come. I tried calling the temple, but nobody’s answering, so I don’t know what’s going on there. I hope Jiko’s okay. I hope she isn’t dead already. I hope
she waits for me. I’m praying. Can’t you hear me praying?

I know this is stupid. I know you don’t exist and no one is ever going to read this. I’m just sitting here on this stupid bus stop bench, drinking a can of too
sweet coffee, pretending that I have a friend to write to.

But the fact is, you’re a lie. You’re just another stupid story I made up out of thin air because I was lonely and needed someone to spill my guts to. I
wasn’t ready to die yet and needed a raison d’être. I shouldn’t be mad at you, but I am! Because now you’re letting me down, too.

The fact is, I’m all alone.

I should have known better. I knew when I started this diary that I couldn’t keep it up, because in my heart of hearts, I never believed in your existence. How could I?
Everyone I believed in is dying. My old Jiko is dying, my dad is probably already dead by now, and I don’t even believe in myself anymore. I don’t believe I exist, and soon I
won’t. I am a time being about to expire.

Babette was right. I am selfish, and I only cared about my own stupid life, just like my dad only cared about his own stupid life, and now I’ve gone and wasted all these
beautiful pages and failed to achieve my goal, which was to write about Jiko and her fascinating life while I still had time, before she died. And now it’s too late. Talk about temps perdu.
I’m sorry my dear old Jiko. I love you, but I screwed up.

It’s cold. The blossoms in front of the station have mostly fallen, and the ones still clinging to the branches of the trees are an ugly shade of brown. There’s an
old man in a blue-and-white jogging suit sweeping the petals from the sidewalk in front of his pickle shop. He doesn’t see me. The stationmaster is opening the station doors. He knows
I’m here but he doesn’t look at me. A dirty white dog is licking its balls across the street. An old farmer woman with a blue-and-white tenugui on her head is bicycling by. Nobody sees
me. Maybe I’m invisible.

I guess this is it. This is what now feels like.

1.

The storm blew in from the northeast at dusk, rounding the Aleutians, sliding down the Alaska coast, and funneling into the Strait of Georgia with gale-force winds that knocked
out the power and extinguished the entire island in the blink of an eye. One minute the island was there, its presence marked by clusters of tiny glinting lights, and the next instant it was gone,
plunged into the darkness of maelstrom and sea. At least that’s how it must have looked from above.

Over the next couple of hours, the wind continued its assault on the clearing in the tall trees. The little house that usually blazed far into the night was now discernible only by the insipid
glow that emanated from the small square bedroom window.

2.

“. . . this is it,” Ruth read, straining to make out the letters in the dim light of the kerosene lamp. “This is what now feels like.”

Her voice sounded so small in the howling vastness of the storm-whipped night, but for a single long moment, the words brought everything to a standstill. The lamp flickered. The world held its
breath.

“She caught up with herself,” Oliver said into the silence.

They sat there, side by side in bed, thinking about what Nao had written, conscious that they were waiting for the wind to pick up, but when the quiet persisted, Oliver finally spoke. “Go
on,” he said. “Don’t stop.”

Ruth turned the page, felt her heart miss a beat.

The page was blank.

She turned another. Blank.

And the page after that. Blank.

She skipped ahead further. There were perhaps twenty pages still remaining in the book, and all of them were blank. The wind started up again, lashing the trees and pummeling the tin roof with
sheets of rain.

It made no sense. She knew the pages had once been filled because on at least two occasions she had checked, riffling through to see if the girl’s handwriting had persisted to the end of
the book, and indeed it had. The words had once been there, she was sure of it, and now they weren’t. What had happened to them?

She groped for her headlamp, which was hanging on the bedpost, switched it on, and slipped the band around her head. The bright LED beam was like a searchlight. Carefully, she raised the book
and glanced down at the bedspread, scanning the small hillocks and vales, half expecting to catch sight of the letters scurrying away into the shadows.

“What are you doing?” Oliver asked.

“Nothing,” she muttered, searching the blank pages once again, in case a stray word or two had gotten left behind, trapped in the gutter or stuck in the spine.

“What do you mean, nothing?” he asked. “Keep reading. I want to know what happens.”

“Nothing happens. That’s what I mean. The words are all gone.”

He exhaled, softly. “What do you mean, all gone?”

“I mean they were here, and now they’re not. They’re missing.”

“Are you sure?”

She held the book up to show him. “Of course I’m sure. I checked. Several times. The writing used to continue all the way to the very last page.”

“Words can’t just disappear.”

“Well, they did. I can’t explain it. Maybe she changed her mind or something.”

“That’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think? She can’t just reach in and take them back.”

“But I think she did,” Ruth said. She switched off the headlamp. “It’s like her life just got shorter. Time is slipping away from her, page by page . . .”

He didn’t answer. Maybe he was thinking. Maybe he’d fallen asleep. She lay there for a long time, listening to the storm. The rain was blowing sideways now, beating against the
window like a creature trying to come in. The kerosene lamp on the bedside table was still lit, but the wick wanted trimming and was sputtering badly. She would need to reach over and blow it out
soon, but she disliked the stench of kerosene and smoke, and so she waited. Oil lamps and LEDs. The old technologies and the new, collapsing time into a paradoxical present. Did whale oil smell any
better? In the jittery light, she was aware of Oliver lying next to her, a dim, unstable silhouette, moving in and out of darkness. When at last he spoke, as though no time at all had passed, the
proximity of his voice startled her.

“If that’s the case,” he said, “then it’s not just
her
life that’s at risk.”

“What do you mean?”

“It calls our existence into question, too, don’t you think?”

“Us?” she said. Was he kidding?

“Sure,” he said. “I mean, if she stops writing to us, then maybe we stop being, too.”

His voice seemed farther away now. Was it her ears or the storm? A thought occurred to her.

“We?” she said. “She was writing to me. I’m her
you
. I’m the one she was waiting for. Since when did I become us?”

“I care about her, too, you know,” he said. His voice sounded close again, right next to her ear. “I’ve listened to you read the diary, so I think I qualify as part of
you by now. And besides, ‘you’ can be either singular or plural, so how do you know she wasn’t referring to both of us from the beginning?”

It was hard to tell with all the racket of the wind, but she thought she caught an undertone, a simmering amusement, in his voice. She switched on her headlamp again and turned the beam on his
face.

“Do you think this is
funny
?”

He held up his hand to deflect the harsh light. “Not at all,” he said, squinting. “Please . . .”

She obliged, turning her head away.

“I’m serious,” he said, as he receded into the dimness. “Maybe we don’t exist anymore. Maybe that’s what happened to Pesto, too. He just fell off our
page.”

3.

Outside in the tall cedar tree by the woodshed, the Jungle Crow raised its shoulders against the heavy rain. The wind whipped through the boughs, ruffling the shiny black
feathers.
Ke ke ke
, said the crow, scolding the wind, but the wind couldn’t hear over the din, and so it didn’t answer. The branch swayed and the crow tightened its talons,
preparing to launch forward and fly.

4.

“You sound even crazier than I do,” she said.

“Not at all,” he said. “On the contrary. We just have to approach this problem logically. Take it step by step.” There was something careful and deliberate in his speech
that made her uneasy.

“You’re baiting me,” she said. “Stop it.”

“If you’re so sure the words were there,” he continued, “then you have to go find them.”

“That’s ridiculous—”

“The words were there,” he said. “And now they’re gone. Now, where do missing words go?”

“How would I know?”

“Because it’s your job to know?” He had been directing his remarks to the ceiling, and now he turned to face her. “You’re a
writer
.”

It was perhaps the cruelest thing he could have said.

“But I’m
not
!” she cried, her anguished voice rising to compete with the wind. “I used to be, but I’m not anymore! The words just aren’t there . .
.”

“Hm,” he said. “Maybe you’ve been trying too hard. Or looking in the wrong place.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe they’re here.”

“Here?”

“Why not?” He gazed back up at the ceiling. “Think about it. Where do words come from? They come from the dead. We inherit them. Borrow them. Use them for a time to bring the
dead to life.” He rolled onto his side and raised himself up on one arm. “The ancient Greeks believed that when you read aloud, it was actually the dead, borrowing your tongue, in order
to speak again.” He moved his long body over hers, reaching toward the oil lamp on the bedside table. He cupped his hand over the tall glass chimney to blow out the flame, and for just a
moment, the light shining from below, up onto his face, cast the deep sockets of his eyes into skeletal shadows. “The Island of the Dead. What better place to look for missing
words?”

“You’re freaking me out . . .”

He laughed and then blew across the funnel of the chimney. The room went dark and the acrid scents of kerosene and smoke rose like ghostly leavings.

“Sweet dreams,” he whispered.

5.

What if I travel so far away in my dreams that I can’t get back in time to wake up?

“Then I’ll come and get you.”

What does separation look like? A wall? A wave? A body of water? A ripple of light or a shimmer of subatomic particles, parting? What does it feel like to push through? Her fingers press against
the rag surface of her dream, recognize the tenacity of filaments and know that it is paper about to tear, but for the fibrous memory that still lingers there, supple, vascular, and standing tall.
The tree was past and the paper is present, and yet paper still remembers holding itself upright and altogether. Like a dream, it remembers its sap.

But she holds her edge, pushing until the fibers give way, like cambium to an ax blade, like skin to a knife—

The boughs part then, revealing a path that winds and twists, growing narrower and narrower, leading her into an ever-thickening forest. The rain has stopped now. Crickets chirp. The fragrance
of temple incense, cedar and sandalwood, lingers in the air.

In the distance, something catches her eye amid the leaves—a pixelation, a form, a figure? Hard to say. It darts from limb to limb. A bird? The pixels cohere, darken, and the image
dissolves. She strains after it and then remembers.
Maybe you’ve been trying too hard.
She stops trying.

Sometimes the mind arrives but the words don’t.

Sometimes words arrive but the mind doesn’t.

Where are these words coming from? She stops walking, too. She sits down on the thick forest floor in the roots of a giant cedar. The mossy humus forms a cushion underneath her, cool and damp,
but not unpleasant. She crosses her legs.

Sometimes mind and words both arrive.

Sometimes neither mind nor words arrive.

A spider drops on a silvery thread from the branch overhead. A faint breeze stirs the treetops. Dew and rain cling to the leaves and ferns of the understory. Each drop holds within itself a
small, bright moon.