A Tale for the Time Being (54 page)

And speaking of stars, one night about a month after we got home, my dad and I went out for a walk to that little park by the Sumida River, and we sat on the swings and watched the stars above
and the dark water of the river flowing by. Feral cats were slinking through the shadows, eating garbage. In the darkness, swinging back and forth, it was easy to talk about difficult things. We
talked about the stars and the size of the cosmos, and about war. We’d just finished reading Haruki #1’s secret French diary earlier that day. My dad got this graduate student who was
studying French poetry at the university to translate it for us, and we were reading it together, and for the first time I was learning how evil people can be. I thought I understood everything
about cruelty, but it turns out, I didn’t understand anything at all. My old Jiko understood. That’s why she always carried Haruki’s juzu beads with her, so she could pray to help
people be less cruel to each other. After the funeral, Muji gave the juzu to me, and now I carry them all the time, too. They’re pretty intense beads, dark and smooth and heavy with all the
prayers from H #1’s and Jiko’s fingers that have gone into them. I don’t know any prayers, so I just make them go round and round and say blessings in my head for all the things
and people I love, and when I run out of things I love, I move on to the things I don’t hate too much, and sometimes I even discover that I can love the things I think I hate.

At the end of the secret French diary, on the night before he died, my great-uncle actually wrote about his suicide mission, and me and my dad were surprised to learn that he had made up his
mind not to crash his plane into the enemy aircraft carrier after all. He couldn’t get out of going on the mission, so he decided to fly his plane into the waves instead. Of course, this was
totally top secret. He knew his commanding officers would execute him for treason if they found out his plan to purposefully miss his target, and he wanted to make sure that his mother and his
sisters got the compensation money that the government was supposed to give to the families of dead pilots who gave their lives for their country. It made a lot of sense to me. He was like the Crow
Captain. He didn’t want to support a war that he hated, and he didn’t want to cause any more suffering, even for his so-called enemy. When I read this, I felt a little bit ashamed,
actually. I remembered how I used to ambush Daisuke-kun and beat him up, and also how I went forth as a living ghost to stab my enemy Reiko in the eye. I started to feel so bad about this, I
decided I would apologize if I ever saw them again, which I probably won’t. Daisuke and his mom moved away, and since I stopped going to school, I don’t see Reiko anymore.

Anyway, when we read about Haruki’s decision to fly into the waves, my dad totally lost it. We were at home, sitting at the kotatsu, and he was reading the translation out loud to me, and
when he got to that part, he put down the page and made this loud snorting noise that sounded a bit like a gigantic sneeze, only it wasn’t. It was an explosion of sadness. He stood up and
went into the bathroom and shut the door, but I could still hear him crying in a deep, gulping way. This is weird, right? To hear your dad totally fall apart? I didn’t know what to say, and
of course it freaked me out because when your dad’s already tried to commit suicide a bunch of times, this kind of thing makes you nervous. But eventually he came out again and started to
cook dinner like everything was back to normal, so I dropped it, but later that night, when we were in the park and swinging in the darkness, I asked him why he’d gotten so bent out of shape,
and he told me.

It was all connected to his job in Sunnyvale and how come he got downsized. I was still pretty young when that whole thing happened, so I didn’t understand it at the time. All I knew was
that he was designing interfaces for a computer gaming company, which seemed pretty cool to me.

“My interfaces were really good,” he said. “They were so much fun. Everybody enjoyed playing them.” He had this wistful, faraway look in his eyes. “We were
prototyping first-person operator perspectives. They called me the Pioneer of POV. Then my company signed an agreement with a U.S. military contractor. They were going to apply my interfaces in
designing weapons controllers for soldiers to use.

“Wow,” I said. That sounded pretty cool, too. I didn’t say so, but he heard it in my voice. He dug the plastic toe of his slipper in the bare patch of sand below the swing and
brought it to a stop.

“It was wrong,” he said, leaning his body forward into the chains that held up the swing. “Those boys were going to kill people. Killing people should not be so much
fun.”

I stopped swinging, too, and hung there next to him. My heart was pounding, pushing the blood into my cheeks. I felt so stupid and young, and at the same time something was cracking open inside
me, or maybe it was the world was cracking open to show me something really important underneath. I knew I was only seeing a tiny bit of it, but it was bigger than anything I’d ever seen or
felt before.

He got off the swing and started walking. I followed him. He told me how he fell into a deep depression and stopped sleeping at night. He tried to find someone to talk to about his feelings. He
even went to see a California psychologist. He kept bringing up the issue at work, too, trying to convince the members of his development team to let him program some kind of reality check into the
interface design, so that the poor pilots would wake up and understand the madness of what they were doing, but the military contractor didn’t like this idea, and his company and team members
got tired of hearing about his feelings, so they fired him.

He sat down on a cement panda and held his face in his hands. “I was so ashamed,” he said.

I couldn’t believe it. I stared at him, sitting all hunched over on the panda’s head, and I felt like my heart would burst with pride. My dad was a total superhero, and I was the one
who should be so ashamed, because the whole time he was being persecuted for his beliefs, I was just pissed off at him for getting himself fired and losing our money and ruining my life. Shows you
how much I knew.

He was still talking. “. . . so that’s why I cried today, when I read Uncle Haruki’s diary. I understood how he felt, you see? Haruki Number One made his decision. He steered
his airplane into a wave. He knew it was a stupid, useless gesture, but what else could he do? I made a similar decision, also stupid and useless, only my plane was carrying our whole family. I
felt so sorry for you, and for Mom, and for everyone, on account of my actions.

“When 9/11 happened, it was clear that war was inevitable. They’d been preparing for it all along. A generation of young American pilots would use my interfaces to hunt and kill
Afghani people and Iraqi people, too. This would be my fault. I felt so sorry for those Arab people and their families, and I knew the American pilots would suffer, too. Maybe not right away. At
the time those young boys were carrying out their missions, it would all feel unreal and exciting and fun, because that’s how we designed it to feel. But later on, maybe days or months or
even years later, the reality of what they’d done would start to rise up to the surface, and they would be twisted up with pain and anger and take it out on themselves and their families.
That also would be my fault.”

Restless, he stood up from the panda and shuffled over to the chain-link fence that surrounded the playground. I followed. A little gate led out onto the high angled concrete embankment of the
river. We sat side by side on the slope and watched the swift dark current of the river sweep by. I knew he’d thought about drowning himself in these waters. I knew he was thinking about the
times he’d come here to die. He reached over and took my hand.

“I let you down,” he said. “I was twisted up with my guilt. I wasn’t there for you when you really needed me.”

I held my breath. He was going to bring up the Panties Incident. He was going to confess that he’d been bidding on them. I tried to pull my hand away. I really didn’t want to talk
about it, but how could I escape? After all, I’d asked him a tough question and he’d given me a true and honest answer. I owed him. So when he asked me how my panties had gotten up on
that burusera hentai website and what had happened in the video, I took a deep breath and told him everything. I know he and Mom had talked about my ijime, but I don’t think he ever realized
how bad it was. I could see it made him sad, but it also really pissed him off.

“Thank you for telling me,” he said when I’d finished. There was a hard edge in his voice but I knew he wasn’t mad at me. It sounded more like he’d made up his mind
about something. He stood up and pulled me to my feet, and we walked home in silence, stopping once at a vending machine so he could buy me a Pulpy. He seemed really preoccupied. I don’t know
what he’s planning to do, but ever since that night, he’s been back working at the computer like a fiend with a raison d’être.

He’s stopped reading The Great Minds of Western Philosophy completely, and spends all his time programming, which really is his superpower. I mean, there are lots of superheroes with
different superpowers, and some of them are big and flashy, like superstrength, and superspeed, and molecular restructuring, and force fields. But these abilities are really not so different from
the superpower stuff that old Jiko could do, like moving superslow, or reading people’s minds, or appearing in doorways, or making people feel okay about themselves just by being there.

Anyway, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, except that I thought you would like to know. My dad seems to have found his superpower, and maybe I’ve started to find mine,
too, which is writing to you. And before I run out of space, I just want you to know that me and my dad are really okay, now that I finally know what kind of man he is, and even though we
haven’t actually discussed the topic of suicide, I’m pretty sure that neither of us is thinking along those lines anymore. I know I’m not, anyway. As soon as I’ve finished
these last pages, I’m going to buy a new blank book and keep my promise, which is to write the whole entire story of old Jiko’s life. It’s true she’s already dead, but her
stories are still alive in my head at least for now, so I have to hurry up and write them down before I forget. I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms
or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.

And maybe you’ll be glad to know that for the first time in my life, I really don’t want to die. When I wake up in the middle of the night, I check to see if H #1’s sky soldier
watch is still ticking, and then I check to see if I’m still alive, and believe it or not, sometimes I actually feel scared, like
Oh my god, what if I’m dead! That would be
terrible! I haven’t written the story of old Jiko’s life yet!
And sometimes when I’m walking down the street, I find myself thinking,
Oh, please don’t let that
stupid Lexus careen out of control and run me over, or that crazy hentai burusera salaryman with the comb-over stab me with a penknife, or that guy all dressed in white who looks like a cult
terrorist drop a bag of sarin gas in my subway car . . . at least not until I’ve finished writing old Jiko’s life! I can’t die until I do that. I have to live! I don’t want
to die! I don’t want to die!

That’s what I find myself thinking. At least until I finish writing her story, I absolutely don’t want to die. The thought of letting Jiko down brings tears to my eyes, and I guess
you could say this is a big improvement in my state of mind, to actually be worried about dying like a normal person.

And here’s one last thing. I just learned something very encouraging. I learned that old Marcel Proust didn’t write just one book called
À la recherche du temps
perdu
. He actually wrote seven! Amazing, right?
À la recherche du temps perdu
was an incredibly long story with thousands of pages, so he had to publish it in a bunch of
different volumes. And the very last volume is called
Le temps retrouvé
, which means
Time Regained.
How perfect is that? So now I just have to keep my eyes open and try to
find an old copy of
Le temps retrouvé
. I’ll take it to the crafty shop in Harajuku and see if I can get the lady who works there to send it to the hacker to do another
book-mod for me, and then I’ll write old Jiko’s story in that.

Hm. You know what? On second thought, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll actually try to learn some French so I can read Marcel’s book, instead of throwing out all the pages. That would
be cool. And as for my old Jiko’s life story, I think I’ll just buy some plain old paper and get started.

1.

She closed the book.

She’d reached the end. The final page. She was done.

Now what?

She looked at the clock. The red numbers glowed, 3:47 a.m. Almost four o’clock. The woodstove in the living room had long gone out and it was cold in the house. If she were at Jiko’s
temple, she would be getting up to go sit zazen in an hour. She shivered. Outside the bedroom window, the cold, black night pressed against the pane, and only the single bright spot of her
headlamp, reflected in the glass, kept it at bay. She could hear the wind in the bamboo, and the sound of a tall tree creaking. Next to her, Oliver slept soundly, his lips making a little pu-pu-pu
sound. The injured cat, in the box on the floor next to his side of the bed, was silent. He must be sleeping, too.

She’d woken inexplicably an hour earlier, and after lying awake for a while, unable to get back to sleep, she’d picked up the diary. Before she knew it, she was reading the
penultimate page. Only one more to go. She’d hesitated then, wondering if the pages would suddenly multiply again, but they didn’t. She turned the final page. The words continued, she
read them to the end, and then at the bottom of the page, they stopped. There was no doubt about it. There were no more words and no more pages.