The Bread We Eat in Dreams (29 page)

32.
Yuki-Onna looks up. Her eyes are darker than death. She closes them; Yuu’s words appear on the back of her neck.

33.
Yuu is unhappy. He wants Sazae-Onna to love him. He wants Yuki-Onna to come back to visit him and not the Noble and Serene Electric Master. He wants to be the premier calligrapher in the unhuman half of Japan. He wants to be asked to join Namazu’s dice games. He wants to leave the House of Second-Hand Carnelian and visit the Emperor’s island or the crystal whale who lives off the coast of Shikoku. But if Yuu tries to leave his ink dries up and his wood cracks until he returns.

34.
Someone wanted a good path between the human and the unhuman Japans. That much is clear.

35.
Sazae-Onna does not like visitors one little bit. They splash in her pond. They poke her and try to get her to come out. Unfortunately, every day brings more folk to the House of Second-Hand Carnelian. First the Guardian Lions didn’t leave. Then Datsue-Ba came back with even more splendid clothes for them all, robes the color of maple leaves and jewels the color of snow and masks painted with liquid silver. Then the Kirin returned and asked Sazae-Onna to marry him. Yuu trembled. Sazae-Onna said nothing and pulled her shell down tighter and tighter until he went away. Nine-Tailed Kitsune and big-balled Tanuki are eating up all the peaches. Long-nosed Tengu overfish the river. No one goes home when the moon goes down. When the Blue Jade Cicadas arrive from Kamakura Sazae-Onna locks her kitchen and tells them all the shut up.

36.
Yuu knocks after everyone has gone to sleep. Sazae-Onna lets him in. On the floor of her kitchen he writes a Kappa proverb:
Dark clouds bring rain, the night brings stars, and everyone will try to spill the water out of your skull.

37.
At the end of summer, the unhuman side of the house is crammed full, but Ko can only hear the occasional rustle. When Kawa-Uso the Otter Demon threw an ivory saddle onto the back of one of the bears and rode her around the peach grove like a horse, Ko only saw a poor she-bear having some sort of fit. Ko sleeps all the time now, though he is not really sleeping. He is being Yuu on the other side of the plum-colored screen. He never writes poetry in the tatami anymore.

38.
The Night Parade occurs once every hundred years at the end of summer. Nobody plans it. They know to go to the door between the worlds the way a brown goose knows to go north in the spring.

39.
One night the remaining peaches swell up into juicy golden lanterns. The river rushes become kotos with long spindly legs. The mushrooms become lacy, thick oyster-drums. The Kitsune begin to dance; the Tengu flap their wings and spit
mala
beads toward the dark sky in fountains. A trio of small dragons the color of pearls in milk leap suddenly out of the Nothingness River. Cerulean fire curls out of their noses. The House of Second-Hand Carnelian empties. Namazu’s Lions carry him on a litter of silk fishing nets. The Jar of Lightning bounces after Hone-Onna and her gentleman caller, whose bones clatter and clap. When only Yuu and the snail-woman are left, Sazae-Onna lifts up her shell and steps out into the Parade, her pink hair falling like floss, her black eyes gleaming. Yuu feels as though he will crack when faced with her beauty.

40.
The Parade steps over the Nothingness River and the Nobody River and enters the human Japan, dancing and singing and throwing light at the dark. They will wind down through the plains to Kyoto before the night is through, and flow like a single serpent into the sea where the Goldfish Emperor of the Yokai will greet them with hismillion children and his silver-fronded wives.

41.
Yuu races after Sazae-Onna. The bears watch them go. In the midst of the procession Hoeru the Princess of All Bears, who is Queen now, comes bearing a miniature Agate Great Mammal Palace on her back. Her children fall in and nurse as though they were still cubs. For a night, they know their names.

42.
Yuu does not make it across the river. It goes jet with his ink. His strong birch shaft cracks; Sazae-Onna does not turn back. When she dances she looks like a poem about loss. Yuu pushes forward through the water of the Nothingness River. His shaft bursts in a shower of birch splinters.

43.
A man’s voice cries out from inside the ruined brush-handle. Yuu startles and stops. The voice says:
I never had any children. I have never been in love.

44.
Yuu topples into the Nobody River. The kotos are distant now, the peach-lanterns dim. His badger-bristles fall out.

45.
Yuu pulls himself out of the river by dry grasses and berry vines. He is not Yuu on the other side. He is not Ko. He has Ko’s body but his arms are calligraphy brushes sopping with ink. His feet are inkstones. He can still here the music of the Night Parade. He begins to dance. Not-Yuu and Not-Ko takes a breath.

46.
There is only the House of Second-Hand Carnelian to write on. He writes on it. He breathes and swipes his brush, breathes, brushes. Man, brush. Brush, Man. He writes and does not copy. He writes psalms of being part man and part brush. He writes poems of his love for the snail-woman. He writes songs about perfect breath. The House slowly turns black.

47.
Bringing up the rear of the Parade hours later, Yuki-Onna comes silent through the forest. Snow flows before her like a carpet. She has brought her sisters the Flower-and-Joy Kami and the Cherry-Blossom-Mount-Fuji Kami. The crown of the Fuji-Kami’s head has frozen. The Flower-and-Joy Kami is dressed in chrysanthemums and lemon blossoms. They pause at the House of Second-Hand Carnelian. Not-Yuu and Not-Ko shakes and shivers; he is sick, he has received both the pain in his femurs and the pain in his brush-handles. The Kami shine so bright the fish in both rivers are blinded. The Flower-and-Joy Kami looks at the poem on one side of the door. It reads:
In white peonies I see the exhalations of my kanji blossoming.
The Cherry-Blossom-Mount-Fuji Kami looks at the poem on the other side of the door. It reads:
It is enough to sit at the foot of a mountain and breathe the pine-mist. Only a proud man must climb it.
The Kami close their eyes as they pass by. The words appear on the backs of their necks as they disappear into the night.

48.
Ko dies in mid-stroke, describing the sensation of lungs filled up like the wind-bag of heaven. Yuu dies before he can complete his final verse concerning the exquisiteness of crustaceans who will never love you back.

49.
Slowly, with a buzz like breath, the Giant Hornet flies out of her nest and through the peach grove denuded by hungry Tanuki. She is a heavy, furry emerald bobbing on the wind. The souls of Ko and Yuu quail before her. As she picks them up with her weedy legs and puts them back into their bodies she tells them a Giant Hornet poem:
Everything is venom, even sweetness. Everything is sweet, even venom. Death is illiterate and a hayseed bum. No excuse to leave the nest unguarded. What are you, some silly jade lion?

50.
The sea currents bring the skeleton-woman back, and Namazu who has caused two tsunamis, though only one made the news. The Jar of Lightning floats up the river. Finally the snail-woman returns to the pond in her kitchen. They find Yuu making tea for them. His bristles are dry. On the other side of the plum-colored screen, Ko is sweeping out the leaves.

51.
Yuu has written on the teacups. It reads:
It takes a calligrapher one hundred years to draw one breath.

There is a tree at the end of the world. It grows around a broken old brick wall—the wall is broken because the tree is strangling it, bursting through its mortar with its silver-red roots. The tree is stunted because the wall was built too close to its root system. That is how things are at the end of the world.

The end of the world is easy to find. There’s a boat up north will take you there for twenty dollars and an apple. If you don’t have the cash, Annie’ll probably take you anyway. But the apple is mandatory. Annie has been running the ferry so long that she breaks off a strand of her hair when she wants salt for her soup. She wears a black hat with a silver pin, so you’ll know who she is, and the boat-horn sounds like a widow weeping. But if you don’t bring her an apple, she’ll take you to Bar Harbor with the rest of the tourists, tip her hat and give you a nice little coupon for 20% off your lunch at some nameless cafe.
You have a nice summer, now, sweetheart
.

The dock at the end of the world needs some work. Annie keeps meaning to get her girl Frigg to replace the planks, but somehow it never gets done, winter comes and goes, and the same barnacled redwood-trunks slowly rot into the sea. Frigg got it into her head to go to art school in New Hampshire. I’ve heard she’s studying juggling, with a minor in wire-walking. I don’t judge, even though one of the dock lines broke last year and a poor trireme sank right off the pier. All hands drowned, except the Red Hound of Mykenos, who bit the sea until it spit him back. Old boy sleeps by the tree now, and growls at the summer people. Annie gave Frigg an earful during finals week. It’s ok, though. If the end of the world wasn’t a safety hazard, there’d be hotels here by now.

The tree at the end of the world is an apple tree. Trust me, I know. Some folk say it’s fig, and some say pomegranate, some say walnut when they’re
very
drunk, and I don’t begrudge them tenure. The locals know better—they’re apples, big as basketballs, the color of the sun. Some of the apples know the difference between good and evil. Some have
kallisti
written on them. Some will get you pregnant for six years. Some know how to live forever. Some will drop you dead in the ground before your second bite. Trouble is, it’s damnably hard to tell one from the other. Even I have to squint, and even I’m wrong, sometimes. We’ve only had one lady up looking for the
kallisti
apples, and frankly, we’re a little more careful with our receipts now.

Black Sally built the wall at the end of the world. She said she did it to keep the wolves out, away from the damn tree—worse than deer, wolves. One summer she hung little slices of green stuff all over the tree to keep the local fauna off. She said it was shards of the World-Emerald her cousin sent from Peru, but we could all see
Irish Spring
stamped in the stuff, and the World-Emerald doesn’t smell clean and fresh as the Irish countryside.

It smells like bones.

Anyway, it wasn’t the wolves. There’s only three of them, and they’re not so bad. Sure, they mess with the roots and gnaw a bit—they’re only dogs, after all. If I were a dog I’d probably chew on the tree, too. Mostly, they lope about looking hangdog and hoping Black Sally will fall in love with one of them and make them human. She tried it once, but he ran off to be an aeronautical engineer and she said that was the end of wolves for her. Everyone knows Sal built the wall because of the meridian. That’s the actual end of the world, you know. The tree and the dock and all, they’re just decoration. You can’t see the meridian, or smell it, or hear it. And sometimes it moves, just to be contrary. But it stays on the other side of the wall, because Black Sally told it to. The wall says:
Danger: High Voltage
. It says:
Keep Behind This Line Until Your Name Is Called
. It says:
that’s far enough, son
. If you, because you didn’t listen to Sally or Annie or me, hop the wall like a hooligan and step over the meridian, well, that’s it for you, kid. You vanish—there’s no poof, or popping noise, or flash of light, but you’ll blink out, sure as Sunday. It’s not very nice to watch. We post signs, but there’s no telling some people.

The coffee at the end of the world is bitter. Harry Half-a-lion sells it for a dime a cup out of a little kiosk about half a mile from the tree. Used to be a nickel, but times are hard. Harry used to be somebody, he likes to tell us. Used to be a big strong man somewhere down south; made his money wrestling lions and snakes and mucking out stalls for some rich old man. Harry rowed himself out to the end of the world—Annie never forgave him for that. He meant to take an apple for some lady back home, but I can’t think of a soul who looked at those apples and didn’t sneak a bite for themselves. Harry sat down in the dust and cried, poor soul. I think he must have gotten the kind that tells you you’re naked, no matter how many furs you’ve got on your back. Naked and weak and young, and no help for any of it. Harry gets his coffee shipment in from Mexico by way of dinghy every spring, and everything smells like beans for a week while he roasts the beans himself in a big bronze barrel. You should see his arms when he’s turning the berries over, it’s like something out of a storybook. When folk come looking for the tree, he pours them little dixie cups of hot coffee—it’s cold at the end of the world, even in July. Apples don’t grow in the heat, you know. Harry doesn’t allow cream or sugar. That sort of thing is too decadent for him to bear. Once, someone suggested he ought to offer croissants. Harry just punched him right in the nose.

That said, we do eat, even at the end of the world. Idun wears an apron and not much else, even when ice forms on the ends of her hair. The wolves watch her and their tongues loll out of their mouths—but she’s not interested in aeronautical engineers. She keeps her stove smoking all winter long: apple pies and apple tarts, caramel apples and baked apples and apple upside-down cake, apple-spice bread, apple pudding, apple popovers, apple jam and applejack. Once, as a kind of joke, she brought a fig-pomegranate pie with walnuts sprinkled on top to the annual bonfire. We all had a good laugh. Idun doesn’t say much, but she’s got a friendly face . I think she had a husband once, but she doesn’t like to talk about it. Anyway, it’s all pretty dangerous stuff, mixing the apples like that. They smell wonderful, but I never eat them. I don’t want to know what that applejack knows.

There are aphids on the tree at the end of the world. Little milky green ones, and they love the apples. A butterfly landed on the tree once, and then another, and another, and we all came out to see them, they were so beautiful, blue and white and black. Black Sally sighed like her lover had come home to her, and the aphids roared up in a thin green wave and devoured the butterflies, so fast I almost forgot they were ever there, like the aphids could eat my memory of them, too. I think the aphids know what the applejack knows. They eat from all the apples. They’re dead for all time and alive forever and they know they’re naked and they don’t care, and they know they’re the fairest and they know the butterflies are, too. I’m afraid of them. One autumn Black Sally and I got out these old perfume atomizers and sprayed cayenne pepper and lemon juice on them. I was sure I could hear them laughing, tiny, green laughter—they shriveled down to nothing for a day and then swelled up again, milkier and hungrier than before. There used to be a nice kid who sold little silver apples on chains down by the wall. Not anymore. I don’t really want to talk about that. We leave the aphids alone, now.

Once, a woman came to the end of the world. She was dressed all in black, with a high collar. Annie let her off at the dock—Frigg wasn’t even born yet, and Annie had pigtails but a ferryman’s license all the same. Harry didn’t want to give her any coffee, but she just stared at him till he grumbled and pulled the tap on his thermos. The wolves ran off yelping—one bolted straight into the meridian and vanished. She walked up to the tree like she’d known it all her life.

“What do you want it for?” said Idun.

“My daughter,” said the woman.

“Is she pretty?” Idun always loved pretty girls, like they were her special sisters.

The woman in black nodded. “The fairest of them all.”

“Be careful, then. It’s hard to tell the apples apart.”

“I have faith,” said the woman, her stony face set, her lips red as blood. “I know all the old gods; they come ’round Thursdays for cake and checkers. They will guide my hand, and my daughter will know I love her, that it was all a mistake. She will live forever, and I will fade and die, and that is right and proper. She will live forever and know that her mother loved her, really, so much more than mirrors and huntsmen.”

“Be careful,” said Idun.

The woman in black reached up and plucked an apple, a beautiful one, shining in the twilight and the mist of the end of the world, white on one side and red on the other. None of the other apples were like that. She could barely hold it in both arms. But the apple got smaller as the ferry drifted back over the water, until it could fit in an old woman’s basket.

Years later, she came back. She was old. Her feet were covered in blisters. Idun shook her head and kissed them. Idun is like that.

Well, that was a long time ago. The tree punishes pride, it’s always had a bit of a thing about that. I can’t really walk anymore—some things don’t ever heal. I mostly sit by the wall in my old boat deck chair and watch the wind blow milkweed into the meridian. I watch them silently vanishing as the moon comes up. I knit, when my arthritis lets me. Frigg sends up a nice home-spun wool from New Hampshire at the end of each semester. Black, of course. When tourists come, I hand them headphones and an audio tour on cassette tape. On it, I tell them all the apple-stories I know. Except one. I used to do a live show, but the kids seemed so bored.

When winter comes to the end of the world, the sea freezes over, and we all have a little peace. The dock is clotted up with chunks of ice, and even the meridian freezes in places, huge circles of ice floating in the air like mirrors. It’s so quiet. That’s when I think about her the most, when I touch the great apples, hanging red and bright even in the cold, as they always will. I think about chances, statistics. What was the probability of choosing so badly? One in a hundred? A thousand? Less? Was there ever any chance that I might choose the right one, or did the tree choose, all along?

I dig my nails into the flesh of one, and the juice like blood runs over my wrinkled hand. I look up, helpless, palsied, childless, into the flat, frozen heavens, a sky like skin, skin as white as snow.