East is East (20 page)

But there was no sense in thinking that way—all that was lost to him now. Now he was in America, where nature was primeval,
seething, a cauldron of snapping reptiles, insects and filth, where half-crazed Negroes and homicidal whites lurked behind every tree—now he was in America, and he had a new life ahead of him. And what he wanted was to turn right, to the north—that was where the great mongrel cities lay, that much he knew—but he'd traveled that road already, to the Coca-Cola store, with its subhuman proprietors and deranged customers, and he hadn't thought much of the experience. And so he turned to his left, and headed south.

This time he strode along the shoulder of the road, defiant, angry. If they came for him, he'd fight. Screw them all, the long-nosed bastards. He was wearing clean clothes for the first time in weeks—
hakujin
clothes—and he'd be damned if he'd plunge into the cesspool alongside the road like a scared rabbit. He'd had it. He was fed up. He was going to walk all the way to the City of Brotherly Love. On his own two feet. And god help anyone who got in his way.

He walked, one foot in front of the other, the sun sinking, the mosquitoes massing, and the road never changed. Tree and bush, creeper and vine, stem and leaf and twig. Birds wheeled overhead; insects danced in his eyes. He looked down, and the corpses of lizards and snakes, wafer-thin and baked to leather, stained the surface of the road. He looked up, and something slithered across the pavement. Before long, the canvas of the tennis shoes began to chafe at his ankles.

And then he heard it, behind him: the ticking smooth suck of an automobile engine, the hiss of tires. He hunched his shoulders, set his teeth. Sons of bitches.
Hakujin
scum. He wouldn't turn his head, wouldn't look. The ticking of the engine drew nearer, the tires beating at the pavement, his heart in his mouth … and then it was past him, a whoosh of air, rusted bumper, children's faces pressed to the rear window. Good, he thought, good, though he was slick with sweat and his hands were trembling.

He hadn't gone a hundred yards when a second car appeared, this one hurtling out of the crotch of the horizon ahead of him. He
watched his feet and the car came toward him. Dark and long, the teeth of the grille, the high wasteful whine of the
Amerikajin
engine, and then it too shot past him, the memory of the driver's pale numb unblinking gaze already fading, already useless. But what the specter of that second car had done was to mask the presence of a third, and he realized with a sudden jolt that not only had another vehicle crept up behind him undetected, but that it was now braking alongside him, the huge demonic white thrust of its fender right there, right there in the corner of his eye. Be calm, he told himself, ignore it. The tires crunched gravel. The fender was undeniable, gleaming, ghostly, white, the long steel snout of the entire race, nosing at him. Every word of J
ō
ch
ō
shot through his head, but he couldn't help himself. He looked up.

What he saw was a Cadillac, an old one, with fins and glittery molding, the kind of car TV personalities and rock stars maneuvered round the streets of Tokyo. In the driver's seat, hunched so low she could barely see over the doorframe, was a wizened old
hakujin
lady with deeply tanned skin and hair the color of trampled snow. She slowed to nothing, a crawl, and her eyes searched his as if she knew him. Unnerved, he looked away and picked up his pace, but the car stayed with him, the big white fender floating there beside him as if magnetized. He was puzzled, tense, angry: What was she doing? Why didn't she just go away and leave him alone? And then he heard the hum of the electric window and he looked up again. The old lady was smiling. “Seiji,” she said, and her voice was a jolt of cheer, strong and untethered, “Seiji—is that you?”

Astonished, Hiro stopped in his tracks. The car stopped with him. The old woman clung to the steering wheel, leaning toward him and gawking expectantly across the expanse of the passenger's seat. He'd never laid eyes on this woman before, and he wasn't Seiji, as far as he knew—though for the moment he couldn't help wishing he were. He shot a quick glance up and down the road. Then he bent forward to peer in the window.

“It's me, Seiji,” the old lady said, “Ambly Wooster. Don't you
remember? Four years ago—or was it five?—in Atlanta. You conducted beautifully. Ives, Copland and Barber.”

Hiro rubbed a hand over the hacked stubble of his hair.

“Oh, those choral voices,” she sighed. “And the shadings you brought to
Billy the Kid
! Sublime, simply sublime.”

Hiro studied her a moment—no more than a heartbeat, really—and then he smiled. “Yes, sure,” he said, “I remember.”

“You're so clever, you japanese, what with your automobile factories and your Suzuki method and that exquisite Satsuma ware—busy as a hive of bees, aren't you? You've even got whiskey now, so they tell me, and of course you've got your beers—your Kirin and your Suntory and your Sapporo—and they're every bit as good anything our lackadaisical brewing giants have been able to produce, but
sake, sake
I could never understand, how
do
you drink that odious stuff? And your educational system, why, it's the wonder of the world, engineers and scientists and chemists and what have you, and all because you're not afraid of work, back to the basics and all of that. You know, sometimes I almost wish you
had
won the war—I just think it would shake this spineless society up, muggings in the street, millions of homeless, AIDS, but of course you have no crime whatsoever, do you? I've walked the streets of Tokyo myself, at the witching hour and past it, well past it”—and here the old lady gave him an exaggerated wink—“helpless as I am, and nothing, nothing did I find but courtesy, courtesy, courtesy—manners, that's what you people are all about. It's manners that make a society. But you must think me terribly unpatriotic to say things like this, and yet still, as a Southerner, I think I can appreciate how you must feel, a defeated nation, after all. What did you' say your name was?”

Hiro was seated at the massive mahogany table in Ambly Wooster's great towering barn of a house at Tupelo Shores Estates. He'd finished the soup course, cream of something or other, and he was gazing out on the gray lapping waves of the sea, nodding agreeably
and praying silently that the Negro maid would emerge from the kitchen with a plate of meat or rice, something substantial, something with which he could stuff his cheeks like a squirrel before someone discovered his imposture and ran him out the door. The old woman sat across from him, talking. She'd never stopped talking, even to catch her breath, from the moment he'd slid into the passenger's seat of her car. But now, as he watched the gathering dusk and fought down the impulse to attack the maid in the kitchen if she didn't hurry and bring him meat, rice, vegetables, the old lady was asking his name. He panicked. The blood rushed to his eyes. What was his name—Shigeru? Shinbei? Seiji?

But then she went on without waiting for an answer, nattering about flower arrangements, the tea ceremony, geisha and robots (“… so unfair really of these yellow journalists, and that's what they are, no one would deny that, least of all themselves, so unfair and irresponsible to characterize such a thrifty and hardworking, no-nonsense, nose-to-the-grindstone race as yours as
robots
living in
rabbit
hutches, shameful, simply shameful, and it just makes my blood boil …”), and Hiro relaxed. His function was to listen. Listen and eat. And at that moment, as if in confirmation of his thoughts, the kitchen doors flew open and the maid appeared, tray in hand, two intriguing wooden bowls perched atop it.

She was a big woman, the maid, big as a sumo wrestler, with nasty little red-flecked eyes and a wiry pelt of hair bound tight to her skull in rows that showed the naked black scalp beneath. Her nose was flattened to her face and she carried a sickening odor with her, the odor of the
hakujin,
the meat-eaters and butter-stinkers—only worse. From the moment he'd stepped in the door with his ragged shoes and dangling Band-Aids and thrown himself at the dish of nuts on the coffee table, she'd regarded him with loathing, as if he were vermin, as if he were something she'd squash beneath her foot if only he weren't under the protection of her dotty old mistress. She saw through him. He knew it. And now, as she came through the doorway, she caught his eye with an incendiary look,
a look that said his time was coming, and that when it did there would be no holds barred. Hiro dropped his eyes.

“There's nothing more practical than a futon, that's what I've always said, and I was just saying to Barton the other day—he's my husband, Barton, he's an invalid—oh, thank you, Verneda—I was just saying to Barton, 'You know, Barton, all this furniture, all these gloomy old antiques, they're just such a clutter, so inefficient, I mean the Japanese don't even
have
bedrooms—' ” And then the old lady paused a moment, a look of bewilderment surprising her all but immobile features. “But then, where
do
your sick and elderly lie up when they're ailing? … I suppose in those excellent hospitals, best in the world,
our
medical profession certainly can't touch them, what with the AMA and all their infighting, our own students having to attend medical school in Puerto Rico and Mexico and all those filthy, horrid, Third World places—”

With an angry snap of her wrist, the maid set the wooden bowl down before Hiro, and he wondered in that moment if he'd come far enough, if she recognized him, if she'd called the authorities and they were even then bearing down on him, but the thought flitted in and out of his head, all his attention focused on the insuperable bowl before him. Meat. Rice. He couldn't hide his disappointment: the bowl was filled with salad greens.

Later, though, with time and patience and the bleary, head-nodding endurance of the conscripted, he was rewarded with yams, several dishes of pale green vegetables boiled beyond recognition, and meat—fresh succulent meat, ribs and all. It was the first hot meal he'd had since his dispute with Chiba aboard the
Tokachi-maru,
and he lashed into it like the indigent he was. The maid had set great heavy ceramic bowls of the stuff on the table, and his hostess, pausing in her monologue only to take a birdlike peck at a scrap of meat or mashed greens, urged him on like a solicitous mother (“Oh, do have a bite more of the okra, won't you, Seiji? Heaven knows Barton and I could never—and the pork too, please, please—”). He filled his plate time and again, scraping the depths
of the serving bowls and sucking methodically at the naked sticks of the bones that littered his plate, while the old lady rattled on about kimonos, cherry blossoms, public baths and the hairy Ainu. By the time the glowering maid brought coffee and peach cobbler, he was in a daze.

He no longer cared what was happening to him, no longer cared where he was or what the authorities might do to him if they caught up with him—this was all that mattered. To be here, inside, with rugs on the floors and paintings on the walls, to be here at the center of all this wonderful immensity, all this living space—this was paradise, this was America. In a trance, he followed his hostess from the dining room to the library, and while the maid cleaned up they sipped a sweet and fiery liqueur and filled their coffee cups from a gleaming silver carafe that might well have been bottomless.

At some point, he found himself stifling a yawn, and noticed the clock on the mantelpiece. It was past one in the morning. The maid had long since seen to the needs of the invalid upstairs, taken leave of her employer and departed for the night—to her home on the mainland, as Ambly Wooster informed him, in detail and at length. He'd had no problem with the old lady's accent, really—her speech was carefully enunciated and precise, not at all like the barbaric yawp of the girl in the Coca-Cola store—but this term,
mainrand,
was new to him. For the past hour or so he'd merely leaned back in his chair, letting the liqueur massage him, and he hadn't caught more than a snatch or two of the old lady's ceaseless rant. In fact, if it weren't for his in-bred courtesy, his compulsion to avoid giving offense, his samurai's discipline, he would have drifted off long ago. But now, suddenly, the idea of this
mainrand
sprang up in his head like a sapling disburdened of snow, and he cut her off in the midst of a paean to kabuki theater. “Mainrand,” he said, “what is this, sank you?”

Ambly Wooster looked startled, as if she'd wakened from a dream. Hiro saw now just how old she was, older than his
ob
ā
san,
older than the bird that laid the thousand-year-old egg, older than
anything. “Why, the shore,” she said, “the Georgia coast. This is an island we're on. Tupelo Island.” She paused a moment, blinking at him out of her watery old eyes. “What did you say your name was?”