The Emperor of Any Place (13 page)

Evan can hear the finality in Leo’s voice.
Don’t fight it,
he tells himself. The truth is this whole thing is freaking him out. But there’s one thing he can do — has to do. “Got it,” he says, reluctantly. “But in case you need to reach me, can I give you my cell number? I mean it’s best you don’t phone the landline.”

“Right. Good.” Leo sounds relieved. Like he wouldn’t have asked for it but was glad to get it. So Evan gives him his number. Then he gives him his e-mail address as well, just in case. He says good-bye and is about to hang up when he hears Leo say something else. “Pardon?”

“I wanted to say that your father sounded like a really nice guy.”

Evan feels the stricture in his throat, overcomes it. “He was,” he says.

“So was Derwood. My dad. He died back in . . . Oh, it was over five years ago. The thing is . . . what’s happening with the Ōshiro book — what we are hoping to do? It’s supposed to be a kind of testament to him. That’s why I went ahead with it.”
What?
Evan wants to shout.
What?
“That’s why we’re at loggerheads with Griff — at this impasse. It was something I wanted to do for my dad. I still miss him a lot. You know?” He waits for a reply, but Evan can’t speak. His whole head is suddenly filled with nothing else in the world but missing his father. “I am sorry for your loss,” says Leo, as if he has tasted Evan’s loss at the end of the phone. “You look after yourself, okay?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Evan stands for a good long moment in the dark, thinking about the call. Then slowly, slowly, as he lets the world back in on his thoughts, something dawns on him. He becomes aware of something he hasn’t noticed until just this moment. The TV is no longer blaring.

Quietly, he makes his way along the hallway to the top of the stairs and, kneeling on the broadloom carpet, sees Griff standing in the kitchen. From this angle, he’s headless, but Evan doesn’t need to see his face. His hands are enough. They’re clutching the back of the blue ladder chair pressed up hard against the cluttered little kitchen table he and his dad never ate at. It’s littered with notes, rubber bands, and stumpy pencils; the kinds of things you pull out of your pocket and leave there for no reason when you come home. There’s also a cordless phone. Griff ’s hands hold on to the chair back so tightly that even from this distance Evan can see the knuckles are white.

Back in his room, Evan races to his bed and drops to his knees. The book is still there, nestled in a herd of dust bunnies. He needs a better hiding place, fast — a less obvious hiding place. He grabs the book, blows the fluff off it, stands up, and looks around. His eyes land on the closet door. There’s a poster of Albert Einstein there with the quote “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

“Thanks for that, Albee,” Evan says, and heads to the closet. On the shelf there are boxes. Neat containers of past obsessions, and he knows the one he wants. He puts down
Kokoro-Jima,
and then, on his tiptoes, he pulls down a black box big enough to ship a cat in, if you had one. He opens it.

Ah, yes. Pokémon.

He’s forgotten now how many cards he’s got, approximately a gazillion, all neatly stacked in piles, organized in some order that was intensely important to him once upon a time. Neat piles bound with rubber bands. “Winner and still champion of the Tidiest Kid Ever competition,” he murmurs to himself. On his knees, he unpacks the cards, then shoves the book in and piles the cards back on top of it. He looks to see if any yellow shows through. He’s about to close the box when paranoia jabs him in the gut, and he stops. He takes off the band holding one of the piles and sifts through the cards until he comes to one he wants. He puts it on top of the pile, rebands it, and then places the pile right in the middle. Slowking, with his headgear: one of the cards banned from general competition. What’d they call that head thing? Right, “Shellder,” not a hat, but a symbiotic creature latched on to the head of — Hell! He doesn’t have time for this now. He straightens up the cards. Done.

Just in time.

The knock on the door is sharp — expected, but it still makes him jump.

“Just a minute,” he says, shoving the box as quietly as possible onto the shelf. He closes the closet door, steps back. And the bedroom door opens.

“Jesus!” says Evan. “I said I was coming.”

Griff stands in the entranceway, his hand on the doorknob. “I didn’t hear you.”

“Yeah, well, then, you shouldn’t have come in!”

“Keep your shirt on, soldier.”

“And stop calling me that!”

Griff nods, stiffly. But the look on his face says he’s not a man used to being ordered around.

Pull in your horns, Evan.

“Sorry,” says Evan. “What do you want?”

The old man scans the room. Evan sidles away from the closet until he’s near enough the desk to lean on it, about as nonchalant as a terrier on speed.

Griff is nodding appreciatively. “You keep this place spick-and-span.”

“Thanks. Is that all?”

Griff ignores the question — the surliness, despite Evan’s promise to himself to play nice. “You must have gotten that from your mother,” says Griff. “Your daddy’s room was an eyesore when he was your age.”

“So, I’m borderline anal. I just like to know where stuff is, you know?”

“I do know,” says Griff, and stares at him hard. “So maybe you got this trait from me, after all. Skipped a generation.” Evan just stares. How do you tell a man that if you thought you shared a trait with him, you’d rip your own DNA apart, by hand, helix by helix?

“I like to know where stuff is, too,” says Griff, his eyes hardening.

He knows!

“It’s a lesson you learn living in barracks. You want everybody around you to know that what’s yours is yours.”

Evan looks down. Can’t match the deep blue hardness in those eyes. He leans his backside against his desk, rubs his hands down the front of his jeans, in case there’s any Pokémon magic dust on his fingertips. He looks up. “Is there something you wanted?” He tries to make it sound casual.

Griff turns off the killer death ray. “We’re out of coffee,” he says.

For a moment Evan wonders if this is some kind of really weak joke. “You burst in here to tell me we’re out of coffee?”

“Out of butter and eggs, too. A lot of things: salt, ketchup.” From the look on his face, patience is the main thing Griff is out of. “I thought I’d take the car up to that all-night place I saw on Don Mills. If you don’t have further plans for it.”

Good,
thinks Evan.
And as soon as he’s gone, lock him out and call the cops.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Anything you need?”

“No, I’m good.”

“Well, then. I shouldn’t be long.”

Griff closes the door with a feigned salute. Evan doesn’t breathe until he hears the click of the latch.

Evan sits at his desk, his legs apart, his elbows on his knees, the iPhone cradled in his palms, waiting for Leo to text him or phone. Waiting for more. Nothing. He sighs and puts the phone down, turns to his computer and Googles “Kokoro-Jima.” He’s not sure why, but when in doubt, ask the mother of all search engines.

There is lots of stuff in Japanese, some drumming group, a mail server for a domain called kokorojima.jp that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anything Evan can comprehend. There’s also a TV show, which catches his interest for a moment, before he realizes it’s not Kokoro-Jima; the search engine is just riffing on the word “kokoro” by now.

So he Googles “Leo Kraft.”

Turns out to be a real estate agent. Nice face, sort of chubby, losing his hair, tanned, dark features, dark eyes, and high-quality real-estate-agent teeth. There are letters from happy home buyers and sellers. Evan scrolls through them, looking for . . . what?

He sits back in his chair, the fingers of both hands raking his hair, scratching at his scalp. Dandruff sifts down, a minor July snow flurry. Right. He should have asked Griff to get shampoo.

Money. Lawyers.

Maybe Leo is building a resort on the island? Evan imagines people lounging by a pool surrounded by ghostlike children in bathing suits. He imagines
jikininki
as hotel bellhops and waiters. Lifeguards.

Not satisfied, he returns to Kokoro-Jima and scrolls through several pages before remembering what the words mean in English. So he quickly types in Heart-Shaped Island and . . . well, there are lots of them. Angelina even bought one for Brad for his birthday, or so it says. There are heart-shaped islands in Polynesia, Turkey, Australia, Germany — even Canada.

But not Isamu’s island. Nothing that big.

He scrolls on, because what else has he got to do? And then on page six, finally something:

“The Heart-Shaped Island: A Story of War and Healing.”

Breathlessly, Evan opens the site but there is nothing there but a message:

404. That’s an error.

There’s a cartoon drawing of a discombobulated robot trying to put himself back together and the explanation that the URL he was looking for cannot be found on this server. “That’s all we know,” says Ma Google.

Evan shakes his head. What does it mean?
Was
there a site called “The Heart-Shaped Island: A Story of War and Healing”? Was it closed down? Was that because of Griff ’s lawyer? But if there was a site, what was it about? Evan wants to smash the desk, have himself a good hard two-fisted tantrum. He holds off. No need to break stuff.

Then his phone dings. A message. He grabs it.

— Phined yet?

It’s Rollo.

— *Phined*?

He waits.

— Phoned, douchebag.

Did Evan tell him about Leo? No. Hmm. Then it comes to him.
The girl.
The girl who didn’t think he was entirely a douchebag.

— Yes. We’re getting married. Invite is in the mail.

— Ha ha ha. do it!!!

Evan goes to respond and stops himself, closes the window. He doesn’t have time for this right now. He’s exhausted. And it’s not just that. He senses that Rollo is trying too hard to bring him back from the dead. That’s what it is. He wants him to think about girls and music and the stuff that makes Any Place go around. Except he doesn’t know that Evan has washed up on this desert island instead, where he is surrounded by dead people . . . and one person who
should
be dead.

He thinks about the story. Griff hasn’t made his entrance yet. He would have been a million years younger. Evan tries to imagine him as ever having been so young — Evan’s own age from what he said.

And then an image comes to mind.

He jumps up from his desk and heads to his father’s room. He turns on the light, blinks. Fights down the lump in his throat, the tears pricking at his eyes. He will never be able to unlearn this room. He’ll have to do something with it. Turn it into something else. Get in a lodger. Sink the fucking place. He takes a deep breath, wipes his eyes.

Get a grip,
he tells himself. He’s got one more year of school. Then college. He won’t keep this place. No, he will. He’ll rent it out. No . . . oh, it doesn’t matter. He takes another big breath. He doesn’t have to decide anything right now. Right now he just needs to concentrate on what is going on. Concentrate on the stranger in
his
house. He feels like Ōshiro discovering the downed plane and realizing there is this missing navigator — someone sharing his private island.

On the dresser there is wooden cigar box covered in dust. Neither he nor his father was ever much for dusting. Now there is dust on everything in the room, but the layer on the cigar box is thicker, older, white with age. In the box are some pieces of jewelry, stuff Evan’s mother chose not to take when she left. She left in quite a hurry, the way his father tells it. Evan was only three; he didn’t see her go. His father set her up in a catering business, and she took off with some rock star. That was the story. Evan was never sure if it was true. It didn’t matter. Not anymore. He digs through the shadowy stash in the box, sniffs the faint tang of perfume that is as old as he is. Finally, he finds what he is looking for: a velvet jewelry box. He opens it. There is a silver chain inside with a heart at the end, a locket. Yes! He leaves the room, flipping off the light, enters his own room, and closes the door softly behind him. Mission accomplished.