As they enter a small park, she begins to doubt that,
even if alone, without any of the patients, she could get served here in the shops, or board a bus, for she would know who she is and it would somehow spill out, telling everyone. And it is here that it is pounded into her that she is one of them as well, that she is no different, no matter how she may appear. The same. Over there, across the channel, the patients are dependent on her, but here she is as dependent on them as they are on her. Maybe more so. All of them are getting along much better over here than she. Mrs. Makibara has bought her sunflower seeds; they are all now placing the plastic sheets on the ground, getting ready to have the lunch that they have prepared. She is the only one sitting on the bench at the far side of the park, cold with sweat, feeling unsteady. At the opposite end of the park, a young woman is playing with a small group of children, all wearing the same uniforms and hats. She still has her eyes on them when Mr. Shirayama comes over and sits next to her.
“Are you okay, Miss Fuji?”
“I don’t know. I feel a little dizzy.”
“Try to eat something. This is difficult for all of us. Maybe it’s too much being here for the first time.”
“But I’ve been here before.”
Mr. Shirayama’s face is puzzled.
“This is where I came those nights. I didn’t just go swimming; I used to walk these same streets. Only it was night and there was nobody out here. And I was alone, wasn’t with any of you.”
The severity of her words shames her, leaving Mr. Shirayama as if she has slapped him across the face. He stands and returns to the blanket that the other patients have laid out. He must have said something to them, because they eat for a while before one of the patients comes over with a couple of rice balls and a piece of fish.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You should eat something; maybe it will make you feel better.”
“I’m not hungry.” She tries to be nice, wants to be polite, wants not to hurt them, but wants even more to be left alone, and she can’t bring any warmth into her voice. The patient takes the food back to the blanket.
She notices the sun, the shadows it is casting, and figures that she must remain here another two hours before getting back to the ferry and returning home to Nagashima.
ARTIFACT Number 1139
A photo from the dock, looking
toward Shodo Island
For weeks, she has thought of this day. And now it is here and she is standing on the dock early, as on every year. This year, she needs no umbrella for the night is clear; it hasn’t rained for more than two weeks. She has been standing here for more than a fist of the passing crescent moon. About an hour, she thinks, remembering one of the patients telling her that the length of a fist held up to the horizon is about an hour’s distance for the moon to travel. The moon is now on her second fist and she knows the answer to the question that has trailed her since her last birthday: It wasn’t because of the rain that there was no fire.
ARTIFACT Numbers 2027, 2028, 2029
A harmonica, an accordion, a drum
The first time she hears it, she thinks it is in a dream. Distant, but clear. Then she thinks that it is the wind whistling up from the Inland Sea and through the cedars, but she doesn’t feel the wind. There are two different kinds of sounds: first, a high-pitched moaning, and later that is joined by a musical instrument—a harmonica perhaps. There is a pattern to them, a repetition, with breaks every fifteen or twenty seconds, and then it starts back up again. The more she listens, the more she is convinced that the second one she is hearing is a musical instrument, a harmonica.
The first one, she can’t place as any instrument she knows.
Still, she can’t imagine where it is coming from. Maybe it is one of those nights when the wind is just right and sounds carry across the channel—the engine of a trawler, the bark of a dog, voices even, although she can never understand what they are saying, but certainly voices. She has tried to put faces to those voices—maybe the man on the fishing boat she had seen on her late-night swims, or maybe the boy and girl. But this thinking makes her weary, the faces always obstructed by night or distance.
Leaning up on her elbows, she checks to see if anyone else is awake. They’re not. Miss Kitanami is supposed to be on night watch, but she has fallen asleep against the wall. She wants to wake someone, ask them if they, too, hear it, see what they think it is. She tries concentrating as to which ear the music first enters, from the right or left, but she knows how sounds can play games. Maybe her hearing is fading, she thinks, perhaps from the diving, like—she pauses, takes a second to remember her name— Miyako; dear Miyako, how the air pressure had damaged her hearing, so many of the older divers’ hearing. She has often imagined this happening, getting older, having to lean in closer to a conversation to hear it, closer each year, until she would be nearly on top of the person. How she would talk louder, thinking everyone else also had trouble hearing.
Her worries about her hearing are shoved away by the fact that she couldn’t recall Miyako’s name. Her mentor, her favorite of all the divers, the one who fed her while she hid in the horrible weeks before arriving here. She tries recalling the other divers’ names and can only come up with five or six; she can recall some of their faces, their bodies in the showers, but not the names. Maybe it isn’t her hearing that is fading, for the music is clear; maybe it is the repetitions of the days that are dulling her mind.
The second one is a harmonica, she tells herself again, almost certain that it is coming from the hill to the east of her room, up there near the suicide cliff. But why, and who? She wants to go outside and see, but she remains there listening to the music, wondering if someone on the other side of the channel is also awake, also listening.
For the third
straight night, she hears the music. Tonight, there is a drum added to the harmonica and the other instrument. She has thought of asking others if they, too, have heard it, but she doesn’t, allowing herself to enjoy the remote possibility that she is the only one who listens to it each night, a personal performance. Tonight, however, it is too much for her, and she steps into her sandals, walks out into the early March night, and follows the music.
The plum blossoms are late this year, and their white flowers, although dulled, can still be seen silhouetted against the cloudy night sky as she walks up the hill. She likes the plum blossoms more than the cherry, their beauty equal, she thinks, and the crowds are always smaller and she can enjoy them more. The slight grade up the path is rocky, although not as bad as it used to be. She has recently seen a few of the patients, with their large bamboo baskets, hauling rocks from the path, others raking and sweeping it. The difference is quite noticeable, and she imagines that someday she may even be able to walk the path in her bare feet.
The music gets louder the farther she goes, but then suddenly it stops, then picks up and starts again from the beginning. She has no idea of the song, but she recognizes the same notes played over and over again. Repeated about every half minute.
Rehearsal
is the word that comes to mind. How things are done over and over until nearly perfect, and then over and over again. The repetition, almost like diving. How she could rate each and every day of diving, good or poor, or that rare near-perfect day when her lungs felt fresh each and every dive, her hands finding exactly what she wanted. Those rare days—maybe once or twice a season.
She is at the door of the large building atop the hill, the opposite side of which, only a hundred feet away, is the suicide cliff. She has never stood atop the cliff, night or day. Has seen it only from below. From down below, with the sea curling in and around the rocks, there’s almost a strange beauty to it, but up here, although it is night and she can see very little, it is cold. Cold enough to make her forget the music coming from the building behind her.
She turns and almost runs over to the building, the music pulling her into it. Once again, she hears the music, that same twenty-second spurt of a piece or piece of a piece that she has heard for the past three nights.
The sliding door is open; a lizard with a tail twice the length of its body sits on the door frame. The music has stopped as if on cue, as if they know she is there. She is to the side of them, a dozen men sitting on wooden chairs atop the tatami floor. Although the night is cold, some are barefoot. Several hold their harmonicas to their mouths, ready to play; others rest them on their laps, listening to the man sitting on a stool in front of a set of drums.
A hitting together of two wood blocks and the music starts up again. First, there is that sound that she couldn’t place; it is coming from some strange instrument that a man holds, pulls open and closed, small piano keys on one side. A cumbersome-looking instrument. As he opens and closes it, she thinks of a giant handheld fan, opening and shrinking. The pace begins slowly and then the harmonicas join in, picking it up until it is almost frenetic, the drum boom, boom, booming in the background, pulling the pace gradually back down again until only a creaking of a chair is heard.
“You have to play together, all the same pitch. There are too many individual tones running in and out of here. Let’s try it again from the beginning.”
They do, that slow pace picking up, peaking, and then going back on down.
“Again.”
She can’t decide how the song makes her feel—good or desperate, or both, up and down, as with the music.
“Okay that’s better,” says the man at the drums, although she doesn’t recognize anything so different from the previous times they played. “Let’s take a break.”
The man comes over to her, the drumsticks under his left arm.
“I hope we are not disturbing you.”
“No. I heard the music for the past few nights and I was wondering where it was coming from.”
“Let me introduce you to the Blue Bird Band. We are going to perform a concert here this summer. As you can hear, we need practice, but we have some good players.”
“It’s nice to hear music.”
“Thank you. It gives us something to carry around with us during the day; we can practice in our heads, which helps to blank out things we don’t want to think about.”
“The only music I have heard here are several songs that I call up in my mind. But it seems that some days I can’t do it. I forget them or I can’t find them.”
“I hope that this band will put some new songs in your head and that you can recall them anytime that you need.”
“What’s the big instrument?”
“That’s an accordion. You’ve never heard one before?”
“No, I don’t think so. Where did you get it?”
“Before I came here, I used to teach high school band. I’ve managed to get a few older instruments donated.”
“I hope you continue on with it. It’s nice.”
“Come back and listen anytime you like. We’ll be here almost every night.”
ARTIFACT Number 0901
A story told by Miss Min
While the urn—Woman, fifty-five—is being painted, she goes down to the bottom of the cliff. It has been awhile since she has been here. The winter has been long; she has fought a cold all through it, and today is the first time in several months that she has felt well enough to sacrifice the extra hour of sleep. As she walks through the darkness of five o’clock, she wishes she had stayed back on the futon. She feels as though she is a stranger to this part of Nagashima, would, on a normal day, be chilled by the thought that maybe she has lost another piece of this place, like the shore where she used to stand, years ago, across from Mushiage, like the dock from where she began and ended her swims. But, today, she knows she has lost much more than a piece of this island.
She steps along the shell-crunchy shore, heading over to the large rocks. Although the sun is not yet up, the sky has given enough light for her to see. Once she makes her way atop the third rock, the highest in the cluster, she feels a stranger here no more. It is the familiarity of these rocks that she likes most, how they never seem to change, how they take so long to be worn away by the sea, by the wind, the bodies that have hit them. The passing of time is so much kinder to them than to us, she thinks. She looks at her hands, which are as they have always been, short, thickfingered, but now there are creases running around them and the skin is looser. And the rest of her body, not only her hands, is softening, too.
She sits on her favorite rock.
The sun is up, still hidden by the small hill on the eastern side of Nagashima. It is not a spectacular sunrise in any way, which lessens her guilt for not coming here more often.
She remembers the day when she first went over to Key of the Hand Island with Miss Min and wishes that she could go back and tell her of the bird she has seen, the fish that it has caught. Today, she thinks again, I have lost more than a piece of this island. While looking over at the path, which is still under the sea, she would like to pray, but that has never been something for her. So she thinks of a story that Miss Min told her one day while she was giving her a massage:
He watches his mother as they climb. She leads the way,
whether making it easier or more difficult for him, he isn’t
sure. It is the middle of October, the beginning of autumn
here in the central part of the country. The higher they
climb, the closer to winter it becomes. Near the top, where
they will stop, it will be two weeks closer to winter than
down in the valley.
“I can watch the leaves change colors and together we
can fall when it is time to rejoin the earth,” she told him
and his wife two days earlier. It was one of the rare mentions since making the decision the spring before.
Knowing that others have done the same, been doing
so for awhile, doesn’t help him, doesn’t ease at all the raging, repeating, mocking question: What are you doing? He
has heard about the son carrying his elderly mother or father on his back all the way up, but it is these words that
propel him up the mountain. His mother, although seventy, needs no help; it is he who wants to stop and rest. He
who wants to take the load off that question, peel it from
his back, set it on the ground for a while.