East is East

academy—and then all at once he knew where he was and his eyes locked open. He saw the crosshatching of the wicker, shellacked and faded, and he saw the flowered pillowcase and his own filthy and battered hand. He heard nothing, not a sound. In the next instant he was up and off the couch, cursing himself, cursing her, and then he tore open the door and ran for the woods, his breath coming in torn ragged gasps. How could he have trusted her, he thought, oblivious to slash of palmetto and tug of briar, his adrenaline surging, expecting at any moment to hear the first startled bellow of the sheriff’s hounds at his back. The bitch, the false deceptive white-legged hakujin bitch: how could he have been so stupid?

This wasn’t fair play—fea pure—not at all. This wasn’t how the game was played. This was cheating. She’d caught him with his defenses down, caught him when he was ready to pack it all in, to give up and die of shame and ignominy, and she’d seduced him with her voice and eyes and her pure white body and then stabbed him in the back. But he’d escaped her. Oh, yes. And he would never yield again, never—he would be as ruthless and crafty as the high-noses themselves. No more fea pure for him. Nice guys finish last—Leo Durocher, the great Amerikajin manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers had said that, and Jocho had said it too.

He tore at creeper and twig, splashed through a scum-coated channel and startled something in the shallows. Finally, winded, he threw himself down in the red muck to consider the situation. For a long moment he held his breath, listening—they came at you with dogs, bloodhounds, he knew that. Give them a sock, a sandal, a cigarette butt, and they could track you to the ends of the earth. He was too frightened yet to be miserable, too exhausted to think straight. But when he calmed down, when the sun dropped below the rim of the world and left the trees in haunted gloom and the birds of the night screeched overhead, he was fully miserable once again, and he began to wonder if he hadn’t been just a bit rash.

Perhaps she had meant to help him after all. She said she was going to get him clothes. He couldn’t very well expect her to have a suit of men’s clothes in her cabin, could he? She didn’t live there, he knew that much. She came in the morning and left in the evening. He supposed she was a secretary of some sort and that the cabin was her office—and if that was the case, well then perhaps she had gone to get him clothes … and food, more food, the meat paste sandwiches and hard vegetables and fruit he’d discovered in the lunch pail, the little cheeses wrapped in foil and a wedge of frosted cake. His hara announced itself then and he rose itching from the muck, a lingering sour troubled taste in his mouth, and struggled back in the direction from which he’d come.

It wasn’t easy. The shadows deepened; the trees stood in ranks, linked arm to arm, as alike as blades of grass; things swift and unseen whipped through the scrub at his feet. Twice he toppled headlong into the bushes, the dirty gauze of cobweb and spider silk caught in his mouth and nostrils, mosquitoes harassing him in all their legions. He’d almost given up hope when the tangle of trees released him to the brief remission of the yard.

He froze. It was full dark now, the night clear and moonless. Not twenty feet away stood the cabin, an absence of definition, a shadow that drew in all the shadows around it. Nothing moved. He listened to the chirr of crickets, the hum of mosquitoes, the violent thump and wheeze of his own internal machinery as it went about the business of keeping him alive. What if they were waiting in there for him? What if they were watching him even now, their dogs at heel, guns drawn, fingers twitching over their searchlights?

Step by tottering step, he approached the mass of shadow that was the cabin. Going to school, living with his obasan, swabbing the galley of the Tokachi-maru, he’d almost forgotten his own physicality, and here he was, playing another children’s game: red light, green light. He took a step and then froze. Two steps. And then another. When he was close, when he could distinguish the horizontal bar of the porch railing from the clot of shadows behind it, he felt a surge of joy. The clothes: there they were! He reached out to the material, the white T-shirt palely glowing. She’d been true to him after all—she was his ally, his friend, his comfort and support, and she did play by the rules, she did, though he must have been as strange to her as she was to him. In that moment, he loved her.

In the next, he was crestfallen. She’d brought him antiseptic and bandages, water and soap and clothing that smelled of scented detergent and the tumble-dryer—but she’d forgotten the most important thing, the thing that made his gut seize and cry out in peristaltic anguish: she’d forgotten food. The apples, dates and crackers, the box lunch, they were nothing, a distant memory, and a great howling inconquerable hunger took hold of him like rage. The bitch, the stupid bitch, she’d forgotten to bring him food!

All right. But he had the clothes, the soap, he had clear clean potable water. Or at least he assumed it was clear, clean and potable—he could barely make out the basin in the black of the night. He bent his face tentatively to the basin and drank, and to his joy he found the water sweet and fresh, with no taint of the swamp—had water ever tasted so good? Then he stripped off his rags, fumbled for the washcloth and soap and began a long slow luxurious lathering which he interrupted only long enough to stave off the mosquitoes.

When he’d finished, he stood and upended the basin over his head and then filled it again—at least she’d thought to leave the water jug on the porch, he muttered to himself, his gratitude drowned in outrage: no food—Band-Aid strips, but no food! He wet his hair, soaped and rinsed it and wet it again. Then he sat on the front steps, still naked, and cut the burrs and thistles and twigs out of it with his penknife. He didn’t have much of a beard—a few sparse hairs curling from his chin and darkening his upper lip—and these he tried to cut too, but with less success. Finally, he reached for the shorts and slipped into them with all the satisfaction of a half-grown boy slipping into his yukata after a long hot soak.

He carried the T-shirt and the tennis shoes, Jocho and his penknife into the dark cabin with him. For a moment he stood there in the darkness, smelling her, a sweetness of the flesh and a hint of western perfume that lingered like spice on the air. The cabin was deserted. He remembered the hot plate and the tin of crackers. She must have something here, he thought, anything. And then he took a risk: he fumbled round the place, lost in utter blackness, till he found her desk lamp and switched it on.

The room sprang to life, a dazzle of color and dimension—a room, habitable space, four walls and a roof. He was inside. He’d spent his whole life inside, and now he was inside again. The windows glared at him, opaque with light, and he knew he was visible to anyone standing out there in the night… but he didn’t care. Not now. Not anymore. All he cared about now was food. And where was it? Where did she keep it? He scanned the room—the rows of books, the typewriter with its curling page, the fireplace, the chairs and loveseat—finally settling on the flimsy little table that held the hot plate. There were coffee things there: a mug, a spoon, a ceramic container with packets of Sweet’n Low and non-dairy creamer, a boldly labeled jar of decaf. And that was it. Nothing else. Nothing to eat.

For the next half hour he sat there in a pool of golden light, treating his wounds and sipping decaffeinated coffee—one cup after another. There wasn’t much nutrition in it, he knew—some soya protein in the creamer, maybe—but he loaded his cup with the artificial sweetener and the packets of dry yellowish powder and told himself he was having a rich and satisfying meal. He dabbed gingerly at his torn flesh, examined his poor battered feet like a pensioner in his garret. He squeezed the pus and flecks of dirt from the infected cuts and abrasions that striped him from head to toe, treated them with stinging iodine and soothing peroxide, and applied the Band-Aids one atop the other till his legs and arms and chest were a pale wheeling collage of plastic strips. He took his time, and his heart beat like a clock, strong and steady. To be here, to be inside, in this space separated from the hard ground and naked sky, was a quiet miracle. That it was her space, that she was here during the gathering hours of the day, made it all the sweeter. He felt, at long last, that he’d been rescued.

When he was done—when he’d used all the Band-Aids, drunk all the creamer and emptied all the packets of Sweet’n Low—he flicked off the lamp and stretched out on the wicker loveseat. He would spend the night—this one, at least—under a roof, instead of scrabbling around in the mud like an animal. God, how he hated nature. Hated the festering stink and the wet and the gnats in his eyes and ears and nostrils. The wicker was hard beneath him, but it didn’t matter. He closed his eyes and settled himself, the obscene drama of the night, with all its comings and goings, its little deaths and devourings, its spiders and snakes and chiggers, out there where it belonged.

The problem was, he couldn’t sleep. He was exhausted, worn-out, as weary and heartsick as any human being on the planet, and he couldn’t sleep. He kept seeing her, the woman, the Amerikajin, rehearsing her face and her body over and over again: the moment she turned to him, the rustled silk of her voice. And then he was thinking of his obasan and how when he was small and couldn’t sleep she would read to him in the glowing little circle of the tensor lamp beside his bed. She hadn’t liked Mishima, hadn’t liked it when he gave up baseball for Jocho and his Hagakure. And then he remembered the nights he couldn’t sleep because of the clenching