East is East

there in his brain: his mama at the stove and himself and Wheeler and his daddy sitting at the table, the mad hag’s shriek of a hurricane wind in their ears, windows rattling, claws on the roof, and his mama jiggling the cast-iron pan and flipping corn cakes as if nothing in the world was the matter. He was thinking about that and the tightness was gone, and then he glanced up and caught the grandson’s eye, and saw, for the first time, that the grandson was staring back at him as if he’d seen a ghost.

And that was it, the beginning of the end: recognition. This was no grandson—and the noose bit into him with a sudden savage jerk—this was, was … there were no words to form the thought, only rage crackling like grease in a hot frying pan. He took three steps forward, the machete poised over his head, and he saw those Chinese eyes, that Chinese nose and mouth and ears come back to haunt him. “Son of a bitch!” he cried—or tried to, the words sticking in his throat, choking him, the noose like a garrote, like two nooses, two garrotes … and then something was giving way inside of him and he plunged forward as if into a vast body of water and knew he would never be short of breath again.

Hiro had awakened that morning—his sixth under the Wooster roof—to the smell of eggs, bacon and fried tomatoes, and to the strains of some vaguely familiar symphonic music, some Russian or European thing. He dressed in his freshly laundered shorts—Ambly Wooster, rambling on about textiles, Taiwan, Korea and Jordache, had tried to give him a pair of her grandson’s blue jeans, but they’d been too tight to zip up—and then he pulled on the gray sweatshirt, thick cotton socks and Nike hightops that fit as if they’d been made for him, and sauntered downstairs to breakfast.

The music swelled to greet him, and as he turned the corner into the sunstruck parlor, he caught a glimpse of the morning maid, Dolly, darting out of sight like an insect. If the other one, Verneda, was physical and suspicious, Dolly was her opposite: slight and neurasthenic, afraid to make eye contact, her hair a topiary marvel, her skin the buttery tan of the blazer Hiro had worn to school as a boy. She disappeared into the dining room, leaving Hiro to bow deeply to his host and hostess, who were seated at the breakfast table in the bay window overlooking the sea. The glass was pregnant with light. Gulls hung over their heads. Somewhere, beneath the rush of violins, the ocean pounded the shore.

“Seiji!” the old lady cried, giving him a cagey look, her head tilted to one side, a smear of lipstick blotting her crooked smile. He could see that she was holding back, biting her lip, fighting to dam up the torrent of banality that lashed her tongue like a whip across her palate, teeth and lips through her every waking moment. “Ohayo,” she said, greeting him in Japanese and struggling with her tongue, her very eyes bulging with the effort to hold it all in.

He bowed again. “Ohayo gozaimasu,” he returned, and bowed to the husband too. But the husband wouldn’t have known that, since he was blind and deaf, propped up in his wheelchair like a man of rags propped up on a broomstick.

On the table were rashers, eggs, toast, butter, coffee, fried tomatoes and marmalade. It wasn’t the sort of breakfast he preferred—he liked ochazuke himself, a bit of cold rice warmed with green tea—but he couldn’t complain. Not after his exile in the wilderness, not after the crabs and grasshoppers and the hopeless spoon-licking repast he’d made of coffee crystals, nondairy creamer and artificial sweetener. But still, the Americans made such a mess of their food—just served it in a heap, with no thought of grace or proportion, as if eating were a shameful thing—and if he weren’t starving, he would have turned up his nose at it. He pulled back the chair to sit down.

“Well, don’t you notice anything?” the old lady asked, trembling with the effort to contain all those slips of meaning, that rush of words and syllables and phrases.

He paused over the chair, bewildered.

“The music,” she said. “The music, Seiji—” and then she caught herself. She was grinning now, her teeth dead and gray, cracked, yellow, too big for her mouth.

And then he understood. The music. It was a routine she’d impressed on him. It meant nothing to him—he liked American music, personally, disco and soul, Michael Jackson, Donna Summer, Little Anthony and the Imperials—but he knew what she wanted. And he needed time here and she was kind to him and he didn’t mind, didn’t mind at all. He released the chair, stepped back a pace, composed himself, and began, as best he could and with the sweeping muscular movements of the long-distance swimmer, to conduct.

Later, after Barton had been fed and changed and wheeled out into the shade for some air; after Dolly had appeared and vanished again like a domestic ghost, only the faintest click of plate and cutlery giving her away; and after Ambly Wooster had spilled her continents, her oceans, her worlds of breath and gone up to take her afternoon nap, Hiro strolled out to sit beside the pool and grow strong again.

He felt safe here, the space enclosed and cultivated in a proper and proportionate way. And the water—it had been milky the first day, but he’d found the chemicals, the chlorine and acid, and stirred them in, and overnight it had become pellucid—the water soothed him. Throughout the afternoon, as the sun mounted in the sky and the heat rose, he plunged in and out of the pool in the swimming trunks Ambly Wooster had provided for him, frolicking like a seal. And each time he entered the pool, he felt that much cleaner, that much more human, that much further removed from the swamp. He lay back, drying in the sun, and watched the gulls sail across the sky, and when Dolly, eyes averted, slipped up on him with a plate of sandwiches and fruit, he ate with quiet satisfaction and with a deep and abiding gratitude.

America wasn’t so bad after all, he began to think. And he even entertained a brief fantasy of staying on here and becoming Seiji, whoever he was, and of looking up his father in the telephone directory and inviting him down. They could swim together, he and his father, and together, with concentration and patience, they could poke holes in Ambly Wooster’s breathless monologue and come up for air. But then he knew he was being unrealistic, dreaming, letting his mind drift, knew that they’d pin him down here sooner or later. He was on an island—an island, of all places—and he had to get off it. He thought of asking the old lady to drive him to the mainland in the back of her car, but of course there were problems with that. Just getting her to shut up long enough to put the proposition to her seemed an almost insurmountable obstacle, to begin with. And what would he tell her—that he was a criminal, an outlaw, a vandal? That he wasn’t Seiji after all? And where was this mainland? From the pool he could see only the open ocean, serene, endless, blue, ocean that rolled over the hump of the world and slapped the shores of Africa. And from the far side of the house he saw another house, and beyond that another house, and then the marsh.

A boat, he thought. Perhaps he could beg a rowboat or a little catamaran, a Sunfish, anything. How far could the mainland be? He was thinking about this theoretical boat, the chance of the waves and the stinking festering cesspool of a marsh that was sure to form a barrier round this elusive mainland, when he became aware that someone was staring at him. He looked up and there he was, the last man in the world he wanted to see.

But no: it was a bad dream. He was hallucinating. It couldn’t be. But then the hallucination moved, and he saw that he wasn’t dreaming at all, and that the Negro, the cannibal, the madman who’d fired on him with a gun when he was defenseless and hungry and half dead from drowning, was as palpable as the sun in the sky. And worse: that he had a weapon in his hand—a kendo sword—and that he was coming at him, eyes rolled back in his head, his mouth a black pit that drained his face. Hiro was awestruck. Terrified. The man didn’t look human—he was possessed, hellish—and he was writhing and gasping and choking out a curse in the thick wadded language of the shaman and the witch doctor.

Hiro shot to his feet. There was nothing in all the pages of Jocho to prepare him for this. He took one look at the transmogrified Negro, raging and kicking and tearing at the earth now, and he had his clothes bundled in his arms and he was leaping the fence like a high-hurdler. He never looked back—as far as he knew his feet never touched the ground. Three bounds and he was out of the yard, over another fence and into the adjoining yard, where a woman whose nose was smeared with some sort of obscene plaster leaped up out of a lawnchair with a shriek that cut through him like a whirling tomahawk, and then he was in the next yard over, fighting off a swarm of dogs the size of stuffed toys. He kept going. Through a clutter of lawn furniture, across patios, leaping pickets, brickwork and chain-link as if he’d been born to it. People shouted at him, but he ignored them. Dogs tore out of the shadows to intercept him, their heads low, and the neighborhood suddenly resounded with their barks and snarls and their mad distracted howls. He kept going.

At some point, breathless, panicked, taking a landscaped slope and bursting headlong through a stand of ornamental pine, he heard the first distant chilling cry of the sirens. They were coming for him. Crouched low,