East is East

Ha! he exulted. Ha! The fools. They were so stupid it was incredible. Four hours they’d sat there, and never once did they glance up at the window. It was the American nature. They were oafs, drugged and violent and overfed, and they didn’t pay attention to detail. That’s why the factories had shut down, that’s why the automakers had gone belly up, that’s why three professional investigators could sit in an eight-by-ten-foot cell for four hours and never notice that two of the bars had been pried from the window. Hiro wanted to laugh out loud with the joy of it.

And then, still standing, he turned his attention to the paper bag. Inside there were two rock-hard biscuits, each wrapped around a sliver of congealed egg and a pink tongue of what might once have been ham. It never ceased to amaze him how the Americans could eat this stuff—it wasn’t even food, really. Food consisted of rice, fish, meat, vegetables, and this was … biscuits. No matter: he was so hungry he scarcely used his teeth. He bolted the biscuits, which tasted of salt and grit and grease so ancient it could have been the mother of all grease, and he washed it down with the cold coffee.

In the next moment he was scaling the wall again. It took him only two tries this time, his arms flailing, the chairs swaying wildly beneath him. He found toeholds in the rough masonry, and for a long while he clung to the ledge, dangling like a pendant. When he’d finally caught his breath, he was able to replace the two bars he’d removed from the window, even going so far as to mold neat little plugs of masonry crumbs at their base. He knew that the Amerikajin agents would be back in the afternoon, and he didn’t want to press his luck. He knew too that they planned to take him to the ferry in the evening and thence to the mysterious mainrand, where a modern cell awaited him. And why wouldn’t he know? They’d discussed their plans right there in front of him, as if he were deaf and blind, as if English had suddenly become impenetrable to him despite the fact that they’d just got done asking him about six thousand questions in that very same language. Oh, they were sloppy. Sloppy and arrogant.

Hiro, however, had no intention of winding up in that mainland cell—or in any other, for that matter. When they were finished with him, when they were hunkered down over their chili beans and barbecue and generic beer, when the hypnotic voice of the TV murmured from every porch and window and even the dogs grew drowsy and stuporous, that was when he would make his move. That was when he would scale the wall one last time and drop catlike into the adjoining cell to try his luck on the outer door, all the while praying that it wouldn’t be locked. And it wouldn’t be. He knew that already. Knew it as positively and absolutely as he’d ever known anything in his life, knew it even as he let his exhaustion catch up to him and he drifted off to sleep. It was just the sort of detail the butter-stinkers would overlook.

* * *

He woke to a sharp thrust of light and a sudden escalation of heat as withering as the blast of an oven. His sleep had been deep and anonymous and they took him by surprise, the tall one with the rodent’s eyes and his runt of a companion. It must have been late in the afternoon, shadows lengthening in the barn that enclosed the cell, a flash of electric green just perceptible in the moment the door swung open to reveal the great gaping wagonhigh entranceway to the barn itself. Hiro sat up. His clothes were wet through, his throat parched. “Water,” he croaked.

The tall one shut the door and the day was gone. The little man laughed. He had something in his hand—a tape player, Hiro saw now, Japanese-made and big as a suitcase—and he maneuvered round Hiro to set it beside him on the wooden bench. The little man’s smile had changed—it was a cruel smile, unstable, no longer bemused. Were they going to force a confession out of him as the police did in Japan? Were they going to tape it and edit out the groans and screams and cries for mercy? Hiro edged away from the thing. But then, flexing the muscles of his neck and shoulders, the little man reached out to depress a button atop the machine and immediately the cell swelled with music, disco. Hiro recognized the tune. It was—

“Donna Summer,” the little man said, flexing and grinning. “You like it?”

This time, they questioned him for what seemed like days, but what actually must have been closer to two hours, Hiro later realized. They asked him the same questions they’d asked him earlier, over and over again. Questions about his politics, about Honda and Sony and Nissan, about Ruth and Ambly Wooster and the old Negro and the accident at the shack. And all the while the disco beat drummed in his head and his voice cracked around the parched kernel of his throat. They held out the promise of water as a bargaining chip—if he cooperated he would be rewarded; if not, they’d watch him die of thirst and never lift a finger. He cooperated. He told them, over and over again, about Chiba and Unagi and Ruth and her lunches and everything else he’d told them a hundred times over, only this time he told it with Donna Summer and Michael Jackson for accompaniment. Every once in a while he would say something that struck the little man and the little man would interrupt him to give the tall one a look and say, “See? What’d I tell you? Squarest in the world.” They left him a Tupperware pitcher of tepid water and another Hardee’s bag, this one filled to the grease-spattered neck with twists of cold greasy potato and two geometrically perfect hamburgers.

Hiro forced himself to eat. And he drank down the water too, every drop: he didn’t know when—or if—he’d see more. There were two deputies outside the door—he’d seen them when his inquisitors had let themselves in and out of the cell. He could hear the soft murmur of their voices, smell the flare of their tobacco. Twenty minutes. He would give them twenty minutes to eat their corn dogs and piccalilli and butterscotch ripple ice cream, twenty minutes to stupefy themselves with gin and whiskey and beer. Then he would make his break.

He counted out each of those interminable minutes, second by second—one a thousand, two a thousand, three—and he heard the faint but distinctive hiss of pop-tops, and there was the smell of hot grease and more tobacco, and then the murmur of voices faded away to silence. The time had come. The time for action. The time when a man of action must make up his mind within the space of seven breaths. Hiro only needed one. He sprang for the wall, clambering up the slick stones like a lizard, removed the false bars and squeezed through into the adjoining cell. Head first, then shoulders and torso and the right leg, then reverse position and drop lightly to the bench below. His blood was singing. He was moving, acting, in control of his own destiny once again—and the door? His fingers were on the rusted handle, his thumb poised over the latch—it was the moment of truth, the moment on which all the rest depended. He pressed: it gave. Ha!

Rusty hinges. Open a crack. Look. There, leaning back in a chair propped against the door of the first cell, was a deputy, red hakujin face and wheat-colored mustache, pointy nose and slivered lips. His head was thrown back, the cigarette smoking between his fingers, the can of beer and grease-stained bag at his side, and his breathing was deep and regular, somnolent, breath caught in the pit of the larynx and released again with the faintest stertor. Yes: the long-nosed idiot was asleep!

Hiro almost swaggered when he realized it: asleep! But he contained himself— discipline, discipline—and slipped out the door like a shadow, a ninja, the nimblest assassin ever to float over two feet. But what of the other guard? What of him? He was nowhere to be seen. Stealthy, stealthy. The red cheeks and flaming nose, the air sucked down the tubes and vomited out again: Hiro couldn’t resist. He bent over the sleeping deputy and slipped the cigarette from between his fingers, justifying it to himself as a precaution: it was only a matter of a minute or two before the fool singed himself awake. But the chicken—it was chicken, breaded and fried, wings, drumsticks and thighs, in the grease-stained bag—the chicken was another matter. Casually—as casually as Yojimbo hiking up his yukata or Dirty Harry scratching his stubble—Hiro leaned forward to pluck a drumstick from the bag, savoring the moistness of it as he eased along the inner wall, looking for a door that would give onto the yard out back.

And what was here? A shadowy vastness, rafters and crossbeams, a smell of urine, fungus, the body functions of animals dead a hundred years. He moved to his left, away from the deputy and the glaring high double doors of the barn’s main entrance, flattening himself against the cool stone wall. The place was deserted: an ancient pitchfork against the damp wall, the stalls where livestock had once been kept, the odd strands, like fallen hair, of antediluvian hay. Something stirred in the rafters overhead and he looked up into the slatted shadows to see a pair of swallows beating through the gloom. And the other deputy? Hiro was light on his feet, invisible, a ghost in the place of ghosts. At the end of the line of stalls a weak light leaked round the corner and down a hallway. Hiro made for it.

He turned down the hallway to his right, proud and scornful and ready for anything—he was escaping, escaping again!—and the light swelled to embrace him. There was a doorway there, vacant and bleeding light—a doorless doorway, the wooden slab with its latch and handle apparently lost to some ancient hakujin cataclysm. Beyond the doorway he saw green—the virescent glow of freedom in