“Son, I don’t think your beautiful country is ready for the likes of me. Nah, I’ll have it like my friend Philip Yano, straight, but in one of those little flat deals.”
“Coming up.”
The boy pulled a large bottle off the shelf, unlimbered a kind of flattened dish about half an inch high, and poured just a small jolt of the clear fluid into it.
Bob held the odd cup up, sniffed it. It had a medicinal quality. He thought of all the time he’d spent in hospitals, too much time, and fluids that had come out or gone into him, or that burned when some orderly put them on his ruptured flesh.
“Semper fi,” said Bob, “catch me if I fall now.”
“What do you think?”
“Hmmm. I see how you could grow to like it. It’s all right.”
It had a biting odor to it, then in the throat a kind of subtle sweetness, not overpowering, with a hint of fruit, but it left an afterburn as it went down, suggesting the presence of fire under the sweetness.
“Another?”
“Hell, why not. I’ve still got an hour before my plane and I’m not going to do anything on the plane but sleep the Pacific away.”
He semper-fied the second one down, then had one for the road, one more for the Corps, one for the dead of Vietnam, one for the dead of the Pacific, one for the living, one for the thought-they-were-living-but-were-dead, and one for the hell of it. Somewhere in there he wondered whose feet were on the ends of his legs, and meantime the boy responded to him, as boys did to men who clearly knew their way about the world, as many young marines had, and bought him another. He then had to buy the boy one, it made perfect sense. Then of course he had to go to the bathroom and he got directions, found the room, and went in to discover what he already knew, the Japanese bathrooms were like science fiction, and somehow on their own they stayed perfectly clean. He negotiated that transaction, then checked his watch, realizing it must be time to board. He headed to the departure gate.
Then he made a disturbing discovery. They’d come and changed the airport while he’d been sitting at the bar. It was now a different airport, and the more he tried to find his gate, the stranger it got. He noticed he’d tired considerably, probably from carrying someone else’s feet around, and decided to take a rest.
He awoke as a janitor shook him, but quickly went back to sleep, and awoke a second time to find a policeman shaking him, looking stern.
Lord, what a headache! It felt as if someone had put his head in a vise and a couple of sumo wrestlers had put their full weight against the tightener.
Then he thought, Hell, I am not on an airplane.
He looked at his watch.
It was 6:47 a.m. Tokyo time.
The plane was long gone.
He sat there for a second, aware that his life had just gotten extremely complicated.
Oh, you stupid fool. You moron. You cannot ever touch even the first drop or this is what happens.
He looked up and down the airport, saw that somehow he’d taken a wrong turn out of the bathroom and compounded that error with other errors and ended up in a wrong corridor. He tried to map out what he had to do: return to the main terminal, get in line, turn in his unused boarding pass and ticket, get himself rebooked on the next available LAX-bound flight-how much would that cost?-call Julie and let her know, then get something to eat and hunker down. He’d have to catch up with his luggage at LAX and the anger he now felt was because of the possible loss of the calligraphy Philip Yano had given him: Steel cuts flesh / steel cuts bone / steel doesn’t cut steel.
You idiot.
Next thought (his mind was moving so slowly!): maybe there was a way to rebook without leaving the departure terminal, which would spare him the nonsense with security.
So finally he got up and decided on a first course of action: coffee. Then food. Then he’d be ready to face the ordeal his own stupidity had created.
So he walked the terminal and, in ten minutes or so, indeed found a JAL office and counter. Unfortunately it wasn’t open yet. It opened at eight, still an hour and a half off. Down the way, he found the flashy international departure mall, and soon enough a Starbucks, and managed to talk the young men behind the counter into firing up a coffee for him, though they weren’t technically open. The new USA Today International was out, so he read it, then an International Herald Tribune and an Asian edition of Newsweek.
Eight o’clock rolled around; he went back to the JAL counter, was first in line, turned in the boarding pass and ticket, gave a somewhat vague description of his adventure with the sake and the bathroom, and without difficulty was rebooked on a 1 p.m. flight to LAX; he even got another aisle seat. There was no problem with his luggage; it would be held at U.S. Customs at LAX. She even smiled at him.
Then he found an international phone, called his wife, who was out, thankfully. He left a message and decided it was best to tell the truth; she’d be unpleasant for a week, but in the end it was better than a pointless fib.
Now, by nine, he was done and caught up and only had to wait another few hours.
I won’t be sad to leave this damn airport.
He sat down, took his load off, and decided on another course of action. He found that Starbucks, waited in a long line, got another cup. The place was crowded so he wandered into the terminal and found a seat.
That was when-it was 10:30 a.m.-he noted an image on one of the television monitors. It took a while to organize in his slow-moving mind: it ran from something vaguely familiar to something sharper until finally it became knowable.
It was Philip Yano.
Then came a family portrait of the Yanos, one that he’d seen in their home. Philip, Suzanne, the grave doctor- to-be Tomoe, the sons Raymond and John, and finally the little sweetie, Miko.
Then the house in which he’d spent such pleasant hours-in flames.
Bob simply sat there, trying to make sense of it, trying to get it organized in a way he could deal with.
He turned to the person next to him, a Japanese man in a suit.
“Sorry, sir, the TV. What does it say?” he blundered, not even remembering to ask the man if he spoke English.
But he did.
“It’s very sad,” the man said. “He was a hero. A fire. He, his family. Wiped out.”
13
He was in his shop. His family slept above him, but late in the night Philip Yano was alone with his father’s blade before him.
It lay, with its broad curvature, its obscured hamon where hard cutting metal met soft supporting metal, its mesh of scratches, burrs, blurs, spots of rusts, chips, and ware, on the bench before him. The light gleamed dully on its surface, showing its imperfections, with stains of toxins running riot, radiating stench and miasma.
What secrets do you hold? he wondered.
Should I invest six months and 15,000 yen per inch to have you polished? And suppose that reveals…nothing. Suppose you’re a tired old hag of a blade, polished so many times that now you’re brittle and will shatter at the merest breath. You yearn for oblivion, and another polish-the tenth, the fiftieth, the five hundredth?-would just take away more of you, make you weaker and yet more nondescript.
I would waste my money, my time, and my spirit on you.
He tried to accept what lay before him: an unremarkable ancestral blade created sometime in a forgotten past by a smith of no particular talent. You were all right. You served: a war here, an execution there, maybe a duel, an ambush, a plot, maybe politics and ambition and strategic planning, an Edo or Kyoto ceremony or two, and finally, hundreds of years after your birth in fire and clay, you were clapped in military furniture and went off to war and
