“Yes.”
“We have to skate up it as fast as we can and go shooting out through the arch.”
“Why? It’s open sea out there.”
“It’s part of the gift. Do you trust me?”
“If you get my dress wet, I’m going to sue you.”
“Your dress won’t get wet. When we go out the top, stay close to me.”
He twists a ring from his longest finger. It’s a band topped with a small, carved animal, perhaps a dog or a qilin, but it has no legs and some complicated tail. He untwists the carving from the band and presses the little creature into my hand. He covers my hand with his.
We skate up the spiraling ramp, holding the carving in our clasped hands. The temple seems to spin in place beside us as we skate around, the statutes of Mu Haichen and Lim Tian-Tai turning as if on a potter’s wheel. The stars show through the arch, and we go speeding out of it and fly toward the open sea.
Below us, rivers of light marble the dark water and flotillas of boats gather with students and senseis atop them holding up octopus lanterns.
As we hurtle toward the water, our cloaks whipping and snapping behind us, Hisashi yells, “Throw it!”
The little carved ring hits the water below us and swells into the form of a boat with an audible crack.
We fall into the boat and send a crown of drops spraying out around us.
The head of a dragon adorns one end of the boat, the head of a phoenix, the other. I run my hand over the sides. It seems to be made out of the pearl, but it has a softer, more porous texture, like a sea sponge.
It expands when wet. And shrinks when dry. Like the trinket.
“You got my dress wet!” I say.
“I’m sorry! It doesn’t spray that much when it’s just myself.”
“I told you it would!”
“I know! I know! Because you’re a shining, thousand-story-tall goddess and I’m a cannibal barbarian slave!”
“You have to pay a price for getting my dress wet.”
“What do you want?”
“You have to answer any question I ask you truthfully.”
“All right.”
“Forever.”
“So expensive!”
“You don’t get to set the price of the vase after you’ve broken it.”
“Start with easy questions.”
“First question. Can we do that again?”
“No. We have to wait for the boat to dry before it becomes small again.”
“Second question. Where did you get this?”
“I carved it.”
“Is this some form of the pearl?”
“Yes.”
“But where did you get the material?”
“Ah … somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be.”
He smiles, but it’s clear he’s uncomfortable. The children of the Chairman of New Deitsu Pearlworks Company must have access to things others don’t, even if they don’t talk to their father.
I change the subject, as I’m trying to pay more attention to the feelings of others. “I’ve never seen a boat with two heads. Does it mean something?”
“Yes.” That’s all he says. He smiles so sadly that I wish I hadn’t asked. Do the two heads have something to do with him and his sister? I want so desperately to ask him why he and Doi have been communicating using Chi pulses instead of talking to each other directly. However, the expression on his face at this moment looks so defenseless that I don’t have the heart to ask him anything confronting.
Out across the water, the rest of Pearl Famous is beginning the festival celebrations. I don’t feel guilty for enjoying the music that washes over the water toward us. However, I refuse to look at the octopus lanterns as they’re sent up and burned alive. I hear the sound of them bursting and sizzling as they hit the water, returning the animals to their home as ashes. They didn’t die because they had to feed another animal. They died to entertain people. They died for nothing. And over it all, applause. Ignorant, cruel applause.
Hisashi sees me resisting the urge to look each time the blossoms of color light up the sky and our faces. He cups his hands over my hand and says, “Thank you.”
I look in his face and almost tell him that there’s nothing he needs to thank me for, that I don’t want to look at the lights, that no matter how beautiful they are, they’re ugly. That no matter how beautiful they are, they can’t be as beautiful as what I’m looking at now.
I would gag if I heard someone say that, but when it’s you who wants to say it, it’s completely different. Still, I find enough discipline to keep my emotions collected.
Hisashi lays out a meal for us. It’s sushi made from wonderfully firm braised tofu that has a delightful, chewy skin on it, strings of crisp green pepper and onion, kernels of crispy rice scraped from the side of a stone hot pot, and pickles rolled in sea vegetable as thin as paper and as faintly fragrant of the sea as any fine fish, all of it lightly drizzled with a thin but rich sauce of curry, miso, and cashew cream. He serves it in beautiful lacquered bento boxes. It could use some salt, since it seems to be salted with what I think is just boiled seawater, like all the food here, but I have no complaints.
It seems that having the distraction of eating allows Hisashi to speak more freely.
“The two heads on the boat are a dragon and a phoenix,” he says. “Do you know what dragon and phoenix twins are?”
“Doesn’t that mean boy and girl twins?”
“Yes. Very lucky symbol. Usually. Not so lucky when the two of them are entwined in the womb so they can’t be born naturally. And their father has to decide whether to save the children or the mother. Our father chose us.”
My heart
