He remembers what the gravedigger girl said in the gallery chamber staring at the Lightning Man: that we are treasure buried under sky. He couldn’t follow all her English words, but he could sense the timbre of her heart, the strange beat of her soul. Love is a hidden treasure, too, he thinks. You meet the one the universe forged in the fire just for you and they bury their love deep inside you but sometimes you don’t even know it’s inside you until it’s ripped out of you, until it’s dug up out of you like pure gold dug out of earth. The hole remains. The hole is never filled and your blood and your soul and your joy and your life leak out of that hole, until you are empty. Until you are a ghost.
Then he tries his English words again for Greta Maze, digs up every last one of them that he stores in his busy mind and he tries to explain something to the sleeping actress. He lies on his side and he rests his head on his right elbow and he leans in to Greta Maze’s ear and he whispers, ‘Greta . . . make . . . whole again . . . Yukio . . . wanted . . . to go.’ He looks to the sky. ‘Yukio . . . wanted . . . sky.’
The actress is sleeping but still she makes him nervous. Every broken word an act of release. An act of confession.
‘I want to stay,’ he whispers. Clear English. Near-perfect English.
The admission feels like a betrayal as much as it feels like the truth. And the truth of it makes him weep. ‘I want to stay,’ he whispers. Words between tears. ‘I want to stay . . . Greta Maze . . . I want to stay.’
He wipes his eyes. Rubs them. Pulls himself away from the actress. Standing now. Ashamed. Embarrassed. He walks to the stream by the stinkwood tree and he watches the seed capsule canoes flow into the forest. Rowing away.
The pilot’s back is turned to Greta, so he does not see her open her eyes. He does not see her looking to the sky through the branches of the stinkwood tree, her eyes slowly adjusting to the light. Her mind is processing the information of the moment – birdsong, running water, the smell of earth and bark, the touch of the grass on her palms by her side, the beating of her heart. And her heart is absorbing the words of Yukio Miki, his whispered broken-English confession. She woke to those whispered words. They opened her eyes, but she kept them closed. The treasure he dug from deep within his heart and soul and handed to a woman he barely knows.
She stands in silence and she treads softly on the grass beneath her saddle shoes. This might still be the long dream, she tells herself. Her cave-bound stupor. She turns and finds the pilot standing at the stream. Yukio doesn’t hear her footsteps. To him she only appears, as if she has come from another dimension, from that world to this one, from the vanished to the found.
‘I just had the strangest dream,’ Greta says.
Yukio’s head is turned to his side and his eyes are on her face and her face is staring deep into the tangled vine forest.
‘I dreamed that I was dreaming,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want to wake up from the dream. But you were beside me, Yukio. You kept waking me up. I wanted to sleep but you kept waking me up. You didn’t want me to sleep. You didn’t want me to go to the dream. You kept screaming a word at me. The same word over and over.’
She turns to him. ‘Stay.’
She steps closer to him. Closer to the pilot who fell from the sky. Who fell for her. She raises her left hand and her fingers brush his cheek because she needs feeling, touch, to tell her this is not the long dream. And that touch makes him close his eyes because that touch is too gentle, too caring, and so warm and filled with such feeling that he wants to pull away from it. But he will stay. Stay.
‘Stay,’ he says.
And she moves closer still and their bodies are touching now and he can feel her breathing and he can feel her chest against his and the curls of her hair are brushing his forehead and he can smell her and that smell is earth and life and future and past and his doom and his regret for finding this stranger in this upside-down land where he is the enemy, and her cheek is brushing his cheek now and his body and the motion inside it make him a sinner. Forgive me, Nara, he tells himself. Her skin is a landmine. Her skin is a dropped bomb. Her skin is the end of this world war and it’s the world exploding into pieces. Forgive me, Nara. And the movement in his neck is a betrayal and a truth and the weight he shifts to his cheek to brush back against hers is a crime and a
