Lord of All Things (6 page)

“Of course. That’s C-3PO.” She knew about him from Brenda, who had seen the film on video and told her all about it.

“That’s right. Protocol droid, third class. He’s really just an actor in a costume, though.” Hiroshi pointed at the other robot, the one with the storm cloud. “That’s Number 5. He’s much more interesting. A real robot. He’s supposed to be a military robot, but after he gets struck by lightning, he turns pacifist, and they come after him. He can do really amazing things; for instance, he can read a book in less than a minute. He just goes through it like this”—Hiroshi mimed riffling through pages—“and he can store everything that’s in the book.”

“I’m not allowed to see films like that,” Charlotte admitted. “My mother says I’m too young.”

“I even saw it in the theater,” Hiroshi said. “When I get good grades in English, my mother sometimes takes me to the movies over in Shinagawa. They show American films there in English. That’s where I saw this one. It was pretty funny.” He squatted down in front of his shelves, shuffled through a stack of papers, and then showed her a gaudy leaflet with colorful Japanese writing and a picture of a chunky toy robot with a dome-shaped head and sturdy pincer arms.

“I’d like one of these. It’s an Omnibot. It can carry things around, pour you a drink, and other stuff. It costs fifty thousand yen, though, so I’d never be able to afford it.”

“What would you do with it?” Charlotte asked.

“I’d modify it, of course, so that it can do more things. I’d make it a real mechanical servant.”

The idea clearly fascinated him. Charlotte thought it was strange. But then again she’d always found boys a bit strange. “You could pour me a drink, you know,” she said. “That’s what you do when a lady visits.”

“Ah,” Hiroshi grunted. He hurried to the fridge and took out a can of soda, which he passed to her. “Here you are.”

Charlotte wasn’t actually thirsty, and she didn’t much like soda, but there was no refusing it now. She took a sip and looked around again. How tiny everything was here. There was one more sliding door. Charlotte wondered where it led. Probably to the bathroom.

“We could arrange a signal,” she suggested.

“What kind of signal?”

“For when my mother’s not home. Sometimes she goes out in the afternoons.”

“And your father?”

“He’s always at work. Anyway, I don’t think he cares very much if you come.” Charlotte went to the window. “Do you see the window of my room? The one with the yellow curtain? When the coast is clear, I’ll put the doll you repaired behind the glass there.”

“Okay,” said Hiroshi.

She handed him the can, only half-drunk. “I think I’d better go back now before anybody notices that I’m gone.”

Two days later Charlotte’s mother asked her whether she wanted to go downtown to go shopping and maybe get an ice cream. “You need another dress for summer, after all.”

“Can we go to a museum as well?” Charlotte asked.

Mother rolled her eyes. “No, most definitely
not
. We’re going to a
nice
,
new
shopping mall.”

“I won’t join you, then, thank you.”

Later, Charlotte watched from the window as her mother got into the car with Madame Chadal and an interpreter and drove out through the main gate. As soon as they were out of sight, she ran to her room and put Valérie in the window.

Hiroshi was there in less than fifteen minutes. “I’ve had an idea,” he said, taking a piece of dark metal from his pocket. The way he held it, it had to be heavy. It turned out to be a magnet—strong enough to send the paper clips skittering around on top of Charlotte’s desk when he held it underneath.

“I was reading today that human blood contains iron. Did you know that? There’s this stuff called hemoglobin. It’s what makes the blood look red, and it has iron in it.”

“Really?” Charlotte asked, surprised, and looked at her hands. “Iron?”

“Yes. Not much, of course, or the magnet would just stick to you. But I thought that it had to be possible to stop the hemoglobin from going round if you held a magnet to a vein.” He put his left forearm on the desk, his palm facing up so that the veins were visible, and then held the magnet just below his wrist. “It should get darker soon.”

Charlotte found it a strange idea but somehow fascinating, too. She waited, not taking her eyes off his arm for an instant. From time to time Hiroshi lifted up the magnet so they could see underneath.

“Maybe my skin’s too dark,” he said thoughtfully after a while.

Charlotte didn’t think his skin was dark at all—not like that of her classmates back in Delhi. But hers was lighter, that was true. She put her forearm next to his. “Try mine.”

It was a funny feeling to have the magnet at the vein on her wrist where the doctor usually took her pulse and imagine the hemoglobin gathering beneath it. There was nothing to show it was happening, though, on her skin either.

“Could this be dangerous?” Charlotte asked. “Could I faint or something like that?”

“I’ll catch you if you faint,” Hiroshi declared.

They waited a bit longer. It was beginning to get boring.

“Maybe there’s not enough blood there,” Charlotte ventured. She thought. Where was the skin thinner and the blood flow greater?

She jumped up, flung open her wardrobe, and stood in front of the mirror inside the door. “The neck! There’s a big vein here, do you see?” She cocked her head to be able to see the side of her own neck. “Here. Hold the magnet right there.”

Hiroshi came up behind her and held the magnet to the thick artery pulsing at her neck. The two of them stood there motionless, waiting to see what would happen. They stood that way for hours—or so it seemed to her.

“It’s not working,” Charlotte declared at last.

He nodded and lowered the magnet. “You’re right.” He put it back in his pocket. “You can’t believe everything you read in books.”

“Come on,” said Charlotte. “Let’s go play on the swings.”

It was three days before he saw the doll in the window again. Hiroshi put down the radio—still not fixed—and ran out the door.

When he arrived, Charlotte was holding two big flashlights, one in each hand. She had come up with the idea of exploring the cellar. She wouldn’t have dared to do it on her own, but she was dreadfully curious about what might be down there. So curious that Hiroshi, too, got swept up in the fever of discovery. The two of them crept down the stairs to an iron door that led to the cellar.

It was cold down there, especially after the baking summer heat outside. The first thing they found was the heating plant. A steel door opened into a room with an enormous oil tank that occupied almost the entire space. In the next few rooms they came upon old typewriters and shredders and bulky calculating machines, and box after box of forms. Then they reached a bigger room, its metal shelves full of files.

“Ugh!” Charlotte said, shivering. “Old documents. I hate those. Come on, let’s get going.”

Hiroshi didn’t know what was so awful about old documents, but since he didn’t think they were especially interesting either, he followed her. At last they came across a lumber room with all sorts of treasures: weird lamps; dusty furniture; garden gnomes; hot plates with thick cloth sleeves around the power cords; framed photos of castles, icebergs, and ships; flowerpots full of shriveled bulbs; a rusty saw; a tricycle with a missing wheel…

“Look at this,” said Charlotte, holding up a sealed flask full of some yellow fluid with a dead snake rolled up inside.

Hiroshi had found something even better: a big metal tool chest. “Unbelievable,” he breathed as he lifted the lid and studied all the racks and pinions, the axles, cogwheels, and baseplates. One compartment held hundreds of nuts and bolts, another three electric motors with their cables. “I could practically build a robot with all this.”

He put the chest down on the floor and began to build—something, anything, just to see how the cogwheels fitted together and how the axles turned. Charlotte squatted down next to him, picked up a large cog, and furrowed her brow. She put it back down. She picked up another part, a baseplate dotted with screw holes, and dropped it straightaway.

“You shouldn’t play with these,” she declared.

Hiroshi looked up. “Why not?”

“They belonged to a boy who killed himself.”

“Really?”

“He was in love with a girl who wasn’t interested in him. He threatened her, said that he’d kill himself if she didn’t go out with him, but she still didn’t want to. So he decided to throw himself off the roof of the building where she lived so he would hit the ground right in front of her window.” Charlotte was telling the story in a flat, toneless voice. “That’s how he planned it, and that’s what he did.”

Hiroshi looked down at the tool chest in fascination, at all its beautifully made parts. He didn’t know whether to feel scared or sad that he had to stop playing with them.

“If I were in love, I wouldn’t kill myself,” he pronounced.

“What if she didn’t want you?” Charlotte asked.

Hiroshi shook his head. “I’d keep trying until she changed her mind.”

At supper Hiroshi asked his mother whether she knew anything about a boy who had lived in the embassy and killed himself by jumping off the roof of a girl’s house. Though he didn’t mention the tool chest, he included the part about the boy jumping right in front of the girl’s window.

His mother looked at him, perplexed. “Where did you hear that?”

“Someone told me,” Hiroshi said.

She reached out and began clearing away the dishes of rice and pickles. “Something of the sort happened, yes. But it was a long time ago. I wasn’t working there yet; one of the old cooks told me about it. It was a gardener’s son…” She stopped tidying the dishes. “He wanted to play a trick on a girl in his class, dangle something in front of her window to give her a fright, and he fell.” She looked sternly at Hiroshi. “Let that be a lesson to you. Don’t go playing tricks on people.”

Next time Hiroshi saw Charlotte, he called her out. Just because she lived in a big house with a garden, that didn’t give her the right to make up stories and pull the wool over his eyes. He was really angry with her.

She listened to his accusations in silence, and once he was done, she said, “It wasn’t a lie. Your mother just doesn’t know the full story.”

“But you do, eh? Am I supposed to believe that?” he shot back at her. “You’ve only been here a couple of months. My mother’s lived here for as long as I’ve been alive.”

Charlotte didn’t answer. She just looked at the ground. They were standing on the lawn where he had seen her that night. She had been waiting for him there after she put the doll in the window. The hose that the gardener had watered the plants with that morning was neatly coiled up nearby. Birds were rustling through the bushes in search of food, and they could hear the distant rumble of traffic. A telephone rang through an open window somewhere.

“If I tell you a secret,” Charlotte asked, “will you keep it?”

Hiroshi looked at her standing there. She had put her hair up in a ponytail today. He realized he couldn’t stay angry at her for long. “Okay,” he said.

She sat down on the grass and waited for him to join her. “I have this sort of talent,” she explained seriously. “I used to think everyone could do it, but I’ve realized by now that I might be the only one anywhere who can.”

Hiroshi frowned. Was this going to be another lie? “A talent? What kind of talent?”

“When I touch something, I know what happened to it before. I know how old things are; I know whom they belonged to and what kind of people they were. I know what the people felt, what they were afraid of, everything.” She ran her hand over the lawn. “This grass is all new. It doesn’t belong to anyone, hasn’t got any memory. But if I touch the hosepipe for instance”—she stretched out her hand and ran it across the pipe—“then I can feel the gardener. I can feel that he’s worried about his wife being ill, that the doctors don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

Hiroshi thought about it. He thought about everything he had read in the books the librarian always said were too difficult for someone his age. He tried to understand how a talent like that would even work. As far as he knew, it wasn’t possible. He had never heard of human thoughts being stored inside things.

“I don’t believe you,” he said.

“When I touched the pieces from the tool chest, I felt the boy’s thoughts, how he was going to kill himself. The thoughts are all around the whole box—it practically glows with them—because he always played with it. When I got back the doll you’d repaired, I saw how you had been watching me in the rain, and how you kept a lookout for me all the time after that. That’s how I knew where you lived.”

“I think it’s more likely you just saw me sitting at the window.”

“No, I didn’t.” She shook her head sadly. “I’ve never told anyone else about this. My mother always wonders why I like going to museums so much. I only like the ones where you can pick things up and touch them, though.” She looked up, and now her eyes lit up. “When I touch something that’s old—really old—it’s like reading a thousand books at once, all in a second. Sometimes I feel hundreds of people at once. I know how they used to live in the old days, what they were afraid of, what they dreamed of…”

Hiroshi looked at her skeptically. “I don’t understand how something like that could work. I can’t believe it.”

The two of them sat in silence for a while. Hiroshi wondered what might happen next. Charlotte was probably offended. But what could he do? He couldn’t say he believed her when he didn’t at all. That would have been a complicated sort of lie.

“I’ve got an idea,” Charlotte said suddenly. She looked right at him. “Next time, bring me something that belonged to your father.”

4

Something that had belonged to his father? Easier said than done.

Before he left, Charlotte had explained to him exactly what she would need—something his father had handled, had held. “Glasses are best,” she’d said.

“My father didn’t wear glasses,” Hiroshi had told her.

“A watch, then. Clothes. A chair he used to sit on every day.”

They didn’t even have any chairs in the apartment. Chairs were a Western invention; in Japan you sat on the floor. His mother no longer had any clothes that had belonged to his father, not anymore—why would she? As for watches, she did have a watch she’d set aside somewhere. She said it was a present from his father, which Hiroshi would be allowed to have once he had finished school. But that, of course, meant his father had never actually worn the watch himself. Hiroshi had a couple of photographs. They were probably no good either; though his father was in the pictures, that didn’t mean he had ever held them in his hands.

Hiroshi looked at one of the photos, perplexed. It showed his father as a young man, and the street sign behind him showed it had been taken in Japan. His father had a narrow, fine-featured, good-looking face. Most of all, Hiroshi was fascinated by his hair, a dark gold, tousled mane. Nobody he knew had hair like that. Nor did he; nothing even remotely like it, alas. And then there was his father’s smile…it was an extraordinary smile, one that drew Hiroshi back to this photo again and again. Some days he thought his father must have been very happy indeed that day; others, he thought that it was a sad smile. It was strange.

Mother seldom spoke of his father. She had told him a few details when he was much younger but had considered the topic closed ever since. His father had come from the US to Tokyo to study, which was when the two of them had met, he knew that much. He also knew she had gone to America with him but that she hadn’t liked it there. Then his father had suddenly fallen gravely ill, and his family had told her she had to leave. That was when she went back to Japan with Hiroshi in her womb. She never saw or heard from his father again.

He always felt sad thinking about it. He remembered how, when he was little, he had sometimes made up stories that his father was an important man, an adviser to the US president, or a great scientist, or very busy doing other important things for the world. But one day, he had told himself, his father would come back, put his hand on his shoulder, and say,
“This is my son.” And then everything would be wonderful.

He had an idea. Hiroshi put the photo away and scooted over to the shelves by the window, where he kept his most private possessions in a tin box on the lower shelf. Actually, it was mostly junk: The movie tickets from the robot films he had been telling Charlotte about. A white glove he had found lying on a park bench when he was a kid, as though the person who had been wearing it had gone up in a puff of smoke the moment before; Hiroshi had been so fascinated that he couldn’t help but take the glove home. A notebook with the
Masters of the Universe
characters He-Man and Skeletor on the cover. That had been the first thing he had ever bought with his own pocket money, though he could no longer remember why and didn’t know what he should write in it. It had been lying in the box ever since. A little, blue plastic dog. A seashell from a beach he had gone to visit with his mother he had no idea where.

And a penknife that had belonged to his father.

It was a thick penknife, red with a white shield with a cross in it, and opened out into eleven different tools, including a knife, corkscrew, bottle opener, and scissors. When he was little, one of the blades had suddenly snapped shut when he was playing with it and cut his finger badly. He hadn’t touched the knife since, had forgotten all about it. But it had belonged to his father, who had carried it every day for years. At least that’s what Mother had said.

Hiroshi hesitated. All at once he wasn’t so sure he even wanted Charlotte to tell him something about his father. Not even if she was just making up stories. Maybe she would say something horrible about his father, and he didn’t know whether he wanted to hear that.

He would have to think about it.

The days passed, and the doll never appeared. When he finally spotted it on the windowsill, Hiroshi hesitated for a moment, then put the penknife in his pocket and ran out of the door.

“Do you have something?” Charlotte asked straightaway, and when he nodded, she said, “Come on, then.”

She went out into the garden with him. “I thought my mother would never leave the house again,” she remarked as they strode across the lawn. “She’s got a friend she usually goes to see, the Italian ambassador’s wife I think, but she’s not in town at the moment. At least she went to the hairdresser’s today—that will take three hours, maybe longer.”

“Why are we going out in the garden?” Hiroshi asked.

“It works better outside,” Charlotte said, crossing the lawn to a little copse of trees.

In between the trees was a regular thicket; they could hardly see the house from here, and they scratched their skin on the branches, and their clothes were snagged. Charlotte seemed to know the way, though. She marched ahead until they reached a small clearing, then she sat on the ground and put out her hand. “Okay. Hand it over.”

Hiroshi took his father’s penknife from his pocket and put it reluctantly into her outstretched hand. She closed her fingers around it, shut her eyes—and smiled.

“That gave you a right old shock,” she said, without opening her eyes.

“What?” asked Hiroshi.

“When the knife snapped shut.”

Hiroshi caught his breath, surprised. How did she know about that? He’d never told anyone, not even his mother.

Charlotte was quiet for a while, keeping her eyes closed and the knife held tight in her hand. “Your father’s from Texas,” she said at last. “From a rich family. Very rich. His parents wanted him to get a job in the company, but he wasn’t interested. He was crazy about Japan, collected everything he could about it. One day he came to Japan to study here even though his family was against it.”

Hiroshi looked at her, stunned. He didn’t know what to think.

“At first he lived in dormitories,” she went on. “He didn’t like it, though, because he was living with other foreigners, mostly Americans. So he looked for a room in the city, people who rented out to students. He went to see a family, who showed him a room he didn’t really like, because it was dark and didn’t have nice furniture, but just as he was about to say so a girl walked in. He fell in love on the spot and took the room.”

“And who was that?” Hiroshi asked.

“Your mother.”

“Oh.”

“He was so deeply in love that he stopped paying attention to his studies. He went into the travel agency where your mother worked and then acted surprised to see her there. He’d really followed her in secret, though.”

Hiroshi had to grin. He thought of the photo of his father and tried to imagine him keeping a low profile in the streets of Tokyo. Everybody must have noticed him.

“He was always thinking of ways to talk to your mother more often. She was very shy, but she spoke good English. He finally thought of asking her to help him with his Japanese lessons and improve his pronunciation. It was difficult, because she had to ask for her parents’ permission. They sat in the living room with them for the first few lessons and watched very closely.” She stopped and giggled suddenly.

“What is it?”

“Your father had a trick up his sleeve. After a few weeks your grandparents left the two of them alone. Your father made up a lesson that was full of sentences like ‘I love you’ and ‘You’re so beautiful’ and that sort of thing.” She giggled again, louder this time. “He had somebody at the university write them down, and then he mocked them up as a set of teaching materials that looked just like the real course. Then he deliberately mispronounced the sentences so that your mother had to correct him all the time. She blushed like crazy, but she went along with it…” Charlotte stopped again but didn’t giggle. This time she just smiled. “After the lesson they kissed.”

Hiroshi looked at her, feeling flustered and uncomfortable. Girls liked that sort of thing—he knew that from school—but he hated kissing. It was quite enough that he would be seeing his grandparents soon and that they would kiss him. However, he knew that one day he would have no choice but to kiss a girl. Otherwise h
e
’
d never be able to get married.

“He wanted to marry your mother, but he didn’t dare without asking for his parents’ permission. That’s why he wanted your mother to come with him to America. The third time he asked her, she finally agreed. He wasn’t happy when she did, though, because he was so worried about what his family would think. Charlotte opened her eyes and handed the knife back to Hiroshi.

“What else?”

“Nothing else. After that he didn’t have the knife on him.”

Hiroshi put it in his pocket. “I don’t know much about my father,” he admitted. “I didn’t know that he was from a rich family. I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

“Of course he’s still alive,” Charlotte said firmly.

“Do you think so?”

“Yes,” she said, getting up and brushing the soil from her dress. “If he had died, you’d have inherited something.”

That evening, when Hiroshi’s mother came home from work, her back ached so much that she had to lie down. “We washed the curtains from both grand salons today and then hung them up again. That always leaves me feeling half-dead.”

“Should I go get some painkillers?” Hiroshi offered.

“Oh no.” She patted the futon beside her. “Sit down and tell me something. What have you been up to all day?”

Hiroshi came closer, feeling awkward. “You wouldn’t be interested if I was to tell you all the technical stuff.”

She made a face that was not quite a smile. “I just want you to take my mind off my aches and pains.”

He stood there in thought, feeling the penknife still in his pants pocket, then sat down, took it out, and showed it to her. “Is it true this belonged to my father?”

Mother raised her head with difficulty and looked at the knife. “So you’ve got it.”

“You gave it to me.”

“Ah yes. So I did.” She sank back down with a groan. “Yes, that belonged to your father.”

“And how come you had it?”

“When we flew to America, it was in the pocket of some pants he forgot to pack. Your grandpa and grandma kept all of his things, and I found it when I came back.” She smiled a bittersweet smile at the ceiling. “John was so upset about that. He thought he had left it in a taxi.”

“Tell me about him,” Hiroshi said, putting the knife back in his pocket. It was a handy little tool, with its multiple screwdrivers, the tweezers, and so on. He could find a use for it.

“Oh my. What is there to tell? You already know everything. And anyway, didn’t we say that
you
would tell
me
something?”

“No,” said Hiroshi. “Just that I would take your mind off it.”

His mother shrugged and moaned, turning her head from side to side a little. “This always happens. Every time I feel poorly, Dr. Uchiyama is on holiday.”

“Did you love him?”

She sighed and looked at Hiroshi. “Your father? Of course. Very much. I was young and foolish, and he was a handsome man…” She stopped for a moment and blinked rapidly. Her eyes were shining now.

She began to tell the story. How one day he was standing there in her parents’ living room just as she came home. How she would watch him secretly from her window, see him coming and going but not dare talk to him, because she was afraid her English might not be good enough, or that perhaps she wouldn’t understand his Japanese. How, a little while later, he had turned up, of all places, at the travel agency where she worked, an agency that specialized in trips to Australia.

She didn’t tell the story of how they first kissed.

“He insisted that I come to America to meet his parents,” she continued after a long pause, a silence that somehow sounded like a sigh. “I didn’t want to, but he persuaded me in the end. He was the kind of man you couldn’t refuse for long. I couldn’t anyway. So off we went.”

It was as though she were talking about a death sentence.

“It was all very strange for me. America, the endless roads, the land stretching away in all directions. And then the Leak family house—no, not a house, a ranch. They were terribly rich, had a hundred rooms, servants, a swimming pool, dozens of cars, horses, a bowling alley. They even had their own movie theater down in the basement…I was quite overwhelmed at first.”

Hiroshi tried to imagine it. The way she described it, even the French embassy would look small by comparison.

“His family was very kind when we arrived—or, at least, so I thought. At the time I didn’t know any other Americans apart from your father; I didn’t know they always smile and act friendly. In reality, though, they were totally against our being together, and not only his parents but his brothers and sisters, too. John’s grandfather had fought in the war against Japan. When I happened to run into him on his own one day, he told me he hated the Japanese and that I mustn’t imagine for a moment that anyone in that house would ever agree to John marrying me. If John went ahead and married me anyway, the old man said, he would lose his inheritance, and since he’d never learned any way to make a living, we would starve.”

“What a horrible thing to say,” said Hiroshi.

“They were horrible. After running into the grandfather, I realized a lot of the kind things they said were actually insults dressed up in nice words. In a funny way I was relieved, since I understood why I felt so unwelcome.”

“Why didn’t you just run away with him?”

“We wanted to. But first John wanted to talk to a lawyer and find out whether his family really could disinherit him, under Texas law. We were just figuring out where to go and what we would do if we did have to fend for ourselves when we both fell ill—first me, and then John the next day. They wouldn’t call a doctor for my sake, but when John got sick, they got one to come out, of course.” She began to rub her sides as though trying to stretch herself out on the futon. “I can still remember. The doctor looked like that American actor John Wayne. He was wearing thick leather boots and a cowboy hat on his head and had a stethoscope around his neck. He wouldn’t let the Leaks order him around, so he went ahead and examined me first. ‘Congratulations, ma’am,’
he said, ‘you’re pregnant.’ Then he examined John and stood right up and said, ‘Get him to the hospital.’ Then they found out that John had a brain tumor, a very aggressive one.”