The Nicholas Linnear Novels (215 page)

And yet she was the one who had survived—oh, no, not merely survived, flourished. For Haha-san emerged from the radiation laboratory rosy-cheeked, strong, with lustrous hair and perfect teeth, and was never ill a day in her life.

That was the course her gift took; her sister’s took another path entirely. In fact, Senjin believed that his mother never even knew she carried the gift inside her. It was not her karma to possess it at all, merely to pass it on to her children: her twins, Senjin and Shisei.

It was Haha-san who named them, just as it was Haha-san who cared for them. Their mother had no interest, or she was too ill to be bothered with them. It was as if her life had a single purpose: to give birth to them. After that occurred she, like many insect mothers, perished; in a sense, consumed by her offspring.

If Haha-san had two brothers and both had died, who was
sensei,
her brother? Senjin asked this of Haha-san as soon as he was old enough to grasp the contradiction.

Haha-san laughed.
“Sensei
is my brother,” she said. “He appeared on your mother’s doorstep a year to the day that she was married. She was already pregnant with you and Shisei. He claimed to have survived the bombing of Nagasaki. He said that he stood at ground zero and was unharmed, that he did it to test himself and the strength of his gift, that if he had not survived, that would have been all right, because it would have meant that his gift was too weak, and he never could have endured the thought that he was inferior among his own kind.

“He said that once he survived, he went to China, to a place known as Zhuji, to study mental disciplines. In Zhuji, he said, he earned the title
sensei.”

Senjin, feeling warm and full of food, for it was near to bedtime, had looked up into her face. “Is it true, what
sensei
told you?”

Haha-san had smiled at him. She smelled of milk and of sugar, a unique scent which was to haunt Senjin for all of his life. “Well, it’s not polite to doubt the word of
sensei,”
she said. “But I did not believe what he said about the bomb.” She shrugged. “Perhaps he hid out in the mountains or he was given a concussion by the shock wave of the blast. I doubt that anyone could have survived at ground zero, but I don’t know what the truth is. The other part is true, however.
Sensei
did go to Zhuji to study. That’s why it was many years, and your mother and I were in our twenties before we saw him. By then a great deal had happened to him.”

What had Haha-san meant by that? What had happened to
sensei
in Zhuji? Senjin tried by various ways to get Haha-san to tell him (it was inconceivable to ask such a question of
sensei,
who was so secretive about his life), but each time, she managed to avoid answering him.

It was then that Senjin learned that he could not depend on any one person to answer all the questions crowding his brain. Haha-san could answer some,
sensei
could answer some others. But, increasingly, Senjin discovered that neither of them could, or would, answer the questions that were most crucial to him.

He told only Shisei what he planned to do—journey to Zhuji. Of course she cried. They had always been together, even—especially—in the womb; the thought of a separation terrified her.

“You’re weak!” Senjin yelled at her. “What did
sensei
tell you about such weakness?”

“I don’t remember,” Shisei said through her tears.

Which made Senjin hit her. He did not mean to, or anyway had not planned to, which was the same to him. It was the first time he hit her, but certainly not the last. Only later, far away from her, across the South China Sea, did he hear in her response an echo of Haha-san’s obfuscations. He could not punish Haha-san—well, not yet, anyway—so he had punished her.

Shisei, his twin; his other half. She.

Senjin was haunted by
she:
a maddeningly diffuse femaleness that dominated his dreams, which he pushed from his conscious mind during waking hours. At first he was convinced that this femaleness was the essence of his weak and hated mother, absorbed with her nutrients through the umbilical. Later he suspected that it was that part of Haha-san’s gift she found frightening and repulsive, that she had cast off from her. Still later he thought that perhaps this femaleness contained something of both.

It had nothing to do with Shisei; it had everything to do with Shisei.

Shisei had absorbed everything he had, in the womb. Like a member of the underground searching for a traitor, he suspected her of inheriting their mother’s fatal weakness. This was because he could not bear to suspect himself of such a sin, remembering what Haha-san had said about
sensei: If he had not survived, that would have been all right, because it would have meant that his gift was too weak, and he could never have endured the thought that he was inferior among his own kind.
Senjin knew that she could just as well have been talking about him.

He was as vigilant against any sign that he had absorbed his mother’s propensity for weakness as the scientists had been with Haha-san in their search for radiation poisoning. In so doing, his attention was elsewhere when he incorporated into himself the River Man’s moral universe.

He did not, of course, know that he was doing this; no child ever does. But it happened just the same, because in the end Senjin was as needy as any child is, and he took what he needed where he found it, mindless of the consequences.

Perhaps it is too easy to say that this happened mainly as a consequence of his having no father, but what other explanation is there? It is true that both Senjin and Shisei looked like their father. Their mother had been a pleasant-looking woman, but nothing more. Their father, on the other hand, was, like them, filled with a luminous beauty.

All Senjin had left of him was a photograph. It was now frayed at the edges; it had a center crease, and the lower left-hand corner had been torn away. But it was still his prized possession. It showed a slim, magnetic man in a knife-creased army uniform, the tunic of which was so studded with medals it was possible for the young Senjin to believe it was made out of metal.

What had happened to the twins’ father? No one knew. He had been a career military man, had survived the many harrowing battles of the war in the Pacific, as the Japanese termed World War II. His bravery in battle was unquestioned, as was his leadership. He had become invisible to the American war-crimes tribunal, which convened just after the war, so it was clear that he had many friends in high places.

He began flying planes—experimental jets at Mitsubishi and Kodai, gaining a reputation for nerve that nearly eclipsed his wartime climb to glory. He rode at the edge of the earth’s atmospheric canopy, nearer to the sun than anyone save Chuck Yeager. Then the American astronauts burst on the world stage, and everything turned to dust.

One day he just disappeared. Perhaps, so brave in battle, he could not bear to be eclipsed in its aftermath. He lived his life near the edge, was not otherwise content. Perhaps he, too, had served his purpose in impregnating the twins’ mother, and was no longer needed.

Not true. Senjin and Shisei needed him.

“The waterfall,” Senjin prompted the River Man.

“Yes,” Shisei said. “What happened after the waterfall?”

The waterfall. To the River Man the waterfall was the apocalypse, the twilight of the gods, Armageddon. It was at once the end and the beginning. Like a nexus point in time, all paths led to the waterfall and away from it.

For many years the twins dreamed of the waterfall as if it were alive, a presence suspended in the twilight of their room.

“It was the
samseng,
the tong leader, Tik Po Tak who pulled the murderer So-Peng from the boiling waters at the base of the falls,” the River Man said. “The body of Zhao Hsia, weighted down by the force of So-Peng’s projected will, never reappeared.

“So-Peng said, ‘The tanjian we both sought is dead.’

“The vile pair returned to Singapore, congratulating themselves on the success of their mission. But everything had changed in the weeks they had been away.

“A rival
samseng
had taken advantage of Tak’s absence to stage a bloody coup in Nightside, the area of Singapore where Tak had held sway. And So-Peng’s mother was gone. Terrified by the consequences of what she had done, of pitting one son against the other, she had apparently fled into the dense forests of teak and sandalwood far to the north.”

That was the end of the story, as far as the River Man was concerned. To the twins, he had merely tantalized them, and they tried in every way they could think of to get
sensei
to go on with the story. It had no ending, he had told them, but they were unsatisfied with such a nebulous answer.

And as far as Senjin was concerned, this was another reason why he was determined to travel to Zhuji. It was in China that he became convinced the end of the story would be revealed to him.

Shisei had other desires. When she dreamed of the waterfall, it was composed not of rushing, turbulent water, but of a forest of bright faces. These faces, all young, all beautiful, were turned in her direction. They were looking at her, not in the way of observing, but with the kind of adoration reserved for celebrities or movie stars. Yet she was neither. But she knew—this was still in her dream—that she required this adoration of the forest of bright faces as a flower needs water or sunlight in order to survive. Without this adoration, there was only an unutterable darkness, filled with fear.

But it was not, as might be supposed, loneliness that Shisei feared—after all, she had Senjin, always and forever a part of her spirit. It was that she would never get enough love.

Senjin loved her; but what about anyone else? Haha-san had nursed her, nurturing her, attending to her basic desires. That was duty; but was it also love?

It was not yet clear to Shisei that Haha-san lived in agony, that this agony determined not only her actions but, far more importantly, what lay beyond the actions. Haha-san’s agony was like a living thing, an evil-tempered pet or a revolting disfigurement that Haha-san humped around with her wherever she went.

It was as if this inner agony were Haha-san’s own twin, the entity to which she was most intimately connected. It had made of her a freak locked within herself, an automaton subject to irrational bursts of emotional violence.

This violence—a projection of Haha-san’s will—took many forms. For Shisei it usually began with an intense itching inside her head, as if a nest of spiders had crawled inside her mind. Then bright flashes of light would blind her, so that in the beginning, before she learned to anticipate this part, she would fall to her knees or, if she were in the middle of playing, stumble painfully against some piece of furniture.

But these preliminary manifestations were nothing compared to what was to come: a re-creation of the horrors of postblast Nagasaki with its stink of burned flesh, its sight of bloated, charred bodies, shrieking wounded, its choking taste of ash composed of human bones and waste, all filtered through Haha-san’s disturbed psyche, magnified, warped, embroidered by her own peculiar terror, anguish, and rage.

Think of the worst nightmare monster, then imagine it come to life, stalking you through your house, passing through walls and closed doors, seeking you out wherever you hid. Think of it finding you, entering your mind, filling it with hideous images, impressions of terror, despair, and death.

The children were affected differently by these chaotic disgorgings of psychic violence. Senjin would run outside, enraged that his environment had been invaded. Here was the origin of his demon woman, soft and seductive on the outside, yet within, seething with malefic destructive force. In the rain and the snow he would curse Haha-san and vow some day to wreak a terrible vengeance on her. But Shisei, as if paralyzed by the onset, could not get herself to leave the house. She would lose control over herself, her own essence contracted into a tight ball, as if her will to resist was subverted by her need to submit to what she believed were the definitions of her life with Haha-san and
sensei.
She would cower in her room, trembling in fear as each new assault inexorably sought her out. Her eyes were squeezed shut as she prayed for an end.

She endured the monstrous horrors until the fiery psychic attack subsided and the house returned to a semblance of normalcy, although always she could hear the crockery continuing to vibrate on the open shelves in the kitchen. For a long time after the attack ended, no one dared go near Haha-san, not even
sensei.

Gradually Shisei became convinced that these outbursts, terrifying in their power and unpredictability, were a result of some failing on her own part (why else, she reasoned, would they seek her out?), that it was irrefutable evidence that she was somehow unworthy of being loved.

When Senjin fell ill or was overtired and Haha-san pulled him to her pillowlike breast, he felt himself unable to breathe, suffocating in her endless warmth, the smell of milk and sugar. But when Shisei climbed upon Haha-san’s lap, she reveled in the proximity to that slowly beating heart which put her to sleep within minutes no matter how agitated her state had been. This inevitable passivity (which came from Shisei’s overwhelming desire to please Haha-san and thus gain her elusive love) endeared her to Haha-san, who, despite her perseverance over suffering, must have found Senjin’s aggressive squirming at her breast unsettling. Her duty was to pacify the children, and when she could not, once again her anxiety blew through the house like a storm.

Ironically, Haha-san’s emotional violence led indirectly to the birth of Shisei’s own philosophical outlook on life: the struggle to attain
seishinshugi,
the triumph of the power of the spirit over the physical. Two other factors influenced Shisei: the fear that she would never get enough love to survive, and the fact that she was female, therefore inferior to any male. And it was a male—her twin brother, Senjin—who she was constantly pitted against in her lessons with the River Man.