The Pearl Diver (15 page)

ARTIFACT Number 2209
A star chart

On this late night, walking home from Clinic B, she hears a somewhat familiar sound far above her, but one that she has only heard during the daytime. She looks up and sees, for the first time at night, a distant jet slicing through Cassiopeia.

ARTIFACT Number 1625
A stalk of wheat

The mother is passing through the shopping area of Mushiage when she sees a group of people coming her way. She has just come out of Kato’s Noodle Shop, where she bought some fresh buckwheat noodles for that night’s dinner.
There are five or six of them nearing. One appears normal; initially, she thinks it is a staff worker, but the closer he comes, she sees he is not. They pass within several feet of her. She doesn’t move, holds her breath as they near. One of them is being led by the elbow; he wears dark glasses, and his nose is so deformed, flat almost, that the glasses slip off his face, only to be saved from the ground by the strap tied around the stems.
When this happens, one of the others places the glasses back on the man’s face, until they fall again. As the man is about past her, the glasses fall from his face, no one noticing, and there he is, his head turned toward her. There are no eyes beneath where the glasses were, no eyebrows, no eyelashes. But there also aren’t bottomless holes like she had imagined, but sockets, skin-colored. She thinks that she has stifled the scream but doesn’t know for certain. It seems as though he is gazing at her for hours, but they continue up the street, disappearing into the noodle shop.

The following Tuesday, she doesn’t go to the shop for buckwheat noodles, but, rather, to the market, where she picks out some tofu and rice noodles instead. Back home, while washing the dishes, there is a knock at the door.

“Satomi, please see who is there.”

She hears her talking to someone, and in a few seconds her daughter comes into the kitchen and says it is Mrs. Kato.

“Mrs. Kato?” she asks, even though she knows who it is and probably what she wants.

“Come in and have some tea.”

“No thank you, I must be getting home to prepare dinner.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, thank you. I was checking to see if you were okay. You didn’t come by today, and I can’t remember the last time on a Tuesday when you didn’t come in.”

“Oh, I was really busy here.”

She feels her daughter in the other room, listening in, and wants to tell her to get back to her studies, but she doesn’t dare.

“I will always deliver to your house; you know that.”

“Yes, Mrs. Kato, and thank you, but it just slipped my mind.”

They stand in silence until she again offers the woman some tea.

“No thank you.”

She steps into a pair of sandals, slides open the door, and leads Mrs. Kato out along the narrow walk. When Mrs. Kato closes the gate and is in between the beam thrown by two streetlights, where she can’t see the other woman so clearly, she speaks. “It’s because of those people, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I’m sorry, Mrs. Kato.”

She hears Mrs. Kato’s sandals clip along the street and watches her as she reappears under the streetlight and then fades again when she is between two lights. She continues watching her fade, appear, fade again, until she turns the corner of the street.

ARTIFACT Number 1764
A notebook of Mr. Shikagawa’s

Still, after more than two decades, this is the way it is. She can’t ever seem to view him in the present, only the distant past, that first day here.

From the first, she had admired him, but always from a distance. He lives on the opposite side of the housing blocks, in A-1, on the south end of the island. Before, she almost never had to go over to this end of the island to give massages or clean up after the patients, and even now as a nurse, there is rarely the need to go. But this morning, one of the nurses tells her to go up to A-1 and A-2 to get some blood samples. With the patients growing older, abortions are a rarity; her days, in recent years, have been filled with more traditional nursing duties—blood work, giving shots, physical therapy. She walks through the long narrow corridor, past the descending numbers—2019, 2018, 2017—and stops outside the door of 2016. She hears a voice inside. Not words from a conversation, but one word, then a couple, then nothing, another word or a couple of them. Not sentences. She isn’t certain of the last time she has seen him, probably at last year’s autumn bazaar—she usually sees him there. She waits for a pause in his words before knocking.

“What?” the same voice she has been listening to answers gruffly.

“I’m here to do blood work, Mr. Shikagawa.”

“Come in, come in.” Again the gruff voice.

She slides the door open, and in the middle of the tatami room, on the floor at a small table, he sits.

“Miss Fuji,” she says, announcing herself.

His tone of voice softens a little. “Come in, Miss Fuji.”

“They have sent me to get some blood work.”

“Why at this time? Always in the mornings, when I’m busy.”

“I’m sorry, but this is the time they send me.”

“Not you, Miss Fuji. It is always nice when they send you. They don’t send you enough. Sit down and rest for a while.”

“I have quite a few blood samples to do.”

“That’s okay. Only for a few minutes.”

She sits across the table from him; between them is a notebook, single words written all over it. She reads a few of them:
clang, gong, ring, strike.

“It’s my writing. I’m sorry it’s not so neat. The feeling is slipping away from my hands.”

She slides back a little, surprised, although she knows that she shouldn’t be, that he knows she was reading the words.

“It’s okay to look, Miss Fuji. I don’t mind. I’m trying to find the right word for a ringing bell. Maybe you can help me.”

“I’m not much for words, Mr. Shikagawa,” she says, thinking of deer drinking from the river.

“I don’t believe that. Your name is quite beautiful, and that was all your doing.”

“I should be getting your blood work.”

“Which arm do you want?”

“Let me see.”

He holds out both arms while she searches for a good vein.

“The right one today.”

He lowers his left arm, keeps the right one out for her. “May I ask you what you were doing when I came in?”

“Writing.”

“I know, but what are you writing?” she asks as she withdraws the needle.

“Poetry. Tanka poetry. Do you like poetry, Miss Fuji?”

“I can’t say that I have ever read any. I went a couple of times to the storytelling sessions. But that was a long time ago.”

“Ever since Mr. Yamai died, they haven’t been the same. He was a wonderful writer.”

“He was a writer?”

“Yes. He wrote short stories. Had several of them published. The best writer on this island.”

She looks at him, his face close to his notebook, the small flesh-colored craters hidden by the blue glasses. Mr. Shikagawa is one of the patients whom the medicine hasn’t helped, one who has built up a resistance to the new drug dapsone. His condition over the past few years has deteriorated, first the nerve function in his eyes and now the lack of feeling coursing throughout his body.

“Can I ask you something, Mr. Shikagawa?”

“Of course, Miss Fuji.”

“How do you know what you have written down in those notebooks?”

“Each night, one of my roommates reads to me what I have written down each day, and I remember it, add to it the next day. Sometimes it’s only a word; it takes maybe a week or a month to find the right word.”

“One word?”

“Words are the most important thing we have. A few words, one word, can change history. Imagine that the correct words had been chosen by those people who are in charge of our lives. A few well-thought-out words and things might have been different. Unfortunately, they have chosen all the wrong words.”

ARTIFACT Number 1390
A packet of sunflower seeds

She crosses the channel for the first time during the day. It has taken weeks to convince her that it isn’t so bad to go over there. Many years have passed since she went on those late nights, and still she has told no one. The patients believed, still do, that she was going for swims, not crossing the channel, not actually setting foot on the mainland.

It has been even more difficult to convince Mr. Shirayama of this day trip.

“There is nothing over there I care or need to see. It’s not going to make my life any different.”

Finally, she coaxed him.

“I’m going, so if I can, you can, as well. It’s only for a few hours; it will be something different, be good to get away for even a little time,” she says, repeating the speech given to her over the past weeks.

Now, they are all on the ferry, eight of them, and no one is talking, each somewhere in thought. Some of the patients are turned to the shore of the mainland, others to the shore they have left, she, caught in the middle, looking into the channel, at the trail of water left by the ferry. She can’t believe how nervous she is. The ferry goes south, down the channel, past the dock to which she used to swim. They go about a quarter of a mile farther before the engine is cut and the ferry is guided to the dock, greeting it not with the thud she has braced herself for, but with a squeak as they hit and the current pushes the ferry up against the large tires tied to the sides of the dock. It has taken about six minutes more by ferry than for her to swim across.

They help one another down the ramp onto the cement dock. The captain of the ferry, a staff worker at Nagashima, tells them that the afternoon boat leaves at three o’clock and that if they are not there, they will have to swim back. She thinks that he means it as a joke, but she isn’t sure.

This part of town is new to her, and for now she isn’t too apprehensive. It isn’t the unknown that makes her uneasy, but the known, the streets she roamed late at night, the small fishing dock, the man, the two children who are now grown and would never recognize her, nor she them. The autumn air is cool; the wind seems different over here, if only because it is coming from a different direction. Still, after all these years, she is surprised by her intense dislike for autumn, for what it represents, what it represented— the far-off diving season, the excruciating winter to follow. They continue on a small road, following near the channel, passing where the ferry had brought them.

“How are you doing, Mr. Shirayama?”

“I don’t know why I let you talk me into doing this.”

“Because they talked me into it.”

They pass more houses, but she sees no people. She can’t help but feel that they are being watched, sure that there are people watching or at least hiding behind a cement wall, or in a thicket of a garden, or in a house.

Although this is certainly not a daily occurrence for the patients, two others, like her and Mr. Shirayama, have never been here; the others come over a few times a year to buy some things—mainly seeds, gardening supplies, and fabric.

She pays close attention to where they are going but is still surprised to find that they have reached the main street, the one that leads straight up from the dock to where she used to swim. Looking to the right, she sees the dock, the channel, and, beyond it, Nagashima. If the water wasn’t so rough, she could get a better glimpse of the dock where she spent so many hours of her life, the rocky shoreline. But today, the autumn breeze has stirred up the channel, and she remembers how on days like this she would have to stand on a rock or on the sandy hill if she didn’t want to lose sight of the children in the jagged water.

She keeps looking, until one of the patients guides her away from the dock and up the street where she went that first night here, and on the other nights, as well. Now there are other people, not many, but some. She feels eyes, some staying on them a long time, following them, others fleeting. She peers right into the back of the head of one of the patients. She isn’t sure whether she is breathing or holding her breath. They continue up the street, nearing the fish market; she can hear the voices from the stalls off through the small side streets. She wants to run in the opposite direction, down to the dock, swim as fast as she can over to Nagashima. They stop, and she asks Mr. Shirayama why they have done so.

“Mrs. Makibara went to try to buy some sunflower seeds.”

They stand on the sidewalk and wait.

“We used to eat in that noodle shop there,” a patient says, pointing to the building, its metal shutters pulled down, a sign—OUT OF BUSINESS—hanging on the front. “They had the best buckwheat-noodle soup.”

She fears that she may make eye contact with someone, or maybe someone will be looking at her. Doubts as to whether she could survive over here shatter her. For so long she has felt that she could make it over here, on this side of the shore, but now it is daytime and all the people are out and she is no longer protected by the dark of night or the channel.

The farther they go, the more she resents them, not the people of this town but the seven patients with her, they, the source of her doubts today. How they coaxed her into this, how without them, she is certain, she could walk these streets unimpeded. She would only stand out as a stranger, a visitor, somehow connected to this town, not a freak. The word her sister used—
freaks
—and now she doesn’t believe that she could defend them as she did on her sister’s visit, doesn’t honestly believe that she can do so. If she were alone, they would never know; she’d sit at a counter, eat a bowl of ramen or some sushi, and no one would think twice about serving her, would make small talk and she would be on her way.

One of the patients takes her by the arm, whether to urge her along or to be guided by her, she isn’t sure. She smacks the arm, smacks it again when it doesn’t move, realizes that the arm doesn’t even know that she is smacking it. They pass the bus station, a thought rushing through her to run to the bus, go wherever it is going, as far as it is going, and then get on another bus or train or whatever and take that as far as it will go. On and on. Anywhere but here with them.
The bus pulls out and away from the station and from them. A man in the back of the bus turns and looks out the window at them.