The Pearl Diver (20 page)

When she checks both of these places and still he is nowhere to be found, her concern grows. Her thoughts dart from Mr. Yamai to Mr. Nogami, how they were snatched away from this place for thinking and acting out on their thoughts, for trying to bend the rules, to break them; her connection to both men, and now to Mr. Shirayama, telling him not to let them build the barrier.

Not now, she tells herself, walking out of the Lighthouse and down the hill, passing Key of the Hand Island. They wouldn’t dare do anything now, not with all the recent changes around here, the new look to the place.

Then she thinks of the bridge; maybe that is where he is. She hasn’t been over there; she knows that some patients have gone and watched them work on it, but she has no desire to see the bridge.

She makes the steep climb at the western end of the island and continues the half mile through the thick forest. She is surprised, annoyed by how out of breath she is after such a short climb and walk. As she is about to look at the area where the bridge is being constructed, she wrenches her eyes away, looks down at the ground. She doesn’t see, refuses to see what she has only heard about: the huge crane, the span of the bridge, which the men in the hard hats are working on.

Mr. Shirayama and the other patients have tied themselves to the posts of the barrier. Her initial reaction, although she knows what is happening, is to untie them, help them up.

“How are you feeling Mr. Shirayama?” She goes over to him.

“I feel surprisingly alive. I slept for a couple of hours like this.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“The patients’ rights group up in Tokyo have been called. I think that we will win this one, Miss Fuji.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“Do the construction workers look as if they care if there is a barrier or not? They only want to finish the bridge. It was the health officials who wanted this thing built here. Besides, I don’t think any of the foremen want to get near us.
When they do talk to us, it is from far away.”

“Well, Mr. Shirayama, history is not on our side in these types of things.”

“History is changing. Like I told you many times, Miss Fuji, one step at a time.”

ARTIFACT Number 1497
A speaker

It is as if, suddenly one morning, the voices are everywhere. She recalls seeing over the past couple of months the poles being built all over the place, but she didn’t think much of it, for recently, in the past year, many things have been changing here. The cement road and sidewalk she is on right now leaves her legs and lower back aching. She tries walking on the grass or dirt when she can, but there is so much of this cement and so little of the ground. Only if she goes all the way down past the gardens is there a good stretch of dirt. Even all the way down there, the voices follow her.

“Yesterday, the Tokyo Stock Market closed up forty-three points and the Nikkei Index was up six and a half points.
Today’s weather for the Kanto region will be mostly cloudy, with a high of fifty-seven. Kansai and west Japan will be mostly cloudy, with highs in the low sixties. There is a twenty percent chance of rain.”

Every thirty feet, there is a speaker, and no matter where she goes, the words of the radio announcer from NHK trail her. Standing right next to a speaker, the voice is almost too loud for her. Then as she walks away from it, it fades, but as soon as she thinks that it will leave her alone, the next speaker starts to pick up in volume, until it also is too loud and the whole thing repeats itself. In any direction, there is always another speaker.

The deep voice of Mr. Enoyama, the young staff member at Nagashima, cuts into the music, which has started. “Good morning. Excuse me for interrupting, but I have a couple of announcements this morning. First, today’s lunch menu will be miso soup, pickled radishes, red snap-per, and rice. The specials at the Shopping Center are bananas, grapes, lemons, and eggplant. Don’t forget that next Saturday afternoon from one to five there is our spring crafts show, held in front of the Shopping Center.” In midsentence, the song comes back on and life outside of Nagashima continues, and it will continue until the speakers are turned off tonight at nine o’clock, when, once again, until tomorrow morning at six, the island will return to itself.

ARTIFACT Number 0908
A gallon of black paint

On each of the newly built whitewashed cement-block one-story apartment houses, the names of trees and flowers are painted on the upper right-hand corners: Pine, Forest, Bamboo, Evergreen, Chinaberry, Sweet Flag, Laurel, Dogwood, Chinese Parasol Tree, Iris. And the names of birds: Seagull, Spot-Bill Duck, Bulbul, Heron, Chick, Pheasant, Turtledove, Umbrella Bird, Canary, Robin, Bush Warbler, Quail, Mockingbird, Swallow, Goose, Falcon, Wagtail, Kingfisher, Java Sparrow.

ARTIFACT Number 1133
A photo of the ceremony for the
opening of the bridge

It is a sunny, pleasant May day, the humidity low, and the one-mile walk is nice. There is no steep climb through the bamboo and pines now; a paved road has been cut through all the way to their end of the bridge. She is surprised by the excitement that she feels, having for the past couple of years felt not much of anything for the bridge. But today it is here and everyone is going. Alongside her is Mr. Shirayama, and Mr. Shikagawa is being pushed in his wheelchair by a nurse.

When they arrive at the bridge, she stands there and listens as Mr. Shirayama tells Mr. Shikagawa about it.

“It is a gray half-moon shape, about sixty feet high, twenty-two feet wide, and six hundred feet long. From where we are, looking across, there is a small mountain, the channel is forty feet below, and off to the right are clusters of houses on the south side of Mushiage town. It’s the most beautiful bridge.”

She leaves both of them, passes the place where the barrier had been constructed, and walks out onto the bridge. Many patients, nurses, staff members, and some others in suits, whom she doesn’t recognize, are gathered there talking. She goes off to the far side, rests her arms on the railing, and stares down into the channel, the water moving ever so slowly below her. It seems far, the channel below. Seems much farther than forty feet, she thinks. I used to dive nearly twice that depth and it took about a minute to get there, but from here, through air, with no water holding me back, it would take a few seconds to cover the same distance.

She tries recovering the excitement that she was feeling only minutes ago, and she walks along the bridge, away from Mr. Shirayama, not wanting to spoil this happiness that he has earned. That we have all earned, she thinks. But why don’t I feel any of this joy that so many of the others are feeling, this victory? She continues on through the people, nodding, bowing to those she recognizes. She turns around and goes back toward the Nagashima end of the bridge, spots Mr. Shirayama in the middle of a crowd of people, and he is smiling. She crosses the end again unimpeded, where now not even the scar that was left after they tore down the barrier is visible.

The opening ceremony is just beginning as she leaves, taking the winding cement road down through the pines and bamboo, following it to where the Inland Sea can be seen.

ARTIFACT Number 2940
A copy of the Nagashima microbus schedule

She still likes to walk, but there are days when she doesn’t have the energy, and on those days she sometimes rides the microbus.

WEEKDAYS: 9:00, 10:00, 11:00, 13:00, 14:00, 15:00, 16:00

WEEKENDS AND HOLIDAYS: 9:00, 10:30, 14:00, 16:00

Chiryto Health Center—Mutsumishita—Seibu Bathhouse—Hiiragi—Heisei Park—Enoki— Namihana Bathhouse—Oyama San-Cho—Shinso Auditorium—Lighthouse—Building C-7—Shopping Center—Fukushi Auditorium—Rosario Church—Akebono Apartment House—Building A-13—Nozomi Bathhouse—Hagi East Dormitory—Soyogo Dormitory

ARTIFACT Number 0954
A needle

Needles. An echo of her past. The sound of them against the whetstone, the three or four nurses scrapping the needles, a near-constant sound.

The doctors give explanations: blood, possibly sex, infected mother to a newborn, contaminated needles. No need for explanations. She has learned about hepatitis C from all her years as a nurse in Clinic B, the liver cancer or cirrhosis that most likely follows, how some of them fight it, how others slip quickly away.

More and more patients have become sick, and she is sick, too, and she knows it. She has been more tired as of late, not aging tired—she is not even sixty—but a much deeper, longer-lasting tiredness. She knows.

ARTIFACT Number 1858
An election poster

When she sees it, she can’t believe it, and before she even reaches the pole, her anger has control of her. She tears the first one she sees off the pole without much problem, then rips it in half, leaving it behind on the ground. The next telephone pole is fifty feet away; she tears another off the pole, then in half, leaving it on the ground, as well. In the entrance of the apartment houses, the entrance of the cafeteria, the supermarket, at the bus stops. She knows that people are watching—staff, patients. No one comes to assist or stop her. But after a little while of doing this, she notices a couple of people with large garbage bags following not far behind, and they gather up the shredded posters and throw them in the bags.

ARTIFACT Number 2987
Man, seventy-one, number 3,425

Early this morning, she is down past the gardens. Mrs. Tsubame, in her electric wheelchair, gives her a good-morning bow. The July gardens are colorful—red and yellow peppers, onions, orange cucumbers, all almost ready for picking. One of the patients once told her that the orange cucumbers came all the way from Okinawa. She doesn’t like them—they are too bitter for her—but she has always found them pretty.

On the other side of the island, atop the Hill of Light, the Bell of Blessing rings out six times. Before the echo of the final one has ceased, there is a crackle and then the speakers are on and begin their day; speakers that now she hardly even hears unless she wants to. She can walk the length of the island past every speaker and never hear a word of the baseball games that are played in the summer nights. She completely tunes them out. She recalls the night that she and Mr. Shirayama were coming from the bazaar and he was listening to his favorite baseball team— the Hanshin Tigers—play. At each speaker, he would slow down and listen to a pitch. How angry he was when, at exactly nine o’clock, the Nagashima staff worker’s voice interrupted the game, said good night, and the speakers were silenced until the next morning at six. After that, she bought Mr. Shirayama a small radio so he wouldn’t miss the end of his games.

The relaxed, familiar voice of the radio announcer from NHK starts in with the news, but the third story of the day is interrupted by Nagashima’s announcer.

“Good morning. Last night, at one-oh-five, Mr. Nakahara from the Seagull Building, Room seven oh oh eight, died of cancer. He was seventy-one years old. He was from Osaka. His religion was Shinshu. There will be a ceremony at nine A.M. today.”

She listens to the announcement repeated. She tries to remember something about Mr. Nakahara, but she can’t come up with anything distinguishing about him. He arrived a year or two before she did, was diagnosed with hepatitis C, developed liver cancer a year ago. Number 3,425, she thinks. An urn with “Man, seventy-one” will be painted today; his ashes will join the rest up in the shrine. She thinks of Mr. Yamai and how she spread some of his ashes in Kyoto. A strand of satisfaction slips through her.

The news comes back on in midsentence. She continues with her walk, past Mr. Shirayama’s work shed, down along the rocky shore, anchors used on long-ago fishing trips are rusted, grass grown up, twisted all around them. There is something beautiful but sad in those anchors. She lowers the brim of her hat and keeps walking in the direction of the eastern hill, which the sun has cleared. The sun, although just beginning to stretch the shadows, is already hot. At the base of the hill, where the cement road has turned to dirt, stands the last of the poles holding the speakers. She walks away from the morning news, and when she rounds the curve, she is out of range of the voice.

There isn’t much up on this hill; once in a while, on a clear day, she can see the cluster of islands in the Harima Sea, where once many fishermen from her island made their livings catching yellowtail, but she has heard that pollution has all but wiped out the trade. Today it is too hazy to see the islands.
There is a rustling in the growth of weeds and wild grass, and she sees a long brown snake slither a few feet from her, moving across the path and into the weeds.

She looks over to Shodo Island, wonders whether the divers still dive or whether that area of the Inland Sea has also become too polluted. She thinks of the coins she buried among the olive trees every Saturday, can’t remember how many she had buried in her four years of diving, but she knows where. The fifth row and the twelfth tree.

Her thoughts come back to Mr. Nakahara and the cancer that claimed him. Will this be my fate, too, after all these years fending off an ancient disease, only to be claimed by a modern one? Death doesn’t frighten her; it never has, even when she was sixteen or seventeen, in her early days of diving. She remembers how some of the women got around the subject of death by telling stories, myths about how the Inland Sea claimed some of them. They were only trying to scare her, the young new diver, but she never believed what they were saying. One story was about how a diver once got her foot wedged between two rocks at the bottom of the sea and couldn’t get loose; her skeleton could still be seen years later wiggling there, still clutching an oyster shell, a perfect pearl inside, but nobody dared to remove it. There was one about how a huge squid squeezed one of the divers to death. But the story she liked the most, maybe because she found it most believable, was the one where two divers fought over a large shell, wrestling for so long that they both ran out of air in their lungs well before they could resurface. The shell they died over sat in front of the shower rooms as a reminder to the divers. This story brings a smile to her face all these years after hearing it.