Below the hotel veranda, neighbor boys shoot down mangoes with slingshots. Sometimes they miss and startle roosting fruit bats. A belt stretches across the restaurant table. “Eso no es nada,” son of The General says, referring to the cloth belt that he uses on his child. “Once, when I was around sixteen years old, I walk into the army station and the soldiers ask me, ‘Are you afraid of your father, El General, or do you respect him?’ ‘Claro—of course, I’m afraid of him,’ I answer. My dad overhears and rages into the room. ‘Miedo? Fear? I’ll teach you what fear is.’ He turns to the soldiers. ‘Prepárense el agua.’ He yells at me, ‘Strip down to your underwear.’ I do what he says. The soldiers drop ice water on me from an overhead tub. Out of nowhere, my dad slams his pistol on the side of my face and then my shoulder. I fall to the ground and my dad comes after me again. For sure, I think my shoulder’s broken. Then I get up, limp home in my underwear, pack my bags, and leave for an artist community in the mountains.” After a peasant massacre, El General earns the nickname “El Loco.” Green Berets send counterinsurgency experts to train him in how to clean up Communism. El General forms “La Mano Blanco” — “The White Hand” — the first Death Squads in Central America. Surveillance files are established with tabs: union, student, antigovernment, religion. Murdered victims are thrown in ditches with signs, “La Mano Blanco.” Bankrolled by the CIA, El General buys land and a fleet of luxury cars. President LBJ presents El General with a medal for his “Exceptional Meritorious Service.” Studying abroad, the son of El General and my husband become roommates. In college, the son receives a phone call. His brother was murdered leaving church. The army advises him not to return for the funeral. A year later, another phone call. This time, El General was murdered. Again, he is advised not to return. “We know who killed El General,” says a high ranking military official. “If you give us the word we will avenge your father’s death.” The son does not give the word. Both he and my husband graduate, relocate, then lose contact as they wait out the war in different countries. Granted political asylum, the son of El General and his first wife settle near pacific waters, which at first they find comforting. But when warm currents from home never arrive, they shake their heads at the chilly waters, as if an old friend has changed; his wife says the ocean knows only one season: winter. Once, holding his firstborn, the son walks against a seawall. A surging tide sideswipes him, knocks his baby out of his arms, and pulls his boy out to sea. He lunges after him, reaching for hand, heel, or leg. The next wave returns his son back into his arms, unharmed, as if the sea grants second chances. Now, he has a recurring nightmare, even though his firstborn has grown, lives abroad, and plays in a rock band. Enshrouded in waves, dark seal shapes rise, then crash to shore. They are babies. Babies crawling to land. Before the next wave breaks, he gathers as many as he can, but still, he can’t find his firstborn. He wakes on all fours, pillows and covers in hand. By chance, twenty years after college, my husband runs into his old roommate at our vacation hotel. Remarried, he has a child our son’s age. When I meet him, I am standing waist deep in the pool and he almost falls in as he reaches across the water, trying to shake my hand. Late afternoon, we share foil-wrapped roasted fish with him and his new wife. Our caramel-colored sons look like twins. My one-eyed fish stares up at me. Long-tailed roosters strut by our palapa as if they own the pool deck. Below the veranda, neighbor boys shoot down mangoes with slingshots. Sometimes they miss and hit fruit bats. A soft belt stretches over the table. Our server delivers another round of Pilzners topped with limes and hands the boys their Cola Champagne. Seeing a shadow in the deep end, my husband dives into the pool and pulls up a boy. Bloated, face purple, hands blanched, he isn’t breathing. On the other side of the pool, his mother screams. Distracted by shell necklaces for sale, his parents didn’t see their son jump into the pool. The boy spews a fountain of water when his uncle administers CPR. He starts to breathe. They rush him to the hospital and later he is released in good health. Sons in hand, we walk out to the beach and await the sunset. Sitting in the sand, we watch the sun glow iron red. Farther down the beach, the father of the drowned boy also watches. The father never thanks my husband. The son of El General shrugs. “What’s a father going to admit?” With his palms face up, the setting sun rests in his hands then slides through his fingers. Like molten lava, the sun burns into the horizon.
Genres Archives
Fiction
The Third Daughter
The Chairman is dead. Outside, the people of Chinatown are cheering. They light firecrackers and beat pots and pans, chanting as they march three floors below the window of my apartment. Their signs say, “Smash the Emperor!” Drips of paint spoil the sweep and curve of the calligraphy, the characters bleeding as if shot.
Shouts and curses echo over the cobbled San Francisco street. The Chairman’s supporters, wearing black armbands, march from the opposite direction. A standoff, a scuffle, and two men roll in the street until one reaches under his opponent’s leg to pinch his testicles like a ripe tomato. The man howls, the other shouts, “Fuck you and ten generations of your ancestors!” This is how the civil war continues, half a world away and a quarter-century too late. Without dignity.
The cheering swells, the revelers giddy with rice wine and easy victory. Sincerity shines in their faces. No longer will they whisper the Chairman’s name, afraid of his reach across the ocean. No longer will they invoke him to scare their children, or as a curse against their enemies. No longer will the people I betrayed live under his threat. With the Chairman dead, the people here will be able to reach family trapped on the other side. They can return to the homeland they thought closed forever, kneel and press their foreheads to the soil. If only I could hunger like them, for a dream, for anything larger than myself. What I want is to want, once again.
I tear myself away from the window, unable to watch any longer, and comb my wet hair with my fingers. After a busboy at the Pearl Pavilion collided with me, spilling sauce down my back, I returned to shower between my shifts and heard the news on the radio. I undo the towel wrapped around me. At twenty-seven, I am plain and strong, hard lines everywhere but my chest. I trace a finger across a thin scar on my right kneecap, where I fell in the fields as a child, and the burn scar on my wrist, a souvenir of the Chairman’s revolution. I smooth my callused palms on the red satin shirt, the stain rinsed out and blotted dry. The dampness makes me shiver as I fasten the frog closures, feeling the pinch at my neck. The uniform is slightly too small, tight across my shoulders. I slip on black trousers, and as a final touch, a necklace of a prancing jade ox. A gift from the Cook, on the third anniversary of my time at the Pavilion. I reach my arms up to clasp the thin gold chain, feeling my chest muscles pull tight, and my breasts push against my shirt. Here my awkward younger self emerges, exposed and on display. Although I might appear strong and sure-footed, versions of me compete within. A clumsy peasant. A nimble dancer. A straight-backed revolutionary. A doubting missionary.
Old Wu knocks at the door, three hard raps his signal. I tell him to come in.
He shuffles inside, his back bent, but his eyes strong. He never married, like many of the bachelors who came here as teenagers in the 1930s to work in laundries or as houseboys. While my parents grew up toiling in the fields, he set sail for Gold Mountain.
“The old bastard is dead!” he crows.
The Chairman and I met the year I turned sixteen. I look away so that Old Wu cannot see my grimace. I pour us tea, ever the dutiful daughter. Even though the tea scalds my tongue, I drink, trying to ease the heaviness in my chest, and the taste is smoky, lingering and pervasive. I roll the empty teacup in my hand, absorbing the traces of warmth from the ceramic, solid and heavy, hard as bone.
“Guneung, you’re so quiet,” Old Wu says, addressing me as “young maiden.” He sits on my folding stool, the only piece of furniture that I possess, other than my bunk bed and a cardboard box that serves as my dresser and night stand. He coughs, a deep, wet hacking that has plagued him this autumn. He catches his breath and sets down his teacup on a stack of newspapers. “You should be happy! Let’s have a real drink. I have a bottle of plum wine I’ve been saving for the right occasion.”
He grins and mimes clinking glasses. Not for the first time, he is trying to romance me. I put on my coat and usher Old Wu into the dark hallway that smells of grease and stir-fried vegetables. “I’m late for work.”
“Be careful.” He wants to protect me, but he doesn’t know that I have faced down dangers he could never imagine.
“Don’t get mixed up in their fights,” Old Wu adds, his face anxious, and suddenly I am ashamed of my resentment. Why should my past visit his present?
Old Wu has never inquired about my history and I have never volunteered. Perhaps he wants to believe, for my sake, that I never suffered. I walk down the narrow, steep stairs, where the overhead light has burned out again. Outside, firecrackers sputter and pop. My foot slips and I pitch forward before I catch myself, bracing my hand on the peeling wallpaper. I hesitate, not yet ready to face the crowds.
The Chairman tried to obliterate our past, but the Chinese still revere our dead. Against his wishes, in secret, we prayed to our ancestors and asked for their blessings and protections. Now we will sweep the tombs of our ancient heroes and sing the stories of their great deeds.
Consider the hero’s tales of piety and courage, of coincidence and reversals of fortune, of virtue and corruption. To become a hero, your details will be worn away, worn smooth, until you are blank, the barest of outlines. Only then can you become a light leading the people of this generation, the next and the next.
* * *
I was born in 1949, the year of our country’s Liberation, when a peasant became leader of our country, when the Chairman’s rule promised to end hunger and superstition, to end all that made us weak. Even in this new era in which women could be heroes too, my father must have been disappointed when I was born. He wanted a son so much that I became one for him.
Sixteen years had passed since Liberation and my birth—a blink, a breath in a country with a history thousands of years old— and I was impatient for change. Only recently had my village begun to recover from three years of famine. I did not know then that my homeland was poised between periods of chaos. That we were less than a year away from the Cultural Revolution, that schools would close and teenagers — model students one day, thugs the next — would form gangs and turn on their neighbors, their teachers, and their parents. They would destroy the old world, so a new one could be born.
The Party official was its harbinger. He arrived on an early autumn day, just before the harvest. The rumble of his Jeep echoed through the valley and along the rutted road that led to our village. We dropped our hoes and ran in from the cornfields. He was new to us, short and compact, his steps slow and precise, and his expression steady. He ordered the girls aged fourteen to twenty to line up in the plaza, and told us to remove our hats. I took my place at the end, hunching my shoulders. It did no good. I was still the tallest, broad-shouldered and knock-kneed, awkward as a baby calf.
Ba, sitting beneath an acacia tree, tipped the brim of his straw hat, and I straightened. He was reminding me that as tall as I was, he was taller. As dark as I was, he was darker. Until last year, I joined him and the other men in the plaza in the evenings, listening to their riddles and stories, rowdy and rousing. Then my body began to curve and swell, and I was no longer welcome.
Everyone in my village shared the same surname, Song. Our neighbors knew my parents and my grandparents. They recognized the inherited shape of my ears, my temper, and my fate. They had me determined before I was born. My sisters and I shared our middle name—Mei, plum tree of integrity—that indicated we lived through the same generation of civil wars, bandits, and famine. The winter blossoms open in snow. Pure, strong, and reckless. I like to think that at first I was a doll to my two sisters, new and precious in a home with no toys and no time to play. Later, I became Third Daughter, another task in a long day. To carry, to feed, to bathe, to silence. I became competition, the meager portion of porridge divided once more.
The official began to walk along the line. I straightened my wrinkled gray tunic and sagging pants. He paused before each girl: the scrawny ones, the short ones, the village beauty renown for her dimples and petal soft skin. At last, he stopped at me. I shifted on my feet, wondering if the visitor found me wanting. I resisted looking down—resisted what was expected of me. I studied his high cheekbones, his deep-set eyes, and he drew back from my scrutiny. The official turned around and examined each candidate for a second time.
The wet heat was starting to break, and our shuffling feet had kicked up the scent of chickens, dust, and straw. I flexed my hands, sticky with sweat. My knees ached, and my shoulders were sore from weeding since dawn. Cicadas droned, their song monotonous yet haunting, punctuated by the flick of their wings. Such tiny creatures, but together, deafening. To my left, my neighbor sucked nervously on the end of her braid. To my right, another tugged on her tunic. The official paused not before the village beauty, but the oldest candidate, her squashed nose covered by a glistening mole.
I wanted him to pick me for this duty and to separate me from the rest. I prayed to the Chairman, asking him to grant me the opportunity. I imagined him beaming, his hand outstretched. Mine, reaching. I wanted to live like a hero: courageous, admired, eternal. Rebellious, too, for giving up a typical life. My parents told us stories bursting with heroes who sacrificed for the people. Female heroes were few but vivid: a teenage spy, beheaded after she rallied peasants against enemy soldiers. A factory worker burned to death after she stopped a huge fire. A peasant killed when she held together a collapsing kiln.
When I was eight, I wanted to be Sister Yu, who herded her commune’s escaped sheep during a blizzard. She crouched against the wind, straining to hear their frightened bleats. Pretending, I wrapped a rag around my ears and eyes, trying to feel my way home from the edge of the village. I dipped my hands into the icy river until they went numb.
When I was twelve, I wanted to be Iron Girl, who grabbed the reins of a stampeding ox to save three terrified elders. She died when the cart ran over her. I flicked stones at our exhausted ox, willing it to run and rage, but it did not raise its head. My exploits earned the scorn of my neighbors, who called me muddle-headed, a stupid egg. I never explained what I was doing. Heroes died, but they lived forever in me.
If the official did not pick me, in a year I might be married. Later, I would have a baby, then another. Even if my marriage were delayed three, five years, even if it had nothing in common with the disappointment of my parents, I would rise at dawn, toil, hunger, and ache, every day repeated until I died.
My neighbor, Fatty Song, whose strong arms and broad back I admired, pushed to the front. At the spring festival, Fatty, a brigade leader, had apologized for bumping against me, never knowing that I had brushed against him. He played the bamboo flute, sweet yet sinuous melodies that I wanted for myself. Behind him stood my sisters, too old to participate. First Daughter nudged Second Daughter, and they began to whisper. I knew they hoped that the official would pass over me. My sisters, born less than a year apart, were always together, crows perched on a roof—forever watching, cawing in a language not meant for me.
My mother leaned on the arm of First Daughter. Ma was tiny, slender with delicate features—plump mouth, brushstroke brows, and long-lashed eyes. People snickered that my mother was like a flower planted in dung because she was married to my father. The beautiful invited such ridicule. My two sisters inherited my mother’s looks and consequently absorbed most of her attentions. She braided their long, shiny hair, but ran a comb through my thin locks. Her hand rested easily on their shoulders, never mine. My sisters were the first to survive infancy, arriving after a stillborn son and a toddler fallen to a fever, and my mother loved them with an intensity forged from loss. I inherited Ba’s broad nose and high cheekbones—crude if handsome in a man, but plain on a woman. It pleased me that we looked alike, sharing what no one else did.
Ba rose to his feet. As a teenager, soon after he married my mother, he left for the provincial capital to make his fortune. He had quick hands and thought he could work in a factory. He returned a year later, missing the pinky finger of his right hand. He had attempted what others in his generation wanted, and his failure earned their contempt. I turned my head to the breeze, soft and warm. Low, slanting light transformed the crumbling bricks and splintering wood of our homes into something inviting and beautiful. I was proud that the official had arrived when our fields were lush and the persimmon trees heavy with heart-shaped fruit. We must have seemed like a model village, a socialist paradise.
The official didn’t know about the village’s squabbling during the long mandatory political meetings. A few, like my father, challenged the directives from the Party. Dig up the graveyard and change the course of a flooding river? The land where our families had lived for generations was beyond change, Ba had argued. He was too fond of the past, a nostalgia that spat at the promise of the future. That was when I first began to question my father, for how could he deny the Chairman’s wisdom? The headman triumphed, Ba lost, and the river straightened where it once curved.
I cocked my hip and stared at Headman Song, trying to attract his attention. Two years ago, a musician on his way to the capital had sought shelter in our village. Although he wore the same rough clothes as the rest of us, his eyebrows arched like willow leaves and his skin glowed. His high haunting voice silenced us. He sang of heroes, of a mischievous monkey king who rebelled against the heavens. He plucked at a zither over his lap, the melody roiling from his fingers. Every family volunteered to house the musician that night, for the village never had such remarkable visitors. Headman Song prevailed, and he moved his wife and four children to his brother’s home to provide quiet for the musician. At midnight, I crept to his house in the hopes of listening to another song. Instead I heard grunts and moans. Through a crack in the front door, I saw their shadows on the wall come together and apart. I recoiled, but part of me wanted to be inside, too, pushing and clinging. Shudders ran through both men. I leaned closer and knocked over a stack of baskets, falling to my knees and skinning my hands in the dirt. I tried to untangle my feet from the baskets and as I rose, the headman burst through the door, naked. His nipples were startling, large and flat. He gripped my wrists, and I kept my eyes on his face. He scowled beneath his knit brows, his body heavy with the thick soapy smell of chestnut trees in bloom. I did not scream, and he knew I would keep his secret.
Now I waited until the headman’s gaze settled on me. I floated my hands as the traveling musician once did over his zither. Over the headman. His eyes widened. I swiveled my head over the length of the crowd, as if to say, I will tell everyone. Headmen elsewhere in the province had been beaten for lesser offenses, for the people hungered to humble the powerful. The people listened to their confessions, stripped their authority, and forced them to tote night soil and catch flies in a jar. Even if few believed me, the headman’s reputation would suffer, for such was the strength of accusation in those days.
The cicadas rose in pitch, droning and deafening. Headman Song took the pipe from his mouth, and turned to the official. They spoke with their heads bowed and expression hidden. The official returned before me and rested his hand on my shoulder. He was testing me, and I did not wince or draw back.
Mistakes Were Made, Errors Happened
I came to Tokyo summers, when I was a boy, with my mother, hot August weeks, shimmer rising with cicada buzz. We stayed with her brothers and sisters in the suburbs on the Den-en-toshi-line.
I caught frogs and kept them in the clear plastic bubbles that encased toy cars bought from vending machines till they suffocated. My cousins and I set off hanabe. We ate dango ice creams. We raced little sailboats in the man-made stream at Sendagaya Park.
For me, the exotic freedom was intoxicating, though I now realize my mother was running from something, from my American father, from her life in San Diego. She was hoping, probably, that her family in Japan would say, Come back, come home. But Tokyo wasn’t her home anymore. And I loved it because it wasn’t home.
I learned my rudimentary Japanese. I slurped up soba and onigiri. I felt Japanese, at least during those summers.
When I returned a year after I graduated from high school, I didn’t feel Japanese or American, just stuck in the middle.
2.
I arrived with $800, which I put down as key money for an apartment in Nishi Azabu. I was looking for a soft future and didn’t see any reason why a good-looking kid like me wouldn’t find his way in another Tokyo summer.
There were girls—foreign girls, Japanese girls—and I was hot-blooded and eager, but I couldn’t get my words out—in English or Japanese. I hung out in gaijin bars with the other foreigners. My sweaty shirt stuck to my chest. I played dumb, and sometimes, amazingly, it worked, and a girl would warm to me or take pity on me, and bring me home. My tongue-tiedness soon disappointed each of them, however. I never knew what to say in English or in Japanese. They quickly tired of me.
I joined a pickup soccer game in Yoyogi Park most afternoons. I had played for Mission High, where, sometimes, I was mistaken for Mexican, because of my black hair and usefulness as a midfielder. Here, they had trouble even making a guess.
And I was soon broke.
3.
I got a job as a messenger for a company that designed brochures. I didn’t know my way around Tokyo outside of Minato-ku and had to rely on Masa, another messenger, who struck me as diabolically brilliant. He usually steered me right. He had good ideas, most of them criminal.
One of his best ideas was to steal computers from the office and sell them to a fence who ran a used machine shop just a few blocks away.
This would have been a great heist, but our boss walked by the storefront one day and recognized his Macs in the window because they still had our company logo.
Masa, who had found the fence, had taken less than a tenth of what they were worth.
4.
We were both fired.
5.
A short, middle-aged Japanese man in a bomber jacket had recognized me in a little pub shaped like a railroad car. He was an associate of my former employer. As this bomber-jacket fellow went on about my immorality, I stayed quiet and unresponsive. We were standing side by side, as if we were staging our little conversation as a play for fellow drinkers.
He poked a finger at my shoulder and called me scum. When I ignored him, he shoved me.
This escalation caught me by surprise. I was left with two courses: retreat or hand-to-hand combat. Neither appealed.
Then, an almost miraculous intervention: a woman with short blonde hair that was swept up and away from her freckled face by a headband approached me, smiled, kissed me on both cheeks, and said, in a French accent, that she was so happy to see me.
I told her I was likewise delighted.
The angry man attempted to intervene: “You’re a dirty half-breed.”
I ignored him, turning my full attention to this blonde French woman. Her presence—her interest in me—caused the angry man to break off his challenge.
She played with the buttons on my shirt. “You missed me?”
“Of course,” I told her.
I had never seen her before.
6.
Delphine said she had mistaken me for someone else, for another half-Japanese, half-American guy with long hair. I was grateful for her rescuing me and for her acquaintance. I bought her a drink. It turned out that she lived nearby, just on the other side of Gaien Nishi Dori, the main street in my neighborhood.
The next day, she faxed me a map, and I rode my bicycle over to her apartment.
She lived on the third floor, in a Western-style apartment with carpeted living room. By day, the glamour of her nocturnal appearance was wiped away, and her features now appeared more flattened—as if someone had changed the aspect ratio on her face. Her round eyes, flat nose, and full cheeks put me in mind of a koala bear, but a sexy koala bear. She wore a tank top revealing fleshy, freckled arms and sweat pants that rode up between her haunches.
When she lay down on the floor beside her sofa and stretched, lifting those arms over her head so that I could see her short, curly, sand-colored armpit hair and then arched her stomach and hips upward, I couldn’t resist: I got down next to her and began to give her a massage—this was my standard move, a little shoulder and neck rub, and then a repositioning of the hands, and then lips on neck. She closed her eyes, seemed to enjoy my touch, but when I tried to kiss her, turned away.
“I’m a call girl,” Delphine explained.
“So what?”
“So I’m not for free.”
7.
Masa telephoned and asked what I was doing. He was with Mr. Saito, and they were downstairs. When I got in the car, Masa was smiling through his fake tortoise shell glasses, obviously pleased that he was riding around in a Mercedes Benz 500. Mr. Saito nodded when I greeted him.
We rode north, past Nishi Azabu, through the tunnel, and then along the park to Yotsuya, where we idled next to a Lawson’s convenience store. Masa looked at me and nodded.
Mr. Saito led us down some stairs and into a darkened apartment with an open kitchen opposite a red upholstered booth in which four women in towels sat drinking cold oolong tea, while two men in headphones ate soba. In the middle of the table, a video camera lay on its side.
Mr. Saito and a large man with sweaty forehead and a beer company towel wrapped around his neck had a conversation that went like this:
“On or behind?” Saito asked.
“We’re late.”
“Why?”
“Late girl.”
“Catch up?”
“Yes.”
“Today?”
“—”
“Tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Is he here?”
“No.”
“Him?” Saito pointed at me.
The sweaty man looked at me. “Show us your penis.”
I pulled down my jeans and my underwear.
Both Mr. Saito and the sweaty man made disappointed grunts.
“You said you were half foreign.”
Mr. Saito didn’t give us a ride back to Nishi Azabu.
8.
There was an Australian girl, Cheryl, who liked me. She was an English teacher who lived in Yokohama and sometimes came up to Tokyo to see me. She brought groceries and cooked me meals. She took some pleasure in feeding me, worried, as she was, that I was becoming too skinny. (Cheryl herself was not at risk.) She told her friends I was her boyfriend.
Cheryl wore a gray skirt and a white blouse—her teaching outfit—while she cooked me a hamburger steak, potatoes, and peas and carrots.
Delphine called me. “You are free?”
“Not really.”
“You are with someone?”
“Sort of.”
“Girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Can you do something for me?”
“O.K.”
She wanted me to get her five grams. She would pay.
“And then we’ll hang out, do the speed.” Delphine said. “You can fuck me a lot. I love that. On shabu.”
Cheryl was stuffing herself with hamburger.
9.
Masa and I were kicking a soccer ball back and forth in a parking lot where a soufflé restaurant used to be. It had been a fantastic soufflé place. I really wasn’t a big soufflé guy—is there such a guy?—but they had all kinds of flavors—chocolate, strawberry, kiwi, passion fruit—each little soufflé coming in its own porcelain cup and the texture was exquisite, a soft, steady melting that seemed more like the memory of a flavor rather than the flavor itself. They tore the place down to put up a parking lot. Which wasn’t bad, because now we had a place to have a little kickaround.
We drew a chalk goal on the retaining wall and dragged two pylons to make a goal on the other side of the lot. Late afternoons, a few of the local kids came out, and we’d run threes or fours until the parking lot owner showed up and shut us down.
Twice that afternoon, our game was interrupted, once by a male model we knew from California who was selling Ecstasy and another time by Sampson, a heroin dealer from Canada. Neither of them had what I needed.
Later, while we were drinking canned iced coffee and sitting on a parking block, I told Masa about my plan: I wanted to go back to America. Tokyo was killing me. I needed enough for a plane ticket, maybe a few hundred dollars more. I could crash at my mom’s trailer in San Diego for a while. With the money I would make from Delphine, I would be halfway there.
Masa thought it was crazy to go just when things were going so well.
10.
Masa had found Kimi, a Korean guy we knew who wore leather pants and wandered around Tokyo like a forest ranger through the wilderness. He was up in Asakusa, all the way across Tokyo, and I would have to go up there later today to meet him, give him the money, and then wait around a coffee shop while Kimi went to score. I didn’t like the plan. It meant giving a large amount of money to a guy who was famously unreliable and had no fixed address and no real attachments and frequently vanished for weeks at a time. And waiting for him in a godforsaken part of town.
Masa pointed out that it wasn’t my money. It was Delphine’s.
11.
Here’s what my day looked like after I gave Kimi the money, waited around, and then went to look for him:
X=medium-sized trip, XXX=long trip
NK=not finding Kimi, K=finding Kimi:
XXX NK
XXX NK
XXX NK
XXX NK
XXX NK
I never found Kimi and ended up returning home without Delphine’s speed or her money.
12.
I rode the Toyoko line to Yokohama with Cheryl, because she told me I could make some money modeling for this lady who ran her English school. They had actually used Cheryl as a model and she was kind of fat, so I thought for sure they would use me.
We had lunch with the lady, a slender, short Japanese woman with glasses who spoke weird English—“you don’t say,” “dressed to the nines and tens,” “good grief”—and while we never talked about the modeling job, I could tell she was a little disappointed. I must have looked too Japanese. I have found that when people envision their archetype of what a good-looking half Japanese dude looks like, they are actually imagining a quarter Japanese dude.
I went back to Cheryl’s place above this pachinko parlor, and she cooked us packet beef curry.
After a while, her new Australian roommate came home. Nadine had on a blue cocktail dress and had this great brown hair that was teased and sprayed to sort of rise up around her head like a lion’s mane. I believed it was because Cheryl had told her I was her boyfriend that Nadine didn’t pay any attention to me.
While we smoked some hash, I told Cheryl I wanted to go back to America. Maybe she could loan me the money? Just a hundred thousand? She reminded me she was saving for her own trip around the world.
Cheryl went to bed. I lay down for a while and then slid open the shoji screen like I was going to the bathroom, but instead crossed the kitchen and slid open the shoji to the living room, where Nadine was lying down in her futon. I sat down beside her. She was sleeping with her arms out of the kagebuton, the room dimly illuminated by the street lamps and signage outside. I wanted to slide my hand across her upper arms where the flesh was a little goose bumped.
She suddenly turned over. Her eyes were wide open.
“What the fuck are you doing, you Jap?”
13.
When Delphine finally reached me, she surprised me by not sounding angry.
“My pussy is so wet,” she told me.
I could have fucked the phone.
“All you have to do is get my five grams.”
14.
A soccer team I played with called and told me to show up at Sacred Heart with my spikes. I had played pickup soccer with a few of the members of The New Era Gauchos in Yoyogi Park so they knew I was useful. New Era was a recruiting firm that played in a corporate league, and they called me whenever they had a game.
We destroyed their rival recruiting agency — I scored two goals.
Later, while we were having drinks at an izekaya, the coach — yes, they actually had a coach — slid me an envelope with 25,000 yen. He told me they needed me again next Saturday. They were playing an English school, and, if they won that game, they would make the cup playoffs. He said I was better than other gaijin players because I didn’t look like a gaijin, but played better than most of them.
15.
My aunt and uncle had moved since I used to visit them when I was a kid. They lived out in Machida now. They invited me over to see my grandmother, my obaasan. She sometimes gave me envelopes with money, so I rode the train out and then walked the kilometer from the station up the hill to their house. It was warm out, so I wore a T-shirt and jeans and was sweating a little when I got there.
They had divided the already tiny house in two so that my cousin, his wife, and their two kids could live in this little in-law apartment that was now next door. They were all sitting around, watching a women’s marathon race on television. My grandmother seemed happy to see me and asked me about my job.
I told her I quit.
“Why?”
“Mistakes were made,” I said, using the passive Japanese conjugations. “Errors happened.”
My uncle asked me what I was going to do now. He helped manage the repair and servicing garage for a Subaru dealership. He already employed my cousin and had offered me a job in the past. I would have to start at the bottom, doing oil changes and spray cleaning engines.
I told him I was going to go back to America. Maybe get a job there.
Before I left, my grandma gave me an envelope with ten thousand yen, about a hundred dollars.
16.
Cheryl called and told me she was breaking up with me. That what I had done to her roommate was creepy. And I wouldn’t get to model for the English school catalog. “Too bad, because Chino-san wanted to hire you.”
17.
Masa, to make his rent, sublet his Azabu Juban apartment to a pair of Japanese girls who worked at Uehara boutiques. What they found out after they moved in was that he also intended to continue living in the ten-mat apartment. They took the six-mat bedroom and Masa spread out a futon in the hallway. They had to step over him to use the bathroom.
If we had drugs, Masa and I would sit inside the bathroom, Masa in the square tub and me on the toilet seat, and lock the door so the girls could sleep.
Both the girls were saving up for plastic surgery. Sometimes, Rie-chan, the less attractive of the two, would have sex with Masa if the other roommate was out. He used to record their sessions on a tape recorder and listen to them through headphones while he rode around on his scooter. He said this made him feel like Warren Beatty in Shampoo. I pointed out that Warren Beatty had a motorcycle, a 500cc Triumph Tiger, and rode without a helmet, while Masa was riding a 50cc Yamaha scooter and wore a Nippon Ham Fighters batting helmet.
18.
“Do you want to buy my refrigerator?” I asked my cousin. In the summers when we were kids, he and I had done everything together. Since moving back to Tokyo, I hardly ever saw him.
“What kind?”
“Panasonic.”
He said he would come by to see it.
It was one of those half-sized refrigerators with a little interior freezer that looked like it could be the miniature refrigerator for a race of tiny people who lived inside the refrigerator.
My cousin showed up with a friend of his, and they lifted it out of my kitchen and down the stairs and managed to wedge it into the trunk of the friend’s Cressida. I was waiting for them upstairs, but then heard the car start and my cousin drive off without paying me.
It had actually belonged to my landlord.
19.
When I was three, I went with my grandmother and two of my uncles to one of those pay-by-the-hour fishing holes where old men sit in front of coffin-sized squares dangling their lines. There were pools of varying sizes into which you could cast for a selection of farm-raised trout, perch, and bass. Obaasan held me against her rough cotton dress, the fabric scratchy against my face, as my uncles gave money to a man in an apron who stood inside a booth. Just behind and to the right of his head, there was a bright, bluish tube of light surrounded by wire mesh with gaps the size of checkerboard squares. It was hot and buggy and I watched mosquitoes and flies swarm around this mesmerizing light before they turned fatally toward the blue glow, where they fried in a crisp sizzle. This is my first memory.
20.
Masa had found a little black case. It was cardboard, but with fake leather coating so that it looked almost like a real briefcase. He took to carrying it around with him everywhere, placing it on the running board between his legs when he rode his scooter. He didn’t really have anything in there—a few CDs, a pack of cigarettes, empty cough syrup bottles, some unpaid bills—but he said it made him look more professional. He would come to my apartment, sit down on the floor with his black case on his lap, and then click open the snaps, as if he were a salesman about to launch a demonstration. Then he would pull out, like, a banana and peel it and start eating it, and he would have no idea how ridiculous he looked.
After finishing his banana, he announced that Mr. Saito had a new project. We wouldn’t be gay, technically, because these were transsexuals.
“Do they have penises?” I asked.
“Yeah, but they also have tits.”
I thought about that. That would be O.K.
We rode the subway up there and then killed time reading comic books in a convenience store before Mr. Saito showed up. He led us downstairs, where a bunch of guys sat around in towels reading comic books and drinking tea from cans, while a cameraman sat smoking a cigarette with his video camera on the table in front of him.
“These are guys,” I pointed out to Masa, “not chicks with dicks.”
Masa shrugged. “Look, they’re going to suck you. Not you them.”
“What about you?”
Masa shook his head. “I’m not into guys.”
“Neither am I.”
I was still short Delphine’s money.
Mr. Saito told the guys to take off their towels and told me to pull down my pants. The camera man lazily got up, put out his cigarette, and flipped over the screen on his camera.
The guy who sucked me off was a wiry little guy with a fat tongue. He didn’t seem into it, either. I thought of Delphine, her fleshy arms, her short bobbed hair. I could imagine her smell —
This guy was really good at sucking cock, and I came way too fast.
Mr. Saito refused to pay me because he said he couldn’t use the footage.
21.
“Enough with my pussy talk,” Delphine told me. “Now I am going to have you thrown from a moving vehicle.”
22.
I drank a can of corn soup and trotted up to the pitch, where I began stretching and then loosened up by running around the field. The rest of the New Era Gauchos were shooting on our goalie, and I joined them, launching a few into the top left corner. The English teaching school had brought a squad of Japanese and Brazilians. The team logo, a big white hand holding a pink rose, looked familiar. It was Cheryl’s English school. And there was Cheryl on the sideline in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I had to admit she looked pretty good, but when I went over to say hi she just nodded and didn’t say anything.
“Why do they have so many Brazilians?” I asked one our players.
“They are half Japanese, half Brazilians.”
“No, they’re not,” I pointed out. “Look at them. They’re Brazilians.”
My teammate just looked at me funny, like, who the fuck can tell a half-breed from a Brazilian? But I know half-breeds, and these were no half-breeds.
Just before kickoff, while I was standing on the center line waiting for my teammate to roll the ball toward me, I looked over at the sideline and saw Masa, standing there with his black case and next to him was…Delphine?
What the fuck, I thought, why did he bring her?
The English school players really were Brazilians and kept the ball in our half of the field for most of the game. At one point, I went and stood near Masa and asked him in Japanese why he had brought Delphine, of all people.
“She’s so hot,” he explained. “I ran into her and she said she wanted to see you.”
She was wearing expensive-looking sunglasses, a navy blue short jacket with a fur hood, and jeans.
“She wants to kill me,” I told him.
“Yeah,” Masa agreed.
Delphine waved. Then ran a finger across her throat.
I spent the rest of the game as far from Delphine as possible, twice picking up stupid off-sides calls because I was reluctant to run back for the ball past where she was standing.
With about 20 minutes left in the game, I saw two Nigerian men walking toward the touchline. Delphine’s friends.
I ran off the pitch and down the ivy embankment toward the shopping street, my spikes catching where there were chain link squares laid over the earth to help the vines grow.
I heard we lost 4-0.
23.
Masa came over that night.
He had fucked Delphine.
“She made me promise I would get her money back,” he explained. He was sitting in my apartment, on my floor. We were sorting through videotapes he had found in the big garbage to see if there were any we could sell.
How was he going to do that?
“I’m gonna show her where you live. But don’t worry, I told her I don’t know you very well, so—”
There was a loud banging on my hollow, metal door and a sound like an animal breathing.
“They followed you,” I whispered.
Masa nodded and did an exaggerated gesture of being out-foxed, shaking his head sadly.
The men outside the door said calmly in surprisingly polite Japanese. “Come, sir, open up.”
I told Masa I was going to hide in my kitchen, in the little gap next to the sink and below the water heater where the refrigerator used to be. From outside the kitchen, you would never know there was a space there.
Masa said he would tell them I wasn’t here.
I listened to Masa open the door, tell the Nigerians I was gone. Somehow they knew immediately to walk to the kitchen and order me out of my hiding place. They couldn’t fit through the narrow galley entrance without turning sideways.
“I’m gonna pay her,” I promised. I gave them the few thousand yen I already had.
In the meantime, they explained, they were going to take my television and CD player. Then the larger of the two, a man with broad shoulders and a neck as thick as a scooter tire, told me to come closer. I hesitated and he walked over to me and took me in his arms. He smelled sweet, of talcum powder and some sort of cheap cologne. He began squeezing, and kept squeezing, until the air was expelled from my lungs and my rib cage contracted and I felt a sharp pain in my two lower ribs and my lungs were forcibly prevented from expanding. He was suffocating me, from the outside, like a boa constrictor. I could see his expression, a slowly broadening smile. He had black marks across his teeth where he seemed to be struggling with tooth decay. I passed out.
24.
I had never seen a suit like this, where the jacket came with shirt cuffs, shirt collar, and a tie, all sewn in, dickey-style, so that all you had to do was button the jacket and you looked like you were wearing a full suit. You didn’t even need to wear a T-shirt underneath it. They charged me 50,000 for that purple suit and said I could repay it with my first month’s salary. Then they charged me another 20,000 to feather my hair and bronze me up in a tanning booth. By the time I was done, I looked like all the other punk touts who stand outside Almond trying to convince guys to come to a club.
I had to stand out there from 8 p.m. until 4 a.m. and tout the hostess bar. Whoever walked into the club with one of my cards in his hand meant I would be paid one thousand yen. For every ten, there was a one thousand yen bonus. I figured I would be able to convince at least 20 guys a night to visit the club. I would make enough to pay back Delphine in four nights. In a week, I would make a 100,000; in a month, enough to fly back to San Diego where I could play pickup soccer at the local high school, maybe even enroll in community college and play my way onto the team.
The first night, I made zero yen.
25.
I figured out that the bottles of wine at the Meidi-ya near Hiroo Station had price tags that could be peeled off and switched for cheaper ones. The wine cooler room was located just behind the cashiers, but if you stood in there long enough, as if you were appraising the vintages, then they would forget you were there and you could switch the labels on a ten thousand or twenty thousand yen bottle for a five hundred yen bottle and then walk up to the teenaged cashier, pay the price on the tag, and stroll.
After a few days, I had all these fancy bottles back home in my apartment—I didn’t know anything about wine, but this stuff retailed for $200, $300 a bottle, classy stuff. This had to be a couple thousand dollars worth of wine. I was giddy, it was the first time one of my schemes had actually worked, and so easy.
Masa brought Mr. Saito over to look at my collection. He told me that he would pay me ten thousand yen, about a hundred bucks, for all of it.
“No,” I told him, “it’s worth twenty times that.”
“What do you know about wine?”
Nothing. But I wasn’t going to give this away for that cheap.
Mr. Saito looked at his watch and said, “Fine, I’ll give you twenty thousand.”
I shook my head. I was tired of being cheated, tired of every plan running aground, every scheme falling apart, of guys threatening me and squeezing me and ripping me off. Look at all these beautiful bottles. Dom Perignon—I’d heard of that one. Chateau Haut-Brion. Chateau Brane-Cantenac. This was real fancy stuff. Pure shit. Why should I sell it for cheap?
Masa wanted to make a deal, but I told them no way. No more. I’m tired of always being the guy who makes the crap deals, who gets the bad jobs and the lousy breaks. I told them to get out. Both of them.
Then I gathered up the wine and champagne, the best stuff, in two big plastic bags and lugged it up to Delphine’s. I figured she was French, she would love all this stuff. I was just going to leave it in front of her door with a note saying this was to pay her back, to erase that debt. But after I set the bottles down, I knocked on her door.
She was wearing a short, belted bathrobe that showed off her lightly freckled legs.
I could smell her.
“What’s this?”
I held up a bottle of 15-year-old Margaux. “Here,” I said, “It’s good wine. Fancy.”
She looked at the bottle. Nodded. “O.K. Is it all Grand Cru?”
“It’s all like that,” I told her. “And champagne, too. You can have it all. Let’s just call it even.”
She bent down and began going through the bags, apparently pleased with what she saw there.
“D’accord.” She smiled. “Would you like to come in?”
26.
“I just wanted to pay you back.” I told her when we were finished.
“We’re equal now.” She smiled.
27.
I walked back down to Meidi-ya, thinking all I had to do was switch the labels on some more wine and then find someone to buy the drink, just a few bottles at a time, and, gradually, over days and even weeks, I would make enough for airfare back home. It would be like a little job for me, just take a bottle or two a day, sell that, and swipe a couple more.
For the first time in months, I was optimistic about my prospects. I could see how I would get out of here. I could give back that stupid suit; I wouldn’t have to show my dick in any more gay porn videos. I could go back to San Diego, enroll in community college, play soccer, and learn something. Maybe business, since I seemed suddenly to be developing an aptitude for that.
I thought about calling my mom to tell her the good news.
28.
When I got to Meidi-ya, I headed straight for the wine cooler and almost smushed my face against the newly installed, locked glass door to the wine room.
29.
Obaasan came through for me, giving me enough for my ticket to California. She felt guilty, probably, about the way they had all turned their backs on my mother when she had a baby with a gaijin. When she had me.
30.
It’s hot here, and dry, and I miss that Tokyo mugginess. I’m sleeping on a futon in my mother’s living room. In the afternoons, I practice with the Miracosta junior college soccer team. The coach told me that if I keep my grades above 2.0, next season I can join the team.
I look forward to practice, but sometimes, while I’m making my runs, I think about Tokyo. I think about Delphine, of all people, or I think about Tokyo and Delphine, all of it somehow mixed up in my mind and, instead of desperate and frightening, it all seems fun and enlivening, and I stop midplay and look around—like I’m stuck—until the coach yells at me, “Where’s your pace? Pace!”
Around me, the field is empty; the game has moved past me. I look like this:
_______________I_____________
So I run.
Frida & Diego, or Among Musicians Only
E, antes de ser uma história de espectros,
é uma história escrita por um deles.
Sergio Sant’ Anna, O Voo da Madrugada
I know we were notorious for our wicked cha-cha groove, but this is no funky cha-cha no more, I should warn everybody. Cha-chas, no matter how twisted, aren’t suited for this kind of darkness. This is a tango macabro. Carlos Gardel meets Poe in a dark and stinky alley. This is when the bolero gets drunk, the blues turn upside down, and the ballad collapses under the weight of its own pathos. This is a song too ghastly for words. That’s why I don’t have to worry about singing it (and secretly wish I didn’t have to write about it). This is a tune, at least in theory, ideally suited for Rosie in her Evita La Desaparecida mode, so she could blow her most noir trombone licks, although it would probably be Cuautemoc’s sax, as usual, leading, making sure “the lament is juicy, warm yet desolate, like Miles, man.”
Of all instruments, however, the bass with its grave, low voice is ideal to carry the burden of highlighting the crucial silences and breaks (let’s call them musical events) in this tango, which means that we are in Brendan’s hands. His chubby fingers have always moved fiercely up and down his contrabass with the overt intention to rule over the rest of us (his appetite for power only matched by his appetite for burritos). Fortunately for us, we had Ali, unafraid of dissonance or a power struggle, ever ready to harmonize anything that came his way with his light, sensible yet swingy piano style.
As for Jesús, our “guitar matador,” this would be his chance to go deeply flamenco and play “dark and tough como los cojones de un burro,” while Alberto would most likely leave the congas aside and opt for the cajón, “cause el cajón, mi hermano, is the king del silencio.”
So, yes, it is in principle an impossible tune, a forbidden dance (if there is such a thing), a censored-in-the-Mission-District story based on a series of improbable events that we have sworn to keep as secretive as we can — although writers are always selling somebody out, I tell myself, quoting Joan Didion, as if to remind myself that I might be a traitor but can’t really be blamed for that, or for being a hack, dangerous and ridiculous as a virtuous man in an imperfect and corrupt world. This is my chance to play the villain, I suppose, so all of us could play the victims of our own ethos, the blind leading the blind and guided only, at least in the beginning, by the unremarkable yet unforgiving rattle of a rusted Safeway cart rolling down the empty streets of a sleeping city lost in the fog.
For it all started with that metallic and repetitive sound in the middle of the night. It all started, actually, with Jesús feeling not quite responsible for his actions. He had been hit hard by the Spanish Blues, a seasonal affliction that rendered him cantankerously at odds with his surroundings: “Coño, tell me if there is anything more depressing than San Francisco after midnight. At least with the fog I don’t have to see that I live in a fucking cemetery de la hostia.”
He knew what he was talking about, since almost every night (and never before two in the morning), he had to face the streets of San Francisco as he walked home after closing Café La Michon.
“I mean, where are the fucking hipsters, the beats, the ex-hippies, the diehard punks de los cojones, the weirdos, the artists de la hostia, the so-called bohemians del coño de su madre, the dotcomers with their baby faces and all their fucking money? Where are the pimps, the whores, those classical creatures of the night? Where is the music and all the fucking hip and multi-culti San Francisco youth? Why aren’t they flooding the streets of this supposedly world-class city, me cago en Dios? Why isn’t everybody enjoying the night como gente civilizada, hostias? Where is life, por los cojones de mi abuela?”
Needless to say, once Jesús felt this “deeply flamenco,” there was no turning back. He had to go to Manolo’s studio on Virgin Alley and share a joint with him as he listened to Manolo’s unpolluted Madrilenian accent despite almost a lifetime in San Francisco. And since I can never go to bed before sunrise anyway, and that night I certainly didn’t feel like going home to write, I decided to walk with him. On foggy nights like this one, in any case, it wasn’t that unusual for us to keep each other company on our way home from La Michon. We lived two blocks away. So there we were, walking down Valencia Street practically blind and Jesús, next to me, going on and on about what “an insipid city de los cojones San Francisco is,” when we first heard that monotonous rattle hammering against the night’s slippery frog-like skin.
Then, upon crossing “the border” and remembering how much Alberto liked to call Mission Street “Tijuana” and Valencia Street “San Diego,” and not before Jesus added that “the distance between the two can’t be measured in blocks, coño,” we noticed the rattle got awfully close to us, close enough, in fact, to give us a first glance of the floating wake of her white dress as she pushed the cart away with a desperate sense of purpose, like a homeless bride late for her midnight wedding.
That was it, really. Or maybe I should say that was all it should have been. But then came a wet, cold, sticky urge to follow her as one pursues a ghost, an urban legend, a myth that had already left its fragile yet immortal mark on the most inhospitable alleys and hours of the Mission. It was about time, we told each other, as we ran into La Llorona, The Boogie Man’s Bride, Frida La Loca (condemned to push her cart full of brushes and paint cans in penance for our sins).
It could be argued, of course, that maybe all we wanted was to watch her paint something on a wall or a garage door; all we cared about was to witness the almost miraculous fact that madness had somehow not been able to take everything away from her, especially what she loved most; all we needed was to have a chance to mourn and come to terms with the death of the Amanda we knew and our death inside her impermeable world. And considering that in a city big on murals, Amanda Vargas was (is) one of its biggest stars (“The Joan Baez of the Bay Area muralists,” the local press called her), it could never be overstated what a monumental tragedy her nervous breakdown had been (“An artist in a constant state of revolution,” as she preferred to call herself). So given the fact that it was (and it is) simply impossible to walk the streets of the Mission without running into her murals, I guess it was only to be expected that after that night, we would began to take late-night walks “chasing Frida.”
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Tagged Frida & Diego, Mission District, San Francisco, Willy Lizarraga
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Our Brave Little Soldiers
Maria and I went to a party in an empty airplane hangar. The idea was to eat some cake and forget about the war. The place was decked in streamers and flags. There was punch and some folks came dressed as famous prisoners. I was having a pretty good time talking to Nelson Mandela, when the loudspeaker kicked on.
It seemed everywhere we went that year there was a loudspeaker. The enemy was obsessed with announcements. He made three or four of them a day—dim, lengthy ruminations that varied according to his mood. If the enemy was feeling cross, he shrieked belligerently, insulting us, calling us filthy whores, cock-sucking motherfuckers, and things like that. But if the enemy was pleased, he wooed us. He said we looked good, and called us his special children. Other times he seemed altogether unaware of us. He recited poetry and read passages from the books he loved best. Once, he sobbed openly for eleven minutes. The problem with being a prisoner is you just have to stand there and listen.
Now the party had stopped, and Nelson and Maria and I were hanging out by the punch bowl, waiting. The enemy tapped the microphone and cleared his throat. Hello, he crooned. Can everybody hear me?
He wanted to fight. He said he would take us all, but his plan was to start with the tiny babies and work his way up. Bring me your tiny babies! he growled. Then he laughed maniacally, and hung up. Even for the enemy, I thought he sounded extreme.
Maria found the tiny babies huddled together in the cap of an old coke bottle. She put her head to the floor and tried to coax them out. They’re afraid, she said. See. But I couldn’t see. I said it just looked like a dirty bottle cap. So Maria turned the cap over, and shook the tiny babies free. They fell into the palm of her hand. See, she said again. Then I saw. Her hand was cupped and it looked like she was holding a mound of finely ground pepper. I squinted and saw the little eyes, brown and gloomy, stuck, inside the little skulls.
We had to use tweezers to dress them in their tiny shields and tiny black boots. We didn’t have any swords, so we strapped tiny sewing needles to their backs. Then we set them down in front of the hydraulic door. There, we said. Now that’s done.
Maria took up a gold trumpet and led us in a fight song. Our tiny soldiers began marching, first in place, then toward the door. Even in their uniforms, they didn’t look very professional. Their helmets were too big and kept falling down in front of their eyes. They had a hard time keeping a straight line. One of them stumbled away from the group to throw up.
Eventually, they managed to get outside. We watched them make their way across the runway and into the field beyond it. And then we couldn’t see them anymore. Once, I thought I spotted them, but it turned out to be ash from Nelson’s cigarette. I was still safe. I should have been glad, but I wasn’t. I felt like crying.
We stayed there for a long time. We kept on cheering because Maria said they could still hear us. I thought about my voice sounding as big as God, and how now would be a good time to say something profound, but I couldn’t think of anything good. Maria hooted and Nelson clapped. Be brave, we cried. Good Luck!
