—
The telephone rang at shortly after ten. The call was from Masahiko.
“I know it’s sudden,” he said, “but I’m on my way to Izu to see my father. Would you like to come along? You mentioned the other day that you’d like to meet him.”
Someone will phone my friends tomorrow morning and invite you somewhere. You must not decline.
“That’s great. I’d love to go.”
“I just got on the Tokyo-Nagoya Expressway. I’m at the Kohoku parking area now. I think it’ll take me about an hour to reach you. I’ll pick you up and we can drive to Izu Kogen.”
“Did something happen to your father?”
“Yeah, the nursing home called. Seems he’s taken a turn for the worse. So I’m going to check on him. I’m more or less free today anyway.”
“Are you sure it’s all right if I go along? Aren’t times like this for family only?”
“Don’t worry. It’s perfectly okay. No other relatives will be there, so the more the merrier.” He hung up.
I put down the phone and scanned the room. Was the Commendatore around? But he was nowhere to be seen. Prophecy dispensed, he had disappeared. Probably to a realm where the dictates of time, space, and probability did not apply. Nevertheless, there had been a morning phone call, and I had been invited somewhere. So far, at least, that prophecy had been accurate. It bothered me to leave with Mariye still unaccounted for, but I couldn’t do much about that. The Commendatore had instructed me, “No matter the circumstances, my friends must not decline that invitation.” I could leave Shoko in Menshiki’s hands. After all, she was his responsibility, to some extent.
I sat back in the easy chair in the living room and resumed the story of the invincible Armada as I waited for Masahiko. Almost all the Spanish soldiers and seamen who had managed to escape their shipwrecked vessels and crawl onto the shores of Ireland more dead than alive were murdered by those who lived along the coast. The poverty-stricken locals had slaughtered them for their possessions. It had been the Spaniards’ hope that, as fellow Catholics, the Irish might show them mercy, but they were out of luck. Religious solidarity was no match for the fear of starvation. Sadly, the Spanish ship carrying the war chest holding the gold and silver intended to buy off England’s powerful nobility sank as well. No one knew where all that wealth had gone.
It was shortly before eleven in the morning when Masahiko’s old black Volvo pulled up in front of my house. I was still thinking about all those gold coins lying at the bottom of the sea as I threw on my leather jacket and headed out the door.
* * *
—
The route Masahiko chose took us from the Hakone Turnpike to the Izu Skyline highway and then down from the Amagi highlands to Izu. He explained that this way would be faster—that the weekend meant the coastal roads would be jammed—but nevertheless our route was crowded with people out on excursions. The leaf-viewing season had not yet ended, and many of those on the road were weekenders unfamiliar with mountain driving, so the trip took a lot longer than expected.
“Is your father really in bad shape?” I asked.
“He’s not long for this world, that’s for sure,” Masahiko said lightly. “A matter of days, to be more precise. Age has whittled him down to almost nothing. He has trouble eating, and pneumonia is a constant threat. But the patient’s orders are that under no circumstances are IV lines and feeding tubes to be used. In other words, he demands that he be allowed to go quietly once he can no longer eat. He arranged this with his lawyer when he was still mentally competent, signed the forms and everything. So there will be no interventions. That means he could go at any time.”
“So I guess you have to be prepared for the worst.”
“That’s about right.”
“It must be rough.”
“Hey, it’s a big deal when someone dies. I can hardly complain.”
The old Volvo was equipped with a tape deck, and the glove compartment was stuffed with cassettes. Masahiko stuck his hand in, grabbed one, and inserted it without checking to see what it was. It turned out to be a collection of hits from the 1980s. Duran Duran, Huey Lewis, and so on. When ABC’s “The Look of Love” came on, I turned to him.
“Sure feels like time has stopped in this car,” I said.
“I don’t like CDs. They’re too shiny—they’d scare crows away if I hung them outside my house, but they’re hardly something to listen to music on. The sound is tinny and the mixing is unnatural. Having no A and B sides is a drag too. That’s why I still drive this car—so I can listen to my cassettes. Newer models don’t have tape decks, right? Everyone thinks I’m nuts. But I’m stuck. I have a huge collection of songs I recorded off the radio and I don’t want them to go to waste.”
“Man, I never thought I’d hear ABC’s ‘Look of Love’ again in this lifetime.”
“Don’t you think it’s amazing?” Masahiko said, casting me a quizzical glance.
We went on talking about the music of the eighties, songs we’d heard on the radio, as we tooled through the mountains of Hakone. The blue slopes of Mt. Fuji loomed around each curve.
“You and your dad are quite a pair,” I said. “The father listens only to records, and the son is stuck on cassettes.”
“You should talk. You’re just as behind the times. Worse than us, maybe. I mean, you don’t even have a cell phone. And you hardly ever go online, right? I’ve always got my cell phone with me, and anything I need to know, I Google. I design stuff on my Mac at work. Socially, I’m light-years ahead of you.”
Bertie Higgins’s rendition of “Key Largo” came on. An interesting selection indeed for a guy claiming to be socially evolved.
“Are you seeing anyone these days?” I asked, changing the subject.
“You mean, like a woman?”
“Yeah.”
Masahiko gave a small shrug. “I can’t say it’s going all that well. As usual. And things have gotten even rockier since I made this weird breakthrough.”
“What kind of breakthrough?”
“That the right and left sides of a woman’s face don’t match up. Did you know that?”
“People aren’t perfectly symmetrical,” I said. “Whether it’s breasts or balls, the size and shape of the two sides are always going to be different. Every artist knows that much. That lack of symmetry is one of the things that makes the human form so interesting.”
Masahiko shook his head several times without taking his eyes off the road. “Of course I know that. But what I’m saying is a little different. I’m talking about personality, not form.”
I waited for him to go on.
“About two months ago, I took a photo of this woman I was seeing with a digital camera. A close-up of her face from the front. I put it on the big office computer. Then I managed to divide the screen down the middle and look at the two halves of her face separately. Removing the right half to look at the left, and vice versa…You get the idea, right?”
“Yeah, I get it.”
“That’s when I realized that her left side and her right side looked like two separate people. Like Two-Face, the bad guy in Batman.”
“I missed that one.”
“You should watch it sometime. It’s pretty good. Anyway, it freaked me out a bit. I should have left things alone at that point, but I went ahead and tried reversing each side to make a composite face. That way, I could double the right side to create a complete face, and do the same with the left side. Computers make that sort of stuff easy. What I was left with was images of what could only be seen as two women with two totally distinct personalities. It shocked me. I mean, there were actually two women inside every woman I met. Have you ever looked at women that way?”