“Haiku,” I said. “Is that the word?”
“That is the word. The poet Senryu.” He translated: “ ‘Bitter winds of winter But later, river willow, Open up your buds.’ ”
“That’s a pretty poem.”
“I agree. I will be in touch when I know more, Jonah.”
For whatever reason, he had stopped always calling me Jonah Kirk. It was just Jonah now. I didn’t know what that meant, but I liked it.
“Happy new year, Mr. Yoshioka.”
“Happy new year, Jonah.”
He bowed to me, and I bowed to him, and he opened the door, and I stepped into the fifth-floor hallway. As I headed toward the front stairs, he closed the door, and suddenly I thought that I would never see him again, not alive at least, that all the talk of murder had somehow made a target of him, not a target specifically for Drackman or Fiona Cassidy, but for fate.
Shaken, I halted and looked back toward his apartment. The fear was baseless, and yet it continued to grip me.
This was voodoo thinking. But all children are prone to voodoo thinking because they’re essentially powerless and because they lack so much knowledge of how the world works; therefore, they’re quick to imagine mysterious and sinister forces pulling strings behind the scenes, magic and monsters.
In my case, having had prophetic dreams and having had a piano conjured for me by Miss Pearl, I knew that the world was a many-layered mystery. Everyone told me voodoo was nonsense, and I didn’t really believe in pin-stuck effigies and effective curses, but I did believe a devil walked the world, ceaselessly harvesting.
I went through the door at the end of the hall, started down the stairs, and had to sit before I reached the first landing, because my legs felt rubbery. I trembled as if I weren’t in a warm building but instead were sitting in the falling snow, on a stone stoop as cold as ice. Five—maybe ten—minutes passed before the tremors stopped and my legs no longer felt weak.
I’m not sure I understood at the time why that episode occurred. Decades later I realize that, as a child, I was fond of some nuns and kids at Saint Scholastica and had much affection for Mrs. Lorenzo and Mrs. O’Toole, but I loved wholeheartedly only my mother, Grandma Anita, and Grandpa Teddy. And though I never thought about it this way in those days—it wasn’t a thing a child would ever contemplate—that was the largest universe of love I could at the time imagine. But the universe was expanding. I feared for Mr. Yoshioka because he was becoming a surrogate father to me. The better that I knew him, the more I loved him—and the more I feared losing him.
45
January of 1967 brought tragedy when three astronauts—Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee—died in a flash fire in their Apollo capsule during a simulated countdown at Cape Canaveral. The horror of their deaths set the tone for the year to come.
Later there would be the famous Summer of Love, thousands flocking to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco to form communes, bliss out at free concerts by acid-rock bands, and make love instead of war. They called it Hippie Haven and meant to start a new and better world, but by the end of summer, crime was soaring in Haight-Ashbury. Hospital ERs were overwhelmed with people hallucinating and psychotic from bad LSD trips, while addiction to hard drugs and deadly overdoses had become epidemic. The music darkened from Scott McKenzie singing about wearing flowers in your hair to the Doors’ celebration of psychosis in “The End,” a throbbing carnival organ evoking menace and madness. Buffalo Springfield proved prescient in “For What It’s Worth,” in which their music and voices stirred in the listener a deep uneasiness as they sang about violence in the streets: “There’s something happening here … There’s a man with a gun over there.”
That same summer, the worst race riots in the country’s history broke out in Detroit. Thirty-eight died and entire sections of that city were reduced to smoking ruins. Meanwhile, the war in Vietnam escalated.