In my pajamas, in bed, I couldn’t concentrate to read. I had a little transistor radio with an earphone, and I tried to dial in music that might elevate my mood. Couldn’t find it. I took the La Florentine box out of my nightstand and looked at the Xerox of the page from the book about Manzanar, the pictures of Mr. Yoshioka’s mother and sister. That made me think about the war and the riots and everybody killing everybody. The only thing that settled my mind was the haiku on the little sympathy card that had been attached to the floral arrangement at Grandma’s funeral. I read it over and over again: Dawn breaks And blossoms open Gates of paradise.
The events of the day weighed me down. I slept. Toward morning, I dreamed. In the dream, my father was strangling Fiona, and for some reason I wanted to stop him, although she frightened me more than he did. Then my perspective changed, and I saw that she wasn’t Fiona, that she was instead my mother, that the necktie bit cruelly into her throat. Her eyes were clouded. She was half dead. I tried to scream for help, but I literally had no tongue, and I tried to hit him, to claw at his face, but I had no hands. My arms ended at the wrists, in bracelets of coagulated and crusted blood.
I woke up, thrust up, threw back the sheet, sat on the edge of the bed in the lightless room, gasping. No residue of sleep clouded my mind. I was clearheaded, alarmed, alert. What I feared was not the nightmare, but that I might hear the voice of Miss Pearl and see her silhouette, a moving darkness in the dark, which would mean that the horror seen in sleep must be prophetic.
How greatly relieved I was when she wasn’t there, but just then I glimpsed a paleness at the screened window, where the lower sash was raised to cool the room. I thought it must be the face of someone who had been watching me sleep, as Fiona Cassidy had once watched me and even photographed me slumbering unaware. If the long-awaited but unknown crisis drew nearer by the day, as Mr. Yoshioka and I both believed that it did, cowardice—even mere hesitation—might be the death of me, and so I rose and rushed to the window to confront who might be spying on me. I found no one, just a mosquito jittering against the metal mesh, such a frail visitor that it made no sound that I could hear above the pounding of my heart. If some watcher had been there, face ghostly in the waning night, she or he had fled, though perhaps it had been only a figment of my imagination.
59
Thursday morning, after feeding and walking Toshiro Mifune, Mrs. Setsuko Nozawa drove well below the speed limit on her way through Charleston, Illinois, to Eastern Illinois University. The dog was in the mood to ride with his head out the window. To drive above twenty-five miles per hour would put his eyes at risk if the wind carried in it sharp flecks of something.
Although she traveled by a roundabout route, staying mostly to quiet residential streets on which the speed limits were low, a few impatient drivers blew their horns at her. She drove with her head high, unfazed by their discontent, and she would not deign to reply in kind when crude words or gestures were flung her way. Each time a horn blew, she said, “Namu Amida!” which meant “Buddha have mercy.” Those might have been words of forgiveness, directed toward the rude motorists, if she had not pronounced them with such an edge. The dog agreed with her, sensitive creature that he was, and matched every “Namu Amida” with a growl.
In the Alumni Affairs Office of the university, an attractive redhead with a constellation of freckles and an imposing bosom was most charming and helpful. Mrs. Nozawa repeated her invented story about a student who years earlier had done a great kindness for her and her husband, and the flame-haired woman explained that they were not at liberty to give out alumni addresses. Mrs. Nozawa said that she understood and appreciated their discretion, but that she only wanted to know if the Alumni Affairs Office would forward a letter from her to the kind young man if he had in fact graduated from the university. That was, of course, a courtesy that the university would be pleased to extend to her. Mrs. Nozawa was most gratified by the cordial tone of the exchange.
She doubted that Lucas Drackman had attended the university under the name Douglas T. Atherton. More likely, he had forged the Social Security card and Student Activities card with which he had qualified to rent the mailbox from Betty Norbert. Therefore, she gave the redhead the Drackman name and a likely year of graduation—1963. In minutes it was confirmed that Lucas Drackman was indeed a graduate, and Mrs. Nozawa promised that, in a few days, she would return with her letter in a stamped and sealed envelope, which she had no intention of doing.
Mr. Tamazaki of the Daily News had hoped only that she would find that Drackman had been living in the area at the time Mrs. Renata Kolshak had disappeared from a ship in the Caribbean, thus establishing that he could have rented, under a false name, the mailbox to which a ticket to the same cruise had been sent to one Douglas T. Atherton. Mission accomplished.
A short while later, in her office in the dry-cleaning shop from which she oversaw the Nozawa commercial empire, she called in her report to Mr. Tamazaki, who was most grateful for her efforts. She assumed that was the end of the matter, but mere hours later, she would learn otherwise.
60