A Tale for the Time Being (18 page)

“Hey, is that your Jungle Crow?” Callie asked.

Focusing her light, Ruth could see the gleam of black feathers and the glint of a jet-black eye. “Muriel,” she said, as though it were the answer to Callie’s question.

Callie laughed. “Of course,” she said. “But everyone’s talking about it. Our local nativists already have their knickers in a twist.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?” Callie said. “Invasive species. Exotics. Black slugs, Scotch broom, Himalayan blackberries, and now Jungle Crows?” She turned to Oliver.
“Speaking of exotics, how’s the Covenant War going?”

He made a face. The NeoEocene site, where he was planting his climate-change forest, had been clear-cut by a logging company and then placed under a covenant, which stipulated that any
subsequent reforestation be limited to species that were native to the extant geoclimatic zone. His trees were deemed to be exotic and thus in violation of the covenant. Neither Oliver nor his
botanist friend who owned the property had been aware of this.

“Not good,” he said. “The covenant holder wants me to stop planting, but I’m arguing that given the rapid onset of climate change, we need to radically redefine the term
native
and expand it to include formerly, and even prehistorically, native species.” He looked discouraged. “Semantics,” he said. “So stupid.”

As though in agreement, the Jungle Crow gave a harsh caw, and Callie laughed. “See?” she said. “He’s acclimating. Don’t be surprised if our island xenophobes storm
this place, armed with nets and kerosene torches.”

Ruth looked up in the tree at the outline of the crow in the darkness. “Did you hear that?” she called. “You better watch out.”

The crow flapped its wings and hopped along the branch, sending a shower of water raining down onto Callie’s head.

“Hey,” she said, wiping the wet from her face. “Cut it out. I’m on your side.” She turned to Ruth. “They’re very clever. Did you know—”

Ruth held up her hand. “I know,” she said, but Callie carried on.

“—that in Sliammon mythology they’re magical ancestors who can shape-shift and change into human form?”

“You don’t say,” Ruth said.

Callie grinned. “You should get Muriel to tell you about it sometime . . .”

6.

That night in bed Ruth read the day’s allotment out loud from the diary. Pesto lay on Oliver’s stomach, purring, while Oliver stared up at the ceiling and rubbed the
cat’s forehead. She read the part about Nao’s funeral and the video that went up on the Internet.

The story of the bullying made him angry. “I hate that,” he said. “How could the school allow that to happen? How could that teacher participate?”

Ruth didn’t have an answer. Pesto stopped purring and looked uneasily at Oliver.

“But it makes total sense,” Oliver said, glumly. “We live in a bully culture. Politicians, corporations, the banks, the military. All bullies and crooks. They steal, they
torture people, they make these insane rules and set the tone.”

She slipped her hand between the pillow and his head and kneaded the nape of his neck. The cat reached up a paw and laid it on his chin.

“Look at Guantánamo,” he said. “Look at Abu Ghraib. America’s bad, but Canada’s no better. People just going with the program, too scared to speak up. Look
at the Tar Sands. Just like Tepco. I fucking hate it.”

He turned over on his side, pitching the cat onto the mattress. The cat jumped off the bed and left.

After Oliver fell asleep, Ruth got up and went to the window. Somewhere out there, the crow perched in the boughs. Their crepuscular crow. She couldn’t see it, but she liked the thought of
the black crow hidden in the shadows. She wondered if it had managed to make friends with the ravens yet. She crawled back into bed and drifted off.

That night, she had the second of her nun dreams. It was the same temple. The same darkened room with the torn paper screen, the same old nun, dressed in long black robes,
seated at the desk on the floor. Outside, the same moonlight shimmered softly in the garden, only now in the distance, beyond the garden gate, Ruth could dimly make out what looked like the outline
of a cemetery, its jaggedy silhouette of stupas and stones, stark against the pale night sky.

Inside the room, the harsh, cold light from the computer illuminated the old nun’s face, making her look haggard and sickly. She looked up from the screen. She was wearing the black
glasses that were similar to the ones Ruth wore. She took them off and rubbed her tired eyes, and then she spotted Ruth. Unfurling the wide black wing of her sleeve, she beckoned, calling her
closer, and then Ruth was beside her. The nun held out her glasses, and Ruth, realizing that she’d left hers on the bedside table, took them. She knew she had to put them on. She blinked. The
lenses were thick and murky. Her eyes would need a moment to adjust.

No, this wouldn’t do. The nun’s lenses were too thick and strong, smearing and dismantling the whole world as she knew it. She started to panic. She tried to pull the glasses from
her face, but they were stuck there, and as she struggled, the smear of the world began to absorb her, swirling and howling like a whirlwind and casting her back into a place or condition that was
unformed, that she couldn’t find words for. How to describe it? Not a place, but a feeling, of nonbeing, sudden, dark, and prehuman, which filled her with such an inchoate horror that she
cried out and brought her hands to her face, only to find that she no longer had one. There was nothing there. No hands, no face, no eyes, no glasses, no Ruth at all. Nothing but a vast and empty
ruthlessness.

She screamed but no sound emerged. She strained into the vastness, pressing into a direction that felt like
forward
or even
through
, but without a face there was no forward, or
backward, either. No up, no down. No past, no future. There was just this—this eternal sense of merging and dissolving into something unnameable that went on and on in all directions,
forever.

And then she felt something, a feather-light touch, and she heard something that sounded like a chuckle and a snap, and in an instant, her dark terror vanished and was replaced by a sense of
utter calm and well-being. Not that she had a body to feel, or eyes to see, or ears to hear, but somehow she experienced all these sensations, nevertheless. It was like being cradled in the arms of
time itself, and she stayed suspended in this blissful state for an eternity or two. When she awoke to an insipid beam of winter sunlight filtering in through the bamboo outside her window, she
felt oddly at peace and well rested.

1.

Have you ever heard of metal-binding?
⁷²
It’s something that everyone in Japan knows about, but nobody ever heard of in
Sunnyvale. I know because I asked Kayla, so maybe Americans don’t have it. I never had it either until we moved to Tokyo.

Metal-binding is what happens when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t move, like some gigantically fat evil spirit is sitting on your chest. It’s really scary. After
the Chuo Rapid Express Incident, I used to wake up thinking it was Dad on my chest, and if he was sitting there it meant that he was a ghost and therefore he was dead, but then I would hear him
snoring across the room and realize it was metal-binding. You open your eyes and stare into the darkness. Sometimes you can hear voices that sound like angry demons, but you can’t speak or
even make a tiny noise. Sometimes while you’re lying there your body feels like it’s floating away.

Before my funeral, I was getting metal-bound a lot, but it stopped after my funeral, probably because I became a ghost myself. I ate and slept, I wrote email to Kayla sometimes, but inside I
knew I was dead, even if my parents didn’t notice.

Kayla had figured it out, though. We’d pretty much stopped trying to live-chat because of the time difference. Tokyo is sixteen hours ahead, which means that it’s daytime in
Sunnyvale when it’s nighttime here, and since I was living in a two-room apartment the size of Kayla’s walk-in closet, it wasn’t like I could get up in the middle of the night and
turn on the computer and start chatting, so mostly me and Kayla were using email, which was a drag. I hate email. It’s so slow. On email it’s never now. It’s always then, which is
why it’s so easy to get lazy and let your inbox fill up. Not that mine did anymore, but it used to. Right after we left Sunnyvale, everyone was emailing me like crazy and asking me all about
Japan, but it took Dad a couple of weeks to get an Internet connection set up, and by then all my friends were involved with their summer vacations, and then school started, and they all kind of
dropped me.

I tried to have a blog for a while. My eighth-grade teacher in Sunnyvale, Mr. Ames, told me to start one so that I could write about my impressions and observations and all the interesting stuff
that was going to happen to me in Japan. My dad helped me set it up before we moved, and I named it
The Future Is Nao!
because I thought that my future in Japan was going to be one big
American-style adventure. How dumb was that?

Actually, it wasn’t completely dumb. At the time I was feeling hopeful, which now seems kind of sad and brave. It wasn’t my fault that I didn’t understand what was happening.
My parents weren’t exactly being up front with me about our reasons for leaving California. They were saving face and pretending everything was fine, and I didn’t actually know we were
broke and unemployed until we got here. When I saw the crappiness of our Tokyo apartment, it started to sink in, and I realized that I wasn’t going to have any big adventures, and that
basically there was nothing I could post on the blog that didn’t make me feel like a total loser. My parents were pathetic, my school life was horrible, the future sucked. What could I write
about?

“Me and my mom enjoy soaking in the hot tub at the public bath.”

“Today at school I had a hilarious time playing kakurembo with my new friends. Kakurembo is like hide-and-seek, and I got to be It!”

“My dad applied for a new job as a track inspector on the Chuo Rapid Express Line.”

I kept it up for a while, making these cheerful, chirpy postings to
The Future Is Nao!
but I felt like a total fraud. And then one day, a couple of months after I got back, I happened
to check my statistics, and I realized that the whole time since I started my blog, only twelve people had ever visited it, for about a minute each, and I hadn’t had a single hit in weeks, so
that’s when I stopped. There’s nothing sadder than cyberspace when you’re floating around out there, all alone, talking to yourself.

Anyway, it didn’t take Kayla long to figure out that maybe I was becoming a pathetic loser and it wasn’t cool to be my friend anymore. I swear, even on the Internet people can give
off a virtual smell that other people pick up on, although I don’t see how that’s possible. It’s not like a real smell, with molecules and pheromone receptors and so on, but
it’s just as obvious as the stink of fear in your armpits or the vibe you give off when you’re poor and don’t have any confidence or nice stuff. Maybe it’s something in the
way your pixels start behaving, but I was definitely starting to have it, and Kayla was sniffing it out from the opposite side of the ocean.

Kayla is totally the opposite of me. She is superconfident and has lots of money and isn’t afraid of anything. Even though we haven’t corresponded for a while, and I don’t even
know what high school she’s at, I’m 100 percent sure she is the most popular girl there, because she is the type who will always be the most popular girl wherever she is. Being number
two isn’t even a possibility for Kayla, and that was the case even in second grade, when she picked me out and allowed me to sit next to her at lunch. Now that I think about it, it was a
miracle she was ever my friend.

Things started to go seriously wrong after I emailed her a picture of me in my new school uniform, and she texted me back this superironic email, which went something like, “OMG i luv yr
uni4m! its soo manga! u gotta snd me 1 so i cn go as a jap skoolgrl 4 haloween!”

To her, my new life was just cosplay,
⁷³
but to me it was totally real. We had nothing in common anymore. We couldn’t talk about fashion, or
the kids at school, or who was a loser, or what teachers we liked or hated. Our chats and emails went nowhere, and then she started taking longer and longer to write me back, and after a while she
just kind of disappeared. When I tried to find her online and she was always off even when I knew she had to be on, I realized she had blocked me from her buddy list.

I still wrote her emails sometimes, but she almost never answered. After my funeral, I tried to share my feelings honestly about how much I hated my school and being in Japan, and how much I
missed Sunnyvale, but I still couldn’t tell her about the ijime or my dad or our whole situation, so to be perfectly fair, she didn’t have a whole lot to go on. I can’t blame her
for not understanding. When she finally wrote me back, it was this tight, bright, cheerful little email that made it clear that she really wasn’t interested in me if I was going to be a
whiner.

After that, I forwarded her the “Tragic and Untimely Death of Transfer Student Yasutani” link to my funeral. Mostly it was to shock her, but like I said, I was kind of proud of my
stats too. I waited and waited for an email to show up from her, but it never did. Maybe this is what it’s like when you die. Your inbox stays empty. At first, you just think nobody’s
answering, so you check your
SENT
box to make sure your outgoing mail is okay, and then you check your ISP to make sure your account is still active, and eventually you have
to conclude that you’re dead.

So, you can see why I was feeling like a ghost. Ghosts in Japan are pretty intense. They’re not the kind you get in America that go around dressed in sheets. In Japan, they wear white
kimonos, and they have long black hair hanging in their faces, and also they have no feet. Usually they’re women who are righteously pissed off because someone has done something horrible to
them. Sometimes, if a person has been treated really badly, she can even become an ikisudama,
⁷⁴
and her soul leaves her sleeping body and wanders
around the city at night doing tatari
⁷⁵
and wreaking vengeance on all her shitty classmates who have tortured her by sitting on their chests. That was
my goal for the summer vacation. To become a living ghost.