The Dead Are More Visible (2 page)

Once the controlled chaos of recess was at its peak, Yukon would often withdraw from the action and skip over to join me by the chain-link fence that separated the schoolyard from a cool, high, sound-swallowing
oasis of bamboo, an exhaling green jungle in the heart of Tōkyō. I would be smoking while watching the kids (this was the late eighties, and Japan), seeing how their games would permutate, blind man’s bluff into tag, tag into hide-and-seek, intrigued by the brisk negotiations that momentarily broke the flow of play—though the flow, in fact, never really broke, not until I stopped it and herded the class back inside. There was something atomic, or quantum, in this constant, shifting action and repatterning, as if the players were linked so closely to a primal source of energy and motion that they would naturally re-enact it whenever conditions allowed.

Yukon would take my free hand and look up at me in her stern manner, her brow crimped hard under the pageboy bangs, lips clumped together as if ready to scold. Her skin was coppery dark. She spoke with a slow, dignified formality—possibly a personal style, but more likely her way of making sure I got the Japanese.

Sensei, chotto ii kangae ga aru yo
 … “Sensei, I have a little idea. It might help you.”

“Is my Japanese improving, do you think?” I would always ask, flicking down my cigarette and swivelling my shoe on the butt.

“It certainly is, Sensei! However, you still talk like a woman.”

“I know. My verb endings. I know I have to be less polite.”

“And what did you have for your snack today, Sensei?”

A quarter pack of Camels
, I thought, but I told her, “A muffin and milk.” Often at this point I’d have to break off to holler at one or more of the boys. It might be Clement or The Phantom hunkered down on the head of a smaller child like Rocky—a portly, bespectacled five-year-old who wore a tie and looked like a miniature banker—or maybe it was Mickey Rourke, whose name none of the kids could begin to pronounce, trying to wedge Dorothea into the tiny window of the plastic playhouse. “
Damé yo!
” I would call and stride over, gathering George up in my arms to get her clear of the scrimmage, then bringing her back to the fence and holding her, hoping she would again make it through the afternoon without needing a change.

“Tell me, Sensei, do you have all these games at home in America?”

“Canada. Yes, we have versions of them.”

“Please demonstrate.” This she would say with commanding gravity, and often I would, though one time instead I told her the story of how, in Mexico some years before, I and the woman I was with and some other travellers, one of whom had children, started a game of blind man’s bluff in the plaza of Oaxaca City. Local children began to gather. We thought it was because of the novelty of seeing adults at play, and gringo adults at that, but no, it was curiosity about the game itself. When one of our number, fluent in Spanish, asked if
they wanted to join in, they said that they would like to but didn’t know the rules, had never seen the game before. Play, we urged, and they did join in, and before long they had taken over, as we adults and two children backed out one by one, winded and laughing. We left them there, playing in the lamplight in the darkening plaza under ancient Montezuma cypresses while their parents looked on, visibly tickled. And now (I told Yukon) what I wonder is this: has their game spread outward from that plaza, all through the state of Oaxaca, maybe across the mountains and into the next state—maybe throughout the country? All Latin America? Wouldn’t that be something?

Yukon, still holding my hand, gravely watched her surging schoolmates. She seemed to be giving my story consideration.

“Can you stay and keep teaching us, Sensei?”

George had dozed off, her head in the crook of my neck, a line of yellow drool snailing down my collar and onto the tie Eguchi insisted I wear.

Yukon added, “
Gaijin
sensei are forever leaving.”

“I think I will go home for Christmas,” I said. “I’ve been away from home for a few years. Eight years now. Imagine not seeing, say, your parents for that long.”

“I hardly ever see my father,” Yukon said. “I do see his bathrobe. It’s white!” Long pause. “If I might ask, will you see your father at Christmas?”

“Well, actually, no.” I released her small, cool hand and felt my shirt pocket for my cigarettes, then
remembered George on my shoulder. I took Yukon’s hand again and explained that my parents had passed away some time ago.

“I used to have two grandfathers,” she said after a moment, then smiled.

“I should be back after Christmas, though.”

“Perhaps blind man’s bluff came to Japan from
Mexico
,” she said with force.

I nodded and made a thoughtful face; I saw no reason to quash the fantasy. It wasn’t impossible, after all. And it was good to be reminded that if reprehensible things could spread, spilling outward from their origin to stain the world, better things might spread as well.

Upon meeting, the two conceived an inward affinity

Principal Eguchi had hired me in January. She had asked me to meet her at a place called Brain Noodle. I’d wondered if, over the phone, she’d been mispronouncing “Brine Noodle” or something else, but no. When I entered, five minutes early, she rose from a stool at the sushi bar, her hands brushing her skirt as if bits of food might be clinging there, though at her place there was nothing but a glass of beer and an ashtray with a few butts of exactly even length and a fuming cigarette.

“Welcome,” she said, splaying her hands, though not widely or ostentatiously, as if quietly indicating ownership of the restaurant as well as her school. “Please join me.”

I was feeling buoyant. I had just arrived from tropical Singapore—where for a year I’d been teaching at an academy expressly tooled to generate dutiful, dream-free logicians—and I was finding the relative cold of Tōkyō reviving right to the marrow. And the rush-hour uproar, the near-slapstick tumult of the streets and subway: welcome changes after the embalmed order of Singapore. Energy is optimism and I was ready to start over, one more time. A fresh start might sedate the fear that my years of travel were bringing me no closer to that place where the heart of life beat strongest, and were instead stealing from me the chance of belonging anywhere. I was about to turn thirty and it struck me as old. Old, at least, to have no connections or home, no woman, no child or even niece or nephew—and young to have no parents. Mine had died in a traffic accident several years before, while I was teaching at an American school in the tea-fragrant foothills of Uttar Pradesh, near Dehradun. Paradise, I’d believed. The news had not found me for several weeks. My older brother and our relatives had not forgiven me, as far as I knew, for being so irresponsibly unreachable.

She was tall for a Japanese woman, fit, smartly dressed. A charcoal skirt suit over a blindingly laundered white blouse. Hair back in a tight chignon. Black frame glasses of a style that would seem hip, youthful, a decade later, but at this point did not. In fact, they seemed chosen to make her look older. More formidably set apart. Her makeup was laid on
thickly enough that it was hard to guess her age. Asian adults look about ten years younger than Caucasians of the same age; she looked a little over thirty. Her expression during our meeting and through the months that followed was a repeating slide show of purposeful impatience, contained anxiety, and an openness, kindness, that came in what seemed accidental leaks and which she was always quick to deal with, like something that shamed her—a tampon, a bottle of pills or other sign of carnal frailty—flipping from a purse onto a floor.

Eguchi ordered beer for both of us without asking what I wanted. Hot sake was what I wanted but beer was fine. I was hungry and hoped we might order before discussing terms. She barged straight into them. Talking, she looked me over surreptitiously but steadily, as if interviewing not a potential English teacher but a sketch model or stunt double.

“I have made the schedule for you. Here are your hours.”

It should have worried me that she pronounced it “oars.” She handed me a neatly typed stack of sheets. Her fingernails were painted cerise, but clipped short.

I scanned the top sheet.

“So it’s true, what I’ve heard—we work Saturdays here.”

“So it must be,” she said, “for everyone.”

“Hmm.”

“You will find it the same at each school. And the
Saturday is a half day, with the smaller children. An easy day.”

“Oh … are small children easy?” I was trying to be droll, to disguise my disappointment, but it sounded almost aggressive.

“Here, yes. Especially if you are not the mother. You … don’t like children?”

“It depends on the child,” I said frankly—an obvious mistake. Since I never settled in any place for long, I’d developed the habit of saying exactly what I thought. I’d come to expect not to know people for long. With her gaze on me narrowing, I made a recovery, as I had to—I had just a few hundred dollars to my name. “But mostly, yes, I like them. I’d even say I admire them, if that makes any sense. And like I said on the phone, I have lots of experience.”

She made a close study of my mouth. “You have none?” she asked.

“Pardon …? No, as I said, I have lots.”

“Ah! And how many is lots, Sensei?”

“Well … it depends what we’re talking about. Flights, money, continents …”I reached for a cigarette.

“I mean
children
, of course.”

“Six or seven would be lots.”

“Six or seven! Very good, Sensei!”

I studied her, trying to get a read. She turned to the waiter, frowned, and signalled for more beer. The brisk demeanour seemed certain to rule out any advances by
Japanese men, though her air of professional competence and energy was, to a foreigner of my background, attractive.

“I myself have none of them,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, “no, I meant that I—”

“But, so it goes, I do have hundreds, at the school. I think they are happy there. But we must work hard.”

“
Hai, dozo!
” screamed the waiter, setting down two beers like live grenades and fleeing.

“Is it six, then,” she asked me, “or seven?”

I lit my cigarette and offered to light hers. “Well …”

“Ah!” she said. “By the way, as tomorrow is the weekend, you’ll be starting.”

Passive aggressive

Around three months into my stay, lesson 4 introduced scads of more advanced vocabulary, including nouns such as belief, disappointment, delight, stamina, entrails, and lethality. In the next lesson, “Expressing the Tense-Future in Japanese,” I was asked to translate a number of sentences climaxing with
Tomorrow at sunrise, they intend to shoot me
. Lesson 5, around four months into my stay, helped me learn to manage the oft-used passive voice in phrases that built on the work of preceding lessons:

Tomorrow it is quite possible that I shall be shot
.

Next week, perhaps, it is more likely that I shall be shot
.

By the end of next month, at the very latest, I am almost certain that I shall be shot
.

The lesson also contained some completely fresh material, like the sentence
Kodomo-tachi made mo korosare-mashita:
“Even the little children were slaughtered.”

I was now sure that the authors, consciously or not, were trying to discourage their students from pursuing further study. Perhaps they hoped we would leave the country altogether. At one of my Saturday meetings with Eguchi, I did mention the book and its oddness, but in a subtle way, having learned enough about Japan that I figured specificities would embarrass her. Anyway, I couldn’t remember the authors’ names, and Eguchi was distracted by business matters, so we let it go.

In the next lesson, toward the end of the rice-planting festival in June, casualties continued to mount and this flashcard narrative appeared:
When the bombs began to fall, there was nowhere for my children to hide. Many children were left without mothers or fathers. All through the night, we searched
.

Ghost in the looking glass

July in the schoolyard, sunlight searing through the breezy peaks of the bamboo to cast moving, ink-sketch shadows onto the asphalt. Yukon canters over and stops, dons a solemn face, takes my hand. A question is coming. In my years abroad I’ve developed into a
decent linguist and my Japanese is now good enough for sustained dialogue.

“Sensei, can
gaijin
have babies?”

“Yes, they can!” I respond with enthusiasm. “That’s why there are so many of us.”

“I don’t see many. Once I saw a black man. I was scared of him, but now I’m not.”

“My parents had me, for instance.”

“I never did see a
gaijin
with a baby. A real
gaijin
baby.”

George is in my arms again, drooling against my neck; generally she requires a nap at some point during our now two- to three-hour recess.

“Then you’ll have to go to Canada someday, to see. Maybe I’ll go back and you can visit me.”

For a moment she’s pensive.

“What are bears for, Sensei?”

“For chasing and eating Canadian children. That’s why there are so few of us.”

“I thought you said that there were so many?”

“Well—I survived.”

This Lewis Carroll logic seems acceptable to her.

“I wouldn’t be discouraged by a bear,” she says.

“Would anything scare you?”

“I suppose an extremely bad dream might. Do you have bad dreams, Sensei?”

“Yes. But I don’t remember them.”

Silence for a moment.

“Then how do you know you have them?”

“I see their tracks in the morning.”

“I dream more when Father is away,” she says, “but they’re not always bad. But he’s
always
away.”

“That’s why I don’t have a baby. Because if I did, I’d be away, in Japan.”

Through the looking glass again. She knots her brow. The frown releases in a wide, spirited grin that triggers an answering release somewhere in me. My students’ minds offer these brief, sweet truancies from my own.