The Journey Prize Stories 21 Read online

  By the time we left the school building, everyone else – all our classmates, the other teachers, even Suzuki sensei – had gone. We walked down the deserted hallway to the back exit and together pushed the heavy door open. When it banged shut behind us, it made a hollow metal clang.

  Although it was almost dinnertime, the sun was still shining and felt warm on the back of my head. We walked as far as the grocery store at the second intersection and then paused. Neither of us had said a word, and I was afraid to look at her.

  My heart was pounding. Our homes were in opposite directions and we had reached the place where we had to part. I didn’t want to tilt my head back to look up at her – somehow that felt rude – so I ended up staring at her neck. The spot where I had put my lips was buried somewhere under the strap of her backpack.

  “We did our best,” I said.

  “We did our best,” Sayuri echoed.

  “We’ll play better next time.”

  “Yes,” Sayuri said, so softly I could hardly hear her. “Next time.”

  I turned around once when I was part-way home, half hoping I might find Sayuri following me. But the road was empty, a long dusty stretch of asphalt, lined on either side by trees. In the distance, a shimmering wave of heat rose like the fluttering wings of dragonflies. I pictured Sayuri at the other end of the road, hidden in a low dip just out of sight. Somewhere beyond.

  That was the last time I saw her.

  “I don’t get it. Why didn’t they just hire their own language teachers? It doesn’t make any sense.” Masayuki shook his head repeatedly in front of the television. “I can understand spying, but this is too bizarre for words.”

  According to the news, the abductees had been forced to work as Japanese language teachers for the North Korean Intelligence Service. I tried to imagine Sayuri as she stood in front of a class full of dark-suited men and pointed at words on a blackboard with a long wooden stick. It was hard to believe that anyone would want a fifteen-year-old to teach them.

  A photograph of Sayuri, older, sadder, very tired looking, began appearing in the weekly tabloids. It didn’t bear much resemblance to her, no matter how much Sayuri might have aged. There was nothing of the girl I remembered from high school, nothing of the Sayuri I’d known, or thought I’d known. The woman was standing next to a very tall, thin man, supposedly her husband, and flanking them on either side were two small girls who looked like they were carved of wood. The family stood in front of a dingy pink studio curtain. Above their heads hung a large framed portrait of Kim Jong-il.

  “Now they’re saying that everyone could be dead, you know,” Masayuki said. “If they find any graves, the government is going to ask for DNA testing or some such thing, but I can’t imagine that will ever happen. Nobody knows what goes on over there.”

  I tried to picture Sayuri’s grave, but it was pointless. I knew it would be empty, a hollow wooden box filled with stale cold air.

  I got up and went into the kitchen. Behind me I could hear Masayuki rapidly switching from one channel to another, the background voices breaking up into flecks of sound.

  I pushed open the big window over the sink and leaned out as far as I could. Everywhere I looked there were apartment buildings, row upon row like a vast army of giant grey dominos marching toward me. The breeze was hot and dusty. Not a hint of rain, and the sea was far away.

  JESUS HARDWELL

  EASY LIVING

  So long as you didn’t try to burn it down, or annoy your fellows with a knife or something, they left you alone at the Beacon. It was cheap, the bar made deliveries, and the shower worked. The Cuban guy at the desk would close his mind like a bag over his face – you could watch it happen – and turn to stone. He was called Jonah because he had worked on a ship, before he jumped. He was ill in some way and given to rages, but was mostly all right, and he’d let you in for free on occasion if you’d share, so generally I did when I’d had enough. It was a home of sorts at the Beacon, and a fine place to get lost.

  We had been there three or four days, me and the wife of an acquaintance, shoving everything we had inside us, including, when we could manage it, each other. Those were good days, full of high vacant fervour and disregard. There was a sweet raw taste to time, and the room itself, according to our mood, became a vast cathedral, or a small velvet box. I remember the sheets had stars, hundreds of blue stars shattered all over. And I remember her breasts, how they buoyed, and the wet spikes of her nipples floured with coke. I jammed them up my nose and we floated off immense, above ourselves, empty and marvellous.

  That couldn’t last, of course. We wore out. The drugs evaporated. Our throats dried. Our skin grew tight and tender, and what air remained was from the desert, and had quills. We were dogs really, dragging around what was left of us like we’d been run over and didn’t have the sense to stop yet. The room was just a room, and she had a husband to get back to.

  Then one of us by miracle found some hash we’d trampled. It was heavy hash, import deluxe from Morocco. We did not have a pipe, so we knived it. The burn through our heads was hot and cool together, with a delicate edge of ambush. Straight away we brightened, and pretty soon we were feeling almost repaired. She began to look all right again, clean and filthy at once, which I like.

  So I grew my arm across the room to where she was, stark there on the bed with a leg up, watching my hand enlarge and sniff about to find her. I took her hair, the spattery twists of her hair flashing in rivulets, and I twined it in my fist and wound, reeling her in until our foreheads banged. Then I said into her eyes that the room was on fire and we had twenty minutes to live. It wasn’t much to give, but it struck her well somewhere and she clasped me down.

  As we rocked I saw her face loosen and change. I watched it slide, dissolve, and then re-form into three. It was her in the middle, and the two others beside her rippling across, back and forth. They were emerging and blending so fast I couldn’t make out if I knew them. It didn’t matter. Their mouths were wide and lovely, they looked ready to sing, and everyone was smiling. We rowed and lolled. I swam on their tongues. And when I beckoned them they came and came and met me where I was, holding them there and waiting. When it was time the stars squeezed and blew apart. The force of it spasmed from my spine and bent me. It moaned me open and I gasped my love into their mouths, my full helpless love for all of us happy there together. Then the bed swallowed and we drowned.

  We slept some, we must have. When I woke it was me alone that surfaced. She was one again, a fragile wreck smashed out still and far beyond. I checked to see if she was breathing. She was, so it seemed all right to leave her. I got my clothes and shook them on. In her purse I found a compact and broke the mirror off. I laid it between her legs and combed my hair. When I left she was just starting to stir. In my mind I blew her a kiss, and added one for Jonah. Then I was gone and out into the fresh shock of the air, and walking along on the lighted carcass of the city at night.

  I was headed for a bar I knew in a hotel by the harbour. There was fog in the streets, and spangles of snow had shaken loose and were swirling around. I hurried because I knew we could sit, Chummy and I, sit there and drink, and be warm and easy, and listen to the horns muscle in.

  He was there, of course, at a table where the bar ended. He was always there when I knew him, except when he was working, which he wasn’t much then. He wasn’t too drunk and waved me over. Before I asked he said, “Pretty fine. Pretty fine and the same, my man. Yourself?” I said I was fine too, the finest, and I sat, and we ordered Coronas and lime.

  The arm he’d waved with stayed suspended. It was a while before it fell and I looked for the tattoo on the back of his wrist that made him angry then and that he might get rid of. It was true the trumpet was more a trombone and I thought the cigar in the end too much myself, but the mantis was well done. It looked stubborn and wise, and when he flexed it had a jaunt to it. He had never shot through the mantis and I was glad it wasn’t gone.

  The beer came a
nd went and came again. Then Chummy asked what was I going to do, if I was going to do anything, about the wife. I said that was probably over.

  “That’s the way,” he said. He’d had wives himself, and been married twice. “It’s always done and finished, and then it isn’t.”

  “Sure. But it’s finished sometimes. You can see the skid marks.” I liked talking left-handed like that, and trying to guess where he was going.

  “Yeah, it stops. But you can’t know when it does. So what you feel when you think it does is just yourself stringing yourself along and hoping. That’s the way it is, my man, all the freaking way until you’re dead. That’s just the true smiling bitch of it.”

  This was a little beyond where I wanted to be at that time, so I had to agree, and we let it drop. Before it dropped, though, he said, “Sometimes I think you trust too much.”

  “So you do? And what does that mean?”

  “I really do, and that’s what it means.”

  “Well all right,” I said. “I’ll put a watch on that, and you can show me the coin for the next round.”

  “Fair enough. I’m with you there, my man.” Then he added, “You realize I’m just slinging it, right?”

  “Sure. Everything’s good.” And it was, even though I knew he meant it then. I held up two fingers, a touch apart. “We’re like this.”

  “I see,” he said. “Let it be tight like that then.”

  Chummy left for a bit to make a call for an arrangement. My mind wandered and I let it stretch. I thought of the wife – her name was Rebecca; Savannah, professionally – and how much she might tell her husband. He was a bit of a dealer and a bit of a thief – nothing serious, just what was easy – and a decent guy despite. Then I wondered why it was, although you couldn’t be sure what even the decent were capable of, why it was really that I didn’t care at all what she told. I didn’t get far with that, so I forgot it and looked around the bar.

  It wasn’t crowded. The locals were drunks mostly – hawk-faced and devastated, hoarding their tables as though they were precious aeries of refuge – and the others were drop-ins, tourists from the cruise ships. I thought I heard some German but it was probably just Texans. They were blond and loud and what I could see of their faces bored me, so I waited for Chummy and twirled a bottle on the table. When it stopped it pointed at his chair, at the coat he’d draped over it. It was a huge coat, raccoon, and still in fair condition. For a time he kept a gun in the pocket over his heart. It wasn’t for use, not directly. But it could solve a situation sometimes. Relax it, I mean, before it happened. But then, the guy who told me that hanged himself in a cell, so there you go. The gun had been pawned after a while, but Chummy kept the coat all the time I knew him. One summer, the whole summer, he wore it through the heat. He said he enjoyed it – the animal feel and breathing of the heat – of course, he was also timing everyone’s conversations with a stopwatch then. I never saw him worse, and he couldn’t play, but when he could he was something rare.

  When he was more or less fit for a time and playing regularly in a not-at-all bad quartet, I went to hear him in a club downtown. It was well after the hour and the rest of them were on the stand already. They tuned and waited, traded a few runs and waited some more, pretending without trying to be convincing that it was part of the show. But Chummy wouldn’t come. He just stood at the back, in the raccoon coat against the wall as though nailed there, cradling his trumpet like a damaged child. He stared straight ahead, but what he saw wasn’t anything there in the solid sense. In fact you’d have sworn he was completely blind. There was a clear chance of an incident, I suppose, but it didn’t happen, and after a while a Korean girl I wasn’t familiar with came and got him. She led him shuffling, testing each step like he was feeling for where the cliff was, up through the tables, through the smoke and the elbows and the noise. It was a long way, and he was slow, but he made it to the chair they had for him and gentled himself in. I didn’t think he’d be able to haul back from wherever he was, but when they started he was right there, resurrected and sure.

  The first notes were serene, with a lot of space between them. Then he played some half ones fast and stricken. He went on alternating like that, stacking them apart as though he were building two separate things. Toward the end he mixed them and soldered, and they held and made a kind of arch. For a moment we all passed naked through it into some place we did not belong, but was ours anyway until it ended. That’s what I liked about music, and about Chummy too. Everything was as possible as nothing, and you weren’t obliged to choose or be responsible.

  So when Chummy came back at last and gave me the good word on the arrangement, we tossed around whether the foghorns should be thought horns, or a whole section of basses that the wind bowed. We decided on both and drank some more and considered the waitress. She was young and we admired her nylons, the soft brush when she walked, and her wrists’ efficiency. She had china bones. Then we switched to scotch and talked of Clifford Brown and how rotten it was what happened. Chummy had a thing about Clifford. He used to say quite often that it was a source of wonderment that he, being what he was, had already lived nearly twice as long as someone like that, someone with so much jump and knowing in his horn, and so clean in his habits. That’s the way, we said. Everything’s yours, right in your hands the whole deal, then it’s yanked and nothing.

  And we talked of what impossible hurricane of luck might blow us clear to Guatemala or Belize, somewhere warm at least, and how we would live there rich for a long time like real human beings if we could, and enjoy the rain even, and be gracious toward everyone. Then we drank some more, and the horns welled and we were quiet.

  It was probably about then I noticed the old people. They were some kind of couple and they were dancing, I guess. He was still tall and she never was, so he had to stoop to keep her his and gathered. They were both thin as pipes. The music was junk but they liked it enough. They picked up the pace, they swanked and juddered, and she held on her best.

  Chummy by this time was blinking. He made a fist on the table, placed his head on it, and nodded out. I let him go and watched the old people again.

  Jesus, they were ancient, and the strobes were merciless, badging them unearthly with reds and purples, and a very mean slash of yellow. But they were spry too, like they’d just been dug up and were hungry and they were meat to each other. They had the floor to themselves but were only using a foot of it. Then they kissed and kept at it. They were glued and feeding, working their jaws like pumps.

  It was gruesome, I suppose, and it might have been disgusting. What made it amazing was, when they broke away for breath, there was a long loop of spit that drew out between them. It hung swaying from their chins and stayed with them as they danced, as they shut their eyes and danced, oblivious and serene inside their own scrap of forever. That’s what knocked me out.

  Chummy by that time had roused, and was humming or mumbling into his hand. “Chummy,” I said, “you think you’ll love me when we’re old?”

  He reared then. There was no blinking, and he seemed actually to focus, heaving his whole proud landscape of a face across the table into mine. “I don’t even love you now, man.”

  PAUL HEADRICK

  HIGHLIFE

  Christopher, my husband, is angry – my husband is so angry – he is so profusely angry that he is dying that it is in everything, his anger is in everything. I can smell its sour smell and feel it burning, even in this shocking equatorial heat, and I can hear it buzzing in the air even as he sleeps beside me and the mosquito netting hardly moves in the lake breeze, which does not carry his hot, reeking anger away.

  For three weeks after Christopher was diagnosed, his calm and confidence seemed as deep as ever, and then he sold his collection. I returned from a day at the institute just in time to see the last box loaded into the U-haul. It all made sense as Christopher, steady while I wept, explained what he had done. When he died I would not know how to deal with the records, or what w
as a fair price. He wanted them to go to someone who appreciated them. He had simply alerted his Internet discussion group to their availability, had announced his imminent death and his need to find a buyer promptly, and there had been no negotiation, only a thorough exchange among his followers and fellow doo-wop aficionados across the continent, a consensus on a fair price, and then a sale. He took my hand and we went down to the basement together, where we stood among the empty metal shelves and turned about in the frightening new spaciousness, and I think now that right then he began to shift and we began to separate. My throat tightened and something numbed and corrupted the contact of my feet with the floor, of my hand with his, and I knew, without realizing I did, that he was banishing me.

  It’s true that I would not have appreciated the records the way another collector would, true that I would have appreciated them differently, and the sale brought money enough to pay for this trip and more. We certainly had enough money to pay our way through airport immigration, but Christopher refused and continued to question and demand as the immigration agent continued to insist. Our papers were not in order, we needed different visas, something was wrong with our visas, we would simply have to turn around and reboard for the return flight to Heathrow. Behind us the whispering, coughing, grumbling grew louder, and yet I knew that I could not simply pay the bribe, that Christopher was already receding and I could not risk a setback. I would have to live with his new stubbornness, his useless anger, and try to find a way to slide by and reach him once more. “These visas are missing the second authority. They are not valid without the second authority,” the agent said again. Christopher smiled.