East is East

For his part, hiro didn’t know what to think. There was a storm coming, it was getting dark and he’d been bitten six or eight times by every last mosquito on earth, not to mention their cousins, the ticks, chiggers, deerflies and gnats. Choking on mud and vomit, carved hollow as a gourd with hunger, he’d staggered out of a bog, scattering birds, reptiles and frogs, and into a stand of trees where the water was shallower, the mud firmer. Hours back, when the sun stood directly overhead, he’d blundered across a raft of bitter purple-black berries and crouched in the ooze, gorging till they came back up like the dregs of a bad bottle of wine. For a long while he lay there enervated, cursing himself, his hakujin

father and strong-legged mother, cursing Ruth—she’d betrayed him, the bitch, used him for her story, her fiction, used him on a whim and then discarded him like so much human rubbish. The water cradled him. He closed his eyes on a hail of mosquitoes and slept afloat. And then, as the sun dropped out of the sky and every animate thing in the swamp came to him for its hourly ration of Japanese blood, his senses reawakened. It was a sound that got him going first—a soft lilting incongruous melody weaving in and out of the cacophony of roars and grunts and screeches that tore at him without remit. Was it a flute? Was somebody playing a flute out here in the hind end of nowhere? And then his sense of smell kicked in and the knowledge of cookfire and meat came to him.

The storm broke round him as he lurched out of the trees and up onto the bed of semifirm mud, something like earth beneath his feet once again—a small miracle in itself—but what lay before him was a puzzle. A crude structure, nothing more than a lean-to really, struggled out of the tangle a hundred feet away, and there were people inhabiting it, hakujin,

gathered round a fire. Was this a house? Were these hillbillies—or swampbillies? And what was a “billy” anyway—some sort of goat, wasn’t it?—and how could anyone, swampbilly or no, actually live here? But then this was America, and nothing about these people would surprise him. Whether they were buffalo skinners, young Republicans or crack dealers, it was all the same to him—he was dying of the wet and hunger and a despair that was all talons and claws and wouldn’t let go of him, and he needed them.

Still, dying or not, this was nothing to rush into. He recalled the bug-eyed Negro fighting for his oysters, the girl in the Coca-Cola store, Ruth, who’d lulled him into submission only to turn on him and cut his heart out. He smelled the meat, saw the shelter, imagined what it would be like to dry himself, if only for a minute … but how could he approach these billies? What would he say? Pleading hunger was no good, as the Negro had taught him; the Clint Eastwood approach had backfired too, though he’d been satisfied with his curses, proud of them even. The only thing that had worked was dissimulation: Ambly Wooster had believed he was someone called Seiji, and if she’d believed him, maybe these people would too. But he had to be cautious. Living out here—he still couldn’t believe it—they had to be primitive and depraved. What was that movie, with the city dwellers in canoes and the hillbillies attacking them from the cliffs?

But now they’d seen him. The lightning flashed, the rain drove at him. There was a man standing there on the platform, wearing a dazed and frightened expression—it looked bad already—and he was yelling something and the other two—a woman and a boy—froze. What was he saying? Oh, yes. Yes. The hakujin

war cry: “Can we help you?”

Hiro stared at them and then glanced round him at the rain-washed swamp. He was beaten, starved, swollen with insect bites, filthy, saturated, anemic with loss of blood—and it seemed as if it had been going on all his life. He took a chance. Let them shoot him, let them string him up and nail him to a cross, flay the skin from his bones, devour him: he didn’t care. Ruth had betrayed him. The City of Brotherly Love was a fraud. There was the swamp, only the swamp. “Toor-ist!” he called, echoing the girl in the store. “Fall out of boat!”

Nothing. No reaction. The two smaller faces flanked the larger and the three pairs of rinsed-out eyes fastened on him like pincers. The wind screamed. The trees danced. “Toor-ist!” Hiro repeated, cupping his hands to his mouth.