East is East

She found her way to Hiro’s floor. The nurse on duty, a short black woman with cornrow braids and earrings that were like paperweights, gave Ruth the sort of double take she might have lavished on a Di or a Fergie or Donna Summer herself, and then led her past a bored-looking deputy and into Hiro’s room. Hiro was propped up in bed, looking wan, his skin and the whites of his eyes faintly yellowish, as if they were tarnished. His face, which seemed impassive, dead, the face of a stone Buddha, came to life when he lifted his eyes to Ruth’s. “Rusu,” he said, and though he was depressed, though he was hurt, sick and defeated, he couldn’t disguise his pleasure, and he gave her a quick fading glimpse of his crooked smile.

Ruth had no illusions about the story—Hiro’s story. Her story. It probably had a half-life of about three days. It was one of those things that for some unfathomable reason gets the whole country worked up to a fever pitch and then dwindles away to nothing, yesterday’s news, a dim glimmer in the collective memory. She knew that. But she was confident she could get the book done in six months—it was her own story, she was on the inside of it—and rekindle that glimmer into a spark. And so did her publisher, obviously. The reporters out front were giving them publicity you couldn’t buy. “Hiro,” she said, and she crossed the room to him.

She took a seat beside the bed. There was a silence. The deputy poked his expressionless face in the door and then took it away again. “How are you feeling?” she said finally, and she dug around in her purse for the little gift-wrapped box of sweet bean cakes she’d brought him. “I brought you something,” she said, setting the package on the table. The deputy stuck his face in the door again, then he moved into the room, striding purposefully, and he took the package from the table and held his hand out for Ruth’s purse. “Ah’m not gone frisk you,” he said, “but Ah’m watchin’,” and then he returned to his station.

“So, how are you feeling?” Ruth repeated. “They treating you well? Is there anything I can get you?”

Hiro said nothing.

“How about your grandmother? Do you want me to write her? Phone her?”

Hiro didn’t respond. There was another silence. After a long while he turned his mournful eyes on her and said: “You lie to me, Rusu.”

Now it was her turn. She waited.

“In the house,” he said, and his voice sounded parched, dried up, torn out by the roots, “you are the one. You tell them I am here.”

So that was it. She wasn’t going to have to defend herself over the boat and the swamp and Turco—apparently that was lost to him. He was taking her back to Tupelo. All this time he thought she was the one who’d betrayed him. “No,” she said.

“Yes. You never have any idea to take me to mainrand.”

“No. It was Saxby. He saw you there on the porch and he went to the police without telling me. I never knew till it was too late.” She lowered her voice. “I did want to help you. I do. I still do.”

He gazed out the window. They were five stories up. There was nothing to see but dead clouds in a dead sky. “I’m tired,” he said after a moment.

She wanted to tell him not to worry, that everything was going to be all right, that she’d look after him and get her father to help and Dave Fortunoff too—he was well connected in Savannah—but she couldn’t. She felt awkward. He looked terrible. The deputy was watching her. “Okay,” she said, rising from the chair, “I understand. It’s all right. I’ll come back tomorrow, okay?”

He glanced up at her, struggled to lift his hand from the sheets and spread his palm in valediction. “I say goodbye now.”

She felt for him in that moment, a quick sharp flooding of the glands, and she bent forward to touch her lips to his cheek, guard or no guard. “See you tomorrow,” she said.

He never answered.

The City of Brotherly Love

The dreams were of things he couldn’t admit, dreams OF torment and horror and hate. They came at him as he drifted in some disembodied realm where colors flashed in his eyes and faces bled into one another without reason or chronology. And a hiss, always a hiss, as of the air rushing from a punctured lung. He saw Chiba become Wakabayashi and Wakabayashi become Unagi and felt the slap of their multiple hands. He saw his mother at the bottom of the pond, her ravaged fingers, the rictus of her mouth, and the hiss became a scream, silent and prolonged. He saw Ruth and her face was the face of his captors and tormentors, and it was their hate that burned in her eyes. And then he saw himself, and he was at the bottom of the dead black endless American swamp, his flesh gone white, flaking, dropping from the bone, and then he was rising, apart from himself, above them all, rising toward the trembling aqueous light of the surface.