Black Glass Page 6

  Harris opened his eyes and saw things with a glassy, weary clarity. Behind his wife was the Oprah show, her favorite. No wonder he hadn’t noticed the television was on. Harris’s mind was moving far too fast for television. Harris’s mind was moving far too fast for him to be able to follow what his wife was saying. He had to force his mind back, remember where she thought he was in the conversation.

  “I’m a moderate drinker,” he said.

  “He sent over a report. Last night. A report the government commissioned on moderate drinking. It’s interesting. Listen.” She had pages in her hand. Harris was pretty certain they hadn’t been there before. They popped into her fingers before his very eyes. She riffled through them, read, with one finger underlining the words. “‘To put it simply, people who drink a lot have many problems, but few people drink a lot.

  “‘People who only drink a little have fewer problems, but there are a great many people who drink a little.

  “‘Therefore, the total number of problems experienced by those who drink a little is likely to be greater than the total number experienced by those who drink a lot, simply because more people drink a little than a lot.’”

  Harris was delighted with this. It made no sense at all. He was delighted with his wife for producing it. He was delighted with himself for hallucinating it. He would have liked to hear it again. He closed his eyes. The colors began singing obligingly. To put it simply, people who drink a lot have many problems, but few people drink a lot.

  “All I had was a Shirley Temple,” Harris told his wife. He remembered the voices in the living room. “Do we have company?”

  “Just some women from my class,” she answered. She put the report down uncertainly. “He’s just worried about you, Patrick. As your supervisor, he’s got to be worried. The stress of field-work. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, if you have a problem. You’ve handled it better than most.”

  Harris skipped ahead in this conversation to the point where he explained to her that he didn’t have a drinking problem and she was persuaded. She would be persuaded. She was a reasonable woman and she loved him. He was too tired to go through it step by step. Now he was free to change the subject. “Why are there women in the living room?”

  “We’re just doing a project,” his wife said. “Are you going to drink your soup?” Soup, soup, soup, the colors sang. Harris didn’t think so. “Would you like to see the project?” Harris didn’t think he wanted this either, but apparently he neglected to say so, because now she was back and she had different papers. Harris tried to read them. They appeared to be a cartoon.

  “It’s for the women’s center,” his wife said. “It’s a Carry Nation/Superhero cartoon. I thought maybe you could help advise us on the drug stuff. The underworld stuff. When you’re feeling better. We think we can sell it.”

  Harris tried to read it again. Who was the man in the hat? What did he have in his bottle? He liked the colors. “I like the colors,” he said.

  “Julie drew the pictures. I did the words.”

  Harris wasn’t able to read the cartoon or look at the pictures. His mind wasn’t working that way. Harris’s mind was reading right through the cartoon as if it were a glass through which he could read the present, the past, and the future. He held it between himself and the television. There was a group of women on Oprah. They were all dressed like Carry Nation, but they had masks on their faces like the Lone Ranger, to protect their real identities. They were postmenopausal terrorists in the war on drugs. A man in the audience was shouting at them.

  “Do you know what I’m hearing? I’m hearing that the ends justify the means. I could hear that in Iraq. I could hear that in China.”

  The women didn’t want to be terrorists. The women wanted to be DEA agents. Harris’s supervisor was clearing out his desk, removing the pins from the map in his office as if casting some sort of reverse Voudon hex. He had lost his job for refusing to modify recruitment standards and implement a special DEA reentry training program for older women.

  In a deserted field in Colombia, a huge woman gradually came to her senses. She stared at the clothing she was wearing. She stared around the Colombian landscape. “Where the hell am I?” her ti bon ange asked. “¿Que pasa?”

  From the safety of his jail cell, Manuel Noriega mourned for his lost yachts.

  A woman in a wet T-shirt played a new video game in the dark back room of a bar. MY MOTHER TOLD ME TO BE GOOD, BUT SHE’S BEEN WRONG BEFORE, the T-shirt read. Bar-Smasher was the name of the video game. A graphic of Carry Nation, complete with bonnet and hatchet, ran about evading the police and mobs of angry men. Five points for every bottle she smashed. Ten points a barrel. Fifty points for special items such as chandeliers and pornographic paintings. She could be sent to jail three times. The music was a video version of “Who Hath Sorrow, Who Hath Woe.” The woman in the T-shirt was very good at this game. She was a young woman, and men approved of her. Her boyfriend helped her put her initials on the day’s high score, although anyone who gets the day’s high score probably doesn’t need help with the initials. She let him kiss her.

  Harris was back in Panama, dancing and raising a loa. The Harris in Panama could not see into the future, but even if he could, it was already too late. Raising a loa had not been his real mistake. By the time the loa came, everything here had already occurred. Harris had made his real mistake when he took the toad. Up until that moment, Harris had always played by the rules. Harris had been seduced by a toad, and in yielding to that seduction he created a whole new world for himself, a world without rules, just exactly the sort of world in which Harris himself was unlikely to be comfortable.

  “Come on,” his wife said. “What do you really think?” She was so excited. He had never seen her so animated.

  She was going to be old someday. Harris could see it lurking in her. Harris would still love her, but what kind of a love would that be? How male? How sufficient? These things Harris was unsure of. For these things he had to look into himself, and the cartoon looking glass didn’t go that way.

  He held the cartoon panels between himself and his wife and looked into her instead. He had never understood why Carry Nation appealed to her so. His wife was not religious. His wife enjoyed a bit of wine in the evening and thought what people did in the privacy of their own homes was pretty much their own business. Now he saw that what she really admired about Carry Nation was her audacity. Men despised Carry Nation, and Harris’s wife admired her for that. She admired the way Carry didn’t care. She admired the way Carry carried on. “I always look a fool,” Carry wrote. “God had need of me and the price He exacts is that I look a fool. Of course, I mind. Anyone would mind. But He suffered on the cross for me. It is little enough to ask in return. I do it gladly.”

  “I know it’s not literature,” Harris’s wife said, a bit embarrassed. “We’re trying to have an impact on the American psyche. Literature may not be the best way to do that anymore.”

  Harris’s wife wanted to encourage other women not to care whether men approved of them or not, and she wanted and expected Harris to say he approved of this project.

  He tried to focus again on the surface of the glass, on the cartoon panels. What nice colors.

  “Kapow!” Harris said. “Kaboom!”

  We come from the cemetery,

  We went to get our mother,

  Hello mother the Virgin,

  We are your children,

  We come to ask your help,

  You should give us your courage.

  —Voudon song

  CONTENTION

  Some of us are dreamers.

  —Kermit

  At dinner Claire’s son asks her if she knows the name of the man who is on record as having grown the world’s largest vegetable, not counting the watermelon, which may be a fruit, Claire’s son is not sure. Claire says that she doesn’t. Her son is eight years old. It
is an annoying age. He wants her to guess.

  “I really don’t know, honey,” Claire says.

  So he gives her a hint. “It was a turnip.”

  Claire eliminates the entire population of Lapland. “Elliot,” she guesses.

  “Nope.” His voice holds an edge of triumph, but no more than is polite. “Wrong. Guess again.”

  “Just tell me,” Claire suggests.

  “Guess first.”

  “Edmund,” Claire says, and her son regards her with narrowing eyes.

  “Guess the last name.”

  Claire remembers that China is the world’s most populous country. “Edmund Li,” she guesses, but the correct answer is Edmund Firthgrove and the world’s most common surname is Chang. So she is not even close.

  “Guess who has the world’s longest fingernails,” her son suggests. “It’s a man.”

  Well, Claire is quite certain it’s not going to be Edmund Firthgrove. Life is a bifurcated highway. She points this out to her son, turns to make sure her daughter is listening as well. “We live in an age of specialization,” she tells them. “You can make gardening history or you can make fingernail history, but there’s no way in hell you can make both. Remember this. This is your mother speaking. If you want to be great, you’ve got to make choices.” And then immediately Claire wonders if what she has just said is true.

  “We’re having hamburgers again.” Claire’s husband makes this observation in a slow, dispassionate voice. Just the facts, ma’am. “We had hamburgers on Sunday and then again on Thursday. This makes three times this week.”

  Claire tells him she is going for a personal record. In fact it is a headline she read while waiting with the ground meat for the supermarket checker that is making her rethink this issue of choices now. “Meet the laziest man in the world,” it said. “In bed since 1969 . . . his wife even shaves and bathes him.”

  Claire imagines that a case like this one begins when a man loses his job. He may spend weeks seeking new employment and never even make it to the interview. He’s just not a self-starter. Thoroughly demoralized, on a Monday in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, he refuses to get out of bed. “What’s the point?” he asks his wife. She is tolerant at first. He needs a rest. Fine. She leaves him alone for a couple of days, even brings in trays of food, changes the channel of the TV for him.

  This is no bid for greatness, this is a modified suicide. “Man collapses watching game show.” But staying in bed turns out to have pleasant associations for him. He begins to remember a bout of chicken pox he had as a child—how his mother would bring him glasses of orange juice. He feels warm and cared for; his despair begins to dissipate. “I’ve got such a craving for orange juice,” he tells his wife.

  Months pass; he has been in bed an entire year before he realizes what he has become. He’s not just some schlub who can’t find work. Suddenly he’s a contender. With stamina, perseverance, and support he can turn tragedy into triumph. He tells his wife that the only thing they have to fear now is a failure of nerve.

  How does she feel about this? In the picture which accompanied the story she was shown plumping up his pillow and smiling, a beefy sort of woman, a type that is never going to be fashionable. She may feel, like him, that this is her only shot. His greatness is her greatness. His glory is her glory.

  Or her motives may be less pure. Out in the world more, she is bound to be more worldly than he is. He has a vision. He is extending the boundaries of human achievement. She is speculating on the possibility of a movie made for TV. She may suggest that, as long as he is just lying there, he could be growing his fingernails, too.

  She is an ignorant woman. You don’t just grow your fingernails because you happen to have time on your hands. It requires commitment, a special gelatinous diet, internal and external fortification. A person’s nails are, in fact, most at risk during those precise hours a person spends in bed. She has her own motives, of course. She is tired of clipping his nails. “Why don’t you grow your beard out?” she suggests, rouging her cheeks and donning a feathery hat before slipping out to a three-martini lunch with the network executives. She will order lobster, then sell the exclusive rights to the tabloids instead. “Why don’t you make a ball out of twine?” The largest recorded string ball is more than twelve feet in diameter. That will keep him in bed for a while.

  At the restaurant she meets Solero don Guillermo, the world’s fastest flamenco dancer. She forgets to come home. Her husband grows hungrier and hungrier. He makes his way to the kitchen five days later, a smashed man. He contemplates slitting his wrists. Instead, while preparing his own breakfast, he manages, in twelve seconds, to chop a cucumber in 250 slices, besting Hugh Andrews of Blackpool by four cuts. The rounds of cucumber are so fine you could watch TV through them.

  Forty-two years later—a good twenty-four years off the record—he gets his wife’s note, placed in a bottle and tossed off the Queen Mary. “Kiss my ass,” it says.

  “You know”—Claire’s son’s voice is accusing—“how much I hate raw hamburgers. This is all pink in the middle. It’s gross. I can’t eat this.”

  “I’m tired of hamburgers,” Claire’s daughter says.

  “Is there anything else to eat?” Claire’s husband asks.

  Claire smiles at them all. She sends them a message, tapping it out with her fork on the side of her plate. It may take years, but she imagines it will get there eventually.

  SHIMABARA

  The sea, the same as now. It had rained, and we can imagine that, too, just as we have ourselves seen it—the black sky, the ocean carved with small, sharp waves. At the base of each cliff would be a cloud of white water.

  At the top of the cliffs was a castle and, inside the castle, a fifteen-year-old boy. Here is where it gets tricky. What is different and what is the same? The story takes place on the other side of the world. The boy has been dead more than three hundred and fifty years. There was a castle, but now there is a museum and a mall. A Japanese mall is still a mall; we know what a mall looks like. The sea is the same. What about a fifteen-year-old boy?

  The boy’s mother, Martha, was in a boat on the sea beneath the cliffs. Once a day she was taken to shore to the camp of Lord Matsudaira for interrogation. Then she could see the castle where her son was. The rest of the time she lay inside the boat with her two daughters, each of them bound by the wrists and the ankles, so that when she was allowed to stand, her legs, through disuse, could hardly hold her up. Add to that the motion of the boat. When she walked on land, on her way to interrogation, she shook and pitched. The samurai thought it was terror, and of course there was that, too.

  Perhaps Martha was more concerned about her son in the castle than her daughters on the boat. Perhaps a Japanese mother three hundred and fifty years ago would feel this way. In any case, all their lives depended on her son now. As she lay on the boat, Martha passed the time by counting miracles. The first was that she had a son. On the day of Shiro’s birth, the sunset flamed across the entire horizon, turning the whole landscape red, then black. Later, when Shiro was twelve, a large, fiery cross rose out of the ocean off the Shimabara Peninsula and he was seen walking over the water toward it. He could call birds to his hands; they would lay eggs in his palms. This year, the year he turned fifteen, the sunset of his birth was repeated many times. The cherry blossoms were early. These things had been foretold. Martha remembered; she summoned her son’s face; she imagined the sun setting a fire each night behind Hara Castle. The worst that could happen was that her son prove now to be ordinary. The wind that had brought the rain rocked the boat.

  Thirty-seven thousand Kirishitan rebels followed Shiro out of Amakusa to the Shimabara Peninsula and the ruin of Hara Castle. Kirishitan is a word that has been translated into Japanese and come back out again, as in the children’s game of telephone. It goes in as Christian, comes out Kirishitan.

  The rebels
made the crossing in hundreds of small boats, each with a crucifix in the bow. A government spy stood in the cold shadow of a tree and watched the boats leave. He couldn’t count the rebels. Maybe there were fifty thousand. Maybe twenty thousand. Of those, maybe twelve thousand were men of fighting age. The spy grew weak from hunger and fatigue. Just to stand long enough to watch them all depart required the discipline and dedication of a samurai.

  General Itakura Shigemasa pursued the rebels through Amakusa, burning the villages they’d left behind. Many of the remaining inhabitants died in the fires. Those who survived, Itakura put to death anyway. He had the children tied to stakes and then burned alive. It was a message to the fifteen-year-old Kirishitan leader.

  Although Hara Castle had been abandoned for many years, it was built to be defended. The east side of the castle looked over the sea; on the west was a level marsh, fed by tides, which afforded no footing to horses, no cover to attackers. North and south were cliffs one hundred feet high. Only two paths led in, one to the front, one to the rear, and neither was wide enough for more than a single man. On January 27, 1637, after ten days of repairs, the rebels occupied Hara Castle.

  They hoisted a flag. It showed a goblet, a cross, a motto, and two angels. The angels were fat, unsmiling, and European; the motto was in Portuguese. LOVVAD SEIA O SACTISSIM SACRAMENTO: Praised be the most holy sacrament. In March, when Martha knelt in Lord Matsudaira’s camp to write Shiro a letter, there were one hundred thousand Bakufu samurai between her and her son.

  • • •

  JANUARY, FEBRUARY, MARCH, and early April passed in a steady storm of negotiations. The air above Shimabara was full of words wound around the shafts of arrows. One landed in the camp outside the castle. “Heaven and earth have one root, the myriad things one substance. Among all sentient beings there is no such distinction as noble and base,” the arrow said. An arrow flew back. “Surrender,” it asked, but obliquely, politely, confining itself, in fact, to references to the weather.