SHOJI

Toshi’s father died with tubes sprouting from his body. Shoji had always been thin, but now, he looked ready to break. He lay unmoving, but certainly not at peace. His chest rose and fell regularly, in time with the rubber-and-metal pump whooshing and shushing beside his head. From the bottom of his baby blue hospital robe, his bare legs protruded like bread sticks. They were terribly uneven because of some freakish accident during the war, a very long time ago. Too long to remember. The right leg was straight and unblemished, the left twisted and scarred. When Toshi pictured his father in his mind, Shoji was always limping.

Toshi let free a sigh as heavy as the world. A nurse hovered at the door. The staff had noticed that whenever the lumbering young Japanese fellow was left alone in a room for longer than a minute, every monitor would start making loud noises. They never knew that the commotion sounded to Toshi like a call to arms. It gave him fabulous goosebumps.

Rainwater was tapping on the windows. There were days in Milwaukee when it felt as though the rain had been falling forever. After the family doctor had told them about Shoji’s cancer, the remedies started coming from all directions: Chinese medicine, prayers, ads in tabloid newspapers and friends calling to say they knew someone who was cured just by eating lots of oranges. Or was it grapefruit? Oranges or grapefruit. Who knew which? Or was it all just baloney?

“But Toshi,” Shoji said one night after a supper of beef kidneys braised with garlic and shallots, “I’ve been a scientist all my life. Even now, my dreams are of witnessing the glory of galaxies moving away from each other.” He still had his appetite then, and other than his deformed leg, Shoji was perfectly proportioned, lean but not too lean, and he had square bones. Toshi had noticed long ago that women smiled a lot around his father. His mother was flinging dishes into the dishwasher. Mitsuyo was doing everything more forcefully now. It was a dark, empty nothing outside the window. Clouds masked any galaxies that might have blossomed overhead.

Shoji said something about Doppler shifts that Toshi didn’t understand, but he squinted and nodded thoughtfully. He put a finger to the cleft of his chin. His father was smiling and crying at the same time.

“A scientist,” Shoji said, shaking his head. “All my life, I wanted to be nothing else.” Toshi sighed, his big shoulders wilting.

His father wasn’t interested in much about anything after he found out he was dying a slow and horribly painful death. Most days, he read in his study and hardly said two words beyond what was absolutely necessary. He didn’t even pardon himself when he went to the toilet to vomit. He never excused himself, and, even though he always closed the door, the bathroom wasn’t soundproof, so Toshi and Mitsuyo weren’t spared his suffering. Not completely. Never completely. Even when Toshi covered his ears and started singing “This Old Man” so loud his voice was hoarse the next day.

There was one instance when Shoji came to life, and that was to yell at his wife. He was sitting at breakfast. Mitsuyo was ladling him a bowl of clear broth brewed from bonito flakes because by then he couldn’t ingest much else. She was wondering aloud why all these terrible things were happening to them.

“To us?” said Shoji, his voice hoarse and frostbitten. “To us? When did you catch a terminal illness? This is happening to me, and has nothing to do with you.”

This was hardly fair, and Toshi thought hard about telling his father so. Toshi recalled how one day, when he and his younger brother were still in elementary school, the wind was gusting, and they saw a baby robin fall from a tree in front of their house. As soon as it hit the ground, it began flailing its wings in that pathetic, hyper-panicked way that frightened animals have.

Before Toshi and Kei could get to it, a neighbour’s dog, a huge black Rottweiler, materialized out of nowhere and took the baby bird in its mouth. They heard the muffled sounds of tiny bones being crushed. Kei screamed at the dog and threw a book at its face, which made it drop its prey and run off. But the baby robin was already dead. Whatever small flicker of light that had made it cry for food or its mother had flown from its tiny chest. Toshi felt a fragment of his heart break away and fall to the ground. His brother looked like he might never smile again.

“You crazy kids go inside!” yelled Old Man Garber in his thick Polish accent that sounded like gears grinding. He stood across the street on his porch, his thin, pale arms behind his back. What little hair covered the top of his head was neatly combed to one side, but his shirt-tails hung over his pants. His spine was petrified in an arc at his shoulders, making him hunch over. He had to look up in order to look ahead. An ugly grey cat named Mongoose sat by his ankles and licked its privates. “Big storm is brewing!”

The dimly lit foyer of their house was as quiet as an abandoned church when they returned with the dead bird. Mitsuyo had gone to the corner store on Oakland for some peanut oil. Shoji was home, though, in his study, behind the columns of paper, so they cried out for him. When there was no answer after a few tries, they went to find him.

“Why did you bring it back here?” was the first thing their father asked them when he saw it.

Kei’s face was wet with tears, like grass in the morning. “I thought you could help us bury it.”

Shoji looked at him as if he had just suggested they stuff it and put it on the mantel. “Bury it? Are you mad? It’s dead. Put it in the garbage.” And with that their father turned his gaze back down to the jumble of mathematical calculations that filled his note paper.

Kei wouldn’t stop crying as they buried the bird in the flower garden out back. The daffodils were in bloom. Even though Kei was crying, Toshi could hear him swearing under his breath. “Fuck you,” he said. “Fuck you.” The words sounded funny coming from such a small kid. And it was odd that anger was burning so brightly behind a curtain of tears. Kei was angry and brooding as far back as Toshi could remember. Brooding, handsome and intelligent, like their father. Toshi had been always aware of life’s unfairness in such matters.

Toshi couldn’t blame his father for not understanding, though. Like Old Man Garber, Shoji hadn’t seen. Kei and Toshi had been too close, and that’s why death had affected them so.

Just like how Shoji’s death was affecting them now because they were too close. So, in truth, the cancer wasn’t just devouring Shoji. It was eating away at everybody around him. But this was hard for Shoji to see, because he was the main course.

“And one more thing: I’d most appreciate your not asking ‘why this’ or ‘why that’ any more, if you’d please,” Shoji said. Mitsuyo didn’t say a word as she dragged her feet upstairs, massaging her greying temples, looking as forlorn as a rotting piece of wood drifting aimlessly at sea. Despite her thin frame, frailty didn’t suit her. Neither did the black-and-yellow sweater she’d thrown on that morning, but she was beyond caring. Her hair said she just didn’t give a flying shit as thin, coarse wisps reached out in patches like weeds. “It’s bound to drive all of us mad!” Shoji still kept yelling in the kitchen, to no one in particular.

But now that he was lying on a hospital bed, now that all he did was stare at the ceiling as if the emptiness fascinated him, Toshi could tell his father was ignoring his own advice. It was very apparent that Shoji was asking himself why, and that this was driving him crazy, just like he said it would. His eyes didn’t move, and his breathing was regular, controlled by the cold, metallic pump by his head–his indifferent surrogate lung. But you could tell he was upset. He was thinking to himself, Why? Why? Why?