Work of the Gods
Fiction by Grant Buday
Sometimes I dream that I am cardboard: light and fibrous and corrugated, with a delicate tan skin. But three days living on hunks of cardboard dipped in plum sauce does things to you. Like leave you starved but constipated.
Noguchi-the-Gimp doesn't care. He runs the depot and pays ten thousand yen for a cartload. Ten thousand yen buys two lines of gyoza and a large Kirin, or coffee — good coffee, freshly ground, aromatic, and black; I haven't tasted coffee or smoked a cigarette in a year. Hunger — real hunger, the hunger my father went through in Hiroshima during the war — is a mental disease, it doesn't just stay in your belly, it climbs your throat and invades your mind and takes over the way the Americans did after they dropped the bomb.
Yesterday Noguchi-the-Gimp threatened to repossess my cart. He has a withered leg and sits all day in a canvas chair in the depot with his fat hands folded atop a bamboo cane propped between his knees. Yesterday he says, "Morioka-san. Come here. No, no. Come closer." He lays that cane along my cheek as if it's a sword blade, as if he's some sort of clan master or shogun, and he leans forward as far as his belly lets him and he says, "Morioka-san, you're a turd." Everyone was listening, old Ota who wears plastic bags, and all the others. "And you better start meeting your quota. A full can each day."
I've had a bad year.
I lost my job as a draughtsman at Sendo & Sendo, Cartographers. I also lost my wife, home, and routine. I loved my wife, home, and routine. Up at six each morning, shave, shower, smoke a cigarette, eat a breakfast of raw egg on rice, smoke another cigarette. Walk to work and smoke two more cigarettes. Twelve hours later, at 6:30 in the evening, back home sipping a large Kirin and smoking a cigarette while watching sumo on TV. Then Kuniko served supper. At eight, she massaged my feet. Sometimes the slick sound of the jasmine oil got me hot and we'd do it. I liked to do it now and again. Then at six in the morning the alarm clock played ''Stranger on the Shore" by Acker Bilk and the day began again.
I was an ant, a drone, a robot. The thing is, if you grew up with a father like min , who went through the bomb, who wondered how he happened to be out of the city that day of all days, when the world blazed white and was then reduced to ash, who had half his friend s incinerated and the rest crippled and cancerous. or mad but thinking they were sane, if you lived with a man like that you tend to see a little routine as a good thing — I'm not talking about those guys in white glove and uniforms doing jumping jacks in front of the gas station while chanting company slogans, or those poor girls at the entrance to the department stores bowing you in and then bowing you out — I only mean some simple pattern to your existence, a sense of a past and of a future.
Then I lost my job to a computer.
And now I might lose my cart. Noguchi-the-Gimp was going to dump me. So this morning I followed Ota, not intending to rob him, but because I wanted to learn from him, to benefit from his experience as a master cardboard collector. By 6:30 in the morning, with the sun still behind the skyscrapers and entire city blocks in shadow, Ota's can was already full! How did the old guy do it? It was as if the cardboard called out to him, as if he could smell the stuff, as if he could feel it. I'd often asked the secret to his success, but Ota was sly. He'd laugh. He was one of those southerners, from Nagasaki, one of those guys who knew little tricks, like how to cook and eat cardboard and not get sick, like how to catch crickets in the middle of Tokyo. He'd bring them home to our cardboard shacks under the overpass and keep them in cages made of toothpicks, so that along with the sounds of cars and trains there was the soothing creak creak of crickets. Their song made us grow reflective. We'd yawn and belch and pass the sake and assure each other that cardboard collecting was only a phase, something that no one — certainly not our families — need ever know of. Ora laughed when we went on like that because he was perfectly happy collecting cardboard.
I crept up on Ota while he was going through a trash heap behind a warehouse. Ota’s green plastic garbage bags caught the oily shine from the loading dock light. The plastic bags crinkled and shifted with his movements. He was lean and small and two cords stood out at the back of his frail neck, two cords that almost begged me to strangle him. There was a short length of radiator hose nearby. I picked it up. That’s when Ota turned — plastic bags crackling , the oily shine rearranging itself — and his look of happiness at finding yet more cardboard collapsed into one of confusion. That expression halted me, nearly made me change my mind and bow low and beg Ota's forgiveness, because Ota's face reminded me of exactly how I felt reading the letter informing me that after twenty-one years I'd been replaced with a U.S.-designed computerized mapping program. I brought that radiator hose down on Ota's skull, brought it down hard. It was an old length of hose, but it had weight, enough to stun but not kill — or so I thought, so I hope, because I have nothing against good old Ota-san.
That's when I panicked, groped on my hands and knees, panting and apologizing, though remained cogent enough to roll Ota out of sight and cover him with newspaper. He was as light as a cricket. Anyone who saw him would assume he was just some sot sleeping it off. I loaded the cardboard, piece by exquisite piece, as if handling rare maps, onto my cart and hurried away.
That was hours ago. It's nearly noon now and I'm lost; Tokyo is like my mind, full of twists and loops and dead ends, and it seems to go on forever, and it seems to change from day to day, and it seems to writhe, and now I had no idea which direction to go. I saw a man unloading crates of Coca-Cola from a red truck. "'Sir, excuse me — " But he waves his white-gloved hand in front of his nose. I step back. I sniff myself and discover it's true, I do stink: of rags and sweat and onions. Onions? How could I smell of onions when I haven't eaten in nearly four days? With ten thousand yen I could eat all the onions I wanted a sack full, onions and gyoza and dolphin — how I loved dolphin, and whale, minke whale — and rice and beer, and then take a bath at the sento where I'd groan in the steaming water.
It's August, the rainy season, and the hot alleys smell of latrine. I’m beat and scared, and even more than a cup of real coffee or a hot bath I want to go back to my cardboard box under the overpass and curl up and sleep. Just crawl into my box and close my eyes and dream of flying on a sheet of cardboard over the Imperial Palace, with its walls and towers and moat.
I intend to get back to Kyoto and my wife. I'll bring back money and stories, and I'll tell her the truth I have learned, that cardboard is perfect in the way only a machine-made product can be. Consider the smooth surface with only the rarest flaw, a flaw that highlights the perfection. I'll bring samples. She'll feel its balsa weight and the rib-like corrugations beneath the smooth tan skin. Baked in kilns, its parched scent causes the most exquisite tickle in the throat. Truly, cardboard is a thing of beauty. And she'll nod and understand.
But I can't leave the cardboard, not now, not after what I'd done to get it, it would be an insult to Ota. So I lean my shoulder into the can and push, and that's when I hear thunder. I halt. Rain. But what does it matter if the cardboard gets a little wet? Noguchi-the-Gimp will bitch but the recyclers will boil it down anyway. So I hurry on. That's when I discover the spatter of blood all down the side! Blood. Noguchi-the-Gimp will wonder how it is that I, his worst and most erratic supplier, suddenly show up with a cart teetering with Grade-A material stained with blood. I wipe at the blood with my sleeve and the thunder booms closer, as if warning me.
I swing the cart to head back to the overpass, but where is the overpass? As I wheel the cart in a circle the cardboard slews off into the alley where a man driving a forklift runs right overtop of it, and then with a gust of exhaust reverses and backs up crushing it again, leaving two soot-black tread marks. I shriek.
And then it begins to rain.
The drops burst in little explosions on the cardboard. I throw myself down, arms out to protect it while the hissing rain drenches me and runs over the pavement. The rain does not let up but intensifies, like a machine reaching maximum speed. I go limp and close my eyes and give up. What a relief it is to give up. The rain eventually ceases but I stay where I am for a long time. The sun steams on my soaked back and my shirt feels like a vast bandage. I dream of a radiant room sweet with the rice-stalk scent of fresh tatami while Kuniko hums "Stranger on the Shore" in the bathroom and my father trembles in the closet. ■