No names, p.37
No Names, page 37
When next I look at my watch, it is past midnight. I touch each of the girls on the cheek lightly, saying quietly, Anata o hontoni aishiteimasu, I love you very much, to each of them. I say it in Japanese, as I always did with Peter, and do with Isaac as well, because, even after all these many years, the ideas and the feelings still mean more to me that way. Hopefully, one day the girls will learn Japanese. They both have my blood, through Tomoko, but language forges a far more important bond.
I leave the girls to their dreams. The sun is still bright enough that I don’t need to turn a lamp on. I go to the box chock-full of the past, searching through its contents for a letter. There is none. The tapes and CDS are ordered by date. The first is from December 1975. I lift it up, this plastic case containing traces of Peter and Mike, and contemplate what it would mean to hear their voices from that time right now. I’m not sure I could bear it, and though it sounds funny, I am not sure it is even right for me to intrude on them. Though the box was initially addressed to me—and I can therefore presume Mike would want me to listen—still, it would feel like trespassing on their friendship, their love, their story. Obviously, I was a part of it—a small one—but in the end, it is their story, not mine. To distract myself, I fry up the cod cheeks, slide them onto a blue glass plate and pour myself a beer. It is red and strong. I sit on the bench facing the window. I am, however, too preoccupied to really savor my treat. I have a second beer. I pick up another cassette, examine it, then place it, too, back in the box. I close the lid and turn to look out over the ocean, hoping for some respite from memory.
JULY 2018, DANIEL
This night, a rare easterly comes, steady and strong. If it continues, we will make up time lost in yesterday’s punishing squalls. The sky glows psychedelic, exactly the way Michael loved it. This phenomenon brought him, he would say, to a state of ecstasy, or ekstasis—that is, becoming entranced, being brought out of oneself. The whole northern portion of the sky writhes and throbs neon green. From there, it swirls into deeper and deeper currents of cyan splattered with yellow stars. It always amazed Michael that the stars actually shone brighter through the overlapping swaths of colors. In the middle of the night he would sometimes wake me, and we would leave the house, heading with the dogs over to the promontory. We would sit on the north cliff all night long, transfixed by the spectacle aurora borealis offers the soul.
Sailing at night is usually when I am able to lose myself most completely; however, these past three days, since Mariko’s news of the box from Michael, I cannot even lose other people, especially not Michael, let alone myself. What has become of him?
Isaac sleeps belowdecks; our girls sleep two days away. They are my life, my happiness. And yet, it could all be so easily disturbed by these relics from the past that await us on the Island. It has been nearly a quarter century since Michael left there—considerably longer than the fifteen years of our bivouacked life together. I know, fifteen years and bivouacked—especially in such a solid and ancient house—make for something of a paradox. But our situation was perpetually temporary. There was never any kind of understanding—let alone an agreement—between us that our life together would continue, not even from one day to the next. He could, and eventually did, leave, and without a word. It is forty years since I met Michael and Peter, and now their absence has become vivid again, painful. Michael and I are now practically old men. A case of nostalgia, I suppose. In centuries past, nostalgia was a disease confined to Swiss mercenary soldiers when away from their beloved Alps, and later expanded to include any soldier away from home. In our time, nostalgia is general and seems to afflict the old most acutely. Time has supplanted space in how we think of it: those Alpine valleys have become years.
This pain brings with it a thought I had long ago learned to repress: that Isaac has, for me, in some perverse way, served as emblem, or totem, of both Peter and Michael. A terrible admission, but it was, I swear, enacted almost entirely in my subconscious. I would even go so far as to say that it was as likely in Isaac’s subconscious as it was in mine.
Now it seems important to recount my early days together with Isaac, to reaffirm the beauty and the love we have. It was one warm Sunday afternoon, halfway through Isaac’s Fulbright in Copenhagen, that our separate needs coalesced, and we fell in love. The two of us were sailing around the Øresund, amid a vast flotilla of other weekend sailors, when he announced that he would quit his PhD studies in mathematics. At first, I did not respond.
“While I like math,” he explained, “and have some talent, I really don’t have the passion for all the years of study ahead. It’s a slog.” The wind kept blowing his long red hair across his face and he kept pushing it away. I was, quite literally, seeing him and not seeing him eye to eye.
His announcement perturbed me. I did not say so, but I suspected he was leaving mathematics so that he and I might be together. He was in a top program in the States. “You know,” I began cautiously, “we all have a calling.” He frowned, staring off toward the pastel mansions along the shore. “And mathematics is yours. Down the road you may very well regret having abandoned it.”
Isaac shifted to face me directly. His face tensed. He gripped his hair in his fist to hold it back so he could look at me directly. “Listen, I’m good at math, and I enjoy it, but that doesn’t mean it’s my calling, as you put it.” He inflected the word calling with a shot of sarcasm. “I’m also a decent guitarist and enjoy playing, but that doesn’t mean I have a calling or even want to be a musician.” He paused, lasering in on me with those eyes of his, each a different color. “Just because you have a calling, Daniel, doesn’t mean everyone does.”
Until that very moment, I had not realized Isaac had never stood up to me before. Suddenly, I viewed myself as something of a tyrant. This was disconcerting. Yet, even as he was disagreeing with me—challenging me—it felt like a good thing. It was as if a barrier between us had been broken through. My respect for him grew tremendously, and I knew then, as he looked at me in what could almost be called defiance, that I loved him.
“I just want a life,” he concluded, at last breaking into a smile. “I’d like to teach math to high school kids.” He let go of his hair and the wind once again swept it across his face.
It was then I changed course, both literally and figuratively. I jibed quickly, bringing the boom around. Once I had the boat turned about, we set sail for the low, sandy island where I had taken the No Names all those years before. I had no plan in mind, at least not consciously, of recreating the only moments I ever spent alone with his father. Only in retrospect did I understand, or rather, admit to myself, that in those hours the past did indeed come alive.
We docked, walked up the gradual slope, and then, passing the descendants of the same herd of golden cows that have grazed there for generations, I took Isaac’s hand. The tough marram grass scratched our ankles. A pair of sapphire-blue butterflies traced arabesques above our heads. A rabbit sat up on its hind legs, undisturbed by our intrusion, ears glowing pink in the afternoon sun. We crossed the tiny island, arriving at the same secluded swath of golden sand where Peter and I had gone so many years before. As if on cue, together we undressed, in silence, dropping our clothes onto the sand. We stood there for the longest time, naked, looking at one another, as if to determine that this was real and that we were real, before wading into the surf and diving in. The water was especially clear and blue on that day. We swam around and around each other, like dolphins at play, and when we finally emerged from the waves, we lay down in the warm sand and made love, the uncanny sweeping over us in time with the shadows of gulls.
The northern lights begin to fade. To starboard, a humpback blows. Usually, I would go down to the cabin and wake Isaac for such a sighting, but this time I will let him sleep. The approaching daylight washes my nostalgia out. There is no use subjecting him to my disconsolate mood. My first impulsive thought is to try and find Michael, to sail solo all the way to America. Indulging my imagination further, I see myself sailing up the Saint Lawrence Seaway, over the Great Lakes, and eventually docking the First Movement in the farthest western port of Lake Superior (Duluth, is it?). There, I would find a ship-sized American convertible to rent and drive all the way to Arizona. I would tell Michael he could return to the Island, that it is his for as long as he wants to live there. He and I would recreate the solitude we once shared at regular intervals. This is all of course as presumptuous as it is preposterous. Most likely, he has a perfectly happy life in this place called Blindeye, and I have faded from his memory. Certainly, he was deliberate in not providing a return address on the box.
It pains me and shames me to think how I could consider—even fleetingly—upending my life, one so filled with love. However, I am certain that to not allow this fantasy to play out in my imagination would have an insidious effect on my love for Isaac and our family. Michael is, I have to remind myself once again, the one who left the Island without letting me know, the one who vanished after our sole concert together—again, without a word. I have learned to recall all of this without bitterness. My love for Michael will, as it has, continue outside of the present, outside of any shared place. Yes, outside of time and place. There it must stay.
Although he has not said anything specifically, I can sense that the box awaiting us has reignited Isaac’s original, unchecked passion for the No Names. After all, it contains the past he has always so intently desired to know and to have been a part of. But then, I need to remind myself, it was his passion for Michael and the No Names that brought our lives together in the first place and set these decades of love in motion.
Desire overwhelms me. I double-check the chart points I plotted, engage the jib and rudder self-steering, and go belowdecks. As I head to the V-shaped bed in the bow, I strip off my polo and Bermudas. Isaac is on his back asleep, breathing deep and steady. I move on top of him, covering his mouth with mine, and slowly he comes to that state between dream and sleep where his passion becomes unbridled. I pull his gym shorts off. He is already aroused. I wet his penis with my mouth, then straddle him, letting him enter me. All our beautiful history plays out in the rhythm of our bodies, making this familiar act suddenly unfamiliar. When he is spent, he opens his legs and guides me into him. I move steadily, I lose myself, I am no longer who I thought I was.
JULY 2018, ISAAC
“Daddy! Daddy! Papa! Papa!” the girls holler as they race down from the house to meet the boat. Miyo leaps into my arms as we step onto the landing, Aiko into Daniel’s. Miyo gives my stubbly cheek a kiss, laughing, “That tickles, Daddy!”
Aiko asks Daniel, “Papa, why couldn’t we sail here with you and Daddy?”
Daniel explains what he’s already explained a hundred times before, that the girls must wait until they are ten. He of course doesn’t tell them that he sailed across with his parents every year from when he was a newborn, or that he did his first solo voyage when he was fifteen, still a kid.
“But why?” Aiko persists.
“Sometimes there are storms, my darling,” he answers, “and you have to be able to help reef the mainsail and hoist the storm-jib.”
“I know how!”
“You do?”
She blushes.
Obaachan steps down onto the landing, gives me a kiss as she takes Miyo from me. She tells Aiko to hop down from Daniel and help carry the luggage. She then leans over on tiptoes to kiss Daniel on the chin.
After dinner, the five of us walked along the stream and up the mountainside to the pool at the base of the waterfall so the girls could take a swim. They’d been begging us. The water from the mountain is cold, though not nearly so cold as the ocean. Miyo ran over the rocks to the water and dove right in without a thought. She’s fierce like that, like my mother, and looks like her too. I bet they’d have gotten along. Nearly every day I think how sad it is the cancer took her before either of them was born, years before. Aiko took her time, splashing her arms and thighs before launching herself gently and gracefully. Daniel and I went in the water with them, or, really, only Daniel did. He swam all the way across the pool and under the falls, to the girls’ amazement. I only waded at the edge. Obaachan sat on a large rock above, watching over us.
Miyo shouted up to her, “Hiibachan, you’re Queen of the Island!”
And I thought how beautiful all of this is and how beautiful our girls are, and how one day they will be the queens of the Island. From Daniel, they learn tales of their line of ancestors stretching back over the past millennium, and of a mythical musician who, for a time, dwelt here and filled the place with songs of one prince who drowned and another prince who died in war. And, in turn, the girls will make their own stories, making this island truly theirs.
Everyone else has gone to bed hours ago. I put my glasses on and open the laptop, feeling a little like Pandora as I begin searching Mike Abramczyk. I’m not finding anything. I search The No Names, The No Names punk band, and so on. It’s as if they never existed. They’re invisible like they said our city was. Finally, I search Blindeye, Arizona. It’s in the middle of the desert, apparently the farthest place from anyplace in the continental US. Whatever that means. It’s a place as opposite as opposite could be from this island, and yet maybe bizarrely similar in its obscurity and isolation. How intentional was that on his part? On Google Maps I cruise the bleak main street of Blindeye, and head out of town on the two-lane highway into the wasteland. Everything glare, everything impossible to imagine.
I want it to be possible to imagine Mike, to imagine him in our lives. I’m sure I could find him if I went there. Up till now, all these years I’ve felt complete without him, or at least I thought I was. And up till now, I’ve thought our family was complete without him, but maybe we aren’t. The pathetic truth is that in these past two plus decades I’ve only ever allowed myself to miss him vaguely and in passing. The fact that good old-fashioned repression ruled someone like me—who has always prided himself on his raging id—is classic. But what is it that I’m looking for in him? At this late stage in the game, am I looking for a father figure? Some unimaginative shrink might come up with that one. It’s more than that, though, or not only that. I don’t know exactly what, but it’s more than that. It’s desire—or about desire—though not sexual desire, or at least not only or even mostly. It’s desire for friendship and love in some ultimate and probably unknown and unworkable form, as I imagine he and my father had. It’s about living life as if life were not meaningless, while at the same admitting that it is. There’s a blank space in time left by my father/Mariko’s son/the girls’ grandfather/Mike’s whatever/Pete/Peter/Peter Ichiro Lac, that only Mike, or the idea of Mike, can help each of us fill, and then only partially, for like a second or two. But that’s throwing Mike into the role of savior or sacrifice, selfishly ignoring the fact that he experienced—and probably still experiences—the loss of Pete profoundly. And of course Mike himself creates a blankness—a blankness of a blankness!—for me, but obviously way more for Obaachan and Daniel.
My recharged desire will not go over well with Daniel. He’ll sense it, for sure. I haven’t thought through the risks and unintended consequences of bringing Mike into our family. Daniel will be sensible, of that I can be a hundred percent sure. He’ll try talking sense into me, and he should. I can tell he’s uneasy. First thing we got here, I wanted to listen to some of the tapes, but he keeps putting me off, saying we need to take care of things around the farm first. Obaachan acts evasive, preoccupying herself with the girls.
I get up from the table, then hesitate for a moment before going over to the box. In my Pandora mode I bring out the very first tape in the sequence, one from 1975. I turn on the vintage Beomaster 1900. It’s probably from around the same year—yet it’s one of the newest things here on the farm. I put the cassette in the player, lean back and press Play:
MIKE: Testing, testing, one, two, three …
PETE: We’re speaking into the new tape player that the future badass facsimile of Simon and Garfunkel is gonna use to make a demo that’s gonna get them signed by the grandiosest label in this whirling world.
[laughter, followed by two electric guitars playing, not too fast and not too loud, fairly intricate chords for thirty-four seconds, followed by laughter that’s now a lot more raucous]
PETE: Unreal, my Orpheus! You nailed it!
MIKE: We nailed it!
PETE: Add the words this time.
MIKE: They’re yours. You sing them.
PETE: I only do backups. [he laughs, then sings falsetto, “Stop, in the name of love …”]
MIKE: Come on. I’ll do harmony. [he starts playing]
PETE: You’re such an ass-wipe! [he then sings in his real voice] I thought I had to fall in love, /But one look at you and I was floating in a dream … [the music stops] That really sucks. That’s way too sappy.
MIKE: No, it’s alright, man.
PETE: Problem is, I listened to my inner Plato who tells me, “At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.” Unless of course the philosopher’s being ironic, because as far as I can tell, every guy is touched by love every day and very few are poets. Take you, my horndog, for instance …
