The Dead Are More Visible Read online

  Also by Steven Heighton

  POETRY

  Stalin’s Carnival

  Foreign Ghosts

  The Ecstasy of Skeptics

  The Address Book

  Patient Frame

  FICTION

  Flight Paths of the Emperor

  On earth as it is

  The Shadow Boxer

  Afterlands

  Every Lost Country

  ESSAYS

  The Admen Move on Lhasa

  Workbook: memos & dispatches on writing

  ANTHOLOGIES

  A Discord of Flags: Canadian Poets Write About the Gulf War

  (1991: with Peter Ormshaw & Michael Redhill)

  Musings: An Anthology of Greek-Canadian Literature

  (2004: with main editor Tess Fragoulis, and Helen Tsiriotakis)

  CHAPBOOKS/LETTERPRESS

  Paper Lanterns: 25 Postcards from Asia

  The Stages of J. Gordon Whitehead

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2012 Steven Heighton

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2012 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Heighton, Steven

  The dead are more visible / Steven Heighton.

  Short stories.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36668-9

  I. Title.

  PS8565.E451D42 2012 c813’.54 c2011-907795-7

  v3.1

  For my sister, Pelly Heighton,

  and my nieces: Tarah, Christine, and Julia

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Those Who Would Be More

  A Right Like Yours

  Shared Room on Union

  OutTrip

  The Dead Are More Visible

  Noughts & Crosses

  Fireman’s Carry

  Heart & Arrow

  Journeymen

  Nearing the Sea, Superior

  Swallow

  Notes & Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  [ THOSE WHO WOULD BE MORE ]

  Now and then, the man and his boss discuss the weather

  Principal Eguchi ordered scotch instead of beer. Scotch for both of us. We were meeting in Brain Noodle, as we did every week after the Saturday-afternoon cram class I’d been teaching for her since my arrival in Japan ten months before. In public like this, she was always formal with me, but today she was practically rigid and her English had developed a limp.

  “You’ve promoted us from beer to scotch,” I said.

  “I have—pardon? Promoted you?”

  I knew that Brain Noodle’s manager and chefs and wait staff all considered Principal Eguchi a troubling phenomenon—a tall, polished woman who owned her own business and drank quantities of beer in public. And now scotch. She was not sipping.

  “A manner of speaking,” I said, waiting for her to slip out her pocket dictionary and demand details. I’d never had a student in Eguchi’s school as meticulous about learning English as Eguchi herself, as if she had founded her American-English school simply as a pretext to improve her own grasp of the language. Officially we met each Saturday to discuss the students and any problems that might have come up during the week, but largely these meetings—like our other encounters—were tutorials for her. I didn’t mind. My salary was good, Eguchi was intriguing on a number of counts, and the food at Brain Noodle was superb.

  Today the dictionary remained in her pearl handbag, though she did snap the bag open to take out her matte silver compact. She wore as much makeup as any woman I’d ever met. It was applied kabuki-style and, in times of stress, fine-tuned in public. She was a good-looking woman and I never saw the point of this hyperbolic rigour, but of course I said nothing.

  “Is everything all right, Ms. Eguchi?”

  “Would you care for another Suntory!”

  “Should we order first?”

  She seemed confused. Her eyes were always evasive—she tended to focus on my mouth when I spoke, which usually made me light a cigarette or reach for the toothpicks sheaved in shot glasses along the sushi bar—but today her eyes could find nowhere to land.

  “Uh, Ms. Eguchi …”

  “Some of the parents are compliant,” she said in a rush, finally meeting my gaze.

  “Compliant? You mean—in sending us their children?”

  “They say the children are so happy in the juku.”

  “Oh, oh, you mean ‘compliment.’ As in—”

  “Too happy, the children. Too much play, not enough work. These parents are …”

  I sat back. “Oh. These are complaints.”

  “Several complaints. More than several. How many is several, Sensei? In English?”

  “Well … I guess around three or four.”

  “Ah. How many is many?”

  “There’ve been many complaints?”

  “They say that recess is half the class, Sensei! That means, two hours or more.”

  I could only nod.

  “And, you refuse to assign the housework.”

  “Four hours seems like a pretty long time to keep three-and four-year-olds at a desk. On a Saturday.”

  “You have said this before, Sensei. And I have said: Short recess, no problem. But not like this.”

  “Some of the children aren’t even three yet!” Several. Many.

  “Their parents are erecting to send them here. You are paid to teach them.”

  I thought of how some of the smaller pupils couldn’t even understand the simple Japanese I had to use to give instructions. I’d tried before, diplomatically, to convey my feelings about the juku to Eguchi; she’d simply told me that Westerners—especially of my generation—could never hope to understand Japan.

  “Perhaps I feel I have not given you enough time off,” she said, inscrutably.

  “Have you told these parents that we learn English during the recess?”

  “But how, Sensei?”

  “Like I said before. I play games with them. They learn to count. They learn verbs.”

  “English for playing the game is not what the parents want to learn for them.”

  I had to look away. I signalled the waiter for two more scotches.

  “All right. I can try shortening the recesses.”

  “Thank you, Sensei. But …”

  “But only by so much.”

  “But I have promised these parents, Sensei!”

  She was looking at me in a kind of agony. I had seen this before. She was imploring me to take her meaning so that she would not be obliged to finish her sentence, to strip matters to the root. I decided not to help out. I finally sensed what was going on.

  “I have promised to give shrift to their compliance, Sensei. I am very sorry. So sorry.” The scotches arrived. The waiter glanced at us sidelong. I picked up my scotch and drank it off, then stood, eyes stinging.

  “I
gather you mean that I’m fired.”

  “No!” she said, aghast. “Only that I must replace you at once!”

  ——

  Each day, the child brings to the teacher an apple

  A month into my stay in Japan I began to notice oddities in the primer I had been using to teach myself the language. I’d bought it in a used bookshop on a cul-de-sac in downtown Tōkyō. It was close enough to the Ara River that you could smell the water—sour, swampy—as you emerged from the cramped interior. The shop was about fifty feet deep and maybe six feet across—four feet if you deducted the width of the high shelves on either wall. I suppose at one time the space had been no more than an alley between buildings that would have sprouted from the ruins left by the American air raids of ’44 and ’45. I was in a hurry (on my way to meet Principal Eguchi for the first time: job interview) and didn’t spend long comparing the different primers that crammed a good three feet of shelf space. I chose one of the less foxed and fretworn paperbacks: Japanese for the Beginners and Those Who Would Be More. The authors shown in the discoloured photo on the back—bespectacled, beaming under a cotton-candy froth of flowering cherry trees—were professors in Kyōto, a pair of elderly and venerable linguists. The book had been published in 1969. I supposed they would be dead by now. It cost just a hundred yen.

  The vocabulary for lesson 1 was unsurprising: thank you, pencil, dog, floor, home, why, when, this, that, him, her, good night and so on. It was when I started memorizing the words for the next lesson that I noticed an oddness of tone and trajectory. This was a few weeks later, when my honeymoon with the new was waning, giving place to spells of fatigue, commuter claustrophobia, sensory saturation—all the usual markers of culture shock. Among the cats, the cars, the uncles and aunts, houses, doors, windows and other basic vocabulary, the word shitai appeared: “corpse.” The authors, Drs. Sato and Okubo, then perkily urged me to translate a number of Japanese sentences into English, including My mother’s pencil is on the table, When Father comes home, he sees the good dog, and When I looked through the window, there was a corpse on the floor.

  I flipped to the appendix to check my translations. All correct. Then, after a dozen or so other standard phrases, this: My uncle says that there are some corpses in that house. Bolder now, I tinkered with the sentence and, seizing some lyric license, settled on: In my uncle’s house are many corpses. It went on like that. The oddness was diverting enough, but more than once, trying to study while packed among standing, dozing salary-men on trains that were like human trash-compactors, I glanced up and looked around, spooked, like a man reading a tepid letter that swerves mysteriously into threatening tones.

  In my second month I moved a backpackful of worldly goods into a midget flat not far from the bookshop and the river. I spent little time there. I ate in noodle shops or sat in the park with a book when I wasn’t working, commuting. The flat never began to look lived in. Its vacant echoing never ceased—that audible sign that a tenancy has taken root. I was grappling now with lesson 3, which focused on the use of the past tense and introduced new vocabulary. The Second World War, or some discreetly unnamed facsimile, made its first appearance. I wasn’t completely surprised. Among the new words that I committed to memory were rifle, battle, ruin, bomb.

  My aunt stayed with us here for dinner last night.

  The sun was bright that day and the wind was warm.

  My uncle has a rifle that he found after the battle.

  A rifle is no match for a bomb.

  ——

  I will, I shall, I am going to return

  In my last lesson that Saturday, before Eguchi fired me, I’d introduced my students to the future tense in English. It seemed important that the toddlers in the class become acquainted with its nuances. As for the four-, five-, and six-year-olds, the concept would be novel for them as well, since there is no actual future tense in Japanese. Tomorrow I go to the store. Next week I finish my studies. Before long I go home to Canada. That was futurity, Japanese-style—simple, logical. By the end of the lesson, and not for the first time, I felt frustrated, mildly ashamed of my mother tongue with all its traps and catches, countless irregularities, fine print, provisos, codicils … If Japanese had a clear, military order and concision, English resembled a sprawling civilian bureaucracy. Hard to get a definite answer. Harder to find your way around. Week by week, just as Eguchi alleged, I was extending the children’s recess.

  Japanese may have been the more logical tongue, but months into my study of it I was still not fluent; when I gave the children instructions in Japanese they would titter and shout out delighted corrections. My best student, Yukon, would approach me at recess or after the class to footnote these corrections with the mild and beguiling pedantry of a six-year-old happily instructing an elder. Yukon was the “class name” her mother had asked Eguchi to have me use when addressing the girl. I could see the word’s attraction from the mother’s point of view—it was Canadian, yet in sound it was close to several Japanese given names, and easy to say. All sixteen children had been assigned class names, either by their parents (Clint, Rocky, ABBA, Milk Shake, Waylon, The Phantom, Marvin, Miami, Mickey Rourke) or by Eguchi, who favoured the sort of name she found in the chunky Victorian classics she was grinding through to improve her English: Dorothea, Clelia, Silas, Clement, Edmund, and—for two-and-a-half-year-old Toshiko Watanabe, who, you could tell from her lumpy form and cowpoke wobble, was still in diapers—George.

  Once the controlled chaos of recess was at its peak, Yukon would often withdraw from the action and skip over to join me by the chain-link fence that separated the schoolyard from a cool, high, sound-swallowing oasis of bamboo, an exhaling green jungle in the heart of Tōkyō. I would be smoking while watching the kids (this was the late eighties, and Japan), seeing how their games would permutate, blind man’s bluff into tag, tag into hide-and-seek, intrigued by the brisk negotiations that momentarily broke the flow of play—though the flow, in fact, never really broke, not until I stopped it and herded the class back inside. There was something atomic, or quantum, in this constant, shifting action and repatterning, as if the players were linked so closely to a primal source of energy and motion that they would naturally re-enact it whenever conditions allowed.

  Yukon would take my free hand and look up at me in her stern manner, her brow crimped hard under the pageboy bangs, lips clumped together as if ready to scold. Her skin was coppery dark. She spoke with a slow, dignified formality—possibly a personal style, but more likely her way of making sure I got the Japanese.

  Sensei, chotto ii kangae ga aru yo … “Sensei, I have a little idea. It might help you.”

  “Is my Japanese improving, do you think?” I would always ask, flicking down my cigarette and swivelling my shoe on the butt.

  “It certainly is, Sensei! However, you still talk like a woman.”

  “I know. My verb endings. I know I have to be less polite.”

  “And what did you have for your snack today, Sensei?”

  A quarter pack of Camels, I thought, but I told her, “A muffin and milk.” Often at this point I’d have to break off to holler at one or more of the boys. It might be Clement or The Phantom hunkered down on the head of a smaller child like Rocky—a portly, bespectacled five-year-old who wore a tie and looked like a miniature banker—or maybe it was Mickey Rourke, whose name none of the kids could begin to pronounce, trying to wedge Dorothea into the tiny window of the plastic playhouse. “Damé yo!” I would call and stride over, gathering George up in my arms to get her clear of the scrimmage, then bringing her back to the fence and holding her, hoping she would again make it through the afternoon without needing a change.

  “Tell me, Sensei, do you have all these games at home in America?”

  “Canada. Yes, we have versions of them.”

  “Please demonstrate.” This she would say with commanding gravity, and often I would, though one time instead I told her the story of how, in Mexico some years before, I and the wom
an I was with and some other travellers, one of whom had children, started a game of blind man’s bluff in the plaza of Oaxaca City. Local children began to gather. We thought it was because of the novelty of seeing adults at play, and gringo adults at that, but no, it was curiosity about the game itself. When one of our number, fluent in Spanish, asked if they wanted to join in, they said that they would like to but didn’t know the rules, had never seen the game before. Play, we urged, and they did join in, and before long they had taken over, as we adults and two children backed out one by one, winded and laughing. We left them there, playing in the lamplight in the darkening plaza under ancient Montezuma cypresses while their parents looked on, visibly tickled. And now (I told Yukon) what I wonder is this: has their game spread outward from that plaza, all through the state of Oaxaca, maybe across the mountains and into the next state—maybe throughout the country? All Latin America? Wouldn’t that be something?

  Yukon, still holding my hand, gravely watched her surging schoolmates. She seemed to be giving my story consideration.

  “Can you stay and keep teaching us, Sensei?”

  George had dozed off, her head in the crook of my neck, a line of yellow drool snailing down my collar and onto the tie Eguchi insisted I wear.

  Yukon added, “Gaijin sensei are forever leaving.”

  “I think I will go home for Christmas,” I said. “I’ve been away from home for a few years. Eight years now. Imagine not seeing, say, your parents for that long.”

  “I hardly ever see my father,” Yukon said. “I do see his bathrobe. It’s white!” Long pause. “If I might ask, will you see your father at Christmas?”

  “Well, actually, no.” I released her small, cool hand and felt my shirt pocket for my cigarettes, then remembered George on my shoulder. I took Yukon’s hand again and explained that my parents had passed away some time ago.

  “I used to have two grandfathers,” she said after a moment, then smiled.

  “I should be back after Christmas, though.”

  “Perhaps blind man’s bluff came to Japan from Mexico,” she said with force.

  I nodded and made a thoughtful face; I saw no reason to quash the fantasy. It wasn’t impossible, after all. And it was good to be reminded that if reprehensible things could spread, spilling outward from their origin to stain the world, better things might spread as well.