Harsh words of mercury
by Tom Bradley
[ fiction - november 02 ]
Pity the Japanese woman who thinks bleak thoughts every time silvery water presents itself to her eye. She's like a sparrow reminded of steel wool when it bellies into a cloud.
Sui-gin, "water silver": the imagistic way her native tongue denoted a certain substance. She'd long since forgotten the term for it in Russian (probably an English cognate). This heavy, shiny, rolling gunk was like no other liquid her kindergarten classmates had ever run between their fingers and fondled in palms with all the scrapes, vermin bites and unnamed sores of active, normal, marginally nourished Soviet childhood.
And among the pink hands were a few yellow ones, equally permeable. One pair belonged to an embassy brat with a large number of air miles already under her belt, a girl from an isle of bourgeois capitalism in the seas beyond Siberia. Her hands, in retrospect, were even scrawnier than those which would almost bungle the elementary school entrance examination a year later, back in Tokyo. Little Masako was a hyper-adrenalized nail biter even at that tender age, so there was no shortage of exposed quick and peeled-back hangnails on her microscopic fingertips. Plenty of holes and lesions for the juicy metal to seep into.
Their instructor, one Comrade Svidrigailov, was a gigantic snow-colored person, a failed applicant for admission to the Central Institute for Advanced Technology. She wanted her young charges never to be frustrated as she'd been. When not seated at the twelve-ton cast-iron spinet accompanying unsyncopated songs in minor keys (nothing like the dozens of happy-go-lucky Portuguese ditties Masako had memorized in her Brasilia nursery school), Comrade Svidrigailov concentrated on providing the children with an intensive introduction to the wonders of science. She called it her modest contribution to the arms race with America, then in full swing.
She'd already demonstrated the phenomenal effects of liquid nitrogen: a downright circus of rubber balls exploding like light bulbs, whole reams of construction paper shattering like so many panes of glass, nails being hammered deep into concrete with the help of roughly cylindrical food items (which reconstituted themselves in Masako's memory as overripe bananas, but had probably been large barrel-pickled turnips). The whole extravaganza had been a major success, eliciting the only response Comrade Svidrigailov had ever gotten from the natty scions of rich party muckamucks in the front row. A few eyelids had even stirred among the otherwise feral communards and hereditary muzhiks in the back.
Aberrant substances seeming to get through to young minds where the mere language of Pushkin failed, Comrade Svidrigailov decided to try a similar approach again. Hydrochloric acid was her dream, for it would lead into many edifying discussions of the human digestive system, not to mention the intimidation techniques of gangsters in capitalist countries. But sulfuric acid was hard to come by, unlike her second choice of substances. And her second choice, as far as she was aware, was a lot less hazardous to handle.
So she used a change for the worse in the already terrible weather as a heavy-handed segue to a new topic in the science unit. She brought in a couple of baby thermometers, the intrusive occidental style. Not forgetting to field and pitch the expected jokes about the glass knob on the business end (Bolsheviks seemed to find in anuses a much richer source of humor than do Japanese--or at least Japanese of the governing class), she broke them open and, placing a dab on each little desk, invited the children to "get familiar" with the contents.
Warming to the occasion with the first hoots of ecstasy from the front row, Comrade Svidrigailov climbed on top of her own desk and revealed the dazzling way the nectar under consideration splashed and splintered into a million eyeball-grazing globules when allowed to drop from a height.
"But watch out for the broken glass. It's dangerous."
Masako hesitated to handle the stuff. It seemed not to belong within her range of experience, this liquid that hefted like a solid. A native of relatively balmy Honshu Island, she was still sorting out the relationship between the hard slippery material that clogged Moscow's gutters and the burning clouds that belched from the omnipresent samovars. But she allowed herself to be peer-pressured into participating in this "science project" because she thought it might be a good way to do what she was always urged to do by her mom, a former stewardess with Air France, where they'd mis-nicknamed her "China Doll" and printed her name tags accordingly for the decade-plus she'd flown with them.
"Find what it is about yourself," Mom said, "that might incite confusion or disharmonious feelings, and smooth it over." Open yourself wide like a lotus blossom and smile as you assimilate whatever metals they feel like forcing into your body.
Father must not have listened to such admonitions. After putting in more than a month of overtime, when he didn't get home at his usual hour of eleven o'clock but stayed in the embassy all night, catching a cat nap here and there, he finally managed to finagle an evening off to pay an uninvited visit to the party cell of the school board and raise holy Buddhist Hell about toxins in the classroom. Mom fastened her fingernails into his shoulder and tried to hold him back, pleading, "Father! Don't cause a scene! Don't shame us by making a nuisance of yourself! We're guests in this country, as I keep telling your brain-damaged daughter!"
Mom turned out to be right - not about brain damage, but about being a nuisance. Reprisal for the disturbance was immediate. Daddy's daughter was accosted the very next day by older kids from the upstairs grammar school, red-scarved Young Pioneers and Junior Socialist Leaguers.
"Do your bones get any longer when the temperature rises in the summer?" they chortled around chronically swollen adenoids and tonsils. "You could use the extra height."
Of course, she had no idea what they were talking about. She was only able to interpret this treatment as bullying by squinting hard, and almost straight up, into their dazzling white faces, where she instinctively recognized broad sneers of sadistic glee.
They enticed her into the reading room and caused her to look at Chapter Three of their mimeographed Cyrillic primer, Exploitation of the Proletariat Throughout the World. The illustrations were pirated from an old Look Magazine expose, and featured people who looked something like the scattered few Mongolian types in her class. Gifted Masako was already able to muddle through the few English captions that hadn't been cropped by the commissars, and they said the people in the pictures were actually Japanese. It followed that their faces must also have resembled her own, even though she'd lately been feeling quite white among all the vast Slavs.
Before being shown the Look photos, Masako had harbored only the vaguest suspicions as to why everybody, especially Comrade Svidrigailov, expected her to associate exclusively with the strange kids from out east. Barely able to speak, those eyeless outcastes were bused, or rather trekked in all the way from Irkutsk for ideological purposes, and to preserve correct appearances in this model school. They tended not to be the most exciting playmates in Eurasia, as they spent a lot of time gazing wistfully up into the sunless sky, tears streaming down their round faces.
But now it finally dawned on Masako that she'd been encouraged to find a desk among their unwashed ranks solely in consideration of the physical features she shared with them. With the strange objectivity of the very young, she began dispassionately to question the beauty that Daddy, if not Mommy, always claimed to see in her face.
Her Caucasoid classmates' gold, ivory and lapis-lazuli kissers were the very models for Likka-chan, the Shinjuku high-fashion doll. Masako and every other Japanese girl owned and loved Likka-chan, built whole inner worlds around her, and laid the foundations of their psyches on her escape-and-rescue adventures, co-starring similarly melanin-unencumbered plastic princes, sold separately. Once Masako had idly wondered aloud, within Mother's earshot, whether black-haired, almond-eyed dolls were manufactured anywhere in the world, and had gotten nothing but a blank stare, a silent pause, then a bemused chuckle, followed gently by, "Don't try to tell jokes. Humor is a difficult trick even for a male. You certainly haven't the intelligence for it."
The oriental faces in the Look expose were among the few this tiny expatriate had ever seen depicted in something other than restaurant advertisements, and she examined them with interest, trying to learn about herself.
But all was not well with this particular bunch of Asians. They looked to be simple fishermen and their families, but were twisted and wadded like botched origami sculptures: limbs bent backward, eyeballs charlie-horsed, tongues lolled in square knots. Putting the best face on an unpleasant situation, as all good Nihonjin do, several of the less sorely afflicted in one photo tried to enjoy a hot bath together with their offspring. (The polar children hovering over Masako's shoulder giggled at least as much at the hairless nakedness as at the pain.) Through mimeographed steam, Masako's countrymen gazed with love into their sons' and daughters' unrecognizable, unrecognizing eyes.
In another picture she saw the administrative building of a nearby chemical plant, secure behind a living cordon of sumo-sized riot policemen. It was hard to believe that the blue-clad officers were born of the same stock as the withered and wasted freaks who swooned and waved protest signs among poison-vomiting culverts on the other side of the chain-link fence. And, though she didn't let on at the time, Masako was already able to read the Romanized name of her grandfather's corporation in the captions.
As if on cue, Comrade Svidrigailov chose that moment to stride into the lime-green reading room. At a glance she was able to see her proper course of action. The leaders deemed her unqualified to be placed in charge of the older pupils' nurture under normal circumstances; but this was a rare opportunity to exploit the special foreign student as a living, blushing object lesson.
"Have you looked into those people's eyes?" boomed Comrade Svidrigailov in her mannish voice. "The expression has been skewed not only by degeneration of the tissue underlying the eyelids, but by dissolution of the central nervous system. Their very senses were being perverted, therefore the universe itself was perverted, as far as they were able to ascertain. And their perceptions had just enough time to drive them insane with terror before the pure physical agony killed them. It would be very hard, my children, to imagine a more unpleasant way to leave this earth."
(A pause to wink broadly at the meanest sixth-grade boys, the sharp dressing sophisticates with well connected fathers, to whose French-wine-and-American-movie parties this social-climbing educator cherished faint hopes of being invited.)
"A certain young lady's family," continued Comrade Svidrigailov, "under the kind auspices of Japan's mighty Chisso Corporation, enriched those poor fish-workers' water with plenty of the runny silver which my kindergartners just studied. And, as you can see, it did not have the best effect on their general level of health, for they put it in their mouths, not just their hands. You didn't take a sip, did you, Comrade Masako?"
Titters were heard from a small mob gathering in the reading room. Comrade Svidrigailov possessed the emotional maturity of the least grown-up of them, but was better informed. So when she instigated the taunting, she was able to bring a more or less adult sting to it.
"Now I'm not saying there's any definite scientific connection. But the owners and operators of the offending plant, being rich enough to consume more than their fair share of the local catch, might develop a resistance to the disease. And you know there's a genetic component to class. Lenin said so. And capitalist exploiters do tend to produce a certain type of offspring..."
"Resistance?" snickered Anna Belov, whose little sister Masako had always fancied to be a borderline friend. "That must be why this Nip's face is only slightly lopsided, like the American WC Fields'."
"Yes," chimed in another behemoth kid. "She talks out of one side. A natural water carrier for a basketball team. She can pass on contraband instructions from the coach."
"Or she could be one of those interpreters that cower and mumble at the Jap emperor's elbow all day long."
"She's born for it."
"Interpreter, nothing. She acts like a princess herself."
"What about the slitty eyes? Did the thermometer juice cause that affliction?"
"They're all cursed with such eyes."
"The stuff must palsy the hands as well. That's why she's got such putrid handwriting."
"And, please don't forget, its atomic number is 200.59," Comrade Svidrigailov reminded everybody, deftly steering the discourse back onto the scientific track now that political obligations had been fulfilled.
Branded the justifiably tormentable spawn of black-class bourgeois reactionaries, Masako came home crying daily over the course of an entire semester. She was politely ignored until she started to disturb the downstairs neighbors' rest with screaming nightmares about her arms bending backward at the elbows and shattering like thermometers.
"Amend your ways," said Mom, finally, bedside, in a relatively soothing tone. It was deep night in their cavernous Moscow flat. Daddy was still at work, and Masako had just turned in a contemptible performance on the times-thirteen multiplication table. "You must work hard to learn what it is about yourself that provokes such discord among your coevals," said Mom. "And correct it promptly before any more disharmony results from this weakness of yours, whatever it may be."
At that, the little girl's weeping got louder, and Mother continued her comments, unperturbed.
"There, there. I know it's hard to make yourself into a good citizen. But we must learn to put the best face on everything. Every experience has a silver sheen to it, if you've been born with enough basic intelligence to peer closely around the edges. We must fix on the good side. Your pain today will make you a better member of society tomorrow."
Mother shifted onto the other buttock and said, in a bedtime-story voice, "Once, when I was a stewardess, I allowed myself to be caught unawares by a pocket of clear-air turbulence and popped an upper vertebra on the cabin ceiling, starboard, aft. I was forced to remain supine for the remainder of the flight, not only depriving my fellow crew members of my help, but taking up precious space on the galley floor. And do you know what I did?"
Sleepy Masako didn't leap to reply, so Mom put the question again, more firmly--but first asking the child, rhetorically, of course, whether she'd been born with no eardrums as well as no penis and no cerebral cortex.
"What did you do?" asked Masako.
"Well, I'll tell you. The second I got out of the hospital - even though my co-workers were all foreigners and therefore congenitally incapable of forming even a rudimentary idea of what I was doing - I removed my shoes and kowtowed to them ten times in the Air France stewardesses' central lounge, five-kilo neck brace and all."
"Was that in wonderful, beautiful Paris?"
"Not that it matters, but yes. Shall we review our Periodic Table of Elements now? What comes right after gold?"
"In our family?" asked Masako, and got a prompt good-night slap in return.
From that point on, the child began asking herself what good it would do to amend her ways when her sin was inherited, according not only to her teacher, but to the mean boys who got her alone in the stairwell and teased her in a dialect she comprehended only imperfectly.
"Your whole family," they said, "lives on the flesh of fishermen scooped dead from the silver sludge of Minamata Bay."
Little Masako began to weep into her pillow every night, more fiercely, in anger now as well as heartbreak. She only wanted to be friends with people, and the big kids were inciting even the token Uzbeks to shun her.
"That's just because they think you're an egghead," explained Dad one Sunday afternoon while she scrubbed his back. It was just the two of them awash in the white man-sized bathtub, an unprecedented treat, for her sisters were taking naps. He was speaking softly so his voice wouldn't bounce off the tile walls and into the kitchen. It would be better if Mom didn't hear him putting immodest sentiments inside her head.
"It's just because you can read two and a half languages already in kindergarten, and it's plain to see that you're going to learn more and more. Even your ridiculous teacher feels inadequate in front of you. That's the real reason everybody's so mean. The Minamata matter is just a smoke screen, a false charge trumped up by communists ashamed of their own mediocrity."
He looked up at the steamy light fixture, which might very well have been bugged, and added, in a much louder voice, "Petty envy is the crippling curse of the Marxist dispensation!"
* * * *
But, a year later, back home in Nippon, "the Minamata matter" was exactly what a certain six-year-old would think she saw, caked and bursting from the hollows of a heat-split skeleton at a hillside crematorium. It was a special afternoon, when she was allowed to publicly display her dinner-table skills for the first time.
Masako had been pressed to early chopstick mastery by - who else? Mom believed, along with many of her compatriots, that such digital discipline, reinforced by its intimate connection with sustenance, somehow enhanced one's mathematical aptitude.
"Eating our rice with a pair of hashi from childhood on," explained Mom, "loosens up our built-in abacus. What do I mean by such a cryptic remark? Well, I'll tell you. We Nihonjin, in ancient times, perfected the secret art of using our fingers in calculating. Hence the discrepancy in math scores between our high school enrollees and the spoon-wielding barbarians on the far side of the Pacific. Here, fool, let me show you."
She grabbed Masako's hand and commenced dislocating digits.
"Thumb into the palm is one, followed by the index, two, and so on and so forth, until all four fingers have cloaked the thumb in an attitude unsuited for fist fighting."
(Later, as a student in Boston, Masako would learn that the number-five position was the male homosexual salute. It had seemed significant at the time, but she'd meanwhile forgotten how.)
In the event, Masako was able to hone these exquisite skills to the point where she was allowed to help her extended family pick through the few chunks of an unmarried old relative which had survived the consecrated incinerator - all according to the venerable traditions of her ancestral Buddhist sect.
Mother explained that, macabre as this ritual would seem to foreigners, the burnt bone-picking served a definite theological purpose in certain segments of Japanese society. It was a kind of inchoate Eucharist for closet ancestor-worshippers, a tip of the Buddhist hat to Nihonjin who might otherwise be disinclined to profess a foreign faith imported third-hand from the Asian mainland.
Masako's Daddy had given her a brand-new kid-sized black sequined clutch purse to go with the rest of her mourning outfit. To impress Mom with how well she was able to plan ahead and equip herself in advance, she had tucked into that purse her pretty new Hello Kitty chopsticks with the real moving eyes.
But Mom only wound up ridiculing her (in a whisper, of course) because, as anybody but a mongoloid cretin would know, crematoria provide their own chopsticks for the special task, cooking size, green and white ivory, to be left sticking upright among the beloved's remains in exactly the position which one was never, ever to leave one's regular hashi sticking in rice, because of the morbid (read unlucky) associations.
"I'm certain Great Auntie wouldn't appreciate being culled from this ash trough and placed into the memorial urn by cartoon character hashi," sneered Mom as they knelt with cousins and grannies around the sirloin-fragrant pit.
She paused to critically appraise her daughter's dishwashing job, then added, in a dour tone, "Especially not with a solidified grain of rice adhering to the left one. In any case, that chunk's too big to retrieve with chopsticks. Even if you were a sturdy boy and the pride of our household, you wouldn't have the finger muscles to do it. Nobody expects you to even try. It's foolish, as well as immodest and disruptive to the social order, for a dull girl like you to be such an overachiever. Content yourself with this wrist bone - and what's the New Latin term for it?"
In the vestibule of the Buddhist funeral parlor, Masako had watched her dutiful dad bop his fine mahogany-brown forehead on the floor at the feet of each well-wisher and condolence deliverer, including some uninvited ones: fishermen from the newly condemned bay - perfectly well-behaved, as their presence alone was disruption enough.
Shadow-lurking Minamata Grampa, having just lost a sister to more natural causes than they'd lost theirs, addressed a beautiful young monk in a whisper audible clear across the reception area, even over the roaring of the stoked furnace. He grumblingly described the unwashed intruders as "cheeky opportunists whose own genes can't produce worthy heirs, so they invent a scandal, cast aspersions on our pristine effluents, and try to tap the corporation for settlements - less euphemistically known as blood money - to finance them as they mop up after their deformed children. Well, they won't see a single aluminum yen from it! Not in my lifetime, by God!"
"I imagine not in theirs, either," murmured the monk as he surveyed the quaking, gasping interlopers.
At their twisted feet, meanwhile, Daddy kowtowed especially hard on the concrete, as if to drown out Grampy's unrepentant words, his skull sounding full of thickish fluid and about to burst like a shrunk-wrapped honeydew. And that was the first time Masako saw her loving Father's face crumple, his character, by all visible indications, sink into temporary but total disarray.
It was a measure of how little this sort of thing is talked about in polite Japanese society that she had to wait until she entered junior high school and enrolled in an AP biology course to find out that infection with the "Minamata matter" wasn't really hereditary at all. And even then she figured it out for herself, using an American textbook her father had brought home from the US Consulate library. Masako's biology teacher hadn't enough common scientific sense even to understand the question, and couldn't imagine why he should: nothing like it was scheduled to appear on any college entrance exams.
Speaking of such all-important examinations, already at the age of six Masako had been drilled by Mom in anatomy and several other morally unambiguous disciplines whose essences could be reduced to basic response conditioners, such as systems of flash cards. Nevertheless, with the enormous amounts of other information that had been compacted between the walls of her skull since that afternoon at the hillside ovens, Masako could not be sure that she'd correctly identified (had she identified it out loud?) a large, blackened, slightly greasy object as a femur.
Great Auntie's thigh bone - which, she hoped, smelled like an outhouse only in retrospect - had split wide open in the flames, and little Masako had seen, or thought she'd seen, oozing from where the barbecued marrow should've oozed, a certain liquescent substance, that terrible sauce, the curse of her clan.
The roasted marrow had seemed silvery, and she couldn't help thinking of the etymology of sui-gin. Her skeleton loaded with such gunk, Great Auntie would've indeed gotten taller, which is to say, better, worthier of love, had she survived into summer.
