“Won’t that be too much for him?” Mari clutched at Takeo, cocooned in a pure-white blanket.
“He’s been cooped up long enough in here. Isn’t there a park or something where you can go for half an hour?”
Lloyd unhinged the collapsed stroller and expanded it like an accordion. “I know exactly where we can take him.”
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden felt comfortable to Mas even though he had never been there before. The bare wisteria trees twisted around the wood-framed archways like frayed rope, their branches bent like arthritic fingers. But they held the promise of what was to come in a few months. L.A., on the other hand, barely showed any signs of seasons. Sure, every spring the lavender blooms of the jacaranda trees popped open, spreading sap and petals on luxury cars, to their owners’ dismay. Around the same time, the flowers of the long-stemmed agapanthus plants exploded like white and purple hanabi, fireworks, in freeze-frame. But perhaps the biggest seasonal rite of passage was the summer forest fires eating dried-up hills surrounding Los Angeles. Mas remembered one time a fellow gardener’s truck came close to becoming molten metal when flames jumped the Glendale Freeway in search of more dead brush. That summer, flakes of ash like crushed dried seaweed covered Mas’s driveway and got stuck in the dandelion heads on his lawn. And everywhere, there was the scent of smoke.
No fragrance, either good or bad, was coming out of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden this early in spring here. They passed the herb garden, and Mas noticed a cement planter with a sign, MUGWORT. Mugwort was used to make moxa, cigar-shaped sticks that Japanese used to burn against their skin to relieve their aches and pains. But instead of the leafy plant, there was only a blanket of brown pine needles and weeds underneath the plant’s name.
Down the path was the familiar construction of a Japanese-style fence, simple planks of wood assembled without any signs of nails. And then, as if the fence slid across to make way for the view, Mas walked into the world of Takeo Shiota. Beyond the seven-foot stone lantern and an open wooden house along the kokoro -shaped pond was the torii gate, bright persimmon orange and wading in the green water. Of course, it wasn’t as grand as the gateway Mas remembered at Miyajima. The New York version looked like an oversized toy, yet it still made its impact. Mas stood still, his hands balled up inside his pockets. He remembered going to Miyajima on a train and then a boat with his mother and his two oldest brothers one time when he was seven. The fog had first hidden the tree trunk posts of the torii, and then, like a curtain, the mist lifted. Had a giant placed the torii there in the water? he had asked his mother. “ Bakatare, baka, ” his brothers spit out, spinning their black school caps on the ends of their fingers. His mother said nothing, but Mas could feel her hand faintly squeezing his shoulder.
“Not bad, huh, Arai- san?” Lloyd said. He then pointed to the rectangular sign at the top of the gate and read the Japanese characters. “ DAI-MYO-JIN. Great bright God. Enlightenment, right?”
Mas shrugged his shoulders. Here again, the sign, like the message left by Kazzy’s father on the bottom of the concrete pond, was hard to understand. But what Mas could appreciate was the sweeping arch of the top crossbar and the straight line of the bottom bar right underneath it. The arch seemed to lift the whole gate out of the water, clearly transporting people to another place and time.
“What happen to this Shiota?” Mas had never heard of the landscaper before he stepped foot in New York.
“Died in an internment camp. Actually, I haven’t been able to verify his exact year of death. Some say 1943, but his relatives back in Japan think it’s 1946. But either way, he didn’t spend his last days in New York.”
“No camp ova here, desho?”
“Yeah, the Nisei in New York were safe, but some of the Issei pioneers, even diplomats, were taken away. There were these State Department internment hotels, I guess you can call them. One was in North Carolina, where I think Shiota might have been.”
Mas frowned. A man who created this would be viewed as a threat? Didn’t make sense.
“He even had a hakujin wife. But no kids. That’s probably why no one knows anything about him. She sent her in-laws care packages after the war, but we don’t really know what happened to her later in life, either.”
As Mari bent over the stroller, Mas and Lloyd made their way to the wooden house by the pond. It reminded Mas of a similar structure in a botanical garden not far from his house in Altadena. They sat on a bench, their faces shaded by the extended roof. Next to them were a couple of hakujin women in nuns’ habits who spoke softly in a language Mas couldn’t make out.
There had been one thing that Mas had wanted to ask of Lloyd. “Whyzu you a gardener in the first place?” he finally asked.
“Probably the same reason why you are. I love plants, being outdoors.”
Yeah, yeah, thought Mas. That’s what the hakujin always thought. “But youzu write, desho? A type of poet, datsu what Mari said one time.”
Lloyd laughed. “That was a long time ago. I was an English major at Columbia. I considered teaching English, but got hooked on horticulture instead. My PhD is on hold right now, but I hope to go back to it.”
It was easy to lose sight of your first love, your first passion. Mas had wanted to become an engineer in Hiroshima, but over time he’d had to successively scale back his dreams. “I planned on buyin’ nursery,” he told Lloyd, “by the beach. Deal fell through, and besides, Mari and Chizuko make a big, big fuss. Don’t wanna move away from friends.”
“So you sacrificed for your family?”
Mas never thought about it quite that way. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe.”
Lloyd jutted out his jaw and ran his fingers through his oily, thin hair. “Do you think the man in the Impala was really out to get you? I mean, maybe Tug got into his lane accidentally, you know. A type of road rage.”
“Hard to say,” Mas said. But Tug was convinced that they had been followed. And something else was kusai, stinky. “Youzu ever meet dis Anna Grady?” Mas asked.
“Yes, an attractive woman. But then, Kazzy always went for the pretty ones.”
It made sense to Mas that Kazzy would have been consumed by beauty. Based on the last outfit he wore alive, the shoes and the suit, he seemed like a man who needed to be surrounded or touched by pretty things. Mas was hardly tempted by good-looking packages. It was like the Japanese folktale of the Tongue-Cut Sparrow: A greedy old lady, who had savagely clipped off the tongue of a wayward sparrow, forced her way into the Sparrow World. Her kind husband, a former traveler to the Sparrow World, had brought home a great treasure in a small box. Like her husband, the old woman was offered a choice between a small or a large gift. The woman chose the larger, only to discover that the box was full of demons. In Mas’s experience, the same could hold true for beautiful women.
“Why he callsu it quits wiz her?”
“You know, that’s a good question.” Lloyd balanced his right ankle on his left knee. “It could be because he found out he was sick. Did you get a chance to read the other pages in the journal?”
Mas shook his head. After all the excitement from yesterday, reading about buying meat and cleaning house was the last thing that Mas wanted to do.
As they sat in front of the green pond, koi splattered with bright-orange, white, and black markings whipped their fins and tails toward the water’s surface. Kissing the air with the circles of their mouths, they begged for food. But Mas wasn’t about to stick a nickel in a machine that offered brown food pellets instead of gum balls. He’d leave that for lovers and children, people who thought nothing of wasting money for a bit of happiness.