Plum Rains Read online

  Here in their own living room, a half hour had already passed and Sayoko was still watching. She leaned forward, eyes fixed on the technician’s hands as he closed flaps and ran a finger over seams that became invisible at his touch.

  Angelica asked, “Does it have a name?”

  “It names itself,” the technician said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Only after it learns enough.”

  “Maybe it should learn enough before it’s delivered.”

  “No,” he said. “It learns from its new owner. That’s the only way.”

  There were always things to do: a digital health diary for Sayoko; prescriptions to be ordered and new suppliers to be found—harder and harder given how rare it was for people to take old-fashioned pills anymore when customized methods for releasing medication and instantly monitoring its effects were available. A handyman needed to be called about installing a better handrail in the bathroom. The week’s meals had to be planned with consideration given to Sayoko’s changing preferences as her appetite improved.

  Laundry. Shopping. A quick bathroom floor mop-up. Sayoko was mostly independent in her toileting, but she was not always neat, who would be at that age? Angelica helped her with a shower-seat sponge bath in the morning and evening while the family’s traditional deep tub remained lidded and often unused, except by Itou-san when he was home.

  On top of it all, Angelica had her own daily language studies: new Japanese kanji to be memorized every day and additional ones to review in time for the next language exam.

  Even while you waited for the last exam’s results, there were new updates being issued, another exam already scheduled, online forums in which workers from Indonesia and the Philippines guessed which medical kanji would be dropped or added. The conspiracy-minded commenters said that the foreign worker system was designed to fail. There was no reason a nurse or physical therapist should need to know vocabulary that no Japanese person used in daily life or to read kanji that would stump even a native-born medical professional.

  If Angelica still had nursing friends in Tokyo, and free time, they’d sit picnicking and drinking beer, complaining about the language tests that were surely meant to reduce the number of foreign workers, even while Japan’s aging population paradoxically required more and more outside assistance. But she didn’t have the heart to make new friends, to replace the ones who had chosen to return or had been forced to leave. She could not afford the luxury of scrolling through the online forums, adding her voice to those who protest. She barely had the time to learn new kanji and to review the ones already fading, like puddles drying in the tropical warmth of a Cebuano sun.

  To think there had been afternoons, on Cebu, when she had sat in the park at lunch break, on a square of cardboard, reading comic books—the Filipino kind, not manga, the kind Junichi talked about ceaselessly thanks to his job promoting pop culture at the same Ministry that employed Itou-san. The Filipino comics were romance novels and chronicles of immigrant survival, rendered graphically not because it was cool, but because so many of her fellow Pinoys barely knew how to read. By their standards, Angelica’s first month’s nursing salary in Cebu—$335—was a fortune. Now she earned six times that amount and it still wasn’t enough. Every Filipino had a cousin abroad who said the same thing: it’s nearly impossible to get off-island without borrowing, the debt collectors are vicious, the cost of living abroad is so high, there are fees, the government takes, you think it’s so easy, you try. And any Filipino who could, did.

  Datu had gone for the big payoff. First there was a small signing bonus. It wasn’t enough to cover the cost of a visa, health paperwork, and upfront travel, but a much heftier bonus would be paid once he’d lasted two years on the job.

  For months after he left, she heard only good reports. He had his own studio apartment in the BZ, without a roommate. It was ten times better than Dubai. It was a hundred times better than Shenzhen. She tried not to question and to simply feel happy that he was happy, living in the moment, enjoying the benefits: the steak and Atlantic salmon dinners, the indoor wave pools and golf courses, and all those perks, why? Everyone knew why. Because the job was in a contamination zone, a place both ruined and made suddenly more profitable by chance.

  Vast populations of wildlife had been wiped out. Residents had been evacuated. Miners and support service employees had moved in at considerable risk to their own health, as even the normally duplicitous corporations admitted. Working in the new Burned Zone wasn’t a death sentence, as far as people knew this early in the project’s development. But it was a dangerous gamble.

  By this point in the afternoon, Sayoko was usually ready for tea and some bean-paste-filled confection or a bowl of miso, but when Angelica offered, Sayoko waved her off.

  Angelica, aware of the extra roll of flab that had been gathering around her own four-foot-nine-inch frame, decided to put off a snack for the moment as well. She didn’t feel comfortable leaving the technician unattended, not before he had finished his task and explained the unit’s purpose. So they would all spend the next half hour together, wordlessly waiting. Fine with her. It was the closest thing to a break she’d had all day.

  Thoughts of Datu sent her back to her phone, which she discreetly checked from her position in an old chair near the balcony door. It wasn’t like him to be out of touch for so long. Even with her message problem, she should at least see whether he had tried to contact her. A few new messages had scrolled in from Junichi, and as with the earlier ones, she could see the sender and the first words of preview text: Sorry, I had . . . No doubt an explanation for why he’d stood her up at lunch, the least of her worries. But from her brother: nothing.

  She tried sending a text. To Junichi she wrote: Phone problems today. Strange. Tell me if you get this? It seemed to go through but she wouldn’t be sure until she received a reply.

  It occurred to Angelica now to check outgoing messages, to see if these, too, had failed to send or had become suddenly invisible.

  Unlike the newest incoming ones, the outgoing ones were at least fully accessible. Her last to Datu had been a reminder to watch for notices about their joint land title request. Word was, things on Cebu were finally picking up, the thirty year backlog finally getting sorted, as things sometimes did when an up-and-coming political party wanted support. Datu was terrible about paperwork, and yet because he was the designated head of household—the only real survivor, as far as the Philippine government was concerned—she couldn’t be sure she would receive notice, no matter how many times she added her name to the countless legal forms.

  Another Filipina at her last job had once pressed Angelica on this point, reminding her that if Datu died prematurely, Angelica’s name and documentation might carry little official weight.

  A terrible thought. The sort of thing only a person from your own homeland might dare to say. Sometimes fellow Pinoys knew too much.

  But you have to consider it, given where he’s working. Alaska, right?

  Which made Angelica wish she’d never told anyone. It was hard enough to have the worries rattling around in her own head.

  The woman wouldn’t let it go. It’s called Masakit, right? That thing the miners get?

  There was a scientific name for the excruciating disease caused by exposure to the toxins present in the Central Yukon District, where the rare earth elements were mined, but in Filipino, they called it simply Masakit, or “painful,” just as the Japanese had given the name Itai-itai—“it hurts, it hurts,”—to cadmium poisoning more than a century earlier. Some things never change, including the willingness to endure poisoning, or subject others to it, just to extract wealth from the earth.

  But it’s fairer and more transparent now, Datu had reassured Angelica. No one denied the dangers, including pancreatic cancer and leukemia from the rare earths mining itself. As generations of people from China, still dominat
ing over ninety percent of the rare earths market, could attest. Add to that the rarer, less understood Masakit bone-softening disease that wasn’t even directly related to the mining, but rather to the environmental destruction that had softened opposition to the mining.

  It had all started five years earlier, when a weaponized bird flu had escaped government labs in eastern Russia and hit Alaska, wiping out a handful of Native villages, including ones where the elders still passed down stories of their grandparents barely surviving the influenza that had swept through more than a century earlier. The first few hundred human deaths weren’t insignificant, but it was fear of a global disaster that led to the panic. Authorities predicted that once the virus reached major population centers beyond the coastal villages or once Alaskan birds migrated south—whichever came first—the lab-mutated, species-hopping plague would be unstoppable. Aggressive, experimental measures were implemented, and they worked. The weaponized flu was stopped in its tracks, but not without unintentionally sacrificing Alaska to the cause.

  Angelica remembered the news footage showing weary northern survivors boarding planes and ships en masse, and following the radical anti-flu effort, the aerial photos of the gray-green arctic plains, stippled with the bodies of hundreds of thousands of dead caribou. Things decayed slowly in the far north, Angelica remembered the reporters saying. She had wondered how long it would take for nearly a million caribou and who knows how many other mammals, birds, and fish to disintegrate, and she imagined a vast unpeopled country habitable only by flies—if that.

  The old concern about losing polar bears to climate change seemed quaintly insignificant compared to this new turn of events. It reminded Angelica of downturns in her own life: you were looking over your shoulder for the thing you’d always feared and missed the entirely new threat barreling toward you. You worried about the past, or some sort of gradual loss, and then someone’s brilliant new idea exploded your carefully designed life all at once.

  In Alaska at least, a bright side of the disaster revealed itself, almost too quickly, a cynic might have observed. A multinational mining project that had been opposed for years was cleared to ramp up production, now that surrounding communities no longer existed. A silver lining, some pro-mining headlines had proclaimed. The U.S. challenges China’s rare earths monopoly. The only potential victims now were the foreign workers—forty percent Filipino—who were all aware of the risks.

  It’s different, because we know what we signed up for, Datu had told Angelica from the airport, where he’d taken her call, the last time he’d be able to talk with any measure of privacy. He was not guarded then, not yet absorbed into the BZ’s culture of silence. She saw his big, smiling face on her phone screen, the tooth he’d chipped in his twenties, when he’d tried boxing for three whole months, thinking it would make him instantly rich. She saw the crowds of Ninoy Aquino International Airport behind him and heard the flights being called, bound for every corner of the earth. He was wearing a tropical shirt, like a man going off on vacation.

  Where’s your coat? she’d insisted.

  They never let us outside. Don’t worry about it. They’re calling my flight.

  So board last. Talk to me.

  I can’t. First class. Reimbursable. Datu would cover the scandalously high interest rate on the loan until his employer processed his payment—which always took longer than expected, Angelica knew—but at least he’d travel in style. He held up the boarding pass, waving it as he grinned.

  Is that one-way or round-trip?

  He didn’t answer.

  Angelica heard the call for Los Angeles, first stop on the way to Anchorage and then Fairbanks and then a smaller plane after that. Never mind. Tell me what you’ve gotten yourself into.

  And he’d tried to explain his reasoning again, the same way he’d explained every other get-rich-quick scheme he’d ever attempted. The multinational company was considered a model of corporate responsibility. After some initial publicity problems, it promised end-of-life on-site colony care to everyone who’d been employed two years or more. So at least an overseas laborer could count on one thing: medical attention, at the bitter end. Although not if you got ill quickly or wanted to die somewhere other than the miners’ hospice.

  Datu wouldn’t have to make that choice, because he was different—as Angelica had told that nosy woman who’d asked her about Masakit. As Angelica told herself. Datu was always resistant, always stronger than his fellow man. He’d know when to take his winnings, leave the table, and go home.

  They had a plan: retirement back in the Philippines, on Cebu, together. Back on that very same stretch of coast where they had lost everything except each other. It meant even more to Datu than to Angelica, who had always considered herself less nostalgic about places than about people. It meant so much to her only because it meant so much to him. The government was finally settling claims, sorting out lost titles, cutting through decades of red tape and squatters’ objections. Angelica and Datu had to keep an eye on things. Even if true retirement was a long way off, they had to stay ready, because paperwork is unforgiving. Which is why she was always telling him to watch for the notices. They may ask us to send in more forms. They may even ask us to come in person. We miss a deadline, they’ll say we forfeit. They’ll cheat us if we’re not careful.

  She knew that Datu dreamed of a small house by the sea, prize roosters and a guard dog, a traditional patio outside and a contemporary rec room inside: big screen for watching Latin American soccer, American football. A motorcycle with sidecar parked under thatch. All that. And to keep memories of their grandmother and parents alive: a garden and barbecue pit, the sort of place where many people can eat together, the way it should be. Flowers climbing the covered porch.

  Angelica counted on those dreams to help keep him safe. When they talked—using censored and time-delayed communications, but no matter—he could paint a picture that almost made it seem real to her. Bananas harvested from their own yard. Pig roasts. Sea breezes. She had pretended at many things in her life, and she could pretend this as well: that she believed. As long as he was there with her, in the gray twilight of the near future, walking several paces ahead.

  After an hour, the technician had set up only half of the robot: the head and torso, a soft-cornered semi-transparent white cube. No limbs or bottom half, no signs of mobility. The robot’s head had an opalescent sheen, but there was no expressive, digitally rendered face playing across the smooth surface.

  “Why is it so simple looking?” Angelica asked.

  “Simple does not offend,” the technician said.

  “I mean . . . why doesn’t it look more realistic?”

  Even modern taxi-driver mannequins and department store automatons could be deceptive. Angelica had been often startled her first month in Tokyo, realizing that the well-dressed, white-gloved man helping direct passengers toward a crowded subway car was not a human at all—and nearly as surprised to discover that a robotic department store cashier with a porcelain face was, in fact, a real woman.

  “Something that has low intelligence and looks halfway human can be entertaining. Something with high intelligence and advanced features—almost human, but still not quite human—can be . . .” the technician trailed off.

  “Can be . . . ?”

  “Can create unease,” the technician said.

  Angelica waited for him to explain more, but he did not. Nor did he make any move to open the two boxes still sitting on the living room floor.

  “You aren’t going to finish it?” she asked.

  “Smaller is better, until they are friends.”

  In its simplicity, it reminded Angelica of something she’d seen years earlier in a nursing class: pictures of surrogate monkey parents created by psychology researchers in the last century, sometimes no more than a circle with eyes attached to a rectangular mesh body. A face stuck to a cheese grater. So litt
le to suggest the form of a living thing. It was enough to trick the baby monkeys, but Sayoko-san was no monkey, and how dare they treat her like an animal or a fool?

  The technician pressed a button and the robot’s trunk lit up like a screen, ready to play a series of short videos that Sayoko was directed to watch, with one sensor clipped to her earlobe and an optical reaction-reading visor snugly positioned on her head. In the corner of the screen, a close-up of Sayoko’s eye flickered briefly as the focus sharpened, highlighting a small box drawn around her iris. A second box appeared as the focus tightened around her pupil. The technician tapped something, the eye close-up disappeared, and the videos began to play.

  In the first one, a young man and woman argued in the dark corner of a parking lot. The man took a threatening step closer. Sayoko leaned toward the screen, as rapt as when she watched her morning television dramas. The technician reminded Sayoko to find a comfortable position and remain still, keeping her eyes fixed on the screen, but he looked satisfied, both by the readings he was getting and the attentive expression on his subject’s face.

  The second video showed an international track competition. A female sprinter fell and the woman next to her turned and helped her up, losing seconds in the process as the two limped to last-place finishes. Sayoko watched with a furrowed brow, lips pursed and quivering, suppressing her reaction. At the finish line, the runner who had fallen first dropped to her knees, face buried in her hands, while the other, who had sacrificed her own victory, placed a hand on her opponent’s shoulder.

  In the third video, a baby was being born.

  The sounds of a woman’s grunting labor, followed by the squall of new life, filled the room. The robot remained silent. Angelica herself did not care to hear these sounds, which felt too intimate, an inappropriate sharing of what might have been a very happy moment for the woman, or perhaps a tragic one—who was to say? It felt manipulative, in either case, and if Angelica had ever chosen to have a baby, she wouldn’t have allowed a camera between her legs, that was for sure.