Plum Rains Read online

  Though the technician had suggested this was an interactive training that would take over two hours, Angelica didn’t see what was being accomplished. Sayoko’s face had registered a half-dozen reactions, but she hadn’t been asked a single question.

  “This is new technology?” Angelica asked.

  “The newest,” the technician said. “Not available to the public.”

  “Like—black market?”

  “No, no. Just not on the open market yet. A pre-legal prototype, restricted use.”

  “Pre-legal?”

  “Not for the average customer. Due to trade issues. Your employer works for METI, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he understands.”

  It’s a silly toy after all. A video game. Ten—no, twenty years out of date. The thought didn’t comfort her. In this age of robopets, programmable companions and kenkobots, no job, role, or relationship was safe. The automaton wasn’t even fully operational yet. There was no saying what level of sophistication it might display. Angelica was holding fast to her limited, hopeful understanding of robotics: none of today’s models were truly intelligent. International law and regional agreements defined technology’s limits. On top of that, the marketing of social gadgets was all about flash and empty promises. But what did she know? She couldn’t even understand how her phone worked.

  This new “friend” could cause problems, once Sayoko was attached to it, by functioning poorly. It could cause even more problems by functioning too well, as perhaps Kenta Suzuki himself knew.

  “I’m sorry,” Angelica said to the technician, finally. “Can I offer you some tea?”

  He wasn’t a tea drinker, fortunately. That spared her the trouble of brewing the perfect, traditional pot. She always worried that she didn’t serve tea correctly, even though they had trained her at the group home: part of a Japanese nurse’s duties, alongside the medical ones. They went to the kitchen to drink three-in-one Nescafé instead, leaving Sayoko to her “orientation.”

  Angelica crossed her legs at the ankles, flexing her toes, feeling the injured knee twinge. The technician picked at his nails with a torn Nescafé packet. The silence was amiable at first, but as the minutes passed, with the recorded sounds from the next room streaming in—seductive whispers, awkward laughter, the disturbing sound of a child’s tantrum building—Angelica felt her blood pressure rise.

  Her confession broke the silence. “I do my best, but she can be a difficult lady.”

  The technician looked at her wide-eyed, surprised by her indiscretion.

  “Are you going back to the Philippines?”

  “Why would you say that?”

  He looked down into his cup. “I shouldn’t have assumed. I only read that so many guest workers are going home these days.”

  In the next room, Angelica heard Sayoko softly chuckling during a pause between videos. Better. Less creepy, anyway.

  Angelica tried not to feel so downright hostile. The technician was only doing his job. She offered her guest a special coconut-flavored cookie from her private stash.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Delicious.” He ate two more.

  She tried not to let it bother her. He had no way of knowing that brand of cookie was so hard to find in Japan.

  “You probably miss it, I imagine,” he said, still chewing.

  “Not everything.”

  “You’ll be happier when you go back. Can I give you some advice? I think we are like birds or whales. I think something inside makes us want to return to wherever we were born. It can’t be ignored.”

  She thought of everything he didn’t know and didn’t care to know: about the dangerous job Datu had felt forced to take, about Yanna and her now motherless children, about the threats of money lenders, about the problems facing a person who was and would always be worth more off-island.

  She put the lid back on the tin as gracefully as she could, before he could take the last cookie.

  “After all,” the technician continued, “What is money compared to being home? You know the saying: man needs just half a tatami mat when awake, one tatami mat when asleep.”

  “And then there is another proverb,” she added without looking up. “Even in hell, transactions require money.”

  “Very good!” he chuckled. “You memorize our sayings very well.”

  “We have to. They’re on the exams. More coffee?”

  A minute later, from the living room where Sayoko was still hooked up to the sensors, Angelica heard the sound of a hiccup, which might have been a stifled sob. But her ears could’ve been playing tricks.

  The technician mused, “I hear the beaches in your country are peaceful. I don’t know why you’d choose to leave.”

  “People have their reasons,” she said. He just wanted to make himself feel better. Send the foreigners home. Make it sound like it was better for everyone.

  “I might enjoy the tropics,” he continued, “but I couldn’t retire to a beach. The city is for me. I’m like your lady out there. She is a child of Tokyo, many generations.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Because I’m Edokko, I recognize Edokko. It’s in our blood. We’re assertive.”

  And who, she thought, is to say I am not also assertive?

  He stood up and excused himself suddenly. “I think she’s almost done. One more test.”

  In his absence, Angelica finished her coffee and thought about this man who wanted to know nothing about her life, who wanted only to imagine her homeland as tropical fruits and white-sand beaches and beautiful women with waxy-white sampaguita flowers tucked behind their ears. All true, and of course she missed it when she allowed herself to, which wasn’t often. But that did not mean it was a simple paradise.

  She remembered the men who had held the hospital staff hostage in Cebu—her, Yanna, Maricor, Efren—only for a few hours. She thought of how the guerillas, after plundering the wards for medicine and computers, had castigated Yanna for the haggard look of the patients, the empty pharmacy cabinets, the crumbling ceiling tiles in the surgery and the rats in the cafeteria. The guerilla leader had shouted: This is how you treat our people?

  Angelica had stepped in front of Yanna to shield her, shouting back with equal outrage. You don’t understand how little we have to work with. And who are you to accuse us of bad behavior? He’d hit Angelica across the face with the side of his pistol. Which was nothing. He could have raped her. He could have shot her.

  They had both fled to Japan after that. But Yanna, finding fewer pediatrics jobs than expected, logically, had told Angelica and their roommates that she was going back after the first year.

  You can’t go back, not while you still owe Bagasao.

  Yanna had refused to listen: my girls . . .

  Angelica had tried to convince her: your girls will be fine.

  She could still see the look on Yanna’s face as they sat around the dining room table so small that even two dinner plates couldn’t fit without the rims touching: I know they’ll be fine. Because they both knew women—many women—who had been forced to leave their children behind, not just for a year or two, like Yanna had, but for ten years, fifteen years. Childhoods come and gone.

  So maybe they’ll be fine, Yanna had said again, reluctantly. But I won’t be fine. I miss them too much. I love them too much.

  You can’t, Angelica had said without missing a beat. You can’t let yourself give in to that. This isn’t about how you feel. It’s about how the world really works.

  Yanna had looked at Angelica like there was something wrong with her, and maybe there was.

  Yanna had said, What’s the point of living if I can’t be with the people I love?

  Though Filipinas made that choice all the time. Did that mean they were heartless, or just wise?

  Yanna had said, Are you saying what
I want doesn’t matter?

  And Angelica had been tongue-tied, wanting to say: You can’t want. You can’t need. It’s better for everyone that way. Some people are put on this earth to need and some people are put on this earth to be needed. They—she and Yanna and countless foreign workers like them—were lucky to be needed. It was the only luck they had.

  Ignoring everyone’s advice, Yanna had gone back. Threats immediately ensued and consequences followed the threats. Bagasao had made his point to everyone in the Filipino community with whom he did business, advancing money for visas, security deposits, flights to employer countries that would take months to be reimbursed, and months of living expenses in places that made you work for free, in “training programs,” before you could dream of a real paycheck. Men like Bagasao were the gatekeepers. To travel to any imagined promised land, you passed through their doors first, and you accepted the terms they set. You owed them for their help, sometimes for months, sometimes for years. They were not debts that could be written off.

  They called Bagasao “Uncle,” even people who weren’t related to him, as a term of respect—and perhaps as a form of superstition. An uncle might hurt you, but an uncle, one hoped, would know when the point had been made. The situation with Yanna proved that optimistic idea untrue. Looking back, Angelica realized that Yanna’s death marked the moment she shifted from wary faith to increasingly bitter agnosticism—not when she lost most of her family, an event which could be blamed on nature, but when she lost a friend to the cruelty of man. A world in which nature claimed the innocent was bad enough. A world in which people wreaked equal havoc was unacceptable.

  Still, Angelica was not an outright atheist, someone who confidently rejected any notion of divinity. Even if there was not a personal, caring, actively present God out there, or if He had chosen to withdraw so far that we now appeared as only sand grains on a beach, hardly worth His attention, perhaps He had still left something behind: some kind of pattern. She continued to wear the little cross around her neck, out of habit and the smallest, smoldering residual hope, but she did not pray. Not after what had happened to her last and closest friend.

  When Angelica found out about Yanna’s funeral back in Cebu, which she could not attend, she thought the breathless, burning feeling inside her was guilt for having encouraged Yanna to come to Japan. Now, the shock long since faded, she recognized it as anger. She had saved her friend’s life once, when the terrorists came to the hospital. She could not keep saving it, again and again. In this unkind world, how many lives could she be expected to save?

  She could manage one, maybe, and given Datu’s choices and evasions, that kept her occupied enough—and being occupied was good. That was the strange thing. She didn’t necessarily resent his dependence upon her. It kept her looking forward instead of back.

  Datu, are you sure you’re not losing weight? Don’t skip your monthly exams. All the blood tests: if they don’t do them, request them. It’s part of your package. I’m not nagging, I’m only asking. I don’t see why we have to do audio. Next week, I want to see you.

  Yanna had thought Bagasao would be merciful—that the future itself was merciful. That had been her mistake.

  In fact, the future was not merciful. The future was not just. It was only the future, a place that made no promises, a place with neither light nor sound nor smell nor taste, but only a void. Angelica did not know why hell was imagined as a colorful, blazing inferno when it seemed clear to her it was a cave, oppressive in its darkness, sharp everywhere, and wet. Actually, she was wrong. It was not without smell. It did smell: like the very worst nights and days of her childhood. Like being trapped as a storm passes over, taking down villages with it. Like rubble and rain.

  Angelica put the vision out of her mind and reached her hand into the tin, only to realize she had unthinkingly eaten a cookie, without tasting it. It was the last one in the package, and she did not know when she’d be able to buy another.

  3 Angelica

  She woke to a soft click and low hum, like the electric water kettle was starting up several hours too soon. As Angelica kept listening, the hum faded. Perhaps only plumbing in the condo overhead. Time: 2:37 a.m.

  The good news: many hours left until her alarm would go off, and a few delicious moments of snuggling down into the warm blankets, thankful it was not yet morning, her mood already so much better than when she’d gone to bed. The simplest things could do that: food, sleep, a shower. Sleep especially. She could not understand why people were tempted to experiment with those new drugs that made an eight-hour recharge unnecessary.

  Angelica rolled to one side, reached for her phone, and clicked the icon for Sayoko’s room: one eyespot showed black, another showed gauzy grey, a third—entirely disabled—flashed an error message. The fourth, placed too high for Sayoko to mess with, angled toward the middle of her futon, revealed bunched-up sheets. It was hard to see whether her thin body was comfortably resting beneath them, but Angelica squinted her eyes at one dark patch and decided: yes, she’s there as always. Best not to disturb Sayoko for no reason.

  Angelica was just nodding off when she heard the clicking sound again. The next sound—Sayoko’s muffled, agitated voice—brought Angelica back to high alert.

  She slid her legs off the futon, pulled on a robe and stood outside Sayoko’s door, tapping lightly.

  “Can I come in?”

  Through the door, Sayoko answered, “No.”

  Angelica already had her hand on the lever and was about to push down when she registered that Sayoko had refused her. A variation on their standard agreement. Sayoko treasured her privacy and so Angelica would always ask, but it was a courtesy more than a request. Those nights last year when Sayoko had been receiving chemo and there was restlessness and nausea and good reason for late-night vigilance, the response to a knock had always been no answer—if Sayoko was asleep—or muffled acquiescence. Never this.

  “Sayoko-san, are you sure? I heard noises. May I come in?”

  “No.”

  “But I need to check. Are you all right?”

  “I’m sleeping.”

  Older people were as vulnerable as children, especially when it came to the internet, where late-night shopping, gambling, or the surrender of sensitive information was commonplace. Until now, Sayoko’s only weakness had been her teledramas.

  “Are you talking to someone online?” Angelica asked.

  There was no reply.

  “You’ll tell me if you need anything,” Angelica said again, waiting in the pitch-black hallway, feet growing cold. “Sayoko-san?” She tried the more generic honorific she had first used until Sayoko had given her permission to use her given name: “Obaasan?” Grandmother?

  Still nothing.

  Back in her own room, Angelica pulled the comforter up to her chin, ready to spring up again at a moment’s notice. She waited and listened, doing her job. Sleep was salvation but it was less important for her than for Sayoko, who at her age needed the healing power of good food and rest. No one would ever know all the nights that Angelica had stayed up listening, checking the eyespot camera feed linked to her phone or softly opening the door, just to be sure.

  Angelica did not know how much time had passed, waiting in the dark to hear if Sayoko had finally settled down. Perhaps she’d even drifted off. But then she heard it again—click—followed by Sayoko’s muffled voice: “I’m here. All right. I’m here.”

  Angelica checked her phone. Three fifteen in the morning.

  Sayoko’s voice was audible again, sounding more tired than alarmed: “Yamete.” Quit that.

  There was a dragging sound, like rubber-tipped chair legs being pulled across the floor. Like Sayoko was using her walker to get to the bathroom or moving a light piece of furniture.

  Angelica swung her legs over the edge of her futon and froze, straining to hear. Two voices. She pulled on her robe again and
slowly opened her door, checking for light in the hall. She stepped lightly, pausing outside Sayoko’s room.

  “Ii-yo,” came the old woman’s voice. All right, all right.

  The voice that responded was high-pitched, yet it sounded male. Angelica couldn’t make out the words.

  Sayoko articulated slowly, “I’ve told you that already.”

  Angelica knocked. “Sayoko-san? Are you talking to someone?”

  Both voices stopped.

  “Can I come in?”

  No answer except a high thin buzzing alternating with the sound of static.

  “Sayoko-san? Are you having trouble? I won’t go away this time. You have to answer me.”

  The second voice started up again: questioning, afraid.

  “Sayoko-san?”

  No clear answer. Angelica seized it as an excuse. She pushed open the door and saw that Sayoko had dragged a chair closer to her dresser, on top of which sat the assembled top half of the Taiwanese robot, eye slits softly illuminated.

  Sayoko called out, “I didn’t say you could come in!”

  As Angelica advanced, the static sound started up again and the robot’s eye slits pulsed brighter. The screen in the robot’s torso flickered with images taken earlier that day: one photo after another of Angelica from the front and side and back, distant fuzzy shots and fish-eyed close-ups, all taken surreptitiously.

  Angelica hurried forward, instinctively wiping a hand in front of the screen, trying to find the right gesture to turn the thing off, but a wail stopped her in her tracks.

  “He’s only trying to identify you,” Sayoko said. “You’re scaring him. Don’t!”

  When Angelica stopped, Sayoko lowered her voice. “Everything scares him. He can’t sleep.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’s trying to learn, but it’s all too fast.”

  The pulsing static started up again, lower now: a seabird’s call mixed with the sound of waves shushing against the beach.