Floating City Read online

  Momoye chose the fifth day of the month for Frankie to return to school. He needed protection from bad-luck number four. The day before, the two of them cawed once more; they hunched their backs and hid their arms, laughing again at the Priest’s misfit followers. It was the end of their magic time of secrets, though Frankie didn’t yet know how the whole story ended. He’d miss the Sad Girl and the Half-Lame Boy who followed the Priest. Frankie now counted himself among his flock, the strange and not quite whole.

  “You are strong,” Momoye told him, guessing his thoughts. “You are healed. You are healthy.” But the followers kept following. Sometimes one or another of them declared themselves almost healed by the Priest, even though they smelled, wept or hobbled the same or even worse: the cawing louder, the lepers more scabbed and festering. They followed right to the dock where the Priest and his young bride departed for the New World.

  Momoye mocked their cries: Don’t leave us! We’re not healed!

  “They’re still waiting!” She laughed then went silent.

  “What happened to the Priest?” Frankie asked, though he wasn’t certain he wanted to know.

  “Gone,” his mother replied, suddenly stern, her brows arched, like a warning.

  “Did he go back to them?”

  She nodded her head then, yes. “Back home.”

  “The brother?”

  “Nobu?”

  So that was his name, her brother.

  She lifted her hands, swept them aside: to the wind, to the waves. She didn’t know.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Frankie was roused by his mother along with everyone else. “Time for school!”

  He groaned. His body was more than healed; it complained at having been still too long. Frankie squinted at the bright morning sun. The salt air stung him all over, the breeze grazed him, yet when he breathed deeply his sides no longer hurt. Confident, he took the oars to row them all to shore, but never did the shore look so far off. His arms wobbled. He began to wheeze.

  “It’s all right, Frankie,” Aki told him and took over.

  At school, unfamiliar words awaited him on the chalkboard. Rows of numbers, equations he’d left behind. Girls laughed when he sounded out one new word, even the Japanese girls.

  “The square root of sixteen, Frankie?” Miss McIntyre now asked. Frankie could not answer.

  “The square root of sixteen.”

  He stuttered, fffff. Could not say it.

  From behind him, a voice called out, “Four!”

  Of course he knew. But he didn’t dare say it. Death number four. The other Japanese in the class knew it, but they didn’t care. They weren’t afraid.

  He was made to stay after school. The whole class filed past him.

  The square root of sixteen equals four, he wrote as the clock tick-tocked in the empty classroom. Down the page across every line: equals four, equals four. Four, four, four. Nothing but bad luck when he’d already had his share.

  * * *

  —

  On Port Alberni’s highest hill, out past the sawmill, perched the biggest homes in town. Grand, like a waltz. The grandest he’d ever behold, he figured. Frankie walked briskly, head down. If anyone stopped him, he’d pretend to be there for a reason, running errands for some rich so-and-so. But he’d never been stopped, not once. He paused before the house with the turret at the front. The grandest of the grand houses, with a round room, no less. What was inside it? A round bed, a round table? What to do in it but walk in circles or play ring-around-the-rosy? Once he’d come after dark and seen it lit up as if for a party. He’d hoped to catch a glimpse of the pretty daughters up there, future queens of the Rose Queen Parade with their fair hair in waves and bows. He heard they went to some fancy school for girls only.

  Roses climbed up the latticed walls of the house. Different colours of roses, from orange to coral to pink to red to burgundy to purple to yellow to white. Sometimes he ventured into the flower beds and squatted down to smell them, deep in their mysterious centres: they were sweet, spicy, bitter; some even smelled as if they were rotting, yet they were velvet. He was tempted to pluck one for his mother.

  They’d had a garden once, not a bit grand. He was young then, but he remembered, or perhaps he remembered his mother telling him. It was on land, of course. A normal house like everyone else’s, before they had to leave. The house he was born in. Purple irises spiralling around the house. They were strangely exotic flowers, purple petals furred with yellow, both upright and dangling. They recoiled into brown fists on their stems after blooming: dead wonders. His mother had wanted a river of them to circle their small house, like they would a temple in Kyoto, she said. One day he’d go there and see the Golden Temple.

  Then the men had come. One worked, he said, in the office at the mill; the others were his friends—business friends. They warned Taiji that the City would be coming to chase him off his land because they didn’t want Japs cluttering up the waterfront any longer. But this man would do Taiji a good turn and buy the lot from him before he got thrown off for a pittance. He was fair, he said, and generous—too generous, and too soft in the head—placing bills in Taiji’s hand: fifty dollars. Taiji had never held that much at one time. The man pointed to houses of other Japanese down the way. The same thing was happening to them.

  So Taiji said yes. He told the neighbours and everyone else sold their lots too, and started to pack up. Then one day, the City came with No Trespassing signs to nail to doors and two hundred dollars in envelopes ready to give to each family.

  * * *

  —

  Frankie arrived home to find Aki lying face down on the floor. The others were outside, frolicking in the boat. He dropped the rose by his mother’s chair. Aki tugged him down beside her. He felt the floor planks gape and strain like ribs against his own.

  “We’ve been swallowed up,” she said quietly, with a finger to her lips. She pressed one eye between the planks, cocked an ear to the slap of the water. Frankie felt his nostrils prickle.

  “Frankie, look.”

  “Can I see?” Augusta had come in, hovering over them. Aki shooed her away.

  Frankie set his own face to the dark crack; a cool draft stung his eye. “See what?” He couldn’t see. He couldn’t see anything. A wave carried them up, then down.

  “The face there,” Aki said, and instantly he pulled away. She pulled him back. “It just wants to say hello.”

  Not just the fish and the whale and the octopus, but the smallest pebble on the ocean floor, a bubble of seaweed could be peering up at you. “Even the sea has a face,” she told Frankie. “You only have to watch and listen.”

  Frankie gave a laugh but shuddered to recall the murk he’d been pulled into between the logs, and the unseen sea of faces that had surrounded him.

  In the morning, before the others rose, he watched Aki slide from the bed to the floor and creep again to the spot that was now hers. The house was rising and falling with the waves, more than usual, and she gave a little cry when water lapped up between the boards. She glanced over, grinned and beckoned, Come look, Frankie. But no: he didn’t care to be greeted by any faces of the sea.

  After school he found her there again. Alone this time because Momoye had met up with the girls in town and Yas was off with Taiji on the logs. She was lying so still, so patient, one eye pressed to the gap, until, with the sound of a tiny splash, she shrieked. Aki rolled back from her spot, her eye streaming red.

  “Aki! Are you all right?”

  Her hands flailed in the air. Her feet kicked. As she shrieked again, her one eye stared wide open without seeing him; the other was swarmed in red. She wailed and writhed on the floor, then lay still on her back, quiet.

  “Aki.” He crept forward. He bent down. The red that covered her eye and the side of her face was like blood, but thick and gluey. He was about to touch it when the whole mass slid off her cheek. He jumped back, and it slithered across the floor.

 
; Aki did not move. Her eye was swelling shut between welts of red and purple. “Wake up,” he whispered. “Aki, wake up!” But she didn’t stir. He slapped her cheek, the untouched side, what he’d seen his mother do when Taiji drank too much.

  She woke with a start. Her open eye rolled around, searching. It found him. He’d saved her, his sister.

  “Yas!” she called, looking past Frankie. “Yas, where are you?”

  “No, it’s Frankie!” he shouted back.

  Aki struggled to sit up. Beside her lay the creature from the sea that had answered her call. They watched it slowly inch homeward, its tentacles sprawling, then retracting, to heave its glassy red dome into the gap between the planks.

  Frankie raised his boot to stomp it.

  “No!” screamed Aki.

  He would save her; he would save both of them.

  “Stop, Frankie!” Aki was seeing everything at last.

  Frankie’s boot came down. But the creature escaped it and slipped between the boards, back into the sea.

  * * *

  —

  A jellyfish, Yas told them. A red lion’s mane jellyfish. He’d seen them while riding the logs. The fishermen warned they could sting even after they were dead. You might not die from it, but you could come close.

  The doctor came and bandaged Aki’s eye. There was nothing else to be done. Her face was mottled and puffy on one side. She wandered through the house without saying a word. Frankie offered her water to drink, food to eat; he even rowed as fast as he could, with Augusta holding a dripping ice cream cone from town. But Aki gave it to the sisters to share. He offered to row her to shore to watch the sunset, but she said no. Not even Yas could coax her out.

  Frankie lay in bed with his fists clenched at his sides. He should have pulled the thing from Aki’s eye right away. Acted, as Yas would’ve.

  After a week the bandage was removed, but Aki could not open her eye. The welts had sealed it shut. She’d become a cyclops, a monster from their school books, watching and listening to the world with only one eye pressed up to it.

  * * *

  —

  Taiji and his friend Mr. Koga sat in the house, celebrating one more month lived through and gone. It was Thursday, payday. Yas was, as usual, out on the late shift after school, breaking up the latest boom come into the harbour. The afternoon rain was melting into evening vapour.

  Aki lay on the floor, ribs to the planks, good eye to the crack beckoning to the creature that had visited her before. Frankie had given up trying to pull her away. Momoye sat in her chair by the window, gazing at the shore. That chair had become hers alone, and Frankie was sure she was pining for a proper house on land with flowers around her front yard. Augusta and Julia were reciting every line spoken or sung by Shirley Temple in Little Miss Marker, the one movie they’d seen in town. Taiji had succumbed to his Canadian Club whisky, muttering about a mountain and a lake he’d staked claim to somewhere on Vancouver Island.

  Before leaving, Mr. Koga bent down to ask Taiji something he’d asked him many times before: Would he toss a coin or two into Mr. Koga’s hotel?

  “It’s a long way to Tippelaary!” Taiji drawled.

  Mr. Koga collected his bottle and headed out the door to meet his partner in the venture, Mr. Fung.

  “Wait,” Frankie called and scrambled after him.

  Mr. Koga rowed a crooked line to shore under a waning moon, splashing Frankie now and then with the oars. Down a dead-end road they finally came to Mr. Fung’s shabby lean-to. Before going in, Mr. Koga drank deeply from his bottle and handed it to Frankie. “Go on,” he urged. Frankie held it to his lips and threw his head back. It scorched his throat on the way down, then set off a glow that warmed him from his ears to his toes. This was what Thursday tasted like.

  Their venture would produce a hotel two storeys high with a potbelly stove and a wool blanket in each room. Visiting lumbermen needed a place to stay. Newcomers. People who couldn’t afford to stay at the Arlington Hotel in town. So what was the problem?

  “No land!” said Mr. Fung as he stacked a few coins on his kitchen table. “Cost too much! Pie in sky!”

  Mr. Koga handed over his coins, which Mr. Fung added to the pile. “Payday!” Since Mr. Fung spoke Chinese and Mr. Koga Japanese, they met on rocky isles of English.

  “Not enough.” Mr. Fung slid a single faded bead to the near-empty side of his abacus.

  “Float it!” Frankie blurted. Like his own house. Right now, he felt like he himself was floating. “Who needs land?” He’d learned that when the men had come to board up their house. Instead of letting anyone tear it down, Taiji had set it onto the water, anchored it on the inlet.

  Frankie snatched Mr. Koga’s bottle and took another gulp. He felt light but seaworthy.

  A floating hotel. Guests could look out their window either to shore—like his mother did from her chair—or to the forest across the inlet.

  “They could fish for their dinner!” Frankie cast a line across the cramped room and reeled it back in.

  Mr. Fung squinted his squinty eyes at the boy. “How to build?” Mr. Fung was a land dweller. A farmer from Guangdong.

  That was easy as pie. Build a house, only bigger, with two storeys instead of one. Put it on a raft and anchor it in the harbour. “Why not?” Frankie asked.

  Now Mr. Koga narrowed his eyes at him. Not just a tagalong, he was supposing. The boy had more schooling than either of them. Why not?

  Mr. Koga had ideas, then, too. He wanted it as fine as the Arlington Hotel, but at a cheaper cost. With a restaurant and a barbershop. And a beer parlour. People would line up for their ten-cent glass of beer.

  And ice cream, thought Frankie. And a garden: a floating garden with flowers bobbing atop the sea.

  Why not? The two men agreed. Fortune’s cat was waving its right paw at them. They drank and passed the bottle. Frankie took another gulp or two. He was no rider of logs but he would not be felled. When the two men dozed off, he stepped out into the night and walked up the street. The ground was passing under him more quickly than he was passing over it. He could hardly wait to tell everyone that he was now a partner in a business. He’d help with the hotel, yes, but the garden would be all his: with irises for his mother, with roses of all kinds and colours. Sea Garden, he’d call it. Or Floating Garden. Floating Flowers.

  He was still floating. Higher and higher, farther from the ground, from his feet. Spinning. A light up ahead was so white he couldn’t see what was actually there. He knew he was heading down to shore, back to the boat, but where had Mr. Koga left it? Frankie’s head was a top, whirling off into the air in the blaring light. He stumbled and fell.

  Aki appeared above him, her cyclops eye catching the bright light. “Aki,” he started. She reached down to take his arm. Then his other arm was taken too.

  Mama. He was reaching for Momoye, his breath heaving. He couldn’t help himself. Like a baby. He wanted to tell her about the hotel, the floating part that was his idea, and the garden. The flowers for her.

  Aki was shaking him but he only wanted his mother.

  Mama! He let his arms drop; he felt sick. Let go, he muttered and rolled half away.

  Are you running from him?

  From who?

  She set the lamp down and the bright light flared beneath him.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Mongolian Spot

  It was the stillness he noticed first. Then the air that was dry and warm in his nostrils and sweet smelling. Land air. He opened his eyes. He wasn’t home. He wasn’t even in his own clothes. Frankie was in a room empty save for the bed he lay in, a desk and chair, and a Jesus on a cross on the wall. Shush, the Jesus seemed to say as he hung there from his tiny hands and feet.

  He tried to sit up but his head throbbed. His throat felt raw. Out the one small window he saw the sky that was his sky; his clouds too, and a peek of sun. Beneath wasn’t sea, but a field. He looked to the door, and right then came a knock. Slowly, the door opened.


  Two ladies entered, one smiling. “He’s awake,” she said.

  “I am Miss McCracken. This is Miss Hawks.”

  They stood like sentries at the lower corner of the bed. He thought the sunlight might pass right through them; they were so fair. Their hair was white as clouds; their blouses too. Jesus dangled from each of their necks.

  “Tell us your name, my dear,” the first, smiling one asked. “Last night you couldn’t tell us.”

  “Frank.”

  “We’ll call him Francis,” said the second. “He’s not well at all.”

  “He must be hungry after all the retching.”

  They talked on as if he wasn’t there. Was he?

  “He must rest.”

  “And heal.”

  His head was stabbed with pain, over and over. He couldn’t think. The smiling lady, who seemed the nicer, gently eased him back on the pillow. “Perhaps he should lie on his front,” she said, wincing.

  “Yes,” said the second. “Turn over,” she ordered. Which he did.

  “When can I go home?” Frankie asked quietly into the pillow, which smelled of sweetness and powder. He glimpsed tiny Jesus out of the corner of his eye. Jesus loves me, he’d sung in school, just yesterday morning, it seemed.

  “When it is safe.” Seconds passed in silence. Then he felt the covers drawn back and the waist of his pants folded down. Cold stealing over his buttocks. A sharp intake of breath and a sigh. Then fingers probing there. He shivered. The eyes of tiny Jesus were cast down and away.

  “Does it hurt?” a voice whispered, the nice lady’s. He shook his head in the pillow.

  “Barbaric,” the other lady declared near his ear. Gently, his pants were rolled up and the covers tucked around his neck.

  * * *

  —

  He didn’t know what or where the Sisters of Mercy Mission was, but he soon learned that Miss McCracken and Miss Hawks lived in this humble home doing God’s work however and whenever it was needed. The house was always quiet and no one came or went.