Tom Bradley
The Curved Jewels



Sam Edwine snapped awake at three o'clock in the morning. His eyelids were forced apart by something inside his brain that wasn't exactly a dream, though it had chosen the medium of sleep to bring itself to his awareness.

He'd been awakened a few times in the past with flashes of godlike insight, or what passed for such in the wee hours. But this was the first time he'd been rousted by a pure emotion. It was sadness. Life's bleakness had reached such a pitch that tonight it had solidified into a physical sensation. It felt like a small axe blade inserted into the skin between the eyebrows.

He somehow knew that he wouldn't sleep much in the foreseeable future. And the near future, at least, had become strangely foreseeable--but he was too sad to be astonished when he found himself making gestures in the direction of the telephone several seconds before it began to ring.

Only with the bell's first shriek did the knowledge of where he was rush into his head, in a barrage of Japaneseness. There were so many vanities and vexations, so many things that had to be done before the ringing could be stopped.

He didn't want to wrench a knee (which one would it be today?) struggling to raise his 160 kilograms and two-plus meters from the futon. He didn't want to shuffle across the frayed mats and get slivers wedged between his gouty toes when he stumbled over the kerosene space heater. He didn't want to bump his head on the dwarf-level lintel and take yet another chance on the floor buckling under him in a certain disintegrated place between the bathroom and the wall where the phone was nailed.

In fact, the only thing that persuaded him to get vertical at all was that his wife must never, under any circumstances, be exposed to the person who was, without a doubt, on the other end of the line.

Still, after more than twelve years, Sam had only to hear the voice. The caller didn't have to identify herself to achieve the desired effect. She was always going to turn up, for as long as they both should live, during those times when his moral immune system was in a weakened condition. This person would crop up simultaneously with thoughts of mortality, regardless of the remoteness of the country he'd hidden himself in. Whenever he was in a lightless mood, her voice would sound in an electronic hiss only millimeters away from the skin of his brain, summoning him, at three a.m., to join her in yet another bout of antisocial behavior.

She never had the courtesy to inform him of what that behavior might be until it was two-thirds accomplished. So it wasn't surprising to hear her hang up in his ear after supplying a stripped-down skeleton of details, only what he absolutely needed to know.

Some kind of conversation with his wife was necessary at this point. But he couldn't turn on the light to ascertain whether Polly was awake because it might disturb their children, who slept on the same small configuration of floor mats, everybody sprawled together, Aleutwise, in the only insulated corner of the concrete floor. Even in the dark, Sam could tell that the younger Edwines, at any rate, were sleeping. He could hear their miniature snores and nose whistles mixing together. It might have been a kind of relief to stay stooped over them until the polyrhythms repeated themselves and became a pattern, a strange attractor, as they say. But he'd been summoned.

So he spoke into the darkness, and asked Polly whether, when she got up, assuming she could find a spare minute or two, she wouldn't mind bundling up the kids and cycling over to the accounting office (he had to take the car--sorry), and putting in for reimbursement from his travel budget, since he must reluctantly raid the black lacquer box in the tokonoma (after so many years of economic exile their home language had become hopelessly bastardized) and requisition the modest pile of yen with which she'd been intending to feed the family.


Polly gave no audible indication of being awake or asleep, but he could be pretty sure that her eyes were shut. They were so round and huge that the odds were in favor of any stray light particles in the neighborhood caroming off them sooner or later if the lids were separated. So much of the whites was exposed, and they were so white, her irises such a deep blackish brown, that the contrast alone made Polly's eyes, when functioning, seem to blast out their own illumination.

Nevertheless he spoke on, and asked her to phony up a professional reason, research or something, for her husband's removing himself to a certain island not too far away.

"I can tell you this much," he whispered--and he hoped she was too unconscious to register the next few words, which were being forced from between his lips by an admittedly childish need to disburden his conscience into her lap. "I'll actually be headed in the opposite direction, to an island in a different sea."

Without knowing if she was even listening, Sam cajoled his wife into compromising her personal integrity. He recruited her to lie on his behalf, to draw this sashimi-style red herring across his path, not because he'd been instructed to do so, but strictly by his own initiative. He was acting on a bottom-dweller reflex that had been slumbering twelve years. There was someone he needed to warn Polly about before leaving town; but he had to take pains not to sound as though he were delivering something so paternalistic as an admonition. The best he could come up with on such short notice was a firm but gentle toe in her floating ribs and, "While I'm gone, it might not be a bad idea to avoid Ichinuki." To impart earnestness, he tried to pronounce his immediate superior's name correctly, with pure, long vowels, instead of in his usual way--Itchy Nookie.

At the mention of that name, Sam's older girl moaned in her sleep. Without thinking, he did whatever he always did--made a sound or gesture, a telepathic pat on the shoulder or something--that soothed his daughter back into oblivion.

And then he succumbed all the way. It was like relaxing everything, including the autonomic functions of his body. He deliberately took a deep breath, stepped into his shoes, and delivered himself up to the chaos that hung, anyway, over this imitation of a home and job, this fleeting hiatus of ersatz normalcy, the abyss on either side. Opening the front door was like abandoning Polly and little Hannah and littler Naomi on a ridge between jagged sandstone cliffs in a red desert. And he was just going away for fifteen to twenty hours, as far as he'd been told.

In no time the Edwine family Mazda lurched into the first of an interminable series of expressway tunnels. It vanished into blackness thick as the fur on a Labrador retriever that shags anything thrown out in front of its face, heedless of peril to the teeth and tongue.