The Vanished Birds Read online

  “The university called,” Aki said.

  “What did they want?” Fumiko asked.

  But her mother shrugged, squeezing open an edamame pod with her spidery fingers.

  Word had gotten around that Fumiko was back home. When she returned the call to her alma mater, an old professor of hers, M. Toho, asked if she would come attend a panel on massive wing dynamics that Friday. Fumiko was in no mood to participate in the talk—she never liked performing for the public—but she didn’t turn down his offer, because in the other room she could hear Aki watching one of the old movies she’d once starred in, laughing at the jokes she and her onscreen partner told, and when she was not laughing, reciting the lines along with the characters in an eerily youthful voice. The routine depressed Fumiko; she needed out.

  She asked M. Toho what time they needed her.

  Two days later, the silhouette of a dirigible drifted against the white moon as many meters below, in the auditorium of the university, the panel finished to a carbonation of applause. Fumiko stood with her fellow speakers, her curtain of black hair falling forward as she bowed, wondering all the while what she was doing there. During the reception she drank her glass of water while her former professors spoke about her as though she were not present, praising her many accomplishments at such a young age—Only thirty and she has access to more grants than I’ve had in a lifetime!—and curbing those praises with subtle, and not so subtle, suggestions that she might be in over her head—I’ve seen many brilliant young minds burn out from the pressure, Fumiko. Please do your best to not lose control. She thanked each person for their suggestions, her patience for such pleasantries wearing thin, regretting having come at all, until M. Toho waved a stranger over from across the room and shepherded her into the group. Fumiko stood a little straighter, correcting the slight hunch in her back, for the stranger was one of the most beautiful women she had ever seen in her life.

  “This is Dana Schneider,” M. Toho said, beaming. “She’s going to save the world.”

  Dana laughed, showing off her brilliance of teeth. “I wish you would stop introducing me like that.” She bowed to Fumiko. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, M. Nakajima.”

  Beauty was cheap in those days. Like Fumiko’s mother, parents with access to good hospitals had to go out of their way to not have a child who was at least conventionally attractive. Billboard models were the new average. Some bucked the trend, creating children that were alluring because of their defects—Fumiko had a few suitors who fetishized her asymmetry, which made her more self-conscious of the fact—but then there were parents who made art of their children. Parents who considered the ears, the eyes, the mouth, the nose, the discrete parts of the face and how they melded with the whole. These were the people who created new variations of beauty. Dana was a new variation. There was a story in Dana’s face—a forgotten myth, of a deer who for one night turned into a man and made love to a human woman by a cold-water brook, in the dark heart of a forest. A strange ancestry that revealed itself in the dramatic contours of Dana’s cheekbones, her jaw—the way the lower half of her face projected forward just a nudge, a hint of a snout, and on that projection, a flattened nose, positioned just above the wide set of her lips. She was the tallest woman in the room by a head. Her hair was cut short, with blond Nero bangs that fell evenly across her brow. Her ears were sylvan, pointed at the tip, and her lips full and red, without makeup. On her cheek were five freckles, each freckle a point of some invisible star, just below her right eye; an eye that was large, luminous, its iris purple and flecked with gold, which reflected nothing but Fumiko’s post-vanity face. Fumiko shut her eyes, unnerved by the spark in her heart, and returned the bow. “Are you a student here?” she asked.

  Dana nodded. “Eco-friendly tech. Solar-panel fields, bio-farms. Nothing that’s going to save the world,” she said, giving M. Toho a playful look, “just make the end of it a little slower to arrive.”

  “A realistic goal,” Fumiko said.

  “An honorable one,” M. Toho added. “Sustainability is important work. Go on, Dana, tell Fumiko what you and your group are working on.”

  “Strictly preliminary in its stages. I wouldn’t want to bore her with our half-baked ideas.”

  “Nonsense. Fumiko is a scholar first. I’m sure she’d be delighted to listen. She might even provide some keen insight, and, if you’re interested, Fumiko”—and now M. Toho had taken her aside with a conspiratorial hush—“it would be a great help, to not just us but the project itself, if you spread the word about our work among your circles.”

  “You need funding,” Fumiko said.

  “We need people paying attention. And yes,” he admitted, “like every academic institution, we need funding. But I do genuinely think you will be interested in the work. So please,” he said, “as a personal favor to me, listen to Dana while I show M. Takahashi to her car—I think she’s had a bit too much free Champagne.” And like that, M. Toho walked away, glancing back at Dana with an encouraging smile before he helped up a woman who was drooling on one of the tables.

  Dana sighed. “He’s a subtle one.”

  “I won’t be able to help you,” Fumiko said. Her eyes were trained on the carpeted floor. “Sustainability isn’t my field. I can’t provide much insight. And right now, I’m not in a position to pass your work on to those who might fund it further. Your pitch would be a waste of both of our time. I’m sorry.”

  Dana considered this for a moment, then said, “I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

  Startled, Fumiko looked up from her feet.

  “There’s a great curry place on the boardwalk,” Dana said. “We should go. Unless you wanted to stick around here and have more student projects thrown at your feet.”

  “You mean now?”

  “Right now,” she said, smiling. “Before M. Toho comes back.”

  Fumiko surprised herself when she agreed, never one for impulsive decisions, the acceptance of Umbai’s job offer notwithstanding. She chalked it up to the fact that she was in no hurry to return to her mother’s apartment, though she was self-aware enough to know that there was more to it than that; knew by the fast pace of her heart when she looked at Dana that there was so much more as they pushed through the double doors and left the auditorium together. Outside, where the air was warm and dry.

  Somewhere, she heard a child laugh.

  They walked down to the shoreline; a long strip of boardwalk that stood above the surface of the water, the true shore, the sand and dirt and trees gone under the tide. During the ambling walk, Dana explained to Fumiko how M. Toho brought her out of the lab anytime he needed to “seduce” someone into giving his department more funding or notoriety. “ ‘Seduce’ is the wrong word—more a distraction tactic. I charm them with my purple eyes and they open their wallet, or their contacts page.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m sorry if M. Toho’s ‘salesman mode’ was off-putting,” Dana said. “He really does think highly of you. It’s a rare day when you don’t come up in conversation.”

  “It’s fine. No apologies necessary.”

  Dana relaxed. “I’m glad.”

  “How much farther is it?”

  “A few more blocks.”

  “And what is the project you are working on?”

  “Oh, I was being honest earlier when I said it’s all preliminary. We’re working on alternative light sources. Luminescent bulbs that don’t require electricity. Not much more to say than that. We’re still brainstorming.” She laughed. “I’m not sure what ‘pitch’ M. Toho was expecting me to give.”

  “If you don’t have a pitch, why did you invite me to dinner?”

  “I wanted the company.”

  She sounded so genuine, Fumiko wanted nothing more than to believe her—that anyone would want to be with her for her company alone—but it was difficult to quiet the
neuroses in her head as she followed Dana across the intersection, unable to escape the feeling that this woman was working some sort of angle; an impromptu dinner date disguising a hard sell. They walked through the manufactured public garden and onto the planks of the concrete boardwalk, where they could hear the water lapping against the struts. The “great curry place” Dana had referenced was a food stall manned by an older woman, who heaped steaming rice into biodegradable containers, draping the rice in ribbons of thick brown sauce, fanned with slices of fried chicken. They brought their food to a bench by the water.

  What Fumiko noticed first about Dana was her gift of talk; how without any perceptible effort she segued from topic to topic, dipping into her reservoir of personal history—her parents both worked for a lunar fracking company, which proved a major point of contention between them and their eco-conscious daughter during holiday get-togethers—then back to the present, the people she worked with, her small apartment below a pianist who played dirges nonstop from two to four in the morning, and to Fumiko herself, when she admitted with appealing shyness how taken she was with the panel that night, and the intelligence with which Fumiko spoke. There was an ease to Dana’s presence that was contagious. Fumiko spoke with hesitance at first; brief descriptions of her career thus far, then a clumsy, self-deprecating reference to the viral vid of her dressing down her subordinate—“The worst part was I got some of the math wrong, but no one noticed. Yell loud enough and no one cares what you’re actually saying; you’re always right.” Soon they were walking down the pier, with Fumiko comfortable enough to complain about what it had been like, living with her mother again. “And it’s unbelievable that she’s still using that same calorie counter. They discontinued the model a few years ago. It miscalculated caloric percentages and had people thinking they were eating more than they actually were, but she insists on keeping it. I think she likes the deception.”

  Dana laughed. “I thought my parents were difficult, but I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like, growing up with her.”

  “I take it you know about my history.”

  She grinned. “Just what’s been made public. Did the post-vanity ideals stick?”

  “Only until I threatened to become famous, and she started treating me like an actual daughter.”

  Dana sighed. “You deserved better.”

  Fumiko slowed her pace when she heard this trite sentiment. “How do you know I deserved better?” she asked.

  The question caught Dana off guard. “I just meant a child deserves someone who loves them unconditionally.”

  “I’ve made my peace with it.” She continued walking. “And if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be where I am now.”

  “I suppose not,” Dana said.

  “I’m done talking about her,” Fumiko said.

  Dana was quiet. “All right,” she said.

  They walked through an avenue of cherry blossom trees. It was a quiet night in the city. There were couples out, and families, but still plenty of space to walk. Fumiko stewed, regretting the swiftness with which she’d shut Dana down. A pink petal fell before her, twirled until it landed on her shoe. She chuckled, which she knew wasn’t like her at all—something in the air.

  “What is it?” Dana asked.

  She almost thought better of sharing the story, but she knew that if she didn’t, the night would end and she would be back where she started—alone in a room not speaking to her mother.

  “It’s a trivial story,” she said, a lightness to her voice to make the telling easier. “When I was a child, my mother and I went to a park once to sketch the trees. Lessons in taxonomy. While we looked for interesting leaves, there was a boy in the park who was tucking cherry blossoms behind girls’ ears.” Fumiko shoved her hands in her pockets, not knowing what else to do with them. “It was just a thing he did for the ones he thought were pretty. The girls would line up like attendants and wait for their turn. One by one he would slip a flower onto their ear, and they would say Thank you, Koji so sweetly. I wanted a flower too, so I joined the line before my mother had realized I was gone. But when the boy got to me, he just looked at my face and said, ‘No.’ That was all he said. No. And then he walked past me like I wasn’t there.” She laughed when she said this. It was all so ridiculous. “My mother saw all of this, and she had a—let’s say a ‘conversation’ with the boy’s mother. His mother made him give me a flower. The face he made when she told him to go back…I’ll never forget it. The anger he seemed to feel at the unfairness of it all. Why, Mother, why do I have to give a flower to the ugly girl?” She laughed again, but this time she was shaking. “The worst part is, I was still happy to get my flower, even though I hadn’t—that the criteria wasn’t met.”

  It was the first time the story had ever left her lips; the act of retelling it made her wince, the hurt still fresh. She waited for Dana to say something, to segue into happier conversation, but Dana just regarded her with her purple eyes that caught the moon, until she knelt down, picked up a fallen blossom, and tucked it behind Fumiko’s right ear.

  All it would’ve taken was a touch for Fumiko to crumble apart on the sidewalk. But there was no touch when they parted ways that night, just an exchange of Handheld numbers. “You’re here for a month, right?” Dana asked.

  “Yes,” Fumiko said.

  “Then we should make the most of it. What are you doing tomorrow?”

  She lifted her shoulders. “Nothing.”

  Dana nodded, and put away her Handheld.

  “Then I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said.

  Fumiko returned home with her heart in her pocket. She lay in bed but did not sleep. Troubled by her strange need to shout from her window, to grab someone by the neck and whisper the possibility of miracles. But by her own design she had no one in her life she could call. No one to whom she could describe the encounter with that beguiling and beautiful woman; no friends, or even good acquaintances, her lifetime of distancing herself from others now taking its vengeance as she tripped in and out of purple-eyed dreams.

  * * *

  —

  The next day she walked the sunbaked streets that overlooked the green waters of Nakagusuku Bay with her hand in her khaki pocket, gripping her Handheld while waiting for the telltale vibration, afraid that she would somehow miss the call if she did not keep a hand close by. She regretted never investing in a PrivateEye—it would’ve been impossible to miss a retinal notification. She ate a slice of sponge cake on a park bench while she considered her regrets, and when she was done, she brushed stray crumbs off her lap and walked to the Museum of Earth Sciences. She paced around the Grand Hall, studying the enormous magmatic sculpture that was suspended by wire above her. A fast reader, she sped by the many digital plaques that contextualized the exhibits until she had experienced the majority of the museum in a little under an hour and a half. It was toward the end of her private tour when Dana finally called.

  “Are you still free tonight?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Fumiko said, pausing at the display on tectonic shifting. “What would you like to do?”

  “There’s a new exhibit on supervolcanoes at the Museum of Earth Sciences. I heard it’s pretty good. Have you seen it yet?”

  She had. In fact, she was there. Behind her was the blue-red holographic display of cracked earth crust. A child shrieked as lava spewed from a digital fissure. “No, I haven’t seen it,” Fumiko said, covering the mouthpiece so Dana wouldn’t hear the display. “When do you want to meet?”

  “My last class gets out at three, so an hour after?”

  That was five hours from then. “That works with my schedule. I’ll see you then.”

  “Perfect! Can’t wait.”

  Fumiko lowered her Handheld. The crying child was escorted out of the dome by his harried mother, who glanced at Fumiko in apology before turning the corner to the bathroo
ms.

  The wait for Dana was excruciating. Fumiko kicked around the neighborhood. Was both frustrated and thrilled by the hours of waiting, the long rehearsal of what she would say and how she would smile and if she should shake Dana’s hand or give a friendly hug. When Dana finally arrived, it took everything Fumiko had to not explode from all the collected potential energy. Dana gave her a brief hug, and said, “Shall we?” before leading her back into the museum, and though it was exhausting for Fumiko to pretend it was her first time experiencing the exhibit, she would have done it again in a heartbeat, if only to see once more the dazzle in Dana’s eyes as the holographic projection of Earth’s insides expanded and swallowed their bodies in its bright fires.

  After dinner by the pier, they made plans to meet the next day. Dana suggested they ride on a gondola—insisting against Fumiko’s misgivings of tourist attractions that it was the best way to see the city. Most of Okinawa City was built upon struts lifted above the water, the city’s geography crosshatched with canals, the canals populated by tourist gondolas that drifted between the backs of buildings and beneath arched bridges.

  The sky that day was overcast, threatening rain, but they risked the boat anyway. The ride started off well. Dana pointed out various landmarks while Fumiko let her right hand fall over the side of the boat, dragging along the cold water as she gazed up at the birdless sky and listened to the reverence with which Dana spoke the names of architects she admired. But twenty minutes in, the clouds broke, and the rain began to fall, forcing the pilot to dock downtown. They sprinted through the downpour to a café across the street, Dana giggling as she squeezed water from her thin scarf. The café was a warm place made of wood and carpets. At the counter, students chatted with the barista and in one of the booths a man muttered into his Handheld while scrolling through the news Feed. They sat at a table by the window, ordered tea for Dana, and orange juice for Fumiko, which she felt the need to explain, even though Dana didn’t pry. “I can’t drink caffeine,” she said. “It wreaks havoc with my system.” On the wall screen, the volume dialed down to the last bar, a news station played a story on the recent certification of the Desiree, the station that would begin construction next year in the Eridani system. “There they go,” Dana said during a wide shot of engineers shaking hands below a congratulatory banner. “That’s the third one this year, isn’t it?”