Part III, Chapterlets 12-15

12.
As the days of their strange engagement went by, they spent many hours together, in museums, parks, coffee shops. Yuriko could tell that this pleased Reason more than words. She was surprised at his taste, sometimes. How he would turn from something truly beautiful to something kitschy and cheap—and still be moved by it. When he touched something, his hands seemed to do his eyes’ work. She thought to herself that he had the touch of a blind man. His fingers would move through space quickly and then hesitate an inch from the surface of something, shaking. Afraid to touch whatever might be there in the imagined dark. When his hand stopped shaking it would close, like he was muffling a shout made by his palm, or like he was that old, drunk television Superman, unsteadily pantomiming catching a bullet. At this point he would turn away, and she would ask him what he had felt. Often he would say, “Nothing,” and stride away. But sometimes he would smile. The grace of his hands frightened her.
His clothes were from a season she could not place. He wore sturdy, dark fabrics of the kind her adopted mother had worn, but of more elegant cut. His pants were molded to his hips and fell down loosely without pleats, sagging a touch at the crotch, but his shirts and waistcoats were always formfitting. She had owned a book of costumes in college—pictures of military uniforms from different ages to use as patterns when putting on a play. Sometimes, reason looked like a somber version of one of the bright, painted soldiers of the steppe. He seemed new and ancient.
As time went on, she found that, if she loved Reason, her love for him was not one that she had chosen. It seemed as if the weight of him was such that she had been pulled in his wake, a body in space orbiting a distant star—sometimes spending years in darkness, sometimes passing near enough that it could be seen against the backdrop of other bodies, other spaces. The relief of the thought was immense. If she was being pulled along, then she could be betraying no one.
If she confessed to herself her motive for pursuing the relationship was pragmatic. She had often dreamt of making a life for herself without relying on her family’s old money—which meant a return to an old way. She had visions of making herself comfortable through hard work and sacrifice. When she looked at Reason, she could see comfort and more standing in front of her, without any effort required. When he had asked to marry her, she had been taken aback. What was more shocking was the eagerness with which she anticipated the formalization of their contract.
When they were married, Reason took her first to Vienna. To reassure himself that he tried to satisfy the curiosity about the old world that she had confessed during their museum visits. She kept saying to herself, in this garden or that palace, I will feel something that will transform me; I will suddenly become as easy with Reason and this marriage as he is; I will feel Allison sheared off of me by the grandeur of these old buildings, and the weight of her will no longer be mine to carry. If Reason sensed any of the anguish that she felt moving through the haze and confusion of such an old place, she could not see it. He seemed as much the sightseer as the guide. With a mechanical efficiency he took her through the city, sometimes smiling and saying, “You are a member of the Destry family, now.” Like that would make her feel something other than twice a foreigner in that foreign place.
He said things to her in German, which she forced herself to memorize. When Reason wasn’t around, she asked their driver their meanings. The driver treated it like a flirtation game. This saddened Yuriko, though she understood it. “Das Leben ist ewig, darin liegt seine Schönheit,” he translated to her in his brashly inelegant English as “The life is eternal. In it lies its alreadyness.” This had confused her more than ignorance. Only once had the driver stomped off without replying.
One night, when they were discussing books over heavy schnitzel and dumplings, she told Reason she hated the Romantics. He laughed and said that by that he supposed she meant the English Romantics. She asked if there was any other kind. He was quiet for a while, squeezing those hands around the handle and body of a beer mug, then he said, shaking his head, “Yes. But it is not fair to speak of them as if they are in the past in any case. Die Romantische Dichtart ist noch im Werden. Ja das ist ihr eigentliches Wesen, daβ sie ewig nur warden, nie vollendet sein kann. How does it go? Eine Philosophie der Poesie überhaupt…” He moved off toward the bar of their suite still muttering in German. When she related what she remembered to the driver, he was unwilling or unable to translate.
They walked along together in front of the Imperial palace in an unseasonably hot sun that pounded down all around the clipped hedges and tinted the statues brilliant white and gold. They went to the Kammergarten and talked, into the Gloriette, still talking, moving from bench to bench, Yuriko realizing in a moment of profound horror and cheesiness that they had a great deal to learn from each other. They looked at every tree and statue from at least two angles, confused by the sun into a kind of permanent awe and restlessness.
Back at the hotel, Yuriko went to the window and pulled aside the velvet hangings, and opened the window despite the night’s cold. He talked to her of the history of Vienna, of Emperor Francis Joseph, of Charles the First, on and on. Yuriko could hear a certain strain in his voice. His words were heavy as if they were supporting the combined weight of their new life and their old hotel. Looking around after this inexhaustible flow of information had begun to ebb, she noticed Reason sitting with one leg thrust out, his head pressed back against the cushion of his chair, just falling asleep, one arm dangling down—his hand somehow more awake and alert than the rest of his being. She realized somehow that she was not entirely what he had hoped she was. This realization was a happy one. Here was something else to distinguish Allison from this man. This man had expectations of her—however small—and she could break them. The different quality of Allison’s feeling for her grew large in that moment and threatened to crush her. She retreated to the bedroom and closed the door on Reason’s silent sleep.
Two days later, they were in Paris. She made him take her into church after church, where she lit candles and murmured her little prayers. In the months that followed, she took comfort in the fact that he did not prevent her from doing this small penance at every church that they passed. He didn’t even comment on it. Just waited, content to study the paintings over each altar and breathe in the stony air. Yuriko could tell that he had resigned himself to her seeming faith as someone might resign themselves to the eventual discovery of a secret too large to glimpse all at once.
As far as she could tell, Reason was looking for the way to be with her, as if being in her presence was clumsy. He was constantly listening with his head to one side as they walked, as if he could hear the echo of her, and that a precise knowledge of echoes would lead him to a manner of being with her in the world that would make all the facts and secrets the new nearness and the irretrievable distances between them somehow less important. As if he was looking for a different foundation to base their new, permanent intimacy on than the removal of loneliness. There was something admirable in it that had Yuriko looking for little churches with an eagerness that almost scared her.
Their eventual return to Oklahoma was marked with Yuriko’s strange premonition of bearing a child. She believed herself to be on the verge of pregnancy, somehow, and she related this bizarre feeling to Reason while they were seated in the library, looking at a late spring fire. He did not seem to hear. He responded, “A child? Yes. A child,” and leaned in to give her an expert kiss before returning to his book. Yuriko had become aware of an entire land inside her mind that was unfolding beneath this new pressure of an expectant husband. She started going out into the country in her car or by cab.
She wandered through the small towns and stared through small, streaked windows onto dusty bits of wood and crumbling furniture labeled antique, alone and wrapped up in this new interior landscape. Once, not having returned for three days, she walked in to find Reason standing, immobile at the window in the master bedroom. When he saw her, he seemed to melt, collapsing onto the hardwood floor in a thumping tumble of sweating flesh. She moved halfway across the room toward him, filled with a terrified pain. He looked up, asking where she had been. She said that she had been all the way to Omaha.
Soon after that, she went to the Boston Avenue Methodist Church and demanded baptism by immersion. She entered the presence of the man performing the ceremony quietly, and the few who were scattered amongst the pews did not cease their prayers or look up. Then, as if some wish for salvation, something even more hideously impossible to fulfill than those wishes that had burdened them throughout their lives had somehow crashed upon them, like a wave breaking over their heads—as if the shadows in the pews had thrown themselves at their bent backs with palpable weight—they looked up and saw her, saw her body moving resolutely down into the water and back up, nude beneath a clinging white baptismal robe, a tall woman with the body of a courtesan.
Despite the quiet protests of the staff, she wandered, dripping to the middle of the aisle where she knelt, conspicuous and alone at the center of every gaze. When a puddle had formed around her, she rose, found her clothes, changed and left.

13.
When Reason came home that night, Yuriko was curled up on a windowseat, one hand supporting her head and one hand on her immense belly. A book was open on the seat next to her. The book was Le Secret, and a whole paragraph had been underlined. The page was stained with tears. As Reason read the sentence, “L’étrange sollicitude des adultes à l’égard des enfants est cruauté pure: obliger quelqu’un qui depend d’eux comme ils ont dépendu eux-mêmes de leurs parents, à refaire le chemin d’obstacles, à se cogner aux mêmes barrières, à peiner sur les memes problèmes, le tout, évidemment, par amour,” he came to the conclusion that something was wrong.
She opened her eyes but did not move. He tried to take her by the arm and lift her toward him, but she resisted with one hand against his chest. She appeared frightened, her mouth opening and closing in silence. He released her and stepped back, trying to articulate something of the concern he was feeling, but they moved away from each other with nothing said.
That night, the contractions came. She began to swear loudly. He tried to make her comfortable.
“Fuck off!” she yelled. She moved unsteadily, leaning away from their mutual center of gravity as he held her up. She was drunk—her hair was swinging behind her and her grey eyes were livid.

14.
Yuriko was delivered of twin boys amidst identical roars of affirmation and despair. Trembling in rage and pain, she rose up in her hospital bed and looked about her, the orbits of her eyes dancing as she searched the faces in the room. She cried, “Allison, Allison!” her eyes wide like a lost child in a darkened room.
A week after the delivery, she was desperate, convinced of the irreparability of her crimes. This act of birth had evoked long shuttered feelings of betrayal and anxiety that flooded over her and seized her attention with a force that nothing could pry loose.
One night, Reason came home to find the thick nurse restraining her with the nanny looking on sadly. Her arms were behind her head in a classic full-Nelson. The nanny calmly said that they had entered to find the missus holding one of the boys over her head as if about to smash it on the side of the crib. They had taken the child and restrained the mother, who even now writhed quietly, not looking about her as Reason watched.
Reason looked in on his sons in their crib. They were healthy, fat, squat, and pink. Unconcerned. They gave a simultaneous mewling cry. He instructed the nurse to release his wife. She drifted over and latched on to him. He walked her up the stairs and put her to bed.
Yuriko began wandering again. Little trips, from which she would return days or hours later, with no account of where she had been or what she had seen. The staff grew uneasy around her. They avoided mentioning her name when they spoke with Reason. Something was coming. The shadows that Reason had felt since Sifu Chang had left were growing denser. They were obscuring everything in a dim mist. It nearly blinded him in the mornings, but most often he could see by the time he returned from work, late at night.
On one such occasion, coming home around four in the morning, she was standing in the dark with her back toward the window, most of her lost within the half-circle of the curtain. He could tell from the line of her posture that she was angry. As he came toward her, she yelled, “I didn’t want them!” and punched him in the eye. He allowed her to hit him three times before he took control of her arms.
Once she was still, he waited to a long count of ten before he said, “You didn’t want them? What am I supposed to say to that? You had a number of options at your disposal. Why have them if that was the case?” Reason loosed her arms and stepped away.
“Why does everyone have to talk about them all the time? Does the whole world know?”
“Not even a significant percentage of it.” Reason waited. When she said nothing further, he asked, “Who’s Allison?”
“I’m leaving,” responded Yuriko. She grabbed a jacket off the bed and left.
For a few months, Yuriko’s acquaintances called the house looking for her. No one knew where she had gone. When she was seen in Tulsa again, it was with one Allison Meyers. She did not tell anyone where she had been. She seemed vague on the details when her friends called her. And when she seemed vague they called him to express their concern. The vagueness was no impediment to some.
“She’s been in Amarillo. That’s where Allison’s family is. I delivered her, so I ought to know,” the doctor had said when Reason had wondered aloud in front of him. “Now, buy me a drink.”

15.
Aka, despite his sadness, had felt real rage at his brother’s abandonment of their home. As he watched the waves, day after day, he grew resentful. His brother had been lonely, even the birds that bathed in his spring could attest to that, but, in the end, his brother had been selfish, too.
It felt to Aka as if his brother had lightened his burden by increasing that of another. Ao had been lonely, but now Aka was alone, without the comfort that Ao must have found for himself out in the world. Aka thought that perhaps his brother and he were not so alike as they once thought.
Aka climbed to the peak of the blue mountain and sat with his brow furrowed. He sat there, seeking stillness, but it would not come. He grew more and more resentful of his brother. He decided that his brother must come back to their home. He had sought his solace in the world. Now, it was time to be home.
Aka reached up and grabbed a handful of the storm cloud rolling by overhead. He hefted himself up and over the side of it. Once he was settled on its broad back, he whispered to it. It ponderously turned in the direction he had indicated, the direction Ao had taken when he left. The storm cloud began to carry Aka out to sea. As he moved over the surface of the water, whitecaps bunching beneath him and lightnings trailing in his wake, he thought how best to convince his brother to come home.