Country of Origin Read online

  But first he handed her a small presento, a token memento of the evening—a brooch with red gems of indeterminate origin, ostensibly arranged to look like a ladybug, but which regrettably resembled a sunburned cockroach. “Domo,” Lisa said. “Gosh, a little bauble.”

  “Bubble?” Mojo asked.

  “Bauble.”

  “Bobble?” He juggled his hands.

  “Bauble. A geegaw. Or is it gewgaw?”

  Mojo stared at her, thoroughly confused.

  “A pretty-pretty,” Lisa said, slurring a little.

  “Ah,” he said, brightening, “you think pretty?”

  “Yes, very pretty.”

  He smiled at her and mopped his forehead and then, noticing her half-emptied glass, frantically motioned to the waiter for another round.

  They made a few excruciating passes at small talk, but mostly stared out the windows at the view—a convenient reprieve from conversation. When his châteaubriand and her coq au vin were served, they sliced and forked and chewed with great deliberation, as if the act of eating the meal required the utmost focus. They each had another drink, split a bottle of Merlot, then had a snifter of X.O. with their cherries jubilee.

  “Good? Oishikatta?” Mojo asked her when the bill came.

  “Oishikatta,” she said.

  He wiped his brow, happy.

  Laughing, they teetered to the elevator, stumbled across the lobby, then hung on to each other for balance at the hotel entrance, waiting for his car. When they were tucked into the black Toyota Crown, Mojo asked where he should direct his driver, the club or his mansion.

  “Mansion,” Lisa giggled.

  Beaming, Mojo clutched her hands in his. “Thank you, thank you,” he said.

  They drove onto one of the elevated expressways and shot through the city, neon blurring past the windows of the car. Lisa was drunk, terribly, terribly drunk, and also a little stoned. Before leaving the restaurant, she had gone to the bathroom and gulped down a Quaalude. She had never taken a Quaalude before. She hardly ever did drugs—well, okay, she had also ingested one Percodan that morning, but it had been purely medicinal, a salve for her hurt ribs, one of which might have been broken—and, combined with the booze, the pills were affecting her quickly.

  Mojo lived in an exclusive residential neighborhood called Denen-Chofu. It was only twenty-five minutes from Akasaka, but it seemed a world apart. Ginkgo trees lined the streets, and it was quiet, as if they had been kidnapped to the country.

  Mansion was a misnomer, just a name for a nicer apartment. This building, the Homat King, was one of a string of fancy abodes that catered to rich Japanese and foreigners. Still, Mojo’s place was palatial: four bedrooms, a garden patio, more space than he knew what to do with. He was a widower, and his children, he said ruefully, did not visit often.

  Lisa sank into the couch, head spinning. Mojo made drinks for them, but she worried suddenly that he might not be able to perform, which would embarrass them both and lead to all kinds of awkwardness, such as the question of whether she would still receive her gift, or if they would have to try again. She didn’t care about the money. She wasn’t doing this for money. But the money was important to stamp the evening as an official transaction. If she was going to be accused of being a whore, she wanted to do this right.

  Mojo began dancing. He had some god-awful disco on the stereo, and he had taken off his suit jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves and unclipped his tie. He was loose, flying, making funny gyrating movements with his hips, arms akimbo. He wasn’t a bad man, he was actually quite nice, he was rather sweet. And not frightfully ugly. No, he might have been short and squat and big-bellied, face pancaked as to be featureless except for one eyelid that drooped, and he might have been unctuous, a font of secretions, sweaty, hair greased with rank-smelling ointment, skin oily and shiny and pungent with cologne, but he wasn’t entirely repulsive.

  Wanting her to dance with him, he tried to lift Lisa off the sofa, but he didn’t leverage himself properly and fell face-first into the cushions, which broke the two of them into hysterics, until Lisa, swallowing a hiccup, farted. It wasn’t a huge fart—chisai desho—and it wasn’t long, but it was a watery fart, a short, powerful splutter, a moist punctuation of air that horrified Lisa and shocked them into momentary silence, mouths yawned open. But then Mojo began guffawing, and Lisa did, too. He had a high-pitched, keening, hyenic laugh, and Lisa’s was a deeper, slower rumble, and the two of them—convulsing, shrieking, moaning—harmonized into a sound that was an ornithological abomination, a cross between a turkey buzzard and a titmouse on speed.

  Flatulence was a time-honored tradition in Japan. Lisa had seen farting contests on TV, participants imitating animal noises, farting along to popular songs, lying on a table, knees to chest, a laboratory tube stuck up their ass, attempting to blow out candles. Mojo now tried to eke out his own fart, squeezing his face tight, grunting, holding his breath, but he was having trouble. He grabbed Lisa’s palm and slapped it against his sweaty forehead, pressing hard. It was a childhood game played by Japanese boys to induce farts, but to Lisa it felt evangelical, like a tent-top preacher laying hands. “Heal,” she said, and gripped Mojo’s head harder. “I command you to receive the power of the Lord and say unto you, demons asunder, let’s hear that bunghole thunder!” She pushed Mojo’s head against the back of the sofa. “I anoint you and compel you to blow a gasket, give me some almond toast.” She rose onto her knees on the sofa and shoved her hand down on his forehead. The movement electrified the pain in her ribs and made her throw up a little in her mouth, but she swallowed it back down. “I call on the benediction of God to empower you, toot the chute, shoot the monkey.” She was floating upward, lifting. “I want spark plugs!” she shouted, hovering near the ceiling. “Ringo vapor! Koita, koita! Anus evacuas, fanny fumigatorio!” She was so dizzy, red and green lights popping in her eyes, the room darkening. “Fart for me, my sweet methane prince. Fart for Mama.”

  She wouldn’t have sex with Mojo, she decided. It would prove nothing. She would be punishing no one other than herself. It was stupid to have even considered it. She resolved to leave Japan, to go back to the States. She didn’t belong here.

  And then she awoke in the dark. She was lying on her back in a bed. The lights were off, but the curtains weren’t drawn, and the moon was seeping into the room—one of the bedrooms in Mojo’s mansion, she gathered. She was alone. She still had her clothes and shoes on. But why did she feel so groggy and heavy?—oh, molasses. She couldn’t move, her arms and legs were dead weight. She could barely turn her head. What had happened? Had she fallen asleep? Passed out? Where was Mojo? She was very cold, and her face and neck felt wet. Her throat and chest hurt. Her ears were plugged, as if she were on an airplane on a steep descent. The pressure was unbearable. She tried to swallow, but the pain in her ribs and also her chest got worse, her lungs seared. Something was wrong. She wasn’t breathing. Her airway was blocked. Oh, God, she wasn’t breathing. She tried to cough, to get up, to grab her throat, but she could do nothing, she couldn’t move, she was already losing consciousness. The cold wet on her skin—she had vomited. She had been passed out on her back, and she had vomited from all the drinks and the Percodan and the Quaalude, and she was now choking on her own vomit.

  This can’t be happening, she thought. I can’t die like this, not like this. The pain in her chest began to ease, but she instinctively knew that this meant neither relief nor rescue, but finality. She was sinking. She was drowning. She felt embarrassed, and stupid, and terrified, and very, very alone. She had no family, no one who would really miss her. Was she really going to die like this? She wondered what would happen to her body, where she would be buried, if anyone would claim her. She was not quite twenty-five years old.

  TWO

  THE FIRST call came on July 10, 1980, at 2:35 a.m., the message taken by the overnight embassy duty officer. A woman named Susan Countryman from Richmond, Virginia, was trying to locate her younger sister, L
isa, in Tokyo. She hadn’t been able to reach her for over a month.

  After his morning coffee, Tom Hurley called the number the woman had left, but her daughter, who couldn’t have been more than twelve, said she was at work. Tom asked the girl to have her mother contact him at the embassy, explaining that Tokyo, accounting for Daylight Savings Time, was thirteen hours ahead of the East Coast. When he hung up, he worried for a moment that the girl hadn’t understood what he’d meant about the time difference, but promptly forgot about it.

  The embassy was abuzz with Jimmy Carter’s visit. The President had come to Tokyo for Prime Minister Ohira’s funeral, and this morning he was meeting with China’s Premier Hua at the Hotel Okura. There was so much going on in the world that year: the hostages in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Olympic boycott, Cyrus Vance’s resignation, Kim Dae Jung’s sedition trial and the Kwanju riots, the strikes in Poland. Here in Japan, there were the Lockheed and KDD scandals, the no-confidence vote against Ohira, his heart attack, the subsequent elections for both houses in the Diet, and the trade war with the US over everything from cars to rice to telecommunications equipment.

  It was an exciting time to be a diplomat in Tokyo, and Tom was privy to none of it. As a Junior Officer in American Citizens Services, the most delicate issue he faced these days was fetching Jujyfruits for a pothead in jail. Benny Daws and Jorge Hernandez, two veteran Consular Officers he had befriended, weren’t any better off.

  “It’s because we don’t have last names for first names,” Jorge said that night. “If you really want to belong to the Yankee establishment, you need a good Eastern Seaboard, old-money first name like Ellsworth or Thorne.”

  They were drinking beers in a pub in Akasaka. Benny waved over the waiter and asked for another round of bottles, then said, “Of course, along with the name, it helps to be Ivy League.”

  “And then there’s that other thing,” Jorge told him.

  “Hm?”

  “Seals the deal if you’re tidy-white,” said Jorge, who was Chicano.

  “Oh, yes, there is that little thing,” said Benny, who was black.

  “Please,” said Sara Sobeske, who was Polish. “Can’t we go one night without talking about race? Night after night. I’m bored out of my tree.”

  Tom began, “How do you get a one-armed Pollack out of a tree?”

  “Don’t you dare,” Sara said.

  “Wave at him,” Tom said. “How did the Pollack break his leg raking leaves?” He had dozens of these jokes memorized. He had found a book of them.

  “Shut up!”

  “He fell out of the tree,” Tom said. “How many Pollacks—”

  “Stop!” Sara cried.

  They had been going out for a couple of weeks—nothing serious. She was a secretary in Admin, and she was leaving for the US next Friday, quitting the State Department for good. She hated being a secretary, and Tom couldn’t blame her. The hierarchy in the department was rigid and clear. At the top were Foreign Service Officers, FSOs, in the Political and Economic sections. At the bottom were the secretaries and FSNs—Foreign Service Nationals—locals who were saddled with all the shit work. Languishing in between were the FSOs in the Administrative and Consular sections. Every Junior Officer had to spend his first tour or two as a Vice Consul, but to get stuck in Consular meant the death of one’s career before it began. It was a repository for flunkeys, hacks, washouts, and layabouts. It was also, by a remarkable coincidence, where most women and minorities ended up.

  Jorge refilled everyone’s beer glasses. “It’s curious to me how you can be so cavalier all the time,” he said to Tom.

  “I’ve got no complaints.” In ACS, Tom mostly pushed paper—renewing passports, certifying births and deaths, handing out absentee ballots and tax forms—but he was, in his opinion, doing relatively well. He was in Tokyo, after all, a coveted post, rather than in Africa or on the Cucaracha Circuit, and he was no longer stamping visas—unlike Jorge and Benny, who had three graduate degrees and twelve years of Foreign Service experience between them.

  “Exactly my point,” Jorge said. “I don’t know what it is. Maybe you’re charmed, maybe the gods have anointed you, but somehow you lucked into this cushy gig—”

  “Who’d you pay off, anyway?” Benny asked. “Who’d you sleep with?”

  “I’ll never tell,” Tom said, winking.

  “You shouldn’t be content with where you are,” Jorge said.

  “Ouch,” Benny said.

  “You should demand more of yourself.”

  “Had to take it up the ass, huh?” Benny said.

  The three men made for an odd trio. Benny was bandy-legged and small-shouldered, with a supple, light step, but he had a loose, rumpled quality about him. Jowly face. Jiggly gut. Always the joker. Jorge, on the other hand, was thin and edgy and cantankerous, a bit of a subversive, sinister-looking with his gray-tinted eyeglasses. Jorge had dubbed them the Triplets of Token, the Three Mudketeers, the Rainbow Brethren, and, like an older brother, he was always riding on Tom.

  Sara’s apartment in Perry House was unnavigable with moving boxes, so she and Tom went to his place in Harris House, the middle of the three buildings on the embassy compound. His apartment had steel doors and linoleum and a concrete balcony, and it was outfitted with standard government-issue furniture that evinced the American penchant for plaid, but it had a ridiculous amount of space for a single man: two floors with two huge bedrooms upstairs. That night, however, Sara was partial to the sofa in the living room downstairs, a lovely wine-and-green-tartan monstrosity with matching chair and ottoman.

  “Two Pollacks are walking through a field,” Tom said.

  Sara snapped her head around and glared at him. “I—am—”

  He grabbed her hips in his hands and pulled her toward him, staring down at her ass, which was, all in all, quite a lovely sight. “They come across a sheep with its head stuck in a fence.”

  She expelled a soft moan. “—going—”

  “One of the Pollacks drops his pants and fucks the sheep.”

  She closed her eyes and bent down farther. “—to—”

  “Then he turns to his friend and says, ‘Okay, your turn.’ ”

  “—kill—”

  “His friend says, ‘Fine,’ and sticks his head in the fence.”

  “—you.”

  They changed positions, Sara rolling onto her back on the sofa, Tom kneeling on the floor between her legs. “Are you going to miss me?” she asked, looking up at him.

  “Of course,” he told her.

  “Why do I even bother to ask?” she said. “You know, Jorge doesn’t get it. You don’t care about delivering demarches or getting on the country team, because the work itself doesn’t really interest you. You just want to travel and get laid. It’s all a lark to you. They love people like you, people who’ll just go along with whatever’s decreed.”

  Trying to distract her, he kissed her neck, nibbled her earlobe.

  “You don’t want anything to ever get too serious,” she said. “You don’t want to have to feel or think about anything.”

  Tom brushed her hair off her forehead with his fingers. Everything she was saying about him was essentially true. He was weak and acquiescent, and he was superficial. He didn’t work very hard, and he wasn’t very ambitious. But not for the reasons she presumed. In any case, he knew she wasn’t trying to be mean or recriminatory. She was young—twenty-three. She had become more affectionate for him than the situation, with her imminent departure, had warranted, and he was touched by her peevishness. “I really will miss you, Sara,” he said.

  She turned away from him. “I’m sure you will.”

  LISA COUNTRYMAN had not registered with the embassy, which wasn’t unusual in Tokyo. Most expats didn’t think it necessary to keep their local contact information up to date or to specify emergency next of kin, since Japan was hardly Third World and the city was virtually crime-free. But not registering also meant that Lisa Countryma
n had not signed a Privacy Act Waiver, and therefore, by law, there was only so much Tom could disclose to her sister about her welfare and whereabouts.

  “What does that mean?” Susan Countryman asked when she and Tom finally spoke on the telephone.

  “This will sound silly,” he said, “but it means that even if we find her, there’s a limit to what we can tell you without her written consent.”

  “What?”

  “We can’t reveal her location, welfare, intentions, or problems unless she specifies we can.” Tom had never handled a missing-persons case before, and he was reciting straight from the FAM, the Foreign Affairs Manual. “Some people disappear by choice,” he said, “which is their legal prerogative.”

  “Look, I’m her sister,” Susan Countryman said, betraying a faint Southern accent.

  “I understand,” he said.

  “I just want to know if she’s safe.” There were children screaming in the background. She explained that she was a nurse in the burn unit at Richmond Memorial, and she had just finished a twelve-hour night shift, and now her three kids were awake and demanding breakfast.

  “Mrs. Countryman,” Tom said, doodling on a notepad, “I assure you we’ll do everything we can to help you.”

  “Ms.,” she corrected. “Let’s say you find her but she doesn’t give you consent. You’ll at least tell me you found her?”

  Tom set down his pen, mildly interested. “Is there some reason she might not want to talk to you?”

  “No. Of course not. I’m just asking. You’re the one who brought up the possibility.”

  He slid the FAM closer and paraphrased Section 135 of Subchapter 7. “We can only give you negative information. We can tell you that a careful search has failed to reveal any information that she is or was in the consular district. We can tell you she departed the district and left no forwarding address. But we can’t tell you she’s in the district if she doesn’t want that revealed, and we can’t give you her forwarding address unless she expressly said that we could. All we can do is inform her that you’re trying to locate her and forward a message to her.”