The Hemingway Files Read online

  Even now, those two magical names ramify deeply, being as they are the hazy yin and yang of my first serious enchantments overseas. Their precious names hover and whir about me like bright, insistent hummingbirds, along with other recurring images:

  – Starched robes cinched with deep purple sashes

  – Steaming mugs of green tea, trays of rice crackers wrapped in seaweed

  – Late night sounds of trains, swooshing in and out, clack-clack, clack-clack

  – Antique wood-block prints: bawdy geisha, cone-shaped mountains, red torii

  – “Great Wave off Kanagawa”

  – Prussian blue and white fingers, dagger-like, plunging into tiny boats,

  – Old hillside temples, jutting into wind, anchored on thousand-year-old timbers

  – Bald monks in wooden shoes, sweeping wide porches, incense painted on air

  – Fresh crab brains, gooey as toothpaste

  – Orange day lilies and white chrysanthemums, dozing in earthen jars

  Remembering has never been hard, often in haiku-like form—mere images, as above. But not always pleasant images—sometimes I would awaken in the dead of night, sweaty, startled, remembering what I wanted to bury. No, it was getting it all down on paper, preparing to send it out to the world that’s been the hardest part. But I always knew the story needed telling, and given the circumstances of recent months, I’ve finally found the guts to wrench it out, for you, my friend, and for all the world to see.

  In fact, there are confessions to make. I’ve suffered my own fair share of guilt, maybe even trauma, admittedly an overused word these days. Michael Herr puts it this way: “The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all; it just stayed stored there in your eyes.” What a line: stored in your eyes!

  The mixed feelings are hard to explain, and harder to justify. I was paralyzed by remorse for days and weeks at a time, followed by a month of remorseless ease and comfort, unmoved by the events recorded here. Maybe I’m just kichigai— crazy, out of my gourd, cowering at flashing red lights, sirens rotating around in my brain. Over and over I’ve heard the familiar screams: Taskette! Taskette! (Help! Help!) And I’ve had the repeated nightmares, and the clammy, sudden awakenings. Meanwhile, I’ve kept my silence, biding my time.

  Only in the past half dozen years did I begin to take some action, searching for answers, doing what any good researcher would do. I devoured countless books about the effects of trauma on its survivors. Academic volumes, clinical data, mostly about the survivors of the deaths of loved ones. Earthquakes became a particular focus. I studied the grisly accounts of massive temblors all over the world: in Iran, for example (December 2003, over 26,000 dead), or Pakistan (October 2005, over 73,000 dead), or China (May 2008, over 87,000 dead). Haiti, earlier this year: over 315,000 dead! Strangely, I ordered books on Amazon filled with frightening photographs. The literary trope also captivated me: the biblical symbolism of earthquakes, the threshing floor of God’s wrath, the shorthand of apocalypse. And I developed a fascination with the pragmatics of earthquakes, how mundane human lives are so easily and abruptly shaken to their core, how normal people respond to the daily tremors of their existence, and how unpredictable concussions reveal the hidden fault lines of our characters. I felt like my own world had been rocked, and underneath were all these deep, secret chasms and fissures.

  As one expert put it, “Trauma seems to be much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available.” The story of a wound. I like that. Or, in some cases, hundreds, or thousands, of wounds.

  Another expert listed the many characteristic symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and I was not at all surprised to learn that at least five of them described my own odd behaviors: 1) excessive vigilance; 2) feelings of numbness or cognitive deadness; 3) sleeplessness often featuring recurring, intrusive memories of the events; 4) compulsions to repeat certain events, including a weird fascination with similar forms of violence; and 5) a sense of isolation from others. One famous psychologist described in detail exactly how I felt a good deal of the time: “Normal life becomes permeated by the bizarre encounter with atrocity and violence from the past, so much so that this past can never be completely purged. The two worlds haunt each other; the phantoms of a violent past insist on making their eerie presence permanently felt, even as we wash the dishes, write letters, or walk the dog.” And another psychologist described the three steps for full recovery from PTSD: according to clinical research you must tell your story, you must find a reliable witness for your story (usually a close and trusted friend), and you must work to create a new story altogether.

  That’s where you come in, Marty. Are you that close and trusted friend?

  Until now, nobody alive knows what I’m about to tell you, though my old pal Jim Daymon probably has a strong inkling, along with a few concrete artifacts—clues that I entrusted to him many years ago. Jim used to live in a Zen monastery up in the Japan Alps, but I haven’t spoken to him in well over a decade now. More about Jim later.

  The story you hold in your hands is the result of much fear and trembling this past summer and culminates many years of restless drafting and false starts, the majority of it now consigned to a digital purgatory. Most of the words came spilling out over long weekends of camping and hiking with my black and silver German shepherd, Walt, and my trusty laptop in the amazing mountains and coastlines within a day’s driving distance of eastern Washington. Unfortunately, these past few months, many Fridays and Saturdays I would wake up feeling terrible, barely able to walk to the kitchen for coffee. But I had to write out my letter to the world, and tell the story. It has, to some extent, lifted a burden and begun the process of redemption, if that’s even possible at this late stage.

  By now, of course, if it’s all gone according to plan, you’ve already heard the news: the most important motivation of all this effort has been the solemn realization that I’m dying. During spring break this year, I was riding my bike out in Mt. Rainier National Park—one of my favorite places on the planet—and I experienced some sort of physical attack. It was in the Paradise section of the park, and I was marveling at the endless fields of purple and yellow wildflowers. Suddenly, I hit a very deep pothole in the road and immediately felt a sharp pain in my lower chest that took my breath away and sent me careening into a very large, and very old western hemlock tree. Besides breaking my collarbone, I lay there for quite a while, blinded by a throbbing pain beginning around my belly and through to the small of my back, until someone happened by and alerted the park rangers, who rushed me away to the nearest hospital. It wasn’t that near.

  It turned out that the bicycle accident was the least of my problems, and that the stabbing chest and back pain that had buckled me over and sent me headfirst into the tree was the real source of trouble. The ER folks attended to the collarbone and urged me to contact my regular MD for further testing. CT scans indicated a mass along my spine, and additional tests confirmed that I had prostate cancer that had gone metastatic (rare for a youngish forty-something like myself, but not unheard of). Stage IV, I was calmly informed, meaning not only that would I be dying soon, but I probably only had a few months of active living to enjoy—or endure.

  All this was less than five months ago. My final weeks and days, almost certainly, will find me bedridden and, in the end, largely immobile. I am telling you all of this as abruptly and humorlessly as I was told by Dr. Koyama, my earnest physician back in Spokane. There was a mocking irony to his being of Japanese heritage, I remember thinking, though of course he was third generation. His father, though, had spent time at Manzanar as a little boy, so the tragic remnants of historical abuse still lingered in Dr. Koyama’s sad smile. Or at least I imagined it lingered. As he put it that day, his palms pressed togeth
er, prayerlike, and his index fingers touching his lower lip: “Consider this summer to be your gift. What do you want to do with it?” He peered at me over the top of his reading glasses. “Or—what do you need to do?”

  Physicians generally do not make good therapists, but in this case, he asked the right question. And so, learning that I probably only had a few months of serious energy left, I knew it was time to finish my story. I must now face those few dark secrets hidden away, and consider the best way to dispose of them. Honestly, I had no idea if I could do it. In fact, if my health had not changed, I’m sure I would have kept it all buried away, in some dark vault underneath the floorboards, like in a Poe story, just as I had for fifteen years. But now I had to figure out what to do about those secrets, and I didn’t have a whole lot of time to do it, if modern science had anything to say about it.

  I’m hoping that writing all this down will be redemptive. But I need to warn you up front: complete redemption, in my case, is partly up to you. Yes, today I’m feeling the old remorse rising up within me. So to put things right, at least in my own mind, I need the help of a trusted friend. It will require you to undertake “a few minor tasks,” as Sensei liked to put it. You’ll get to know him soon, in a way.

  I realize you are an “old dog,” but newness is good for the soul, though I’m sure the favor I’m going to ask will sound like climbing Mt. Fuji to you—and, in fact, climbing will be involved, as you will soon discover, so I suggest you order some comfortable walking shoes. There’s no one else I can trust, Marty. My dad’s too old, and his health’s lousy anyway—and my death, I’m sure, will be a tough blow making things even worse for him. And Mika? Well—I could never reveal these things to her. Finally, I want it to be someone who truly cherishes and understands the treasures involved. That leaves only you. And so I have sent you this box full of nothing but words. And a key to unlocking them.

  Basically I want to enter whatever awaits me in the Great Beyond through the doorway of tranquil sleep, made possible by the knowledge, or at least the belief, that I did my best for those remaining. So please be that close and trusted friend, and help me create a new ending to this story. As Emerson once wrote:

  “A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”

  Best wishes, EJS

  With this letter from my old protégé, I was catapulted into spring semester of 2011. Professors always hope to hear from former students; in fact some of the greatest satisfactions of any teacher are the achievements and adventures of star pupils like Jack. And here, being described as a trusted friend, was a poignant moment to be sure. But can you feel the horror with which I now read Jack’s epistle?

  He had left Bloomington in the summer of 1986, heading off for graduate work in the Ivy League. One often loses track of people, with or without the Internet, and this was certainly the case with professors and their former students back in those days—even the favorites. And so for roughly a decade, I heard nothing.

  Our relationship recommenced in the waning months of the Clinton administration, just before Easter of 1997, when he wrote a lengthy letter to me, announcing with great joy, that after spending three years in Japan followed by a couple years teaching and writing in Seattle, he had finally been offered—and had accepted—a tenure-track position at Gonzaga University in Spokane. I had not even known at the time that he’d lived and worked in Japan, but of course, I was overjoyed to hear of his good successes.

  Jack did not announce this news in an email, as today’s students might, and in fact, I still have the letter, tucked away in one of my prized file folders containing them all. Those letters, it goes without saying, along with our unspoken commitment to snail mail, are now revered even more in my memory. For me, his letters had become Jack. In truth, we had not even been in the same room together since he left Bloomington twenty some odd years before.

  Now, I will catapult you, my dear reader, into the larger tale followed by my own account of the adventure set in motion by Jack’s elaborate plan. Yes, finally, onward to Jack’s wonderful manuscript.

  The majority of the lengthy chronicle you now hold in your hands was produced not by me, but by my former protégé, Dr. Eugene Jackson Springs, a splendid student whose potential and achievements were among the best it has been my privilege to witness and encourage. I have only augmented Jack’s story occasionally, at the end of chapters, with either useful observations and/or hard factual data, all of which I’ve italicized (like this) for the sake of my readers. Jack’s story, with my minor interruptions, is then followed by a briefer report of what came afterwards. My own participation in all this, as it turned out, required more than just editorial assistance.

  I can divulge up front that I now understand why he kept certain details in the strictest secrecy for so long, and why evidently his own parents were not even allowed to hear the tale—until now, when all the world can listen.

  Our great authors were an eccentric bunch: often bullies, sometimes even sociopaths. All were driven by mixed motives, by their love of truth and beauty, by their tempestuous and autocratic personalities, and by the impure motivations of lust, personal gain, and notoriety. And yet they penned those marvelous words, words, words.

  The lyrical inventions of the great artists can indeed set us free, but if we’re not deliberate in our careful use and stewardship of them, their narcotic effects can imprison us as well. Jack’s confession is thus a cautionary tale. It illustrates a devotion that should certainly inspire us, even as it reminds us that some kinds of devotion also contain the seeds of our own corruption, and perhaps even destruction.

  EPISTOLARY FRIENDSHIPS II

  by

  E. J. SPRINGS

  Completed Sept. 4, 2010

  Dedicated to

  Sensei and Mika

  CHAPTER 1

  You are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by all men.

  —St. Paul to the Corinthians, II Cor. 3:2

  I find letters from God dropped in the street— and every one is signed by God’s name, And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever.

  —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

  I have loved the letters of the dead, Yu-san. I have given my life to discovering them, the secret thoughts from one famous person written to another, the miscellany of genius writers whose forgotten words were to me the very breath of life. Their letters are, in most cases, part and parcel of the author. We hold in our hands the remnants of the dead.

  —Sensei, circa autumn 1993

  The real story begins in Japan, and it will likely end there, too, though that part remains to be written. How I ended up in Japan is a pretty good yarn, but I won’t tell most of it here. Suffice it to say that I had never been there before 1992, and frankly had never even given Japan the briefest of thoughts. It was just some place far away. I had those old stale ideas about Japan, a mythic place with temples and geisha girls, samurai and sushi, all that, but beyond the stereotypes, I’d never thought much about it.

  I left Bloomington in summer of 1986 and headed off to New Haven to begin work on my doctorate, thanks to my inflated letters of recommendation. Still, I felt like the insecure little corn pusher from the Midwest that I was. Before I knew it, I was defending my dissertation and searching for full-time positions in the field. But when the smoke cleared, I received zero offers. A PhD from Yale, but no jobs on the horizon. To say I was devastated is putting it mildly.

  That was in the late winter of 1992, over eighteen years ago, but I can easily drum up the dread and alienation that took up residence in the pit of my stomach, the choking miasma that enveloped me every single day, rendering me limp, directionless. I felt trapped by the machine of higher education, chewed up and spit out on the pavement, like one of the homeless guys down on Chapel Street, on the wrong side of New Haven.

  But suddenly an unseen hand beckoned me all the way to the Land of the Rising Sun. At the end of the very last week of
February 1992, I found myself seated in the cluttered office of my mentor and dissertation director, Sherri Fisher. I was literally hours away from giving up the ghost and accepting a temporary, one-year appointment at a no-name college on the outskirts of Wichita, Kansas. I could hardly even believe that Wichita had outskirts, but I had no other options, my money was running out fast, and I was making the rounds to my trio of advisors, asking them for their opinions about my renting a U-Haul and heading off for the Great Plains.

  Long story short: Sherri knew a professor in Japan who had faxed her with inquiries about me. They had some prestigious three-year, post-doc available, called the Goto Fellowship, and my scholarly work fit the description perfectly. She produced the fax, written by the chair of the Department of American Studies at Kobe University, Professor Aoyama Daisuke. I was immediately ill at ease. I couldn’t pronounce the name or even determine whether the professor was male or female. I read the fax twice, as Sherri continued shuffling papers. I had never once in my life thought seriously about living in East Asia, or even visiting there for that matter.

  “So you know this—person?”

  “Oh yes, very well, actually. I once spent two months at Kobe University, and have been back a couple times when visiting Japan. Aoyama-sensei is a gentle, friendly, and funny guy. I think you’ll like him.” She turned her chair to look me straight in the eye. “Actually, he’s a Big Ten guy like you—he did his PhD at Northwestern, and lived in Chicago for about eight years, so his English is perfect. You’d like Kobe, and the school; it’s built onto the side of a mountain that rises straight out of the Pacific, just a couple miles away. The fax mentions that the apartment they provide will be in the same building they put me— very nice, very upscale, fully furnished, with a view of the bay. It would be a terrific set up, with an excellent condo to live in and lots of support from the university.” She twirled a little in her chair, and surveyed me like a Cheshire cat. “To be honest, it would beat the hell out of eastern Kansas, Dorothy.”