Deaths Excellent Vacation

Green’s heart beats loud in his ears, Are you like me?
    But she throws her head back with a cry of loneliness and disappears into the deep.
    When they are back on dry land, the kids say nothing. They stand on the rocky shore, each of them alone for a minute. Then the boy goes from one to the other, touching them on the shoulder, bringing them together into a protective hug. They reach out for the two older men, for Lan. She reaches out for him. Green stands with them, embracing them and embraced.
    Tonight he has done new things. Of all of them, that silent lonely hug is the hardest, and it’s what he will remember, that and Nessie’s tongue tasting the green monster made of force and silt, hoping she could find something like herself.
     
     
    HE takes everyone back to Japan in his invisible force-field UFO. They’re quiet on the trip. Over Japan, the trees are pink and green with springtime. At the big Tokyo train station, the kids and the older men shake hands with him and Lan. Then the Japanese Talents wander away, down escalators. The station is a big mall, open in the center. Green and Lan can still see the group, past the escalator, two levels below them. The kids stand in front of a game store, huddling together.
    “Guess they thought they’d be happier when the heroics happened,” Green says. “Guess they thought they’d figure something out.”
    “They’ve seen monsters,” Lan says.
    He nods.
    “We went fishing,” he says. “Four of us. We were so jazzed about being Talents. That was the age of Talents. We thought we had it made. We were kings of the world. We were like each other. But Atom got sick, Astounding was going to get himself blown up someday and he did, I stole my wife from Iguana and pretended to be human. We went fishing and we caught loneliness. I can’t help the kids, Lan. Badgers and cats don’t live more than a few years. Someday there’ll be only one of them left. And it’ll see something it thinks is like itself or its friends, but the smell will be wrong and the taste will be wrong, and it’ll know it’s the only one of itself in the world. Being the one there’s only one of, that’s being a monster.”
    “I’ll buy you a present,” Lan says.
    She makes him wait outside a shop full of statues of every description, from Buddha to the Virgin Mary. Here in Planet Tokyo you buy Buddhas in a train station. She comes out with a little box. Not far away from them there’s something like a food court with little tables. They take a table with pink plastic flowers embedded in its top. “Open your present now.” She goes away and comes back with two drinks, something chewy and sweet with barley in it.
    Green’s present is eight little plastic statues in a row on a plastic base.
    “The Eight Immortals.” She touches their small heads one by one. “Immortal Woman He, whose lotus flower gives health. Royal Uncle Cao, whose jade tablet purifies the world. Iron-Crutch Li, who protects the needy.” She takes the next one off the stand, a slim Chinese boy or girl with a woven basket and a flute, and stands it by her purse. Through the woven material of the purse he can see the outline of that long flute. “Lu Dongbin, whose sword dispels evil spirits. Philosopher Han Xiang, whose flute gives life. Elder Zhang Guo, master of clowns, winemaking, and Qigong kung fu. Zhongli Quan, whose fan revives the dead.”
    Green picks up the statue with the basket and flute, and looks a question at her.
    “Immortal Woman runs a health food store in New Jersey. The Philosopher and Quan are dead, I think. The Philosopher’s flute came to me in the mail one day. I saw Zhang Guo on the beach in Monterey but he wouldn’t talk to me. Lu, Li, Cao, I don’t know. Immortal Woman frightens me most. She didn’t want to be a monster. She wanted friends and neighbors. She made herself forget she was immortal. I go in there once a year or so, and she says nothing but trivial things, How do you like those Dodgers? She never stops talking. She bores everyone and forgets to charge for newspapers. But she isn’t a monster.”
    “You want to be lonely?” Green says. “You want to be alone?”
    She touches the statue he has picked up, which means she touches his hand. “Lan Caixe. The shape-changer, the mysterious one. The minstrel whose songs foretell the future. No,” Lan says, “I didn’t want to be a monster. So I made other shape-changers, and I thought they would be like