The Otter and The Owl

Chapter Twenty-One

Hakodate | Yesterday

Aki walked to Jeremy's room and found that, yes, he had indeed left the house.

She walked through the house in a daze, lost in shame and suddenly all too aware that through her actions she had dishonored her family and filled her father's last years with great sorrow. She felt buffeted by gales of uncertainty as she came to her room -- until she remembered. She was samurai. She had dishonored her family. There was only one way out.

She went to find her father's swords.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Seattle | Today

The spy looked at the crimson kimono even as his mind drifted to the swords that attended the silken garment. They were his now -- and he could not deny them...

"Patrick?"

Light from a recessed fixture in the ceiling danced along the Masamune's perfect edge, entrancing him, as always drawing him inward to that other light...

"Patrick? Are you still with us?"

He recognized Carolyn's voice and felt his way back to her, his mind struggling to break free. "Yes...yes...so sorry. I've still a bit of jet-lag, I think. Please, pardon me."

Carolyn refilled their glasses, pulled him back into the moment. "Should I make you an espresso?"

The spy pushed himself up in his chair, then he smiled at Dr. Andrews. "How is the crab? Palatable, I hope?"

"Delicious. Won't you help me out here? There's too much for me alone."

"Perhaps." The spy looked at Carolyn again and she retreated to the warmer confines of the kitchen. "Where was I? Oh yes...incidents."

"Yes, and frankly, I hope you don't mind me saying that I find all this a little hard to swallow -- Mister Grey."

The spy smiled. "I understand," he sighed, before taking a long pull from his glass of tea. "My PhD, the first, anyway, was in biochemistry. Oxford, in case anyone is wondering. My second was in neuropharmacology. Stanford. I also finished my MD there, by the by."

"You...you're a physician?"

The spy shrugged.

"That's a simple question, Grey. Are you a physician, or aren't you?"

"It really doesn't matter now, does it, Andrews?" the spy sighed, suddenly growing tired of the other man's preening paternalism.

"What has this story got to do with me, Dr. Grey?"

The spy looked down at his hands crossed on his lap and he nodded slowly. "Once we knew of the existence of the virus we began to model possible threat vectors, and these crude estimates were alarming enough. Then we received the purloined sample and the first thing we did was send it to Goldstein at Southwestern. Once we had the sequence it didn't take long to figure out how they'd made the agent. Essentially they weaponized a potently malignant cancer, so the job at hand was to come up with a readily deployable countermeasure."

"A...countermeasure? You mean...like a vaccine?"

The spy shook his head. "A vaccine was deemed too slow. Vaccines take time to reach a significant percentage of any given population, and with this agent the time involved was simply too great. No, the problem we faced was twofold: detection and direct intervention."

"Direct intervention? How so?"

"We devised a cure, Dr. Andrews."

A cold, heavy pressure settled over the oncologist as the real import of those words sunk in.

"A cure? For neuroblastoma?"

The spy nodded. "Yes, including all known forms of astrocytoma and glioblastoma."

"That's preposterous! Fucking preposterous...and you know it!"

"I am the wisest man alive," the spy whispered, "for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing at all."

"What?" Andrews snarled.

"Oh, nothing," Fontaine/Grey/the spy replied. "Nothing at all."

Andrews pushed his chair back and he had just started to stand...

...when a large white owl flew down from the pine and settled on table.

The physician, now quite startled, fell back into his seat. "What the devil..." he just managed to say, his voice now little more than a dry, barren place in a land of confusion.

"I don't think he's quite ready for you to leave, Dr. Andrews. Do sit and let me wrap this up."

The owl was not quite two feet tall and he was purest white -- aside from his all-seeing amber eyes -- and once he'd settled on the table his head turned slightly -- until his unblinking eyes were trained on Andrews'.

"In the cooler," the spy said, pointing at the Yeti by his feet, "you'll find twenty-one vials; Akira will need three of these." The spy took one of the envelopes and bent the little brass clasps to open it. "These documents release the patent and assign it to the University of Washington. I've already signed, and note my signature was duly notarized by our embassy in Japan. Carolyn will notarize yours when you're ready, at which point you may begin synthesis and production. The second envelope details the necessary steps."

"Look, if this is true, if you're not pulling some kind of..."

The owl's head bobbed twice, then he spread his wings wide.

"Oh, it's quite real, Dr. Andrews. And there are no strings attached -- other than my request for absolute anonymity."

Andrews now stared at the owl, quite unable to avoid the creatures haunted eyes. "Anonymity?" he asked.

"My absolute anonymity. It's spelled out in the release, but everything is rescinded the moment absolute anonymity is vacated. Understood?"

Andrews nodded -- but he was startled by a wet, thrashing sound out on the pier...and then he spotted a sea otter trundling up the planks towards Grey...who was now smiling and spreading open a large towel on his lap. The otter leapt up into the all-embracing towel and Grey wrapped himself around the creature and began drying her fur. Andrews shook his head in disbelief, his hands beginning to tremble. "What did you put in that goddam tea?" he asked serenely. "Acid?" The otter turned and began licking the spy's nose and chin, then the owl hopped over and assumed his place on Grey's shoulder, leaving Andrews to drift along inside a self-induced semi-hallucinatory stare.

"Stevia, I think," the spy sighed, the owl rubbing against his ear. "But just a pinch."

Coda

Seattle | One year later

The spy's daughter sat on the deck watching the sunset, her mind focused on the otter in her lap. Carolyn slid open the patio door and came out with dinner, Dr. Andrews following along a moment later with four glasses and a bottle of chilled riesling.

Akira's hair was growing again -- though her eyebrows were still sparse -- and her color was better, but she was free of the malignancies that had been coursing through her body. She was settling into her new life in America, still very weak after treatments ended but improving day by day. There were times when she -- almost -- believed as her father had, that the otter was really her mother and the owl her grandfather, but as far as she was concerned the jury was still out on all that nonsense. The gardens were, however, still immaculate.

"Is Patrick still napping?" Andrews asked -- though he directed his question to no one in particular.

Carolyn smiled and nodded. "Yes. He had another rough night, I'm afraid."

The physician nodded. "I guess that's to be expected -- at his age. Is he using the walker?"

"No," Carolyn replied -- with a little scowl showing. "I think he's too proud."

"Is he in the living room?"

Carolyn nodded and Andrews put down the glasses and the bottle then turned to go inside and check on the old man. If nothing else it seemed like the right thing to do.

As he walked up to the sofa in front of the simmering fireplace he pulled up short, surprised to find a tiny fox curled on Patrick's chest -- though he saw both were sleeping fitfully. He moved closer to look over the little creature, but as he bent over to inspect the fox a shadow passed over Patrick and Andrews jumped back as the white owl landed on the sofa's back. The owl stared at him so Andrews shook his head and walked back out onto the patio, not quite knowing what else to do -- or even to think. "This isn't a house," he muttered to himself, "it's a menagerie."

He walked over to the table and sat down, found his glass was full and that condensation was already forming on the glass. "When did the fox show up?" he asked Carolyn.

"Fox? What fox?"

"What fox? The one in there, the one asleep on Patrick."

"What?" Akira and Carolyn cried as they stood, both making their way into the house.

Yet Patrick wasn't on the sofa now. In fact, he was nowhere to be found.

Carolyn ran into Patrick's bedroom -- but he wasn't there. She checked his bathroom, then ran outside through each one of his little gardens -- and still she found not a trace of him. She heard Andrews in the garage and went to check, but nothing came of that, either.

Then they heard singing. A low, almost sonorous lament, the words Japanese. Was it -- coming from the living room?

They ran from the garage back into the house and found Akira standing before the lone television, and she was openly weeping now.

"I was just standing here," she sobbed, "and then this started playing..."

Andrews recognized the scene immediately, the words incisive, grounded in the heart of the moment:

life is brief
fall in love, maidens
before the crimson bloom
fades from your lips
before the tides of passion 
cool within you,
for there is no such thing 
as tomorrow, after all

A chill ran down the physician's spine as he tried to remember the first time he'd seen Kurosawa's Ikiru, and how he'd openly wept as Takashi Shimura sang The Gondola Song. The poetic imagery of those last scenes had never left him, and he halfway expected to look up and see Patrick out in his garden on a swing set in a gently falling snow, but no, that was not to be.

"Wait a minute," he muttered. "Where's the fox...and the owl?"

And after a quick look around the house they found that all of Patrick's animals were now gone, even the otter. Gone without a trace. As if they had never been there at all.

And then Akira gasped, and pointed at the framed kimono hanging above the dying fire.

Andrews walked up to the frame and inspected the wood, then the paper backing that sealed the rear of the piece, yet both were intact, undisturbed.

Which was, under the circumstances, quite odd.

For the short sword, the tantō, was no longer mounted there.

But just below, on the black slate hearth gleaming in the last glowing embers, was a spreading pool of deepest red blood -- disturbed only by the paw prints of a passing fox.

© 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | all rights reserved. This was a work of fiction -- pure and simple -- and all characters and events presented herein are fictitious constructs not to be taken literally or seriously. Quoted passages from The Tale of the Heike (c. 1330), as well as the first stanza of The Gondola Song (1915) are now in the public domain. By the by, I highly recommend the Criterion Collection's restoration of Ikiru on BluRay/DVD.