By Richard Oyama

Lucid with rage, Toshio Shimamura eyed the empty street. Traffic was sporadic in East Oakland in mid-afternoon. The front doors to the elder care facility were unmanned. He slipped away from lunch, feigning an urgent need to pee. This was one of the good days when he was still ambulatory, not faint while blood would rush from his brain, hip aching in the bone, knees not knobby, water-sodden, ankles not wobbling like a spinning top.

His snow-white hair was immaculate, single strands splayed across a bald pate, cheekbones prominent in a fleshless rictus. He tightened the knot of a dark-blue tie, a charcoal-gray suit with wide lapels, cuffs and a pink shirt: there was still the dandy in this old man.

Exiting New Lease Nursing Home's doors, he peered out at the gas station, a stucco apartment complex, the botanico, the Chinese restaurant, the row of nursing homes and the vagrant junkie couple. Then he started to walk, eyes nailed to the sidewalk. He knew enough not to call attention to himself. At the end of the street he boarded an AC transit bus to Berkeley, pouring all the change in his pocket into the coin slot. He took a window seat toward the back across a Latina, two orange Lucky'cecs bags at her feet.

Toshio looked out of the glass at the neighbourhood's flashing lights, spilling its vague dark, contours of familiarity and unrecognition. This is Harlem, no, not tenement brownstones but fog-beaten, rundown, Mission-style homes. No, it's California. I'm on a bus. My name is Toshio Shimamura, my Social Security number is 357 63 8474. My parents owned a red farmhouse in Paradise Valley before the war. They raised pigs and chickens. A brook flowed underneath the house. Father made an ofuro with wood planks and a circular piece from a fallen redwood, the iron foundation heated by a fire. We played in a eucalyptus grove. It smelled of wintergreen.

Streets flickered in a soft, opalescent light diffused by fog. His mind ebbed in solitude and nostalgia, away from the bluish streets. The bus distanced itself from the palpable world, travelling counterclockwise. The fog intensified the effect. He felt invisible.

The bus stopped in front of the Tokyo Bank on Shattuck Avenue. Toshio saw it and his rage sparked again like a Santa Ana wildfire. He remembered his mission, disembarking. This was downtown Berkeley, office buildings, banks and a Marine recruiting centre off Telegraph. The former People's Republic, home to the Free Speech Movement and sister city to the Black Panthers had changed. Shattuck had grown seedy. There was a host of dubious Chinese massage parlours and vacant movie theatres. Across the street was a deli advertising "Flank Steak $1" in the window. A furtive bum in a filthy yellow mac scurried by him. The diminutive Japanese teller at the counter recognised Toshio as that nice nisei ojisan.

"Irasshaimase, Shimamura-san, long time no see. How nice of you to pay us a visit."

Toshio smiled modestly, bowing slightly. There was no sense of imposture. At 84 years of age, he had cultivated such impeccable manners, such a decorous, rippleless surface, that strangers assumed it was his actual self, whatever that was.

It was not.

There was no centre or self; it was ritual imposture and ceremony. The player becomes the part.

"Domo, good to see you," he said in the formal manner, rehearsing the role of a Meiji noble. The exchange had all the trappings of deference between lord and vassal.  What Toshio told the teller wasn't so much advisement as command: it must be obeyed.

Without consent or knowledge, he said, his youngest son David had assumed power of attorney over his IRA and money market accounts, safety deposit box and other assets. He wanted to remove his son's name from the forms. The teller signalled the manager who produced the relevant documents and Toshio signed them, informing her that he intended to litigate against his disloyal son. The manager expressed profound dismay and commiseration, asking if there was anything more she could do for him. No. She bowed.

Here was the world of East Oakland. As David Shimamura descended the freeway ramp at Fruitvale, he felt the mood of the neighbourhood shift. The stores were sootier and more disordered. One never knew what one would find in the cramped aisles of a combination hardware/convenience store—as in the Third World, wholesalers dumped seconds and non-brand name products into the ghetto. The diner counter was grimy and windows were fogged with grease. But the talk was more direct and jovial than in Berkeley. There wasn't the air of disillusionment that accompanied the failure of utopian white dreams and possibilities. It wasn't so much we blew it as it was SNAFU (Situation Normal All Fucked Up), so chill, bro. These were inner-city cages where it was foolhardy even to imagine the California Dream. There was no trace of Silicon Valley's economic boom in these outlier neighbourhoods.

Instead, these streets were desolate and jangly with teeth-grinding edginess and a Watch Your Back frontier attitude. The laundromat was a favourite hangout for the local crack dealer. Residents doing their weekly load minded their business and kept to their selves. Do not stare. The Chicano mingled uneasily with the Vietnamese with the African with the Korean. It was not kumbaya. When his older brother Frank visited from Manhattan, David took him to a Saigon-run casino on San Pablo. It took him back to the Nam, Frank said, that same air of incipient war. Spirals of razor wire topped the chain-link fences of autobody shops. Pit bulls were a going enterprise. Muggings occurred with alarming frequency in the Lucky's parking lot. The produce was sodden and black-edged compared to Andronico's.

Who acknowledged the underclass, except those terrified by barbarian black and Mexican hordes who would rape and pillage if Y2K apocalyptic scenarios came to pass?  Berkeleyites were more apt to extend compassion to Tibetans under the thumb of Red Chinese; it stoked their moral rectitude. These post-Reagan days blacks and Latinos had little spiritual cache. They were not good people. Some Asian Americans, ex-Marxist/Leninist/Maoist cadres, abruptly had Tibetan Buddhist conversion experiences. They cut deals for executive positions in the Democratic National Committee or trained as high priestesses.

Shimamura drove down Geriatric Row, a street lined with boxy, undistinguished residential homes and care facilities for the infirm. After Toshio's massive stroke, David toured a number of care facilities and noticed recurrent motifs: the wide-screen TV in the day room where residents were warehoused in wheelchairs in lieu of pleasurable activity; the phenomenon of an infinite afternoon where venetian blinds were pulled against the sun; the overwhelming stench of perfumy disinfectant in off-white hallways; the forlorn loneliness and lostness of the old, starved for human contact, sourpussed and bitter, transformed into limp, barely sentient rags. The New Lease Care Home was the best the money he could buy. That did not say much. Shimamura parked in the back lot.

He checked in at the front desk. Apart from a handful of Pilipina attendants, the staff were black. He told an attendant that his Dad listened to Snoop Dog on his Walkman.

"Yo, the Dog!" the attendant exclaimed. "No shit?"

"No, man, I'm just playing wit you."

"Aw man, I knew you was jiving."

Yet it was a measure of his distance from hip-hop culture that he felt compelled to reach for such an allusion. It was foreign to him. David liked songs but at the same time he wanted to be down with the brothers. The ruse put him in good stead with the staff. The desk clerk waved him on. He walked through the rail-lined hallway to his father's room.

His father's snowy, longish strands of hair were matted on the pillow like an exploding galaxy. His eyes were closed, lips fluttering, emitting a raspy, whistling bird call. The polka-dotted gown had come undone; a thin, bony shoulder was naked. His chest's concavity imperceptibly rose and fell. Knees were knobby, his lightly hirsute legs stick-like and reddened in patches.

"Dad, it's David!" he shouted, gently shaking his shoulder.

"Huh."

His eyes unfurled, a milky café au lait.

"Oh, hello, boy-chan," he said, dim cognition awakening.

Toshio's dementia had not advanced to the stage where he did not recognise David. This was a curse and a blessing. In the early stages he refused to admit his condition or sign off on power of attorney. On a Friday morning the facility manager rang him. Tosh-io had left the home, went to the bank, had the manager undo the power of attorney document and called the Berkeley police to arrest "the strangers" who were squatting illegally in his house. He said they had carjacked his Honda. David had rented the house to a Romanian couple, the wife a visiting professor of linguistics from the Sorbonne, to raise income for his father's retirement home costs. In his paranoiac ravings Toshio blamed everything on his youngest son.

Alzheimer's disease had exacerbated the worst, most irrational aspects of his character. When the fog of dementia periodically lifted, his father saw conspiratorial plots hatched by a traitorous offspring. David was a mole in a John Le Carre novel. During his rehabilitation, Toshio scrambled time periods and conflated identities like a modernist novel: it was 1954 and his sister and brother-in-law were living in the Victorian house in Indianapolis; his oldest son was the youngest brother who came back from a ghoulish factory accident that killed him in Iowa in 1942. His father was a Time Traveller. His son came to terms with alternative facts and fake news like he did self-absorbed narcissists and congenital liars.

Without warning the storms of paranoia abated. Toshio sailed into a somnolent sea, all malice expunged like the glassine bags of bile he excreted after the surgery. He thanked his son for his assistance, an appreciation heretofore only grudgingly voiced. David was grateful.

But like a boxer in retirement or a soldier returning from war, he had no adversary to confront now, no enemy to battle or evade, no door against which to push. All of the mental battlements, the psychic gambits, the carapace he constructed were for naught. What game would he play?

Who was this New Father? Was it an authentic self, the appreciation heartfelt, or merely another symptom of the disease? What had happened to the poison, malice, the liturgy of grievance? Had it expired on the operating table?

If the old father was dead, who was the son? It was strange to think how much character was shaped in opposition to an other as a nation defines itself in relation to, or against, an enemy: the Indian, the Negro, the Evil Empire, the Arab. What an ex-girl-friend called David's "dark and nasty" side could have been merely a defensive reflex to his father's explosive unpredictability. Attack before you're attacked. Preemptive strike. Yet David discerned no major seismic alteration or shift in himself. He merely felt at a loss.

"Dad, you want me to wheel you outside? The air would do you good."

"Not particularly." Toshio's answers had gotten weirdly equivocal.

"So how have they been treating you?"

"Oh, they're very nice." His father's liberalism had not abandoned him. That was consistent. He evinced no resentment toward the mainly black and Pilipino staff. In fact he preferred them to white people who were, after all, The Devil. For that, too, David was grateful.

He wheeled his father into the dining room, seated him at a table with Otis and the Captain then seated himself. Otis, a black ex-serviceman from Alabama who migrated west to work in the shipyards during World War II, was kindly and gracious, his left arm rendered useless from a war wound. The Captain, a spry, wooly-haired Jewess from Baltimore, earned her nickname for the authoritative manner with which she commandeer-ed the door of the nursing home when a visitor arrived. Her chatter filled the air like birdsong.  Now the Captain was dozing at table.

A Pilipina attendant wheeled the cart with lunch trays: Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, tepid peas and carrots, milk cartons. The meal reminded David of grade school fare. His tablemates pecked at their food, sparrow-like. They required encouragement.

What little discussion there was was disconnected, solipsistic, absurdist. Pinter in an old folks home. David was acknowledged as a guest when in fact he was an ambassador from another country: the country of wellness, the able-bodied, the not-infirm. The experience was strangely disjunct. Outside the venetian blinds there were pigeons, grass, flowering trees, sex, music, commerce, Internet cafes, the busyness of lived life. None of that in here. Life at the nursing home was routinised into bad science.

The milk pudding had the texture and consistency of Gerber's baby food. Above the stooped heads of his lunch partners, David saw a kitchen worker wheeling an aluminium cart into the kitchen. Her name was Magdalena. She was small and slim, but her breasts were protuberant under tight-fitting green scrubs. Her skin was chocolate-brown and radiant. Her eyes were dark-bright. Whenever she brought the food cart, David derived pleasure in watching her walk away. He ogled her shapely calves.

David was starved for beauty. His father nodded off. Otis spooned the pudding with his right hand, left arm hanging immobile at his side like a windless flag. Captain chattered amiably about nothing. Three weeks later, she would have a debilitating stroke that would rob her of speech.

In the communal living room, residents were silent and withdrawn, crowd-ganged into wheelchairs in front of an enormous TV screen or indifferently involved in music, crafts or exercise classes. Their activity was made tentative by mental impairment or failing motor skills. Hands trembled, eyelids drooped, spittle drooled from a cracked underlip.

Toshio was not a joiner, never had been. His manners were impeccable, to be sure, he said the right—the expected—thing, rarely behaved wrongly or ever made an inappropriate remark to one of the attendants but did not engage either. After lunch David attempted to encourage his father.

"Dad, it's a lovely spring afternoon, not too warm, the apple blossoms are blooming, you can smell jasmine and eucalyptus in the air. How's about if I take you on a spin around the block?"

The retirement home was stifling and claustrophobic. The street was not much better, but it held out the promise of surprise, good or bad.

"No thanks," Toshio said. "I'm fine right here."

"Are you sure? Don't you want to get out and about?"

"Not especially." He appeared to have lost all curiosity or interest in the world outside these institutional walls. David intended not to reach that point. He would do himself in first.

"You're sure now?"

"I'm sure."

He wheeled his father back to his room, helping him climb back into bed. Toshio had partial use of his legs, but required an aluminum walker even for short distances now or else his legs would bow. Once, using a cane, he slipped on the uneven cobblestones and hurtled sideways into an untrimmed hedge.

Toshio was strapped into a wheelchair, head like an overripe fruit drooping from a branch. His forehead was mauve and bruised after he fell out of the chair, noggin first. Now his body was secured. The chair's back legs were weighted with sandbags. He was immobilised except for meals and toilet emergencies, but what matter? His mind was elsewhere.

"Dad, it's me, David!" I shouted.

His head snapped upright. His rheumy eyes slid open. He crawled out of the hole of himself, out of a bottomless pit, a lostness I was unable to comprehend. I wondered whether he would not be better off dead, I said to my girlfriend Sarah. A devout Catholic, she was repelled by the notion. However intermittent, she said, his consciousness flickered and ebbed. Amid the bad days, the days of oblivion and nullity, he awakened from the sleep of the dead. This is one definition of being alive.

"Hello, son," he said. Despite his fog, his merging of present with the past, Toshio still knew who I was. He recognised me the last time I saw him after returning from Guatemala on a faculty grant. It was three days before he passed.

"How are you, Dad? How are they treating you?"

He had no memory of the fall. It could have been the multiple strokes and the dementia that dulled his pain receptors. I don't know. Despite my concerns about his care, he did not complain about the nursing home. At every stage of his decline, I moved him into a new institution with a higher level of care. This was the third and last resting place—he would die here. That I knew.

Suddenly, something of the old malice, the ancient grievance, stirred in his exhausted loins, his spine shivering, extremities twitching. As if operating a hydraulic lift, he pulled himself straight and erect. The truth of his circumstances stung him with knife-like perception.

"If I owned a gun, I'd shoot myself in the head," he said.

Yes, I suppose you would. If I were in your current condition, I thought to myself, I would do the same. It's no kind of life.

Instead, I made the anodyne argument.

"Feel lucky to be alive, Dad," I said. "There are plenty of activities you can participate in here. You can make friends." I thought of the long-term residents zombified by disease, medication, feeble-mindedness and TV. For many it was not simply that they had been eclipsed or slid into decline, but rather age itself had dulled them. They had lost their spark and lustre, were glazed in coldness, numbed to the day.

The home should have been called Terminal Island.

What I should have done after the call: take 24 West to 980 West, exit at 27th Street to West Grand, make a left at 27th, left on Telegraph, right on 29th and left on Summit. That's exactly what I failed to do after the nurse called from the retirement home and said that my father suffered a "major coronary event" and had been transferred to Herrick Hospital.  

Instead I avoided the freeway altogether, going south on Broadway, left on 14th, east along the southern tip of Lake Merritt with its vigorous walkers and lowriders, onto Park, lost in the unmagical wood of East Oakland—wig shops, storefront churches,  Black Muslim bakery, pho restaurants, botanicas, autobody shops, used car lots, boys lounging on the corner with cell to ear, girls wired and pitched forward in hurry-home vectors:  the inclement climate of despair.

In the end I got to the hospital—no geolocation back in the day—parked in the lot and checked into Emergency. A blue-gowned doctor swung open the door marked No Unauthorized Staff Allowed.

"I'm sorry. Your father expired from massive heart failure at 2.43pm," the doctor said. "Would you like to see him?"

What did I feel? Sorrow? No. Relief, perhaps. For me and him. He did not possess what we call quality of life or self-reflection. Death can be the road to mercy. Why would I want an image of a bony calavera as a closing image?

"Thank you, no."

I was The Good Son, executor of the parental estate—such as it was—and my father's main caregiver, assuming all duties. Although I was the youngest, my parents believed I was the most responsible. Childless, I shouldered the tasks without complaint. I had internalised the concept of filial piety and obligation. If I wished to invent a more sympathetic narrator, I would pretend to say I was governed by love.

I was not.

That was not in the calculus.  Nor did it exist in the familial language. It was all bruise and trauma.

I am my father's son. His dream of the writing life is mine. The past is prologue. I do not reject him, only his bitterness and malice. But apart from words, our relationship was fraught. And the acrimony spilled over into his communiques. Postcards, letters, notes—page upon page of judgment and misjudgment, accusation, charge and countercharge, rancour, disloyalty, betrayal. An intention to wound. Displacement of motive.

My father was barred from that door into a recognition of wholeness and self-knowledge, an actualised life. In time what I felt was pity. With his death, an obstruction, a stone in my passway, was rolled aside. Now in midlife I was blinded by the face of a brilliant, illimitable sky.

_____