Free The Pearl Diver by Jeff Talarigo Page B

the way, only darkness, barely a trace of Nagashima. Everybody is deep in sleep over there. The fishermen are still an hour or two from awakening, over here. She is alone. No one in this country knows where she is. This thought alternates from ecstasy to anxiety. The most freedom she has felt since her diving days. Lifetimes ago.
    The dock moans and groans, following her all the way to the land. She feels the sting on her stomach and chest from where she brushed the rocky bottom of the shore.
    It is a small town; she can tell that even in the dark, even after walking only a couple of minutes. Her bare feet are tender against the cement. It is not any different from other fishing towns she’s been to. Except now, at this hour, there are no people. She goes along the main street. She hears to her right the soft lapping of the tiny waves. She passes a noodle shop, a market, which, she can tell from the smell, is for seafood, a couple of other little shops, a few houses. Everything asleep, all within hearing and smelling distance of the inlet of the sea. So quiet here. Up the street, there are two buses parked—MUSHIAGE BUS CENTER reads a sign. She checks the small schedule in front, a bus every hour and forty-five minutes. One to Oku Station, the other to Hamanaka.
    She goes to the port, sees dozens of fishing boats nudged by the water, dancing out of rhythm with one another. Small boats, for two or three people. The whiteness of their skin glows in the night. On one of the boats, a man looks like he has just awakened.
Ten yards from her, a small kerosene lantern showing the outline of his frenzied hair. He looks at her; she’s not sure how much he can see, but he is looking. She doesn’t budge. When the flame of the lantern is jiggled by the wind, she realizes that she shouldn’t be here. She starts to run, away from the man, his boat, lantern, his wild hair. When she gets to the main street, she has to stop and think which way to turn. Left and down the street, passing, she’s certain, the houses, market, noodle shop—sees none of them. She is at the small dock, not sure how far from the man. Hundred yards. Three feet. Can’t be all that far. She doesn’t pay any attention to the creaks she is awakening on the wooden dock, she gets to the end of it, slips herself into the August water, goes under, and points her head toward Nagashima.
    ARTIFACT Number 0243
A photo of the Mushiage-Nagashima ferry
    He, as was true with so many of the patients, had had his last moment of freedom on this shore of Mushiage, the same dock, not far from where she now sits on this late night, where the ferry brought them across the channel. The same dock that he would have stood at on the day he arrived in Mushiage at the age of fifteen. The dock where an official from the leprosarium marked his footprints, preventing others from stepping where he had walked.
    She has learned not to ask Mr. Shirayama of the days before his arrival, because, although he talks openly about every detail of his years here, he is guarded, protective of his days before Nagashima. As if he has dripped water on that salty mound of his memory and allowed it to dissolve grain by grain. Once, she asked him what his real name was, and when he didn’t respond, she thought he hadn’t heard, so she repeated the question. He glared at her and still said nothing. He glared at her until she turned away.
    But, after almost four years of knowing Mr. Shirayama, he has told her some things, or at least allowed them to slip out. It was in 1939, eight years after they opened this facility, nine years before she arrived here, that Mr. Shirayama traveled nearly a hundred miles by freight train, and then, from the station, walked the remaining twelve. It was spring, most of the way a slight grade down toward the coast, from where he took the ferry the final five minutes here.
    Unlike herself, he hadn’t hidden from the police. His parents had delivered him to them. That is all he