The Professor, the Pool Guy, and the Paniolo

A young child with a mysterious blood disease. A widening gyre that mobilizes people from Hilo to Japan into a support team. A most unusual subplot involving the stock market and country music. Stay tuned to this true story as told in real time in these pages—because even we don’t know where it’s headed.

Orchestrated and conducted by Mark Panek. To read Chapter 1, click here.

---

Chapter 2 – Daggers, Swords, and Stars

---

Noriko still hasn’t texted.

They’re rolling the jetway clear of the big 747 and beginning to back us out of the gate at HNL, the iconic shape of Diamond Head shimmering off in the distance through a wave of jet fumes.

Still Noriko hasn't texted.

Again it hits me that I never should have left her and Kenken behind—even for what was supposed to seem like a lighting-quick six-day trip to Tokyo. I kept hoping to see my phone light up from the moment my Hilo connecting flight landed over an hour ago, or maybe ten minutes after that, or ten minutes after that, but…nothing.

Now one of those impeccably groomed JAL flight attendants—Yamamoto, the kanji on her name tag reads—she’s already buckling herself into the jump seat directly facing me. Though she can’t possibly be a minute older than 26, with just a glance and the slightest hint of an understanding smile she’s able to communicate an entire paragraph, first commiserating with my predicament in we’re-all-in-this-together fashion, and then detailing how wonderful and safe it would be for all of us and especially me if I could just put the phone away for takeoff.

I find the whole image so quintessentially you’re-already-back-in-Japan-the-moment-you-set-foot-on-a-Japan-Airlines-plane that I can’t suppress the sudden urge welling up inside to share the moment with…my son, whom I dropped off at E.B. Desilva Elementary a matter of just a few hours ago, and whom I suddenly miss all the way down to my bones. Whenever Kenken and I got to fly JAL to Tokyo, we’d always rub it in to Noriko, especially if she’d gotten stuck on one of the American carriers whose flights better matched the tight vacation schedule doled out by the hospital where she works.

JAL’s hot towels, the little slippers they gave you, the limitless menu of Japanese video programming. The decent food, even in coach. Above all, the unmatched way the cabin crew took pride in caring for your every need, and even apologized if you ever had to ask for another Asahi—all of it was never less than perfect. One time just before takeoff, back when Kenken was seven, we texted a photo of our slippered feet a couple of planes over on the HNL tarmac, where Noriko sat, crammed into her seat and suffering under the scowls of a couple of Boomer-aged over-it flight attendants lumbering down the United aisles barking out the only two Japanese words they’d ever bothered to learn: “Mizu!” “CHA!” “Mizu!” “CHA!”

Her reply cracked Kenken up: “Not funny.”

True to form, today’s cabin crew wordlessly springs into action the moment we reach cruising altitude—which is also the moment I pull out my phone and my credit card and try to make sense of the wireless log-in instructions at the back of JAL’s inflight magazine. At no point does any of this come easy to me, from entering codes to choosing from a pricing menu and clicking on this, and navigating back to that, while new windows keep opening up on my little screen, and it may finally be time to think about getting glasses. Five dollars. Fifteen for three hours. Twenty seems like an enormous sum, considering that the whole point of this trip is the five-grand consulting fee I managed to score—by some miracle, a guy was making a movie about Japanese sumo, an ultra-niche topic on which I’d written not one but two well-received books, and like I said: we suddenly need all the money we can get our hands on, so here I am. 

Right there I lose the in-house connection and have to start over, determined now to just eat the whole twenty bucks since that seems like what they’re after, when all of a sudden…by now I’m not even surprised…right on cue, one of those…angels sent from heaven above…a perpetually on-the-spot JAL flight attendant…the very Ms. Yamamoto, it turns out, an apron now covering the front of that impeccable Navy uniform: she takes a knee right there in the aisle, offers that understanding smile of hers, and starts pecking a finger away on my phone screen, a little ridge forming between her eyes as she sets to work helping me connect. She has to have better things to do in the way of getting the in-flight service moving, but of course her teammates see or even just sense what’s going on and pick up the slack while she inputs my credit card number.

The real care she’s taking evokes the well-worn memory of the frequently told story of Kenken’s nightmarish first flight to Tokyo, back when he was an 18-month-old thirty-pound ball of nonstop writhing, squirming curiosity-filled pure energy. The idea had been to run him ragged in HNL airport, and then load him up with a bag of toys and gadgets and iPod animal videos so he’d…sit still…for the next…eight hours, a plan that didn’t make it through takeoff.

Instead, Noriko and I rolled up our sleeves and set up twenty-minute shifts guarding him while he climbed the stairs to first class over and over and over and over again, or carrying him back and forth across the width of the plane to look out this window and then that window and then this window and then that window, counting each ceiling pinlight along the way (sixteen, sixteen, sixteen) for eight straight fucking hours. Right when we were all about to snap, one of these..angels sent from heaven above…at strategic intervals, one of the JAL attendants would intervene and take a turn, bouncing little Kenken up and down with boundless enthusiasm, distracting him from comprehending his separation from…Mama!…for as long as humanly possible, sometimes up to four minutes straight, which to us, under the circumstances, felt like a two-week vacation.

“There.” Ms. Yamamoto hands me back my phone, the whole process having taken a matter of seconds. “I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting.”

Waiting.

I could tell her about waiting. Waiting for a frikken text from Noriko, who’s at home waiting for a call from the people at Kapi‘olani Hospital for Women and Children. They’re waiting for the people at whatever lab it was where they’d sent a sample of Kenken’s bone marrow, nearly a week ago now, to find out whether or not he has…leukemia.

Things had moved with frightening urgency that morning we’d awoken to the horrific red cascade of Kenken’s blood numbers: the doctor called us to come in immediately when they opened at 8:00. Space for a bone marrow biopsy—meaning, as we learned, they would drill into Kenken’s pelvic bone to extract a marrow sample—space was cleared the very next day at Kapi‘olani. Phone calls to the insurance company, inter-island flights to HNL booked for Noriko and Kenken—when I picked them up at the airport that evening, my son was so wiped out that, looking back, I wonder why I wasn’t with him for any of it—until I recall that it would have cost two (more) days of work and hundreds of extra now-precious dollars. He may have been in the care of the most capable nurse I know, but still. 

To make up for it, I busied myself, in consultation with my doctor-friend Chris, scouring the internet for nutritional solutions to low blood platelet counts. Low-carb, papaya-leaf-extract-B-12-seaweed-shark-liver-oil. I bought a sack of papayas at the farmer’s market and planted two in the yard. Beets. Chicken, high in B-12. As a family we’d eat papayas and beets and chicken all the time until the numbers rose. Let’s look up some good chicken recipes.

Chicken recipes. 

I check my phone again, telling myself it’s to scroll around for…more chicken recipes…since I only just checked for Noriko’s text about five minutes ago, and five minutes before that, and did you know it takes sixteen pin lights to span the width of a 747? I’ll check it again five minutes from now, too, or try to hold out for six, and check it five minutes after that, and again and again for the next eight straight fucking ours, a fifty-year-old 172-pound ball of nonstop writhing, squirming anxiety-filled pure energy.

Lucky for me, at the end of it all, Narita airport offers free wifi, and, once in the outer terminal, where your credit card is much more widely accepted that it is in the city, you can rent your own portable internet hotspot for twenty thousand yen, which is what I do.

Still…nothing. 

I’ve never been very good at praying, but I do know I have a stop to make on the way to the Tokyo apartment where Noriko grew up and where her mom and dad are waiting for me: Tomioka Hachiman, the very Shinto shrine where modern Japanese sumo was born. It also turns out to be Noriko’s neighborhood shrine, and if its grounds are sacred to me, it’s because, as we told Kenken on a visit back when he was six, if sumo hadn’t been born, he wouldn’t have, either. Back then Noriko took a photo of father and son making strong-man poses in front of the huge granite monument listing the names of the sport’s highest rank holders dating back over a century—an image that, as I now try to pray, sets me off…sobbing…and finally begging the Shinto gods right out loud. 

From there the memories are as visible as real-life ghosts, the whole 10-minute walk to the apartment: 2-year-old Kenken on that swing right over there in the park, his eyes suddenly wide with wonder when Mama shows up to meet us. The vending machine: he still loves that he can get a Potcari Sweat pretty much anytime he wants one all over the city. Akafudado store’s bakery: you can see him just a few months ago carefully choosing from its warm treasures. The “14” button in the elevator Hilo Boy loves to push, still. His shoes may as well be among the pile at the apartment’s entrance.

Inside, my in-laws fall into their typically incredible warm welcome, O-ka, my mother-in-law, already having loaded the little square table on the tatami in front of the TV from corner to corner with little plates of food, O-to, my father-in-law, proud as ever to punctuate his greeting with a big Western-style bear hug, a huge step outside his old-school Japanese cultural comfort zone. I’m reminded yet again that this man, Masaharu Sekikawa—O-to!—he’s the most positive and optimistic person I’ve ever been around. Raised by a single mother way out in rice country in the abject poverty of post-war Japan, he was sent all the way to Tokyo at age fifteen to work, and to put himself through school, unable to visit home even once for the next three years. His favorite word seems to be zeitaku!—a word that defines an impossibly luxurious experience. He pronounces it in utter satisfaction after a hot bath in a 3’x3’ closet of a bathroom, or after a sip of cold beer.

He says it a lot more now that he’s…survived leukemia…after having been given a fifty percent chance of living. For six straight months in a hospital only a couple of subway stops from where we sit around their table, the nurses kept wheeling out one roommate, dead, and wheeling in another, again and again and again. Right now he’s pouring beer into my glass and telling me about the most vivid dream he had in there, his always-strict mother scolding him from the other side, “Dete-kure!”—Go back! The dream kept him going all those months, he tells me, allowing that famously positive attitude to keep shining through, which, as any cancer doc will tell you, is the main thing that kept him on the right side of that fifty percent. 

“Daijoubu,” he says, beaming at me, “daijoubu!” Kenken’s going to be fine.

I try to keep the advice in mind the whole next morning—the movie guy, in fact, a fired-up young Brit in his late twenties with the throw-back name of Harry, he turns out to be exceedingly interesting, a great distraction during our visit to a live sumo practice, and through our little tour of Ryogoku, the neighborhood housing many of professional sumo’s training stables. I check my phone maybe every twenty minutes now, a huge accomplishment, and make like I’m looking at GoogleMaps as I do so. Under the huge, sprawling canopy of Asakusa temple, even hemmed in by a herd of selfie-stick Westerners hundreds of tourists thick, I stay positive, and as full of zeitaku gratitude as my father-in-law always is, throwing my coin with no more than a prayer of thanks.

Outside, I spot Harry waiting for me on a bench, characteristically chatting with another pair of tourists, and that’s when my phone finally rings. 

Noriko starts in with details but I have to interrupt: “Yeah, but is it leukemia?”

“It’s not leukemia,” she says.

It’s not leukemia.

She goes on some more but that’s all I really hear. My whole being seems to exhale.

Then I focus back in on her words. Again I’m waiting—waiting for her to tell me how they’re going to treat this thing, whatever it is. I read somewhere online that the spleen, which filters the blood, can, like, malfunction and cause an artificially low platelet count. Low platelets—even I know a deep enough cut with a kitchen knife and you could bleed right out, but she’s not saying anything about the spleen.

I’m a little lost. I need clarification.

So I interrupt her again: “So what’s next?  What are they going to do?”

“That’s what I’m saying,” she tells me. “Dr. Kyono says he has aplastic anemia.” Aplastic anemia. I came across it while googling around but I was more focused on leukemia. What do they do? Gotta be meds, or at least, like, some kind of plan, right? Maybe a transfusion?

“They’re going to monitor him.”

She goes on about “restrictions” and I look out through the smoke wafting up from the big cauldron of burning incense at the temple’s entrance, out past that massive red gate, down the row of souvenir shops a hundred yards long. Kenken always liked to check out this one hole-in-the-wall place that sold…daggers.

Swords.

Ninja stars.

“Monitor him,” I finally say.

“That’s right.  Dr. Kyono said that if his count goes down even more, they call it ‘severe,’ he have to get a transplant. With his count the way it is, all they can do is monitor. We have to wait.”

“Yeah, but like, what are they gonna do?”

There was a pause, like she didn’t know what I was asking.

“Do?”

“Yeah. Where do we go now?”

Another pause.

“That’s what Dr. Kyono said: right now, we have to just wait. That’s all we can do.”

To Be Continued

---

The Professor, the Pool Guy, and the Paniolo is a serial novel by Mark Panek, David Gagne, and Shane Kalaniopio.

Image by Rachel Marker.