The Cost of Paradise
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 7
Everything up to here I saw, or had from men standing where I could not be. What comes after, I did not see. I was still in that country finishing my own work, and by the time I got home the two of them had a year behind them that belonged to nobody but themselves.
So I am going to get out of the way. I have the rest from both of them, over a great many evenings at their kitchen table, and from twenty years of my own eyes. But I am done narrating her. She is a person, not a story I am telling, and she has waited long enough to speak for herself.
It starts in Germany, in the rain.
The nurse at Landstuhl was about twenty-four and had a clipboard and a very kind voice.
“Any prior injuries I should know about?”
“Yes.”
The nurse waited. Carlos, in the chair by the door, studied the ceiling.
“Okay. Can you tell me about them?”
“Left shoulder, fragment, two years ago. Some of it is still in there. Above the ear, the same day, but that is only a scar. Right thigh, older, and it went through, so it is not interesting.” She thought. “Ribs twice. Once a wall and once a man. The hand is nothing, that was a door.”
The nurse had stopped writing.
“Is there a paper for this?” Avîn asked. “It would be faster if I write it myself.”
“No — no, this is fine. I just — are you in pain right now?”
“No.”
“Any of it?”
“Some of it. Not enough to write down.”
The nurse cleared her throat and moved on to allergies. Out in the corridor Carlos held the door and said, “You made her cry.”
“I answered her questions.”
“I know.”
“She asked.”
“I know. Come on.”
It rained all the way to the airfield and it rained in Baltimore too, which she seemed to find funny.
“I thought America was hot.”
“America’s a lot of things. This part is just wet.”
She watched everything from the passenger seat and said almost nothing for forty minutes. The highway, the trucks, the billboards.
“That is a photograph of food.”
“That’s an advertisement.”
“For what?”
“Chicken sandwich.”
“It is fifty feet tall.”
“Yep.”
“Who needs a chicken sandwich fifty feet tall?”
“Nobody. That’s sort of the whole idea.”
She sat back. Then, a few miles later, in a different voice: “There are no walls on the houses.”
“No.”
“Anyone could walk to that door.”
“They could. Nobody does.”
She turned to look at him.
“Nobody does?”
“Not really. Not without calling first.”
“Hm,” said Avîn, and filed it, and he did not understand until later that she had just heard the most disturbing sentence of the entire trip and had not been able to say why.
The house was small and it was theirs and it had a yard with a fence a child could step over.
She walked it before she set her bag down — front room, kitchen, hallway, back door, yard — and tried the back door twice.
“It is a very bad lock.”
“I’ll change it this week.”
“Good.” She seemed satisfied out of all proportion to a lock.
The bed was the first argument.
“It is very high.”
“It’s a bed.”
“It is a bed on a table.” She pressed the mattress with the flat of her hand, unimpressed. “At home the mattress goes on the floor and in the morning you fold it and put it against the wall and then you have a room again. This thing sits in the middle of everything all day doing nothing.”
“That’s — yeah, okay, that’s a fair point about beds.”
She slept on the floor the first four nights. Not out of any drama; she took a blanket and a pillow and made a sensible bed in the sensible place, and slept eight hours, and got up and folded it. On the fifth night it was cold, and she looked at the floor and then at the bed with him already in it and said, “Move over, this house is badly heated,” and that was the end of that.
It was two weeks before he realized she had never once said she was going to sleep on the floor. She had simply done it, the way she did everything, and then stopped when there was a better option, and never mentioned it again.
The trouble started on the second Saturday, and it started because she cooked.
He came in at noon and there was food for a dozen people. Rice, and two pots of something, and flat bread she had worked out how to make in an American oven after three failures, and the whole kitchen smelling like a place he had not been in a long time.
“Who’s coming?”
She looked up. “What?”
“This is a lot of food. Who did you invite?”
And he watched her go still for the first time since she had landed.
“Nobody is coming,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I did not invite anybody.” She looked at the pots. “I have made food for twelve people.”
“It’s fine. We’ll eat it all week.”
“That is not the — “ She stopped. Started again, slower. “Carlos. It has been fourteen days.”
“Yeah.”
“Nobody has come to this house. Not one person. Not to the door, not to the yard, not to say hello, in fourteen days.” She had both hands flat on the counter. “Are we being punished? Have you done something?”
“What? No.”
“Then where is everybody?”
“They’re — “ He gestured vaguely. “Home. In their houses.”
“Doing what?”
“Watching TV. I don’t know.”
“Alone?”
“Mostly, yeah.”
She stared at him. He would tell me, years afterward, that of everything that happened in that first year — the language, the driving, the paperwork, the funerals she could not attend — that was the only moment he ever saw her genuinely at a loss.
“I have never been alone in a house,” she said. “In my life. Not one night, until this one.”
“Never?”
“There were nine of us in three rooms. Then there were eleven of us in a position. Then there was a war, and in a war you are never alone, that is the one good thing about a war.” She turned a pot handle so it faced the wall, which was a thing she did when she needed her hands busy. “In summer everyone sleeps on the roofs. You can hear four families arguing at once. If you are quiet for two days somebody comes to find out what is wrong with you.”
“Here you’d have to call them.”
“Call them and ask them to come and see me?”
“Basically.”
“And they would put it in a calendar.”
“Probably.”
“Carlos.” She was not being funny. “That is the loneliest thing I have ever heard, and I have buried thirty people.”
So she did what she had done her entire life, which was study the ground.
She learned to drive in nine days, which the man at the licensing office described as aggressive, and which she described as adequate. She got the shopping down to a route and a list and complained bitterly about the size of the carts. She learned the mail, and the bank, and a machine that would give her money out of a wall at any hour, which she thought was insane and used constantly. She was on time for things Americans were not on time for and it took her a month to work out that six o’clock meant six-fifteen and that arriving at six was an act of hostility.
The in-processing took two days and produced the only recorded instance of Avîn losing her temper in a government building.
It was not the questions. She answered those. It was the fourth form asking for the same three facts.
“I have written this.”
“Yes ma’am, but this is the DD form, that was the personnel one.”
“They are asking the same thing.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Then why are there two of them?”
The specialist behind the desk, who was perhaps twenty and had been doing this job for five months, said the sentence that every soldier of every army in the history of the world has said: “That’s just how it is, ma’am.”
Avîn put the pen down and looked at him for a moment with an expression that had once persuaded a man across eight hundred meters to stop walking.
Then she picked the pen back up.
“You are correct,” she said. “I apologize. It is the same everywhere. I do not know why I expected the rich army to be different.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Give me the fifth one.”
“There’s six, ma’am.”
“Of course there are,” said Avîn.
The proportions took longer.
There was a man two doors down who spent an entire Sunday in his driveway, on his back under a car, swearing.
“Is he all right?”
“That’s Dave. His transmission’s going.”
“Is that dangerous?”
“It’s expensive.”
She watched him a while from the window.
“He has been out there since morning.”
“He’ll be out there tomorrow.”
“For a machine,” she said, and went and got her tea, and came back to the window, and watched Dave lose his entire weekend to a gearbox with an expression Carlos could not read at all.
That evening she said, out of nowhere: “I do not think it is stupid.”
“What isn’t?”
“The man and his car.” She was drying a plate. “I thought it was stupid this morning and I have decided it is not. It is what a person is allowed to be upset about when nobody is trying to kill him.” She set the plate down. “It is a good sign. It means the country is working.”
Then, after a moment: “I would still not lie under a car for two days.”
It was not all logistics, that first month, and he wants it understood that neither of them was pretending otherwise.
There was a night in the third week when the power went out on the whole street — some transformer four blocks over — and the house went black and silent at once, no hum, no refrigerator, nothing, and both of them were up out of their chairs before either of them had decided to be.
Then they stood there in the dark listening to a suburb do absolutely nothing.
“It is only the electricity,” she said.
“It’s only the electricity.”
“Yes.”
Neither of them sat down.
He found the candles because he knew where they were, and she found the matches because she had rearranged that drawer within a week of arriving, and they lit four of them and put them on the table, and the kitchen came back the color of every kitchen either of them had ever eaten in over there — low light, moving, everything soft at the edges — and something in the room changed temperature.
She was standing very close to him and had not stepped back.
“Carlos.”
“Yeah.”
“This is a very stupid thing to say out loud.”
“Say it anyway.”
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