When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

is.”
    â€œIt’s Tuesday, Mama.”
    AT NIGHT he woke up crying out, “Where am I?” Sometimes he felt a hand on his shoulder and it was his sister telling him it was all just a bad dream. “Go back to sleep, baby,” she’d whisper, and he would. Sometimes there was no answer. Sometimes he heard the wind blowing through the sagebrush and he remembered he was in the desert but he could not remember how long he had been there, or why. Sometimes he worried he was there because he’d done something horribly, terribly wrong. But then when he tried to remember what that horrible, terrible thing might be, it would not come to him. It could be anything. Something he’d done yesterday—chewing the eraser off his sister’s pencil before putting it back in the pencil jar—or something he’d done a long time ago that was just now catching up with him. Breaking a chain letter from Juneau, Alaska. Flushing his dying pet goldfish down the toilet before it was completely dead. Forgetting to touch the hat rack three times when the iceman drove by. Sometimes he thought he was dreaming, and he was sure that when he woke up his father would be downstairs in the kitchen whistling “Begin the Beguine” through his teeth as he fried up breakfast in the skillet. “Here it comes, champ,” his father would say, “one hobo egg sandwich.”
    HIS SISTER HAD LONG SKINNY LEGS and thick black hair and wore a gold French watch that had once belonged to their father. Whenever she went out she covered her head with a wide-brimmed Panama hat so her face would not get too dark from the sun. “Nobody will look at you,” she said to the boy, “if your face is too dark.”
    â€œNobody’s looking at me anyway,” he replied.
    Late at night, after the lights had gone out, she told him things. Beyond the fence, she said, there was a dry riverbed and an abandoned smelter mine and at the edge of the desert there were jagged blue mountains that rose up into the sky. The mountains were farther away than they seemed. Everything was, in the desert. Everything except water. “Water,” she said, “is just a mirage.”
    A mirage was not there at all.
    The mountains were called Big Drum and Little Drum, Snake Ridge, the Rubies. The nearest town over was Delta.
    In Delta, she said, you could buy oranges.
    In Delta there were green leafy trees and blond boys on bikes and a hotel with a verandah where the waiters served ice-cold drinks with tiny paper umbrellas.
    â€œWhat else?” asked the boy.
    In Delta, she said, there was shade.
    She told him about the ancient salt lake that had once covered all of Utah and parts of Nevada. This was thousands of years ago, she said, during the Ice Age. There were no fences then. And no names. No Utah. No Nevada. Just lots and lots of water. “And where we are now?”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œSix hundred feet under.”
    ALL NIGHT LONG he dreamed of water. Endless days of rain. Overflowing canals and rivers and streams rushing down to the sea. He saw the ancient salt lake floating above the floor of the desert. Its surface was calm and blue. Smooth as glass. He was drifting down through the reeds and fish were swimming through his fingers and when he looked up through the water the sun was nothing but a pale wobbly speck a hundred million miles above his head.
    In the morning he woke up longing for a glass of Coke. Just one, with lots of ice, and a straw. He’d sip it slowly. He’d make it last a long long time.
    A day. A week. A year, even.
    EVERY FEW DAYS the letters arrived, tattered and torn, from Lordsburg, New Mexico. Sometimes entire sentences had been cut out with a razor blade by the censors and the letters did not make any sense. Sometimes they arrived in one piece, but with half of the words blacked out. Always, they were signed, “From Papa, With Love.”
    Lordsburg was a nice sunny place