After eating, I still wanted something else, so I asked for some saké. As the warm brew seeped into my system, the question came to me: What on earth am I doing up here? The Dolphin Hotel, such that I was seeking, no longer existed. It didn’t matter what it was I was looking for, the place was no more. And not merely gone, it’d been replaced by this idiotic Star Wars high-tech hotel-a-thon. I was too late. My dreams of the once-Dolphin Hotel had been nothing more than dreams of Kiki, long vanished out the door. Perhaps there was someone crying for me. But that too was gone. Nothing was left. What could you possibly hope to find here, kid?
You said it, I thought. Or maybe I had my mouth open and actually said it to myself. There’s nothing left here. Not one thing left for you.
I clamped my lips tight and stared at the bottle of soy sauce on the counter.
You live by yourself for a stretch of time and you get to staring at different objects. Sometimes you talk to yourself. You take meals in crowded joints. You develop an intimate relationship with your used Subaru. You slowly but surely become a has-been.
I left the bar and headed back to the hotel. I’d walked a fair bit, but it wasn’t hard finding my way back. I had only to look up to see the new Dolphin Hotel towering above everything else. Like the three wise men guided by a star to Jerusalem or Bethlehem or wherever it was, I steered straight for the main attraction.
After a bath, toweling my hair dry, I gazed out over the Sapporo cityscape. When I stayed at the old Dolphin, hadn’t there been a small office building outside my window? What kind of office, I never did figure out, but it was a company and people were busy. That had been my view day after day. What ever became of that company? There’d been a nice-looking woman working there. Where was she now?
I had nothing to do, so I shuffled around the room before flicking on the TV. It was the same old nausea-inducing fare. Not even original nausea-inducing fare. It was phony, synthetic, but being synthetic, it wasn’t entirely repugnant. If I didn’t turn the thing off, though, I felt sure I’d be seeing the results of some real nausea.
I pulled on some clothes and went up to the lounge on the twenty-sixth floor. I sat at the bar and ordered a vodka-and-soda with lemon. One whole wall of the lounge was window, providing a sweeping panorama of Sapporo at night. A Star Wars alien city set. Otherwise, it was a comfortable, quiet place, with real crystal glasses that had a nice ring.
Besides myself, there were only three other customers. Two middle-aged men talking in a hush at a back table. Some very important matter by the look of things. A plot to assassinate Darth Vader? And sitting at a table directly to their right, a girl of twelve or thirteen, plugged in to a Walkman, sipping a drink through a straw. She was a pretty girl. Her long hair, unnaturally straight, draped silkily against the edge of the table. She tapped her fingers on the tabletop, keeping time to the rhythm she was hearing. Her long fingers made a more childlike impression than the rest of her. Not that she was trying to act like an adult. No, not disagreeable or arrogant, but aloof.
Yet, in fact, the girl wasn’t looking at anything. She was completely oblivious to her surroundings. She was wearing jeans and white Converse All Stars and a sweatshirt emblazoned with GENESIS, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and she seemed to be concentrating entirely on the music. Sometimes she’d move her lips to form fragments of lyrics.
“Lemonade,” the bartender volunteered, as if to excuse the presence of a minor. “The girl’s waiting for her mother.”
“Hmm,” I answered, noncommital. Certainly, you don’t go into a hotel bar after ten at night and expect to find a young girl sitting by herself with a drink and a Walkman. But if the bartender hadn’t broached the subject, I probably wouldn’t have thought anything was out of the ordinary. The girl just seemed a part of the place.
I ordered another drink and made small talk with the bartender. The weather, the view, assorted topics. Then nonchalantly I dropped the line that, hey, this place sure has changed, hasn’t it? To which the bartender strained a smile and admitted that, until recently, he’d been working at a hotel in Tokyo, so he scarcely knew anything about Sapporo. And at that point, a new customer walked in, terminating our fruitless conversation.
I drank a total of four vodka-and-sodas. I could have drunk any number more but decided to call it quits. The girl was still in her seat, grafted to the Walkman. Her mother hadn’t shown, and the ice in her glass had melted, which she didn’t seem to notice. Yet when I got up from the counter, she looked up at me for two or three seconds, and smiled. Or perhaps it was the slightest trembling of her lips. But to me, it looked like she smiled. Which—I know it sounds strange—really shook me up. I felt as if I’d been chosen. A charge shot through me; my body seemed to lift up a few centimeters.
A bit disarmed, I boarded the elevator and returned to my room. A smile from a twelve-year-old girl? How could anything so innocent have set me off so much? She could have been my daughter.
And Genesis—what a stupid name for a band.
But because the girl had that sweatshirt on, the name seemed somehow symbolic. Genesis.
Why do rock groups have overblown names like that?
I fell back onto the bed with my shoes still on. Closed my eyes and the young girl’s image came to me. Walkman. White fingers tapping tabletop. Genesis. Melted ice.
Genesis.
With my eyes shut, I could feel the alcohol swimming around inside me. I pulled off my work boots, got out of my clothes, and crawled under the covers. I was too tired, too drunk, to feel much of anything. I waited for the woman next to me to say, “Had a bit too much, have we?” But there was no such conversation.
Genesis.
I reached out to turn out the light. Will my dreams take me to the Dolphin Hotel? I wondered in the dark.
When I awoke the next morning, I felt a hopeless emptiness. No dream, no hotel. Zilch.
My work boots lay at the foot of the bed where they’d fallen. Two tired puppies.
Outside my window the sky hung low and gray. It looked like snow, which added to my malaise. The clock read five after seven. I punched the remote control and watched the morning news as I lay in bed. Something about an upcoming election. Fifteen minutes later I got up and went to the bathroom to wash and shave, humming the overture to The Marriage of Figaro as a wake-me-up. Or was it the overture to The Magic Flute? I racked my brain, but couldn’t get it straight. I cut my chin shaving, then popped a button from my cuff getting into my shirt. The signs for the day were not good.
At breakfast, I saw the young girl I’d seen in the bar, sitting with a woman I took to be her mother. Wearing the same GENESIS sweatshirt but at least without the Walkman. She’d hardly touched her bread or scrambled eggs, seemed absolutely bored drinking her tea. Her mother was a smallish woman in her early forties. Hair pulled into a tight bun, eyebrows exactly like her daughter’s, slender, refined nose, camel-colored sweater that looked like it was cashmere over a white blouse. She wore her clothes well, clothes that suit a woman accustomed to the attentions of others. There was a touching world-weariness in the way she buttered her toast.
As I passed by their table, the girl glanced up at me. Then smiled. A more definitive smile than last night’s. Unmistakably, a smile.
I ate my breakfast alone and tried to think, but after that smile I couldn’t focus. No matter what came to mind, the thoughts spun around uselessly. In the end, I stared at the pepper shaker and didn’t think at all.
There was nothing for me to do. Nothing I should do, and nothing I wanted to do. I’d come all this way to the Dolphin Hotel, but the Dolphin Hotel that I wanted had vanished from the face of the earth. What to do?
I went down to the lobby, planted myself in one of the magnificent sofas, and tried to come up with a plan for the day. Should I go sightseeing? Where to? How about a movie? Nah, nothing I wanted to see. And why come all the way to Sapporo to see a movie? So, what to do?
Nothing to do.
Okay, it’s the barbers
hop, I said to myself. I hadn’t been to a barber in a month, and I was in need of a cut. Now that’s making good use of free time. If you don’t have anything better to do, go to the barber.
So I made tracks for the hotel barbershop, hoping that it’d be crowded and I’d have to wait my turn. But of course the place was empty, and I was in the chair immediately. An abstract painting hung on the blue-gray walls, and Jacques Rouchet’s Play Bach lilted soft and mellow from hidden speakers. This was not like any barbershop I’d been to—you could hardly call it a barbershop. The next thing you know, they’ll be playing Gregorian chants in bathhouses, Ryuichi Sakamoto in tax office waiting rooms. The guy who cut my hair was young, barely twenty. When I mentioned that there used to be a tiny hotel here that went by the same name, his response was, “That so?” He didn’t know much about Sapporo either. He was cool. He was wearing a Men’s Bigi designer shirt. Even so, he knew how to cut hair, so I left there pretty much satisfied.
What next?
Short of other options, I returned to my sofa in the lobby and watched the scenery. The receptionist with glasses from yesterday was behind the front desk. She seemed tense. Was my presence setting off signals in her? Unlikely. Soon the clock pushed eleven. Lunchtime. I headed out and walked around, trying to think what I was in the mood for. But I wasn’t hungry, and no place caught my fancy. Lacking will, I wandered into a place for some spaghetti and salad. Then a beer. Outside, snow was still threatening, but not a flake in sight. The sky was solid, immobile. Like Gulliver’s flying island of Laputa, hanging heavily over the city. Everything seemed cast in gray. Even, in retrospect, my meal—gray. Not a day for good ideas.
In the end, I caught a cab and went to a department store downtown. I bought shoes and underwear, spare batteries, a travel toothbrush, nail clippers. I bought a sandwich for a late-night snack and a small flask of brandy. I didn’t need any of this stuff, I was just shopping, just killing time. I killed two hours.
Then I walked along the major avenues, looking into windows, no destination in mind, and when I tired of that, I stepped into a café and read some Jack London over coffee. And before long it was getting on to dusk. Talk about boring. Killing time is not an easy job.
Back at the hotel, I was passing by the front desk when I heard my name called. It was the receptionist with glasses. She motioned for me to go to one end of the counter, the car-rental section actually, where there was a display of pamphlets. No one was on duty here.
She twirled a pen in her fingers a second, giving me a I’ve-got-something-to-tell-you-but-I-don’t-know-how-to-say-it look. Clearly, she wasn’t used to doing this sort of thing.
“Please forgive me,” she began, “but we have to pretend we’re discussing a car rental.” Then she shot a quick glance out of the corner of her eye toward the front desk. “Management is very strict. We’re not supposed to speak privately to customers.”
“All right, then,” I said. “I’ll ask you about car rates, and you answer with whatever you want to say. Nothing personal.”
She blushed slightly. “Forgive me,” she said again. “They’re real sticklers for rules here.”
I smiled. “Still, your glasses are very becoming.”
“Excuse me?”
“You look very cute in those glasses. Very cute,” I said.
She touched the frame of these glasses, then cleared her throat. The nervous type. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you,” she regained her composure. “It’s a private matter.”
If I could have, I would have patted her on the head to comfort her, but instead I kept quiet and looked into her eyes.
“It’s what we talked about last night, you know, about there having been a hotel here,” she said softly, “with the same name as this one. What was that other hotel like? I mean, was it a regular hotel?”
I picked up a car-rental pamphlet and acted like I was studying it. “That depends on what you mean by ’regular.’ ”
She pinched the points of her collar and cleared her throat again. “It’s … hard to say exactly, but was there anything strange about that hotel? I can’t get it out of my mind.”
Her eyes were earnest and lovely. Just as I’d remembered. She blushed again.
“I guess I don’t know what you mean, but I’m sure it will take a little time to talk about and we can’t very well do it here. You seem like you’re pretty busy.”
She looked over at the other receptionists at the front desk, then bit her lower lip slightly. After a moment’s hesitation, she spoke up. “Okay, could you meet me after I get off work?”
“What time is that?”
“I finish at eight. But we can’t meet near here. Hotel rules. It’s got to be somewhere far away from here.”
“You name the place. I don’t care how far, I’ll be there.”
She thought a bit more, then scribbled the name of a place and drew me a map. “I’ll be there at eight-thirty.”
I pocketed the sheet of paper.
Now it was her turn to look at me. “I hope you don’t think I’m strange. This is the first time I’ve done something like this. I’ve never broken the rules before. But this time I don’t know what else to do. I’ll explain everything to you later.”
“No, I don’t think you’re strange. Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not so bad a guy. I may not be the most likable person in the world, but I try not to upset people.”
She twirled her pen again, not quite sure how to take that. Then she smiled vaguely and pushed up the bridge of her glasses. “Well, then, later,” she said, and gave me a businesslike bow before returning to her station at the front desk. Charming, if a little insecure.
I went up to my room and pulled a beer from the refrigerator to wash down my department-store roast beef sandwich. Okay, at least we have a plan of action. We may be in low gear, but we’re rolling. But where to?
I washed and shaved, brushed my teeth. Calmly, quietly, no humming. Then I gave myself a good, hard look in the mirror, the first time in ages. No major discoveries. I felt no surge of valor. It was the same old face, as always.
I left my room at half past seven and grabbed a taxi. The driver studied the map I showed him, then nodded without a word, and we were off. It was a-thousand-something-yen distance, a tiny bar in the basement of a five-story building. I was met at the door with the warm sound of an old Gerry Mulligan record.
I took a seat at the counter and listened to the solo over a nice, easy J&B-and-water. At eight-forty-five she still hadn’t shown. I didn’t particularly mind. The bar was plenty comfortable, and by now I was getting to be a pro at killing time. I sipped my drink, and when that was gone, I ordered another. I contemplated the ashtray.
At five past nine she made her entrance.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a flurry. “Things started to get busy at the last minute, and then my replacement was late.”
“Don’t worry. I was fine here,” I said. “I had to pass the time anyway.”
At her suggestion we moved to a table toward the back. We settled down, as she removed her gloves, scarf, and coat. Underneath, she had on a dark green wool skirt and a lightweight yellow sweater—which revealed generous volumes I’m surprised I hadn’t noticed before. Her earrings were demure gold pinpoints.
She ordered a Bloody Mary. And when it came, she sipped it tentatively. I took another drink of my whiskey and then she took another sip of her Bloody Mary. I nibbled on nuts.
At length, she let out a big sigh. It might have been bigger than she had intended, as she looked up at me nervously.
“Work tough?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Pretty tough. I’m still not used to it. The hotel just opened so the management’s always on edge about something.”
She folded her hands and placed them on the table. She wore one ring, on her pinkie. An unostentatious, rather ordinary silver ring.
“About the old Dolphin Hotel …,” she began. “But wait, didn’t I hear you were
a magazine writer or something?”
“Magazine?” I said, startled. “What’s this about?”
“That’s just what I heard,” she said.
I shut up. She bit her lip and stared at a point on the wall.
“There was some trouble once,” she began again, “so the management’s very nervous about media. You know, with property being bought up and all. If too much talk about this gets in the media, the hotel could suffer. A bad image can ruin business.”
“Has something been written up?”
“Once, in a weekly magazine a while ago. There were these suggestions about dirty dealings, something about calling in the yakuza or some right-wing thugs to put pressure on the folks who were holding out. Things like that.”
“And I take it the old Dolphin Hotel was mixed up in this trouble?”
She shrugged and took another sip. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Otherwise, I don’t think the manager would have acted so nervous talking to you about the old hotel. I mean, it was almost like you sounded an alarm. I don’t know any of the details, but I did hear once about the Dolphin name in connection with an older hotel. From someone.”
“Someone?”
“One of the blackies.”
“Blackies?”
“You know, the black-suit crowd.”
“Check,” I said. “Other than that, you haven’t heard anything about the old Dolphin Hotel?”
She shook her head and fiddled with her ring. “I’m scared,” she whispered. “I’m so scared I … I don’t know what to do.”
“Scared? Because of me and magazines?”
She shook her head, then pressed her lip against the rim of her glass. “No, it’s not that. Magazines don’t have anything to do with it. If something gets printed, what do I care? The management might get all bent out of shape, but that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s the whole place. The whole hotel, well, I mean, there’s always something a little weird about it. Something funny … something … warped.”
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