There was nothing I could do. He had disappeared.
The following afternoon they dredged the Maserati out of Tokyo Bay. As I expected. No surprises. As soon as he disappeared, I saw it coming.
Another corpse. The Rat, Kiki, Mei, Dick North, and now Gotanda. Five. One more to go. What now? Who was the next in line to die? Not Yumiyoshi, I wouldn’t be able to bear that. Yumiyoshi was not meant to die. Okay, then Yuki? The kid was thirteen. I couldn’t let that happen to her. I was going down the list, as if I were the god of doom, dealing out orders for mortality.
I went down to the Akasaka police station to tell Bookish that I’d been with Gotanda the previous night until right before his death. Somehow I thought it was the right thing to do, though naturally I didn’t mention Kiki. That was a closed book. Instead, I talked about how exhausted Gotanda had been, how his loans were piling up, the problems with work, the stresses in his personal life.
Bookish took down what I said. Unlike before, he made simple notes. Which I signed. It didn’t take an hour. “People dying left and right around you, eh?” he said. “At this rate, you’ll never make friends and influence people. They start hating you, and before you know it, your eyes go and your skin sags. Not a pretty prospect.”
Then he heaved a deep sigh.
“Well, anyway, this was a suicide. Open and shut case. Even got witnesses. Still, what a waste. I don’t care if he was a movie star, he didn’t have to go blitzing a Maserati into the Bay, did he? Ordinary Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla would’ve done the job.”
“It was insured.”
“No sir, insurance never covers suicides,” Bookish reminded me. “Anyway, you can go now. Sorry about your friend. And thanks for taking the trouble to come in,” he said as he saw me to the door. “Mei’s case isn’t settled yet. But the investigation’s still going on.”
For a long time after, I walked around feeling as if I’d killed Gotanda. I couldn’t rid myself of the weight. I went back over all the things we’d talked about that night. If only I’d given him the responses he’d needed to save himself, the two of us might be relaxing on the beach in Maui right now.
No way. Gotanda had made up his mind from the beginning. He’d been thinking about plowing that Maserati into the sea all along. He’d been waiting for an excuse. It was his only exit. He’d already had his hand on the doorknob, the Maserati in his head sinking, the water pouring in, choking him, over and over again.
Mei’s death had left me shaken, Dick North’s death sad and resigned. But Gotanda’s death lay me down in a lead-lined box of despair. Gotanda’s death was unsalvageable. Gotanda never really got himself in tune with his inner impulses. He pushed himself as far as he could, to the furthest edge of his awareness—and then right across the line into that dark otherworld.
For a while, the weeklies and TV and sports tabloids feasted on his death. Like beetles on carrion. The headlines alone were enough to make me vomit. I felt like throttling every scandalmonger in town.
I climbed into bed and shut my eyes. Cuck-koo, I heard Mei far off in the darkness.
I lay there, hating everything. The deaths were beyond comprehension, the aftertaste sickening. The world of the living was obscene. I was powerless to do anything. People came and went, but once gone, they never came back. My hands smelled of death. I wouldn’t be able to wash it off, like Gotanda said.
Hey, Sheep Man, is this the way you connect your world? Threading one death to another? You said it might already be too late for me to be happy. I wouldn’t have minded that, but why this?
When I was little, I had this science book. There was a section on “What would happen to the world if there was no friction?” Answer: “Everything on earth would fly into space from the centrifugal force of revolution.” That was my mood.
Three days after Gotanda plowed the Maserati into the sea I called Yuki. To be honest, I didn’t want to speak to anyone, but her of all people I had to talk to. She was vulnerable and lonely. A child. And I may have been the only person in the world who would hear her out. Then again, more importantly, Yuki was alive. And I had a duty to keep her that way. At least, that’s what I felt.
Yuki wasn’t in Hakone. A groggy Amé answered the phone and said that Yuki had left two days earlier to return to the Akasaka condo.
I called Akasaka. Yuki snatched up the receiver immediately. She must have been right beside the phone.
“It’s okay for you to be away from Hakone?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But I needed to be alone. Mama’s an adult, right? She ought to be all right on her own. I wanted to think about myself. Things like what to do from here on. I think it’s time I start to get serious about my life.”
“Well, maybe so.”
“I saw the papers. That friend of yours, he died, huh?”
“Yes, the Curse of the Maserati. As you warned me.”
Yuki did not answer. The silence seeped through the wires. I switched the receiver from the right ear to the left. “How about a meal?” I asked. “I know you’ve only been eating junk, right? I haven’t been eating too well myself. Let’s get ourselves a better class of grub.”
“I’ve got to meet somebody at two, but before that I’m okay.”
I looked at the clock. A little past eleven.
“Fine. I’ll get ready now. See you in about thirty minutes,” I said.
I changed clothes, took a swig of orange juice, pocketed my wallet and keys. I’m off, I thought. Or no? Had I forgotten something? Right, I’m always off. I’d forgotten to shave. I ran over my beard with a razor, then sized myself up in the mirror. Could I still pass for a guy in his twenties? Maybe. Maybe not. But did anybody care? I brushed my teeth again.
Outside it was sunny. Summer coming on. If only the rainy season could be put on hold. Sunglasses on, I drove to Yuki’s condo. I rang the bell at the entrance to her building and Yuki came right down. She was wearing a short-sleeve dress and sandals, and carried a shoulder bag.
“You’re looking very chic today,” I said.
“I told you I had to see someone at two, didn’t I?” she replied.
“It suits you, your dress. Very becoming, very adult.”
She smiled but said nothing.
It was a bit before twelve, so we had the restaurant to ourselves. We filled up on soup and pasta and sea bass and salad. By the time the tide of salarymen washed in, we were out of there.
“Where to?” I asked.
“Nowhere. Just drive around,” she said.
“Antisocial. Waste of gasoline,” I said, but Yuki let it drop, pretending not to hear.
Instead she turned on the stereo. Talking Heads, Fear of Music. When did I ever put that tape in the deck?
“I decided to get a tutor,” she said. “That’s who I’m meeting today. I told Papa I wanted to study, and he found her for me. She seems like a real good person. Strange, but seeing that movie made me want to learn.”
“What movie? Unrequited Love?”
“That’s right. Sounds crazy, I know. Even sounds crazy to me. Maybe your friend playing the teacher made me feel like studying. At first, I thought, gimme a break, but I must have gotten hooked. Maybe he did have talent.”
“Yeah, he had talent. He could act. If it was fiction. Not reality, if you get what I mean.”
“I think so.”
“You should have seen him as a dentist. He told me that was acting.… Anyway, wanting to do something is a good sign. You can’t really go on living without it. I think Gotanda would be pleased to hear it.”
“Did you see him?”
“I did,” I said. “I saw him and we talked. We talked a long time. A very honest talk. And then he died, just like that. He was talking with me, then he gunned the Maserati into the Bay.”
“Because of me?”
“No, not because of you.” I shook my head slowly. “It’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault. People have their own reasons for dying. It might look simple, but it never is. I
t’s just like a root. What’s above ground is only a small part of it. But if you start pulling, it keeps coming and coming. The human mind dwells deep in darkness. Only the person himself knows the real reason, and maybe not even then.”
He’d been waiting for an excuse. He’d already had his hand on the doorknob.
No, it was nobody’s fault after all.
“Still, I know you hate me for it,” said Yuki.
“I don’t hate you.”
“You may not hate me now, but you will later.”
“Not now, not later. I don’t hate like that.”
“Well, maybe not hate, but something’s going to go away,” she murmured, half to herself. “I just know it.”
I glanced over at her. “Strange. Gotanda said the same thing.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. He said he had the feeling things were disappearing on him. I don’t know what kind of things he meant. But whatever they are, sometime they’re going to go. We shift around, so things can’t help but go when that happens. They disappear when it’s time for them to disappear. And they don’t disappear until it’s time for them to disappear. Like that dress you got on. In a couple of years, it won’t fit you, and you might even think the Talking Heads are moldy oldies. You might not even want to go on drives with me anymore. Can’t be helped. As they say, just go with the flow. Don’t fight it.”
“I’ll always like you. That has nothing to do with time.”
“Makes me happy to hear that, because I want to think so too,” I said. “But to be fair, Yuki, you still don’t know much about time. It’s better not to go deciding too many things now. People go through changes like you’d never believe.”
She was silent. The tape auto-reversed to side B.
Summer. Wherever you looked, the town looked like summer. Cops and high school kids and bus drivers were all in short sleeves. There were even women in no sleeves. And to think not so long ago it had been snowing.
“And you really don’t hate me?”
“Of course not,” I said. “In this uncertain world, that’s about the only thing I’m sure of.”
“Absolutely?”
“Absolutely 2,500 percent.”
She smiled. “That’s what I wanted to hear.” Then she asked, “You liked Gotanda, didn’t you?”
“I liked him, sure,” I said. Suddenly my voice caught. Tears welled up. I barely managed to fight them back and took a deep breath. “Each time we met I liked him more. That doesn’t happen very much, especially not at my age.”
“Did he kill the woman?”
I scanned the early summer cityscape for a moment. “Who knows? Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t.”
He’d been waiting for an excuse.
Yuki leaned on her window and looked out, listening to her Talking Heads. She seemed a little more grown-up than when we first met, only two and a half months before.
“What are you going to do now?” asked Yuki.
“Yes, what am I going to do,” I said. “I haven’t decided. I think I’ve got to go back to Sapporo. Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Lots of loose ends up there.”
Yumiyoshi. The Sheep Man. The Dolphin Hotel. A place that I was a part of. Where someone was crying for me. I had to go back to close the circle.
I offered to drive Yuki wherever she had to go. “Heaven knows, I’m free today.”
She smiled. “Thanks, but it’s okay. It’s pretty far; the train’ll be faster.”
“Did I hear you say thanks?” I said, removing my sunglasses.
“Got any problems with that?”
“Nope.”
We were at Yoyogi-Hachiman Station, where she was going to catch the Odakyu Line. Yuki looked at me for ten or fifteen seconds. No identifiable expression on her face, only a gradual change in the gleam of her eyes, the shape of her mouth. Ever so slightly, her lips grew taut, her stare sharp and sassy. Like a slice of summer sunlight refracting in water.
She slammed the door shut and trotted off, not looking back. I watched her receding figure disappear into the crowd. And when she was out of sight, I felt lonely, as if a love affair had just broken up.
I drove back up Omotesando to Aoyama to go shopping at Kinokuniya, but the parking lot was full. Hey, come to think of it, wasn’t I going to Sapporo tomorrow or the day after? So I cruised around a bit more, then went home. To my empty apartment. Where I plopped down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling.
They’ve got a name for this, I thought. Loss. Bereavement. Not nice words.
Cuck-koo.
It echoed through the empty space of my home.
I had a dream about Kiki. I guess it was a dream. Either that or some act akin to dreaming. What, you may ask, is an “act akin to dreaming”? I don’t know either. But it seems it does exist. Like so many other things we have no name for, existing in that limbo beyond the fringes of consciousness.
But let’s just call it a dream, plain and simple. The expression is closest to something real for us.
It was near dawn when I had this dream about Kiki.
In the dream as well, it was near dawn.
I’m on the phone. An international call. I’ve dialed the number that Kiki apparently left me on the windowsill of that room in downtown Honolulu. Beepbeepbeep beep beepbeep beepbeep … I can hear the phone lines connecting. I’m getting through. Or so I think. The numbers are linking up in order. A brief interval, a short dial tone. I press the receiver to my ear and count the muffled reports. Five, six, seven, eight rings. At the twelfth ring, someone answers. And in that instant, I’m in that room. That big, empty death chamber in downtown Honolulu. It seems to be daytime. Noon, judging from the light pouring straight down through the skylight. Flecks of dust dance in these upright shafts of light, bright as a southern sun and sharp as gashes from a knife. Yet the parts of the room without light are murky and cold. The contrast is remarkable. Like the ocean floor, I’m thinking.
I’m sitting on a sofa there in the room, receiver at my ear. The telephone cord trails away over the floor, across a dark area, through the light, to disappear again into the gloom. A long, long cord. Longer than any I’ve seen. I’ve got the phone on my lap and I’m looking around the room.
The furniture in the room is the same as it was. The same pieces in the same places. Bed, table, sofa, chairs, TV, floor lamp. Spaced unnaturally apart. And the room has the same smell as before. Stale and moldy, a shut-in air of disuse. But the six skeletons are gone. Not on the bed, not on the sofa, not in the chair in front of the TV, not at the dining table. They’ve all disappeared. As have the scraps of food and plates from the table. I set the telephone down on the sofa and stand up. I have a slight headache. The kind you get when there’s a high-pitched hum in your ears. I sit back down.
I detect a movement from the farthest chair off in the gloom. I strain my eyes. Someone or something has gotten up and I hear footsteps coming my way. It’s Kiki. She appears from out of the darkness, cuts across the light, takes a chair at the dining table. She’s wearing the same outfit as before. Blue dress and white shoulder bag.
She sits there, sizing me up. She is quiet, her expression tranquil. She is positioned neither in light nor in darkness, but exactly in between. I’m about to get up and go over to her, but have second thoughts. There’s still that slight pain in my temples.
“The skeletons go somewhere?” I ask.
“I suppose,” says Kiki with a smile.
“Did you dispose of them?”
“No, they just vanished. Maybe you disposed of them?”
Eyeing the telephone beside me, I press my fingers to my temples.
“What’s it mean? Those six skeletons?”
“They’re you,” says Kiki. “This is your room. Everything here is you. Yourself. Everything.”
“My room,” I repeat after her. “Well, then, what about the Dolphin Hotel? What’s there?”
“That’s your place too. Of course. The Sheep Man’s there. And I’m here.�
��
The shafts of light do not waver. They are hard, uniform. Only the air vibrates minutely in them. I notice it without really looking.
“I seem to have rooms in a lot of places,” I say. “You know, I kept having these dreams. About the Dolphin Hotel. And somebody there, who’s crying for me. I had that same dream almost every night. The Dolphin Hotel stretches out long and narrow, and there’s someone there, crying for me. I thought it was you. So I knew I had to see you.”
“Everyone’s crying for you,” says Kiki, ever so softly, in a voice to soothe worn nerves. “After all, that whole place is for you. Everyone there cries for you.”
“But you were calling me. That’s why I went back, to see you. And then from there … a lot of things started. Just like before. I met all sorts of folks. People died. But, you did call me, didn’t you? It was you who guided me along, wasn’t it?”
“It wasn’t me. It was you who called yourself. I’m merely a projection. You guided yourself, through me. I’m your phantom dance partner. I’m your shadow. I’m not anything more.”
But I wasn’t strangling her, I was strangling my shadow. If only I could choke off my shadow, I’d get some health.
“But why would everyone cry for me?”
She doesn’t answer. She rises, and with a tapping of footsteps, walks over to stand before me. Then she kneels and reaches out to touch my lips with her fingertips. Her fingers are sleek and smooth. Then she touches my temples.
“We’re crying for all the things you can’t cry for,” whispers Kiki. Slowly, as if to spell it out. “We shed tears for all the things you never let yourself shed tears, we weep for all the things you did not weep.”
“Are your ears still … like they were?” I’m curious.
“My ears—,” she breaks off into a smile. “They’re in perfect shape. The same as they were.”
“Would you show me your ears again, just one more time?” I ask. “It was an experience like I’ve never known, as if the whole world was reborn. In that restaurant that time, you knocked me out. I’ve never forgotten it.”
Dance Dance Dance Page 35