Koji made the sage noise that he always does on the rare occasions when he doesn’t understand something. “So, when do I get to see her again?”
I swallowed. “Never, probably. She’s going back to international school in Hong Kong. She only comes to Tokyo every couple of years with her father to visit relatives for a few weeks. We have to be realistic.”
Koji sounded more depressed about it than I did. “That’s terrible! When’s she going back this time?”
I looked at my watch. “In about thirty minutes.”
“Satoru! Stop her!”
“I really think … I mean, I think that—”
“Don’t think! Do something!”
“What do you suggest? Kidnap her? She’s got her life to get on with. She’s going to study archaeology at university in Hong Kong. We met, we enjoyed each other’s company, very much, and now we’ve parted. It happens all the time. We can write. Anyway, it’s not like we’ve fallen longingly in love with each other, or anything like that—”
“Beep beep beep.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, that was my bullshit alarm going off.”
I dug out some old big band Duke Ellington. It reminds me of wind-up gramophones, silly moustaches, and Hollywood musicals from before the war. It usually cheers me up. “Take the ‘A’ Train,” rattling along on goofy optimism.
I looked gloomily into the murky lake at the bottom of my teacup, and I thought about Tomoyo for the fiftieth time that day.
The phone rang. I knew it was going to be Tomoyo. It was Tomoyo. I could hear airplanes and boarding announcements in the background.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello.”
“I’m phoning from the airport.”
“I can hear airplanes taking off in the background.”
“Sorry I couldn’t say ‘good-bye’ properly last night. I wanted to kiss you.”
“So did I, but with everyone there, and everything …”
“Thanks for inviting me and Dad to Mrs. Nakamori’s last night. My dad says thanks too. I haven’t seen him nattering away like he did with your Mama-san and Taro for ages.”
“I haven’t seen them nattering away like that for ages, either. What were they talking about?”
“Business, I guess. You know Dad has a small stake in a nightclub. We both loved the show.”
“It wasn’t a show! It was just me and Koji.”
“You’re both really good musicians. Dad didn’t shut up about you.”
“Nah … Koji’s good, he makes me sound passable. He phoned about twenty minutes ago. I hope we weren’t too gooey at the bar last night. Koji thought we were a bit obvious.”
“Don’t worry about it. And hey! Dad even implied, in his roundabout way, you could visit during your holidays. He might manage to find a bar for you to play sax in, if you wanted to.”
“Does he know? About us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Takeshi doesn’t exactly give me holidays.… At least, I’ve never asked for one.”
“Oh …” She changed the subject. “How long did it take you to get so good?”
“I’m not good. John Coltrane is good! Wait a sec—” I grabbed a copy of John Coltrane and Duke Ellington playing “In a Sentimental Mood.” Smoky and genuflective. We listened to it together for a while. So many things I wanted to say to her.
There was a series of urgent rings. “I’m running out of money—there’s something—Oh, damn, ’bye!”
“ ’Bye!”
“When I get back I’ll—”
A lonely hum.
• • •
At lunchtime Mr. Fujimoto came in, saw me, and laughed. “Good afternoon, Satoru-kun!” he jubilated. “Blue skies, just you wait and see! Tell me, what do you think of this little beaut?” He put a little package of books on the counter, and straightened out his bow tie, arching his eyebrows and acting proud.
A grotesque polka-dot frog-green bow tie. “Absolutely unique.”
His whole body wobbled with mirth. “We’re having a disgusting tie competition in the office. I’ve got ’em licked, I think.”
“How was Kyoto?”
“Oh, Kyoto was Kyoto. Temples and shrines, meetings with printers. Uppity shopkeepers who think they have a monopoly on manners. It’s good to be back. Once a Tokyoite, always a Tokyoite.”
I started my rehearsed speech. “Mr. Fujimoto, when I told Mama-san about your kind offer to help me get an interview at your office she gave me this to give you. She thought you and your co-workers might enjoy it at a cherry-blossom party.” I heaved the huge bottle of rice wine onto the counter.
“Sake! My word, that is a big boy! This will last awhile, even in an office full of publishers! How extraordinarily kind.”
“No, it was kind of you. I’m sorry I’m too ignorant to accept your generous offer.”
“Not at all, not at all. No umbrage taken, I promise you.… It was just a passing …” Mr. Fujimoto looked for the right word, blinking hard, and laughed when he couldn’t find it. “I don’t blame you in the least. You wouldn’t want to end up being like me, would you?” He found that a lot funnier than I did.
“It’s not my place to say this, but I wouldn’t mind ending up being like you at all. You’ve got a good job. Unforgettable bow ties. A great taste in the world’s finest jazz discs.”
He stopped smiling for once and gazed out. “The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, it turns ever more perfect. And when it’s perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits the ground it gets all mushed up. So it’s only absolutely perfect when it’s falling through the air, this way and that, for the briefest time.… I think that only we Japanese can really understand that, don’t you?”
A van roaring the message Vote for Shimizu, the only candidate who really has the guts to fight corruption screeched past like a drunken batmobile. Shimizu never betrays, Shimizu never betrays, Shimizu never betrays.
Mr. Fujimoto trailed his fingers through the air. “Why do things happen the way they do? Since the gas attack on the subway, watching those pictures on TV, watching the police investigate like a crack squad of blind tortoises, I’ve been trying to understand.… Why do things happen at all? What is it that stops the world simply … seizing up?”
I’m never sure whether Mr. Fujimoto’s questions are questions. “Do you know?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know the answer, no. Sometimes I think it’s the only question, and that all other questions are tributaries that flow into it.” He ran his hand through his thinning hair. “Might the answer be ‘love’?”
I tried to think, but I kept seeing pictures. I imagined my father—that man who I had imagined was my father—looking out through the rear window of a car. I thought of butterfly knives, and a time once three or four years ago when I was walking out of McDonald’s and a businessman slammed down onto the pavement from a ninth floor window of the same building. He lay three meters away from where I stood. His mouth was gaping open in astonishment. A dark stain was trickling from it, over the pavement, between the bits of broken teeth and glasses.
I thought about Tomoyo’s eyebrows, her nose, her jokes, her accent. Tomoyo on an airplane to Hong Kong. “I’d rather be too young to have that kind of wisdom.”
Mr. Fujimoto’s face turned into a smile that hid his eyes. “How wise of you.” He ended up buying an old Johnny Hartman disc with a beautiful version of “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart.”
A mosquito blundered its way into my ear, suddenly there, loud as an electric blender. I pulled my head away and swatted the little bugger. Mosquito season. I was scraping its fuselage onto a bit of paper when Takeshi’s estranged wife marched in, pushing her sunglasses up into her bountiful hair. She was accompanied by a sharp-dressed man who I immediately sensed was a lawyer. They have a look about them. When Takeshi offered me this job I’d spent a whole evening over at their apartment in Chiyoda, but now apart f
rom the curtest of nods Takeshi’s wife ignored me. The lawyer did not acknowledge my existence.
“He,” Takeshi’s wife pronounced the pronoun with the unique bitterness of the ex-wife, “only leases the property, but the stock is worth quite a lot. At least, he was always boasting that it is. The real money’s in the hair salons, though. This is just a hobby, really. One of his many hobbies.”
The lawyer demurred.
They turned to go. Takeshi’s wife looked at me as she was stepping through the door. “You can learn something from this, Satoru. Never make a big decision which will alter the shape of your life on the basis of a relationship! You may as well take out a mortgage on a house made of sponge cake. Remember that.” And she was gone.
I thought about what she had said as I put on a Chet Baker disc. A trumpet with nowhere urgent to be and all day to get there. And his voice, zennish murmurings in the soft void. My funny valentine, you don’t know what love is, I get along without you very well.
The phone rang. A hysterical Takeshi. Drunk again.
“Don’t let them in! Don’t let that mad cow in!”
“Who?”
“Her! Her and her backstabbing-scumbag-bloodsucking lawyer, who should be representing me! They’re going after my testicles with a meat cleaver! Don’t let them look at the stock—don’t let them look at the accounts—it’s illegal—and hide the limited edition original Louis Armstrong. And the gold disc of “Maiden Voyage.” Stick it down your boxer shorts or something—and—”
“Takeshi!”
“What?”
“It’s a bit late, I’m afraid.”
“What?”
“They’ve already been. Just to look around for a few seconds, so the lawyer could see the place. They didn’t look at the accounts, they didn’t evaluate anything.”
“Oh. Great. Just great. Great. What an utter, pigging mess. That woman is mad cow disease on two legs.… And what legs they are.…” He hung up.
The sunlight hummed and was soft. Shadows of twigs and branches swayed ever so slightly against the back wall. I thought of a time many years ago when two or three of Mama-san’s girls had taken me boating on a lake. One of my earliest memories.
Your place does keep you sane, but can also keep you lonely.
What was I going to do? I rolled up my shirt and looked on my forearm. There was a snake which Tomoyo had drawn on with a blue pen yesterday afternoon. I asked her, why a snake? She’d laughed at me like she was in on a joke that I wasn’t in on.
Two thoughts walked into my place.
The first thought said that we hadn’t slept together because sex would have closed an entrance behind us and opened an exit ahead of us.
The second thought told me quite clearly what to do.
Maybe Takeshi’s wife was right—maybe it is unsafe to base an important decision on your feelings for a person. Takeshi says the same thing often enough. Every bonk, he says, quadruples in price by the morning after. But who are Takeshi or his wife to lecture anybody? If not love, then what?
I looked at the time. Three o’clock. She was how many thousand kilometers and one time zone away. I could leave some money to cover the cost of the call.
“Good timing,” Tomoyo answered, like I was calling from the cigarette machine around the corner. “I’m unpacking.”
“Missing me?”
“A tiny little bit, maybe.”
“Liar! You don’t sound surprised to hear me.” I could hear the smile in her voice. “I’m not. When are you coming?”
And so we talked about what flight I could catch, where we would go, how she would level things with her father, what I could do to avoid eating into my meager savings too much. I felt as near to Paradise as I have ever been.
HONG KONG
THE MOON, THE moon, in the after …
There’s a mechanism in my alarm clock connected to a switch in my head that sends a message to my arm which extends itself and commands my thumb to punch the OFF button a moment before the thing beeps me awake. Every morning, without fail, no matter how much whisky I drank the night before or what time I finally got to bed. I’ve forgotten.
Fuck. That was a horrible, horrible dream. I can’t remember all the details, and I don’t think I want to. The office was being raided. Huw Llewellyn had stormed in, with the Chinese police and my old scoutmaster whose Volvo I once shat on, they were all on rollerblades, and in my haste to erase the suddenly numerous files relating to Account 1390931 I kept mistyping my password. K-A-T-Y-F-R-B, no, K-T-Y, no, K-A-T-Y-F-O-R-B-W—no, and I’d have to start over. They work their way up the building, floor by floor, coffee cups were spilling in their wake, the electric fan swings its eye this way again, and unpaid telephone bills flutter through the air, bats at dusk.… There’s a window open, and forty days and nights up the wind is vicious. The mouse on my computer sits there frozen, refusing to double-click. Was it any of this? Was what any of this? I’ve forgotten.
How many times have I dreamed of computers? I’d keep a dream diary, but even that might be used to help nail me one day. I imagine reporters printing the screwier ones, and prison analysts discussing the porn ones in supermarket aisles. I wonder who had the first computer dream, where, and when? I wonder if computers ever dream of humans.
Horn-rimmed Llewellyn. I’d only met him yesterday, and here the cunt was already gate-crashing my subconscious.
Fuck. The minute hand clicks again. The second hand glides around, reeling in my life surely as a kite string when it’s time to go home. Fuck. I’m eating into my morning time safety margin. Another morning feeling as shattered as I felt the night before. My face feels cracked and ready to fall off in Easter-egg bits. And to cap it all I’m going down with another bout of flu, I swear it. Hong fucking Kong and I spend half my life walking around feeling like a steamed dumpling. Easter must be around now. Come on, Neal, you can make it as far as the shower. A hot shower will do the trick. Bollocks. Some speed would do the trick, but it’s all snorted away.
I haul myself out of bed, stepping on a cold waffle and a plate. Fuck! She’s coming today, I think, she’ll clean it up. At least there’ll be some food waiting when I get back. Something Chinese, but at least I won’t have to face another waffle.
Into the living room. There is a message for me on the answering machine. Luckily I remembered to switch on the Sleep-easy mode before I went to bed, otherwise I’d have got even less sleep than I did. I swipe all the crap on the sofa onto the floor, jab the PLAY button, and lie on the sofa.…
“Rise and shine, Neal! This is Avril. Thanks for disappearing last night. Remember you’ve got the meeting with Mr. Wae’s lawyers at 9:30, and Theo wants a full briefing beforehand, so you’d better get here by 8:45 sharp. Get the coffee perkin’. See you soon.”
Avril. Nice name, silly slag.
Don’t get too comfortable there, Neal. One, two, three, up! I said, “Up!” Into the kitchen, chuck the old filter into the overflowing bin, fuck, it’s gone everywhere, ho-hum, sorry, maid, fresh filter, fresh coffee, more than the recommended dosage thank you very much, click ON. Trickle your thickest juice there for your Uncle Neal my baby, that’s the way. I’ve forgotten. Open the fridge. Half a lemon, three bottles of gin, a pint of milk that expired over a month ago, dried kidney beans, and … waffles. God is still in heaven, I still have some waffles left. Waffle in toaster. Back to bedroom, Neal. There’ll be a white shirt hanging in the closet, where she hangs them up every Sunday, every one the skin of a gwai lo, shagged and fleeced. I’ll be so fucking angry if she’s yanked them off the hangers again.… She’ll do anything for attention.
No, it’s okay. Hanging in a neat row. Boxer shorts, trousers, slung over the chair where you left them last night. The cheap, tubular chair. I miss the Queen Anne one. It was the one thing in this apartment older than me. One more bit of Katy gone. Grab a vest, a shirt, your jacket, something’s missing—belt. Where’s my belt?
“Okay. Very fucking funny. Where’s my belt?
”
The air conditioner drones from the living room.
“I’m going into the living room right now. Unless I find my belt on the arm of the sofa, I am going to go fucking ballistic.”
I go into the living room. I find my belt on the arm of the sofa.
“Just as fucking well.”
I remember that I got dressed without my shower. I stink, and there is a meeting with what’s-his-face from the Taiwan Consortium this morning.
“You plonker, Neal,” and nobody disagrees. When you call yourself a plonker nobody ever disagrees with you. The shower will cost me the rest of my safety margin. Unless the morning routine—“routine”—goes like clockwork, I will miss that crucial ferry, and have to start fabulating some impressive excuses.
I click off the air conditioner. “It’s only fucking May. You want to freeze me to death? Who would you have to drive round the bend then, hey?”
In the bathroom I find she’s been up to her usual tricks with the soap bottle. Katy always bought those pump-action containers of liquid soap, and so does the maid, which was all well and good until she discovered what fun it was to hammer the pump up and down. It is all over the walls, in the toilet bowl, on the floor of the shower cubicle, probably—yes—under where I just laid my shirt. Smeared trails everywhere like jerked-off semen.
“Very fucking amusing. Are you going to clean up this mess?”
Funny, she never touches any of the toiletries that Katy left behind. It’s only ever my stuff. Why don’t I just chuck that woman-stuff out? I still have a box of tampons in the cabinet. Two boxes. Heavy flow, light flow. The maid never touches the tampons—I can’t understand why. Maybe it’s a Chinese thing, like the babies not wearing nappies, and just crapping through that bum-flap wherever and whenever. The maid suffers no qualms about working through the talcum powder, skin moisturizers, and bath pearls, though. Why should she feel any qualms, if she doesn’t about anything else?
The shower deluges my head. Soak, shampoo, rub, rinse, conditioner, finger up a smearage of the pumped-out body soap, lather, rinse. I give myself a full two minutes. Bathe now, pay later.
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