The Devouring God

by James Kendley

  “What did he say to that?”

  “Not a word. I told him that in Fukuoka, there was a show club called Tomato Tomato, but I didn’t even know if it was open anymore. This isn’t Tokyo, and I don’t think there’s a big gay neighborhood like Shinjuku Ni-­chomé, maybe just a few isolated clubs. I told him he could ask around at the baths in Futsukaichi, or go ask in town. And I told him his Japanese was so good he could probably meet men online . . .”

  “But he wasn’t interested in men, was he?”

  Yoshida sat back in her chair. “Just that student.”

  “Was he angry that you thought he was a homosexual? I certainly would be.”

  “I can only imagine, Detective. No, he was very calm, and he talked to me very politely, as if I were a stranger’s child. His Japanese really is good, and he understands sarcasm. He told me that his desire is not sexual, that it is actually something quite pure and reverent. Just saying that he wants to lick the student’s bones does not explain the devotional aspect.”

  “ ‘Devotional aspect,’ he said?”

  “Those were his words. I just told you. He also said he is very curious about the texture of the bones, how they will feel on his tongue. He imagines that the cranium, the jaw, and the cheekbones will probably be smooth, like polished ivory, but that the long bones, like the humerus and femur, may have some subtle grain like fine wood.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “He said he has licked various surfaces around his house, trying to imagine how different bones would feel. He asked me if it sounded silly, walking around in the dark, licking countertops and cabinets and doorsills. I asked if he had hurt anyone or acted on these desires, and he seemed not to hear me. He said it was ridiculous to think about the texture because all the bones would be smooth when he had licked them clean.”

  “A man this disturbed can’t stay hidden long. This isn’t his first threat, and we’ll be able to catch him easily.”

  After a moment of silence, Yoshida spoke quietly and deliberately. “You can’t even trace the call. How can you catch him?”

  The detective smiled. “You know, when I worked in Tokyo, we had a system where we could track a cell phone to within one hundred to five hundred meters. We could receive the location circled on a map at any fax machine anywhere in the country.”

  “And why doesn’t that work here?”

  The detective just smiled.

  “This is an old trunk exchange,” Takuda said. They both turned to look at him. “Not only is there no stored information available about incoming calls, there’s no way to trace incoming calls without advance preparation and active switching. Even though we have the destination, there’s no way to trace to the origin until we can isolate the transfers for that particular call. It will take luck, but we will do our best.”

  The detective said, “Security Guard, when you say ‘we,’ you mean . . .”

  “Ota Southern Protection Ser­vices. We offer a wide range of ser­vices, as I’m sure President Ota will tell you.”

  “I’m sure. Tell me,” he said as he turned back to Yoshida. “How did the conversation end?”

  “He said that because I thought this was some sort of sexual act, his offering should include a woman’s bones as well.”

  “ ‘Offering’?”

  “His words. He said his ex-­girlfriend would be perfect, but she is a little short, and her teeth are crooked. These imperfections would ruin his offering, but it would be a beginning. Perhaps he should start there, he said, just because she is so short. He said, ‘A journey of a thousand leagues also starts with a single step.’ ”

  “Ugh. What did you say?”

  “I said nothing. I sat there thinking how terrible it was that both this man and I lived in the same world.”

  The detective was silent.

  “He said he still had a question for me, and I reached for the phone to disconnect, but he spoke too quickly.” She straightened in her chair as if to collect herself. “He asked me again how tall I am.”

  The detective sat forward. “Do you think he means to harm someone?”

  She frowned. “I don’t know how he intends to get a woman’s bones otherwise.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Tuesday Evening

  Thomas Fletcher went off his medication. Almost immediately, his obsession with Haruma’s bones dissipated.

  Then Japan came alive all around him.

  It started with full-­body spasms and white light searing his brain, followed by waking nightmares of blue-­lightning death on Osaka train cars and the man who turned himself inside out with his fingernails. He knew the visible world would come alive as well, and he didn’t have long to wait.

  One morning, he saw a torn sweatshirt ­thrashing vainly in the eddied currents of a flood drain. It gestured to him for help. Later that day, two plastic bags buffeted by wind from passing cars spun in a mad ­tarantella above the median before shrieking off into the leaden sky. Coffee puddled in a subway corridor raced in runnels of grout to reach the soothing darkness in the drain hidden in the floor grate. The remainder, stranded, squirmed in the discarded can, rocking as if to spill itself. Thomas averted his eyes, but he somehow saw the can’s spastic struggles no matter where he looked.

  The awakening of Japan progressed, as day follows night, and the demons and angels he had seen all his life emerged from the crowd.

  Thomas told no one. Instead, he spoke of the Japanese themselves. He insisted that they were insane. He insisted with conviction.

  One evening, at his friend Tracy’s apartment, he told the story of tutoring a mother and her as-­yet-­unborn child at twice the going rate. He spoke lovingly to a teakettle as if it were the mother’s belly. As his audience responded, his pantomime lecture to the fetal scholar became passionate.

  Gorgeous Tracy—­her eyes were wild with laughter, and her new boy-­toy, Benjamin, just grinned and shook his head, even though he was too new in the country to understand the context of the story. “Good Lord, what a country,” he said. “A hundred bucks an hour to teach a fetus. That’s crazy.”

  “That’s not crazy,” Thomas said, shaking his finger at Benjamin. “The Pachinko Lady is crazy.”

  “That’s not crazy,” Tracy said. “The Fujisaki Screamer is crazy.”

  “I give up,” said Benjamin. Benjamin was a busy guy, all busy with business, ready to get busy with Tracy, too busy to let a running gag play out properly. Bastard. “Who are these ­people?”

  Tracy started: “The Fujisaki Screamer is a student, about fifteen years old . . .”

  “Older,” Thomas said.

  “ . . . and he wears a uniform from an industrial arts high school. He hangs out on the Fujisaki station subway platform and screams really loud. Just unbelievable. See, Benji, it’s all about the pressure of the college exams. They call it ‘exam hell,’ and the kids go to special after-­ school tutoring centers . . .”

  Thomas was well past giving a damn about the plight of Japan’s youth. Benjamin, on the other hand, was fresh off the turnip truck. He knew nothing about Japan, and that’s the way Tracy liked them, these newcomers who weren’t yet exhausted by the life of leisure. She would teach him, she said. And then, as always, she would tire of him, and Thomas’s time would come around again.

  This was the life they had chosen, even though the world was theirs. The Berlin Wall was down, Vietnam was back online, and the Great Wall was up for grabs at pennies on the dollar. They could have been anywhere, doing anything, even building peace and prosperity in Port au Prince or Mogadishu or Beirut, if they had really wanted. Instead, they spent their terrible freedom staying up all night, drinking to the point of physical agony, and screwing like monkeys in the subtropical swelter.

  Tracy made it look easy. She was built for a life of ease. She leaned over to fill Thomas’s beer, her breasts swinging under her
tee shirt, just as they swung when Thomas took her from behind, swinging one clockwise and the other counterclockwise, smacking into each other as her round rump rotated up toward him and he pounded her flesh . . .

  “Thomas, dude, wake up.”

  They were waiting on him. Funny, but he dared not laugh. There was no way he could explain that lapse, so he explained the next Invisible Crazy:

  “The Pachinko Lady walks in the middle of a four-­way intersection in the rat’s maze near Hakata Station. There’s a big pachinko parlor on each of the four corners, and she just walks around in the intersection drinking coffee from paper cups. She’s there from dusk until at least midnight, and sometimes she’s there in the middle of the day, weaving in and out of traffic in a funky old fake leopard-­skin jacket, winter or summer. She leaves her coffee cups in the middle of the intersection, and I’ve counted as many as fourteen. A true java junkie.”

  “She’s a bookie,” Benjamin said.

  “Her husband went into one of the pachinko parlors one night, and she’s still waiting for him,” Tracy said. “I’ve always thought so.”

  “Yeah, right? She never figured out there was a back door,” Benjamin said.

  “Or she loves pachinko, but she doesn’t know which parlor to go into,” Tracy said. “The choices are just overwhelming.”

  “Or she’s a road agent for a black-­market organ network,” Thomas said. “When pachinko players go around the corner to cash in their winnings, the black suits harvest them. The number of coffee cups the Pachinko Lady leaves in the intersection tells Yamaguchi-­gumi foot soldiers how many livers are on ice. That’s how they’ve paid for the new construction over by the prefectural offices. They just started liver transplants at Kyushu University Hospital, you know, the first liver transplants in Japan. If they have overstock from the transplants, they’ll have banquets down by the castle ruins. Just like the old days.”

  Tracy stared at him. Clueless Benjamin said, “Yeah, a lot of strange stuff happens over here, and it’s hard to tell if it’s really that strange or if being here just softens you up for it.”

  “I don’t know if the Japanese even see the Invisible Crazies,” Tracy said, tearing her gaze from Thomas’s face. “For us, they really stand out, but they may just fade into the background for the Japanese. Or the very reasons that we notice them makes them nonentities in Japanese society. Anyway, they wig us out.”

  Benjamin said, “Maybe we’re just more Invisible Crazies.”

  Tracy pursed her lips. Thomas couldn’t hear other ­people’s thoughts, not yet, but he knew she was making a decision.

  “I mean, you know these ­people aren’t really invisible to the Japanese. They just ignore these Invisible Crazies the same way they ignore us. But I wonder what the Japanese say about us and the rest of the Invisible Crazies when they’re at home drinking beer.”

  Tracy’s smile broadened, and her eyes narrowed. The decision was made—­Benjamin was history, and Thomas was back in the saddle. Not tonight, though, not yet. Tonight she would drain Benjamin, savagely, until he was wrinkled and blue, chafed, exhausted. Then she would kick him out.

  “Um, Thomas, you’re losing focus a little there, man.”

  Thomas had drifted again. Benjamin’s expression was woefully concerned, the expression they had taught him to use when he wanted to pretend that he cared about anything he couldn’t destroy outright.

  Tracy’s expression was pained. She saw. She knew.

  She cornered Thomas in the kitchen later. She apologized about Benjamin, as if Thomas cared. She told Thomas she would help him find a new doctor.

  “That doesn’t work,” Thomas said. “I’ve already lost two jobs, thanks to the doctors. The whole doctor-­patient confidentiality thing doesn’t mean anything here. We aren’t ­people here. We have no rights here.”

  “Maybe confidentiality wasn’t the problem,” she said. “Maybe the doctors didn’t say anything. Maybe your bosses just saw what they saw. Like Benjamin says, we aren’t really invisible.”

  Just past her shoulder, willowy shapes floated slipstreaming in the polished wooden grain of her cabinet door. As Thomas watched, more and more appeared, whorled and faceless angels shining nut-­brown on golden triptychs. One of them, the Boy Who Walks Sideways, told Thomas their story: We are very shy. We disappear when we turn sideways.

  They weren’t invisible, and they weren’t chameleons. They just knew how to disappear.

  Thomas did, too.

  He left Benjamin to his fate. He rode down to the beach for a little breathing room. Japan, where it’s so crowded the bedbugs are hunchbacks and you have to go to the beach just to change your mind. He lay in the cool sand, thinking about Tracy bucking and writhing on top of him in the moonlight, and he thought of lovely little Kaori Nabeshima. What a fool he had been to kick her out. What the hell had he been thinking?

  Then he thought of the bones again, of Haruma’s bones especially, but it was just the shadow of the obsession, and he finally, finally felt like himself again. He had a nagging feeling that he had missed something about the obsession with the bones, but he pushed the thought away. He could still push thoughts away, to some degree.

  He unbuckled his belt thinking about Kaori. Stroking himself as he remembered her trying to arouse him in his old farmhouse, he finally responded as wave after wave rolled in. The medication was finally wearing off. He was still thinking of Kaori as he spurted across the squirming dunes. His ejaculate shone like diamonds on the beach, but he kicked sand across it just in case it started to move of its own volition. Just in case.

  We aren’t invisible . . . I wonder what they say about us. What rubbish.

  None of that was important. The oblong moon shattered on silent waves that beat sand with silent futility, one by one, before sliding back defeated into the bay. It always started with waking nightmares. That was just the first day or so. After that, things started to fall into place, and it all started to make sense again. Looking out at the waves, seeing them reaching for the moon, reaching for love and failing again and again, Thomas began to see for the first time that there was an invisible current flowing through his waking world. It was clear as day, just for a second: all human lives as silent waves washing up on the same beach again and again and again until the final, defeated slide back into the cold, black waters whence they came . . .

  All for love, all for the moonlight, all for romance!

  As he stumped through the sand on the way back to his bicycle, he wondered about the thing under his floor. He should probably return it before he got into trouble. He would just ride back to his house and get it, and he could drop it off where it came from. He had always had the feeling that it wanted to go home. It would probably be smart to help it go where it wanted to go. That would be the sensible thing to do.

  CHAPTER 6

  Tuesday Evening

  It was a quiet evening in Fukuoka Prefecture Mental Health Ser­vices Satellite Office 6. Detective Kimura had left. Ota and the section chief had come back after lunch to tell them that everything was set up and that Takuda would take care of them. Despite Yoshida’s chilly reception of this news, Takuda thought she would tolerate him.

  Nabeshima, defiant in the face of her earlier fright, was more than tolerant. She was curious. She had seen Takuda at least in part as he saw himself in the mirror. Perhaps he was the first . . . oddity she had been able to speak to, though she didn’t ask again why he looked as he did.

  And I’m not asking what she sees when she looks at me. I don’t want to know.

  At her invitation, he sat across the desk from her. She spoke to him coyly, in a slightly flirtatious manner that made clear she considered him harmless. “I’ve just finished writing up my notes, and I thought I would pass the time catching up on my email. I have to use the second phone line, though.”

  “It’s convenient, I’m sure.”
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br />   “Yes, it is, but the connection is awfully slow. Any­way, where shall we go? I think we should look up the security guard. What is your given name, Security Guard Takuda?”

  From the front room, Yoshida called out: “Kaori, leave the man alone.”

  “Oh, I have your name right here, on the paperwork your boss left us . . . Tohru. That’s an old-­fashioned character combination, isn’t it?”

  “Not when I was born.”

  “Ha. Neither was the name Kamekichi, was it? Oh, I suppose you’re not that old. Now, from your accent, I’ll say you’re from . . . Honshu, probably north of the mountains, correct?”

  Takuda said nothing.

  “Yes, from the mountain shadow . . . Oh, here’s your profile, I didn’t even see that . . . former prefectural police detective . . . let’s search!”

  Takuda breathed slowly and calmly as the girl waited for her search results. It was too bad that she had a slow connection. It would be better if the results just came immediately, like ripping off a bandage. Then again, maybe it was better that she would be unable to download posted snippets of video about him and his partners. The print versions of his story were grim, but some of the television coverage was downright lurid.

  Nabeshima inhaled sharply. She had found him.

  “Ms. Yoshida, come here, please.”

  Yoshida came quickly, without a glance at Takuda. He sat impassively, waiting for them to finish reading. They were framed by the tall filing cabinets behind them, the older woman reading over Nabeshima’s shoulder as their expressions passed from shock to revulsion and, finally, naked fear.