“I want it.”
“Want what?”
“The depression. The self-hatred and doubt. The despair. The lust for death. I’ve become addicted to it and it’s rich and delicious.”
“Maybe you’ve actually gone mad.”
“What the hell is sane, Butterfly?”
“Isn’t it something to do with being able to function in a socially acceptable way and consider the value of those around you?”
“Who’s to say the rest of the world isn’t mad?”
“But maybe you could get help. They could give you drugs to stabilize you.”
“My mother died in the asylum. Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“They sent her there, my grandmother and your Komori, scheming witches, they sent her there to die, they murdered her.”
That Komori could scheme was no surprise to me. But to speak badly of her was the biggest taboo. It could not be done. Jay knew this. It was as though he had insulted my religion. Nobody had ever spoken about Komori like this in front of me and I had to swallow sudden anger.
“I’m sure they sent her there for her own good,” I said dryly. Perhaps Jay did have hereditary madness.
“Nobody can send me away, that’s all I’m saying. I’m happy here in this sweet depression. And hopefully it will consume me alive and my body will putrefy from the inside out and I will dissolve in delightful pain, thick and sweet, and everything will become somber.”
My mind raced. I was fascinated by the idea that somebody could lust for darkness; that he wanted to sustain it rather than to try to break the cycle. This rejection of the most basic value of happiness was against everything we had been programmed to believe in, yet it struck me as a fundamental reality. The rest of the world was indeed wrong and Jay was perhaps on the path to the ultimate and purest darkness. I could barely breathe. I recognized it. He was talking about something I already knew. I excused myself and told him I would return the next day.
—
“How is Young Nephew?”
“He’s not well, Komori.”
“What’s wrong with him? Should we send Dr. Bastide around?”
“I’m not sure, Komori. I don’t know that he needs that kind of help.”
“Why? What kind of help does he need?” she asked.
“He’s depressed,” I said, and Komori’s face stayed blank. I could never read her.
“Well, we all feel down sometimes, but you have to carry on. Life can’t just stop because you don’t feel happy. I have lived through war, lost my home, my country, outlived my parents, my sister, my niece and countless friends and been rejected by others. If I were to count the people I truly have left in the world, Butterfly, there would be only you. There are lots of reasons to be depressed. Life easily could have stopped, but you have to keep yourself together. Young Nephew knows this.”
“It’s not just that he feels bad. I don’t think his depression is even linked to anything tangible. He’s sick.”
“Do you mean that he is mentally ill?” said Komori. “Perhaps he would be better off in the hospital.”
“He said that his mother died in a hospital like that.”
“It’s true, may her soul have found peace. But these places are not what they were in those days.”
“What days? When did she die?”
“The eighties.”
“Oh my God, so recently.”
“She had much difficulty, Butterfly.”
“What happened?”
“She too was sick. We tried to help her. We tried to protect the family honor as she would have wished. One day I will tell you about it, Butterfly, and you will understand.”
“She didn’t die naturally, then.”
“Dying with honor is part of nature’s intention.”
“Komori, I think he may want to die.”
“Then he should be allowed to.”
“I’m confused,” I said. “The solution to sickness is surely not death. We should be looking for a way to bring him back to health.”
“Nature has given us the power to make choices about our lives, and we choose dignity in death, Butterfly. That may be hard for those we leave behind, but we must support them even as they do honor to our memory of them.”
“I don’t really understand what you are talking about.”
“I think you do, Butterfly. I think you have the gift of understanding. Death is one stage of nature’s cycle. Knowing how to choose death, even in the most difficult of situations, is part of the art of living.”
“So, should we leave him to suffer and then maybe die, or are you suggesting he commit seppuku?”
“I have something that I would like you to take to him,” she said.
She slowly raised herself to her feet and glided to a drawer from which she drew a narrow object about a foot in length and wrapped in silk. I knew what was inside and for a second I was dizzy and my insides tingled. She passed it to me with both hands and bowed.
I went to visit Jay every day for the next two weeks, bringing him whiskey (he would accept nothing else). He always wore pajamas and always smelled of alcohol and a little of piss. His thin beard was becoming wild and his face gaunt. But somehow, through his tears, we started to laugh now and then; insane, raucous laughter. I wondered whether this was a sign of him pulling through. But he didn’t want to pull through.
“I need to feel it, Butterfly. I need to go deeper.” He focused and meditated on his emotional pain, nurturing his despair, but his only true worry was that he would become numb and the work he was doing would not achieve climax. I was his reality check, a way for him to gauge his descent. He was weak and trembled constantly. His hands and feet were covered in bruises and fine cuts. He’d stopped eating and as far as I was aware drank only coffee and whiskey. “I’m close, Butterfly,” he told me. “I’m close.”
On the last day, I went to his apartment after work. The door was ajar (I guessed for me) and I let myself in. I could hear him in the bathroom, muttering. I called out but he didn’t answer, so I smoked a cigarette, toying with a paper bag on the table. It was an empty drugstore bag. I ripped the paper for the pleasure of the sound and revealed a checkout ticket. It said: “Double-edge SS Platinum Blades 10 Pack $4.69.” Adrenaline shot through my body and I jumped up and tried the bathroom door. It opened and Jay was lying naked in the bathtub. From one hand he dangled a bottle of whiskey over the side. There were cigarette burns up his arms and on his body there were blue marks of self-inflicted violence. But for all the shock and nonunderstanding, he seemed to me like a holy man. He was near to fulfillment. On the corner next to a lonely bar of soap was the brand-new packet of old-fashioned razor blades. He watched my eyes settle on them and said, “It’s over, Butterfly. It’s over.”
“What? Your beard?” I joked from nowhere.
“Ha-ha. No, it’s over, Butterfly.”
I paused. “Maybe you’re right.”
“I know I’m right.”
“Not with those razor blades, though.”
“Why not?”
I fetched my bag from the other room and carefully unwrapped the silk from a ceremonial knife in a wooden scabbard, inlaid with lighter-colored wood, gold and mother-of-pearl. My heart raced in fear and excitement. I placed the knife across both my hands and bowed to him. The humid air heaved a sigh in awe.
“Thank you, Butterfly. Thank you a thousand times for this.” He lifted his hand to the knife, but he was shaking so much that he couldn’t take it.
“Wait,” I said. I had come equipped with a small box of diazepam. I pushed four pills out and put them in his mouth, then helped him lift the whiskey to swill them down. I should have left at that point, but I couldn’t. We sat and waited as he became calm and my breathing became heavy and fast. Every inch of my skin was alert.
“Could you light me a cigarette, Butterfly?”
“Of course.” I lit the cigarette and then held it to his mouth as he pulled down the
smoke and then moved it away again between puffs. When he had finished, I handed him the knife again. He clasped it in one hand and tried to remove it from its scabbard, but his hands were weak and still trembled. I took it from him and swooned at the sound as it came out. My brain was blank and the silence deafening, throbbing with my heartbeat. I folded his fingers around the handle and pointed the tip of the blade to his belly.
“It might be easier if you were to sit up.” My voice faltered. I didn’t expect that. Something else was taking over.
“No, not through the gut, Butterfly. Please. It’s too violent. I’m not a fucking samurai. The arms. You can do my arms; they don’t mind the cuts.”
“It’s best that you do this, not me.”
“Do you have any more of those pills?”
“I do, but you shouldn’t have too many. They’ll knock you out.” Why was I still there?
“Oh please, Butterfly.” Blood rushed behind my ears, filling my brain with gray noise.
I put two more pills in his mouth and poured whiskey in to help him swallow and he rested his head back, not quite calm.
“Maybe you are not ready for this, Jay.” My mouth was dry.
“Oh, I am.”
“There is no obligation. You don’t have to do this to follow any tradition. You only do what you want to do.”
“You cannot imagine how much I want this, Butterfly.”
“I can’t do it for you,” I told him, but my fingers were tingling with hope he might let me.
He forced his eyes open and looked at me hard and then at the knife, as though willing it by psychic energy to his wrist. I clasped his fingers to make sure he had a firm grip on the knife, but his hand fell away, leaving the handle in mine. I offered up his inner arm and positioned it under the blade. My throat was aching now and my eyes began to overflow. My breathing was deep and fast. My stomach muscles were unsure whether to cramp or spasm, and my brain was bursting. He looked at me and nodded. I pushed the knife down hard and drew the blade sharp across his arm through the tendons and arteries, down to the bone. He hissed an in-breath (more from surprise than pain) and the blood flowed out of him thick and fast. I choked on the violence of my crying as it burst from me and I held myself up on my hands and knees on the floor.
“Thank you, Butterfly. Thank you a thousand times.”
“This again.” My words had no form as they sobbed from my mouth. Dark air filled my lungs and pain shot through my body.
He leaned his head back and watched the ceiling. I slid to the floor, sprawled out with my face down. Saliva spilled from my mouth. In a few minutes he would be no more. No more conversations over coffee. No more loud laughter. There would be a void in his place. I wanted to stay where I was, but after a minute I forced myself, trembling, to my feet.
“I have to go, Jay.”
“Goodbye, Butterfly.”
I kissed his head and my tears fell down onto him. “Goodbye.”
“Butterfly?”
“Yes?”
“Could you pass me the whiskey?”
“Yes.” I picked up the bottle and lowered it onto his pocked belly (still intact). The knife fell into the water and he moved the nonbleeding arm toward the bottle so it wouldn’t fall.
My crying had peaked and I could feel my body going back to normal more quickly than I would have imagined possible.
“Thank you, Butterfly. Thank you a thousand times.”
“I’m going now. Goodbye, Jay.” I was still crying, but I felt light and agile. Brand-new.
“Goodbye, Tomomi Ishikawa.” He closed his eyes again and remembered the pretty young man with dark hair who used to come to the library every Thursday afternoon at three thirty; tall and always windswept, dressed in dark clothes. Jay would busy himself in the Rose Room, watch and anxiously wait for him. Always at three thirty on Thursdays, always at the southern end of that great reading room, and the man would take a book from his bag (always a different book, always fiction), and sit and read for an hour. Now the room was empty and the hushed sound of a hundred people reading dissolved into a quieter silence. The sun shone in low from the west and there was just Jay and the young man. He finished his page and looked up. He recognized Jay and smiled. “I’ve come for you,” he said. “I knew you would,” said Jay. “I knew it would be you.”
8
Looking Underground
Images of a knife cutting through Jay’s wrist wouldn’t leave my imagination and I thought of dark blood pumping out of his arm and turning light red in the bathwater. If you help someone to die because the person wants you to, is that murder? Maybe in a court of law, but it’s not morally wrong, surely. Surely? Why did she have to be there? Why did she do it for him? Butterfly was a storyteller; it didn’t mean that the stories were true. Her anecdotes had always been like games, exaggerated and extreme.
And so this was her treasure trail. I went back to her computer, daring myself to look further. I looked at the names in the ‘My Dead’ folder. Tracy, Jay, Komori, Guy Bastide, Daddy, Stranger, Ben Constable. (Ben Constable!) I stared at the screen with my mouth open. The stranger was the man on September 11. Jay was the nanny’s nephew. Komori was her nanny. I guess Daddy was her father. Guy Bastide might be the same as the Dr Bastide mentioned in the notebook about Jay. I didn’t know who Tracy was. I was Ben Constable. What did that mean? The others were dead, that’s what I thought. I rummaged for something to write on. I didn’t want to forget what Tomomi Ishikawa had said to me one time.
‘I wish you were fucking dead, Ben Constable.’ She was crying. Her mood had turned. I expect it had been building up for a moment, but I hadn’t noticed and so only saw the explosion. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, rummaging through my life like this?’
I wasn’t rummaging, we’d just been talking, drinking. She’d been telling me stuff, I can’t remember what exactly. I thought about putting my arms around her, but I didn’t really feel like it. I don’t mind being supportive when things are tough, but I won’t be the whipping boy.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said.
‘I mean that I wish I didn’t know you. To hate gives you too much credit.’
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know what I’ve done and I don’t want to hang out with you when you’re like this,’ I said.
‘Go, go. I wish you would fucking go. I’ll make you go, I swear. I will fucking kill you if I have to.’
I had nothing to say to that. My legs ached, telling me that it was time to leave her.
A favourite thing about Tomomi Ishikawa was that she didn’t lose control when she was drunk. She didn’t become intense and aggressive, or an incoherent wreck. That’s why I could drink with her forever. That’s what I thought.
‘You don’t know anything, Ben fucking Constable. You think you do, but you don’t.’
‘I think you should go home,’ I told her.
‘You think I’m a monster, don’t you?’
‘I think you’re drunk and in a nasty mood that I don’t much like.’
‘I have a savage, discoloured face, and my lips are dark and swollen.’
‘Stop it. Let me take you home.’ I reached out my hand as a last attempt to not leave her in the street, but I wasn’t feeling nice.
‘If you knew me, you’d think I was a monster.’
She linked arms with me and wiped her tears on my shoulder. I shook my head and sighed.
‘I don’t know what’s going on with you right now, but you seem pretty monstrous.’
‘Like Antoinette Mason,’ she said. ‘You know who that is?’
‘No.’
‘Bertha Rochester? Jane Eyre? Emily Brontë?’
‘Wuthering Heights?’ I asked wearily.
‘Asshole,’ she sputtered, and my temper heated a degree.
‘I don’t know who any of your people are. You’re always saying names of authors and people like you think I should know them all and I don’t, and I don’t care about them.’
‘
It’s like talking to the village fucking idiot.’
‘You need to start being a lot nicer to me,’ I said, and she was silent and looked at the ground.
‘Don’t ever listen to me,’ she said, still growling.
‘That’s not easy with you shouting abuse in my face.’
‘Whatever I tell you is lies,’ she said. ‘None of it is true. I’m talking about stories. Do you understand?’
‘Not even remotely.’
Then from nowhere she added, ‘I think I’m going to have to kill myself.’
‘I was going to suggest that,’ I said, too bitter to be funny, but she laughed anyway. How the hell was I supposed to react?
‘I love you.’ Suddenly she was small and crying again.
I forced myself to feel something and tensed my arm so hers was squeezed a little where it linked at the inside of my elbow.
‘You could always kill yourself another time. You know, wait for a while,’ I said. ‘Most of the time you’re nice and I like you. There’s still so much to talk about. We could go on for a long time. You shouldn’t kill yourself yet.’
‘I’m not feeling good, Ben Constable, and I’m a little drunk.’
‘I noticed,’ I said. ‘If it’s any consolation, I’m drunk too.’
‘We’ll forget about this in the morning, yes?’
‘If you want.’
‘I want us to forget,’ she said.
And I nearly did.
I printed everything I had found on Tomomi Ishikawa’s computer since her death and gathered together the notebooks and letters so I had it all in one place, spread out on the floor in front of me. There were clues that I’d never followed up. There was more to find. I needed to get systematic with the ‘My Paris’ folder and read through the lot to know where to look next. But already there was the plant in the metro. It was more than a clue: Butterfly had specifically told me to photograph it. It was a long-overdue task.
I took the bus and watched patiently as it stopped and started through traffic at walking pace all the way to Buttes Chaumont. I got off at the southern tip of the park and hesitated, drawn through the big green gates by the trees and man-made hills rather than heading for the metro station, as though what I was about to do was scary or difficult (when in fact it was neither). Somebody once told me that the park had been a quarry and had been known for its insalubrity at some undefined point in history. I think it was the site of a massacre or mass execution. Now it was Paris’s most landscaped park and arguably its most beautiful.
Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa Page 7