Every building and location in this story exists somewhere in LA, from downtown to the mid-century mansion in Brentwood. The story got too lengthy for that friend’s purposes, but I couldn’t let it go, so I reworked it and here it is.
***
Sakura didn’t know why George was so cute when he was being stupid. Maybe it was the determined frown or the absolute certainty with which he punched his words. “Stab wound, lower lumbar, punctured kidney. No sign of forced entry.”
She put her hand up, concentrating, “Just stop it right there.”
“I have to bring you up to speed.”
“No. You don’t. And you know you don’t.”
“But what if you . . .”
She shot him a look and George backed off. This routine had been going on since he first called her in almost a year ago on a multiple homicide. It had become ritual.
Sakura dropped to a squat, pulling her trench coat around front so it wouldn’t drag in the blood-soaked carpet. The trench coat was perhaps cliché for the circumstances, but she hadn’t counted on this call. She was supposed to be spending the day at the library studying for the bar exam.
She was grateful she chose to wear trousers that morning. The entry point of the knife was less important than the variety of knife—boning. Well used, recently sharpened, chicken blood on the handle. The smell of ginger and fish was as strong as the smell of human blood and stomach acid that hung thick, trapped by the heavily curtained windows of the small apartment.
And then there’s the thing she didn’t talk about. The knowing. She knew the girl’s mother did it. The mother was angry that her daughter had started dating outside their social circle. Whether it was race or class she couldn’t be sure—perhaps a combination of both. The girl had argued and stood up for herself for about the second or third time this month, but this was the first time she stood fast. Her mother had snapped and the knife had moved quickly. Sakura knew that the mother was crying in a neighbor’s apartment about two stories up, consumed by the kind of despair that doesn’t fade. The mother-daughter stories always got to her.
But what Sakura said, and what would keep George calling her—and she wanted him to keep calling her—was, “It was her mother. You can find her in apartment 5D. She has blood on her clothes, not hard to prove. Find a way to make it manslaughter will you?” She rose to her feet and straightened out her jacket.
George’s know-it-all face cracked wide open into a smile so broad she felt a blush rise. She turned away and walked over to the cutting board to see what was cooking before all of this happened. Soup. A stockpot. Pork on the counter, sliced next to an unopened package of pink-and-white-swirled kamaboko. Judging by the balance of smells coming from the broth pot on the stove, it was apparent that the mother was a good cook, which somehow made the whole thing even more awful.
“I’m hungry.” She didn’t know that she’d said it aloud until she saw George’s amused expression. An inconvenient side effect of Sakura’s condition? talent? was that when her mind was so preoccupied, her regular filters shut down. Standing at a blood-soaked crime scene, a dead girl on the floor, she knew this was not a normal thing for a person to say.
George laughed. He wrote down a few notes and waved her out the door. After talking to the officers on duty, who then scrambled past them up the stairs, he met her in the hallway and said, “I know this awesome noodle place . . .”
“Please, no noodles.” She nodded back to the apartment. “You didn’t want to make that collar?”
“I owe Jeffries.” He thought a moment. “Okay, T.O.T.” It was her favorite lunch place on Second Avenue—a sushi bowl would be better. She wouldn’t be able to get the image of the pork slices and kamaboko out of her head.
They walked along the street and Sakura reeled with the sudden thought, Crap, this means this is a date of some sort. Even though she’d wanted it for a while, this wasn’t necessarily the best idea. George was a cop—well, a detective, but still. She envisioned a future of late nights worrying, midnight calls, court testimony that would put him in danger. Would she know he was dead before someone told her he had been killed?
Stupid. Just lunch. And he was cute. He wore his hair longer, almost retro, and his suits were always in color combinations so stylish that she worried he had a woman choosing his clothes for him. When he looked at her sideways, a lock of his hair fell in his face and he reminded her of her hardest high school crush—the three-year crush she’d never acted on.
They walked down a lost part of Second Avenue toward the center of Little Tokyo where the buildings surrounded them, but nothing spilled into the streets. There were no restaurants or coffee shops here, only buildings in a variety of architecture, no obvious purpose. The air was clean and damp, a rare treat this time of year in Los Angeles when the seven-month summer was perpetually threatening to descend. Sakura was just thinking of a neutral topic to discuss with George when something white flapped in her face, blowing her hair around her, obscuring her vision. Her hands flew up to block whatever it was and she whipped her head around to see, but it was gone. An owl? The flutter sounded wrong for a bird, it was softer and wider, if a sound could be wide. She stopped in her tracks. “Did you see that?”
“What?”
It passed by again and somehow flew through the wall of the building in front of her in a flurry of white. Was it an insect? A butterfly? Too big.
“That.”
She looked at George, who watched her face, concerned. “What?”
Just then the insect flew out, grazing her face with its soft-feathered wings. It hovered in the middle of the street long enough for her to make out a white moth, wings spread in a less frenetic flutter than ordinary moths; its body perfectly still as its wings vibrated around it. It was looking at her, or she assumed it was looking at her because the two irisless black eyes were on the sides of its head. Its wings were translucent in parts and the sunlight glimmered through from behind them exposing its vein-work and thick, beautiful feathers, thicker at the wings’ edges. The seamed, perfectly sectioned abdomen of its white body reminded her of a tailored tuxedo. Its beige fur antennae twisted around, as if attempting to communicate. The most alarming thing about this creature was its size—its body was as big as that of a cat. Its wingspan must have been three or four feet.
She grabbed George’s shoulder and pointed at the moth. “That.”
“You said you were hungry. Let’s go.”
The moth, as if knowing she understood, flew back into the building.
“Follow me,” Sakura said.
She knew that if George couldn’t see the moth, he could at least be a witness to wherever it led. And, despite her lessons in self-defense, she felt better about going into an abandoned building with a cop at her side.
She stepped through the glass-paned door covered with years of layers of cracked dirty white paint. The inside of the three-paned storefront window was so covered with grime she wondered if it had been set dressed—there was something too perfect about the age of the place. It’s quite possible a normal building had been distressed for a film or television shoot, this was LA. She knocked on the door, not expecting an answer, but it’s what you did just in case.
George said, “What are we doing here? We have a quarter mile to lunch. Ramen. Ramen. Ramen.”
She tried the door. The latch lifted when she pressed her thumb down, but the door wouldn’t budge. She leaned back a bit and jammed her shoulder into it and it cracked open. “How you can eat ramen after what we found?”
But she trailed off. A horrible smell came from inside. Mold, dust, old newspapers and a dull, throbbing note of blood and opened bowels, all made worse by the fact that it had clearly happened a few days before.
She heard a swish and a click as George pulled his gun out of his jacket and edged himself in front of her on alert.
They had stepped into what may have at one time been an art gallery. The floor was polished concrete and there was a counter
at the front. Hooks were bolted into the walls, spaced far enough apart to suggest large paintings or framed artwork. There was one pedestal in the center of the room with a single wire stand sticking up out of it that had likely once held a figurine. A plexi-glass case of corresponding size lay broken in two pieces on the floor.
Sakura had seen enough since she got her gift/curse, that she was rarely startled. She’d seen murders like this morning—family disputes—but had also witnessed extreme and sudden acts of violence: crimes of passion and a few cold-hearted murders. Something about this was different.
The shop was larger than it had seemed from the outside and Sakura stayed close to George as he rounded one corner at the far right of the space. It was a smaller room lined with glass display cases. When they turned back into the front room, the moth was hovering near a doorway on the other side.
“This way.” She stepped in front of George, who, fortunately, asked no questions.
A dim streak of sunlight leaked out of that room and the smell went from awful to pure invasive as they approached. It was too pungent to think. The sound of the moth’s wings echoed off narrow walls and, as Sakura stepped into the room, it took her a moment to work out what she was seeing. She stepped closer and her foot skidded through something viscous. She stabilized herself against the doorjamb as the noise in her head and the chaos of the scene hit her all at once. For the first time since she’d gotten this gift, she wanted it to disappear. She wanted to be home in bed, her mother alive, safely in the house with her. She wanted it all back.
There was a pile of four? five? suited bodies of dead men on the floor, and she quickly processed that the liquid under her feet was blood and other bodily fluids about two days gone. What had happened to the bodies was bigger than knives or gunshots. A man lay separated from the pile, arm outstretched to the side, face turned in the opposite direction. As she tried to make sense of his odd angles, she noticed that he stopped, halfway down, in a trail of dangling flesh and digestive tubing. She looked for his other half, which should start near him, right?
In her head she heard yelling, the breaking of bones and the tearing of muscle and organs, and saw that the men were afraid of whatever—wind? roaring? rage?—filled the room. But the image wasn’t clear, she couldn’t see the perpetrator. Only the ripping, the pained faces. The moth was staring at her, waiting for her to process, but this was too much.
There was something in that display case. Something very small, held aloft by that small wire. A netsuke? Before the thing arrived, the men were standing around it, amidst an exhibit. Where was the rest of the art? They were discussing something in hushed tones. One of them had a gun.
“Sakura.”
Was the moth talking to her? She looked to it, but it flew away through the far wall. “Wait,” she said.
“Sakura. We should leave.” It was George. He was already on his cell phone, calling it in. “Second and Los Angeles.”
“One of them had a gun, but there’s something I can’t make out.” She looked more closely at the pile of dark fabric and blood and saw organs and broken bones exposed and sticking up from various limbs and torsos.
He clutched her arm and pulled her out of the room and her feet skidded again on the fluid on the floor. She nearly fell, but he caught her and held her up. She slid into his arms, not by design, but was not sorry when she landed there. “There was something bigger in the room, something I can’t see.”
“Shhh. Shhhh.” For the first time in their two years of knowing each other, Sakura saw actual fear in George.
She said, “I need to figure this out.”
“Shhh. Shhh. This is . . .” He urped and then let go of her, scrambling for the front door.
When she got to the front room, she saw him out the window vomiting into a nearby trashcan. She stepped toward the door, but the moth was in front of her, blocking her way.
She looked up. “What?” She should be afraid—an insect that size would scare anyone, but she knew it meant her no harm.
The moth hovered and she tried to push past it. It darted and blocked her again, that same look in its black eyes.
“Okay, show me. But not that room again. I can’t go in that room again.”
The moth flew over her head to the counter that stood behind them where it landed and folded its wings, looking more like an ordinary moth than it had yet. It was still. Waiting.
“What?”
She knew it wanted her to look behind the counter. She knew that the space behind it couldn’t hold anything as huge or horrible as what she’d seen in the next room and the fact that this thought consoled her made her sick.
The moth fluttered its wings and settled in again. If an insect could express sadness, it did.
As she rounded the counter, she saw the crumpled form of an old man. He was dressed nicely, but not in business wear, more art gallery wear. Dark trousers, peach tie dyed? silk shirt.
Not tie-dyed—blood from bullet wounds. She reached over to touch his shoulder which twitched. He was still warm.
Her shout echoed against the empty walls. “George! George! Call 911, this guy’s still alive!”
“What?”
“Jesus.” She scrambled for her phone, but George stopped her and reached for his.
He said, “It’ll be faster if I call it in.”
She tried not to think of the unfair ridiculous cruelty of that. That anyone in this city could get help faster with the right connections. She took off her coat and threw it over the man and he moaned. Moaning had to be a good sign, right?
“My god, how long has he been here like this?” She turned to talk to the moth, but it was gone. Talking to the moth was ridiculous, but she had so many questions. Who the hell shoots an old man? And what tears five men to pieces?
***
The first time she remembered getting her ability and the last time she was ever public about it was when she was five. She may have seen things before that, but not recognized them as unusual. They were on a trip back to her mother’s hometown, Yokohama, to visit family. They were paying homage at the family shrine, lighting incense, taking a moment, and Sakura had to pee. She’d had to pee for the past hour, but she wasn’t sure how to ask. All of the rules were different in this place. At home, she’d have said, “Excuse me, do you have a bathroom?” but here her mother was so guarded, so cautious about her behavior that she was terrified to do anything and the shrine was definitely not the place to speak up.
The old lady who sat on the altar was kind. Sakura didn’t know where she came from or if it was okay to sit on an altar or how exactly she perched there, being so old. The old woman—so sad!—looked at her mother and said, “Tell her that I’m sorry about the book. That I’m happy for her life in the States. And that I’m happy she had you.” But she wasn’t talking, she was more thinking it at Sakura. That part was weird and she tugged on her mother’s dress.
Her mother whispered a hiss at her, “Not now.”
“But Mama.”
“Sakura, be quiet.”
“The lady wanted to tell you something.”
“What lady?”
But the woman was gone. “The lady with the brown jade necklace,” Sakura said. “It was a circle. She said she’s sorry about the book. She’s happy for you and happy you went to Los Angeles. And she’s happy you had me.”
Her mother turned to her in amazement and with such horror in her eyes that Sakura wished she could unsay it. And for the first time in her short life, Sakura’s mother slapped her. She sank to the ground and pulled Sakura close to her and wept. Her mother never cried. Even when her father left them. But her mother held her and cried and petted her hair and Sakura made up her mind then and there that she wouldn’t tell her mother anything ever again.
She was glad she made that choice, because later she started seeing stuff all of the time. It was easier not to tell her mother. She thought of these visions as her “stories” and wrote them in a journal—in English, whi
ch her mother had never learned to read. She didn’t start seeing violent images until she got into law school, about the time she met George.
***
She was interning at a criminal law office under a real turd of a boss who made her do half his work; but he let her go to trial with him, and that was experience you couldn’t buy. George was testifying on a case that her boss was defending. The defendant was so guilty it made her blink. When she caught George in the hallway after and said, “It was under the bed. Why didn’t you guys look under the bed?” he was intrigued enough to ask her to coffee.
At first, she could tell he was attracted to her and he was especially cute, but when they talked about the case in detail, she saw his attraction fade next to his passion for the case itself. When that light left his eyes, she knew this was a man married to his job. After that, he’d call her in on especially difficult cases, only once or twice a month. But lately it had been on the no-brainer cases, like the mother who murdered her daughter with the boning knife. Maybe he was re-thinking his attraction for her.
They did end up having noodles, but it was Cup Noodles at the station as they answered questions. Sakura described what she’d seen as best she could (leaving out the moth, of course) but in no way could she describe what she knew. The screams, the tearing of flesh. The unseen force doing it all. Her “stories” had always made sense, but now she had hallucinated a giant moth and had seen something wretchedly superhuman tear a man in half. She ate her still crunchy cardboard noodles, described what she could and left as soon as they let her. As she left the station, she suddenly missed George. This pissed her off.
She had to get back to the library. The bar exam was coming up and while she worked hard for the first two of her six months, she’d found it hard to concentrate lately. And now, with images of the moth and ripping bodies, and anger, so much rage, swirling in her head, the books that waited for her, piled in her carrel in the library held little interest at all.
Phantasma: Stories Page 5