McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

by Michael Chabon

  Wei was drawing her self-portrait from a mirror and munching coffee-crusted macadamia nuts. “No, you can’t have the picture,” she said, handing me a piece of paper with a string of digits on it. “A woman called. Five minutes ago.” The number was unfamiliar. “Not your Nightingale who sings every evening,” Wei said, making me wonder if she listened in, “another.” Hadn’t the caller left a name? Wei shook her head. “Didn’t you ask what she wanted?” Wei snorted like a sly pony and for one second I wanted to crack all her bony bones like biscuits in bags and see her sly smile then. Back outside, I tapped in the mystery number. Grace answered. She’d made me look pretty stupid in Runaway Horses, I told her. “You recover okay. Listen, I made one-two phone calls. If you still want that knife, I know someone can maybe help.” Of course I still wanted that knife. Grace was coming to Hotel Aloha now. Through the glass, Wei watched me, fingers twizzling her braided hairband. I knew that look. Female jealousy is rich cream.

  “Quicker to walk than to find cab.” Grace led me at a brisk clip down poorly lit backstreets. She swatted away my requests for information, saying only that I was free to turn back anytime I wanted. None of the weak stars were familiar from my childhood astronomy. Was I being led into a trap like that time in Cambodia? Perhaps, perhaps. Through a doorway half-blocked with rusting junk we climbed five concrete flights, lit by lamps swarming with black moths. No view but other housing blocks and washing strung across balconies. Grace stopped before a nameless door. Monkey-wrench marks scarred the frame. To my astonishment she kissed me on the lips. Not erotically, not brashly, not shyly. Surely not pityingly? “What was that for?” Grace pressed the bell and ran back down the stairwell. Jesus Bodysnatched Christ—but before I could call out, a Japanese guy had stepped through into the milked moonlight, uttering my name, with your crucifix—it had to be, there’s only one—on his hairless torso. Was I in room 404, dreaming this, or stuck in one of Dwight’s fag-queen home movies? Certainly the youth was coffee-advert handsome, ponytailed, judo trousers, but he was stitched and patched from a very recent, pretty serious beating. “So you’re here.” His English was as American as it was Japanese. “Shingo told me you’d been into Runaway Horses. I, like . . . meant to call you”—he gingerly indicated his bruises—“but my creditors, like . . . changed the terms of repayment.” His name came to me and I said it: Nozomu. Nozomu asked how I’d found him. Police sirens wailed from the dark mass under Diamond Head. Grace showed me here, I answered, gesturing at the stairwell, but even her footsteps had vanished. Nozomu frowned. “What Grace?” Grace the Filipina, Grace from Bar Wardrobe and Runaway Horses. Nozomu spat over the railing. “Shingo better not be giving my address to, like . . . no one. But you better come in, now you’re here.” I followed him into a poky apartment smelling of men, soy sauce and local marijuana. “I’ve only got, like . . . cold beer, but sit down anyway. I know what it is you come for. Don’t worry. You’re welcome to it.”

  Nozomu dug out a battered flute case from a closet of ratty towels, then shoved the moraine of surfing magazines and fast-food wreckage off the coffee table with his foot. “Vulture went to your seller’s hotel, the Holiday Inn or somewhere. He brought it to my bar after closing. Never seen him so, like . . . high. Not even when he was high. When Vulture told me what it was, I was like . . . ‘Yukio Mishima’s suicide knife? Like, sure.’ But Vulture showed me the Kakutani mark and I was like . . . ‘Whaah! How awesome!’ ” Nozomu unclipped the case and I assumed my professional calm. Twelve inches of gunmetal gray, blade tapering to a fang, shaft housed in an age-yellowed ivory handle. Just a piece of pre-Meiji ironmongery, but not. Events—grandiosely, “History”—imbue objects with a frequency just beyond the human ear, just. This frequency is our livelihood. The sunglasses shading Oppenheimer’s eyes from the first H-bomb test in 1944; the shiny 3mm bullet that liberated Ernest Hemingway from Ernest Hemingway; and yes, Yukio Mishima’s knife, radioactive with what it had done. I picked the weapon up—its lightness surprised me—and checked for the tiny characters “Kakutani” inscribed on its nub. There, the real thing, just as its certificate of authenticity promised. I very nearly laughed. “Vulture went back to his hotel to get some Big Island weed to, like . . . celebrate. But morning came and still no Vulture. I was like . . . ‘He’ll be back in day or two. For this little beaut at least.’ ” Nozomu meant the knife. “But I tell you, since he left it with me I got, like . . . an evil streak of luck. Every table I sat at, every game, every casino, hands of cards, good cards, strong cards, turned to shit. King Midas in reverse, right? My creditors cut my, like . . . lifeline, I lost my bar, oh, yeah, my motorbike got stolen the day after my insurance is finish. My fortune-teller, like, a guru really, told me today, like . . . ‘an impure metal’ in my life was, like, the source. Pretty, like . . . obvious, huh?” I grunted in sympathy. Your beautiful fool—still ignorant of why you never returned?—had no idea that he was about to hand me enough impure metal to buy his bar, everything in it and everyone in it. “So it’s no, like . . . bullshit? This dagger really killed Yukio Mishima?” The icy beer burned my fingers. “Well,” I began, “Mishima did open up his abdomen with this blade, yes, but it takes hours to die from a single cut. To force one’s innards out, a further cut is required, from crotch up to sternum. You’ll appreciate, the subject rarely has the strength for this jumonji-giri, so tradition dictates that he—or she—appoint a kaishakunin to cut off the subject’s head with a full-length samurai sword after the first cut. Mishima’s appointee was a kid of twenty-five, Hissho Morita, a colonel in his private army of adoring boys. But with jieitai troops kicking down the door, helicopters thundering overhead and a tied-up general having a pulmonary seizure in the corner, Morita blew it and hacked at Mishima’s shoulder blade instead. Morita missed three times, before a third compatriot, Furukoga, grabbed the sword and beheaded Mishima with one clean blow. So strictly,” I finished up, “this knife is the shorter accomplice in Mishima’s death, but the one with brains.” TV laughter broke through the mosquito screen. I wanted to leave. There was no point giving Nozomu a sales pitch or the Mishima myth. “Why did Mishima do it? I heard it was, like . . . ’cos he didn’t like how Japan was, like . . . Americanizing. But what difference could he make if he was, like . . . dead?” Millions of words have been shoveled into the grave of that very question, I replied, before parroting your theory: Yukio Mishima feared senility more than dying. By 1970 he felt his literary and physical prowess was sliding, so he exchanged his life for a piece of theater shocking enough, entertaining enough, to guarantee an immortality his literary canon could not. “Must have hurt like fuck,” Nozomu muttered. “At least his death was for something,” I said, replacing the knife in the flute case and getting to my feet. Nozomu asked where you are now. Werewolf did hush you up well. El Salvador, I lied to your last boyfriend. I’d seen you off from the airport here in Honolulu on Sunday. Nozomu repeated, “El Salvador,” like an orphan sighing, “When my father was alive . . .”

  Is language erased, Vulture? Are quotations and word pyramids the last toys of literacy to go? You, who had a word—dozens, puns, similes—for everything, are you now struck dumb, Zachary Tanaka? Is this why you didn’t warn me? Is this I heard only my own echoes? My key was in room 404 when I noticed, down the corridor, the PRIVATE door was ajar. Gone midnight. An invitation? You’ll understand, I was jubilant with the promise of wealth. As you had been. Yukio Mishima’s knife, in this flute case, under my arm, had sought me out, cutting me free of dependency on Nightingale, on orthodoxy. Come now, I assured myself, where’s the harm in a little entertainment? One last time before a fling becomes adultery? Remembering the jealousy in Wei’s face as Grace had led me to Nozomu’s, I knocked on Wei’s door. No answer, so I half peered in. Spray from a just-cut lime scented the air. Her room was identical to 404, even down to the print of the ukulele-strumming hula girl. “Wei?” Was she sulking? Patter patter patter—a poodle ran by, lead trailing from its collar. Rumors might scamper to Uncle if I dit
hered on the threshold, so in I slipped and closed the door. “Wei? It’s me.” A spine-cracked Chinese–English dictionary lay splayed. Clothes lay slumped on the armchair. Look. Wei’s braided hairband. I picked it up and ran it between my nose and lip. “What do you think you’re doing?” asked Wei. Jesus Cardiac Christ! The clothes on the chair were Wei, who now sat up like a big cat. “It says ‘Private’ on my door.” Sex, or anything like it, was not going to happen. “Um, just making sure you’re okay, Wei. You seemed upset earlier. But you’re okay now. So. Off to bed. Early flight tomorrow. Ciao.”

  But the door was no longer there. You heard correctly. See for yourself. No door. Just wall. Where I came in. No door. No tricks. No fucking door. When I turned to Wei, unable to believe what my eyes and fingers swore was true, I knew my physical superiority counted for nothing. I got out the words, “How did you do that?” Wei watched me like a lecher in a strip bar. Fear choked me so I had to shout, What did you do to the door? Louder. What did you do to the door? Wei ran my seppuku knife between her nose and lip. But I was gripping the flute case. No. It lay open on Wei’s lap. “How did you do that?” Wei pricked her tongue with the point. Testing. Give it back! Give it back! Wei proffered the ivory handle and my legs—mine yet no longer mine—walked me to her like an inexpertly deployed marionette. A muffled shout reached me from a nearby room: “Who are you? Are you okay?” but no reply was permitted. The It inside Wei is too strong for any battle of wills. You learned that, Vulture, when It made you scrawl on the mirror; cut the chain on the roof hatch; teeter on the lip; take one little step. It now made my fingers unbutton my shirt, buckled my knees, made my hand grip the ivory handle and aim the steel tip at my navel. Now I knew It knew what I feared most. Not this way! Not this way! It stilled my tongue. “Your hoax call from Immigration was entertaining.” Wei’s voice, not Wei’s speech. “Did you find much in Uncle’s room? Did you see Aunt? She still busies herself around Hotel Aloha.” Wei leaned close enough to kiss me. “You’re thinking, ‘Why me?’ Did those black moths you and Zachary used to dismember ever complain, ‘Why me?’ No, they blundered into the wrong room, at the wrong hour, lured by the wrong candle. That’s all. You want cause? Effect? Logic? Meaning? This is the meaning, here. . . .” My right arm spasmed and the razor-sharp metal bored through my stomach wall. Left to right, rip. Severing cartilage, intestines, notching my spinal cord. Pain firecrackered, but the It in Wei kept my backbone erect and stopped the blackness swallowing the lights. It was feeding. My hand plucked the blade out and a jet of blood spattered like piss on the wall, I heard it, before the knife plunged back into my groin. My second juddering groan took a long time, hours, days, to burn out. Groin to sternum, rip. It arched me so my innards slithered out like a never-ending placenta, shittily, mushily. Now I was dead enough to glimpse you, Vulture. Wei’s lips moved. “This is what you did not know you want.”

  VIVIAN RELF

  by JONATHAN LETHEM

  PAPER LANTERNS WITH CANDLES INSIDE, their flames capering in imperceptible breezes, marked the steps of the walkway. Shadow and laughter spilled from the house above, while music shorn of all but its pulse made its way like ground fog across the eucalyptus-strewn lawn. Doran and Top and Evie and Miranda drifted up the stair, into throngs smoking and kissing cheeks and elbowing one another on the porch and around the open front door. Doran saw the familiar girl there, just inside.

  He squinted and smiled, to offer evidence he wasn’t gawking. To convey what he felt: he recognized her. She blinked at him, and parted her mouth slightly, then nipped her lower lip. Top and Evie and Miranda pushed inside the kitchen, fighting their way to the drinks surely waiting on a counter or in the refrigerator, but Doran hung back. He pointed a finger at the familiar girl, and moved nearer to her. She turned from her friends.

  The foyer was lit with strings of red plastic chili peppers. They drooped in waves from the molding, their glow blushing cheeks, foreheads, ears, teeth.

  “I know you from somewhere,” he said.

  “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  “You one of Jorn’s friends?”

  “Jorn who?”

  “Never mind,” said Doran. “This is supposed to be Jorn’s house, I thought. I don’t know why I even mentioned it, since I don’t know him. Or her.”

  “My friends brought me,” said the girl. “I don’t even know whose party this is. I don’t know if they know.”

  “My friends brought me too,” said Doran. “Wait, do you waitress at Elision, on Dunmarket?”

  “I don’t live here. I must know you from somewhere else.”

  “Definitely, you look really familiar.”

  They were yelling to be heard in the jostle of bodies inside the door. Doran gestured over their heads, outside. “Do you want to go where we can talk?”

  They turned the corner, stopped in a glade just short of the deck, which was as full of revelers as the kitchen and foyer. They nestled in the darkness between pools of light and chatter. The girl had a drink, red wine in a plastic cup. Doran felt a little bare without anything.

  “This’ll drive me crazy until I figure it out,” he said. “Where’d you go to college?”

  “Sundstrom,” she said.

  “I went to Vagary.” Doran swallowed the syllables, knowing it was a confession: I’m one of those Vagary types. “But I used to know a guy who went to Sundstrom. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “I’m twenty-eight. You would have been there at the same time.” This was hardly a promising avenue. But he persisted. “Gilly Noman, that ring a bell?”

  “Sounds like a girl’s name.”

  “I know, never mind. Where do you live?”

  She mentioned a city, a place he’d never been.

  “That’s no help. How long you live there?”

  “Since college. Five years, I guess.”

  “Where’d you grow up?”

  The city she mentioned was another cipher, a destination never remotely considered.

  “Your whole life?” he asked. Doran racked his brain, but he didn’t know anyone from the place.

  “Yeah,” she said, a bit defensively. “What about you?”

  “Right here, right around here. Wait, this is ridiculous. You look so familiar.”

  “So do you.” She didn’t sound too discouraged.

  “Who are your friends here?”

  “Ben and Malorie. You know them?”

  “No, but do you maybe visit them often?”

  “First time.”

  “You didn’t, uh, go to Camp Drewsmore, did you?” Doran watched how his feelings about the girl changed, like light through a turned prism, as he tried to fit his bodily certainty of her familiarity into each proposed context. Summer camp, for instance, forced him to consider whether she’d witnessed ball-field humiliations, or kissed one of the older boys who were his idols then, he, in his innocence, not having yet kissed anyone.

  “No.”

  “Drewsmore-in-the-Mist?”

  “Didn’t go to camp.”

  “Okay, wait, forget camp, it must be something more recent. What do you do?”

  “Until just now I worked on Congressman Goshen’s campaign. We, uh, lost. So I’m sort of between things. What do you do?”

  “Totally unrelated in every way. I’m an artist’s assistant. Heard of London Jerkins?”

  “No.”

  “To describe it briefly there’s this bright purple zigzag in all his paintings, kind of a signature shape. I paint it.” He mimed the movements, the flourish at the end. “By now I do it better than him. You travel a lot for the congressman thing?”

  “Not ever. I basically designed his pamphlets and door hangers.”

  “Ah, our jobs aren’t so different after all.”

  “But I don’t have one now.” She aped his zigzag flourish, as punctuation.

  “Hence you’re crashing parties in distant cities which happen to be where I live.”

  “Hey, you
didn’t even know if Jorn was a guy or a girl. I at least was introduced, though I didn’t catch his name.”

  He put up his hands: no slight intended. “But where do I know you from? I mean, no pressure, but this is mutual, right? You recognize me too.”

  “I was sure when you walked in. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “Yeah, maybe you look a little less familiar yourself.”

  In the grade of woods over the girl’s shoulder Doran sighted two pale copper orbs, flat as coins. Fox? Bunny? Raccoon? He motioned for the girl to turn and see, when at that moment Top approached them from around the corner of the house. Doran’s hand fell, words died on his lips. Tiny hands or feet scrabbled urgently in the underbrush, as though they were repairing a watch. The noise vanished.

  Top had his own cup of wine, half-empty. Lipstick smudged his cheek. Doran moved to wipe it off, but Top bobbed, ducking Doran’s reach. He glared. “Where’d you go?” he asked Doran, only nodding his chin at the familiar girl.

  “We were trying to figure out where we knew each other from,” said Doran. “This is my friend Top. I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

  “Vivian.”

  “Vivian, Top. And I’m Doran.”

  “Hello, Vivian,” said Top curtly, raising his cup. To Doran: “You coming inside?”