by Greg James
There was laughter between us but mine was empty. There were smiles shared but mine was hollow; a mask to entice and deceive. I remember my face hurting from the laughter and the smile. I remember resenting them both for it; reminding me of my discomfort in enforced social discourse.
Afterwards, we were sitting around the dining table nibbling on after-dinner mints and sipping fragrant black tea when my friend said, “Let’s have a photograph together. We’ve known each other for simply years and we still don’t have a single picture of the three of us. We must remedy that.”
“A wonderful idea,” Angela said, “wonderful.”
I’m sure I concurred though not without self-consciously touching my face and hair; neither being aspects of myself I was very proud of. My skin being too sallow and my hair too thin and wispy. That said, the evening had been a good one and a memento of a sort would be nice. A picture of myself and Angela – perhaps I could cut my friend out of it somehow with the clever use of scissors.
My friend produced a camera, set it up and set the timer so that we had about ten seconds to arrange ourselves. Angela and I sat side by side whilst my fried positioned himself behind us, a warm hand resting on either shoulder; a reminder of our friendship and my position in it. Flash – the photo was made. He said that he would post me a copy once he’d had the film developed. It shouldn’t take too long as they had a family holiday coming up: a weekend in the Cotswolds, away from it all. I thought of my holidays spent in the shabby bed-and-breakfasts of the south-east coast – and I won’t set down just how black and miserable were the feelings that came rising to just below the surface.
There’s not much more to say of the evening – except that I left closer to midnight than I intended and with a stumble in my step as I weaved my way to the bus stop.
I think I might’ve cried myself to sleep that night in my cold, damp bed but it could have been a dream. I have a lot of those.
The photograph arrived in the post the following week. I set the plain manila envelope it came in against the salt and pepper pots on my small, square kitchen table. There was no room in my abode for a dining room so I ate at this scuffed and chipped formica surface with the wood-chip painted wall staring back at me from the other side. Today, I stared at the envelope as I gnawed upon and slowly swallowed my scrambled eggs and toast. I left it there, went to work, and when I returned home then I opened it.
The photograph? I regarded it. No, I didn’t look at it – I regarded it for what felt like an hour but was probably only a few lonely minutes. There was my friend, his wife, and then there was the pale creature intruding into their intimate space; violating it. I looked at me and something that might have been a smile but wasn’t crept across my lips. I set the photograph down and picked up a greasy penny that’d been resting on the kitchen windowsill for god knows how long. I sat down, turning the dirty coin over in my fingers as I thought and thought upon what I was about to do. With thumb and forefinger, I kept the photograph steady against the kitchen table as I set to work.
I can barely describe how it felt; each stroke of the coin, the feeling of friction produced by its coarse edge, and the sight of Angela’s countenance, bit by bit, little by little, being scratched away. My breath was catching in my throat. My teeth were set against each other; too tight to grind or click. I could feel a trembling go through me that turned my stomach and set my knees to shaking. I was being overtaken by pure abjective impulse – and then I stopped. She was gone; Angela’s face was no longer there. An uneven, scored, crude oval of whiteness was all that was left. I looked at it. I put it away somewhere; a drawer, I think. Face-down. I tried to forget about what I’d done.
Just over three months passed and it was about time for the usual meeting with my friend at the Watergate. I telephoned and asked when would be a good evening for us to meet. He sounded strange as he spoke, “I’m sorry, Katherine. Now’s not a good time. I’m not sure when will be a good time. Not for a while.”
“Oh, really?” I asked.
I could hear sounds in the background; children crying, and something else – other sounds like someone trying to speak who could not. They were very sad sounds to hear; echoes almost.
“I’m very sorry,” he said, “Angela’s … very unwell and I don’t know what to do about it. I will have to let you know when will be a good time, if ever.”
And that was it. He hung up – didn’t even wait for me to say goodbye. He didn’t ask me to come around or to help out in any way. And I didn’t call him again; not after another three months had passed, not after six. There had been something in his tone on that last call – an understanding. How he came by it I think I’ll never know though I myself remain not entirely clear what had transpired. I knew only it had happened and that was the sum of it. A few years later, I read about his suicide in the local paper; a small item just before the sports pages. Survived by his wife and children, it said. There were no photographs.
Afterwards, my life didn’t change much and nothing really happened to me. I am now as I was then; working in various offices, growing much older, more sallow in the face, and losing my hair as my mother did before me. I look more and more like her every day according to some. There are times though when I think of my friend, his wife, and their children, and when I do – well, I smile.
Tangerine Dream
or
A Curious Evening in the company of Kafu Nagai
I awoke in a Japanese house. The cream fusama rippling slightly from a tangerine-scented breeze. I didn’t know how I came to be there. I had never been out of my home country, my home town, yet here I was in a foreign place in a foreign land. Getting to my feet, I examined myself for signs of violence or kidnap. I found none. My body was dressed in a plain kimono that reached down past my knees. A pair of slippers, soft and silk-lined, were by the partition door. I slipped them on and rested my hand on the wooden frame, feeling it tremble from whatever weather was disturbing the structure of the house.
I stood there for an inestimable time with my eyes closed; just listening, just feeling. The quiet was near-absolute. The lowing of the wind outside reached my ears, nothing else did. I was alone in this strange house. I should have been scared but I was not. It was strangely comforting to be alone in a place I did not know. To be out of my old life, the one that had wound tight about me like the ageing skin of a snake.
People often speak of making a new start. Starting afresh. Starting over. Of course, such a decision does not usually lead to a nocturnal dislocation such as this. Still, it did lead me to wonder whether such a thing was possible. Could the unconscious, worn to the quick by routine, desperate for difference, for change, for otherness, act upon the person and transport it elsewhere. Literally take it into a new life, to begin afresh, to start over. There were no mirrors in the room so I could not check and see if my face was at all different. Being in Japan, I imagined it would have to be. I wondered whether this dislocation had landed me in the present, future or the past. All the possibilities intrigued me. It had been a long time since I last experienced possibility as a part of my life.
I opened the shōji and stepped through into the rōka. It was lit by small kerosene lamps that were set along the floor at intervals of five feet or so. The glow cast by the lamps was autumnal; soothing to my senses, making me walk slowly, a somnambulant abroad. The shadow cast upon the wall was from one of the lamps, that was my first thought on it. Then, I examined it more closely and realised it was not. The design of the lamps being hunched and squat, I thought the silhouette cast to be a simple deformation caused by shape, texture and obstructive surfaces.
Then, of course, I knew the shadow was cast by a man and that man was my host.
I was ambivalent about meeting him.
Why?
Because he must have brought me here and no-one who brings one to a place without their consent means them good. Not that good is much of a concept, really. Perhaps I should say that such a person usually desire
s to disrupt one’s schedule. Mess up the routine. Break the simple securities of the plain, ordered world down for no other reason than to do so. No, I did not want to meet such a person.
That all being said, and thought, my sense of objection was rendered moot. The man who owned the shadow opened the shōji while I dithered on the spot, caught up in my usual web of worried reflection and ambiguous, uneasy, over-paused response.
I did and did not recognise him. I had not known him in life but his face was familiar to me in this underlit limbo. A long, louche face with large ears. The mouth down-turned in a melancholy mode. The eyes staring out at me from behind circular black-rimmed glasses. He was not dressed as I was. He wore a grey suit like so many I had seen worn by tired businessmen rocking half-asleep on the trains and buses in my home town in my home country.
“Who are you?” I asked, already knowing.
“I am Kafu Nagai and you are late for the end of the world.”
*
We sat opposite one another, waiting for the green tea he was brewing to steep. His eyes were intent on the pot, not on me. I was wondering what was going on. I had questions for him. None I dared ask. I was sitting here with a man dead. Gone fifty years ago. He was brewing tea. How could any of this be happening?
It was very strange, too strange. Consorting with the dead was a pastime for the mad and the elderly. I am neither. My life is a wonderfully contained thing. My movements from morning to night could be used to set clocks by. I have read a few books that have mentioned this man but I am no great admirer of him, or his work. Why has he come to me now, or I to him? This just should not be.
“The tea is ready.” He said.
We sat and drank and we talked and, at some point, I clumsily burned my hand on the teapot. There was much to talk about with the world at an end. Words, thoughts, feelings, sights, smells; all of these things were soon to cease and come to an end. Just like that. What then of them. What did they mean. What was their purpose. People wailing, screaming and praying to gods and killing their fellows on the say-so of said deities. An atheist who hears voices is assumed mad but a theist who hears voices is assumed blessed. Of course, there are the other religions; civil rights, individual rights, patriotism, the worship of the commercial. The love of disco lighting over the amber twilight. The wabi-sabi dwelling in the shadows of concrete-building husks. The natural whisper of yuugen from a weeping willow tree, its limp leaves swimming in the night’s vapours. Oh, so much we talked about that was little, large and nothing at all.
Something was to become nothing. The little things in life were to be no better or worse off than the supposed greater. What to do, where to go, how to be. There would be no more of it. How beautiful it was.
For some reason, a reason many would loathe me for, this made me smile. It was a smile best suited for the funeral of a bitter foe though said foe would have to have been a much-loved part of one’s life to begin with. Yes, there was a melancholy to the expression, a pulling of muscles that did not want to be pulled, a tightness that comes when old wounds are scratched at it, made to give up their blackly-seeded bile. That all said, the sweetness of release too, of a thorn taken out and cast far away.
“Would you like to see it?” asked Kafu Nagai, “the end.”
I nodded my gracious thanks. He leaned to his feet with a cry and a crack of old bones. Shuffling along, he went to the outer wall and slid open an outer shōji, just a little. “It is all coming apart you see.” he said, “Like a bunjinga, is it not? Painted by hands inspired by another place, another time. Maybe there is some namban in it too, eh? Who would think that, when it all came to an end, we would see the world as a thing so foreign, poisonous, and exotic to ourselves?”
Looking out through the small opening, I could see the world and it was weeping like the willow tree. Oils, watercolours, inks and enamel; all running into one another then trailing off into nothingness. Faces, futures, lives and loves forming a disintegrating waterfall, all of it flowing down without making a sound. Blues, yellows, amethysts, old man red, cherry and apricot shapes dissolving into space. Coming in, through that space, from in-between, was that tangerine breeze threaded with a fine orange smoke. It made sighs that were like those of men who stand at the lowest step of the gallows waiting to ascend. It was a way of being that was no way at all. I moved away from the opening.
“What is the smoke?” I asked Kafu.
“It is what is under the world, I think. What the tired and world-weary leave behind. Such people are considered mutants because of their pessimistic exegesis of the life and times they lived in. So, when they pass on, their spirits sink below and become as this. Who better to wipe the canvas clean than those who were pilloried and harried for their desire to not draw blood, to not believe and to not love. Those who were made so as to never make a thing again. Sweet dissipation, my dream is here. Your dream too, I think.”
“But this is not a dream. This is real.” I said.
I showed him my finger; the bubble of a blister left by the hot teapot.
“So, you feel pain? So what? So what if you are as dead as I am? You would still dream. Shakespeare lied when he said there is undiscovered country ahead. There is no such thing. We die, we lie down, we rot and then we dream. Even when the maggots have snacked on the last of our brains, we carry on with the dreaming. I have been dreaming for fifty years and I want to make an end of it. What better end could there be than this?”
“But how can the world be dying, just like that?”
“Who knows? Perhaps it is its hundredth birthday? Maybe it is a tsukumogami and this is how it changes into being alive? Funny to think there were all those people spending their time raging about life and its beauty yet they were really living in a dead ugly world. Ah, here they are, my sweet ones.”
Hovering before us, there was a geisha, careworn, hair showing grey, suckling on a last tooth, brown with decay. Her eyes were polished marbles reflecting the chiaroscuro of the dying world’s enamel waterfall. She held a withered hand out to me. On either side of her stood a Japanese school girl, no angels these, their hair shining greasily, thoroughly unwashed, their cheeks marked by dirt and catfight-scratches. Their eyes were bright as spit-balls and their skin was preserved amber. They were wicked dolls, each holding out a hand also.
“Ah, my old ghosts!” Kafu smiled, showing where he had lost teeth, as he clapped his hands, “How good of you to come for us!”
He took the hand of one school girl. I was too tentative to take the hand of the other.
“Look here, gaijin, you should take her hand because otherwise, you will wake up. Go back to where you were, what you were doing. Here, you can take the hand of these unwashed delights and be led into whatever awaits us. See what must not be seen. Feel what must not be felt.” he winked lasciviously at me as he said this.
Kafu then gestured at the nearly-gone world. Its once-ordered layers fast becoming a deluge of evaporating muds. The scent of tangerines was so strong, so ripe, almost bitter, verging on rotten, suggesting a profound decay. Soporific softness. Lingering liquescent touches, heavily stained with satisfying and sour juices.
“Take a bite of uneaten fruit. What have you got to lose?” Kafu cackled.
The schoolgirl snatched her grubby fingers at me, trying to grasp my hand. I felt her touch on my skin for a moment. It was damp, dingily sweaty. I could smell wet refuse from alleyways and soiled linen. I thought of home, my bed, my house, my job. All the mundane things we hold so dear. There was a tear in her eye and a small, circular brown bruise on her cheek.
I took her dirty little hand.
The geisha, still sucking at her dead tooth, turned and led the way, leading us away.
“Out we go!” cried Kafu.
Breathing in a rich air tasting of rancid tangerines left in the bin of a backstreet takeaway, together we passed through a thinning veil of pale rain, which poured down endlessly into the soundless void. On the other side, I saw what Kafu always drea
med of seeing. The last sound I heard was his cackle; the laughter of an old man satisfied at last.
I do not know if I was.
“ ... I want dissipation, to destroy myself in dissipation … ”
Kafu Nagai
The Curse of Amen-Ra
We are born from darkness into darkness. The light, the colours we see, are mere creations cast before our eyes; we dwell in seas of inconstant shadow where there are no walls, no barriers, no limits - only the shadow of a darkness in which we endure. Those who know the way may learn to shape the shadow and come unto a further darkness that lies far beyond death and there, where the light is at its darkest, all things shall come to them and be their dominion.
'Invocation at the Gate of C'cth' - a translation from original hieratic script found in the tomb of Amen-Ra.
I do not know what fate is likely to befall these words or whether they will find their way into civilised hands. Perhaps, it would be for the best if they did not. Ignorance is, after all, a sweet blessing that I wish I had not given up as freely as I did. My purpose in writing this memoir is to ease my weakening faculties from the weight of memory that they have been suffering under for some time. My eyes ache and water, my hands shake and tremble but I will finish this task before I set about putting an end to myself.
There! I have done it; made my confession to you, or to no-one but this scrap of yellowed and tawdry pulp, that I mean to take my own life. It is a subject and course of action that I have been describing a narcotic orbit around for many months now. My rooms in this downtown New York hovel-house are grubby, rat-infested and cockroaches make their nests in my food. I feel no security from my neighbours or the oafish landlady. I have no-one to call upon for aid. I shiver under blankets in threadbare clothes when I desperately try to sleep at night and every night I fail to grasp more than a few hours of slumberous succour. For when the candle's light is put out and perfidious darkness veils the room, I see only her and hear only her.
