Fatal Journeys

by Lucy Taylor

  Their hunger, like our own, is vast and insatiable.

  It is the hunger of the dead for what they have lost, the hunger of the living for one more taste of what they will inevitably lose. I can feel my own death—whether it comes tonight or thirty years from now—like teeth upon my throat.

  “Come with me,” I call to Katsuro-san, and when he turns to me, I see the same wild hunger in his face, the greed for life and more life. It is the first time in so long that we have looked into each other’s eyes and really seen each other.

  We pull free of the whirling mob, fight our way through the outer circles of the dancers. A stone bridge leads across a deep pond filled with koi to a temple dedicated to the scholar and calligrapher, Tenjin. We cross the bridge and duck underneath where the shadows are deep and no light penetrates. Katsuro-san sits with his back against the stone arch, opens his yukata and guides me down on top of him. Above us, the drums are pounding, the dancer’s feet stomping out the beat, voices raised in song. The urgent sounds Katsuro-san and I are making go unheard.

  It’s after midnight as we walk back through the temple complex to the house, our sweat-soaked yukatas clinging to our bodies. My hair is plastered to my faces in a damp cap. Fireworks still explode intermittently and ashes drift in the air from the fires. In the deep darkness, where no one can see us, Katsuro-san slides his arm around my waist and kisses me as silent tears stream down my face.

  In his embrace, I start to have a change of heart. I decide to tell him that I know the truth about the writing inside the butsudan. In the heat and passion of our coupling, I have—for a moment—the wild hope that there still might be a future for us, that underneath our lies and pretenses, we could still make a life together. I think of the riches Hiroshi-san claimed to have stashed away and the life of ease and prosperity Katsuro-san and I could enjoy if we could find them.

  “Katsuro-san, I have to tell you something,” I begin.

  But as we round the corner and head back to the house, there is a terrible and ungodly sight. For a moment, I imagine that the Meiji brothers across the street have lit a bonfire, although their yard is even tinier than ours and to do so would put the entire block in danger. Katsuro-san cries out in anguish and breaks into a run.

  I wail like a madwoman, “Wait, don’t go inside! There’s nothing there!”

  He doesn’t hear or, if he does, my words mean nothing to him.

  Still pleading with him to stop, I run behind him, but Katsuro-san is already at the door. He heaves it open and plunges inside. Through the thick smoke, I get a glimpse of flaming shoji screens. It occurs to me if any ghosts are still adrift this Oban, they will be lost no longer. Our blazing minka is a gigantic milestone of flame and fury.

  Two firemen hauling a hose yell at me in Japanese and shoulder me aside. I glimpse Katsuro-san’s writhing silhouette for just an instant before a burning beam cuts short his screams. I don’t see Katsuro-san again, but I see his father. Hiroshi-san’s phantom form takes shape amid the smoke and cinders. Soot frames his smile and ashes cling to him like scales. A look of vengeful satisfaction contorts his face. In a grim and terrifying way, he looks well pleased.

  Unlike Katsuro-san, the butsudan, along with most of the house, survived the blaze. Our ever vigilant neighbors, the Meiji brothers, had seen the flames and called for help. Then they rushed into the house to save the one thing that any Japanese would know is valued above all else. The butsudan sat safely on the lawn where the Meiji men had carried it while Katsuro-san was searching for it in vain amid the smoke and flames.

  For nothing.

  Like his father, Katsuro-san underestimated me. It’s true I failed to learn much Japanese and my attempts to speak are still pitifully inept. But I can use a kanji dictionary well enough to know that he was lying when he told me the words carved into the butsudan were the craftsman’s signature. What I found were the characters for ‘discovery’ and ‘prosperity’ and in the hidden compartment behind them was a key that I removed before I ever tested Katsuro-san’s loyalty by asking him their meaning. The key was inside an envelope and, on it, in both Japanese and English, were instructions.

  ««—»»

  On the last day of Obon, while Katsuro-san’s body is being held waiting a final burning in the crematorium, I take the key to the Buddhist temple and wait while an officious young monk scurries to find the priest.

  The priest is a portly, broad-faced man with a bald dome and a belly that would do credit to Gautama himself. When he learns that I am Hiroshi-san’s widow, his smile expands like the wings of a pink bird unfolding and he bows ever more deeply.

  “Yes, yes,” he says, beckoning me.

  He leads me to his office at the back of the temple and presents me with a carved, lacquered box. “Hiroshi-san was a generous and pious man,” he says. “Over the years, he gave a fortune to the temple, but he never wanted anyone to know. Merit comes from anonymous giving, he used to say. Hiroshi-san entrusted this to me. He told me you would come for it one day. He said he would make sure you learned of it.”

  At last, I think, this is what it all was for.

  But when I open up the box, there is only this: a small porcelain bowl. In it, a tiny ball of mochi.

  And I remember New Year’s Day, when I prepared the mochi in the sweet bean soup, cooking it ‘til it was soft and rubbery. Katsuro-san had left the house. I came to Hiroshi-san while he was napping, his mouth open, snoring. Almost lovingly, like a mother bird feeding its young, I popped a thick piece of mochi into his mouth. His next snore sucked it down. When his eyes opened in surprise and fear, I clamped my hands across his mouth. The mochi plugged his windpipe. That New Year’s Day, he was among four other elderly Japanese men who died eating mochi for good luck.

  A tragedy, all too preventable, the newspapers predictably pointed out.

  It is the last night of Obon when I walk down to the river to watch the final ceremony. Candles are being lit and set in little paper boats to float downstream from the river to the sea, guiding the departing spirits back to the land of the dead.

  As I watch the parade of lights stretching out to the horizon, I know that I will remain here in Japan, that I will tend the butsudan, put out the offerings of rice and pour the sake and plum wine, that I am the keeper of the ancestors, guardian of the ghosts of my dead husband and dead lover.

  You are still my wife, Hiroshi-san said.

  I know that he is right. One day the candles in their little boats will mark the way for me. One day my spirit will follow them, traveling to my own destiny in the land of the dead.

  And when Obon comes around, I will return with all the other ghosts, to remember what I’ve lost.

  How Real Men Die

  Eddie Pitrowski hitched up his jeans in a dingy Patpong hotel room and wondered how he could still enjoy sex so much, knowing that in just a few days, he was going to watch his best friend die.

  Worse, that he was going to be the one to kill him.

  What kind of cold-hearted bastard could compartmentalize such a thing, he asked himself. A sociopath? A sex addict? A nutcase?

  All of the above, his ex-wife Annie would have probably said. Their daughter Margaret, too, who according to her mother had become a lesbian purely to spite Daddy and now piloted a Yellow Cab through sections of Detroit that even the cops avoided. The kind of neighborhoods that Eddie had grown up in.

  The plump, poppy-lipped girl he’d spent the last twenty minutes bending over the bed collected her clothes, twirled a sequined thong around her finger, and purred, “For a farang, you good fook, Eddie. You ready more boom-boom?”

  Eddie thought if had any more boom boom right now his heart might torpedo right out of his chest, but he grinned at the complement, happy to hear he was a farang who could fook.

  He’d had his fun. Now it was time to get down to business. “Your boyfriend back in Soi Cowboy said you’d bring me something extra. You got it with you?”

  The girl wiggled the thong up over
her hips and reached for her tote bag which was festooned with sequins and looked larger than the suitcase Eddie’d brought with him for ten days in Thailand. Carefully, she extracted a baggy, which she passed to him using the tips of her nails, as though whatever was inside might try to bite her. Inside was a smaller bag. Eddie unzipped it and shook a minuscule speck of powder onto his finger. Put it to his mouth and got a humdinger of a jolt.

  The girl came around behind him, curled her arms around his waist and slithered against his spine like a cobra. “Farang love Thailand,” she cooed. “Best sex in world.”

  “Not to mention the best China White,” Eddie said. He resealed the baggy and counted out the girl’s money along with what he owed for the heroin. The girl had worked pretty hard, so he added a few hundred baht as a tip, then ushered her out into the steaming, sexed-up, neon-blinding chaos of the Patpong night. He hailed a tuk-tuk, gave the driver some bills, and sent her on her way.

  No sooner was she gone than another girl approached, this one a mini-skirted bottle blonde who whispered a menu of obscene suggestions like a hostess proffering a tray of hors d’oeuvres.

  Though sorely tempted, Eddie declined.

  Ah, true paradise, he thought. Then he did a nimble hop-skip to avoid plunking his foot in a pile of dog shit and almost got nailed by a recklessly swerving songthaew, a green pick-up truck with two benches in the back that served as a popular form of public transportation. The driver screamed something as he careened past, the passengers in back packed in like toothpicks and holding on for dear life.

  Okay, so not a perfect paradise. But still…every five feet another beautiful, buyable, fuckable woman.

  What the hell could be better than that?

  Then he thought about the baggy in his pocket and, even in the sticky swelter of the neon-and-exhaust-fumes-saturated night, a mean chill banged through his ribs like he’d been tongue-kissed by the devil himself. His mouth filled with ashes and his stomach twisted like a wounded snake.

  I need a goddamn drink. Now.

  He dodged his way across the chaotic traffic clogging Surawong Road and ducked into the tingling cool of the Nang-Klao Club. His buddies Danny and Kurt sat at the end of the horseshoe-shaped bar, quaffing Singha beers, while a pair of diminutive, bikini-clad bar girls fluttered around them like brilliantly plumaged parakeets. Kurt Anderson was a beefy, fireplug of a man with a barrel chest, curly grey hair receding off a broad forehead, and a goofy, lopsided grin that women found irresistible. He was an ardent photographer and clung to his Sony HD video camera with the kind of protective reverence some men reserve for the family jewels. Beside him slumped Danny Pinchero, fifty-eight years old, a couple years short of retiring from the Ford plant where he’d put in three decades. He was pole-thin and sinewy, with bloodshot black eyes that flashed like exposed synapses and seemed to recede deeper into his skull every day.

  All three of them had grown up on Detroit’s tough east side, surviving on guile, guts, and sometimes, sheer meanness. They’d each seen the inside of a cell more than once, although only Eddie had done serious time—two years for possession and assault in ’83 and a nickel in the early nineties for impulsively holding up a Party Store while under the influence of Wild Turkey and a grab bag of pharmaceuticals. He’d been more or less clean since then, working off and on in construction, but his temper still got him in trouble—he’d been 86’d from so many bars that Kurt joked the only gathering of drunks where he was still welcome was the AA group that met in the First Baptist Church across the street from the neighborhood tavern.

  “Got what you went for?” said Danny, his eyes glued to a spotlighted stage in the center of the room.

  “Yep.”

  “So it’s under control?”

  “As planned.”

  He took the stool next to Kurt and ordered a Mekong whiskey, then turned his attention to the stage, where a splay-legged young woman was popping ping-pong balls from between her thighs like a hen laying eggs. The crowd applauded uproariously. The woman looked like she was mentally filling out tax forms.

  The Mekong came and he chugged it, floating away on the sweet burn for a moment before he signaled the bartender for another. That one went down smoother than the first, and he called for a third.

  Kurt leaned over and whispered, “You’re hittin’ it pretty hard, don’t ya think? When the time comes, you don’t wanna be too effed up to…you know… take care of business.”

  Eddie was always amused by Kurt’s persnickitiness when it came to good honest cursing, but he didn’t care for the lack of trust the comment implied. He grunted and hoisted the fresh drink the bar girl put in his hand.

  Kurt sighed audibly. “Just saying, man.”

  A ping-pong ball suddenly beelined in Eddie’s direction. He plucked it out of the air, stuck out his tongue and slurped it long and obscenely before tossing it back to the girl.

  He turned to Kurt. “Who the fuck you think you’re talking to? This is me, Eddie! I’ll be fine.”

  ««—»»

  The phone call had jolted Eddie awake two weeks earlier, on a teeth-clackingly cold night in the middle of a bitter winter, snow pelting down on the icy slick streets of Detroit, wind keening across frozen Lake St. Clair like a blade scraping steel.

  Roused from an inebriated slumber, he fumbled in the recliner cushions for the cell and got it to his ear in time to hear Danny say, “Eddie, you there?”

  “Danny? What the hell! You know what time it is!”

  “Time to head for Bangkok, that’s what time!”

  Having consumed most of a fifth of Jack before dozing off, the laugh track from an 80’s sitcom clawing for whatever consciousness remained in his benumbed brain, Eddie was in no mood for a rude awakening. His buddy’s declaration, uttered without preamble and made more menacing by the fact that the speaker sounded stone cold sober, knocked him sideways and pissed him off, as if a not at all funny Zen monk had just blindsided him with a koan and then kicked him in the shins for good measure.

  He lurched awake, spilling the dregs of his drink onto the soiled, crumb-flecked carpet. “Bangkok? What the fuck you talking about?”

  “Bangkok,” Danny pronounced the word with hearty, desperate zeal. “Hot girls, cheap booze, sex capitol of Asia—the place you said every real man ought’a party hard before he kicks the bucket.”

  “I said that?”

  “Hell, yeah, you did! Up at Houghton Lake four summers ago. When we signed the pact? Remember?”

  Eddie grabbed the bottle of Jack and glugged back a throat full. “Pact? Can’t say I recall any pact.”

  “Bullshit you don’t.”

  He remembered, all right. Like yesterday. A scorcher of a night, sitting around in folding chairs outside Kurt’s RV, three boozed-up, reefer-toking, middle-aged fools philosophizing about good deaths and bad deaths and in what manner they wanted to exit this world. They’d reminisced about guys they knew who’d gone out in a blaze of glory in motorcycle crashes, bar brawls, and drug deals gone haywire—these were the good deaths, the macho ones—and then the other kind, like that poor son of a bitch Big Jim Earl from Gratiot Street, whose very name used to evoke awe, but who ended up at the VA, frail and ridden with tumors, wearing a diaper and hooked up to a feeding tube, and how the fear of being weak and helpless, unmanned, the fear that had probably dogged each of them since the moment the doctor pronounced them male, had struck them all silent, like Death had snuck up and grabbed each one of them by the balls.

  That was when they’d cooked up a plan to cheat the cancer ward and the Alzheimer’s wing and go out like the two-fisted s.o.b.’s they knew themselves to be.

  Real men to the end! they’d shouted, high-fiving and slamming shots like the Red Wings had just aced the Stanley Cup.

  “I dunno, there might’a been some damn fool thing we signed,” Eddie said finally. “But next day, after we sobered up, we burned it.”

  “Don’t matter. A deal’s a deal.”

  Eddie hoiste
d the bottle, but thumped it down again without swigging. A question commandeered the silence, but he was afraid to voice it.

  “If you’re saying what I think you are, then—who’s getting the one-way ticket? It ain’t me. So who drew the short straw, you or Kurt?”

  He shut his eyes. The television blatted mindlessly. In the distance, a dog howled.

  “I got throat cancer that’s spreading like crabs in a whorehouse,” Danny said and Eddie could hear the click of fear in his voice. “Doc says without treatment I got maybe another good month or two before it crawls up my neck and takes a shit in my brain.”

  “Aw, fuck, Danny. Jesus Christ. I can’t believe it.”

  For some reason, he’d always had this premonition that of the three of them, it would be Kurt who got done in prematurely by some terrible affliction.

  “How long you known?”

  “Coupla weeks. I could do chemo and radiation, slow it down for a while, but what the fuck for? I’d rather go wild in Thailand and die with a grin on my face and you and Kurt by my side than hooked up to some fuckin’ torture device.”

  “You told Kurt?”

  “He’s on the phone with Thai Air even as we speak. Ten days from now, I told him. That give you time to clear your calendar?”

  “Danny, look, I’m not sure I can do this.”

  “Don’t worry about the money, this junket’s on me.”

  “It ain’t the money.”

  “What then? The pact was your idea, man! The world’s a cold fucking place, you said and we three gotta watch each other’s backs! Right up to death’s fucking door!”

  On the TV Eddie saw a racing hotrod roar off one end of an opening drawbridge, slam onto the other side and keep going as it outpaced a frantic soundtrack.

  Danny coughed, cleared his throat. When he spoke again all the bravado was stripped away. His voice sounded small, constricted.

  “Eddie? You’re with me on this, right? I’m scared, man. I don’t know how to die. I’m counting on you.”