The Night Listener and Others

by Chet Williamson

  They were linked now, Nichols thought wearily, hooked together like Siamese twins with a common heart. Of course, Quentin might drop over dead any minute and Nichols and North could live into their nineties.

  But could he take that chance? Especially after what the knife had done, the knife that he had blessed with power by blooding it, the knife that had cursed him with its knowledge. It had told him, had warned him, and he would be a fool if he ignored it.

  So he looked at Quentin, and smiled kindly and sympathetically. ‘No point in rushing it, is there?’

  ‘Huh?’ The smoke steamed out of Quentin’s nostrils.

  ‘Your time. I mean, cigarettes can’t help, right? You ever think of quitting?’

  ‘Nah, not really. I don’t think I could anymore.’

  ‘Oh, sure you could, sure you could—just a little willpower, that’s all.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ll worry about that tomorrow. I got these contracts to finish today,’ and he waved his cigarette at an inch-high stack of papers.

  Nichols’s heart leapt. ‘Christ, you’ll be here till seven again tonight.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Why not let me help out a little?’ The words tumbled out, desperate, anxious. ‘Boy, I don’t know how you get any rest with all you do…’

  ‘I manage.’

  But for how long? How long?

  ‘Really, why not let me take a few? I’ve got time.’ ‘You sure?’

  ‘Positive!’

  Nichols stayed until 9:30 that evening working on the contracts, and came in at 7:30 the next morning to finish them. Then he asked Quentin for more. He took on so much of the workload that he practically lived at the office, and in six months he was promoted to assistant manager. He could not get Quentin to quit smoking, although he talked him out of buying a small Italian convertible in favor of a larger, more protective American car.

  The years went by.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Nichols served as beneficent nursemaid, toady, and slave to Quentin, seldom leaving the office before eight each night, never giving himself a free weekend, taking his required vacations by holing up in his apartment and scurrying into the office on the slightest pretext. He added cigarettes to the continuous quarts of coffee he used to keep himself alert to his work and to his boss’s changing moods, and was soon a three-pack-a-day man.

  So it came as a surprise to no one when Nichols had his stroke. To no one, that is, except Nichols, who looked up from the office floor at Quentin’s concerned and rested face, and thought, just before what felt like a very sharp knife cut into his chest for the last time, that something seemed curiously, sadly, fatally unfair.

  The Pebbles of Sai-no-Kawara

  …But the demon with the iron club would come and knock down the piles of stones. Then the Bodhisattva Jizô would hide the children in his sleeves and drive the demon away…

  Lattimore had never seen a sadder place. It was pleasant enough if you looked at it in ignorance, but when you knew what each of the little statues represented, when you knew why many of them wore red bibs or caps, when you knew why there were small toys and stuffed animals sitting on the stone ledges, then your heart could break.

  Lattimore had seen the sad places of the earth. He had trod the killing fields in Southeast Asia, he had breathed in the dust of what was once the World Trade Center, he had walked the streets of Sarajevo and Kandahar. Journalism had taken him to those places and many more, less known and far worse. Just two days ago he had been to Hiroshima for the first time, had seen the Peace Memorial Park and the A-Bomb Dome, and had fought back tears at the sight of the thousands of paper cranes placed by little hands at the Children’s Memorial.

  All of these places, however, signified lives lived and then stopped, while the Jizô-dô at Kamakura’s Hase Kannon Temple was redolent with the atmosphere of lives never begun. Every one of the thousands of small statues of the smiling, bald-headed Bodhisattva Jizô had been placed, rank upon rank, by parents of children who had been stillborn, miscarried, or aborted.

  Jizô was loved because his compassion could free the children from hell, to which they had been sent for having caused their parents so much grief. It was only one of the Japanese conceits that made little sense to Lattimore. It was, after all, not the fault of the children that they had died before birth, and surely not their fault that they had been aborted. That was the parents’ sin, if sin it was.

  Lattimore, despite his experiences, still believed that abortion should be an option, and had once chosen it as such. It had meant little to him when they were so young. Only later, when he and Carolyn had had a child at a more convenient period in their lives, did he begin to question their action. His daughter had grown into an intelligent, kind, and caring woman, and there were occasions just before dawn when Lattimore would lie in bed sleeplessly, and wonder about Tracy’s older brother or sister, thinking of what he might have become, or who she might have been.

  He and Carolyn never talked about it, though they had both agreed at the time that it was the reasonable thing for them to do. Now, thirty years on, he could tell that this place was affecting her as deeply as it was him. Her eyes were damp with restrained tears as she handed him the guidebook and he read about the little red or white bibs and hats with which parents decorated the statues of Jizô in the hope that he would take extra special care of their children’s spirits.

  With a thick lump in his throat Lattimore read on, about how the children in hell gather by the dry riverbed of Sai-no-Kawara, where they build small cairns of pebbles to attract the attention and the compassion of the Buddha. Belief in this aspect of the legend seemed strong as well, since many piles of pebbles littered the ledges and walks, left by parents trying to shorten their children’s time in hell.

  Carolyn, her head down, continued up the pathway to the larger halls, but Lattimore could not follow her, even though he wished to. The atmosphere would not let him. He could not separate himself from the statues, ranging in height from four inches to over a foot. Row upon row of them climbed the heavily wooded hill.

  He couldn’t figure out if the items left beside and near them were offerings to Jizô or gifts for the children. There were flowers and opened bottles of soda, small metal cars, brightly colored pieces of origami, and pinwheels turning in the light breeze. On one ledge, at the feet of an alcoved Jizô, were two Tarepanda, the stylized stuffed panda toys that seemed to be in every gift shop window. They were in a sitting position, the little one leaning against the larger, and were staring intently, their large black eyes rimmed by white, at the rows of the beloved Bosatsu.

  Slowly Lattimore went up the steps in the direction his wife had taken, but he continued to watch the statues, their bald heads looking like beads on an abacus crowded beyond use. He found Carolyn outside the Kannon Hall, and after examining the massive yet graceful Hase Kannon, with its eleven faces of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, they retraced their steps back through the complex. As they passed the Jizô-dô, Lattimore slowed, but Carolyn hurried on and he increased his pace to catch up with her.

  They both paused at the pond near the Bentenkutsu, the grotto made of several linked caves illuminated by torchlight, and watched the huge koi swimming. Then they went out onto the street and headed back to the small hotel at which they were spending the night. They stopped at a café on the way, where they each had a steaming bowl of ramen. From the way they laughed when they slurped their noodles, Lattimore felt hopeful that whatever dark memories the Jizô statues had brought them had dissipated.

  The next day was Saturday, and Tracy, her work week over, would meet them for further touring. She was a reporter and columnist for one of the major Tokyo dailies, giving the gaijin side and reporting on American trends in Japan. As Carolyn never tired of reminding him, Tracy was her father’s daughter, and he was extremely proud of her. She had long had a fascination with anything Japanese, and had made all her own breaks, working h
er way through the additional year of college in Tokyo, and finding her job on her own, Lattimore’s name being little known in Japan.

  She was an extraordinary person and Lattimore could not help but wonder, lying in bed that night, if his other, long-lost, never-born child might have been just as wondrous. He had never been struck by his self-imposed loss so strongly as he had today. Every one of those statues seemed accusatory, almost as though the small Jizôs were the lost babies themselves, small and hairless and newly formed.

  What the memories of the temple made him grieve for was not the loss of an actual child, but the loss of the potential person who might have been. And yet, he tried to rationalize, if one thought that way, one would do nothing but try to procreate in the attempt to bring high achievers into the world. That road, once taken, could lead to total banishment of contraception as well as limitations on reproductive choice, and he most certainly did not agree with either of those options. When you made your choice, you lived with your guilt if you defined it as such, and three decades afterward, he involuntarily and unwillingly had.

  It chewed at him so that he could not sleep, and he quietly got up and sat in a chair. The room was too small, however, for him to turn on a light without waking Carolyn, and he did not wish to sit in the bathroom with a book, so he decided to get dressed and take a short walk. He wrote Couldn’t sleep—went for walk—back soon on a pad by the phone and left the room, closing the door gently behind him, the idea forming in his head of what he would do under the cover of the night.

  The man behind the front desk looked at him curiously, and Lattimore said in English, “No sleep…walk,” and made his fingers wiggle like the legs of a walking man, a gesture he hoped would be universal. The night manager gave him only a curious smile and a little nod, and Lattimore stepped out into the street.

  The narrow residential streets were quiet at two in the morning, except for an occasional barking dog or the sound of a car or motorcycle blocks away. Lattimore walked back the way they had come from the temple that day, since it was the only route he knew, or so he pretended. In actuality, his plan was almost fully formed by now.

  The parking lot in front of the Hase Kannon Temple was dimly lit, but Lattimore stayed in the shadows anyway. The main gate would be locked, of course, but the wall surrounding the temple complex was not impassable. A thick-boled tree stood by it, and, keeping to the darkness, he made his way to it, climbed into its heavy branches, and gingerly leaped to the top of the wall. He struggled to maintain his balance, but fell into the blackness on the other side.

  He landed on the loose stones of a walkway, and let himself go down on his hip and side. The noise he made sounded loud to him, but he waited and heard no reaction to it. Maybe there were no watchmen, he thought. Few Japanese would be profane enough to break into a temple complex, and no foreigners would have a motive. There was nothing to steal outside but the personal offerings and statues, and the temple buildings where the relics were kept were surely locked and probably set with alarms.

  Lattimore stuffed his pockets with stones from the walkway, and moved stealthily toward the Jizô-dô. To be caught would be at the least embarrassing, so he tried to stay off the paths and in the shadows of the trees and shrubbery. The moon was nearly full, lighting his way to the outside of the small hall. He looked about and listened intently before he stepped out of the shadows.

  There, on a long flat ledge beneath an ancient shade tree and surrounded by ranks of the tiny statues, was a larger statue of the Bodhisattva. It was seated, one hand raised as if in blessing. Lattimore got on his knees in front of it, and took the stones from his pocket. With them he started to build a small cairn, setting a first, flat layer and then adding to the pile until at last he had a small pyramid.

  The simple act of making the cairn focused his mind on his self-chosen loss, and filled his heart with the tears he would not allow himself to cry. When he had finished, he looked into the stone face of Jizô and whispered, “Please take care of him.”

  It made sense for it to be a son that they had never had. He had a daughter, so it had to have been a son. Now, as he knelt before this Bodhisattva, this Enlightened One who declined Nirvana so that he could remain and teach others, he felt foolish and sad and frightened. Most of all he felt confused. He had never been a superstitious person, so why was he kneeling before this statue, this idol in whom he could not bring himself to believe? Why had he gotten up in the middle of the night and risked arrest and scandal to pile pebbles in a temple?

  Oh yes, the Jizô-dô was a tragic place, but it was primarily a superstitious place, a place where ignorance rather than grief was the strongest characteristic. It had swept up Lattimore in its raw emotions and he had in turn reacted emotionally and irrationally.

  The thought irritated him so that he reached out his hands and swept the pebbles away. They skittered across the ledge and fell onto the path, and he blanched at the sound. It was over, it was done and had been done years before, and piling up a few stones and whispering entreaties to a false god would accomplish nothing. He had been a foolish romantic, trying to expiate himself for an old act that should have been forgotten with bellbottom pants and love beads.

  Lattimore pushed himself to his feet and walked down the steps, hoping that he could find a way to get out of the complex as easily as he had gotten in. The trees grew more thickly further away from the main gate. Perhaps he could find one to climb and then get over the wall again.

  As he passed the entrance to the grotto he heard a sound that made him freeze. At first he thought it was just a cat, but as he listened more closely he knew that it was a human voice. It sounded like a baby crying, and he tried to determine where the wailing was coming from. To his surprise, the source seemed to be the dark opening into the grotto itself, and he walked toward it.

  As he drew near, he saw that it wasn’t dark after all. There was a dim light inside, and he wondered who was foolish enough to take a baby into that cave in the middle of the night. It would be impossible for him to fetch a watchman, but perhaps he could check to make certain that at least the child was with someone and not alone, having somehow been lost there when the temple closed.

  It was a scenario he was spinning from moonlight, and he was sure of it when he heard the other voices. Try to deny it as he might, it was not the sound of one baby now, but several of them, and the closer he came to the mouth of the cave the more they grew in number, so that when he stood in the irregularly shaped doorway, he heard a multitude of babies all wailing as though in great pain. Part of his brain warned him to go back, but he was drawn into the cave. No warning, no threats of harm could have kept him outside. He knew that what he was hearing was impossible, that it was either a delusion or manifestation of something in which he did not believe, but his senses told him that it was real, and he followed them.

  He did not know how the cave was lit, only that it was just bright enough for him to see as he followed the sound. The grotto was different from when they had visited it during the day. He did not remember so many winding passages, nor did he recall the rock paths going ever downward the way they did now. He pressed on as though he were walking through a dream, ever following the sounds of crying, and those sounds grew until they seemed to be all around him, and at times he had to clear his throat to assure himself that it was not him who was making the noises.

  He went on and downward for what seemed like hours, and he knew that another chamber must have been opened in the cave, one that he had not seen earlier. But at last the passage leveled out and the walls widened, and he came into a great open place, all of rock. The cave in which he stood and in which the babies toiled was impossibly wide, but not high, perhaps the height of three men, so that it seemed claustrophobic and oppressive.

  Here the wailing was so great that he had to put his hands over his ears. It was even worse than the sight itself. There was nothing but babies, untold thousands, maybe millions of them, as far as he could see, lying in
a depression as wide as the stone bed of some subterranean river long dried to dust. They were pitiful, hairless and naked and crawling like worms, none of them over six inches in length. Some had large hydrocephalic heads, others only rudimentary arms and legs, more like flippers than limbs. Their flesh was every color from deepest black to the white of ivory, and many seemed blind, their eyes no more than slits in the oversized globes of their heads. Others, however, had eyes that bulged fishlike from the sockets.

  Most of them moved like fish would do on dry land, flopping, pushed by barely formed arms and legs. What they were doing with what limbs they had was what Lattimore had been doing at the Jizô-dô, pushing stones into piles, some with their arms, some with their heads. Only a few were able to grasp the individual pebbles with their hands and place them on others. The piles formed could scarcely be called such. Once any height was attained, the movement of their fellows in their own attempts to construct their own cairns would knock others down, and the task would start again. It was, Lattimore thought, like a day care…

  In hell, yes. That’s where he was, wasn’t he, in the particular hell that accompanied this particular belief ? And wasn’t it also, he wondered, born of his own particular mindset on this particular night?

  Whether figment or delusion or dream or reality, it was hideous. It was unbearable. The sounds of the babies, children, stillborn creatures, damned hairless mice, whatever they were, bored through his skull like a drill, and although he kept his hands pressed over his ears, the tortuous keening went through them as though they were paper. How could such unformed, fragile beings make such a powerful sound?

  Then he recalled that there were millions, billions of them, squirming, glistening little maggots, all screaming at once, and the pain of it cut into and mingled with his own pain until he roared, and shook his hands in the air, and found his right fist to be wrapped around the handle of a heavy iron club. Though he could not imagine how he had found the strength to hold it, his pain made him strong, and he ran toward the mewling slugs in the dead riverbed, swinging the great club at them to make them stop their noise, the agony of which was killing him.