That sense of aromatic void repulsed him even more than if it had reeked of stale urine, and he tossed it away again, into the corner of the room. It wasn’t like him to act this way, and he remembered that he was due a vacation. People weren’t supposed to work nonstop the way he did. There were other things in life beside offices and boardrooms, deals and re-deals, agreements and betrayals that aroused and sapped in equal proportions. After a while, he had no doubt that it could make you see things.
As for what he could do here and now, getting out of the room took precedence. There was no way he could spend the night there. McBride quickly got dressed and packed his luggage, then called the front desk and asked for another room. He tried to explain that there was a noise in the cooling system that kept him awake, though he was certain that the desk clerk, whose English was cursory, did not understand. Still, the woman told him to come downstairs and she would give him the key to another room.
In fifteen minutes McBride was fitting the new key into the lock of a room two floors higher than his previous one. He pushed open the door, shoved in his bags, and then fumbled for the light switch, letting the door drift closed behind him. The single switch turned on every lamp in the room, and the seated, blanket-covered figure on the floor seemed all the more real in the stark, unyielding brightness.
McBride could only stand there, arms at his side, and look at the shape helplessly. He felt afraid, but he also felt a lethargy stealing over him, a sense that no matter where he went he could not escape the silent and terrible figure in front of him. He could have turned and walked out of the room, but felt that if he did he would have to eventually confront the thing again. Better to face it now and get it over with than to live in dread expectation of where and when it might appear.
A dubious practicality intervened long enough for him to try and remember what he could of ghost stories he had heard, and he thought he recalled that it was important to ask the ghosts what they wanted. It seemed absurd, but his options were limited.
He walked across the room toward the figure, wishing that the room were darker. To see that face again in bright light would be hideous. Still, the idea of turning off some of the lights did not occur to him until he had taken the blanket in his hand and begun to pull it off once more. It would not be as bad this time, he told himself. Even in the light, it would be the same face, so the shock would not be as great.
He was wrong. He had expected to see the burned and charred ruin of an A-bomb victim, but looking up at him now was the pale face of his ex-wife Polly, seamed only by the lines that age and sorrow and McBride himself had cut there. Her light-brown eyes were devoid of emotion, as empty as glass.
McBride tried to speak, but when he opened his mouth it seemed that sand rushed in to fill it. Her gaze, though lifeless, stabbed into him, and he jerked his head away, closing his eyes. He remained that way for a long time, wishing that what had happened before would happen again, that she would be gone when he opened them.
She was, and like the other time the blanket remained. McBride held it, then buried his face in it and inhaled deeply, smelling nothing at all. He knelt upon the spot where he had seen Polly sitting cross-legged, and rubbed his hand over the carpet. Then he stood up and folded the blanket neatly.
Holding it, he left the room and took the elevator to the lobby. It was still humid outside, though cooler now that the sun was down. McBride tucked the folded blanket under his arm and walked down the street, heading for the river. There were still people about, but the crowd thinned as he drew closer to the bridge, until there were hardly any other pedestrians at all.
He reached the end of the bridge. A third of the way across, beneath one of the street lamps, he saw a seated figure covered by a blanket. McBride walked toward it, afraid but unable to turn back, bound by inevitability. When he reached the figure he stopped and looked down at it. He shivered in spite of the warm night.
The wooden bowl in front of the figure was empty. McBride took from his pocket the 500-yen-coin he had intended to place there earlier, and dropped it into the bowl. He expected to hear the sharp sound of metal striking wood, but instead heard a dull sound like a muffled bell struck far away.
Nothing changed. The head beneath the blanket did not bow in thanks, nor did the apparition disappear. Nothing changed, and McBride realized that the next move was his.
In Japan, where privacy was held sacred, what he planned to do seemed almost blasphemous. Still, he had no choice. This squat, mysterious shape, which had caused McBride to see things he hoped and feared were nothing but the fabrics woven by his own guilt, had to be seen and revealed for what it really was.
As he had done twice before, McBride grasped the blanket and stepped back. In spite of his anxiety, he nearly smiled as the absurd image came to him of unveiling a statue. The smile, however, died in utero when he saw that the face beneath the blanket—or, he grimly reconfirmed, the face that he was projecting there—was that of his deceased father. Like the face of his ex-wife, it was expressionless, yet pierced him all the same. Yes, he thought, yes, it was guilt, wasn’t it? All that guilt he thought he had inured himself to, its avatars rushing out like black smoke from the suddenly broken window of a closed and burning house, or like the smell of a bad fish when the refrigerator door opens after weeks.
This time, however, he would not be afraid. He cleared his throat, and the rough sound centered him. “What do you want?” he asked the figure with his father’s face, and then added one of the few Japanese phrases he knew: “Nani o? “ What?
The bald head with its fringe of gray hair lowered until it was looking down at the wooden bowl with the coin in it. Then the face came back up and again looked at McBride.
The message was unmistakable, and McBride took the rest of the coins from his pocket and let them fall into the bowl. Still there was no response. He took out his money clip in which were two hundred thousand yen in large bills and, without removing the gold clip, dropped the money into the bowl. Then he removed his wallet from his hip pocket and took several hundred dollars in U.S. currency from it, all he had left.
McBride, eyes filled with tears of pleading, got on his knees in front of the man and placed it into the bowl on top of the rest of the money as though he were making an offering. He bowed his head, hoping the figure would find his gift acceptable, and stood up.
The beggar looked up at him. Its expression was unchanged. Then it turned its head to look across the bridge toward the other side of the river. McBride followed its gaze, and felt lead sink through his chest as he saw the others.
Stretched along the bridge until they reached the other side was a long row of figures, side by side, all the same. Each was seated, apparently cross-legged, on the pavement, and each had a blanket over it, identical to the folded one McBride still held under his arm and the loose one he had let fall to the sidewalk. The long row of figures reminded him of a temple elsewhere in Kyoto, where a thousand identical wooden carvings of the Kannon Buddha stretched away into the darkness and dust.
As he had in the temple, McBride walked slowly down the row of figures, but this time he stopped at each one, pulled off each blanket, and looked at the face beneath. He found his son there, he found Claire. He found Tom Porter, the man who had given him his start in the business. He found people he had cheated, lied to, used, and forgotten until this night.
McBride had no money left, so he could only bow deeply, rolling each blanket he removed into a wad of cloth that grew larger and larger, and around which he had to wrap his arms. The last few faces he barely saw through his tears.
At last he stepped in front of the final figure, and sighed wearily, wiping away tears with the bundle of blankets he held. He thought he knew whose countenance he would see there, and when he withdrew the blanket and saw that aged and weary face looking up at him, the revelation was no surprise at all. It was his own, the last face in the long line of those betrayed and lost. He could not bow, as he had done with the others
.
Instead he plodded on toward the end of the bridge, not turning back to see if the long line of seated figures, now revealed, was still there. He knew it would not be.
McBride turned to the right onto the walkway by the river, and went down underneath the bridge. There, in the dim light the city cast, he saw a number of homeless people, some sleeping, some just sitting, their arms wrapped around their knees, watching the lights reflect on the water of the river. He walked toward a sleeping man, dropped the pile of blankets, then folded one and set it beside the man.
He did this for several other sleepers, then started giving the blankets to those who were awake. They accepted them with a deep bow. Some lay down and pulled the blankets over them, while others folded them and lay upon them. McBride continued until only one blanket was left. He sat on it and watched the river for a long time, then spread it on the ground and lay down to sleep.
Early in the morning, when it was still dark, he awoke. On the ground next to him was an empty wooden bowl. He removed his suit jacket and gave it to one of the other men, then went onto the bridge, sat cross-legged on the side-walk, put the wooden bowl before him, and pulled the blanket over him so that he was hidden from sight.
McBride remained there throughout the day. His sight was limited to his own lap and the sidewalk and the bowl in front of him. The blanket kept the sun from him. He felt neither hungry nor thirsty, nor did he ever feel the urge to urinate. When enough coins were in the bowl, he reached out and removed them, putting them into his pants pockets.
By the time darkness fell and the footsteps of passersby ceased, his pockets and the bowl were full. McBride got to his feet, the blanket still over his head, and shuffled off the bridge and down beneath it again. There he distributed the coins to the people there, who bowed their gratitude but did not speak. Then McBride lay down again on the blanket and slept until just before dawn, when he went above and sat beneath the blanket on the bridge.
His days passed in this way. He gave away the coins he was given, and bought nothing to eat or drink. At night he would sit and watch the lights on the river until he fell asleep, then arise in darkness and sit all day beneath the blanket.
It was the first time that Ted Sechrist had been in Kyoto since the summer meeting after which Dennis McBride had disappeared. Three months had passed since Sechrist’s colleague had vanished from the hotel, leaving behind his packed luggage in a room into which he had just moved.
McBride’s fate was still a mystery, both to the police and to Sechrist, and a discomfiting one. As a resident of Japan, he had felt responsible for Dennis, which, he had to admit, was a bit absurd in light of Dennis’s single-minded intensity when it came to business. Accompanying Dennis had been akin to babysitting a tiger, albeit a quiet one.
Sechrist could come up with no explanation for Dennis’s disappearance. He hadn’t seemed overly depressed, but suicide was always a possibility, especially after a breakup. Still, no body of a foreigner had been found, even after boats had searched the river, which Sechrist suspected was too shallow to drown in without great determination.
Now, back in Kyoto, sitting alone in the bar of the hotel from which Dennis had vanished, Sechrist thought back over the last day he had spent with Dennis, searching in his mind for any clue he may have overlooked or forgotten in those hours when he was questioned by the police. He had told them that Dennis had seemed introspective, and had mentioned the breakup with Claire, but he hadn’t mentioned Dennis’s comment about wishing he had given something to the beggar under the blanket.
Sechrist’s drink paused halfway to his lips, and he set it down. What if— and it was a crazy idea—but what if Dennis had gone back to look for that beggar, to give him some money? The odds were that the man, covered as he was, wouldn’t have seen Dennis anyway, but what if he had? He might have been the last person to see him before his disappearance.
Sechrist left a 500-yen-coin on the bar and went outside into the cool October air. He climbed into a cab and told the driver, “Sanjo-hashi,” and the car headed for the bridge.
Sechrist stopped the cab at the end of the bridge and got out. It was dark, but there were still many people afoot, and the bridge was well lit. Sechrist started across it, and was almost relieved to see the figure of the sitting man covered by a blanket several yards ahead. He stopped in front of the man, took a handful of coins from his pocket and dropped them into the man’s begging bowl with a loud clatter.
“Sumimasen,” Sechrist said. Excuse me. “Shitsumon wo kitte ii no?” May I ask you a question?
There was no reply, so Sechrist forged on.
“Sankagatsu mae …“ Three months ago …“Segatakai gaikokujin ha nani ka agemashita ka?” Did a tall foreigner give you anything?
Still no response. “Sumimasen?” Sechrist repeated. There was no reply, no movement.
In his desperation for an answer, Sechrist performed an act that he knew, as a long-time resident of Japan, was the height of rudeness. He touched a stranger. Leaning down, he gently pressed the man’s shoulder, and jerked back his hand. Something had not felt right. It was as if his fingers had contacted not flesh but a stick beneath the cloth.
“Sumimasen!” he said, loudly now, but still there came no answer. Bracing himself, Sechrist grasped the blanket and yanked it away from the sitting figure.
He gasped, as did several passersby who had surreptitiously slowed to watch the unaccountable drama. One woman gave a short, sharp scream at the sight of the corpse, clothed in garments that had been soiled and eaten away in places by the decaying tissues they had encased. Dried skin clung in strips to several of the yellow bones, but the flesh of the face had long since disappeared.
An autopsy determined that the body was that of a Japanese man in his mid-forties, and of small stature. Only a few teeth remained, and a positive identification could not be made.
I should become a savior to all beings. I shall release them from their sufferings.
—The Vows of the Boddhisattvas
Story Notes and Sources
THE NIGHT LISTENER (Twilight Zone, July-August 1984)
This is one of those personal stories that comes from lying awake late at night and wondering if those creaks are just the house settling, or something else. I’m not a believer in the supernatural, although I love to use it in fiction, but it really didn’t make its way into this story. What I do believe in is the foolishness and self-destructiveness of man, which did.
SEASON PASS (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1984)
The amusement park in this story is based on Hershey Park (I’ll never be able to think of it as “Hersheypark”), a leisure staple of my childhood. All my life I’ve lived no more than ten miles away from Hershey, Pennsylvania, and when I was a kid we’d go to the park nearly every summer weekend. There was no admission fee in those long-gone days, rides were a quarter, and the entertainment was free. By the time I wrote this story, the park had gone the route of most others and charged admission, thus the season passes of the title.
The story was a final nominee for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award, and my wife Laurie and I went to New York City for the ceremony, though I didn’t expect to win, since living legends Donald E. Westlake and Lawrence Block were among the other nominees, and my story was really more fantasy than mystery. My low expectations made for a relaxing evening, and we were seated with Westlake and Block and their spouses, as well as my friend, Playboy fiction editor Alice K. Turner. Westlake seemed cheery, and Block rather tense, though he won.
But for us, the surprise of the evening got set up when we were leaving the Algonquin Hotel to go to the banquet. We were trying to get a cab, when the doorman hailed one, but not for us. A tall old lady climbed in, leaving us to walk to the banquet. Once there, we were amazed to see that the old lady was also there. She turned out to be Eudora Welty, who received the Raven Award that night for Reader of the Year. Jeez. She could have offered to share.…
NIGHT DEPOSITS (University Man, April 1988)
This is a “lost” story, in a way, since I never saw a copy of the magazine in which it was published. My agent at the time, Jim Allen, sold this story to a new market, University Man, about which I knew nothing except that they paid well. Though I got my check, I never got a copy of the magazine, and by the time Jim submitted another story, they had folded. Try as I have, I’ve never been able to find a copy of the magazine. The story was reprinted in Necon Tales (1990), and in a couple of Marty Greenberg’s “100 Little” anthologies. It’s set in an earlier version of my native Elizabethtown, and is a dearly gory little thing that must have felt very out of place in University Man. And if any readers come up with a copy of the issue, I’m prepared to trade handsomely…
TO FEEL ANOTHER’S WOE (Blood Is Not Enough, ed. by Ellen Datlow, 1989)
The genesis of this tale was the several months in the mid-seventies when I lived in New York City just after I’d gotten my Actors’ Equity card (which I still have and use), trying to get an acting job. I roomed with my friend, Ren Reynolds, and went to what felt like dozens of audition interviews a week. That experience helped me conclude that writing would be more pleasurable, since editors aren’t rejecting you as much as a single story, while at auditions they’re rejecting you. No wonder many actors (including me when I wear that suit) are so insecure.
“To Feel Another’s Woe” was also, so far as I’m aware, the only story of mine to be blatantly plagiarized. A “writer,” who will remain nameless here, had reduced my story from 5,700 words to 3,200, and changed it from first person to third, retaining my plot, characters, action, and dialogue, scene by scene. This person was then foolish enough to submit it to Ellen Datlow for Scifi.com, apparently not realizing that Ellen had bought the original story. Ellen recognized it, of course, and reported the plagiary to me. My attorney took care of the rest. Those who wish to read the whole unpleasant story may find it in Dave Langford’s Ansible 158 online.
The Night Listener and Others Page 36
