by Susan Barker
‘You like the Tigers, Mary?’
What? I am flustered for a moment. ‘Excuse me?’
‘The Hanshin Tigers. Do you like them?’
Oh, baseball. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Good girl.’
Yamagawa-san chuckles. I have passed the test. He turns to Yuji, his tone changing.
‘Gave you a good beating, didn’t they?’
‘Yes,’ Yuji says. ‘I deserved it.’
Yamagawa-san tuts and shakes his head. ‘No, Yuji. This is far less than you deserve. Be thankful your mother is who she is, because it is only the sheer accident of birth that saved you from getting what you deserved.’
Yuji nods, listening attentively.
‘Anyway, Yuji, what’s done is done. Let me run through the terms your mother and I have agreed upon.’
Yamagawa-san lifts his backside from the table again, wiping his palms on his trousers. Light from a virtual fish tints his face with riotous stripes of colour.
‘First you must leave Osaka and never come back. And when I say you can never come back, this means never. You might be tempted to test the water after a decade or so, or even after a few months, if I know you, Mr Oyagi. Try it and you will be killed. Even after my death – not too soon, touch wood –’ he raps the granite desk three times, ‘you won’t be forgotten. Whoever replaces me will take you on, just as I took on the enemies of Ogawa when he was killed.’
His voice is mellow, even verging on affectionate at times. I am so desperate to be out of here, the condition that we never come back is the most reasonable thing I’ve ever heard. I am sure Yuji sees it differently, though.
‘What else . . .?’ Yamagawa-san asks, directing the question to his memory. ‘If you start hankering after the glamour and violence again and toy with the idea of joining another syndicate, don’t. I will find out and come and cut out your tongue. Understood?’
Another nod.
‘Anyway, it’s unhealthy to dwell on the past. Let’s toast your new life, your new love.’ He smiles at me in an ingratiating way. ‘What do you say?’
Yuji nods and Yamagawa-san claps his hands, once.
‘Aya-chan, drinks.’
The door opens and the girl from The Sayonara Bar walks in. A fan is tucked into the broad sash of her white kimono. She does not acknowledge me, her rosebud painted lips shut tight, giving nothing away. Beneath her lacquered geisha hairstyle she has eyes for only Yamagawa-san. She shuffles over to him and bows deeply.
‘Three whiskies, no ice.’
Aya nods and moves to the wall opposite the plasma screen. She places her palm flat against the wall and it opens into a liquor cabinet. A phalanx of bottles sit upon a mirrored platform of blazing light. As she clinks about with glasses and screw caps I watch the ivory pillow folded from the back of her kimono sash, the downy unlacquered hair at the nape of her neck. Does Yuji know her from when she used to work for his mother? If he is confused by her being here he doesn’t show it.
‘So, exciting, isn’t it, going off into the big, bad world? What are your plans?’
‘I don’t have any,’ Yuji says.
I can hear the hesitancy in his voice. He talks to Yamagawa-san as though treading an active minefield.
‘Rubbish! Your mother has booked you on a flight to Seoul that departs from Kansai International at 5 a.m. Still, you are wise to try and keep it from me.’
He smiles and winks at me, molars grinding. The sooner we drink up and leave the better. Aya turns to face us, bearing the tray like a porcelain serving doll. She comes to me first and proffers the whiskies, impervious to my attempts to penetrate the blankness of her face. I take a glass. The geisha robot disarms me with a crafty wink. Then Aya turns her tray to Yuji. As he selects a whisky she leans towards him, smiling. She removes a hand from the drinks tray and pinches the flesh of his cheek. Yuji keeps perfectly still, the whisky held limply in his lap. Aya moves her face closer to his, her teeth glistening behind parted lips, like she wants to take a bite out of him. Then she half sucks, half kisses his bloodied, unresponsive lips. Stunned, I glare at her, suppressing the strongest urge to jump up and yank her off him. At her lapse in professionalism Yamagawa-san only chuckles. Aya runs the tip of her tongue up the side of Yuji’s face, over the battlefield of cuts and grazes. She whispers something in his ear, then releases him and turns to Yamagawa-san with the last whisky.
‘Thank you, Aya. That will be all.’
Aya bows and glides out of the room. The door closes behind her and blends seamlessly into the black of the wall.
Yamagawa-san raises his glass. ‘A toast, Yuji. To your future. May you be happy and grateful for your ill-deserved freedom.’
Yuji and I lean forward to clink glasses with Yamagawa-san before drinking our whiskies.
‘Music,’ Yamagawa-san announces.
I smile politely. Is he insane? Is he so hard up for company that he is willing to consort with a disgraced gang member and his girlfriend? Can’t he see how desperate we are to get out of here? Perhaps he gets a kick out of our discomfort. Yamagawa-san opens a thin laptop on his desk and skims his fingers over the keyboard. Within moments the tinkle of piano keys rains down from speakers in the ceiling. The intro to a forgotten song followed by the genderless, spine-tingling vocals of Chet Baker.
‘You like jazz, Mary?’ Yamagawa-san asks.
‘Yes.’
I’m not so keen really, but, fuck it, what does personal taste matter right now? We sit in silence as Yamagawa-san closes his eyes and sways his head to the music, lost in his jazz connoisseur’s delight. In any other circumstances Yuji and I would be in hysterics, exchanging grins at the very least. As it goes we daren’t even look at each other. Yamagawa-san’s eyes spring open. The head swaying has perked him up and he embarks on some crackhead monologue about Miles Davis that is excruciatingly hard to follow. He then complains about the bad season that the Hanshin Tigers are having, and how he had to confiscate his daughter’s credit cards after her recent splurge at the Hankyu . . . and so on. I don’t get why he is being so friendly. Isn’t he angry at Yuji? Maybe he is just in a talkative mood. Tomorrow he’ll wake up wondering what the hell he was going on about the night before.
I tune out, lulled by the hypnotic singing and the whisky spreading its warmth right down to my toes. I am surprisingly relaxed now; Yamagawa-san’s mindless stream of consciousness must be having a soporific effect. On the plasma screen the virtual fish flit. I let my eyes swim out of focus, so the fish dissolve into a myopic blur, a kaleidoscope of shimmery fish scales. Thrown by this acid montage, I try to flip back into the correct gear, but my eyes continue to swim lazily. Somewhere beneath my drowsy stupor, panic begins to stir. What the fuck is going on? I turn in the direction of Yuji and try to reach across the space between our chairs. Gravity reclaims my arm before it even makes it to his armrest. No reaction is registered on Yuji’s part.
Yamagawa-san cuts off mid-sentence. ‘Well, Mr Oyagi, it’s been a pleasure but I expect you are anxious to be off. You have exactly one hour to collect your belongings and leave Osaka.’
Yuji nods and rises from his chair with enviable ease. My limbs are dense, as though I am at the cusp of a fever.
‘Yuji . . .?’ Why is my voice so weak? ‘My legs . . .’ My legs feel strange . . . I reach for his hand, but it seems to evade mine. Panic eddies and corkscrews in my gut. This cannot be happening. ‘No . . .’
I try to reach again but my arm is not co-operating. The room will not stay still. Jazz crashes atonally in my ears, and the walls swell and oscillate. At the door two blurry figures are shaking hands. The door closes. I struggle to bear with it, flailing at the last dregs of consciousness, but find myself letting go. It’s easier.
20
WATANABE
I lie on my back, fallen from heights beyond imagining. A pale day moon waxes and wanes, framed by the rungs of the fire escape. I lie on a bed of damp cardboard, enclosed by the walls of the Tiger Den and Karaoke La La L
and. For the thousandth time I lift my hands to my face and stare into the fate furrows of my palms, valleys and deltas, sedimented with alley silt. I strain so hard my brain cramps. Nothing happens. Frustration and loss pounding in my chest, I flex and flex until I am nearly spent.
A cold drop of water splashes down from the sky onto my brow. Heaven must be weeping me a tear. Or subjecting me to Chinese water torture. Stare into these palms long enough and I will go mad. But I will not surrender. So I stare once more and flex, as somebody very close by begins to scream.
Earlier this afternoon the poseur-mobile swerved all over the road as we piston-crunched back to the city, serenaded by the blaring horns of oncoming cars. One pick-up truck veered into a rice-paddy ditch to escape our kamikaze path, a mishap that barely dented Red Cobra’s conscience. We tyre-squealed on through the sleepy suburbs, Red Cobra manhandling the steering wheel as though it had done him harm.
By denying him the fulfilment of revenge, the phone call from Yamagawa-san had torn a great existential cavity in Red Cobra’s world. As his white-knuckle passenger I was unsympathetic; I told him not to answer the damn phone. My primary sentiment was anger. At the Lotus Bar we had had fate in our clutches, only to let it flutter away, like a winning lottery ticket in the breeze. Now Mary and I were back where we started, uncertain as two quantum specks in a sea of relativity. God may not play dice, but our good Lord, He does like to rattle them about in his loosely clenched fist.
Red Cobra slammed on the brakes at a bend in the road. The Mercedes spun to a halt, momentum throwing me into my seat belt.
‘You. Out,’ he hissed.
The road was deserted. Either side of the car potential landslides of bamboo forest were held back by concrete embankments. Red Cobra clutched the steering wheel, ravenous for the solitude in which to indulge his manic despair. That was fine by me. The symbiotic potential of our union was long exhausted as far as I was concerned. I opened the car door and estimated a 17.2-minute hike to the nearest station.
‘If you are still worried about Mary,’ he murmured, eyes on the windscreen, ‘she will show up later at the Seven Wonders.’
I nodded, as if this was something I didn’t already know – his self-esteem needed the boost. No sooner had I closed the door than Red Cobra slammed his foot down and tore away, like a man with only an hour left to live. At the time I saw this reckless passion as weak. But I understand enough now to withhold judgement.
I moved along via various modes of public transport to the Street of True Love and hid in the alleyway opposite Yamagawa-san’s headquarters. Though Mary would not arrive for several hours, and my surveillance capacity is independent of spatial proximity, I saw no harm in being prepared. The alley was a rat bonanza, with a vermin density of 4.3 per square metre. As I crossed the stinking threshold, one skulked by with the paws of its offspring dangling from its mouth. This did not perturb me. Pavements, manhole covers and drains: all these barriers between human city dwellers and the rat population disintegrate beneath my hypersenses. The subterranean activities of these cannibalistic, disease-spreading critters are no mystery to me. And credit where credit’s due, they are a damn sight more astute than humans. As I sat on the cardboard, one surveyed me from the fire escape, its tiny eyes glinting in acknowledgement of the paradigm shift I represented for humanity. I gave him a sombre nod before reconvening my extra-sensory espionage.
I somersaulted four streets east to look in on the hostess bar. Alone in the lounge, Mama-san was on the phone to a catering company, trying to secure a replacement chef. Her cranial sacs were still inflamed after having to put to rights the pot plant I knocked over earlier that day. That boy is long overdue for a sacking, she seethed, Beethoven’s Fifth failing to soothe her as she waited on hold. I moved up a flight to the tiny room where Mary paced the tatami, eating her heart out over Yuji. Barefoot she strode in her cotton bathrobe, the peach down of her limbs gently chafing. Like an infinity of Cubist paintings, her visceral being glistened from every possible aesthetic plane. Twice my hypergaze had to be averted lest it overdose in rapture.
As Mary chewed her lower lip, molecules shuffled in the thought factory of her mind, generating anxiety after anxiety. How easy it would be for us if the blueprint of the universe was Newtonian and mechanistic, I thought. If I could leap ahead in the chain of cause and effect, and forecast the next twenty-four hours, then the necessary steps for rescuing Mary would be clear to me.
Alas the universe does not conform to Newton’s clockwork schema. Ours is a cosmos governed by fuzzy logic and paradox. And in this chaotic and random void the future morphs by the nanosecond. What will hatch from these eggs called now? I cannot say. I figured my best bet was to employ my hypersenses to monitor the situation, and then, when the time was right, I would act. Returning to the hostess bar and warning Mary off will not work when she is so hung up on Yuji. And my poor verbal presentation skills would not do justice to my dark prognosis.
Mary knelt beside a low table. Gases exchanged in her lungs and the protein of her toenails regenerated. Life teemed in every cellular unit of her being. I pulsed with pride, for soon she would be my companion in hyperspace. We had only the immediate future to live through first.
Projected into the room above the hostess bar I saw the blind optimism that flooded Mary’s mind. I saw the life epicycles of the mites in the woven mats and the silverfish in the book bindings. But the wondrous complexity of it all paled next to my monomania for Mary. My projection into that room above The Sayonara Bar was just another expedition into the mind of god, a trip I long took for granted. Though not for much longer.
My demise began as a hot flush. My micropores leaked sweat. The electrical conductance of my skin leapt up. Tiny fireworks exploded on my retina. Thinking it would pass, I stayed by Mary’s side. The mental palpitations did not concern me so much as her welfare. At least not until the fall.
It was like plummeting from a skyscraper. A moment of sheer cardiac terror. The urban landscape sank into absolute flatness. One moment all was bright and fourth-dimensional. Then it flatlined, spewing me back into the alley in the Street of True Love. Numb with shock, I tried to comprehend what had happened. With the exception of my first ever excursion, my sixth sense has never acted independently of my will before. Choking back my panic, I sat up and tried to vault back. Nothing. Rodents whispered in the wheelie bins. Ousted from the guttering, a drip splashed at my feet. Mustering all my strength, I flexed once more. When I saw I was still stranded in the alley my mouth filled with the metallic taste of my worst fear. The spiked jaws of the mantrap had clamped shut on me, incarcerating me in the third dimension. I could feel the blood leeching from my cerebellum as consciousness gave way to the dark splendour of despair.
I came round about six or seven hours later. I cannot say precisely when because the fabric of space-time is no longer accessible to me. How long this spatial castration will last I do not know. I am positive, though, that it is not permanent. One is not bestowed with divine powers only to have them cruelly repossessed. This malfunction of my extra-sensory apparatus will resolve itself in time. I must be patient.
Adjustment has been tough, though. No longer can I read the intimate secrets of passers-by; they have become strangers to me. No longer can I perceive the city as a single entity; an organism of concrete and flesh; gorging on fast food, caffeine and electricity; excreting rubbish, sewage and heat. I am not even privy to the mundane carry-on behind the walls that enclose me. What is the chemical composition of the air I breathe? What thoughts occupy the mind of that rat watching me so intently? Your guess is as good as mine. Most devastating of all, I do not know Mary’s whereabouts. For the first time in months my only organs of sight are my eyes. And what wretched, pathetic organs they are.
As soon as I regained consciousness I attempted to contract my hypersense. When I failed, I banshee-screamed the street down. Throughout the night my screaming has enticed many onlookers. Earlier two girls from the Tiger Den came
and stood in the alley entrance. They wore tiger-striped catsuits, their detachable ears and whiskers silhouetted against the neon nightscape.
‘D’you reckon we ought to call the police?’
‘I think he’s having a bad trip.’
‘He keeps staring at his hands like there’s something inside them.’
‘Hey . . . If you’ve taken too many mushrooms, you just have to ride it out. Chin up, little guy.’
Later the manager of Karaoke La La Land came out the back way to ask what was the matter. At my nonreply he shrugged and told me to keep it down. At that point I realized it was imperative I got a grip. I had to be alert for the coming of Mary. Without my extrasensory sense I had begun to fear that I had missed her.
My sense of loss is overwhelming. The evolutionary short circuit in my mind has erased not only my ability to transcend but my memories of transcendence too. Though my mind’s eye can summon any colour, sound or smell of the ordinary realm, it cannot summon that which lies beyond. It is as though my travels into the fourth dimension never even happened. Only two things now persuade me to draw my next breath: Mary and the faith that my powers will return.
Since recovering from my breakdown I have been monitoring The Seven Wonders. So far, nothing of interest – just a trickling influx of salarymen and yakuza. The windows are darkened and I cannot see inside.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello.’
‘Still here, then?’
The question is too ridiculous to answer. The girl in the lycra tiger costume lights a cigarette, standing one foot in the street, within sensible fleeing distance should I turn nasty. Her whisker attachments quiver as she sucks on the filter. Behind her the odd punter saunters by, casually checking out her artificial tail. Had I met her a few hours ago I would have sent binary pulsars into her mind to fathom exactly where her need for self-humiliation stems from. Deprived of my resources, I just have to surmise that she is stupid.
