Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  An old woman whose spine was so badly crooked that she did not even reach to my waist staggered slowly down the sidewalk, clutching a shopping bag in each hand. Diagnosis: calcium insufficiency. Nakano’s mother might have ended up like that, had she lived longer. The old woman stooped so far forward that from the rear she appeared to be decapitated. How much longer could she creep on, and how much pain must she endure—and for what? I would have helped her, but Nakano was waiting.

  So I turned away down Chuo-dori, into the promenading crowds, the huge advertising screen in the cylindrical brand-name tower of the many windows, with the café at the bottom named after a mediocre coffee chain. Nakano had left the café, it seemed. Bowing indifferently, the waitress presented me with a note from her; I was no longer to trouble myself with her affairs. I thanked the girl and walked away, not knowing where to take myself; and not even the sunshine on the creamy golden calves of little uniformed schoolgirls consoled me.

  Our flat lay an hour and a half from the Ginza: three changes of subway, a bus so crowded that one could rarely sit down, another bus and then a fifteen minute walk. Nakano had found the place when my income became less regular. Perhaps I should have gone straight there. After all, I needed to pack my belongings. Etsuko, who adored me, would jump up and down when I opened the door. I would take snapshots of her in her uniform, and her mother might smile for an instant before she expelled me. But when I reached the subway station, my legs declined to stop. Before I knew it, I had rounded the corner, and reached the Kabuki-za.

  Instead of the accustomed line of ticket-buyers and -holders there stood a vague horde, most of them on the sidewalk in front of the theater, and others, the ones with zoom lenses or a yearning for lost panoramas, across the street. They aimed their cameras upward at the row of white-and-black-crested red beehive lanterns above the awning; above these, that familiar wide white arch with the flattened ends roofed the portico; then rose the high façade which was now merely an outermost sarcophagus. The signboards no longer bore the likenesses of brilliant warrior-actors and onnagatas in many-hued kimonos. This saddened me more than my own failures. The authorities had already fenced off the theater with black-and-yellow-striped plastic bars connected by waist-high plastic cones. I could have stepped over them, but someone would have scolded me. Gazing in beneath the awning, I saw a certain door striped wood-brown and tan—closed now. How many times had I entered it?

  The window of the semicylindrical box office had closed, and inside, a white sign with black characters marched down it. Behind the purple awning, the three pairs of brass-handled, red-lacquered doors were shut, and through their panes I could see nothing but the crowd’s dark reflections.

  Behind the plate-glass windows of the Miu Miu department store stood two mannequins whose well-shapen legs were crystalline plastic, whose arms and heads were brass armatures and whose white skirts were embroidered with red fish-scales around their narrow waists. As I contemplated the glittering silver geoglyphs where their breasts should have been, that same bent crone approached me, creeping and groaning. She had set down those two heavy shopping bags somewhere, but seemed no less weighed down. Bowing, she informed me: Your prayers will no longer be accepted.

  2

  By the time I finally returned to our apartment, nobody lived there, and even the number had been obliterated. As I watched, workmen began to carefully demolish the building. A bridge of silver paper was rolling itself up into the sky.

  I set down Etsuko’s parcel on the sidewalk, knelt, bowed and clapped my hands. Then I rose and walked away, wishing to spend the rest of my money at once.

  Across the street stood a stationery shop where I used to buy Etsuko’s school supplies. She used to cry out for joy and clap her hands when I brought her a new pink notebook whose cover depicted yellow butterflies, or a bookbag dedicated to the goddess Amaterasu, or a lacquered vermilion pencil. Entering this establishment, and exchanging bows with a pretty, chirpy clerk in a black-and-yellow uniform, I discovered just past the magnifiers and inkstones a new subdepartment devoted to folded-paper figurines. A certain warrior wore wide-legged pantalons with a gold-on-cream pattern of upside-down waves; he was as flat and broad as a Noh actor. A certain slender lady, as faceless as a Heian beauty, lived straight and stiff in her cellophane envelope. The hem of her vermilion gown had been neatly creased back to show naked white paper. Most of these origami personages, as I should really call them, were not previously known to me, although I thought to recognize the last Regent of Kamakura. Their beauty aroused my greed, so I bought more than twenty of them. They were all the same price. Counting sweetly in a low voice, the clerk showed me the total, and bowed once more when I paid. The light gleamed on her edible cheeks.

  Then I went next door and bought a bottle of sake which was wrapped in a brown-spotted bamboo leaf tied with coarse black cord. Since I still possessed money, I proceeded to the next building, where, abutting the wooden façade of an old shop, there rose a curvy-cornered pillar with a sliding steel grating which must have once opened and closed from side to side, and above this, red and white in plastic relief announced TOBACCO; and from the next storey upward it was all hotel. I checked in. They made me pay in advance. Then I took the elevator to my room.

  3

  The snow-white shoji panels beside my bed could open, disclosing a narrow space where a refrigerator squatted unplugged from its outlet and two chairs faced each other across a stained veneer table. Here I sat drinking sake and watching the silver dusk tarnishing the fog upon the forest hills, the whitewashed concrete buildings going grey. I felt safe, and hidden. Sometimes I closed the screens so that there was nobody but the empty chair and me.

  Now the world was silver-blue and bluish-grey. The tatami mat beneath my feet was so warm and tan.

  4

  In the flats across the street a single window was illuminated, and within I thought I saw Etsuko, sitting on her heels as she always used to do when she was waiting for me to come home.

  5

  When I lay down to sleep, I dreamed of a jointed black wall, very shiny, glowing dully with elongated brass hinges in the shapes of nutcrackers, doublecrosses, nippled lozenges, chrysanthemums, insect-eaten leaves; and silently this wall opened. At once I awoke. First I felt refreshed, as if I had slept long and deeply, but the instant I sat up I found that it was not even midnight. So I returned behind the shoji panels and sat watching the darkness.

  At dawn, pale blue turquoise light pasted itself within the window, and I lay watching the fading peach-colored shadows of canted latticework upon the far wall of my room, the shoji screens beginning to go faintly whitish-blue. I was febrile. When I listened to the clock, it seemed that each tick was a wave carrying me toward the grave. Presently the turquoise departed from my window, and the world became greyer and greyer, its tones and lines softened by fog. So I rose and dressed.

  The instant I pressed the elevator call button, the door to that conveyance slid open, and I was in an ugly steel chamber of approximately the same dimensions as the shower. The elevator stopped at each floor and opened. My room was on the fourth floor. The lobby was on the second. The hotel seemed to be owned by a middle-aged man and an elderly lady; I supposed them to be mother and son. They were indifferent almost to unfriendliness. Evidently they ran the place themselves without any helpers, because the outer door was locked after eleven at night. What I did not know was when it opened, and whether I could go out and wait until it was unlocked. So the elevator stopped at the third floor, then at the second, which was dark and warm, with a thick sleepy atmosphere, then at the first; and when I saw that the front door was not only locked, but sealed off with a heavy curtain, I gave up and decided to return to my room. The elevator awaited me. It stopped at the first floor, then slowly closed its door and groaned upward. When it opened upon the second floor, I saw that a certain luminescence was now swelling from behind the reception desk; but in that instant ther
e was a sinister click, and then the second floor went dark again. Next came the third floor, and then the fourth. It was about five-thirty in the morning. I sat in my niche and watched the fog-tones brighten into peach. Some of the corrugated roofs were striped white in their grooves; what looked like snow must have been fog.

  By seven-thirty I found myself overlooking a lovely snowy-fog-world, which appeared as warm as my shoji panels, for the forest hills were smoke-green near the sky and various shades of dark jade below, although it is true that the white walls and roofs of the city crowded together not unlike tombstones.

  I wondered how I ought to live.

  6

  Now nearly all the roofs were grey, although there remained a few turquoise ones and a green one and even one red one; no, come to think of it, they were all different colors; and beyond them there might have been mountains. In the jade-grey wall of tree-cloud I could see a swirl of pale cherry blossoms. The sky was occupied by a narrow column of mist which rose up to touch a horizontal cloud.

  7

  Since my money was even now unexhausted, I descended to the lobby, paid for a second night, went out, bought three more bottles of sake, again selecting that special kind which offered such lovely speckles on its bamboo leaf, and returned to my room, which had been perfectly cleaned during the quarter-hour of my absence. Double-locking myself in, I slid the shoji panels apart, seated myself in one of those two chairs by the window, opened a bottle of sake and began to organize my paper figures. This took me all day. By evening I felt ready to remove them from their transparent envelopes.

  8

  Three of them were courtiers, with topknots of lacquered black paper. Upraising their red streamers, they showed me how sad it was when the Heike fled the capital, bearing off the Child Emperor (whom I had not purchased from the stationery shop, so I helped them represent him by means of a monogrammed envelope which I had taken from the reception desk). The tonsure of another far more aloof cutout identified him as the Cloistered Emperor who had commanded their removal from the scroll of visitors, and dispatched the Genji warriors to hunt them to death—hungry spirits, all of them, and as real as I once was. Lowering my ear, I learned that I could hear their murmurings. The Cloistered Emperor was whispering verses from the Golden Lotus Sutra. His bland voice reminded me of a poem about autumn wind.

  When the last Kamakura Regent was forced to commit suicide, his soul became as slender as a Japanese lady’s leg. He too was now a paper ghost, flat and stiff, with scallop shells and stars upon the night-indigo of his battle robe. Truth to tell, his epoch was so much later that he should have been sold in a different subdepartment. His topknot was lacquered shiny like the black taxicab which sighs across the castle bridge. He was the most melancholy heir of Yoritomo, who had destroyed the Heike as if they were insects.

  In matching transparent packets, four Genji warriors with eagle-feathered arrows in their quivers stood ready to whisper their names to the Heike, and behind them I laid out Shunkan the lonely Genji exile, whom the Heike refused to recall from his hunger-island; chief among their unforgivers I lined up the Priest-Premier Kiyomori, who in his narrow splendor was as foolish as a paper ghost who imagined that he had attained everything; while up against the paper screen I placed six Heike warriors mounted on their paper horses and dreaming aloud of the capital even as they cantered through the air; behind them I found a place for that longhaired Genji horsewoman named Tomoe, so fearsome with bow and sword; and beside her I stood Yukiko the Cherry Tree Ghost (another cutout from a later period), in care of Yoshitsune the Genji hero, who wore a battle robe of crimson brocade. On top of the unplugged refrigerator I positioned Yoritomo. Sometimes I was horrified by Yoritomo’s square white faceless head, his hair tied back with braided silver wires, but then I reminded myself that at their height the Heike had also been cruel.

  As feeble as cherry blossoms they all glided to and fro, so that my niche behind the shoji screen grew nearly as crowded as a modern Japanese graveyard. Of all of them the one I loved most was the Jade Lady Yokihi, that celestially beautiful inmate of the Island of Everlasting Pain. Her dance was a poem which achieved its effect by omitting the one line in which its context was stated.

  Rolling up my last thousand-yen note, I made a cone of it and inserted the tip in my ear. Then I could hear the paper ghosts whispering: Shigemori is dead. The Cloistered Emperor has passed away. Why cannot I succeed to the position of one of these?

  I heard the Cloistered Emperor chant: When the wooden lattice is darkened.

  And wherever Yokihi danced her Dance of Rainbow Skirts, the air beneath her tiny feet became illuminated, a miniature path to dreams.

  9

  In bygone days, when money still came to me as easily as air and the capital shone at Shikishima, a certain Pale Lady desired me, although I cared for her not; she shared my best friend’s pillow in order to gain my address, then appeared before me in tears and with disordered hair, begging to sleep in my arms. I consented out of pity. Even when I was penetrating her she kept enumerating other lovers; all she truly wished was to add my name to her scroll. Many seasons later, when the woman I loved had abandoned me (I remembered gathering all the cherry blossoms which had fallen into her disordered hair), and I grew so desperate to be held that anyone would have served, I went to my Pale Lady, entreating her to give me comfort in her arms, but she refused with smiling cruelty. Now here she was, crisply remade in a flash of crinkled gold paper. I could not help but recall how I had felt on that occasion, although fortunately my former grief reincarnated itself less viscerally than merely visually, as when a paper general cuts open his belly with his black paper sword, and scarlet paper shows behind the cut. Lowering my ear, I heard her imploring me to do something, in a voice as weak as an autumn cricket’s.

  At any rate, she put me in mind to wonder whether all these paper ladies represented old loves of mine, and, if so, whether the rest of them were likewise the paper ghosts of my past.

  The Pale Lady said: I dream of you as I once did.

  (In the past I had waited for dreams, while Nakano went treading her double path.)

  As for Yokihi, whom she represented or recapitulated I could not have said—perhaps Reiko or Michiko, although she might have been Mitsue. Her knee-length golden tassels tickled her pink-and-carmine robe, and her double mass of hair was ribbed with segments of both red and gold paper. Wondering and dreaming, I listened through my homemade ear trumpet and caught her murmuring: It is really impossible to compare my heart to anything.

  Yes, they all must have been foam from the past.

  10

  They began to dance and masquerade. That was when I realized that I had never known love or beauty before. The long red and gold stripes of Yokihi’s hair ornaments mad me explode with happiness. The Pale Lady took up a poisoned dagger and serenely glided across the floor.

  If you have ever seen the wine-tinged rainbows of autumn foliage reflected in a river at sunrise you may be able to imagine how lovely it became on the air-bridge they created. As I gazed up into the blossoming hills, my heart shouted with joy, and my memories passed across the window.

  11

  Now I was pretty much finished. Lacking the funds for drunkenness, I purchased a bag of squid-flavored potato chips and set out to join the headbanded, high-cheekboned beggarmen whose heavy sweater-sleeves came halfway down their hands and who warmed themselves with cigarettes and sake as they sat playing cards and guarding their cardboard flat of eggs from other eaters. At first they threatened and abused me, but I charmed them with my paper ghosts, who glided to and fro on eerie errands a hand’s breadth above the dirty sidewalk. No one could harm or catch them; they came only to me. The autumn winds might flutter them about, but between gusts they re-formed into vibrant arrays. I made my living by sitting on a piece of cardboard while they played around me, and passersby dropped coins into my hat. And so the money fell down upon me as easil
y as ever.

  All day I watched elegant women passing before me, silently admiring and critiquing their performances, for I had become not entirely inexperienced. One day I walked all the way to the new Kabuki-za, just to look upon the theatergoers as they waited in line. When they had all gone inside, so that I had the sidewalk to myself, I entertained myself inspecting the posters of the latest beautiful onnagatas. Then I window-shopped at the stationery establishment where I had bought Etsuko’s school uniform. Wishing to make gifts for my paper ghosts, I considered buying a pair of scissors. But which size was best? Wrinkling her nose, the clerk rushed out to the doorway and shooed me off.

  I never visited the place where I used to live, but once I took my paper ghosts into a cemetery, where Yokihi danced alone for herself and me and the twilight was shining on the white characters incised in the dark glossy crowd of graves.

  I missed Nakano more than I would have expected, which made me smile a little. As for Etsuko, I remembered how when she used to run into my arms her heartbeats reminded me of a ghost’s long and gentle fingers clasped together. Had some rich woman dropped a million yen in my cup, I would have wished to find the girl, and buy her more uniforms and notebooks; thankfully, this did not happen. By now those two had become a pair of painted cherry-ladies against a crimson ground, and my paper memories of them were softened by a cherry tree’s pink storm clouds on the verge of showering down its melting treasures.

  In time I grew known among all the edifices from VOICE BAR to GIANT ARENA, whose hopes, like everyone’s, had been tainted by death. For a backdrop I had houses, grubby little apartment towers and glittering corporate castles, all of which looked their best in the dusk. What mortal could fail to be allured by the flower-sleeve of Lady Yokihi, especially when she let down her hair to mingle with her gold tassels? Who could remain indifferent to the sufferings and machinations of the Cloistered Emperor? When I watched the glidings of my paper warrior-ghosts with their lacquered black topknots, I pretended that I too was brave and important, and the man who each day read yesterday’s newspaper all day, pretending not to be unemployed, told me that he had begun to dream of himself in jade armor laced with black silk string. Adoring the movements of the Cloistered Emperor, the former soapland employee imagined that someday he might be invited to pay a visit to the Paper Palace. And whenever Lady Yokihi danced, the homeless women who were my neighbors seemed to become court ladies weeping behind jade curtains.