The Earthquake Bird

by Susanna Jones

  Kameyama is very busy wherever he is and does not reappear for a while. Oguchi bows his head and scribbles something on a notepad. I am left to wonder at my future, and what control I now have. I think of Teiji and how, if he were here with me, I would not care what happened next. But it’s nicer to reflect on the past, and more useful. If I think of what has already happened, I can start to make out how the past became the present, how my friendships turned to nothing, and why I’m here.

  I picture Teiji sitting opposite me in Oguchi’s chair, taking my hand and stroking the tips of my fingers, caressing them like soft cool water. I shiver at the imagined sensation and that is enough to take me back to Shinjuku, the place where I first saw him. That night I believed he was made of rain and nothing else.

  I was wandering around central Tokyo. It was soon after Mrs. Yamamoto’s string quartet had disbanded and I was now at a loss every Sunday evening. I came to the famous skyscrapers of Nishi-Shinjuku and had every intention of walking straight past. Guidebook writers are enthralled by this Blade Runner setting of futuristic buildings, but to Lucy’s mind they are nothing more than dull hotels, banks, and government offices that happen to be very high and cast long shadows. Exciting if you’re standing on the fifty-second floor, a crick in the neck if you’re on the pavement. It was raining steadily and I was the only person not bothering to use an umbrella. Umbrellas are cumbersome and a menace to the streets with their inhuman span and sharp, dangerous spokes. Lucy’s skin is waterproof and her clothes can always be dried.

  A young man stood in front of the Keio Plaza Hotel, with streams of umbrella-wielding people passing him on both sides. He was leaning over a puddle, apparently taking photographs of it. Water slid over his hair and face but he seemed not to notice. His camera clicked and he moved fluidly to the other side of the puddle. I stared. He appeared to be made of water and ice. I had never seen a man with such delicate fingers, sharp brittle shoulder blades, transparent brown eyes. He glinted in the neon dark more sharply than the vast ice sculptures of the Sapporo Festival I had marveled at when I first came to Japan. He was an exhibit of the Tokyo night and so beautiful that I couldn’t walk past him.

  I went to his puddle and looked in to see what had captivated him. The reflection of the Keio Plaza Hotel divided the dirty water into two. On one side were shiny windows and lights, on the other, darkness and a couple of cigarette butts floating. To my eyes the stubby ends looked like people jumping from the hotel windows, but he was looking deeper into the puddle than I could see. I took a small step forward so that the tips of my shoes entered the water and were reflected over the hotel. He didn’t look up. He shifted around the puddle with the camera against his eye all the time. Then he shot the picture, including my feet. I kept my position and he lifted his head to look at me. His eyes searched my face as if he couldn’t quite find what he wanted. He put his camera back to his eye and looked at me through the viewfinder, like a child peering through an empty toilet-paper tube to see the world in another way. And the camera clicked and flashed. Those were the first pictures he took of me. I have never seen them.

  The moment was so intimate that I knew it must be followed by an even deeper intimacy. After all, I had flirtatiously invited myself into his photograph. He had led me in and captured me with a single snap. My feet and face were now inside his camera. He had got me inside him and the next step was obvious, though brazen.

  We may have spoken, but if we did, I don’t remember it. I don’t even remember the point at which I knew where we were going. I believe that we walked together in silence. We could hardly afford a room at the Keio Plaza—no one can—and so we headed to his apartment in Shin-Okubo. It is a walk of about twenty minutes but another part of Tokyo altogether. We left the neon towers and entered backstreet Tokyo. Old houses nestled between small apartment buildings. Narrow gray streets were lined with tiny shops and bars. Orange lanterns decorated cheap eating houses. Alley cats hissed at dogs that barked from balconies. We passed many puddles but he took no more photographs until we reached his apartment.

  I can hear the click of his key in the door. Then, in lamp-light and with the curtains open, he took one final picture. It was of my naked body. I was kneeling on the bed, leaning back, waiting to become beautiful under his touch. I didn’t mind being looked at through the camera. It had more kindness than a naked eye. A camera can’t blink or sneer, at least not when the picture is taken. It saves its opinion until the film is developed.

  And then Teiji closed his eyes. He did not open them again until much later and I like to believe it was because the image of my body was framed under each eyelid. He was watching that still image when I crawled on top of his ice body, rocked him back and forth until the ice turned to water and his icicle penis melted inside me. I stayed in my position long after our breathing had slowed, wondering how this had happened so easily. Then I lifted myself off his slender frame, pink and aching inside and outside with something that felt unusually close to joy.

  Since his eyes were closed and the room was light, I took the opportunity to look around the space to acquaint myself better with this man. The room was like a large closet. His clothes hung from the walls, blue and gray sweaters, soft T-shirts, old trousers, and a pair of jeans. There was a tie hanging over the curtain rod but it was covered in dust and I could see no shirt that it could be worn with. There was no bookcase, just piles of books stacked high. I could not see the titles. On top of the books were piles of CDs. There was a large begonia in the corner of the room with a pair of swimming goggles entwined among the leaves. There were three or four cameras strewn on the floor, two cardboard boxes full of camera shop envelopes. But there were no photographs on display anywhere. The walls were painted white, a little dirty. Apart from his clothes they were bare. The curtains twitched against them in the night breeze, bluish white.

  We must have slept, but I don’t remember. In the morning, he took me to the small noodle restaurant where he worked. I learned later that it belonged to his uncle and he would inherit it one day. It wasn’t open yet but we sat behind the scratched wooden counter at the back of the shop and drank tall glasses of iced barley tea. A small fan on the wall behind me turned noisily from side to side, blowing cold air down the back of my neck. We didn’t look at each other. Our bodies touched, side by side, and I absorbed his warmth, made it mine.

  Oguchi is watching me now. He pours me a glass of water and I am grateful for this apparent token of kindness, though for all I know it is a right written into the Japanese constitution. I am hot. I dip my fingers into the glass, smear cold water across my face. He seems to take this as a sign that the ice is broken.

  “You have been in Japan a long time. Nine years?”

  Is this part of the official questioning or is he chatting me up? I’m not certain. Surely he should be recording everything I say, to be used in evidence against me.

  “Ten.”

  “What brought you here?”

  This is more like it. I have been asked this question fifty thousand times in ten years. I don’t have an honest answer because there isn’t one, or I am not honest enough to think of it. But I have a few pat answers for when I’m asked. This is a special occasion and so I use all of them.

  “An interest in Japanese culture, I wanted to study the language, I needed to save some money, I wanted to see the world, I wanted to get away from dreary old England, I like tofu.” I am enjoying this so I ad lib and give him a few more. “Chopsticks are lighter than knives and forks and are held in the same hand—you don’t get that metallic taste, the trains are so much better here, both reasonably priced and reliable, sumo wrestlers have beautiful calves although their thighs can be too dimply for my liking. It’s so clever the way you can pay your bills at a convenience store instead of having to wait until the banks are open and then being late for work. The irises are beautiful in May, just as good as the puffy pink cherry blossoms that people go on and on about like they do with geisha who are not so speci
al when you look at them close up because you can see their spots even through all that makeup, schoolgirls on the trains are always laughing, I can’t stand my family.”

  I can see he is not sure where to take this. I am a little surprised, and rather impressed, by my fluent collection. I’ll be quiet now. I will not tell Oguchi anything more than he asks for, because everything else I say will lead to Lily. I will have a job convincing the police that I am innocent, but one thing is indisputable. If Lily had never met me, she would be alive now.

  The facts of Lily’s death, as far as I know at this stage in the interview, are few and easily open to misinterpretation. She had been in Tokyo for several months when one night she disappeared. A few days later the torso of a young woman was fished out of Tokyo Bay, with a couple of unattached but matching limbs, I forget which ones. Although the police were unable to make an official identification because there were no hands and so no fingerprints, it seemed to be widely accepted that the body was Lily’s. As you know, my connection with the event was that she had been seen knocking on the door of my apartment earlier in the evening of her disappearance. My neighbor saw the door open, spotted me in the doorway speaking angrily to Lily, and saw Lily walking away. Then she watched as I followed a few minutes later, carrying a bundle. This is certainly a lie. Why didn’t she say that she saw me tuck a revolver into my shirt after closing the front door? Or that I held a dagger before me as I walked? I have never denied the other facts though I have chosen not to detail the conversation we had at that time.

  One of the suspects was Lily’s ex-boyfriend, though unless he was using a fake passport and traveling very quickly, it seems that he was back in England with a foolproof alibi, worse luck for me. On the day in question he was captured on closed-circuit television, entering a chip shop in Goole and asking for cod and chips with a pickled egg for lunch. He fiddled with the hem of his anorak and scratched his ear before reaching into the pocket of his jeans for a couple of pound coins. The other main suspect is the usual Mr. X who shows up in dark alleyways at night in every country in the world to remind us, by what he does to a woman’s body, that the definition of a human being includes that which is not human.

  Without further evidence it is hard to imagine what progress the police could have made. I don’t suppose my friend is going to tell me, until I give him something more about Lily. I remain silent; my thoughts return to Teiji.

  The morning after our first encounter I awoke early, scribbled my address on a scrap of paper and left it under his camera before we went to the noodle shop. I didn’t write my telephone number. I wanted him to come and find me.

  The doorbell rang while I was in the shower. A week had passed since our first meeting. I could tell from the sound of the bell—less sudden than usual, a quietly confident ring—that it was Teiji’s soft fingertip pushing the button, so I didn’t bother to pick up a towel. I opened the door more narrowly than usual—even then I knew my neighbor was nosy—and let Teiji slip through.

  If only I could remember what he said to me. He might have told me I was beautiful, for I’m sure that he did say so sometimes. He may have exclaimed upon finding me so perfectly, nakedly prepared for him. Perhaps I don’t remember what he said that day because perhaps he said nothing. It may have been that we went straight into my room where we fell immediately into lovemaking. And afterward, with a sheet around me, I looked into his camera while it snapped up my image. We could have done all this without a single word. And yet, if he never spoke, how did I even know that his name was Teiji?

  But every time I remember Teiji what I am doing is not remembering Lily. It’s all wrong. I still have not introduced Lily, not properly. I have been putting it off, hoping she would walk in of her own accord. But I was wrong. She is already here, you see. She is there in the shadows of the room’s corners, in the buzzing of the light over my head, the fruit fly at the corner of my vision that may just be a speck in my eye. When I lean forward my hair flops over my left temple and then I know Lily is inside my face. Sometimes I feel I am walking not quite like myself—my steps are shorter, quicker, a scuttle, almost—and so I know she’s got into my legs too.

  * * *

  I blink and realize that Kameyama has returned and together he and Oguchi are staring at me.

  “You can’t just sit and gaze into space. You will have to tell me about Bridges-san. It won’t do to sit here all night and not tell me anything. You knew her well. We already know that.”

  “Yes, I did.” But not well enough. That is all.

  Kameyama shouts questions at me, one after another. I close my eyes and ears. I see and hear nothing.

  2

  I met Lily in a bar in Shibuya. It was only a few months ago, though it seems longer. She was with Bob, the teacher I’d become acquainted with in a dentist’s waiting room, and some other English teachers, and I did not want to be there. I rarely socialized with other foreigners, and since I’d started seeing Teiji I had no desire or need to see anyone else. But Bob had called to ask me especially.

  “There’s a new woman working at the British bar I go to, Lucy. Well, girl really. She’s a bag of nerves. She’s never been abroad before and she looks as if she’s just landed on the moon. I don’t know how she’s going to cope.”

  “Oh.” What was it to me?

  “She needs help. I mean, she needs to find an apartment. She’s living in a seedy gaijin house now with some real assholes and she’s the only woman. If she doesn’t get out soon, I think she’ll crack up.”

  “It’s not hard to find an apartment. I’ve done it.”

  “Lily doesn’t speak a word of Japanese.”

  An unusual name. I liked it. “So can’t you help her?”

  “I thought you’d be able to help. You found your place on your own so you know what’s around and what to look for. Besides, your Japanese is better than anyone else’s. It was just an idea.”

  “It sounds more like a plan than an idea.” But I am a Leo and respond well to flattery. Bob had won my help.

  “Will you come out for a drink with us on Friday? We’re going to an izakaya in Shibuya. Just meet her, yeah? If you don’t want to go around to real-estate agents with her, at least you could give her some advice.”

  It’s not that I’m so ungenerous as a rule but I wanted to spend every minute of my time with Teiji, or by myself, thinking about Teiji. There was no space for this wimpish woman. Lily. I imagined a tall, beautiful woman with pale skin and a long white neck. She’d be in a corner of the bar sipping gin and tonic from an elegant glass. She would look at me and smile serenely. Beautiful women are always pleased to look at me. My dark eyes are too piercing to be beautiful. I am the ugliness that defines their beauty. For that matter, men are pleased to look at me too. They think, I may not get a supermodel, but at least I know I can do better than get her. You could say, then, that I have a unique beauty; people like to look at my face, they like me to be around for aesthetic reasons. I envied Lily before I’d seen her.

  I entered the bar and found the English teachers sitting in a corner, talking loudly about work. Lily was the only one of the group I didn’t know. She did have pale skin but she was short and jagged, all elbows and knees. She had a large tuft of dyed auburn hair that rose an inch or so from her head and then flopped over her left eye. Her eyes were dark, like mine, but without expression. They sat beneath her eyebrows like two fat plums. She peered at me from under the tuft. Her eyes and fingers twitched. She was attractive, but also slightly comical and instead of envying her, I found myself smiling.

  “’Ello.”

  I located her accent immediately, to East Yorkshire. I am no Professor Higgins, it just happens that she sounded exactly like the girls I was at school with. Years of traveling, speaking other languages, and trying to disassociate myself from my origins have left me with no traces of my original accent. I speak in a neutral, hard-to-locate voice, and it suits me very well. I have no patience with people who carry their accent l
ike a flag or anthem, determined to assault you with their provincial jingoism.

  Lily smiled at me, then twitched and fiddled with her fringe.

  “I like this Japanese beer,” she said to me. “It’s great.”

  “I’ll have Guinness. When did you arrive?”

  “Here? The pub? Tonight?”

  “No. Japan.”

  “Oh.” She dropped cigarette ash on her lap and brushed it clumsily with her fingers. Her hands were shaking slightly. “Last Friday. To be honest I never thought I’d get here and now that I am I’m not really sure why, you know.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s like, I’ve got to get used to a new home, a new language, everything. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, you know, everybody else really seems to fit in. This is my first night off and I’m all at sea.”

  “You’ve only just got here. Of course it’s hard at first. What brought you to Japan?”

  “I was in a relationship that ended. My boyfriend, Andy, I left him, you see.”

  I thought she was about to start crying. She flicked her tuft off her face and lowered her voice, as if to let me in on a secret.

  “Well, I had to. We were going to get married but it all went horrible. And I was in a terrible state and I decided I just had to leave, you know. You see, he was very possessive and even though I don’t think he liked me very much, he still followed me around sometimes, to make sure I didn’t have fun with anyone else. I really don’t know what he thought I was doing. So I wanted to escape from him, but it wasn’t just that. I wanted to start things all over again so I thought I’d travel, you know, see the world and that.”