Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa

by Benjamin Constable

  ‘I didn’t get it,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Blackpool’s the town next to Southport.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘What could there be at Blackpool that, in a joke, Gustave Eiffel could have gone to see for inspiration?’

  ‘Er, a tower?’

  ‘Hurray!’ I said, and we both laughed at my total comic failure.

  ‘Tell me another joke,’ she said. ‘This time I’ll get it, I promise, and I’ll laugh and you will be very funny indeed for my film.’

  ‘I don’t know any jokes,’ I said. ‘Can I see?’

  ‘OK,’ she whispered, and I reached out my hand towards the screen and that was the end.

  I went to the folder called ‘Things I Like’ to see whether there was anything about me in there. Inside were more folders than would fit on the screen and each was full of photographs. I waded patiently through snapshots of cities I couldn’t quite place. Flash photography of faces I didn’t know. Old people, young people, Asian people, white Europeans, black people, Native Americans, mountains, clocks, roads, gardens, plants, buildings, plants, buildings, flowers, buildings, towers. Stained-glass windows, Georgian windows, Napoleonic windows, shop windows, doors (big, small, double, ornate), gates, more people, churches, statues, windows, pillars, doors, Roman arches, doors, gardens, clocks, Gothic arches, windows.

  I liked the brainless tedium of looking through pictures of no importance to me. I scrolled through the images as fast as the computer would bring up the next one, moronically clicking on the right-hand arrow over and over until my legs felt as if they’d been on a long car journey. I got up and drank a glass of water, went to the toilet, then came back to my systematic trawling of the photographs. There were occasional pictures of me. Several where I was talking to people, some of them familiar, most not, during soirées I remember. I don’t remember the faces; I’m bad with faces. Even with people I know well. For example, Tomomi Ishikawa and I never met in a particular place and we had no allocated time. Sometimes we saw each other once or twice a week, sometimes once a month, sometimes less. But if I didn’t know where to look out for her, I couldn’t recognise her. She would do tests and walk by me in the street or sit at the next table to see whether I’d say hello. Most of the time, though, she would grin and wave so I would know it was her. I appreciated that. It reminded me of a thing. I went in the bag that follows me everywhere and got out a notebook, then scratched around for something to write with. All I could find was Tomomi Ishikawa’s on/offable pen. I did a quick scribble on the page to see whether it worked and the blue ink looked strange coming from my hand; I normally write in black.

  ‘Hey, how come you never recognise me?’ Tomomi Ishikawa asked. ‘I’m not sure whether I should be offended.’

  ‘Don’t take it personally,’ I said. ‘I can’t recognise anyone.’

  ‘I thought maybe all Japanese people look the same to you because we don’t have lots of distinguishing lines like you limeys.’

  I shifted in my seat with feigned discomfort and tried to catch my reflection in the window to see whether I was covered in lines. ‘I just hardly ever recognise faces,’ I said. ‘I once passed my mum in the street and she said hello. I smiled and carried on walking, I had no idea who she was.’

  ‘Really?’ Now her eyes lit up.

  ‘Really. I’ve got hundreds of embarrassing stories about not recognising people I ought to. Family, friends, famous people, dates—it’s never good not to recognise your date.’

  ‘You fucking freak.’ She burst out laughing. ‘That’s awesome. Have you always been like that or has it come on due to brain abuse?’

  ‘I’ve had it as long as I can remember,’ I said. ‘It’s all about context. If people act like they know me and they’re in the kind of place I might expect to see them then I’m usually OK. But out of context is a problem. People often get offended.’

  ‘Oh my God. Are you sure this isn’t something you’ve just made up so you can be different from everybody else?’

  ‘No, it’s a real thing. It’s called prosopagnosia.’

  ‘Wow, it must be real, it’s got a Greek name!’

  ‘Yeah, it might be Greek.’

  ‘Oh, it definitely is. “Prosopon” means “face” and “agnosia” means “not knowing”,’ she said. And then, ‘Wait, wait, wait, if you had a girlfriend you could have all the excitement of thinking you were sleeping with strangers, without any of the disadvantages, and all the comforts of a stable relationship.’

  I laughed. ‘It’s actually a bit like that.’

  ‘Oh my God, and it would be even better the other way around. You could use your proso thing as an excuse to sleep with loads of people on the basis that you thought they might be your girlfriend. I think you need to start putting out in a major way.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, unconvinced.

  ‘But it would be a waste not to,’ Tomomi Ishikawa insisted. ‘And besides, you’re single; it wouldn’t harm anybody. You have to sleep with thirty women this year. OK?’

  ‘Thirty sounds like a lot to me, but I’ll try.’

  ‘It’s not that many. Think about it: there are fifty-two weeks in a year so you have to sleep with one woman a week and there would be twenty-two weeks when you didn’t have to if you couldn’t find someone suitable.’

  ‘I don’t have to do anything, Butterfly. I’ll only sleep with people I want to. Anyway, why would I think that thirty women were my girlfriend if I was single?’

  ‘Oh, please, Ben Constable. Make an effort.’

  ‘OK, but only if it’s true love every time. It might actually be quite sad. My heart would be broken every week.’

  ‘Oh, oh, oh, wait—you could write an epic poem that would detail your heartbreaking encounters and explain that you are in fact a victim of love (not being able to recognise people), and I could have consumption and we could go and live in Italy!’

  ‘All right. You’ve convinced me.’

  ‘What, you’re going to do it? Really? Oh, I knew you would. Can I tell people?’

  I flicked through the pages of my notebook for the one Butterfly had filled with the word ‘prosopagnosia’ over and over without telling me, while I’d gone to the toilet or the bar or something. The words went along the lines and then round the side of the page, between the lines and upside down.

  21/2

  Tomomi Ishikawa’s Writing

  I looked at the folders: ‘My Brain’, ‘My Dead’, ‘My Paris’, ‘My Stuff’ and ‘Things I Like’. Again, I managed to resist the more gratifying titles and clicked on ‘My Paris’. There were fifty or so files. I looked at one called ‘Time for Everything’.

  When it comes to superlatives, Gare Saint-Lazare comes nail-bitingly close to deserving many, without ever quite getting a cigar. It’s one of Europe’s busiest stations, with rush-hour trains arriving and departing every thirty seconds. In passenger numbers it comes second in France with 100 million a year, and it’s Paris’s oldest station, although not the oldest in France.

  Originally opened in 1837, it was built to house the Paris end of the line serving the nearby town of Saint-Germainen-Laye, the current edifice was designed by Juste Lisch and completed in 1889 in time for the Universal Exhibition that year.

  For a period, Claude Monet was the station’s unofficial artist in residence. He was fascinated by the changing light and the clouds of steam.

  The façade overlooks two squares: the Cour de Rome and the Cour du Havre. The former is home to a striking glass-domed metro entrance by Jean-Marie Charpentier. Both squares have sculptures by Armand Pierre Fernandez, who worked under the chisel name of Arman and was one of the original signatories of the declaration of Nouveau Réalisme in 1960. Consigne à vie is a tower of precariously balanced suitcases in bronze. L’heure de tous is a collection of stopped clocks, each showing a different time.

  Tomomi Ishikawa saw Paris as a series of facts, dates and architects. She had obviously spent much of her spare time
researching. The next file I clicked on was called ‘Arcades’ and looked like this:

  By the middle of the nineteenth century, Paris had around a hundred and fifty covered streets (passages couverts). They are not uniquely Parisian—functionally descendants of the great bazaars of the Arab world and precursors to the modern mall—but the Parisian versions have in common an eerie and deserted feel, ghosts of an ill-remembered past. They are lined with small shops and covered by glass roofing, but unlike the later and grander arcades of Milan, Brussels, and Moscow, they are narrow and dimly lit.

  There are approximately twenty passages couverts accessible to the public (the rest were demolished to make way for Haussmann’s restructuring of the city in the 1850s). They frequently resist attempts to revitalize them and many, in their neglect, have taken on remarkable and unique identities. Passage du Ponceau in the 2nd arrondissement is dedicated solely to candy makers, Passage du Caire is predominantly occupied by clothing wholesalers, Passage Brady in the 10th is lined with Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi restaurants. It smells of spices and casts a doubt in one’s sense of place.

  These texts were all good and interesting, but they didn’t feel as if they were written for me. I backed out of ‘My Paris’ and allowed myself the satisfaction of clicking on ‘My Dead’. Inside there were seven folders named as follows: ‘Tracy’, ‘Jay’, ‘Daddy’, ‘Guy Bastide’, ‘Komori’, ‘Stranger’ and ‘Ben Constable’. Why was my name included in a folder called ‘My Dead’? I thought of all the times when I’ve lost a file because I’ve accidentally dragged and dropped it into another folder and not noticed. It’s not an everyday occurrence, but it does sometimes happen and can be frustrating. But I didn’t belong among the dead, that much was certain.

  In the ‘Ben Constable’ folder was a collection of files, all dated in the American format with the month first. They were emails either to or from me. Piles of them. This one was entitled ‘WORKING TO PLAN’:

  MR. CONSTABLE,

  Are we meeting today as planned? I’ll be waiting for you like Samuel Beckett with little idea of the day or even time. And if you arrive we can wait together. Am miserable, Ben Constable, but I won’t be when I see you.

  ISHIKAWA

  Why had Butterfly given me her computer? She knew I liked hers because it was shiny, but I had a computer already—albeit a little the worse for wear—and I had no urgent need of IT charity. She’d erased nearly everything, leaving just a selection of tat. Why was this for me? What was I supposed to do with a collection of photographs of buildings and people I don’t know? Some emails I already have stored in my email account? Extracts from a guidebook to Paris that she never got round to writing? Is this my inheritance? Thanks, Butterfly. There must be something for me in all this junk.

  I had a sudden idea and logged on to the Internet. Maybe the password to her email account was saved on the computer. Butterfly loved email. Her default account opened automatically. There were thirty-seven unopened emails. Customer service communications, phone bills and special offers. This was her account for official things, not personal letters. But the last unread email in her inbox (and thus the first posted) was from an address I recognised. I had received many emails from this sender. This was Butterfly’s real email account, where friends and personal business were kept. She’d sent something to herself.

  Well, Ben Constable, if you have started to suspect there is some vague and wayward method in the madness I have left for you, then you are smart as can be. Maybe though, you have not yet gone through enough of my shit to notice that there is a story here. These are pieces of a puzzle, and a quest. This is your call to adventure! The adventure is, unfortunately, not brilliantly worked out, so you may have to add your own details, pinches of salt to render more palatable the inconsistencies in my ill-conceived plot.

  Part of the reason I’ve gone to such lengths is the secret desire we all have to confess, and so part of the prize is to know me better (perhaps for worse), for much of what I have left you is spilled ink from my pen, giving form to the darkest corners of my conscience. But there is also an idea to draw you from what has seemed a long winter wrapped securely in the world of the known. Arise now, Sir Knight, for it is springtime and there are brave deeds to be performed, and I will be your faithful squire (though I hope the battles you fight are strictly with windmills and imaginary foe), and maybe you will win the beautiful Dulcinea, for the prize is the experience, the treasures are things to see, do, taste, smell; plus a small mass of written material that, maybe, you would use as inspiration for a novel, store as a keepsake, or burn to keep you warm on winter evenings when you’re writing in poverty in your garret room and dying of diphtheria, as I hope for the sake of your artistic credibility that you do. You deserve a romantic death, don’t you think?

  You are, of course, in no way bound to complete the labors I have set for you, but there is plenty here to keep you going should you feel so inclined. And I shall look down from heaven (or up from hell, more likely) and smile and laugh with you, like I am almost certainly doing right now as you read this. Shit, I hope you don’t find unnerving the thought that I’m in the room with you. Put that thing away, you dirty boy—no, only kidding; leave it out—no, sorry, I really am only kidding. I’ve taken this whole thing too far. Goddamn.

  Now, go back and read some of the stuff on my computer. There should be some ideas for things to do, not that I think you’re looking for things to do, but that’s the starting point.

  Butterfly.

  X O X M X Y X X X B X R X A X I X N X O X O X

  3

  Tomomi Ishikawa’s Apartment Is Mysteriously Cleared

  I left the computer and paced between the rooms. I stared longingly at my bed and thought about getting undressed to feel the crisp cotton cool against my skin. I thought of Butterfly’s ghost in the room with me and I was embarrassed at the thought of being naked. If she wanted to hang out even after death, surely it didn’t mean that she had to watch everything? Or maybe having attached oneself to a living person, ghosts are there for the whole ride and can’t get off, and she would be forced to witness even my most intimate and potentially embarrassing moments.

  I flopped down on the bed and tried not to think. I wondered whether she had cried when she did it, or if she was calm. I wondered whether there was a moment of panic when it was too late and she had a doubt, or changed her mind. I imagined her lying on her side facing me, her arms around the pillow with her head resting on it, her eyes watching me. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  I got up and put my shoes on. ‘I’m going to the shop,’ I told her. I washed my face and then ran down the stairs, out of the door and into the épicerie on the street below. The wine selection isn’t great, but I found a couple of bottles that seemed passable and bought them both.

  * * *

  The next time I woke it was morning and I was drunk and fully clothed. There was the pungent odour of a full ashtray by my bed, delicately more noxious for the half-finished glass of wine next to it. In the mirror my teeth were stained purple. I took the ashtray and the wineglass to the kitchen, then came back for the empty bottles. There was something unwholesome about having got drunk by myself, but under the circumstances I could allow myself to run off the rails a little. That’s what I wanted. To run off the rails.

  I showered and spent a good five minutes brushing my teeth until they were passably tooth-coloured again. I opened the windows and let the cold air blow in, leaving the curtains closed. I got back into bed, still damp, and slept.

  * * *

  When I woke again it was three in the afternoon. I didn’t feel drunk anymore and I had a towel wrapped round my waist. I got up and slipped on some shorts without exposing myself. Damn it, Butterfly. I don’t even believe in ghosts or the afterlife or anything, but I still turned my back to the room as I pulled on my jeans.

  I would have liked some instant food, but there was nothing. I chopped shallots and mushrooms and fried them quickly with lardons and
plenty of black pepper. I stirred in crème fraîche and waited for water to boil for spaghetti. I mixed the sauce and pasta, threw in a raw egg, sprinkled Parmesan and gorged a big bowlful. It wasn’t quality but at least there was quantity, and with a similar amount left in the pan I wouldn’t have to think about making food for the rest of the day. I finished the grapefruit juice.

  I sat down on my bed and indulged myself in the fantasy of letting my life go to ruin. I’d like to let everything fall apart and become a tramp, and live in the street and die from hypothermia one winter’s night in a couple of years. I cleaned the kitchen sink and washed the floor. Next, I scrubbed the toilet, the shower, and the bathroom floor. I got out the vacuum cleaner and whisked round the apartment. In the living room, Butterfly’s computer was watching me. I turned it on and looked in the ‘My Brain’ folder.

  I drank half a bottle of pastis to get myself drunk, but rather than achieve the cloudy abandon I so desired, I passed directly to the hangover I knew I’d regret before I even started. Now it is 3:20 a.m. and my head is throbbing. I recommend consuming more than just yogurt before hitting the hard liquor. An unlit cigarette hangs from my lips. To my left is a tumbler still containing a healthy couple of fingers, to my right an ashtray, between the two, my loquacious hands flutter on the keyboard. Flrrrrr.

  I write out of habit, Ben Constable, much like people who talk just to hear their own voices. This is not for you, today you are just the named outlet valve for my brain, an imaginary person to listen to my wandering thoughts.

  If I should die and you should live . . . I can’t sleep. I keep dropping off, sitting, standing, and the sandman comes to give me dreams, but I recognize him. He is the reaper come to take me, and I wake in fear because, for all I long for death, I run from it like the coward I am. I drink in the hope of one day finding the courage to let go.

  If I should die and you should live and time should gurgle on . . . my head nods involuntarily, and as my consciousness slides the image of a place comes to mind. I wonder whether you know it. As you walk down from Gambetta there is a small leafy island, where many roads meet. One of them runs down alongside Père Lachaise and two rise steeply, then drop off, cutting their continuation from view so you could imagine anything over their horizon, plunging cliffs or the sea. And there he is, the sandman standing, calling me, and my body spasms back to life with a jolt. To the right there used to run a street called rue de la Cloche (which, as you know, means bell). The eponymous cloche is not from a church, nor does it toll from the nearby cemetery, it is a dome hollowed out beneath the ground where the bedrock has been dissolved by subterranean streams. They demolished the street and its neighbors to prevent it subsiding. I’m sure there is a lesson to be learned there.