Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa

by Benjamin Constable

  If I should die and you should live and time should gurgle on, and morn should beam and noon should burn as it has usually done . . . Emily Dickinson has infected my brain (although I can’t remember the rest of that particular poem). Oh, Emily Dickinson, what have you done to me? Look at me holed up writing diaries and letters and hiding from the world. Is this what you would have had me become? Who am I kidding that I could sit around writing and regain my innocence like trying to regrow virginity? I do not measure up to my literary heroes. Maybe that’s why I turned bad. Maybe that’s why I must die and life can carry on much better without me. I only hope that there is no eternity. To think that we would have to forever live and never cease to be.

  It’s still 3:20 a.m. and I don’t know whether stopped time exists to impede my coming fate or to emulate it. Did you know that Paris has many stopped clocks? There is the clock in the form of a dragon-slaying knight in the Quartier de l’Horloge—its two faces do not agree on the moment at which time should stand still. Another favorite is the clock hidden behind the church of Notre-Dame de Bonne Nouvelle in the Sentier. And as you open the box of my delights after my demise, you will see many stopped clocks. Which reminds me of my mission before these words so rudely interrupted it. I need to find places to hide things for you. What have we got? Stopped clocks? Places from dreams. Hmmm . . . I have an idea.

  I’m going to stop writing. I feel happy to be hanging out with my imaginary you, but there are things to do to avoid self-pity and that terrifying sandman calling me to sleep, but I will not come, no, not yet.

  This was a bit like a letter addressed to me that had never been sent. I wondered how many pieces of writing like this could exist somewhere in the world. I stretched out on the sofa and the sandman came to haunt me for the umpteenth time that weekend. It was Sunday evening. I had the opposite problem to Tomomi Ishikawa. I had spent no more than ten hours awake since I got home from work on Friday.

  * * *

  Early-morning grey shone through the curtains. I could hear rain so I left them closed. I ate the rest of yesterday’s carbonara cold from the pan and I wished I’d saved some grapefruit juice. I thought of going back to bed, but there were insistent questions I wanted answers to. Where was Tomomi Ishikawa’s body? Had she committed seppuku and was she lying in a bloody mess somewhere? Who else knew about this and how could I contact them? I checked her email again. There were another ten unread messages from nobody of interest. Then I checked my own email.

  There were twenty-two new messages, including three from my work which I thought best to ignore, seeing as it was Monday and I hadn’t gone in and my phone was off (I would ring up later and tell them I was sick). One of the messages was from Tomomi Ishikawa posted at 18.24 on Friday. That’s the time that I was coming out of the metro on my way home, a few minutes before I received her letter. A few minutes before everything changed. It said:

  Here is a Parisian enigma for you: How do you walk from rue du Faubourg Montmartre to the Palais Royal on a rainy day without getting wet? (Et in Arcadia ego.)

  B. X O X

  Something was wrong. I got out Friday’s letter and scanned through to check. And it was there, clear as day: ‘By the time these pages find your hands I will have been dead for a few hours.’ These pages had found my hands on Friday at six thirty-something, and the email was sent on Friday at six twenty-four. Not possible. Tomomi Ishikawa was dead when she sent that message. That left four possibilities:

  1. Tomomi Ishikawa was not dead when she sent the email. Maybe there had been some kind of delay and she wasn’t able to kill herself at the exact moment she had planned. Or the sword had somehow missed her vital organs and she was busily recovering in hospital.

  2. Somebody else had sent it, either by Tomomi Ishikawa’s explicit instruction or by the person’s own volition, pretending to be Butterfly.

  3. There was some kind of delay either with my email account or with hers.

  4. By supernatural force Tomomi Ishikawa had sent me a message from beyond the grave.

  I couldn’t stop my brain racing. What if Tomomi Ishikawa was not dead? Why would she have lied to me? What if she was in trouble? Maybe there was a clue in her writing that only I could decipher, and I should go and save her or at least get help? Maybe she was trying to make a fool of me or hurt me. Perhaps she just didn’t like me. I opened the curtains and looked out at the steady strings of falling water. I needed to stop my brain from thinking. Sudden and immediate sleep was one option, but I was getting bored of sleep.

  I put on my shoes and coat, then took the metro to Grands Boulevards and walked up rue du Faubourg Montmartre in the pouring rain. A few hundred yards on the left I found the entrance to Passage Verdeau. I had been here before, with Tomomi Ishikawa. The grey light shone dimly through the glass-panelled ceiling. It was a sleepy and lonely place. I came out the other end, dashed across rue de la Grange Batelière and went into Passage Jouffroy. Yellow lights shone from the shops that were open, their windows filled with ancient objects. Others were closed or unoccupied. A handful of damp tourists had ducked in, sheltering from the rain. They stared at the entrance to the waxworks museum. They were the only other people in Tomomi Ishikawa’s tiny covered streets. Back at the boulevard, I crossed and went into Passage des Panoramas. That Paris, in all its imperial grandeur, should have a shabby selection of arcades, small and fading, is something I love. The world of money has not yet managed to make everything fit the mould of success.

  I came out at another street but there was no entrance opposite to go down. I would have to choose left or right on open-topped streets. The rain was starting to soak through my clothes. Galleries Vivienne (the most glamorous Parisian arcade) was the next covered street I could think of in this direction but it was a fair way off. How do you walk from rue du Faubourg Montmartre to Palais Royal without getting wet? Take an umbrella, I guess. Which reminded me that I had just passed an umbrella shop. I walked back through the twilit street and the rain drummed heavily on the glass roof until I came to the tiny shop offering restored vintage umbrellas and a repair service. A bell sounded as I opened the door.

  A woman with messy brown hair stood up. ‘Bonjour,’ she said, as a reflex and then, ‘Oh, hello.’ She sounded surprised.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, unsure how she could know I spoke English.

  ‘Hold on a second,’ she said, with just the faintest of accents. She rummaged under the counter and produced an umbrella-shaped package and handed it to me. ‘This is for you.’

  I was so taken aback that I couldn’t speak for a couple of seconds. ‘I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.’

  ‘Oh.’ She hastily pulled the umbrella-shaped package back towards her. ‘I’m sorry, I thought you were Ben Constable.’

  ‘I am Ben Constable.’ I was kind of plaintive and confused.

  ‘Your American friend said you would look through the window one rainy day and that if I spotted you I should give you this.’ She held out the umbrella again and smiled.

  ‘But I don’t want an umbrella.’ I didn’t mean to be rude, but I seemed to have been reduced to expressing just the most basic of ideas.

  ‘It’s paid for. It’s yours.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Have we met already?’

  ‘No. She showed me a picture of you. That’s how I knew what you would look like.’

  She smiled at me politely and I hesitantly took the package and tore through the paper. There was a full-length wooden-handled umbrella, and a card with my name on it.

  ‘When was she here?’ I asked.

  ‘Last week. Thursday, I think,’ said the woman.

  I opened the envelope and there was a sheet of notepaper with a quickly scribbled message in block capitals:

  THIS IS TO KEEP YOU DRY AS YOU DASH BETWEEN ARCADES ON YOUR WAY TO THE PALAIS ROYAL, OR ON ANY RAINY-DAY EXCURSION YOU CARE TO TAKE. NOW, HERE IS ANOTHER RIDDLE: WHICH TELLS THE TIME MORE PRECISELY, A CLOCK THAT IS A MINUTE FAST, OR ONE THAT HAS STOPPE
D?

  Easy. The clock a minute fast never tells the right time. The stopped clock is exactly right twice a day. The clock on the wall in Butterfly’s apartment was where I needed to look.

  I climbed the narrow wooden stairs and knocked on Tomomi Ishikawa’s door, then, without waiting, put the key in and turned it. Cat wasn’t with me; that was OK. Before I could even see inside I could hear that the acoustics had changed.

  The stopped clock was not on the wall. There was no note for me on the table. There was no table. There were no chairs. In the bedroom there was no chest of drawers, no mirror, there was nothing in the built-in cupboards, there was no bed. There were no plants and no pictures on the walls. There were no books on the shelves, and no shelves. The fridge was empty, but at least there was still a fridge. There was no fruit, no fruit bowl, there was no towel in the bathroom and the shower tray was dry. The apartment was completely empty. I hadn’t expected that.

  4

  Tomomi Ishikawa’s Dead

  ‘You look like a lady,’ I said, inviting myself to sit at a table with a woman drinking red wine and scribbling on loose sheets of notepaper. She was almost certainly Tomomi Ishikawa, but I couldn’t be totally sure.

  ‘Oh, hey,’ she said, leaning forwards to kiss my cheeks, ‘I am a lady.’ It was definitely her.

  ‘You ain’t no lady,’ I said, and we both laughed. ‘But you’re all dressed up and wearing makeup. I didn’t recognise you.’

  ‘I felt like a change.’ She dismissed me, but I wasn’t satisfied.

  ‘You don’t normally feel like dressing up like a lady, though. What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m bored of being me,’ she said. I felt triumphant having extracted the truth. ‘I want to reinvent myself.’

  ‘OK. But I quite liked you before,’ I said. ‘I mean, I like you now as well, even though I don’t really know the reinvented you yet, but I’m sure you’re very nice. I’m just saying that I thought you were very nice before. I shall miss the old you.’

  She was silent and just stared at me and I saw her eyes were full of tears. I turned to catch the attention of the man known affectionately to Tomomi Ishikawa as Our Waiter and ordered a beer. She lit a cigarette.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Why do you want to reinvent yourself?’

  She sighed. ‘When I look at my life, and everything that’s happened, I want it all to not exist. I’ve done nothing I’m proud of. I want to start again from scratch and be different.’

  On Monday, March 19, 2007, I abandoned Tomomi Ishikawa. The empty apartment was a merciless assault on my friendship, not a wake-up call or a slap across the face; I was held down and beaten, then forced to watch as something simple and precious was ripped from my loving protection. Tomomi Ishikawa had destroyed something of mine and my only possible revenge was to forget her and live on. On Tuesday, March 20, I got up and went to work. I didn’t think about stopped clocks or hidden mysteries. My mind no longer absently queried the whereabouts of Tomomi Ishikawa’s body or how she’d killed herself. It was over.

  Curiously it didn’t take a lot of effort. I worked in the day, spent my evenings with friends and went home drunk most nights. The spring came and went and Paris disappeared off on holiday to the coast. My work shut down for a month and I found myself alone and sober with nothing to do.

  I was fresher in the mornings. I cooked proper meals and read books in the afternoon, stretched out with warm air blowing in through the open window. Cat showed up now and then. He lounged and dozed in the sun and I started doing the same, sleeping whenever I felt like it. If I had been running from something, I had caught up with myself and I started to suspect that I was happy.

  Then one day in August my computer broke. I switched it on and the screen was blue and nothing I did could make it work. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world. I didn’t use it for much and anything important was backed up on an external hard drive, but now that it was gone I wanted it. I could have had it repaired but it was old and the keys stuck and the fan rattled. I had the money for a new one. But there was Tomomi Ishikawa’s shiny laptop gathering dust, standing on its side against my bookcase. Perhaps it was the right time. Perhaps I was ready to admit the memory of Butterfly back into my life.

  I lifted the lid and turned on her computer.

  I made a new folder for my things and opened a new file to write in and let my fingers do the remembering.

  ‘So, what would you like in your new life?’ I asked Tomomi Ishikawa.

  ‘Money,’ she said. I was disappointed but pretended not to be.

  ‘And do you have a surefire moneymaking scheme?’

  ‘No, not really. I thought I could start by dressing better and doing my hair and nails to see whether it brought in some cash.’

  ‘You mean like becoming a prostitute?’

  ‘No, but money attracts money, so perhaps you have to act like you’ve got it in order for it to come to you.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Maybe. But perhaps it would be good to have a plan B that involves you being slightly more proactive.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Er, robbing a bank.’ She laughed like someone who didn’t find me funny but was trying to be polite. ‘And bank robbery is great for reinvention because so long as you don’t manage to pull off the perfect job (and with us running the show that would almost certainly be the case), the feds’ll be looking for you everywhere, so you’d be obliged not to keep any of your old life. You can’t go to any of your usual places or be in contact with anybody you know.’

  ‘That sounds good,’ she said with a definite lack of enthusiasm.

  ‘The bad thing is that afterwards you’ll only have me to hang out with.’

  ‘Who says that you’re not part of the past I’m trying to get rid of?’

  I stopped in my tracks. I hadn’t considered that I could be part of anybody’s problem. And if I was, why the hell was she meeting me for a drink? I decided that she was rude.

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t have to meet me. I’ve got better things to do than come and have you say I make you feel bad.’

  ‘No, I’m really sorry. I didn’t want to make you feel like that. I’ve got so many doubts at the moment. You’re the only person I can tell this kind of stuff to. It just came out wrong.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, and took a big swig of my beer.

  ‘I wouldn’t normally want to rob a bank,’ she said, ‘but it would be fun with you.’ She was backtracking. ‘What would you do with your share of the money?’

  I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to play anymore. ‘I’d buy a boat,’ I said. It’s like playing word association. You don’t think about the answer; you just say whatever comes out of your mouth.

  ‘And live a life of luxury on the Riviera?’

  ‘No, I’d be a pirate.’

  ‘Oh, you could have an eye patch and wear a tricorne hat!’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. It’s not a fancy-dress party. I’d be the laughingstock of the pirating community. This is the twenty-first century.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘But I just liked the idea of you having an appropriate costume. Oh, wait wait wait . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ll be able to have lots of women of different nationalities.’

  ‘What, thirty?’

  ‘At least thirty. You’d have a woman in every port and then occasional affairs with feisty maidens on the boats that you pillage, who fall for your mean pirating ways and bad manners.’

  ‘Do I have bad manners?’

  ‘I’m sure you could learn some.’ I couldn’t help smiling. ‘Sorry. I guess I’m not always very sensitive,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Saying that you looked like a lady.’

  ‘Ben Constable, you are a problem because I can tell you stuff, and that’s a bit like feeding my own misery. Sometimes you just ignore me and talk about stupid things like
robbing banks, which is good. My shit needs ignoring, not nourishing.’

  ‘But you have to deal with your shit as well. I guess it’s about timing.’

  ‘I’d love to tell you all my shit sometime, but . . .’

  ‘But then you’d have to kill me?’

  ‘Something would have to give.’

  ‘Maybe we should plan a bank robbery instead. Can we dig a tunnel?’

  ‘Hey, Paris is full of tunnels,’ she said. ‘There might be one already there we could use.’

  I stopped writing and got up and stretched, then looked in the fridge for something to snack on. I sat down, crunching on a raw carrot, and started looking through the computer. Like a big, dark magnet, the folder called ‘My Dead’ drew me towards it. I clicked on a folder called ‘Stranger’. Inside there was a single file dated 09-11-2001. I double-clicked.

  This story is a secret. You can’t have it just like that. There’s a time for everything. First you have to follow the clues, then you find the treasure.

  I went into Butterfly’s ‘My Paris’ folder and clicked on the file called ‘Time for Everything’. It talked about a statue at Saint-Lazare made out of stopped clocks. I knew that statue. I’d seen it before. I dug out the envelope from the umbrella shop with the riddle. The first time I’d thought of the statue, but Butterfly’s apartment had seemed a more probable hiding place and I had dismissed the statue as unimportant. Now I knew something was hidden there for me.