Graveyard of Memories

by Barry Eisler

I walked over to the bathroom door. I could see her in profile. She was leaning forward, her arms across her breasts. Japanese baths are typically part of an integrated shower room—an enclosed space with a tub on one side and an equally large area for showering alongside it. This makes it easier to shower and get clean before getting in the tub, which is a requirement in Japan and, in my opinion, in all other civilized places, as well. I’ve never understood the idea of soaking in a tub full of the grime floating off your body. On the other hand, a half hour earlier, I had deliberately pissed my own pants, so maybe my opinion on these things shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Anyway, Sayaka had left the chair in the shower area alongside the tub, her clothes piled under it. I realized she would do her showering in the tub—it would be easier sitting in the tub itself, and also left the shower area for the wheelchair. And indeed, there were handles installed in the walls and a rope pulley dangling from the ceiling, all obviously designed to make her passage to and from the tub easier. To make it possible at all.

  “Can you turn the light out in the living room?” she said. “It’s still too light here.”

  “Do you have a candle?”

  “Just an emergency candle, under the sink in the kitchen.”

  “I’ll be right back.” I found the candle, lit it on the stove, and set it down in the sink outside the shower/bath room. Then I turned out the light in the living room and came back in. The light was nice like this. I pulled off my wet pants, then my shirt, then my underwear, and pushed it all under the wheelchair. I was as hard as any twenty-year-old about to get in a bath with a girl can be, which is to say, painfully hard. She glanced at me, then looked away. I felt as embarrassed as I thought she must be.

  “What’s easier?” I said. “Should I get behind you?”

  She nodded, her arms still crossed over her breasts.

  I eased in behind her, doing my best not to stab her in the back. She handed me the shower wand. The water was running, but she hadn’t yet put in the drain plug. I wet my body, soaped up as best as I could under the circumstances, and rinsed off. I put the wand down and gently soaped her back. “Is it okay?” I said.

  “Yes,” she whispered. I rinsed her back, then lathered up my hands again and did her shoulders. I pulled her against me and slowly leaned back. I kissed her neck, her ear, and she turned her head and we stayed like that for a few minutes, just kissing. She was still covering her breasts. I soaped her arms, and then, very gently, eased them away from her body. She resisted for just a second, then let me. I started soaping her breasts, and if I thought I’d been painfully hard earlier, this made it nearly unbearable. Every time my fingers glided over her nipples she would moan into my mouth and it was making me so crazy my balls started to ache. I soaped her throat and her belly and she started rubbing against me, using her arms on my legs to move herself back and forth in a way I was afraid would make me come if she didn’t stop. Yeah, what can I say, twenty years old. It’s a trade-off.

  My hand went lower and I started touching her, rubbing and stroking, my fingers sliding back and forth along her soapy hair. “Is it okay?” I said, breathing hard.

  “I can’t…I can’t feel you down there. But everything feels good. Everything.”

  “Are you sure? Because…you’re really wet.”

  “I am?”

  “Yeah. Here.” I rinsed our hands and the front of her body. She touched herself and looked at me. “I…but I can’t feel it.”

  “Come here,” I said. I pulled her back into me. We kissed and I started touching her again. She was so wet my fingers slid easily inside. “Can you feel that?”

  “I’m not…I don’t think so.”

  “My finger’s inside you. I’m moving it. In and out.” Jesus, saying it out loud was such a turn-on I couldn’t believe it. With my free hand, I started rubbing her breasts again.

  “Are you serious?” She reached down and felt alongside my hand, her fingers intertwining with mine. “Oh. Oh. I don’t know, I can’t feel it, but it’s making me feel good. I don’t understand. But…God, you’re making me feel good.”

  She started rubbing against me the way she had been, panting, pressing into me, kissing me. I put my free hand on her throat and kissed her harder. Her soapy back sliding up and down my cock felt insanely good, like a mild, undulating electric shock. I was embarrassed I was going to come like that. I whispered, “Sayaka, if you keep moving like that, I’m…I’m going to…you’re going to make me come.”

  “Really?” she said, turning a bit and looking at me and continuing to slide slowly up and down. “I can make you come like this?”

  “Yes,” I whispered, looking into her eyes.

  “Oh, I want you to. I want to feel you coming. Come for me. Come from me doing this.”

  At that point, it didn’t matter what she said—I couldn’t have stopped myself if I’d tried. I felt my balls contract and my cock jump and there was an explosion of molten pleasure, and I cried out and gripped her throat and looked into her eyes, and my hips started moving involuntarily as though we were fucking and the look on her face was beyond beautiful, and she said, “Oh, you’re coming, oh, oh, oh,” and she reached across and cupped my face while my orgasm went on and on. I was embarrassed I was coming on her back like that but she kept sliding up and down and she was so excited she was panting, and I just thought Fuck it and stopped caring whether I should be embarrassed, it felt too good and if she wasn’t why should I be?

  When it was finally done, I sagged against the back of the tub, spent and bewildered. I didn’t know what I’d been imagining when I proposed the bath—something, I guess—but not that. Sayaka turned to her side and snuggled into me. I stroked her hair and slowly caught my breath. She rubbed my chest and said, “Was that good?”

  “Are you kidding? Could you not tell?”

  She laughed. “I want to hear you say it.”

  “It was incredible. The way you were moving…it was making me crazy. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? For what?”

  “Well…I think I got it all over you.”

  She laughed. “I want you to do it again.”

  My head spun. “Oh, man. If you say so.”

  We rinsed off, then filled the tub and lay there talking and laughing until the water started to cool. She told me where to get a fresh pad for her wheelchair, and I threw the dirty one and all our clothes in the washing machine. When I was done, she was in bed, under a light quilt. She said, “You’re staying, right?”

  “Unless you’re kicking me out. But you know I don’t have anywhere else to go, so that would be cruel.”

  She laughed. “It’s a small bed, but…”

  “I think we’ll manage.” I got in next to her. We lay on our sides kissing. I was hard in about zero-point-two seconds. Yeah, twenty years old.

  She said, “Is it okay…I want to touch it.”

  I kissed her and stroked her cheek. “You can do anything you want.”

  She reached down and her fingers curled around me. “Oh. That’s what it feels like. It’s nice. I like it.”

  “Oh, man, I do, too.”

  She laughed. Her other arm disappeared beneath the quilt. A moment later, she held up a glistening finger and looked at it in wonder. “I’m wet,” she said.

  I licked her finger and she gasped. She said, “Can you…can you be inside me? I want to see if I can feel it.”

  I nodded. “Here. Let’s get you on your back.” I moved her legs and got between them. They were as limp and shrunken as she had said, but I didn’t care. I barely noticed. I put my weight on my elbows and looked in her eyes. “You do it,” I said. “Guide me.”

  And she did. I held very still while she got the feel of things and moved at her own pace. After a minute with me maybe an inch inside, she said, “I can’t feel it, but it feels good. I can’t explain. Can you push a little?”

  I laughed a little breathlessly. “I’ve been trying not to. Here, is that okay?”

  The feeling
of her fingers wrapped around me even as I slid deeper into her was glorious, intoxicating. “It’s good,” she said. “Push more.”

  I did. She said, “I don’t understand. I can’t feel it there, but I can feel it everywhere. God, it’s lovely.”

  “Oh, good. It’s lovely for me, too.” I moved a little faster, deeper. I was starting to breathe hard.

  She pulled the quilt off us and turned her head to the side to watch. “Oh, that’s so good,” she said. “Seeing you do that. God, that’s so beautiful.”

  Having her watch like that, experience me moving inside her with her hand and her eyes, was insanely erotic. Panting, I said, “I think…I think I have to stop.”

  “Yes, stop. Don’t come inside me. Even if I can’t feel it, I can still get pregnant.”

  With difficulty, I slowed down.

  “But I want you to,” she went on. “Next time, with a condom, I want to feel that, okay?”

  “Oh, God, yes. Ask me anything.”

  She laughed and I managed to pull out just in time. She said, “Did you come?”

  I shook my head. “No. Almost, but no.”

  She reached down and started moving her hand up and down my shaft. “Oh, God,” I said. “God.”

  She was looking right into my eyes. “I want to make you come again.”

  “Oh, fuck…you are…” I groaned, and came on her belly to the firm rhythm of her hand.

  When I was done, I collapsed onto my side next to her. She reached down to her belly, then brought her finger to her lips. For an instant, she seemed to remember herself, and looked suddenly self-conscious. “I wanted…to see what you taste like,” she said.

  I shook my head slowly, watching her in wonder, absolutely speechless.

  She slid her finger into her mouth and smiled. “It’s good.”

  “Oh, I can’t tell you how glad that makes me.”

  She laughed. “When you were inside me, I couldn’t feel it…but at the same time, I could. And now I feel…I can’t explain it. So relaxed. Like something really good happened to me. Like I had a wonderful dream I can’t quite remember. It’s so strange. So…God, it’s so lovely.”

  I looked at her, saying nothing, just spent and happy and feeling I was halfway in love. She said, “Tell me what you’re thinking?”

  “No, it’s stupid.”

  “Tell me.”

  “That…the way you trusted me tonight. With everything. And this was your first time. I’m just…blown away.”

  She nodded. “Me, too.”

  “I don’t want you to be embarrassed with me, okay? Your legs, or whatever. None of it bothers me.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Well, you’ve been doing pretty well so far.”

  “Have I? I guess you’ll have to get me into bed more often. I want to try everything with you, okay? Everything.”

  And for the rest of the night, we did. To this day, it was the best night of my life.

  chapter

  twenty-three

  We slept late the next morning, having been up and active pretty much the entire night before, and also as sleeping in was Sayaka’s habit. When we woke, she had to get to class and I needed to go meet McGraw. But I told her I’d see her at the hotel that night.

  “You know,” she said, “if you really need a place to stay, you could stay here.”

  I couldn’t very well tell her that right then, money was the least of my problems. “I don’t know,” I said. “I feel like I’d be imposing.”

  “You wouldn’t. Not if you’d be willing to stay up with me for a while when I get home from work.”

  I laughed. “How about if tonight, I stay at the hotel, and I go home with you after? And then we’ll see.”

  She smiled. “That sounds good.”

  I stopped at a shoe store and bought new shoes and socks. The proprietor, a grizzled oyaji who looked liked he’d seen just about everything in his time, was either too polite or too jaded or both to ask why the ones I had on smelled like a urinal. I told him I’d just wear the new pair out of the store. He nodded and didn’t offer to dispose of the ones I was replacing, and I did him the courtesy of not asking, instead finding a trash can outside.

  After I’d returned the van, I headed out to Inokashira, a heavily forested park in the west of the city and the place where McGraw had said he wanted to meet. Inokashira was a huge cherry blossom attraction in the spring, when people liked to take paddleboats up and down the eponymous pond at its center, to better delight in the blossoms extending on either shore all the way down to the waterline. The shrine, located in the northwest of the pond, was dedicated to Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of everything that flows—water, music, words, knowledge. For whatever reason, Saraswati was known as Benzaiten in Japanese, where she was revered as a Shinto deity, as well.

  I crossed the bridge to the bright red shrine—a fusion of Chinese, Indian, and Japanese styles. A few tourists milled about, and I saw a couple of Japanese families enjoying a morning outing. McGraw was there already, predictably enough, taking pictures, dressed in slacks and a polo shirt, looking like a birdwatcher or amateur photographer. He was carrying the usual shoulder bag—looked like it was time for another delivery to Miyamoto. He saw me and walked over.

  “Son, you are a goddamn one-man slaughterhouse, did anyone ever tell you that?”

  Seeing McGraw right after leaving Sayaka was surreal. Like two parallel dimensions suddenly brushing into contact with each other. “Not in those words, no.”

  “Well, what words did they use?”

  “Something about my having a temper.”

  He laughed. “Is that what you call it? Four yakuza, shot to death in Fukumoto’s house. One of them one of his captains.”

  “What do the police think?”

  “From what I hear, the working theory is a Vietnamese gang and a dispute over drug trafficking. The Vietnamese gangs have a reputation for violence, and Christ almighty, whoever did this is about as violent as you could ask for.”

  For whatever reason, I had the feeling he was baiting me. Surprisingly, I didn’t care. He had something I wanted. Beyond that, at the moment he didn’t matter.

  “Say, I meant to ask you something,” he said, mopping his brow. “How did you know about Benzaiten? I make it my business to know these places, because they’re out of the way and good for meetings, but this is hardly Kaminarimon in Asakusa.”

  “My mother was American.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning a lot of what the natives take for granted, a visitor treasures.”

  “So it was your American mother who made you aware of your Japanese heritage?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “Odd.”

  I shrugged. “Didn’t you say we’re sometimes defined by our paradoxes?”

  He nodded. “I did say that, didn’t I? Didn’t realize it was true.”

  I didn’t care whether it was true or not. I just wanted to get down to business and get this thing finished and behind me. “So? Where’s the file?”

  He set the bag on the ground. I would pick it up when we were done. “We’ll get to that,” he said. “First, Miyamoto will be waiting for you tomorrow at noon in the lobby of the New Otani Hotel.”

  “Okay.”

  He glanced at the shoulder bag I was carrying and frowned. “Two bags…looks a little odd.”

  “It’s temporary.”

  “So is life.”

  There was an odd pause. I thought it was strange he wasn’t going on to micromanage me about how to do the exchange—follow Miyamoto into a restroom, slide the bags under the stalls, whatever. Or saying anything snide about my tradecraft or lack thereof. I’d gotten so used to his bullshit, its absence was mildly disconcerting.

  After a moment, he said, “Can’t you see you’re too good to be just a goddamn bagman?”

  I was surprised. “It’s honest work,” I said, not knowing where he was going.

  He chuckled.
“Look, I know I ride you hard—”

  “Yeah. You do.”

  “Well, why shouldn’t I? What are you? A glorified errand boy. You want me to respect the guy who shines my shoes, too?”

  I said nothing.

  “You want respect? Do something worthy of respect. Look, I’ll admit it, I was wrong about you. I didn’t think you could step up. But Jesus Christ almighty, was I wrong. I was a bad manager, I put you in the wrong role. Now I see where you belong, see what you were made for, and it’s impressing the hell out of me. In the right role, you’re exceptional. You move fast, you show good judgment, and damn but you’re fucking deadly. I could use a man like you, I really could. Talent like yours is rare.”

  I didn’t like the I, and I didn’t like the use. “Maybe I just got lucky.”

  He snorted. “Luck is a skill, son. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

  “Don’t call me son.”

  “Don’t be just a bagman.”

  I don’t know why I was so reluctant. Maybe some part of me sensed I was being manipulated. Maybe some part of me recognized that any further, and the water would be over my head. Maybe I just wanted time to think.

  Or maybe it was the promise of what I might be able to have with Sayaka, if only I could get clear of this shit.

  “Let me just say this,” he said. “This program you’ve been involved in. What you think you know is just the tip of the iceberg. It needs to be managed and I need good people to manage it.”

  Again, that I. “I’ll think about it.”

  “You should.”

  “In the meantime, you owe me a file.”

  “Look, forget about Mad Dog. I’ll find another way to take care of him. Maybe he can be bought off, let me look into it.”

  “You’re saying a guy named Mad Dog can be bought off? You told me this is about honor.”

  “Yeah, and some people’s honor is more expensive than others’. I don’t know Mad Dog’s price—do you?”

  “No.”

  “Besides, if the Gokumatsu-gumi thinks it’s under attack by some ultraviolent Vietnamese gang, Junior’s apt to be careful for a while.”

  “You said he was a fuck-up.”