The Nicholas Linnear Novels (181 page)

Into the ringing silence Dr. Hanami said in Japanese, “Perhaps some tea is called for.”

When faced with a crisis, Nicholas thought, fall back on the old traditions. The rage was so strong inside him that he was trembling. He watched Dr. Hanami ring through on his intercom, order the tea. When it came, on a black lacquer tray, the surgeon dismissed his receptionist, set about brewing the tea himself; taking pinches of the cut green leaves, dropping them into the boiling water, using the reed whisk at just the right speed to stir up the froth, turning the tiny porcelain cup around and around to ensure an even distribution.

There was something soothing, even comforting about the process. Its orderliness, its lack of spontaneity, its formality, even its stylized movements, served to bring a sense of normalcy—of the patient procession of past to present to future—firmly into focus.

Nicholas felt himself relaxing, the enormous tension that had built up overnight dissipating like air leaking from a punctured tire. He sank back by degrees into the chair.

At that moment Dr. Hanami served him the tea. When they had both drained their cups, the surgeon said, “Now, from the beginning, tell me everything.”

“I want to talk about some details of the subject’s history that have, until now, eluded me.” Dr. Muku said this as soon as Senjin sat down.

It was unlike Dr. Muku to seize the initiative in these psychoanalytic sessions. Senjin was like those strange and eerie fish that live near the bottom of the sea, that see without light and, often, without eyes. He knew without having been given any visible sign that Dr. Muku was coming close to the truth.

Senjin was quite certain that the psychiatrist had begun to suspect that there was no psychopathic “subject” and, further, that this mythical “subject” was, in fact, Senjin himself.

There were, of course, dangers inherent in his knowledge. But even had Senjin suddenly stood up and confessed everything, Dr. Muku would be helpless to do anything about it. Certainly, he was constrained by the dictates of his profession from divulging anything they had discussed. Senjin had made it clear in their first session that whatever information exchanged hands was strictly confidential and could not be repeated outside the confines of the room in which they met.

Dr. Muku had readily—if, in retrospect, somewhat foolhardily—agreed, as Senjin suspected would be his wont. Now the relationship between them had taken on a new and, to Senjin’s way of thinking, exciting dimension. There was a subtle struggle for control forming between the two of them, a kind of skirmish line as yet amorphous and, therefore, mutable.

It was akin to living on the edge, the length of cloth twisted around Senjin’s neck, being pulled tighter by Dr. Muku’s pudgy hands as the two men drew closer in a deadly dance. Senjin felt himself growing hard. A pulse in the side of his forehead beat a hasty rhythm with the heating of his blood. This kind of lethal game was what he lived for.

“For instance,” Dr. Muku was saying, “what kind of upbringing did the subject receive? Was his family life normal?”

“What do you mean by ‘normal’?” Senjin could not keep the sneering tone out of his voice. “Doesn’t psychology shun the term ‘normal’ as being false?”

“Psychology might,” Dr. Muku said in an assuring tone, “but psychotherapy may not. It all depends.” He provided Senjin with a smile so contrived that, as far as Senjin was concerned, he might just as well have said,
You should know. You’re not normal, are you, Senjin-san?
“Of course,” Dr. Muku went on amiably, “you’re right. In the abstract—that is, statistically—there is always a norm. However, the real world is quite different. Still, it is often the case that psychosis has its roots in early family life. And here, for the purpose of our discussion, we may use the word ‘normal,’ because I would be willing to bet that our subject did
not
have a normal upbringing.”

Senjin sat forward. “In what way?”

Dr. Muku shrugged. “Perhaps his mother was a whore, or he believes that she abandoned him in some way. This would account for his obsession with Kiyohime and the demon woman.” Dr. Muku shrugged. Because they were sitting in the small, close room, facing one another, and because Dr. Muku’s back was to the window, his face was in half shadow. In that soft light Dr. Muku’s face seemed made of putty. “Our subject could even have harbored incestuous feelings toward his mother. That kind of guilt would be too heavy a burden for a child’s developing psyche to bear. It would be natural for him to ‘get rid’ of those unwanted feelings by projecting them outward, away from him, by turning them into something else—namely, the innate evil of the female. He would conveniently believe that his mother caused, by action or word, those taboo sexual feelings.” Dr. Muku’s eyes glittered behind his round glasses. “Is any of this making sense? Does it have a familiar ring?”

“How would I know?” Senjin said blandly.

“Well, you are far more familiar with the subject than I am.”

“Am I?” Senjin raised his eyebrows. “I’m beginning to wonder if either of us know him sufficiently.”

Dr. Muku shifted in his chair. “What makes you say that, Senjin-san?”

“Well, for one thing, the mystery of sex. That is, the suspect hasn’t, to my knowledge, raped any of his victims.”

“Yet they have all been women, his victims, yes?”

“Yes,” Senjin lied.

“All young. All beautiful.” Dr. Muku was nodding at the appropriate visual prompts Senjin was giving him. “Well, he must have come close. Very close. It is just a matter of time before he spills his seed over them.” Dr. Muku pointed, as if Senjin were, indeed, the subject. “You see, our friend must feel that the act of ejaculation is akin to pulling the trigger of a gun. He’ll see his ejaculate as the bullets.”

Senjin sat very still. “You’re very sure of yourself, Doctor.”

Dr. Muku shrugged again. “Nothing is sure in my field, Senjin-san. One tries merely to make the proper educated guesses. Like a detective, I carefully walk amidst the rubble of a ruined psyche. I imagine that my modus operandi is quite similar to yours at a murder site. We are both looking for clues that will allow us to piece together the whos and whys that led to tragedy. And in order to solve the mystery, don’t you sometimes take a leap of faith or two?”

Senjin recognized the direction in which this was going. Not only had Dr. Muku begun questioning him, instead of the other way around, but the psychiatrist was also bringing Senjin himself directly into the conversation.
We are both
…and
don’t you sometimes
…This methodology was part of the clever interrogator’s procedure of involving his subject in the interrogation in order to elicit truthful answers to his questions.

Senjin said, “I have found that the leaps of faith of the kind you describe are best left to films and novels where an author controls the destiny of all the characters.”

Dr. Muku cocked his head, looking at Senjin quizzically. “But is it not the same here in real life? Life controls our karma. Surely our destiny is not in our own hands.”

Senjin smiled. The balance of power had begun to shift, if ever so subtly. The more Dr. Muku continued in the interrogation, the more sure of himself he became, the more he revealed of his own strategy and the less threatening he became, the less control he maintained over the situation.

It was time, Senjin thought, to further enlighten the doctor. “Muku-san,” he said, “have you ever heard of Kshira?”

“No. I don’t believe I have.”

“Kshira is a form of physical and mental discipline,” Senjin said. “But it is more encompassing man even a philosophy. It is its own reality. Kshira is the language of the sound-light continuum.”

Dr. Muku blinked. “The what?”

Senjin lit a cigarette, but he didn’t seem to draw on it deeply or often. “The sound-light continuum,” Senjin repeated. “You have no doubt heard of
ki,
the underlying energy of all things—humans, animals, the sea, the forests, the earth itself. Well, the Kshira
sensei
have made a remarkable discovery, and it is this: that there are different forms of
ki.
By recognizing them, and harnessing them in series, an engine of enormous psychic and physical energy is created.”

Senjin could see that Dr. Muku was skeptical. That was hardly surprising. When it came to the human mind, Dr. Muku was locked within the severely limited framework of modern analytical thought. He was, to Senjin’s way of thinking, a pathetic cripple, unable to comprehend anything save what he had been taught at school.

“The thing about Kshira,” Senjin said, suddenly leaning forward, “is that it is infinitely malleable.” He took a puff on his cigarette and it began to sizzle, bursting with an odd blue-white incendiary glow.

Senjin’s left hand covered Dr. Muku’s face before the psychiatrist had a chance to react. Senjin’s thumb rifted Dr. Muku’s glasses off the bridge of his nose. The metal slid in the sweat sheen breaking out on the psychiatrist’s forehead.

Then Senjin jabbed the glowing end of his cigarette directly into Dr. Muku’s left eye. His left hand, fingers spread like a spider across the doctor’s face, held Dr. Muku implacably in place.

Dr. Muku’s arms flailed at Senjin as the phosphorus-impregnated cigarette burned even more deeply into his eye socket. He began to wail, an eerie, stifled sound that was more a vibration emanating from his throat.

Watching him as if he were an electronic image on a TV screen, Senjin smiled. “The ‘subject,’” he said in Dr. Muku’s ear, “has not killed only women. Young women, beautiful women.” He was throwing the psychiatrist’s words back at him. “You were wrong, Doctor. About me. About everything.”

There was a smell in the room, emanating from Dr. Muku, and Senjin’s tongue appeared between his parted lips, curling slightly, questing for more of the scent. It was the stench of death.

Senjin shifted his gaze, staring into Dr. Muku’s wildly rolling right eye. Tears were streaming from it, and with one finger, Senjin wiped them away. The pupil was dilated, as if the psychiatrist were an addict. Senjin wished that Dr. Muku could tell him what the pain, the fear, were like. Surely his analytical brain could make sense of the chaos, could separate the rage of sensation into easily recognizable components.

“Muku-san, what is it?” Senjin asked. “What is happening to you?”

There was an entire world in that one teary eye, defined by agony, detailed with the increments of knowledge at the approach of death.

Then the eye fixed on something even Senjin could not see.

Dr. Muku, burning still from the phosphorus embedded in his skull, lay slumped against the back of his chair. He looked quite relaxed now, Senjin thought.

Senjin reached past the body, jerked open the drawer of the wooden side table. He grunted, extracting the mini tape recorder. The reels were slowly churning, faithfully recording every word, every sound uttered in the room. Senjin had suspected that the doctor had begun taping their sessions as soon as Senjin had given him enough clues for him to form his opinion that Senjin and the “subject” were one and the same.

Senjin depressed the stop button, pocketed the device. Then he looked at Dr. Muku. “You’ll never know how wrong you really were,” he said.

With slitted eyes he looked into the blinding sun of his memory, remembering each aftermath of the Kabuki play,
Musume Dojoji.
How he would treat his dates to an expensive dinner, encourage them to dissect the psychological motivations of the two major characters. And how, sated on these odd appetizers, he would then proceed to the main course, the slow, aching, erotic discipline of murder.

Senjin pulled the curtains on that lambent sunlight, bent, hefted the corpse onto his shoulder. In a way, he thought, it was a pity that Dr. Muku could no longer answer him. But then again, Dr. Muku still had another—more important—service to perform.

Clearly, Dr. Hanami did not believe him. Nicholas had finished his account, starting with his vague feelings of unease in the hospital after the operation, his trying and failing to stem the postoperative pain, to the events of the last twenty-four hours, which proved conclusively that he had lost the use of
Getsumei no michi
and every other aspect of the martial arts he had painstakingly learned over the years.

Dr. Hanami had sat back, steepled his fingers, and said with absolute finality, “But my dear Mr. Linnear, what you are suggesting is patently impossible. You may well
think
that you have, as you say, lost these admittedly remarkable abilities, but let me assure you that you have not.”

He extracted a set of X rays from Nicholas’s file, turned and snapped them into place against a pair of light boxes mounted on the wall behind his desk. He switched the boxes on. “See here”—he pointed to a shadow—“is where the tumor lay, along the second temporal convolution, just above the hippocampal fissure. You can see its outline here.” He switched his attention to the second X ray. “Now here we are after the operation. As you can see, there is a perfect fitting of the folds. The surrounding area was left absolutely undisturbed. Of this there can be no question, Mr. Linnear. None at all.”

“Then what happened to me, Doctor?”

Dr. Hanami considered this for some time. Very deliberately, he switched off the light boxes, pulled the X-ray film down, slid them back into the folder. Then he closed the file, clasped his hands over the top. “It’s difficult in these cases to be certain, but it seems to me that we could begin by asking not what happened to you, but rather, what
is happening
to you.” Dr. Hanami smiled encouragingly. “After a major operation of this nature it is not at all abnormal for the patient to believe that some part of him has been excised along with the nonbeneficial tissue.” He drew a small pad toward him, scribbled a name and a phone number. He ripped off the sheet, gave it to Nicholas.

“What is this?”

“Dr. Muku is preeminent in the field of psychotherapy, Mr. Linnear. His office is right across the—”

“That’s what you think I need?” Nicholas said, incredulous. “A psychiatrist?”

“Given your present emotional state, I think it would be highly bene—”