The Nicholas Linnear Novels (52 page)

We’re well away from there, Nicholas thought. Such strictly business-oriented places, like parts of downtown Tokyo, made him nervous. Like airports, they all had a frightening similarity that cut across language and even race. He never knew where he was in airports—he could be anywhere at all in the world and never know it. Train stations, however, were quite different. Oddly enough, there were no two alike that he had seen and this kind of old-world individualism was comforting to him. Of course, on trains, one could look out the window and see far more than just gray clouds like wisps of an old man’s beard, parting like gossamer. What held the goddamned thing up, anyway?

He tore his eyes away from the ribboning land, glanced around the car. The passengers, too, on this train were different. The last businessman had debarked at Kobe and now, all around him, he watched the people of the land. A man in blue overalls and thick-soled, high-topped shoes sat with his thickly callused hands crossed over his lean belly, chin on his chest, legs stretched out, ankles crossed. He had very short hair which was white and a stiff-looking mustache which was black. A farm worker, perhaps, on his way home. Across the car, a fat woman in a bright white and crimson kimono slept peacefully with her mouth open and the breath hissing in and out. Beside her, a squat stack of brown-paper-wrapped parcels. Two kids in Western clothes knelt, arms and elbows along the seat top, making faces at anyone who passed.

“… in the back.”

“What?”

“Nicholas, have you been listening to me?”

“No. I’m sorry. I was thinking about the Bunraku.”

She laughed. “You mean the way I jerked you off.”

“I don’t,” he said, “understand why you feel you have to talk like a sailor. Why, for example, must you say ‘fuck’ instead of ‘make love’?”

“Because,” she answered seriously, “‘fuck’ is exactly what I mean. Have you ever
made love
, Nicholas? Tell me what it’s like.”

“I make love to you.”

“What are you talking about? We
fuck
like bunnies.”

“I don’t even think that is what you do.”

“Oh no?” Her tone rose slightly. “Listen, Nicholas, I fuck you the way I fuck everyone else. You know what I do with you? Well, I do it with other men, too. With Saigō, for instance.” Now why did she bring him up? “I come on the edge of his hand, against the instep of his foot, his tongue and his nose, his—”

“All right!” he cried. “Enough! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

She rubbed herself against him, began to purr like a giant cat. “Me? I’m just trying to get you excited, that’s all. You weren’t paying attention to me and I—”

“Jesus!” he said,” getting up. “Is that the way?” He went roughly past her, out into the aisle to the end of the car, stood watching through two sets of glass at the jouncing car behind his. Christ, he thought, did she think telling him about her past conquests would turn him on? What a twisted idea. He felt cold and slightly nauseated. He braced himself against the swaying with a stiff arm against the door frame.

On his right a town flashed by, becoming smaller as they pulled away toward the southeast. He glanced at his watch, calculating distances and speed. That should be Kurashiki. Good. They were but moments away from sighting the northern end of Seto Naikai, the Inland Sea, which he had always found so peaceful and calm during the summers his parents had taken him there as a child.

They plummeted through thick stands of tall gaunt pines, the car darkening abruptly and eerily as if they were in the midst of an eclipse. Then, just as swiftly, the sun broke through again and the foliage fell sharply away on the right, revealing the high bluff along which they raced. Below them, Seto Naikai, glittery with sunlight, dancing like ten thousand golden scimitars, a jewel field.

He watched, transfixed at the sight. But still. Part of his mind was in a film. This was the point when Yukio should come silently up behind him, put her arms around him and tell him she was sorry. This was no film and it never seemed to happen to him that way. And why should he expect it? He did, nevertheless. The eternal romantic.

Islands, so far from home, humpbacked and flat-faced, stretched one after another across the waters of the Inland Sea, all the way to the horizon. Was there really, as he had been told as a child, more land, than water here? He could not say and he thought then that it did not matter. They looked like pieces of intricate knitting, these islands, terraced to make them productive; usable land was at a premium in Japan.

One day, he thought, I would like to spend my time just traveling from one island to another, talking to the people there, sitting down to eat with them after helping them in the terraced fields, spending a night here and there. I think that if I did that, I’d probably live out my life and die before I got to the last one. What an idea! Never to go back, only forward. Each day different from the one before and the one after. Never to get tired; never to get bored. As he was now? Awfully young to feel this way, he mused. But he knew that he was not bored or tired but merely feeling the symptoms of each, hiding what he really felt.

Fear.

In Hiroshima it was a completely different story. In the bay, above which they passed like a wisp of smoke, they saw Miyajima, marked by the great orange and black
torii
, the gate of the Itsukushima Shrine. It was one of the most spectacular sights in all the islands, one that he had seen many pictures of but, until now, had never seen in person.

It hung there as if in midair, rising out of the tidal waters like a great three-dimensional cuneiform character written upon the world, mark of the old Japan, a warning never to forget the past.

The train seemed to stand, huffing, for a long time in the Hiroshima Station. All about them were the squat ugly industrial structures dominated by a kind of incandescent silence hanging in the air, as thin and brittle as a robin’s egg.

The seat facing them, long vacant through the afternoon, was taken by a gaunt, spare man in a gray and brown kimono. His head was hairless save for a few wisps of white beard hanging from the point of his narrow chin. His skin seemed as translucent as parchment, stretched across high cheekbones, but underneath his eyes and at the sides of his mouth one could see the masses of wrinkles like the vast accumulation of the years, an ancient tree whose age one could count by the number of rings in its flesh.

His eyes were bright chips as he nodded to them. His hands were lost within the folds of his formal robe.

Soon after, the train gave a little lurch and they began to move slowly out of the station. On the way out, the feeling of oppression only magnified as if all the air had been sucked away and what remained to breathe, if only they would open the window and stick their heads out, was the frosty vacuum of space. They might have been on another planet.

Nicholas felt a creeping in his flesh and he looked out the window, upward into the bright porcelain sky, certain he had heard the heavy drone of an airplane.

The train moved with unutterable slowness through the city. For a moment they could see, silhouetted against the near horizon, the shell of the old observatory, standing just as it had been left in 1945, its surmounting hemisphere a bird’s-nest skeleton, a lonely, forbidding eyrie for the gulls that swooped low near it but would never touch its inimical skin. Perhaps even after all this time they could still feel the incendiary heat, the hissed outpouring of radiation, carrying it in their bones like a race memory, the survival instinct.

“You want to know the real me?” Yukio said into his ear as they both stared at the only monument to what had happened here such a short / long time ago. “There. You see it. That is what I am like inside. What you see on the outside is all that’s left standing.”

Now he thought she had become maudlin, turning full circle from her usual sardonic tough-as-nails stance. But, he thought, it was this dichotomy that most intrigued him about her. And he did not for a moment think she was as uncomplicated as she made out. He knew that to be a defense—her ultimate defense perhaps. Still, he could not stop himself from wondering what manner of unfamiliar territory lay beyond the stone wall she had so effectively erected.

Streamers of cloud flew obliquely across the sky as they left Hiroshima behind, seemingly to begin from the ground, reaching up into the very heart of heaven.

“Pardon me,” said the old man across from them. “Please excuse this intrusion but I could not help wondering.”

He paused and Nicholas was obliged to ask him, “What were you wondering?”

“If you have ever been to Hiroshima.”

“No,” Nicholas said and Yukio shook her head.

“I didn’t think so,” the old man said. “In any case, you would be too young to remember the old city, to have seen it before the annihilation.”

“Did you?” Yukio asked.

“Oh yes.” He smiled, almost wistfully, and when he did, the wrinkles seemed to fade from his face. “Yes, Hiroshima was my home. Once. That seems very far away now, I think. Almost as if it were part of another life.” He smiled again. “And in an important way it was.”

“Where were you,” Nicholas said, “when it happened?”

“Oh, I was away in the hills.” He nodded. “Yes, safely away from the fireball. Trees shook miles away and the earth convulsed as if in pain. There was never anything like it. A wound in the universe. It went beyond the death of man or animal or even civilization.”

Nicholas wanted to ask the old man what it was that went beyond all those things but he could not bring himself to do it. He stared, dry-mouthed.

“It was lucky you weren’t in the city when the bomb fell.”

The old man regarded Yukio. “Luck?” he said as if tasting the flesh of some unfamiliar fowl. “I don’t know. Perhaps luck might be a modern equivalent, though an inadequate one. If anything, it was karma. You see, I had been out of the country just prior to the war. I was a businessman in those days and went quite often to the continent. Mostly to Shanghai, where a majority of my selling was done.” For the first time his hands came into view and Nicholas saw the unnatural length of his nails. They were perfectly manicured, buffed and gleaming with clear lacquer. The old man saw the look in Nicholas’ eyes, said, “An affectation I picked up there from the Chinese mandarins with whom I did business and who befriended me. I do not even notice them now, I’ve grown so accustomed to them. But, of course, these are only of quite a moderate length.” He settled back more comfortably in the seat, began to speak as if telling a bedtime story to his grandchildren. He had a remarkable speaking voice, commanding yet gentle, as well modulated as a seasoned lecturer’s. “We took some time off over a long weekend and, all our business completed, we went into the countryside for a bit of relaxation. I had no idea what to expect, really. These were Chinese, after all. The mandarins have, ah, peculiar tastes in many things. But in business one must learn to be cosmopolitan in one’s thinking—especially when it comes to the matter of your clients’ personal tastes. Yes, I do not believe that it is good policy to be closeminded or, ah, traditional here. The world supports a myriad of cultures, is that not so? Who is to say which is the more valid.” He shrugged his thin sharp shoulders. “Certainly not I.”

Outside, the afternoon was waning, the oblique cloud banks streaked with gold and pink on their undersides, a charcoal gray above. The sun was already out of sight below the horizon and in the east the sky was clear, a vast cobalt porcelain bowl, seeming translucent. High up, several first-magnitude stars could already be seen flung aloft as if by a giant hand. The world seemed suffused with an absolute stillness as at the midpoint of a long summer’s afternoon when time itself ceases to have any meaning. It was a magical time, made up of fantastic elements having all miraculously arrived at the same spot at one instant, the inaudible sigh the inner ear hears in that last moment in a theater before the curtain rises.

“They took me on a journey, my mandarin friends. To a town within a town, as I said, outside of Shanghai. It was—excuse me, my dear—a bordello. Not merely the building we went to, oh no. The entire town. Yes, that’s right, a city of pleasure. You will forgive me, young lady, parts of this tale. A man on business for weeks at a time—one can ill afford to take one’s wife along on such trips for many reasons. And these things become, well, almost an expected part of the trip.

“The mandarins regard sex very highly, oh my, yes, they certainly do. And I cannot say that I blame them.” He gave a little chuckle, not at all smutty but rather avuncular. “It is, after all, both a necessary and an important part of life, so why not honor it.

“Uhm, in any event it was the most sumptuous, the largest such place I had ever been to. The clientele was strictly mandarin and further, I gathered, only certain families. Extremely exclusive, yes.” His eyes were big and dreamy. “One could live the rest of one’s life there quite easily, I daresay. But, of course, that is not possible. Such places are only for a small amount of time. That kind of rarefied atmosphere would, I imagine, pall after a time. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to chance it. Life would most certainly be not worthwhile if all such spectacular dreams were shattered. Everyone needs times in their life when reality can be set aside, hm?”

The train rattled onward, across a trestle bridge, plunging into a bleak and scraggy forest of deciduous trees, as forlorn as the ragtag remnants of some defeated army. The light was dying, the clouds stark now in their blackness, only losing definition near the horizon where the haze rendered all color indistinguishable. Night had swept them up as swiftly as a remonstrating parent.

“So. Here we are in this place. But my purpose is not to tell you all the goings-on there.” He smiled winningly. “You’re young enough not to need any help from me on that score. No. Rather, I wish to tell you about a man I met there.” He held up one long bony but perfectly straight finger. The long nail gleamed in the artificial light of the car, causing it to look like a street marker. “Curious. About this man, I mean. He was no client, of that I am certain. Yet neither did he appear to be an employee of the establishment. Certainly I never saw him at work.