The Nicholas Linnear Novels (63 page)

Like moving through a dream. All senses assailed relentlessly until distortion grew like weeds in the abandoned front yard of reality. Every step forward carried with it the burden of two in retrograde. He thought of Alice down the rabbit’s hole and wondered if Carroll could have had this in mind. Only Coleridge might have dreamsmoked this up; it seemed the habitat of a damaged archangel.

At the bar there were leather-padded seats on which no one sat, a line of jackdaws ironically eyeing a busy cornfield in summer.

Nicholas sat and ordered a drink out of form. He was not thirsty. He watched the lamé glitter in the spiraling lights, the neon shoes with heels impossibly high. Multicolored eye makeup seemed to cover half the faces of women who turned toward him again and again in the course of the dance. Flesh was entirely incidental, it seemed; arms and breasts and thighs were painted like lizard skin. Their expressions recalled to him vivid scenes from
Metropolis.

He was searching for Justine but in this madhouse it seemed useless: like running after Yukio in Kumamoto. Doors closing in his face as fast as they were opened.

Then what Sam had said to him earlier in the evening began to seep through into his consciousness. What difference did it make what he was now as long as he knew what he wanted to be; what he wanted. It was no longer 1963, part of another lifetime. But he knew that he would never truly be free until he understood it all. Without understanding, he knew, assimilation was impossible. The
kijin
—the goblins of his past—would be appeased by nothing less.

“What are you doing? C’mon, c’mon, c’mon and dance.”

She was a sloe-eyed blonde in a lavender crepe de chine dress which showed off her ample breasts to maximum effect.

“Don’t you wanna”—her bird’s head swayed seductively—“get in the swing? C’mon, c’mon.”

“No, I don’t think—”

“—apricorn, right? You must be. Dour.” She pronounced it
dower.
“All Capricorns are dour. But—”

“I’m not here to dance,” he said, feeling foolish. “I’m here to find someone.”

“—do it together.”

“You don’t understand. There is a woman here. A woman.”

“So?” She took his hand, crimson nails gleaming, changing colors, lines of light flacking. “Let’s dance, dance, dance until we find her.”

He broke away from her grip.

“Don’t you want to have fun?” she cried after him.

Went up to the second level, blues and greens like a grotto of waving kelp. Synchronization had begun to set in and he felt his pulse throbbing to the beat of the music flailing the air with the abandon of a reaper at his wheat field.

And, at last, he saw her on the highest level, partly obscured by the scaffolding of the circular staircase. He had to wait several minutes, the narrow path clotted and blocked: dancing up, dancing down.

Disappearing in a wave of arms and heads bobbing and he went up the iron stairs two at a time. Black leather walls like a padded cell, smoked glass far too fragile for the height: what if someone should stumble in thrall and fall? What then?

Light in reds and yellows, turning white and gray against the black leather, disconcerting, like seeing a color TV show on an ancient set; everything somehow just slightly out of phase.

There she was. With a tall broad-shouldered man with lank black hair and the sallow skin of a Puerto Rican. He wore a sleeveless undershirt with a red, blue and gold Point Beer button, high-waisted deep red trousers.

“Justine.”

Her head whipped around and light caught at the crimson flecks in her near eye. Watched him silently until her partner whirled her around in a blur.

“Justine.”

“What’a’you want, man? Don’t hassle my chick, hey. Keep cool, okay?”

“Justine. Look at me.” He reached out.

“Hey, man. Hey, hey. No way to act. You ain’t listenin’. Drift away now. She don’t want no part o’ you.”

Noted in passing, the dilated pupils, the reddened nostrils.

“Why don’t you go to the men’s room and do some blow?”

“Now, hey man. I’m through talkin’ to you.” The
click
unheard in the throbbing of the leather room but the gleam of the switchblade was unmistakable.

“Justine.”

“Don’t talk to her, man.” One shoulder lowered. “Now this’s for you.”

He was very fast and he knew how to use it, trained in the street where there are no rules except the need to survive. This kind could be far more dangerous than the professional because of the unpredictability. The eight-inch blade could rip open his abdomen in a fraction of a second.

Blocked the initial thrust with his left forearm and, pivoting, slammed the edge of his right hand into the Puerto Rican’s hipbone. There was no sound save for the music; their violent motions, dancers’ movements assimilated into the fierce kineticism of the leather room.

The Puerto Rican’s mouth opened wide, his head thrown back in precisely the pose of the man in Munch’s
The Scream.
He moved to right himself and Nicholas jammed his shoe against the outer edge of the other’s right instep. All balance fled him and he pitched sideways, between two startled couples. His outflung arm smashed someone in the face as she whirled by.

It all might have been a scene from a comic opera but Nicholas did not feel like laughing.

Justine looked from him to the fallen man, clutching his hip. The switchblade lay on the mottled floor like a centerpiece at a bizarre wedding which no one seemed to want to pick up and take home.

“Justine—”

“How did you find me? What do you want from me?”

“Justine.”

“I can’t take any more. Please, please, please. Can’t you see I’ve been crying—”

“—over you. Over you.”

“Justine. I came here—”

“And I don’t care anymore if you know it.”

“—to tell you I love you.”

Tears rolled silently from her eyes. The air was as thick as honey with music: aching voices, insinuating rhythms, erotic percussion. “Please.” Had she heard him?

“I love you.” They touched in a kind of radiation of energy and misspent emotion. “Justine, I—”

“…cried in the sand in front of your house with the night and the sea and that’s never happened to me before.” And he thought, lying on the long pale sea-foam sofa with Justine’s long warm body next to his: You’re wrong, Croaker. I can feel. I
do
feel.

“Don’t be ashamed of it.”

“I’m not.” The first faint crumbling of his past, sliding downward to be buried at last beneath the churning waves of the sea. “I wouldn’t have told you otherwise.”

“It makes me happy.” She put her fingers on his hip as if searching for a lock to open. “To know that you can be grateful to me for something.” Stockinged, her legs whispered one against the other like cicadas’ wings. “The way I am grateful to you.”

“It’s a new feeling.” She watched his eyes turning inward, listening to his words. “What I did to you was so cruel. But I did it—I did it out of self-defense; a kind of survival instinct. I suddenly felt how close you had come to the core of me and it reminded me—”

Her long hair brushed his shoulder. “Of what?”

“The sea, a long time ago; the mist and a ferry ride through a cyclorama of Japan.” His lips stayed half open even when he was silent, tidal breathing as one does when dreaming. “It reminded me of a girl I once loved. The trouble was then, I thought I was still in love with her.”

“Where is she now?”

“I don’t know. She could be anywhere—anywhere.” She could feel the rise and fall of his chest and abdomen, as regular as the tide. “She told me she loved me—she convinced me—I didn’t know anyone could be that good at deceit….”

She smiled’, half hidden in the dark. “If you’d been a woman, you’d know all right.”

“Sometimes I think sex is for the animals.”

It was quiet for some time, just the intermittent hiss of late-night traffic passing outside, remote and inconsequential. Justine was surprised more by his tone; she had never before heard such bitterness and she found herself wondering just what had transpired between him and that girl so long ago.

“I’m jealous,” she said. She thought she might be taking an awful chance. “I’m jealous of how much of yourself you gave to her.” He was quiet, beside her. “Never again, Nicholas?” Only her side and hair touched him. “Who is being punished?”

When he spoke, his voice was tight. With what was he struggling? “She made me… feel…”

“What?”

“Feel, just feel.”

“Is that so terrible?”

“And then she left me. She went off with…” And he told her what he had never told anyone, flooded with shame.

Justine put her warm lips against his ear, whispered, “Unzip me, Nicholas.”

He reached out. It came as the rasp of a log cracking, burnt through, subsiding into the hot ashes of the grate.

The tops of her breasts shone palely in the werelight like the swelling crests of the sea at dawn. Here, too, there were depths to be plumbed. But the tugging he felt now went beyond his loins; a kind of tidal wash, covering his whole body, sweeping into his head. “I missed you so much.” And not, anymore, Yukio.

She could feel how that had been torn out of him. “Yes,” she whispered. “I can see that now. I felt old and tired without you there.” She shrugged out of her shoulder straps.

“Let’s not make love right away.”

Her eyes were glittery so close to him, the little fire in the far one like a beckoning beacon homeward bound.

“Say it again.”

“Justine, words sometimes have no meaning at all.”

“Then what does?”

His arms encircled her. “I’ll hold you,” he whispered. “And you hold me.”

Her fingers brushed his skin, moving.

Fukashigi, the kenjutsu master, awoke at first light with the tendrils of something still in his mind.

The world, this early, was fog-shrouded, familiar landmarks rendered as in a pointillist painting.

Not a dream. Fukashigi did not carry such things into the waking world.

Something had dragged him away from sleep. The tendrils swirled.

And immediately he thought of Nicholas.

It must be time then. And despite all his wisdom, Fukashigi felt the slight thrill of fear shiver him.

He had thought about this time often during long nights when sleep eluded him and now he knew that he had been deluding himself, thinking that this day might never dawn.

Here it was, after all this time.

Time, he knew full well, meant absolutely nothing.

Even with the distances involved, he felt the psychic tuggings like a storm pulling at the moorings of a ship.

The long years in China and Japan seemed like a mist-shrouded dream to him, like the world he saw outside his window. The mind, he knew, could do much, play many tricks, and he wondered this morning which world was truly more the dream. In a way, America could never be as real as those days and nights on the Asian shore with their spices and their mysteries.

There had been time then, unlimited time, it had seemed once, to plunge into each more involving puzzle. And the joy he felt at their eventual unraveling was still unequaled in his life.

There had been, of course, several times when he had cause to regret the life he had carved out for himself. It was, after all, a most perilous path, fraught with real and imagined dangers every step of the way.

Jealousy racked them all like a perennial ague that could never be fully assuaged. There was resentment of anyone new. And especially of one who sought to plumb the depths that had frustrated them all.

And conquered.

Fukashigi sat up on his
futon
, hearing his bones creak. Magic, he thought. What a misunderstood word. Typically Western. He had to laugh.

Then he thought about Nicholas. He did not envy him but then there was no envy in Fukashigi’s heart. Had there been… Fukashigi shrugged his thin shoulders.

Who knows? He thought. But there was excitement inside him again.

Now he thought that he could see clear down to the bottom. The floor was full of silty hills and fish without color wove the pattern of their changeless lives through the mud and rocks and sand.

This section of the Straits of Shimonoseki had been haunted for seven hundred years or thereabouts. Ever since the infant emperor Antoku Tennō perished herein a spectacular sea battle along with every other man, woman and child of his Taira clan at the hands of the Minamoto.

There were frequent reports of sightings of the strange Heiké—another name for the Taira—crabs which have human faces on their carapaces and are said to house the
kami
of the long-dead defeated warriors.

They cannot, it is said in legends, find peace and thus, on fog-blanketed nights, fishermen swear they can see odd spectral fires upon the unquiet waters and they refuse to launch their boats, even when the fish are running, for during these terrible nights, the Heiké would rise from the deeps, interfering with passing ships, pulling unwary swimmers downward to their deaths.

And it was to help assuage these lost and unhappy
kami
that the Buddhists built the temple of Amidaji there.

But now, Saigō thought, it is more than ever a haunted place, this Dan-no-ura, for an outpouring of my own soul lies dead and defeated in those waters, come to join the joyless Heiké in their endless journey: there would be no burning fire, no golden lotus hearth for either.

He could see the perfect face lying on the bottom undisturbed as if there were no intervening waves; perfect only now as the features composed themselves in death. A traditional heroine: the pious daughter, the loyal wife, heart filled with sacrifice; all her grievous sins expunged.

It was good, he told himself. It was right; it was just. A death decreed by history.

What else could he have done?

He felt the shortness of breath and the burning tears threatening to destroy his dead eyes with their pitiful flow and he automatically began to chant the
Hannya-Shin-Kyō: Form is emptiness; and emptiness is form….What is emptiness—that is form….Perception, name, concept and know
e
dge, are also emptiness…. There is no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind….