THE FRONT door stood open. It offered a sky pink with sunset and a summer breeze like a celebration on the skin.
Chieko’s girls danced and danced, their eyes blazing with the light of victory. Laughter defied gravity; they orbited slower dancers like overheated planets and brushed their backs with tender hands.
Kids crowded the arcade games while Chieko slipped coins in the Wurlitzer. She threaded her way through the dancers and took a seat at the bar.
“Another beer?” May asked.
“No, thanks. I’ve had enough. How about some coffee?”
Kiyomi poured out a cup and pushed it over the bar. “What’s wrong? You should drink like everybody else.”
She shook her head. “Too tired. I have to open the bar in a few minutes. What I really need is some sleep.”
“You can’t go,” May complained. “The party is just getting good.” She nodded at Chieko’s employees. “Your girls are having fun.”
“They’re not the only ones, I think. Does your brother know you’ve been drinking?”
May threw up her hands and backed away from the bar. “Who, me?”
“And her,” she nodded at Kiyomi, as the girl handed half a dozen beers over the bar to Noriko Maejima and her housewife cronies.
May looked aghast. “Kiyomi-chan, you haven’t been sneaking beer again, have you?”
“Of course not,” she burped. “I’m too young.”
“Well, just don’t let your brother catch you,” Chieko warned.
May leaned across the bar and whispered. “What gave us away? How did you know?”
Chieko laughed. “You should take a look at yourselves.”
The girls grinned into the long mirror behind the bar. Kiyomi’s face was strawberry red, May’s a deepening rose. They screamed in mock horror and covered their faces with their hands.
“You look really drunk!” Kiyomi accused.
“You, too!”
“How much have you had?” Chieko asked.
“A lot!” the girls laughed.
“How much is a lot?”
“A whole can.” They looked proud of themselves.
“Well, that is a lot,” Chieko agreed. “One whole can each. I’m impressed.”
“Uhh, not exactly,” May admitted. “We shared it and she couldn’t even finish her half. What a lightweight.”
“I did, too. You’re the one that—”
“They look very happy, don’t you think?” Chieko said, changing the subject. The girls didn’t appear in imminent danger of falling down or getting sick. Half a beer wouldn’t hurt them.
“Who?”
“Your brother and Helen.”
May and Kiyomi leaned on the bar and placed their chins in their hands. Encircled by the other dancers, Sam held Helen close and whispered in her ear. “It’s so romantic,” Kiyomi sighed. “She’s so lucky.”
“Hah!” May exclaimed. “He’s the lucky one. She’s totally perfect. Everybody knows that.”
The girls began to argue, Kiyomi saying that Sam was smart and kind and reliable. May countered with Helen’s beauty, independence and bravery.
“What do you think?” they asked Chieko, willing to let one of their favorites settle the argument.
“You’re both right,” she answered. “Now, why don’t you calm down and watch. It’ll give you something to look forward to.”
May and Kiyomi needed no further urging. They watched and smiled and dreamed as Sam spun Helen across the floor. May was so happy she thought she might faint. Nakazono was gone gone gone. Anything, absolutely anything was possible. Nothing could hurt them ever again.
“So that’s it, I guess,” Helen said. “I wonder how he’ll like it in jail.”
Sam was holding her close enough to feel her heartbeat. The cop had been far from his thoughts. He felt free for the first time since his return to Japan. His choices seemed limited only by his imagination.
“Nakazono’s not going to jail, you know that,” he said. “They’ll fire him, they’ll humiliate him, but they’ll never convict him. I expect he’ll be around the neighborhood for a long time. He was raised here. He has nowhere else to go.”
“You don’t think he’ll try anything else, do you? He’d have to be crazy.”
“Everything is going to be fine.” He caressed her cheek and lost himself in her gray eyes.
Helen laid her head on his shoulder. “I hope you’re right.”
“Trust me.”
“I’ve heard that one before.”
“And did you?”
“What?”
“Trust.”
“Too much. I staked my whole history on it, my past and my future.”
Sam nodded. “You’re right, that is too much. I might not be able to pick it up, let alone carry it. Why don’t you just trust me today? I can do that much.”
She smiled and hugged him. “That’s sounds just right. You’ve got a deal.”
The music changed. Helen held his hand and towed him back to their table. “How was Manny doing?” he asked.
“He was still sleeping the last time I went upstairs. He’s just tired and bruised. He’ll be fine in a couple of days.”
“How about the old ladies? Are they taking good care of him?”
“Kojima-san was guarding him like a mama bear watches over her cubs.”
“Did Nakamura-san go home?”
Helen shook her head. “No, she’s still up there doing what she does best.”
“Sleep?”
“Exactly. Kojima-san put her into bed with him. You should go up there and take a look before she wakes. It’s a very pretty picture.”
Lt. Nakazono stumbled out of a bar under the tracks. A train rumbled overhead as he pissed on a cement wall. His suit jacket was long gone, his shirt stained and torn. He leaned forward and pressed his cheek to the wall. The cement was still warm from the sun. A woman in black approached. She averted her eyes and tucked her chin into her breast, afraid to see too much.
Nakazono slid down the wall to his knees. He moaned and held out his hands, begging for help. His fluttering hands, his bruised and bloody face—the woman changed course. His eyes scratched at her as she passed. She gasped and began to run. That kind of help wasn’t hers to give.
Nakazono made it to his feet and struggled onward. The stars, shining above, were pretty. They pulled him toward the river and his apartment. A ragged choir sang brittle a cappella in his head. Off-key voices drowned out the world and pushed him forward. He bounced off pedestrians, knocking men and women aside.
A light brighter than stars, brighter than neon, pulsed and swelled. He looked up and howled. She stood tall and strong atop Matsuya department store. Her hair was long and white. Looking at him, laughing at him. The choir scrambled behind his eyes, wailing in fear, fighting for a better look. They upset his balance and he crashed to the pavement.
Just to make sure, but casually so no one would notice, Patrolman Takahashi verified his feet were touching the ground, confirmed the top of his head was lined up with the moon. Everything seemed properly oriented and he continued walking. You could never be too sure, especially after a day like today.
Eyes on cracks in the sidewalk, resolutely onward, he walked toward the home of Nakazono. To put things right, if he could. He nearly cried out in fright. Without the lieutenant, what would become of him? It was a mercy he had no imagination, his vision of the future—a wall of blackness—was horrible enough.
For nearly thirty years, Nakazono had been his life, an anchor. When the ground trembled and tried to dislodge him, only Nakazono kept him from drifting away. Takahashi turned a corner and checked his feet again. Still firmly planted. But not this afternoon. When they’d come for the lieutenant he’d floated up to the ceiling, flailing and crying. No one had noticed his ascent, they’d been too busy with Nakazono.
First, they’d taken away his gun. That had been the easy part. The lieutenant had been more difficult when the captain from headquarters had asked him to give up his bottle of gin. It had taken three men to pry it out of his hands. They’d covered his head with a beige raincoat to hide him from the photographers. Takahashi could still hear Nakazono’s sobs eerily muffled by the coat. He’d assisted at a hanging in a prison on the edge of the city last year. The man had worn a hood, not a raincoat, but his final cries had sounded exactly the same.
He knocked on the lieutenant’s door. A neighbor stuck her head out of an apartment down the hall. Her eyes were both sly and angry. They burned with a passionate interest in lives more eventful than her own.
“Get back inside,” Takahashi shouted.
The woman snarled and pulled her head back into her apartment. Takahashi knocked again. No answer. The patrolman sighed and put his ear to the door.
And there it was:
Nakazono moaned and moaned. So much rarer than tears, an expanding pain, a loss of breath. A great sadness given voice. Dead silent screams, loud between the cries, were heard as far away as Honolulu. Pleas for release at any cost, they rolled up the beaches like a tsunami.
A chain rattled. Takahashi whispered, afraid of upsetting what might be behind the door. “Boss, let me in. It’s me, Takahashi. I just want to help.”
Slowly, the door swung open. The room was dark, filled with darting flickering images. A TV set glowed in a corner, chocolate drapes billowed. They concealed a balcony and a sliding glass door open to the night. An air conditioner hummed, straining to cool humid air pushing into the room. Currents, hot and cold, blew over Takahashi’s cheeks. They carried a fearful smell. Gin consumed and passed through the skin, forgotten food conniving to rot, urine, vomit and coppery blood.
He gasped and followed a dark shape deeper into the room. It paused, stymied by shards of red brick strewn across the carpet. A bonsai with shiny leaves lay collapsed on a bier of dry soil. Yellow roots shivered, exposed and dying. The wallpaper was torn three feet above the baseboard. A smear of mud and a dusting of red brick marked the spot the little tree had hit.
The patrolman snapped on a table lamp and turned off the TV. Nakazono muttered, detoured around the broken pottery and shuffled over to a leather couch. He was naked under a woman’s pink terry cloth robe. The sleeves squeezed his biceps like tourniquets and hung just past his elbows.
Takahashi stared at the wreckage. His jaw fell open and he made a little noise of confusion as the lieutenant’s feet tangled. He fell into the narrow divide between couch and coffee table. Nakazono cried and struggled to free himself. Takahashi hesitated, fascinated, as if seeing a tortoise on its back, baking in the sun.
Nakazono muttered and pulled himself up on the couch. He sat with his hands on his knees, shaking his head like a dog whacked in the skull with a two-by-four. The tissue surrounding his left eye was purple-yellow, tinged with green. The eye had closed beneath a cut that would require many stitches to close. Dried blood caked his face. The corner of the coffee table was sharp beveled maple. A dark streak stained the table and ran down to a small pool of blood soaking the carpet.
Nakazono was still wagging his head back and forth like a metronome. Takahashi shivered, stepped forward and held the lieutenant’s head until it slowed and stopped. Nakazono began to clap his hands and laugh. He slapped them together slowly. His laughter was soft but growing, rising. His hands popped together like gunshots.
“Stop, oh, please stop,” Takahashi cried, afraid of such craziness. He grabbed and held the lieutenant’s hands with all his strength.
Nakazono opened his good eye, aware for the first time that someone was in the room. He cocked his head for a better angle. “Who’s that? Is that you, Takahashi?”
The patrolman backed away, unnerved by his own audacity. To touch the boss. Until today, what an unthinkable thing. He grinned. “Yes, boss, it’s me. I’m here to help you, I mean, I know you don’t need my help but, uhh...”
Nakazono sighed. “Shit, the idiot.”
Takahashi began to cry, fat tears streaming down his middle-aged face. “Let me help, boss. Let me make it better. You can be strong again, stronger than before. We can get those bastards, we can get ‘em good.”
The lieutenant shook his head. “Get the fuck out of here.”
Nakazono reached under the couch and pulled out an American-made .45 automatic. He put the muzzle in his mouth and rocked back the slide.
His head exploded, cracked open by a red-black screaming thing. A voice like no other, huge and cruel, shouted, “STOP!”
White hot pain raced up his arm. The gun clattered to the table. He screamed and looked down, expecting to see his hand burned to the bone.
The voice laughed. “HURT DIDN’T IT, ASSHOLE? WELL THAT WAS NOTHIN’. YOU TRY A STUNT LIKE THAT AGAIN AND I’LL SHOW YOU WHAT REAL PAIN IS.”
Takahashi sobbed and crawled toward the door as Nakazono gagged on the pain and threw up. The red thing, the black thing, was purging his skull. The other voices, guilty little secrets, tried to escape. It ran them down and crushed them.
Until only one survived. “YOU DON’T NEED THIS ONE NO MORE, DO YA?”
Nakazono wiped his mouth and coughed. “Too strong, too strong. It was an accident, I tried to explain, she won’t listen.”
The voice laughed. “OF COURSE SHE AIN’T LISTENIN’, YOU DUMBSHIT, SHE’S DEAD. YOU KILLED HER.”
“But—”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP. IT’S JUST YOUR IMAGINATION.”
“What about you?”
“I’M THE REAL THING, BOYO.” The voice moderated it’s tone. “AND FROM NOW ON YOU AND ME, WE’RE GONNA HAVE SOME REAL FUN.”
“Please—”
Pain crawled up from his stomach and Nakazono screamed.
“YOU’RE NOT LISTENING.”
The lieutenant whimpered and surrendered.
“THAT’S BETTER. AND SINCE YOU’RE BEING SUCH A GOOD LITTLE SAMURAI, I GOT A TREAT FOR YOU.”
The red-black thing raced across his head and pinned Elena to the back of his skull. It ripped open her blouse, yanked up her skirt and shredded her panties.
“HEY, LOOK AT YOU. THAT’S WHAT YOU WANTED ALL ALONG, ISN’T IT? WELL, GO AHEAD, EAT YOUR FILL, THERE’S PLENTY MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM.”
Patrolman Takahashi reached the door. Still on his knees, he looked back. He was shaking in fear and it was all he could do to keep from screaming. The lieutenant was slumped on the couch covered in vomit, masturbating wildly.
Takahashi unlocked the door.
“Get your ass back over here, patrolman,” Nakazono ordered. “I got plans for you.”
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