Dance Dance Dance (32 page)

"But once, when I was in elementary school, I knocked into this friend of mine, and he fell off a small bluff. I don't know why I did it. But the next thing I knew, he was down there. It wasn't a big fall, so he wasn't hurt too bad. It was supposed to be an accident. I mean, why would I push this friend of mine over the edge on purpose? That's what every-one thought. I wasn't so sure. Then high school, I set fire to these mailboxes. I'd put a burning rag down the slot. Not just once, not even as a prank. It was like I was compelled to do it. Like it was the only thing that'd bring me to my senses. Unconsciously, that was what I thought. But after-wards I would remember the feel of things. I could still feel it in my hands. And I wouldn't be able to wash it off. God, what a horrible life. I don't know how I can stand it." Gotanda shook his head.

"How do I check if I killed Kiki?" Gotanda went on. "There's no evidence. No corpse. No shovel. No dirt on my trousers. No blisters on my hands. Not that digging a hole is going to give you blisters. I don't even remember where I buried her. Say I went to the police and confessed, who'd believe me? If there's no body, it's not a homicide. She disap-peared. That's all I know for sure. There've been times I wanted to tell you, but I just couldn't. I thought it'd wipe out whatever closeness we had. Whenever I'm with you, I feel so relaxed. I never feel the gap. You don't know how precious that is. I don't want to lose a friendship like ours. So I kept putting off telling you, until you asked, like this. I really ought to have come clean."

"Come clean? When there's no evidence you did any-thing?"

"Evidence isn't the issue. I ought to have told you first. But I concealed it. That's the problem."

"C'mon, even if it were true, even if you did kill Kiki, you didn't mean to kill her."

He held out his palms, as if he were going to read them. "No. I didn't mean to. I didn't have a reason. I liked her, and in a small way we were friends. We could talk. I could tell her about my wife, and she'd listen, honestly. Why would I want to kill her? But I did, I think, with these hands. Maybe I didn't do it willfully. But I did. I strangled her. But I wasn't strangling her, I was strangling my shadow. I remember thinking, if only I could choke my shadow off, I'd get some health. Except it wasn't my shadow. It was Kiki.

"It all took place in that dark world. You know what I'm talking about? Not here in this one. And it was Kiki who led me there. Choke me, Kiki told me. Go ahead and kill me, it's okay. She invited me to, allowed me to. I swear, honestly, it happened like that. Without me knowing. Can that happen? It was like a dream. The more I think about it, the more it doesn't feel real. Why would Kiki ask me to kill her?"

I downed the last of my lukewarm beer. A dense layer of cigarette smoke hovered like an ectoplasmic phenomenon.

"Feel like another beer?" I asked him.

"Yeah, I could use one."

I went to the bar and came back with two mugs, which we drank in silence. The turnover at the place was as busy as Akihabara Station at rush hour, customers coming and going constantly. Nobody bothered listening in to our conversa-tion. Nobody even looked at Gotanda.

"What'd I tell you?" Gotanda summoned up a smile as he spoke. "Not a star in sight." Gotanda swished his two-thirds empty glass around like a test tube.

"Let's forget it," I said quietly. "I can forget it. You forget it too."

"You think I can forget it? Easy to say, but you didn't kill her with your own hands."

"Hey, you hear me? There's no evidence you killed Kiki. Stop blaming yourself for something that might not have even happened. Your unconscious is using Kiki's vanishing act as a convenient way to lay a guilt trip on you. Isn't that a possibility?"

"Okay, let's talk possibilities," said Gotanda, laying his palms flat on the table. "I've been doing nothing but consid-ering possibilities lately. All sorts of possibilities. Like the possibility that I'll kill my wife. Am I right? Maybe I'd stran-gle her if she allowed me to, like Kiki did. Possibilities are like cancer. The more I think about them, the more they multiply, and there's no way to stop them. I'm out of con-trol. I didn't just burn mailboxes. I killed four cats. I used a slingshot and busted the neighbors' window. I couldn't stop doing shit like this. And I never told anyone about it, until this minute. God," he sighed deeply, "it's almost a relief telling you.

"What goddamn thing am I going to do next? That gap— it's too big, too deep. Professional hazard, huh? The bigger the gap, the more weird the shit I find myself doing. Is it in my genes? God, I'm afraid that I will just kill my wife. I haven't got any control over it. Because it won't take place in this world."

"You worry too much," I said, forcing a smile. "Forget this nonsense about genes. What you need is a break from work. Stop seeing your wife for a while. It's the only way. Throw everything to the wind. Come with me to Hawaii. Lie on the beach, drink pina coladas, swim, get laid. Rent a con-vertible and cruise around listening to music. And if you still want to worry, you can do that later."

"Not a bad idea," he said, the folds of his eyes crinkling as he smiled. "We'll get us two girls and the four of us can fool around till morning again. That was fun." Shoveling that good snow. Cuckkoo. "I can take off any time," I said. "How about you? How long will it take you to finish up what you're doing?"

Gotanda gave me the oddest smile. "You don't under-stand a thing, do you? There's no such thing as finishing up in my line of work. All you can do is toss the whole thing. And if I do that, you can be sure I'll never work again. I'd be drummed out of the industry, permanently. And, I'd lose my wife, permanently."

He drained the last of his beer.

"But that's fine. Back-to-nothing is fine. At this point, I'm ready to call it quits. I'm tired. Time I went to Hawaii and blanked out. Okay, let's scrap it all. Let's go to Hawaii. I can think things over later. I'll . . . become a regular human being. Maybe too late, but worth a try. I'll leave everything up to you. I trust you. Always did, from the time you first called me up. You seemed like such a decent guy. Like what I'd always wanted to be."

"No such decent guy here," I protested. "I'm just . . . keeping in step, dancing along. No meaning to it at all."

Gotanda spread his hands a body-width apart on the table. "And just where, pray tell, is there meaning? Where in this life of ours?" Then he laughed. "But that's okay. Doesn't matter anymore. I'm resigned to it. I'll follow your example. I'll hop around from elevator to elevator. It's not impossible. I can do anything if I put my mind to it. I'm sharp, hand-some, good-natured Gotanda after all. So, okay, Hawaii. We'll get the tickets tomorrow. First class. It's gotta be first class. It's in the cards, you know. BMW, Rolex, Azabu, and first class. We'll leave the day after tomorrow and land on the same day. Hawaii! I look good in an aloha shirt."

"You'd look good in anything."

"Thanks for tickling what remains of my ego."

Gotanda gave me a good, long look. "You really think you can forget I killed Kiki?"

"Uh-huh."

"Well, one other thing you don't know about me. Remember I told you I got thrown in confinement for two weeks?"

"Yeah."

"That was a lie. I blabbed everything and they let me out right away. I wasn't scared. I wanted, in some sick way, to do something gutless. I wanted to hate myself. I'm such a louse. You didn't know that when you clammed up to save my face, you also saved my rotten hide. You did something for me that I wouldn't do for my self—wash away my dirt. And I was glad, you know. It gave me the chance to finally be honest with myself. I feel like I've come clean at last. Man, I bet it wasn't too pleasant to watch."

"Don't worry about it," I said. It's brought us closer together, I wanted to say. But I didn't. I decided to wait for a time when the words would mean more. So I just repeated myself, "Don't worry about it."

Gotanda took his rain hat from the back of his chair, checked to see how damp it was, then put it back. "I got a favor to ask you," he said, "as a friend. I'd like another beer, but I don't have it in me to get up and go get one."

"No problem," I said.

I stood up and went up to the bar. There was a line, so it took me a while. By the time I waded back to the table, mugs in hand, Gotanda was gone. Ditto his rain hat. And no Maserati in the parking lot either. Great, I shook my head just great.

There was nothing I could do. He had disappeared.

40

The following afternoon they dredged the Maserati out of Tokyo Bay. As I expected. No surprises. As soon as he disappeared, I saw it coming.

Another corpse. The Rat, Kiki, Mei, Dick North, and now Gotanda. Five. One more to go. What now? Who was the next in line to die? Not Yumiyoshi, I wouldn't be able to bear that. Yumiyoshi was not meant to die. Okay, then Yuki? The kid was thirteen. I couldn't let that happen to her. I was going down the list, as if I were the god of doom, deal-ing out orders for mortality.

I went down to the Akasaka police station to tell Bookish that I'd been with Gotanda the previous night until right before his death. Somehow I thought it was the right thing to do, though naturally I didn't mention Kiki. That was a closed book. Instead, I talked about how exhausted Gotanda had been, how his loans were piling up, the problems with work, the stresses in his personal life.

Bookish took down what I said. Unlike before, he made simple notes. Which I signed. It didn't take an hour. "People dying left and right around you, eh?" he said. "At this rate, you'll never make friends and influence people. They start hating you, and before you know it, your eyes go and your skin sags. Not a pretty prospect."

Then he heaved a deep sigh.

"Well, anyway, this was a suicide. Open and shut case. Even got witnesses. Still, what a waste. I don't care if he was a movie star, he didn't have to go blitzing a Maserati into the Bay, did he? Ordinary Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla would've done the job."

"It was insured."

"No sir, insurance never covers suicides," Bookish reminded me. "Anyway, you can go now. Sorry about your friend. And thanks for taking the trouble to come in," he said as he saw me to the door. "Mei's case isn't settled yet. But the investigation's still going on."

For a long time after, I walked around feeling as if I'd killed Gotanda. I couldn't rid myself of the weight. I went back over all the things we'd talked about that night. If only I'd given him the responses he'd needed to save himself, the two of us might be relaxing on the beach in Maui right now. No way. Gotanda had made up his mind from the begin-ning. He'd been thinking about plowing that Maserati into the sea all along. He'd been waiting for an excuse. It was his only exit. He'd already had his hand on the doorknob, the Maserati in his head sinking, the water pouring in, choking him, over and over again.

Mei's death had left me shaken, Dick North's death sad and resigned. But Gotanda's death lay me down in a lead-lined box of despair. Gotanda's death was unsalvageable. Gotanda never really got himself in tune with his inner impulses. He pushed himself as far as he could, to the furthest edge of his awareness—and then right across the line into that dark otherworld.

For a while, the weeklies and TV and sports tabloids feasted on his death. Like beetles on carrion. The headlines alone were enough to make me vomit. I felt like throttling every scandalmonger in town.

I climbed into bed and shut my eyes. Cuck-koo, I heard Mei far off in the darkness.

I lay there, hating everything. The deaths were beyond comprehension, the aftertaste sickening. The world of the living was obscene. I was powerless to do anything. People came and went, but once gone, they never came back. My hands smelled of death. I wouldn't be able to wash it off, like Gotanda said.

Hey, Sheep Man, is this the way you connect your world? Threading one death to another? You said it might already be too late for me to be happy. I wouldn't have minded that, but why this?

When I was little, I had this science book. There was a section on "What would happen to the world if there was no friction?" Answer: "Everything on earth would fly into space from the centrifugal force of revolution." That was my mood.

41

Three days after Gotanda plowed the Maserati into the sea I called Yuki. To be honest, I didn't want to speak to anyone, but her of all people I had to talk to. She was vulnerable and lonely. A child. And I may have been the only person in the world who would hear her out. Then again, more importantly, Yuki was alive. And I had a duty to keep her that way. At least, that's what I felt.

Yuki wasn't in Hakone. A groggy Ame answered the phone and said that Yuki had left two days earlier to return to the Akasaka condo.

I called Akasaka. Yuki snatched up the receiver immedi-ately. She must have been right beside the phone.

"It's okay for you to be away from Hakone?" I asked.

"I don't know. But I needed to be alone. Mama's an adult, right? She ought to be all right on her own. I wanted to think about myself. Things like what to do from here on. I think it's time I start to get serious about my life."

"Well, maybe so."

"I saw the papers. That friend of yours, he died, huh?"

"Yes, the Curse of the Maserati. As you warned me."

Yuki did not answer. The silence seeped through the wires. I switched the receiver from the right ear to the left.

"How about a meal?" I asked. "I know you've only been eating junk, right? I haven't been eating too well myself. Let's get ourselves a better class of grub."

"I've got to meet somebody at two, but before that I'm okay."

I looked at the clock. A little past eleven.

"Fine. I'll get ready now. See you in about thirty min-utes," I said.

I changed clothes, took a swig of orange juice, pocketed my wallet and keys. I'm off, I thought. Or no? Had I forgot-ten something? Right, I'm always off. I'd forgotten to shave. I ran over my beard with a razor, then sized myself up in the mirror. Could I still pass for a guy in his twenties? Maybe. Maybe not. But did anybody care? I brushed my teeth again.

Outside it was sunny. Summer coming on. If only the rainy season could be put on hold. Sunglasses on, I drove to Yuki's condo. I rang the bell at the entrance to her building and Yuki came right down. She was wearing a short-sleeve dress and sandals, and carried a shoulder bag.

"You're looking very chic today," I said.

"I told you I had to see someone at two, didn't I?" she replied.

"It suits you, your dress. Very becoming, very adult."

She smiled but said nothing.

It was a bit before twelve, so we had the restaurant to ourselves. We filled up on soup and pasta and sea bass and salad. By the time the tide of salarymen washed in, we were out of there.

"Where to?" I asked.

"Nowhere. Just drive around," she said.

"Antisocial. Waste of gasoline," I said, but Yuki let it drop, pretending not to hear.

Instead she turned on the stereo. Talking Heads, Fear of Music. When did I ever put that tape in the deck?

"I decided to get a tutor," she said. "That's who I'm meeting today. I told Papa I wanted to study, and he found her for me. She seems like a real good person. Strange, but see-ing that movie made me want to learn." "What movie? Unrequited Love?"

"That's right. Sounds crazy, I know. Even sounds crazy to me. Maybe your friend playing the teacher made me feel like studying. At first, I thought, gimme a break, but I must have gotten hooked. Maybe he did have talent."

"Yeah, he had talent. He could act. If it was fiction. Not reality, if you get what I mean." "I think so."

"You should have seen him as a dentist. He told me that was acting. . . . Anyway, wanting to do something is a good sign. You can't really go on living without it. I think Gotanda would be pleased to hear it." "Did you see him?"

"I did," I said. "I saw him and we talked. We talked a long time. A very honest talk. And then he died, just like that. He was talking with me, then he gunned the Maserati into the Bay."

"Because of me?"

"No, not because of you." I shook my head slowly. "It's not your fault. It's nobody's fault. People have their own rea-sons for dying. It might look simple, but it never is. It's just like a root. What's above ground is only a small part of it. But if you start pulling, it keeps coming and coming. The human mind dwells deep in darkness. Only the person him-self knows the real reason, and maybe not even then."

He'd been waiting for an excuse. He'd already had his hand on the doorknob.

No, it was nobody's fault after all. "Still, I know you hate me for it," said Yuki. "I don't hate you."

"You may not hate me now, but you will later." "Not now, not later. I don't hate like that." "Well, maybe not hate, but something's going to go away," she murmured, half to herself. "I just know it."

I glanced over at her. "Strange. Gotanda said the same thing."

"Really?"

"Yeah. He said he had the feeling things were disappear-ing on him. I don't know what kind of things he meant. But whatever they are, sometime they're going to go. We shift around, so things can't help but go when that happens. They disappear when it's time for them to disappear. And they don't disappear until it's time for them to disappear. Like that dress you got on. In a couple of years, it won't fit you, and you might even think the Talking Heads are moldy oldies. You might not even want to go on drives with me anymore. Can't be helped. As they say, just go with the flow. Don't fight it."

"I'll always like you. That has nothing to do with time."

"Makes me happy to hear that, because I want to think so too," I said. "But to be fair, Yuki, you still don't know much about time. It's better not to go deciding too many things now. People go through changes like you'd never believe."

She was silent. The tape auto-reversed to side B.

Summer. Wherever you looked, the town looked like sum-mer. Cops and high school kids and bus drivers were all in short sleeves. There were even women in no sleeves. And to think not so long ago it had been snowing.

"And you really don't hate me?"

"Of course not," I said. "In this uncertain world, that's about the only thing I'm sure of."

"Absolutely?"

"Absolutely 2,500 percent."

She smiled. "That's what I wanted to hear." Then she asked, "You liked Gotanda, didn't you?"

"I liked him, sure," I said. Suddenly my voice caught. Tears welled up. I barely managed to fight them back and took a deep breath. "Each time we met I liked him more. That doesn't happen very much, especially not at my age."

"Did he kill the woman?"

I scanned the early summer cityscape for a moment. "Who knows? Maybe he did and maybe he didn't."

He'd been waiting for an excuse.

Yuki leaned on her window and looked out, listening to her Talking Heads. She seemed a little more grown-up than when we first met, only two and a half months before.

"What are you going to do now?" asked Yuki.

"Yes, what am I going to do," I said. "I haven't decided. I think I've got to go back to Sapporo. Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Lots of loose ends up there."

Yumiyoshi. The Sheep Man. The Dolphin Hotel. A place that I was a part of. Where someone was crying for me. I had to go back to close the circle.

I offered to drive Yuki wherever she had to go. "Heaven knows, I'm free today."

She smiled. "Thanks, but it's okay. It's pretty far; the train'll be faster."

"Did I hear you say thanks?" I said, removing my sun-glasses.

"Got any problems with that?"

"Nope."

We were at Yoyogi-Hachiman Station, where she was going to catch the Odakyu Line. Yuki looked at me for ten or fifteen seconds. No identifiable expression on her face, only a gradual change in the gleam of her eyes, the shape of her mouth. Ever so slightly, her lips grew taut, her stare sharp and sassy. Like a slice of summer sunlight refracting in water.

She slammed the door shut and trotted off, not looking back. I watched her receding figure disappear into the crowd. And when she was out of sight, I felt lonely, as if a love affair had just broken up.

I drove back up Omotesando to Aoyama to go shopping at Kinokuniya, but the parking lot was full. Hey, come to think of it, wasn't I going to Sapporo tomorrow or the day after? So I cruised around a bit more, then went home. To my empty apartment. Where I plopped down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling.

They've got a name for this, I thought. Loss. Bereave-ment. Not nice words.

Cuck-koo.

It echoed through the empty space of my home.