Dance Dance Dance (4 page)

7

There was nothing for me to do. Nothing I should do, and nothing I wanted to do. I'd come all this way to the Dolphin Hotel, but the Dolphin Hotel that I wanted had vanished from the face of the earth. What to do? I went down to the lobby, planted myself in one of the magnificent sofas, and tried to come up with a plan for the day. Should I go sightseeing? Where to? How about a movie? Nah, nothing I wanted to see. And why come all the way to Sapporo to see a movie? So, what to do? Nothing to do.

Okay, it's the barbershop, I said to myself. I hadn't been to a barber in a month, and I was in need of a cut. Now that's making good use of free time. If you don't have any-thing better to do, go to the barber.

So I made tracks for the hotel barbershop, hoping that it'd be crowded and I'd have to wait my turn. But of course the place was empty, and I was in the chair immediately. An abstract painting hung on the blue-gray walls, and Jacques Rouchet's Play Bach lilted soft and mellow from hidden speakers. This was not like any barbershop I'd been to—you could hardly call it a barbershop. The next thing you know, they'll be playing Gregorian chants in bathhouses, Ryuichi Sakamoto in tax office waiting rooms. The guy who cut my hair was young, barely twenty. When I mentioned that there used to be a tiny hotel here that went by the same name, hi response was, "That so?" He didn't know much about Sap-poro either. He was cool. He was wearing a Men's Bigi designer shirt. Even so, he knew how to cut hair, so I left there pretty much satisfied.

What next?

Short of other options, I returned to my sofa in the lobby and watched the scenery. The receptionist with glasses from yesterday was behind the front desk. She seemed tense. Was my presence setting off signals in her? Unlikely. Soon the clock pushed eleven. Lunchtime. I headed out and walked around, trying to think what I was in the mood for. But I wasn't hungry, and no place caught my fancy. Lacking will, I wandered into a place for some spaghetti and salad. Then a beer. Outside, snow was still threatening, but not a flake in sight. The sky was solid, immobile. Like Gulliver's flying island of Laputa, hanging heavily over the city. Everything seemed cast in gray. Even, in retrospect, my meal—gray. Not a day for good ideas.

In the end, I caught a cab and went to a department store downtown. I bought shoes and underwear, spare batteries, a travel toothbrush, nail clippers. I bought a sandwich for a late-night snack and a small flask of brandy. I didn't need any of this stuff, I was just shopping, just killing time. I killed two hours.

Then I walked along the major avenues, looking into win-dows, no destination in mind, and when I tired of that, I stepped into a cafe and read some Jack London over coffee. And before long it was getting on to dusk. Talk about bor-ing. Killing time is not an easy job.

Back at the hotel, I was passing by the front desk when I heard my name called. It was the receptionist with glasses. She motioned for me to go to one end of the counter, the car-rental section actually, where there was a display of pam-phlets. No one was on duty here.

She twirled a pen in her fingers a second, giving me a

I've-got-something-to-tell-you-but-I-don't-know-how-to-say-I look. Clearly, she wasn't used to doing this sort of thing.

"Please forgive me," she began, "but we have to pretend we're discussing a car rental." Then she shot a quick glance out of the corner of her eye toward the front desk. "Man-agement is very strict. We're not supposed to speak privately to customers."

"All right, then," I said. "I'll ask you about car rates, and you answer with whatever you want to say. Nothing personal."

She blushed slightly. "Forgive me," she said again. "They're real sticklers for rules here."

I smiled. "Still, your glasses are very becoming."

"Excuse me?"

"You look very cute in those glasses. Very cute," I said.

She touched the frame of these glasses, then cleared her throat. The nervous type. "There's something I've been wanting to ask you," she regained her composure. "It's a private matter."

If I could have, I would have patted her on the head to comfort her, but instead I kept quiet and looked into her eyes.

"It's what we talked about last night, you know, about there having been a hotel here," she said softly, "with the same name as this one. What was that other hotel like? I mean, was it a regular hotel?"

I picked up a car-rental pamphlet and acted like I was studying it. "That depends on what you mean by 'regular.' She pinched the points of her collar and cleared her throat again. "It's . . . hard to say exactly, but was there anything strange about that hotel? I can't get it out of my mind."

Her eyes were earnest and lovely. Just as I'd remembered. She blushed again.

"I guess I don't know what you mean, but I'm sure it will take a little time to talk about and we can't very well do it here. You seem like you're pretty busy."

She looked over at the other receptionists at the front desk, then bit her lower lip slightly. After a moment's hesitation, she spoke up. "Okay, could you meet me after I get off work?"

"What time is that?"

"I finish at eight. But we can't meet near here. Hotel rules. It's got to be somewhere far away from here."

"You name the place. I don't care how far, I'll be there."

She thought a bit more, then scribbled the name of a place and drew me a map. "I'll be there at eight-thirty."

I pocketed the sheet of paper.

Now it was her turn to look at me. "I hope you don't think I'm strange. This is the first time I've done something like this. I've never broken the rules before. But this time I don't know what else to do. I'll explain everything to you later."

"No, I don't think you're strange. Don't worry," I said. "I'm not so bad a guy. I may not be the most likable person in the world, but I try not to upset people."

She twirled her pen again, not quite sure how to take that. Then she smiled vaguely and pushed up the bridge of her glasses. "Well, then, later," she said, and gave me a busi-nesslike bow before returning to her station at the front desk. Charming, if a little insecure.

I went up to my room and pulled a beer from the refriger-ator to wash down my department-store roast beef sand-wich. Okay, at least we have a plan of action. We may be in low gear, but we're rolling. But where to?

I washed and shaved, brushed my teeth. Calmly, quietly, no humming. Then I gave myself a good, hard look in the mirror, the first time in ages. No major discoveries. I felt no surge of valor. It was the same old face, as always.

I left my room at half past seven and grabbed a taxi. The driver studied the map I showed him, then nodded without a word, and we were off. It was a-thousand-something-yen distance, a tiny bar in the basement of a five-story building. I was met at the door with the warm sound of an old Gerry Mulligan record.

I took a seat at the counter and listened to the solo over a nice, easy J&B-and-water. At eight-forty-five she still hadn't shown. I didn't particularly mind. The bar was plenty com-fortable, and by now I was getting to be a pro at killing time. I sipped my drink, and when that was gone, I ordered another. I contemplated the ashtray.

At five past nine she made her entrance.

"I'm sorry," she said in a flurry. "Things started to get busy at the last minute, and then my replacement was late."

"Don't worry. I was fine here," I said. "I had to pass the time anyway."

At her suggestion we moved to a table toward the back. We settled down, as she removed her gloves, scarf, and coat. Underneath, she had on a dark green wool skirt and a lightweight yellow sweater—which revealed generous vol-umes I'm surprised I hadn't noticed before. Her earrings were demure gold pinpoints.

She ordered a Bloody Mary. And when it came, she sipped it tentatively. I took another drink of my whiskey and then she took another sip of her Bloody Mary. I nibbled on nuts.

At length, she let out a big sigh. It might have been bigger than she had intended, as she looked up at me nervously.

"Work tough? "I asked.

"Yeah," she said. "Pretty tough. I'm still not used to it. The hotel just opened so the management's always on edge about something."

She folded her hands and placed them on the table. She wore one ring, on her pinkie. An unostentatious, rather ordi-nary silver ring.

"About the old Dolphin Hotel . . . ," she began. "But wait, didn't I hear you were a magazine writer or some-thing?"

"Magazine?" I said, startled. "What's this about?"

"That's just what I heard," she said.

I shut up. She bit her lip and stared at a point on the wall. "There was some trouble once," she began again, "so the management's very nervous about media. You know, with property being bought up and all. If too much talk about this gets in the media, the hotel could suffer. A bad image can ruin business."

"Has something been written up?"

"Once, in a weekly magazine a while ago. There were these suggestions about dirty dealings, something about call-ing in the yakuza or some right-wing thugs to put pressure on the folks who were holding out. Things like that."

"And I take it the old Dolphin Hotel was mixed up in this trouble?"

She shrugged and took another sip. "I wouldn't be sur-prised. Otherwise, I don't think the manager would have acted so nervous talking to you about the old hotel. I mean, it was almost like you sounded an alarm. I don't know any of the details, but I did hear once about the Dolphin name in connection with an older hotel. From someone."

"Someone?"

"One of the blackies."

"Blackies?"

"You know, the black-suit crowd."

"Check," I said. "Other than that, you haven't heard any-thing about the old Dolphin Hotel?"

She shook her head and fiddled with her ring. "I'm scared," she whispered. "I'm so scared I ... I don't know what to do."

"Scared? Because of me and magazines?"

She shook her head, then pressed her lip against the rim of her glass. "No, it's not that. Magazines don't have any-thing to do with it. If something gets printed, what do I care? The management might get all bent out of shape, but that's not what I'm talking about. It's the whole place. The whole hotel, well, I mean, there's always something a little weird about it. Something funny . . . something . . . warped."

She stopped and was silent. I'd finished my whiskey, so I ordered another round for the both of us.

"What do you mean by 'warped'?" I tried prompting her. "Do you mean anything specific?"

"Of course I do," she said sharply. "Things have hap-pened, but it's hard to find the words to describe it. So I never told anyone. I mean, it was really real, what I felt, but if I try to explain it in words, then it sort of starts to slip away."

"So it's like a dream that's very real?"

"But this wasn't a dream. You know dreams sort of fade after a while? Not this thing. No way. It's always stayed the same. It's always real, right there, before my eyes."

I didn't know what to say.

"Okay, this is what happened," she said, taking a drink of her Bloody Mary and dabbing her lips with the napkin. "It was in January. The beginning of January, right after New Year's. I was working the late shift, which I don't gen-erally like, but on that day it was my turn. Anyway, I didn't get through until around midnight. When it's late like that, they send you home in a taxi because the trains aren't run-ning. So after I changed clothes, I realized that I'd left my book in the staff lounge. I guess I could have waited until the next day, but the girl I was going to share the taxi with was still finishing up, so I decided to go get it. I got in the employee elevator and punched the button for the sixteenth floor, which is where the staff lounge and other staff facilities are—we take our coffee break there and go up there a lot.

"Anyway I was in the elevator and the door opened and I stepped out like always. I didn't think anything of it, I mean, who would? It's something that you do all the time, right? I stepped out like it was the most natural thing in the world. I guess I was thinking about something, I don't remember what. I think I had both hands in my pockets and I was standing there in the hallway, when I noticed that everything around me was dark. I mean, like absolutely pitch black. I turned around and the elevator door had just shut. The first thing I thought was, uh-oh, the power's gone out. But that's impossible. The hotel has this in-house emergency generator so if there's a power failure, the generator kicks on automat-ically. We had these practice sessions during training, so I know. So, in principle, there's not supposed to be anything like a blackout. And if on the million-to-one chance some-thing goes wrong with the generator, then emergency lights in the hallway are supposed to come on. So what I'm saying is, it wasn't supposed to be pitch black. I should have been seeing green lamps along the hall.

"But the whole place was completely dark. All I could see were the elevator call buttons and the red digital display that says what floor it's on. So the first thing I did was press the call buttons, but the elevator kept going down. I didn't know what to do. Then, for some reason, I decided to take a look around. I was really scared, but I was also feeling really put out.

"What I was thinking was that something was wrong with the basic functions of the hotel. Mechanically or structurally or something. And that meant more hassle from the management and no holidays and all sorts of annoying stuff. So, the more I thought about these things, the more annoyed I got. My annoyance got bigger than my fear. And that's how I decided to, you know, just have a look around. I walked two or three steps and—well, something was really strange. I mean, I couldn't hear the sound of my feet. There was no sound at all. And the floor felt funny, not like the regular car-pet. It was hard. Honest. And then the air, it felt different, too. It was ... it was moldy. Not like the hotel air at all. Our hotel is supposed to be fully air-conditioned and management is very fussy about it because it's not like ordinary air-condi-tioning, it's supposed to be quality air, not the dehumidified stuff in other hotels that dries out your nose. Our air is like natural air. So the stale, moldy air was really a shock. And it smelled like it was . . . old— you know, like when you go to visit your grandparents in the country and you open up the old family storehouse—like that. Stagnant and musty.