The Devouring God (3 page)

 

CHAPTER 5

Tuesday Evening

T
homas Fletcher went off his medication. Almost immediately, his obsession with Haruma's bones dissipated.

Then Japan came alive all around him.

It started with full-­body spasms and white light searing his brain, followed by waking nightmares of blue-­lightning death on Osaka train cars and the man who turned himself inside out with his fingernails. He knew the visible world would come alive as well, and he didn't have long to wait.

One morning, he saw a torn sweatshirt ­thrashing vainly in the eddied currents of a flood drain. It gestured to him for help. Later that day, two plastic bags buffeted by wind from passing cars spun in a mad ­tarantella above the median before shrieking off into the leaden sky. Coffee puddled in a subway corridor raced in runnels of grout to reach the soothing darkness in the drain hidden in the floor grate. The remainder, stranded, squirmed in the discarded can, rocking as if to spill itself. Thomas averted his eyes, but he somehow saw the can's spastic struggles no matter where he looked.

The awakening of Japan progressed, as day follows night, and the demons and angels he had seen all his life emerged from the crowd.

Thomas told no one. Instead, he spoke of the Japanese themselves. He insisted that they were insane. He insisted with conviction.

One evening, at his friend Tracy's apartment, he told the story of tutoring a mother and her as-­yet-­unborn child at twice the going rate. He spoke lovingly to a teakettle as if it were the mother's belly. As his audience responded, his pantomime lecture to the fetal scholar became passionate.

Gorgeous Tracy—­her eyes were wild with laughter, and her new boy-­toy, Benjamin, just grinned and shook his head, even though he was too new in the country to understand the context of the story. “Good Lord, what a country,” he said. “A hundred bucks an hour to teach a fetus. That's crazy.”

“That's not crazy,” Thomas said, shaking his finger at Benjamin. “The Pachinko Lady is crazy.”

“That's not crazy,” Tracy said. “The Fujisaki Screamer is crazy.”

“I give up,” said Benjamin. Benjamin was a busy guy, all busy with business, ready to get busy with Tracy, too busy to let a running gag play out properly.
Bastard.
“Who are these ­people?”

Tracy started: “The Fujisaki Screamer is a student, about fifteen years old . . .”

“Older,” Thomas said.

“ . . . and he wears a uniform from an industrial arts high school. He hangs out on the Fujisaki station subway platform and screams really loud. Just unbelievable. See, Benji, it's all about the pressure of the college exams. They call it ‘exam hell,' and the kids go to special after-­ school tutoring centers . . .”

Thomas was well past giving a damn about the plight of Japan's youth. Benjamin, on the other hand, was fresh off the turnip truck. He knew nothing about Japan, and that's the way Tracy liked them, these newcomers who weren't yet exhausted by the life of leisure. She would
teach
him, she said. And then, as always, she would tire of him, and Thomas's time would come around again.

This was the life they had chosen, even though the world was theirs. The Berlin Wall was down, Vietnam was back online, and the Great Wall was up for grabs at pennies on the dollar. They could have been anywhere, doing anything, even building peace and prosperity in Port au Prince or Mogadishu or Beirut, if they had really wanted. Instead, they spent their terrible freedom staying up all night, drinking to the point of physical agony, and screwing like monkeys in the subtropical swelter.

Tracy made it look easy. She was built for a life of ease. She leaned over to fill Thomas's beer, her breasts swinging under her tee shirt, just as they swung when Thomas took her from behind, swinging one clockwise and the other counterclockwise, smacking into each other as her round rump rotated up toward him and he pounded her flesh . . .

“Thomas, dude, wake up.”

They were waiting on him. Funny, but he dared not laugh. There was no way he could explain that lapse, so he explained the next Invisible Crazy:

“The Pachinko Lady walks in the middle of a four-­way intersection in the rat's maze near Hakata Station. There's a big pachinko parlor on each of the four corners, and she just walks around in the intersection drinking coffee from paper cups. She's there from dusk until at least midnight, and sometimes she's there in the middle of the day, weaving in and out of traffic in a funky old fake leopard-­skin jacket, winter or summer. She leaves her coffee cups in the middle of the intersection, and I've counted as many as fourteen. A true java junkie.”

“She's a bookie,” Benjamin said.

“Her husband went into one of the pachinko parlors one night, and she's still waiting for him,” Tracy said. “I've always thought so.”

“Yeah, right? She never figured out there was a back door,” Benjamin said.

“Or she loves pachinko, but she doesn't know which parlor to go into,” Tracy said. “The choices are just overwhelming.”

“Or she's a road agent for a black-­market organ network,” Thomas said. “When pachinko players go around the corner to cash in their winnings, the black suits harvest them. The number of coffee cups the Pachinko Lady leaves in the intersection tells Yamaguchi-­gumi foot soldiers how many livers are on ice. That's how they've paid for the new construction over by the prefectural offices. They just started liver transplants at Kyushu University Hospital, you know, the first liver transplants in Japan. If they have overstock from the transplants, they'll have banquets down by the castle ruins. Just like the old days.”

Tracy stared at him. Clueless Benjamin said, “Yeah, a lot of strange stuff happens over here, and it's hard to tell if it's really that strange or if being here just softens you up for it.”

“I don't know if the Japanese even see the Invisible Crazies,” Tracy said, tearing her gaze from Thomas's face. “For us, they really stand out, but they may just fade into the background for the Japanese. Or the very reasons that we notice them makes them nonentities in Japanese society. Anyway, they wig us out.”

Benjamin said, “Maybe we're just more Invisible Crazies.”

Tracy pursed her lips. Thomas couldn't hear other ­people's thoughts, not yet, but he knew she was making a decision.

“I mean, you know these ­people aren't really invisible to the Japanese. They just ignore these Invisible Crazies the same way they ignore us. But I wonder what the Japanese say about us and the rest of the Invisible Crazies when they're at home drinking beer.”

Tracy's smile broadened, and her eyes narrowed. The decision was made—­Benjamin was history, and Thomas was back in the saddle. Not tonight, though, not yet. Tonight she would drain Benjamin, savagely, until he was wrinkled and blue, chafed, exhausted. Then she would kick him out.

“Um, Thomas, you're losing focus a little there, man.”

Thomas had drifted again. Benjamin's expression was woefully concerned, the expression they had taught him to use when he wanted to pretend that he cared about anything he couldn't destroy outright.

Tracy's expression was pained. She saw. She knew.

She cornered Thomas in the kitchen later. She apologized about Benjamin, as if Thomas cared. She told Thomas she would help him find a new doctor.

“That doesn't work,” Thomas said. “I've already lost two jobs, thanks to the doctors. The whole doctor-­patient confidentiality thing doesn't mean anything here. We aren't ­people here. We have no rights here.”

“Maybe confidentiality wasn't the problem,” she said. “Maybe the doctors didn't say anything. Maybe your bosses just saw what they saw. Like Benjamin says, we aren't really invisible.”

Just past her shoulder, willowy shapes floated slipstreaming in the polished wooden grain of her cabinet door. As Thomas watched, more and more appeared, whorled and faceless angels shining nut-­brown on golden triptychs. One of them, the Boy Who Walks Sideways, told Thomas their story:
We are very shy. We disappear when we turn sideways.

They weren't invisible, and they weren't chameleons. They just knew how to disappear.

Thomas did, too.

He left Benjamin to his fate. He rode down to the beach for a little breathing room.
Japan, where it's so crowded the bedbugs are hunchbacks and you have to go to the beach just to change your mind.
He lay in the cool sand, thinking about Tracy bucking and writhing on top of him in the moonlight, and he thought of lovely little Kaori Nabeshima. What a fool he had been to kick her out. What the hell had he been thinking?

Then he thought of the bones again, of Haruma's bones especially, but it was just the shadow of the obsession, and he finally, finally felt like himself again. He had a nagging feeling that he had missed something about the obsession with the bones, but he pushed the thought away. He could still push thoughts away, to some degree.

He unbuckled his belt thinking about Kaori. Stroking himself as he remembered her trying to arouse him in his old farmhouse, he finally responded as wave after wave rolled in. The medication was finally wearing off. He was still thinking of Kaori as he spurted across the squirming dunes. His ejaculate shone like diamonds on the beach, but he kicked sand across it just in case it started to move of its own volition. Just in case.

We aren't invisible . . . I wonder what they say about us.
What rubbish.

None of that was important. The oblong moon shattered on silent waves that beat sand with silent futility, one by one, before sliding back defeated into the bay. It always started with waking nightmares. That was just the first day or so. After that, things started to fall into place, and it all started to make sense again. Looking out at the waves, seeing them reaching for the moon, reaching for love and failing again and again, Thomas began to see for the first time that there was an invisible current flowing through his waking world. It was clear as day, just for a second: all human lives as silent waves washing up on the same beach again and again and again until the final, defeated slide back into the cold, black waters whence they came . . .

All for love, all for the moonlight, all for romance!

As he stumped through the sand on the way back to his bicycle, he wondered about the thing under his floor. He should probably return it before he got into trouble. He would just ride back to his house and get it, and he could drop it off where it came from. He had always had the feeling that it wanted to go home. It would probably be smart to help it go where it wanted to go. That would be the sensible thing to do.

 

CHAPTER 6

Tuesday Evening

I
t was a quiet evening in Fukuoka Prefecture Mental Health Ser­vices Satellite Office 6. Detective Kimura had left. Ota and the section chief had come back after lunch to tell them that everything was set up and that Takuda would take care of them. Despite Yoshida's chilly reception of this news, Takuda thought she would tolerate him.

Nabeshima, defiant in the face of her earlier fright, was more than tolerant. She was curious. She had seen Takuda at least in part as he saw himself in the mirror. Perhaps he was the first . . .
oddity
she had been able to speak to, though she didn't ask again why he looked as he did.

And I'm not asking what she sees when she looks at me. I don't want to know.

At her invitation, he sat across the desk from her. She spoke to him coyly, in a slightly flirtatious manner that made clear she considered him harmless. “I've just finished writing up my notes, and I thought I would pass the time catching up on my email. I have to use the second phone line, though.”

“It's convenient, I'm sure.”

“Yes, it is, but the connection is awfully slow. Any­way, where shall we go? I think we should look up the security guard. What is your given name, Security Guard Takuda?”

From the front room, Yoshida called out: “Kaori, leave the man alone.”

“Oh, I have your name right here, on the paperwork your boss left us . . . Tohru. That's an old-­fashioned character combination, isn't it?”

“Not when I was born.”

“Ha. Neither was the name Kamekichi, was it? Oh, I suppose you're not that old. Now, from your accent, I'll say you're from . . . Honshu, probably north of the mountains, correct?”

Takuda said nothing.

“Yes, from the mountain shadow . . . Oh, here's your profile, I didn't even see that . . . former prefectural police detective . . . let's search!”

Takuda breathed slowly and calmly as the girl waited for her search results. It was too bad that she had a slow connection. It would be better if the results just came immediately, like ripping off a bandage. Then again, maybe it was better that she would be unable to download posted snippets of video about him and his partners. The print versions of his story were grim, but some of the television coverage was downright lurid.

Nabeshima inhaled sharply. She had found him.

“Ms. Yoshida, come here, please.”

Yoshida came quickly, without a glance at Takuda. He sat impassively, waiting for them to finish reading. They were framed by the tall filing cabinets behind them, the older woman reading over Nabeshima's shoulder as their expressions passed from shock to revulsion and, finally, naked fear.

Finally, Nabeshima stared without expression at the screen, as if this was what she had expected all along. Yoshida looked as if she would cry or throw up. He thought for an instant that an expression of pity had passed over her face, but he didn't trust pity anymore. Over the previous few years, Takuda had found that fear overcame pity in most ­people's hearts.

Yoshida straightened and looked him in the eye.

“It's unbelievable you found work as a security guard. It's unbelievable you found work at all. Does your boss know what you do in your off-­hours?”

“If he does, he hasn't mentioned it.”

She moved slowly back toward her desk. Passing brought her closer to him, and she hugged the wall as she went. Takuda would have scooted forward to let her pass, but leaning forward over the desk would have spooked Nabeshima.

And Nabeshima was ashen, her pale face lit blue by her computer monitor. “Are you dangerous?”

Not to you
, he thought, but the explanation was more complicated.

Yoshida slid behind her desk. She seemed relieved to be closer to her telephone, and she raised her head to look him in the eye, to prove that she wasn't afraid. “You should answer the question. It's a reasonable question.”

“As a detective, I used force in arrests, but no one ever accused me of abuse.”

“That's work. How about your off-­duty excursions?”

“I've never harmed a living human being.”

Nabeshima groaned as if that were a particularly bad joke.

Yoshida ignored her. “Are your accomplices here? The priest and the boy?”

“Accomplices? Reverend Suzuki lives with me and my wife. The boy, as you call him, lives with us as well.”

“You stick together,” Yoshida said.

“We try to work different shifts.”

“Your poor wife.”

Takuda bowed where he sat. “Yes, my poor wife.”

“How long have you been working for Ota?”

“Ota Southern Protection Ser­vices. About seven months.”

Nabeshima was staring at the screen. “So you and your friends came just after desecrating cemeteries in Tokuyama. That was after burning down an ancient villa on Sado Island.”

“She means destroying an irreplaceable national historical treasure,” Yoshida said.

Nabeshima stood and edged past him. She stood in the doorway uncertainly, as if she would bolt if Takuda moved. “Did you burn yourself on Sado? When you and your friends burned that villa?”

Takuda knew she was trying to ask about his face without Yoshida understanding. “That's where I got some of the scars you see, from invisible fire. But we didn't burn anything. No charges were ever filed in that case, not even misdemeanor trespassing. The fire started beneath the flooring, in a hidden chamber.”

Yoshida crossed her arms. “You and your friends have never been arrested, even though everyone knows you are criminals. You play on the superstition and ignorance of backward country ­people.”

Takuda frowned deeply. He couldn't help it, even though the invisible scars probably made his face crease in unexpected directions. Nabeshima looked away.

“Your friends are as dangerous as you are,” Yoshida said. “The local police who protect you tend to lose their jobs, don't they?”

He just looked ahead. He had been in this situation before, and there was no reason to speak. At least he had held this job for seven months. Sometimes he lost the job before the interview.

Yoshida exhaled as if she had been holding her breath. “Well, this is unacceptable.” She reached for the telephone.

That's when it happened: a slight quickening, a tightening of his muscles, a subtle shift in his own body that told him he was in the right place. As she picked up the telephone, his heart began to slam against his ribs.

“Please put that down,” he said.

She hurriedly pushed buttons, pretending not to watch him. As he walked toward Yoshida's desk, Nabeshima slid sideways toward the kitchen.

He towered over Yoshida. She put the receiver in the cradle and sat down slowly.

“You must think this through,” she said.

“You are in no danger from me,” he said. His body was on fire, but his mind was at ease. “Do whatever you like after the call.”

“The call?”

“Yes, the call. It's coming.” The blood coursed faster in his veins. Without thinking, he clenched his calloused fist, and the knuckles popped deep in the flesh. “That is, I think it will be a call. Something is coming, and the doors and windows are secure.”

“You are truly out of your mind,” she said. Anger blazed in her eyes. “Nabeshima, use your cell phone.”

“I lost it,” Nabeshima wailed from the kitchen.

Yoshida put her hand on the telephone. She was half his size, and she was terrified, but she would fight if she had to. “This is a prefectural office, and you will not stop me from calling for help.”

He was dizzy, as if the blood had drained from his head. The power washed in more quickly and completely every time, and now it left him reeling. “You'll never understand it, but right now, I'm the only help you've got.”

Her hand tightened on the receiver. “You don't have to live like this. When the manager gets here, we will all sit down and talk. I know ­people who could help you.”

He laughed aloud. It was probably not a pretty sight, but he was beyond caring. Nabeshima peered around the doorjamb to see what was happening.

Both women jumped when the phone rang.

“There it is,” Takuda said.

Nabeshima and Yoshida stared at him while he fished out his cell phone with trembling fingers.

“Didn't you want to record it?”

Nabeshima and Yoshida scrambled to turn on the tape recorder. The section chief had provided them with a microphone that attached to the back of the receiver with a rubber suction cup. Takuda doubted such an old-­fashioned contraption would work with a modern phone, but they hadn't asked him. He dialed his partner.

Mori answered on the first ring. “I started the trace just before the call. I've already got him.”

“Okay, you knew it was coming, too.”

“Yes. I lost my balance, and I had to crawl to my desk, but I got it in time.”

“Good. They have an old fax machine on the second line here.” Takuda reeled off the number. “Just send whatever you get, please.”

“Another minute or so. Ah . . . did the surge come to you, about ten minutes ago?”

Takuda rubbed his forehead. It was beginning to ache. “Ten? It just got to me about two minutes ago, and it almost knocked me out.”

“Yes, it's strong this time. I saw shapes and colors I don't have names for.”

“Well, call Suzuki. Ask him how long ago it hit.”

Mori snorted. “Suzuki won't know. He doesn't feel it, and he has no sense of time. I still don't think he's one of us.”

“Okay, okay. I've got to go. Fax it when you've got it.”

Mori hesitated, and then he said, “Did you expect this? Did you know this was coming?”

“I thought something was coming. The way was cleared for me,” Takuda said. “But tonight, I thought we were just going to trace a nuisance call and help make our friend Ota richer.”

Mori didn't respond to jokes like that anymore. He hung up.

Yoshida and Nabeshima were cheek-­to-­cheek trying to share the telephone earpiece. Nabeshima's retro hoop earring had gotten tangled in the makeshift wiretap cord, but she didn't even seem to feel it.

Yoshida pleaded: “Who . . . wait, calm down . . . who stole what? Kurodama? What is it you're missing?” Yoshida looked annoyed, but she was obviously not terrified, and Nabeshima just looked confused. Maybe it was not the foreigner.

Was I wrong? Was the surge wrong?

As Yoshida tried to get answers from the caller, both she and Nabeshima glanced up at him. They were no longer quite so afraid. They were curious. They wondered how he knew.

Then we're in the right place.
His heart sank. Every time, he hoped it was a false alarm, but the surge was always right.
We've got work to do.

“Well, I can't . . . if you don't tell me who . . . no, no, don't hurt anyone. You're not . . .” Yoshida and Nabeshima both went limp. The caller had hung up.

Nabeshima blinked as if waking. “I know that voice,” she said.

Yoshida concentrated on the little handheld recorder as she rewound the tape, so Takuda asked Nabeshima: “Was that the foreigner?”

She nodded. “He was very upset. It's hard to tell, but I think I know his voice . . .”

Yoshida's tape recorder gave a loud snap as it finished rewinding, and she pushed the play button. The three of them crowded in to hear. The caller's voice was unintelligible. Even Yoshida's shouting was muted and indistinct.

She grabbed her pencil. “Okay, let's get what he said. I think he said the Kurodama was gone, and he asked if it was here.”

Takuda ran his palm over his scalp.
Kurodama
, black jewel, could refer to a brand of large table grapes, a brand of candies, or anthracite.

Nabeshima shook her head. “That doesn't make sense. He was speaking in English half the time. It was really tough to understand.”

Yoshida hissed, “Then tell me what you understood. Help me get this on paper!”

Nabeshima gave Takuda a helpless look, as if he could do something for her. The fax machine buzzed and whirred. Mori had isolated the source. He left them to reconstruct the foreigner's call.

As the paper edged out of the fax machine, Takuda began to understand why he had been brought to the satellite office.

“Ms. Yoshida, I need your help in here,” he said.

She peered suspiciously into the back office.

He held up the fax from Mori. “Please come look at this fax from my associate, the one you call ‘the boy.' We both work for Ota Southern Protection Ser­vices.”

She rolled her eyes.

“We were ready for this call,” Takuda said. “Tracing calls from an unknown cell phone is well within our reach, with the consent of the landline owner.”

Her eyes widened. She approached, but she kept Nabeshima's little desk between them. “So you know who the caller is?”

“Not exactly. The cell phone owner has caller ID switched on. Your telephone is just too old to display it. Otherwise, you would have recognized the name.” He handed her the sheet.

She read it, blinked, and then read it again. “Kaori Nabeshima?” she whispered. “Our Nabeshima?”

They both looked at Nabeshima perched on Yoshida's chair, trying to fill in the details of the foreigner's frenetic call.

Yoshida turned back to Takuda. “If this is some kind of game . . .”

“There's no game and there's no mistake. The call came from a cell phone account in her name.”

Yoshida stepped away, watching him over her shoulder for the first few steps, and then she turned toward the front office with the fax sheet clutched behind her back. She approached Nabeshima slowly and carefully with her hand outstretched as if she were approaching a small animal.