The Graveyard Apartment (7 page)

“I guess visiting your ancestors' graves on the first day of spring is the next best thing to a picnic in the park,” Misao said. She filled a dish with water for Cookie, then set it on the floor. The dog's pink tongue splashed water in every direction as she began lapping eagerly from the bowl.

Tamao showed her mother a fistful of dandelions that she had picked along the way. The buds were still tightly closed.

“Mama, do you think these dandelions will bloom if I put them in water?”

“They might,” Misao said. “It's certainly worth a try.”

“Oh goody. I'll go stick them in a cup.”

As she watched her little daughter flying toward the kitchen sink, Misao spoke to Teppei with consciously feigned casualness. “Speaking of visiting graves, do you have any thoughts about how we should spend the day?”

“You're talking about Reiko's grave, right?” Teppei asked as he blotted his sweaty neck with a towel.

Misao was relieved to hear her husband address the subject so directly. Taking a cue from his decisive manner, she said lightly, “Well, it has been quite a while,” as if she were talking about nothing more fraught than, say, visiting the last resting place of her own grandmother—who had died ages ago, when Misao was only two or three years old. “I remember you were busier than usual at work during the autumn solstice, so we didn't pay a visit then.”

“Well, then, shall we go today? Hey, what if we brought lunch? We could join all the picnicking hordes. No, what's the word they use on TV—‘droves'?”

“Joining the droves sounds good to me,” Misao said with a grin, and Teppei, too, seemed pleased that the decision had been so easily made.

This is a perfect plan,
Misao thought, still smiling with satisfaction.
If we just keep doing normal things, we'll eventually be able to put the past behind us completely and move ahead with our lives, one step at a time …

Misao and Teppei were acquainted with a couple who had lost their precious three-year-old son when he wandered into the street and was run over by a three-wheeled trash truck. The bereaved parents had lived in a realm of perpetual grief—a literal vale of tears—and to an outside observer they appeared to be in very real danger of dying themselves, from unbearable sadness. The father was so devastated that he wasn't able to bring himself to do any work, while the mother spent every day obsessively praying at the family's Buddhist memorial altar from morning to night. Every month on the anniversary of their son's death, the couple would make a pilgrimage to his grave. This continued until they had another child. After that, their visits to the graveyard dwindled rapidly, until they reached the bare minimum: once a year. In Misao's experience it was almost universally true that with the passage of time, the living feel ever more distant from people who have died. Surely the same thing would happen eventually with Reiko.

“By the way, the occupants of 201 seem to be moving out,” Teppei said offhandedly as he romped around the living room with Cookie.

“Really?” Misao was standing in front of the refrigerator, peering at the shelves in search of something she could turn into cold dishes suitable for a picnic. “Some company was using 201 as a business office, right?”

“That's right,” Teppei said. “There was a moving truck out in front of the building just now.”

“I'll bet there were lots of cardboard boxes—you know, the unsold inventory from the health food products they were peddling.”

“Oh right. Yes, there were tons of boxes. Maybe that company went bankrupt because they couldn't sell their products.”

“I doubt that. They're probably just moving to a better location. I mean, this place isn't exactly…”

This place isn't exactly
what
? Realizing that she wasn't sure how to complete that sentence, Misao quickly closed her mouth. After a moment's reflection she went on, disingenuously, “This location isn't exactly convenient, being a bit outside the city center and so on. I mean, a retail business wouldn't really get any walk-in traffic here.” She suddenly remembered the piles of cardboard boxes stored in the basement. Maybe they weren't excess inventory in the normal sense but, rather, had simply been abandoned when the company found a predictably limited market for extra-fattening protein bars and lost interest in trying to sell them. Misao hadn't gone back to the basement since her first visit with Eiko, so she didn't know whether the boxes were still there.

Tamao returned with the dandelions in a cup of water, which she placed near the balcony. “Look, Mama, if I put them here they'll bloom soon, right?”

“Yes, they should, because that spot gets lots of sun.”

“So if flowers will bloom here, what about a tree? Would it bear fruit?”

“Sure, I guess that would be a possibility.”

“Okay, then, could we grow bananas here by the window?”

“No, I'm afraid it wouldn't work for bananas. They need a warmer climate than this.”

“Aw, darn. If we could grow our own bananas here, Pyoko would be really happy. He's always saying that he wants to eat a banana.”

Oh, no, not the dead bird again
, Misao thought impatiently. She shot a significant glance in Teppei's direction, but he appeared to be absorbed in perusing the TV listings in the newspaper. After a moment, he looked up. “Pyoko was a funny little bird, wasn't he?” he said. “I mean, liking bananas so much and all. Hey, how about this? We could pay a visit to Pyoko's grave today, as well, and we can take him a banana.”

“Yes! Yes! Let's do that,” Tamao enthused, clapping her hands.

When Tamao first mentioned that the dead bird was coming back to life and visiting her in the nursery late at night, Misao had worried that her daughter might be suffering from some kind of mental disturbance. She shared her concern with Teppei, but he dismissed it out of hand, saying, “Come on, it's just a harmless little fantasy. I think it's cute.”

Then he launched into one of his outlandish stand-up-comedy riffs: “Look, here's an idea. These days they have medical insurance for pets, and we've been doing the ad campaigns for one of those companies. So maybe we should have invested in an afterlife insurance policy for Pyoko! It could also cover the survivors, in case they need therapy after having nightmares or seeing ghostly apparitions. And the copy could be something like,
We'll watch over you and your beloved pets, even after they're dead
. What do you think? Genius, right?”

Teppei took a dynamic, laissez-faire approach to child-rearing, and Misao often thought that her husband's easygoing attitude made it necessary for her to pay extra attention to the nitty-gritty details. Having to be the pragmatic one occasionally made her uneasy, and at times she even wondered whether the fact that she wasn't working outside the home might be causing her to fixate on minor matters. She remembered something one of her female friends had said, years before: that when you quit your job and start staying home all day, little things that wouldn't have fazed you in the past begin to bother you, a lot. Maybe her friend had been right. Perhaps she had too much time on her hands, and it had turned her into a chronic worrywart.

Misao thought about the “Who, What, When, Where” game she had delighted in playing when she was a young child. The participants cut paper into small pieces, then wrote a phrase that fell into one of the
W
categories on each slip. The scraps of paper were then sorted into face-down stacks, and players would pluck one from each category, in order. This often resulted in boringly anodyne sentences—for example, “My friend sneezed last week at school”—but the real fun began when the sequence of phrases, while still grammatically coherent, conjured an outlandish or even outré situation. Misao still recalled one particularly naughty combination: “My teacher was sweeping up a pile of excrement yesterday at the department store.”

Remembering the hilarity that had ensued, Misao thought wistfully about how free and imaginative her young mind had been. Maybe filtering her present concerns through the lens of that childish game would help her to laugh off her worries, and let them go.
Tamao was chatting up a storm with a dead bird yesterday in the nursery.
Or how about this:
My hedonistic self-indulgence drove Reiko to hang herself from the rafters seven years ago, in her own entryway, while Teppei and I were enjoying an adulterous romantic getaway.

Misao shrugged her shoulders as if to dislodge the invisible demons perched there, then forced herself to return to the present. Opening a cold bottle of Calpis, she filled three glasses with the tartly sweet, milky-looking soft drink.

Out in the living room, Teppei turned on the television. Two brassy-voiced women, both speaking in affectedly high-class tones, were discussing an education issue on a daytime talk show.

Cookie padded up to Teppei and sat down expectantly next to the sofa. The animated buzz of people reveling in a day of recreation drifted in through the open doors to the balcony. As she was carrying the cold drinks from the kitchen, Misao glanced at the TV screen and noticed something odd.

The majority of the screen was taken up by the two women, who were both in late middle age. The face of one was covered with fine wrinkles and crowned with what was almost certainly a wig, styled in a jaunty bob. The other woman sported a pair of oversized eyeglasses with lavender frames. Misao had never seen either of them before, but she deduced that they were probably professors at some university.

The talking head with the purple glasses was intoning, “That's why it's important to implement appropriate countermeasures in the home,” when a shadow appeared in one corner of the screen. It was a dark, dense shadow, unmistakably shaped like a human being. The shadowy figure seemed to be fidgeting restlessly, in a way wholly unrelated to the action on camera.

Misao went up to the TV set and rubbed the dark patch with one finger. The friction of flesh on glass made a squeaking sound, and she felt a swift jolt of static electricity. She snatched her finger away, and once again examined the screen intently. “It isn't dirt,” she said after a moment.

“What isn't dirt?” Teppei asked.

“There seems to be something on the screen. See here? The black spot.”

Teppei joined Misao in front of the TV screen. After staring for a minute or two, he said, “You're right. I see it. Maybe something blew out in the cathode ray tube or something.” He picked up the remote control and began to cycle through the channels. The humanoid shadow wasn't visible on any other stations, but when Teppei returned to the original channel, it immediately appeared again. “There must be some kind of static or interference,” he declared confidently.

“Hmm, I wonder,” Misao said. “Maybe try flicking through the other channels again?”

On Channel One, there was a cooking show. Channel Three was showing a health program that focused on the role of diet in diabetes, while Channel Six had a rerun of a popular singing show. Channel Eight was running an old period drama; Channel Ten featured an art education program; and finally, way over on Channel Twelve, a noisy anime series was in progress. There were no shadows apart from the one on the original station: an image with a featureless face like a silhouette cut out of black paper and a body that suggested a stage actor dressed in black tights and gesturing in an overstated way.

“It doesn't seem to be mechanical,” Misao said. “I mean, it's only on this one station.” Teppei turned off the television. When the screen went dark, the strange shadow vanished, as well.

“Nah, it must have just been some kind of interference,” he said. He switched the TV set on again. The shadow was still there in a corner of the screen, and now it began executing a curious series of calisthenic movements: placing both hands on its knees, then raising its arms to the heavens, and finally bringing its hands down to cradle its head.

Tamao had been watching the TV screen intently the entire time, and now she spoke in a voice that barely rose above a whisper. “It's just like Pyoko said,” she breathed.

“Huh?” Misao was disconcerted. “What about Pyoko?”

Tamao cast a quick glance at her mother and then, as if confessing a guilty secret, she said nervously, “It's just like what Pyoko was saying. He told me the other place is full of people like that. They don't have any faces, and their bodies are completely dark and shadowy…”

Misao could feel the color draining from her face. She was seized by an urge to reprimand her daughter for spouting such drivel, and she had to bite her lip to keep the angry words from tumbling out. For an instant, she seemed to see the single white feather she'd found lying next to the telephone floating languidly past her eyes.

An awkward silence filled the air. Teppei switched the TV off again and said, “Okay, no more talk about that. Everyone here is acting a little bit crazy. It's just some interference: nothing more, nothing less. All right? Can we agree on that? Some wires just got crossed somewhere. Lately lots of tall apartment blocks have been going up not too far from here, so it isn't surprising that the broadcast signals would run into some interference from time to time. That's all it was. The picture will be back to normal before you know it.”

“But…” Misao began, pushing back a lock of hair that had fallen into her eyes. “You have to admit it was kind of strange.”

“Hey, anything can happen when you live in an overcrowded city like Tokyo,” Teppei said. “The other day one of the guys at work was saying that late one night when he was listening to music on his stereo, a man's voice suddenly came out of the speakers. It turned out that my friend's sound system had picked up a short-wave radio broadcast from a truck that was driving past his house, but he said that he really thought he was losing his mind until he figured out where the disembodied voice was coming from.”