The Miko - 02 (91 page)

But Senjin was at that moment too busy to appreciate the dancers’ splendid manipulation of emotions. He was already wending his way through the red-lighted warren of the club’s backstage corridors.

He found the cubicle he was looking for, and slipping inside, melted into the darkness. Alone in the tiny space, he set about taking inventory. Against the rear wall he found the window, grimy and paint-spattered with disuse. It was small but serviceable. He checked to see if it was locked. It wasn’t.

Satisfied, he unscrewed the bare bulbs around the large wall mirror. There were no lamps or other sources of illumination in the room. He reconsidered and screwed one bulb back into place.

When Mariko, the dancer who had been the object of Senjin’s attention, walked into her dressing room, she saw him as a silhouette, as flat and unreal as a cutout. The single bulb threw knife-edged shadows across his cheek. She did not, in fact, immediately understand what she was seeing, believing him to be the image on a
talento
poster one of the other girls had put up in her absence.

She had been thinking about power—the kind she possessed here, but apparently not elsewhere in her life. There was a paradox lurking somewhere within this synergistic puzzle of power, but she seemed at a loss to discover what it was or, more importantly, how it might help her attain a higher status than was now accorded her.

She had yet to learn the secret of patience, and now she never would.

Senjin detached himself from shadows streaking the wall as Mariko opened the door. He was against her, pressing himself along the entire length of her as if he were a malevolent liquid poured from the shadows.

Mariko, still half stunned that the poster image had come to life, opened her mouth to scream, but Senjin smashed his fist into it. She collapsed into his arms.

Senjin dragged her into a corner and pulled apart the flaps of her robe. There was now a small blade, warm from his own blood-heat, lying in the palm of his hand. He used it to economically shred her clothes, denuding her in precise, coordinated quadrants. Then he arranged the strips just the way he wanted.

For an instant Senjin’s baleful eyes took in the full measure of this glorious creature, as if fixing an image in his mind. Then he knelt and swiftly bound her wrists above her head with a length of white cloth. He tied the other end around a standpipe, pulling the cloth tight so that Mariko was stretched taut.

He withdrew an identical length of cloth, wound it around his own throat, slipped it around the standpipe, calculated distances, knotted it tight. Then he unzipped his trousers and fell upon her flesh without either frenzy or passion. It was not easy to effect penetration, but this kind of grinding pain acted as a curious spur for him.

Senjin at last began to breathe as hard as the men in the club had done during Mariko’s act. But he felt nothing from either his or Mariko’s body in the sense of a sensual stimulus. Rather, he was, as usual, trapped inside his mind and, like a rat within a maze, his thoughts spun around and around a hideous central core.

Flashes of death and life, the dark and the light, interwove themselves across his mind in a flickering, sickening film that he recognized all too well, a second deadly skin lying, breathing, with malevolent life just beneath his everyday skin made of tissue and blood.

Unable to bear the images and what they symbolized any longer, Senjin dropped his upper torso and his head. Now, with each hard upthrust inside her, the noose was pulled tighter and tighter around his throat.

As he approached completion, his body was deprived of more and more oxygen and, at last, sensory pleasure began to flood through him as inexorably as a tide, a thick sludge of ecstasy turning his lower belly and his thighs as heavy as lead.

Only at the point of death did Senjin feel safe, secure upon this ultimate sword edge, this life-death continuum made terrifyingly real. It was the powerful but tenuous basis on which Kshira, Senjin’s training, was built. At the point of death, he had learned, everything is possible.

Once one has stared death in the face, one comes away both with one’s reality shattered and with it automatically reconstructed along different lines. This epiphany—as close as an Easterner will ever come to the Western Christian concept of revelation—occurred early in Senjin’s life, and changed him forever.

Dying, Senjin ejaculated. The world melted around him and, inhaling deeply from Mariko’s open mouth, he gathered to him the susurrus unique to every human being. Greedily, like an animal at a trough, he sucked up her breath.

He rose, unwrapped with one hand the cloth from his throat as, with the other, he mechanically zipped his trousers. His expression was empty, eerily mimicking Mariko’s expression when, at the end of her show, she had faced her audience.

Now that the act was over, Senjin felt the loss, the acute depression, as pain. He assumed one must necessarily feel incomplete when returning from a state of grace.

His hands were again filled with the slender bits of steel that had lain like intimate companions along his sweaty flesh. What he had done with Mariko’s clothes, Senjin now did to her skin, shredding it in precise strips, artistically running the steel blades down and across what had once been pristine and was now irrevocably soiled. Senjin chanted as he worked on Mariko, his eyes closed to slits, only their whites showing. He might have been a priest at a sacred rite.

When he was done, there was not a drop of blood on him. He withdrew a sheet of paper from an inside pocket and, using another of his small, warm blades, dipped its tip into a pool of blood. He hurriedly wrote on the sheet,
THIS COULD BE YOUR WIFE.
He had to return the tip to the blood twice in order to complete the message. His fingers trembled in the aftermath of his cataclysm as he blew on the crimson words. He rolled the sheet, placed it in Mariko’s open mouth.

Before he left, he washed his blades in the tiny sink, watching the blood swirling in pink abstract patterns around the stained drain.

He cut down the length of cloth that had bound him to the standpipe. Then he went to the sooty window and, opening it, boosted himself up to its rim. In a moment he was through.

Senjin rode a combination of buses and subways to the center of Tokyo. In the shadow of the Imperial Palace he was swept up in the throngs of people illuminated by a neon sky, clustered like great blossoms swaying from an unseen tree. He was as anonymous, as homogenous within society as every Japanese wishes to be.

Senjin walked with a step dense with power yet effortless in its fluidity. He could have been a dancer, but he was not. He passed by the National Theater in Hayabusacho, pausing to study posters outside, to see if there was a performance that interested him. He went to the theater as often as possible. He was fascinated by emotion and all the ways it could be falsely induced. He could have been an actor, but he was not.

Passing around the southwestern curve of the Imperial moat, Senjin came upon the great avenue, the Uchibori-dori, at the spot which in the West would be called a square, but for which there was no corresponding word in Japanese. Past the Ministry of Transportation, Senjin went into the large building housing the Metropolitan Police Force. It was, as usual at this time of the night, very quiet.

Ten minutes later he was hard at work at his desk. The sign on the front of his cubicle read:
CAPTAIN SENJIN OMUKAE, DIVISION COMDR, METROPOLITAN HOMICIDE.

Under the knife, Nicholas Linnear swam in a sea of memory. The anesthetic of the operation, in removing him from reality, destroyed the barriers of time and space so that, like a god, Nicholas was everywhere and everywhen all at the same moment.

Memory of three years ago became a moment of today, a pearling drop of essence, distilled from the blurred seasons passing too swiftly.

Nicholas spreading his hands, palms up.
I look at these, Justine, and wonder what they’re for besides inflicting pain and death.

Justine slides one of her hands in his.
They’re also gentle hands, Nick. They caress me and I melt inside.

He shakes his head.
That’s not enough. I can’t help thinking what they’ve done. I don’t want to kill again.
Voice trembling.
I don’t believe that I ever could have.

You never sought out death, Nick. You’ve always killed in self-defense, when your insane cousin Saigo came after us both, then when his mistress, Akiko, tried to seduce and kill you.

Yet way before that, I sought out the training, first
bujutsu,
the way of the Samurai warrior, then
ninjutsu.
Why?

What answer do you think will satisfy you?
Justine says softly.

That’s just it,
Nicholas cries in anguish.
I don’t know!

I think that’s because there
is
no answer.

Swimming in the heavy sea of memory, he thinks, But there
must
be an answer. Why did I become what I have become?

A flash of spoken word, uttered long, long ago:
To be a true champion, Nicholas, one must explore the darkness, too.
Immediately, he rejects the remembered words.

He sees the stone basin in the shape of an old coin that lies within the grounds of his house. He recalls, in a starburst of memory, taking up the bamboo ladle in order to slake Justine’s summer thirst. For a moment the dark belly of the basin is less than full. Then he can see, carved into its bottom, the Japanese ideogram for
michi.
It symbolizes a path; also a journey.

His journey out of childhood and into the ranks of the ninja. How rash he had been to rush into that hideous darkness. How foolhardy to put himself into such moral peril. Did he think that he could learn such black, such formidable arts without consequence? A child, unthinking, unknowing, hurls a stone into the middle of a pristine, sylvan pond. And is astounded by the change in the pond’s appearance because of that one act. All at once the calm, mirrored skin of tree and sky is shattered as ripples advance outward from the trembling epicenter. Image of tree and sky waver, distorted out of reality, then disintegrate into chaos. And down below, the mysterious fish, hidden in veils of shadow, stir, squirming toward the surface.

Was it not the same with Nicholas’s decision to study
ninjutsu
?

He floats. Time, like sensation, is wholly absent, banished to another, weightier realm, but recalling
michi,
he thinks of the stone basin on the grounds of his house northwest of Tokyo. Before it was his, it had belonged to Itami, his aunt; Saigo’s mother. In his battle with Akiko, she had sheltered him, had aided him, and he had come to call her Haha-san, Mother.

Itami loved Nicholas, even though—perhaps partly because—he had killed Saigo, who had stalked Nicholas, murdering Nicholas’s friends as he had come ever closer to killing Nicholas.

Saigo was totally evil,
Itami says.
There was an uncanny purity to him that in other circumstances might have been admirable. I wished him dead. How could it be otherwise? Everything he came in contact with withered and died. He was a spirit-destroyer.

If it had been the same with Akiko, Saigo’s lover, she would surely have succeeded in destroying Nicholas. But her purity of purpose, her flame, had encountered Nicholas’s spirit, and had flickered in its power.

Akiko, as part of Saigo’s continuing revenge, had, through extensive plastic surgery, taken the face of Nicholas’s first love, Yukio. But against her will, Akiko had fallen in love with Nicholas. Because of her vow to Saigo, she was trapped into seeking Nicholas’s death, and in the end Nicholas knew he would have to kill her in order to save himself. But as he had confronted her, he had wondered whether he could bring himself to kill her, for she, too, had engendered strong, dangerous feelings in him.

Even now, suspended in nothingness, he is not certain of what he would have done had not the gods intervened. The earthquake that hit north of Tokyo opened up the ground on which Akiko stood. Nicholas tried to save her, but she slipped away, down into the darkness, down into the shifting shadows beneath the rippling crust of the earth.

I am not proud that I destroyed Saigo, your son,
Nicholas says.

Of course not,
Itami says.
You acted with honor. You are your mother’s son.

Itami is eighty when this exchange occurs, three years ago, an hour before the gods will take Akiko to their bosom in the center of the earth. Six months later Itami is dead, and Nicholas, weeping at her funeral, thinks of cherry blossoms at the height of their ethereal beauty, falling to the ground, where they are trampled under the feet of gaily scampering children.

Sadness, unlike sensation, remains with him, bending his inner gaze to the slowly beating heart of his tiny daughter, blue-skinned, as fragile and translucent as a Ming vase. Kept alive by tubes and pure oxygen for three cruel weeks while she struggles valiantly to cling to what fragment of life was willed her, she finally expires.

As if in a movie, Nicholas watches in mute despair Justine’s mourning. He had not thought it possible for a human being to shed so many tears. For months her anguish is absolute, blotting out the entire world around her.

And how does Nicholas mourn? Not with tears, not with the self-absorbedness of body and spirit that the mother—within whose body the new life grew, and who already shared with her that mysterious, intimate bond, soul abutting soul—must most wickedly shed like a serpent’s dead skin. He dreams.

He dreams of vapor curling. Lost, no direction home, he falls through vapor. Gravity drags at him with such an inexorable pull that he knows he will drop a great distance. He knows that he had just begun to fall. And, knowing that, with absolute certainty, he wants nothing more than to stop falling. And cannot. He falls. He screams.

And awakens, his body coiled and sweat-soaked, and cannot return to sleep. Night after night bolting awake, licking his salty lips, staring at the ceiling, at the vapor curling.