The Nicholas Linnear Novels (204 page)

The Tau-tau training of his childhood and adolescence had not been enough for Senjin. In teaching him what they knew, his
sensei
had inadvertently exposed to his restless mind the limitations of their magic. In being made aware of the limitations, he had automatically taken a leap of faith, going beyond the boundaries of Tau-tau. And he had found another world.

It was based upon the ancient principles into which Tau-tau tapped, but it used them in a wholly new way, a way of which only Senjin could possibly conceive.

Senjin had come to his tanjian
sensei
through Haha-san, who, thinking that she understood the nature of his melancholy, had done her best to discover some way in which to motivate her “son.” She had, in fact, correctly recognized the scope and depth of his intellect, and was certain that only Tau-tau would be a strong enough discipline to challenge him, sustain him, and, ultimately, contain him.

Being tanjian was a matter of bloodlines. One could not learn Tau-tau without being of the blood, and tanjian blood was passed down through the mother.

This was another reason why Senjin hated his mother. She had had the effrontery to bequeath him a legacy even though she had abandoned him. It had taken all of Senjin’s skill not to master Tau-tau (which had come easily to him), but to mold it into something he could find useful.

Senjin had grown up with dogs, or so it seemed to him, and that, too, he laid at his mother’s feet. If only she had lived, if only she had not abandoned him, casting aside her sacred duty to keep him safe from harm.

But she had been weak; she had allowed her life to come to an end, cowardly wriggling out of her responsibilities to him. From the day he became aware of her sin against him, of how wickedly she had robbed him, Senjin had like a tireless stoker fed his hatred with the singular obsession of someone fearful that without constant attention it would in time fade like memories.

Haha-san had been a tanjian
miko,
an adept at a certain kind of magic. But she had been bound up in obedience. Often Senjin wished only one thing in life: to cut her free of her moorings, to beat out of her the obedience that defined her life. To make of her something she was not and never could imagine being.

The first time this happened was when he came upon her fresh and dewy after her bath. She had turned her back to him, demurely slipping a cotton kimono around her shoulders. But not before he had had a glimpse of her naked torso.

Senjin was twelve when this occurred. He had not seen her naked since he was six, when he still took baths with her, and sometimes, when he was frightened or was awakened by a nightmare and was allowed into her bed, where he fell back to sleep with his arms around her.

He was aroused not only by Haha-san’s naked torso, but by how she had deftly turned her back on him in a gesture that was as coy as a coquette’s. He burned then to press himself against the suffocating pillows of her white breasts, to expel his breath into her, to slide into her warmth, to be intoxicated by her intimate scent.

But this was all fantasy on Senjin’s part. It could never occur because of Haha-san’s chasteness, which came not from any philosophical, religious, or sociological strictures, but simply because she was following the dictates set down for her by her mother. As far as Haha-san was concerned, these laws were carved in stone, so inviolate that Senjin could never even know whether in her heart she wished to join with him in sexual congress.

When, years later, he entered his first woman, he found that only through thinking of Haha-san could he find release. Yet thinking of his surrogate mother enraged him. Inevitably this led his mind back to his real mother, and his rage would become uncontrollable, overtaking him like an eighteen-wheel truck bearing down upon a tiny car, swallowing him whole.

Death and the imminence of death was all that could satisfy him then.

The slight ammoniac smell caused him to reach up, crack the lid on the sensory deprivation tank. He could feel before he saw it the slick, viscous strings of his semen crisscrossing the water that lapped at his belly. Sliding his fingertips along the velvet length of his still quivering erection, Senjin sighed in contentment.

Naked, Shisei lay upon her stomach. Sunlight, slanting in through the bedroom window in Branding’s Georgetown town house, struck the giant spider’s carapace, firing the colored ink embedded beneath her skin. It was the last day of the month, almost high summer.

She stirred, luxuriating in the feel of the bedcovers, and the insect stirred to life, articulating its hairy legs with the rippling of her muscles. The rhythmic expansion and contraction of the cephalothorax, the eight ruby-colored eyes alight as if with intelligence, completed the illusion.

Cotton Branding watched with a combination of fascination and horror. He reached out as if in a dream, his hand upon the spider, feeling only Shisei’s warm skin. The feeling was eerie, like the fly in the depth-perception test optometrists gave kids, which appeared three-dimensional until you tried to grasp its wing.

“You promised to tell me,” Branding said, “how you got the spider.”

Shisei turned over and the creature was gone, like that, a door banging shut. Her clear skin, her firm flesh, was burnished in the early morning sunlight.

“Why can’t you see me tonight?”

“I have to work,” Branding said. “As long as you’ve brought me back to Washington, I’ve got to attend this State dinner for the West German chancellor. Don’t be upset.”

“But I’ve already made plans. Dinner at The Red Sea, then home for some dancing. I went to the record store yesterday and spent a fortune on music for us.”

Branding smiled. “It sounds wonderful, but tonight it’s just not possible.”

“How long will you have to stay? I’ll wait up for you. We’ll dance when you get home.”

He saw the need on her face, and marveled at its childlike quality. “All right,” he said. “I’ll do my best to be home by midnight. But if I’m not, go to bed.”

She reached up, locked her hands behind his neck, drew him down to her. Her body writhed up against his in an almost uncontrollable spasm, or so it seemed to Branding as his mouth was filled with the taste of her.

But he could not imagine making love to her again without knowing the origin of the spider tattoo. “Tell me,” he whispered in her ear. “Tell me the story.”

Shisei broke away from him long enough to search his eyes with her own. “You really want to know, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Even if it means being shocked. Even if it means that afterward you might come to hate me.”

“Shisei,” he said, moving against her, “do you believe that I could hate you?”

“Hate and love, Cook, are often so close that one cannot tell them apart.”

“Trust me,” Branding said. “I know the difference between the two.”

Shisei closed her eyes. For a moment he could feel her breathing, his own body rising and falling upon her own. Somewhere in the house a phone was ringing. He ignored it, letting the answering machine do his work.

“Tell me,” he urged her. “I want to know.” He understood that in a basic sense that was a lie, or, at least, not the whole truth. He
needed
to know how she came by this strange and eerie device, as others need to know by word or deed that they are loved.

Branding wanted to understand this enigmatic creature who had so captivated him, not only because he would then be closer to her, but also because he clearly recognized the enigma as her ultimate protection. And he knew that he would never pierce to the core of her until she revealed to him the secret of the spider.

Shisei took a deep, shuddering breath. “Like everyone else,” she said at last, “I was born of the union of a man and a woman. But unlike most people, I never knew my parents. The family who raised me cared nothing for me. Had they shown me any emotion, even cruelty, I would have been grateful. As it was, I grew up feeling nothing. I did not understand emotions save the most basic one: fear. I ran away from the family and, as far as I know, they did not try to find me. When I was hungry I sought out food; when my bladder was full, I urinated in the shadows; when I was tired, I sought out shelter. I was an animal, nothing more. I was, in essence, a blank canvas.”

Shisei moved, and each time she did, Branding was suffused with her scent, a spicy musk that made him dizzy.

“Karma is unfathomable, but sometimes it is also strange,” Shisei whispered. “A man found me. He was an artist, but he did not put paint on canvas. He did not chisel figures out of stone or with a blowtorch bend metal into sculpture. He was a tattoo artist.”

“He drew the spider,” Branding said.

Shisei gave him a sad smile, brushed a lock of hair back from his face. “Life is so simple for you, Cook. Things happen and there is a reaction, a direct consequence, like a theorem in physics.”

“You met an artist and he saw in your body the perfect canvas for his art. You
are
perfect, Shisei. You don’t need me to tell you that.”

She stirred restively, as if she could not bear the weight of his words. “The spider was the greatest tattoo he had ever produced, the pinnacle of his art,” she said. “In that you are right.”

“And the rest?”

“The rest is unknown to you.” Shisei’s body was slick with sweat. “And now, as you wished, you will hear it.”

Branding had sudden misgivings, as if he had come too near the fire and was suddenly in danger of being burned.

Then it was too late, because Shisei was saying, “The artist’s name was Zasso. Zasso means ‘weeds’ in Japanese, so it must have been a name he had taken rather than been born with. It was a kind of political declaration typical of artists who, by necessity, live apart from the rest of mankind.

“Zasso, as I came to find out, loved the theatrical. Artifice was his first line of defense against the world, which he considered to be hopelessly entangled in its own entrails. He often referred to people on the street as cattle grazing in a field. They had, he maintained, no more conception of what was important or beautiful than did a cow.

“Beauty—or the pursuit of it—was Zasso’s life study. He was an aficionado of
matsuri,
which is a kind of phenomenon one can find in Japan either on the theater stage or in the whorehouse bed. It is wholly Japanese, meaning one must view it on many levels. Most often it involves the sort of brutality for which we Japanese are justifiably infamous. In the old days, however, it was different. The
matsuri
was performed in every village of the country. It began as a primitive tribal ceremony, a dance of chaos. Our novelist, Yukio Mishima, once called the
matsuri
an obscene attempt to join humanity and eternity. But I think he was afraid of the implications, that through chaos man had the potential to be godlike. Mishima abhorred chaos.”

“As do we all,” Branding said.

Shisei’s golden nails scored white lines in his flesh. “No,” she said. “Not all.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No,” she said, “I don’t.” Her nails dug into him further. “Tell me, Cook, if I hurt you with these—really hurt you—will you love me or hate me?”

“That’s an odd question.”

“Nevertheless, I want you to answer it.”

“But why would you want to hurt me?”

“That’s not the question.”

“I don’t know how I would feel,” he admitted.

“How easily love can be turned to hate. How fragile is existence, that it can be instantly turned inside out!” Shisei’s eyes were glittering, catlike. “Now the doorway to chaos has been opened. It would take only the smallest nudge to loose it completely.”

“You’re not taking into consideration the psyches of human beings,” Branding said. “The essential fairness of the vast majority of them keeps chaos in check.”

“You were right about one thing,” Shisei said, abruptly switching topics, “Zasso was attracted to my beauty. He presented himself as a kind and compassionate benefactor who understood my state and wished to, as he said, ‘save me from the life that had been thrust into me like a knife.’”

Shisei was trembling. Branding held her close. “I don’t want to go on,” she whispered. “Oh, Cook, please don’t make me.”

“I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do,” Branding said. He thought he could feel her suffering almost as if it were his own. “But I think it would be beneficial for you as well as for me if you told me what happened.”

“Cook, I—”

“You need to unburden yourself,” Branding said gently, in his lust for forbidden knowledge imagining himself a priest-confessor, uninvolved in the emotions being invoked. “This incident isn’t a scar, but an open wound. It requires healing.”

“Is there no other way?” she said in a small voice.

“No.”

Shisei closed her eyes, and he wiped the sweat from her face. “It’s all right. You can tell me.”

Her eyes flew open, and he thought he glimpsed a dark-red flame flickering within them. Then she said, in a hissing exhalation of breath, “Zasso was an artist, a connoisseur of beauty and of pain. He became my jailor, my tormentor, my demented lover. I had no choice. I had to submit to everything. The moment I stepped across his threshold, I became a prisoner.”

“Of course you mean that figuratively,” Branding interjected.

“No. I mean prisoner in the literal sense.” She saw the look on his face. “I knew this was a mistake.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s difficult absorbing everything you’re telling me.”

Shisei’s eyes were focused inward, and as she began to speak, Branding could almost feel the past being resurrected. “Zasso debased me so that when he exalted me he would know from what abominable depths he had raised me up. And with each further debasement, he said to me, ‘I am saving you.’”

“You mean he raped you?”

“I was ten when Zasso found me. I suppose that carnal desire was a component of the ‘radiant beauty’ he saw in me. But not right away; I was still too unformed, too far from the ideal into which he was determined to fashion me.” Shisei licked her dry lips. “No, he treated me like an animal. ‘You are a creature of the streets,’ he said to me. ‘Some wild thing. It is my duty to train you.’ He made me crouch in a corner. When I moved it was on all fours; when I ate it was from a bowl he put on the floor; when I urinated or defecated I did so on sheets of newspaper. He insisted I speak in grunts and barks. ‘Animals have no knowledge of civilized language,’ he told me.”