The Nicholas Linnear Novels (164 page)

Late afternoon. In the street the sky was the color of zinc. It was as dense as metal, as soft as putty. Industrial ash turned the air to syrup. White filter masks were much in evidence, not only among the cyclists whirring by, but also over the mouths of pedestrians fearful of lung damage.

Daylight had torn the neon night down, but what had it replaced it with? A colorless murk, aqueous and acrid, the bottom of a sunless sea.

He had many hours to kill, but that was all right. It was how he had planned it, emerging from an anonymous lair, traveling solely by foot, also anonymously, creating a path through the maze of the city only he could know or follow.

Despite his surroundings, he felt galvanized, ten feet tall, monstrously powerful. He recognized the signs, as familiar and comfortable as a well-worn shirt, and he smiled inwardly. He could feel the slender bits of metal lying along his bare flesh beneath his clothes. Warmed by his blood-heat, they seemed to pulse with a life of their own, as if his burgeoning strength had infused them with a kind of sentience. He felt like a god, an heroic avenging sword sweeping through Tokyo, about to excise a disease that was rotting it from within.

Down narrow streets he went, a man of silence, a singular icon of brutality and death. He crossed puddles of stagnant water from which arose like a miasma the stench offish innards. Like oil slicks, they threw back the rainbow colors of the fluorescent dusk.

It was evening by the time he made his way toward the doorway of The Silk Road. It was festooned with multicolored neon, garish plastic flowers, and cheap glitter tacked against faded crepe paper. Seen from a distance, the entire entrance was made up to resemble the inner petals of an enormous orchid or, if one’s mind ran to such images, a woman’s sexual organ.

Senjin passed through the glass doors into a space filled with reflected light. It was like being inside a prism. Revolving disco lights refracted blindingly off walls and ceiling, both covered in mirrored panels. The result was as momentarily disorienting as had been Senjin’s coffinlike hotel room. He felt at home here.

American rock music was playing at such a volume that the speaker diaphragms were taxed to their limit. The result was a thick, heavy sound, furry with bass and electronic distortion.

Senjin walked across the black rubber floor, identical to that used in children’s playgrounds. He passed a bar consisting of columns of colored water bubbling through plastic tubes. The top was Plexiglas.

He caught the eye of the manager, who turned away from him, hurrying to the sanctuary of his office deep in the back of the building. Senjin found an empty table stageside and sat down. He waved away the waitress as she began to weave her way toward him.

Senjin looked around him. The club was packed, mostly with businessmen out on their companies’ expense. The atmosphere was dense with the fumes of cigarettes, Suntory scotch, and the sweat of anticipation. Senjin’s tongue emerged from between his lips, licked at the air as if tasting the mingled scents.

The minuscule stage before which Senjin sat was teardrop-shaped Plexiglas, one of several on three different levels. The revolving disco lights spun off the scarred surface of the Plexiglas, sending distorted rainbows sparking through the club.

Eventually the girls emerged. They wore oddly demure robes that covered them from throat to ankle so that they had the aspect of oracles or sibyls from whose mouths the fates of the men in the audience would soon be made manifest.

Apart from their faces, one could not see what they looked like at all. One had, rather, to trust those gently smiling faces that looked like neither angel nor vixen, but were suffused with such a maternal glow that it was impossible to find them intimidating or frightening. Which was, of course, the point. Trust me, those expressions said. And, automatically, one did. Even Senjin, who trusted no one. But he was, after all, Japanese and, whether he chose to believe it or not, he was in most ways part of the homogeneous crowd.

Senjin concentrated his attention on one of the girls, the one closest to him. She was as startlingly young as she was beautiful. He had been unprepared for her youth, but far from disconcerting him, her age somehow heightened his own anticipation. He licked his lips just as if he were about to sit down to a long-awaited feast.

The music had changed. It was clankier now, more obviously sexual in its beat and in the insinuation of the brass arrangement. The girls simultaneously untied their robes, let them slip to the Plexiglas stage. They wore various forms of street clothes, most of them suggestive in one way or another. Strobe lights flashed. In unison the girls began to strip, not in any western bump-and-grind fashion, but in a series of still-life tableaux, freeze-frame images held on the video of the mind. The poses, as the garments came off, were increasingly wanton, until, at length, the girls were naked.

The music died with most of the light, and Senjin could hear a restive stirring in the audience. The scent of sweat outmuscled all others now.

The girl in front of Senjin had flawless skin. Her muscles had the firmness, the roundness of youth. Her small breasts stood out almost straight from her body, and the narrow line of her pubic hair would have revealed more than it concealed were it not deftly hidden in shadow.

Now the girl squatted down. In her hands were fistfuls of tiny flashlights imprinted with the name of the club, The Silk Road. She offered one to Senjin, who refused. But immediately there was a mad scramble over his back, as the businessmen lunged to grab flashlights from her hand.

When the flashlights were gone, the girl bent her upper torso backward until her nipples pointed up at the mirrored ceiling where they were replicated over and over. The bizarre image looked to Senjin like the statue he had once seen of the teat-bellied she-wolf who had suckled Romulus and Remus.

Balancing herself on her heels as deftly as an acrobat, the dancer began to part her legs. This was the climax of her act, the
tokudashi,
colloquially known in leering double entendre as “the open.”

Senjin could hear the clickings all around him as the tiny flashlights came on, insect eyes in a field of heaving wheat. Someone was breathing heavily on his neck. He was sure that every man in the club was concentrating on that one spot between the girls’ legs. The flashlight beams probed into those inner sanctums as the girls moved about the stage, keeping their legs remarkably wide open. It was a discipline to walk this way, as difficult to master as diving or golf, and no less deserving of admiration.

Senjin watched the muscles in the girl’s legs bunch and move as she slowly scuttled around the entire perimeter of the stage as easily as if she were a contortionist in a circus. All the while, her face was as serene and in control as if she were a queen or a goddess under whose spell these mortals had come. As long as she held her legs apart for the most minute inspection, this girl—and the others above and around her—maintained a magnetic power as hard to explain as it was to define. Senjin, totally uninterested in that spot of female sexual potency, wondered at its hold over others.

The lights came up abruptly, dazzlingly, breaking the hushed, florid silence. The rock music blared anew, the girls reclothed in their robes, once again mysterious, their faces now devoid of any emotion or involvement.

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.