“Nice place, but can I get something with a better view?”
“All due apologies. It’s our only model,” said Fisherman without expression.
“No way. I’m going home. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Don’t worry, we’re not locking you in,” said Fisherman. “A cell is just a room if you don’t lock the door.”
I was too tired to argue. I gave up. I stumbled in and fell onto the hard cot. Damp mattress, cheap blanket, smell of piss. Love it.
“It won’t be locked,” Fisherman repeated as he shut the door with a cold, solid thunk.
I sighed and pulled the blanket over me. Someone somewhere was snoring loudly. It seemed to come from far off, but it could’ve been in the next cell. Very disturbing.
But Mei, Mei! You were on my mind last night. I don’t know if you were alive at the time, but you were on my mind. I was slowly taking off your clothes, and then we were making love. It was our little class reunion. I was so relaxed, I thought someone had loosened the main screw of this world. But now, Mei, there’s nothing I can do for you. Not a damned thing. I’m sorry. We lead such tenuous lives. I don’t want Gotanda to get caught up in a scandal. I don’t want to ruin his image. He wouldn’t get work after that. Trashy work in a trashy world of trashy images. But he trusted me, as a friend. So it’s a matter of honor. But Mei, my little Goat Girl Mei, we did have a good time together. It was so wonderful. Like a fairy tale. It’s no comfort to you, Mei, but I’ll never forget you. Shoveling snow until dawn. Holding you tight in that world of images, making love on deductible expenses. Winnie the Pooh and Mei the Goat Girl. Strangling is a horrible way to die. And you didn’t want to die, I know. But there’s nothing I can do for you now. I don’t know what’s right or wrong. I’m doing all I can. This is how I live. It’s the system. I bite my lip and do what I got to. Good night, Mei, my little Goat Girl. At least you’ll never have to wake again. Never have to die again.
Good night, I voiced the words.
Good night, echoed my mind.
Cuck-koo, sang Mei.
The next day wasn’t much different than the previous. In the morning the three of us reassembled in the interrogation room over a silent breakfast of coffee and bread. Then Bookish loaned me an electric razor, which was not exactly sharp. Since I hadn’t planned ahead and brought my toothbrush, I gargled as best I could.
Then the questioning started. Stupid, petty legal torture. This went on at a snail’s pace until noon.
“Well, I guess that about does it,” said Fisherman, laying his pen down on the desk.
As if by prior agreement, the two detectives sighed simultaneously. So I sighed too. They were obviously stalling for time, but obviously they couldn’t keep me here forever. One business card in a dead woman’s wallet does not constitute sufficient cause for detention. Even if I didn’t have an alibi. They’d have to strap me down—at least until the fingerprinting and autopsy yielded a more plausible suspect.
“Well,” said Fisherman, pounding the small of his back as he stretched. “About time for lunch.”
“As you seem to have finished your questions, I’ll be going home,” I told them.
“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” Fisherman said with fake hesitation.
“And why not?” I asked.
“We need to have you sign the statement you’ve made.”
“I’ll sign, I’ll sign.”
“But first, read over the document to verify that the contents are accurate. Word by word. It’s extremely important you know what you’re signing your name to.”
So I read those forty-odd sheets of official police transcriptions. Two hundred years from now, I couldn’t help but think, they might be of some value in reconstructing our era. Pathologically detailed, faultlessly accurate. A real boon to research. The daily habits of an average, thirty-four-year-old, single male. A child of his times. The whole exercise of reading it through in this police interrogation room was depressing. But read it I did, from beginning to end. Now I could go home. I straightened the stack of papers and said that everything looked in order.
Playing with his pen, Fisherman glanced over at Bookish. Bookish pulled a single cigarette from his box of Hope Regulars on top of the radiator, lit up and grimaced into the smoke. I had an awful feeling.
“It’s not that simple,” Bookish spoke in that slow professional tone reserved for elucidating matters to the unordained. “You see, the statement’s got to be in your own hand.”
“In my own hand?”
“Yes, you have to copy everything over. In your own handwriting. Otherwise, it’s not legally valid.”
I looked at the stack of pages. I didn’t have the strength to be angry. I wanted to be angry, I wanted to fly into a rage, I wanted to pound on the desk and scream, You jerks have no right to do this! I wanted to stand up and walk out of there. And strictly speaking, I knew they had no right to stop me. Yes, but I was too tired. Too tired to say a word, too tired to protest. If I wasn’t going to protest, I’d be better off doing what I was told. Faster and easier. I’m wimping out, I confessed to myself. I’m worn out and I’m wimping out. Used to be, they’d have to tie me down. But then again, their junk food and cigarette smoke and razor that chewed up my face wouldn’t have gotten to me either. I was getting weak in my old age.
“No way,” I surprised myself by saying. “I’m going home. I have the right to go home. You can’t stop me.”
Bookish sputtered something indecipherable. Fisherman stared up at the ceiling and rapped his pen on the desk. Tap-tap-tap, tap, tap-tap, tap-tap, tap.
“You’re making things difficult,” said Fisherman succinctly. “But very well. If that’s the way it’s going to be, we’ll get a summons. And we’ll forcibly hold you here for investigation. Next time won’t be such a picnic. We don’t mind that, you know. It’ll be easier for us to do our job that way too. Isn’t that right?” he tossed the question over to Bookish.
“Yes sir, that’s going to be even easier in the long run. That’s what we should’ve done earlier. Let’s get a summons,” he declared.
“As you like,” I said. “But I’m free until the summons is issued. If and when the summons comes through, you know where to find me. Otherwise, I don’t care. I’m outta here.”
“We can place a temporary hold on your person until the summons is issued.”
I almost asked them to show me where it said that in Statutes of Law, but now I really didn’t have the energy. I knew they were bluffing, but it didn’t matter.
“I give up. I’ll write out my statement. But I need to make a phone call first.”
Fisherman passed me the telephone. I dialed Yuki’s number.
“I’m still at the police station,” I said. “It looks like this’ll take all night. So I guess I won’t make it over today either. Sorry.”
“You’re still in the clink?”
“A real drag.” This time I beat her to the punch.
“That’s not fair,” she came back. There’s a lot of descriptive terms out there.
“What have you been doing?”
“Nothing special,” she said. “Just lying around, listening to music, reading magazines, eating cake. You know.”
The two detectives tried to listen in again.
“I’ll call you as soon as I get out of here.”
“If you get out of there,” said Yuki flatly.
“Well, okay then, lunchtime,” announced Fisherman, soon as I hung up.
Lunch was soba, cold buckwheat noodles. Overcooked and falling apart. Hospital food, practically a liquid diet. An aura of incurable illness hovered over it. Still, the two of them wolfed the stuff down, and I followed suit. To wash down the starch, Bookish brought in more of his famous lukewarm tea.
The afternoon passed as slowly as a silted-up river. The ticking of the clock was the only sound in the room. A telephone rang in the next room. I did nothing but write and write and write and write. Meanwhile the two detectives
took turns resting. Sometimes they’d go out into the corridor and whisper.
I kept the pen moving. At six-fifteen I decided to make dinner, first taking the yam cake out of the refrigerator …
By evening I’d copied twenty pages. Wielding a pen for hours on end is hard work. Definitely not recommended. Your wrist starts to go limp, you get scribe’s elbow. The middle finger of your hand begins to throb. Drift off in your thoughts for a second and you get the word wrong. Then you have to draw a line through it and thumbprint your mistake. It could drive a person batty. It was driving me batty.
For dinner, we had generic take-out food again. I hardly ate. The tea was still sloshing around in my gut. I felt woozy, lost the sense of who I was. I went to the toilet and looked in the mirror. I could barely recognize myself.
“Any findings yet?” I asked Fisherman. “Fingerprints or traces or autopsy results?”
“Not yet,” he said. “These things take time.”
I kept at it until ten. I had five more pages to go, but I’d reached my limit. I couldn’t write another word and I told them so. Fisherman conducted me to the tank and I dozed right off.
In the morning, it was the same electric razor, coffee, and bread. The five pages took two hours. Then I signed and thumbprinted each sheet. Then Bookish checked the whole lot.
“Am I free to go now?” I asked hopefully.
“If you answer a few more questions, yes, you can go,” said Bookish.
I heaved a sigh. “Then you’re going to have me do more paperwork, right?”
“Of course,” answered Bookish. “This is officialdom. Paperwork is everything. Without the paper and your prints, it doesn’t exist.”
I pressed my fingers into my temples. It felt as if some loose object were lodged inside. As if something had found its way into my head and ballooned up to where it was impossible to remove.
“This won’t take too long. Be over before you know it.”
More mindless answers to more mindless questions. Then Fisherman called Bookish out into the corridor. The two stood whispering for I don’t know how long. I leaned back in my chair and studied the patterns of mildew on the ceiling. The blackened patches could have been photographs of pubic hair on dead bodies. Spreading down along the cracks in the wall like a connect-the-dots picture. Mildew, cultured in the body odor of the poor fools ground down in this room the last several decades. From a systematic effort to undermine a person’s beliefs, dignity, and sense of right and wrong. From psychological coercion that fed on human insecurity and left no visible scars. Where far removed from sunlight and stuffed with bad food, you sweat uncontrollably. Mildew.
I placed both hands on the desk and closed my eyes, thinking of the snow falling in Sapporo. The Dolphin Hotel and my receptionist friend with glasses. How was she getting along? Standing behind the counter, flashing that professional smile of hers? I wanted to call her up this very second. Tell her some stupid joke. But I didn’t even know her name. I didn’t even know her name.
She sure was cute. Especially when she was working hard. Imbued with that indefinable hotel spirit. She loved her work. Not me. I never once enjoyed mine. I do good work, but I have never loved my work. Away from her work, she was vulnerable, uncertain, fragile. I could have slept with her if I’d felt like it. But I didn’t.
I want to talk to her again.
Before someone killed her too.
Before she disappeared.
The two detectives came back into the room to find me still lost in the mildew. They both stood.
“You can go home now,” Fisherman told me, expressionless. “Thanks for your cooperation.”
“No more questions. You’re done,” Bookish added his comments.
“Circumstances have changed,” Fisherman said. “We can’t keep you here any longer. You’re free to go. Thank you again.”
I got up from my chair and pulled on my jacket, which reeked of cigarette smoke. I didn’t have a clue what had happened, but I was happy to get the hell out of there. Bookish accompanied me to the entrance.
“Listen, we knew you were clean last night,” he said. “We got the results from the coroner and the lab. You were clean. Absolutely clean. But you’re hiding something. You’re biting your tongue. You’re not so hard to read. That’s why we figured we’d hold you, until you spit it out. You know who that woman is. You just don’t want to tell us. For some reason. You know, that’s not playing ball. We’re not going to forget that.”
“Forgive me, but I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“We might call you in again,” he said, digging into his cuticle with a matchstick. “And if we do, you can be sure we’ll work you over good. We’ll be so on top of things that lawyer of yours won’t be able to do a damn thing.”
“Lawyer?” I asked, all innocence.
But by then he’d disappeared into the building. I grabbed a taxi back home.
I ran a bath and took a nice, long soak. I brushed my teeth, washed my face, shaved. I couldn’t get rid of the smoke on me. What a hole that place was!
Refreshed, I boiled some cauliflower, which I ate along with a beer. I put on Arthur Prysock backed by the Count Basie Orchestra. An unabashedly gorgeous record. Bought sixteen years before. Once upon a time.
After that I slept. Just enough sleep to say I’d been somewhere and back, maybe thirty minutes. When I woke up, it was one in the afternoon. Still time in the day. I packed my gear, threw it into the Subaru, and drove to the Sendagaya Pool. After an hour’s swim I was almost feeling human again. And I was hungry.
I called Yuki. When I reported that I’d been released, she gave me a cool that’s nice. As for food, she’d eaten only two cream puffs all day, sticking to her junk-ridden regimen. If I came over now, though, she’d be ready and waiting, and probably pleased.
I tooled the Subaru through the outer gardens of Meiji Shrine, down the tree-lined avenue before the art museum, and turned at Aoyama-Itchome for Nogi Shrine. Every day was getting more and more like spring. During the two days I’d spent inside the Akasaka police station, the breeze had become more placid, the leaves greener, the sunlight fuller and softer. Even the noises of the city sounded as pleasant as Art Farmer’s flügelhorn. All was right with the world and I was hungry. The pressure lodged behind my temples had magically vanished.
Yuki was wearing a David Bowie sweatshirt under a brown leather jacket. Her canvas shoulder bag was a patchwork of Stray Cats and Steely Dan and Culture Club buttons. Strange combination, but who was I to say?
“Have fun with the cops?” asked Yuki.
“Just awful,” I said. “Ranks up there with Boy George’s singing.”
“Oh,” she remarked, unimpressed with my cleverness.
“Remind me to buy you an Elvis button for your collection,” I said, pointing at her bag.
“What a nerd,” she said. Such a rich vocabulary.
We went to a restaurant where we each had a roast beef sandwich on whole wheat and a salad. I made her drink a glass of wholesome milk too. I skipped the milk for myself, got coffee instead. The meat was tender and alive with horseradish. Very satisfying. This was a meal.
“Well then, where to from here?” I asked Yuki.
“Tsujido,” she said without hesitation.
“Okay by me,” I said. “To Tsujido we shall go. But what’s there to see in Tsujido?”
“Papa lives there,” said Yuki. “He says he wants to meet you.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. Don’t worry, he’s not such a bad guy.”
I sipped my second cup of coffee. “You know, I never said he was a bad guy. Anyway, why would he want to meet me? You told him about me?”
“Sure. I phoned him and told him how you’d helped me get back from Hokkaido and how you got picked up by the cops and might never come out. So Papa had one of his lawyer friends make inquiries about you. He’s got all kinds of connections. He’s real practical that way.”
“I
see,” I said. “So that’s what it was.”
“He can be handy sometimes.”
“I’ll say.”
“Papa said that the police had no right to hold you there like that. If you didn’t want to stay there, you were free to go. Legally, that is.”
“I knew that myself,” I said.
“Why didn’t you just go home then? Just up and say, I’m going. Sayonara.”
“That’s a difficult question,” I said after some moments’ thought. “Maybe I was punishing myself.”
“Not normal,” she said, propping up her chin.
It was late in the afternoon and the roads to Tsujido were empty. Yuki had brought a bagful of tapes with her. A complete travel selection, from Bob Marley’s “Exodus” to Styx’s “Mister Roboto.” Some were interesting, some not. Which was pretty much all you could say about the scenery on the way. It all sped past. Yuki sank into her seat silently listening to the music. She tried on the pair of sunglasses I’d left on the dashboard, and at one point she lit up a Virginia Slim. I concentrated on driving. Methodically shifting gears, eyes fixed on the road ahead, carefully checking each traffic sign.
I was jealous of Yuki. Here she was, thirteen years old, and everything, including misery, looked, if not wonderful, at least new. Music and places and people. So different from me. True, I’d been in her place before, but the world was a simpler place then. You got what you worked for, words meant something, things had beauty. But I wasn’t happy. I was an impossible kid at an impossible age. I wanted to be alone, felt good being alone, but never had the chance. I was locked in these two frames, home and school. I had this crush on a girl, which I didn’t know what to do about. I didn’t know what love meant. I was awkward and introverted. I wanted to rebel against my teachers and parents, but I didn’t know how. Whatever I did, I bungled. I was the exact opposite of Gotanda.
Even so, there were times that I saw freshness and beauty. I could smell the air, and I really loved rock ‘n’ roll. Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams. I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.