“I’m a fan,” the colonel said, winking. “Secret member of the cult.” He dropped a coin in the offering box, and the three of them, chatting away, walked to the nearby train station. The men wondered if Lisa didn’t have some kind of serious speech impediment (she spoke as if there was a gumball in her mouth), but neither of them inquired about it.
The shrine to which Lisa had referred was called Yanagi Mori. Oddly enough, it turned out to be located in Akihabara, one of Tokyo’s most nondescript districts, known primarily for its discount electronics stores. Surrounded by a red picket fence, Yanagi Mori faces a narrow plebeian street lined with small shops and stalls. Its rear is on the cement banks of the Kanda River, an urbanized trough whose imprisoned green waters course pitifully across Tokyo in much the same way that the Los Angeles River trickles through L.A.: a liquid indictment of the failed imagination of man.
Although the shrine grounds were no larger than, say, the parking lot at a suburban McDonald’s, it was filled with Tanuki images in stone, wood, clay, rusty iron, and other media not readily identifiable. Some of the carvings were quite fanciful, and the Americans had to admit the place had a pleasing atmosphere. Certainly it was reverential, but with comic undertones, as if refusing to allow that reverence to puff up into piety.
After they’d wandered among the statues for a while, Thomas pointed to a building on the grounds. “Looks like more tanukis over there.”
“No,” said Lisa. “That Kitsune shrine. Kitsune not same-o same-o Tanuki. Kitsune is what you call . . . fox. In Japan, fox and badger have special powers and people worship, but are not true gods. Kitsune the fox is messenger of gods. He run between worlds. Between other world and this world. Sometime cause trouble, make joke, but he work very hard. Tanuki never work. He for fun. Eat, drink, dance, make sex. Alla time big fun.”
“I see,” said the colonel. “So why aren’t we hanging over there with Kitsune? Sounds like Br’er Fox is the important one.”
From the curve of his visor to the blunt tips of his military shoes, Lisa looked him over. Her eyes, he thought, were luminous, like the interior of a bell pepper from which a slice has been cut out. Her smile, having no real color of its own, seemed to usurp color from everything around her. It mixed the hues and threw them back at him. “Oh?” she asked. “You no think fun important? Fun not important same-o same-o work? Maybe fun more better? You no think so?”
“It wouldn’t take much to convince me, Madame Ko. And you’re doing a pretty good job.” His laugh, deep but unsteady, had a lot of bayou silt in it.
Leworc spoke up. “The colonel here is not entirely averse to fun.”
“Not entirely,” agreed Thomas. “Not entirely. I plan to have me a heap more of it when I get out from under the weight of these eagles.” He tapped his epaulets and explained to Lisa, “I’ll be retiring in five years.”
“What you do then?”
“Oh, we bought us a nice cedar lodge out in Oregon. In the hills near Grants Pass. Hook me some fine trout, buy me a pair of them Timberland hiking boots, meet a few amis, maybe, who’ll just want to play poker with me and not always be woofing about current events. Most of the time I’ll just sit on the porch and sip whiskey and talk to the woodpeckers. Hell, maybe I’ll rise up now and then and hug a tree or two.” Unnoticed by the others, he fingered the note in his pocket. “Of course,” he sighed, “since we haven’t located that knock-up temple, there won’t be any pitter-patter of little feet around the place.”
Leworc grinned at the reference. Lisa thought, Don’t be too sure of that! She was remembering, obviously, her escaped tanukis, how they were at large at Grants Pass—but then, suddenly, something else came to mind. A notion buzzed in her skull like a diamondback. She turned to one of the stone badgers and pretended to study it. The way she was working her jaws, one would have guessed she was chewing gristle, but it was due to the thought process—and the increasing pain in her palate. Several minutes passed before she rejoined the men. With unexpected boldness, she grabbed the colonel’s right hand and placed it on her belly. “In short time,” she said, “I have baby-san. I go away. No can keep baby. Maybe I give baby you and you wife.”
Thomas was speechless. Leworc asked, “Are you serious?”
“Yes. Is so.” She clasped Thomas’s hand more tightly. “You think alla night, you talk you wife. Tomorrow or next day, you come here to shrine.” She pointed, then, to a building on the premises, a house not much bigger than Dickie’s hut. “Caretaker house. If I not here, you leave answer with caretaker. Okay? If answer is yes, then you come back this place in one year.” She consulted her watch. “One year. September 15. When baby no more suck tit. If I no here, baby girl be in caretaker house. For you. Your child. I sorry, no legal papers.”
For someone with his military and CIA connections, getting an undocumented infant out of Japan would scarcely be a problem, but Thomas was still shaken. He could tell, however, that although Madame Ko’s speech was worsening, she was totally sincere. All he could mumble in reply was, “Thank you. This is unbelievable. Thank you. I’ll let you know. We’ll give it some serious thought and let you know. Thank you.”
At that precise moment, Lisa’s eyes widened, and her face contorted. She covered her mouth with her hand and doubled over. Thomas was convinced she was about to vomit. Embarrassed but concerned, the men stood there looking helplessly at each other. Lisa made a horrible choking sound and turned away from them. Then, she commenced to pull something out of her mouth. Something brightly colored. And soft. And surprisingly large.
For a full minute, she stared at what appeared to be a lovely fresh chrysanthemum. It glistened with saliva as with the dew. She held it up for the men to see. She smiled apologetically, yet with just a hint of pride. Then, she turned, walked swiftly to the caretaker’s shack, and disappeared inside.
“Jesus!” Bill Leworc swore. “What the hell was that all about?”
“Oh,” said Colonel Thomas dismissively, leading his friend out of the Tanuki shrine, “Madame Ko’s with the circus. It was some kind of trick.”
EPILOGUE I
Stubblefield’s body was never found. The logical assumption was that his remains were eaten by a tiger. It was a bit odd, however, that a combing of that portion of the gorge turned up not a bone, not a shred of purple suit, not a piece of the backpack he’d been wearing (apparently, he’d planned to spend the night at Dickie’s).
The search party, which included Dickie and a half-dozen weeping young women, observed two deep indentations in the mud at an eddy where the stream had been overflowing, and since each was about double the circumference of a human leg, it inspired the theory that Stubblefield had landed feet-first in the ooze and miraculously survived the fall. Such a “miracle” is not without precedent. For example, once in New Zealand, a skydiver whose chute failed to open landed in a nasty duck pond and walked away with barely a bruise.
There were a couple of elders who insisted that Stubblefield was protected from tigers by his tattoo. They reasoned that he was alive and well, perhaps living in a cave with a family of tanukis.
A slightly more credible rumor, brought to Fan Nan Nan by some well-traveled circus performers, insisted that he’d made his way to Hong Kong, where he’d long had funds on deposit, and, indeed, had been spotted there on more than one occasion. He was reputed to be holed up in a splendidly appointed junk in the harbor—writing his memoirs. Now there’s a book that might knock a hole in a library wall or two. It would probably be called Keep ’em Guessing and be roundly attacked by all those who cannot abide the idea that in the life of an individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one. Until such an autobiography should appear, however, we can only presume that Mars Albert Stubblefield is dead. Long live Mars Albert Stubblefield.
Following a final, sputtery, perilous flight in decrepit Smarty Pants II, Dern V. Foley reoccupied Villa Incognito.
He dismissed the staff,
paying them off with rugs and pieces of furniture. The concubines, including his favorite, were rewarded with valuable objets d’art and sent away. That same day, Dern took a hacksaw and cut the guy wires on the villa side of the gorge. Then, he sawed through the circus cable. When he was done, it dangled uselessly from the opposite rim, resembling, as it reflected the afternoon sun, a giant glowing noodle hanging over the edge of a bowl.
Having carefully examined with an open mind every single one of its verses innumerable times but finding in none of them any rational justification for the popular belief that they constituted “the word of God,” Foley now tossed his Bible aside and turned full attention to the surrounding flora and fauna. And should the invocation of “nature spirits” prove in the end to be yet another dance around the suck of a spiritual black hole, just one more bloodless squeezing of the cosmic turnip—well, there was always the wine cellar and the chandoo.
Not to mention that special, splendid joy he took each waking moment at having once again slipped through the steel net of authority.
Speaking of authority, Col. Patt Thomas was assigned to temporary duty in Pakistan. Before leaving for Karachi, he met with Lisa Ko again at the Tanuki shrine, where he informed her that he and his wife, after an hour-long telephone conversation, had enthusiastically decided to accept the offer of her baby girl. In the past, they’d been lukewarm about the prospect of adoption, but this was somehow different.
Naturally, there were questions. The identity of the father, for example. When Madame Ko said she could not provide that information, Thomas shrugged and wrote it off to the promiscuity that seems always to abound in show business.
Lisa was almost equally vague concerning where and how the couple might reach her during the intervening year, but Thomas was left with an impression that she would be spending much of her time at the Yanagi Mori shrine and might possibly be contacted through the caretaker there.
Regarding her whereabouts once the Thomases had picked up the baby, she alluded to the Lake Biwa wilderness area, wherever that was. What she would be doing there she would not or could not say, although she made it rather clear that she wouldn’t be coming back. Not ever. However, she would provide a sealed envelope that her daughter should open upon reaching puberty. Since that was Madame Ko’s sole stipulation, the colonel gave his word, and final arrangements were made. (Her speech was fine, incidentally, and there were no more magic tricks.)
Prior to his departure from Tokyo, Thomas made one additional set of arrangements. His wife, it seems, would very soon be escorting his sister to a certain clinic near New Delhi, where she might die with the grace and ease that every being deserves, and for which purpose God—or Mother Nature if you prefer—surely put the opium poppy on earth.
Pru Foley ran off to New York with Bardo Boppie-Bip, becoming shortly thereafter the producer of her cable TV show: buffoonery for the gay, the would-be gay, and the unsuspecting. In Pru’s e-mail messages to Bootsey, she sounded happy enough, although she once let it slip that she was unable to respond romantically to her partner unless the clown was in full polka-dot suit and whiteface, a kink that seemed destined to create trouble somewhere down the line.
As for Bootsey, she was not quite as lonely as everyone had feared, due to the fact that, to great astonishment at the post office, she dyed a green streak in her hair, painted dark circles around her eyes, pinned on a corsage of black paper roses, and began frequenting late-night venues such as the Werewolf Club. Her intention was to infiltrate a satanic cult, in the hope that she might make contact with fellow Satanists down in Los Angeles and eventually rescue Dern from the Playboy Mansion. Her standing in local Goth circles received a lethal blow, however, on the evening when she was overheard to refer to Halloween as “the cutest holiday” and the first wild storm of autumn as “precious.”
Dickie Goldwire peddled the inferior rubies in Bangkok. Then, using his fake French passport, he traveled by train to Singapore, where he sold the pigeon-blood gem for a small fortune. Back in Thailand, he arranged for Xing to deliver to the Hmong widow her share of the proceeds, and shortly thereafter, he looked up Miss Ginger Sweetie.
“Dickie!” she squealed. “You no go now dream school? Where you guitar?” Within a month, they were married. The vows were Buddhist, but it was a Western-style wedding at which Elvisuit sang, and sang beautifully, although his beeper went off twice during the ceremony, and immediately thereafter he rushed off to another gig.
The newlyweds moved to Nakhon Pathom, near the university, but not three months passed before the bride was granted an American student visa, and away they flew to Colorado—Mr. and Mrs. Pepe Gazeau—so that she could study the writings of Allen Ginsberg at Naropa Institute.
Shocked by the deterioration of liberty and the all-pervasive proliferation of advertising in the U.S. during his absence, Dickie experienced some difficulty in adjusting. As much as he missed Fan Nan Nan, however, he bore no rancor, no regret, and thanks to the ruby money, he and Miss Ginger Sweetie lived quite comfortably in Boulder. Aware of the various consequences of contacting family or running into acquaintances, he kept a very low profile—although he was inclined on occasion, in tribute to Stubblefield, to scrawl LIE! with a marking pen across “Vine Ripe Tomatoes” signs all over town. As of this writing, he hasn’t been caught.
How often and with what depth of feeling he thought of Lisa Ko, it’s unprofitable to speculate, although we may be certain that at many a quiet moment alone he pondered what Stubblefield had meant exactly when he said that “our Lisa has some kind of enchanted sickness.”
Regarding guitars, Dickie did buy a new Martin D-28, a genuine one this time. And he finally finished the words to his song.
Just because you’re naked
Doesn’t mean you’re sexy,
Just because you’re cynical
Doesn’t mean you’re cool.
You may tell the greatest lies
And wear a brilliant disguise
But you can’t escape the eyes
Of the one who sees right through you.
In the end what will prevail
Is your passion not your tale,
For love is the Holy Grail,
Even in Cognito.
So better listen to me, sister,
And pay close attention, mister:
It’s very good to play the game,
Amuse the gods, avoid the pain,
But don’t trust fortune, don’t trust fame,
Your real self doesn’t know your name
And in that we’re all the same:
We’re all incognito.
EPILOGUE II
Knock! Knock!
“Who’s there?”
“Me. Himself.”
“What? Tanuki? Is that you? Come on in—if you can get in. My den looks like a typhoon passed through it. Even the God of Bachelor Apartments would be appalled at this mess.” Kitsune watched Tanuki waddle in. “It is you. Where have you been, old rascal, and how have you been getting along?”
“Aw, you know. Same as you.”
“Yes, I do know.” Kitsune sighed. “Those damn men. But we might not have to worry about them much longer. They seem more intent than ever on committing mass suicide.”
“Yeah, global hara-kiri. But they don’t call it that.”
“Of course not. They call it progress. They call it growth. They call it national security and energy policy and all sorts of foolish things, but both the motives and the end results are the same. The good news, perhaps, is that they’re starting to relearn the art of species-wide communication. I mean, they do it with those machines they call computers, they do it on the ‘World Wide Web,’ but . . .”
“That goes all the way back to the Animal Ancestors. They forgot how to do it, I guess, when they forgot that they were animals.”
The fox nodded. “All that showy technology in the paws of a band of primates who in terms of their emotions are barely advanced beyond the level of baboons. They’re c
himpanzees with bulldozers, monkeys with bombs. It’s a dangerous situation, but that’s okay: danger is the perfume of change, and change is the future’s vocation. There’s hope for us in this realm yet. Meanwhile, your clan is faring better than most. Much better. Why, your fame is even spreading to America.”
“Ha!” snorted Tanuki. “That and two thousand yen will get you a cup of sake.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. What a rotten host I am! But I swear I haven’t a drop of drink on the premises. All I can offer you, I’m afraid, is a rump of leftover owl.”
In the mouth of the perpetually hungry badger/dog/raccoon, saliva pooled like runoff from a shower. Nevertheless, he said, “Don’t bother. I’ve got to be trotting along. I’m on my way to an appointment.”
“Ah so! Yes, yes. You have to meet someone. I remember. It continues, doesn’t it? Your greatest folly or your greatest triumph. As the humans say, only time will tell.”
Again Tanuki snorted. “Time has a big mouth and a small brain.”
“Well put,” said Kitsune. “Well put.” They chuckled together at the various misconceptions surrounding the phenomenon of time. Then the fox said, “Okay, you’re Tanuki. You’re going to do what you’re going to do. I must say, I remember Miho and little Kazu with a certain fondness.” He nudged his visitor with his snout. “Here, I’ll walk outside with you. When you come again, I’ll have a bottle for you. And we can do something more productive than complain about human beings. We should follow the example of the gods, no doubt, and just ignore them until they wise up.”
Tanuki was about to retort that it was easy enough to ignore mankind when one was in the Cloud Fortress or the Other World, but he was suddenly struck by what a gorgeous day it was in this world, and his tongue seized up with joy.
All across the clearing, the dying grass and the sun were practically the same shade of yellow. Last-minute shoppers crowded the pollen parlors, and every other flower-head drooped from bee-weight. A breeze with only a calorie or two of warmth left in it slid down the mountainside as if on its way to one final dip in Lake Biwa. Already rubbed red by nights of foreplay, boughs, each leaf alert, awaited the transformative ejaculation of frost. The air was musky with the fate of fallen fruit and collapsing mushrooms, brisk with the historic hustle of harvest, and a flock of crows flapped through it, teasing everybody and everything with their impenetrable koans. In flight, a twitchy curve of ebony luster, they formed the false mustache of the world.