Читать книгу Why Ghosts Appear - Todd Shimoda - Страница 16

I didn’t recognize her at first—she was the young woman who lived in Mizuno Ren’s building. Her eyes were no longer puffy and red from lack of sleep or crying; quite the opposite, they were bright and clear. She had applied a touch of makeup subtly and expertly. Her hair looked as if it had been professionally styled that day. Instead of carrying the weight of her life, she was carrying a plastic shopping bag from a convenience store. She went into the kitchen and put the bag on the counter. She walked around me and sat in one of the chairs. I broke out of my catatonic state and sat in the other chair.

“Where’s Mizuno Ren?” I asked her in a tone meant to show her I was all business.

“I was going to ask you the same question,” she said with a smile of confidence. “When you came by earlier, I was curious, so I came over here.” She waved her hands around the air. “No one was home.”

“You know him well, don’t you?”

She considered the question. “I can’t answer because I don’t know what you mean by ‘well.’ If you mean I know his whereabouts at all times, his innermost thoughts, his ultimate goals and aspirations, then I must answer ‘no.’”

With a focused effort, I compelled my mind to confront the game she was playing. “But you know him well enough to have a key to his apartment? I assume you let yourself in here with a key,” I said, imitating her hand waving.

She smiled again and said nonchalantly, “Would you like a beer?”

I didn’t think it was a good idea to share a drink with the woman who had so far presented herself as an adversary. My hesitancy to answer must have seemed an affirmative response, because she got up from the chair and went to the kitchen. I watched as she pulled two cans from the sack and opened them with an expert flip of the tabs.

“Sorry about the can,” she said. “I’d rather not use Ren’s glassware.”

I nodded and we both took a sip. She put down her beer and casually folded her legs underneath her. “Sure, I have a key.” She took one out of her pocket and showed it to me, then slipped it back in. Her hand stayed inside her pocket while she looked at me. “That’s not unusual is it? Ren gave it to me so I can take care of his place while he’s away.”

Indeed, that was not unusual, but it suggested they had more than a casual relationship. One person didn’t just hand the key to his or her apartment to someone without first establishing trust. I took a sip of beer. She finally drew her hand out of her pocket slowly, making it a deliberate act of sensuality, I believe, or perhaps wanted to believe.

Sounding like an uncle without an emotional thread in his being, I said, “I’m only here out of good intentions. Mizuno’s mother is concerned that he didn’t show up for the holiday as usual.”

She shrugged as if that wasn’t important. “I’ve lived in the building for almost four years,” she announced. “Ren moved in a few months after me. I noticed him right off, but he didn’t seem interested in me, nothing other saying ‘Hi.’”

She delved into the past like a projectionist searching for a particular frame. My own film loop was unraveling while I listened to her, largely because my impression was that she was making up a story, ad-libbing like an actor in an unstructured screen test. Her storytelling was smooth but not practiced, as if she were listening intently to her words, making sure none of her story bore inconsistencies. She was writing a script of falsehoods that had to stand on its own. When I first saw her stroll into the apartment, I thought at last I had something concrete. A real, beating-heart connection to the missing son. Disappointment brings one down from the high of success, or anticipation of such.

She went on with her story: “We finally said more than ‘Hi’ one rainy night, a night like this one, when the rain was so fierce that walking through it was like swimming. He was coming in from the rain, I was just leaving. We collided at the top of the stairway. He was so sweet …”

The limit of my patience was being reached while I waited for her to get to the point. I sipped the beer that tasted more of aluminum than hops. “Excuse me,” I said. “I hate to interrupt, but I feel strange, guilty perhaps, sitting here in Mizuno’s apartment talking about him as if he is dead. I should be leaving, but I had a few questions before I go.”

She unfolded her legs and I couldn’t help staring. “Okay. Ask away.”

“For one, I asked earlier if you have seen him recently and you gave a rather vague answer.”

She switched legs again. “You see, I don’t ask him where he goes. I never ask when he will be back. If he tells me, fine. But I’m not the kind to pry. And I’m not his girlfriend.”

Girlfriend or not, I believed they had been intimate.

She continued: “Sometimes I don’t see him for months but I can often feel he is here. Um, does that make sense?”

Compared to what she said so far, relative to all that I had uncovered in my investigation, it made excruciating sense. My own system of logic—as twisted as it had become—was as irrational and unreliable as the people I encountered. My downfall was trying to make sense of the irrationality I faced: affairs, disappearances, embezzlement, blackmail, and violence. All of the irrational acts occurring for purposes never fully articulated, for if they were, they would sound absurd, outlandish, and with almost no chance of making someone happy. Even if they succeed, the consequences are never what was intended, but then it doesn’t matter because the unsociable acts become the goals in and of themselves. Getting away with it, or just getting away, is the measure of success. So the actors come to believe, for rarely do their lives improve with success; they only shift their ultimate demise to another path.

But then perhaps that is all we can really accomplish in life.

“I don’t think Ren is dead but maybe he wants to be dead.” Her voice grew soft, her gaze went off to the side as if she were delivering a soliloquy. “What does it mean to die anyway? It’s more than a loss of a functioning body, it’s as if we leave our body behind. This change happens before we actually die, in a physical sense, it can happen a few milliseconds before, or it can be years before.”

Again I felt as if my own torturous death were imminent and I had a chance to stop it if I knew how, but I would never reach such a moment of enlightenment. For to reach that moment meant I would already be dead.