I pulled off the surgical gloves, dropped them inside out into the briefcase, and slipped once again into the deerskin pair. I eased into the overcoat. I rolled up the plastic, picked up the rest of the items, and put them in the briefcase, too, which I carried back into the living room. I looked around.
Take it backward, starting with the bathroom. I double-checked everything, then triple-checked. Nothing was out of place. No telltale signs. The washing machine was cycling through rinse. Crawley’s things would be clean soon.
One last check of the closet. Everything was in order, Crawley included. He was canted forward, the rope preventing him from tipping onto his face, his knuckles resting alongside him against the carpeting. Well, there are worse ways to go, I thought. And I’ve seen plenty of them.
Ordinarily, I work under substantial time constraints, and don’t have the opportunity for triple-checks, and certainly not for reflection, when the job is done. But this time, it seemed, I did.
I watched Crawley’s lifeless form, thinking of all the death I had seen, of the deaths I had caused, starting with that unlucky Viet Cong near the Xe Kong river so many years before. I wondered what that poor bastard would be doing today if our paths had never crossed.
Probably he’d be dead anyway, I thought. An accident or a disease or someone else would have killed him.
Yeah, maybe. Or maybe he would have lived, and today he would be married, to a pretty Vietnamese girl, a fighter, as he had been, and they would have three or four children, who would revere their parents for the sacrifices they had made during the war. Maybe his first grandchild would have been born recently. Maybe he would have wept with terrible joy as he hugged his child’s child to his own thin chest, thinking how strange life was, how precious.
Maybe.
I sighed, watching Crawley’s oddly canted form. He looked relaxed, somehow, untroubled, as cadavers often do.
In developed countries most people live their lives without ever even seeing a body, or, if they do, it’s an open-casket affair, where you have context and witness only the peaceful, ruddy-cheeked façade of the mortician’s artifice. When Mom and Dad die, they’re taken care of by strangers in a nursing home two towns over. The kids don’t have to see them go. They don’t even have to see them after. They just get a “we’re sorry to inform you” call late that night from the institution’s management, for whom such calls are as routine as putting out the weekly garbage is for a suburban homeowner. The funeral home picks up the body. The cemetery buries it. Unless you’re a professional, you might live your whole life without seeing someone in the moment of leaving his own.
People don’t know. They don’t know the way the jaw goes slack, how the skin turns instantly waxy and yellow, how readily the eyelids close when you ease them shut. They don’t know the awful smell of blood and entrails, or how, even if you can wash the stench from your skin, nothing can ever cleanse it from your memory. They don’t know a hundred other things. You might as well ask them about the mechanics of butchering the animals that become the meat on their supper tables. They don’t want to see any of that, either. And things are set up so they don’t have to.
Sometimes I can forget the divide this knowledge produces, the way it separates me from those unburdened by its weight. Mostly, though, I can’t. Midori sensed it even from the beginning, I think, although it wasn’t until later that she fully grasped its essence.
Yeah, sometimes I can forget, but never for very long. Mostly I look at the innocents around me with disdain. Or resentment. Or envy, when I’m being honest with myself. Always with alienation. Always from a distance that has nothing to do with geography.
I walked over to the door and looked through the peephole. There was nothing out there.
I let myself out, checking to ensure that the door had locked behind me. I left through the front entrance, just another resident, heading out for the evening. Someone new was at the front desk. Even if the college girl had still been there, she wouldn’t have recognized me. The light disguise I had been wearing earlier was gone, of course; but more than that, I was a different person now. Then, I had been a timid immigrant in a cheap, ill-fitting windbreaker, a visitor to the building. Now I walked as though I owned the place, a resident in a professional-looking overcoat, on his way out to a foreign car and thence to an important job at the office, a responsible position that no doubt occasionally required evening hours.
I left the building and crossed the street. I took off the galoshes, put them in the briefcase, and got in the car. I drove a few miles to another strip mall, where I changed into some of the clothes I was traveling with: gray worsted pants and an olive, lightweight merino wool crewneck sweater. I slipped the overcoat back on and was glad for its warmth.
For the next hour or so I drove around suburban Virginia, stopping at gas stations and convenience stores and fast food places, depositing a relic or two from the Crawley job at each of them until the briefcase was empty and it, too, had been discarded, in a Dumpster at a Roy Rogers. I pitched it in with the other refuse and watched a small avalanche of fast food wrappers cascade down and bury it.
I walked back to the car. The leafless trees along the road looked skeletal against the night sky beyond. I paused and stared for a long moment at that sky, at whatever might lie beyond it.
Oh, did I offend you? I thought. Go ahead, then. Take your best shot. I’m right here.
Nothing happened.
A minute passed. I started to shiver.
Suddenly I was exhausted. And hungry. I needed to get something to eat, and find a hotel.
I got in the car and pulled out onto the road again. I felt alone, and very far from home.
Wherever that might be.
PART THREE
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving…
T. S. ELIOT, Gerontion
10
THE TICKET I had bought to get from Osaka to Washington was a round-trip. One-ways attract unnecessary attention, especially post-September 11. When I’d left I wasn’t sure that I’d be using the return, but I certainly had a reason now, and the morning after my chat with Crawley I caught a return flight from Dulles.
I slept well over the Pacific, all the way to the pre-landing announcements, the flight attendants having kindly respected my wish not to be wakened, even for champagne and caviar service. Ah, first class.
I took the rapito, the Rapid Transport train, from Kansai International Airport to Namba’s Nankai station in south Osaka. My ticket was for a window seat, and during the thirty-minute journey from airport to terminal station I sat and stared past my reflection in the glass. A sliver of sun had broken through the clouds at the edge of the horizon, shining like a sepia spotlight through an otherwise gray and undifferentiated firmament, and in the fading moments of the day I looked on at the scenes without, scenes that passed before me as disconnected and mute as images in a silent film. A rice paddy in the distance, tended by a lone woman who seemed lost in its sodden expanse. A man tiredly pedaling a bicycle, his dark suit seeming almost to sag from his frame as though wanting nothing more than to cease this purposeless forward momentum and succumb to gravity’s heavy embrace. A child with a yellow knapsack paused before the lowered gate of the rapito railroad crossing, perhaps on his way to a juku, or cram school, which would stuff his head with facts for the next dozen years until it was time for them to be disgorged for college entrance exams, watching the passing train with an odd stoicism, as though aware of what the future held for him and already resigned to its weight.