The Night Listener and Others (24 page)

He had just wiped the blade gingerly on his handkerchief and was beginning to fold it away when he remembered the grim child’s game he had played at that meeting months ago. His throat tightened, and his chest felt cold, as when he imagined lumps on his testicles while toweling after a bath.

Rice, Merrick, Keller. That had been it, hadn’t it? The first three?

Jesus.

He left his office, putting his knife in his pocket as if it were a living thing, and went down the hall to see Quentin, who immediately noticed his discomfort. Years of practiced agreement had enabled him to read people with uncanny precision.

‘You all right. Bill?’ he asked Nichols.

Nichols nodded. ‘Just been thinking about the crash. It’s pretty upsetting.’ He paused before continuing. ‘Listen, Hank, you saw it, right?’

Quentin nodded bitterly, taking short, sharp puffs on his Camel. ‘Yeah. Christ, it was ugly. I know why they didn’t want the wives to identify them, but I sure wish they hadn’t called me.’

‘Where were they?’ Nichols’s words were expectant, almost feverish in their intensity.

‘What…in the hangar? What do you mean?’

‘No, no. I mean in the plane. Where were they in the plane?’

‘You mean when it hit?’

Nichols nodded abruptly.

‘Well…what difference does it make?’

‘I’m just…’ Nichols swallowed with difficulty. There was a click in his throat. ‘Just curious, that’s all.’

Quentin stubbed out his cigarette and lit another, a wariness behind his eyes. ‘From what I heard, Rice was up front with the pilots to watch the landing. Merrick was right behind him in a front seat, and I think Keller was sleeping in the back.’

Rice, Merrick, Keller
…

‘Where did the fire start?’

‘The front of the plane. But it raced to the back in seconds.’

Front to back.

Rice, Merrick, Keller.

Quentin…

Nichols.

‘What’s the matter with you? You know something I don’t?’

Nichols guiltily wiped away the sweat that had beaded on his upper lip. ‘No, it’s just…been such a shock. A shock.’

Quentin nodded. ‘I know. Horrible. You never know when your number’s up. That’s why I figure, hell, why quit smoking? When it’s time it’s time, you know?’ And he took a deep drag as if to illustrate his contemptuous and begrudging acceptance of his karma.

When it’s time it’s time. Nichols had heard that one before. He had also heard another one—

My time is your time.

Quentin was next in line. Quentin, then Nichols. But as long as Quentin lived…

Nichols watched Quentin inhale the unfiltered smoke, and it seemed as if the tars and poisons seared his own lungs, changing healthy tissue instantaneously into rabid carcinogenic beasts that tore and gnawed.

He watched Quentin’s leg shake nervously, watched his fingers drum the desktop, and it was as if Nichols’s tension was rising, elevating his blood pressure, reddening his face, making a once-firm heart beat tiredly and trippingly.

They were linked now, Nichols thought wearily, hooked together like Siamese twins with a common heart. Of course, Quentin might drop over dead any minute and Nichols and North could live into their nineties.

But could he take that chance? Especially after what the knife had done, the knife that he had blessed with power by blooding it, the knife that had cursed him with its knowledge. It had told him, had warned him, and he would be a fool if he ignored it.

So he looked at Quentin, and smiled kindly and sympathetically. ‘No point in rushing it, is there?’

‘Huh?’ The smoke steamed out of Quentin’s nostrils.

‘Your time. I mean, cigarettes can’t help, right? You ever think of quitting?’

‘Nah, not really. I don’t think I could anymore.’

‘Oh, sure you could, sure you could—just a little willpower, that’s all.’

‘Yeah, well, I’ll worry about that tomorrow. I got these contracts to finish today,’ and he waved his cigarette at an inch-high stack of papers.

Nichols’s heart leapt. ‘Christ, you’ll be here till seven again tonight.’

‘Probably.’

‘Why not let me help out a little?’ The words tumbled out, desperate, anxious. ‘Boy, I don’t know how you get any rest with all you do…’

‘I manage.’

But for how long? How long?

‘Really, why not let me take a few? I’ve got time.’ ‘You sure?’

‘Positive!’

Nichols stayed until 9:30 that evening working on the contracts, and came in at 7:30 the next morning to finish them. Then he asked Quentin for more. He took on so much of the workload that he practically lived at the office, and in six months he was promoted to assistant manager. He could not get Quentin to quit smoking, although he talked him out of buying a small Italian convertible in favor of a larger, more protective American car.

The years went by.

One.

Two.

Three.

Nichols served as beneficent nursemaid, toady, and slave to Quentin, seldom leaving the office before eight each night, never giving himself a free weekend, taking his required vacations by holing up in his apartment and scurrying into the office on the slightest pretext. He added cigarettes to the continuous quarts of coffee he used to keep himself alert to his work and to his boss’s changing moods, and was soon a three-pack-a-day man.

So it came as a surprise to no one when Nichols had his stroke. To no one, that is, except Nichols, who looked up from the office floor at Quentin’s concerned and rested face, and thought, just before what felt like a very sharp knife cut into his chest for the last time, that something seemed curiously, sadly, fatally unfair.

The Pebbles of Sai-no-Kawara

…But the demon with the iron club would come and
knock down the piles of stones. Then the Bodhisattva Jizô would hide the children in his sleeves and drive the demon away
…

Lattimore had never seen a sadder place. It was pleasant enough if you looked at it in ignorance, but when you knew what each of the little statues represented, when you knew why many of them wore red bibs or caps, when you knew why there were small toys and stuffed animals sitting on the stone ledges, then your heart could break.

Lattimore had seen the sad places of the earth. He had trod the killing fields in Southeast Asia, he had breathed in the dust of what was once the World Trade Center, he had walked the streets of Sarajevo and Kandahar. Journalism had taken him to those places and many more, less known and far worse. Just two days ago he had been to Hiroshima for the first time, had seen the Peace Memorial Park and the A-Bomb Dome, and had fought back tears at the sight of the thousands of paper cranes placed by little hands at the Children’s Memorial.

All of these places, however, signified lives lived and then stopped, while the Jizô-dô at Kamakura’s Hase Kannon Temple was redolent with the atmosphere of lives never begun. Every one of the thousands of small statues of the smiling, bald-headed Bodhisattva Jizô had been placed, rank upon rank, by parents of children who had been stillborn, miscarried, or aborted.

Jizô was loved because his compassion could free the children from hell, to which they had been sent for having caused their parents so much grief. It was only one of the Japanese conceits that made little sense to Lattimore. It was, after all, not the fault of the children that they had died before birth, and surely not their fault that they had been aborted. That was the parents’ sin, if sin it was.

Lattimore, despite his experiences, still believed that abortion should be an option, and had once chosen it as such. It had meant little to him when they were so young. Only later, when he and Carolyn had had a child at a more convenient period in their lives, did he begin to question their action. His daughter had grown into an intelligent, kind, and caring woman, and there were occasions just before dawn when Lattimore would lie in bed sleeplessly, and wonder about Tracy’s older brother or sister, thinking of what he might have become, or who she might have been.

He and Carolyn never talked about it, though they had both agreed at the time that it was the reasonable thing for them to do. Now, thirty years on, he could tell that this place was affecting her as deeply as it was him. Her eyes were damp with restrained tears as she handed him the guidebook and he read about the little red or white bibs and hats with which parents decorated the statues of Jizô in the hope that he would take extra special care of their children’s spirits.

With a thick lump in his throat Lattimore read on, about how the children in hell gather by the dry riverbed of Sai-no-Kawara, where they build small cairns of pebbles to attract the attention and the compassion of the Buddha. Belief in this aspect of the legend seemed strong as well, since many piles of pebbles littered the ledges and walks, left by parents trying to shorten their children’s time in hell.

Carolyn, her head down, continued up the pathway to the larger halls, but Lattimore could not follow her, even though he wished to. The atmosphere would not let him. He could not separate himself from the statues, ranging in height from four inches to over a foot. Row upon row of them climbed the heavily wooded hill.

He couldn’t figure out if the items left beside and near them were offerings to Jizô or gifts for the children. There were flowers and opened bottles of soda, small metal cars, brightly colored pieces of origami, and pinwheels turning in the light breeze. On one ledge, at the feet of an alcoved Jizô, were two Tarepanda, the stylized stuffed panda toys that seemed to be in every gift shop window. They were in a sitting position, the little one leaning against the larger, and were staring intently, their large black eyes rimmed by white, at the rows of the beloved Bosatsu.

Slowly Lattimore went up the steps in the direction his wife had taken, but he continued to watch the statues, their bald heads looking like beads on an abacus crowded beyond use. He found Carolyn outside the Kannon Hall, and after examining the massive yet graceful Hase Kannon, with its eleven faces of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, they retraced their steps back through the complex. As they passed the Jizô-dô, Lattimore slowed, but Carolyn hurried on and he increased his pace to catch up with her.

They both paused at the pond near the Bentenkutsu, the grotto made of several linked caves illuminated by torchlight, and watched the huge koi swimming. Then they went out onto the street and headed back to the small hotel at which they were spending the night. They stopped at a café on the way, where they each had a steaming bowl of ramen. From the way they laughed when they slurped their noodles, Lattimore felt hopeful that whatever dark memories the Jizô statues had brought them had dissipated.

The next day was Saturday, and Tracy, her work week over, would meet them for further touring. She was a reporter and columnist for one of the major Tokyo dailies, giving the gaijin side and reporting on American trends in Japan. As Carolyn never tired of reminding him, Tracy was her father’s daughter, and he was extremely proud of her. She had long had a fascination with anything Japanese, and had made all her own breaks, working her way through the additional year of college in Tokyo, and finding her job on her own, Lattimore’s name being little known in Japan.

She was an extraordinary person and Lattimore could not help but wonder, lying in bed that night, if his other, long-lost, never-born child might have been just as wondrous. He had never been struck by his self-imposed loss so strongly as he had today. Every one of those statues seemed accusatory, almost as though the small Jizôs were the lost babies themselves, small and hairless and newly formed.

What the memories of the temple made him grieve for was not the loss of an actual child, but the loss of the
potential
person who might have been. And yet, he tried to rationalize, if one thought that way, one would do nothing but try to procreate in the attempt to bring high achievers into the world. That road, once taken, could lead to total banishment of contraception as well as limitations on reproductive choice, and he most certainly did not agree with either of those options. When you made your choice, you lived with your guilt if you defined it as such, and three decades afterward, he involuntarily and unwillingly had.

It chewed at him so that he could not sleep, and he quietly got up and sat in a chair. The room was too small, however, for him to turn on a light without waking Carolyn, and he did not wish to sit in the bathroom with a book, so he decided to get dressed and take a short walk. He wrote
Couldn’t sleep—went for walk—back soon
on a pad by the phone and left the room, closing the door gently behind him, the idea forming in his head of what he would do under the cover of the night.

The man behind the front desk looked at him curiously, and Lattimore said in English, “No sleep…walk,” and made his fingers wiggle like the legs of a walking man, a gesture he hoped would be universal. The night manager gave him only a curious smile and a little nod, and Lattimore stepped out into the street.

The narrow residential streets were quiet at two in the morning, except for an occasional barking dog or the sound of a car or motorcycle blocks away. Lattimore walked back the way they had come from the temple that day, since it was the only route he knew, or so he pretended. In actuality, his plan was almost fully formed by now.

The parking lot in front of the Hase Kannon Temple was dimly lit, but Lattimore stayed in the shadows anyway. The main gate would be locked, of course, but the wall surrounding the temple complex was not impassable. A thick-boled tree stood by it, and, keeping to the darkness, he made his way to it, climbed into its heavy branches, and gingerly leaped to the top of the wall. He struggled to maintain his balance, but fell into the blackness on the other side.

He landed on the loose stones of a walkway, and let himself go down on his hip and side. The noise he made sounded loud to him, but he waited and heard no reaction to it. Maybe there were no watchmen, he thought. Few Japanese would be profane enough to break into a temple complex, and no foreigners would have a motive. There was nothing to steal outside but the personal offerings and statues, and the temple buildings where the relics were kept were surely locked and probably set with alarms.