The Night Listener and Others (46 page)

McBride made himself smile at the thought as he stepped into the shower and washed away the day’s sweat and grime. He got out, toweled himself, dried his hair, and slipped into the yukata the hotel provided, then stepped out of the bathroom.

By the dim light of the bedside lamp, McBride saw that he was not alone in the room. Sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor between the foot of the bed and the wall of shelving that housed the desk and the large TV was a figure covered by a yellow-brown blanket.

McBride’s breath locked, and he felt his heart pounding. He blinked his eyes several times as if to whisk the sight out of his vision, but it stayed. For a long while he didn’t move, thinking that the figure still might vanish. He wondered if he was dreaming, since the distinctiveness of his dreams often surprised him, but decided after a moment of reflection that he was not. All his senses were sharp. He was indeed seeing what he was seeing.

If so, there could be only one reasonable if unlikely explanation. For some unknown reason, the blanketed figure had followed him to his hotel, made his way past the front desk, and entered McBride’s room, either with a key or because it had been left ajar. McBride steeled himself with the righteous indignation of a man whose privacy had been invaded, and took several steps toward the sitting figure.

“Hey!” he said, but the figure neither replied nor moved. McBride was next to it now, but instead of pushing it with his fingers, as he had intended, he reached for the lamp on the desk and switched it on. The additional light only brought the figure into higher relief. McBride could see that the blanket was a loosely woven cotton rather than wool, and the color was blended from both brown and yellow threads that made it the color of sodden hay.

The details confirmed McBride’s feeling that this intruder was corporal enough, but when he grasped the blanket at the ridge between the man’s shoulder and his head, he found that he could not bring himself to jerk it away as he had planned. Instead he stood for a moment, then, holding the cloth between finger and thumb, slowly moved backward, dragging it off.

Even minutes later McBride could not have said what the figure was wearing. He was too fixated on its face. As the blanket revealed the head, it turned slowly to look at him, and he nearly squealed. No eyes pierced him, for they had been burned away, sealed over with gray, charred lids. The whole face was a bumpy terrain of ashy ridges and dark, sunken hollows. Strands of long, black hair were dusted with ash, the filamented ends crisp and sere, curled by fire. The mouth was a black gash, the brown lips swollen and suppurating.

All this McBride saw in a quick, fierce moment, and then he pressed his eyes closed with a sharp intake of breath until the fear that the figure would rise and move toward him made him open them again. When he did, there was nothing there.

The figure had vanished, but McBride’s fingers still held the blanket, the bulk of which lay in folds on the floor. He looked about desperately to see if the thing had leapt wraith-like to another part of the room, but he was alone. Then he looked at the door and saw the chain still in place.

McBride’s whole frame was wracked in a shudder, and he let himself drop heavily onto the bed, flinging the blanket from his fingers as though shaking off a spider. His mind spun in a dozen different directions, trying to create rational or even irrational explanations for what he had just seen. Hallucination, perhaps. He had hallucinated that face from Hiroshima, for he had no doubt that it had been born of his visit to the city and the photos of the blast-burned victims he’d seen there.

But if he
had
been hallucinating out of some misplaced guilt over both his country’s sins and his own failure to drop some money into the covered beggar’s bowl, was he
still
hallucinating? The blanket which lay at his feet had to have come from somewhere.

Or had it been there all along? Had he taken it out of the closet to throw over the bed in the cool, air-conditioned room? He bit back his fear and picked it up. It seemed clean, and when he held it gingerly to his face, there was no odor to it at all, not even the neutral smell of clean cloth.

That sense of aromatic void repulsed him even more than if it had reeked of stale urine, and he tossed it away again, into the corner of the room. It wasn’t like him to act this way, and he remembered that he was due a vacation. People weren’t supposed to work nonstop the way he did. There were other things in life beside offices and boardrooms, deals and re-deals, agreements and betrayals that aroused and sapped in equal proportions. After a while, he had no doubt that it
could
make you see things.

As for what he could do here and now, getting out of the room took precedence. There was no way he could spend the night there. McBride quickly got dressed and packed his luggage, then called the front desk and asked for another room. He tried to explain that there was a noise in the cooling system that kept him awake, though he was certain that the desk clerk, whose English was cursory, did not understand. Still, the woman told him to come downstairs and she would give him the key to another room.

In fifteen minutes McBride was fitting the new key into the lock of a room two floors higher than his previous one. He pushed open the door, shoved in his bags, and then fumbled for the light switch, letting the door drift closed behind him. The single switch turned on every lamp in the room, and the seated, blanket-covered figure on the floor seemed all the more real in the stark, unyielding brightness.

McBride could only stand there, arms at his side, and look at the shape helplessly. He felt afraid, but he also felt a lethargy stealing over him, a sense that no matter where he went he could not escape the silent and terrible figure in front of him. He could have turned and walked out of the room, but felt that if he did he would have to eventually confront the thing again. Better to face it now and get it over with than to live in dread expectation of where and when it might appear.

A dubious practicality intervened long enough for him to try and remember what he could of ghost stories he had heard, and he thought he recalled that it was important to ask the ghosts what they wanted. It seemed absurd, but his options were limited.

He walked across the room toward the figure, wishing that the room were darker. To see that face again in bright light would be hideous. Still, the idea of turning off some of the lights did not occur to him until he had taken the blanket in his hand and begun to pull it off once more. It would not be as bad this time, he told himself. Even in the light, it would be the same face, so the shock would not be as great.

He was wrong. He had expected to see the burned and charred ruin of an A-bomb victim, but looking up at him now was the pale face of his ex-wife Polly, seamed only by the lines that age and sorrow and McBride himself had cut there. Her light-brown eyes were devoid of emotion, as empty as glass.

McBride tried to speak, but when he opened his mouth it seemed that sand rushed in to fill it. Her gaze, though lifeless, stabbed into him, and he jerked his head away, closing his eyes. He remained that way for a long time, wishing that what had happened before would happen again, that she would be gone when he opened them.

She was, and like the other time the blanket remained. McBride held it, then buried his face in it and inhaled deeply, smelling nothing at all. He knelt upon the spot where he had seen Polly sitting cross-legged, and rubbed his hand over the carpet. Then he stood up and folded the blanket neatly.

Holding it, he left the room and took the elevator to the lobby. It was still humid outside, though cooler now that the sun was down. McBride tucked the folded blanket under his arm and walked down the street, heading for the river. There were still people about, but the crowd thinned as he drew closer to the bridge, until there were hardly any other pedestrians at all.

He reached the end of the bridge. A third of the way across, beneath one of the street lamps, he saw a seated figure covered by a blanket. McBride walked toward it, afraid but unable to turn back, bound by inevitability. When he reached the figure he stopped and looked down at it. He shivered in spite of the warm night.

The wooden bowl in front of the figure was empty. McBride took from his pocket the 500-yen-coin he had intended to place there earlier, and dropped it into the bowl. He expected to hear the sharp sound of metal striking wood, but instead heard a dull sound like a muffled bell struck far away.

Nothing changed. The head beneath the blanket did not bow in thanks, nor did the apparition disappear. Nothing changed, and McBride realized that the next move was his.

In Japan, where privacy was held sacred, what he planned to do seemed almost blasphemous. Still, he had no choice. This squat, mysterious shape, which had caused McBride to see things he hoped and feared were nothing but the fabrics woven by his own guilt, had to be seen and revealed for what it really was.

As he had done twice before, McBride grasped the blanket and stepped back. In spite of his anxiety, he nearly smiled as the absurd image came to him of unveiling a statue. The smile, however, died
in utero
when he saw that the face beneath the blanket—or, he grimly reconfirmed, the face that he was
projecting
there—was that of his deceased father. Like the face of his ex-wife, it was expressionless, yet pierced him all the same. Yes, he thought, yes, it was guilt, wasn’t it? All that guilt he thought he had inured himself to, its avatars rushing out like black smoke from the suddenly broken window of a closed and burning house, or like the smell of a bad fish when the refrigerator door opens after weeks.

This time, however, he would not be afraid. He cleared his throat, and the rough sound centered him. “What do you want?” he asked the figure with his father’s face, and then added one of the few Japanese phrases he knew: “
Nani o?
“ What?

The bald head with its fringe of gray hair lowered until it was looking down at the wooden bowl with the coin in it. Then the face came back up and again looked at McBride.

The message was unmistakable, and McBride took the rest of the coins from his pocket and let them fall into the bowl. Still there was no response. He took out his money clip in which were two hundred thousand yen in large bills and, without removing the gold clip, dropped the money into the bowl. Then he removed his wallet from his hip pocket and took several hundred dollars in U.S. currency from it, all he had left.

McBride, eyes filled with tears of pleading, got on his knees in front of the man and placed it into the bowl on top of the rest of the money as though he were making an offering. He bowed his head, hoping the figure would find his gift acceptable, and stood up.

The beggar looked up at him. Its expression was unchanged. Then it turned its head to look across the bridge toward the other side of the river. McBride followed its gaze, and felt lead sink through his chest as he saw the others.

Stretched along the bridge until they reached the other side was a long row of figures, side by side, all the same. Each was seated, apparently cross-legged, on the pavement, and each had a blanket over it, identical to the folded one McBride still held under his arm and the loose one he had let fall to the sidewalk. The long row of figures reminded him of a temple elsewhere in Kyoto, where a thousand identical wooden carvings of the Kannon Buddha stretched away into the darkness and dust.

As he had in the temple, McBride walked slowly down the row of figures, but this time he stopped at each one, pulled off each blanket, and looked at the face beneath. He found his son there, he found Claire. He found Tom Porter, the man who had given him his start in the business. He found people he had cheated, lied to, used, and forgotten until this night.

McBride had no money left, so he could only bow deeply, rolling each blanket he removed into a wad of cloth that grew larger and larger, and around which he had to wrap his arms. The last few faces he barely saw through his tears.

At last he stepped in front of the final figure, and sighed wearily, wiping away tears with the bundle of blankets he held. He thought he knew whose countenance he would see there, and when he withdrew the blanket and saw that aged and weary face looking up at him, the revelation was no surprise at all. It was his own, the last face in the long line of those betrayed and lost. He could not bow, as he had done with the others.

Instead he plodded on toward the end of the bridge, not turning back to see if the long line of seated figures, now revealed, was still there. He knew it would not be.

McBride turned to the right onto the walkway by the river, and went down underneath the bridge. There, in the dim light the city cast, he saw a number of homeless people, some sleeping, some just sitting, their arms wrapped around their knees, watching the lights reflect on the water of the river. He walked toward a sleeping man, dropped the pile of blankets, then folded one and set it beside the man.

He did this for several other sleepers, then started giving the blankets to those who were awake. They accepted them with a deep bow. Some lay down and pulled the blankets over them, while others folded them and lay upon them. McBride continued until only one blanket was left. He sat on it and watched the river for a long time, then spread it on the ground and lay down to sleep.

Early in the morning, when it was still dark, he awoke. On the ground next to him was an empty wooden bowl. He removed his suit jacket and gave it to one of the other men, then went onto the bridge, sat cross-legged on the side-walk, put the wooden bowl before him, and pulled the blanket over him so that he was hidden from sight.

McBride remained there throughout the day. His sight was limited to his own lap and the sidewalk and the bowl in front of him. The blanket kept the sun from him. He felt neither hungry nor thirsty, nor did he ever feel the urge to urinate. When enough coins were in the bowl, he reached out and removed them, putting them into his pants pockets.