I’ve Been Afraid Before

(March 2020)

I thought about running. It was what I absolutely most wanted to do. We could make it, I thought for just that moment, perhaps as a boy of 12 might think when caught doing the wrong thing. We could run back, back through the street tracing our very steps, back to the train, and back to the bar where DK was buying ginger-laced vodka that on second thought wasn’t as bad as all that.

But when I took a half step backward, I ran into DK, who was standing there as solid as if the woman’s gaze had turned him to stone. Then we both broke at the same time, and instead of running I led us further up the alley.

The smell got more acrid and more hollow as we walked.

I was afraid, but at the same time I saw Ichihara standing there looking as if he had been exposed and defeated, like it was my arrival that had ruined everything rather than the existence of this woman who looked like a night hag on meth, and a room that smelled like a perfume factory gone rancid.

“What are we doing–“

“Non!” Ichihara stopped me.

The huge man stepped aside, stuffing cash into his pants that I assume has come from Ichihara’s own pocket. The woman seemed to disappear backward, as if she was swallowed up by the passageways of her building rather than having moved through any vehicular means. We went down stairs. Ichihara, me, then DK.

Through a hallway,

Through a passageway protected by dangling ropes of thick twine and dried rawhide that hung from the ceiling like shed skin from ancient animals. I’ve been afraid before, but this is different. I feel this underneath my insides. I feel it in the place that holds the soul. Something isn’t right, but if when I looked back to run, the basement appeared to me like an expansive panorama of black ground with pale red and purple-blue sky and I knew there was no place to run to this woman couldn’t find.

Then we were in her room.

It was small, and walled. I felt the walls here. Yes. Solid.

She sat on pile of pillows, knees up in a half-squat. She wore a robe or, maybe an old kimono of a fashion long out of date that was blue, and she had a cowl pulled up over much of her head, the hair on which I could see was littered with trinkets and plants and bits of things that I wasn’t sure were not living creatures. Her arms seemed almost ropey as they wrapped around those knees. Her hands, though, they drew me to her. They were smooth and young, nails painted dark.

Sweat beaded on my forehead, and I realized how hot it was here. I saw no fire, though it felt as if one was burning at the center of the floor.

I was about to speak when the woman gave a string of Japanese that I had no chance to follow.

Ichihara replied, stepping forward.

He began to talk then. His voice was low, but firm. I hear the name “Charlie Cooper” a few times. At one point he twisted his torso to indicate me, and DK, though he never took his eyes away from the woman who sat there with her eyes open and her head at an angle, listening like a dog might, only this dog’s eyes were sharp and piercing, and I knew would not miss a thing if either DK or I were to step out of line.

She spoke further.

He responded.

She nodded gently, the nearly desiccated husk of a lotus blossom fell from her hair.

He sighed and his jaw set, and as he reached his hand back into the coat pocket he took a moment to steal a look at DK, and a look at me. And at the moment I felt the pain of loss as deeply as any I had ever known.

He pulled his hand out, and there in the palm was the bobblehead doll that Ichihara kept on his desk, head bobbing.

She took it gently, wrapping her fingers around Shojiro Sano’s belly and bat and the place where his neck would have been.

Ichihara stepped back and bowed.

She placed the doll in the middle of a floor that was painted in red and purple swirls that included images of dragons and swords and the feet of a geisha, and in another corner depicted flying machines and toads and the image of a building that might have been the Eiffel tower.

Then she sang, and I felt …

It was as if you were in a snow globe. You know? The things you shake up and the white plastic bits settle slowly, drifting through the oil or whatever liquid is in there to make a whole new landscape. The ground disappeared and you were flung up into the air and wafting, settling. My stomach was in a different place from my brain.

It wasn’t unpleasant.

Not really.

It was as if you were in a house full of flowers. Like a funeral home, times a hundred. the scent was deep and raw and fresh. Pure.

It is hard to be afraid at that moment.

You’re too busy with other things, really.

It was if you were in The Wizard of Oz and the cyclone came, spinning you around. But it was the beginning. All in black and white, and made before you might realize that Dorothy has killed her first witch using a house as her weapon.

Then there came a thunderous raw crack of ceramic.

And everything stopped.

I landed with a crash, rather than the gently floating of flakes in a globe of oil.

The woman was gone.

We were standing there in her room, the three of us.

I was stunned, but cogent, I thought. But DK was in shock, and Yuni Ichihara, chief inspector of police was bent over, and shuddering, his forehead in his hands and tears streaming down his face.

In the middle of the floor were the shattered remains of the bobble-head doll.