Audition (17 page)

    ‘It’s worse than that. I get a recording saying the number’s no longer in service. It’s been that way since a few days after Izu.’

    ‘What happened there, exactly?’

    ‘Only what I just told you.’

    ‘But why would she suddenly vanish?’

    ‘I don’t know. She must’ve misunderstood something I said or did. I’m sure we could clear it all up in about two minutes, but I have no way of getting in touch with her.’

    Yoshikawa was silent for a moment. Then, in a quiet voice, he said, ‘You should just let it go.’

    Aoyama wanted to smash the receiver against the glass wall of the phone booth. He was literally trembling with rage and exasperation. Since Yamasaki Asami’s disappearance he hadn’t been able even to eat properly, and his nerves were like live, sizzling wires.

    ‘I know you’re not going to listen to anything I tell you,’ Yoshikawa said, ‘but I’m partly responsible, and I have to say this: I think you should forget about her.’

    ‘You don’t get it, Yoshikawa. It was just a little misunderstanding, dammit. I need to find her, and all I’m asking is if you have any ideas. She said she was living in Nakameguro, and I thought you might know the address.’

    ‘Look, the only address I ever saw was the one on the résumé, the one in Suginami, and somebody else lives there now. I told you that before, right? I don’t know anything about Nakameguro. Besides, we’ve already tossed all the résumés . . . Hello? You still there?’

    ‘Yeah. All right. Later,’ Aoyama said and hung up the phone.

11

The new year arrived without any word from her. Aoyama had been showing up at work every day, and he tried hard to be himself around Shige in spite of the emotional torture he was going through. But he couldn’t hide the physical toll it was taking.

    In the two months since Izu he’d lost six kilos. Not even when Ryoko died had he ever found himself in such a state that he couldn’t get food down. Ryoko’s death, devastating though it was, had been gradual. Seeing her weaken day by day was agonising, but it had given him time to assimilate and process what was happening. To this day he remembered with gratitude the courage Ryoko had shown in those final days. Her gentle resignation in the face of such pain and fear had been a wonderful parting gift to those who loved her.

    But Yamasaki Asami had disappeared suddenly. Without any warning or foreshadowing whatsoever – they hadn’t even argued or exchanged bitter words – she’d vanished from the hotel room and seemingly from the face of the earth. It was all just some sort of misunderstanding: he still believed this, and that belief was one of the things impeding his recovery. He’d revisited Nakameguro any number of times in the past two months. Starting at the big intersection where the taxi had dropped her off after some of their dates, he’d wandered aimlessly through the maze of side streets. He was fully aware of how pathetic this was and didn’t really expect to find her there, but it was all he could think of to do. Nakameguro was the only thread he had left to cling to.

   
No forgiveness for lies.

    He still didn’t know what she’d meant by that. All his memories of her were ambrosial and poisonous, in equal measure. He remembered with brutal clarity every detail of every date, to say nothing of those last, ecstatic hours in Izu. And beautiful memories, he’d come to realise, were the sledgehammers of despair.

    He’d had dozens of telephone conversations with Yoshikawa, and met with him several times for dinner or drinks. And he’d even discussed the situation with Takamatsu and other members of his staff. But the discussions were usually more about baring his soul and bemoaning his loss than soliciting comfort or advice, and eventually even Yoshikawa tired of hearing it.

   
I mean, how crazy is this, Yoshikawa? I didn’t do anything! Nothing I know of anyway, and up till then everything had been going so well! It would be ridiculous to end it like this
  . . .

    Shige, on the other hand, was a rock. Aoyama wondered how it was possible for a boy his age to have such a firm grasp of this sort of situation. Shige seemed to realise that the worst thing you can do for someone in psychological distress is to give them special treatment. He acted as always towards his father and never once asked about Yamasaki Asami. And when Rie-san rather too persistently expressed concern for Aoyama’s health, Shige covered for him, saying, ‘Sometimes a man just doesn’t feel like eating.’ He’d learned about loss when his mother died, and he knew things that Aoyama himself had apparently been forgetting: that pouring your heart out to someone affords only temporary relief at best; that you just have to resign yourself to a period of suffering, somehow going about your everyday business as you slowly find a way to assimilate the loss.

    Damned impressive for a sixteen-year-old, thought Aoyama. He was sitting on the living-room sofa, with his bare feet up on the coffee-table, eating yogurt. It was the last Sunday of January. Shige had left early that morning to go skiing with a friend, saying he probably wouldn’t be home till late but not to wait up. Gangsta was outside, barking as usual. Born to hunt, the beagle was big on vocalising. He’d howl along with ambulance sirens, bay at sparrows and crows, and sometimes even yelp at insects crawling over the ground.

    Aoyama had walked to a nearby market earlier to purchase the yogurt, along with salmon roe in soy sauce, deep-fried tofu and cabbage rolls. He had no appetite whatsoever, and food still turned to ashes in his mouth, but he knew he had to maintain at least the will to get back on his feet, if only for Shige’s sake. Two things were necessary, he believed, in order to maintain that will: work he could get motivated about, and proper nourishment. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life showing Shige how weak and pathetic he was.

    He mixed some honey into the yogurt and sat there on the sofa forcing himself to eat it. Even something as soft and mild as yogurt was difficult to swallow. It wasn’t that his system was actively rejecting food, but as if the nerves were too busy retracing memories of Yamasaki Asami to send out signals demanding nourishment. He’d only been with her once, yet images of her naked breasts and sex, her hips and fingertips, streamed incessantly through his mind. He’d look at a top nude model in some magazine, and his entire nervous system would insist that there was no comparison. It was like a narcotic, he thought, and not just metaphorically. Her voice and smell and touch had provided him with exactly the same sort of thing, chemically speaking, that certain drugs provide, and the receptors in his brain were clamouring for her. There was nothing else that could take her place, as far as his nervous system was concerned. The nerves were honest, and strictly physiological. Reasoning didn’t work with them.

    He was listening to music as he ate the yogurt. With his nerves as battered as they were, it had become painfully clear to him how irritating television can be.
You may be feeling like shit
, the TV screams at you,
but the rest of the world is carrying on just fine!
He’d begun listening to a lot of classical music – from Bach to Debussy, from gloomy, minor-key symphonies to lighthearted piano pieces. Nothing was less abrasive or helped the time to pass better than classical music. A single Mozart piano concerto lasted about thirty minutes, for example, and listening to Nos. 20 to 27 ate up four whole hours. Of course, not even the magic of Barenboim’s piano could obliterate the unbearably evocative image of Yamasaki Asami, and not even Mozart could neutralise the suffering. But the beauty of the melodies and arrangements was soothing to the nerves, and if he just sat drinking in that beauty, the second hand on his watch would continue its leisurely sweep, and eventually night would arrive. Then he could reach for the cognac or whisky.

    He forbade himself spirits during the daytime. He’d realised within a couple weeks of Yamasaki Asami’s disappearance that alcohol was no way to deal with the agony. Several hungover mornings, after too little sleep, Aoyama had experienced an almost debilitating sense of self-loathing, seeing himself as a total failure in life. Deep grief was like a physical wound, and too much alcohol only impaired the healing process.

    What he was drinking with his yogurt at two in the afternoon on this Sunday, therefore, was a cup of Fortnum & Mason apple tea. The music was a collection of Verdi overtures. Playing right now was Von Karajan conducting
La Forza del Destino
. The collection would consume about forty minutes, and then he’d listen to a little Wagner. After that, some of Mozart’s later quartets and violin sonatas, and by the time these were finished he’d be well into the night. He’d take his time soaking in the bath, then break out the beer and eat his deep-fried tofu and cabbage rolls. After dinner he’d listen to Brahms’s
Hungarian Dances
and Strauss’s
Metamorphosen
, and then, with two hours to bedtime, he’d allow himself some cognac and put on a Chopin nocturne. He had several – Ashkenazy, Rubinstein, Pollini, Horowitz – and he listened to one every night before going to bed. The piano always seemed to speak to him, saying,
Well, we’ve made it through another day. Time to think about turning in.

    He had a performance by Michelangeli that he hadn’t listened to yet, and it was as he was thinking he’d check it out tonight that he first noticed something different about the atmosphere of the living-room. It was a vague sensation, as if he’d caught a faint whiff of some unforgettable fragrance, or heard a brief, barely noticeable ringing in his ears, or seen someone flit across the edge of his field of vision, or all three at once, and he leaned forwards on the sofa and looked around the room. ‘Rie-san?’ he said. It was her day off, but maybe she’d decided to drop by and fix dinner. She was genuinely worried about him, and it wouldn’t be unlike her to do something like that.

    ‘Rie-san?’

    There was no answer. He sniffed at the air and looked towards the kitchen. Maybe something was burning. When he’d got up to go to the toilet a while ago, had he lit the stove to warm up the cabbage rolls? He’d been so unmindful and distracted lately that he wouldn’t put it past himself to forget something like that. Leaning further forwards, he could see beyond the counter to the stove. None of the burners were lit. So what had just happened? He sat back and picked up the remote control to lower the volume on
The Sicilian Vespers
. One difference he was certain of: Gangsta was no longer barking, or making any other noise. Except when asleep, Gangsta was always either barking or scrabbling about, making his presence audible in one way or another – with his chain scraping across the edge of his doghouse, his tail flapping back and forth against his hindquarters, his hind leg thumping against the ground as he scratched himself, his footsteps pattering back and forth – but now there was only silence.

    When he tried to call Gangsta’s name he found that his vocal cords refused to vibrate or produce any sound, and that in fact he was having difficulty breathing. This discovery caused a sudden jolt of anxiety. He reached for the apple tea and took a sip, but he couldn’t taste anything. Was something wrong with his sense of taste, too? Or had someone switched his cup? Maybe Shige had come home early, sneaked quietly into the house and decided to play a little trick on his old man, Aoyama was thinking, when a weird and spine-chilling sound split the silence. It was a sound like rusty hinges creaking, but he couldn’t tell if it came from somewhere in the house or somewhere between his own ears. Everything went dark for a moment, and the sofa seemed to lift and then slam back down to the floor. And then, from the corner of the living-room, came a clear, succinct voice.

    ‘Can’t move, can you?’

    When the curtains billowed and Yamasaki Asami emerged from behind them, he wondered if he was hallucinating.
Where have you been?
he tried to say, but the inside of his mouth was numb and no words came out.

    She walked up to him and took hold of his face, squeezing his cheeks together with the thumb and index finger of her left hand. She was wearing rubber surgical gloves. The pressure of her grip was enough to force his mouth open, but he didn’t feel any pain. All the strength had drained from his body, and it now seemed as if her one-handed grip was the only thing that kept him from sliding off the sofa. Drool was dribbling down his jaw. In her right hand she held a very thin plastic hypodermic. She showed it to him.

    ‘Go to sleep for a while. I’ll let you know when we’re ready to start. Your body will be like a corpse, but I’ll make sure your nerves are all wide awake. That way the pain will be a hundred times worse. So get some sleep while you can.’

    She inserted the needle at the base of his tongue.

    The liquid in the hypodermic seemed to saturate his body in no time. Aoyama did fall asleep, but for what seemed like only a moment. He was awakened by an excruciating pain in his eyeballs – as though they’d been speared from the inside with long pins that penetrated out through his pupils. His tears had a faintly medicinal smell. He couldn’t move, couldn’t so much as wiggle a finger, but certain sensations were extraordinarily vivid. He was able to work his jaw slightly, the feeling was back in his tongue and his sense of smell had returned. The tears misted his vision, and yet even the mist had a certain shining, crystal clarity. It was like peering through a fish-eye lens. Each time he blinked, he saw what looked like the after-image of a dead tree – probably the tiny capillaries on the retina itself – and heard something like the click of a camera shutter. Every little sound was amplified, and when Yamasaki Asami peered into his face and said ‘Hello again’, her voice reverberated like cathedral bells. His first reaction on realising that she was going to murder him was not, strangely enough, terror, but the sort of feeling of closure one has upon finally solving a puzzle. It hadn’t just been a misunderstanding after all. It was about Shige. She hadn’t been able to accept or forgive the fact that Aoyama had a son whom he adored.