Dreams of Speaking (12 page)

The more Alice and Mr Sakamoto met, the more they liked each other. Their initial recognition of affinity, built with lopsided speculation in a brief encounter on the train, had been confirmed and extended in conversations and shared city walks. He was a man not just enraptured by telephones and Alexander Graham Bell, but given over to vigilant apprehension of the world made both destructible and glorious by its many technologies. He remembered the bomb, but he also delighted in gadgetry. He was respectful of vast machinery, but pondered the mechanism of a corkscrew and the intricacy of old clocks. When they sat in parks he noticed the tiniest things: the nervous vectors of a single sparrow, the mottled colours and arrangements of fallen leaves, the rainy tints in the afternoon sky. This was a capacity, he said, that had come from the practice of
haiku
, which he thoroughly recommended to everyone he met. There was a fabric of knowing, he claimed, beyond vision, beyond hearing. Just as dogs practise an apparently subsonic intelligence, or birds know by inner geometry their flight paths and havens, so there are latent forms of life everywhere and secret understandings. Richer than silicon, he said. Hyperlinked without end.

Mr Sakamoto's interest in technology, Alice discovered, was bound principally with characters and stories. He spent hours
reading biographies, or searched on the internet, finding the details of inventors' lives and filling in gaps with the stuff of his own preoccupations. When he offered to send Alice occasional biographical notes, she agreed. It seemed a pleasant way to extend their friendship. By this means she became the recipient of Mr Sakamoto's meditations on inventors, tales charming and loopy, informative and daft.

The balance between them, a lighthearted, almost comic, equipoise of anecdote and observation, shifted when Mr Sakamoto listened to Alice's distress. He had earlier listened with knowing quiet as she told him of the violence in the Métro, and the old woman who displayed her blue tattoo; but an incident concerning Leo led to a phone call in the night and her voice sent towards him with desperate force. Mr Sakamoto heard Alice's soft-speaking voice strain against weeping. He heard her tear apart. He felt for her almost exactly as he felt for his daughters: a great and virtuous love, a wish above all to give solace.

 

It began when Alice returned one evening from the library, weighted with her papers and ideas, caught in the distractions of her project. When she turned the corner into her street she thought, for an absurd moment, that someone was making a movie. There were lights, roped off areas, police in natty uniforms and shiny boots holding back a small curious crowd. Voices were interested, engaged. But as she pushed forward she realised it was something else, it was something terrible. She explained to the police officer standing nearest that the door of her apartment building was in the cordoned-off area, and asked if she might pass. It was only then, having ducked under the light-reflecting tape and entered the site of emergency, that she saw him. The boy she had called Leo, the boy
she had watched day after day, rocking to his own music, wired for personal sound, tuned in, autonomous, lay dead in the doorway opposite, his head propped, as though arranged, so that he appeared to be looking her way. Leo's young face was pulpy and crudely disfigured. A man kneeled beside him, making notes.

‘Leo,' Alice exclaimed, with a weak involuntary shout.

Everyone seemed to turn in her direction.

‘You know this boy?' someone asked.

‘Yes. No.' She corrected herself.

‘Leo who? What is his surname?'

Alice was obliged to reveal that she did not know the boy, that she had never met him, or talked to him, or even nodded as he passed by, that ‘Leo' was a kind of fantasy connection. The policeman looked irritated. Alice added that he attended the school at the end of the street. The policeman wrote this down. He asked Alice if she had seen anyone suspicious in the street, anyone talking to ‘Leo'. Anyone harassing him. Any drugs. Any fights. Any prostitution. Alice knew nothing.

‘I know nothing,' she heard herself blandly pronounce. ‘
Je sais rien.'

Her throat was dry and her hands were trembling. Over the policeman's shoulder she could see the still uncovered boy, his face battered and black-looking, the nose clearly broken. The hood of his parka was askew, exposing a gash along his cheek. One eye was half open. The lights of the investigation were startlingly bright. Alice saw her own street as she had never seen it before. Brutality accentuated it, made it sharp and irrefutable. There was a stain of piss on the wall, not far from the body. Crumpled paper in the gutter. A shredded and illegible poster, peeling like human skin. Alice heard a cough, an impatience; the policeman found this foreigner wearisome.

‘Go inside,' he said. ‘Now.'

Alice fumbled for her keys and obediently entered her building. She felt herself stagger up the uneven stairs to her studio, full of a weight in her chest that was like a brick, like a sob, like a dead thing lodged inside. She sat in the dark, at the window, watching all that happened below. For a long time the men in the street just mingled and talked. Then Alice saw Leo's body sealed in a black vinyl bag, lifted into a van and taken away. The reflecting tape was dismantled, wound on a spool like a film. The cars began to withdraw. She saw the last two policemen having a quiet cigarette. They joked about something: there was a moment of cruel laughter. When finally they departed, Alice ran downstairs, outside, and acting purely on instinct, skidded into the telephone booth on the corner and rang Mr Sakamoto at his hotel. He asked her to wait while he turned off the television in his room, and then he listened.

Alice spoke to Mr Sakamoto of the battered face. She spoke of the boy who was named and not named Leo, the boy she had known and not known, who was treated like garbage, left dumped in the street, destroyed, made ugly. She spoke of the sorrowfulness of the night and the sound that was never the river. She spoke of the way the policemen's lights made everything inhuman, and the waste of it, and the pity, and the fierce anonymity. She told him of the joke she could not hear, and the implicit disrespect. The forms of negation that inhere in a single flicked butt, or a tone of voice, or a flung paper cup, consigned to litter.

Alice was aware of making awkward gestures in the glass box of the telephone booth. She was aware too that she talked quickly and probably made no sense at all. But still she spoke, and still she imparted to the ear of gentle Mr Sakamoto her vision of the thin boy's face, robbed of life, and the central shadow in the street that was his fallen body, and the police with their stubborn persistence, simply hanging around. How
undramatic they were. They had acted as if the world was orderly and sound. As if it were an everyday occurrence, this propped body, this offence.

At some point in her monologue, Alice became self-conscious.

‘Forgive me,' she said, ‘I don't know why I'm telling you all this. Bothering you in the middle of the night.'

But Mr Sakamoto pacified and reassured her.

‘Do you want company?' he asked. ‘Do you want me to come over? Or I could get you a room here. We could drink coffee together.'

But Alice said no. She was suddenly nervous of the intimacy of spoken words. The spilled emotion. Her unguarded display. They arranged to meet the next day at their usual bistro.

When she thought about it afterwards, she was surprised at her lack of restraint and uncharacteristic will to disclosure. It had been a summoning of despair into language, and its release through the telephone. All that black wind that had rushed to occupy her, all that night-time distortion and sense of despoliation, she had converted into words and sentences for Mr Sakamoto, just as he did, in another scale, in an entirely other scale, for his Uncle Tadeo. It was an experience of the strange tenderness of hyperbolic moments. The emptying joy.

 

Over their lunch Alice resumed her clumsy apology.

‘I can't believe how I went on and on last night. About the joke. About the river. I didn't know what I was saying.'

‘It's OK. Really. Everyone needs inside them an ocean or a river.'

Alice had heard him but wasn't sure how to respond.

‘It was an overreaction,' she continued. ‘I didn't even know him.'

‘Not at all,' responded Mr Sakamoto. ‘The death of the young is unacceptable. We should feel appalled and insulted. We should howl and complain. There is no overreaction to witnessed death.'

He looked out the window and seemed to have no appetite. He had a beautiful face, creased and burnished with sadness. His hair was silver, neat. He wore an impeccable dark grey suit and a red silk tie, patterned with chevrons. He might have been a Tokyo banker. Alice watched Mr Sakamoto push food around his plate. They left their meal half eaten, and walked by the Seine, in the wind-blown afternoon, companionable, now, in what was implicitly understood but could not be uttered, in what blew away, torn to shreds, in the wake of any calamity.

Alice was missing television. After long days of reading and writing, she wanted the uncomplicated comfort of serial images. She wanted a sofa on which to recline, and before it a moulded luminous box, solid and commanding as a shrine. Like plastic bags and mobile phones, television was both a facile utility and a tacky satisfaction. The news she read in newspapers seemed less real without its animating images; the weather report less credible without comic-book clouds and suns tacked onto colourful national maps; and her narrative hunger, which was massive, was unassuaged. She wondered if the story of Leo's murder had been shown on television, if she would have been able to see his weeping mother, and his father, grim and brave and wearing a tilted shabby cap, just holding back the tears as he spoke of his loss. Perhaps there was a shot of his house, somewhere, and a younger brother or two, looking bewildered and estranged, peering with suspicion at the television crew, who nevertheless managed efficiently and brutally to intrude. Perhaps too, he had a pretty sister, almost his age and looking very like him, with the same thin pallid face and nervy manner, who announced to the camera that he was the best brother ever to have lived, and that he adored animals and video games and popular music.