Floating City (35 page)

“Koei?” he whispered in the night.

“Yes, yes. Kiss me again.”

She seemed drawn to the devastation the war had wrought upon her city. Though almost all of the rebuilding had already taken place, there were still places throughout Tokyo that bore the scars of the bombing raids and the napalm-induced firestorms. Afternoons, golden in the burnished autumnal atmosphere, she took him to these places as if they were intimate gardens whose exquisite existence she was willing to share. She seemed most at ease in these maimed sites, as if the protection of her shell was not necessary here. Thus, in an unconscious way, she presented to Nicholas the existence of her own scar, though not its mysterious nature.

Of course, by then he knew that she must have been hurt sometime in the past. But this wound ran deep, so it was likely not merely a last-minute rejection by a suitor or a callous remark by a lover. That it was sexual in nature he had no doubt whatsoever. It often seemed to him that Koei burned with a sexual ardor that was quite intense, and that she lived in mortal dread of that ardent part of her. She was split off from herself, two people at once, struggling to regain a semblance of balance after a trauma of unknown proportions.

“You’re my savior,” she whispered to him one night. They were entwined in each other’s arms, lying within a blanket they had laid at the edge of the open field where, sometime before, the stars had lit them, an owl had hooted mournfully, and their lips had met. “Save me.”

What did she need to be saved from?

The terrible thing was Nicholas suspected that he knew. He did not want to know, and yet he desperately wanted to understand it all because he wanted more than anything else to end her pain and suffering, to make her whole again. It was that time of his life. His belief that he could do this was absolute.

“Save me.”

By
save me
she meant “take me.” He knew it and she knew he knew it. It was what she wanted. It was what he wanted. It was right.

Carefully, he unbuttoned her blouse. She arched slightly and he unhooked her bra. His head bent and his mouth enclosed one hard nipple. She gasped, ran her fingers through his thick hair. He could hear her ardent heartbeat, and it was as if he were dipped in fire. He wanted more than anything to enter her and, in doing so, enclose her in warmth and protection. He wanted an end to her suffering.

He kissed her breasts, white as milk, as he unfastened her skirt. He pushed it down, along with her underpants. Then he rose up over her.

At that moment, she cried out and, rolling away from him, drew her legs up to her chest. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” she sobbed.

From behind her, he whispered, “It’s all right.”

“No, no.” Her head whipped from side to side. “It’s all turned to ashes, everything I’ve dreamed about for weeks.” Her shoulders shook. “I have no explanation. I can’t—”

“It’s all right,” he said again, and turned her gently toward him. “Don’t worry. It will be fine.”

“No,” she whispered as her hand found him and enclosed him. “It isn’t all right.” She caressed him lightly.

“Koei, you don’t have to—”

“No, no, I want to.” Her hand stroking so softly. “Oh, Nicholas, I want what you want, please believe me, but I can’t—” She gasped as his seed exploded on her fingers and wrist. “Yes,” she sighed, her head against his heaving chest. “Oh, yes.’”

In the night, with only the wind and the birds, they seemed suspended in time, wafted on currents and eddies only they could see.

Nicholas, working up his courage to say what needed to be said now, held her tightly. “I know you won’t tell me on your own, so let me say this for you.”

“No.” She put her hand over his mouth. “Please, no.”

He took her fingers firmly away. “You know it’s for the best, Koei. Because if I don’t, you will never be healed, and the darkness will remain between us and we will never recover. We’ll come to distrust and hate one another, and I won’t allow that to happen.”

He paused for a moment, heard only the wind and the wild beating of their hearts. She had acquiesced, finally, in the only way she knew how now.

“You were raped, weren’t you?” He felt a tiny spasm go through her as if he had pricked her with a needle. “How long ago did it happen?”

“Three years, five months, six days.” She stared up at the night sky, and her voice was as dry as that of an economics professor. The door was at last open.

“Your parents know, don’t they?”

“Yes.”

That explained her mother’s disengagement, her father’s almost paranoid caution when it came to Koei’s relationship with Nicholas. Her mother was still in denial and her father’s rage had not abated.

“Who did it?”

She rolled away from him, but he caught her in his arms, forced her back. “Koei.” He made her look at him. “This poison that’s inside you must come out. It’s killing you, don’t you see? You’re only happy when we’re together, and then only sporadically.” He thought of the raped parts of Tokyo where she felt free to display her own terrible scar. “We’ve lanced the wound and the poison is oozing out, but we’ve got to get it all or the infection will go on and on until you’ll lose all will to live. I can’t believe that’s what you want. Not now.”

For a long time she gazed mutely into his eyes. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it abruptly. He knew she wanted to cry, but it was too late for that. He was witnessing the last barrier she had unconsciously erected to keep herself sane after the rape. The split was not yet complete.

“Who raped you?”

“Please don’t make me do this.”

“It’s for your own good. You know it as well as I do.”

“He was... a friend. Yasuo Hideyuke. My... a boy from school... a senior.” She put her head down, sobbing so inconsolably he could only hold her, rocking her back and forth.

After a time, there were no more tears, only her voice, thin and reedy as she regurgitated the horror that now had to be fully exorcised. “He was... older than I. I looked up to him... for protection, you know. I trusted him. I never suspected, but when he attacked me, it was very quick. I was asleep, I didn’t know at first what was happening. I could smell the liquor on his breath, and then I felt his hardness pushing against me. It was like a pole or a spear, I... I didn’t know what to do. I was wild, I think, then my mind went numb. I couldn’t be there, this couldn’t be happening, not to me. So I shut down. I remember my legs opening as his hands grabbed me.” Her fingers clutched Nicholas as if she were afraid of drowning in her memories. “The pain roused me. I cried out, but this only seemed to spur him on, looming over me, pounding up and down on me. In me. There was something—I don’t know—horribly aggressive, as if rage drove him, not lust. And that’s when I snapped. I could have borne his lust, I suppose, because it would have been understandable in a way. But rage? How had my trust incited this in him?

“I tried to fight him, and he hit me. He seemed to like that, too, beating me while he was... inside me, and he reared up over me and...
God!
No more. No more!”

The next morning, Nicholas went through classes like a zombie. At his aikido dojo he barely heard his
sensei’s
lesson, and when he was thrown to the tatami by a second-year student, he knew that he was in trouble.

In the end, he knew whom he had to see and it wasn’t Koei. It was the man who had cut her life in half before she had gotten to full flower.

He found Yasuo Hideyuke, who had graduated from school only to become a fisherman. He had taken over his father’s boat and now ran it with the precision of a drill sergeant. He was, as Koei had said, a big man, with the musculature of a weight lifter. A surly, taciturn creature, perhaps he felt trapped in a business he didn’t care for but that paid the rent for him and his widowed mother.

He did not like Nicholas’s looks and made this plain without preamble. He was a political radical, hating both the Americans and the Communists with equal enthusiasm.

“Whether or not I dated Koei is no business of yours,” he said with his spread-legged stance barring Nicholas from coming onto his boat. “This is my property; you’re trespassing.”

“The past will not go away,” Nicholas said.
“That
isn’t your property.”

“I have work to do,” Hideyuke said dismissively. “Leave me alone.”

Nicholas began to step on board. “Not until I get some answers.”

“Here’s the only answer you’ll get out of me,” Hideyuke said, grabbing a curved fishhook and swinging it with precision toward Nicholas’s face.

Nicholas reacted instinctively. He stepped into the attack, rather than away from it. He ducked, the fishhook flashed over his head, and he struck Hideyuke in the stomach with an
atemi.

The big man grunted, sucked in his breath, and slammed the wooden handle of the fishhook down onto the back of Nicholas’s neck. Pain exploded in Nicholas’s head and he went down across the space between the dock and the side of the boat.

Hideyuke kicked him into the crevasse, so that Nicholas was holding on to the gunwale of the boat with both hands while he dangled over the water. The fishing boat, though tied up, jostled in the water, moving dangerously close to where he dangled.

“How do you like
this
answer?” Hideyuke said as he brought the barbed end of the fishhook down onto Nicholas’s left hand. Nicholas let go with that hand, and the hook buried itself into the gunwale of the boat.

That gave him his moment, and he swung upward. Hideyuke was caught between trying to punch him and letting go of his weapon. He opted for the weapon, concentrating on freeing it.

His muscles bulging, he ripped it free, but by that time Nicholas had kicked out, slamming the sole of his shoe into the side of Hideyuke’s knee. The big man went down but, reaching out, took Nicholas with him.

They crashed onto the gunwale, and then, still struggling, tumbled over the side. Nicholas, on the bottom, reached up, grabbing a hawser, slippery with seaweed. Hideyuke, still clinging to his weapon, slid down, clutching Nicholas’s left leg with his free hand.

Nicholas looked down, saw the big man swinging back his arm, readying another slash with the fishhook. He did the only thing he could: he drew back his right leg, slammed his shoe onto the top of Hideyuke’s head.

Hideyuke’s attack aborted in midswing, and he lost his grip on Nicholas. He went straight down, into the black water, churning with the movement of his boat as it jounced against the dock, bounced back out again.

The police held Nicholas three hours for questioning, but he was finally released. Witnesses could not agree on how the fight started, but they all praised Nicholas’s courage in plummeting into the water at considerable risk to himself in an attempt to rescue Hideyuke. Besides, he was Col. Denis Linnear’s son.

“There is something I need to tell you,” Nicholas said to Koei when they met at sunset at one of her bleak, scarred places in the city. “I saw Yasuo Hideyuke today.”

Koei stood so still she might have ceased to breathe. All the color drained from her face, and the look in her eyes he had only seen in prey at last treed by its hunter.

“Did you speak with him?”

“He wouldn’t answer my questions.”

Some of the extreme tension that had gripped her dissipated, and he thought for a moment she would collapse in relief. He held her in his arms.

“Koei, he’s dead.”

“Who’s dead?” She had that bewildered look he had seen in her so long ago.

“Hideyuke.”

“What? How?”

Nicholas looked at her for a long time. “We got into a fight.”

“He fought with you? You’re... my God, I’ve seen what you can do.” Then, as if a switch had been thrown inside her, she gave a little moan. “Why were you there?”

“You know why.”

Now she cried out in earnest. “Retribution. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“No, I...” In truth Nicholas did not know, and the question had been haunting him ever since he hauled himself out of the water. Had he gone to see Hideyuke in order to confront him? For what reason? To hear him confess and gain a measure of satisfaction? Or had it been to seek retribution for the hideous crime he had committed? No, it couldn’t be. He was incapable... Then he recalled one of his conversations with Tsunetomo when the
oyabun
had recounted the story of the loyal retainer who had committed seppuku because his lord’s son had been killed.
Duty is not only familial,
he had said to Tsunetomo in response.
It is a sense of time and place; but mostly it is a definition of self.

“I don’t know,” Nicholas said.

“You don’t know,” Koei repeated. Then anger filled her face, turning it into something he could never have imagined. “Yasuo was an innocent boy. He and I held hands, once or twice. That’s all.”

Nicholas was so stunned, there was a buzzing in his ears. “But you told me—”

Koei put her fists against her ears. “I know what I told you, but I didn’t know what else to say. You were making me talk about it, and maybe you were right, part of me wanted to. But I couldn’t tell you the truth.”

“What truth!” He shook her so hard her teeth rattled. There was a taste of bile in his mouth and his bowels had turned to water. He had a glimpse of Hideyuke losing his grip, falling into the roiling abyss between dock and boat.
“What truth!”
he roared.

In the face of his pain and rage the cyst of silence and lies burst at last. “It was my father! My father raped me!”

And now, as reality shifted, he saw in a flash all the interactions that he had so neatly misinterpreted: Koei looking into her father’s limo as if it were an open grave, the mother’s disaffection, the father’s jealousy, Koei’s strange animation at describing an imagined violent death for her father,
I was asleep, I didn’t know at first what was happening,
she had been at home when she was raped. The half-truths and the clues; the silence and the lies.

She collapsed at his feet, her hands over her eyes. But it was too much; even she could not block out the past and the present. “Oh, Buddha, save me!”