"Angel of Osaka"

Deep South v.3 n.3 (Spring 1997)

It is a dreary apartment building with nothing but the air-conditioning to recommend it. Grey walls, studded with smoked-glass unopenable windows, reached into the clouds of the rain that just wouldn't come. I broke into a sudden sweat as soon as I stepped into the lobby, like I had absorbed all the humidity of the Osaka summer and, in the desiccation of the building, it was being leached out of me. I felt my keys in my pocket as the elevator carried me up, running a finger along the serrated edge of the one that I knew by shape would open the apartment door.

Eleventh floor. Step up slightly, the elevator doesn't level properly. One turn to the right, then three paces forward. Right again. There was no resistance as I turned the key. Not that an unlocked door was odd in itself. It's just that Beth and I had a system: a tab of paper rolled and stuck in the lock meant that one of us was home and didn't want to be disturbed. Who am I kidding? It meant that Beth was home and didn't want to be disturbed. I was, am, a virtual recluse. I think I brought Ryu home once to sell him some of what he calls `Americana', a Sisters of Mercy e.p. and a book by Henry Rollins.

But Beth, she entertained occasionally. She would bring home from work, the club, men who wanted private photo sessions. Strictly amateur, they brought the camera. Last time it was heels & stockings, I think; long, sinuous, western legs. Beth made a set of prints for them and kept the negatives. I think she even ran an ad in some paper. She wanted: statuesque, blonde, European goddess... etc... I remember writing it out for her in Japanese. I couldn't find a word for statuesque.

So she wasn't with anyone but... I pushed the door open, meeting a wall of moist air. An insistent breeze slid something white against my foor. I looked down. A feather, maybe a pigeon's. A window was open somewhere. I bent to pick up the feather, then walked to the solarium. What little furniture we had stood out bleakly in the weak grey light of the day. A jagged pattern of light, torn by the flapping curtains, lay on the floor, mirroring the shattered glass in the window frame. I counted the steel-tube chairs and found one missing. I carefully brushed the glass fragments from the air-conditioning vent that ran underneath the window and placed my hand on its reassuring chill metal. Leaning out as far as I thought safe, I looked down for the lost chair, trying to imagine what had prompted Beth to hurl it through the window.

I found it. Strangely it had made it further than she had. Odd. I thought it, having to go through the window... But there it and she lay on the rough ground of the building site that is our north view. I could see she was down on her front, head turned to her left and arms bent like she does when she's sleeping. It was only the wrenched angle of her waist, legs askew, that showed something didn't fit. It looked, from eleven floors up, like she was wearing that latex corset, a favourite of hers, and black heels. I would have to go down.

I stepped back into the living room and pulled the blinds of the solarium shut. Pure white halogen light flooded from the kitchen as I poured myself a coffee mug of Glenfiddich, mailed to me by my father. My father, who owes his understanding of Japan to James Clavell and believes his son is a merchant-adventurer pillaging the stock market in the name of western hegemony. In reality I am a representative sample of that (in Japan) elusive species: the young, white, university-educated male. I don't actually do anything except exist for the firm as a shining example of the new age of international cooperation, the harmony of east and west. In short, when we meet with suspicious European industrialists, I sit beside the marketing manager and smile reassuringly. If I could explain that to my father...

But that'd be simple. How could I ever convince Beth's father, probably still knee-deep in pig shit on some Hungarian farm, that his gentle Magyar daughter, come to chiselled feminine perfection, should end up dead in Japan? I left out her stop in America, but perhaps that's best. Beth, dancing under the name `Bethany'. She said the audiences here were different, they just stared, recording the image of the blonde with taut muscles and sculptured snatch. In any case better than the spunk-stained stages of Bridgeport.

I lit a cigarette and rolled it in the coke Beth had left on the coffee table, inhaling the acrid chemical stench quickly and deeply. With the remote I pressed play on the CD player. Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart came on, Beth's favourite work song. Ian Curtis' Sinatra-like voice filled the apartment. Hadn't he topped himself too? Hanged in Macclesfield.

Quite plainly something had to be done. I smoked some more coke and then, feeling better, I stood up, brushing the tobacco-coke haze aside, and made for the door. I went to the stairwell.

It was only with chemical resolution that I could get close to Beth. I did a wide circle around her, looking up, but the building site didn't seem to inspire contemplation from my fellow tenants. I slid a hand under her shoulder. She was still warm and pliant. Inhaling deeply and holding it, I turned her gently over. I breathed out, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Beth was translucent, like she was fading; one side of her face looked bruised but as I stroked her cheek the dark blue stain faded leaving her colourless. Tissue paper skin. I held her hand, blue against my pink. There didn't seem to be much in the way of serious horror here until I got down to where her leg stuck out at that strange angle. Just below where the PVC fabric of the corset stretched across her inner thigh, I could see meat, raw and interlaced with veins and tendons. An ivory bit of bone, thick as my fist, jutted out, its edge ragged and tipped with bits of stringy flesh. I looked back to her face, untouched, and straightened a wisp of hair that had blown over her eye.

There would be no one to see her now, I had her out of the public eye. Privacy for once, Beth. I laid her down across the grey hood of Ryu's car in the underground parking lot. A Subaru from the mid-fifties, rounded and clumsy looking. Slumping down against the front tire, I breathed quickly and raggedly, feeling the exhaust fumes sandpapering my throat and my slack office worker lungs. I called Ryu on my cell, he lives in the tower opposite mine (the one with the better view); our buildings share the parking garage. I told him I needed a ride.

With my sleeve I wiped the encrusted dirt from Beth's corset. The damp air had dulled its gloss so I continued rubbing, polishing it to a fine sheen. My hand traced the cold rubber contours: the hard breast forms, the flattened stomach. I wanted to go down further to where the suspenders, with their silver clasps, trailed across her white thigh. But the gash, almost at her bikini line frightened me. It's not like we were lovers, let me be clear about that. I was using so much junk that I know even in the best case I could only muster a reluctant half-hard-on. But I did go down on her. I was close to Beth, could feel the heat from her sex, her pulse thudding against my ears as she pressed her thighs together, holding me between her legs; as I held her lips between my lips I could sense her excitement, like they bloomed in my mouth. And when she came I thought I'd done my part in taking her away from all of this. It was the least one exile could do for another.

There were other reasons for me avoiding straight sex, more precisely, one reason, pretty much self-inflicted. In the west, in the back parking lot of my apartment. Up against my broken down Impala. All I knew was he lived five doors down from me. We'd seen each other on the way in and out. I don't think there's anything like completely straight or completely queer; it's a question of degree.

His hands searched for the buttons on my 501's. I gripped the roof of the Impala. I remember thinking that this was definitely a plateau in my deficient sex life. A brilliant sliver of time set against uniform grey, like diamonds on felt. No consequences. My face pressed against the cold glass of the car. It was this instant that mattered, not after, not me as an old man dying of some middle class wasting disease. An exchange: the future for the one moment in the now. The unforgiving, unprotected, moment. I didn't regret it. I'm sure if I saw him again, if we admitted we knew each other, if we actually talked, if he's still alive... we wouldn't have much to say... he didn't know what he had... Terence it was really nothing...

But here I was in a different here and now with my friend's body on the hood of a car. In the best case what could I hope for? Maybe deportation if things went unexpectedly well. I wished Ryu would hurry. I had to promise him that bootleg: Bauhaus at Eindhoven in `81. A rarity. It was worth a drive.

I was lucky he came up from behind the car and didn't immediately see Beth sprawled across the hood. Strangely he took it well. Unemotional like always. We headed out of the garage and started to think of the big picture.

Or rather Ryu did. Get rid of the body, he was pretty firm on that. But to me it wasn't the body, or it, it was Beth. Ryu wanted to dump her in the Yodogawa, the river that loops through Osaka. But Beth. I didn't want to leave her in exile; not in the sunless riverbed. I'd keep you warm, Beth, but not tonight. In the backseat with her I ran my hands across her corsetted form. I crossed her arms across her chest and tried to spread her fingers. As I opened her left hand two scraps of paper fell to the floor. I asked Ryu to turn on the light. A small photo, back and white with a crease across the middle from too much folding, had her in white, a crucifix clutched proudly in front. She must've been fourteen or so. A tentative smile on a face I could still recognize as the one beside me. On the back in green ink and elegant copperplate hand was "Beata Agnes Konrad". Beata; I said it to myself a few times. I liked it better than Beth or Bethany.

We must've been on the Hanshin Expressway, I saw the prison on our right. I unfolded the second photo and saw Beth, half-turned from the camera, looking out over an expanse of desert. Just her and sand. A perfect moment out of time. I envied her having that picture to look back on. The ideal instant, fixed. It always seemed to me that that moment, when things were really ideal, to fix it was like dropping a stone in water. The waves move only outwards in rings. You could try to swim against them but you'd never get to that still point again. All you had was nostalgia; maybe that's all Beth had. But there she was, in Africa maybe, out of time.

I slid both photos into my pocket. We were near the river. The humidity was oppressive, dampening Beth's hair and pressing it against her face. Her face. I leaned over to straighten her hair and was frightened to see her face immaculate ivory under the night sky, then flicker a repulsive green as we drove under a sodium street light. I ran my hand along her strong jaw line and down across her neck. I couldn't just abandon her, I had to take something back.

In hindsight it was a boneheaded manoeuvre but in hindsight everything is a boneheaded manoeuvre. In hindsight I would've had a copy of Grey's Anatomy; in hindsight I would've had something better than Ryu's utility knife. But there it was. We rolled Beth's body down the embankment and into the drainage ditch. I tried to sop up the blood with papers from a box of files Ryu had in the back seat. When I had emptied the box I put her head in it. Beth had a calm aspect to her, eyes closed and a faint smile on her blue-tinged lips. Ryu said that it was a custom in ancient times to take an enemy's head, pack it in salt against the corruption of the summer heat, and send it to your lord as proof of loyalty. He didn't know about taking the head of a loved one.

The Subaru sputtered and died. There was a high chain-link fence beside us; beyond it stretched a field littered with crippled shards of machinery, going back fifty yards or so to a warehouse.

I heard Ryu sigh. I saw his face reflected in the rear-view mirror; pallid, eyes sunk deep in sockets. Ryu was of two minds- straight, meaning laconic, a Japanese `Thin White Duke', -and wired on crystal-meth. He unwrapped some ice, balancing the packet on his lap, and smoked it, cupping his hand under his cigarette to catch stray ash and preserve the precious interior of his vintage Subaru. Threads of smoke wafted to the ceiling. Silence, except for Ryu's measured breath. He turned in his seat and passed me the blackened foil of meth, a half-smile, thin as a razor, on his sallow face.

We slumped in the complacency that follows substance abuse. In the distance a pin-prick of light shone bright against the dark wall of the warehouse. The unlovely castoffs of machinery were picked out by the night-watchman's flashlight. I nudged Ryu and he started the car.

We had been driving for some time, now keeping to the narrow streets that interlaced an industrial park. I could see that Ryu was waxen; drops of sweat hung from his jaw. There was a nervous edge to him as he navigated the constricted streets. I knew he was coming down. I asked him to let me out at Yodogawa River Park. He wanted to know if I was sure and I said so.

From there I don't know how I got to the railway tunnel or where it was. I sat in the darkness, as near to black as a place like Osaka can get. Opening the box lid, I reached in and took Beth out, laying her down on my black suit jacket, spread over the gravel. I reached into the suit pocket and pulled out the two photographs. A grey shape fluttered to the ground. I bent closer and lifted to my face the feather I'd found in the apartment. I put it right below Beth, flanked by the photos, two ragged squares of white. Then I knelt Japanese style before the makeshift shrine, my Butsudan. She shouldn't have gone... at least she shouldn't have... without me...

I felt a rush of wind coming down the tunnel and made a move to protect the altar but somehow I knew at that moment it was no longer important. A light glimmered and grew into a myriad of bright pin-pricks against the creeping fog. I saw a form in the aureole of whiteness. A corsetted figure looking down on me. I stood up with the feather in my outstretched hand. Her PVC shone like pewter where the light caught her curves. I was still as, behind her, grey wings opened and spread. Beautiful delicate wings, I imagined they'd be too slight to carry her. The layered feathers caught the tunnel wind and fluttered. I thought: if I had wings to set me free. I stepped closer. She smiled at me and I reached out to the light, holding the feather, her feather, out to her. She became less distinct as the white light behind her congealed and strengthened, softened her outline, and finally embraced her.