Told by Enzi, a runaway and laborer who becomes an entrepreneur and a criminal, “The Aether and the Lie” tells the tale of Kaori, an artist from Tokyo who stalks and kills her ‘one love,’ and then confesses through her art. It is also Enzi’s story, tracing his drifting past and comparing his own failed ‘one love’ to his strange relationship with the artist from Tokyo. It is a story of murders, money buried in the mountains of Montana, a wise bail-bondsman who lives in the back of his truck, revenge, and a thin detective who studied to be an architect but now only draws lines between incorrect assumptions. However, it is not just crime, as the story is infused with nature and solitude, and unwraps the motivations for doing bad things.
Visit MontanaVoice.com for more information and to listen to additional episodes.
Told by Enzi, a runaway and laborer who becomes an entrepreneur and a criminal, “The Aether and the Lie” tells the tale of Kaori, an artist from Tokyo who stalks and kills her ‘one love,’ and then confesses through her art. It is also Enzi’s story, tracing his drifting past and comparing his own failed ‘one love’ to his strange relationship with the artist from Tokyo. It is a story of murders, money buried in the mountains of Montana, a wise bail-bondsman who lives in the back of his truck, revenge, and a thin detective who studied to be an architect but now only draws lines between incorrect assumptions. However, it is not just crime, as the story is infused with nature and solitude, and unwraps the motivations for doing bad things.
Visit MontanaVoice.com for more information and to listen to additional episodes.
The Lie, a novel by Steve S. Saroff
(c) 2021 Steve S. Saroff
Prologue
Missoula. It was beautiful. In the spring, up where the town runs out, where the houses nudge against the edge of open, there are still bluebirds. And in the fall, the colors of the trees lining the streets near the university makes the town look like a place where you could start over. Buy that house. Put a trampoline in the yard for the kids. Get away from the city and move to Montana. But then, like hot bleach mixed with smoke, there is a reminder that it is still the West. Where people who have never had any real chances have already come and given up before you.
Aether (Ae·ther):
1) Plato’s fifth element, the quintessence, which floated the stars.
2) A substance which physicists once believed light moved through.
3) Where words and numbers now travel to reach the glowing screens.
Chapter One - Kaori
At three in the morning the phone rang. I let it go to voicemail and didn't listen to the message until the next day. The call had been from Kaori, a Japanese woman whom I had met at a crowded party more than two months before. Kaori had told me then that she was an artist and that she had come to Montana to “become famous.” Now she was calling me because she was in jail. Her voice message said, “Please. I have no person now. I in the jail. I find your name in my pocket. I wait for you.” Nearly six feet tall with red-tinted, jaw-length black hair, I first noticed her because she was standing by herself with her back to the crowd, looking out a window. And then I noticed her hands, long and thin, her fingers stained with blue paint.
The people I worked with had brought me to the party, but I was weary from listening to technical talk and money stories. When I saw Kaori, I wanted to stand next to her, next to someone I didn't know. I went over to where she was. She turned and looked at me for a moment and then returned her gaze to the darkness outside. It was the start of September, and outside it was raining. I tried to watch the rain through the darkness, instead, though, all I could see ? all I was able to pay attention to ? was Kaori's reflection. Her eyes were large and dark in the paleness of her face, and she too seemed to be looking at my reflection, looking at me. So, I spoke to her reflection. “You have paint on your hands,” I said. “What have you been making?” She didn't answer. She didn't move. My eyes relaxed, focusing past the window now and into the darkness. I was about to turn and leave the window and go back to the kitchen or another crowded room. Suddenly she looked directly at me, her face less than two feet from mine, and said rapidly and with an awkward accent, “My boyfriend, he student. He love me. I come to Montana for him. For him I paint. For him I artist. For him I be famous.”
I asked her, “Is your boyfriend here?”
She shook her head, a silent 'No,' and then turned back to the window and said quietly, “No, no. He go. He go.”
“Who do you know here?” I asked.
She answered, “I come here to find my boyfriend, but he go now. He love me, but he forget me.”
I didn't say anything, and she continued, “I paint all week for him. I finish this morning.” She nodded her face towards her hands, “I bring painting to house this afternoon, but he no take it.”
“Your painting,” I asked, “what was it of?”
She looked at me quietly, and then asked, “You understand art?”
I nodded, yes.
“How you know art?” She asked. “You study it?”
“No, I do not paint,” I said, “but I think I understand making things, like why we try to show ourselves. But why wouldn't your boyfriend take your painting?”
“You ask what I paint. I made myself,” and she put a hand up, pulling her hair above her head, “I paint my hair in colors of how I feel for him. I paint rainbow. I paint sad thing like storm. And he not take it. He say he will not look at it. He close door on me. He have other girlfriend now. He break my heart.” She was looking out the window again, and continued speaking without looking at me, “I come here because this is house of person he work for. I knew of party. I think maybe he come here. But he does not come.” And then she looked at me again and said to me, “You understand art? You understand why I trash painting?”
“Trash it?” I asked.
“Yes. Take knife, cut face. Throw painting in can by street.”
It had been too long since I had heard talk like this. I had been in the world of the lie for the past few years, a place where no one is honest and where no one shows weakness. In just these few sentences exchanged with Kaori, I knew that I didn't want to be at the party anymore. I didn't want to talk with anyone else except her. And what I suddenly wanted was to try to save her “trashed” painting.
“Hey,” I said, “I don't know you. You don't know me. But will you let me keep that painting for you? Can we find it?”
She didn't answer right away, and when she did, she didn't say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Instead she asked, “You have car? You drive me home now? He not come here. I go home.”
And without saying anything else we left.
She lived in an apartment building on Arthur Street, near the University. When I parked next to it, she turned to me and said, “Thank you for drive home,” and then she added, “My name is Kaori. Painting in can behind building,” she pointed, “I no want to see it again.”
She opened the car door and was about to close it when I said, “Wait. Can I see you again? Can I talk with you sometime?”
“No,” she answered, “I have boyfriend. He no love me anymore, but I have boyfriend.”
“Ok,” I said, “But if you do want to talk sometime, or if you want to show me paintings, here, call me.” I had taken a scrap of paper and written down my name and phone number and handed it to her. She took the paper, and without looking at it shoved it in her coat pocket, closed the car door, and walked into her apartment building.
I waited a few minutes, and then I got out of the car and went to the back of the building. In the alley there was a dumpster with a hinged metal cover which I lifted and then I looked inside. In the light from the streetlamps, it was easy to see, and there, still on the top of the garbage, was an abstract portrait of Kaori. It was about three feet square, painted in blues and reds. Her hair was a sprawling rainbow, and her skin was white with highlights of silver. There were two diagonal cuts through the canvas. One went through an eye, and the other across her cheek and through her mouth. I pulled the painting from the dumpster, held it so that its surface was away from the falling rain, and then I took it to my car, and put it in the back seat. It was an oil painting and some of the paint was still wet. As I drove back to my house, I shook my head and laughed a bit. There was now blue oil paint on my hands.
She didn't know anything about me. She hadn't asked. And because I was sick of the lie, I had written my name and number rather than handing her a business card. I did not think she would call me, but I kept thinking about her. I had taken the painting and hung it on the wall in my bedroom. The two cuts had not ruined anything; rather, they gave an expression to the face that I had seen in Kaori's. Wildness with a hint of desperation.
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I was awake two months later, early November, at seven in the morning listening to the message she left. I boiled water and made coffee. I checked email and read some news on the computer. I listened to the message again. And again. She did not know English well, but she had given me enough words to understand what was happening. I found the number for the county jail, and I called. Yes, they had a girl named Kaori. They also told me that her bail was set at thirty thousand dollars, she was being held for committing four felonies - breaking and entry and three assaults - and that her scheduled court date was two months away. Over the phone they wouldn’t tell me any details of the assaults. And when I asked for specifics about what bail means - having never bailed anyone out of jail before - they told me to call a lawyer or a bail bondsman. In the background there was yelling and noise. The person on the other end of the phone abruptly hung up.
These years in the lie have made me hate lawyers. I called up a bondsman, the first one listed on Yelp. I told him what I knew, and he explained that I could go to the jail myself and hand over thirty thousand in cash which I might get back if she showed up for her court hearing. Or I could give him three thousand that I will not get back. I asked him why I might lose the thirty thousand even if she made her court hearing, and he explained that the judges often used the posted bail as the fine - in addition to prison time - for people found guilty. “What did she do?” the bondsman asked. I told him I have no idea, and he said, “A Fella could hire a lawyer. Find out.” I thanked him for the info and told him I would think over the options, and we ended the call.
I went into work. I read and deleted several messages. I spent a few hours on the phone. It was all politics about who will control things. O'neill came into my office and complained about work being done in Seattle. He told me that I needed to go there as soon as possible. In the last two weeks I had already been to SLAM four times. But I said, “Ok,” and I went home to take a shower and get some clothes. I caught the afternoon flight, got into a rental car then into the traffic, spent the night at a motel, and at six the next morning - in the dark - went to SLAM and talked with executives most of the day. There was no discussion of what was broken or impossible, instead everyone was worried about the auditors that their main investor had on site. The talk revolved around how we would describe “person-hours” spent on “designated-projects.” It took hours to get to any point, and even then, I was not sure what I had said nor what anyone had said. I caught the evening flight back to Montana and got back to my house near midnight.
All the concrete, the fractured motel sleep of the night before, the day in the glass-palace rooms with white-boards and assistants, the diagrams and convincing, the talk about money, then the furious freeway traffic in the winter dusk ? too many trucks ? nothing soft. Ugly machines. Too fast. The airport, the shuttles, into and out of the crowds, back onto a jet. Back. Unlocking my door. It always feels like weeks.
I turned around and walked back outside. In the dark, close by, are mountains. I breathed the cold air deep. To be stirring a fire someplace up high, counting stars. I went back into my house where there was welcome home, which means that it was no home.
It was now a few days since Kaori left her voice mail. In the morning I went to work and spent hours with O'neill explaining what went on in Seattle, and then I had to spend hours on the phone with people in London, and then more phone time with people in Seattle, who asked me if I would come back there the next day. Now it was four in the afternoon and already getting dark. A nothing day. A day in the lie.
All of a sudden, I wanted to know what she had done. I picked up the phone and called the bondsman. He remembered me. “We can do it right now,” he said, “Meet me at the jail in half an hour with three thousand in cash,” and he gave me driving directions.
I left my office and went across the street to the bank and got the money. I then drove down Broadway to the jail. The bondsman was already there. He was dressed like a working cowboy, the boots, the long black coat, and the hat. When he shook my hand I saw a revolver under the coat, just like a cowboy. He asked me for the money. I gave it to him, and he said, “Thanks, I like hundreds.”
We went into a lobby where, behind thick glass and through a speaker, a guard asked, “Who is it today?” The bondsman explained, and then we sat and waited for half an hour. He told me again that I won’t get my three thousand dollars back and he had me sign some paper that said if she doesn't show up for the court hearing I will have to pay him more than thirty thousand dollars.
“A Fella trust this gal?” he asked me.
“I really don't even know her,” I told him.
He just stared at me. He seemed impressed when I handed him the money, and from how I dressed and what I drove I knew he was thinking that I didn’t have much money. Which was fine. But then he warned me, threatened me, “A Fella just needs to make sure she shows up for the hearing. I don't want to be coming after no Fella.” He was silent for a while, and then said, “Usually I check a bit more to make sure a Fella is good for all the cash, but what the hey, right?” and slapped his knee, like he did this sort of thing all the time. Like he hoped he would have to chase somebody down for a bad debt.
There was a buzzing sound, and a steel door opened, pushing damp and stale air into the waiting area. A jailer came out escorting Kaori by holding her elbow. She was wearing blue jeans and the coat that she had on that night we met. On her feet she was wearing orange, paper slippers. Her pants and her coat are stained with dark and dried blood. She was looking at the floor, her head bowed, her face hidden by her hair. Both her hands had bandages on them. The right hand had a gauze bandage wrapped about her knuckles, and the left had a bandage near the wrist. The bondsman had Kaori sign some paper too. Kaori did not say anything and did not look up at any of us. As we were going out, the jailer said to me, “She can keep those slippers. She wasn't wearing any shoes the night she came in.”
Outside, the bondsman shook my hand again, this time letting his coat swing open, so I got a good look at the holster around his waist and the long-barreled pistol. In his free hand he was holding the papers that Kaori signed. I glanced at them and asked if I could get a receipt for the cash I had given him earlier. He laughed, looked at Kaori, looked back at me, and said, “She's your receipt. You keep your eye on her.”
It was dusk outside. The county jail was on the west side of town, near a pork processing plant. The place smelled like bacon, and the knapweed filled fields surrounding the jail were spotted with scraps of newspaper and other wind-blown trash. Kaori and I were standing next to each other, I looked at her, but she was still looking at the ground. I turned away from the bondsman, I said to Kaori, “This is an ugly place. I'll drive you home.”
Neither of us said anything as I made the ten-minute drive from the jail to the University district. When I got to her apartment I parked and turned off the engine. She was still looking down, and I had not been able to see her face at all. “Here we are,” I said, “you're home now.” But she didn't talk, and she didn't look up either. Then she said, quietly, “I wait three days for you. I do not know if you get my message.”
I didn't say something like, ‘Hey, I have almost no idea who you are, and no idea of what you have done, so why should I risk who-knows-what to get you out of jail.’ Instead, I said, “It was a lot of money.”
“How much?” She asked. And I told her, and I also said ? and I am not sure why - that I didn’t care about the three thousand that I had given to the bondsman, but I did care that she made it to the court hearing in two months. She nodded, said, “I got it.” Then she opened the car door, stood there for a moment, and said to me, “Come inside.”
I got out and followed her into her ground floor apartment. She took a small wallet from her pocket and got her key, opened the door, turned on the light, and said, “Please, come.” The apartment was one room. There was a kitchen nook in one corner, a bed in the other. The center of the room had a small table with one wooden chair. Next to the table was a painter's easel. Leaning against the walls were dozens of paintings, most of the canvases the same size as the one I took from the dumpster.
The place stunk, the smell of rotting food from dishes in the sink, mixed with fumes from the oil paintings. She went to the window and opened it, then said to me, “Please,” and gestured to the chair. I sat down and she took out her wallet, asked me how to spell my name, and wrote me a check for the money I had just given to the bondsman, and handed it to me. I took the check but then asked her, “Didn't they tell you that you could have bailed yourself out? Didn't they explain that if you had money - if this check is good - that you could have called a bondsman yourself?”
She was looking at me. There were dark circles under her eyes. Her lower lip was swollen and cut. Her straight hair was tangled, and wisps of it were curling into one side of her mouth. I looked at her. She was crying. Slow, slow tears in the corners of both her eyes, slow, slow tears down her face. Then she said, “If no one want me out, then I do not want come out.”
“But you don't know me,” I said, “We don't know each other at all.”
She nodded, and said, “You take my painting. In my culture we know without much word.”
I still had no idea of what she had done, or of who she was. But I said to her, “You need to wash up, change and get some sleep. Is there a shower here?” She nodded 'yes’ and pointed to a door that I hadn't noticed. I asked, “Do you want me to leave?” She shook her head fast, no. Stay, she told me. She said, “Please, no leave me alone.”
She got some clothing and a towel from a dresser and went into her bathroom. I couldn’t stand the stink anymore, so I drained the water from the dishes, which got rid of most of the smell right away. She came out of the shower about the same time I was finishing washing the dishes and started to tell me that I shouldn't have cleaned, but I shrugged. She sat down on her bed, and I went back and sat on the chair. “What did you do?” I asked, “What happened?”
“I so sad,” she said, and then she lay down, and pulled her blankets over herself. “I tell you in the morning.”
I got up to go, but she sat up and said, rapidly, “No, no, please stay.” I went back to the chair and sat down, and she smiled at me, the first time I had seen her smile, and she pulled the blankets up to her face. She had changed the bandages on her hands, replacing the large gauze wraps with band-aids. Now she didn’t look like a felon. She looked like a girl from Japan, living alone with her paintings. I said, “Ok,” and she closed her eyes, sighed several times, shuddered, and then seemed to be sleeping.
There was a lamp in the apartment's far corner, near the window, and I turned that on and turned off the overhead light. I paced quietly about the room, looking at the paintings, gently pulling them from where they leaned against each other, one at a time putting them under the lamplight. They weren’t like a student's work, or from someone's whose hands and eyes were just trying to kill time. There was a style, a consistent mood between all the paintings. Faces with their eyes closed, and figures huddled against walls on the outside of row houses - house after house after house - with tall buildings behind and elevated railroads overhead. Tokyo. The railroad edge of Tokyo, where school children commute four hours a day between their cramped homes and distant schools while their parents work. Same sort of stuff as the rusting oil barrel fringe of Montana towns, the emptiness past the sprawl, but in Tokyo it was a sanitized and crowded loneliness.
I spent an hour with the paintings and forgot about Kaori who was sleeping a few feet away. At about seven I decided to leave, but when I was opening the door Kaori said, “Don't go.” I closed the door and went and sat down on the floor and leaned against the bed.
“Did you sleep?” I asked.
“Yes. But I wake and watch you. You like my art?”
“Much,” I said. She put her hand on my shoulder.
“Sleep next to me,” she said, and then said again, “I so sad.”
Maybe because I had been desperate too... I laid down next to her, five hours earlier than I usually try to sleep, and we just held each other, two strangers, and our eyes closed, and then I was sleeping as if I were drugged and drunk. Roaring trains turned to softness, her breath on my neck, my mouth against the top of her head, dreamless and still.
I woke up alone in Kaori's apartment. I put my shoes on, used the bathroom, and then waited. After about a half hour, I left a note asking Kaori to call me, and I left. Instead of going to work, I drove onto the Interstate, and then drove west. I pulled off at the Fish Creek exit, fifty miles from Missoula, and then drove about ten miles until I started getting worried about getting stuck if it were to start snowing. I turned the car around and parked where the road was wide enough for someone to get past, and then I got out. I walked up a south-facing slope until I was out of the dense lodge-pole, to where the land was open and high. After an hour of walking, I made it to the ridgeline, and then I continued uphill for another hour. It was a brilliant late autumn day, warm enough that I didn't need gloves or a hat, and cool enough to be comfortable. I sat down and leaned against a large Ponderosa Pine, waited for my breathing to slow back to normal, and then took my phone out of my jacket pocket and turned it on. There was a clear view down into the Clark Fork valley, so the phone worked fine. I called the office.
“Where have you been?” Suzzy asked, “You've got a bunch of messages.”
“I'm having a slow day,” I said, “I’m going to keep working here, from home. Give me anything you think is important, otherwise I’ll deal with phone messages when I next get to the office.”
Suzzy said that nothing seemed important, and I thanked her and said that I would be in the next day. Then I turned the phone off. I sprawled out in the sun, lying on the deep layer of pine needles. The warm vanilla-like smell made me feel good. It was silent. No breeze, and too late in the season for insects or birds. I tried to sleep, but couldn't, so I sat up again and took out a small notebook and pen from my coat pocket and made a list of things I knew for sure about Kaori. I wrote, “Artist. Sad.” Then I made another list of questions. I wrote a “Get a lawyer? Call the court? Find out where her boyfriend is?” I ended the list with, “Did she try to kill him?”
I lay back on the pine needles, but I couldn’t relax, and not just because I wanted to know more about Kaori. I was also thinking about Tsai, someone whom I had met in Seattle several months before and had since been doing his illegal computer work. Code hacking that I knew could get me put into federal prison.
I sat up and I turned to a blank page in my notebook, and at the top I wrote, “What I Know About T,” and made a short list on that page. I wrote, “Montana connection? Global networks. Texas. London. Money.”
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When we had first met, Tsai introduced himself by sitting down and saying, “Hello Enzi. You and I have a Montana connection.” It was a late evening in Seattle, and I had just gotten to a café after leaving a dinner meeting with SLAM’s chief financial officer. I was going to read for a while before going back to the hotel for the night. When the stranger sat down, I looked up from my book, and asked what that connection was. He told me that both of his grandfathers had worked, “in the Butte mines.” I asked him to tell me more about that, but he waved his hand, and said, “Long, painful time ago.” Then he talked briefly about the global financial network that he was involved with, saying that he was a vice president of British Telglomerate. He also said that he had flown up from Huston, Texas, specifically to meet me. When my expression showed surprise, he told me that he had followed me from my earlier dinner meeting, saying that he knew the person I had been talking with. He said, “You will see, Enzi, that our world is a small one. I already know about you, and now you will start to learn about me. My name is Tsai.”
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I closed the notebook, turned the phone on again, and called Tsai. He answered by saying, “Yea, what?” and I could hear traffic noise.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Driving,” he said, “In Manhattan. It sucks.”
“Park,” I said.
“When was the last time you tried to find a parking space in New York at five? And where are you, you're not in your office.”
I told him and then he said, “Last time we spoke you were outside too. I don't think you ever sit at a desk anymore.”
“Whatever,” I said, “What's up? You wanted me to call you.”
“You and I need to meet. You did a good job. I need to see you. In person. Come to New York. Tomorrow.”
“I can't make it,” I said.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Personal stuff.” Then I added, “Why don’t you come here, to Missoula.”
He was silent for a while, with only the sound of, slow, congested traffic, horns, and wind.
“Are you driving with your window open, Tsai?” I asked, “Something wrong with you coming here?”
“Yea, the window is open. It's actually nice here. And, yes, there is something wrong with me coming there. Like maybe I don't want to do the carrying. But you, on the other hand, you have reasons to come to New York, all of which would stand up well under cross-examination. Meet me tomorrow night at eight. Meet me in that deli we both like. The one where they don't serve milk. You know the one.”
“Katz's,” I said, and then I asked, “And my personal situation? Do you even want to know why I think I should stay here?”
Tsai laughed, and said, “Bring your 'situation' with you, Enzi. You are only going to be gone two days. You'll be flying back with what we talked about, and it will be safer traveling with someone.” I was quiet, and then Tsai added, “Bring her with you.”
One of things I had noticed about Tsai was that he was able to correctly guess most of the time, by how well he listened to people talk, underlying reasons. And how he paid attention to what wasn't said. I decided then that it would be good to be in New York, and that I would try to bring Kaori. It could help. It could make it easier for me to relax as I checked my bag. Also, Tsai and I were both breaking serious laws and acting like it was just clean business, so it would be a bit of a reality touch to have someone with us who was fresh out of jail to be a reminder to me of what he and I were risking.
I told him, yes, the personal situation was a girl, and yes, I agreed to come to New York. Then I turned off the phone again and sat and listened to the silence before walking back to my car.
I drove straight to Kaori's, parked, and went and knocked on her door. She asked who it was, and after I said, “Enzi,” she opened the door, but only a few inches.
“Yes?” she asked, as if she didn't know who I was or why I was there.
“I'm hungry,” I said, “I spent the day outside and haven't eaten anything. Will you come and eat with me?”
“You funny,” she said. “You act like we friends. You should go away. Why should we eat food together?”
“Maybe because you are hungry, or maybe because you called me to get you out of jail. I don't know, like, remember me? I was here with you last night?” And I laughed, and then asked, “Can I come in?”
Then she said, “I go eat with you. But you wait.” She closed the door, and in about a minute came out, carrying a jacket and a large sketchbook and wearing dark sunglasses, even though in the hallway there was almost no light. I didn't say anything. I walked out of the building, and she followed me, and we got in the car and then she said, “I spend all my time in apartment. I should go out. You help me again, even though I tell you go away.”
I asked her what kind of food she wanted, and she told me it didn't matter, and then I started the car and was about to drive south on Arthur, when Kaori touched my arm and said, “Please, not go this way. Jim house this way. Turn around. Go other way.”
I said “Sure,” and did a U turn, and then went west and headed for the downtown.
A day of walking in the hills and sitting in quiet had given me what it always did, patience. I was in no hurry to ask her who Jim was and was in no hurry to try to find out why she had been in jail. Instead, I was happy to be feeling hungry and tired but knowing that I would soon be eating good food and would be near this art girl with her dark glasses and her sketch book.
I was content to be quiet, but then she asked me, “What you do today?” We were just pulling into the parking lot of a restaurant. I parked and then looked at Kaori. “I can't see your eyes,” I said, and I reached over and took off her sunglasses. She did not move, did not seem to even blink. It was dark now, and the only light was from the streetlights.
“I left your apartment this morning,” I said, “and I drove out of town and up a dirt road and then I walked for a few hours and thought about you.” I said this, speaking like I had been telling myself I must speak – only saying true things – but I still felt, as I looked at her, foolish and thought that she was about to start to laugh.
But instead, she said, “I have liked to go with you. I sit all day in apartment, like jail, and think about Jim and how he hate me, how he bad for me. I should go walk with you.” Then she reached and took the sunglasses from my hand, put them back on, and said, “I no want to see much. Come, we go inside. We eat, then talk,” and she got out of the car, carrying her sketchpad, and walked into the restaurant. I followed her.
We sat down in a booth, she on one side, I on the other. Kaori took off her dark glasses and picked up her menu, and said, “Menu hard. Better when visit friend.” I didn’t understand, but then she explained that it was strange to her that when going to restaurants that she had to decide what to order, but when going to a friend’s house everyone had the same food. She also she said, “I think much already today. Not think here.”
I got the waiter’s attention then and asked him, “Could you please bring us whatever is good?” The waiter said “Sure,” asked a few questions about price, and then went back towards the kitchen.
Kaori said, “We play game now. We wait with no talking. Then food comes, we have good surprise. Then we eat. No talking. Then you ask questions. Ok? Some words. Some drawing. Ok?”
I asked her what she meant, and she said, “Shhhh! This is wait time.”
So, I waited.
When the food came Kaori, smiling, said, “Now we have good surprise,” and told me that she had not eaten all day. I said I was hungry too. Then she said to me again, still smiling, “Shhhh! We both only eat now.”
I laughed, and said, “sure, then questions, right?” She nodded, but answered again, “Shhhh! Eat!”
When we were both finished with our food, she said to me, still smiling, “Now you ask questions.” She then took her sketchpad out from its case and held a pen, poised in her hand, and looked at me.
I thought she wanted some silly game lightness. I looked at her without asking anything. I looked long enough that I saw a seriousness in her eyes that was not hidden by her smile, and since I did not want silliness, I asked, “Kaori, is Jim your boyfriend?”
She looked at me for a few more moments. Then her smile, and the game were gone. Her eyes showed a flash, a bit of widening, a touch of rage. She looked down at the sketch pad and began drawing. After about a minute, and without looking up from her drawing, she answered, “He was my boyfriend. Today I decided that I no have boyfriend now.”
“Where you in jail because of him?”
“Yes. Him and Elizabeth. And police. I attack. I bite Jim. I hit police.” She kept drawing, not looking at me, and continued, “It raining. I run out of apartment. I forget shoes. I call him. He hang up phone. I call and call. I run to his house. I run in rain.”
“Does he live close to you,” I asked, “When you asked me not to drive down Arthur, is his house near your apartment?”
“Yes,” she said, “It was house of ours. My apartment only for paint. It was my room. It was my bed. It was my window. I stood by window. I in back yard that was my backyard. I could see in window. My candle burning. My bed. My boyfriend. She not right in my bed. She wrong to be on my boyfriend.”
Kaori stopped talking, and concentrated on the drawing, her arm moving fast and smooth. I said, “You do not need to tell me anything else. I don't need to hear anything that you don't want to say.” But she looked up at me, and said, “you can just see answer here,” and she turned the drawing pad towards me.
It was a pencil and ink sketch, all dark except for accents with red and blue ink. The fast lines of three blurred figures in motion. A naked woman being pulled by the hair across the floor by another, barefoot woman, whom I recognized as Kaori by the red in her hair. And there was a naked man waving his arms next to the two, his face outlined in blue. Behind them was a large, sliding glass door with the window shattered. Streaks of gray looked like rain. Red marks on Kaori's hands were blood. There was a lit candle next to the bed. There was a bottle of wine, colored blue, next to the candle. She let me look at the drawing for maybe five seconds, and then yanked the sketch pad back to herself, ripped the drawing out, crumpled it, and started on another.
“He was drunk,” she said, “and he call police when I break window.”
“When the police came,” I asked, “What happened?”
“Jim put hand on my face, he pull me. I bite his finger. Police put hand on my shoulder. I hit police. Here,” she touches her own nose, “Police push me. Put cuffs on me. Elizabeth say I say, 'I kill Elizabeth'. She is liar. Jim drunk. He drink wine. He drunk. Elizabeth was on Jim. That wrong. Jim call police on me. That wrong. It was my window. I pay for big window. It was my big bed. I pay for big bed. I pull Elizabeth to make her leave. Pull out of bed. But she not understand Japanese way. She think I try to kill her. It my blood. It my blood on her hair. It my hand break window. It not her boyfriend. It not her blood. “
She told me all this between fast breaths, nearly in a whisper, but still I was left with a feeling that she has been yelling at me. Her English moved back and forth in tense and correctness, but I understood what she said. I was suddenly afraid of her. Afraid of her question-and-answer game. Then she was quiet again and drew in her sketchbook. The waiter came back to our table, and I asked him to bring some wine, whatever he thought was right. I asked Kaori if she wanted some too.
She looked up and said, “I think for self now. I ask easy question now,” and then she asked the waiter, “Do you have Raspberry coolers?”
The waiter said yes, they had wine coolers. Kaori put her dark glasses back on, and said again, “Raspberry,” a word that was difficult for her to pronounce, and she smiled again and looked for a moment like a high-school girl, absolutely innocent.
The waiter asked her what she was drawing, and she said, “Here, see,” and turned the big sketchbook towards him. I was watching the waiter's face, wanting to see his reaction to whatever chaos Kaori might show him, but he just said, “Very nice,” and then went back to the kitchen.
I asked her, “What are you drawing now?” and she let me see. It was a sketch of a huge, half-full wine glass in a clearing in a forest. There was a crescent moon in the night sky that was reflected on the surface of the dark wine. Sitting on the base of the glass was a naked woman, her knees up under her chin, her arms wrapped about her legs, and her long hair hanging in front of her face. I was amazed by the drawing, amazed that she drew it in less than ten minutes using nothing except a pencil and a sheet of paper. But it was not her technical ability that touched me, instead it was the simple emotion of the drawing which made me actually shiver for an instant, made me want to hug my own tired legs, the way the ghost-like woman in the sketch was doing. Emotion that came from a hand, to paper, then to my eyes, in a way that no one yet has figured out how to do over the aether of computers.
She ripped the drawing from the sketch book, and I thought she was going to crumple that one too, but instead she handed it to me and said, “For rescuing me, this for you.” I took the drawing from her just as the waiter brought us more drinks. She sipped from her cup, giggled, and said, “I like sweet purple drink. I like bars where they have pink drinks and cream that floats. I like straws and little hats. Have you been to Karaoke bar? I sing American song.”
I heard all this, but I was just looking at the drawing she had given me. I was drinking rain that had fallen from Australian clouds, moved through the earth, up into a vine, and turned into fruit half a world away. I was drinking dark wine that had aged on a ship as it crossed oceans, and mysteriously, stayed delicious. And I was sitting with a girl who has punched a Montana cop in the nose and who was sipping her sweet purple drink that was spiked with industrial ethanol fermented and distilled from North Dakota corn, but who was also able to show her feelings simply by sketching onto paper. Someone who was able to make me frightened one moment, and foolish the next.
“Kaori,” I said to her, “I have to go to New York City tomorrow morning. Will you come with me?”
“Why you go New York? I never been there,” she said.
“It's a good place,” I said. “We can stay in a hotel in the middle of the city. Up high, look at the lights at night. Lots of bars there with sweet drinks. I have a meeting tomorrow evening. Work stuff. Then we can go to galleries.”
She took off her dark glasses and looked at me, and asked, “You have job?”
I started to laugh. “Yes,” I said, “I have job.”
“What kind of job? You don't dress like you have job. You look like student. You have old car.”
“Oh,” I said, still laughing, “You can't tell what someone does by how they dress.”
“In city you have job, you wear tie.”
We looked at each other for a while, not speaking. Then I said, “Come with me to New York. I have money but this isn't Japan, and I don't care about the ties or cars. Keep showing me your drawings. I want to see what you draw next.”
“What you do?” she asked me then, “Why you go New York?”
“Software,” I said, “Networks. My job. Come to New York with me, talk with me.”
She had finished her wine cooler, and said, “I decide. I want another. This.” She waved for the waiter, and he brought us more to drink. Then she said, “I don't know computers. But I like talk. What will we talk?”
What do we tell, what stories do we use to show ourselves? Should I have told her about leaving home when I was young? Should I have told this girl who went to karaoke bars about the Canadian plains at night, the thunderheads in the far distance, the silent, flashing lightening? Should I have told her about being so hungry that, waking up, I would cry, no place to go, no one anywhere to talk with? I could also have told her stories about the good things. About rivers and sun-warmed rocks, and the way I found Montana, the first summer. Trout from the Yellowstone River, fires at night, big stars in the sky. But I knew she wouldn’t want to hear about those things, so I said to her, “I will tell you stories about going up in buildings and finding stairways to the rooftops of skyscrapers, and getting up there where no one is allowed, and you will tell me stories about the buildings in Japan.”
She looked at me and asked, “In New York, we go to the roofs?”
I asked her, “Are you scared of heights?”
“Yes,” she said. “When I walk across the bridges I want to jump off, I am scared of myself much then.”
“Then we will not go to any roofs...”
“No, no, you do not understand. Take me to places. I will not jump when I am with you. In New York, I will buy you tie. You will look so nice.”
None of this made sense. I was driving Kaori home. She was leaning against my shoulder. She said, “I am drunk, but I not call police. Jim calls police. I not call police.”
At her apartment, I put her into her bed. “New York tomorrow,” she said, “roof tops of skyscrapers. Bars with sweet drinks,” and she giggled.
“Yes, New York tomorrow. I will be back here early. You sleep now. I have to go home and pack,” and I left.
Back at my house I leaned her sketch against the wall underneath the slashed painting. Then I bought two tickets to LaGuardia. As I was putting dirty socks into a large suitcase, I thought about the cash that Tsai would be giving me, and I got scared, like I was the one needing someone to keep me from jumping.