The Aether and the The Lie, is a story inspired by the collapse of WorldCom. A story about heartbreak, art, murder, a billion-dollar heist, and the motivations behind the crimes. Enzi and Kaori are in New York City and find high places.
Visit MontanaVoice.com for more information and to listen to additional episodes.
The Aether and the The Lie, is a story inspired by the collapse of WorldCom. A story about heartbreak, art, murder, a billion-dollar heist, and the motivations behind the crimes. Enzi and Kaori are in New York City and find high places.
Visit MontanaVoice.com for more information and to listen to additional episodes.
From “The Lie,” a novel by Steve S. Saroff
© 2021 Steve S. Saroff
In Katz's, in New York, I had just taken the briefcase and I was introducing Kaori to Tsai. They shook hands, and Kaori said, “Pleased to meet you,” and she smiled.
Tsai asked, “Are you hungry? Do you like kosher sandwiches?”
Tsai had a big Texas accent, but all his grandparents had all been Chinese immigrants, and then his parents ended up in Austin, where Tsai was born. The briefcase Tsai had just handed me was a test, and it contained half a million dollars. He had given me this money in exchange for my architecting security holes into SLAM's global network. Security holes that Tsai had been using for several weeks to steal financial information. It was the first illegal money I had ever received.
Tsai had already explained that I would be getting much more. Instead of the cash, we could have easily worked out a way to have paid me with something less cumbersome, like crypto, but he had told me that he needed to see how serious I was. “If you will risk checking a suitcase full of cash onto a plane – which will be easy if you have the right attitude – then we can keep working together.”
He told me this two months before, during our first meeting at Katz's. When I had balked about getting onto a plane with a suitcase of cash, he had said, “I’ve got a collection of old hundred dollar bills. The ones that don’t have those metal security stripes and fibers. Of course, don't try to carry it on, make sure to check the stuff. Big suitcases work well. Put the money into dirty socks. Pretend you are living in a dorm, save them up for a month. Then travel with someone. Don't worry, that's important, don't worry.” He went on, “and when you are home, convert the paper. I like gold bullion coins myself. Take about nine thousand dollars at a time and go to coin dealers. Wear a cowboy hat. Smile a lot. Get the dealers to keep getting more for you and if you’re buying, they don’t ask for ID. Then bury the metal in different places. Steep hill slopes on public land where it would be hard to ever log or build a road are good. I scatter steel and lead shot, you know, shot-gun pellets, all around so that a good-old-boy with a metal detector won’t mess up the plans. And keep some kind map. Have a bit of pirate fun about it all.”
“You're serious?” I had asked. He answered, “Why wouldn't I be? I've got coins all over the hills in the desert. They don't do as well as the S & P, but my wife thinks I'm a rockhound. And I do collect rocks too, by the way. Quartz crystals. Pyrite rocks from mine-tailings. Anything that glitters. I’m especially fond of azurite from near Bisbee.” He stared at my for a while, and then said, in that first meeting, “You and I work in a world of the aether and the abstract. But there’s no point unless some of what we do is tangible and makes us sweat.”
Two months later, Tsai was meeting Kaori in Katz’s. They were at the counter together, and Tsai was explaining the food. Pointing at the pastrami and matzo ball soup. He was saying, “There are thousands of expensive places to eat in the city, but only a few like this.” The counter man had already tried to hurry them up, saying, “Make up yo' mind, come on now,” but it was a joke, there was no one else waiting for service, and the counter man was cutting small slices of meat and handing them over the counter so that Kaori could taste the difference between pastrami and corned beef. “Of course, there is no ham here,” Tsai said, “Not kosher. And no cheese either since we don't eat meat with milk.” Kaori looks at him and asked, “You Jewish?” Tsai laughed and answered, “Of course. I am a Jewish American Chinaman from Texas.” But when Kaori cocked her head slightly, Tsai said, “No, no, just kidding with you. I'm mostly like all of us, a mixture of nothing.”
Katz's was bright and square. White linoleum and cafeteria chairs at industrial tables. Tsai, Kaori and I ate pastrami sandwiches. People come in and out, and outside it was dark, without much noise of traffic. Tsai was enjoying talking with Kaori. He was asking her all the normal questions that I had not. He asked about her family, what her father and mother did, about brothers and sisters. She explained that her father owned a business in Tokyo, and that she had one younger sister who still lived at home. She said her mother, “Keeps house.”
Tsai asked her what she was doing in America, and Kaori said that she was living in Montana because “Sky reaches forever. Mountains good for art.”
Tsai asked her if she was an artist, and Kaori nodded, and said, “yes. I paint.” Then Tsai said he would like to buy a painting from her. “I will buy from you whatever you think is your best,” he said, “I will pay you one thousand dollars.” I see that Kaori was impressed. She said to him, “But you have not seen, you do not know if you like.” And Tsai answered, “Enzi has told me that your work is excellent.” Then he looked at me and said, “Come on, let’s get out of here, let’s go to midtown.”
We got up and walked outside. I was carrying the briefcase and it banged against my legs. I wanted to put it under my shirt. I wanted to make it go into the aether and become invisible. I wanted to find an ATM that would accept illegal money through a slot that was big enough for a leather briefcase. But instead, I walked behind Tsai and Kaori, who were chatting like close friends, and who walked calmly by the several groups of men who were leaning against lamp posts and walls. Tsai didn’t just go to the curb and wait for a cab or call an Uber. He took his time, walking two blocks to the corner of Ludlow Street. Kaori turned to me, “Your friend is most nice,” she said.
Then Tsai waved his hand and almost immediately a cab stopped. We all got in the back seat with Kaori in the middle. Tsai told the driver to take us to the NBC building, and the driver said, “Rockefeller Center,” and we were driving. I had the briefcase in my lap and Kaori asked, “What is in there,” and touched the case. I flinched, and I saw Tsai smile. I looked at him and hoped he was going to say something, but he just kept smiling at me, like he was watching to see how I would answer. I still didn't know for sure what was in the briefcase. I was guessing - right as it turned out - that it was cash, but I hadn’t known for sure. “Work stuff,” I said, “Manuals. Papers.” Kaori was fine with that answer, and she turned to Tsai and asked him where we were going. “Top of the NBC building,” he said, “Nice views from there. Nice drinks.”
“Can I jump off top?” she asked.
I laughed and explained to Tsai that Kaori had a fear of heights that made her want to jump. She slapped my hand and said, “It not true. I not scared when I not alone.”
“Then we won't leave you alone,” said Tsai.
All the passing lights, the darkness, and the sounds. The car making its hard turns, the horns from the cabs, I was not really there. Instead, I was someplace where it was quiet and where I had sweat on my face from fast walking, my breath deep, and the sun shining. I had a notebook, a pen, and I was trying a new idea out. A way to encrypt data streams by doing cyclic redundant checksums on every one-thousand-twenty-four bits of data. Matching each data block against a matrix of set numbers and taking the set of numbers as the operands from the processor. Making the key to the codes be in the processors themselves, the order of their instruction sets. Like a book code, where you decipher messages only if you have the same edition book as the person who made the code. And by using the computer’s processor instruction set to be the code, it is like hiding valuables by keeping the keys in an unlocked drawer while everyone is spending their time trying to crack safes.
I liked Kaori’s legs; I loved her hands. Her smell, the way her red tinted hair looked in the light which came and went in the cab. But mostly I wanted to see her paint more. I wanted... I wanted... not what it is that she wanted, not what Tsai wanted. Why was I doing this? This money thing? Kaori was looking at Tsai. I unclicked the latches on the briefcase and opened it just enough to get my hand in. I felt envelopes, letter sized envelopes, and I took one out and closed the case. Kaori had not turned away from Tsai. She had not seen me open the case. I put the envelope in my hip pocket. It felt like a wallet back there. It felt good. I pushed my left knee and thigh against Kaori's leg. She giggled slightly and returned the pressure.
The cab dropped us off in front of the NBC building, but Tsai pointed to a men's clothing store that was still open, one block down. “You need different clothes to get in,” he said to me.
“Then let’s go somewhere else,” I said.
“Nah,” said Tsai, “There's a view up there and besides it is the best place for talking.”
Kaori nodded at Tsai and said, “He needs tie. He needs look nice like you.”
I shrugged, I didn't care about any of it, but I followed them down the block and into the store where Tsai found a clerk to help us. In five minutes, I was wearing a dark linen suit with a black cotton shirt and a blue tie. I was laughing then, thinking, “this is just silly.” I had the clerk throw out the clothes I was wearing, and Tsai nodded his approval. When I paid for everything, taking some cash from the envelope that had been in my back pocket, I saw Kaori looking at my hands with an expression that reminds me of how she looked when I bailed her out of jail: face down, hair covering everything, sad. “You do have job,” she said to me. And Tsai, not missing much, put his hand lightly on Kaori's shoulder and said, “Enzi has big job.”
We walked back to the NBC building, and we took the express elevator to the Rainbow Room. In the elevator Kaori leaned against Tsai, and she looked like she was an older sister, being so much taller than him.
“You are quiet, Enzi,” Tsai said to me, “Still waters running deep or are we just in a quagmire?”
“Thinking,” I answered, “about deep quagmires.”
The elevator opened on the sixty-fifth floor, it opened to velvet blackness in a narrow hallway. A man in a tuxedo was standing at the end of the hallway, next to the door to the Rainbow Room. We walked up to him. Tsai asked if we could get one of the “upper” booths and handed the man a hundred-dollar bill. The man took the money and said, “I'll see what I can do.” He told us to wait and went into the bar. He came back in a minute and said, “Your booth is ready, have a good one.” We went into the bar, and a waitress greeted us. She was all smiles, and it was obvious that she had been told about the large tip and expected the same.
Money makes things easy. Clothes and attention from strangers. Stuff. But none of it feels real, because there is no work, and no ideas. And without the work or ideas, stuff becomes junk. But I was holding the briefcase, and I was then wearing the clothes. And I was looking at a view, at the top of an elevator ride, a view that was bought, that took no work to get to.
Take away the money, and it was just a small, dark bar at the top of an old building. And we were all getting drunk. I had been drinking cold vodka. Tsai was drinking scotch. Kaori had been sipping pink stuff through narrow, plastic straws.
We were sitting in a booth that was against a windowless wall. The booth was several feet higher than the rest of the tables in the place, and we had a view directly out the windows behind the bar. The view was of New York City, and it was a clear night. We were higher than most of the other buildings, and it was like we were looking down, instead of up, at a blanket of stars. The Empire State Building was close to us, a bit higher than we were. And further away, in the light-studded distance, are where the trade buildings had been. I've put the briefcase on the floor against my right leg. Kaori was looking at the view and talking with Tsai, who was sitting close against her left side. I had mostly been silent. But Kaori kept her leg against mine and had put her right hand down on the tabletop and was holding my hand. I was trying to talk to her with my hand. Stroking her fingers, touching her wrist, turning her hand over, palm up, and putting my hand flat against hers.
The waitress brought us another round, but before I drank mine, I gently lifted Kaori's hand and dipped two of her fingers into the ice-cold vodka. For a moment she let her fingers linger in the shot glass, then she yanked her hand away, turned from Tsai and looked at me, and said, “What you do? You crazy?” I didn’t answer. Instead, I drank the shot and then held the empty glass against the palm of her hand. She and I looked at each other for a moment, and then I said, “Not everything makes sense. I wanted to taste your fingers but...” She interrupted me with a laugh, pulled her hand away from mine and then touched my face. Then she said, “You kiss my fingers, here,” and she moved her hand down near my mouth.
We drank more, and I got up and went down to the bar. I got closer to the windows. Tsai and Kaori stayed in the booth. There were not many people in the place, but it was still crowded and had the universal reek of a bar. I looked at the faces in the dark, trying to decide if there was anyone I could like. But it was just a money place. The drinks were money. Even the chairs were money. I was standing at the bar, and behind it a door opened, and the bartender came out carrying a box. For a moment I could see into a place where I felt like I could belong: the back room, the clutter of a small kitchen. There was a young man there leaning backwards against the steel counter, a white towel draped over his shoulder. He was smiling and was saying something to the bartender in Spanish ? I heard the fragments of a few good words, “Bueno.... hasta....” The bartender's expression changed as the door swung shut behind him. He was back out from honesty, back into the room of money and lies, and his face became a mirror, his face became like mine. He put the box down under the bar, and I looked at the people sitting near me, I looked at their hands. Hands holding drinks, hands on the bar top, hands limp like the bartender's rag that he was now using to wipe up the vodka that I had just spilled. “No problem,” he said to me, “Let me pour you another.” “I'm sorry,” I said, “I don't need another. Let me have some water instead.”
The bartender replied, “What kind?”
I wanted to say, 'just water,' but I caught myself, remembered where I was, remembered that I was so drunk that I had just spilled a drink, realized that my voice was slurred, so I said, “Any type,” and the bartender opened a blue bottle and poured the blue liquid into a glass filled with blue ice cubes. I took a bill out of my pocket and handed it to him, and he turned to get change and I said, “Keep it,” and he smiled a blue smile - the dim, blue lights in the ceiling near the rows of upside-down wine glasses - and he put the bill in his pocket and asked, “Where you from?”
I wanted to say, “I am from there,” and I wanted to point towards the kitchen door, but I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to have to explain anything true. I wanted to say, “There's been a mistake, I am on the wrong side of things,” but instead I just pointed to Tsai and Kaori and said, “From up there, that is where I am from.” And I walked up to the booth, back to my strangers, back to what I what I was becoming.
“We are surrounded by chance and also by opportunity,” Tsai was saying, talking to Kaori, “Like how I met my wife. I'm not so tall. My wife though, she is tall. Like you,” he touched Kaori's head, “but not Asian. It was a hot day, and in Texas hot days mean a hundred degrees and humidity too. I was on my motorcycle on the beltway. Houston. Five in the afternoon. Traffic stop and go. Then all stop. Six lanes of traffic not going anywhere. There was a Mustang next to me, an old one, a convertible with the top down. A woman was driving it. She had the radio up loud. She had all this blond hair. The car was black. Man, it was perfect. I started talking to her. You know, about how the traffic jam sucked, and the heat. She leaned on the door, sort of leaning out the window even though the top was down, and I sat there on my motorcycle. I wasn't wearing a helmet. She said to me, 'you have nice eyes.' When the traffic started moving again, I gave her my phone number, a card, and she called me, and we got married a few months later. There's no reason to delay. There are never second chances.”
Tsai then abruptly said to Kaori, “Ok. Now explain why you are in America. I don’t believe it is only because of good sky for art.”
I thought that Kaori would laugh or ignore him, but instead she said, “My father wants to go to America when he is boy. But he cannot. He makes me and my sister to study English. He says to study all the time, this important. But all he read is magazine with porn picture. My mother sleep in one bed. My father in other. My father drink beer each night. My mother cry. Sister and I fight. All the time I paint. I plan revenge on father. I will go to America because he did not go. Then I meet college student. American. And he take me from Tokyo. There is nothing else.”
Like her hand moving over paper. A fast sketch. She had put on her dark glasses again. She looked away from Tsai, looked towards the windows of city lights, the buildings in the night, and she said, “No, there more. I go to jail because boyfriend stop love me. Then I rescued.” She leaned against me. “Now I here, and you buy painting of mine you have not seen. Soon I become famous. You are wrong. I have second chance.”
Tsai said, “Tokyo to America to jail to here. And I know your painting will be fine.” He stopped talking and looked at Kaori for a few seconds, then moved his eyes past her and to me. He gave me a look that, in my blue-light drunkenness, said, “We should not be drinking more. We should not be mixing our crime with this girl's fragility.”
“You should watch her draw, Tsai.” I said this because I meant it. I wanted Kaori to do something like reach over and take one of the gold-plated pens that Tsai kept in his shirt pocket, click it, reach for a napkin, and then show what she could do. But nothing happened.
I was drunk, and I am remembering the conversation as fragments. But Tsai suddenly said, as I thought he would from his expression, “We should not talk anymore now. We must say goodbye and goodnight.”
Kaori was clumsy and had to lean against me in the elevator back down to the street. She has kept one of the “little umbrellas” from a drink of hers. Tsai had become a Zen Buddha, small and calm. He looked like he has always been this way, but even with all the vodka in me, I was not fooled. He was forever thinking about complexity, about things as abstract as the space between numbers past the end of their limits of precision. Or he was as hard-wired as the data links in the Cayman Islands. I was going down, down the express elevator with the tall suicide girl leaning against me. She was trusting me, I felt that in how she was breathing and how she had an arm around my back. And what was I thinking about? I was thinking about Tsai, about how he was controlled greed, and how I was becoming greed as well, but I was not as controlled.
The first time when I was in New York with Tsai, he and I also sat down in Katz's. That first time Tsai had explained to me about the London security market, data connections from there to New York through the Islands, and how SLAM was a sloppy company which could be exploited. He got me excited because I had started to think like him, and like the other executives at places like British Telglomerate and SLAM. I was thinking that it was ok for business to be whatever you could get away with. And my engineered software holes in data transfers systems? Tsai had said, “It will be perfect. Some developers in Montana who are far away from the money, you, working for SLAM, you build the flaws at the beginning, and I will have other people take it from there. No one knows each other. You start the process, make the weakness possible, and then we get to have a few moments of head-start on all the rest of the world for the rest of time.”
The elevator reached the ground floor before I could think myself out of the sadness that I was remembering falling into. I was in a city. But I looked up and even though it was only a narrow slit, there was air and sky up there, and a few brave stars that had competed against the New York lights. Seeing those stars washed my sadness away - and I knew where I wanted to go. Instead of words, instead of talking, I wanted to go to the top of a tall building, above the glass and concrete.
Tsai got us a cab, and he said goodbye again. And as I looked out the back window I saw Tsai walking on the street, strolling deeper into Manhattan.
Then we were back at the hotel. And we were back in our room. I put the briefcase under the bed, and said to Kaori, “Come on, let's try to find the roof.” I thought she would not want to leave the room again - it was about two in the morning - but she surprised me, she said, “Yes, a high place. Now.” And just like that - snap, snap - I am glad I was with her.
Loneliness goes and comes as her hands touch and un-touch mine. She is not a sweet-drink-drunk then. Instead, she was moving like the lines in her sketches, cat-like and ready. Ready for finding a Manhattan rooftop in the middle of a clear night. We went up the stairway, but then at the fortieth floor our way was blocked by a locked door. We were both panting because we had just run up five flights. She had been holding my hand. We still had fourteen more floors to go. We went back down one flight, and we went through that door and there was a bar, which was still open, though there were only two or three people there. I looked across the bar, to the corner of the building opposite to where we were standing. There was another door. We walked to that door. No one noticed or cared about us. We tried that door. And it was unlocked. We walked through the door and closed it behind us. We were in a dim hallway that led behind the bar. We walked down that hallway, and there were several more doors. I tried all the handles. Most were locked. A closet. Another closet. Then, yes, what I was looking for. A narrow, service stairway. Steel stairs. Fluorescent lights. Steep steps. We went up. Fourteen flights. We weren’t running anymore, but we were still walking fast. And then there was a door marked, “No Entry,” the door that I was hoping to find. Like a lot of things in forgotten places, it had been left unlocked. It opened with a “whiiisssshh” sound as the pressure difference in the stairway sucked the night air down on us.
We were on the top. Cell antenna masts and ventilation units. I heard Kaori gasp, not because of the height ? she couldn’t see that yet, since we had come out of a doorway that had put us roughly in the center of the rooftop ? but she gasped because of the clutter of stuff and the knowing that we were someplace where we were not allowed to be.
“Someone comes?” she asked, whispering. I put my arm around her, and I said, “I will tell them we are guests in the hotel, and I will say I am sorry, and they will just tell us to go back. It would not be much trouble. We did not unlock doors.” And then I walked her to the edge.
We were walking on loose gravel that crunched under our feet. There was also the noise from the big metal boxes that housed industrial fans. The fans that were pushing air to the rooms beneath us. We stepped past these. We also stepped around the antenna masts, and we stepped over the cables that snaked about. There was some light ? red, flashing light ? from beacons that were on the antenna masts, but it was mostly dark.
We got close to the building's edge and the street sounds came up to us like vertical wind. Kaori gasped again. Her knees were against the concrete rail. She leaned over it, looking down. I stepped back a bit, my arms around her. I was laughing then, like I was a teenager, like I had just ? as I did once ? climbed to the top of a water tower, alone at night and stepped off the narrow ladder and onto the sloping metal surface that dropped ever steeper down. But then, in New York city, I was holding onto Kaori, and I was not alone.
I said, “Sit down.” And we both sat so that it was safe, resting our chins and arms on the top of the railing that was only about two feet high. Our faces were next to each other, and both of us were looking straight down onto Madison Avenue. She had her arms around me too. She turned and looked at me. Her face was against mine. Our foreheads touched, we played tricks with our eyes, moving our heads so that we were looking directly into each other. Her eyes that had no color or shade in the darkness. We moved our heads again, and we kissed while we were still looking into each other's stare. I liked the way she tasted, the alcohol sweetness of her lips. I liked the gravel that I was sitting cross-legged on. I liked that there was no bartender nor barmaid to interrupt us. I liked the girl. I liked the city from up high. I leaned my head far back, and there were stars. Light from that place where there is no sadness. I was finally high enough.
She put both her hands on my shoulders. She said, “I do not love you. I am not girlfriend. But I be with you tonight.” She lifted her arms up behind my head. I put my hands under her shirt, turning them so that both my thumbs were pointing down and my fingertips were touching. I pushed against her, starting near her waist, as she pulled against me. My hands moved up, lifting them briefly over her breasts, and then out the opening of her shirt. I crossed and closed my hands gently and completely around her neck. I felt her strong pulse and her breathing. She kept her arms around my head and got to her knees in the gravel, and then she straddled me, sitting on my lap, and brought her knees up to under her chin. She kicked off her shoes, and her stocking feet were resting on my legs. She moved her face again close to mine, but far enough back so that I could see the city lights reflected in the beauty of her wide-open eyes. All those thousands of small lights reflected in her darkness. She said again, questioning, “Only one night, yes? You not ask again?”
I moved my head forward and I whispered into her ear, “I will not ask again.”
She whispered back to me, “Ok. You do everything tonight. Love me on these stones.”
She fell asleep there, on the roof, lying naked on top of me. Not for long, maybe a few minutes. My hands moved slowly over her, touching, and remembering, with the gravel underneath my back being a perfect contrast to her perfect smoothness. Then she shuddered, pushed herself up and put her clothes on. “I cold,” she said. And she said, “Get up, Enzi. Take me to room with window and soft bed.”
We went back the way we came, through the unlocked service doors and stairways, down to our floor and to our room with the wall of windows. We left the lights off and lay together on the bed closest to the windows. It was then four in the morning, and I was no longer drunk, and I was tired. I wanted to go to sleep. But Kaori took off her clothes again, and said to me, “Now you be naked,” and she pulled off my tie and helped me take off my shirt and my pants. Then she said, “You on your side,” and she pushed at me so that I had to turn away from her. I was then curled on my left side with my face towards the windows and my back towards her. Then she said, “Stay. Do not move.” I felt her getting off the bed, and then the bathroom light was turned on so that a dim glow filled the main room. I heard her rummaging about, and then she was back on the bed.
Next, instead of feeling anything, I heard her sketching, a soft scratching over the surface of paper. “I draw you,” she said, “I draw man who love me one night only.”
I didn’t move, I closed my eyes and begin to fall asleep, but in a few minutes, I felt her get off the bed, and then the bathroom light went off so that it was dark again. I heard her tearing the paper from her sketchbook, and then she was back on the bed, and I felt her hand on my shoulder. I started to roll over, but she said, “Please, no move.” Then I felt something strange. She was tucking the large sheet of paper from the sketchpad under my shoulder and hip and was wrapping it over my back. She did this, and then she lay down against me, so that the sketch that I had not yet seen was trapped between us. Then she reached and pulled the blankets over us. I was sore from the roof's gravel, sore from where it had pushed and bruised me through the new linen jacket and shirt. The paper against my back was cool, and it took the feelings of the gravel away. Then, as we both were falling asleep, our small movements caused the paper to make sounds, which mixed with and became my dreams. Dreams of Kaori tearing and crumpling sheets from her sketch book and then throwing them at me. The crumpled drawings hitting more solidly than could be possible, little hard fists beating at my back, beating in time with my broken heart.
I woke up alone. I woke up to the sound of a hotel maid was pounding on the door and yelling, “Housekeeping.”
We forgot to hang the “do not disturb” sign on the door. I shouted, “Come back later,” and the maid went and pounded on the next door. My mouth was dry, and my head hurt from the vodka, though I remembered everything of the night before. I got out of bed and looked in the bathroom. She wasn't there. I pulled the briefcase out from under the bed and opened it. The money was there, along with a flip phone, a new burner. I took it and the suitcase into the bathroom and locked the door. As Tsai had suggested, I had brought about a few dozen pairs of unwashed socks with me. The ever-practical Tsai. Sitting on the toilet, I distributed the ten-thousand-dollar bundles, putting several into each dirty sock, which I then rolled and wrapped into balls.
After I finished with the socks and the money, I closed both the suitcase and the briefcase, and took a long shower. When I came out of the bathroom, Kaori was back in the room. “You must wear clothes,” she said to me, turning her face away. “You must not be naked near me,” she said, “You and I not be this way.” I laughed and picked up my clothes. The only clothes I had were the linen ones from the night before, which were now so dirty that I decided I could not wear them.
“I need to call someone and have them go buy me some more clothes,” I said, “I can't wear these.” I would not have cared about how the clothes looked, even if they had been torn, or filthier, but I was remembering what Tsai had said about not looking unusual, about needing to be clean and neat. I said to Kaori, “You and I wore these out quick, didn't we?”
Looking out the window, she answered me, “I no understand you. You made me drunk. I wake up. I confused you in bed with me. In future, be careful of good clothes.” And still, facing away from me, she continued, “You have big luggage. Wear other clothes from your big luggage.”
Sudden loneliness mixed with throbbing paranoia. Mixtures of moods coming from contrasting events. Her apathy for me that morning, and my fear of the dirty cash. Then I did not care what Kaori thought of me, and I was frightened of the steps needed to get back to Montana. I said, “I didn't bring any other ‘nice’ clothes.” I walked over to the closet, and there I found a thick, Manhattan Yellow pages. Probably the only place in the world where yellow pages can still be found. I remembered the name of the men's store from the night before and I called them. When I asked if they could deliver more clothes if I paid with cash, they said, “No problem, Sir.”
With enough cash in Manhattan, everything is easy. I told them I had been in the night before, told them that I was in a room at the Palace, read them sizes off the labels, and they said someone would be at my room shortly. This time with two suits and even a few black tee shirts. When I was done with the men's store, I called room service and ordered two large breakfasts.
When I hung up the phone, Kaori, who was standing at the window with her back to me, said, “Now I see you are big shot. Now you just stranger to me.”
I stretched back on the bed and turned on the television with the remote, found something. I was still watching it when half an hour later there was a knock. It was room service. I put on a bathrobe, and I let the room-service person in. He put the tray of food down on the table that was near the windows. Then I gave him a hundred-dollar tip. He thanked me and left.
All this time Kaori had been standing by the windows, still looking out at the city. I was expecting more of the same coldness from her, so I was surprised when she suddenly turned around, sat down in a chair at the table across from me, and asked, “What sort?” She lifted the metal covers from the plates. Nodded, smiled, and said, “I like omelet. I like coffee. You take care of me even when I am mad at you. Jim never take care of me when I mad.”
I sipped from my coffee. “Did you get mad at him a lot?”
“Yes. I did it. Mad when he not listen me. Mad when he not see me. Mad when he not see my meaning.”
We ate for a while in silence, and then she said to me, “I most mad when he called police. When I break my window. My big window. I lied. I tell you that Elizabeth was liar. But she not. I the liar. I say, 'I kill you.' I do think I kill her. But in Japanese. Not in English. In English everything I say is not what I feel. In English I be other people. You learn Japanese and you will know me. You will know my secrets.”
Kaori stood up from the table and walked back to the wall of windows. She looked out over the city and said, “Tokyo buildings not dark like this. Tokyo sky not blue like this. Tokyo buildings silver. Tokyo buildings white. Tokyo sky gray.”
I said that New York's sky was often gray as well.
She said, “Tokyo sky seem gray all time. Room window, my bedroom Tokyo window, near ground. Only could look up, but not see sky. Too many buildings close. I think then that sky is always gray because I could not see. I always want to break Tokyo window. Want to hit and hit,” she slapped the plate glass hard enough to make me flinch, “In Montana, in house with Jim, I say, 'We put big window in room,’ and we did. I buy. I look out. I wake up and look every morning. I remember colors of sky, of flower, of tree. I take memories to my paint place, to small Montana apartment, and try to show color. But all I paint is Tokyo colors. Memory of Tokyo window last forever. Gray cover everything else.”
She sighed, then turned around and came back to the table and the food, sat down, looked at me, giggled, and said, “Maybe I go back to Montana and kill Elizabeth. Maybe I go back into jail where there is no window ever.”
She was smiling like it was a joke, but her hand had picked up a fork and was clenching it tightly enough that her entire arm trembled. I said to her, “Don't think about hurting anyone. Try to remember these New York colors.”
“I just pretend! Ok?” and she giggled more, “I don't care anymore about window,” her voice sounding like a little girl's. She repeated, “I don't care, I don't care,” her head leaning first to her left, then to her right, moving with each syllable which she pronounced in a singing lisp.
Then there was another knock on the door which I was glad to get up and answer. It was the delivery person from the clothing store. I thanked him for being so fast, he shrugged, and told me that I needed to pay him two-thousand four-hundred and sixty-three dollars. I did, and I also gave him a hundred-dollar tip. As soon as he left, I took off the bathrobe and started to put on the new clothes, and as I did, Kaori came up to me, put her hands on me, and said, “Wait. Be naked longer.”
“I thought we weren't going to be, 'this way.' I thought last night was the only night,” I said.
She didn't answer me. Instead, she pulled my hand, leading me to the windows, where she turned away from me again. She faced out over the city and put both her hands flat against the glass at her shoulder level, and then said, “You such silly man. You must see more than I say. Love me again. Please.” She said this and I remembered a minute before, her voice playful but her hand clenched and trembling.
Everything was the lie. My sadness, and especially my joy. Where I dreamt, where I stood, listening to Kaori’s sounds, and feeling the sweat that was running down her back, was an empty space. The city, in brightening daylight, the city in front and underneath us, was then a maze of small rooms and infinite loneliness. Less than twenty-four hours in New York and I was missing Montana. Terribly. Kaori turned, looked at me over her shoulder, and said, “You kiss me. Now. You must.” Her eyes closed, and then the blue sky over the city faded into gray.
From “The Lie,” a novel by Steve S. Saroff
© 2021 Steve S. Saroff