8 - A Green Place

In Seattle, Kaori shows that she too is hiding something. Kaori confesses through her art and Enzi bleeds. The Aether and the Lie is a story of art and science gone wrong.

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Chapter Six of The Lie - A Green Place
By Steve S. Saroff
(c) 2021 Steve S. Saroff

The three of us, Dave Cheat, Kaori, and I, went into Uwajimaya, a grocery store in the international district of Seattle. Kaori had brought her portfolio case with her.

There were long, narrow aisles of packaged food from Japan, Thailand, and China. There was a seafood counter that sold fresh squid and sea urchins. Kaori had picked up a handbasket and was selecting items from the shelves. Kaori said she was going to shop for some “fun snacks” and then we should go to the deli for lunch. I picked up a large bottle of Sake. A stairway led upstairs, and I asked Kaori what was there, and she said, “Books.” So I told her I would be up there.

The bookstore had nearly as much floor space as the grocery section. There were thousands of books arranged by language; Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean. I took books off the shelves and opened them. The words were in a language of pictures, of shapes. I had no idea about any of the meanings, but I liked my feelings when I looked at the characters. I found a small book that had no English anywhere on nor in it, a book that did not have a bar code. I decided to buy it. I went to the casher, and I waited in line. On the counter, there was a glass bowl with two-inch square, embroidered pillows. I picked one up. It was filled with sand and was meant as a book weight, something to hold the book’s pages flat open on a table. It fit well in the palm of my open hand. I tossed it about a foot in the air and let it fall back into my hand. Then I threw it higher and caught it again. The book weights were covered with fabric, and each had different embroidery. Some had words written in Kanji. Some had images of Mound Fuji. Some had birds flying between trees. I picked up another one, tossed, and caught it. When it was my turn at the cashier, I paid for the bottle of Sake, the book, and five of the sand-filled book weights. Then I went back downstairs.

I was walking through the isles at Uwajimaya and looking for Kaori. The store was crowded with a city mixture of people, old and young. Most were shopping alone. I passed a couple who looked to be in their seventies. The man had one hand on the shopping cart, and his other was at the woman’s waist, lightly holding the hem of her blouse. She was reading the label on a small tin that she was holding. As I walked past them, she turned to the man and showed him the tin, and they both smiled. She put it into the cart. Moods surged like fast water, like rain with wind, and time twisted as my memories rushed over me again.

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I was back with Helen, remembering shopping with her in Missoula at the market on the corner of Broadway and Madison. A market owned by an Italian soldier who was wounded at the start of World War II. He was put on a ship as a prisoner of war and then sent across the world from Rome to a POW camp in Missoula. In mid-war, Italy became an ally of the U.S., and he was released. He and the Montana nurse who took care of him got married, and he stayed in Missoula. They opened their store. It was a story explained in a framed and yellowed newspaper article on the shop’s walls.

Helen and I would go into that shop and find cooking oils, cheeses, and bottles of wine. The Italian shop owner would talk with us as we filled our baskets. The owner talked about bread. He explained that the best bread was not from any bakery. He said we should make our bread by baking it on a large, flat stone put into the oven and heated hot. Helen picked up a small tin of anchovies and looked closely at it. She then held it in front of me and put the tin in our basket. The shop owner was saying, “It is simple. You put the dough on the stone. When it is done, you put the olive oil. You put those anchovies. You open that wine. You have a good meal. You have each other.”

I did not need money buried in a hole. I needed what I had lost. “You open that wine. You have a good meal. You have each other.”

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In Uwajimaya, I was walking past the couple and their cart. Even though I was still in the store, I opened the bottle of Sake which I paid for when I bought the book weights. I took a long drink. Then I screwed the cap back on. After that, I found Kaori and Dave and joined them in line at the deli department.

We got food from the deli and sat at a table inside and ate. Kaori was eating something she told me was called natto and said, “Stinky beans. I like. You no like.”

I unscrewed the sake bottle again and took another big hit. Dave and Kaori both looked at me, questioning. I held the bottle out to them and said, “You want some?”

I thought that Dave would warn me about getting kicked out of the place, but he surprised me by reaching out and drinking from the bottle. Then he said, “Your turn,” to Kaori. She said, “No legal here,” but then changed her mind and said, “So what. Nothing matters,” she took the Sake, drank, and put the open bottle in the middle of the table.

Kaori saw my bag and asked what I had bought. I showed her. “Book Chinese,” she said, “No idea what it says.” I tell her I liked the way it looked. She nodded and said, “I like book. Small.” She was turning the book over in her hands, running her fingertips over the binding. Dave said, with a good mood and smiling, that it was probably an accounting book.

Kaori asked me what else I bought, and I poured the five book-weights onto the table. “Why you buy?” She asked, but before I could answer, Dave Cheat said, “Those be for juggling,” and he scooped all of them off the table, lifted his three-hundred-pound self out of his chair, and was juggling all five weights. Five. Inside Uwajimaya.

I was impressed. Five, not three, five. People in line at the deli counter turned and watched. And while Dave was juggling, he glanced at me and said, “You do know the relation between juggling and programming, don’t you?”

I said I didn’t, and he said, “Whatever number you can do, someone watching will always ask, ‘Can you do one more?’ If I am doing three, they will ask, ‘can you do four?’ And if I do four, they will ask me to do five, then six. On and on.” He dropped one of the balls, and then all of them splat around him on the floor. He was breathing hard and sat down. I got up and picked up the bags.

“And,” I asked, “the relation to programming?”

Dave said, “Write code that solves a problem, immediately you are asked to write more. More features. Make it faster. Juggle eleven balls even though eleven is impossible. I guess it can be fun trying.”

I looked at Dave Cheat. I knew exactly what he meant. Then, almost to prove it, Kaori said to Dave, “Can you do six?” And he laughed and explained that it is easier to juggle seven than six. She said, “Huh?” and he answered her, “Odd, even. Even patterns keep balls in the same hand. Odd numbers pass back and forth.” She did not know what he meant, and she reached over and took another drink from the sake bottle. As she was drinking, someone from behind the counter, who had been watching Dave juggle, shouted at us “No! No!” and waved his hand, pointing outside, “Take it there. Please!”

“We have been evicted,” Dave said with a genuine smile. The three of us went outside. It was a glorious blue day. I smelled the closeness of the saltwater from the bay. I drank more Sake, then handed the bottle to Dave, who also drank before handing the bottle to Kaori. She said, “I will be drunk in the daytime,” but she drank too. Finally, she asked me, “Can you do? You throw balls in air?”

“Juggle,” I said, “Yes, but not so well.”

“Juggling should be a requirement of all coders,” Dave said, “It should be the first line on a coder’s resume. ‘I juggle.’”

I suggested that we leave Dave’s car in the parking lot and go to the waterfront. So we went over and stood on 5th Avenue and called an Uber. In fifteen minutes, we were back through downtown, near the boats and ferries. We walked to the end of a wooden pier, where there were benches built into the guardrails.

Dave and I tried to teach Kaori how to juggle, but after a few tries, she said, “Too confusing now. Nothing matters now.” She picked up her portfolio case and walked over to the railings near the water. She leaned over the railings. I followed her and asked what she was looking at. “Down,” she said, “But not far enough.” She sat on a bench, unzipped the portfolio case, and took out the large sketchpad. “I will draw,” she said. “You juggle.”

Dave had walked near the bench, carrying the book weights. He tossed me one and asked, “Pass?” and we started throwing the five weights between each other. He asked me when I had learned to juggle, and I told him that my business partner, O’neill, taught me. O’neill said that being able to relax your hands and shoulders was important if you were going to sit hours at a time in front of a computer. Dave nodded in agreement. He told me that he learned to juggle in the Army. He said that he still juggles every day and had gotten good at juggling without getting out of his chair.

I was getting drunk, and the sun was shining, and I laughed out loud, still just happy. Dave thought I was laughing at him and said, “In the Army, I also used to run. Hurt my knee, though. Then I gained all this weight.”

As we were tossing the book-weights between each other, a man in his early 20’s rode up to us on a bicycle. He had a large duffle bag slung over his shoulder, and he took it off and dumped a whole pile of juggling clubs by our feet. “You guys do clubs?” he asked.

Dave said, “Sure,” so the two of them started passing the white, plastic juggling clubs between each other. The guy with the bicycle, with his clubs, had long, dreadlocked hair, tattered clothing, and attentive, bright eyes: probably another coder, another technically obsessed worker. “I Juggle,” at the top of his resume.

I was watching Dave and Dreadlocks juggle, and I sat down cross-legged on the boards, the bottle of Sake next to me, Kaori behind me. I talked to Dave as he juggled. I asked him how long he had lived in Seattle. He kept his eyes on the clubs in the air, but he answered. He told me he grew up in Seattle. Again, I was surprised.

Then Dave asked me if I grew up in Montana. I told him that I did not. He asked me what I liked about Montana. I told him that the mountains were good for walking into, for getting away from everyone. He said, “I feel you there.” Then he asked me how I ended up in Montana. I was going to tell him a lie and say I went to college there. Instead, I told him the truth. I said, “I was a run-a-way. Left home, worked all over, but stayed in Montana because of a girl I met there.”

He said, still juggling, “I can respect that. But, man, you and I should have talked like this sooner. It would have made everything easier.”

I had forgotten how close I was sitting to Kaori as I talked, and she suddenly asked, loudly and with anger, “You had girl before?”

I thought she was totally kidding, but I looked at her, and her face had that same look that I had first seen when she told me about “trashing” her painting. The same wild look I had seen when she woke from her bad dream in my house two nights before. I handed her the bottle of Sake, but she didn’t reach for it. Dave was not paying attention to us. Dave was busy having fun juggling with Dreadlocks. Kaori asked again, demanding, “You had other girl in Montana?”

“A long time ago,” I said.

Kaori had been sketching, but then her hand stopped. She was staring past me, and she said, “Men should only have one. Women should only have one. I will not breath again.” She turned her face down towards her sketchpad and furiously moved her hand across it.

I drank more Sake, finished the bottle, and then I asked Kaori if I could see what she was sketching. She shook her head and said, “No.”

I stood up and walked to the end of the pier, dropped the empty sake bottle into a trash bin, turned around, and leaned against the rail with my back to the water. Dreadlocks, the other juggler, was riding away on his bicycle. Dave was sitting down on the pier and was talking to Kaori. I was too far away from them to hear what they were saying.

“Other girl in Montana,” yes, we should all have just one, we should all move gently from childhood into the arms of a true dream. We should all live in a world where there is no pressure, no failure, and no lies. I felt like walking back over to Kaori, sitting next to her, and watching her hands move on the paper. However, I also felt like being alone.

I turned my back on the city. I looked out over the water. The Olympic Mountains across the bay and in the clouds. The snow and the glaciers up high. There were sea birds in the air. There was wind. A ferry was coming in, perhaps a mile out, probably from Bremerton. I could make out the silhouettes of people standing on the bow. Bow this way. Stern the other. A boat that never made a turn just went back and forth forever, but always in the right direction. I turned around again, and Dave Cheat was walking towards me. He came up to me and leaned on the railing. “That is one crazy girl there,” he said.

“How so?” I asked.

“I just asked her how the two of you met, and she told me that you got her out of jail. She said she was in jail because she knife-slashed another girl.”

I leaned back, putting my elbows on the railing. I looked at Kaori sitting and sketching by herself. “Some of that sounds right,” I said, “I did get her out of jail, but no knife. I don’t know why she said that.”

Dave nodded and said, “I am toasted. Good stuff. Sa-kaay. Stronger than it should be.”

He was quiet a moment, then he went on, “She’s shaking, you know, hands, feet, even her face. Twitching. I don’t think she should drink. What is she drawing? She wouldn’t let me see.”

I told him that I didn’t know and that she hadn’t shown me either. And I said, “I have seen her when she is upset. I think she will be fine in a few minutes.”

Then Dave said that he should be getting back to work, that he needed to check in before the other engineers started to leave for the day. “I made everyone come in early,” he said, “They were all angry at me for that.”

“How come you didn’t schedule the meeting for a bit later?” I asked.

He was looking out towards the Olympics. Then he said, “I always thought you and O’neill were little snots. Something not right about you guys, something tricky. Marketing, hype, ‘consulting services for the banking industry.’ Crap. Just selling smiley face crap.” He was quiet, and I stayed silent too. Then he went on again, “Might still think that too. But it was good today, that math. And, hey, you are a juggler, right?”

I sighed and said, “Right, but not like you.”

He laughed and said, “Only because I have this bum knee. If I didn’t, I would be walking around out there,” and he pointed to the Olympics, “I would be walking more.”

Walking more. I, too, should have been walking more, spending more time outside, away from the lie. That I took straightforward mathematics and packaged it as ‘something new,’ and fooled Dave Cheat, fooled the other engineers, was wrong. It was “smiley face crap.” Tsai told me that I could do it and take advantage of SLAM’s weak understanding of programming. And Tsai had been right, but it was not feeling good.

Dave and I walked over to where Kaori was sitting. She saw us coming and zipped her sketchpad back into the portfolio case. She was no longer shaking. She no longer looked upset. I said that we should go back to SLAM, that Dave needed to go back to work, and that she and I needed to get our bags and find a place to spend the night. It was only a few blocks walk to SLAM from the pier, where we were, but I remembered Dave’s bad knee, and I called another Uber. I asked about Dave’s car, and he said he would get a ride back to Uwajimaya later after the Sake had worn off. Then Dave told me, “Hope what I said back there was alright to hear.” I told him the truth. I said, “it was perfect to hear.”

“Hey,” Dave asked, “you guys want to meet up later for dinner?”

I should have said ‘sure’, but instead, I said that Kaori and I had an early flight to catch in the morning. Dave said, “next time then.”

After we got our bags from SLAM, we walked down to the corner of Pike and second and went into the Green Tortoise. She had been silent ever since we left the pier, holding her face in a hard way that I had not seen before. We went into the building and then up the stairs to the hostel. As we were coming up to the check-in desk, Kaori said to me, “Separate rooms. I pay mine. You pay yours.” Before I could answer her, we were at the counter, and the desk clerk was saying hello to us. Kaori had taken out her passport and said, “I need room. Own room.” The clerk glanced at her passport and said, “Konichiwa. Only Japanese I know.” Then he told her that a private room is sixty dollars and turned a large, old-fashioned registration book towards her to fill out and sign.

Then I told him that I needed a room as well, and he asked where I was from, and I said “Montana.” He asked me if I had a student ID, and I told him that I didn’t. He explained to me that the rooms were only for students or people traveling from other countries. As he told me this, Kaori was walking away from me, heading towards her room with her key.

I told the clerk I understood, and then I caught up with Kaori, and I asked her, “What is going on?”

She stopped walking, turned to me, and said, “What you mean? I go to my room. You drunk. You go somewhere else. You go find first girl. You stay with her.”

I shook my head. I didn’t understand anything, but I asked Kaori what room number she was in, and I told her that I would come back later in the evening to see if she wanted to go out for food. She asked me what time the flight departed back to Montana, and I told her that our tickets had us leaving the next afternoon, at two, and that we should get a ride to the airport at noon. She said to me, “You told Dave we leave in morning. You liar. No respect. You come here tomorrow at noon then,” and she turned and walked away from me.

I was on the street again. Midafternoon. Drunk. Kaori was a child. I was thinking this as I started to walk up Pike Street. I was going to walk the few miles to Capitol Hill. I would pretend that the traffic noises around me were the wind and the rain and pretend that the concrete and asphalt were the rocks and trees. I would pretend that I was back in Montana, walking up a ridge. She’s a child. I walked. She said, ‘Other girl, first girl.’ I walked, and the Sake started to wear off. I began to pay attention, and there were patterns on the sidewalk, patterns to the traffic congestion, patterns between my breathing and the swinging of my arms.

There were patterns to everything, even patterns to chaos.

When I walked past the Marriott, I stopped and I went in and got a room. Then I came back out. I was going to keep walking, but because it was a big hotel, there were taxis out front waiting to give rides to the people who hadn’t figured out smartphones and Uber. One of the drivers was leaning against his cab, talking excitedly into his phone. He was speaking in a language that I did not think I had heard before, and he nodded to me as I looked at him, and then he pointed, questioning, to the back seat of his cab. I got in. He stayed outside talking on his phone for about a minute more. Finally, he got in and said, in a thick accent, “Where to, my friend?”

I asked him if he knew where a good place to get coffee and read was, and he said he did and started driving. I asked him what language he was speaking, and he said, “Somali, the language of my home.”

I asked him if he knew other languages too. I could see his face in the rear-view mirror. He said, “Of course. I am alive because I know other languages. I know Somali, Arabic, English, and French. But, of course, I know others too, but not so well.”

“You are alive because of your languages?” I asked.

He then told me that he escaped mass killings because he spoke Arabic to border guards and spoke English to Americans. He asked, “You know this book that I am reading now?” And he held up a book so that I could read its cover. “This author says it best. He writes, ‘You survive by telling stories.’ You, my friend, should read this book.” The book he was holding was called “The Reawakening” by an author named Primo Levi.

He put the book back on the front seat and then said, “Too long a story how I got here.” We had stopped at a red light, and he turned about again and looked at me through the cab’s open partition window. He was maybe 25 years old, his face bright, his eyes optimistic and brilliant, and he said, “I am now learning Spanish because I want to understand the dreams of my girlfriend. She is a wonderful girl. She talks in her sleep, but when she wakes up, she says only little things. She says we must learn each other’s language and share dreams. So she is learning Somali.”

The light turned green, and we made it one more block and then were stopped again. He said, into the mirror, to me, “I think it is true, my friend. You live best if you share stories.”

We were driving again. He asked me what languages I knew. I told him only English, and the driver said, “Hmmmm.” Then I told him that although they were not the same, I knew some computer languages. The cab had stopped in front of a café up near the corner of Olive and Broadway.

I paid the driver through the open partition, and then the driver looked directly at me again and said, “Computers are not people, my friend. You must learn real languages to hear real stories. Computers are machines.”

I suddenly wanted to ask him about Kaori, see what he would suggest.

“Listen,” I said, leaning forward, “Can I ask you something? Something about a girl?”

He smiled broadly, and he said, “My friend, don’t you just know that is my most favorite subject. Best talk. Forget all the wars, all the other problems,” and then he turned the engine of the cab off.

So, I told him about what had just happened. My mentioning a girlfriend from years ago upset Kaori and how she had checked into the Green Tortoise by herself. I told him about bailing her out of jail, about going to New York, and how she said that she was ‘not with me’ but how she slept with me anyway. Finally, I told him about how, earlier in the day, as she was sketching, she was trembling.

The Somalian cab driver - the man of stories, languages, and dreams - reached through the cab’s partition and pushed at my shoulder and said, “My friend, you must not leave this person alone no more. I will drive you back to her now!” Then, without saying anything else and without waiting for me to answer, he turned back to the wheel, started the cab, and drove to the Green Tortoise.

In front of the hostel, he said, “Something, I feel, is wrong.”

As I told him about Kaori, he had stopped me often for details, and the story had taken a long time to tell. With the walking I had done earlier, then checking into the Marriot, and then talking, it had been about two hours since I had left Kaori alone. I thanked the cab driver again, handed him some more cash, and then I went into the hostel.

I went upstairs, walking past the check-in counter without anyone noticing. I went down one hallway to a stairway that I had seen Kaori go through, then up another flight of steps and into another hallway. It looked like a college dormitory. There were a few people in the hallway talking. Several doors were open, and music was coming from the open doors. I said brief hellos to the people I passed, and I walked to the door with the number Kaori told me was hers. I knocked lightly on her door.

She opened it almost immediately as if she had been standing by the door waiting. She said, looking down towards her feet, “Come in.” Her voice was thick, lower-pitched than I had heard before. I thought she was doing this to keep quiet so that no one knew that she was sneaking me into the room. So, I went in quickly, and she closed the door before I had done more than glance at her or the room. When I was inside, I saw how dark the room was. There was no window, and the only light was from two lit candles on the floor.

I told her that I was no longer drunk and that I was sorry I got drunk. She said, “Don’t care. Nothing matter.”

She was standing by the door, still with her face turned down. I wanted to tell her that I would start to learn her language, that I had just met someone who explained how important that was. But, instead, I said to her that I’ve checked into a hotel up the street, and I asked if she was hungry.

She said, “I never eat again.”

My eyes were getting used to the candlelight, and I looked at the small room. She had torn about a dozen sheets of paper from the sketchbook, and they were spread out on the floor and the bed. I recognized Kaori’s rapid-hand style, the wide, smudged lines of the charcoal mixed with fine details from a pen. The entire floor was covered with sketches. Except for standing by the door, there was no other place to stand without stepping on a sketch.

“You’ve been working,” I said, and I knelt by the closest drawing.

There were three people in the sketch, two were standing, and one was on the ground near them. I thought the sketch was of Dave Cheat and Dreadlocks, with me sitting next to them on the pier. Then I looked closely. One of the standing people was waving an arm upright - there were lines of rapid motion - and in the hand was a knife.

It was a smudged, charcoal drawing of a fight, fine detail frozen in fine, red ink. The person on the floor was in a heap. Red lines trailed along the body and around the feet of the two standing fighters. I recognized that the person holding the knife was Kaori. I pulled another sketch closer to me, nearer to the light from the candle that I was sitting next to. It also showed Kaori holding a knife. A long, broad blade, like the one I had seen in her apartment the time I washed her dishes. In this drawing, she was slashing at the neck of a girl sitting on a bed. One hand held the knife, while the other hand pulled the girl’s long hair. The third person, a naked man, knelt on the bed. He was falling towards Kaori and the knife. The drawing showed movement. In the flickering candlelight, in the drawing, I saw that it was Kaori rushing into a room where Jim and Elizabeth had been in bed. In the drawings, I saw her cutting Elizabeth’s throat.

“You like?” Kaori asked, her voice thick and strange, “You like what I do to girl who is not first girl, to girl who is not me?”

“No, I do not like,” I said, “I do not like these at all.”

As I was kneeling, Kaori stepped directly on top of the sketch that I was partially holding, her barefoot tearing the paper. Then, she walked across the other sketches, picked up the furthest from me, and held it up.

“This one. You like?”

It was too dark for me to see the drawing. I said, “I can’t see it. Too dark.”

She took one step towards me, stood still, and again demanded, “You like?”

“I still can’t see it,” I said.

Kaori made kind of a crying sound, sort of a quiet scream, and rushed up at me, holding the large sheet of paper in front of her until she pushed into me, knocking me over. She still pushed at me as we were now both on the floor. She was saying, “Look. You look, you see.” Then she sat up, and even though I was upset, I sat up too, and took the wrinkled and torn drawing and put it on top of the other ones that I had already seen.

That drawing was of the two people - Jim and Elizabeth - having sex. Jim was on his back, and Elizabeth was sitting partially on top of him. The drawing was done entirely in green ink. There was no charcoal, no indication of motion, just fine-lined clarity. Their two faces, though, were both blurred and distorted and were cross-hatched and ugly.

“I don’t need to see this,” I said and pushed the drawing away.

“This one,” Kaori said, getting up and picking up another drawing. I stood up, not wanting to let her run at me again. Instead, she came up to me and held another sketch in front of her and said again, “Look. This art is me.”

The sketch was of the couple, Jim and Elizabeth, lying crumpled on the floor, and Kaori about to cut herself. In the sketch she was holding the knife against her middle.

“You should not be doing this,” I said. “This is crazy wrong.”

“You know wrong? You know crazy?” She demanded.

I didn’t know what to do. I said, “Kaori, sit down. Please,” and she sat down suddenly and heavily on the floor. Then she started pulling the sketches together into a single pile in front of her.

“I thought today you were drawing us as we juggled,” I said. “I thought you were happy today.”

“What you know of happiness?” She asked. She started tearing at the pile of sketches, ripping corners off, then folding the torn corners into dense triangles.

There was loud music coming through the wall from the next-door room. There was talking from outside in the hallway as several people walked past. I was watching her hands folding at a scrap from the drawings, which had become a pile of folded triangles. I could hear Kaori’s breathing. It had gone from gasping to normal. I could feel my own heartbeat. I could hear the paper as she folded it. I had been standing, not moving, ever since she asked me what I knew of happiness.

Then I said to her, “You can’t do this. You can’t imagine killing them or yourself.”

She didn’t look up, but she said, “Only one love.”

I felt that she was right, but I knew that she was wrong. So then I said to her, “Come on, forget about them,” and I knelt next to her and started to put my arm around her shoulders.

There was a snapping flash, green with pain, and I was instantly nauseated. I thought that she had stabbed me in the face with something. I touched my face, but I didn’t feel a wound. Like she did to the cop on the night that she was arrested, she had punched me hard, but I was not built as strongly as that cop. My nose was bleeding heavily. My jaw clenched, my eyes squinted shut, and I couldn’t see. I thought that she was going to keep hitting me, maybe actually stab me. I pushed away from her on the floor, rolling over the piles of paper that had been her sketches. I shuffled myself backward until I came against a wall. Then I sat up, both hands covering my face. I tried again to open my eyes, and I was able to, and then I was looking at her, and she was sitting, not moving, face down, her arms hugging herself, rocking slightly.

I stood up. There wasn’t a bathroom, but there was a sink. I walked towards it, keeping my face turned down so that the blood dripped into my hands and not onto my shirt. I turned on the faucet and let the blood drip. My ears were ringing. I pinched my nostrils and turned towards her, not sure what I was going to say or what I would do. She had picked up a candle, moved across the floor, and was then sitting by one of the sketches she had not torn up. I was scared of her, but she was not moving any closer to me. Instead, she was studying the paper, holding the candle above it. There was a large drop of my blood near the center of the sketch.

“Sensual,” she said. She touched the drop with her finger and then picked up a brush that was on the floor. Using my blood, she drew a large character across the charcoal, across the ink. “This means ‘Happiness,’” she said, “Kanji.”

I was upset. I was afraid. I stayed standing and upset, but something was pulling at me from the sadness of the sketches, which made me want to try to hold Kaori again. I was still pinching my nostrils, and I felt blood pooling inside my sinuses. “I think you broke my nose,” I said. “This is not good.”

She looked at me then. She slid closer to me, against my legs, and she bowed her head down so that her face was against the floor. She reached up to me. She touched my free hand, and then I was sitting down next to her. She lifted her face from the floor and said, “So, so sorry.” She cried, and I saw, in the candlelight, her tears dripping down her face. She pushed her face against mine, and there were new flashes of intense pain, but I didn’t pull back. Then I was tasting her tears. I let go of my nose, and the blood poured out and dripped onto our lips. She had put both of her hands on my face, and the blood was smearing, and I didn’t care. I was lost. And without stories.

“I hit Jim. I no hit you.” She said. “I hit Jim, I hit Elizabeth. Stomach is broken. Heart not break. Stomach breaks. Hunger is gone. Sad.”

I was crying then for both of us. My face hurt. I got up and went back to the sink. I took off my shirt. I turned the faucet back on. I splashed hot water over my face, on my chest, on my arms. I leaned there, near the running water, until the bleeding stopped.

I stood up straight and turned around. Kaori was still sitting on the floor. In the candlelight, I saw white tracks from her tears through the blood, my blood, on her face.

“You understand?” She asked, “You understand looking at art? You see I kill? You see I will kill me?”

I didn’t answer. I was thinking of things like emergency rooms and therapists and trying to figure out what it meant that a girl, who I had been falling in love ,with had just broken my nose.

Then she asked, “Why you not yell at me for hurting you?” She stood up. She walked to me. We were the same height. It was her eyes again. Maybe mine as well. Falling into each other. But it didn’t last. Instead, there was the sound of head-banging music coming from the next room.

“Ugly music next door,” I said.

“Green music,” she said, “In green place.”

“Don’t kill yourself,” I said. “Don’t kill anyone.”

“Too late,” she said. “I did it. I killed. I did yesterday. Before we slept,” and then she knelt again, leaning forward so that her face was against the floor, her arms around my feet.

“What?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

She repeated, “I killed. I did it yesterday.” She gestured towards the remaining drawings, and she pushed at the pile of the torn ones.

“I did,” she said.

I did not understand at all. “When?” I asked.

“Yesterday,” she said, “Before you come. Before you ask to go to Seattle. Yesterday. After we back from New York.”

I said, “Stop holding onto my feet.” I kicked at her. I moved away. I sat down on the bed. She remained kneeling, her face hidden by her dark hair, which was touching the floor. I asked her again because I still did not understand, “When?”

She said, “I say already. Afternoon. I think of Jim all time in New York. I think of him when I was with you.” She sat up, she looked at me. She said, slowly and clearly, “I no love you. I only love Jim. Only one love.”

I didn’t say anything, and she continued, “Afternoon. I go to his house. I kept key. I open door. I go in. I go in bedroom. I do what you saw.” She waved her arm towards the drawings and the torn paper. Then, still kneeling, she again lowered her face against the floor.

I asked her, “Kaori, why did you go to his house?”

She sat up and looked at me. She turned her head and smiled and said, “Bad music those people listen to. Should tell them turn off.” She stood up. She walked over to the sink. She touched her face, looking in the mirror at her reflection, with my blood on her skin. She turned on the water and washed her face, the same as I had done half an hour ago. Splashing the water upwards, cupping it, moving her hands.

I thought of hot summer days and of walking. I thought of stopping at cold streams. But Nothing was refreshing in what she was doing, Nothing good about watching her. My face hurt.

She looked at me again. She said, “I want talk to him. I want to tell him about New York. I want to tell him you ‘nothing.’ I took knife. To show him. Knife from apartment to house. Not to kill. To trash. I go to Jim’s house to trash other paintings of mine. I go there to trash what was mine. To trash. To start again.”

Then she giggled. Her mouth opened like a yawn, but with laughter coming out. She collapsed on the floor. The laughter turned to wailing and then abruptly stopped. Then she said, “I forget that he no have painting. I forget he gave all back already. I open door with key. I go in. I see wall where painting had been. I see Nothing. I walk in house more. I hear good music. It was my music. I go in bedroom. It was my bedroom. Then fast. I trash her because she there. I trash Jim next. He with her again. Then I shower there. It was my shower. Then I go back to apartment, to my paint place. Then you knock on door. I open. You say we go Seattle. I forget everything. Happy with you. Pretend with you.”

I needed to call someone. Or to go somewhere and curl up by myself and find a pattern, some sense. Find some equation out of the awful noise. But, instead, I said, “My face hurts. I need ice.” She answered, “I find,” and then she left the room.

I blew the candles out. The only light then was from the narrow slit under the door. I found the bed again, and I lay down. The bed was not right to curl up on. It was like a stretcher in a morgue, in a place where there was no window, no sky, no stars, no clouds even. It was just a bed in a small room in a green city.

A few minutes later, Kaori came back into the room. She held the door open for a moment, looking into the dark room. Then she closed the door and came over to me. “Here,” she said, “ice.” She was holding a towel that she had filled with ice cubes. “I find machine,” she said, “I find towel. All good now.”

I held the wrapped ice across the bridge of my nose and against my closed eyes. She pushed at me, said, “move,” and I slid over until I was against the wall. She lay down next to me. She pulled the bed’s covers over us. I knew I should not have been there. I worried that she would hurt me more, that she might even kill me. I also thought that she might kill herself if I slept. From what she had shown me, the sketches, and what she had said, those were real worries. Then she said to me, whispering, “Be with me now. I will be ‘other girl,’ you will be ‘other boy.’ We close our eyes in this green place. We pretend.”

Crazy is crazy, but lonely is lonely. I do not know which is the saddest.

I wanted to be anywhere else. I did not want to be with Kaori. I did not want to be in the room with her. It hurt to talk. It hurt to breathe. And with the swelling, or the coldness of the ice, there was a sudden twitch, a tic that went up each of my cheekbones to corners of my eyes. I wanted to walk or to run, and then sleep and then wake up somewhere else. But instead, in the darkness, we found each other again. So I said, to the darkness, not to Kaori, “Everything now is a lie.”

The ice melted, and the water ran through the towel and soaked the pillow under my head. The next-door music finally was turned off. Kaori was sleeping against me.

Then it was morning. I could tell because I had been sleeping. I could tell because conversations coming from out in the hallway had woken me.

I got off the bed and went to the sink. I turned the light on. Both of my eyes were blackened, and the bridge of my nose was swollen. The dead blood under my skin was already turning an ugly tinge of green.

Kaori woke up and walked over to me. We looked at each other’s reflections in the mirror. She said, “No more crying. No more hit. No more kill.”

I asked her reflection, “Nothing else bad? No killing ‘self?’” She didn’t say anything.

We left the Green Tortoise and went outside. It was just dawn. We walked together to the Marriott where I had checked in the evening before. When we went in, the doorman looked at my face and the dried blood on my shirt and asked if we were guests. I showed him my keycard, and then we went up the elevators to my room. Inside the room, I took off my clothes, went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and sat down in the tub, leaving the drain plug in. The bath started to fill with hot water, and the room filled with steam. Kaori came in and pulled the shower curtain back, and climbed into the tub with me. She said, “We take bus now.”

I said to her, “No, we can still fly. We can get on the afternoon flight.”

She said, “I no understand.”

I said, “We don’t need to take a bus.”

She giggled. “No,” and she moved and strained her mouth and then said, “I say bath. You hear ‘bus.’ “

She splashed water on me. No paint on her hands now. No reason to understand more than there was. She had touched me by how well she showed her feelings - the rapid clarity of emotional talent - but what I was was seeing now was dreadful. In the bath, she poured shampoo in her hands and washed her hair. Some of her red hair tinting stained the soap with the faintest of colors. She rinsed her hair, and then she opened her eyes, giggled again, and said, “You like bus with me?” She held one of her legs up above the bathwater, lightly pushing me in the chest with her foot. Both of her arms were wrapped around her other leg, pulling her knee close to her face. She said, “We forget everything. Play now in bus. Forget.”

I wanted to forget. I hoped that Kaori had made up her story, that she had imagined, nightmared, then drawn. I started to reach to her but stopped before touching her. I was thinking that, in Missoula, she could not have killed two people and then, an hour later, pulled me into her apartment and to her bed. I was also thinking that she could not have broken my nose and then been trying to tease me with her accent and her body. But that is what she did, and that is what she was trying to do.

I got out of the bath, got a clean shirt from my duffle, then dressed.

There was no eating, no talking. I checked out of the Marriott. She carried her bag and her portfolio of sorrows. I carried my duffle. I remembered the nylon strap that was over my shoulder and walking up Pike Street. I remembered looking at the traffic lights, noticing how they switched from yellow to red in a timed order. I remembered people on the sidewalk, their shoes especially. I remembered the laces too, and the way they were tied with bows or with ragged knots. But I do not remember getting into a car, though I do remember being in one. I was looking down at my shoelaces, and I remember thinking about the night before, about Kaori’s hands moving rapidly, and the tearing and the folding. I could remember each of the drawings, the solid lines, and the blurred ones. In the drawings, the girl who was slashed, her eyes were open, and her look was of terror, but the boy’s eyes looked dreamy and calm. The space between the ink showed the knife steel. The darkness became the wooden handle in Kaori’s hand. I remembered and saw all of this, but I could not remember when I tied my shoes. I could not remember asking the Uber driver to take us to the airport. I could not remember Kaori there beside me. And I could not remember arriving back in Missoula. But the events that happened after we got off the flight, the events accelerating my words into the immediate tense of now, I am remembering perfectly.

Montana Voice

8 - A Green Place

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