Piercing (2 page)

They began meeting about once a week to have dinner or visit a museum or see a movie together. Kawashima was working for a graphic design firm and drawing in his spare time. His drawings were all of narrow roads in the moonlight; no other subjects had ever interested him. But one day near the end of summer he drew from memory a pencil sketch of Yoko’s face. When he presented the sketch to her on their next date, she invited him to her apartment for the first time. And there she made a halting and clearly painful confession. Until about a year before, she’d been dating an older man from her company, and on the day they broke up she’d swallowed a handful of sleeping pills and been rushed to the hospital. What did he think of a woman who’d do something like that? Kawashima said he didn’t think it was any big deal, and he meant it.

‘Who hasn’t wanted to die at one time or another?’ he said.

Not long afterwards, they moved in together. They’d been sharing a place for about six months when, late on a freezing winter’s night, Kawashima awoke and leaped out of bed drenched in a sweat that had soaked all the way through the covers. Startled from sleep, Yoko frantically asked what was wrong, but all he would say was that he needed to take a little walk. He threw on some clothes and left the apartment. When he returned, some two hours later, he told her something he’d never told anyone before.

‘I get like that sometimes,’ he said. ‘It’s happened to me ever since I was a little kid, but I never had a name for it until I got older and found it in a psychology book. They call it
pavor nocturnus
- night terrors. It was even worse when I was little. I’d wake up in a panic and jump out of bed, like I did tonight, only I’d be screaming at the top of my lungs. Sometimes I’d run in circles around the room for, I don’t know, two or three minutes. Afterwards I could never remember anything, only that something had terrified me so badly that I didn’t know who I was and couldn’t even recognise the people around me. It was like they’d melted into my dream, become characters in this nightmare. It was so scary. So scary. Now that I’m grown up, it’s not quite as bad. I mean, I don’t forget who I am anymore, and like, tonight, I knew that was you speaking to me, asking me what was wrong.’

‘So why,’ Yoko asked, ‘did you dash out all alone? Why didn’t you let me hold you?’

Kawashima shook his head.

‘I’ve just always thought it best, when I lose control like that, not to be around anybody else. Better to go somewhere by myself and walk it off, do some deep breathing to calm myself down.’

He decided, then and there, to tell Yoko everything he’d been keeping secret for so long - with the single exception of the time, at nineteen, that he’d stabbed a certain woman with an ice pick. He didn’t want to get into that, partly because the event was so vague and uncertain in his memory, and partly because he feared it might scare her away. He didn’t want to lose her.

‘I think what’s behind them, behind the night terrors, is that after my father died, when I was four, my mother started hitting me. She’d beat the hell out of me. I don’t remember my father at all, except for this vague sense that he used to take us out for drives in a car. And I know he had one, for a while at least, because my mother always used to describe him as the sort of fool who’d put a down payment on a car he couldn’t afford. I haven’t seen my mother for years, but the last time we met, at my high-school graduation, she said she’d treated me the way she did because I reminded her of
him
- meaning my father the fool. I was afraid of the beatings, because they really hurt, but I always just assumed she must be doing it because I was such a bad kid. The weird thing is, it’s something you can learn to endure, that kind of abuse. You just tell yourself it’s not really you who’s getting beaten. If you concentrate really hard, you can actually get to a place where it doesn’t hurt any more. A lot of times she’d beat me with no warning, and that was especially scary, so I used to try to stay prepared all the time. I’d keep reminding myself:
Mother’s going to hit me, Mother’s going to hit me
. . .

‘What bothered me most, though, was that I was the only one she hit. She never laid a finger on my little brother. As you know, we lived in this little town in the sticks, and the nearest city of any size was Odawara. In Odawara they had a department store with a Playland for little kids on the roof level. The three of us went there together a few times, but when I was about five or six my mother started locking me in the house and taking only my little brother. One time I climbed out the window and ran down the road chasing after them, and she dragged me back to the house and tied me to the water pipes in the bathroom. I remember that so clearly, like it was yesterday. I fell asleep right there on the tile floor, and when I woke up it was dark outside, and all I could see was that empty, narrow little road outside the window . . .

‘Not long after that, a middle-school teacher of mine got me placed in a home for abused kids, and that’s when I started drawing. Right from the beginning I drew nothing but pictures of narrow roads at night.’ Kawashima bowed his head. ‘I’ve never told anyone about this before,’ he said, and Yoko took his hand and squeezed it.

They were married a year and eight months after meeting in Ginza. Yoko told her parents that in accordance with the values she and her fiancé shared she didn’t want a wedding ceremony, and they reluctantly agreed. But in fact it wasn’t really about values. She knew Kawashima hadn’t forgiven his mother and younger brother and didn’t want to put him in an awkward position.

‘I was in the Home for a little over two years,’ he’d told her, ‘and then I went to live with my grand-mother, on my father’s side. At my high-school graduation, I don’t know why but my mother apologised to me. It was a pretty self-serving apology but, still, it was an apology. Then, at the end, she said, “You forgive me, don’t you? You forgive your mother?” I nodded without even thinking, but then something in me snapped and I slapped her face, hard. It was the only time I ever hit her.’

Kawashima hadn’t opposed Yoko’s decision to quit her job. He’d made up his mind right from the beginning to support her in anything she chose to do. Nor did he express any reservations when she said she wanted to have a baby. The other guys in the office often teased him about how much he’d changed since his marriage, how much more cheerful he was. ‘What exactly is Yoko-chan putting in that bread of hers?’ - that sort of thing. He himself wasn’t really sure if he’d changed or not. But ever since he’d met Yoko, and especially since the day they’d decided, at her suggestion, to marry, his bouts of self-loathing had all but ceased. Not once had he been overwhelmed by the old panic and terror, not even when Rie was born and he first held her in his arms. Not, in fact, until ten nights ago.

The mental and emotional torment of the old cycle of anxiety - unable to bear being alone, wanting someone always near but growing anxious when someone does get close, fearing that if they get any closer there’s no telling what might happen, until the fear itself becomes unbearable and solitude seems the only solution - had seemed to be fast becoming a thing of the past.

Until ten nights ago
, Kawashima muttered to himself, flicking the switch on the lightbox atop his desk. On its glass lid he arranged several of the thirty-five-millimetre slides he’d taken from the company archives. They were photos he was considering for a poster advertising the Yokohama Jazz Festival, though none of them had anything to do with jazz. Choosing graphics that had no direct connection to the product was something of a speciality of his. When the first indoor ski-slopes were about to open in Kyushu, his presentation - with copy that read THERE’S A FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING splashed across a photo of a little Caucasian boy and girl kissing - had won out over all the other agencies and made him a minor hero at the office. The photos he’d assembled for the jazz festival were black-and-whites of fashion models from the 1940s. The girls were all healthy specimens with generous smiles, lying on sandy beaches or about to dive into pools or strolling beneath parasols or drinking cocktails on a terrace . . .

But it was impossible to care about any of this right now.

Ten nights ago. He was in the bathtub with the baby, having just finished washing her. He handed her over to Yoko, who was waiting with a fluffy bath towel, and then he leaned back in the tub, leaving the pebbled-glass shower door partially open. Yoko was murmuring to the baby as she dried her, and he was aware of himself smiling at them. And then, with no prelude or warning, a thought came percolating up into his brain and he felt the muscles of his cheeks twitch and freeze.

I wouldn’t ever stab that baby with an ice pick, would I?

For a moment, he wasn’t certain who was sitting there in that steam-filled tub. Yoko opened the bathroom door to leave, then looked back and said something to him, but it wasn’t registering.
Masayuki? Masayuki, what’s wrong? What’s the matter?
She called to him several times before he snapped out of it.

‘Oh, still there? Guess I was daydreaming,’ he said, and by the time his eyes were refocused on her and the baby, his skin - in spite of the very warm water - had turned to gooseflesh.

The sharp, gleaming point of an ice-pick: from that moment on, he couldn’t get the image out of his head. You wouldn’t do something like that, you would never stab the baby, he told himself hundreds of times, but the voice inside him never stopped replying:
I just might
. And each night from then on he’d found himself unable to go to bed until he stood over the crib, ice pick in hand, to confirm to himself that it was all right, he wasn’t going to stab her.

Kawashima turned off the lightbox. He got his leather jacket from the closet, put it on over his sweater, and headed for the door.

3

THEIR APARTMENT WAS ON the second floor of a four-storey building. He closed the door noiselessly behind him, checked several times to make sure it was locked and made his way down the stairs. There was no guard or watchman in the lobby: to enter through the glass doors you had to either punch in a code or have someone buzz you in over the intercom. To exit, of course, you simply touched the sensor plate marked OPEN, but the landlord had stressed the importance of taking precautions to prevent strangers slipping inside as you walked out. Not long before, someone apparently disguised as a delivery man had burgled one of the apartments; kids had been known to spray-paint graffiti on the lobby walls; and some jerk had once melted the intercom’s plastic number pad with a lighter.

Outside, Kawashima zipped up his jacket and raised its fluff-lined collar, reflecting that he rather enjoyed the cold. In heated rooms, he often felt the outlines of his body, the border between him and the external world, grow disturbingly fuzzy.

Yoko had awakened but hadn’t seemed to notice anything, and for the moment, standing on the empty street of their neighbourhood in Kokubunji, away from the room with the sleeping baby, he felt a certain degree of relief.

It’s just my neurosis, he reasoned with himself. I just get freaked out
imagining
I might stab the baby. It’s not as if I actually want to stab her. Who doesn’t imagine things that make them anxious? Maybe nothing this extreme, but, like, having to give a speech at a wedding, for example - a lot of people are terrified of screwing up and being ridiculed or laughed at. Or you can accidentally make eye contact with some psycho on the train and think,
What if he gets off behind me and follows me home?
Thanks to the imagination, there’s no end to things in this world that can trigger anxiety. Normally, of course, you can free yourself from fears like that just by facing them, or telling someone about them.

Normally.

On the ground floor of the building next door was a video shop. At the end of a long day, after dinner and a bath, Yoko liked to sit with a glass of wine or beer and watch a movie. One night in the last month of her pregnancy, the two of them had watched
Basic Instinct
together. Kawashima wanted to flee the room as soon as he saw the first scene, which depicted a murder by ice pick, but Yoko said, ‘I’m not sure this is good for the baby, but it’s an interesting story, isn’t it?’ It was that attitude of hers, that detached amusement, that helped him calm down and sit all the way through the film.

Often during the past ten days he’d wondered why his fear was of stabbing only the baby and not Yoko. Remembering the time they’d watched
Basic Instinct
together gave him the answer: because Yoko could talk to him. Talking with someone helped neutralise the power of the imagination. And Yoko had a delicate but skilful way of dealing with the wounds he carried inside. Her attitude was neither insensitive nor indulgent - neither,
Why don’t you just get over it?
nor,
Oh, you poor thing!
She never went out of her way to avoid the subject, and when it came up her comments were always both clear-eyed and supportive.

‘When you have a chronic illness,’ she’d tell him, ‘getting frustrated or impatient with it just makes things worse, right?’ Isn’t that what they say? That you have to live in harmony with an illness? To think of it as an old friend?’

Or: ‘Why is it that when people grow up they totally forget how vulnerable and helpless they were as children?’

Or: ‘Until Rie was born, I never knew how stressful having children can be. I’m sure even your mother must wonder what she could have been thinking back then.’

The way she’d say these things never failed to soothe and comfort him. The first scene of
Basic Instinct
was a jolt to his system, but by the time the ice pick reappeared later in the film he was thoroughly enjoying the story.

In the next building past the video shop was a bookstore. Something moved in the gap between the two buildings, and he stopped to see what it was. The gap, just wide enough for a grown man to walk through, dead-ended at another building. It was very dark in there, but he was sure he’d seen two or three small figures moving. Small enough that they had to be children, no more than nine or ten years old. They weren’t moving now, probably because Kawashima had stopped and was looking their way, but he wasn’t about to call out to them or step over and peer into the gap. He knew that even a ten-year-old child could be dangerous. Just before walking on, he spotted a little red point of light. It might have been a burning cigarette, except for the fact that he neither saw nor smelled smoke. The eye of a small animal, maybe, reflecting the streetlight. Between the two buildings, he remembered, were garbage cans and waste water puddled around a drain. The kids were probably killing rats for kicks in that narrow darkness.