Our vengeance was swift. I ran in front of our ragtag band, staggering up the steps of the local temple with Tom behind me whipping his gnarled leather belt like a lasso in front of him and Richard laughing with a bottle of the local devil liquor, shochu, distilled from sweet potatoes, alternately pressed to his lips and ceremonially dousing the flagstones beneath our feet. As luck would have it, the main gate was open and we ranged inside. A knowing glance passed among us as I hunkered down low to the ground and ran for a nearby stand of wooden beams. Tom entered the gate, arms open to the skies, eyes closed, a smile extending across his sweat-soaked face, the full moon casting serpentine shadows of his arms on the crushed gravel that made up the interior of the temple grounds. Richard made as if to crouch, but after repeated tries, bending jerkily like an old man, opted to simply walk over to the offering area I had hidden myself behind. He pressed his forehead against one of the weathered boards and whispered, almost inaudibly, “Otsukaresama de,” and took another pull from the half-empty bottle, stopping it with the long index finger of his right hand. By that time, Tom had gone to his knees, and was alternately picking up gravel by the handfuls, holding it up to the moon’s face, and letting it slip from his hands, much of it bounding down his arms, into his face, and down his chest. The moonlight lit up the area like floodlights, almost daylight, and it felt like I had never been asleep, at least not this day. Richard’s legs finally let go and he pivoted down next to me, offering the bottle.
“I think that we need to make some kind of offering,” he said taking the bottle back from me and swiping at the hair in front of his eyes.
“You mean a prayer,” I asked as I watched Tom fully succumb to the earth, simply choosing to lie down and embrace the dirt and the dust and the grime.
“Well, pray, not pray, I’m not saying that,” Richard smiled lightly, “more like a wish, I guess.”
“But,” I struggled a bit, “what do we wish for?
“For everything we want,” he said and scrambled up, winking at me, and half jogged over to Tom who was still supine on the ground, murmuring to himself, a crazed look in his eyes. Richard spoke to him, I couldn’t make out what exactly, but Tom broke out in immediate laughter and rose from the ground to stumble over to me.
“Richard is fucking insane,” Tom nearly yelled. I looked over Tom’s shoulder to see that Richard had taken out his old Minolta 35mm and was gazing through the viewfinder at the marks Tom had left on the ground, walking in a circle around the scrapings, making sure not to disturb any of Tom’s history.
“He told me that the ground was angry at me, that the wood had told him to warn me that I would be swallowed whole if I didn’t find another Natsuko cardboard cut-out within the next twenty-four hours,” Tom turned around to confront Richard who was cantilevered at the waist and taking pictures of rocks.
“I mean, look at him,” Tom was incredulous. “The fucking guy is taking pictures of things in the dark that aren’t even there, that no longer occupy that space. It’s just mad.” I watched the expression on Tom’s face range from stark glaring to an inviting warmth. He shook his head and wiped at his glasses with a shirttail.
“What are those things,” Tom whispered and pointed. Richard had rejoined us and we were all sitting at the foot of the steps of the main temple. He had produced another bottle of shochu out of thin air, and Tom spilled some on his lap, a shadow forming, when he pointed. Small bits of paper adorned the wood of the offering area that I had used as cover a few minutes ago. The light wind caused the paper to rustle slightly, like paper wind chimes, and cast rain shadows against the grey, moon soaked wood.
“Those are desires, the dreams of the unrequited, broken promises with a last chance of fulfillment,” Richard explained and took a lazy drag from his cigarette, head back, eyes dark. Tom swiveled too quickly towards Richard, losing the bottle on the gravel. I snatched it up and Richard continued.
“They are the thoughts of a man lost in his own reflection, a reflection that sneers back and laughs at the foolish whims of himself.”
“Fucking hell, Richard, you’re just spouting shit out of your ass,” Tom choked.
“Then why am I laughing at you,” Richard asked him with a chuckle, and with that Tom dove over me to tackle Richard. The bout was over quickly, with both laughing inanely, Tom having lost both of his shoes in the process, one sock dragging behind him as he crawled back to the temple steps and the proffered bottle. We sat in silence watching the paper slips pirouette against the air, mosquitoes droning about us. Tom stood suddenly and walked over to the offering area. He ripped a slip of paper off of the stack held on a low table and wrote something, attaching it with the twine others had used to tie their own to the beams. He returned to us and remained standing.
“So, what did you put down,” Richard asked.
“That I survive this jaunt with you two,” he smiled, “and that we never run out of shochu.”
[up next, who knows?]
I needed to remember never to sit next to Tom when flying. His right leg jagged up and down in a furious rhythm and both arms were secured tightly to the armrests. I could see the veins in both of his hands standing out. Richard had the unfortunate distinction of sitting next to him. He was already on his second vodka tonic and talking about radishes with a woman in the row in front of us, a red-head from Texas, I think, who had leaned her chair back and had crammed her head between the space created with her and her neighbor’s chairs. She had large, protruding front teeth but had freckles that were beautiful. Richard didn’t seem to notice Tom’s nerves. I was sitting next to the window and decided to forget about Tom, as I always became nervous by looking at people who were jittery about flying. As I got older, I became increasingly more frightened about flying myself but as of yet had not succumbed to the same level of discomfort as Tom was now, or had always been. The clouds outside slipped by my window and I could see the ground below with unusual clarity, one I was not accustomed to compared with all the other flights I had ever been on. Down below I could make out the shapes of green, green trees and a yellow truck winding along a deserted mountain road. Here and there off the road, now several roads as we passed over and away from the hilly area, were orange roofed homes, covered with tile. I drifted off with my forehead against the cool, vibrating double-layered window and my breath slowing and forming an oval, alternately evaporating and spreading out again against the tiled roofs.
My brother and I had played with tile just like that when we were boys. We had moved in to a new house in the country and the house was unfinished. There was no lawn and whenever it rained the yard became a muddy soup with cracks and fissures forming from the run-off once the sun came back out from hiding and baked the earth. Just beyond the low cement wall that marked the perimeter of this yard was a messy stack of tile that was going to be used for the garage. And just next to that was the biggest pile of sand my brother and I had ever seen in our lives. The day we moved in my brother and I searched like crazy for our Matchbox cars and found them in the fourth box we ripped open, what luck! In a matter of days we had built an intricate network of garages and nail-biting, cliff-hugging roads that our cars inevitably seemed to crash off of, bursting in a fiery explosion of twisted metal down at the bottom the cliff/pile. My brother had come up with the idea of running the handle of our mother’s broom through the pile and made tunnels all throughout it that the cars ran down. Whenever it rained, we would have to build new roads and two or more tunnels always collapsed. Then one day we came home from school and the pile was gone. The tile was missing too. My brother slammed the door to the house and cursed. I just stood staring at the empty spot where the pile had been and kicked at the wooden palette the tiles had rested on, wondering where the pile went.
“Thank God, we made it.”
The plane had touched down and I woke up groggy. Tom was breathing out a huge cache of stored energy. Richard bumped his head on the Texan’s seat back as he pulled his day planner from under his seat. I guess she hadn’t understood the announcement to raise your seats back to their regular position. Tom probably would not have either but I don’t think he had lowered his.
“What do you use one of those for,” Tom asked incredulously.
“Well, you know, I write things in here I have to keep track of,” Richard said unbuckling his seat belt.
“Like what?”
“You know, things.”
“What things?”
“I have things that are important,” Richard said. “That would be bad for me to forget.”
“Let me see that,” Tom snatched the leather case from Richard as he started to get up. He unsnapped the hitch and started to leaf through the pages, the sides of which were colored according to the months. I could just make out that he had flipped to the month we were now in and then started flipping by pages, stopping every third one or so. Tom suddenly burst out laughing, his hangover forgotten.
“I should have known. Read this,” he said and handed me the valise. I looked at Richard who simply nodded and grinned patting his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. Under the heading for Wednesday, the eighteenth, was listed:
1. Wake up
2. Buy cigarettes
3. Listen to some Tom Waits while drinking some whisky
4. None of the above need adhere to strict numerical order
Five days after Tom practically sprinted down the tarmac off the plane, the three of us were back together again. We were in a taxi.
“Oh, where the hell are we?!” Tom had craned his neck both left and right and then flopped over my lap and careened out the window.
“Oh yeah, yeah, I remember that, that shrine or whatever it is, that temple. Yeah, it’s right around here,” he said and interrupted the conversation Richard was having with the driver.
“Richard, tell him that it’s around here, a grey building, tall, next to a video parlor.”
“Video parlor?”
“Yeah.”
“Video parlor?”
“Whatever the fuck you call it. Just tell him it’s near here. If we see a big department store, I think it’s called Departo, we know it’s right there.” The driver looked in the rearview mirror at Tom. What he saw was a swath of blond hair falling over a pale face, sweat slipping down the bridge of his nose and eyes wild, looking all directions at once.
“I know it’s near here.”
Richard babbled something low and knowing to the driver who sucked in some air and cocked his head slightly to the left. I noticed the driver was the only one not affected by the heat. He replied to Richard in a furious torrent and I only caught a few words. Richard nodded and sat back in to the fake leather seat as we overtook a trolley on our right travelling down the road’s median.
“Tom, he doesn’t really,” Richard started.
“There!” Tom cut him off and burst forward, head next to the driver’s. “Stop, this is it, this is the place.” The driver seemed to understand Tom’s exhortations and pulled over. “Yeah, this is it, definitely,” Tom said and opened his door as Richard paid the driver and I followed close behind.
“Mother, mother, please, attend to my friends here. They have had a long journey and need food and drink,” Tom exhorted the bar owner.
“Tom, you know, you should call her mama-san, not mother. I think her husband may be growing weary,” Richard shrugged in the general direction of an ashen man sharpening a long knife in a side doorway.
“Oh, well, it’s just that I’m still trying to get the hang of this damned language. Anyway, order the noodles. They’re fantastic.”
We ordered a round of noodles and a set of beers. By the time the three steaming bowls of noodles arrived, the beer was gone and had been replaced by small wooden boxes full of acrid potato liquor. Tom set in immediately to the noodles. I watched him struggle with the chopsticks for a minute or two until he threw them down in disgust, his shirt pock-marked with splatter from the noodles as they slipped through the torturous eating utensils. Most of the noodles fell back into his bowl but some flopped down onto the counter or floor beside him. The mama-san stood at the furthest corner of the bar watching him and doing her best imitation of a silent movie actor laughing, choking back her mirth. Tom looked incredulously down at the noodles he had lost. Then he picked up the bowl with both hands and drank the soup down, leaving the noodles, vegetables, and beef at the bottom of the bowl. With that accomplished, he slurped up the rest of the contents by the mouthful.
Richard had not yet even started to eat. When the bowls had been served, he had smoked half of a cigarette and continued to smoke as he stared down at his bowl. When he finished smoking, he turned the bowl a half turn and seemed to admire the noodles in front of him for a moment. Then, another quarter turn, the nodding look, but instead of reaching for the bowl a third time, he took the chopsticks placed on the counter and slid them from their protective paper wrapping. Then he broke the chopsticks apart and rubbed them lengthwise together twice. By this time, Tom had finished his bowl and was leaning on the counter to look at Richard’s ministrations. Richard then grasped both chopsticks in his right hand and poked at the pink and white piece of fish byproduct, pushing it down it the bed of vegetables that it lay on. Then he raised one noodle and let it back gently to the soup. That accomplished, he set the chopsticks on the side of the bowl and made a third quarter turn. He picked up the chopsticks and picked up a sliver of beef, turning it over, and replacing it from where he had taken it. Then he began to eat.
“What was that all about,” Tom asked, his voice cracking. Richard did not even look up as he brought noodles effortlessly to his mouth.
“Hey, Richard, what was that whole show you just put on supposed to be,” Tom asked again. He was drumming with both chopsticks on the counter. The mama-san’s quiet laughter had been replaced with a wide-eyed look of shock.
“Well, you know, I saw this movie once, and, well, it made sense.”
“Wh… What,” Tom nearly yelled.
—–
[up next, Buffy?]