I nodded slowly, knowing what was coming.
“I won’t see you after this,” she said.
I went for a smile. It came out mostly wistful. “I know.”
“I figured out what I want from you,” she said.
“Yeah?”
She nodded. “At first what I thought I wanted was revenge. I kept thinking of how to hurt you, how to cause you pain, like the pain you caused me.”
I wasn’t surprised.
“And I resented you for that,” she went on, “because I’ve always believed that hate is such an unworthy emotion. So weak and ultimately pointless.”
I marveled briefly at how innocent a life someone would have to have led for such a philosophy to emerge credible and intact, and for a second I loved her for it.
She took a sip of her Ardbeg. “But seeing you the other day changed that. Part of it was realizing that you really did try to get that disk back and finish what my father had started. Part of it was knowing that you were trying to protect me from the other people who were trying to find the disk.”
“But what was it really?”
She looked away, over to where the band had been playing, then back to me. “Understanding what you are. You’re not part of the real world. Not my real world, at least. You’re like a ghost, some creature forced to live in the shadows. And I realized that someone like that isn’t worthy of hatred.”
Whether I was worthy of hatred and whether she hated me weren’t the same thing. I wondered if she knew that. “Pity, instead?” I asked.
She nodded. “Maybe.”
“I think I might have preferred having you hate me,” I said. I was trying for light, but she didn’t laugh.
She looked at me. “So all we have left is tonight.”
I almost said no. I almost told her it would hurt too much.
Then I decided I would deal with the hurt afterward. The way it’s always been.
We went to the Park Hyatt in Shinjuku. She was staying at the Okura but going back there together would have been too dangerous.
We took a cab to the hotel. We looked at each other on the way but neither of us spoke. I checked us in, and when we got to the room, we left the lights off. It seemed natural that we should walk over to the enormous windows, where we watched the urban mass of Shinjuku twinkling in the violet light around us.
I looked out at the city from my lofty perch and thought of all the events that had led to this precise instant, this moment that I had imagined and ridiculously longed for so many times and that I was now trying to savor even as I felt it slipping irrevocably away.
At some point I felt her looking at me. I turned and reached out, tracing the outline of her face and neck with the back of my fingers, trying to burn all the details into my mind, wanting to have them with me later when she would be gone. I found myself saying her name, quietly, over and over, the way I say it when I’m alone and I’m thinking of her. Then she stepped in close and put her arms around me and pulled us together with surprising strength.
She smelled the way I remembered, clean, with a trace of perfume that remains a mystery to me, and I thought of wine, the kind you wait and wait to decant and then hesitate to drink because afterward it’ll be gone.
We kissed for a long time, gently, not hurrying, standing there in front of the window, and at some point I really did forget what had brought us here together and why we would have to depart alone.
We pulled off each other’s clothes the way we had that first time, fast, almost angrily. I removed the baton from where it was taped to my forearm and set it down. She knew better than to ask about it. When we were naked, still kissing, she pressed against me so that I had to move backward toward the king-sized bed. My legs bumped against it and I sat down on its edge. She leaned forward, one hand on the bed, the other on my chest, and pushed me down onto my back. She knelt astride me, one hand still on my chest, and reached down for me with the other. She squeezed for a second, hard enough to make it hurt. Then, looking at me with her dark eyes but still saying nothing, she guided me in.
We moved slowly at first, tentatively, like two people unsure of each other’s motives. My hands roamed the landscape of her body, now moving on, now lingering somewhere in response to the pace of her breathing or the pitch of her voice. She put her hands on my shoulders, pinning me with her weight, and began to ride me harder. I watched her face, silhouetted by the reflected light of the windows, and felt some intangible thing like heat or current surging between our bodies. I brought my feet up to the bed and from the slightly altered angle of our bodies I felt myself moving more deeply inside her. Her breathing shortened and quickened. I tried to hold back, not wanting to let go before she did, but she moved faster, more urgently, and I started to go over the edge. A sound, part growl, part whimper, came from her throat, and she leaned forward so that her face was almost touching mine and she looked in my eyes and as I felt her coming and as I came too she whispered, “I hate you,” and I saw that she was crying.
Afterward she straightened but kept her hands on my shoulders. She dipped her head forward so that shadows obscured her face. She made no sound but I felt her tears falling onto my chest and neck.
I didn’t know what to say, or even whether to touch her, and we remained that way for a long time. Then she eased off me and walked silently to the bathroom. I sat up and waited. After a few minutes she came out, wearing one of the hotel’s white terrycloth robes. She looked at me but didn’t say anything.
“You want me to go?” I asked.
She closed her eyes and nodded.
“Okay.” I got up and started pulling on my clothes. When I was done I faced her.
“I know you’re doing well in New York,” I said. “Ganbatte.” Keep it up.
She looked at me. “What are you going to do?”
I shrugged. “You know how it is with us creatures of the night. Gotta find a rock to crawl under before the sun comes up.”
She forced a smile. “After that.”
I nodded, thinking. “I’m not sure.”
There was a pause.
“You should work with your friend,” she said. “It’s the only thing for you.”
“Funny, he’s always saying that, too. Good thing I don’t believe in conspiracies.”
The smile reappeared, a little less forced this time. “His motives are probably selfish. Mine aren’t.”
I looked at her. “I’m not sure whether I can trust your motives, after what you just said to me.”
She looked down. “I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. You were being honest. Although I don’t think anyone has ever been honest with me in quite that way. At least not at that moment.”
Another smile. It was sad, but at least it looked genuine. “I’m being honest now.”
I needed to get it over with. I moved in close, close enough to smell her hair and feel the warmth of her skin. I paused there for a moment, my eyes closed. Took a deep breath. Slowly let it out.
I used English to avoid the unambiguous finality of sayonara. “Goodbye, Midori,” I said.
I walked to the door and, habitual as always, checked through the peephole. The corridor was empty. I moved into it without looking back.
The hallway was hard. The elevator was a little easier. By the time I got to the street I knew the worst was over.
A voice spoke up inside me, quiet but insistent. So is the best, it said.
21
I MADE MY way through the backstreets of Shinjuku, heading east, deciding where I wanted to stay for the night and what I would do when I awoke the following morning. I tried not to think about anything else.
It was late, but there were small clusters of people about, moving like dim constellations in the surrounding emptiness of space: vagrants and beggars; hustlers and pimps; the disheartened, the disenfranchised, the dispossessed.