Heindel was known as Hidell, for no special reason.
He went to the movies and the library. Nobody knew the tough time he had reading simple English sentences. He could not always get a fixed picture of the word in front of him. Writing was even tougher. When he was tired it was all he could do to spell five straight words right, to spell a single small word without mixing up the letters.
It was a secret he'd never tell.
He had a liberty card, a gaudy Hawaiian shirt that made him feel like an intruder in his own skin, and a window seat on the train to Tokyo.
It was Reitmeyer who'd arranged the date, explaining to Lee that all he had to do was show up at the right time and place and flash his heartwarming American smile. A thousand forbidden pleasures would be his.
Welcome to JP-land of sliding doors and slant-eyed whores.
He walked invisibly through layers of chaos, twilight Tokyo. He walked for an hour, watching neon lights pinch through the traffic haze, with English words jumping out at him, terrific terrific, under the streetcar cables, past the noodle shops and bars. He saw Japanese girls walking hand in hand with U.S. servicemen, six doggie bakers and cooks by the look of them, all wearing jackets embroidered with dragons. It was 1957 but to Lee these men had the style of swaggering warriors, combat vets taking whatever drifted into meathook reach.
He walked through mazes of narrow streets mobbed with shoppers. He was remarkably calm. There was something about being off-base, away from his countrymen, out of America, that took the edge off his wariness, eased his rankled skin.
He checked the piece of paper with her name on it.
Lamps were lit along the alleyways. He saw a legless man with an accordion, his torso set on weird metal supports, like a Singer sewing machine-an ideogram sign flapping on his chest.
He found Mitsuko all right, a baby-face girl, sort of formless, wearing a skirt and white blouse and a handkerchief on her head, waiting by a sign that read soldiers access, the rendezvous point as devised by Reitmeyer, on a street of cheap arcades.
She took him to a pachinko parlor, a long narrow room full of people pressed against upright machines. They were trying to maneuver a steel ball into a little hole. The machines made a factory din, like a stamping plant maybe. When she found a free machine, she pressed a lever that released the ball. This was the signal for nirvana or whatever they call the absolute state. She stared into the gray circle, watching the ball go round and round. People pushed through the room, students, old women in kimonos, men who looked educated, with high-paying jobs, all waiting for machines. They were three-deep in some places, patient in the noise and hanging smoke as if nothing hit upon the skin but the racing gray ball.
He checked the paper with her name.
Two hours later they were in a room with sliding panels and straw mats. Something told him the place wasn't hers. It looked imitation Japanese. A silk roll hung from the wall, except it probably wasn't silk. He caught a glimpse of a pinup calendar above a dressing table, some bars of Lifebuoy soap. She took off her open-toed shoes. It was a little hard to believe he was on the legendary verge of getting laid. The subject of a million words, noises, laughs and shouts in the sandlots and barracks of his experience. He felt a stillness, looking at his first naked girl, grown-up, outside a magazine. There was something serious about a woman nude. He felt different, serious, still. He was part of something streaming through the world. Then her hand was in his pants, matter-of-fact, like she was turning on a tap. He took off his clothes, folded the shirt with the windswept palms. The moment had been waiting to happen. The room had been here since the day he was born, waiting for him, just like this, to walk in the door. It was just a question of walking in the door, entering the stream of things.
Was he supposed to give her money? Reitmeyer hadn't said. He saw himself having sex with her, He was partly outside the scene. He had sex with her and monitored the scene, waiting for the pleasure to grip him, blow over him like surf, bend the trees. He thought about what was happening rather than saw it, although he saw it too.
He had a duty weekend coming up but was back in Tokyo the first possible chance. It turned out she took his money only to play pachinko. She was a pachinko fool, a total addict of the form, standing for hours in a raincoat that wasn't hers. He'd go out, come back, go out again, checking the strip joints and cowboy bars. He'd stand near the entrance and watch her play. People pressed into the room. Now and then somebody won a prize, a packet of leaf-shaped sweets. He watched her raise her right foot behind her, absently scratch the other ankle.
Strange days in the fabulous East.
This time she took him to a room in a large apartment block set near factories and oil-storage tanks. The air smelled of sulfur and tidal scum. He could see a river from the window but didn't know what it was called. She told him she was thirty-four years old. Strange days and nights. Some time after they were dressed again, a man came in, moving through the shadows, young, lean, familiar with the room, seeming to take Lee for granted, acting as if he knew everything Lee had ever said and done. He was looking for his raincoat.
Lee never understood the man's connection to Mitsuko. A brother, cousin, lover, a handler or protector of some kind, although not a pimp (if she didn't take money). Lee saw him several times over the next couple of weeks. He was an interesting guy, last name Konno, with wavy hair and dark glasses. He chain-smoked Lucky Strikes, knew American jazz, names that Lee was at a loss to identify. They talked politics. They drank beer and gin, which Lee brought to the room but only sipped to be polite. Konno's English was okay, better than rudimentary. He wore shabby clothes and shoes and a black silk scarf, always, outdoors and in.
The autumn damp took hold. Lamplight shimmered in networks of alleys crowded with wooden houses and shops. They'd taken away his American space. Not that it mattered. His space had been nothing but wandering, a lie that concealed small rooms, TV, his mother's voice never-ending. Louisiana, Texas were lies. They were aimless places that swirled around the cramped rooms where he always ended up. Here the smallness had meaning. The paper windows and box rooms, these were clear-minded states, forms of well-being.
Mitsuko took him into the land of nudo. Billboards, photographs, leaflets, lamppost signs, nudes in booths and theaters, neon and paper nudes, models to be photographed, nudes arrayed in colored lights, strangely pale beneath the fake rose glow. Rain-slick streets like the streets in his reveries, movie shadows and dark-coated men, Mitsuko's little pouting mouth, her language of sighs and hints, reverie of stillness, perfection of desire, her legs slightly parted, arms at her sides.
She did none of the things Reitmeyer had said she'd do, and Ozzie didn't ask.
In the bubble he worked in a hot glow, marking intercept paths, checking the oscilloscope for traces of electron motion that represented air traffic within a given sector.
Through the all-night watches he engaged officers in conversation, asked them questions about world affairs. It turned out he knew more than they did. They didn't know the basic things. Names of leaders, types of political systems. The younger officers were the worst informed, Joe College types, which served to justify some old suspicion of his about the way things work.
A crackling voice requesting winds aloft at eighty thousand feet, a voice outside the dome of night, beyond the known limits.
There were bars and bar girls near the base but he preferred going to Tokyo, alone, where he visited Konno in the huge development near the factories. The coppery smog was so thick it obscured the setting sun. Konno smoked Luckies and talked about the struggle to exist. He worked only part-time, an elevator operator, because the country was awash in college graduates. Sometimes Mitsuko showed up and she and Ozzie made love to Thelonious Monk records, weird plinking and bonging blues, sort of Japanese come to think of it. Other times Konno took him to the Queen Bee, a nightclub with elaborate floor shows and gorgeous women drifting through the smoke like one hundred slit-skirt versions of a Howard Johnson's hostess. It occurred to Lee that he ought to wonder what an elevator man and a pfc. were doing in a place like this.