It may have been a matter of pride for the boy not to make himself more formal—in any case he put on nothing over his undershirt. In the hot air, still even with the window open, there was nothing unnatural in his way of dress. The fair body, with no fullness of flesh but with rather a sort of botanical slenderness, sent the immaculate shirt down from the shoulders in two circles and thence over the roundness of the stooped chest. It was a body with a firm coolness about it, and no suggestion of softness. The profile, aristocratic eyebrows and nose and lips, was well formed, as on a somewhat worn silver coin; and the eyes with their long lashes were beautiful.
Honda could see what the boy was thinking.
He was still embarrassed about the flower in his hair. He had had no trouble covering the embarrassment as he received his guests, but he was spun up in it as in a swirl of red threads. And since they had of course had a glimpse of the girl’s ugliness he had to put up as well with misunderstanding and concealed smiles of solicitude. The cause of it all was in his own magnanimity. It had inflicted an incurable wound upon his pride.
Of course. One could scarcely believe that the ugly girl was his paramour. They were altogether too ill-matched. One had only to look at the frangibility of the earlobes, like the most delicately wrought glass, and at the supple whiteness of the neck to know that the boy was one who did not love. Love was alien to him. He washed his hands industriously after crushing the flower, he had a white towel on the desk, he was constantly wiping at his neck and armpits. The freshly washed hands on the ledger were like sterilized vegetables. Like young branches trailing out over a lake. Aware of their own elegance, the fingers curved haughtily, intimate with the supernal. They clutched at nothing material, and their business seemed to be with the void. They seemed to stroke the invisible, but without humility or petition. If there are hands to be used only for addressing the infinite and the universe, they are a masturbator’s hands. I have seen through him, thought Honda.
Beautiful hands for touching the moon and the stars and the sea, meant for no practical work. He wanted to see the faces of the persons who sought to hire them. When they hired a man, they learned nothing from such tiresome details as family and friends and ideology and transcripts of grades and state of health. It was this boy himself they had hired, knowing none of these things; and he was unmixed evil.
Look at it if you will. Unmixed evil. The reason was simple. The insides of the boy were wholly and utterly those of Honda himself.
An elbow against the table at the windowsill, pretending to gaze unblinkingly out to sea, under a natural covering of senile gloom, Honda from time to time stole a glance at the boy’s profile, and felt that he was seeing in that glance his own life.
The evil suffusing that life had been self-awareness. A self-awareness that knew nothing of love, that slaughtered without raising a hand, that relished death as it composed noble condolences, that invited the world to destruction while seeking the last possible moment for itself. But there was a ray of light in the empty window. India. India, with which he had had his encounter as he became aware of evil and wanted to flee it for even an instant. India, which taught that there had to exist in response to moral needs the world he had been so intent on denying, enfolding in itself a light and a fragrance which he had no devices for touching.
But his own inclinations all through his long life had been to make the world over into emptiness, to lead men to nothing—complete destruction and finality. He had not succeeded; and now at the end of it, as he approached his own separate finality, he had come upon a boy sending out identical shoots of evil.
Perhaps it had all been an illusion. Yet, after missteps and failures, he could congratulate himself on an ability to see through pretense. His vision, so long as it was not obstructed by desire, did not fail him. Most especially in what did not suit his deeper inclinations.
Sometimes evil took a quiet, botanical shape. Crystallized evil was as beautiful as a clean white powder. This boy was beautiful. Perhaps Honda had been awakened and bewitched by the beauty of his own self-awareness, which had sought to recognize neither self nor other.
Somewhat bored, Keiko was putting on lipstick. “Perhaps we should go?”
Faced with the old man’s equivocation, she took on protective coloring from her dress and began slipping around the room like a great languid tropical serpent. Her discovery was that the shelf nearest the roof was divided into some forty compartments, and each of them contained a dusty little flag.
Drawn to the bright reds and yellows and greens of the loosely rolled flags, she stood gazing up at them for a time, arms folded. Then, suddenly, she laid a hand on the sharp, gleaming ivory of the boy’s naked shoulder.
“What are these flags for?”
He pulled back in surprise. “We’re not using them just at the moment. They’re signal flags. We only use the blinker. At night.”
He pointed at the signal light in the corner of the room. Hurriedly his gaze returned to the desk. Keiko looked over his shoulder at sketches of ship funnels. He paid no attention.
“May I see one?”
“Please.”
He had been hunched as low as possible over the desk. Now he stood up and moved to the shelf, avoiding Keiko as he might avoid a hot jungle undergrowth. He passed in front of Honda. Standing on tiptoes, he took a flag from the shelf.
Honda had been lost in his own thoughts. He looked at the boy, arms outstretched beside him. A faint sweet smell flooded Honda’s nostrils. There were three moles on the left side of the chest, yet whiter, until now covered by the undershirt.
“You’re left-handed,” said Keiko, not one for reticence.
The boy darted a glance of annoyance at her as he took down the flag.
Honda had to be quite sure. He came nearer the boy. The arm was folded once more, like a white wing; but at each motion two moles were darkly hidden behind the hem of the undershirt, and a third was exposed. Honda’s heart raced.
“What a beautiful design. What is it?” Keiko spread out a flag of checkered yellow and black. “I’d like a dress made of it. What do you suppose the material is? Linen?”
“I wouldn’t know about the material,” said the boy roughly, “but it’s an ‘L.’”
“‘L.’ For ‘love.’”
The boy went back to his desk, now openly annoyed. “Take your time,” he mumbled, as if to himself. “There’s no hurry.”
“So this is an ‘L.’ Not at all what I would expect an ‘L’ to be. Let’s see, now. ‘L’ should be a murky green. Black and yellow checkers are entirely wrong. Heavier and stronger, like knights at a joust. A ‘G’ maybe?”
“‘G’ is yellow and blue vertical stripes,” said the boy, somewhat desperately.
“Yellow and blue vertical stripes? Entirely wrong. ‘G’ is as far from vertical stripes as it can be.”
“I’m afraid we’re keeping you from your work. Thank you very much indeed. I hope you won’t mind if I send candy or something from Tokyo? Do you have a card?”
Surprised at this rather exaggerated politeness, Keiko put the flag on the desk and went to take her sombrero from the little binoculars at the east window.
Honda laid his card politely before the boy. The boy took out a card of his own with the address of the signal station. “Honda Law Offices” on the card before him seemed to dispel his suspicions.
“You seem to have heavy responsibilities,” said Honda casually. “Can you manage all by yourself? How old might you be?”
“Sixteen.” It was a brisk, businesslike answer that deliberately omitted Keiko.
“Very useful work. Keep at it.” Each syllable formal and precise through his false teeth, Honda cheerfully motioned Keiko toward the door and started to put on his shoes. The boy saw them downstairs.