She had long legs for a Japanese, at least for what I imagined Japanese women were like, and that’s why it took longer to dispose of her. I always thought of them as shy and submissive, short and malnourished, like the kids in my barrio. He told me she’d been a dancer. He talked a lot, more than I expected of a Japanese. Of course he could have been lying, they do that. Try to get you on their side, so you’ll understand and maybe feel sorry for them because they’re afraid you’ll rat them out.
But I’m always discreet, part of the job. Mama taught me that, how to be invisible, but always there. Do what is needed, nothing more.
The legs were holding us up. If we could cut them off, I said, it would be a lot easier. Funny where people draw their line, he could strangle her but not touch her legs.
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ he said. ‘You never saw her onstage. She was wonderful.’
Waiting for night, so we could carry the body to my car without witnesses, he told me about his life in a series of before and afters. Before meeting Michiko and after. Before becoming a diplomat and after. Before his son, Taiki, who’d been conceived in Newfoundland and born in Addis Ababa, and was five years old when he was abducted and held for ransom. Mr Oki didn’t go into detail, it was obvious what had happened. Taiki had been mentally impaired. Luring him away would have been easy.
He said animosity poisoned their marriage after Taiki’s ‘disappearance’. Still can’t bring himself to say that other word, although it hovered behind, years afterwards, tainting everything. The boy’s body was never found and Mr Oki blamed his wife’s carelessness, her fearless way of seeking out danger. She’d been a vain fool, a tramp. He wasn’t sure if her sleeping around began before or after that but blamed her anyway.
He resigned his post.
He got jobs consulting, whatever that means. They wandered the world.
‘Making money is boring.’ He says he prefers collecting butterflies.
This is one of those weird rich man’s hobbies I’ll never understand: hunting flying insects. Harder prey: try and catch the Japanese mind. But he’s being open with me. Cramming all his life into a few memories. Like he wants to remind himself––my life had meaning once. And telling me all his rich guy problems, all the cities they lived in just to escape the loss and as I listen I keep thinking––if only someone would drive up and take away my extended family. Even for a week. A marriage without children, stepmothers or abuelitas, all the money I could wish for and the chance to travel, seemed like paradise to me.
He saw it differently.
Michiko had not been an easy woman to live with. As he talks, I sweep up broken glass, a meter running in my mind. My eyes on the rug in the corner, rolled up into the shape of a woman.
It was only when they moved to New York that she stopped hiding her affairs, started having them openly, sometimes inviting her lovers to live with them. But by then he was beyond caring. It became a game, taunting him, seeing just how much he could take.
Everyone’s interested in how I make my living. Don’t I find it weird working with my mother? No, we’re a team: she cleans up, I take care of disposals.
I love my job and nights like this when I get out of the house.
We fell into it by sheer luck. Five years ago, Mama’s employer was murdered. When she found his body she stayed to clean up. Did such a good job that she was asked to clean more crime scenes. Gradually, people started coming to her with strange requests, things she did not want to do. So she passed this work to me.
When people come to me they want a professional. I talk to them. They feel guilty. Who am I to judge…half the time they just need someone to listen.
In my car, heading out to the Valle de Bravo butterfly reserve where he’s decided to bury her, he tells me that for three or four years, his first years of life, he’d been poor. He hardly remembers anymore what it was like. Dirt poor, shoeless poor, surviving on hand-me-downs, and when they had nothing to hand down, they would grab and steal. The youngest of five children, born in a slum on Hokkaido. One day a big black limousine drove up and a finely dressed woman stepped out. He remembered liking her silver-white hair, thinking she looked just like a queen, and the way the driver held the door open for her. And his mother meeting her at the door. All the children had been told to put on their best clothes and line up for the nice lady to look at them. Riki (older than Oki by only a year), Naoto, Araki and, the oldest, Ren. Oki was the only one who wasn’t dressed well because his little stained sailor outfit had been handed down so many times that it was practically rags now, but they’d scrubbed his face clean until you could see the roses in his cheeks and combed his natty hair and when the lady came to him and handed him a piece of rice candy and saw the joy in his face as he unwrapped it, he had no idea that it was him she’d chosen. Well, he’d been a cute kid, everyone said, a little rascal, but cute and he guessed cause he was the youngest, and so the least damaged, the most worth saving, that’s why she’d picked him and not one of his four brothers, who were more coded and set in their ways. He hardly remembered the rest or how he was told he was going to live with the lady, it all happened so quickly and suddenly he was in the car, sinking into the plush dark leather seat. He went immediately to the console island in the middle and started pushing buttons and found out the ones that made the seat vibrate and the ones that made the electric windows slide up and down. He didn’t even realise that his family had come out to wave goodbye to him until he started playing with that button and saw, separated by the moving glass, his mother and brothers standing at the bottom of the shabby stairs. He didn’t realise it was the last time he’d be seeing them, but his mother must have known because she was crying and his brothers all looked very solemn, but were fighting their desire to grab him back. He thought it was a game, like going on a ride at the fairground that took you high above, but after a few minutes of giddy spinning, deposited you on the ground again, returning you to your family.
He says, ‘And all I did was play with that stupid console and laugh as the electric window, like a motorized guillotine, moved slowly up and down. Off with their heads! I giggled. Amused by the illusion as the window sliced up and down. And then the beautiful lady with graying hair got in beside me and I couldn’t see them anymore and the car pulled away. It was the last time I saw them. Years later, I read in the papers that Riki had gotten involved in the Kudo-kai and was killed over turf wars.’
He says all this quickly and off-handedly, like they were distant events that didn’t matter much or touch him anymore, he just wants me to know he was poor once, too. Maybe poorer than me now. So what, who the fuck has the right to measure poverty? I wasn’t an unhappy kid. Sure, until Mama started cleaning, we often went around in rags. That’s all past. The thing is he has money now and that’s what matters most. I’ll get paid for my dirty work. I’m not complaining. Is a poor Mexican worse off than a poor Japanese kid?––but that’s the point of his speech, I guess, that we’re more alike than we think.
He takes out a map to show me where I need to turn off, but I know the place already. I drive out there some nights when I want to be alone. Pretend I have a job somewhere and instead I just smoke and wait for the stars.
He finds the place where they’d spent that last night. Explaining how they’d come down for the Festival de la Mariposa Monarca. Saying how magical it was for him. How they sat on a flat rock and he told her he’d named a butterfly after her. A Mexican Bluewing: Myscelia Michiko. Then he winces, remembering how the kids from the local village eat the butterflies. ‘It’s so appalling. With a switchblade they cut off the feelers then fry them up on a pan. Stick the knife through the butterfly then eat it right off the blade.’ He seems almost more upset about this than his wife’s death. Or maybe it was just that numb way he had of speaking, so I don’t know.
It’s hard to read his face in the dark.
Please, he says…
We are looking into the gorge when he asks me to do it
Shoving a roll at me. Hard to resist the swish of cash.
Trees papered with butterflies like stained glass.
And the moon and the big looming gorge behind him
and his eyes large and helpless
like craters with no bottom.
Says he wants me to push him into the pit with his wife.
Demián Luna
Santa Maria de la Ribera District, Mexico City
Related story by Mia Funk, a sort of prequel, published in issue n. 7 of TDM. https://www.thedreamingmachine.com/a-child-of-snow-by-mia-funk/
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