The Rope Artist

1


When I was a kid, I got sucked into a tiny whirlpool.
     The waves were not especially high. Something heavy pulled me down, then my feet lost touch with the bottom and I went under, sinking into the abyss. Swallowing my juvenile body, the whirlpool did the only thing that it knew how to do: spin downward.
     It hit me that this whirlpool was a part of a gigantic ocean, as obvious as that may sound. Appearing out of nowhere, it swallowed me like it had stuffed me in a bag. Water rushed into my throat, ignoring my attempts to cough it out. I felt the whirlpool passing through my body, but a kind stranger scooped me up. My face broke through the surface of the water.
      “Whirlpool,” I told this strange adult, but all he did was shake his head. You’d think he thought I had pretended I was drowning. A neglected child, oblivious to all the trouble he might cause, trying to capture the attention of any adult who would listen. To a grown man, the water was embarrassingly shallow. The arm that he had hooked around me was suntanned, two big moles in a row on the part of his skin just under my nose.
    She vanished, I thought. When I was being sucked down by the whirlpool, in the middle of it all, I could have sworn I saw the figure of a woman. But no, it must have been some kind of fantasy, washing over me. A woman in the middle of the water, bobbing in the waves. A woman swatting her bony fingers at the waves that threatened to tear off her bathing suit like countless hands. She had to. Otherwise, her body would be seen by all these people. Her long black hair fanned out and undulated in the water. Through the blueness of the moving sea, her body was a distant flash of white. But it had vanished. Had I really seen her? I began to have my doubts. In the kind arms of the stranger, I was pulled out of the water to the safety of the beach.
     My head was spinning. Colorful food carts selling ice cream and soft drinks lined the beach. Watery blue and pink, in harmony with the colors of the ocean and the sky. Little by little, though, the palette of the landscape fell out of balance. It was like the sky itself had sighed at me. As if to say, You had to show up, didn’t you? As if to say, We were in perfect harmony. Then you showed up.
 
 
THE INVESTIGATORS CRAWLED across the carpet on their hands and knees. The one tasked with capturing pictures flashed his camera. It made a glaring burst of light; the afterimage lingered on my retinae like a bruise. A mass of red, purple and blue, floating persistently before
my eyes.
      “What’s wrong?” Ichioka asked. “This can’t be your first dead body.”
     I had spaced out. His tone contained an air of ridicule. But I had a way of smiling at this sort of thing.
      “Sorry about that,” I said, trying to come up with an excuse. “I’m still drunk after last night.”
     My head ached. Again the camera flashed. I wished I could escape the repeated bursts of light.
     What made me think about the woman and the whirlpool? I suppose I could have thought about it voluntarily. Every few years, I seemed compelled to recollect what I had seen that day, as if the memory eclipsed my consciousness. Last year, for instance, that night I stepped out for some cigarettes. At the edge of my vision, I felt a shadow darker than the rest. When I asked myself what it could be, my thoughts turned to the woman and the whirlpool. I moved in the direction of the shadow, but it was nothing, just a bar closed down for the night, no light behind the sign. It was well into fall, but a cicada clung to the telephone pole beside the sign, bent on drawing out a sap the concrete pole could never give.
     Again, the flash. My heart sped up. No, it had been racing this whole time. Since the moment I had stepped into the room.
      “We’ve seen a crime like this before.”
     Ichioka looked at me again. The stubborn afterimage covered nearly half his face.
      “The door was unlocked when we got here, but it doesn’t look like somebody broke in . . . it’s a little aggravating that his cell phone’s gone, but we found a couple of business cards inside his planner.”
      “Right.” Was my voice shaking? “I saw that.”
     The victim was a man by the name of Kazunari Yoshikawa. This was apparently his residence. The way we found the body, his knees were bent into a deep V, tucked underneath him. It had begun to smell offensive, so they carted it away. Above a section of the carpet where three dents, left by something heavy, formed a triangle, two insects flew in circles around each other.
     Maiko’s card was one of the few objects in the planner. My Maiko? Why did this man have her card? But there were other signs. The shirts and jeans hanging on the balcony. The excessive use of clothespins, bordering on neurotic. The peculiar way in which the socks stuffed on the storage shelf weren’t folded one over the other, at the ankles, but were tied in knots, like pretzels. There was vanilla yogurt in the fridge, caramel Häagen-Dazs in the freezer. Chamomile tea beside the thermo pot. All of her favorite things. Even the J-pop CDs that she used to listen to. Had Maiko been living in this place, with this guy? Is this where she had gone when she left me? But what about the body? This was too—
     Through the bruised colors of the afterimage, I saw a bed. Small enough two people would be sticking to each other if they shared it. Maiko and that man. That dead man, on that tiny bed, crawling over Maiko’s body. My heart sped up again. I saw a tiny black line in the corner of the room.
      “Did you check over here?” I asked the nearest investigator.
      “We’ll go over it again later. See something?”
      “No.”
     It was an eyelash. Blackened with mascara. There were no women in our party, so it had to be from someone who’d been living here. One of the investigators must have picked it up with his shoe cover and unknowingly left it in the corner. It could have been me. That black line looked like a slash mark, like a crack left in the scenery. A hole torn in the fabric of my life. My chest was thumping. As my fingers neared the eyelash, they shook uncontrollably. The second that I picked it up, I felt a strange sensation in my fingertips, through my gloves. Like I was making contact with an abstract notion, something you’re normally unable to touch. As I lifted this crack from the floor, my pinched fingers traveled hesitantly toward my pocket. What the hell was I trying to do? It made no sense to hide a piece of evidence like this, when they’d already discovered loads of hair and fingerprints. Hide? Hide what? I put the eyelash in my pocket. What was I doing?
      “Hey.”
     I heard a voice behind me. But no. No one was there. It was Ichioka’s voice, though. Yelling at somebody in the next room. Maybe someone had flashed the camera in his eyes. I took my hand out of my pocket. Holding my cigarettes. As if to show someone that I had just been
reaching for my cigarettes this entire time. I left the room, stepping on scattered weeklies and conservative magazines.
      “Togashi—oh, time for a smoke?”
      “Oh, no.”
      “It’s fine, we’re almost done.”
     I headed for the hallway. This was bad, I thought. Why couldn’t she have left it looking like a break-in, or a robbery? Left a window or a door ajar . . .
     Again a flash of light. I was back inside the whirlpool. What was I thinking? I was tired. I had to remember where I was. The residence of a victim. And like some slacker detective, I was ducking out to have a cigarette. Back to reality.
     Once I was out front, I saw Hayama. Squinty eyes. He was standing outside the fence of the apartment building, having a cigarette.
      “. . . Hi there.”
     Smoking with Hayama made me depressed. But it was too late. He had seen the pack of  cigarettes in my hand.
      “Sounds like the director of the first division paid us a visit,” I said. “But Ichioka told him that we had it covered.”
     Hayama gave me a blank look. Blinking periodically.
      “He said it was a simple enough case to handle on our own.”
     Up until that point I had been smiling, but I realized this was not something to smile about. My whole body went tense.
     Were the rumors true? They say that several years ago, when a female nurse was murdered, Hayama had declined to book the suspect, in spite of overwhelming evidence, and let him get away, just so he could push him to the brink of insanity. The man turned himself in, but Hayama told him to go home. He refused to acknowledge his confession, so that he could summon him repeatedly and force the man to tell him the cruel details of his murder of the nurse. The crime had been suspended in midair. Why didn’t the man surrender himself to some other officer, like at the nearest police station? Was it true the man had hanged himself?
     I caught Hayama’s line of sight. My fingers were shaking. They were my own hands, but he had noticed they were shaking before I did. Even so, Hayama said nothing about it. People say he used to belong to the first division. The only person that he cared about was himself.
      “. . . I guess a couple had been living there together. Wonder for how long.”
     I was trying to smooth things over, but he just squinted and stared.
      “The man was probably there a while,” he finally said. “But the woman moved in recently.”
      “. . . Is that so?”
      “All the girly stuff in there is new . . . Check out the carpet underneath the furniture . . . The marks underneath the stuff that looks like it was his are deeper . . . You can tell that stuff ’s been moved around.”
     Trash was scattered in the park in front of the apartment building. As if there had been some kind of a festival the night before. But my life had no room for festivals. The debris only got deeper, one day to the next.
     Hayama scanned the park and walked over to his car. His suit was understated, but it looked expensive, classy. Thing is, though, he didn’t make it seem like he appreciated a good suit. More like the suit was weighing him down.
     Ichioka came out of the apartment. Maybe he’d been waiting for Hayama to leave.
     Was it really the same Maiko? I couldn’t believe it. This case was way too cut and dry. Like nearly all the cases inundating our society. I had an awful headache, the kind that clamps down on your temples. She’s such an idiot. But who was worse? Maiko, or me, for thinking I was cut out to become a detective?