The Recording

There was no light. That was the first thing I knew, before I knew where I was or what had happened to me. I was lying on something cold and hard, and when I lifted my hand to my face I could not see it.

Then I noticed the quiet inside me. For two years there had been a weight low in my belly, which the physicians could press on but could not name; I woke to it every morning, as if someone had sewn a stone into me while I slept. Now there was nothing. I put my palm there and felt only my sleeping robe and the body under it.

I was a daughter of the Minamoto. I had been ill since my twelfth year. The monks had burned poppy seeds by my bed and chanted until the smoke hung under the ceiling, and the last thing I remembered was their voices, low and steady, and my mother somewhere behind them saying my name. I was fourteen.

I sat up in the dark. My hair was loose, which it never was in company, and I gathered it in my hands as if someone might come in and see.

After a while there was a greyness ahead of me, where the dark was thinner. I walked toward it with one hand on each wall of a narrow passage. I had not walked so far on my own feet in two years, and I kept waiting for my legs to fail. They did not.

The passage opened into a hall larger than any temple I had seen. Galleries were cut into the walls three and four floors up, and at the very top there was a hole in the roof, and one shaft of sunlight came straight down through it.

Where the floor should have been there was water, green and still, from wall to wall. Pillars stood along the edges; at the foot of each one was a raised step with a line of red paint round it, faded but unbroken. In the centre, where the sun fell, stood a woman made of stone. She was three times my height. Moss grew on her shoulders and in the folds of her sleeves. Her hands were folded at her chest and her eyes were closed, as if she were praying.

I bowed to her. I did not know what else to do.

There was another passage on the far side. I stepped down into the water and kept to the wall, where it came only to my knees. It was colder than I had expected, and it smelled of old leaves.

I had passed ten pillars when something crossed the hole in the roof. There was a sound like cloth being shaken out. The sun went, and the hall was black for no longer than a breath; when the light came back, she was in front of me.

She was three paces away, bent low over the water, one arm reaching for my head. Her fingers ended in nails as long as my hand. Her mouth was open far wider than a mouth should open. Her eyes were still closed.

I do not remember climbing. I remember the red line passing under me, and my back against the pillar, and her staying exactly where the light had caught her, reaching for the place where I had been.

You will want to know whether I was afraid. I was. I hid my face behind my sleeve and told myself it was a dream, for if you let a bad dream catch you, you wake. She did not catch me. So after a long time I put out one finger and moved it slowly over the red line.

The light went out. I felt a sting across my fingertip, quick and bright, like the edge of a new sheet of paper. When the light came back she was gone, and my finger was bleeding.

I had had two years of pain. I knew the difference between pain you dream and pain you do not; and somewhere in that time I stopped waiting to wake.

I went on along the wall, down into the water round each pillar and up onto the next step. Seven pillars on, I stepped down, and the dark came.

"Now why," said a voice, "is a dead girl walking in this temple?"

It was a woman's voice, low and pleasant, with a little laughter in it, the way the older ladies laughed behind their fans when a young girl made a mistake. It came from very close, and from no side I could turn to.

Dead. I had known it, I think, since I woke and found nothing where the stone had been. It was another thing to hear it said.

"I know where you've come from, little Minamoto," the voice said. "So tell me. Did you like the life they gave you? Sitting where you were put. Learning what you were told and not a word more. A pretty thing in a lacquer box, taken out to be looked at and put back before you could be spoiled."

My face was hot. I was glad of the dark.

Did I like it? Nobody had ever asked me that. It was not a question anyone asked a girl of my family.

"So here is what I'll give you. A new start. The name gone, the box gone, all of it. You can begin again and be whatever you like. Wouldn't you like that?"

The water was very still around my legs. I thought it was because I was holding so still myself.

I thought about it. It would be a lie to say I did not. I thought of my brother's tutor reading the classics through the screen, and how I had pressed my ear to the silk so as not to miss a word. I thought of the hundred and twelve poems I had written in the hours I was allowed, and shown to almost no one. Those years had not always been kind to me; but the girl behind the screen had worked very hard, and I did not want her thrown away.

"No," I said. "Thank you. I do not wish to begin again. If you take away everything that made me, it is someone else who goes free, and not me. I am Sora. I would rather go on being Sora."

The voice laughed, a real laugh, sudden and pleased.

"Oh, you are interesting. Very well, Sora who would rather be Sora. Then you had better stay alive. She is fast. She moves only in the dark. She cannot cross the red lines. And she cannot see."

"Who are you?" I asked.

There was no answer. I knew it had gone the way you know a room has emptied behind you.

She cannot see, I thought. The next step was two paces off; if she could not see me, I could reach it before the light came back.

I took a step.

The pain came in my side, below my ribs. It was deep and cold, and it did not stop. Then the light came back, and she was beside me, bent so close that I could see the moss in the corners of her closed eyes. Three of her nails were in me.

She did not move; the light held her. I took the pillar in both hands and pulled myself away from her, and I felt each nail come out.

I did not know then what else she could feel. I know now. It was the water. I had moved in it.

I got onto the step. There was a great deal of blood. I tore a strip from the hem of my robe and pressed it to my side as hard as I could bear, and then harder. The pillars began to lean toward me and away. The light in the centre swung like a lantern someone was carrying.

The last thing I saw was the red line, very close to my eye, faded and unbroken.

The tape clicked and stopped.

Session 1, recording. Tape one, end of side A.

I sat in my kitchen with the headphones still on and looked at the small window over the sink. It was twenty to six, and the sky was beginning to go grey. On any other morning I would have been on the river path by now, going north, nodding to the woman at the bench. I had not gone. It was the first time in four years I had missed it, and I noticed only because my running shoes were still by the door where I had left them.

I had come back from 406 a little after three. Hayashi had fallen asleep in the chair with her head to one side; I had waited until her breathing was slow and even, and then turned the lamp down and let myself out. I had meant to sleep. Instead I made coffee and took out the tape.

I had listened to it twice.

You will want to know why. I had been in the room when she said all of it, and I had my notes. But notes are what you think happened, and a tape is what did happen; I learned a long time ago that the two are rarely the same. I wanted to hear her without her face in front of me. Her face was very good at its job.

So I listened, and I wrote down what I heard.

"You will want to know whether I was afraid." She had said that looking straight at me. On the tape it sounds like a line in a story. In the room it had been a question, and she had waited, very briefly, to see whether I would nod. I had nodded.

"I know now. It was the water." Past tense for everything else, and then that. I know now. As if she had gone back and checked.

And there was the pause.

It came after my finger was bleeding. Eleven seconds of nothing but the hum of the recorder and, very faintly, the traffic on Oike-dōri three floors down. I timed it on my phone. Then I rewound and timed it again. Eleven seconds.

I had not thought about it in the room; clients stop all the time. But sitting in my kitchen before six in the morning, I remembered what she had been doing with her hands during those eleven seconds. Her right thumb was pressed hard against the tip of her first finger, the way you hold a small cut closed until it stops. She did not look down. When she began talking again, she moved her hand back to her knee.

I wrote in my notebook: 11 sec. Finger. Right hand. I looked at it for a while. Then, under it, I wrote: Why does it still hurt?

I had no answer. I am not sure I wanted one yet.

The other thing I noticed was what was not on the tape. She had said I killed my brother in the first minute of the session, and in an hour of story her brother appeared once, as the boy whose tutor she listened to through a screen. That was all. There was no name and no face; no reason to kill him, and no sign of wanting to.

You do not put a gun on the table in the first scene unless you mean to use it. She knew that. She had put it there and left it, and gone on talking about something else, and I had spent the whole night thinking about it anyway. That, I realised, was the point.

I took the headphones off and washed my cup and put the tape back in its case. On the label I wrote the date and her initials, as I would for anyone.

Then I got a clean shirt, and some bread and a bottle of water from the kitchen, and went down the corridor to 406.

She was awake. I heard her go still when the lock turned.

I put the mask on in the kitchen, switched it on, and went through. The lamp was still low. She had her eyes closed against it, and the blindfold lay on the table where I had left it. I did not put it back on her. There was no need; she had seen everything in that room there was to see.

"I've brought you something to eat," I said.

She did not answer. I tore the bread into small pieces and held them where she could reach, one at a time, and after the third she began to take them. Then water through the straw. She drank a great deal. I waited until she had finished.

"I have to go out," I said. "I'll be back tonight. Nobody else will come in. You're safe here."

"Safe," she said. It came out rough. She almost laughed again, and did not.

I stood and picked up the empty bottle. I was at the door when she spoke.

"They're not mine."

I stopped. I did not turn round, for turning round would have told her it mattered.

"The photos," she said. "Whatever you think they are. They're not mine. I didn't take them. I was keeping them for someone."

I waited.

"If you delete them, there's nothing left," she said. "Do you understand? That's the only place they are. If they're gone, it's like it never happened."

I stood there with my back to her and the bottle in my hand for a long time; long enough that she might have thought I had stopped listening. I had not. I was thinking that whoever hired me had not wanted a woman's private pictures taken off her phone. They had wanted something taken out of the world.

What was on that phone? And whose was it, that she would sit three nights in that chair and still not give me the password?

"Who were you keeping them for?" I said.

She did not answer. When I looked back she had shut her eyes again, and her mouth was pressed into a line.

That was all right. It was more than I had had at one o'clock. I am a patient man; I told you that.

"Tonight," I said. I went out and locked the door, and walked back down the corridor past my own flat, and down the stairs, and out into the morning.

At eight fifty-nine I was standing at the window of my clinic on Oike-dōri, watching the loading bay across the street, when the black car pulled in.

She bowed at the door exactly as she had the day before, slow and low, and sat in the same chair and arranged her dress with both hands. It was navy again, and the same white cord was in her hair. If I had not known it was Tuesday, I could not have told you.

"You look well, Doctor," she said.

I did not. I had seen myself in the lift mirror. But I thanked her, and turned on the recorder, and the red light came on, and she watched it for a moment the way she had before.

I expected her to go back to the temple. I had prepared for it; I had my notebook open at a page headed Session 2, with three questions under it, and the first of them was about her brother.

She did not go back to the temple.

Session 2, recording, 09:03

I thought today I would tell you about me. Not what happened to me; me. You will need that first, or the rest will not make sense.

I grew up in a house with a great many screens. I am sure you know what I mean, but I do not think you can really know it. Everything a girl of my family did, she did behind something. Bamboo blinds, silk curtains, folding screens painted with cranes. When a guest came, I sat behind a curtain and he sat on the other side, and we spoke without seeing each other. When I went out, which was almost never, I went in a closed carriage with the blinds down.

So I learned to see people without seeing them.

You would be surprised how much there is. A man's voice tells you whether he is lying before his words do; it goes a little higher, or a little too smooth. You can hear the way he sits. Whether he shifts. Whether his sleeves rustle when he talks about money. You can see the shape of him through a thin curtain, if the lamp is on his side, and the shape tells you whether he is leaning in to listen or leaning back to be admired.

By the time I was nine I could sit behind a screen and tell my mother which of my father's guests were afraid of him, and which of them wanted something, and which had already been promised it by somebody else. She thought it was a game. She laughed and told me not to be clever. She did not stop asking, though.

I wanted to be a scholar. You will have guessed that. I learned to read Chinese characters from my brother's practice sheets after he had thrown them away; I would take them out of the basket at night and copy them by the light of one lamp, very small, so that the paper would last. I wrote poems, and I was proud of them. I was prouder still of being able to see what people wanted before they said it.

That is the thing I would like you to understand, Doctor. I was not a sweet child who was made into something else. I was always like this. The screens did not make me. They only taught me where to stand.

I stopped writing about halfway through that. I did not notice I had stopped until she did.

"You have put your pen down," she said.

"I was listening."

"I know. It is nicer when you do." She smiled. "Most people only listen when they are frightened."

She went on through the morning. She told me about the smell of the ink stick her father had let her use once, and never again. About a cousin who tried to court her by sending bad poems every third day. About sitting on the veranda in the rain with her feet under her skirts, listening to the drops on the roof and counting them, to see whether she could count faster than they fell. She could not.

Her brother came into it only at the edges. A boy's voice on the other side of a wall. Sheets of paper in a basket. Once, a pair of sandals left outside her door that she knew were his by the way the straps had been tied. Never his name.

I asked about him once, gently, in the afternoon.

"In the right order, Doctor," she said.

It was twenty past two when she stopped in the middle of something and looked at me.

"When is your birthday?"

It is a question clients ask. They want something personal, something to hold on to. I usually turn it back on them. Why do you want to know? It works almost every time.

I did not turn it back. I do not know why. I was tired, and she had asked it so simply, as if she were asking the time.

"Tomorrow, as it happens," I said.

"Thirty," she said.

I had not told her my age. It is not on the brass plate or on my website. It is on my papers, if anyone looks; and Kirishima Makoto's papers say he was born thirty years ago tomorrow. That part happens to be true. It is one of the few things about him that is.

"That's right," I said.

"Then I will bring you something." She folded her hands. "It is not every day a man turns thirty. My father said it was the age a man stops being given things and starts being expected to give them. He said it as a warning. I always thought it sounded like a relief."

At three minutes to three I turned off the recorder. She watched the red light go out.

She stood and bowed, and I stood, and I walked her to the door. She reached the handle first, as before, and held it without turning it.

I waited for the question. I think some part of me had been waiting for it all day.

It did not come. She only looked at me for a moment with that same pleasant, patient face, the way you look at someone you are fond of who has not been taking care of himself.

"You should try to sleep tonight, Doctor," she said. "It is very hard to sleep with a heater that ticks like that."