A soft swell of thunder, followed a few minutes later by a clattering of rain through the leaves outside the window. The garden flagstones drink the drops so quickly that a first or casual glance shows no moisture, no shiny music washing along the clay lines which divide the tiles. She hears the three notes as one, connecting by an inner echo almost as loud as the real notes themselves. A shakuhachi. A recording, most likely, too perfect and too thin. It’s a hollow sound and the cliché ‘mournful’ is accurate as well. Each breath is a tentative step, blue slippers whose delicacy diverts the listener’s attention as to whether it’s out of tune or not. The air smells of rain. More specifically, of asphalt under rain. A shallow tap, a hand-drum that hardly carries underneath the flute; it could be a ruler on a desk, beating distracted time.
As much as she wants not to be alone she dreads the sound of the telephone, no sound in all the world so out of key. There’s been a parade of pretty boys all afternoon. Doing laundry in their Euro briefs and rainy day sweatshirts. The ones who notice her call up cheerfully that she should drop by. They’ve got wine and more. She doesn’t know, she says, and shrugs and laughs. She’s waiting for some news.
–Get rid of the jerk and marry me! one of the prettier ones shouts.
And might she? Like unlucky Carrington, like twice as unlucky Mme. Tchaikovsky? She’s no idea where the music has been coming from all afternoon. The bottle of red wine seems to darken with each glass less. She scribbles the name ‘Kali’ beside the name ‘Japan’ and sees them divvying the page, ignoring or looking through each other. Not all words are fooled by a magician’s arbitrary matchmaking.
The hermit kingdom. The bronze bells of Seoul. The roof of the world. The Mongolian nightingale whose song is modeled on the snowflake’s pattern, the same brief range of trills and slides but a different tune each time.
The vertical characters, photocopied from posters and spines and painstakingly worked out on tracing paper, are as meaningless to her as an algebraic formula. But unlike the mockery of mathematics, insect legs rubbing black on white, she looks up and away from the crystal blur of calligraphy and is dizzied by the blank white walls of her kitchen, the spotless blue sky that floats outside her window. And then comes the pulse of slight headache which she credits to desire, as though her skull were ringed with a kamikaze’s silk headband.
For as long as she can remember, the center of the world has echoed to the east, a stone dropping into a mile-deep peripheral well. She knows that when she turns to look she’ll disappear forever.