=Geisha in the City of Death=

=13=

What is Neena thinking, one wonders, as she stands inside  the aforementioned room, having closed behind her the door which, unlocked upon her entrance, remains unlocked behind her. It was the fourth door on which she’d knocked, and the last before Neena, confused and frustrated, would have considered turning and walking back downstairs to the lobby to ask at least one more time for the correct room number. Such an interval would certainly have provided Neena with the life-saving opportunity to rethink her reasons for being here in the first place.

She might have hired a taxi to take her straight home, or, more probably, being the romantic type, she might have directed the driver to take her to a late-night coffee shop instead. There she might have sat alone at a window table until dawn, staring out at the sparse traffic, a forgotten cup of cold black coffee set in front of her. Forgotten, too, the zero calorie artificial sweetener packets that her nervous fingers tore into pink confetti. She would shudder every so often at the realization of how utterly surreal even the most ordinary life can become with just a single impulsive choice. How mere chance can literally mean the difference between life and death at any given, otherwise totally insignificant, moment. (Ah philosophy!)

But this is a possibility, like so many others, that is not lived out, for at the fourth door, as we said, the last she intended to try, and even then tried only tentatively, half-heartedly, just for the sake of going through the motions, largely to eliminate any later possibility of the ironical reproach, “if only you’d knocked at that one last door you would have found it,” in other words, fully expecting failure, but doing so if only to confirm defeat, her small fist barely breaking the silence, she knocked.

Her knock was answered, not by a man looking guilty and afraid, or guilty and angry, or guilty and deranged, or any combination of such looks as she’d seen on the faces of the occupants of the previous rooms who’d answered her knock and finding her standing there expectantly instead of who(what)ever it was they feared and/or hoped to find standing there--well, I’ve actually lost the train of thought I was following here.            

What’s important is that the man who answers the door this time doesn’t instantly convince her that she’s knocked on the wrong door yet again. That’s not to say that he gives her the conviction that she’s knocked on the correct door either (of course not)—no, no, no! Instead his demeanor is mild, almost casual, and he speaks to her with a voice that she half-expects without quite knowing that she half-expected it, the dreamer’s dream-voice, the lover’s secret melody that corresponds to something deep inside us that we have always longed to hear.

It is a command which, like all commands, to one degree or another, is imbued with a seductive intimacy. This intimacy carries an authority quite apart from any of the usual apparent sources of authority—physical, psychological, political or economic; i.e. it is not brute force that backs true authority, lends it power. No, what truly ensnares and ensures that a command will be obeyed without hesitation or question, even when the command is unspoken, especially when it is unspoken, is intimacy (Not sure I follow this Pinker, but it sure sounds right.)

This is all another way of saying what should be plainly obvious by now. That it's not necessary to tell Neena what to do; she does it as if of her own free will, and so it is. She crosses the room, slips the handbag from her shoulder, and lays it upon the unattractive still-made bed. She rests the fingers of her left hand lightly on the pilled green spread, brushing the backs of her manicured nails across the worn chenille, and then bends her right leg and, with her right hand, removes one of her white sandals by its high heel (for it now appears to us that she’s wearing sandals and that the sandal is, in fact, white--a “bridal sandal”). She repeats this operation, removing the left sandal with her left hand, but this time with nothing to lean on, and only one bare foot on the floor, she totters, but only slightly, a whisper of a totter, to use a figure, a presentiment of the fall to come. (cf. Elias Canetti’s discussion about why we find it humorous to see someone trip and fall: in short, it reminds our animal brain of the fall of prey about to become meat--a fall which our “civilized” brain re-interprets for us “safely” as comedy).

Meanwhile, the man sits by the window, in a straight-backed wooden chair, his legs crossed at the knee, almost…

Well, let’s just go ahead and say it, demurely--but in that vaguely, yet distinctly European manner of being demure that has nothing feminine about it, that denotes a cultured savagery and suave butchery.

He smokes an elegant, hand-rolled cigarette while looking out the filth-splashed window into a Sophoclean courtyard of cracked asphalt, weeds, and shattered glass of which he can see at present only an irregular dark triangle, and this surrounded by a section of fallen cyclone fence, and a senseless concrete wall every inch of which has been tattooed with an indecipherable graffiti.

The room is totally dark, even darker than it is outside, if that can be imagined (of course it can!), and so there is a kind of ambient light coming in from the window—coming from nowhere apparently!—the abandoned buildings across the street, the broken lamps along the sidewalk, the all-night delicatessen and launderette that must exist, but don’t, the stars and moon one cannot even see through the torpid cloud of atmospheric pollutants that squats, so to speak, above the unconscious city like a malevolent gnome taking an oily black dump, blocking any easily conceivable source of illumination.

Yet in spite of this third or fourth-hand light, wherever, however, it comes (perhaps, it’s only mental light? The light of anxiety and fear? Imagination’s light? Dream light? What light is it that permit us to see in dreams, anyway? There must be a kind of dream light, no? I’m just thinking out loud here, Pinkster…), which somehow creeps into this room, making it at least theoretically possible to see, if see only poorly and with distortion, the man's face nonetheless remains hauntingly obscured, and this obscuration is abetted by several diverse factors, including the angle at which the man’s face is turned towards the window, the way the hand with the cigarette goes to and from his mouth, the smoke therewith exhaled, and, last but surely not least, the fact that Neena, as usual, keeps her own gaze averted, down and slightly to the left, a gesture that she has read or heard somewhere or other (correctly, too, I might add!) imparts a pleasingly suggestive air of coy and coquettish seduction to a woman’s general appearance--a subconscious sexual “come-hither.”

Of what she therefore sees and/or thinks she sees, Neena would affirm this much at least: the man is dressed in wool or tweed, some arty-fatty fabric such as that, a suit, of a personally tailored cut. He almost certainly isn’t wearing a tie, rather a casual shirt under his expensive yet sporty jacket (think hounds-and-hunting in the English countryside), that would be more like it. Upon second thought, perhaps not a shirt at all, but a sweater, a turtleneck, no, not a true turtleneck, but the kind commonly referred to as a "mock turtleneck." On the other hand, perhaps he is wearing the exact opposite of a turtleneck sweater, a long-sleeved, v-necked, mixed-blend t-shirt in an appropriately somber hue.

All of this exhaustive and exhausting detail is superfluous, an attempt to avoid or, at least delay, dealing with the most obvious and disturbing feature of the room: the noose that Neena notices hanging above the bed.

And yet, even as disturbing as this sudden apparition of the empty noose is, and it is, her attention is inexplicably drawn further and, irrationally, to the enigma of the black umbrella, which stands against the papered wall beside the man’s chair. This umbrella makes an appearance even though it isn't raining, hasn't rained in weeks, and there is absolutely no chance—according to the latest and most reliable forecasts—of any rain tonight or tomorrow, or any day of any week in the foreseeable future. The drought being a subject impossible for even the most self-absorbed (and can there possibly be anyone more self-absorbed than Neena?) of the city’s inhabitant’s, even its dead ones, to ignore, suffering as they are by virtue of the severest water shortage in the history of the city, so bad a water shortage rumors of imminent martial law are rampant.

Still, why this detail of the umbrella strikes her so powerfully, or, for that matter, engages her attention at all, under the circumstances, (ie. the hideous room, the waiting man, the rendezvous, the noose), why she should be obsessed or distracted by the incongruity of a simple black umbrella when there is so much else in this scene so much more incongruous, so much more nightmarish, foremost of which, most obviously, is the noose, is, it might be argued, the very essence of “nightmare,” as well as one of those quirks of human consciousness that can't quite be explained. Although it is likely to be explained (or explained away?) all the same as a psychological defense-mechanism against the unthinkable, the threat of massive bodily harm, the imminence of death, all of which, in almost every respect, the current situation certainly seems to portend.

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