=Geisha in the City of Death=

=6=

There are times when Neena almost believes she can see God. The last time this happened, someone was holding her head under water and she was nearly out of oxygen.

She remembers coming to an unfinished corridor and peering around the corner into a damp twilight of scaffoldings, leaky pipes, carts piled with debris.

She paused, listening closely.

She could hear the intermittent sound of a lone hammer, hollow, metallic, apathetic, as if a forgotten mechanic were working on a project that has been long abandoned.

“This is the end of the world,” she remembers thinking.

What could be a better image of it? The unseen laborer, working alone, on a perpetually unfinished pier that extends further and further into oblivion, all in the hopes of seeing…nothing.

"Hello," she called out, unfamiliar with her own voice.

At the end of the world her voice had a raw, unabashed meatiness to it that embarrassed her. There was need in it, a desperate hope for an answer.

“Hello,” she called again.

She closed her eyes and concentrated, listening for an answer. She trembled with tension, like a ballerina on the toes of one leg.

She was almost afraid that an answer would come.

But she needn’t have feared.

There was no answer, nothing but the last syllable of her own question repeated, over and over, but each time at a less and less audible frequency, and with more and more space between each repetition, almost like the cliché of an echo depicted in a cartoon.

The sound of her own unanswered voice continued to dilute itself, homeopathically, until there was nothing left but silence, a distilled and super-potent silence—a silence that heals itself seamlessly after each disturbance.

Then the hammering started again, exactly as before.

She recalls something similar having taken place. She was standing beside a silver casket, closed, next to an open grave. She was the last mourner, after all the others have drifted away.

It was a sunny, but chilly November afternoon.

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