Sex and Murder Magazine

By Gene Hines

Life is a vanishing Spring dream.
It is a shame that I haven’t gone mad.

Raizan

I.
Hank White went to Tokyo to forget about the man he killed. Hank had heard the bump as his front right fender hit—it sounded like hitting a giant watermelon—and he had caught a flash of blue shirt as the man flew from the crumpled fender, across the street, and landed on the curb with another watermelon sound.

After Hank killed the man, the state bar took his law license away. Cocaine. Alcohol. Running over a man trying to cross the street when Hank came too fast around the corner of Costello Avenue. Any one of the three would have been enough. They took his law license and sent him to prison for four months. By the time he got out, Hank's wife—his second one—was gone too. Hank had no wife and no means of making a living. But he did, after thirteen years of law practice, have some money his wife didn't get.

So he went to Tokyo, where there were teeming millions who didn't know him, couldn't understand what he said (because he sure as hell didn't want to talk to anybody), and didn't care if he fell down in the street foaming at the mouth. Somewhere to hide, somewhere where nobody cared.

In Tokyo Hank spent his days in his hotel bed and his nights in cubbyhole Japanese bars drinking sake: booze that lets you drink as long as you like with no more effect than a warm feeling of well-being, until you try to stand up and walk. The Japanese really had something there, and it was the only thing Hank wanted anymore.

On his last day in Tokyo, Hank walked the back streets of the city, down narrow alleyways with tiny restaurants and shops with brightly colored half-curtains hanging over their entrances.

One of the shops was a used bookstore. Hank bought a book. A book filled with words he couldn’t read, a remembrance of his time in a city where he could live without communicating at all, except to find the bathroom and order a bottle of sake. A happy time, or at least as happy a time as Hank thought he would ever have again.

It was an old book. Hank brushed a light coating of dust from the cover and was careful not to damage the brittle pages. An ancient book with a woodblock print in the front and writing that flowed down the pages, from top to bottom, as if the pen had a leak in it. It was a curiosity, maybe a conversation starter, if Hank ever decided to have a conversation with another human being again.

The woodblock print showed people looking down at someone lying on the ground. Just a curiosity.

Hank took the book back to California. A friend on the Asian Studies faculty at Berkeley translated it. The friend said it was indeed very old and valuable; it would be nice if Hank donated it to the university’s rare-book collection. Hank said that maybe he would.

“It’s called The Corruption of Things and it’s ancient Buddhist doctrine,” the friend said. They talked about the book’s woodblock print; “Amazing, isn't it. It's a kusozu, a picture of a decaying corpse.” Hank’s friend held the book in white-gloved hands.

“What are the people standing there for?” Hank said.

“They're looking at the corpse, meditating on it.”

“What for?”

“Read the translation, you'll see.”

Hank read the friend’s translation. In his first reading, he stumbled through without understanding.

The courtesan Komyo was exceptionally beautiful and every man adored her. She required that after the moment of death, her body be discarded on the Western Hill. Everybody crowded in order to see her corpse…

The woodblock print showed a woman, wearing multi-layered robes, lying in a field. Men and women stood around her. Some were old, lines across their faces and their bodies bent over the tops of walking sticks. One was a samurai, sword hilts sticking out of his robes and his hair tied in a warrior’s knot. All of them were looking at the corpse. In the background, four black birds perched in the branches of a tree, watching the people gathered around the corpse.

The people looked upon the courtesan Komyo's corpse. The first day she was still beautiful, her face turned up toward the sky. Some came back, day after day, to contemplate the dead woman's face. Soon the face was purple, and then it was black and bloated. Loathsome things crawled in the ears, the nose, the eyes, and the mouth, through all the openings of the body…

There were days when Hank took up the book and its translation, and forgot to eat, and didn't go to sleep until gray light shone through the windows of his room. Hank wore gloves too when he turned the fragile pages of the book, thin and inconsequential as wafting smoke.

Sometimes it seemed that the black lines in the print moved, shifted some way. Sometimes it seemed he could hear faint voices, sounding the words of the translation when he read them.

Hank was strangely calm at the sound of these voices, they didn't startle him. He couldn't remember when he first heard them. He couldn't remember when he first saw the tiny shifting movements of the lines in the woodblock print either.

Reader, first observe the stages of a decaying corpse. Even the body of a beautiful woman is akin to the filth of maggots. A beautiful face quickly fades as flowers in the third month. The hair tangles in the roots of grass. Even a woman with graceful eyebrows, jade-like eyes, white teeth, and red lips is as if covered with decay and pestilence. In such observation, reader, there is separation from the body, peace and tranquility of spirit…

Wherever Hank was, he thought of the book. To be away from it became almost unbearable. He wanted to hear the voices and see the tiny movements of the ink lines, moving in the blink of his eyes. The flimsy pages of the book were the delicate membranes of something living. The black-drawn figures in the print made infinitesimal changes in their positions; the four black birds shifted in the branches of the tree, but only a little.

The body is filled with impurity. It is wrapped by seven layers of skin and nurtured by six tastes. But it is entirely odorous and defiled, and eventually putrefies from its attributes. If it is discarded in a field it swells and changes color and the skin is peeled. The love of a beautiful woman's body is strong, but when the impurities are seen all desires cease, there is peace and tranquility…

Soon the voices in the book told Hank that it was time to make his choice. The choice that would separate him from the body that held him fast, the memories that imprisoned him; a life of humiliation and regret. He must choose the vehicle of his peace, the instrument of his tranquility.

II.
He chose Mona.

She was standing on the curb on Legion Street.

“What's your name?”

“Mona.”

Hank took Mona up Reservoir Road, the book and translation in his brief case on the back seat, a month's worth of groceries in the trunk of his car.

“Oh, do you live up here?” Mona said. “Awesome.”

He shot her in the temple with a small caliber pistol. The bullet went straight into her temple and she died with only a jerk or two. The hole in her head was unfortunate but it was small and the bullet didn’t come out on the other side; she bled much less than he thought she would.

He took Mona to his cabin at Threadbare Lake. No one knew about this cabin, not even his former wives. There was no telephone, no internet, and no electricity; there was nothing. He didn’t even take his cell phone.

Hank put Mona on the dirt floor of the storage hut behind the cabin, stripped off her clothes and she lay naked.

He padlocked the out-building and went to the car to carry the bags of groceries into the cabin. He put the groceries away and made popcorn. When he finished the popcorn, Hank went to bed. But before he slept, he picked up the translation from a night table.

Attachment to the body is akin to relishing the droppings of maggots in a toilet and is the way of torment and unhappiness, the way that prevents enlightenment…

And the black lines of the woodblock print moved and the voices read the words with him.

Hank slept.

For breakfast, he fried three eggs and made toast and grits. A yellow blob of butter floated on the top of the grits. The food was warm in his belly. Then he went out to the front porch of the cabin and smoked a cigar.

He walked across the yard of the cabin to the outbuilding. The grits churned a little in his stomach. There was a faint odor coming from inside the log building. It wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t strong either.

He put the key into the padlock on the door.

Beyond the open door, he saw shadows. Streams of light slanted through the chinks between the logs, dividing the shadows and making brownish-white pools on the dirt floor. His eyes went to Mona, she was a dark lump.

Hank stepped through the door. He walked to the wall opposite the door and sat in the corner farthest from Mona. He sat, waiting for the penetrating light shafts to widen and brighten with the rise of the morning sun. The odor was a little stronger, but it was still not too bad.

By now, Hank had the translation virtually memorized. He sat in the corner, waiting for the light, and recited the words; the voices recited with him.

The rosy face has turned black and lost its elegance. The limbs have hardened and lie on the deserted field. Impurity of the body emerges…

The light came, painting the corners of the storage room in white. The buzzing of flies mixed with the sound of the voices, a rhythmic dissonance under the music of the words.

A corpse rots in a field. It is as if the sad, cold wind is mourning…

Mona’s body emerged from the shadows, bathed in the soft light of morning. Black specks dotted her white nakedness, black specks that moved and flitted from one place on the body to another.

Hank leaned forward, his hands on the dirt floor, and went to Mona on his hands and knees. The odor was strong now. Hank sat next to Mona and covered his nose and mouth with his hands. He took deep breaths through his fingers, making himself accustomed to the odor of Mona's corpse.

He wanted to touch her.

There were small purple places on her body, splotches that began just above where her body pressed against the dirt floor, places where the blood had settled under the force of gravity. There were flies around Mona’s mouth, her nose and eyes, and other flies buzzing around him, awaiting their turn to lay their eggs.

Still, he wanted to touch her.

She was not so cold now as she was when he took her from his car to the storage shed. The enzymes and bacteria, her own intestinal juices, were eating her; her body was eating itself from the inside, bringing some warmth back to her skin.

Hank closed his eyes, his fingertips touching Mona’s flesh.

In the way of a beautiful woman’s death lies surcease of pain and release from regret…

He cried. For the booze and the cocaine, for his wives, for his lost profession, his humiliation, for the man he killed. He cried for Mona.

The tears relieved him; he felt he might float upward through the beams of light streaming in the chinks in the walls. He wanted to stay, sitting by Mona, his fingers lightly touching her. But the voices told him to go. He obeyed. Come when we call, they said.

When Hank left the outbuilding, the sun was no longer slanting through the spaces in the walls, but standing at the top of the dome of the sky. He went into the cabin and picked up the book. He put the book back down. He didn't look at it. He knew that if he looked at it, if he looked again at the woodblock print, it would be Mona. That Mona would be lying on the ground, the people looking at her, the samurai with his swords and topknot. And the four black birds would still be there, perched and watching, in the branches of the tree. He didn't have to look, and he didn't.

The voices told him to wait. He waited for five days. If he moved from his chair during those days, he didn't know it. He neither ate nor slept, nor relieved himself, as far as he knew. He merely waited. The voices, speaking to him, filing his head with chanting music, singing the mantra of the book.

This corpse was a courtly beauty. Now her blood exudes from the putrefied inner organs and hungry dogs are barking. The sounds of tigers and wolves eating the corpse in the field are heard. Refine the skill of acquiring the image of the decay of a beautiful woman and the spirit will escape this world of sorrow…

Hank knew that he had changed, that after those five days his body was gaunt and a pale ash color. He saw the blue veins standing out in his hands, the bones of his hands like a skeleton. His mind was empty, except for the voices, and when he closed his eyes he felt a velvet darkness all around him.

The voices told him that Mona was waiting for him.

The air inside the storage room was permeated with the odor of decay. Hank went to Mona. He looked at Mona's swollen face, her eyes tightly closed. Beetles were eating the maggots that were eating Mona's greenish-yellow flesh.

Hank cried his happiness. Then he laid his body next to Mona's; he wrapped himself around her, melting his body and his bones into hers.

III
The woodblock print in the book Hank White bought in Tokyo shows a woman and a man lying in a field, the decay of their flesh and the white of their bones mingling together. Men and women, some young and some old, lean on walking sticks, standing around them. One is a samurai with his swords and his warrior's hair-knot.

The old book is on a night table in a cabin at Threadbare Lake. The voices of the book are silent, there is no movement, no infinitesimal changes in the woodblock print. Four black birds perch in a tree in the background of the picture—watching.