“Last time I was here was in grammar school.”
Mariko had learned English exclusively from a year’s stay in London and a bevy of British and Australian teachers. I had always found her expressions amusing. She spoke with a faint trace of the Queen’s English, and her accent was good enough to eat.
“I went to a bread factory in third grade. They would mix the dough with these huge egg beaters the size of canoe paddles. I remember that distinctly along with the smell of gallons of wet flour,” I said though not knowing why.
We were driving across a concrete strip. The concrete strip straddled a shallow river bed. The mouth of the river met the sea a quarter mile over my right shoulder.
“Is this the bridge?” I asked.
She pointed down river, nearly smacking me in the nose.
“It’s not this bridge dummy, it’s that bridge.”
The bridge was of the wooden variety, a curved arch that looked like it had ripped out of an old landscape painting and pasted into the countryside.
“That was built over a hundred years ago,” she said. “This was built last year.”
She drove the car into a parking lot just off the road. The snow had melted since the last big storm though there were several dirty mounds and patches of white that had defied the sun. The lapels of my winter jacket flapped in the breeze coming off the sea. I buttoned the top button of my jacket. Mariko twirled her scarf around the nakedness of her neck.
“Nobody comes here anymore,” she said walking to the edge of the lot. Flat pieces of slate had been laid in the sandy earth to guide visitors to the temple, visitors that she had assured me no longer came.
The stones led through a forest of stunted fir trees that had grown into peculiar shapes. It must be the winds coming off the sea. They were all leaning away from the beach and toward the temple looming ahead in the February gloom. We were alone, her and I and the misshapen midget forest. It now felt comfortable to hold hands. Her hand felt very warm in mine, something like that of a child’s with a happy and active heart.
“Your hands are cold,” she said.
We rang the bell to attract the attention of the gods, clapped our hands and threw a copper coin into the box. We did not tell each other what we prayed for. Instead, we stripped off our shoes and sat on the tatami mats inside. The temple appeared as hollow and lonely as a dead body waiting to be buried on Christmas.
From her coat pocket Mariko pulled a transparent carton of tacoyaki, balls of cooked batter and octopus. She had stopped by a roadside vendor a few miles back who was cooking them in the hope that there would be a healthy crowd of fishermen and sightseers passing through.
“So this is the temple of the bridge builders?” I asked, breaking the silence between us.
“It used to be the temple for the fishermen because most people who lived in the village fished in the sea.”
“How did it become the temple of the bridge builders?”
“One rainy season, it didn’t rain at all. The rice did not grow here, so the local lord had to import the rice from his brother in a neighboring kingdom. They stored the rice on this side of the river. That winter all the water that did not rain during the rainy season came down as snow. There was a lot of snow, and the snow was heavier than usual snow. It was like each flake weighed the same as a stone. The snow broke many roofs so that the people had to huddle inside the strongest homes. Even the roof of the temple broke under the heavy water snow. Finally the bridge broke and, not only were the people cold but the people were hungry because they couldn’t bring the rice over from the other side of the river. It would be impossible to repair the bridge . . .”
Mariko stopped, her eyes focusing on another point inside the temple. We shared the silence with another man who had climbed the stairs silently, stripped off his shoes silently, and now sat silently with his legs folded under him on the tatami. The diffused light of the day reflected off his bald head even in the gloom of the temple.
“Monk,” she whispered, closing the carton of tacoyaki, sliding a rubber band over the lid, and sliding it back into her coat pocket.
To my eye, the quiet man did not look like a monk. He wore jeans and a t-shirt as if it were a summer day.
“The hotel is about mile down the road,” she said glancing down at her watch. “I think we can check-in now.”
__________
Everything is a movement from dream to dream, the spaces and intervals between becoming only shorter and shorter, the transit of self from waking dream to sleeping dream, the open and closed eyed sleep. Yet, once the cycle and song did cease in a certain place so peculiar and unexpected. I was told that place was not a proper place to fall in love, and anyway love is obscene no matter the place or time. I will sin to speak of it, or write of it, or whisper of it, or pray of it. I am sinning now.
__________
It was the kind of hotel that was built for lovers with a need for discretion. There were no chairs in the lobby, only three potted palm trees also of a midget size like the trees around the temple. In the lobby she fed a bill into a machine, punched a button for an unreserved room in the fashion of buying a can of Pepsi, and out from a slot popped a card like an automated erection.
We walked down a long hallway, found our reserved room, and made love in that room until the sun was setting over the sea. After showering, we pulled apart the bamboo curtains. It was a island-themed tropical room as were all the rooms in this hotel I learned. The window looked out over the sea. A cold cloud hovered over the secret hotel, and snow fell from that cloud in lonely flakes. The cloud did not extend all the way to the horizon, and the sun illuminated the world from its odd angle, turning the falling flakes into puffs of pink cotton candy. We watched it all, together in a room that was designed to make us feel as if we were laying in love on a beach in Tahiti. Outside the window in Tahiti, ice crystals were happening.
“You didn’t finish your story,” I said and remembered at the same time. The story felt like an unconsummated act.
“Where did I stop?”
“The heavy water snow had broken the bridge.”
“Well, the bridge is broken and no one can pass. It was decided that the monks of the temple would carry rice on their backs each day to support the village until the snow melted. The monks did this with great courage because they had to travel across the ice of the river in only their rice straw sandals. They had heavy loads but they did not fail the people of the village. It is said the children became fat on the rice the monks carried, and some people were even said to be healed of diseases by eating the rice. When spring came and the temperatures rose, the monks continued to carry rice across the thinning ice as the workmen began to make repairs to the bridge. It wasn’t until the middle of spring that the ice appeared too thin to walk across, yet the bridge had not yet been repaired. One brave monk who was smaller than the rest carried the rice across the thin ice until one day it cracked and the river opened up under him. It is said you can still see his basket at the bottom of the river and his ghost walks along the banks looking for it.”
“So this is a ghost story.”.
“No, it’s a story about love.”
__________
My sin casts a fiery shower of ember slivers out upon the still water. My eye only focuses on one, a bright one, though not a party to any special and fortunate constellation. This ember turns a dark red, like blood, only it glows so unlike blood and still much like it because as the ember falls underneath the surface, it still glows as I bleed. All the other flee from my sight, my mind still knows they are there, but I cannot know. They are merely dim to my eye, and yet they flash against the edge of my darkened vision, so how much more brilliant can my one resplendent sliver be? And the light grows dark from the distance and time, and I think for a long time that there could be no other. I think I still believe that, although I tell myself everyday it is a lie.
__________
To check out of this particular type of hotel, you need only leave the card key in a box in the same fashion you might leave a dollar in a church’s poor box. As we walked back to the car, I looked back over my shoulder as I often do when in public with Mariko. Of course, we were miles from the city so there would be no one here she or I would know.
Every story has a problem, and this is the point were we had ours. The ignition of her Toyota refused to turn-over. She tried one hundred times to cajole her car into starting, but it refused.
“Did you leave the headlights on?” I asked.
“No, they switch off automatically.”
I opened the hood and looked down upon the engine as if looking at it might embarrass it into starting. After this failed, we attempted to jump the car off the battery of the hotel groundskeeper’s truck, but this also failed.
“When does your husband get home?”
“This evening, usually the 9 o’clock train.”
“Okay, I’ve got an idea.”
Luckily the hotel was uphill from the temple. I told her to put the car in neutral, and I pushed the little car out the parking lot and onto the road. We rode the parking break down the hill through the forest of misshapen trees. Luckily, what little snow had fallen the night before had not stuck. We could only hear the howl of the wind and the roll of the tires against the pavement. It was our luck that there was only one curve in the road between the hotel and the temple as the steering was stiff. When we came to it, I held my hand over hers and helped her to turn the wheel enough to keep us on the road.
We coasted to a space at the far end of the temple lot. I had to jump out and push against the passenger door jam to bring the Toyota to a stop. She tried to start up the engine again, thinking there might be good karma swirling around the temple grounds, but still the engine refused to sputter or even turn-over.
“Can you call for a tow truck?” I asked, weary and feeling the chill on my brow. I had started to sweat with all the pushing.
She looked at me with a mournful smile and picked up her cell phone, calling a friend in the city instead, a friend from her grammar school days. The friend said she would be at the temple within an hour.
“What should I do?” I asked her.
“Just go across the bridge. You’ll see the station - just follow the tracks. It’s not far. There’s a train that comes by every hour. It shouldn’t cost very much.”
Mariko pointed down a narrow path running through the trees in the direction of the river bed. Somewhere below was the wooden bridge that had been broken by the heavy water snow and then mended.
“I’m sorry - you do understand?”
She smiled an apologetic smile, taking one of my cold hands in her two warm ones. I felt a sea, both wide and deep, apart from her.
“Remember your ring in the glove compartment. Just call me tonight if you can,” I said, turning toward the forest.
The air was fat with snow even though the wind had died. Where the day before there had been the sound of wind rustling through the pine needles, now there was lack of all sound. The river bed was dry except for a frozen stream, but I could see at one time the river had been much wider. The timbers of the bridge creaked, each step a protest against each sin. When I reached the mid-point, I looked back toward the parking lot and the temple.
Snow began to fall.