End of the Innocence: Secret Messages

  I met with Aoshi at a safe house where he was kept watch by around-the-clock police and medical staff.  It had been nearly three months since he was found.  It was only three weeks ago when he was allowed to leave the hospital to recover at a nice, secluded safe house not too far from Nikko.  Aoshi was invaluable to the Tokyo Police department--not only as their sole witness, but also to keep the media from prying to his fragile state and eventually break the story about the serial killer who had been hunting in Tokyo for the past five years.

    When he came into the living room where I would be interviewing him, he wore a white terry-clothed robe.  He apologized for his appearance and explained the doctor would not let him wear anything but a robe until the stitches came out from his chest and legs.  I nodded and introduced myself.  As we shook hands, I stared at the white gauze that was firmly wrapped around his throat.  I remembered what his throat had looked like when he was found from the photos: raw and bruised.  It occurred to me that those wounds must have healed.  I wondered if hiding those scars had been the doctor's or Aoshi's intention.  I looked away from him just to get the image and the thoughts out of my mind.  As if he had known what I was thinking, Aoshi smiled softly and touched his bandaged throat.  

    "Every night, I wonder about this the most..." he said.  

    "How so?" I said and took a seat on the leather chair facing his.  There's a small oak cocktail table with a clean porcelain ashtray between our chairs.  It was a comfortable distance for both of us.

    "I wonder who could hate me so much to want to kill me...then at the same time, why hadn't he finished what he wanted to do."

    "How do you feel when you think about that?"

    He tilted his head slightly as if to think of his answer carefully.

    "I don't," he said. 

    "You don't register anything when you see the scars and the bruises?"

    "I suppose not.  It's almost like I had these--" he said as he held up his left hand to show me his splintered fingers.  "...for a long time, and through some accident."

    A nurse knocked as she poked her head into the room.  I gestured for her to come in.  She carried in a platter with a maroon clay tea pot and two tea cups.  She smiled at me and when she set down the platter, she gave Aoshi a bigger smile and asked him if he wanted anything as she poured tea into the two cups.  Aoshi shook his head.  The nurse looked at me and I shook my head before she asked me same question.  A moment of awkward silence passed before she excused herself and left us alone again.

    "I hear from the cops that the nurses really likes you," I said as I picked up the tea cup.

    He shrugged.  He was quite an attractive man, and his lack of vanity toward his physical appearance was refreshing.  It did not take long for me to decide I liked him.  

    "How much about all of this do you know?" I asked him then took a careful sip of the tea.  

    "This?"

    "The police and quite a few doctors, some of them possibly psychiatrists in the bunch, must have spoken to you and gave you some information on your present...condition," I said.  "It would help me to know what information you were given and what you actually know.  The police sometimes inadvertently plant details in their subjects when they get a little excited during their interviews."

    "And your job here is to do what exactly?"

    "I understand that you could not recall the entire ordeal," I said.  "And for some reason, parts of your childhood."

    "So you're here to make me remember."

    "Do you want to?" 

    "I don't know," he said and looked down at his splintered fingers.  "I know I should have an overwhelming urge to know who would want to do this to me, but I don't.  A part of me wants to get even, and another part of me just don't care.  I was told I was raped, but that didn't do anything to me.  It was like listening to the news and hearing someone else had been raped."

    "You have no desire to recall your childhood?"

    He picked up his tea cup and blew on it a couple of times before he took a sip.  "I do.  But I don't even know what I wanted to know."

    "Tell me what you can remember about your parents."

    He took another sip of the tea and contemplated the question for a few seconds.  

    "I only can vaguely remember them being gone from my life when I was very young.  I was brought up by my grandmother.  I don't like her very much.  She liked to beat us when we first moved in with her."

    "Us?"

    "I had an older brother.  I don't remember what he looked like or what his name was, as ridiculous as that sound.  He had become something of a permanent presence in my memory.  Like a ghost."

    "Why did your grandmother beat you?"

    He thought about it longer.

    "Someone had explained to us once that we were conceived in sin.  I remember there were many crucifixes and figures of Jesus in each one of the room of the grandmother's house.  We were the children of the devil, she often said.  She would often hit us with a belt in front of this very tall figure of Christ she had kept in the biggest room of the house."

    "Religion creates its own demons," I said.  "Some times the innocents it would like to save, becomes its own martyrs."

    He looked at me blankly.  I don't think he understood what I meant.  I smiled and asked him to continue. 

    "Then we tried to run away.  It was a few months after we had been there."

    "Where did you go?"

    "Not very far," he said.  "The strange thing was that grandmother sent the police to find us.    I would have thought she would be happy to be rid of us, but she was quite adamant about finding us and bringing us back.  The police did find us and returned us.  We were severely punished for running away.  She said we were trying to unite with the devils.  Then we were separated.  I was locked in one part of the house and my brother would be locked in another part.  I would know he's there, or he would know I was there when we being given our daily beatings.  My brother would not cry out because he knew I often cried and screamed when I hear him being hurt.  But I can still hear the sounds of the strap striking him.  That sound was worse than the screams.  At least when he made a sound, I knew he was still alive."

    "You and your brother were very close."

    "All we only had were each other in the world that seemed to hated us for existing,"  he said.  He took another sip of the tea and this time, I noticed his hand was shaking as he held the cup up to drink.  

    "What happened to him? To both of you?"

    "One day, the beating suddenly stopped.  Maybe grandmother thought the demons were beaten out of us or maybe she just became tired of it, I don't know.  I never saw my brother again though.  I heard people whispering among themselves that grandmother had beaten him to death one day, trying to make him scream and repent to God.  And when he died, she was so scared that she stopped hitting me and changed completely.  She cared for me as if I had been her own child, and gave me everything.  I regretted I had never gotten enough courage to ask if she had killed my brother.  I believe she did."

    "Did you try to  verify this when you were older?"

    "Grandmother came from an established and respected family.  Old money and even an older name.  When she was beating us, the servants and the neighbors must have heard us cry and scream--but no one would stop her or report her to the police.  I don't think the police would have done anything even if they knew.  If my brother died, it would have been quite easy for the entire incident to be covered up and never investigated.  There were nothing left of him.  His name was never said again, as if he had never existed."

    "Do you remember where this place was?  Where you were raised?"

    "My papers said Kyoto, although I really don't have much memory of the house where I was raised.  I have strong recollections of schools I was sent to, because I was quite fond of them.  It was the only place where I didn't have to look a crucifix or a figure of Christ."

    "So you've become somewhat of an atheist because of your experience," I said.

    He laughed.  "You would think so, but not in the way you think.  I reject the way my grandmother viewed religion as a whole, but I did not reject the idea of God.  Not even a Christian God."

    "When did you come out to Tokyo?"

    "Five years ago," he said.  "I left with only with the clothes on my back, and the meager savings I had put away in secret for years.  I didn't even leave a note.  I just climbed into the first train that went to Tokyo and left."

    "Is your grandmother still alive?"

    "She died years ago.  I remember that because I had refused to go to her funeral.  One of her sons came to my apartment with a couple of the house servants and tried to drag me into their car to take me to the funeral."

    "Did you go?"

    He smiled softly.  "No," he said.  "A neighbor heard the scuffle and called the police.  I left with the police and spent the week over at a friend's apartment."

    "Have you forgiven her?"

    "What has that got to do with anything?"

    "Sometimes the inability to forgive someone for their crimes against you builds a wall inside.  It dams all the anger and guilt you might have because the wrong had never been righted."

    "So you think she might be the reason why I have no memory of my parents or my brother?"

    "Possibly.  They did leave you and your brother to someone who had treated you quite horribly, and left unimaginable scars.  Your brother's death was also a form of abandonment.  Often, when you refuse to hate someone, yet you do not want to forgive them--they become voids in your life.  It might have been what happened to the memories of your  parents or your brother.  It might have been what happened to to your missing memory of the entire month four months ago." 

    He looked down at his cup and said nothing.

    "The hunter inflicted severe emotional and physical trauma onto you, but toward the last week of your ordeal, he had come to care for you, as your grandmother had come to care for you after your brother was gone.  Your grandmother became kind as a way for her to repent for her fault.  A quick fix to appease her guilt and possibly to ease her fear of God.  The hunter became kind as a way for him to repent his own fears or guilt.  Of course, all of this is speculation.  I don't know what kind of relationship you and the hunter had developed that had caused him to change his mind about you."

    He looked up.  A pained look came over his face and it bothered me to see it.

    "Then I don't want to remember," he said softly.  "I would rather feel nothing and know nothing rather than--"

    He paused.  I drank my tea and waited for him to continue.  He didn't.

    "Have you forgiven her?" I asked him again.

    He put the tea cup on the table and sank back in his chair.  He looked up at the ceiling and said nothing for a while.

    "I have forgiven her for what she did to me, but I couldn't forgive her for what she did to my brother.  As I was growing up, I told her I loved her while I lived in her extravagant house and wore expensive clothing and went to exclusive private schools.  I whored myself out to an easy life....so I had to forgive her.  I was no better than she was.  But for killing my brother, no, I couldn't forgive her.  I told her I loved her although I hated her inside."

   "Do you want to forgive her?"

   "I want to," he said.  "But I kept on remembering how she would tie my hands to the foot of the Christ and whip me as she said prayers.  I had always thought that was how she killed him.  Beat him until he stopped moving, with the Christ looking down at him."

   He touched his bandaged throat.  "The hatred I had for her and even God ate so much of me that I don't even feel the pain.   That feeling was far worse than any physical pain.  It was like being in midst of your own insanity, and all you can do was exist in it."

   "What would you do when the memories come back?"

   He didn't say anything for a long time.

   "Then I learn how to exist in my own insanity," he said.

    "You have a rather narrow view on life," I said.  "It seemed to me that you found comfort in boxing yourself into corners.   There's always other options."

     "Of course," he said.  A small enigmatic smile appear over his mouth.  "There's always death."

   "Have you thought about death often?"

   "In the terms of suicide or just death in general?"

   "Either.  Rather, both.  Have you been tempted?"

   "Perhaps no more you have, doctor," he said.  "Make no mistake, as horrendous as my childhood sounds, I never really contemplated death as a form of escape.  I've always felt there's something and someone I had to live for, although I don't know what it was."

    "We come around to the issue of forgiveness again," I said.  "What about yourself?"

    He smiled brilliantly.  It was then I noticed his eyes.  They were a shade of gray that looked dark green with the slightest shift of light reflected in them.

    "Let's not talk about that," he said.  "I don't like it when people tried to dig too deep into my mind.  Especially a shrink."

    "Why especially a shrink?"

    "He might just validate how insane I really am," he said.  

    I smiled.  I spun the cup in my hands slowly, studying his eyes.

    "Are you wondering if I am a mutt?" He picked up his tea cup and took a small sip from it.

    "Not the word I would have used, but yes.  You have extraordinary eyes."

    "I was told by my grandmother that once in awhile, eyes like these appeared in the bloodline."

    "From your mother or father's side?"

    He shrugged.  "I don't know.  Grandmother removed and probably destroyed all evidence of my parents.  No one would talk to me about it.  Even in the family history archive, the name's blackened out.  I was listed as an adopted child."

    "Even now? Long after the matron of the family passed away?"

    He nodded.  "It really doesn't matter to me anyway.  I don't think the knowledge would have changed my situation much.  I am not sentimental to my past, and especially to the people I don't know."

    "You felt there's no need for some kind of closure to your past?"

    He laughed softly.  "Hardly, doctor.  I've had my closure long time ago."

    With reluctance, I terminated the session after an hour.  I had several meetings booked that morning into the afternoon.  I promised him I would return the next day and spend more time with him to hear anything he would like to say.  He said nothing and smiled then left the room.  As I was putting my notes into the briefcase, Utsuki looked through the door which Aoshi had left ajar and stepped in.  

    "Detective," I said.  "I didn't expect to see you here."

    He closed the door and took out his chewed, unlit cigar and stuck in the corner of his mouth.

    "So?" He said after awhile.

    "I am sorry, detective," I said and snapped my suitcase close.  "He would rather not go through with it, and as a doctor, I follow the will of the patient."

    "What do you mean he didn't want to? What did you tell him?"

    "I told him nothing."

    "Did you also ask him what's going to happen to others--"

    I held up my hand and shook my head.  

    "Emotional blackmail is not part of my job, detective.  And it should not be part of yours."

    He mumbled something under his breath that I couldn't make out.  He probably cursed at me.

    "However, I am willing to work with him and provide him with proper therapies.  I cannot guarantee he can give you what you want but he might be able to give out enough cues for the killer's profile."

    "How many bodies do we get to find while this is going on?" He said from the corner of his mouth that didn't clench the cigar.  

    I said nothing and put on my jacket.

    "What do you want?" He finally said, and sighed.  

    "As much information about where he came from and especially about his relatives.  He had an older brother whom he believed had died when they were very young.  Most likely before Aoshi was adopted into the Shinomori home.  Is there a way to verify this?"

    Utsuki took out his cigar and held it between his index and middle finger.  

    "I've looked into everything about him since the day we got him," he said.  "We traced everything back from what he had down on for his current employer, back to his school, and back to his hometown.  He was from Kyoto, and was raised by his paternal grandmother.  Very prominent and wealthy family.  He was adopted by his grandmother after his parents died in a car accident when he was five.  His uncles and cousins didn't have much to say about him except that he was a troubled child.  Actually, the word they used was 'ungrateful'.  After being put through some expensive and exclusive schools and college, he left Kyoto and severed all ties with them.  Even refused to go to his grandmother's funeral."

    "They gave no reason why he suddenly felt compelled to leave?"

    Utsuki shrugged and stuck the cigar back into the corner of his mouth.

    "You know how kids are sometimes.  They want to be their own man as soon as they can."

    "That was what they told you?"

    He made a gesture with his hand that could be yes or no and sat down on the sofa.

    "The kid didn't want anything to do with them, and they didn't want anything to do with him.  Uncomplicated relationship.  They haven't seen nor heard from him since the grandmother's funeral four years ago.  Not that they were too concerned.  He turned down his sizable portion of the estate left to him in the will and his share got split among whoever showed up for the cut.  They didn't seem too sympathetic when they heard what happened to him either."    

   "There's not many ungrateful people in this world who would turn down a comfortable living when it was delivered on a platter to them," I said.  "What about his brother?"

    Utsuki chewed on his cigar a little longer then bit off the end of it.  He spat it out on the ashtray and fished out a small green disposable lighter from his coat pocket.  

    "Don't know what he's been telling you," he said and lit his cigar.  "He doesn't have a brother."