The Game in the Past. John Zeugner
this?” Moran said, suddenly steadying fighting down the beer and scotch.”
“Turko. You know Turko? Don’t you want a bath? I think you do. I fix it for you. I find you a nice one speaking English. You’ll like this one. Don’t you want to?”
“Why not?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“How much?”
“You pay me two thousand yen. I set it up. Then you pay what she says. Okay?”
“Okay,” Moran said. He set the envelope on the counter top, got out his wallet and took two one thousand yen notes out, self-consciously keeping the extent of his holdings from general view. Moran felt strangely in control, as if he were designing the sequence of events. He had heard about Turkish baths, but the direct action possible in Shinjuku seemed liberating. And the scotch/beer empowering. If he were in charge, what could go wrong? Japan always left him always in charge if totally dependent. Japan was the safest spot on earth. And if he perished here, who would be upset anyway? Only this fellow whose unlined face and features like those Moran imagined American Indians must have possessed for the Pilgrims, bespoke only eagerness to please. No simply taking the money and running. He brought back a slender, short woman who was, Moran estimated, about thirty years old. She carried a red plastic shopping basket and a large sponge. She smiled and her one-piece jump suit with the sleeves and pants cut off at the highest joints reminded Moran suddenly of car hops in Florida. Was she on roller skates?
No, indeed, although she fairly glided upstairs, Moran following, the tuxedoed fellow smiling and bowing with each of Moran’s backward glances. About half way up the stairs Moran saw the envelope still on the Registry counter. He stopped, abruptly wheeled and bounded back down. He jumped the last five steps, vaulted to the desk and snatched the envelope up. Suddenly he felt absurdly foolish. The woman on the stairs smiled at him and waved him to come back up. Moran looked at the tuxedoed fellow, then held the envelope up. “Life insurance policies,” Moran shouted.
He went quickly back up the stairs. She led him to one of about fifteen doors opening off a long corridor. They came into a small six by ten foot room with a narrow massage table against one wall. There was a second room opening off the first. This contained a tiny, rather shallow bath tub. She motioned for him to take off his clothes. As he took off each garment she folded each with exaggerated carefulness, fitting each into the basket. When he was naked she handed him a traditional Japanese towel about nine by twenty inches of thin almost transparent white cotton. Then she indicated he should sit on the massage table. He put the towel across his loins. She stroked the hair on his chest, treating it with wonder and, he sensed, a rehearsed satisfaction. After she had tucked the basket on the floor under the table, she turned back to him and in rapid-fire Japanese said something that sounded like, “Sucki nee mahn en.”
“Eh?” Moran answered, trying to ferret out the meaning from the sounds.
“Sucki nee mahn en,” she repeated quickly, business-like, implacable.
Moran knew his numbers, “nee mahn en,” meant 20,000 yen, more than he had. “Ni mahn yen, desuka?” Moran asked to confirm the amount and to get more time to figure out what “sucki” might mean. He considered whether she meant it in Japanese or English, or did it mean the same in both languages?
“Hai, so desu,” she quickly confirmed the amount.
“Takai,” Moran answered, drawing out the last syllable, a device in Osaka that indicated the price was too expensive.
She appeared not to follow that evaluation.
Moran felt acutely vulnerable. The door to the corridor had been left open and it seemed the room was designedly cold. Chilled down. Moran shift his thin towel protection. He remembered clearly enough that in Japan you didn’t haggle. You didn’t bargain. Crude counter-offers were considered insulting. The door had been left open he decided to settle such insults definitively.
“Ni mahn yen?” he asked again.
“So desu,” she answered automatically with, he figured, a tinge of impatience.
“I don’t have it,” Moran said in slow, hyper-articulated English.
She smiled at him.
“I’m sorry,” Moran went on.
“Sucki nee mahn en?” she said again, sighing.
“Iiya,” Moran answered, “gomen . . . gomen,” apologizing in his pidgeon Japanese.
“Okay,” she said, “okay. Take bath.”
She does speak some English, Moran thought. She drew a tub, scrubbed his back, insisted he wash his own genitals. Then after wiping him dry with the thin towel, she indicated he should lie down on his stomach on the table.
He eased onto the chilly vinyl and she leaned in over his right ear and whispered, “Skoshi mo?”
Moran did not have even an inkling what she was saying. “Eh?” he answered
In a breathy, exciting way she leaned in again, hot scallops of minted breath coming over his neck and ear, “Skoshi mo?”
When he didn’t answer she abruptly flipped the wet towel lengthwise down his back, over his buttocks, and started pounding the backs of his legs, then his shoulders. After a few minutes of this she leaped up on the table and began walking on his back in a way that signaled, it seemed, disgust with him. The door was still open. There could be no defense in this situation, Moran thought. He remembered that it was mostly Koreans who ran the Turkos. Koreans hardly succumbed to Japanese civility and pacifism. He imagined he had been set up. In another moment the enforcers would be in the room and with truncheons extract full payment.
She jumped down and said again, “Skoshi mo?”
“Wakarimasen,” Moran answered. “I don’t understand.”
“Okay. Time up,” she said. She put the basket up on the table and indicated he should get down and dressed. She stood quietly by as he got into his clothes and then when he slipped his coat back on she held out her crossed palms.
“How much?”
“Two thousand yen,” she answered in apparently perfect English. “Downstairs you may have tea or beer. Which would you like?”
“Beer.”
She preceded down the steps, guided him to a western style couch and then brought him a mug of draft beer.
“Thanks,” Moran said.
“Arigatoh,” she answered and went swiftly back through the doors from which thirty minutes before she had appeared.
A disaster Moran thought but at least his worst fears had been avoided. He was still intact. Perhaps she felt the same way. An absurdity of miscommunication. He would have to find out what “Skoshi mo” meant, or would he? He might savor the suggestiveness of it. Suppose he found it only meant “a hot night,” or “tomorrow is a holiday, thank God.” He quickly finished the beer, sensitive that a foreigner in the main lounge might inhibit business. When Moran got to the double glass doors and saw the tuxedoed barker on the street rushing up to new recruits, he suddenly remembered, “Jesus! The envelope!”
He glanced around. No one was in the lounge. He quickly went upstairs. He heard laughter from behind closed doors. But his door, as always, was open. He checked the basket, but the envelope wasn’t there. Nor was it on the massage table, or beneath the mattress, or in the bathroom. Not behind the rattan stool in the bath. Moran slumped against the frame doorway, he remembered carrying the envelope upstairs, remembered setting down some place, but where? He systematically examined the room again, knelt and examined the bath floor. Two absurdities, he thought, a double unfulfilment.
He went back downstairs, waited by the desk but no one came out. “Hello” Moran said strongly. “Onegai,” he said requesting help. “Onegai!”
No response. As he started to look over the top of the registry, he heard the door