The doorman pockets Kern’s money without counting it, hands him a ticket embossed with a silvery holographic samurai, sends him in.
A narrow, dimly lit concrete stairway leads down into a welcome heat and the muted pulse of Russian heavy metal. At the bottom a door opens onto a black abyss full of roaring music, but as his eyes adjust he sees the steep slope of tiered seats, lit only by the fairy light of countless phones, and now a glow from the massive screens mounted over the steel cage at the nadir of the arena.
The music stops and a fierce old Japanese man appears on the screens in what even Kern can see is a good suit, but under the tailoring he, like the doorman, is a plain old crim. He’s sitting behind a big desk in what looks like a lawyer’s office; Kern is too busy picking his way down the stairs to read many of the subtitles but the gist is that Final Sword embodies the traditional values of Japan.
His seat is on the aisle four rows from the bottom and even for just one fight it seems like good value for money. The bloodstains on the cage floor remind him of his pants. Almost everyone is Asian and looks rich and they’re all absorbed in their phones; in the seat in front of him is a white man with cropped salt-and-pepper hair, so close that Kern can smell his boozy cologne and can’t help seeing that he’s looking at a betting website offering odds on the winning technique, things like head cut, wrist cut, throat shot, disarm and, worryingly, messy.
The arena goes dark and silent, and then string music swells as the screens show Tadao, bare to the waist, holding a katana and glowering at the camera. His stats come up: twenty-nine years old, fourth dan in kendo, a lieutenant in the Tokyo municipal police. Children in a kendo dojo, chanting metronomically as their bamboo swords rise and fall, then still images of Tokyo University, Tadao in a Self-Defense Force uniform shaking hands with an epauletted officer, a young woman in a tiny room kneeling beside a vase with a single peony.
The second fighter is Sanzo Vola, foil fencer, thirty-two, Italian, an Olympic silver medalist. A montage shows him in a fencing club lunging acrobatically at a frantically backpedaling opponent, then images of ancient churches, of a walled town on a dusty hill, of fencing tournaments in huge conference halls.
Neither fighter is very lean, which surprises him at first, but it’s probably because the fights rarely last a whole minute, so there’s no need for deep cardio.
Vendors cry their beer and sake and spotlights roam the crowd as two men in white robes with tall black hats—maybe priests, certainly officials—walk into the ring, both reverently carrying a sword. They present the blades to the crowd, white cloths protecting the steel from the moisture of their hands. The crowd applauds, and both swords get little biographical clips, as though they, too, were celebrities. The Italian’s is from a Solingen forge, a straight blade with a triangular cross-section like a long spike, with a strangely windswept aluminum handle, shaped to fit the hand. Tadao’s sword is a katana, gently curved, single-edged, its point like a chisel, from the forge of Masamune, and even from the fourth row Kern can see the waver of the blade’s watermark, and how it seems to be lit with an interior fire—the cold lines of its beauty hold his eyes as a spotlight passes over him, blinding him, and the blade seems to embody the purity he’s always yearned for, and for a moment he desires it over all other things, though of course such weapons are expensive beyond reckoning, and far beyond the reach of the likes of him. As the light passes and his eyes clear he sees Akemi, in the front row, not fifteen feet away, glancing back at him.
He tries to signal to her but it’s dark again and now the screens show a glitteringly antiseptic operating theater where Japanese doctors and nurses in blue surgical gowns bow together and belt out that thing they say when you go into this noodle place out toward Market Street, “hello” or “thank you” or whatever, and the guy who is clearly the boss proudly announces something that the subtitles render as “We are one hundred percent committed to saving the combatants’ lives, with a success rate in excess of forty percent!” and the screens’ light shines on Akemi’s hair.
The two fighters huddle with their trainers in opposite corners of the cage. The trainers embrace them—the Italian gets a kiss on both cheeks—and then file out, ignoring each other, leaving their fighters alone with naked blades under the hard white light. They’re both in just shoes, shorts and gloves, and already sweating. They shift their feet, loosen their shoulders, make minute adjustments to their grips. One of them is probably about to die. Kern knows what it’s like to feel that alone.
The loudspeakers say “Hajime!” and the word hangs in the air as the two come together as though magnetically drawn and Kern is on his feet as the crowd is on its feet because it’s already over, and they echo the Italian’s raw, open-throated cry as Tadao, seemingly weary, falls to his side, and Kern sees the bright thin spike of blade protruding from his back. The blood pools around him as the doctors from the video rush in with hypodermics and defibrillators and the Italian sits down with his back to the cage, emptied, done.
35
Persephone
Just darkness, out the window, punctuated every few seconds by a blue flash from the wing.
The cabin is sleekly minimal, like a five-star hotel room in a narrow metal tube. Only thirty-two percent of Americans, she’s read, will get on a plane in the course of their lives. And how many, she wonders, get on a plane like this.
The vibration is stupefying and dawn is coming soon. She longs for sleep, but is still jittery, and the bag with her sleeping pills is in her last hotel room but one.
In the liquor cabinet she finds Ukrainian vodkas she’s never heard of and cabernets she remembers from the wine lists of good restaurants. She hesitates to open anything because the bill will go to Mr. Iliou, and she already feels she’s imposing, but compared to the flight the liquor costs nothing.
Fifth vodka in hand, her eyes begin to close. It feels a little like home, being on a plane, and it’s good to be safe, numb, departing.
She hasn’t changed clothes in two days. Once standing seems like an attainable goal, she’ll go wash her underwear and socks in the bathroom sink. Ah, she thinks, the glamor of my life.