Munter 9: The Weather in Heaven

The streets made no sense to him in his drunkenness. He got lost a few times on streets he thought he knew very well. He found a music store on one of these streets. It was a music store he'd visited before, so he was able to pinpoint his location from this. He was on Wicklow Street. He went into the music store and looked for Ozu in the racks. There was one album by them. It was the same album he'd listened to in Nobuko’s house. Bold Uniforms. The morose and sexless face on the cover depressed him. He turned to the back of the CD and read the tracklisting.

1. Desperation
2. Refine Our Lines
3. Nevertheless Continue
4. Elegant Agent
5. Efrafa
6. Broken Down Carla
7. Brynderw
8. There’s A Man In The Bank Who Eats The Robbers
9. Marvin
10. Deathsong

He wanted to buy the album, but he didn’t have enough money for it. There was a naggin of Jameson in the inside pocket of his jacket that had made the purchase of an album by Ozu an impossibility.

*

On his way home, Munter walked through the Black Pass, a long, dark, and circuitous alleyway famous for its sleepy old trees, nasty graffiti, and stray cats. He saw the same cats each day. He even had names for some of them. He spotted William and Lloyd shooting past, but couldn’t see Nancy anywhere. She always looked a little heartbroken. Maybe she was off somewhere drowning her sorrows like he was. He’d always observed some complicity there between him and Nancy. Munter sat down on a large rock to drink his naggin of whiskey. Written on the wall facing him, in red spray-paint, was the message, RING A SLUT AND GET A GOOD SHAG. A phone number followed the suggestion. 0861664 but the remaining digits were swabbed over with white chalk. Lloyd came running into view; he sat staring quietly at Munter. Hey, Lloyd, said Munter. There was no reply; Lloyd slinked off. Munter thought these characters were very interesting. He would liked to have been a photographer; he would have come down to the Black Pass with his camera and took some artful snaps of the cats. Lloyd slinking off. William roaring as though he were a lion, not a stray cat. Nancy sobbing. Munter would liked to have been a documentary filmmaker even; he would have come down here with his video camera and microphones and shot a remarkable film about the cats, documenting their daily lives on the Black Pass. He would liked to have been a journalist even; he would have come down here with his notepad and pen and interviewed the cats for what would eventually have become an award-winning article. The Stray Cats on the Black Pass.

[i]The first cat I talk to when I reach the Black Pass is Nancy. Nancy is a slight white kitten. She has purple eyes and a wounded paw. When I ask her what has happened to her paw, she blushes and asks if I wouldn’t mind avoiding the topic. I avoid the topic.

Nancy and her brother Lloyd have been living on the Black Pass for just over two weeks. ‘It’s been good so far,’ she tells me. ‘The other cats have been great. A real comfort.’

Nancy and Lloyd were unhappy in their previous homestead. She tells me they ‘belonged’ to the eight year old Thompson twins, Allison and Sue. The twins were playful. Too playful. They pounded their poor pet cats into early graves nearly. (I guess then that Nancy’s injured paw is probably the result of her plaything days with the twins.) ‘As I’ve already said, Munter, I’d rather not talk about it.’[/i]

That Munter, they would have said. What a brilliant journalist. What a sparkling piece of journalism.

*

It took Munter ten minutes to get the key to properly turn in his front door. He had jammed it in upside down and it stayed that way for much of the time he spent trying to get it to open. When he got inside, he thought about where Nobuko could have disappeared to based on what he knew of her and the places she frequented. Those places he thought of were not good places for anybody to be frequenting. He hoped she hadn’t been hurt. Nobuko had won him over in a brief time with her very strange and wonderful nature. He loved her brutal wit and hostile forehead, and her heart that was bigger than the world, a planet he'd glimpsed but would never reach, it being much too far off, much farther even than Judith’s planet. He wished there was a telescope for hearts. Maybe that would have made things easier for him to deal with. When he saw Nobuko crying that night, he felt as helpless as the propagated drunks of his lifetime. Why had he acted so placidly? He just sat down and smoked his cigarette. He wasn’t really like that. He knew that about himself. He wasn’t the kind who just sat down and smoked a cigarette. In relationships, he was usually the pleaser, the one who invested. He never took to non-attendance. He always showed up for the relationship. This was his need to please, a feathery-frail need vulnerable to the indifference of the other person in the relationship. He'd been scarred a number of times by the absentee in a relationship, the type of person who gave little, knowing that much more would be given by the other party. But he eventually learned how to counteract this move. Munter understood that being the giver in the relationship, he was also giving control to the other person. The other person became the absentee on the power bequeathed by this control. But having given the control, Munter realised that with some effort he was capable of taking it away. He had not been able to do so with Judith, but he had been able to do so in other relationships. He had tried to do it with Nobuko, by sitting down as she wept to smoke his cigarette, but now she was seeking retribution. He was back to being the only one in attendance. Nobuko’s absence was not like previous absences. Nobuko had now taken that absence in a relationship to new heights; he feared she’d done a cosmic runner.

*

Munter tried to think of a description for the love he had for Nobuko, but he could not think of anything appropriate to the feeling. He came up with one suddenly: ‘like the weather in heaven’. The weather in heaven must always be good, even if there are bad feelings left over from life on Earth. So even when things around him were bad, in Nobuko’s company, the weather was good. Nobuko was like the weather in heaven. That weather would not have associated itself with the weather presently making a miserable racket outside. The roof of Munter’s house was being used as a treadmill for the rains. The weather in heaven had a different type of fibre. Munter longed for it.

*

He opened the window and some dreams flew in. They floated above his head, forming cloudy Z’s, before making their way slowly down, down to his slowing consciousness. The first dream featured Nobuko and Mieko in a café. They were conducting interviews for prospective stepfathers. They were looking for the classic stepfather of all time. There was a queue of men waiting to be interviewed. Munter was in a different queue. The queue for a big fry breakfast. The next dream told of Nobuko’s encounter with a man in the night. She was stumbling along in the moments following her row with Munter, muttering and swearing to herself. There was no life on the streets. Nobuko had reached a time in the evening never usually seen, normally lost in the sleep-mist. Munter was there too. He’d avoided the sleep-mist, and was present to witness this hour. He’d decided to follow her after all. He wanted to look after her. He was guilty about the argument and he wanted to make sure she was okay. He kept himself hidden behind her as he followed, creeping forward only when he thought there was enough distance between them. He watched as she lit a cigarette, took only three drags from it, then flicked it classically onto the road, embers splitting and dancing on the gravel for a second. He watched as a man wearing a long coat suddenly appeared and seized her. He banged her head against a wall, his hand clenching her chin forcefully. Munter heard Nobuko’s teeth smashing to pieces within the impact. The man pinned her to the wall for a moment, his right knee locking her position, then he pulled her away and towed her up the street. He held her head tightly to his chest, silencing her mouth with an enormous hand. He dragged her lashing and jerking in his arms through the gates of a nearby park and then brutally punched her on the head. The blow immediately knocked her out and she fell fuzzily to the ground like the messy demolition of a building. Munter ran as fast as he could to catch up. He cursed himself for allowing the distance to grow between them. He cursed himself for letting Nobuko go off by herself. The space between the entrance to the park and Munter’s chase seemed to have increased. Munter seemed to be frozen in pursuit, his legs taking him no further even though they were moving in the traditional human style for causing motion. Not only did he seem to be running without gaining much advance, but also the entrance to the park appeared to be getting farther away. He could have filled a pint glass with his sweat.

These were dreams, of course. That last one, a nightmare. He woke with a feeling of uneasiness, but then felt happy because it was simply a dream and nothing more, a move to wash something away. The details would soon be lost. But this relief was immediately followed by more unease. Whatever it was didn’t wash away. To his consternation, the nightmare stayed with him all day, replaying in greater detail before every drink he took. He drank harder to reduce the details.

***************************************************

Munter’s sitting room was beginning to resemble Nobuko’s sitting room, with bottles scattered and tossed, lying here and there. In one corner, there had developed what appeared to be a city of Jameson bottles. The principal road leading out of the city was busy with the traffic of spilling fluids. In one corner, a giant bastion of Jack Daniel’s stood, surrounded by a vigilant army of Harp Lager cans, some of them bloodied from battle, red wine wounds thick and glossy on their faces.