CHAPTER 57 – Miagete Goran Yoru no Hoshi wo (2)

NYC.
The Met.
Christmas Day. 10 AM.

The museum was closed, and yet it was not.
A handful of staff, paid with generous overtime, attended to the Chief Curator and a small group of private collectors, all of whom had contributed generously to the Met’s endowment trust.

Dr Juliana Vaughan had been up since six, because there was no rest for the wicked.

A private tour on Christmas morning was a rare yearly event that was hotly contested even among the donors. She had allowed only nine individuals with their plus-ones, plus obedient children, and the tour ran for three hours from 930 AM to 1230 PM, with breaks and canapés in between.

At 11 AM, she could be found dispensing truths in the Sackler Wing.
Beside her, from floor to ceiling, the room’s glass wall filtered in the winter light, pale, cold, and linear, illuminating the ancient cream sandstones so that the refraction turned golden.

Behind her sat the Temple of Dendur, collected from Nubia in 1978. The Egyptian Government had gifted it to the US because a dam was swallowing it whole, and they were powerless to save it. And so, the two-thousand-year-old temple now sat in NYC, girt by the mirror-moat of human history.

Vaughan stood at the water’s edge, speaking to the lucky nine and their chosen family members.

The Chief Curator had a manner of speaking that was legendary, an idiosyncrasy Mirabelle described in one of Vogue’s editorials as “aphoristic closure.” Her student had written that, when Dr Vaughan finished speaking, her audience felt enlightened, even though the same information was succinctly delivered on Vaughan’s curated plaques.

“—the colour you’re seeing now,” her voice filled the airy chamber, “is not the colour it was. The original surface was artistically endowed. Pigment on sandstone, reds and blues and greens, the ‘gods’ in their proper colours. Two thousand years of weather removed all of it. What remains is what we feel history should be, CLEAN, sterile.”

She paused and smiled.

“But history is rarely clean or sterile. Instead, it endures. Sometimes, it is buried or forgotten. Sometimes, history lies in plain sight, and we simply refuse to see it. The Temple evokes melancholy precisely because it is a simultaneous preservation of human history, and its inevitable loss.”

The donors nodded, feeling wiser by the minute.
Vaughan continued.

“The historian Motoori Norinaga spoke of this sorrow as an abstraction of ephemerality. He called it ‘Mono-no-Aware’. When history is lost—and it is lost often, through conquest, disaster, political erasure, or simple neglect—what remains is lyrics without the melody, an epic without context. Norinaga Sensei named this particular emotional register as something more vertiginous: the awareness that something WAS. It is a gentle sadness. We have many of these here in the met. Remnants. The Minoan civilisation. The Library of Alexandria. The Native traditions.”

The donors followed like obedient children, even though half of them were older than Vaughan.

“The beauty is oxymoronic,” Vaughan concluded by doing the thing that Mirabelle had written a whole Special Edition about. “The feeling of Beauty is inseparable from the loss. The cherry blossom in Cherry Hill is a canonical symbol precisely because the trees bloom so briefly. From its pale pink bower to the carpeted floor, the liminality is all. This feeling isn’t about accepting loss, it’s about refusing the absence. We refused to let history be nothing.”

Her donors nodded. They understood, whether authentically or superficially, why their donations mattered, why it was a higher cause.

Vaughan left her guests to create space for rumination, for she had spotted a visitor she had promised to see on short notice. For now, her role would be taken over by the docents until the end, when another dose of aphoristic closure awaited her donors, driving home the need to preserve history on ontological and spiritual levels.

Unhurriedly, in her camel turtle-neck and her kitten heels, she greeted her former student.

“You came back,” Vaughan said, smiling, then noted the travesty of fashion behind Eppie with a frown. “Fred.”

“Juliana.”

“You did say don’t be a stranger,” the girl smiled awkwardly.

“So, for what reason do I owe this visit?” Vaughan’s eyes moved to the giant bag beside the girl. “Your… father… or so he proclaimed, said it was a surprise.”

“We found something,” Eppie moved in a way to emphasise the bag. “In Central Park.”

“She found something,” Curon coughed. “I… I paid.”

“Here.” Eppie held out what looked like… cardboard? Cereal boxes? Was this found art?

Knowing her student, however, Vaughan took them with both hands, and with the automatic care she brought to all paper, a reflex of habit. She turned to the light. The pale December morning refracted off the Temple of Dendur.

“This?” Her eyes read the codex of the artwork’s lines in a way that only a dozen experts in America could. “Sumi-e lines? Controlled lines, typical of ink wash work from the Meiji Era. That said, ballpoint pen? So much of it, some smudges too…”

“Is this mould?” Vaughan looked at them in the eyes.

“Yes.” They both replied.

“As a medium?”

“No.” They both replied.

Her eyes returned to the artwork.

“Found materials. Urban. Outsider register. Very interesting. Is the lack of pigment hierarchy because of the materials? Choice or limitation? The involuntary texture is certainly a choice… I hope. The… Nihonga school, a bricolage with Arte Povera?”

Her audience of two was waiting for something.

“The dating…”

Vaughan paused.
No, she stopped. She looked at the signature, then could no longer look away.

“NO-NO-BOY…” she murmured the words, then looked through two more pieces, curated by her erstwhile student. “Who drew this?”

“Someone from your park,” Eppie said. Not critically, not with sadness or reproach. Just… casually. Casually absurd. “Roughly a block from where you’re standing. Sleeping near the undercover vents.”

The Temple of Dendur sat in its pool of engineered light behind them.
Her donors milled about, admiring their newfound wisdom.

“BORN IN SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA. 1920,” she read the lines.

Vaughan licked her lips. They were a bit dry. “Is Kiritani-sensei hale? Is he safe?”

“He’s at the Four Seasons right now, still sleeping,” Eppie said. “I guess he hasn’t slept much since the camp.”

Vaughan looked to Curon for confirmation. The internment camp?

“Yeah, we need your help with his…citizenship?” Curon clarified. “I don’t think Sony can handle this. But you know people, right? Politicians, I mean.”

Vaughan handed the drawings back.

“Tony.”

A docent peeled himself from the wall.

“Ma’am?”

“Ask Estelle to finish the tour in my stead. Give our guests signed copies of my book, the limited edition hardcovers, with my handwritten foreword. Tell them that I’ve found something that requires my immediate attention. Tell them if my instincts are correct, I will be calling on them in the near future. Tell them…” she gave the next words a moment of thought. “That they may soon participate in living history, if they so choose.”

Then Juliana Vaughan turned and picked up her coat from the bench where she had left it, and put it on with the calm of a woman who wasn’t at all flustered by what she had ignored for the last thirty years, and Eppie had found in 24 hours.

“Take me to him,” she said.

And they went.
Out of the Met.
Into the cold.

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The trio suffered a moment of mild existential panic when, at 1 PM, Henry Kiritani was gone.

Gerald then politely informed them that he had seen Mr Kiritani enter Central Park.

Eppie slapped her forehead. Of course, Kiritani had gone back to the park. That was in his character. He had no friends, no family, only the cats.

“Let me call Joseph,” Curon offered as they walked to the park themselves. A minute later, he informed that, yes, Kiritani was in the garden section, feeding the cats. Joseph was the busboy Curon had called to bring food for the cats. The young man told Curon he had seen the odd Japanese fellow at noontime.

They found Kiritani on a bench between the maintenance buildings and the garden, feeding the cats by hand, sorting them into rows, watched by a few children. Normally, his homeless visage was enough to keep tourists away, but Kiritani was no longer dressed like a vagrant. He had replaced the worst of his outfit with what Curon had picked out from Sony’s wardrobe.

Around 2 AM, Curon had gone back to the penthouse and then returned at 8 AM with a massive duffel of whatever he managed to scrounge up from wardrobes. The present Kiritani wore new inners layered with his old boots, old overcoat, and his old hat. His beard and hair remained utterly chaotic.

He looked fresh. His vitality restored, if only by a few points, and that was enough for Eppie.

He looked up when they arrived. The grime was gone, the dead skin of god knows how many seasons. He looked good for a 87 year old.

Vaughan asked Eppie for the artworks, then sat down next to the man.

Then, to Eppie’s delightful surprise, Juliana Vaughan spoke Japanese to the man.