CHAPTER 78 – The Long and Winding Road

by inkadmin

“The quality of mercy is not strain’d;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath.”

William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice

Valorie and Eppie spent the next hour practising her new song, with Eppie humming the tune through [Perfect Pitch] and Valorie learning the words through her mortal brand of [Memorisation]. The words, as Eppie explained, really didn’t matter. The timeless tune possessed the melody of a bardic monologue. The weight rested in the lyrics, told from the heart to wedge open closed doors.

With Valorie’s talent and Eppie’s familiarity with a song that had played in her head for over three decades, something close to mastery was quickly attained, after which the girls had to find a way to discreetly rejoin the party.

Their only barrier was Valorie singing through her tears every second or third verse. Thankfully, it only took the first thirty minutes to convince Valorie once again that it wasn’t her fault.

They stopped by the amenities along the way… and acknowledged that there was no fixing their makeup, not even close. Eppie did her best with her pinpoint precision and whatever Valorie brought in her handbag, and the girls mutually agreed that they looked presentable enough from a distance.

They exited gallery 918 and found that they had already missed the opening of the Tisch Galleries—the Met’s dedicated special-exhibition wing on the second floor. From the map near the entrance, they saw that Vaughan had commissioned multiple partitions, each in sequence, doors held open by docents in themed uniforms so the whole thing read as a single held breath rather than five separate exhibits.

A brass plaque by the entrance told her where the guests had gone:

The Cats of HENRY KIRITANI: A Life in Living History.

The docents in their funeral-coloured garb bowed their heads as the girls approached.

“The guests are midway.” The young man smiled affably at the two stunning young women in their black and green dresses. “Dame Vaughan has instructed that you be let inside. The rooms reset every ten minutes, so you won’t be able to catch up until the final room. Please enjoy the exhibit, Miss Fontaine.”

The girls thanked the young man as the installation opened with the sound of sucking air.

The girls wandered inside and felt suddenly small. They were in a stark white space. The edges of the rooms had been engineered away with seamless interiors to create a liminal world. Boundaries, which were unnoticeable until the viewer came closer, were marked with white-painted pegs, strung from point to point with ivory strings.

In the middle of the room, hanging from the ceiling, was a ten-foot-tall portrait.

It was Kiritani Sensei, half-naked, his kuromontsuki and haori stripped to the waist.

“Oh my God…” Valorie involuntarily inhaled the air-conditioned air.

Eppie lacked the words because her state of shock was far greater than her new friend’s.

The portrait was photographed rather than drawn, with every rib and knot of the spine visible beneath sallow, sun-cured skin. Scar tissue mapped across his shoulder blades like a second, private cartography. Fifty years of sidewalk and shelter-line and winter had written themselves into Kiritani’s ageing body like a rude biography. Yet, the man’s face was a study in patience. Her sensei’s wrinkles were as deep as fault lines; his eyes were half-lidded and exhausted.

They stayed there for the first five minutes, just… taking in the gravity of that visual texture.

“That was the old man you brought in?” Valorie’s voice was sweet and compassionate. “The reason you ran out that night?”

Eppie nodded.

“You’re incredible…” Valorie looked down at her hands. “I am an idiot.”

“Don’t… don’t say that,” Eppie hooked an arm around Valorie’s elbow. “Come on.”

They crossed the middle threshold, felt the backs of their necks tingle, turned, and—

IT WAS A TWO-SIDED PORTRAIT! Eppie’s mind rioted. They could see Kiritani Sensei’s back in the same detail and resolution! They could—

“Are those…” Valorie’s hand on her arm tightened. “Lash marks?”

Eppie didn’t know the answer either.

The plaque read thus:

Fifty Years (Kiritani, Two Sides)
Renata Voss, 2008
Archival pigment print, mounted on aluminium

Photographed in a single sitting, one week before the exhibition’s opening, Ms Voss was instructed only to “photograph what fifty years without shelter leaves behind, and nothing more.” No retouching was performed. The Chief Curator requested that both sides be shown with permission from the subject. No explanation is left to the viewer, who must witness history with their own knowledge and eyes.

And witness history they did. Eppie had seen Kiritani in the shower, but even so, she had never imagined… this.

After another minute, the girls moved on, their hands held a little tighter.

It was only then that they noticed the docent in white. The young woman gave them a solemn smile and opened the door to the next room.

The second room breathed easier. Evidently, Vaughan had become a master of the sensory as well as the visual, for like the Van Gogh exhibitions, she had staff engineer the sound and smell of Central Park in winter. The temperature was also several degrees colder—though that might have been because of their sheer dresses.

The white space was gone. Instead, it was replaced by a seamless, projection-mapped Central Park re-creation that immersed the visitor in one of New York’s finest public spaces. With great subtlety of lighting, the room shifted from spring to winter.

On the walls, arranged almost eclectically, were pictures of cats. Hundreds of cats, all hiding in Central Park. Some were pen on cereal paper. Others were cardboard. A few were whiteboard markers used as paintbrushes. A scant few survived without water damage over the years they were carried by Kiritani in his enormous duffel bags.

Eppie’s sharp eyes caught the plaques:

Kimi, tortoiseshell, companion since approx. 1998.

Tanaka, orange tabby, companion since approx. 2001.

Hundreds more, names Eppie had never heard Kiritani say aloud, for they were cats that had not outlived their portraits, lay everywhere.

Fifty years of homelessness. And here it was. Fifty years of companion cats.

Almost all of Kiritani’s cats were gone; no more than two dozen of them could still be alive somewhere in Central Park, and yet, here they were—living in history: The Stray Cats of Henry Kiritani.

Eppie cried for the kitties.
She cried for her sensei.
Spring, summer, autumn and winter, keeping her sensei company, warming him in times of frigidity, bringing solace in times of desperation. Providing him with the joy needed to keep on living in a hostile birth country.

Valorie looked at her in amazement. “Do you… know these cats?”

“I know that one, and that one.” Eppie swallowed her sadness.

The docent, no less affected by Eppie’s tearful, Disney princess expression, opened the door for them.

The third room was black, the kind used to develop film. The viewer, such as the pair of girls, was forced to find their way by moving from station to station, with each station representing a memory belonging to Kiritani.

The first short film, about half a minute long, was that of 1920s Hiroshima before the bombing. The scene was a family home. The people were clearly unrelated to Kiritani, but they represented what was lost to war.

Recollection 01
From the testimony of Henry Kiritani
Reconstruction and direction: Naomi Ishida, 2008
16mm film, transferred to digital, with sound

No photographs survived Kiritani’s household before August 6, 1945. His memory is now the only negative left to print from. Each station recreates a single fragment of his testimony. Station 01 is surviving archival footage on loan from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

The next station, “02”, held a short documentary about the bombing of Hiroshima. The short film, a mere four minutes long, told the stories collected by American journalist John Hersey in his non-fiction account of Hiroshima, detailing the events before and after the bomb fell, from 1945 to 1985.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Station “03” began with a photo installation of Kiritani as a young artist, handsome, shaven bald like a monk. It was the last time he was in Japan, for the war had begun, and he was returned to the USA as a “US Citizen” to avoid lynching by Japanese nationalists.

Arm-in-arm, Eppie and Valorie went from station to station until they arrived at no. 08, a stark installation of eight crude drawings of Hiroshima in red ballpoint, crisscrossed by hatch marks in black. These were done on age-old American cardboard, made before environmental conscience was a thing, made to last the aeons.

Over the decades, these had gone soft and warped at the edges. They were composite works of mixed found materials as well. Newspapers yellowed to amber. A grocery bag, flattened and drawn on in ballpoint, the Stop & Shop logo still faintly visible behind a mushroom cloud rendered in nothing but cross-hatched ballpoint.

Kiritani Sensei had done this from imagination; Eppie realised something new. He had no access to television. He did not read English fluently. He could only reproduce what was in his head.

Henry Kiritani, undated (c. 1960s–1990s)
Ballpoint ink on found cardboard, newsprint, and paper, in eight parts

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