A Lonely Resurrection

confusion, then fear. He made no sound. I continued to concentrate on the clinical downward pressure.
    With his teeth clenched shut, his chin almost buried in his neck, he threw everything he had into moving the bar. In extremis he was actually able to get the weight off his chest. I hooked a foot under the horizontal supports at the bottom of the bench and used the leverage to add additional pressure to the bar, and again it settled against his chest.
    I felt a tremor in the weights as his arms began to shake with exertion. Again the bar moved slightly north.
    Suddenly I was struck by the reek of feces. His sympathetic nervous system, in desperation, was shutting down nonessential bodily activities, including sphincter control, and diverting all available energy to his muscles.
    The rally lasted only another moment. Then his arms began to shake more violently, and I felt the bar moving downward, more deeply into his chest. There was a slight hissing as his breath was driven out through his nostrils and pursed lips. I felt his eyes on my face but kept my attention on his torso and the bar. Still he made no sound.
    Seconds went by, then more. His position didn’t change. I waited. His skin began to blue. I waited longer.
    Finally, I eased the pressure I’d been putting on the bar and released my grip.
    His eyes were still on me, but they no longer perceived. I stepped back, out of their sightless ambit, and paused to observe the scene. It looked like what it almost was: a weightlifting addict, alone and late at night, tries to handle more than he can, gets caught under the bar, suffocates and dies there. A bizarre accident.
    I changed into my street clothes. Picked up my bag, moved to the door. A series of cracks rang out behind me, like the snaps of dried tinder. I turned to look one last time, realizing as I did that the sound was of his ribs giving way. No question, he was done. Only his convulsive grip on the bar remained, as though the fingers refused to believe what the body had already accepted.
    I stepped into the dark hallway and waited until the street was clear. Then I eased out onto the sidewalk and into the shadows around me.

CHAPTER 2
    I slipped away from the area on foot along a series of secondary streets in Roppongi and Akasaka, cutting across narrow alleyways in a manner which, to the uninitiated, would have looked like a series of simple shortcuts to wherever I was going, but which were in fact designed to force a follower or team of followers to reveal themselves in an effort to keep up. With a few deliberate exceptions, all my surveillance detection moves are accomplished under the guise of seemingly normal pedestrian behavior. If I’m being followed because some organization has taken an interest but hasn’t yet managed to confirm who I am, I’m not going to give away the game by acting like anything other than John Q. Citizen.
    After about a half hour, I was confident I wasn’t being tailed, and my pace began to slow in accompaniment to my mood. I found myself moving in a long, counterclockwise semicircle that I only half acknowledged was taking me in the direction of Aoyama Bochi, the enormous cemetery laid out like a triangular green bandage at the center of the city’s fashionable western districts.
    On the north side of Roppongi-dori, I passed a small colony of cardboard shelters, the way stations of wandering homeless men whose lives were, in a sense, as detached and anonymous as my own. I set down the gym bag I was carrying, knowing the bag and its contents of workout clothes and weightlifting gloves would quickly be distributed and assimilated among the gaunt and trackless wraiths nearby. Within days, perhaps hours, the discarded remnants of this last job would have been bleached of any trace of their origins, each just another nameless, colorless item among nameless, colorless souls, the flotsam and jetsam of loneliness and despair that fall from time to time into Tokyo’s collective blind spot, and from there into oblivion.
    Freed of the burden I had been carrying, I moved on, this time circling east. Under an overpass at Nogizaka, north of Roppongi-dori, I saw a half-dozen
chinpira,
gaudy in sleek racing leathers, squatting in a tight semicircle, their low-slung metal motorcycles parked on the footpath alongside them. Fragments of their conversation skipped off the concrete wall to my right, the words unintelligible but the notes tuned as tight as the tricked-out exhaust pipes