take flight. Entropy would set in. She would die. Miranda listened intently until she could hear the walls. The hush in the room reverberated softly in her ears, and she started to reconstruct the dimensions of her cell in her head. She got up carefully and groped for the edge of the table to steady herself, the way one did when blindfolded in a children’s game. She kicked the bedpan and heard a splash.
“Damn!” she said out loud, and the sound of the voice startled her.
“Damn, damn, damn!” she repeated. “Miranda calling Earth, can you hear me?”
She felt better. Hearing her own voice was proof she was alive. I am afraid, therefore I am, she thought. Her throat was constricted from lack of moisture, and speaking was painful.
“I am afraid, therefore I am,” she said aloud.
No one answered, and she fought a feeling of dread emanating from the silence by taking a step away from the table toward the back wall. When she reached it abruptly — it was closer than she had anticipated — she slid her hand along and up to the grillwork where ducts would connect to humidity control and heat. It was absolutely flush with the wall. She tried to force her fingers into the metal grid to get a grip until her fingernails split and she felt blood spurt. Miranda moved away, feeling her blood smear across the rough wall. She edged around to the door. The glass was impervious to blows. She felt dents in the sheet-metal back of the door and wondered if these were marks of Jill’s rage at confinement.
Jill had read stories. Griffin had left the lights on even when she slept.
Which would be worse? Miranda wondered. Light was confining: in darkness the end of the world could be glimpsed.
She worked her way back around to her bed, kicking the bedpan again as she sat down. The sound of slopping against the steel made her thirsty. It was dry and warm. She felt moisture leaking through her pores. Her lips were beginning to crack. She lay back, waiting. She didn’t know for what, though.
Would Morgan find her? Would Jill relent? Miranda didn’t think she would. In the mind of a girl so morally distraught, what surely wasn’t a premeditated act wouldn’t weigh on her conscience now, at least not enough to offset the respite gained by Miranda’s erasure. She winced at the notion of being erased, but she directed resentment only at herself. Jill was the heir to Miranda’s fall from grace, a notion Morgan would have vigorously rejected — the implications of fall and of grace. She felt the inevitability of her imprisonment, that it was somehow her own doing.
Eventually, she would be discovered.
Would her corpse be mouldering in the bed, her desiccated remains inseparable from the bedclothes and mattress, or dried into dust? Images of the grotesque and macabre entertained themselves in her brain, stopping her from slipping into a state of calm that scared her more than the taunting illusions of death.
Suddenly, the window in the door flashed with illumination, her cell reverberated with light. Gasping, she struggled to the door, her eyes searing in the dim glow. She couldn’t see or hear anything through the thick, narrow window. Miranda banged against the dented sheet metal, but could feel the door thud against the flesh of her hands, feel her efforts dissipate into the depths of its thermal layers. She walked around the room, straightening and tidying. The light suddenly flicked off, and she felt relieved as she stepped carefully through the darkness back to her bed.
That would have been Eugene Nishimura. It must be Sunday afternoon. She hadn’t thought to check her watch, which was under the edge of the bed. She leaned over, picked it up, and set it on the table. It was either Sunday or Monday. Surely, she had been here more than twenty-four hours. Her body felt drained and depleted. She had to conserve. She was leaching vital energy and fluids into the air.
The absence of humidity, the warmth, these were conditions that could easily be controlled by a system ostensibly set up for wine. This place was designed as a prison specifically to hold captives. Jill wasn’t the first. Those weren’t Jill’s dents on the back of the door. Miranda hadn’t noticed any bruises or abrasions on the girl.
Her mind raced. Griffin had kept other victims locked in here, warm and dry, had let them take showers and use the toilet, or at least empty the bedpan. He could have kept them on hold indefinitely for his personal use. She shuddered. How many rapes had occurred in this room? How many women had died here? She settled into the bed, feeling it rise to her weight, feeling a strange kinship with the girls and women who had preceded her in this terrible place.
Morgan went out for Sunday dinner to a restaurant on Eglinton Avenue. He walked there and worked up an appetite. After a pasta dinner, savouring the pleasant taste of garlic in his mouth, he ambled back along Yonge Street and into Rosedale.
Eugene Nishimura’s van was parked in front of the Griffin house, and though it was dark, enough light from Mrs. de Cuchilleros’s side windows enabled Morgan to see his way around to the back garden. Nishimura was inside. Morgan saw his head bobbing through the abandoned casement that was all that remained of the outside entry into the pump room.
“You’re working late,” he said when Nishimura emerged from the house.
Nishimura called out, “Is that you, Detective Morgan? Just a sec. I’ll turn on the pond lights.”
Suddenly, the most astonishing tableau flashed before Morgan’s eyes. He had been trying to make out the shapes of separate fish in the indirect garden lighting. Now a spectacular cube of illumination and colour opened in the ground, the depths of water resonating with absolute clarity.
“What an amazing collection!” said Nishimura. “I moved the grand champ up from the lower pond. Look at her! Have you ever seen red so wonderfully intense? Asymmetrical continents floating in absolute stillness, perfectly balanced. Such harmony! There’s a perfect tension between all the parts. She’s beautifully healthy. She’s a living haiku, a perfect living haiku.”
“Speaking of which, what does Ochiba Shigura mean?” Morgan asked. “Isn’t it something about autumn leaves and still water?”
“It just means Ochiba Shigura. That’s what kind of fish it is.”
“Don’t the words mean something? Translate it into English.”
“It means Ochiba Shigura. That’s a beautiful name for a fish.”
“Meaning what?”
“I don’t know. My Japanese isn’t that good.”
“It’s my favourite. Except for the Chagoi. You’ve moved it back up, too.”
The two men stood mesmerized, staring into the pel-lucid depths at the fish weaving patterns of colour and form, lazily ignoring the laws of gravity as they expounded the dimensions of their home in soaring slow motion.
Eventually, Nishimura said, “I’ve got to get going. My wife thinks I’ve got a new mistress.”
“A new one?”
Nishimura looked at him with an embarrassed smile. “I am a family man.”
“Lovely.”
“I fed them earlier. I’ll be back tomorrow to clean the filters.”
“I’ll walk out with you,” said Morgan. “I don’t want to be left in the dark.”
Miranda
