Chapter Eleven The God on the Shelf
Chapter Eleven
The God on the Shelf
Droplets condensed on the dark brown bottle of ice-cold beer. Keishin wiped them away with his thumb before tipping the bottle into his glass. The golden liquid burbled and the sound blended into the restaurant’s hum. Conversation, punctuated by bursts of laughter, added to the melody of clinking plates and silverware inside the cramped Indonesian restaurant. Keishin sipped his beer, determined to enjoy it even if it wasn’t real: The imaginary Ramesh who lived in the back of his mind always chose this restaurant for their conversations.
A server in an intricate batik vest expertly weaved through a maze of square tables carrying a large tray of colorful dishes. The heady scent of coconut, lemongrass, and coriander trailed him. He stopped at Keishin and Ramesh’s table and set a bowl of steamed rice and an array of small plates on the steel food warmers in front of them. An ironwork lamp cast a yellow-orange glow over the small feast. Keishin’s eyes flitted over the appetizer portions of satay, marinated vegetables, curries, fried bananas, egg rolls, nuts, and fruit compote, and just the sight of them made him feel full. “You always order too much,” he said, looking up at Ramesh.
Ramesh shrugged and scooped a mound of steaming fragrant rice onto his plate. “I never know how long our little chats are going to take. I don’t want to get hungry. What’s on your mind? Having second thoughts about working at Super-K?”
Keishin shook his head and sipped his imaginary beer. “No.”
“What would you like to talk about, then?” Ramesh closed his eyes, savoring his food.
“A puzzle.”
“A puzzle?” Ramesh set his spoon down and grinned. “You have my attention.”
“I met a woman. Her name is Hana.”
Ramesh held up his hand. “I’m going to stop you right there. I don’t give advice about women—in your imagination or in real life. Remember? My wife will be the first to agree that women fall far beyond my expertise.”
“Hana isn’t the puzzle,” Keishin said, even though he wasn’t sure that he meant it. There was something about Hana and her odd stories about tea boxes and treasure hunts that piqued his curiosity, which was something that, outside his lab, had not happened in a very long time. He had met his share of beautiful women, but it was not Hana’s quiet, delicate beauty that made a part of him glad that he had stumbled into her pawnshop by mistake. Just behind the calmness in her eyes lurked the shadows of secrets, peeking out one moment and darting away the next, as though daring him to give chase. And there was nothing Keishin enjoyed more than a good puzzle. “Her pawnshop is.”
“Pawnshop?”
“It was robbed and ransacked. She believes that her father is behind it.”
“And what do you think?”
“To be honest, I don’t know what to think. I tried to convince her to call the police, but she refuses to.”
“Ah, a stubborn soul.” Ramesh eyed Keishin over his bottle of beer. “Sounds a lot like someone I know.”
Keishin rolled his eyes. “Anyway, the point is, I want to help her, but I can’t.”
“Why do you want to help her so badly?”
“You know why.”
“It’s not something I like to think about.”
“No one helped you, Ramesh. They all just stood there and watched that man attack you like you were invisible. But they did see you. They just chose not to care.”
“You did. You took me to the hospital.”
“I just wish that I had gotten there sooner. Maybe you’d—”
“Be more than just a figment of your imagination? Wishing for such things is useless. We can theorize all we want about bending space-time, but we cannot change the past.”
“And that’s exactly why I want to help Hana. I know what happens when people pretend not to see you. I will never know for sure if I would have been like those people who chose to look the other way when you were assaulted. Finding out if you are a coward isn’t something any hypothetical scenario can answer. I refuse to be the kind of person who looks away.” Keishin struggled to push the image of Ramesh bleeding on the sidewalk from his mind. He drew a deep breath. “I need to be better than that, but…”
“But what?”
“I’m not a detective. I’m a scientist.”
“Then be a scientist,” Ramesh said. “Don’t sell yourself short. Physicists have solved some of the universe’s greatest mysteries. Remember the case of the missing solar neutrinos?”
“What do solar neutrinos have to do with anything?”
“For years, we were confounded by the fact that, compared to the predictions of our models, fewer neutrinos made their way to Earth after being emitted by the sun. It made us conclude that either our models were wrong or something happened to the neutrinos along their journey.”
Keishin nodded. “But eventually, the mystery was solved when the physicists discovered that the neutrinos everyone thought had gone missing were not missing at all.”
“Yes,” Ramesh said. “They had shifted from one type of neutrino to another, a kind that just happened to be so much harder to find. It was all a…”
“A masquerade.” Keishin smirked. “Of course. Thanks, Ramesh.”
“Good luck with your puzzle.”
“Thanks.”
“And the woman you’re pretending very hard not to be intrigued by.”
—
Keishin looked up from the hand-painted playing card and gold-rimmed eyeglasses Hana held out. The pawnshop morphed around him. It was no longer the space he had walked into, even if everything looked exactly as it did when he had first arrived. Like the neutrinos, the changes were intangible and invisible, but a masquerade just the same. Desks were still overturned, glass was still shattered, papers were still strewn every which way, but now Keishin began to see the design disguising itself as disarray. Chairs had not simply been haphazardly flung, and shelves had not been carelessly toppled. The scattered furniture was scratch- and dent-free, carefully laid on their sides, almost artfully arranged. As with the universe, this chaos had an author. “I think that you might be right about this being staged,” Keishin said. “But what makes you think that it was your father who set this up?”
“My father left that very same card as a clue for me once,” Hana said. “It cannot be a coincidence that I found it in the vault.”
“But what about the glasses? Why do you think they’re a clue? The intruder may just have dropped them at the door on his way out.”
“Then that would make them the luckiest pair of glasses in the world.” Hana shook her head. “They were placed by the door, in the exact place where they could be noticed, but conveniently out of harm’s way.”
“That still doesn’t mean your father is behind all of this.”
“You are right. It does not,” Hana said. “But the missing bottle from the medicine kit makes me believe otherwise. It contained my father’s sleeping medicine. It has been bothering me how I could have possibly slept through all of this. Now I know why. My father must have slipped his medicine into my sake last night.”
“You think that he drugged you? Why would he do that?”
“That is not important now. I just need to find him before—” Hana bit her lip.
“Before what?”
“Nothing.” Hana shook her head. “Nothing. All that matters is finding him soon.”
“Then call the police. They’ll be able to comb the city faster than anyone.”
“My father is not in Tokyo.”
Keishin frowned. “How do you know that?”
“Because that is what the glasses were supposed to make anyone who saw them by the door think. They were placed there to create the impression that my father had chased an intruder into the city’s streets.” She held up the moon card. “But this card told me the truth, the same way it did in that treasure hunt when I was a little girl. It told me to go left when I thought I was meant to go right.”
“So…” Keishin rubbed his jaw. A ransacked pawnshop, its missing owner, and a woman determined to follow a trail of strange clues were not things he had expected to encounter on his first morning in Tokyo. But somewhere between walking into the pawnshop and seeing the conviction in Hana’s eyes, Hana’s questions had become his. Those questions now clung to him just as fiercely as he refused to let them go. “Where is ‘left’?”
“That is a question for the god on the shelf.”
—
The kamidana altar was set against the hallway wall across from Hana’s bedroom. Keishin’s father had kept a similar one in the spare room in the attic, at the highest point of their home. When he was a boy and his friends asked him about the kamidana, he simply told them what it was. A god shelf. They didn’t ask him any questions after that. The wooden household altar looked like a miniature Shinto shrine and was built to house a chosen deity. His father would light two tiny candles on either side of the altar, make offerings of rice and salt, and pray to their god on a shelf each day. Keishin went through the motions of bowing and clapping thrice, but he could never think of anything to say. “Are you…um…going to pray?”
“My prayers would be useless,” Hana said.
“Then why are we here?”
“Because my father’s may not be. He always visited the kamidana before going to bed. He might have mentioned something in his prayers that could explain what he did to the pawnshop and why he disappeared.”
“Did he write down his prayers somewhere? Did he keep a journal?”
“No.”
“Did he make recordings on his phone?”
Hana shook her head. “Not on his phone.”
“Then where did he keep his prayers?”
“Kei…” Hana drew a deep breath. “There are things I will tell you that will be hard for you to believe. You are free to change your mind about helping me and to leave anytime you wish.”
“I think you might be underestimating my curiosity. I love puzzles probably as much as you do. Maybe more.”
Hana caught a glimpse of the fire that had ignited behind Keishin’s irises. “I can see that.”
Keishin shrugged. “It’s pretty much a job requirement.”
“But this mystery has little to do with your science. It may even be beyond everything you know.” Hana was aware that her words were kindling to Keishin’s flame, but she warned him just the same.
“I chase invisible things for a living. I don’t scare off that easily.”
Hana took one of the candles from the kamidana. “Even if I ask you to listen to smoke?”