Harmless Like You

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  He got up. The back of his hair needed trimming. The other diners clanked on, oblivious as ever.

  The waitress flattened the five-dollar bill, smoothing it and caressing it, a mother rubbing the forehead of her sick child. She took her time. When it was smooth she folded it over a loop in the pocket of her apron and made change from the other pocket standing right at the table.

  “You took the pictures?” Wonderful, the waitress had heard them.

  “Yeah.”

  “Manager said it was you. My mam used to do my hair just like that sweetie. Every day, braids ’n’ everything. You’d’ve thought I was going to a pageant.”

  “Oh. Right. Thanks.” Yuki had not invited her father or mother to this, her first exhibition, which meant perhaps it didn’t count. The first real exhibition would be something she could invite her father to and say see, see I am a success. Were they easy? Easy? This was easy? The stink of chemicals in her eyes? Wandering through real galleries, looking at the work of real artists and wondering again and again what made them better?

  Lou came out of the restroom and reached for the quarters.

  “Not. Easy.” The s rippled on her tongue. “It’s not easy.”

  Lou stopped, coins still glinting between the gaps in his fingers.

  “It’s not easy.” Each easy bounced off the last, getting louder.

  The hand made a fist around the change, the whites of his knuckles showing. “We’re leaving.” The other hand reached towards her arm.

  “Or what? You’ll do what? In front of all these people?” It felt good to make a scene. Good to see all those indifferent diners look up at her. They might not see her art. But now, they could at least for this moment see her and the halogen burn of her rage.

  “Don’t be a child.” He spoke fast and quiet.

  “I’m not a child.”

  “So.” His voice was low; he might have been telling her to put the kettle on or add his socks to the laundry pile, the voice of someone who expects their instructions to be obeyed. “Don’t act like one.”

  “It’s hard. It’s really, really hard.” Why didn’t she have more words? She thought of the Nothing. The ghost girl’s orange teeth. She thought of doors slammed. The bright blur of her mother’s cooking in a trashcan now long since rotted in some suburb. She thought of the flashes of something bigger and brighter than herself. The moments in the arc of a line or the click of a camera that lifted the sky an inch. She thought of how it crashed down again. She thought of the aches in her face from his hands. The aches in her back from the thin mattress. Of how, when he didn’t come to bed until two or three, it was the minute hand that smacked her again and again.

  A giggle, bright and high. Yuki turned. In a corner booth were two girls, one laughing into the other’s shoulder. “Shhh, shh, Stop it. Stop it,” said one. But the other’s giggles lapped higher and higher.

  They were laughing at Yuki. She was ridiculous, that was all. She dropped down into the booth. The leatherette squeaked under her sliding back. She’d made a stupid scene, just like a child.

  Lou turned, pad-footing and silent to the diner door. The glass whacked Yuki’s hand as she tried to catch up. It was dark, but his orange-gold hair was glowing bright as any of the bar signs that lit the street. She put her hand into his. He didn’t pull away, but he didn’t hold on. Her hand fell from his. He wouldn’t look at her. In the half-light, she couldn’t see what he was looking at, if he was looking at anything at all. His stride snapped up the avenue.

  “Lou.” She stopped. “Lou.”

  Nothing. He kept walking, farther and farther away. What was the point of chasing him if she couldn’t catch him? She fumbled for the anger, but it was gone and she felt only tired. He was so far down the street that he could be two dashes of paint. A flick of copper then a streak of gray, barely more than light on water. Barely a person at all. And if he wasn’t a person then what was she? A Nothing.

  So what if it wasn’t easy. What was that to be proud of? She should chase after him. She should promise to try harder, to be a better artist, a better girlfriend, because the Nothing had stretched its arms across the entire dusk.

  It took a second, less than a second. Something inside her flickered. Her brain mimicked their bathroom bulb; it was over-humidified. Her eyes opened as she was falling.

  On the ground, her first thought was, I bet my stockings are going to run. They cost a whole dollar at the drugstore. She couldn’t buy the generic brand as they turned her skin pink. Her second thought was that if she just kept lying there she wouldn’t have to buy another pair of stockings. Were other people’s thoughts this graceless? She would just lie here, just for a moment. She would let the cold flow over her and wash her clean. She should open her eyes. It was not good to be a body in New York alone at night. She didn’t open her eyes. She watched the red hexagons dance beyond her lids.

  Hands on her arm, She pulled away fast, curling in on herself. Her limbs were clunky and bumped hard against the sidewalk.

  “Lou?”

  His fingers made their way across her scalp, checking for bumps.

  “I turned and you were on the ground.”

  “I’m fine. I tripped.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.” A smile tugged at her cheeks, neck, pulling open even her lungs. He’d turned around. He’d turned around for her. He had both arms around her, and was holding her to his chest. If this was all it would take for him to hold her, to wrap his arms around her, it felt so little.

  “I’m fine, really. I think I just forgot to eat all day.” Her mother had low blood sugar levels, and she carried brown sugar cubes in her purse. Overcome with wooziness, she’d sit down and dose herself. Sometimes, she’d give Yuki half a cube. Yuki could still remember the sharp corners melting to syrup.

  The ache in her stomach wasn’t only defeat.

  “You were in a diner all day, and you forgot to eat?” He sighed. “Let’s go back inside. Get you something.”

  She smiled, leaning up to kiss him. Whatever they had going, it was theirs. In a country of which she was a citizen by fluke, he’d claimed her, and she’d claimed him. For now that would have to be enough. He looped his arm under her shoulder.

  “Sorry, for being foul. I just heard they gave the Arts beat to some kid Yale shat out, even though everyone knew Reggie left it to me. Right before he packed up his desk, he gave me his address book. That beat was mine.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “But you know, it wasn’t easy. They weren’t, the photographs. Not for me.”

  “I know.” He put his arm around her and his neck was soft when she pressed her head against it. Gently, he thumbed the back of her neck, and she thought if he would keep that tiny motion going up, and down, up and down, it would erase every ache.

  Jay

  10.

  Berlin, October 2016

  I tapped 1989 into the stainless steel keypad, but the door stayed locked. This apartment had been listed on Berlin’s Airbnb. I’d already transferred the payment. Tried again. I hit the door with a fist. Great. The sky was black as a boot sole. I fumbled in my bag for the notebook into which I’d transcribed the code. The streetlights were weak, and I was going by touch.

  Hotels are funny about cats, and so I’d sublet a small apartment. The old building looked down with merciless glassy eyes.

  Celeste mewled, plaintive in the cold night. There it was in my scrawl: 1989. I jabbed it in again. Silence. Celeste batted at the cage. Oh. Stupid. I’d forgotten the hash recorded in four lazy pen swipes. “I guess I’m making a hash of this, huh.” Celeste didn’t bother mewling at my joke.

  The door submitted to my code. The curling handrail had a thick coat of bubbled paint, and dust had worked into the white. My suitcase smacked the stairs, and the sound echoed through the wide space. I looked around, guilty as a child, but no one came out to scold me.

  I let Celeste out of her box. She ran straight for the bookshelf, jumping over H
egel, Marx, and J.K. Rowling to the top. She crouched, surveying her new territory. The kitchen was narrow, all pine cabinets and mismatched crockery. I stood in front of the mugs, deciding which to drink from.

  People always seem to feel personal about their mugs. Maybe because mugs are often gifts, or because they are the repository of liquid warmth. On trips to Europe, I’d stayed in similar apartments, and I liked to guess the mug the owner thought of as “theirs.” It’d be the mug with a chip on the handle, the design worn from washing, and tea lines etched down the middle. I made hot apfel tea in a thick, white mug. On the front was Lennon in his New York City T-shirt. While the torso was clear, his face had been rubbed down to a gray blur. I pressed my thumb to the smudge. The resident must slowly have rubbed him away. I tried to guess whether hers had been the thoughtful caress or the nervous tic. I decided on thoughtful, that the person living here was a student. She lived alone but had a regular boyfriend, one who stayed weekends, cleaned her bath and called her mousling. She let him call her that even though she was writing her dissertation on transnational feminism.

  From the apartment, I phoned Mimi. She walked the phone over to Eliot’s crib.

  “She’s asleep, can you hear her?” Mimi asked.

  “Yes.” I thought I’d heard breathing, but it might’ve been static. I didn’t know what the point was supposed to be. Eliot didn’t know me to miss me. She was a machine that turned milk into tears. I couldn’t imagine her as a person. Could I really become one of those fathers who stand before Warhol’s soup cans, explicating the ache of mass production to their tot?

  When I woke, there were two gray-vested crows on the balcony railings. The window-balcony was sized for a child or half an adult. It might as well have been built for the crows. Celeste sat on the bed watching them. They were easily her size. I don’t think in all our travels she’d ever seen a bird so large. The right crow had a long sausage in its black beak. His brother hopped forward and stabbed at the sausage. The right crow hopped back. The left bobbed after him. I found myself rooting for the empty-beaked brother; the sausage was far too long for one crow alone. The crows jumped left again, and now I could only see the hungry brother. The edges of his dandy wings were tattered. To get a better view, I sat up in bed and opened the window, which creaked. A sharp wind blew into the room, ruffling the curtains and forcing me to blink. The two crows shot upward into the sky, leaving a pecked sausage on our balcony. I stretched out to retrieve it. The skin was sticky.

  “Wurst from heaven.”

  Celeste didn’t laugh. She never did. Across the street there were several doner stands, selling kebabs, sausages, and beer. The crows had probably found it there. I sat in bed, sheets pulled up to my chest, tearing the sausage into cat-bites. Celeste ate from my hand, her breath hot in the chilly air. Cat skin and human skin feel the same. Run your hands down the inside of your thigh. That’s what Celeste’s back felt like. The gentle pulse of her blood warmed mine. I ate the puckered end of sausage. The meat was clammy, and fine grit stuck in my teeth. I went to the kitchen to clear my mouth. The microwave clock said it was 13:00. I rewound: 7 a.m. in New York. Mimi would have fed the baby; she’d be sipping a pint glass of black coffee and checking her emails.

  At the table, I consulted the map to the gallery. It was walking distance; I wouldn’t even have to take the U-Bahn.

  There was nothing my mother could do to me now. I wasn’t nervous. But I had a stomach ache, a gaseous empty feeling, so I made a cup of instant and called my wife. She did not pick up.

  11.

  Berlin, October 2016

  All I had to do was go to the gallery, get my mother’s number, have her sign for the deed, give her the deed, go home. Easy. I just wanted to talk to my wife first. I decided to check then re-check the route. Then, I would try Mimi one more time.

  The gallery wasn’t on the fashionable Auguststraße, where Quentin Taupe had just opened a branch. It was in one of those pockets of West Berlin along the territory of doner and sex shops that had filled with florists, Japanese textile designers, and fledgling bankers. The studio was tucked under the S-Bahn, Berlin’s above-ground commuter rail. Some architect had gotten the idea to fill in the spaces between the brick feet of the raised rail with glass. Brownfield construction—Dad would’ve loved it. Unwanted land made precious. I’d seen pictures online, done a practice walk through on Google Maps Street View. The camera had surged forward in my stead. The computer’s flat white skies looked much like the sky out my window.

  Celeste’s bowl was full of water. I was ready to go. I dialed Mimi’s number. It wasn’t so late in New York. Cellphone: nada. Landline: my own voice, suggesting that I could also be reached at the gallery. She was my wife, and she’d promised to be there for me for better or for worse. Wasn’t this worse? Actually, she hadn’t promised me that: at our ceremony we’d read poetry and promised to do our best. She was the only person other than my dad I loved. I needed to hear her voice before I set out.

  Without a wifely blessing, I took the stairs down two at a time. I told myself it didn’t matter. Yukiko Oyama was not my mom. As a teenager, I thought of her as “the Egg Donor.” I would be fine without reassurance. I’d planned on going straight to the gallery, but I couldn’t shake off the ache in my back, or the jet lag droning in my skull. My brain ran figure eights around my ankles, darting after one thought only to lope back panting after a stray tangent. I wanted sleep. What was Mimi doing? What the hell did I plan to say to my mother? I needed bitterest coffee to focus me.

  “Americano, with an extra shot of espresso please.”

  I took it black, sitting on a high stool, facing the window; on my right was a mirror. I started at my own face, rising up pale from the upturned collar of the wool coat. I hadn’t shaved. My facial hair was piebald. It grew in irregular circles up and down my jaw. I’d forgotten to pack a razor, and overwhelmed by jet lag and my wife’s silence, I’d failed to remedy the omission. Three gray ovals showed where the hair had begun to prickle. Dirty fingerprints, I thought, and lined my fingers up with the marks. I rubbed each whorl of stubble, then downed the coffee.

  At the supermarket, I bought a razor, and grabbed a roll from a bin labeled Laugenbrötchen. Then, I bought some pastry-wrapped sausages. The grease had risen to the surface of the dough, but it seemed imperative I stuff myself before this ordeal. There were rows and rows of American sodas, but I grabbed a beer instead.

  In the apartment, I shaved and ate my brunch. The roll’s dark crust was salty, as if designed to be consumed with beer. Maybe it was. In three large bites it was gone. I chinked open the beer and felt the hiss of carbonation sigh through my bones. I felt my cheeks warm. When I drank I flushed, a legacy I assumed came from my mother. When Mimi drank, she turned rosy as a twelve-year-old girl’s bedroom. When we drank together, something that hadn’t happened since the baby, she kissed me on my blush-pink spots. She liked them, said they made me look kind and shy. Said I looked like that when we first met, though I was sober then.

  Finishing the bottle, I tossed it, ran a swift hand over Celeste’s back and made my exit.

  The walk to her gallery was quick. In front of me, a mother walked her twins down the street in bobble-topped hats. The yellow pompoms bobbed jauntily like two guiding sprites. We rounded the corner, and there was the gallery. The brushed glass facade was milk white. White as the sky it reflected. I paused on the pavement as the twins toddled away. Behind the glass hung a floor-to-ceiling poster. A giant thought bubble was cartooned over the back of a woman’s head. My mother? The hair was streaky black and white. The white strands curled and frizzed, and hadn’t been Photoshopped out. The thought bubble read,

  “Shit’s Still Brown.”

  The mistake was in the pause. I knew it as soon as I blinked, and the colors in the milky glass bled across my vision.

  In the movies when you faint, this is how it goes: the faces double, blur, and then boom, black out. One: Hold your breath. Two: Lights. Three: Action.
You hear your name in the darkness, once, twice, three times. Then, a face, unfocused at first. The face is saying your name. Movies don’t talk about fainting alone. Movies can’t show the feel of the pavement quicksanding beneath you. Your foot goes down and down into the dark. They can’t show the uneasy familiarity of the fall.

  12.

  Berlin, October 2016

  I blinked. There was grit in my right eye. Water crept in through my jeans. I hoped it wouldn’t show. I sat up and wiped the eye, but there was grit on my hand too. It stung. Nobody tells you that you might fall and wake up, and no one will even notice. You’ll look at a watch or phone, and see you’ve been down for half a minute.

  I made a lap around the gallery, calming my nerves. If she’d been a Damian Hirst, she wouldn’t have been in a space that had once been an alleyway where tramps pissed. But I supposed her profile, like the district, must be growing. The walls were hung with photographs of white plates. On the white plates were white foods: cauliflower, rice, milk, rolls of cheese, crustless bread, skinless bananas, parsnips, sad strips of chicken breast. A bilingual plaque claimed the concept of the show was that for a month, the artist had eaten only white foods. There was no photograph of the shit of Shit’s Still Brown. I was thankful. It was too early to see the insides of my mother’s bowels.

  They described her as Japanese. Was she a German citizen now? It mentioned that she had lived in the States for a while, at a time when it was almost impossible to succeed as a woman or a person of color. To be both meant that no club would have you. You would never be invited to the right parties, lofts, or warehouses. Did they even have the term person of color then? The plaque seemed to applaud her for this effort, for this beating against closed doors. I knew as well as anyone how locked those rooms were. Even far more connected artists, like Yoko Ono or Yayoi Kusama, were only just being properly recognized. My mother’s efforts struck me only as an act of insane hubris, or perhaps ignorance.