The End of the Moment We Had

by Toshiki Okada

  Before he dozed off he pushed the tray to his right so he could put his head down on the counter in front of him. One hand lies on top of the other wrist, and his forehead lies on top of his two hands. He doesn’t need to get going yet, and he’s been in that position for a while. It won’t be long before his hands start to go numb.

  His hands smell like sanitizer. The smell mixes with the smell of the meat he pulls from tightly packed plastic bags in the freezer, that meat patty smell, and the smell of the sweet sauce that goes on the meat. His hands smell of all that, as does his hair.

  I no longer have the urge to stroke my hair, and instead I run the palm of my hand over my cheek, to my chin bone, to the curve of where my jaw meets my neck. I apply pressure to my chin, so that it hurts a little, so that I can really feel the bone in there.

  My husband’s bag, stuffed to bursting, rests under his legs, crammed between his stool and the counter. His hair looks greasy.

  Sometimes when my husband is sleeping I sneak my face close to his hands, so that I can smell them. It’s not that I like the smell of meat. I actually find it disgusting. But I keep doing it because I want to make sure I still find it disgusting.

  As for his hair, as soon as he shampoos, the smell goes away.

  There’s one TV show that I absolutely have to watch, it’s on once a week, on Tuesdays at eleven, and last week when I was watching it my husband was at home. I don’t know if it was because he was asleep or because he just wouldn’t watch it with me but suddenly my frustration at him boiled over, and I knew I shouldn’t have but I started in on him, attacking him, while my show was still on, through the end of the show, past midnight, on and on until who knows how late, basically telling him he was a good-for-nothing coward, which would have been too cruel to actually say so I didn’t, but that about sums up what I was feeling.

  When I was watching TV, I was lying there motionless, my body feeling heavy and tired like it is now, training my eyes on the screen, absorbing the flickering light. I can’t remember what set me off, but I started saying wouldn’t it be nice if we had a little more money, don’t you think we should try to do something about that, I really think we should be thinking more about the future, that kind of stuff, trying to make it seem like it was just occurring to me, when of course I had it on my mind, and I was talking with an edge, and once I got going I sat up and leant forwards over my knees on the vinyl flooring.

  Before long I was shouting at the top of my lungs, not holding back at all, lashing out at my husband and it was like I couldn’t stop. At one point my eyes were swollen and burning. I had the vague feeling that if I really wanted to talk about this with him, it might have been better if I wasn’t screaming and crying.

  Thinking back to that whole thing, I start to feel the laziness in my body tighten up at the back of my neck. It could be that the tension was already there and building up and I only noticed it just then. When I was freaking out at him, I knew that we were both working, and that we weren’t broke or anything, and that this tantrum I was throwing wasn’t doing me or him or us any good. It’s not that I understand all of that only now that I’ve calmed down, I was totally aware of it when I was yelling at him.

  For his part, my husband didn’t act hurt or angry at what I was saying, he just sat there passively taking it all in. To me, this was humiliating. Why didn’t he shout back, challenge the outrageous stuff I was saying, why didn’t he get mad at me? That’s why I’ve spent so much time searching for a blog or something of his, because if he had a reason not to shout back I bet he would have written about it. But it could be that he doesn’t write a blog, or that if he does it’s set to private and you have to sign up or register or something to read it, or it’s on a secret page on Mixi or some other social networking site that I won’t be able to find. And if he did that, then I really really wonder what he wrote.

  I make my biggest move of the day so far: I put my head where my feet were and my feet where my head was. The sheet where my head was feels damp and humid, and I’m sure that there are some parts of the sheet where my feet were that are cool and dry. I tuck my trunk towards my legs so that my body is in a wedge, then pull my legs away so I’m straight again, and repeating this four or five times rotates me around the bed like the hands rounding a clock. I was right, the sheet at the bottom is refreshingly cool.

  While I was yelling at my husband, and after I was done too, he sat there scratching his left bicep like he had a stubborn itch. From his perspective my tantrum must have come out of nowhere. But for me it was a long time coming, it had been simmering, getting hotter, so that once it got to boiling there was no stopping it.

  I let my head drop forwards as far as the bones in my neck will allow. Then I lean it all the way back. But I can’t go so far back on my own. To get it back all the way, so that it’s flush against my spine, snap, I’d need someone to help.

  The sliding glass door beside me gives off an energy that I think is somehow like a lover who wants me, who wants to get on top of me. It’s almost too much to bear.

  This apartment of ours is in the one sunken spot on a swell of land, squeezed into a cluster of buildings, none of them more than five storeys, which isn’t short but feels short, and somehow oppressive. There’s a mix of places: apartment buildings like ours, an exam-prep school, also an Asian goods gift shop, I’m guessing, based on the fact that the window is full of origami and kanji placards on imitation Japanese paper and clothes with fabric that looks rough to the touch hanging from the curtain rods. There are a few, very few, single-family houses, and also a building with gallery space for rent a half-flight of stairs down from ground level. Our apartment building is jammed in right in the middle of all this, kind of like a child being crowded and pushed around by bigger kids. We used to say that being stuck in the middle is why our walls and floors are always sweating. But really it’s because we’re in the cheapest unit in the building, down on the first floor with the worst light. In winter our place feels like a swamp. It smells like one too.

  I always place my futon next to the sliding glass door. Rings of grime spatter across the pane, white outlines of where the drops of condensation have dried, almost regular enough to make a pattern. Just beyond our tiny concrete balcony is a patch of land overgrown with weeds that give off a powerful grassy odour. Between the balcony railing and the wall of the next building is less than a metre.

  I can’t shake the idea that my husband could have a diary or a blog, whether or not I would ever be able to read it, but supposing he has one, does he write about me? When I ask myself this question, I don’t know if I want the answer to be yes or no.

  He’s slumped over on the counter sleeping, head resting on his hands, the tips of his fingers peeking out, and they’ve got a faint red tint to them, like maybe he was handling a red ink-pad.

  Suddenly I have the memory of staring through the glass of the sliding door and seeing two cats on the balcony, perfectly still, until they sprang up onto the rail and leapt to the next building and scrambled up the wall and out of my sight. Thinking about such a mundane scene feels a little like a premonition of death.

  I notice that the two empty cans of beer I set down on the kitchen floor have tipped over.

  There’s mould in the bathroom, but it’s also in the corners of the kitchen, and on one spot of the tatami under the vinyl flooring. I can’t get it out, although I’ve tried. But the mould is worst in the closet, which I keep closed because the smell is really strong. We’ve lived here for several months now, and little by little I’ve got used to the mould smell and the general stickiness, so that it doesn’t even really bother me any more. I’m actually a little surprised that I was able to get used to it, but I haven’t told my husband. He always leaves the closet door open, which I hate.

  Why do we have to live in such a nasty, musty place, it’s tiny and it has no light and it reeks of mould, are we going to spend the rest of our lives here? I once said that to my husband. He said, okay, you wan
t to move? Okay, let’s move, is that what you want?

  I didn’t say anything. Instead I scooted towards him, I was sitting on the floor facing him and I unfolded my legs from under me and thrust them at him and hopped on my butt in his direction and with my outstretched legs I kicked at him over and over again. For a second he laughed, maybe thinking I was doing a special move of a hero in a kids’ show, and he used his left arm to shield himself, but the next moment he whipped his arm back towards me to pin down my legs. Just before he got me I landed one good kick on his arm, right in the spot where he has three large birthmarks, which make me think of Orion’s belt. But then he had me, and I couldn’t move. I struggled for a bit while he held me down, but he’s a man, and I doubt he even had to try very hard.

  His arm on the counter at Becker’s looks bulging, but it’s not from muscles, it’s from the bend in his elbow and from the weight of his head. There’s a burn on his skin from his job in the kitchen, something must have got on him, but it’s already crusting over with a scab.

  After I was kicking him, as he was holding me down, I’m pretty sure this happened, I smelt something weird, and it could even have been coming from my own body, I had no idea what it was but it smelt rotten, like maybe it was the contents of a stomach, vomit about to come up. I’m thinking about it now, after it happened, and I can’t believe a smell that foul could be mine. Maybe I was imagining it, because when you actually smell bad, you only pick up the littlest bit of your smell, like a whiff from somewhere far away, so maybe I wasn’t really smelling it at all. But obviously I couldn’t ask my husband, so I have no way of knowing for sure. If I did imagine it, then why? I mean, why did I imagine a stench like that? At the time I think I was sobbing, tears and mucus running down my face.

  Slumped over on the counter, asleep, my husband’s bony spine and shoulders twitch from time to time. When the spasm is big enough the counter creaks. But it’s still only a tiny movement, and the noise barely registers. His back is rounded and tight at the same time. He isn’t capable of letting go of all that tension, not even in his sleep.

  Whenever I freak out, like I did that time, my husband always comes up with the best-sounding, most optimistic, most unrealistic solution possible. I knew he would do it that time too, I was actually expecting it.

  He loosened his hold on me. Even though he let me go I knew that I shouldn’t start thrashing around again, so I stayed still. But I made sure to keep chewing him out, I said what the hell are you talking about, moving, how could we possibly do that, and you know, we haven’t even been here half a year, we can’t just go from place to place, it’ll cost so much fucking money, did you even stop to think about that?

  He sat there listening to me, wiping his glasses with a lens cloth which he keeps in the pocket of his favourite jeans, the ones he’s always wearing. I don’t think that little lens cloth had been washed in months, but he did manage to get some of the smudges off the lenses. I guess even though he doesn’t wash the lens cloth itself, at least it is in his pocket when he washes the jeans, which happens once in a while. His lens cloth is here now. His jeans are inside out, stuffed into the washing machine, which I can’t see from where I am. The top of the jeans is spilling out over the top of the machine.

  I stretch again. First out, then up, my palms spread to the ceiling.

  My husband is wearing his other jeans, the old ones, with the hole in the knee. The crotch is worn thin, with little openings where you can see the flesh of his upper thigh. His blue T-shirt is also pretty worn out. The crew-neck collar is all stretched and shapeless, and the blue is faded. It used to be bright blue. His legs follow the line of the stool towards the floor, but his feet don’t touch the ground.

  He listened until I stopped yelling, then waited until he was done wiping his glasses, then said to me you’re right, but you know, take the mould for instance, we knew the place was mouldy but we decided we would deal with it because our priority was cheap rent, but now that we actually live here if you can’t stand the smell of the mould, then of course it’s a shame to lose the money it would take to move but wouldn’t moving be the best thing? That’s what he said. But why couldn’t he say something like let’s just stick it out for another half-year?

  I grabbed a kitchen knife and hacked down on the controller cord for his game system. I’m not sure if this was before I tried to kick him and he pinned me, or after.

  I severed the cord neatly. This surprised me, because I thought maybe some of the wires inside the rubber casing would put up a fight. Cutting through the cord so easily was kind of anticlimactic. But at that moment there was no room in my body, my face, my heart, to express that let-down.

  My head always feels like it’s full of dust balls, grey and jagged, mixed with shreds of metal, stabbing at me. I want to get rid of them, dump them out, like emptying the vacuum cleaner, but even if I managed to do that, to shake them all out, somehow I know they would appear again and multiply and fill me right back up.

  If I was really so repulsed by the mould and humidity, there’s no way I would be lying around here like this now. I’d get myself up and get out of these sweatpants, which have this stretched-out elastic at the waist so that I need to tie the drawstrings or the pants fall down, I’d take them off and put on some real clothes and go outside.

  The alley that leads from our apartment building to the street feels like an accidental gap between the buildings, so narrow you’d have a hard time walking your bike through. There’s one part of the alley that’s concrete because it’s part of the foundation, but most parts of the alley aren’t so when it rains the ground turns to mud and shoes get all muddy. But it’s been sunny the past few days, so the dirt in the alley should be dry and hard.

  The street it leads to isn’t much of a street either, only a car-and-a-half wide. It’s closed to oversized vehicles, but they didn’t make it one-way or anything, except for a stretch in the morning when it’s rush hour. I lift my right leg and point my toes, ballet-like, making one straight line. Or I guess I should say that’s what I was trying to do. I can feel the tendons on the outside of my ankle straining.

  The narrow street eventually turns into a wider road that’s a slope with two lanes, where the sky isn’t all chopped up by the buildings and you need to use the traffic mirrors because of the curves as you go down the hill. The slope levels off by the station. But you can’t see the station, because there’s a big bookstore in the way, you can only see it once you cross the intersection. The two-lane road goes past the station and continues on for a bit until it joins Sotobori Avenue which keeps going all the way around the moat of the Imperial Palace. There’s a big sign over the avenue there, with fat white arrows on a green background that direct you to the on-ramp for the expressway.

  I have the whole day to myself, but no way I’m going to work up the energy to go anywhere. If I did go anywhere, it would probably be the convenience store or somewhere for a coffee, and it’d cost money.

  There is a bunch of convenience stores around the station.

  I’ve been staring at the ceiling, and the beam running across the middle starts looking like the centre line of a soccer field.

  I’d better put in that call to work.

  Sometimes when I look at the sign for FamilyMart, with the blue and green stripes, the green part looks beautiful to me (just the green, not the blue). It’s only at a certain time, when the light in the sky is right. Like how I feel about the red of a traffic light when dusk is about to fall and the sky is a little purple. Only thing is I don’t remember at what time of day the light in the sky is right for the green in the FamilyMart sign, except that I’m sure it’s not the beginning of dusk.

  The area around my left bicep starts to itch, so I slide my right hand under the sheets and scratch at it through the fabric.

  My husband’s arm emerges from the short sleeve of his blue T-shirt, bending at the elbow in a sprawl on top of the white tray on the counter. The elbow has a birthmark, and it come
s to a sharp point and looks more grimy to me than the average elbow.

  When I yelled at my husband, demanding to know how he could stand to live in such a mouldy-smelling place, it wasn’t because I’m physically unable to stand it, it’s more the fact we have to live somewhere that’s mouldy, but I don’t think he understood where I was coming from. He’s probably still thinking that I’m suffering from the mould smell itself, and if he’s written about it in his blog, even if he didn’t use any names or write enough specifics for someone to figure out who it was about, I think, speaking as someone who was there, I would be able to identify myself from the details, and if he has written about the whole mould-driving-me-crazy business, I’m sure it paints me in a terrible light.

  This scenario of mine is now pretty much running on autopilot in my brain. Like maybe he ducked into an internet café for thirty minutes before work last night and wrote it, so that I could find it and read it within a few hours of him writing it. He hadn’t written yesterday or the day before, so he was really feeling like he had to do it, get it written down. Like about me chopping through his controller cord with a knife, and me knowing that I could fly off the handle and destroy his controller and he wouldn’t do anything to me, and even though I knew he loved his video games, I would do it anyway, and how he would say I’m a spoilt brat, only a child would act that way, and how he was surprised by my chopping through his controller cord, but his surprise was quickly taken over by anger, but he didn’t blow up, he just stayed calm, he was trying to vibe me to snap out of it, and then he had this sudden impulse and he slugged me. At least that’s what he would have written, even though in real life he’s never hit me even once. He didn’t even make a sound when I chopped the controller cord, not a peep of surprise or anger, which actually I think made more of an impact on me, but in his blog I bet he wrote that he shouted, really went off, like hey what the hell are you doing, you’re acting fucking crazy!