In the morning, when I woke up on the shop sofa, the customer was still in the fitting room. She’d been trying to find something to wear all night. Poor, awkward lamb! I was starting to have a soft spot for her. I decided to run out to a local bakery that opened at six, and placed the bagel and the café au lait I’d bought just outside the curtain, saying, “Please, help yourself.” She didn’t respond, but the paper bag was gone when I next looked.
I touched up my makeup and changed into some spare clothes I had in my locker before the other staff arrived. “It’s not your customer from yesterday, is it?” they said, surprised, but thankfully, when I said, “I know! She asked me to open up first thing,” they didn’t probe any further. By midafternoon, she’d completed her second try-on of all the clothes I’d brought out from stock. Still, she wasn’t satisfied. I drove to the nearest fast-fashion outlet and purchased dozens of pieces for her. Some other customers came to our boutique, but I left them to my colleagues to serve. There were two other fitting rooms, so no one seemed to notice my peculiar customer.
She didn’t like any of the clothes I’d bought for her either, so finally I decided to take her to another clothes shop, fitting room and all. I’d just remembered that our owner liked to change the decor of the boutique every once in a while, so our fitting rooms were movable, on wheels.
“Tell everyone I’ll be out for a bit,” I said to one of the other girls, and hooked the rope around my shoulders. It was heavy, but not impossible to pull forward. I headed into town, towing the fitting room. Pulling a thing like this in broad daylight, I’d been prepared for people to stare, but no one seemed to give it a second glance. I guess they thought we were setting up for some event or doing a photo shoot. My customer inside the booth, who’d been so hard to please, seemed to be having misgivings, saying, “There’s no need for you to go to so much trouble.”
“Please don’t be silly. We’ve come so far—we’re going to find the perfect thing for you, I promise,” I said, trying to keep her spirits up. “I want you to come out of that fitting room with a smile on your face!”
I was set on finding my customer something really special. I thought I’d take her to my favorite boutique. That meant navigating a serious hill through steep residential streets. I called on passersby for help. “What’s behind the curtain?” they wanted to know. When I said, “A valued customer,” someone said, “That’s a funny way of getting publicity,” but several of them offered to help push to the top of the hill anyway.
Together, we transported the fitting room. The steeper the incline got, the more the curtains swayed, and gradually I was able to make out the shape of my customer inside. No one else seemed to be looking, but I could see she wasn’t fat at all. She was smallish, but not especially tiny. More to the point, she didn’t really seem human. Draped in the curtains, she was an unusual shape that I’d never seen before. From time to time I could hear a sticky, slurping, roiling kind of sound, and then the curtain would bulge and cave in different places. I had no idea what she was at all. But it was really no wonder she couldn’t find an outfit that suited her when her body type was so unique!
I was just catching my breath, having towed the fitting room to the top of the hill—all that remained was to descend the hill on the other side—when the rope slipped from my hands and the fitting room started rolling down the steep street, casters rattling. I’d used up all my strength and didn’t have the energy to run after it. The fitting room hurtled down toward the bottom of the hill at an incredible speed, growing smaller and smaller.
“Madam!” I cried, as loud as I could. “You’re welcome to take that curtain, if you’d like.”
A hand stuck out from between the curtains and waved slowly at me for a long time, like someone saying goodbye from a departing car window. Then the hand threw something into the road. When I ran to pick it up, I saw it was a bank note in a currency I didn’t recognize.
Since then, I’ve taken to imagining all sorts of things about the things I see as I walk down the street. Anything at all could turn out to be something beyond my wildest dreams. My customer’s physique was kind of runny and grotesque, but depending on how you looked at it, you could also call it elegant. Picture a picnic blanket laid on a meadow—I bet that would look pretty good on her, like a floral print dress.
Typhoon
“Try these—they’re really delicious.”
I was in the bus shelter opposite the train station, staying out of the rain while I waited for my mom, when the old guy holding the umbrella and dressed in rags started talking to me. I hadn’t noticed him turn up, but he gave me a friendly smile and offered me a little packet of cookies.
“You look hungry,” he said. “Go ahead, take some.”
Even though we were in the middle of a huge typhoon and the ferocious wind was howling past my ears, I thought I caught a whiff of the old guy’s sour smell.
“Aw, cookies!” I said, taking them like a good child.
I was clutching the cookies inside my palm and nervously pretending to eat them when the guy pointed toward the junction where the wide station road met a smaller road and, out of nowhere, said, “Don’t ever underestimate people like them.” He was pointing at a man in a suit waiting for the lights to turn, desperately holding his umbrella open in the storm.
I didn’t react, but secretly I was pretty worried that he’d read my mind. I’d been watching people just like suit man passing by, laughing at them inside. Anytime I saw typhoon coverage on TV, I just had to wonder: What on earth were these people thinking? Walking along looking totally focused on holding their umbrellas open in front of them when their clothes, their hair, and most likely even their socks were wet through. I wanted to say, Are you sure there isn’t something wrong with your head? Are you grown men really kowtowing to umbrellas? But I’d never mentioned these thoughts to anyone else.
“Just watch,” said the old guy. “Soon he’ll be down to bare bones.”
I didn’t know what he meant, but his voice was strong like a sea captain’s, so I looked to where his gnarly finger was pointing, at the man in a suit holding on for dear life to the guardrail by the crossing. I’d nearly been blown out onto the road there too, earlier, as I battled the rain that blew horizontally into my face. Because it was a junction, the strong winds bore straight at you.
“Three! Two! One!” the old guy shouted, just as the man’s umbrella turned inside out like a rice bowl and its fabric disappeared as though an invisible man had ripped it off, instantly reducing the umbrella to just its skeleton.
I was speechless. The old guy’s timing had been perfect.
Associating with people like him was a bad idea. I knew this, but his shabby appearance and offensive smell didn’t bother me anymore. He handed me another packet of cookies, and I pretended to nibble them again, apologizing to him in my head for deceiving him. Oblivious to that, the guy started telling a story about some boy from a tribe that lived deep in a forest. He was explaining what the young kid did to win an umbrella that a foreigner had brought to their village.
“They beat each other with sticks,” said the guy. The wind was whipping his long, tangled hair around, and it looked like the strands were trying to feed on his face.
“Sticks?” I said.
“That’s right. In that village, they had a custom: once a year, the men would take turns hitting each other with a tree branch. So the village chief decided that whoever lasted the longest before letting out even a single sound would win the umbrella. None of the villagers had any idea what the umbrella was for. They thought the foreigners must use it to hit each other, as they did with sticks. No one in the village wanted to avoid getting rained on. Local tradition had it that rain was caused by sylvan spirits and was essential to the villagers’ reincarnation as insects after their death. People get reborn as insects in their mythology.”
Something unpleasant crawled up my spine, as if I’d just looked at a cluster of something t
iny all packed together, like bug eggs. As soon as the guy had said “sylvan spirits,” I’d suddenly felt fearful and panicked about standing there next to him. Had I gotten myself into some kind of unsavory situation? I couldn’t take my eyes off the tip of the umbrella he was gripping. I stuffed the cookies he’d given me into a pocket.
The guy was still talking, his hair still nibbling away at his face. “The young boy wanted the umbrella so badly that he became the first boy ever to take part in the village custom of the men hitting each other with sticks. His opponent kept hitting him and hitting him, but he stuck it out to the end without uttering a single peep. Young boy—not a single peep. Got that? When his towering opponent finally gave a groan at the pain in his arm and conceded, the boy collapsed, and lay still. That’s right: he was dead.
“Can you guess why that young boy wanted the umbrella so badly?”
At the sudden question, I shook my head, and said, “Um, no, sir, I don’t know.”
“He believed that umbrellas could make you fly.”
I was relieved that the story seemed to be over, but at the same time I was a little bit disappointed. Somehow, I’d been hoping for a more inspired ending. I was starting to wonder where my mom was, and about possible ways to safely remove myself from this conversation, when the guy pointed to another drenched man desperately holding his umbrella open. “They still believe too.” Then he counted, “Three! Two! One!” like before—and I couldn’t believe my eyes.
The man, who’d been getting buffeted along, holding aloft his nearly closed umbrella, stepped onto the guardrail and springboarded off, catching the wind and soaring up high into the air.
“All right!” The old guy looked to the sky and pumped his fist. “He really committed, kept his center of gravity nice and low—I knew he had a good chance!”
I stuck my head out from the bus shelter and looked in the direction where the man in the suit had flown off. Wiping the hair and the rain out of my eyes as I scanned the sky, I spotted loads of tiny human figures floating among the dark clouds. I stared, mouth wide open. All of them were hanging on for dear life, writhing and flailing, trying to keep a grip on their umbrellas. Fifty of them, at least, or a hundred, or even more.
I could have sworn the old guy was still right behind me, but when I snapped out of it and turned around, he was nowhere to be seen. Or at least he wasn’t in the bus shelter anymore.
“Catch ya later!” I heard a voice say from above. It was the guy, sounding exultant. “Catchyalater! Catchyaaa! Laterrr!”
I don’t laugh anymore when the news shows drenched people whose umbrellas flip and turn to bones. I don’t belittle their mental capabilities. When I pass people on the street who insist on trying to hold their umbrellas open on a stormy day, I know they are far more attuned to things than I am, that they’re fearless and dreaming big. And if I ever meet a boy looking cynical during a typhoon while sheltering from the rain, I’ll be ready to offer him some cookies and say, “Try these. They’re really delicious.”
On my way home from the bus stop, I gingerly tasted one of the cookies he’d given me. It was crisp and delicate, and better than any other cookie I’d had in all my eleven years.
The old guy was found on the pavement all flattened out the next day, but I still tell this story anytime I’m out drinking and need something to entertain the group. If I tell it right, the part that goes, “Catchyalater! Catchyaaa! Laterrr!” is always a real crowd-pleaser.
I Called You by Name
All through the meeting, i was so distracted by the bulge in the curtain I could hardly sit still.
Why wasn’t it bothering anyone else? The light green drape pooled so unnaturally at the side of the window. No generous depth of pleating could cause a bulge like that. We were seated around three sides of a table, and I was the only one directly opposite the bulge. No matter how many times I told myself to forget it, no matter how hard I tried to concentrate on the discussion, the curtains came into my sight every time I looked up, and there was just no way I could focus on my team’s proposals.
Should I tell them? Maybe say, Look, someone’s in there, make it sound like a joke. But I didn’t know how; I hadn’t established myself as the kind of person who could say that sort of thing. Plus, this was an important meeting for me. After more than six months of strategizing and ingratiating myself, I’d finally won the advertising contract for a major telecomm firm. I was staking my career on my promise to deliver on the client’s request for an “eye-catching stunt that would get people talking.” I had to focus. My team was all men, all younger than I was. If that bulge turned out to be nothing more than a swell in the drape, they’d decide they couldn’t take me seriously. Just a woman after all, they’d think, even though I was better at the job than any of them.
The room was a big one. I hadn’t been able to reserve any of the upstairs spaces, so we’d ended up in the conference room on the ground floor, which held forty people. The distance between me and the window was the length of four long tables, at least. That made me even less confident about what I was seeing.
The first member of my team finished presenting his idea. I said, “I see. Not bad, but don’t you think it’s a little . . . run-of-the-mill? Who’s next?”
As soon as the next guy stood up to explain his idea, my attention was back on the drape. Perhaps the suspicious bulge was just a trick of the light and would disappear if I got up close to it. Perhaps I’d pulled too many all-nighters and was starting to hallucinate. Perhaps . . .
Yes, I’d always been easily frightened, ever since I was small. I was much more prone than the average person to experiencing pareidolic phenomena, which is when any grouping of three dots starts to look like a pair of eyes and a mouth. I’d see it everywhere. Three wrinkles on a suit in my wardrobe would easily reveal themselves to be a face, and I couldn’t look at wood grain for longer than three seconds. It was only recently that I’d found out there was a name for this. It had come up as a question on a quiz show I was watching: “What is the name of the effect, often seen in photographs purporting to show ghosts and spirits, in which a set of three marks is perceived to be a human face?”
That probably explained it: Drapery Bulge Effect. I’d nearly convinced myself I was just imagining things, but then I thought I saw the bulge move. My mind went blank. There was definitely someone in there. I didn’t know why, but they were hiding behind the drape.
I reached for my bottle of water to steady myself. The awareness that I was supposed to be chairing this meeting stopped me from crying out, but I was terrified by what I was seeing. Was it a criminal? A naked person? Who are you?
The second presenter sat down. I said, “Very interesting,” and nodded, pointlessly stroking the cap on my bottle of water. For a moment there was a strange silence, and I worried that I’d said something odd, but then everyone started talking among themselves, and I calmed down a little too. I could probably afford to wait a little longer. If it came to it, as long as I was decisive in giving the evacuation order, my team and I could safely escape. I wanted to examine all the possibilities first, rather than bringing the situation to my team’s attention prematurely.
“Who’s next?”
I thought back to when I went to a furnishings store to look at curtains with my boyfriend, when we were planning on living together—my ex, whom I’d broken up with just last month, when I found out he was seeing someone else, even though we’d discussed getting married one day. Maybe some part of me wished that it was him hiding behind there, and this was making the bulge look tens of times bigger than it actually was.
Forget about all that, I told myself. Focus on the meeting. I tried to read my handout, but the memory of what had happened with my ex was bubbling up now. Screw the meeting. The truth was, I wouldn’t be in this job if I had a choice. What I really wanted was to marry him, fill our place with meticulously selected antique-style furniture, and do housework for him all day long. I was conf
ident in my ability to cook, clean, and launder to perfection. So why did you have to be walking down that street, of all streets, arm in arm with her? All you had to do was do it discreetly so I didn’t find out. Or at least have the decency to come clean when I confronted you, instead of ghosting me! Was that how little I was worth? Not even worth dumping? Was I an old hag? I was so thankful that I’d managed to hold back from crying out when I first spotted the bulge in the curtain. If I had let out some kind of shriek, I probably would have had to fall to my knees out of sheer humiliation.
The third person finished presenting. I was beyond being able to come up with any appropriate feedback. I said, “Okay, time to discuss as a group.”
My team seemed to be taken aback by my unexpected suggestion. “Right now? Don’t you think we should hear all the proposals first?” they asked.
I cut them off, saying, “No, this’ll do.”
They could hardly keep complaining after that, so they all gathered around the whiteboard and started brainstorming. I was the only one who stayed seated, glaring directly at the curtain.
The main question is, Why on earth are your curves quite so suggestive? I lost my confidence there for a minute, but I refuse to accept for another instant that anything about you could be a figment of my imagination. It can’t just be me—how many people all around the world have you bamboozled, all bloused out like this? Is there someone in there? Or isn’t there? Make up your mind! I’ve wasted too much of my life waiting around for ambivalent beings like you. Ghosters. Men who let you down easy. You must think you’re really something. Calling yourself a phenomenon. What’s the big deal about three points looking like a face? Maybe this makes me sound over the hill. A girl as young as the one he was cheating on me with wouldn’t give you a second thought. But I can’t just forgive you, not when you’re puffed up so suggestively. You have no idea what kind of effect you have on people around you. Do you understand the heartbreak of realizing you’ve lost the ability to respond to things you’ve seen with your very own eyes with genuine surprise? How it feels when rationality, and hard-won experience, and your career all suddenly seem pointless? How far I’ve strayed from the carefree, innocent child I was. All that youth, and the potential that I must have once had, wasted. When I look at you, I’m confronted by the fact that I’ve turned into a totally uninteresting person. Don’t you dare make me remember who I used to be.
The Lonesome Bodybuilder Page 3