Affinity
Page 17
But Marco showed zero surprise when he told him. “I know about it. But you don’t have to worry—you’re all right now, even though I could tell you’ve been sick for a long time. Go back to the hospital in a week and get all the tests done again. You’re fine; you’re not sick anymore. They gave you the results of the old tests; those are wrong now.”
“What are you talking about, Marco? I just came from the doctor—it’s over. He said I have maybe six months max.”
“Well, he’s wrong. I swear that you’re OK. Get the tests done. Get them done today if you want. I’ll walk you over to the hospital.” Marco smiled reassuringly and put a hand on his shoulder. “One hundred percent, pal. You’re 100 percent healthy. Trust me.”
And he was. But only after he got the new test results back days later had Marco Sachs told him about the wishes.
They were in the same restaurant where he’d gone to announce his doom to his friend, only this time it was to celebrate his resurrection. The drinks were on him, of course, and they’d had two or three before the subject of the wishes came up.
In the middle of his explanation Marco said, “The irony is they don’t work for me—only for the things I love, like you and Tasha. Every time I’ve wished for something for me, it doesn’t happen. But making both of you healthy again? No problem.”
Someone knocked on the room door. He slipped into the bathrobe supplied by the hotel and opened the door. She stood out in the hall with both hands on her hips, a look of steely anger still on her face.
“I forgot—you had the only key.” She brushed past him and walked into the room. He had to suppress a smile because he could feel her fury buzzing around and off her like a hive of angry bees, all of it clearly directed at him. She sat down on the smallish bed, both arms rigid at her sides as if she were about to spring up again at any moment. “You’re all right now? You’re cured?”
“Yes, completely.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “How can that be? Do you know what the recovery rate from that is? I just looked it up here.” She took a smartphone from her purse and stuck it out at him like a gun. “Seventy-nine percent of all people who have it die within six months. And the long-term survival rate is tiny. But you’re saying you’re absolutely cured?”
“I am—100 percent all right, 100 percent healthy again.”
She raised a hand and put it on top of her head. It almost looked like she was trying to hold all of her thoughts in. “How is that possible?”
He went over and sat down on the bed but far enough away from her so that she wouldn’t feel crowded.
“Marco made one of his wishes for me.”
She turned slowly toward him. In that moment he remembered to look at her eyebrows. And there it was—the exact same colored red-orangey hair that grew on him was threaded throughout the darker hair on both of her brows. Marco had said that’s how it would start—on her, the eyebrows; on him, his bush. And when it became really noticeable, the change for both of them would accelerate. Seeing this striking color streaked throughout her eyebrows and even some showing up in the hair on her head, he knew it had begun for her too.
When Marco came back from the toilet at the restaurant that day, he looked at his old friend a long time and finally spit it out. “I did something else you may not like when you know all the details. But please understand I did it only because I wanted you to be happy.”
How could he not be happy? He had just been given a reprieve by this magical friend from an all-but-certain death sentence. “What are you talking about?”
Marco sat down hard in his chair. “I made another wish for you—I wished that Raleigh would come back. And she is—”
His breath caught in his throat. “She’s coming back? You wished that too?”
Marco raised a hand to stop him, to shut him up. Then he took a drink, although there was almost nothing left in his glass. “Yes, but wait—I gotta explain some things to you first before you get all excited and start celebrating. These wishes? I told you before that they only work for others, never for me. But when I do make one, it not only comes true but I also see the outcome of it as soon as I make the wish. I see what the result of it will be in the future.”
“Yeah, and?” Weeks ago he would have told Marco he was nuts or some such dismissal, but now having seen and experienced firsthand that his pal was telling the truth about the wishes, he waited excitedly. Plus she was coming back! How could he not be bursting?
“When I wished for Tasha to get better I saw that she would, but only for another four more years. Then she’ll die and there’ll be nothing I can do for her. But that’s good in a way because I can cherish the time we have left together while preparing the best I can to live without her. When I wished for you to get better, I saw that as a man, you’ll live to be eighty-four.”
“What do you mean, as a man?”
Sachs picked up his empty glass and drained it as if there were still something inside.
“Marco? What do you mean by that?”
“I wished for Raleigh to come back to you and she will. Soon. I wished her to come back and that you two would be together again for good. And you will if you want, but there’s one big problem.”
“What problem?” His heart began to sink. She was coming back because Marco wished it. Marco’s wishes came true. His now-healthy body was solid proof to him of that. What problem could there be?
“When I made that wish for you two, I saw some things; things you’re not going to want to hear.”
“Like what?” Unconsciously he straightened his back until it almost hurt.
Sachs tapped the table several times with one knuckle. He was figuring out how best to say this. Was there any way to say it right? Maybe just tell the truth and deal with the reaction. “I told you when I make a wish, I can see how it’s going to turn out in the future. Well, when I did it for you and Raleigh, I saw something you’re not going to like.”
“You said that. What is it?” He tried to keep the edge out of his voice but failed.
“You two will never be able to succeed romantically. You can be friends forever and that’ll be fine, but not as a couple. Never. It’s not possible.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re human. As humans, you’re only ever fated to be friends, best friends, acquaintances, business partners—anything but lovers. You can be friends with her forever, but never as a couple. You’ll always have the same problems. It’s fixed but I don’t know why. You have to believe me. Of course you can try—move in together, get married—you can try all you want to make it work that way with her but it never will.
“I love you, you’re my best friend, and I only want the best for you. So I’m telling you all this straight-out to try and save you any more heartache later. You two have been through enough of those ups and downs already.” At that point Sachs was so wrought up with emotion for his friend and his doomed hope that he said the rest almost without thinking. “Never as humans—only as foxes.”
“What? Foxes? What did you say?”
Marco signaled the waiter for another drink. “Do you believe in reincarnation?”
“No.”
“Well, do, because it’s true. That’s another thing I’ve learned from these wishes. Don’t ask me to explain—just take my word for it. You and Raleigh have been bonded to each other throughout history in life after life. As animals, insects, even plants; in this incarnation you happen to be people, but it’s not the first time you were human together. You guys have been a whole menagerie of different beings but were always connected and I guess always will be until whatever comes after … life here.
“I don’t know why. Karma maybe? Or certain things need to be worked out between you two here before you can move on to the next level? I dunno. But the only time you’ve ever been a successful couple, if I can call it that, was when you were foxes. Vulpes vulpes—red foxes.”
A burst of laughter. “Foxes? Raleigh and I were foxes?
”
“Yes and it was the only time in all of your incarnations together that you succeeded as a pair. You can laugh as much as you want, but it’s the truth. And you more than anyone have experienced what happens when I make a wish. If I tell you this is part of that process, you better believe it’s true.”
Now she saw something on his face that made her frown and lean hard forward to get a better look at him. “Your eyes! They’re a different color! You had blue eyes—you have blue eyes. Now they’re brown?” She pulled back, still frowning. “How is that possible? People’s eyes don’t change color.”
For the first time that day, he lied to her. “It was probably all the medicine. They gave me a lot of very strong stuff when I was in the hospital. Who knows what else it did to my insides.”
She shook her head, not believing a word he’d said. “I’ve never heard of a person’s eyes changing color because of some medicine they took. How could any chemical do that to you?”
He shrugged and fake smiled.
“Doesn’t it freak you out? When you look in the mirror and see that your eyes are a completely different color after forty years? Doesn’t it bother you?”
To avoid the question, he needed to take her mind off his eyes. “No, but you know what does bother me, Raleigh? Machines. When you’re sick they put you into different machines. Have you ever had an MRI, or a CAT scan, or how ’bout a bone densitometer? That’s a mouthful, huh? Bone densitometer.”
Thrown off by this abrupt change of subject, she shook her head slowly. What was he getting at? Why was he talking about machines and not his eyes?
“They’re all scary as shit. Not only because of what they’ll say about how sick you are, but because they need to be this close to you to work properly”—he fast flicked his hand out palm up toward her face, stopping two inches from her nose. She flinched. “That’s right—this close. You’re lying on your back naked under a sheet, inside a clicking clacking clanking machine for what feels like hours. With the MRI they slide you completely into this long, narrow cylinder that’s like a torpedo tube on a submarine. But before they do that, they put a giant clamp-like thing over your chest that keeps any part of your upper body from moving. For close to an hour you cannot move or the image is spoiled. You just have to lie there dead still and keep your claustrophobic, panicking self from going completely bat-shit crazy. But that’s just the machines. Next are the medicines—oh, the medicines are a whole other kind of torture—”
Lie number two—he’d never had to take any. Magic Marco had eliminated any need for them with his “plane light, plane bright.”
“What are you saying?” She was now completely off-balance. What she’d seen and learned in the last hour had knocked her off her moorings about him, his health, their relationship … everything.
“I’m saying what really bothered me, for want of a better word, was being sick alone without you.”
She almost shouted, “But I told you I would have come back if I’d known!”
He shouted back, “I didn’t want that!” and slapped his leg. “I didn’t want you to come back out of pity. Out of a feeling of duty to what we once were. I wanted you back after you finally realized there was nothing better out there in the world than this, than us.
“But you didn’t feel that way, especially after you got together with your pilot. So if you had come back when I was sick, you’d have only been biding your time till you could leave again and go back to him.” He spat out an angry grunt and made two fists. “Better for me to be alone in those machines than having you out in the hall pitying me and waiting for text messages from him.” Overwhelmed by the memories of those very bad days, he stood up and walked to the window. He loved her; God, how he loved her. But at that moment he almost hated her. He needed her like air in his lungs. He didn’t trust her an inch. That’s why he’d asked Sachs three days ago, three days before she was to return, to make another wish for him.
“What?”
“You heard me. Can you do it, Marco?”
“Of course I can do it, but that’s not the point. You’re out of your mind—you don’t want this.”
“Yes, I do.”
“But how about Raleigh, would she? How do you know it’s what she would want? Don’t you think you should ask her first?”
The two men stared at each other across the table and their silence was a very dark thing between them for the first time in all the years they had known each other. Marco Sachs could not believe his friend’s request. That’s not true—he could believe it because more than anyone, he knew the turbulent history of this couple. But still—
“No.”
“No what?”
“No, I don’t think I should ask her. I’m asking you—can you do it? Will you do it?”
Sachs felt like his opinion had been split right down the middle with a sharp ax. On first hearing the request, half of him thought it was a mad, selfish, and utterly reckless thing of his friend to want, plus who knew what the consequences would be. On the other side, part of him thought it was the most beautiful demonstration of absolute love and commitment he’d ever heard.
He had to say it, to get it out. “If Raleigh hated it, it would be like you were taking her as a slave. Really—it would be like some kind of slavery to do that to her if she was against it.”
“But that’s the beauty, Marco—she’ll never know. Make your wish with all the right conditions and fail-safes so by the time of the change, we’ll have completely different brains. Words or ideas like slavery won’t be part of our, what did you call it before—our vulpes vulpes minds or vocabulary. We’ll only be two foxes again madly in love, like old times. If that’s the only way we can really be together, then, yes, that’s exactly what I want.”
That first night in the hotel after several more hours of talking, they went to bed quietly but not peacefully. They did not make love but minutes after they got into bed she slid over and, pushing her back up against him, took one of his arms and pulled it over her chest.
“Let’s go to sleep and talk more about this in the morning. I’m exhausted and my mind is too full now to think clearly. I feel like you’ve come back from the dead even though I didn’t know until today that you’d died. Or that we have.”
He nodded and pulled her in a little tighter. He wondered when she would want to make love again. He wondered what she had been like in bed with the pilot. He wondered …
About two hours later he was awoken out of a deep sleep when she cried out and sat straight up in bed. As the fog of sleep cleared from his mind, he could hear her panting. She had been having a nightmare and it must have been a bad one because the panting went on and she didn’t lie back down again.
He knew all these signs from the old days when they lived together and she’d had nightmares fairly frequently. He asked gently, “Do you want to talk about it?”
She put her face in her hands and rubbed it vigorously. “It was so real! I haven’t had a dream that real in years. I could feel the grass and the dirt under my feet, smell things and taste them. I tasted warm blood—warm, hot, coppery blood … blecch!
“I dreamt I was chasing this little mouse or rat. I couldn’t tell exactly what it was except it was small and gray and maybe even a baby. We were zigzagging back and forth through this big, open meadow. I was on all fours and absolutely flying along. I must have been an animal too because I was running so fast. When I caught up, I snatched it in my jaws and just chomped right down on its tiny body. Something crunched and I could feel it squirming in my jaws. It screamed this really high-pitched, horrible, dying sound. That’s when I woke up.”
He said nothing.
Gaijin
Sallie Tisdale
By the time I meet Takeshi at the train station in Kanazawa, I am as at ease in Japan as most visitors can be a few days after landing. The gaijin, the outsider, blurred with travel, leaves the overnight flight to trek through an enormous airport to a train like no other, leading to a
city like no other. I stand balanced among people who maintain a single inch of space between them as though by force field; people staring, reading and sleeping, propped up in corners and leaning on poles. A rail-thin young man with dyed red hair and pale skin wears a T-shirt that says WHY DO MEN DREAM TROUTING THERE. Businessmen doze standing upright, their briefcases against their chests. Schoolgirls in navy-blue uniforms and white knee socks chatter to each other beside a young man reading an erotic manga; on the cover is a schoolgirl in a navy-blue uniform and white knee socks.
What the Japanese call a town is a city to me; what they call a city is Tokyo: thirteen million people and puppies for rent by the hour because no one has room for a pet. Tokyo never stops talking: loudspeakers repeating safety announcements and commercials projected on the sides of buildings; the wee-woop, wee-woop of green traffic lights; hawkers in suits and white gloves on the sidewalks calling out their wares; the hoot and whistle of ringtones; a low, distant temple bell; the squeal of brakes; the tinkle of bicycle bells; workers singing out from stores. The streets stream with office workers in strictly timed waves as trains arrive, two minutes apart, with a low, hard whoosh. Guards with megaphones direct pedestrians across the crowded streets at several angles, past cars called More and Bongo and Mysterious Utility Wizard. The air is sticky and hot and smells of fish, sewer, exhaust, and perfume. The streets are a vast pachinko parlor fever dream, and they never end.
I am here to do research for the Japanese portion of a book of stories about female Zen masters; I’ve been here before and I speak a little of the language—just enough to find my way and handle most of the courtesies of daily life in a land built half on courtesy and half on struggle. I manage to find my way to a tiny single room at a business hotel—a narrow bed with a little sink and toy shower. I seem to be the only woman and the only Westerner there, and I hear doors slamming, men shouting and laughing, the sound of heavy feet running up and down the halls.
I go out for supper and try to eat a whole fried egg with chopsticks, because my other choices were curry doughnuts or eggplant and basil pizza. I love the dense flavors of Japan, but I’m not quite ready for them yet, for the aloe vera–flavored yogurt and squash chewing gum and slimy fermented seaweed—for the intensity packed into a single bite that seems a reflection of how they pack their psychic depths and complex lives into small, tidy rooms and dark suits. After the egg, I ask the young man wearing a T-shirt that says BEADED WRITER for an order of banilla ice-u cream-u, and it arrives on a bed of cornflakes with whipped cream on top.