The Island Dwellers

by Jen Silverman

  “But you like this,” Topher said, from the floor. He was irritated. He’d come biking all the way over here, neglected his girlfriend for months. And now all I was offering him was coffee and a sandwich? “This is like, your thing.”

  “I need you to go,” I said. “Please.”

  “You’re crazy,” Topher said, yanking his jeans back on so hard he almost fell over. “You’re just unbalanced.” He let the door slam behind him. I didn’t feel satisfied, and I didn’t feel mean in a secret bright way that made me excited. I just felt like I couldn’t breathe. I sat on the floor for a long time, until several hours later when Chester started walking between me and the front door, whining. He needed to pee. Eventually he peed on the carpet, his eyes rolling guiltily, and I watched him do it and I cried.

  * * *

  —

  LIVVY CAME OVER LATER THAT night. She’d been having a date night with the gym teacher, but my voicemail must have alarmed her. The door was unlocked and when she walked in, she found me curled up on the futon with the whole room smelling like dog pee. “This is some next-level mental breakdown shit,” Livvy said, but she said it gently, opening all the windows to the spring night. A chill in the air, but the smell of things just beneath the first layer of soil, starting to grow.

  “What were you guys doing, anyway?” I asked, watching her from the futon the way Chester was watching me—wary and fragile.

  “Well, we were eating ice cream out of the carton,” Livvy said, coming to sit on the edge of the futon. “We were sharing a spoon, and making out, and we were going to watch Dance Moms reruns, and we were going to have a really normal and lovely couples night, actually. You look like shit, your hair is disgusting, when was the last time you showered?”

  “Was she going to throw you around the bedroom?” I asked, from underneath my pile of unwashed hair. “Was she going to slap you around and call you names?”

  “We only do that sometimes,” Livvy said, as if that should be obvious. “We love each other, Sarah.”

  “You just met each other,” I said, like a small small angry turtle. Getting smaller with every second. “You actually just met.”

  “I just met you when we first met,” Livvy said, “and I knew I liked you right away.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t like you. Not on my date night, anyway.”

  “Am I a bad person or a good person?” asked the tiny sad turtle.

  “Jesus,” Livvy said. “That’s not even a thing. Why are you worried about that? Those aren’t even real things.”

  “Good and bad are real things,” said the turtle. “You said so. You said I was a good person and you meant I had a history of weakness.”

  Livvy sighed. “You listen to me? You should never listen to me.”

  “You said I wasn’t the sort of person who could hurt somebody,” I persisted, “you said I was friends with all my exes.”

  Livvy reached over and pulled my hood down over my eyes, shaking me from side to side gently. “Sometimes you’re one thing and then later you’re a different one. People are inconsistent.”

  “But then how do we know what we really are?” I asked into the hood.

  “Well,” said Livvy, “most of us just fake it. And sometimes we like being surprised by ourselves. And sometimes we don’t.”

  “I stole from the co-op and I’ve been leaving my bike where I shouldn’t and I told Seth that Chester got run over and decapitated by a truck.”

  Livvy sighed and then she shook her head. “Go take a shower,” she said. “Once you’re clean I’m going back to Amy’s place to get laid.”

  “Didn’t you hear me?”

  “I heard you,” Livvy said, “I’m just choosing not to engage with that information. Now go take a shower. You’ll feel better.”

  * * *

  —

  AFTER LIVVY LEFT, I SAT on the front porch in my underwear, my hair still wet, and smoked one of her cigarettes. It made the inside of my mouth taste like a different person’s mouth, like Livvy’s mouth maybe. I imagined being Livvy. I imagined being a gym teacher, who could slap someone and love her at the same time. I imagined being Chester, with one leg lifted and my nose buried in the damp grass. I imagined the people who had constituted the entirety of my history, who had been the conduits for my worldly knowledge. Smoking on the porch, with a breeze bringing goosebumps up my bare legs, I reimagined my origin story: an empty planet, un-colonized, trees haven’t yet been logged and dragged, rivers run rich with fish, the soil is loam instead of concrete. No boats have touched their noses to my shore. All who are to come have not yet arrived. I took a deep breath. Pure air. This is the place from which our bones move forward, I said to Chester, as he chewed on a twig. This is the place from which we start.

  When I first met Ancash, he was bleeding. He was sitting on the front steps of Praveen’s apartment building in downtown Tokyo, blood trickling down his chin and splashed on the ribs of his white T-shirt. He didn’t seem at all concerned. As I passed him, he nodded and said hey and I said hey back and continued up the stairs; I’d come to visit Praveen, anyway.

  Praveen answered the door, a cup of coffee in one hand and bunched remnants of a lesson plan in the other. “Eikaiwa is shit!” he announced, in his Delhi-accented English.

  “Since you’re the one teaching it, that’s a problem,” I said, accepting the offered cup of coffee. “There’s somebody bleeding on your steps.”

  “It is the Mexican,” Praveen said, with disdain. “He is always in trouble.”

  “Should we see if he’s okay or something? Give him a Band-Aid?”

  Praveen surprised me. “No,” he said firmly. “I have no Band-Aid for him.” Educated by missionaries, Praveen was deeply ingrained with the strictest principles of Christian charity, and I was shocked.

  “You don’t like him,” I exclaimed. “Praveen, you’ll make Jesus sad.”

  “He is not good boy,” Praveen said. Remembering my penchant for not-good boys, he fixed me with a stern eye. “You stay far away, Maria. He is crazy Mexican and gay.”

  “Jesus weeps,” I said, thrilled. “How do you know he’s gay?”

  “We talk about something else,” Praveen said. “Today, I teach past tense, but my lesson plan is shit! How do I do?”

  “What do you do,” I corrected. “How do I know? I teach English to elementary school kids, we’re still stuck on colors.”

  Praveen brooded over the crumpled pages, spreading them out on the countertop. I walked over to the window and glanced down, but the steps were blocked by the edge of somebody’s balcony. Praveen saw me looking.

  “Maria,” he warned. “Yesterday you say to me, ‘Praveen, I turn over new life. Less trouble!’ you say.”

  “That was yesterday,” I said, angling my head for a clearer view. “And I was drunk. So does he teach English too? This gay Mexican?”

  “No,” Praveen said, and the disapproval in his voice was plain. “He does nothing.”

  “He obviously does something,” I objected, “he was bleeding.” But Praveen was scowling. As close as we were, there was always a point in our conversations where I had to start watching my mouth, and I could tell that I’d reached it.

  “Right,” I said, turning away from the window. “The past tense.”

  When I left Praveen’s apartment later, Ancash was gone. But there was a smear of drying blood on the asphalt where he’d been sitting.

  * * *

  —

  ANCASH INTRODUCED HIMSELF TO ME a few days later. I was waiting outside for Praveen, who was late, and Ancash came out of the building in the same jeans and white T-shirt he’d been wearing before. I couldn’t help my eyes going to the noticeable stains. When he saw me, he held the door, standing right next to the sign that announced, first in creative English and then in pr
esumably better Japanese: DO NOT HOLDING DOOR FOR STRANGER PLEASE.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “No prob,” Ancash replied. His accent was more America than Mexico, and I grinned. Oh Praveen. I could just imagine him peering out of his window at Ancash like an angry old man, disapproving from a distance.

  “And yet,” I gestured to the sign. “Do not holding door. For stranger, even.”

  Ancash looked straight at me and the corner of his mouth flickered. “I’ll take my chances,” he said, and thrust out a hand. “Ancash.”

  “Maria.” I shook it. “What kind of a name is that?”

  Ancash smiled. “Quechua. And yours?”

  “My mother had an Italian lover around the same time I was conceived. A last desperate cry for freedom.” I eyed him. “So you live here?”

  “I do. And you, clearly, don’t.”

  “Clearly,” I said, “I’m just here to rape and pillage.”

  “Then I won’t get in your way.”

  I gave him my nightclub smile, my street-corner smile, the one that makes Praveen recite the Lord’s Prayer over my head in a cross between an exorcism and a desperate appeal to God. “I don’t mind if you’re in my way,” I said.

  Ancash looked straight at me, and smiled a bright smile that never changed his eyes.

  “Arrivederci,” he said. He released the door and started up the street.

  * * *

  —

  SOMETHING PRAVEEN WOULD ALWAYS SAY to me: “What you are thinking!” It didn’t matter how many times I corrected him. The words somehow miraculously rearranged themselves again and by the next occasion in which he had to ask me, it always came out the same way again: “What you are thinking!”

  When I told him I was leaving Tokyo to go home to New York and face the music, he had been supportive. “This is very good,” he’d told me. “Family is of utmost important! And you for so many years do not call, do not write.”

  “They for so many years do not call or write to me, either,” I’d said, annoyed, but Praveen shook his head at my childishness.

  “You are daughter,” he’d lectured me. “It is your duty. But I am proud, now you go back and change over new leaf!”

  When I’d showed up back in Tokyo days later, carrying a duffel bag, Praveen had shaken his head at me. “What you are thinking!” he’d demanded. “Go home right now!” But I’d slept on his couch that night and for the next few days, finally getting a little sublet and clientele from an Australian woman living near Akabane. She’d been teaching English to Japanese businessmen when her fiancé proposed to her; she told me that now she was going home to Australia to get married.

  “Japan is just a phase,” she’d said, after the tour of an apartment so small that the tour consisted of standing in the open doorway and glancing around. “All of us foreign devils, we know it, we’re drifting. It’s bloody easy to stay and drift, am I wrong?” She gave me a conspiratorial look, which I immediately disliked her for. “Well, someday something happens and you realize you’ve been drifting too long. Got to go home and get serious about my life. You’re welcome to the furniture for an extra go-sen.”

  Less than fifty bucks for a fully furnished room the size of a closet.

  “Done,” I said. We shook hands.

  “It’ll happen to you someday,” the woman said. “When you’re older, maybe. It’s exciting now, but you’ll look back and it’ll seem like a bad dream.”

  I shrugged. “I bet it beats waking up.”

  She escorted me out of her apartment pretty quickly after that. I took over several days later. Her Japanese businessmen should have been an easy gig, but all of them spoke English with Australian accents so thick, I couldn’t understand them.

  I never heard from that woman again, although from time to time I’d briefly think I’d caught a glimpse of her on some Tokyo street corner. There’s tourists and there’s lifers. Once you’re a lifer, no matter what kind of a fantastic long-term plan you think you’re going home to, it won’t work. You’ll only end up back here, duffel bag in hand.

  As for me, I admitted to Praveen that I’d gotten as far as the departures gate in Narita before I decided I couldn’t do it. I slept in the airport for two whole nights, then turned around and came back. I never even set foot in America.

  “Oh no,” he’d moaned. “Maria, you fucked up!”

  I didn’t mention to Praveen when I stayed the night at Ancash’s place. He didn’t need to know, and I didn’t want to tell him.

  * * *

  —

  “MARIA OF THE OLIVE EYES.” That was Ancash’s greeting when he opened the door. Maybe a flicker of surprise, but no more.

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “There’s a painting called that,” Ancash said, stepping back to let me in. “In Italian: Maria di Occhi Oliva.”

  His apartment was as Spartan as Praveen’s was messy. Only one light on, by the window, a futon already unrolled on the tiny square of floor. A book facedown and open—he’d been reading. Clothes folded on top of a wooden crate: tight T-shirts, torn jeans. Two white button-down shirts hung off the edge of the bare curtain rod. A hot plate balanced on the sink in a corner of the room. I took it all in, then turned back to Ancash.

  He was watching me, unfazed. “My humble abode.”

  “It’s not bad.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “Looked at the mailboxes. There aren’t a lot of other people living here with your name.” I’d wanted him to ask me why I was there, but then suddenly I didn’t. So I kept talking: “It’s bigger than my place, anyway. I mean, my old place was a palace, but I lost it.”

  Ancash lifted an eyebrow. “How’d that happen?”

  “Thought I was turning over a new leaf. Guess not, huh.” I mimicked Praveen: “ ‘Maria, you will ruin your life and what will you do then!’ ”

  Ancash smiled. “Are you here to ruin your life, or am I the ‘what then’?”

  I found myself grinning back at him. “You think you could ruin my life?”

  “Only if you asked me real nice.”

  “You’re not just pretty and dumb,” I realized out loud, delighted. “What are you, some rich kid runaway?”

  “Is that the story of Maria?” Ancash inquired courteously.

  “I’ve never been rich,” I informed him. “My mother tried it, and it fucked her up for good. What are you reading, Brave New World?”

  Ancash picked the book up and handed it to me. Harry Potter. The torn and stained paperback copy seemed to have survived an apocalypse.

  “That tells me nothing about you,” I said, disgruntled. “Everybody reads that shit.”

  Ancash’s smile flickered again. He opened the book. Inside, in the space above every line, he appeared to be writing his own book—a sprawl of fine red ink. It took me a minute to realize that the writing was in Japanese.

  “I’m translating it,” he told me. “By the time I finish, I’ll be fluent in Japanese and then I can do whatever I want.”

  “What does that mean, whatever you want?”

  “Language is the ultimate weapon,” Ancash said, easily. “You might think people will do what you want if you threaten them. Sometimes you’re right, but more often you’re wrong. The truth is this: people will do what you want, when they think what you want. Simple as that.”

  “And when do they think what you want?” I asked, interested.

  “When you tell them what to think,” he said, “in their own language.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was joking, but he had my attention either way. “And what do you want people to think?”

  Ancash took the book back. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “I haven’t decided if you’re on my side yet.”

  “I haven’t either,” I told him, and this time the smile did
reach his eyes. It made them sharper.

  “Good,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  WHAT STRUCK ME ABOUT ANCASH, on that first night, was that when he talked about Tokyo his face softened and he looked the way most people look when they’re talking about a lover. I remember that at one point in the evening, we were sitting by the window drinking shochu, the strong clear rice alcohol that could take paint off a car. Ancash jacked the window up and leaned out. “Look,” he said, breathlessly. Leaning next to him, I saw the rabbit-warren back roads of our little ward all tangled into each other, the lights of hundreds of matchbox apartments piled on top of each other. I took a deep breath and smelled hundreds of dinners cooking at the same time.

  “They’re all eating now,” Ancash said, with a certain reverence that off-balanced me completely. “You know that thing Japanese do, before they eat?” And he put his hands together, and so did I, and we chorused the traditional phrase “Itadakimasu,” like saying grace.

  “There,” Ancash said decisively. He looked at his glass ruefully, then shrugged. “Our sustenance will be of a different kind,” he added, and we toasted. Until that moment I don’t think I’d ever thought of Tokyo as a place where families sat down together. To me, it had been exhilarating, merciless, devoid of stable and communal dinners.

  Ancash had sparked my initial interest first by the indecent and provocative act of bleeding in public, then by Praveen’s strong disapproval. And, while it was true that I’d come looking for trouble, I was always looking for trouble. I could have taken or left Ancash himself, up until that moment by the window. Then, looking at the profile of his face—aloof, unpredictable, impenetrable—it was then that I wanted him. And his inquiry about Praveen gave me the opening I’d been looking for.