The Island Dwellers

by Jen Silverman

  I got a job at a regular host club for reasons that are still difficult to explain. Sheer rebellion, probably. It seemed fitting to start a new life out of the worst mistake Praveen was making with his. A sort of fuck you to the carnival ride: those at the controls are, by default, the winners. Either way, I, too, stopped teaching English and spent my nights in a backless dress, making pidgin small talk with flushed, giddy salarymen. It struck me that my new job wasn’t so different from the eikaiwa conversation classes, except that I was required to dress in a more provocative manner and that my clients—encouraged by their consumption of two-hundred-dollar bottles of champagne—conversed for the most part about the size of my breasts.

  When I look back on that strange, extended time-out-of-time—that all in all couldn’t have been longer than three months—I remember it like a fever dream. Ancash and I worked while the world slept, and slept while the day slid from sun into shadows. It effectively separated us from the rest of the world—and brought us closer together, Hansel and Gretel in a mad rush, no time to stop, no time to reconsider, the future and the present superimposed onto each other. And when electric evening came around again, we went to work in the first glow, sending each other text messages on the train, quotes from American Gigolo, Belle de Jour, and other prostitution classics. Ancash once texted me just before I got off work: Thou hadst a whore’s forehead, thou refusedst to be ashamed. It was the first time it ever crossed my mind that Ancash might, in his former life, have read the Bible.

  After stumbling out into the pale swell of dawn, we would often meet at Shinjuku Station, the necessary midpoint on both of our ways home. Still drunk, exhausted, queasy, we’d buy hot coffee from the vending machines on the platform and doze off on a bench, Ancash’s head in my lap, until our separate trains arrived.

  Sometimes Ancash would tell me stories from his night, sometimes I would tell him stories from mine, sometimes we talked about entirely unrelated things: Praveen’s problems with Irina, or my increasingly psychotic landlord, who we both thought might be a closet serial killer. Ancash never told me much more about his past than the bare details: he’d lived in Tokyo before as a teenager, he grew up on the move, he’d been attending a college in the U.S., a good one, and then he dropped out and came back here. Once he let slip that his father had some high-up international job—a diplomat, maybe—but when I pressed, he simply changed the subject.

  Another time, he showed me his dog-eared copy of Harry Potter, more than three-quarters of it now covered with red chicken tracks. He said that he’d been bringing it to work so that some of his Japanese clients could help him translate. I imagined them charmed by his single-minded pursuit of something so earnest and innocuous. They didn’t know that this was Ancash’s first step toward world domination—Language is the ultimate weapon, he’d said. In my mind I saw the scene: a client bent closely over the book with him, inhaling his shampoo, a glance at the flash of smooth skin between neck and shoulder—a glance, a smile. More red writing scrawled in the margins. A hand on his knee. Ancash’s downcast eyes, the careful stillness of his face. They would look at him and see innocence and want to be the ones to take it away. He would sell them innocence, every night, they’d take it and take it and still never get close to him at all. And then I wondered if, in the end, I was just like them. Ancash never told me if he was sleeping with any of his patrons. And for a long time, I didn’t ask.

  I think I loved that life, but I don’t really know. I remember it like looking out the window of a shinkansen at night—everything is just a blur of lights, whipping past. And then, without warning, it ended.

  * * *

  —

  I’D BEEN SLEEPING SO DEEPLY that the banging at the door was just part of my dream, at first, and then Ancash’s voice filtered in, calling my name. I managed to drag my body off the futon, eyes still half-closed, reeling toward the door. Mornings were like this—waterlogged from alcohol, heavy with exhaustion. I unlocked the door and pulled it open.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Ancash, leaning in the doorway, looked worse than I did. He obviously hadn’t slept yet. He reeked of smoke and alcohol, but he didn’t seem to be drunk anymore. Which meant his head must be killing him.

  “Maria of the Mornings,” he said, and gave me that crooked smile.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, stepping back and gesturing him inside.

  “Can I crash here?”

  “Of course.” I stumbled to the refrigerator, pulled the door open, rooted around past cans of Sapporo and half-eaten conbini bentos until I found a bottle of green tea. I poured some for Ancash and he accepted it. I woke up all the way as I watched him drink—he held himself carefully, as if he was in pain.

  “You should have gotten off work already,” I said. “I waited for you at Shinjuku.” But it was a question.

  Ancash finished the tea and put the cup carefully on the counter. “I was with a client.”

  “You left the bar with a client?”

  “It was a dohan,” Ancash said. “We were still on the clock.”

  I studied him. Dohans were standard practice, especially with clients who’d proved to the host-bar managers that they could be trusted. They’d take you to dinner, maybe to a movie, maybe to karaoke. If you were good, you’d work it so that they ended up back at your club and spent their alcohol money on your alcohol.

  “Where did he take you?”

  Ancash shrugged, and for the first time I felt something cold in my stomach. “Ancash. Are you okay?”

  “Of course I’m okay.” But the impatience, the casualness, the brusqueness in his tone told me he was lying. I put a hand out to touch his arm, but he moved away. “Can I just—I need to shower.”

  “Yeah,” I said, stepping back. “Go ahead. I’ll find stuff you can wear.”

  While Ancash was in the shower, I found an oversize button-down that was too large on me, and a pair of black track pants. When I called his name tentatively, he didn’t answer. All I could hear was the sound of running water. I walked down to the courtyard and bought two cans of vending-machine coffee, one hot, one cold, and drank them back-to-back. Then I bought one more, hot, for Ancash. When I returned upstairs, the sound of running water had stopped. I gathered the dry clothes under one arm, coffee in hand, and walked cautiously to the bathroom door, a fist raised to knock. A sound stopped me—a strange one, at first I didn’t know what it was. It paralyzed me, a horrible mesmerizing sound—and then I knew. Ancash was crying.

  I stood there for a long time, listening to Ancash cry. It was muffled, wrenching. The sound of something being prized loose from a tight dark place. In the end I couldn’t take it. I left the clothes and the rapidly cooling coffee outside the bathroom door, and went back down into the courtyard.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I RETURNED THE SECOND time, Ancash was sitting on my futon. He looked calm and composed, but exhausted. Smaller, somehow, even though the clothes themselves were tight on him. He was drinking the coffee slowly, as if he was afraid he’d be sick. I didn’t know what to say, but he spoke almost immediately.

  “It isn’t what you think.”

  “I don’t know what I think,” I said.

  “You think someone—took advantage of me. Don’t you.”

  “Did they?”

  “You think someone took me somewhere, hurt me—made me do things—and I was afraid to say no—that I didn’t know what I was doing.” There was an ugly edge to his voice.

  “Isn’t that what happened?” I was keeping my voice very quiet. I’d never seen Ancash like this before and it scared me.

  “No,” he said. “No, see, that’s where you’re wrong. I knew exactly what I was doing.”

  “Okay.”

  “Nobody made me do anything. I left the bar with him. I did that.”

  “Okay.”

&
nbsp; “This is who I am. I’m choosing this, Maria.”

  I sat down on the futon next to him, still not touching him. “I know that.”

  “This is my game,” Ancash said, quiet. The harsh edge in his voice was gone. “These are my rules. I’m winning.”

  He was silent for a while. In the end, I had to ask. “Have you…before this…?”

  Ancash flickered a glance at me, but he understood. And after a moment, almost reluctantly, he nodded.

  “Your dad has money,” I said, “if you needed money…” Ancash turned away, and I knew I should stop. I knew I couldn’t possibly understand all the things he’d chosen not to tell me. But I couldn’t stop. “Last night…?”

  “Sometimes shit happens. You think it’s your game and then it’s not, it gets turned on you, but if you stay with it, it becomes your game again.”

  I spoke before I knew what I was going to say. “Don’t sleep with them anymore.”

  I’d surprised him. “Maria—”

  “Don’t do it. Even when it’s not like this, even if it doesn’t go badly that night, or the next night—Ancash…It’ll do things to you.”

  The Ancash who’d knocked on my door and wept in my shower was gone, now. The Ancash I was used to stared back at me, haggard but calm.

  “It’s not that,” he said. “I just—I’m just tired. I’ll be fine. I just get tired.”

  I should have dropped it, but I couldn’t. “I haven’t done that,” I said. “I haven’t had sex with my patrons.” I had meant my tone to be reproving—perhaps with a moral edge—but it didn’t come out that way. Whatever was in my voice made him look at me then, long and serious.

  “If you’re waiting for me,” he said, at last, “don’t.”

  I don’t know if I’d known what I was saying to him until then. I hadn’t stopped to consider it. But when I did, I couldn’t say that he’d misunderstood me.

  “What would be so wrong with it?”

  Ancash closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall. Framed against the mid-morning light, he looked like he was a hundred years old. Without opening his eyes, he said, “Maria, I will never forget you. You know that, right?”

  “Ancash—”

  “Even if you left Japan, even if we never saw each other again, you’d be entirely unforgettable to me.”

  “But what does that mean?” I said, frustrated.

  Ancash opened his eyes. “You think you want me to touch you?” he asked, very softly. “You could have that from anyone, any night of the week, and it wouldn’t mean a thing. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  In the silence, I found myself wondering, When did I fall in love with you? When did that happen? I remembered then, the exact moment. Maria delle Uve, he’d said, laughing with all of Shinjuku flickering and alive around us: The grape is unpredictably sweet.

  “Everything with you means something to me,” I said, and the softness of my voice matched his.

  Ancash was quiet for a long time, sitting beside me on the futon. I thought maybe he’d get up and leave. Or maybe he’d lie down and sleep, and we’d pretend that none of this ever happened. And then, without warning, he reached out and touched my cheek. I looked at him, surprised, but his face was absolutely still.

  “Maria of the Exceptions,” he said, and he leaned forward and kissed me.

  * * *

  —

  THERE WAS A MOMENT IN which I could have stopped him. Later, it was that moment that I remembered first—one that, at the time, felt like it was flashing past, but in which I made a choice. I kissed him back. His mouth tasted like coffee, like salt, behind that the sharp tang of alcohol. Then something smoky, something like licorice. It occurred to me to wonder if he accepted drugs from the clients, as a number of the host girls in my bar did. I wanted to ask him, but I was afraid if he had a moment to think, this would stop.

  When I replay it in my mind, there is so much chronology that escapes me. Was it Ancash or I who pushed the other down on the futon? Which one of us started undressing the other? Did Ancash try to stop? But I don’t think so, I don’t think he did. What comes to me clearly are specific details—the shallow cup of his collarbones, a scar running parallel to his ribs, a small blue tattoo of a koi on his chest. I’d never known he had a tattoo. The taste of his sweat against my lips, sweet-salty. The heaviness of his body against mine, nothing between us but skin, and our bones resting against each other. I remember I thought, Let’s be buried like this, but I don’t know if I said it out loud. I remember that Ancash felt real to me. The whole thing was like a dream, but it was more real than anything else in years. And I remember that when it was over and we were tangled around each other, half-asleep, I said, “Stay,” and Ancash said, “Until the busy world is hushed.”

  It wasn’t until after Ancash left, slipping out into the first glow of evening, that I remembered where those words were from—a remnant from my own rebellious Catholic-school days. It was so out of place to hear the Prayer of Solace in Ancash’s mouth that I had let it slide past without recognition. But later that night, sitting in my empty apartment where the sheets smelled like him, already late for the host club and making no move to get up and dress, I found that I could recall the whole thing. And so I said it out loud, listening to the sound of my voice against the hum and rush of Tokyo, against the sound of Ancash’s absence: “May Christ support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over and our work is done. Then in his mercy may he give us a safe lodging, and holy rest and peace at the last.”

  * * *

  —

  I DIDN’T SEE ANCASH FOR weeks after that. Seeing him would have been like looking directly into the sun. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t go blind. He called me, repeatedly at first, and left voicemails. They were short, succinct: Maria, are you okay? Or: Maria, where are you? Or, toward the end, sadly: Maria, I wish you’d talk to me. Then his voicemails tapered off, but he kept texting me. Then even those stopped. I left work earlier or later than usual, in case he was waiting for me, but I never actually thought he was. Ancash was not the type to linger outside, as Praveen did for Irina every night.

  Praveen called me one night when I was at the host club. It was during a lull, and I was sitting in the back room, smoking. I’d never smoked before, but now it seemed like just another bad habit that wouldn’t kill me quick enough but might make the going sweeter. We weren’t supposed to answer our phones at work, but when I saw it was Praveen, I looked around, saw that the only person nearby was the apathetic bouncer who was also smoking, and picked up.

  “Praveen, what’s up.”

  “Maria, where are you?”

  “At a club,” I said. I hadn’t told him where I was working, and in the past two months he hadn’t asked what I’d been getting myself into. “What’s up?”

  “I need to talk with you,” Praveen said. He sounded distraught. “I need to meet you.”

  “What? Prav, I can’t meet you right now. What’s wrong?”

  “I need to see you,” Praveen repeated.

  The urgency in his voice was so clear that I responded without thinking. “Shinjuku Station by the southwest exit,” I said. “Twenty minutes.” I ground my cigarette out and tossed it in the ashtray. The bouncer said in Japanese, “They’ll fire you,” and I said in English, “Good, I quit.”

  I was still wearing the gold backless dress when I walked out.

  * * *

  —

  WE SAT IN A SMALL square under the flicker of a giant TV screen implanted in the side of a building. On TV, white people were skiing and laughing and drinking Asahi beer. The crowds poured past us in tides, coordinated with the train schedule, ebbing and flowing. Praveen seemed dazed. The story itself was simple.

  “She ask for loan,” Praveen said blankly. “I
see her every day, we make a plan together that she pays off debt, she leaves the club and we marry. Her father, he writes me letter from Ukraine, he says he wants me to marry with his daughter and he will pay off loan by wire of money.”

  “When did she vanish?” I asked, knowing the end of the story before he got there.

  “I see the letter,” Praveen continued, as if he hadn’t heard my question. “A man’s hand lettering. Maybe I don’t read Russian but she tell me what it saying. An address, Maria, her father’s address. Photographs. Wouldn’t you believe her?”

  He looked at me then, with wide empty eyes. He wasn’t even angry, he was bewildered.

  “When did she vanish?” I repeated.

  “All my money,” Praveen said. “I save, Maria. So much, I save, I do not eat at expensive restaurants, I live cheap apartment, always saving.”

  We were quiet. On the screen above us, a movie preview was playing—something about five black guys on skateboards toting AK-47s.

  “Three days ago,” Praveen said, and it took me a second to realize that my question had just reached him, and he was answering it. “I think, maybe she have cold so she skips work. Then I think, maybe she working different hours, so she is not at home. Then her landlord, he say three days she isn’t home, and I’m waiting on doorsteps, in doorways, waiting and waiting and she doesn’t pick up her phone and I keep thinking, She would not do this to me, it is not what it looks like.” He ran his hands across his face and through his hair. We were silent.

  “The money, I don’t care money,” Praveen said at last. He gestured, an open-handed pass over the square in front of us, the blinking, glittering buildings around us. “Her smile, Maria, it is brighter than all these lights. You want to walk into it and stay there.”