The Island Dwellers

by Jen Silverman

  It is in the third week after she should have returned (and five weeks since I’ve seen her) that it occurs to me to track down the Nigerian friends she used to tell me about. All I know of them is that they sell hats by the train station. I don’t even know their names. When I get off shift, I stand by the train station, my hands shaking in my pockets. I am not afraid in the same way I was when I first got here, but I still don’t linger in public, especially not alone. I’m trying to figure out how I can find them, when I see a tall black man in a bright red T-shirt, standing on a street corner. He has a stack of hats in his hand and he’s calling out in Japanese to passersby. Of course it wouldn’t be hard to find a hat-selling Nigerian man in a sea of Japanese.

  When he sees me walking toward him, he gives me a bright smile. “Little sister,” he calls out in English, “the shape of your head is perfect for a hat.”

  I come to a stop in front of him, my fingers tangling and untangling. “I’m looking for—do you know? You were friends with? Risa.”

  He is caught by surprise, but his smile gets warmer. “You are friends with the little girl,” he says, putting his hand at about mid-chest height.

  “Have you seen her?”

  “Very pretty,” he tells me, as if I don’t know. “She smiles and mmm, God smiles. Tell her come back to try on my hats. Business is bad without her.”

  “You haven’t seen her,” I say, and I feel something sink inside my stomach. I hadn’t realized it until now, but I’d been counting on someone knowing something, and now there is no one left.

  The Nigerian frowns at me, tilting his head to one side. “For many months now,” he says. “Is she in trouble?”

  I hear myself say, “I don’t know where to find her,” and I realize only when I hear my voice that I’m crying. I haven’t cried once since I got to this country. Hearing myself cry just makes me cry harder. The Nigerian doesn’t know what to do. He starts to say something, then he steps forward and puts his arms around me.

  It’s been so long since anyone has touched me. And I find that I’m starving for it—the warmth of someone else’s body, someone else’s kindness. I put my face against his T-shirt and I cry while he pats my head and murmurs things to me in a language that’s neither English nor Japanese. The Japanese stream past us and the Nigerian doesn’t even glance at them, he doesn’t care what kind of a scene I’m making. At last he says, “Come have some tea.” I follow him, shaky and dazed, around the corner and inside a small hat shop. There are two other Nigerian guys there, sitting on low stools with their feet up, watching a baseball game on a tiny black-and-white TV.

  “Hanshin Tigers,” he tells me almost apologetically. His friends glance up at him, then at me with growing interest, but he says something to them and they look away again. He leads me past them into a small room in the back. A year ago, I would never have gone alone with a strange man into that space. But now I’m tired and all the fear I know how to feel is for Risa.

  He pulls out a cushion for me, goes to where an electric kettle is simmering, pours us each a cup of tea. He searches around on a back shelf, comes back with some small individually wrapped Japanese cakes, and puts those between us, sitting opposite me. I don’t know what my expression is, but it makes him smile.

  “Be easy,” he says to me. “What’s your name?”

  “Yuliya,” I say.

  He holds out a large hand. Long slim fingers, an artist’s hand. “Abayomiolorunkoje,” he says.

  I blink at him. “I’m sorry?”

  He laughs out loud this time. “My name, A-ba-yo-mi-o-lo-run-ko-je. It means: People Wanted to Humiliate Me but God Did Not Allow. It’s an old name.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I say, and mean it.

  “Call me Koje,” he says, “you won’t be able to pronounce the rest of it,” and we smile at each other over the tea and cakes. And then he asks, “What has happened with our friend?”

  I tell him the whole story. Koje listens until I finish, refilling my teacup from time to time. Then he shakes his head, troubled. “The yakuza are very dangerous,” he says. “I knew a Chinese girl who vanished because of them.”

  “Risa said he would never hurt her,” I say, but the words sound pathetic even to my ears. “She was sure of that.”

  Koje sighs, rubs one long-fingered hand over his face. I wonder if he was an artist before this life, if back home he painted instead of selling hats. I thought of Risa saying to everybody: How did you get here? as if this whole new life was a miracle beyond her understanding.

  “What do I do?” I ask.

  Koje doesn’t want to say it, but he says it anyway. “There is nothing to do. If she has vanished, if she is gone—perhaps she has seen something she should not know. Even if you go looking, you would never find her. Perhaps she is waiting for the right moment to contact you. I’m sorry. There is nothing you can do but wait.”

  I don’t stay much longer. We finish the tea. Koje gives me some wrapped cakes to take home. He walks me to the door, past his friends who are screaming at the Hanshin Tigers. In the doorway of the shop, Koje grabs a bright red hat off of a high shelf, and puts it on my head.

  “I like bright things,” he says, “and your friend was always a bright moment in my day.” And he bends down from his elegant height, and kisses my cheek.

  * * *

  —

  AND THEN IT IS MARCH, but still too cold for any real promise of spring. And then April, and the cold thaws gradually, and then May, and May is beautiful. Even in the factory they have caught firefly fever, everybody is talking just like the Japanese about how beautiful the fireflies are, how we should all go see them. Some Japanese-Brazilian boys from work invite me with them to see the fireflies over Tokyo’s choked and filthy canals. I say that I’ll take the extra hours of sleep over watching insects blink at each other. The boys laugh and pretend to be insulted but mostly laugh. They say, “You have no sense of beauty,” but they say it in Portuguese. I am still adjusting to hearing pure thick Brazilian-Portuguese in mouths that look—but are not—so Japanese. It is not that I am making friends in Risa’s absence. But the Japanese-Brazilian boys have started talking to me whether I want them to or not, and occasionally they come over to my apartment and bring weed, and we all smoke it together.

  May becomes June, and the rainy season begins, and now I have been here exactly one year. I look at myself in a mirror, once, in the back of Koje’s hat shop when I’m visiting him. I am thinner, the angles of my hip bones jut. My face looks different too—older, the mouth set, the eyes cold. I look like someone who does not smile in public. And I look like someone who does not feel fear.

  June becomes the dead weight of July, and in the third week, the rain tapers off, there are whole days of sunlight and thick wet heat. But still no sign of Risa. Nothing in five months. I replay that last meeting in my mind again and again. Risa’s smile and the envelope with money and I’d asked her to call me and she’d promised, she’d promised….

  I haven’t spent that money. I keep intending to do something with it but then I find myself hesitating, as if I’m waiting for a moment that will make itself clear to me. As August begins, I keep thinking: Last year at this time…and then images flood me, all of them Risa, sprawled loosely over my bed, my floor, draped against the window, boneless in the heat. And my body, boneless with desire. I ask myself: Did she want me the way I wanted her? Or was I just something exciting, like Shinichi became exciting? Was I so easily forgotten? I ask myself questions that I hate myself for asking, but then I get angry at Risa: I wouldn’t have to ask these if you were here.

  It’s in the last days of August that I think I see her.

  I’m standing on the train platform with the Japanese-Brazilian boys and we’re all a little stoned, heading back home from an excursion on our day off, and then I look across the tracks and there she is.

 
Maybe.

  This person, maybe Risa, doesn’t see me. She’s standing with her head bowed, a curtain of hair swinging into her eyes, staring straight into the tracks, and the clothes she’s wearing are elegant and simple and expensive, blues and blacks and grays, nothing I ever knew her to wear. Expensive sunglasses on her face despite the overcast sky. The kind of sunglasses you wear over a black eye. And the way she holds herself, folded in, protective—if she would move, I could see if she has a limp. But she doesn’t move. The moment feels so precarious, like a strong wind could blow and suddenly she would vanish.

  It’s her. It isn’t her. It’s absolutely her. Is it? The boys are pushing and laughing, the whole world has changed and they don’t know it. I scan the platform behind her. There are men in suits but there are always men in suits, Japan is a country of men in suits, and I can’t tell if they’re watching her, if they’re with her. I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid that if I call her name, they’ll all turn their heads. Or she’ll look up and not be Risa. Or she will be. As I watch her, she lights a cigarette and smokes, without lifting her head. She moves as if she’s trying to take up the smallest amount of space possible, trying not to stir the atoms of the air. And this tidal thing rises in me because I’m sure it’s Risa, and yet these gestures are so alien to the Risa I knew—the quicksilver, impatient, ferocious girl who kissed me in a Shibuya changing room, who regularly picked the lock and slipped into our apartment, who mocked me for locking the door at all in what was so safe, so safe a country.

  I open my mouth to call out to her. I can’t help it—I have to. And then a train comes thundering between us on my side of the tracks, as swift and merciless as an act of God. The boys jostle me, “Vamos, gatinha”—and I wave them away, desperately trying to catch a glimpse of Risa through the opposite windows of the subway car. “Not yet,” I’m saying to them, “not yet,” even though I know it makes no sense to them. They’re looking at me like I’m crazy—“It’s our train,” the oldest one is telling me, like I’m too high to know where I am. But I know exactly where I am. I’ve arrived at the intersection of six months of stupid hope, six months of unanswered questions, half a year of accumulated fear and resentment and guilt and love.

  “The next one,” I say, shaking off their hands, craning my neck. “The next one, okay?” I know that if she sees me, she might not recognize me at first. My gestures have changed as well. The Yuliya she knew didn’t have friends. The Yuliya she knew didn’t go out in public. The Yuliya she knew didn’t want to draw attention to herself, wouldn’t be running down the platform as I’m running, wouldn’t be jumping up on a bench, trying to see, trying to see, trying to make herself be seen, as the train throws itself forward into motion, car after car after car, leaving me behind with my hands in the air, trying to catch something that maybe can’t be kept, waiting to see if after all the violent commotion, Risa is still waiting on the other side.

  Maureen hires me because she is young and hot and professional, and she believes in women’s voices, and she believes in the new generation of writers, and maybe because I’m green enough that I don’t ask for a contract. We meet six months after I’ve moved to New York, during the span of time in which I’m still sleeping on my cousin Ev’s pullout couch, and missing Philadelphia. Maureen has a production company, although she mostly makes documentaries, one of which has been well received. I wear torn jeans to the restaurant, and realize only upon entering that I may be underdressed. Maureen wears a blazer. She makes the decision not to look at my jeans, and I see her make it. She pulls her long limp hair off her thin face, and she smiles. “I’m so pleased to meet you,” she says.

  Over risotto, she explains the job. It’s a film. She has an idea, but she’s not much of a writer. She’ll pay me to write the screenplay. The idea actually came from a dream she had, that she hasn’t been able to shake. And she has some characters, she has a concept, but she doesn’t know what happens exactly, that would be my job—although she definitely has some suggestions, but really the whole thing would be my prerogative.

  Something inside me hesitates. Some tiny voice says, Pick up this bowl of risotto and walk out onto Sixth Avenue. Then Maureen says, casually, “Thirty thousand or so.”

  I say, “Excuse me?” I’ve been stealing toilet paper rolls from restaurant bathrooms so that I won’t have to pay for toilet paper at Duane Reade. I’m straight out of grad school, and my student loans would turn even an iron stomach.

  “I mean, if it gets made,” says Maureen. “Upwards of thirty-five thousand, if we’re doing a percentage, but clearly up-front it would be a smaller fee.”

  In my mind, I buy nine million rolls of toilet paper. In my mind, I rent a studio apartment in the Village, no roommates, and I put a big oak desk underneath the floor-to-ceiling windows, of which there will be many. In my mind, I pay off all my student loans and I live without preemptively flinching whenever I check the mail. In my mind, I have already calculated how much this risotto will be, with tip. In my mind, I have already started worrying about how much this risotto will be, with tip.

  “Oh,” I say. “Oh wow.”

  Maureen takes a tiny bite of her own risotto, which she hasn’t touched. It’s porcini, and it was more expensive than mine by six dollars.

  “I mean up-front we’re talking, you know, a thousand,” Maureen says.

  I’m still reeling from the thirty-five, so it takes me a second to catch up. “A thousand?”

  “For the first few drafts,” Maureen says. Her nail polish is the color of pearl. Her earrings are tiny gold dots in her perfectly shaped earlobes. “But then once we sell the screenplay to a studio, that’s when the percentage comes in.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Huh.” Is this good or bad? Maureen says it like it’s good. Maureen has a very quiet voice, and you have to lean in to hear her. I read an article once about ways to make people think you’re more powerful than you are, and one of the ways was to talk very softly, but the article was written for men. Maybe Maureen already talked softly anyway.

  When the bill comes, we split it. I wait for Maureen to suggest that she pay the tip, since hers was more expensive. I try not to look like I’m waiting for this. She doesn’t suggest it, so in the end we both leave the same amount of tip.

  Outside the restaurant, Maureen shakes my hand. Hers is very cool and her skin is soft. “Give me a call,” she says. “I’ll be talking to some other writers over the next few weeks but I’d love to know what you’re thinking.”

  I didn’t realize she was considering other people.

  I didn’t realize there was a chance I might not get this.

  A thousand dollars is actually a lot, if you don’t eat twenty-six-dollar risotto every day. Or even if you don’t eat three meals every day. Or especially if you don’t eat every day.

  I say yes. Of course I say yes.

  * * *

  —

  ZARA IS THE OTHER GIRL who works for Maureen. She works more in the documentary end of things. She’s a year younger than me, three years younger than Maureen, and she has two long braids that hang like arrows down her back. The first time I go to the office to meet Maureen, Zara buzzes me in. The office is the second floor of a giant brownstone on the Upper West Side. Zara tells me that Maureen is on a phone call, and she asks if I want a coffee while I wait. I offer to get it myself, and she looks at me oddly, the look I always get when people realize I’m way less sophisticated than anybody else they’ve ever met. But then Zara says, “Okay, I’ll show you where it is, it’s just K-Cups.” She takes me to the small tea/coffee corner, where a Keurig squats. Outside the giant window, a tree curves and its leaves brush the glass. Light filters in, making the walls soft and elegant.

  “This is a cool office,” I say, sounding like a preteen. I’m trying not to stare at Zara in a way that could be construed as anything other than professional. She smells a little like balsam wood, I d
iscover, when she leans over to retrieve a mug from the high shelf.

  Zara gives me that odd look again. “Well,” she says, “I mean. It’s not like office space. You know?” I don’t. “She owns the building,” Zara tells me, lowering her voice. As my whole face changes, she rushes to add, “I mean, her family does. But none of them really use it.”

  “Does she live here?” I ask, amazed.

  “No,” Zara says. “No, no. She lives with her boyfriend, they have a place in the Sixties, by Lincoln Center.”

  “Oh,” I say. I am suddenly very aware that I’m wearing Ev’s button-down shirt because I didn’t have any that weren’t stained, and it’s a little bit too big. Ever since Ev transitioned from female to male, he’s been buying larger shirts, and lifting weights in the hopes of filling out all those new larger shirts. Alongside the realization that I look like a slob, is the realization that I haven’t been to the gym in approximately my whole lifetime, and then also the realization that my monthly MetroCard expires today and now I have to buy another one, which is just slightly more expensive than a gym pass would be, so there goes the gym, and a life as Maureen’s svelte, well-styled, attractive new writer.

  “She had this party there once,” Zara is saying, low, “you wouldn’t believe the canapés, silver tray after silver tray of—and if you went upstairs, you’d see it’s like, wall-to-wall—” but then Zara’s face changes and she says, in a slightly louder and different voice, “There’s the coffee!” I turn and the door to a conference room is open, and Maureen stands in it. She’s off the phone. I never learn what was wall-to-wall because Maureen says, in her little voice, “It’s so good to see you. Come in.”