One Hundred and One Ways

by Mako Yoshikawa

  Although it is only a question of light, the streets I jogged through just a day earlier now seem strange and alien. They remind me of the time I was coming home early from a class party given by a professor who lived in Brooklyn, just a week before Phillip and I began our epic journeys on the subway. I was alone and tired, and at the subway station I got on the train going the wrong direction. I rode a long way without realizing my mistake, and by the time I did, I was at a stop called Rockaway Beach, miles and miles from Manhattan. I stepped off the familiar IND train and found myself outside on an empty platform, in a place marked by the feel of wide-open spaces and saturated with the smell of the sea. The land was flat and I could see far. The very stars seemed changed.

  Now I walk on the sidewalk close to the ledge overlooking the park, which is visible only as a darker darkness. The lamps along Riverside Drive give forth a dim yellow glow and I move forward contentedly, with sure steps, in a New York without people. The good feeling lasts all the way until the crosswalk at 96th Street, where I stop even though there is no traffic at this hour, even though the light is green. Sounds of a fight are drifting over from Broadway: men yelling in deep angry voices, a car honking and then screeching, the crash of breaking glass, and the high and thin screams of a woman or a boy. I turn around and begin to walk quickly northward, back the way I came. I try to look confident and purposeful, as if I were hurrying to meet my biggest male friend just around the corner, but I am thinking that if I were raped and killed and dumped into the river, days would pass before anyone—even Eric—realized I was gone.

  Eric has warned me over and over against taking walks late at night in the park, and I hate myself now for not having listened. The leaves of the trees move even when the wind is not blowing; the sight of a garbage can placed in the middle of the sidewalk makes me want to scream. My breath is rasping and I am almost running when I come to the enclosed part of 102nd Street, where the trees darken the sidewalk, and then I feel something choke my throat because there, almost directly in front of me, stands a large man at a phone booth in the shadows. He is not particularly tall but he looks hugely broad, and by the dim light from the faraway streetlamps I can just barely tell that he is wearing thick boots. The end of his cigarette creates a small moving point of flame. He does not make a sound, listening to a speaker or maybe just a dial tone. I am trapped; even if I were to walk towards the lamplit street, I cannot avoid passing by him.

  I am concentrating so hard on keeping my steps silent that his voice makes me jump. “Wanna fuck?” My mouth dry and my heart pounding, I turn around slowly to face him, and then I feel like laughing with hysterical relief, because the man’s back is turned towards me: he is talking into the telephone.

  When I get home, I am still so shaken that as I unbolt the door to my apartment, I find myself wishing that old Mrs. Noffz would open the door and chat with me about the weather. I even turn around and wait for a few seconds but of course 16D remains shut; it is after three in the morning and she must have gone to bed hours ago.

  I look eagerly for Phillip in the fireplace, yet at first glance the apartment appears empty. With teeth chattering and my body shivering uncontrollably, I check the more secret places he likes to hide: the insides of all the cupboards, the crack between the wall and the bookshelf, the space behind each of the doors. Clearly Phillip does not want to be found. I flick on lights as I proceed, until the apartment is ablaze. When I finally give up the search and stretch out on the sofa, I become aware of the tension in my neck and shoulders.

  I want to call Eric. I want to hear the concern in his voice, and the scolding that would follow the concern. If I called him now, despite the lateness of the hour we would almost certainly get together; within less than an hour I could be enfolded within the warm and safe circle of his arms. I look down at the smooth fingertips of my left hand, a constant reminder of what life was like before I met Eric, and what it could be like again.

  Obaasama, I will say (tenderly, in gratitude for her silent sympathy), you who so recently lost a husband. Grandmother, I am going to tell you how I lost my fingerprints, but you already know, don’t you, the story I am about to tell.

  For a month after Phillip left, I filled the days by killing ants. With eyes alert to even the smallest movement and hands poised for action, I squatted on the cold kitchen tiles for hours on end. I ate cookies and sometimes whole meals as I hunted, incidentally providing bait in the form of crumbs. Purely by accident I had stumbled upon the ideal way to kill time; there was a seemingly endless supply of ants in my kitchen that year, and they were terribly hard to kill. Their bodies were like rubber, and they had a strong and unquenchable predilection for life. Even after I rolled their bodies into malformed balls, they sprang right back into shape, untangling their limbs and crawling on, so that to kill them I had to crush their bodies again and again.

  My life was a struggle with time. I suppose I was at war out of self-defense, because even now I cannot see what I sought to gain, or why I fought at all. When I woke up in the middle of the morning and could not get back to sleep no matter how I tried, I cursed myself because my wakefulness meant that I had the whole day in front of me to kill. I felt triumphant when I slept in past two. I tried to nap in the evening, and every night as I returned to bed, I congratulated myself for having won a battle, as that is what it meant to survive another day. Yet in spite of my daily victories, my eventual defeat was already foretold. While my own supply of strength was finite and easily exhausted, time was a tireless and consequently undefeatable opponent who never ran out of ammunition; another completely fresh day of equal length arose immediately and invariably to replace the one I had just vanquished. It was therefore only a matter of time before I lost to time.

  Now I envision it as an opponent; then I could only picture time as itself. Time seemed neither a father nor a destroyer nor a healer, and it did not seem like a bus we get onto and then step out of: try as I might, I could not visualize it in any of those reassuringly solid forms. Time was only the seconds and minutes that stretched with deliberation into hours, and then with painstaking slowness into days and finally years. It was the movement of my watch, shifting and changing and coming back to its starting point, as regular as clockwork should in fact be, and it was the sole measure of my life.

  I look back now and say that time was a merciful river as well as an unbeatable foe, that in spite of myself it carried me farther and farther away from Phillip, and closer and closer to a point that I later identified as Eric. Yet then time was nothing but the passing of it.

  I lost my fingerprints in the middle of March. Rain came down in an indecisive patter, and the streets of the city were flooded in gray slush. From a store window a mannequin in a skimpy cocktail dress mocked me with a pouty smile. I had been defeated in my attempt to find a birthday present for my mother in one department store, and now I was headed for another. “Something for the house,” my mother had said when I asked her what she wanted, but so far I had not been able to find anything even remotely suitable.

  I munched on candy as I walked, replacing one mouthful with another even before I had swallowed the last, and pulling out such big handfuls that I dropped a few every time; behind me Broadway was littered with the bright colors of jelly beans. In spite of the wind and the rain, maybe ten or fifteen people were gathered on every corner of the intersection at Seventh Avenue and 36th Street. Policemen were waving back the traffic and trying to calm the angry drivers. Two ambulances and four police cars were parked haphazardly in the center of the street, and the sounds and lights of their sirens filled the air. I stood behind the people at the southeast corner and craned my neck to see above the heads of those who got there ahead of me; although I am not short, there were so many people I could see only bits and pieces of the stretcher at a time. First I saw a pair of grayish sneakers under yellow pants, and then as the men carried the stretcher towards the ambulance, the torso slowly swung into view. The woman was huge. Her breasts and
stomach and thighs loomed upwards, and the men were staggering under her weight.

  A middle-aged woman laden with Macy’s bags stopped next to me. Even when she stood on tiptoe, she was far too small to see over the heads, and because the crowd had swelled considerably since the time I had arrived, she could not push through the people to get to the front.

  “What happened?” she asked breathlessly.

  I shrugged and shook my head. The man standing next to her on the other side turned. “She jumped,” he said. “She jumped in front of a Greyhound bus. But I don’t think it killed her.”

  “Oh,” said the woman. She was quiet for a while, and then suddenly, without warning, she began to cry. Startled, the man started to say something, but his voice trailed away uncertainly.

  One of her bags fell out from beneath her arms and landed in a puddle. Her tears made her makeup run down in black streaks on her face. She looked far older, and I saw that I had misjudged her age, that she was really an old woman. The farther I moved away, the more her wails became interchangeable with the sirens and the sound of the wind.

  At least forty-seven vehicles got stuck in traffic as a result of the accident. I know because I counted as I trudged through the slush to get to Lord & Taylor.

  It was dark by the time I gave up on finding a present. As I entered the subway at Times Square and funneled into the turnstiles with the rest of the crowd, I heard the sound of the train coming, but lacked the energy to run for it. Exhausted, I walked slowly, watching the ground and carefully stepping around the congealed vomit by the exit. Hordes of people ran by me to catch the train; it was five o’clock by then, and the height of rush hour.

  Left behind by the rushing crowd, I was alone when I saw the skinny black man huddled in two blankets just outside the entrance to the Seventh Avenue line. The urine smell that hung in the air was especially strong where he stood.

  “Spare some change?” he wheedled, his hands cupped in front of him.

  Without looking at him I shook my head. “Sorry.”

  I walked past. “Sorry?” The man had yelled the word behind me, and I looked back. He was staring at me with his hands clenched into fists. “Sorry! Lady, sorry ain’t gonna buy me food to live. You ain’t sorry, suck my dick, you ain’t sorry.” He gathered the shabby blankets around his shoulders as if he were a dethroned king. “Who the hell do you think you are, anyway? Fuckin’ chink,” he said, and he stalked away.

  My face burned and the purse over my shoulder felt heavy, my wallet a leaden weight. I turned away and tried to lose myself in the stream of people flowing towards the subway.

  It was long past six when I got home. In the apartment the damp crept in through invisible cracks in the wall, and drops of water fell from the leak in the roof. Half in dread and half in sympathy, the windows rattled each time the wind blew. I went to the kitchen and had a few quick bites of butterscotch cake; I took off my coat and boots and went to the bathroom and replaced the wet socks on my feet with a dry pair. I then walked back to the kitchen to make myself some tea. While I waited for the water to boil, I had more of the cake, as usual eating the dry cake part first, and saving the sticky sweetness of the frosting for the end.

  Still chewing, I got down on my hands and knees and scoured the ground for some ants to kill. Only one brave wayfarer roamed the wide and lonely expanse of the kitchen tiles. After mutilating it unrecognizably, I stood up and ate more cake. For once I was not in the mood to hunt. That was, in fact, the last ant I killed that year. By the summer they had disappeared on their own, perhaps moving outdoors to enjoy the weather.

  With cake swelling my cheeks, crumbs powdering my lips, and a large dab of frosting on a finger, I looked down and discovered that my knuckles were buried in fat. I wriggled my fingers and they were unwieldy with their own weight, while my old silver ring was uncomfortably tight. I was so surprised I forgot to swallow, and a bit of chewed cake fell out of my mouth and onto the stove.

  The kettle was whistling by then, so I removed it from the stove and turned the heat off. After that I stood and watched the coil of the stove fade from red to orange. The color inched its way out, spiraling away from the center. Soon almost all the orange was gone, but the stove remained hot; when a last drop of rainwater slid from my hair onto the coil, it sizzled and vanished into the air. The black coil seemed a larger version of the swirls that made up my fingerprints.

  I lightly rested the fingertips of my left hand upon the spiral. As if there had been a short circuit in the signals flowing from my mind to my body, my arm jerked back of its own accord. I forced my fingers back into position and began to count out loud, my voice sounding hollow in the empty kitchen.

  “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…”

  My hand began to shake and twitch. I managed to keep it in place by gripping the wrist down with my other hand.

  “… four Mississippi, five Mississippi, six Mississippi…”

  My arm and then my whole body was trembling, even though I was trying as hard as I could to keep still. My voice was both higher and louder, and I was beginning to speed up the count. I took a deep breath and continued more slowly.

  “… seven Mississippi, eight Mississippi, nine Mississippi…”

  I doubled over so suddenly that I was frightened, and an inhuman sound came out of nowhere to disrupt my counting. A part of my hair brushed against the metal and a sharp, disturbing smell pervaded the kitchen.

  “… ten Mississippi.”

  Slowly I took my hand off the coil. Small pieces of my skin and flesh remained stuck to the metal, and my fingers were raw and badly blistered. The burnt flesh gave forth an odd odor, quite distinct from that of singed hair. It was a smell I had never encountered before, strong and sickening and completely unlike the aroma of steak or chicken. A lock of my hair was much shorter than it had been, the end of each strand shriveled and weighted down with tiny ashes.

  With my right hand, I pried open the box of cake and cut out a large portion with my fingers. I looked at the portion for a second or two, and then I quickly put it into my mouth.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  TWO DAYS LATER, my blistered fingers covered with gauze, I took the subway to Penn Station and caught a train out to Garrison. My mother had come to pick me up at the station, and when I saw her standing by the car, something stirred beneath the numbness I had been feeling since Russia broke the news of Phillip’s death to me at the deli. My mother looked frail and very thin.

  Near us a family was engaged in a boisterous reunion. With glad shouts of “Granny!” they were hugging and kissing an old woman who had stepped off the same train. Adding to the confusion were two little dogs yapping excitedly at ankle level. I had not seen my mother since early January, yet we greeted each other from opposite ends of the car.

  “Hello,” she said, smiling. “Was it a good trip?”

  “It was okay,” I said.

  I did not feel well in the car as we drove home. When we sat down to drink tea in the kitchen, she noticed my bandaged hand.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Forget it.” I could not look at her. “I burnt myself—you know how clumsy I am.”

  “Let me see.”

  Her eyes widened when she saw my fingers, the flesh shredded and the pus seeping out from the open folds of skin. “We’ve got to get you to the emergency room. Get your coat on.”

  She called the hospital to tell them we were coming, and then we went outside again. She concentrated on the road as she drove, and I watched the familiar streets speed by through the car window. The people looked as familiar as the streets. I thought the children were the same ones I had gone to school with, lost in time, and only when they turned and I saw their faces did I know they were not.

  My mother was silent until we were pulling into the parking lot at the hospital.

  “It must really hurt,” she said.

  “Actually, it’s not so bad.”

  I was telli
ng the truth. When I looked down at my fingers, I felt a little nauseated at the sight of all that blood and pus, but I did not feel much pain. It was as if the hand belonged to someone else.

  Later in the day, as we read by the fire, I splayed out my left hand and examined the fingers, each tip coated with funny-smelling chemicals and neatly bandaged. Because the doctor was concerned about the spread of infection, I had a bottle of antibiotic pills as well. As I reached out to pick up my book from the table, I saw that my mother was watching me over the top of her magazine. After taking off the reading glasses that she had begun wearing just that year, she wiped them carefully with her handkerchief. She held them up to the light and studied them as she spoke.

  “You must miss Phillip a great deal.”

  I nodded.

  “Try to keep busy,” she said. “The time will go by faster. You’ll feel better by the summer.”

  I nodded again, too tired to speak, although it did cross my mind to remark on the curious fact that it was my mother, the queen of long-term mourning, who was telling me that I would feel better within just half a year.

  She was smiling shyly, but when she spoke again I could hear the concern in her voice. “To help you keep busy,” she said, “I got you a present.”

  “But tomorrows your birthday” I said. “And all I got you were chocolates—”

  “Never mind,” she said, and handed me the envelope.

  I opened the envelope to find tickets for a season at Carnegie Hall.

  “I wish I could go with you,” she said. “But it tires me out so much to travel these days.”

  I thanked her, pushing myself to sound enthusiastic. She smiled again, put her glasses back on, and picked up her magazine and went back to reading, but at the end of the night, on her way up to her room, she momentarily rested one of her crippled hands upon my shoulder. I did not thank her so she did not know how much it meant, I think, how good it felt to lean against someone else’s strength, even for a fleeting moment.