I hand over my new credit card, with no idea if it can cover such an expensive purchase. What did Silke set as my limit? And now the clerk and the store will know my name. It’s a new world.
On a bench in front of a café, in the shade of a green awning, I pull the camera out of the box and load two backs with film. My fingers do not fumble, not even a little.
I walk through my new neighborhood, and I take pictures on the street as if I am an explorer. This world, unseen before now. I focus on a cat investigating the tire of a parked car and press the shutter. The cat and I go our separate ways, we both have lives to lead, but now I have something immortal, I have a picture of that cat sniffing a tire. Already that moment, that 1/125th of a second has passed, but I’ll always possess it.
The whole time in my room I felt like a photograph in Silke’s wallet. She carried me around always but I remained mute and motionless. And now here I am. Human beings are meant to move.
But my walk is unbalanced, lopsided. My body is cleansed, cleaner than it’s ever been, but I don’t feel quite right. A huge part of me—the new me—is empty. I have gained a lot, I have regained my life, I have made my choice, but without Megumi I feel as though I am missing a vital organ. One of my lungs. One of my eyes. I’ll never get it back. All I can do now is adjust. What a sad, impotent endeavor. Getting used to it: the slow, systematic destroyer of passion.
I left something else for her besides my book of scars. I hope she understands my meaning. I think she will. She found something inside me that nobody else could ever find. She has a direct channel. Kindred spirits groping in the dark for each other, blind, pure nameless feelings intertwined. Forever.
Pale blue paint. Silke was right. The first coat is drying. I sit in the center of the room on the floor eating a ham sandwich and sipping a Miller High Life. She was right.
With the camera I could work again. I could open up a small studio and begin again taking pictures of things and put those pictures in advertisements and packages and websites. Each morning my wife, Silke, could make me a pot of her coffee.
Dipping the roller in the paint, swishing it back and forth a bit, spreading the paint evenly over the wall, this is work. This is improvement. This is me saying I was here, that I have made a change. I have painted the four walls of a room. The smell of the previous residents is gone, and I open the windows to let the fresh air mix with the paint. I clean the rollers and brushes. I pull off the blue masking tape. I crumple up the vinyl drop cloth and take it downstairs to the trash.
A spring training game is on TV, Yankees and Phillies. I watch even the late innings, when the stars have showered and gone and the hopefuls work on their swings. The rhythm of baseball soothes me. Always has. Even now when I think of the day I took my son to the game I am soothed, soothed by the knowledge that I once took my son to a baseball game. I remember it. I will always remember it.
She sets down her suitcase. “Thomas, what have you done? It’s beautiful.”
“You,” I say, “not me. You picked the color, I just covered the walls with it.” She kisses me on the lips and I do not resist. She tries not to act stunned.
“And your hair!”
“Do you like it? Megumi cut it.” I think of the look on her face when I left her at the onsen. I struggle to keep my expression neutral, to not betray my emotion.
“So you saw her.”
“I did.”
“How is she?”
“She’s going back to Japan to be with her family.”
We order pizza and eat on the floor in the living room, huddled around the pizza box as though it is a fire, a hearth, while watching the detectives on Law and Order interrogate a suspect. “I can’t believe you found the perfect color and painted the living room.” She opens a can of beer and we share it, alternating sips, back and forth, as we eat and watch.
We are silent until the next commercial. She takes a bite of pizza and before she swallows she says, “Maybe one day we can visit her. I’ve always wanted to go to Japan.” Tears fill my eyes but do not fall.
“I’m beat,” she says, “do you mind cleaning up?”
I turn out the kitchen light when I’m finished and I stand in the bedroom doorway. “Would you have really gone through with it?” I ask.
She lets out a breath. “It wasn’t a test, or a cry for help, if that’s what you mean. I’ve cried enough already, don’t you think? I snapped. I would’ve really done it.”
“What made you snap?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“No?”
“Does it matter why, exactly, you withdrew, and why, exactly, you refused to come out for so long? I can guess pretty close, and you could try to tell me, but I’ll only understand the broad strokes. Nobody can ever really understand. Your reasons are private. My reasons are private. Not because we shouldn’t know, but because we can’t ever really know. The more we say the less we understand.” She pulls the blanket up, all the way to her neck.
“Then what makes you think everything is okay now,” I ask, “and what makes you think it’s going to be okay?”
“I said it wasn’t a test and that’s true, it wasn’t. But when you came out, when you did what you did, I realized I had an answer I wasn’t even looking for, and once I had it, once I knew the truth, how could I ignore it? How could I be the same?”
She stops. She expects me to say, What answer did you find? But I am cautious. I wait—I, the silhouette leaning against the doorframe.
“You could’ve stayed in there and died,” she says. “Or you could’ve run right past me and out the door.”
“I could never—”
“But when you pulled me out of that window I had my answer. You chose to save me and yourself and us.”
“A stranger would’ve done the same thing.”
“A stranger, maybe, and someone in love, but not someone who hates, and not someone who’s indifferent. Only someone who cares enough to risk his own life.”
“It’ll fade. I have no shining armor.”
“It isn’t always going to be pretty, I know that. But at the very heart of it, when everything was stripped away but life and death, you chose me and us and life. And yourself. You took me into your arms and pulled me back. That’s how I know.”
“I tackled you, is what I did.”
She chuckles. “I didn’t see you coming. I felt you before I saw you. I felt everything. Before we even hit the floor, I knew.”
She is right. The moment came, and in the flames I did not freeze, I did not fail. I sprang. Finally my instinct found me. I caught it and squeezed it tight, and I hope I’ll never let go.
I step into the room and close the door behind me. In the darkness I take off my clothes and lift the blanket and lie down next to my wife. Her body is warm.
Twenty-six
Megumi walks up the stairs to her apartment. A small plastic shopping bag imprinted with the words THANK YOU hangs from one hand. The old wooden staircase creaks with each step and she feels the grooves with her feet, worn into the steps by all those who’ve climbed up and down before her. Maybe she, too, over the last few years of up and down has contributed ever so slightly to the grooves in the steps. Maybe they have grown a little deeper under her weight. She has made her mark. Maybe one day someone will decide that these old grooves are too deep, too slippery, too dangerous, and will tear out the staircase and destroy her mark and replace it with a beautiful new staircase with steps perfectly straight and true and no evidence of those who came before.
Outside her open window the apple tree shimmers in the sunlight. The leaves dance gently in the breeze, rubbing together to make a soft sound. Are they waving to her? She’ll miss you, apple tree. Will she once again take long walks with her father and look at the trees and the spiders in their webs? Will she be back in time for ohanami, to walk with her new brother among the cherry blossoms? She’ll be sure to tell him about this apple tree.
The apartment is empty and soulless,
stripped clear of what few possessions she had. Now it’s just a box, clean and bare, a shell waiting for the next whoever. Be nice to the apple tree!
She calls for a car to the airport. “Five minutes,” the dispatcher says.
In the middle of the room her suitcase stands upright. She sits on it and pulls an envelope of photographs from the THANK YOU shopping bag. Pictures from the onsen, pictures of Thomas Tessler when he had long hair, of him alone and of the two of them, faces together, smiling for the camera. Thomas once told her that every photograph tells a little white lie, but she can’t help thinking those smiles were real, are real, that at that moment they were together and happy. There are pictures of him with short hair, freshly cut, her sitting on his lap. In one picture, when she thought he was looking at the camera, he was in fact looking at her. She looks closely at the expression on his face, reading it, looking for clues. His look is intense, as though he is etching her face into his memory, right down to the texture of her skin. There is no more sadness in his eyes, instead only gentle happiness and longing.
She thumbs further down the stack but then stops. Pictures of Thomas alone on the balcony, the green mountains in the background. She did not take these pictures. They are self-portraits. When did he take them? While she was in the onsen crying?
He shot the rest of the roll for her, twenty portraits, twenty different expressions, a catalog of someone she will say she once knew. She’ll put her favorites on the wall, and when someone asks who it is, she’ll say, “Oh, he’s one of my American friends,” and leave it at that, but she’ll close her eyes for just a moment and remember everything, all at once, and when the feelings become too intense, unbearable, she’ll open her eyes and smile.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Amy Gash, Jae Yoon Hah, Martha Hughes, David Marshall, Elisabeth Scharlatt, and Sonoko Sugiyama.
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2013 by Jeff Backhaus.
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN 978-1-61620-188-3
Hikikomori and the Rental Sister Page 17