The Art of Us

by Hilaria Alexander

  “I understand it’s not what you want to hear,” Marty replied.

  “Not what I want to hear? This is something I never thought I’d hear. We’re not exchange students going to live with a family. We’re goddamned adults, Marty.”

  I looked over to Amos, who had remained silent. His eyes danced between the papers in front of him and me.

  “Are you okay with this?” I asked him, trying to get his attention.

  He shrugged, and I wished I found that gesture irritating rather than charming.

  “I don’t like it, but what choice do we have? Maybe this way we’ll get done faster. Besides, it’s not like they’re going to keep us as prisoners.”

  “You say that now.”

  Prisoners. How could we know? How could we know for sure what our days were going to be like? I’d heard horror stories years ago from friends of mine about what it was like to work in Japan; the stories about stressed sararimans, the businessmen who ended up taking their own lives, weren’t urban legends. The long hours, entire days and nights spent at work without ever going home—it eventually took a toll on people, making their lives miserable. This was true for people who worked in offices, but also in every other work environment.

  I still remembered the Reddit chat Henry Thurlow had done. Thurlow, the only American artist to ever be hired by a Japanese studio, had talked extensively about his experience working in Japan. The opportunity meant forgetting about having any social life and spending days and nights obsessing over work, which led him to be hospitalized several times. Still, as stressful as his job was compared to his life as an artist in the US, he’d never felt more fulfilled.

  Part of me pitied him, and yet, part of me understood him completely.

  The old saying was true: artists seek immortality through art. Being miserable whilst alive doesn’t matter much.

  I stared at the papers in front of me, angry. All of this was so stupid.

  My mind couldn’t wrap itself around the fact that we were going to live with Rika Ishikawa in some swanky property rented by the publishing company.

  “Lena,” Marty said softly, and when I met his eyes, he tried to give me a sympathetic smile. “I get it. This is not what you expected.”

  “Far from it. I don’t know when I signed up to get on this bizarre ride, but all I know is that I want off.” I looked at each one of the people in the room, staring at Amos last.

  “Are we done here?” I asked.

  “We’re done for now,” Marty replied.

  “Well, please excuse me. Looks like I have some packing to do,” I said in an annoyed tone. I grabbed my things and left the conference room.

  LENA

  A few days before we were scheduled to fly out to Tokyo, I’d called my mother, whom I only spoke to occasionally. When I told her I was going to Japan for a while, all she could say was, “Try not to get run over this time around, kid. I’m not going to nurse you back to health again.” Once again, I shouldn’t have been surprised. The woman knew just how to unnerve me. The months I’d spent recovering from the accident had been the bleakest of my life.

  She must have forgotten that I moved out of her house as soon as the doctor cleared me to go back to school.

  She was a piece of work, which was why I hadn’t seen her in years.

  A few days later, I headed to the airport. My Uber driver pulled up to the sidewalk and helped me get my luggage out. As soon as I went inside the airport, I spotted Amos standing in line to check in.

  He was alone.

  I’d thought Olivia would come to say goodbye. She seemed to fit the part of the jealous, clingy girlfriend. I wondered what she thought of all this; she couldn’t possibly be happy about it.

  We said hello to each other but remained quiet throughout the screening process. It all still felt too surreal to be true.

  Later, after we boarded the plane and waited for takeoff, he kept staring at the seat in front of him, lips pursed in annoyance. He wasn’t usually this cranky, and he was the one who’d initiated all of this, so I didn’t understand what his bad mood stemmed from.

  Maybe he wasn’t pleased about being close to me for the duration of the flight; after all, I made no mystery of the fact that I was mad at him. But, truth be told, I had begun to accept that I couldn’t avoid interacting with him anymore.

  From now on, we weren’t going to be solo agents. We had to be a team.

  Therefore, I’d made a promise to myself that I would try my best to be a little friendlier, as much as I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

  Besides, if we couldn’t make small talk, the flight was bound to be awkward as hell. Paz Media hadn’t splurged on business class seats, so we were sitting in coach, right next to each other, constantly bumping into one another.

  It couldn’t be helped.

  Amos was so tall that he barely fit in the seat. His knees touched the seat in front of him, and it looked uncomfortable as hell.

  I put my headphones in and scrolled through the movie selection, hoping to fall asleep at some point.

  I have shit luck with sleeping on flights.

  Once, I slept a solid seven hours on a flight from Thailand. Marty, Violet, and I had been traveling all damn day, and I was exhausted. I woke up just in time for breakfast, and it was the best flying experience of my life.

  This time, I couldn’t relax at all on the flight to Narita, and no matter what I was watching, I kept getting distracted by Amos’ knee bumping against mine, his hand accidentally touching my arm as he was trying to get comfortable, his foot kicking mine as he tried to find that extra inch of space.

  “I’m sorry,” he would say each time. Later on, he grumbled, “I should have paid for business class myself.”

  “Tell me about it,” I replied. “Marty is such a cheap ass. We’re getting an upgrade on the way back, whether he likes it or not.”

  He gave me a warm, genuine smile—the first one of the day. He had been as tense as I had through the check-in and boarding process, and his grouchiness had only gotten worse as we both struggled to get comfortable in the narrow seats of the aircraft.

  He turned on his side, facing me. He had the aisle seat, and I had the window. Thankfully, we were sitting along the side of the plane and didn’t have to deal with any other passengers.

  “I’m going to try to sleep for a bit,” he said in a hushed tone.

  “Okay,” I replied, struggling to stop staring at his face.

  His eyelashes looked even longer and thicker when his eyes were closed. I wanted to run my finger across his eyebrows and down the length of his nose.

  His features seemed to relax, and a few minutes later, the pattern of his breathing confirmed he was asleep.

  He seemed to be dreaming, because his full bottom lip quivered for a second then a shiver coursed through his body.

  The ache in my chest was unfamiliar and unwelcome. I didn’t want to feel for anyone, much less for Amos, but no matter how hard I fought my feelings, there I was, watching him sleep.

  This was not the woman I wanted to be.

  Caring wasn’t a word that had ever fit my personality, and it felt even sicker to care for someone else’s boyfriend. Amos shivered again, so I pulled the corner of his blanket up and covered him, tucking it in the crook between his neck and his shoulder. I sighed and turned toward the window, hoping I could also fall asleep and find some peace in my restless heart.

  AMOS

  “Look,” she said later on, as they were serving us dinner over the Pacific. “I know I’ve been particularly difficult to deal with lately, but you can’t deny this situation is a bit your fault. I probably would have felt differently if you’d talked to me about it before you went to Marty.”

  “You would have told me you didn’t want him to know, Lena.”

  “Exactly. The sketches…they were supposed to be just for you and me.”

  “Lena, I never expected that to turn into this, and yes, I understand that for some weird reason,
you’d rather be anywhere else right now, but you can’t deny how wild this is. They don’t hand out opportunities like this to just anyone, and both you and I have worked in this industry long enough to know that.”

  She nodded pensively and exhaled a deep breath. She tucked her hair behind her ear and looked at me with those big blue eyes of hers.

  I licked my lips, fighting the impulse to tell her everything, the whole truth.

  I wanted to tell her about Olivia and me, that I couldn’t stop thinking about her every minute of every day, but most of all I wanted to tell her I had gone to Marty that day just because I was trying to understand what had happened to her. I wanted to understand why she was so obsessed with Aiko to begin with, and why she seemed to want this story to have an ending as if her life depended on it.

  She was staring out the window, the sky an endless blue canvas, a line of clouds floating right below us.

  “Lena.” She turned around and raised her eyebrows questioningly. “Why are you so obsessed with giving Aiko an ending anyway?”

  She laughed. “Don’t you think it’s a little late for this conversation? You should have asked sooner, St. Clair.”

  “And you would have told me the truth?”

  “Maybe,” she replied.

  “Well, why don’t you tell me now?”

  She shook her head. “Not right now. I’ll tell you one of these nights.”

  I gave her a skeptical look.

  “I promise. I’ll tell you everything eventually, Amos.”

  LENA

  Exhausted. I was positive there was no other way to arrive in Narita. It didn’t matter which part of the world you flew from; Tokyo was still a whole sixteen hours ahead of Portland.

  However, this time around I was traveling in style. After we picked up our luggage and went through customs, we found a driver holding a sign with our names on it. We wouldn’t have to drag our luggage across several train lines and train stations.

  When Maggie and I had done it eleven years before, it had been brutal, but we were students and obviously couldn’t afford a driver who would take us from Narita all the way to the apartment rental office in Shinjuku where we were supposed to sign our lease.

  “Ohayou gozaimasu,” I said, wishing the driver a good morning while bowing lightly. “Watashiwa Lena Andrews desu. Kare wa Amos St. Clair desu. Yoroshiku Onegaishimasu,” I said, bowing again. The driver greeted us, using the formal tone reserved for businesses situations, and led us to our car.

  “Crap, I’m fucking things up already,” I said as I sighed.

  “How so?” Amos asked.

  “I called you kare, which is basically the most colloquial and despicable way to say him. Argh, how could I be so stupid?” I partially covered my face with my hands.

  “Andrews, take a deep breath,” Amos said, bumping against my shoulder playfully. “I don’t care, and I doubt he will mind. At least he didn’t have to figure out how to talk to you in English.”

  “I feel so tired, I don’t think my brain will function properly much longer.”

  He stopped me and turned me around so I was facing him. He held me by my shoulders and looked straight into my eyes.

  “Hey, it’s as much my job as it is yours to communicate with people. Stop being so hard on yourself, okay?” He gave me a long look and I nodded, trying not to get lost in those brown eyes that seemed to incite the best and worst in me.

  We got into the car, and I stared as the landscape outside slowly transformed from countryside into a busier suburban area, and then it morphed into the metropolitan city I remembered.

  As we made our way into the heart of the city, I was overwhelmed with memories.

  The knot in my throat came first, and the tears in my eyes followed soon after. I sniffled and covered my mouth with my hand.

  Amos didn’t ask any questions about what I was fussing about, but he reached for my hand and squeezed it.

  He tried to distract me, asking me questions about places we came across.

  “Is it just like you remembered it?”

  I smiled, still not turning his way. I wasn’t strong enough to look at him right then.

  “It’s…strange. Some things are still the same, while others I don’t recognize at all. That building, for example,” I said, pointing out at a skyscraper that couldn’t have been more than five or six years old. “I’m pretty sure that huge thing was not there.”

  “Where’s Mount Fuji? I thought you were supposed to be able to see it everywhere?”

  “Ha! That’s actually a pretty funny story. Usually, yes, but only if you’re either up on a building and there’s very good visibility or you’re out in the country. I never got to see it, Amos. The whole time I lived here, I never saw it!”

  He laughed with me.

  “It gets better. One day, I decided to take a train and go to the countryside to see it, finally.”

  “And…did you get to see it?” he asked with a hint of a smile.

  “Nope. I traveled four hours on a train to go see the stupid Fuji-sama.”

  “How could you not see it?”

  “The fucker was completely wrapped up in clouds. Besides the base of the mountain, I saw nothing—nothing at all.” I laughed in frustration, and Amos looked at me with an air of amusement. I narrowed my eyes at him as he looked out the window, realizing what he’d done. He’d distracted me.

  He’d snapped me out of my natsukashii kanji—my nostalgic mood.

  AMOS

  When I woke up, I felt as if I was coming out of a coma.

  I’d never had jet lag bring me down so bad. Of course, since neither of us had slept much during the flight, we’d crashed as soon as we got to our hotel room.

  Thankfully, the hotel was right in the middle of Shinjuku, and according to Lena, it was close to everything we could possibly need.

  When I was finally able to open my eyes, however, I forgot where we were staying and screamed in horror as I took in Godzilla’s hand right over my bed.

  We were staying in one of Tokyo’s newest skyscrapers, the Godzilla-themed Gracery Hotel in Shinjuku, which had several rooms decorated with the Japanese nuclear-enhanced sea monster that had starred in more than thirty movies in the last few decades, including what I considered a very unfortunate Hollywood version.

  I’d insisted on having a Godzilla-themed room, and the claws of the monster coming out of the wall were impressive.

  I’d wanted the room with a view of the monster, the one built outside on the patio of the hotel, but it had already been booked.

  Although I knew we had signed up for international phone plans, when I tried calling Lena’s number, I couldn’t get a signal and I was too groggy to try to figure out why my phone wasn’t working yet. I called her room number, and after the fourth ring, she picked up the phone.

  “Moshi moshi?” she asked in a raspy voice, and I laughed. “Oh, it’s you. I was worried they were summoning us already.”

  “That’s tomorrow. Hey, guess what?”

  “What?”

  “Godzilla scared the crap out of me,” I said with a laugh.

  Her low, sleepy voice broke into a laugh.

  “Told ya. What time is it?” she asked.

  “Seven thirty-seven.”

  “Hmmm, maybe we should get something to eat. Are you hungry?”

  “Starving,” I replied.

  “Okay. Give me…thirty minutes. Maybe forty. I need to get my bearings. Come to my room.”

  “What’s your room number again?”

  “Nana zero nana.”

  “What now?”

  “Seven oh seven,” she clarified.

  “I’ll see you in forty minutes.”

  LENA

  Kabukicho, the entertainment district within Shinjuku, had changed quite a bit since the last time I had been there. I didn’t know how it was actually possible, but there were even more buildings in Tokyo’s busy skyline. For starters, the hotel where we were staying had only been o
pened a couple of years before, and the building was so tall, it towered over the surrounding ones—kind of like Godzilla himself.

  Amos wanted to have dinner in an authentic, run-of-the-mill Japanese restaurant, so we forewent looking for a fancier place and opted for a diner that had a selection of classic Japanese bowls like katsudon, a pork cutlet over steamed rice, and tendon, a selection of tempura shrimp and veggies over white steamed rice.

  After dinner, we passed a few izakayas, the equivalent of an American pub but with traditional Japanese-style décor.

  Amos stared curiously at the doors of one that seemed to be bustling with activity.

  “Do you want to go in?” I let out a laugh, amused by the way he stared at everything.

  He looked like a child in an amusement park, but I understood it. There was so much to take in, so much to see. It was going to take him weeks to get used to all of it.

  “Can we?” he asked with some hesitation. He brushed his hair to the side of his face as he often did, and I fought the impulse to reach out for a stubborn strand that was still covering his eyes. He fixed his hair again.

  “Of course we can—as long as you promise we won’t get carried away.”

  “Okay, just one beer. Biru ippon kudasai,” he said, holding up a finger and practicing the right way to order a beer. The grin stretching across his face made me smile. When he did that, I could almost forget we were all the way across the world because of him.

  “Very good. Did you brush up on your Japanese? Did you take classes?”

  He gave me a shy smile. “I used Rosetta Stone. Come on, let’s go in and see what else I can remember.”

  AMOS

  We were almost done with our beer, and I knew it was time to get back to the hotel. Hopefully we’d be able to go back to sleep and get some more rest. We had a full day of meetings ahead of us. the beginning of our work the next day.

  It was just the two of us in a crowded Japanese pub filled with people who were trying to forget about their busy work days.

  I stared at Lena’s face as she looked away, taking in every detail of the place, her lips curved in a smile. I wondered what she was thinking about.