“Kazu?”
“You know.”
“Is he the bald gangster or the gangster with the tight perm?”
“The bald one.”
The memory clicks in. She smiles. Nods. “Oh him. He’s lovely. It’s not always true what they say about Japanese men, now is it?”
“An exception to every rule, I suppose.” I try to look nonchalant. Hide my giddy smile behind the glass of beer.
“Fucking hell. You’re not falling for him.”
“Come on.”
“Keep your cynicism intact, sweetie.”
The first few gulps of beer are working on me. A low-grade euphoria mixed with who-gives-a-shit. “I like to stay on the low end of emotional experience,” I say. “That way rock bottom is close to home.”
The door opens, and a gust of wind sends bar menus fluttering in the air. Adam sneaks up behind Ines and cups her tits. She doesn’t move. Takes a gulp of beer. “I’m giving you a nanosecond.”
Adam’s arms go into the air in mock surrender. Adam is wearing the same Chelsea football jersey he always wears. He smells like a wet ashtray and cologne. He only drinks beer and smokes dope, but he looks like a heroin addict. Grayish skin and sunken cheeks. Sad little bald patch sneaking up on him from the back. Chronically broke. Always avoiding the police. Lecherous as hell. He’s the only Western male in Tokyo that I’ll hang out with, the kind of guy whose luck is far overdue to run out. He, Ines, and I are like three impending head-on collisions running parallel.
“You telling me you’re out of my league is it?”
“Out of your species, Adam.” Ines pats the empty bar stool next to hers. “But do sit down and buy us a drink.”
“Well ladies, it’s your lucky day. Got me a job.” Adam plunks down on the stool and smacks his hands on the bar. “Jiro my man. Set me up.”
Jiro cocks his head to one side. Slowly polishes a wine glass.
“Gin and tonic IV for me and a bottle a’ piss for my lady friends. Chop-chop!”
Jiro stops polishing the glass and stares at Adam.
Ines sighs. “Jinu toniku o hitotsu to biru ippon.” She turns to Adam. “How long have you been in Tokyo, and you can’t order a fucking drink in Japanese?”
“I know the language of love,” he coos, flashing his gnarled yellow teeth at us. He raises his chin to me. “Marge. All right?”
Jiro puts the drinks down and tops off our beer. “The language of love is rarely understood by bartenders,” I say and raise my glass to Adam. “Who the hell would hire you anyway?” Adam is of dubious visa status in Japan. He cobbles together a living by making runs to Thailand, smuggling in hash and fake designer shit. After three or four entry stamps to Japan, when the Japanese immigration officers start to cop on to him, he throws his passport in a washing machine in Bangkok, takes the soggy mess to the English Embassy, and has it replaced with a brand-new one.
“Watch the language. You’re speaking to a man of the cloth now,” Adam says, yellowy fingers pressed together in prayer.
“Cheese cloth,” says Ines.
“That’s right. I’m a minister at New Otani Wedding chapel. Six services every Sunday. Five grand an I-do.”
Japanese girls love the spectacle of the Western wedding. The meringue-like dresses, the wedding march, the quaint little chapel, the fake minister. Any balding white-skinned male will do.
“Inherited the job from a mate of mine—he got deported for drunk and disorderly. Called me from the airport this morning and told me ‘Get ye to the altar.’ Give me a week and I’ll be shagging bridesmaids left, right, and center. I love this bloody country.”
Ines reaches over, takes the giant plastic toy mallet that’s hanging on the wall, and plonks Adam over the head with it. Her way of saying “congratulations.” Jiro screws up his face to stifle a laugh. Then, like a parent’s bellowing voice disrupting a coven of noisy children, a small earthquake shakes the room, knocking the framed photo of John Lennon to the floor. For a moment, the four of us are silent. Eyes dart to eyes. Waiting. The moment is framed. The earth stops moving. Adam rubs his head and mumbles, “Bloody hell.”
Jiro does a little hop and shifts from his frozen pose, and, like a toy whose batteries have been replaced, begins to skuttle around, righting overturned bottles, picking up the menus fanned across the floor. He ticks his tongue as if to scold Mother Nature, grabs his broom, and cleans up John Lennon. His composure is betrayed only by a small blot of sweat, visible when he lifts his arm to straighten Ringo.
Ines gazes into her cleavage as if she’s dropped something down there. “If you think of them like amusement park rides, they’re almost fun.”
“Tits?” I ask. I’m still confused. I still don’t trust the walls and ceiling to stay where they are. Jiro has the bar back to normal at least—grubby but neat.
“Earthquakes. I actually quite like them now.” She sighs, rests her elbows on the bar, her chin on the bridge of her hands, and winks at Jiro. “And tits too, I suppose.”
“Big one coming ne?” Jiro says.
Ines lights two smokes and hands Jiro one. “Promises, promises.”
“Fucking nutters we are—staying here.” Adam’s still rubbing his head. I’ve been hit by the plastic mallet a dozen times. It doesn’t hurt. “Earthquakes. Typhoons. Fucking squat toilets.”
I give Adam a little pout. “You just said you love Japan.”
“Hey you should be agreeing with me, you two. Word is white girls are disappearing.” He nods his head slowly. Meaningfully.
“White girl Adam. Just one.” I’m on that drunk edge. I’ll either get belligerent or lovey-dovey. It’ll happen soon.
“White slavery if you ask me. Yakuza.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Belligerent it is.
“Then there’s that nutter going around on a shopping bike, braining gaijin birds with a baseball bat.”
I sigh. Adam is ruining my buzz. “You’re making that up,” I say.
Adam holds his palm up. “Swear it’s the truth. Nearly killed an Aussie girl in Yoyogi Park.”
Ines claps her hands. “What we need right now is a little smokey-smoke. Adam? Will you indulge us?”
“Bloody hell. Do you know how hard it is to get this stuff?”
“Of course we do, darling. Shall we retire to the lounge?” Ines already has Adam off his stool and halfway out the door, her hands on his back, pushing him along.
Adam turns back. “Brought it back from Bangkok.” Raises his eyebrows and lowers his voice. “Internally.”
“Oh God,” I say, pulling the sliding glass door shut. “Did you have to mention that?”
“Does it matter?”
The street is wet from a shower we missed. The slick black of the road reflecting the neon. Sidewalks buzzing with people who have somewhere to go. People with neat little lives. Paper shopping bags sheathed in plastic by attentive shop girls swing from every hand. A few moments ago, the underpinnings of the world were shifting, calling us down. I see two girls on mobile phones looking around for one another. Rising on their tippy-toes, chins high. Their eyes meet and they scurry toward each other. For a few moments, they stand face to face, fingers interlaced, still communicating through their tiny silver cells.
“No,” I say. Doesn’t matter.
We go around the building to a garbage-strewn alleyway and crouch by the wall. I look up at the building, which is tiled dusty-rose—eight stories tall, dotted with curtained windows, a gulag of one-room clubs with cute names. A scrawny cat with no tail slinks by, eyeing us. Adam pulls a chunk of hash from his pocket and holds the lighter to it.
“Do you ever feel like you’re in a cartoon? In Japan I mean?” I’m having a moment.
“Fucking hell. We haven’t even smoked yet.” He returns to his work, arranging the little black beads on the rolling paper. “Cartoon! What the—”
“All the time,” Ines answers. “What will I draw for myself tomorrow. Hmmm. Maybe an Israeli with rip
pling abs and a bad attitude.”
“Maybe it’s already drawn. The next frame. Maybe we’re already drawn.”
Adam puts the joint in his mouth and talks around it. “Alright Marge, I’m going to have to ask you to shut your gob. Freakin’ me out already.”
Somewhere water is dripping like a metronome. We smoke the joint. Our chests puff up. We speak in squeaky voices, trying to keep the smoke in. Above us, the sky is squeezing out the last remnants of day, navy blue turning black and blacker second by second. My body becomes a network of subtle sensations, tingling and buzzing. I cut and paste the feelings from part to part, enjoying the control. Paranoia is lurking there. I keep it back by staring at Adam’s nose. Adam stares at Ines’s chest. Ines stares at her shoes.
“Ever heard that Japanese fairy tale about the fisherman and the turtle?” Ines asks. A light rain starts to fall, and we line up—backs pressed against the wall—sheltered under a small overhang.
“So this young fisherman saves a turtle who’s stuck in the mud and the turtle takes him under the sea to this fantastic castle. Pure A-list fish party. Fishy drugs and fishy martinis—”
“Mermaids?” Adam asks.
“Sure. Mermaids. Mermen. Everything. Naive little fisherboy thinks he’s died and gone to heaven. He parties hard, like all night, all the next day. Mr. Turtle is all ‘Stay as long as you want. Enjoy! Enjoy!’ So he does, you know. He hides out. Who wants to gut fish when you can fuck an octopus? So he’s looking for the loo one night and he comes upon this room where he can see his old life, his village and his family. And yeah, of-fucking-course he gets nostalgic and pathetic and tells Mr. Turtle, ‘I gotta go.’
“And being the consummate host, Turtle-san gives the fisherboy a gift. A gold box that he tells him never to open. Zenzen akimasu. Never.
“Fisherboy says his good-byes, goes to the surface, and starts walking to his village. Everything’s as dull as ever. And he’s walking and walking and thinking Hmmm, where’s my house?”
Adam has a little coughing fit, waves his hand around a bit. “Right, right—the turtle like slaughtered his family and torched his house?”
Ines slaps Adam’s head. “Anyway, fisher-dork sits down under a big tree. He’s used to floating around. His feet are sore, you know? He takes out the box and he can’t resist—so he opens it. But there’s nothing in it but a mirror. Takes him a minute to figure out it’s him he’s looking at—he’s an old man, ancient, almost dead.”
I stare at a tangled pile of abandoned bicycles. Wordless for a minute or so. The dripping is coming from both sides now, hollow and resonant. The alley feels like a cave.
Ines stands up, smoothes her hair down. “We should go dancing.”
“I’m gonna go home,” I say. I pray that I won’t have to put up a fight. That I’ll be allowed to find sleep.
Ines is stoned. Her accent—the nonspecific European snootiness of it—has softened. She almost sounds Canadian. “Don’t walk,” she says, pushing a ten-thousand yen note in my hand. “Anyway, I know you will. Freak. Who walks when there are cabs?”
I give Adam a peck on the cheek. He looks little brotherly with his wide red eyes, his hood pulled over his head, scraps of hair peeking out. He holds his hand against his cheek where I’ve kissed it and waves as I go.
After a few blocks, Aoyama Street is strangely deserted. It’s like walking in an elaborate movie set. Tokyo nobody. Postapocalyptic in a calming sort of way. Pedestrian walkways crisscross above me, like shadowy arms. The street-lights go through the motions. A convenience store glows like something alive amid the concrete.
Under the cover of night, in the absence of people, Aoyama Street seems as perfectly composed as a contemplation garden. My private garden of stone, glass, and water. Mine alone to wander through. The rain-slicked streets are mine. The darkened buildings, like sleeping giants; the vacuum of silence left after the occasional car swooshes by. Mine.
I wonder what Kazu is doing.
The rain picks up. Urging me home. I tilt my head back, let it drop, heavy like a bowling ball. The raindrops look like mercury, appearing out of the inky screen, hitting my face.
I want to reach up into the weird quiet of the night, tear a strip off the black sky and wrap it around me.
Behind me, like a counterpoint to the pitter-patter of the rain, I hear the squeak of a bicycle. My ears tune into it—the whir of the wheels, water spitting up from the back tire. The slick lubricant of adrenaline guiding me, I turn abruptly at the corner, cross on the red light.
If you scream on a deserted Tokyo street, on a Sunday, in English, do you really make a sound?
The bicycle is behind me. Beside me. There’s a shout—Ki o tsukete!—a pause for mental translation. Then relief. It’s a cop.
Ki o tsukete.
Be careful.
Or literally: Take care of your feelings.
The cop smiles as he passes. Pedals away until I can no longer see his figure—just the neon stripe on the back of his jacket—until the street ahead swallows the neon stripe and I’m alone again. Panic coiled in my belly next to relief.
Fear and excitement are chemically the same. Sadness is a hair away from melancholy. Melancholy is almost pleasure, brushing against happiness. It’s all the fucking same.
I’m ten. Frank’s twelve. Frank says he wants a wound. A wound, he says, makes you special. People look at you differently if you’re scarred. “They imagine things about you,” he says. He talks about Martin MacKinnon, the boy at school who was in a car accident. His face is jigsaw-puzzled by shiny white scars. There’s something happening to Frank’s face. A twitchy unease has started to define his features. He’s not sick yet. He’s just weird.
It’s been a year since Dad left—went to a convention and never came back. His shoes are still lined up in the hall closet. Sometimes I catch Mom ironing and folding his hankies, like he’ll come home anytime with a cold and an old crusty handkerchief in his pants pocket, and she’ll be ready for him. At first, the house was too quiet. The quiet followed me everywhere, punctuated only by the occasional low sob from Mom’s room.
Now Mom does yoga and talks a lot about her spirit guide who is an Indian chief born a hundred years ago. Sometimes, in the evenings, her friends come over, single women from her office, younger than she. They wear ribbed catsuits with zips up the front, ponchos that reek of patchouli oil, big wiry earrings that swing from their earlobes like little satellites. They smoke really thin cigarettes and talk about finding their spiritual center. They drink wine and hiss “He’s an asshole,” about Dad and other men.
I’ve discovered that I can spend hours and hours in my room. Door closed. Reading young adult novels about teen pregnancy and lithe ballet-dancing teenagers with eating disorders and doe eyes. I can hide away for entire weekends and no one notices at all. My room. My kingdom.
Frank finally decides that he’ll cut one of his pinky fingers off. He plans it for a whole week, going through the knives in the kitchen and finding the sharpest one, figuring out the best joint to slice at. Just the tip isn’t dramatic enough, but too close to his palm and he might sever a tendon. He’ll drop the finger down the garbage disposal so they can’t reattach it.
Frank chooses a Sunday afternoon when Mom will be sleeping in front of the TV. He prepares a bag of ice and positions me at the doorway to scream for help. We get our stories straight.
“We were hungry so we decided to have bagels and peanut butter but the bagels were all frozen and the knife just slipped. Okay?” He’s twitchy with excitement.
I’m scared but I say, “Okay.”
Frank smiles, picks up the knife. “It’s time,” he says.
The scream comes out so fast and shrill Frank drops the knife. “Mom!”
Frank gives up on the wound idea. For a week he looks at me with a mixture of sadness and contempt.
“You can still be special,” I tell him. “You’re smart.”
“That’s not the way things work,” he
tells me.
Kazu phones. “I’m in front.”
“Front of what?”
“Apartment.”
I look out my window. There’s his car. A big gray Mercedes with tinted windows. An old lady pulling a shopping caddy eyes the car sideways. I imagine Kazu behind the wheel. Phone to his ear. Connected to me. My pulse quickens.
“I’m coming,” I tell him. I should wait thirty seconds. Feign indifference. Slap on some lipstick. But I take off down the stairs. Take two at a time. Step into my shoes and make for the car.
“Western woman,” Kazu says. “Very fast.”
“So they say.” I lean over and cup his face in my hands. Take his upper lip between mine and suck it a little. Kazu closes his eyes like a cat does when you rub its ears. I let go of his face and examine the books on his lap. Japanese-English dictionary. English-Japanese dictionary. Electronic dictionary. Your New Western Girlfriend: A Guide for the Asian Man. The latter sounds like an instruction manual for a blowup doll. It has a misty photograph of a girl in a sundress walking through a meadow, blond hair lifted off her shoulders by a breeze.
“You’ve got to be joking,” I say.
“Preparation,” Kazu says. He gestures at me strangely. Knuckles against knuckles.
“Huh?”
“Seat-o-belt-o,” he says. An earnest sort of smile. “I like to drive rapidly.”
Kazu rolls off me. The Japanese-themed room is bare except for a futon and low table. “Feeling. How?”
“Good,” I say, fumbling for my smokes.
“No,” Kazu takes me by the chin and turns my face to him. “Please. I want detail. How?”
“Like,” I light a smoke, stare up at the ceiling, “like I’m dissolving.”
“Eh?”
“Like I’m less me.”
Kazu grabs the cigarette and takes a drag. “Honestly speaking,” he says, “I am married man.”
My mouth opens. Air escaping a pricked balloon. “I don’t care.”
Lost Girls and Love Hotels Page 5