Somehow he had managed to avoid this initiation in the past by ducking out the back of the building to meet Mei Ling for a taxi ride to his place. The route to his apartment through the packed roads was so familiar to them that Mei Ling would wait until they’d passed the noodle shop on the right to light her cigarette, knowing she would reach the filter just as the doorman opened her side of the taxi. They always talked on their way up the elevator and fondled each other casually, dancing around the idea of pushing that little red button and doing it right there like they’d seen in a movie once. It excited her; she became much more daring once they left the office. He’d take her straight to his bedroom and let it all out, the stress, those fleeting moments of panic that made up every day. And there was Mei Ling moving with the rhythm of this feeling like she knew what he was thinking even before he did. Like she knew him better than he knew himself.
From what Tetsuya had gathered, this was a special night, a departure from the normal routine. There were girls everywhere, and the place smelled like a hot mix of perfume and anxiousness. The hostesses swam around the tables of men, never staying in one place too long.
To Tetsuya, Ji Min seemed like a different person. He hung on every word of anyone who was even slightly his senior, kissing ass so blatantly that his mouth moved indiscernibly from glass to cigarette to butt cheek, making him look busier than he ever did in the office.
He sloshed his drink down the front of his suit, then ordered another round, urging everyone else to empty their glasses. Tetsuya tossed back the rest of his Scotch and loosened his tie. He felt a little sick, like he might throw up. So he calmly sat at the table for a moment, focusing on a spot behind the lit bar until his stomach settled.
Their glasses blended into the black, lacquered tables, and the dancing ends of cigarettes gave a fluctuating head count as men drifted in and out of private backrooms. Cerulean lamps lit from above made the entire place seem as if it were underwater. Everyone looked dead. A dull buzzing sound erupted from the speakers with just enough variance in rhythm to be passed off as music. The hostesses weaved through the tables, invisible to each other, just daring Tetsuya to touch one of them.
Ji Min whispered in his ear, “You’re so busy, Tetsuya. You never come out with us.” His breath was a horrid mix.
“Yes, well…” he stumbled. His tongue was loose, and he felt terribly unfocused.
“It’s funny how I can never find Mei Ling either, after about seven thirty or so. I always think she’s doing extra work for you, but you’re usually gone as well,” Ji Min said cryptically.
“We’re both quite busy.”
The discussion stopped, and everyone looked at one another. A couple of men glanced nervously at Tetsuya’s boss.
They know, Tetsuya thought almost instantly. They all know.
As if on cue, the lights dimmed, and the room suddenly became unnavigable. A chill filled the air once Tetsuya lit a cigarette to give his hands something to do. For the first time, he noticed bars on the windows. The club was underground, but he didn’t remember having walked down any stairs. He looked around the table at their half faces, indistinguishable from one another but all bluish in pallor. There was no one he could trust here. Not even someone who’d make apologies for him if he decided to go home and be sick, which, at this point, was all he wanted to do.
Suddenly a blue arm emerged from behind and encircled his neck. The polish on the fingernails looked deep purple in the light. The buzzing sound that was now unmistakably music was all around him now and not just inside his throbbing head. At some point, a horn slowly had snuck its way in sync with the other sounds. A jazz beat that had made his heart jump when it first entered the song gave the blue arm something to move to. The hostess picked him up from the waist like a toddler and placed his arms on her shoulders, leading him deeper toward the dark center of the room. He tried not to step on her toes, but she wouldn’t let him look down, so he stopped trying to follow where they went. With one hand she grabbed his face; her nails felt sharp against his cheek. In a second’s worth of light, he caught a cursory glimpse of her face. She was older, thirty-nine maybe. Or even forty. Her mouth appeared as a straight line painted in the same shade as her nail polish. Her eyes were wide, unnaturally so for an Asian woman. Bulging out of her face as they were, her eyelids were pulled tightly against the temples in a way that looked surgically assisted.
The lamps dimmed even further, and Tetsuya knocked into a chair. “Excuse me,” he said to it. The woman laughed and pulled him closer to the center of the room, where the light converged into a hollow void. He sensed a sneeze coming on but lost it and felt extremely cheated by everything. The jazz beat was techno, having shifted again so seamlessly. He felt himself being watched by the dull-lidded, rheumy eyes of his colleagues all around the room, slightly goading him on. He was fearful, yet curious, of what the sad tune might turn into next.
TETSUYA REMEMBERED HIS first earthquake, a relatively large one for Tokyo at 5.4. He’d been getting ready for school, and his glass of water had slipped off the sink. Watching it skip its way off in a jittery journey to the edge, he’d felt no urge to save it from falling. He’d been too caught up in the drama of it all, the visible wreckage, however small, needed as proof that he’d actually been through this. As he stood in the doorframe as he’d always been taught, he tried to recall the list he’d once compiled of things to take from the house in case of an emergency. His coin collection; a love letter he’d written to his second-grade teacher but never sent; a framed picture of his family, the three of them caught in a moment of rare togetherness, standing next to a fountain in Yoyogi Park, his father’s eyes the only ones looking away, focused on some offstage diversion he was soon to follow. He knew there’d been more he wanted to save—things he would later discover were so easily replaceable.
On Tetsuya’s way to school that morning, his mother had turned up the radio when the announcer was reporting the news of the earthquake. No major damage or direct casualties. But he did report a strange side note—a story about the death of a man who apparently had tripped down the stairs and broken his neck minutes after assuring his wife over the phone that her antique set of Limoges had survived the quake. It was almost too absurd to be tragic, yet it struck Tetsuya as extremely unfair. Who had phoned in this ridiculous piece of news? Certainly not the wife. Would she ever look at that Limoges the same way or even dare use it again? Would she destroy it as a penance? Then there was the man himself. He’d gotten up that morning thinking it was just an ordinary day, and only hours later he was an amusing footnote to a disaster, a tidbit hurriedly crammed in between the weekend weather forecast and the baseball scores. News of the weird, fodder for the water cooler. It was then Tetsuya saw the honor in death by natural disaster, the way it saved you from personal fault, instantly enshrining your own history with that of the earth.
IT WAS A feeling felt, at some point, by everyone: the intense, immediate need to escape to the restroom. Had he paid more attention to his regularity the past couple of days, he’d have known he was more than overdue for such a boiling unleash. It was easier to think it was the lunch he’d eaten only twenty minutes before, probably stuffed with some raw mess of meat, or the three cups of Mei Ling’s coffee he’d guzzled down that morning when he’d first gotten to the office than to admit that yes, indeed, a horrific bout of constipation was about to come to an end.
The indignity of such a base bodily function embarrassed him, like a child who gets up early to wash the sheets in order to keep his wet, nighttime accident a secret from his parents. Tetsuya didn’t care why he was so desperately in need of a toilet or even who saw him creep toward the bathroom, his buttocks clenched and his face in a grimace. All he knew was that if he didn’t find a toilet soon, he would have to leave the office with his jacket tied around his waist, then dispose of a very expensive suit—that, or jump out of the twenty-third story window, soiled but noble.
The men’s room on his floor was quie
t but not in the way he’d hoped. It was the forced silence of public defecation, the desire to stifle even the slightest break of wind. He’d done it himself, of course. Coughed when he knew there’d be noise, pulled the paper roll down to the floor before carefully tearing the serrated edge, dashing out with only the most cursory hand wash in order to avoid having anyone look him in the eye. He hated having to do this in a public restroom, always had, even at school where he’d wait until after the last bell, knowing full well he’d be late but who cared, just as long as he’d be alone. Some of the stalls hadn’t even had doors on them, and that was its own separate nightmare. He’d take a side-by-side urinal buddy any day, even if they peeked, which some did naturally, or jiggled at the end like they were masturbating.
He squatted and swept the floor with his eyes, praying for an empty stall. What he saw were eight pairs of polished shoes and a newspaper’s ripped edges; in addition, the physical position he was now in certainly was not helping matters. Without thinking much about it, he exited the men’s room and hurried across the hall into the ladies’ room. No one was in the hallway, which he counted as a minor blessing. The smell was different in this bathroom, lemony and sterile, as if an army of cleaning women recently had scoured it. He also inhaled a sweet smell of perfume he recognized but couldn’t quite place. The lingering scent of Shalimar perhaps? All the stall doors were shut. He pushed in the one at the end and found that it was empty. With his buckle already undone, he sat down in a rush.
Tetsuya was relieved, and a cool, congratulatory sweat formed on his forehead as he felt a great block move out of him. He moaned over-dramatically and hoped to all gods that he was as alone as it had initially appeared. Barring the custodian’s recent visit, as evidenced by the smell of lemon cleanser, the place did feel vacant.
He left the stall and was glad to see he was still alone, but as he passed the oblong wall mirror, he noticed an eye watching him through the crack of the first stall door. For one unmistakable moment, it looked at him, wide, full, and in a strange sense, trained to remember. Was it Keiko’s cataract-riddled eye watching him? Was she there to alert him to danger? To spy on him? As soon as he noticed the eye, it was gone, and then he was out the door without even washing his hands.
He walked down the empty hall feeling a desperate need to be seen, to be noted as a person who could be found in many different parts of the office at any time of the day. A man to whom he’d never spoken more than two words stood at a desk, comparing figures on an Excel spreadsheet with a tall, focused-looking woman. Tetsuya passed by his office offering a smile, his hands in his pockets. He lingered a few moments too long, though, enough time for the man’s face to change from conciliatory to suspicious. So he pressed on quickly around the corner and settled back into his office, forcing himself to answer e-mails. His hands were almost dripping with sweat.
Mei Ling came in with a stack of folders. She brushed her fingertip along Tetsuya’s palm as she passed them to him. She stared at her wet index finger with a puzzled look, as if a stray dog had accidentally licked her.
“Yan Fang is on our floor today. She came to meet with Ji Min on the upcoming perfume launch. She’s going to join me for lunch. Would you like to come?” Mei Ling moved some things around on his desk in a familiar manner. If she had looked at him right then, she would have seen a face confused, then scared, as if a dreadful question were being answered too quickly. If she’d been there later, when the local police arrived to take him away to be grilled in an interrogation room, she might’ve had to look away, embarrassed at the sight of the man she loved being so easily humbled into a boy.
Yan Fang appeared in the doorway dressed in an ill-fitting light-pink business suit. She pursed her lips defiantly and stated, “I am ready to eat.”
•
IN SINGAPORE, AS Tetsuya learned from the police, using the bathroom of the opposite sex was tantamount to a kind of visual sexual assault, public voyeurism with the intent to commit molestation. He found out that men in the past had been taken in for doing nothing more than stealing a roll of toilet paper from an empty ladies’ room. They arrested men all the time as examples, inventing new definitions of lewdness along the way.
He cried when the police first entered his office, with expressions that suggested he was some sort of pervert. The tears erupted from a deep, hidden source within—the part of him that responded to irrevocable change. Nothing moved on his face, just the tears running in silent streams down both cheeks. He’d felt a conspicuous lack of surprise at their almost too prompt arrival, how they’d come so equipped to deal with him. Hadn’t he known that the bathroom door he’d shut on Yan Fang at their apartment had cracks, certain ways of letting things through? And what had set her off exactly—the moaning he’d indulged in privately in the stall, or had it been Mei Ling’s that night after the dinner? So inconsiderate; so grossly, sexually human.
The police ransacked Tetsuya’s desk and produced the clay breast as further evidence of his sexual perversion. As he sat in the small room at the station looking at it, he finally was convinced it was based on Yan Fang. Mei Ling wouldn’t have sculpted herself. He couldn’t imagine her standing in front of the mirror with one eye on her chest, the other fixed to an unformed piece of clay. She might’ve been too afraid that the mirror would distort her perspective somehow, detracting elements of perfection from her body she wasn’t ready to confront in order to produce an abstract lump with only the faintest resemblance to her own body. Maybe she’d simply confused the two of them. Roommates tended to meld into each other if they lived together long enough. It was possible that she’d sculpted so many pieces of Yan Fang that she really did think of them as pieces of herself too. Maybe Tetsuya had misread the meaning of the gift entirely and, more important, who had given it to him.
A slap on the wrist. A suspension without pay. Some corporate branding he’d take months to put behind him but eventually would, and he’d be stronger for it. These were the possible outcomes he allowed to play out in his head as he waited at home to learn his fate. He sincerely believed he could get out of it. They’d respect him again; they would. He could win them over. Still, it didn’t look like any of this would come to pass.
The more time he waited at home by the phone after the arrest, the more likely a severe disciplinary action would be taken against him. It was the waiting that was really doing him in. The speculative scenarios running through his head and all ending up pretty much the same way: a flight back to Narita Airport in economy class and his mother waiting for him at the gate with a genuine smile because, despite the shame attached to the whole episode, he had come back to her, and she wouldn’t be able to see it in any way other than how she might benefit. Then they’d take the express train together back to Ueno station. He felt a dull horror over the inevitability of the vision, like just imagining it had suddenly made it true.
He picked up the phone and checked the dial tone, letting it run until silence came and then a ringing to the operator. He hung up and glanced at a scrap of paper in a hodgepodge dish with the address and phone number of Keiko, the old woman in Tokyo. She was the one person he could think of who was least likely to be waiting by the phone for anyone. It was only the third time he’d thought of her since coming to Singapore. He knew she’d understand what had happened to him here, the cruel, draconian way Singapore had of making examples of outsiders. A person could be caned for throwing out a cigarette butt on the street. Now he could see the appeal of her sad apartment and empty life where no women patiently waited behind closed doors to ruin him.
He imagined it was people Keiko feared the most, not loneliness. Loneliness she could bear. She could mold it into whatever she wanted because, in the end, it was of her own making. People, though, they were uncontrollable. She had put her faith in them once before, and the returns were paltry, unrecognizably pathetic in their terrible morsels of almost kindness. She flung them back with spite, the only defense she had left.
Tetsuya wa
lked up to his open window and peered at the street below. He ran his palm along the window’s ledge, carefully, gently. It would be so easy to jump. He was high enough that there would be no question that his life would end. And wasn’t that exactly what was expected of him? A Japanese man shamed into a somewhat obvious yet completely noble suicide? Wasn’t that exactly how this was supposed to play out? He could avoid returning home to his mother. He could turn his life into the great tragic drama it deserved to be, sealing Mei Ling’s love for him eternally. It was the quickest way out of the sticky trap in which he found himself ensnared.
What if his father had had second thoughts as he fell toward the approaching Shinkansen? What if, in that last moment, he’d seen a picture of his wife and son in his mind and realized that they would still love him without a job and that this—this man standing too close to the platform’s edge—wasn’t really him, that he shouldn’t do this? What if it had all been too late?
Tetsuya couldn’t do it. He couldn’t turn his back on life. Gratifying as it might be in the moment or in theory, suicide was permanent. There was no changing your mind once you took that last step.
Poor Keiko’s solitude was a defeat, he realized, not the triumph she pretended it to be. She acted the way she did because she had to. She hadn’t lost the fight; she’d given it up years ago.
Tetsuya still had a choice. He could choose to turn his back on this place with its unrelenting heat and the rotten smells of cooked garbage and sweat dripping down the closed, locked thighs of women unfulfilled.
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