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 quietfollowed 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
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 quietfollowed 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
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