Lost Girls and Love Hotels (6 page)

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.

K
azu 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.”

I
t’s “Make a Scene!” day at Air-Pro, when we role-play challenging airplane scenarios—screaming babies, belligerent businessmen, terrorists, vegans. I think of my mother, the way she’d say “Don’t make a scene!” when Frank got weepy in the meat section of the supermarket.

It’s hard for me to concentrate at work. The role-playing helps. It always helps to be someone other than me. Today I am the drunk old pervert businessman.

We arrange the chairs to approximate the cabin of a jumbo jet, and tape signs around the room—“cockpit” on the whiteboard, “galley” on the podium, “emergency exit” on the door.

The first recruit is Nami, a fair-faced girl with a mouth full of braces. Her head is perpetually turned at an angle, as though the world was forever presenting her with quandaries. Nami stands in the corner with a chirping coven of
nervous recruits, smoothing down her fitted blue skirt compulsively. I know she is terrified of me, like all the rest, but I no longer get a perverse satisfaction from it, from the panicky little bows, the suspended conversations as I pass by. I feel like a reluctant sadist.

Ms. Nakamura claps her hands, and we take our places. I slouch down in my seat, slip into character. I see myself in a crumpled, ill-fitting suit, potbelly spilling over my belt, a salt-and-pepper mustache adorned with almond skins and spittle. From the depths of my lipid-clogged heart, an angry sort of lust rises. I clear my throat and push the imaginary bell on my armrest.

“Dewars!” I scream. It’s not my voice. There’s a collective gasp from the other recruits sitting rigidly in economy class.

Nami teeters down the aisle, steadying herself on the backs of chairs as if there was turbulence.

“Yes, sir?” she squeaks. “How can I be of assistance?” Her lip quivers.

“Assistance!” I scream. “Whiskey, girl! I need whiskey!”

“Yes sir!” Nami makes it to the podium, pours an invisible drink, twisting the cap back on the imaginary bottle, with undue care. She takes a deep breath, her chest puffing up like a little chicken breast and deflating with a whoosh of air.

“Your whiskey, sir.” She leans down from the waist, hands me the drink. She smells of vanilla and powder.

“Ever seen a trouser snake?” I ask.

“Pardon me, sir?”

I make a grab for her ass and get a handful of buttock-enhancing padding. Screaming, Nami darts out the exit, clip-clopping down the hallway to the washroom. Ms. Nakamura claps furiously, two fingers against her palm. “So real! So real!” she says. I down the imaginary whiskey in one gulp, pull my hand across my mouth, and think about ritual suicide.

On Nami’s “Make a Scene!” report, I write: “Your smile and posture were lovely. You were handling the situation beautifully right up until you depressurized the cabin, killing all of the passengers and crew.” I sign it “Satan” in an illegible scrawl.

In the lobby, I see Madoka, sitting hunched over, reading a flight attendant magazine and sucking on her bottom lip. I sit down next to her, and she jumps. Fumbles with the magazine. Concealed behind the facade of
International Stewardess
is a thick
manga
—spy-girls with catsuits and guns. Secret missions and round cantilevered breasts. Madoka looks at me guiltily. I click my tongue at her. Give her a wink. The compassion I feel for her is like a whoosh of warm air. It shocks me.

Nakamura appears out of nowhere and says, “Madokasan! Time to learn how to sit.” She claps her hands. Smiles wickedly.

I place my hand on Madoka’s shoulder. “God be with you,” I tell her.

T
he Log Cabin Room looks like a sauna with a vibrating bed, plastic fireplace, and a leopard-spot sofa. Kazu strolls around the room. Opening a drawer. Inspecting the radio console. Sitting down on the sofa and then getting up again. He looks a little disappointed. “
Canada mitain?
”

“No Canada’s a bit different.”

He walks around me once and then comes up behind me, wraps one arm around my waist. Pulls my hair off my neck and kisses me.

“No perfume,” he says.

“Not until they make one that smells like a dog’s paw.”

“Never mind. I like your smell.”

We make our way over to the bed. Fumble with clothes. Bodies tense. I look over to the alarm clock. Calculate the time remaining on the room.

“You have appointment?” Kazu asks.

“No. You?”

“I make the schedule. Today I schedule Margaret.”

“What exactly is it that you do?” I ask.

“Do?”

“Your job.”

“Businessman,” he says.

“Salaryman?”

“Similar. Yes.”

“You sell things?”

“Helping selling things. Yes.”

“Do you have an office?”

“Margaret-chan. We Japanese have a saying.”

“Yes?”

“Stay quiet, learn more.”

“Have you ever cut someone’s finger off?”

Kazu sits up. The muscles at his jawline tense and shudder, like a small animal stirring under his skin. I wait for something. Behind his stare, I think I can see decisions being made. Options run through.

“Cutting finger is for apology.”

“Like…I’m sorry. Here’s my finger?”

“Yes.”

I offer up my hand to him. Run it across his forehead, down his cheek. When I go to touch his mouth, he snatches up my fingers. Holds them tight in a little bundle. “Questions finish,” he says and puts my hand on his cock. I nestle my body against his. Blood rushes to my crotch. I tense against him. He moves down. A shudder runs
through me at his touch. It’s building in me. A room filling with gas. Waiting for the spark. The French call it “petit mort.” Little death. He reaches his arm under me, lifts my body up to his mouth.

Lying in the sweet vulnerability of finished lovemaking. A dangerous time. I promise myself never to ask the question again. But I always do. An uncontrollable compulsion to rub off my patina of self-respect in five monosyllables. “Why do you like me?” I ask. Kazu squints at me, and in a flash I run through some of the more tragic responses from the past.
You live next door. My girlfriend is really fat. I’m lonely. I have no idea.

“Because I saw you sucking finger.” He demonstrates with his thumb in his mouth.

“Thumb,” I tell him.

“Thumb. In the Space Room, I watched you. It makes my heart calm. Also I like a challenge.” He pulls me on top of him. “Difficult to make you happy I think.”

Try. Please.

We lie there. Nose to nose. I’ve grown to love the lines of the Japanese face. The way the nose doesn’t jut out of the face but slinks down. I feel so pointy next to him, with my aggressive facial features. Wonder how he could choose me over the subtle beauty of a Japanese woman.

“What’s she like?” I ask. “Your wife?”

He pulls back from me, rolls over, and lights a smoke from my bedside pack. I’ve never seen him smoke. “Difficult,” he says. “She is—” He takes out an electronic
dictionary—it’s weird how every Japanese person seems to have one handy. “One moment please.” He punches something in and turns the tiny speaker toward me. “Psych-o-path,” the electronic voice sounds out. He closes the dictionary and slips it in his shoulder bag. “Also she likes brand goods too much—Prada
to ka
, Gucci
to ka
.”

“What would she do if she knew about me?”

Kazu drags on the cigarette like a seasoned smoker. Like someone in a black-and-white movie. Smoking as an extension of speaking. A form of punctuation.

“Please don’t think about that.” He exhales. Period. Full stop.

I
like to walk home from the love hotels. Through the little streets they are tucked away on, toward the bustling train stations, the chaos of the intersections. I like the hotels around Shinjuku Station the best. I walk around the monstrosity of the station—something like three million people passing through it every day. One million. Three million. Twelve million. It’s all incomprehensible. From the outside, it doesn’t look like a building at all. Sprawling six city blocks. Cobbled together over the years as more train lines were constructed. Impossible to navigate from the inside. From certain angles it looks evil. I’ve always had a soft spot for the place. When I first arrived in Tokyo, I couldn’t stop walking around Shinjuku Station. It wasn’t just that I was lost, which I was, but I felt as if I’d found my place. The endless anonymous concourse. It had everything I needed. There was coffee and food. I could
light up a smoke wherever I pleased. There were no windows, but I’ve never had much use for sunshine. If I walked long enough, the tunnels led me to department-store food halls, where girls in fifties-style cafeteria uniforms handed me strange morsels on toothpicks. Gifts for the weary traveler. There was always a crowd to be swept up into. I imagined being lifted off my feet, dragged by the shoulders of salarymen and schoolgirls to somewhere I couldn’t fathom.

I walk along the outside at street level. Two levels of pedestrian walkways hug the side of the building. Commuters and students, shoppers and girls handing out packets of tissues emblazoned with adverts—
Hai! Dozo, onegaishimasu!
I’m in a daze. Freshly fucked. Happy and buzzing.

On the second level of walkways, I see her. She stands out from the other walkers. She’s tall. Her blond hair catching the sun. Her profile. The nose. Something else. Something that tells me it’s her. She’s moving fast. I start to run. Look ahead half a block to the staircase to her level. I’m running. I seem to have a sense. How to get through the people traffic. Like I’m in a video game and I’m winning.

I look up again. It’s her. I know it’s her. The dead girl. Alive.

I keep running. Faster. The moment closing in on me. Like sex. Running toward something and away from something simultaneously. I make it to the staircase. Take the steps two by two. I want to look at her. Hold her by the shoulders and have a look at her. The eyebrows. The
wicked arch of them. The light spray of freckles. The eyes that have watched me in all my dark moments. I make it to the top. My legs hurt. They won’t cooperate. When I stumble, catching the edge of the last step with the heel of my palm—concrete against skin—the gaggle of schoolgirls appears. Sailor tops and blue skirts. In front of me, like a wall. Making noises like birds or machines, or machines meant to sound like birds. I lose sight of the lost girl. Gone into the station or down the stairs. Gone.