Lost Girls and Love Hotels (8 page)

A
nd then Kazu doesn’t call. A day. Three days. Four days. A week. You feel yourself deflating. Losing substance. He never gave you his phone number. You are in Siberia. In a flimsy hut. The wind howling around you.

Funny how it happens. How things change. You tell yourself that love is for other people. People with soft hearts and fixed addresses. You believe your heart pumps blood. That’s it. That sex is a need—like food and water—that people who make it into something else watch too many romantic comedies.

Intimacy is a word with eight letters.

A word with a sly hiss to it.

But then it begins, like love affairs do, with a chance meeting, and then a raw empty something needing to be sated, something you didn’t notice before. But suddenly it
squawks like a hungry bird, day and night, refusing to be ignored. You love and revile it, this sore shrieking something. Or is it nothing? Or everything? It doesn’t matter. It’s yours. It’s you.

Suddenly you are a walking cliché. The sum total of every love song penned. Even the Japanese ones, with the words you can’t catch—you recognize yourself in the fragile thrum in the singer’s voices. Life is suddenly so banal compared with the transcendence of the love-hotel tryst. When the walls heave and huddle closer, you ride the Yamanote loop line around Tokyo. Round and round again, until your butt gets sore, until you feel like you could stay there forever, looking at the advertisement with a geisha brandishing a power drill. After two or three hours, you start to wonder if the get-from-point-A-to-point-B function of the subway might be a complete ruse. You start to suspect that maybe everyone—the pregnant woman in her cutesy bib dress and bucket hat, the sullen teenager carrying her six-hundred-dollar handbag and touching and retouching her lip gloss, the salaryman sleeping, mouth agape, in the corner seat—maybe they are all going nowhere. Just riding the train to kill time. Kill memory. To enjoy the spectacle of anonymity. The thought is a temporary buoy. You stay as long as the imagined collective ennui entertains you. You stay until the light changes, the salarymen and schoolgirls disappear, and the train is filled with fashionable twentysomethings, so scrupulously cool, so effortlessly hip you want to smash their faces in. Best to leave, when the violent impulses start.

You get a bottle of wine. After half a bottle, the
need
is diluted. You start to feel less like a detached Siamese twin. More like a garden-variety fuckup. Pick up your mobile phone and tell it,
You are not my master
. Drink some more and wait for Ines.

“Darling,” she says as she flings the door open, “I’ve procured love pills.”

Perfect.

Ines is in her underwear, applying mascara. Mouth open. Bent over at the waist. I’m looking at her butt. It’s honey brown.

“Where’d you get the tan?” I ask.

“Granny. She was Métis or Tunisian. One of the two.” Ines stands up, solemnly inspects her handiwork in the mirror. “She’s dead now.”

I look down at my legs. I’m so white I’m nearly blue. “Tell me a secret,” I say and fold my legs under me like a hen on her eggs.

“There was a time, not so long ago, when certain Celine Dion songs could make me weep and sway.”

“Come on.”

“Okay, Ines isn’t my real name.”

“That I knew.”

“Your turn.”

“I think I’m destined to go nuts.”

“That I knew.”

“Seems to happen to everyone around me. Except my mom—she went—” I pause, “New-Agey.”

“Same difference.”

“I just wish I could fast-forward to old age. Youth is like being in an airplane in a tailspin.”

“Enjoy the ride, gorgeous.” Ines slips a shapeless tube of black fabric over her head, transforms it into a slinky dress. She sighs at her reflection in the mirror, as if being beautiful had become banal, tiresome. “I’m going to wear outrageous hats when I’m old.”

“I’m going to collect commemorative teaspoons and figurines.”

“Date men with walkers and fat life-insurance policies.”

“Dye my hair blue.”

“It’s already blue sweetie.”

“See? I’m already halfway there. Bring on the knickknacks!”

“Let’s go, huh?”

“Oh God, not let’s go.”

“It doesn’t matter where we are,” Ines steps into her kitten-heeled mules, drags me off the bed and links elbows with me. “Just that we are there.”

I make a low growling sound in my throat. “Let’s go,” I mutter.

Bar Let’s Go is a place where no one thinks they belong but everyone ends up. If you go to Bar Let’s Go, staying sober is not an option. It’s a very good idea to arrive intoxicated, otherwise you’ll have to down several martinis in quick succession to blunt the reality of Bar Let’s Go.

You are in a room that, if bathed in light, would resem
ble a government office stripped of the desks and chairs: four walls, no character, purpose-built, a temple to the god of wretched excess and bad design. Pass through the doors, pay the thousand-yen cover charge, and buy into the myth that good things happen when we poison ourselves in a dark, smoky room full of people we vaguely despise.

Pimply white boys from Minneapolis or Mississauga revel in their newfound pulling power. Japanese office ladies sip pastel drinks and troll for a bit of strange before they consign themselves to domestic servitude.

All I can hear, all I can sever from the confused din is talk of the missing girl. Snippets of theories, conjecture, morbid fascination.
I heard she’s in Thailand. In hiding. In a cult. In a bodybag.
Ines and I plant ourselves at a table and suck on martinis, waiting for pill-boy.
She’s not the first to vanish.
The pills better arrive soon. I’m starting to shrink away again.
The cops don’t care.
The missing girl has made us, the melanin-deficient diaspora, feel special by virtue of our connection with something tragic. Everyone seems to have shared a drink with the dearly departed, been a schoolmate, a coworker, had a friend who knew someone who sat across from her on the train. Everybody wants to be a survivor of something appalling—the person at the epicenter of the earthquake who walks away without a scratch, walks away with a story to tell again and again at dinner parties, a story to imbue their lives with an aura of luck and immortality. Tragedy makes excellent chitchat.

“Okay Marge. It looks like your face is melting. I insist you have fun.”

“I’m in one of my funks. I’m sorry.”

“Play the worst-case-scenario game.”

“Tell me how.”

“It’s like this. When I was in high school I went to a house party. After the cops bust the thing up, everyone starts piling into cars to go to a bar. I want to be in Trevor Spence’s little red MG, but Sadie Trembley beats me to it—wily little bitch. Short version, the stud runs the car into a tree. Rumor is she was sucking him off—I mean, how cliché. Sadie goes through the windshield face-first. Sixteen metal pins and four operations later she still looks like Frankenstein.”

“Frankenstein’s monster. Frankenstein was the mad scientist.”

“Whatever. Point is. Worst-case scenario I could be living with my mother, writing technical manuals and avoiding mirrors. But I’m here in a tragic club in Tokyo. With
you
, darling.”

“Ah.”

“Makes me feel better every time.”

“Feed on the suffering of others to pump myself up.”

“Exactement.”

I
nes disappears into the ether and strobe lights, and I’m left perched on my stool to contemplate the ashtray. The room—the crowd—is all shyness and reticence. The calm before the come-on. A few tourists in khaki shorts and Teva sandals storm the dance floor, jerking about robotically, exchanging knowing looks. The rest of the people, still huddled in nervous little tribes, look upon the tourists with disdain, waiting for the dance floor to thicken so they, too, can jerk robotically—in relative anonymity, shrouded in bodies.

A Japanese girl in white knee-high platform boots, white lipstick, and eyeliner to match bounds across the empty dance floor. The mouth-breathing white boys stop talking, slack-jawed as white-boots clops toward the tables, her skirt riding up on her little thighs until it’s little more than a wide belt. Her hands are in the air in some sort of high-
speed perversion of the queen’s wave. She’s not so much sexy as unknowingly hemorrhaging sex. No one trying to be sexy would run that way.

Then, through the clamor of heavy breathing and bass beat, I hear my name. Or a high-pitched butchering of my name.
Mah-ga-let!
The bouncing, squealing girl is bouncing toward me, squealing my name. I squint at her. She looks vaguely familiar. And frightening. Her head seems huge as she trips, recovers, lunges toward me. It’s Madoka Wakiyama. The new recruit. Looking very unstewardessy.

Madoka sucks in air, shakes her fingers as if they are on fire and she needs to put them out. She points at her mouth, gasping, holds up a finger to signal me to wait. Madoka clearly has something important to say. I wait. After one final inhalation, tears forming at the corners of her white-lined eyes, she comes out with it.

“Margaret-sensei—” breath—“why so cute you are?”

Before I can ponder the question, compose an answer, Ines is back from somewhere, back with a smile on her face, back with the pills.

“Madoka, Ines. Ines, Madoka.”

“Ehhh?” Madoka says, stroking Ines’s hair. “
Kirei!
Beautiful.”

Ines takes Madoka’s hand and places it on the table. “Paws off the hair, please.”

“You’re beautiful and I’m cute,” I say. “Story of my life.”

“Cute has more currency in Japan, darling.”

“Cute ages badly. Anyway, let’s get happy, huh?”

Madoka is nodding her head, turning her chin to face whoever’s talking. She has the glassy-eyed, falsely rapt expression of someone who hasn’t a fucking clue what’s being said.

“Who’s the go-go dancer?”

“Madoka. She’s one of my stewardess students.”

“She’s very keen.”

“Yep.”

“Maybe we should give her a pill.”

“That’s a bad idea.” I imagine the most illicit thing Madoka’s ever done is drinking beer straight from the bottle. “A very bad idea.”

“Those are my favorite kind.” Ines turns to Madoka. Holds out a pill. “This is a drug, darling. An illicit substance. If you get caught with it, you’ll be hauled down to the police station and your entire family will be shamed for perpetuity. You won’t lose face. You’ll lose face, head, neck, and shoulders. But you’ll feel lovely for the next little while. How about it?” Ines babbles something in Japanese, something that shocks Madoka’s lips into an O. Madoka squints, lolls her head, and before I can stop her, scoops the pill from Ines’s hand and pops it in her mouth.

“Fuck, Ines.”

“She made an informed decision.”

“Now you have to take care of her, you realize.”

“Oh shush. Take your pill, down your drink, and let’s boogie.”

“Boogie!” Madoka says.

After the pills are taken, the booze is downed, Ines and Madoka disappear to the dance floor. I opt to sulk and observe the prickly sensations under my skin. In order to dance without feeling unbearably self-conscious, I have to be under the influence of a substance that either obliterates my ego or expands it to gargantuan proportions. Right now I’m just me. But pricklier.

After half a song of Madoka’s pogo-stick dance moves and Ines’s hardly-moving and staring seductively at Madoka, Bar Let’s Go is a volcano of masturbatory impulses. A few brave souls venture onto the dance floor. Then a few more. A cheerfully violent pop anthem begins, and in seconds the black-and-white tiled floor is no longer visible. Horny boys with three beers in them shout along to the music, fists in the air. I’m ashamed to be human for a moment or two, until, as if on cue, the drug kicks in and I feel like giving everyone a big hug.

Madoka returns to the table red-cheeked and panting, Ines following behind her, a slight spring to her step that tells me she’s high.

“Our work is done here,” Ines says, saucer-eyed. She drags on a cigarette and points her chin to the door.

I make a stop at the ladies’ room. Lean down and slurp water from the tap while I wait for a stall. On the toilet, I have a moment of bravery. Close my eyes and let the sound of Mom’s voice roll over me with the drug.

Happened at some sports bar on The Danforth. He’d
stopped taking his drugs and—well you know how he is. Mags, he’s asking for you. Sometimes he seems almost normal. Maybe those rednecks knocked something back into place. He keeps asking for you, Mags.

Save. Save. Save.

I can feel the gentle tug of the night as it starts to unspool. Serotonin floods my brain. Under my life’s bedrock of crap and trauma, I can sense the gurgle and trickle of water. I’m so thirsty.

Tokyo at night, on drugs, is like being inside a pinball machine. Enough has been said about the neon. You can never say enough about the neon. The way it flashes and glitters for you like an electric ballet, the way you can ride the train at night, out of the city, into the suburbs, through town after town, and every time the train pulls into the station, without fail, just beyond the platform, the neon greets you—calls you into pachinko parlors, beseeches you to drink Sapporo beer, to buy Toshiba, to enjoy the delights of hostess clubs, stacked on top of one another like electric Lego. Stare at the neon and close your eyes. Open them and it’s still there, imprinted.

Everyone on Omotosando-dori is beautiful, their skin seems to glow as if lit from underneath. Even the boys are pretty, pouty-mouthed, hair-do’d, dressed in the minimalist uniform of black and slate gray. You feel as if you’ve come to some understanding, but you’re not sure what it is
or how you got there. Something about the fragility of youth. It’ll come to you. No rush.

Ines and Madoka are walking a few steps ahead of you, arms linked. Every now and again some joke is passed between them, and you can see their faces in profile, laughing, mouths open. You can’t hear them above the hum of the street. They are miming bliss. You can see their teeth. Teeth never looked so lovely. At one point, at one joke, they lean in too far and knock foreheads. A moment of surprise, hands to heads. More laughter, which you can’t hear.

You wish you could articulate the understanding that you’ve come to. You’re dying to tell someone. Anyone. Any of the beauties walking past you would do.
I want to tell you something.

Along the edge of the small creek behind Omotosando-dori, fortune tellers sit at folding tables, in the halo of light cast by paper lanterns. An old woman sells fried squid balls. Some teenagers practice an elaborately choreographed hip-hop dance routine.

At a bend in the creek, a small crowd has formed. Ines and Madoka insinuate themselves through the cooing little throng. You stand on your tippy-toes peering over the heads, but all you can see is an empty wire cage. On the inhale, a hand grabs you at the bicep, on the exhale you are standing next to Ines. You can see now that the cage is not empty. It’s filled with fireflies. Hundreds of them, flickering on and off. The man opens the top of the cage, and the fireflies hover in a cloud of light above your heads. The cloud
begins to splinter off, until you follow just one fly, squint as the light gets fainter, until you are staring into the dark and you remember to breathe again.

Even in your chemically altered state, your mind starts up the same old pattern. Take something good, pick it apart. Analyze it to death. Memorize it. Squeeze it dry until it’s as special as the instructions on a shampoo bottle. Keep the fireflies in the cage until they drop one by one.

Ines turns to you. “How about Tengu?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Neither am I, but I want to look at food.” She’s shouting but it sounds like whisper to you. Like a purr. “Sit at the counter and watch the chefs.”

Outside the pub, a wooden figure of Tengu, the mischievous little goblin with the six-inch nose, stands guard. Ines, who inexplicably knows every Japanese legend, informed you that the mythical figure of Tengu has special powers fueled by the water that resides in a bowl at the top of his head. Always wreaking havoc, Tengu could only be defeated if an opponent tricked him into bowing and spilling the water. For a moment, I think about hopping on top of Tengu’s nose and simulating an obscene act, but I think better of it. I am above that. Besides, the last time I did it, a red-faced cop yelled at me for five minutes and I was barred from entering the restaurant. I was stoned and had the munchies. It seemed tragic.

I wonder why all of my good memories involve illegal substances.

“Remember when you fellated Tengu?” Ines asks.

“I did not,” I say.

“Agedashi-dofu,”
says Madoka.

“—?”

“Fried tofu in broth,” translates Ines.

“I love you all,” I say.

“There’s only two of us,” Ines points out.

“I love you both.”

Down the stairs, the cavernous pub is teeming with people, sitting elbow-to-elbow at the long communal tables, padding around the tatami floors in slippers. Squealing women sound like seagulls. The waiters scream at each other in rough boys’ Japanese. The laughter is almost organic, rising in waves, pulling back into the clink of glasses, chopsticks against plates, and rising again, louder still. We lock up our shoes in little wooden cubbyholes and make our way to the counter seats, where we can watch the chefs. They shuffle around the narrow kitchen like an insect ballet, hands manipulating the food with a skill and intimacy that’s almost sexual. Steam rises from cauldrons of soba broth. Skewers of chicken cartilage cackle over the grill. Not a bead of sweat soils the chefs’ blue cotton headbands.

“I’d like to take them all home with me and have them suckle me like a mother pig,” I say.

Ines nods. “Have them make breakfast.”

“Can you imagine them all squished up around the hot plate in your room?”

“No, no darling. I know a love hotel with a gourmet kitchen room.”

We go back to watching the cooks. Mention of the hotel veers my thoughts to Kazu. The high begins to ebb. My face melts into melancholy.

“You’re not still thinking about what’s-his-name are you?”

“Who? No.”

“Why don’t you just call him?”

“I don’t have his number.”

“I do. Got it from his cell phone while he was taking a pee.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m crafty. Besides, you never know when knowing a guy like that will come in handy.”

Tengu is underground. No cell phone reception. You feel like an anachronism. A person waiting to use a public phone. A salaryman screams into the mouthpiece. His suit looks tired. It wants to go home. The suit’s man slams the phone down on the receiver. Slams it down again. Again. The swaying drunk girl in front of you sobers suddenly, straightens her spine, backs away from the phone. The man. His suit.

The screaming man comes to his senses. You’ve always liked the expression “come to your senses.” You wonder where you come
from
. The man looks down at the receiver. His face softens in apology and he takes a step back. Bows at the phone. Shallow nods of his head leading into deep bends at the waist. You stifle a laugh.
A man bowing at a phone.
The man turns to the queue. Continues his fren
zied apology. The people waiting seem to convey, with their smug pursed lips, that this is what one ought to do to make amends for a phone-booth hissy fit.

“I’m ashamed! I’m sorry! I’m ashamed!” the man barks in Japanese. He seems to shrink inside of his suit. Until he’s all suit and scalp.

If it’s greed that fuels the West, then shame must turn the karmic wheel in Japan.

You clutch the scrap of paper with Kazu’s number. Clench your jaw. Squeeze your eyes shut and open again. Time curves in on you, and you’re at the front of the line. It’s your turn.

“Moshi-moshi,”
Kazu answers.

“It’s me.”

He trills a sentence of Japanese. Too fast for you to understand. Tacked on the end, a snippet of English.

Be patient.

Dial tone.

Along its edges, your field of vision is fractured, pixilated. You hadn’t noticed it before. Now it is all you can see.