What if he was serious? What if she dropped her assistant teaching job, her shoe box apartment with its frayed and molding tatami, her GRE test date in Osaka, already paid for? She could reschedule the test in Paris. She could study at a sidewalk café, sipping wine, eating a beignet, watching people go by.
She heard the familiar
click-whirrrrr
of the Polaroid. Mr. Ukaga did not wave the photograph in an attempt to make it develop faster. Instead, he stared into it. He leaned close to the fire alarm.
“Toshio?”
He did not respond. A full minute passed.
“Toshio?” She was worried. “Let's talk. I need to think about Paris. Okay?” She took a step toward him. He looked up at her, looked at the photo. Looked at her. Then he pulled the alarm handle. A deafening blare filled the room. It was so loud she could feel it in her chest, on her skin. She threw her hands over her ears and ran for her clothes. Harsh yellow safety lights flooded the room, making it look like what it was: an unfinished concrete box. She picked up the cactus cover and slipped it into her bag.
He was oblivious to her as she dressed. Completely naked, he sang along with the blaring alarm tone, matching its pitch with a Pavarottian bellow. His belly was round and puffed and smooth like a drum. His mouse penis slumbered in its shadow.
“Are you okay? Get dressedâsomeone's probably coming!” she yelled. He continued to sing. She looked at the photo in his hand. Her face, mouth slightly open. There was nothing special about it.
She left him there, the drone of the alarm so loud it felt like it was coming from inside her head. Even as she emerged out of a side door, even as she made her way down the dark avenues into the bright ones, did that alarm sound in her mind.
translated by Carmen Yiling Yan and Ken Liu
1
All of a sudden, I'm thinking about an evening from the winter when I was twenty-two.
A pair of pretty twin sisters sat to my right, chattering away; at my left sat a fat boy clutching a soft drink that he kept refilling. My plate contained cold chicken, cheese, and coleslaw. I don't remember how they tasted, only that I'd reached for the macaroni and dropped some on my brand-new pinstripe trousers. I spent the entire second half of the meal wiping at the crescent-shaped stains on my trousers as the chicken cooled on my plate, untouched. To hide my predicament, I tried to strike up a conversation with the twins, but they didn't seem very interested in college life, and I wasn't knowledgeable about ponytail-tying techniques.
The dinner seemed to last forever. There was one toast after another, and I would raise my long-stemmed glass with whomever was standing, and drink my apple juice, perfectly aware that no one was paying attention to what I did. What was the banquet for, anyway? A wedding, a holiday, a bumper crop? I don't recall.
I sneaked peeks at my father, four tables away. He was busy chatting and drinking and telling dirty jokes with his friends, all his age, with the same thick whiskers and noses red from too much alcohol. He didn't glance at me until the banquet was over. The fiddler tiredly packed his instrument, the hostess began to collect the dirty dishes and glasses, and my inebriated father finally noticed my presence. He staggered over, his bulky body swaying with every step. “You still here?” he slurred. “Tell your ma to give you a ride.”
“No, I'm leaving on my own.” I stood, staring at the ground. I scrubbed at the stain on my trousers until my fingers were numb.
“Whatever you want. Did you have a good time talking with your little friends?” He looked around for them.
I said nothing but clenched my fists, feeling the blood rush to my head. They weren't my friends. They were just kids, eleven or twelve years old, and I was about to graduate from college. In the city, I had my friends and my accomplishments. No one treated me like a little boy there, seating me at the children's table, pouring apple juice into my long-stemmed glass in the place of white wine. When I walked into restaurants, a server would promptly take my jacket and call me mister; if I dropped macaroni on my trousers, my dining companion would wet a napkin and gently wipe it clean. I was an adult, and I wanted people to talk to me like one, not treat me like a grade-schooler at some village banquet.
“Fuck off!” I said at last, and walked off without looking back.
I was twenty-two that year.
I open my eyes with effort. The sky is completely dark now, and the neon lights of the strip club across the street fill the room with gauzy colors. The computer screen flashes. I rub my temples and slowly sit up on the sofa. I down the half glass of bourbon resting on the coffee table. How many times have I fallen asleep on the sofa this week? I ought to go online and look it up: What does holing up at home in front of a computer and falling into dreams of bygone youth mean for the health of a forty-five-year-old single man? But the headache tells me I don't need a search engine to know the answer. This aimless way of life is murder on my brain cells.
I close the chat window and sign into a few literary and social network sites, hoping for something interesting to read. But just as my online friend said, everything seems to grow duller by the day. When I was young, the Internet was full of opinion, thought, and passion. Exuberant youths filled the virtual world with furious Socratic debate, while the brilliant but misanthropic waxed lyrical about their dreams of a new social order. I could sit unmoving in front of a computer screen until dawn as hyperlinks took my soul on whirlwind journeys. Now, I sift through front pages and notifications and never find a single topic worth clicking on.
The feeling is at once sickening and familiar.
On a social media site I frequent, I click the top news article,
CITIZENS GATHER AT CITY HALL TO PROTEST HOBBYIST FISHERMEN'S INHUMANE TREATMENT OF EARTHWORMS
. A video window pops out: a gaggle of young people in garish shirts, beers in their left hands and crooked signs in their right, standing in the city square. The signs read
SAY
NO
TO EARTHWORM ABUSE, YOUR BAIT IS MY NEIGHBOR, EARTHWORMS FEEL PAIN JUST LIKE YOUR DOG
.
Did they have nothing else to do? If they really wanted to march and protest, couldn't they have found an issue actually worth fighting for? My headache is returning in force, so I turn off the monitor. I flop onto the worn brown couch and tiredly shut my eyes.
2
In the scheme of an enormous aggregation of resources like this city, a low-income, forty-five-year-old bachelor is utterly insignificant. I work three days a week, four hours a day, and my main duty is to read welfare petitions that meet basic requirements and pick the ones I empathize with most. In an age where computers have squeezed people out of most employment opportunities, using my “emotional intuition” to approve or deny government welfare requests is practically the perfect job, no training or background knowledge required. The Department of Social Welfare thought some measure of empathy was needed beyond the rigid rules and regulations to select the few lucky welfare recipients (from petitions that had already passed the automated preliminary checks, of course), and therefore invited individuals from all strata of societyâincluding failures like meâto participate in the process. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, I take the subway from my rented apartment to the little office I share with three coworkers in the Social Welfare Building. I sit in front of the computer and stamp my e-seal on petitions I take a liking to. The quota varies day to day, but my work typically ends after thirty stamps. I use the remainder of the time to chat, drink coffee, and eat bagels until the end-of-shift bell rings.
Today's a Monday like any other. I finish my four hours of work and swipe my card to leave. I walk toward the subway station, not far away, the gray granite edifice of the Social Welfare Building behind me. The performer is there at the subway entrance as usual, a one-man band whose repertoire consists of ear-splitting trumpeting accompanied by a monotonous drumbeat. As always, he glares at me balefully as I approach, perhaps because I haven't given him a cent these few years. It makes me uncomfortable. The trumpet begins, the sound of a cat scratching at a glass pane. My lingering headache from yesterday begins to stir. I decide to turn away and catch the subway one station up.
The ground is still wet from the drizzle earlier this morning. Ponytailed youths whiz by me on skateboards. Two pigeons perch on a coffee shop sign, cooing. The storefront windows reflect me: a thin, balding middle-aged man in a yellow windbreaker that used to be fashionable, with a brandy nose just like my father's. I rub my nose and can't help but think of the father I haven't seen in so long. More precisely, I haven't seen him since the banquet when I was twenty-two. My mother sometimes mentions him in her calls: I know that he still lives at the farm, that he's raising cows, that he's kept a few apple trees to brew hard cider, even though alcohol has destroyed his liver, and the doctors say that he can't drink again till science can cure his liver cancer.
To be honest, I don't feel a bit of sorrow for him. Although my red nose and big-framed body are all inherited from him, I've spent my adult years trying to escape his shadow, trying to prevent myself from turning into a fat, selfish, bigoted old drunkard like him. Today, however, I find that the only thing I've successfully avoided is the fat. The greatest achievement of his life was marrying my mother. I don't even have anything close to that.
“Stop right there!” A shout cuts short my self-pity. Several figures in black hoodies are sprinting my way, dodging and weaving through traffic. Two cops waving police batons stumble past braking cars in hot pursuit. One blows his whistle; the other is shouting.
The drivers' curses and the blaring of horns fill the air. I press myself against the coffee shop window.
Keep out of trouble.
In my mind's eye, I see my father's cigar-yellowed teeth flash amidst his whiskers.
The people in black hoodies knock over the trash bin by the street. They run past meâone, two . . . a total of four people. I pretend I don't see them, but I notice that they're all wearing canvas shoes. They're all young. Who hasn't worn dirty canvas shoes in their youth? I look down at my own feet, encased in dull brown leather lace-ups. The surfaces of my shoes are covered in creases from long wear, like the wrinkles on my forehead I try valiantly to ignore when I look in the mirror.
Suddenly, someone's hand blocks my view of my feet. He's reaching into the pocket of my windbreaker, pulling out my right hand. I feel strange tickling sensationsâhe's drawing something on my palm with his finger. Surprised, I raise my head. In front of me is the fourth person in black, small and thin, his eyes covered by his hoodie. He rapidly sketches something out on my palm, then pats my hand. “Do you understand?”
“Hurry!” the other three people in hoodies are hollering. The fourth person tosses a glance back at the steadily nearing police and leaves me to run after his friends. The cops are right behind, puffing and panting. “Stop right there!” one of them shouts hoarsely. The other has his whistle in his mouth, blowing raggedly. I'm certain they turn and look at me as they pass by, but they don't say anything, only run into the distance, waving their batons.
The pursuers and the pursued turn the corner at the flower shop and leave my sight. On the damp street, the cars begin to move again, the pedestrians weaving among them as if nothing had happened. But the warmth of a stranger's fingertip still lingers on my right hand.
3
“The usual?” the waitress in the diner below my apartment asks me. Her smile doesn't reach her eyes.
“Yeah,” I say automatically. “Wait, add smoked salmon to the order.” The waitress, who has already turned and started walking, makes an okay sign over her shoulder.
“Did something happen? You changed your order.” Slim is a coworker at the Social Welfare Building, and my only acquaintance close enough to call a friend. He has the ability to sniff out the pheromones other people give off without fail. In the five minutes since he's sat down, he's identified a middle-aged virgin, a pair of gay paramours, an aging housewife desperate enough to bed the pizza boy, a debauched teenager buying beer with his big brother's ID card, and a sexually fulfilled paraplegic.
“For real, though, how would someone in a wheelchair have a fulfilling sex life?” I pick up my beer glass and take a sip.