“just like hamburger; exactly like hamburger”
or,
“other sounds, other loves (another sound, another love)”
(“the daylight ghost of someone ready”)
in which two hyperthymestics encounter an ancient city; they discuss many labyrinths (some figurative) and one library (always figurative)
also:
“silence itself a cathedral”
inside:
“hewn stone & loud gold”
(or, “fortunate at least far enough beyond many if not most nightmares”)
by tim rogers
Four years ago a man pointed a gun at me. He did not kill me. He did not shoot me.
I got a haircut the next day. It was a terrible haircut. For the next four years, all of my haircuts would be terrible. When I go into a hair salon with my hair looking bad, I can excuse the barber for thinking I don’t care what my hair looks like.
Last night I dreamed I had killed someone. I woke up on the verge of vomiting. This was the second time in one week I woke up feeling about to vomit. The previous time, I’d dreamed I was sick. I’d dreamed I was rushing to a toilet to throw up. When I woke up, I could taste the acid in my throat for a full ten seconds.
Last night, it was the pain and the guilt that made me wake up about to vomit. In the dream I was in an attic. I didn’t commit the murder in the dream. I didn’t know the victim. I didn’t know why I had done what I had done, or how I had done it. All I felt was the guilt. I was sobbing in an attic. My soul was shrinking. This was the first time in my life I have dreamed about having committed murder. Usually I dream about my teeth falling out, or my high school saying I missed a question on a test twenty years ago and therefore I earned my college degree under false pretenses.
I woke up with a sharp pain in my chest. Acid bubbled in the back of my throat. I rolled over and slid out of my bed. My right arm was dead with numbness. I’d been sleeping on it. I stepped toward the bathroom. The acid retreated into the depths of my stomach. Maybe I’d imagined it.
I sat on the toilet. I waited for the urine to find its way out of my body. My body pinches my bladder. I shifted position. I lifted one foot. I lifted the other foot. I was on my tiptoes on each foot. The nausea vanished.
I remembered the night four years ago. I remembered the man pointing a gun at me.
Today I had a meeting in San Francisco. I scheduled a haircut for eleven in the morning. I had to wait fifteen minutes for my cab to the neighborhood where the meeting and the haircut would occur. It rained. The rain soaked me.
I arrived at the salon. The hairstylist asked me how I’d like my hair. I started taking my glasses off. I regarded myself in the mirror. Rain had soaked my hair and my clothes. I looked like a guy who didn’t care enough to own an umbrella, much less care what his hair looked like.
“Hey,” I said, “I’m just gonna say. Um, I really care about how my hair looks.”
The hairstylist gave me a tiny laugh.
“Well, alright man, so do I.”
“I mean — I just kind of wanted to say that. I don’t think I ever say that. I used to have — I think, I mean — I feel like I used to have great hair. I used to really like my hair. And I don’t like it anymore. I haven’t for, um, a couple years.”
“Aw.”
“I mean, you do a good job when you cut it; it’s just — I feel like I’m just not being honest when I come in here and I say, ‘Oh, just give me a haircut, I guess’. I feel like I’m not being honest. I really want a good haircut. When I don’t have good hair I don’t want to wear nice clothes, and when I don’t want to wear nice clothes I don’t want to look in the mirror, and when I don’t want to look in the mirror I don’t know what I look like, and then I don’t know what people see when they look at me, you know? At that point, am I even a person? I don’t think I’m even a person at that point.”
I didn’t actually say all of this. I said some of it. I might have even said a lot of it. Either way, what if Osamu Dazai had a Snapchat? That’s what I’m going for, here.
“Alright man; why don’t you tell me exactly what you want.”
I told him what I wanted. He gave me a haircut. I think it’s a good haircut.
Finally, I might like my hair again. It’s not much shorter than it was when I went to the hair salon today. However, it’s about fifty percent the volume it was when I went to the hair salon. I ran my hand through my hair just before I began writing this. I was looking in the mirror. I’d just finished brushing my teeth because I’d just finished eating dinner. I ran my hand through my new haircut. The hair feels different from the way it felt yesterday. It feels fine and thin. It made me remember the first time I ever touched another human’s hair. His name was Eric Barber. It was Tuesday, 4 June, 1991.
The first time I ever touched another human’s hair was also the first time I punched another person in the face. I’ve told this story precisely twice as an adult. The first time was in a hotel room in Osaka, Japan on the night of Monday, 15 July 2015. The second time was on Monday, 26 September 2016, the night of the first United-States-presidential debate of the 2016 election. The third time will be much later in this story.
The two precise finger and knuckle sensations of the first time I touched another person’s hair and the first time I punched another person in the face occurred to me in perfect fidelity the night a man pointed a gun at me. All of these memory sensations occurred to me again on a hot summer night in Kyoto in 2015, when I met another person whose memory capacity matched mine. That particular night, as I conversed with someone so much like myself, my own memories swelled and doubled. Finally, all these sensations, times two, plus the memory of remembering them, occurred to me with bursting totality last night when I almost died in my car on a rainy highway between Richmond and Oakland, California. Last night, remembering what I remembered, I realized that perhaps for the first time I had succeeded in forgetting something: I had forgotten the details of my brain the moments I spent with another human capable of ending my life with a gun. Well, I no longer forget them: many cold facts re-occurred to me last night. I cannot forget them.
In times like these I remember “The Little Prince”:
“A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.”
I can’t say it better. I’ll say it longer, and worse:
I want to summarize memory. I know that to summarize memory is the most important task in the world. I know that if I do not do this I will die. I remember everything. I remember more than anyone I have ever met(, except for one other person). Memory is an organization of what I remember. I write to organize what I remember; I write to disorganize what I have organized. Memory has no “proper” organization: disorganization is re-organization. Disorganization (reorganization) inspires me to remember what I have organized and how I have organized it. To organize what you have already organized is to disorganize it; to disorganize is to reorganize. Through this disorganization, I can re-remember my original memory. My memory includes my re-memory; my re-memory includes my memory. To re-remember is to remember remembering. To re-remember is to remember.
At our ultimate moment, our memory is our life’s work.
I want to tell you about the person I met two summers ago in Kyoto (or six years ago in Hawaii (or three years ago in Chicago (I can’t tell you which (she told me, “if you write about me, please defamiliarize me”)) who remembers as much as I do (or more (yet she is only one person)). In order to do so, I have to relate (a selection from) seven anecdotes containing correlation between life advice and safety tips my mother gave me, and all the people who have punched me, and all the people whom I have punched. A goal occurs to me. I want to accomplish a magic trick with this writing. I will not be perfectly honest about all of the details in either the frame story or in one of the nested stories. I would like you to either decide for yourself where the dishonesty lies, or to not think of it. Whichever path you choose, please accept my sincere promise that, despite any organizational dishonesty, every detail of this piece is real and true. Furthermore, I’ll deliberately attempt to structure this piece in a manner that suits the (inimitable, impossible-for-me-to-comfortably-think-about) way my memory works.
*
At two o’clock in the morning of Monday, 13 July, 2015, I was sitting on a riverbank in Kyoto, Japan. I was sitting with a beautiful girl with enormous long hair.
I had met her on the street an hour earlier. My friend Dave and I had been wandering Kyoto after escaping a bar where several foreigners — our work acquaintances — had been drinking and singing karaoke. We wandered the summer nighttime of the city. It was a Sunday night. Drinkers were alive and loud and distant. Laughter echoed through the covered shopping arcades. The city was old. Its builders had wanted us to feel comfortable. The city was a perfect grid. Our aimless walk felt like fate. We crossed paths with a girl. I have a practice of never speaking a word to a stranger on the street. Sometimes, I see a beautiful person and I look at them, and I feel bad about it, just a tiny bit. I wonder, what shape would this person’s anger hate if they knew I was looking at them? I was thinking that about this girl.
I was juggling an empty Sprite bottle that had been in my tote bag since two days ago. I’d left the tote bag in a locker at an event venue, you see. It (and its trash) had only come back into my possession two hours earlier. This isn’t important to the story.
The Sprite bottle slipped against my fingertip and fell into the road. This girl — maybe two inches shorter than me, wearing Converses, with big strong thighs, tight jeans, a black t-shirt, and hair down to her big butt stopped dead. She turned around. She looked at me. On her black T-shirt was a plain white cartoon skull.
She crossed her arms. She pointed at the bottle with one index finger and middle finger together. She kept the other arm crossed.
“Pick that up.” She spoke fluent English with near-perfect pronunciation.
“Oh, uh, yes, okay.”
I picked it up. I slid it into a recycling bin.
She watched me do this. I waved at her.
“Bye.”
She kept walking alongside us.
I looked at her.
“So, uh, how are you tonight?”
She punched me in the arm.
“Tonight is the fucking worst night of my life so far, to be honest with you.”
“Oh. Uh. Why?”
She put her hands on her hips. She looked me in the eye. She narrowed her eyes. She shook her head. Her hands fell off her hips.
She walked on ahead of us.
She slowed down. She looked at us.
“Where are you going?”
I looked at her.
“We were walking around looking for something to do.”
“You were looking for girls.”
“Well, we were saying, if we found girls, that’d be great.”
She threw her hands up around in the air over her head.
“There are girls everywhere, here and there.”
“Well, I don’t know. I can’t find them.”
She shook her head. She walked on ahead. She slowed down. She looked at me and Dave. She looked me in the eye.
“Hi,” I said. “How are you?”
“I said I’m fucking lousy. Did you forget?”
“Oh, I was pretending to, uh, have met you for the first time. I thought, uh — ”
“If you think I’m fucking ugly, or a bitch, just leave me alone, okay?”
“Whoa, wait, what, I — I don’t know what you want. Are you, like, do you, like, want me to hit on you?”
She narrowed her eyes. She rolled her eyes. She let her arms hang. She did a little exhausted zombie body-quake.
“You must be the stupidest. I’m going home.”
“Okay.”
She squeezed a loud groan through her teeth.
“I don’t want to go home.”
“I am so confused. You are confusing me.”
I walked up alongside her. I put my hand on the small of her back.
“Is this right? Is this what I should do?”
“Fucking fuck, man! Do you joke about everything?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m sorry. I have very little patience right now.”
“Well, I’m sorry if I’m being annoying. Do you uh — want me to stop doing this?” I rubbed my hand in a little circle in the middle of her back.
She thrust her body to the side so that my arm reached around her lower back.
“Just be cool, okay?” she said. “Talk to me. Tell me something.”
“What do you want to know? I know a lot of stuff.”
“Tell me what you do.”
“I make video games. Uh, what do you do?”
She stopped in place.
“Do you want me to punch you in the face?”
“No,” I said. “No.”
We resumed walking.
“You know,” I said, “I’ve been punched in the face exactly seven times in my life.”
“Well, it will be exactly eight times, because of me, if you annoy me again.”
“Hah, okay. Hey, you look like you can punch my head off.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“You’re as tall as me! You have bigger arms than I do.”
“Oh yeah?” We compared our biceps. She smiled when she saw I was right.
An hour later, she, Dave, and I were sitting by the river. Dave excused himself. The girl and I were alone.
She looked me in the eye. Her eyes were dark. Her gaze terrified me. It was so direct.
“You’re cute,” she said. She was less drunk than when we’d met. She’d had a few beers while we sat by the river.
“Oh. Wow. Really?”
“I’m glad Dave is gone, so I can say that to you.”
“Oh, I’m, uh, sure he wouldn’t have minded if you’d said it around him.”
She narrowed her eyes at me.
“What? Was that a joke?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t make jokes like that.”
“Why — what’s wrong with a joke like that?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it, it just — it just doesn’t make a sense.”
Her English wasn’t completely flawless; a grammarian could have argued with a usage or two. I liked it. It was perfect for me.
“Well, sorry.”
She closed her eyes. She shook her head once to the left and once to the right.
“You don’t need to apologize.”
“Sorry — ”
She slapped my thigh with the back of her right hand.
“Come on, man. You want me to go home?”
“No — no.”
“I told you I think you’re cute.”
“Why?”
“Because you look like Gary Oldman.”
“Wh-what?”
“Gary Oldman, the star of such films and Leon: The Professional, The Fifth Element, and Christoper Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy.”
“Yes, I know who Gary Oldman is.”
“You look like him. I’m sorry if this offends you.”
“I mean — wow, I, uh, I’m not offended. I just — no one ever compares me to any celebrities at all, so Gary Oldman is a pleasant surprise. He’s a phenomenally talented actor. Have you seen ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’?”
She narrowed her eyes to slits. Her lips curled in a look of disgust.
“Are you asking me if I am a retard? Of course I have seen ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’. I am a fan of Gary Oldman. I told you, I’m glad Dave is gone, because you are cute like Gary Oldman.”
“Well, heck.”
“No one has ever mentioned it before?”
I shook my head. I was incredulous. This was on a beautiful night. It was hot and I was wearing a button-down linen shirt, Jordan basketball shorts, and a pair of cheap flip-flops I’d bought at MUJI two afternoons ago. The hot wind cooled off as it grazed the dark river and penetrated through to my skin.
“No one has ever compared me to a celebrity before.”
“That’s a lie. Everyone compares someone to a celebrity, and everyone suffers a comparison to a celebrity at some point or another.”
I loved the turn of phrase: “Everyone suffers a comparison”.
A young man cackled in the distant darkness. A young girl yelled at him to shut up. Then another girl let out three shrill belly laughs. One of them was strumming a guitar.
“Have you ever been compared to a celebrity?”
“To a Korean celebrity, yes. The first time was on Friday, November Thirtieth, Two Thousand and One.”
“W-wow, uh, which Korean celebrity?”
“You would not know her. I have been compared to four different Korean celebrities since then, a total of nine times.”
“When was the most recent time you were compared to a celebrity?”
She pursed her lips.
“A little over one year ago. Saturday, June Seventh, Two Thousand and Fourteen.”
“Hey, that was my birthday.”
“Who has compared you to a celebrity?”
“Well, I used to live in Japan, see — ”
“You don’t live here now?”
“No, I’m just here for work — uh, so girls would tell me I looked like Leonardo DiCaprio.”
“You do not look like Leonardo DiCaprio.”
“I know — ”
“He has a different shape of face. His face is much smaller than yours.”
“I know.”
“It would be a stupid girl who compared you to Leonardo DiCaprio.”
“Hey, I’m not arguing with you. I think it was a little bit racist.”
She shook her head. “It’s not racist.”
“I mean, not racist-racist, just like, they’re generalizing.”
“That’s what you should have said.”
“You know, a girl compared me to Leonardo DiCaprio on Monday, November Fifth, Two Thousand and One.”
“Who compared you?”
“It was a girl I had met in Kawagoe, Saitama, Japan. Her name was Mami. She was with her friend Noriko. We had all missed the last train. We ate together in a diner.”
“Why didn’t you stay in a hotel?”
“I was young and I didn’t have much money.”
“You’re staying in a hotel now?”
“Yes.”
“Can we go there?”
“Uh — now?”
She looked at her toe-tips. She looked at the river.
“No, not now.”
I looked at her toe-tips. I looked at the river. I looked at the side of her face. Her eyes were shiny.
Her head turned. She looked me in the eye.
“I told you you’re cute,” she said. “What do you say to that?”
“You’re gorgeous,” I said.
She let out a hard exhale. She wiped her forearm against her wide-open eye.
“I’m a lot fucked-up right now, you know,” she said. “Many events have fucked me up recently.”
“Hey, well, well . . . okay.”
“Tell me what is gorgeous about me.”
“I love your hair,” I said. “It’s so long. It’s — wow, it’s long.”
“I’ve been growing it since I was in middle school. My mother celebrates my hair. I love my mom.”
“It’s beautiful hair.”
“It is fine,” she said. “It’s not like Korean hair. My mother says hairstylists in Korea could not cut it because they are too accustomed to cutting thicker hair.”
“I got my hair cut in Korea four days ago,” I said.
“You are shitting me.”
“No, I really did.” I opened the photos folder on my phone. There was a picture of me in front of a Rolls-Royce in Gangnam. “That’s in front of the hair salon.”
She took the phone. “This is a Rolls-Royce. This is not a hair salon.” She gave the phone back.
“Do — do you remember the first time you ever touched someone’s hair?” I asked her.
“I remember my mother’s hair. I pulled my mother’s hair and she yelled at me. The television was on.”
“The first time I ever touched a person’s hair was the first time I punched someone in the face.”
“That’s not true. Did you punch your mother in the face?”
I remembered a morning in a shopping cart in Newark, Delaware. The first words I can remember hearing in all of my life: “Pepperidge Farm”. My mother is buying a bag of Milano cookies for my dad. I am eating a Dietz and Watson hot dog while lying on my back in the shopping cart. When my mother picks me up to put me into her Ford Thunderbird, I get a handful of her hard, curly hair.
“I mean, the first time I touched the hair of a person who was neither myself nor my mother.”
“When was it?”
“It was Tuesday, June Fourth, nineteen-ninety-one.”
“How old are you?”
“I just turned thirty-six,” I said.
“You’re twice my age,” she said. “Can we go to your hotel now?”
“Can I, uh — man, I hate to do this. Uh, can I see your ID?”
“Are you serious?”
“I just — I don’t want to do anything illegal in a foreign country.”
Her upper lip curled up.
“What?”
“Nothing. Nothing.” She took out her wallet. She showed me her Kyoto University student ID. “Is this good enough?”
I hailed a taxi. The driver asked her where we were going. I spoke up.
“Head for Kyoto Station, please.”
She gathered up a rope of her hair in two hands. She flopped the hair onto my thigh.
“Here. You can touch it if you want.”
I put my hand on her hair, atop her thigh. She had so much hair. I made eye contact with the driver in the rearview mirror.
She picked up my hand. She put it on top of the part of her hair that was on top of my own thigh.
“Think of him,” she said. “Think of him looking at us. Be reasonable.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I want to kiss you soon,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. My feet hurt. My head hurt. I was so exhausted; I was so halfway around the world.
“We were so bad to Dave.”
“Ah, yeah, maybe we were.” Sorry, Dave.
“I hope we didn’t make Dave lonely.”
We got to my hotel room. The “Do Not Disturb” sign was already hanging on the door. I’d been out to a party the night before with an old friend who had come down from Tokyo just to see me. He invited a lady acquaintance of his, and she invited her own girl-friend. We parted into two couples at the end of the night. The girl and I had barely spoken a word to one another. She had come from Nagoya for the party in Kyoto. She needed a place to stay. I let her sleep in my bed. We didn’t speak a word all night in that room. I couldn’t sleep. It was hot in there.
That previous night, this girl — she was from Ukraine — asked, “Do not disturb, huh?”
“Yeah, I just — I don’t mind sleeping on the same sheets. And, uh — ”
I opened the door. We didn’t speak a word once the door had closed. She left while the sun was coming up.
One night later, I’d slept not a minute. The gorgeous tall girl with the strong thighs and the huge long hair didn’t say a word about the do not disturb sign.
The comforter was pulled back on the bed.
“What happened?” she asked, before I could even take my shoes off.
“Oh, on the bed?”
“What happened here? Whose blood is that?”
“It’s, uh, ah, it’s mine,” I said.
I pulled up my right basketball-shorts leg. I revealed the big ugly scab on my right knee.
“What on earth happened?”
“Well,” I said. I chuckled. “Uh, I . . . I’d just dragged these suitcases all the way from the station. And, uh, I’d just ridden the bullet train — shinkansen — ”
“I know that ‘Bullet Train’ is American English for Shinkansen.”
“Right, right; I’d just ridden it down from Tokyo, and I showed up at the hotel, and I’d taken the nine o’clock train, so I’d arrived before noon, and they told me I couldn’t check in until three. And they wouldn’t let me leave my suitcases in the lobby, and — I don’t know why. So I changed my clothes in a public bathroom and — and, anyway, when I finally got back here in time to check in they told me the room wasn’t ready, though they did let me leave my suitcases. And then I had to go set up at the event I was going to, and I ended up walking about seven kilometers to get there, because I’m an idiot — ”
“Don’t call yourself an idiot.”
“No, it’s a word I like. I use it to me, like, ‘somebody who does what they want to do and doesn’t care what people think’.”
“That’s not what it means to me, and I think you’re smart and I hope you care what I think.”
“Uh — yeah, okay, so I just wanted to walk and — do you want to sit down?”
“I’m fine standing for a moment.”
“So yeah anyway when I got back to the room it was after ten PM and I was so tired. I crammed my suitcase in the corner and I just fell down on the bed, like this — ”
I slow-motion mimed landing onto the bed with my knee.
“The bed is just — really hard. It just really ripped the skin off my knee.”
She leaned forward. She pushed her index and middle fingers into the bed.
“Shit,” she said. “It’s hard as a shit.”
We stood looking at the bloodstain in silence. It was about two feet long, and the color of old brick.
“You — ” she made a squiggly motion with her index finger. “You sort of slid on the bed there.”
“Yeah, I was expecting less friction.”
“Can we listen to music?”
“What do you like?”
“I like the nineteen-nineties. Do you have Nirvana?”
“Yeah.”
I put on Nirvana.
“Can you leave the lights on?”
I didn’t turn out the burning fluorescent lights.
We were sitting side by side on the bed. She held my right hand between her two hands.
“Do you remember the first time you had sex?”
“Hah — do I remember? Of course I remember.”
She blushed. “Some — some people don’t remember.”
“I think that’s something most people don’t forget.”
Her lips bit one another.
She looked me in the eyes. “What is the wildest sex you have ever had?” She expanded her eyeballs on the word “sex”.
“I — hmm. I don’t know.”
“Have you ever videoed sex?”
“You mean like recorded it?”
“Yes.”
“No, I haven’t.”
She looked at her knees.
“Me neither.” She looked me in the eyes. “Have you ever audio recorded sex?”
“Huh. No.”
“Me neither,” she said. “Can you begin making a recording with your iPhone voice recorder app please?”
“Uh. Sure.”
We had sex for one hour and forty-four minutes.
I still have the recording. I’m never going to give it to anyone. I promise. At the end of it, very clearly, I ask her, “So, uhhh?” and she says, “What?” And I say, “Uhh, what’s your name?” She tells me her name and I tell her mine. I stop the recorder shortly after that.
The room was tiny and hot. We weren’t able to control the air conditioning. We were sitting with our sweaty backs against the wall and our feet side by side by side by side. We were looking at our own toes and each other’s.
Now in the middle of the bed was a huge puddle of fresh red blood.
“I’m sorry about my period,” she said.
“Ah, I’m sure it happens to hotels all the time.”
“I mean I am sorry if that was gross for you.”
“Oh — oh. No, no, it was totally fine. I mean, just, I guess a maid is going to come in here and see that, and I thought you were worried about that — ”
“Are you worried about that?”
“No, that’s why I said I’m sure it happens all the time.”
“When do you check out of the hotel?”
“I’m checking out in the morning.”
“Are they going to make you pay for the bed?”
“They should pay us to sleep in this bed,” I said. “I’m pretty sure it’s fine.”
She gripped my hand. “What if it’s not fine?”
“I’ll tell them it’s from my knee.”
We rolled the comforter over the bed. We laid atop the comforter. We were naked. I turned out the light. I felt the sweat of her arm cold against the sweat of my arm.
I touched the side of my foot to the side of her foot. I rolled my skull to the left. I looked her in the eye.
“This is cool,” I said.
“What’s cool?”
“You’re as tall as me.”
“Oh. Hah. Yes, very cool. It’s very funny.”
“No, it’s not funny, I mean, it’s neat. I mean I’ve never — ”
“You’ve never had sex with a girl as tall as you?”
“No, I never have. Not until today. It was neat.”
“Was it a kinky fetish for you?”
“For it to have been a kinky fetish for me I’d have to have been thinking about it for years and years. I’d probably have been successful at it by now.”
“Oh. Hey.”
“What?”
“When was the second time you punched someone?”
“It was the day of my Catholic confirmation.”
“When was it?”
“Nineteen-ninety-three. It was a boy named Lester.”
“Why did you hit him?”
“Because he hit me.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Why did he hit you?”
“He hated me.”
“What day was it?”
“Tuesday, November Ninth, Nineteen-ninety-three.”
“Hey,” she said. All was silent. I felt a chill. My eyes were wet. She gripped my hand in her hand. “Hey, uh.”
“What?”
“Nothing — h-how many times you punched someone? Seven?”
“I’ve punched four people,” I said. “I’ve been punched seven times.”
“Seven times.”
“Yeah, seven.”
“I’ve been punched once,” she said. She squeezed her nose. “He punched me in the nose on January eighteenth two thousand and fifteen.”
“Why did he punch you?”
“He was crazy and we were having sex.”
“Oh.”
“I told him to; I said, maybe I’ll like it.”
“Did you like it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t.”
“Did you punch him back?”
“I wanted to.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I thought he wouldn’t like it.”
We were quiet. She slid her arm under my neck. I rested my head on her shoulder.
I asked her, “Have you ever punched anybody?”
“No,” she said.
“That’s good.”
“Is it?”
I was quiet for a second. “I think.”
“Hey,” she said. “Do you — ”
She trailed off.
“Do you — ”
I hugged my arms around her midsection. I squeezed her.
“Hey,” I said. “Do you remember everything?”
She didn’t answer. Neither of us breathed. In the silence a sudden cacophonous gurgle of mucus in her nostrils echoed. She was weeping. Soon I was, too. For the first time in my life I’d met someone else with hyperthymesia, also known as Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory. For the first time in my life, by incredible coincidence, I’d met another person who remembers every name, face, and date they encounter. This is a useless skill. Every memory inside my mind is the same size. My self-awareness is a wall of noise. For the first time in my life, I had broached the subject of Remembering Everything with another person who also Remembers Everything. To remember discussing Remembering Everything with someone else who was Remembering Everything at the same time I was Remembering Everything is to Remember Remembering Everything. My life up until that point was one side of a bowtie; that night was the knot. On the other side of that knot, was a perfect (untouchable) clone of the other side of that bowtie. That clone is frozen where it was: it is a memory as large as all of my other memories, except it is a memory of all my memories, and also a memory of my words locking and my brain bricking when I remembered Remembering Everything. “Everything” is the same size as Every Individual Thing a la carte. She and I cried together probably in consideration of one another and each other — maybe I more violently than her — and to think of it is not the way . . . I do not have a word, this time, this
Later, I asked her, “How did you find out you were like this?”
She told me, “I saw a show on TV a couple years ago, and I thought, that sounds like me.”
“Did you tell anybody?”
“No.” She was quiet. “How did you find out?”
I sighed. I felt a chill.
“I was twenty-five.”
“Shit,” she said. She was quiet for a second. “That sucks.”
“I mean — I was twenty-five when I realized, oh no, this is a thing.”
“Shit.”
“I’m glad you knew it was a thing.”
“Why?”
“It’s nice to know it’s a thing.”
“It is?”
“Yes.” I blinked. “Maybe.”
We were in a fancy cafe in the Teramachi. It was noon. We were drinking Kyoto-style iced coffees — in Kyoto. I figured, Kyoto is a heck of a place to drink a Kyoto-style iced coffee. Little did I know, two months later I’d eat a Danish in Denmark.
I’d checked out of the hotel in the morning. She had to go to school. I was about to get on the bullet train for Tokyo. We were hugging. Then I said, “Hey, let’s have lunch.” I put my suitcase in a locker at the station. We went to have lunch. We went to a vegan café-restaurant in the Teramachi.
She liked the look of the place: it was all wood and sunlight.
“How did you know about this place?”
“I came here with my friend the other night.”
“You just came here once?”
“Well, this is my second time.”
“You ate somewhere for the first time and now you’re eating there for the second time less than a week later.”
“I liked it. I wanted to try something else on the menu.”
“No, no, I’m not judging you. It’s interesting.”
A waitress brought my salad.
“I’m going to wash my hands,” the girl said. She went to the bathroom. I took a photograph of our glasses of coffee. She came back.
“Do you generally do things you like twice?”
I looked up from my salad. She snapped open the plastic wrapper on her moist towelette. She rubbed it between her hands like kindling. She looked at her hands. She looked at me out of the tops of her eyes.
“What?” she asked.
“Oh, just, that’s a weird question. No one’s ever asked me that question before.”
“Well, am I a monster for asking?”
“No. No. I mean, you always hear people say ‘I’ll try anything once’. I’ve never heard anyone say ‘I’ll try anything I like twice’.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“I’m not.”
“That’s not your distinction to make.”
I already knew this, though I liked knowing it, so I let myself learn it again: we were ultimately very different people.
Her vegan locomoco arrived.
“This looks delicious. It is so colorful.”
“The vegetables are very fresh here.”
The waitress had given her a very big spoon.
“This is like a Korean spoon.”
She dug the spoon into the food. It screamed against the bottom of the bowl.
“What?” she was looking at me. “Do you hate spoons?”
“Whoa. Yes.”
“You hate the sound they make on bowls?”
“Yeah.”
“I used to hate this as well.”
“Huh. You don’t hate it anymore?”
She shrugged. “I can take it or leave it. Have you hated it since you were a child?”
“Yeah. It, uh, if it’s loud enough it makes me nauseous. Like, I literally threw up once because my dad was scraping his fork on his plate.”
“My parents are very loud eaters. They bang and scrape their silverware a lot. You would probably die if you ate with them.”
“They can’t be much worse than my parents and brothers.”
“My parents are also loud chewers! It is disgusting to me.”
“Oh, you hate chewing, too? So do I! I used to joke that the reason I moved out of my parents’ house and left the country the minute I graduated from college was because my family are all such disgusting noisy eaters.”
“I wish I would live on a liquid diet,” she said, “because I hate the sound of chewing in my head.”
“Whoa,” I said, “I have lived on a liquid diet because I hate the sound of chewing in my head so much.”
“What was the result?”
“It didn’t feel healthy. So I always listen to music or watch television when I eat instead.”
“Or eat in a restaurant with noisy acoustics like this one?”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“I also prefer noisy restaurants.” She ate some of her food. “This is excellent. However, I must admit that I generally dislike eating food. Does this make me a weirdo?”
“Nah — I hate eating, myself.”
“Why?”
“I feel like a monster when I’m eating. I feel sweaty and gross. I feel like — like if someone touched me while I was eating, I would throw up, or I would explode.”
“Wow.”
“I mean, I’m not just saying this.” My hands were shaking — they were cold (my coffee glass was cold; the air-conditioning was cold) and the coffee was strong. “It’s maybe, if I had to think real hard, maybe it’s my biggest irrational fear. I’m terrified someone’s going to touch me while I’m eating. I feel like such a monster when I eat. I’m just ripping and tearing food and soaking it in my fluids and wringing it and smashing it into myself — ”
“You make it sound disgusting.”
“I’m trying to make it sound how it makes me feel. Hey, you know, I’ve never told that to a girlfriend. Every time I eat a meal with a girlfriend, I sit there terrified that she’s going to touch me and I’ll die.”
“Am I your girlfriend?”
“Hey, sure. You can be my girlfriend.”
“Just until you leave,” she said. She smiled. She unsmiled. “So you told me your greatest fear. That’s good. You should be honest with more people. You should tell people how you feel.”
“That’s easy for you to say. I feel a lot. If I started telling people how I feel, I’d never shut up.”
She smiled. It was the biggest smile I’d seen yet from her. Her smile got so big she became aware of the visibility of her teeth. She stretched her lips to cover her teeth. She laughed out of her nose.
“What was the longest relationship you ever had?” she asked.
“About six years.”
“And all that time you never told her not to touch you while you were eating?”
“I never had to tell her. She never touched me at all.”
“Oh.”
“Now I eat in the kitchen, with music playing in the living room.”
“So you never enjoy a meal?”
I gestured to our food.
“I enjoy maybe six meals a year.”
“Just six.”
“Usually while I’m traveling.”
“Do you like traveling?”
“I love traveling.”
“Is it Your Favorite Thing?” Her eyes pulse-bulged with the words “Favorite” and “Thing”.
I thought about it for a moment.
“I like nice buildings. I like art museums. I like traveling. I like having sex.”
“Don’t say that word in here. What is your number one favorite thing from among those things?”
“I can’t decide between traveling and having sex.”
“Stop saying that word in here. People know what it means.”
“Sorry.”
“And everyone likes — ” she lowered her voice “ — sex.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not true. A lot of people hate it and pretend to love it. I think at least half of heterosexual people must hate it. Christians, for example.”
“Let’s not have a lewd conversation about Christians, please?”
The accent of her suggestion felt translated from Korean.
“Oh! A Pomeranian!”
A woman had sat at a table next to us with a Pomeranian in a Louis Vuitton bag. She told the waitress her friend would be joining her in a moment.
“She said her friend is meeting her in a moment,” I said.
“I know what she said!” the girl said. “My Japanese isn’t that bad.”
“Oh, sorry. I was setting up a joke.”
“Oh. Please continue.”
“Ahem. She said her friend is meeting her in a moment, though it looks to me like her friend is already here!”
The girl gave a tiny silent golf clap. “That is a joke I appreciate. What a beautiful little dog.”
“They’re the funniest dogs,” I said. “If I were going to get a dog, it’d be one of those. I always tell people I would get a corgi, though they’re too big. That’s too much.”
“What’s wrong with a corgi? They’re adorable.”
“They are. It’s just, if I’m going to get a dog, I’m going to admit to myself that the only reason I want a dog is because I want to own another living thing. So I’m going to own the dumbest-looking one possible.”
“They always look lost,” the girl said. She was looking at the dog out of the sides of her eyes. “Then again, I haven’t seen too many Pomeranians in my life.”
“How many have you seen?” I asked her.
She went on looking at the dog. She blinked a couple times.
“Are you allergic to dogs?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve seen sixteen Pomeranians in my life.”
“Nice. I’ve seen, uh.”
We were silent two minutes while I counted.
“I’ve seen fifty-eight Pomeranians.”
“Shit, that’s a lot of Pomeranians.”
“Well, you see them on the train in Tokyo sort of a lot.”
“How many poodles have you seen?”
“Fourteen,” I said.
“You answered very quickly.”
“I counted them a few months ago.”
“Why did you count them?”
“I was trying to get to sleep. I count memories when I am going to sleep.”
“That’s interesting.”
“It’s gotten more interesting as I’ve gotten older. It’s like Memory Golf: I try to think of things that have only happened between three and five times.”
“Why three and five times?”
“It’s hypnotic,” I said. “Three or five times gives you a little slice of every part of your life. You can write a complete and thorough autobiography about anything that’s happened to you between three and ten times.”
“Why not more than ten times?”
“Then it’d be too long.”
“How many cups of coffee have you drunk in your life?”
“Whoa — whoa. Please don’t ask me that. I’ll start counting and then I’ll slip into a coma for a year.”
“Sorry. Now I am thinking about it too. Oh no. I hate it.”
“You have to be careful with this stuff. You can’t write an autobiography about all the cups of coffee you drank, or all the times you’ve used the toilet. It has to be something that’s happened between three and ten times.”
“Not about something that happened twice?”
“No. It might just be a coincidence.”
“Not about something that happened once?”
“Maybe I’m wrong.”
“Maybe you’re not.”
“Whenever I tell people about this, I use the example that I’ve eaten a cinnamon bun thirty-two times in my life.”
“How many times have you told people that you’ve eaten a cinnamon bun thirty-two times?”
“Uh, nine.”
“You could write a complete and thorough autobiography about the nine times you told someone you’ve eaten a cinnamon bun thirty-two times.”
“I’m going to have a stroke if I think about that.”
“Don’t joke about having a stroke, please. I am afraid every day of having a stroke.”
“I’m going to have an aneurysm if I think about that.”
She chewed a lettuce leaf.
“Aneurysm. 동맥류? My grandmother had one of those.”
“Oh.”
“My grandfather died of a stroke.”
“Aw.”
She looked at me eyes with the tops of her eyes. She raised her gaze. She stared at my eyes. I looked at the Pomeranian. I looked back at her.
“What?”
“Tell me something that has only happened once.”
“Everything happens twice.” I didn’t believe it.
“Tell me something that has only happened once.”
“I met you once.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I mean, you, uh, being someone like me.”
“Hmm. Except we’re meeting now, still. When does it become us meeting twice? We met twice when I blinked the first time after seeing you.”
“You think like a computer programmer.”
“Don’t say that to me. Have you ever read Jorge-Luis Borges?”
I almost choked on my bitter coffee. “Yeah, I’ve read Borges. Uh, why have you read Borges?”
“I was Googling memory. I was reading about Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory on Wikipedia.”
“Is there a citation of his story ‘Funes, His Memory’?”
“Oh, yes, you know the story.”
“It scared me the first time I read it.”
“It scares me, too,” she said. “He names all the numbers.”
“That story gave me a terrible idea when I was a teenager,” I said. “Before I go to bed, I play games with my memory, like I was telling you.”
“I like your Memory Golf.”
“So, and this isn’t strictly a memory game — I’ll try to think of a random word. If it has any connection to any events of my day, I throw it away and try to think of a new word.”
“It’s impossible,” she said. She gripped a spoon in her right hand. The spoon was dug into her locomoco. She gripped her glass of ice cold black coffee in her left hand. Her eyes were homing in on me. Her lips were sealed.
“Yeah. If I think of ‘lollipop’, then maybe I’ll remember that earlier that day I’d been thinking of making a doctor’s appointment, and then I’ll remember a doctor giving me a lollipop when I was a child.”
“It’s impossible,” she said. I looked at her hands. I realized I was the only male human in the restaurant.
I sipped my coffee. “Funes named numbers,” I said. “And he tried to keep them unique. He fought against patterns. Eventually his navigation of his universe of number-names must have occupied every possible thought. To name a new number involves a memory of every name of every other number.”
“Sometimes I am sick of knowing new things, and I want to fall asleep in a sensory deprivation chamber, and be fed intravenously,” she said.
“The Tennis Monster tries that, in my novel,” I said.
“Does it work for her?”
“It doesn’t. She can’t stop thinking about the old things.”
“Have you ever tried a sensory deprivation chamber?”
“I have a little bit of a ringing in my right ear.”
“Can’t they play white noise in a sensory deprivation chamber?”
“I — I don’t know. Maybe they can?”
“They have one in the spa my mother goes to.”
“Have you ever been inside it?”
She hesitated.
“No.”
We were walking in a covered shopping arcade. It was hot. She removed sunscreen from her purse. She had applied some that morning. She reapplied sunscreen to her arms and face. I took some as well. My own sunscreen was in my backpack in the locker in the station.
“This city is so old,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
A conversation didn’t happen.
We were walking by the river.
“Sometimes I walk at night for hours,” she said.
An old lady came blazing by on a bike. Me and the girl stepped to the side of the road to let the lady by. She showed us the back of her hand when she passed. She yelled back, “Sorry!”
“Wow, she’s in a hurry,” the girl said.
“Maybe she has to take a dump.”
The girl’s head whiplashed to face me. Her eyes stabbed into mine.
“What? Why did you say that?”
“Oh, it’s just what I say when I see someone in a hurry.”
“It’s gross.”
“Sorry. It’s just, like, when I see someone driving really fast, I say that.”
We were walking again.
“That’s actually nice of you.”
“I mean, you never know what someone is thinking.”
“No,” she said. “No.”
We emerged from the shopping arcade. The sun was hot all over my skin (and probably hers).
“I wander this city aimlessly,” she said. She looked at her feet. “I never get lost.”
We entered another covered shopping arcade. It was cool in the shade. I went into a honey goods store. I bought a bag of lozenges made with propolis. They weren’t the brand I always try to get when I am in Japan, though the surprise of seeing another brand was enough to make me buy them. They weren’t as good as my preferred brand. Or maybe I just ate the other ones first.
“I told you I was punched in the face once. Tell me something that has happened once.”
We were holding hands.
“Someone pointed a gun at me once,” I said.
She tugged my hand. She was standing still. I stood in front of her. She put her arms around my lower back.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” she said. “Why did that happen to you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It was just a weird occurrence.”
“Was it a joke or an accident?”
“It wasn’t a joke or an accident, no.”
“Was it a robbery?”
“It wasn’t a robbery.”
“What was it?”
“A man on the street pointed a gun at me. He told me to stop looking at him.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, I hadn’t been looking at him.”
She squeezed me.
“That is so scary.”
It occurred to me that, for the first time in my life, I had successfully allowed myself to forget something. Well: now it was back. I’d forget it again two days later. I’d remember it again yesterday.
“When he pointed the gun at me, I thought of three things.”
“What were the three things?”
“One was the time I punched Eric Barber, and felt his hair.
“The second was my friend who had been to Korea and hated it.
“The third was a dinner party my friend hosted in her house.”
“Was that the only time you ever saw a gun?”
“Well, there’s guns everywhere in America — ”
“Was it the first time you saw a person wielding a violent gun?”
“A violent gun. Huh. No. It was the second time.”
“What was the first time?”
My girlfriend and I had been waiting at the bus stop. Someone had parked on the corner. The bus came. The passenger door of the car parked on the corner flew open. A man jumped out. He ran over to a woman. He grabbed her iPhone. He ran back toward his car. A big muscular young man yelled, “Hey! Bro!” He jogged over to the car. The man who’d stolen the phone was lowering himself into the car. He produced a gun out of nowhere. It was a huge silver gun. He aimed at at the young man. The young man stopped in place. He put his hands up. Everyone at the bus stop jumped back in silence. I stepped around to the other side of a wall, out of the gun-wielder’s line of sight.
“If it hadn’t been for that guy, you wouldn’t have seen that gun.”
“The guy was an idiot.”
“He was trying to save that girl’s phone.”
“We have rules in civilized society,” I said. “If someone is detached enough to break those rules in broad daylight and, say, grab someone’s phone out of their hand, I would let them go. I would have let him take the phone. I wouldn’t put anything past him.”
“So you’ve only seen two guns?”
“Yeah. That one, and the one a man pointed at me three months later.”
Two months after Kyoto, I’d see a man steal another man’s MacBook. The man who owned the MacBook yanked it away. The thief produced a pistol and slammed the MacBook-owner in the top of the head with it. The train was stopped and its doors were open. Everyone in the train rushed in silence away from the gun, into the corners, trampling each other (and me). The man with the gun slipped out of the train. Everyone in the train got out onto the platform. Someone stepped on the back of my head. That was the second time someone had stepped on the back of my head. (The other time was at a hardcore show in Tokyo in September of 2004.)
We were on a bus headed back toward Kyoto Station. She took her big Samsung phone out of her purse. She took a selfie of herself kissing my cheek.
“Can you tell me about all seven times you got punched?”
We were in Kyoto Station. I got my suitcase and backpack out of the locker.
I gave her a hug. I held her for a minute.
I stepped back.
“Hey,” I said. “I’ll go back to Tokyo tomorrow. Let’s go see my friends in Osaka right now, and stay in a hotel tonight.”
She hugged me.
“First can we go to my house? My period is happening seriously and I don’t want to be wearing jeans right now.”
We used our bus passes. She told me to wait around the corner from her apartment. I stood next to a tree. The wind blew through the tree. An old lady on a bike smiled at me. She came back five minutes later. She was wearing a breezy denim skirt and a plain black T-shirt. Her hair was back in a ponytail. She had exchanged her sneakers for sandals. She looked wonderful. She looked comfortable. I wanted to hug her, so I did. She kissed my neck. She rested her mouth on my shirted shoulder. She spoke with hot breath into my shoulder.
“Sorry I took so long.”
“What? You were only gone a couple minutes.”
“One of my roommates is a real basic bitch and was asking many questions concerning my whereabouts last night.”
“Ah, maybe she’s worried about you.”
“She’s worried about seeming worried about me. She is a basic bitch.”
“Well you said it twice, so it must be true.”
She un-hugged. She narrowed her eyes at me. “Your joking style is not ordinary.”
We took the bus back to Kyoto Station.
“Can you tell me about all seven times you got punched?”
“Yes,” I said. We got on the train for Osaka. I booked a hotel on my phone on the way. We checked into the hotel. We walked the city. We talked sometimes and we were quiet sometimes. We went to my friend’s bar. Another of my friends showed up. We all talked until late. A lot of happy people sat in that air-conditioning-cold, dark, smoky, liquory room making words and noise. My friend gave the girl a drink. It was a shot of something. He lit it on fire. She blew the fire out. She drank the shot. She and I went out for a walk in the Osaka Americamura. It was neon-bright and lively. I bought a 7up from a vending machine. I held it aloft. I positioned a charming little takoyaki stand behind it. The takoyaki stand had a big happy red cartoon octopus sculpture popping out over the sales window. I lined up a photo with my phone. I blurred the takoyaki stand out of focus. I posted the photo on Instagram.
“Why do you keep taking pictures of beverages?”
I’d taken a picture of the bottle of roasted green tea she’d purchased in Namba earlier that afternoon.
“I don’t know. I did it in the airport. Me and my co-worker have this thing. Every day at three PM, we watch an Aya Matsuura commercial for Kirin Lemon Tea.”
“Why do you do that?”
“Because she’s singing ‘It’s three o’cloc, it’s three o’clock’. We watch the commercial — it’s got a distinctive song to it — and I turn it up real loud, and it interrupts work just about completely. Then we get up and take a walk and get some drinks. I usually get a cup of coffee at 7-Eleven.
“Anyway, I arrived in Narita Airport at three-oh-two. I quickly bought a Lemon Tea and took a picture of it in front of a clock. Then I just kept taking pictures of drinks. Nothing else — just drinks.”
“Huh.”
“And everyone on my Instagram keeps asking — ‘is that all you’re doing over there?’ Like, ‘You went halfway around the world just to drink sodas?’”
“Huh.”
“Like, they think that I only exist when I’m posting on social media.”
“Huh. Hey, why don’t you drink alcohol?”
“I think it’s stupid,” I said.
A couple boys in satin jackets yelled to us as we walked by a little park.
“American?” one boy yelled.
“Yeah,” I said.
He held up his hands in two pistol shapes. He made a couple gun sounds.
“Ban ban ban!!”
I gave him a tiny military salute.
“You know what Borges story I maybe like the most?” She asked. “The one about the man who dies in a labyrinth.”
“‘Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth’?”
“Congratulations, you know the name of the story. I know it too.”
“Lord! Sorry.”
She blinked. She resumed.
“I read it in Spanish. The man is afraid of revenge. He is afraid that a person he wronged will kill him. So he builds and lives in a labyrinth. He can’t even be comfortable in there. Can you buy me cigarettes?”
“What? That’s illegal.”
“You let your friend pour me a drink.”
“Hey, he didn’t know it was illegal, and I was in the bathroom.”
“Does your friend not expect you to be hanging out with a college freshman?”
“Heck, I don’t know what anyone expects of me.”
“So you’re not going to buy me cigarettes?”
“No,” I said. “I mean, uh, have you smoked them before?”
“No,” she said.
“Then that’s it. I’m not buying you cigarettes now.”
“Well, that’s shit. I don’t care. I didn’t want to smoke, really, anyway.”
“So Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari dies in his labyrinth. Someone kills him in there.”
“Or does he die of natural causes?”
“If he dies of natural causes, then someone did kill him — he killed himself, by building his labyrinth.”
She gripped my hand. She sniffed. She was allergic to something in Osaka. She lifted her hand and my hand with it. She wiped her eye with the back of her own hand. We passed by another takoyaki stand. Hot loud smelly smoke billowed out of the sales window. She sniffed again. She wiped her eye again.
“He builds a labyrinth to protect himself from the past. And then he dies in it. It is a lovely metaphor.”
“Lovely? You got a morbid idea of lovely.”
“Yes, I often consider myself morbid,” she said. “Do you remember the story of the man who wrote the Quixote?”
“Ah, yes, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’.”
“Again, yes, you know the name; I get it.”
“I know you get it. This time it was a joke.”
She shook her head.
“Sometimes I don’t appreciate your jokes.”
“Me, neither.”
“Then don’t make them.”
She bought a lightly flavored sports drink from a vending machine. I didn’t photograph it.
“Pierre Menard writes all of the book Don Quixote from zero, word-for-word, while thinking and trying to live a life where he is inspired to write each word, word-for-word, as his own words.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know that story.”
“Can I tell you something?”
She tugged my hand. We stopped walking. We were on the corner by my friend’s bar.
“What?”
“I cried when I read that story.”
“How old were you?”
“I was sixteen. I cried. I fucking cried. You can call me dumb and childish, because I probably didn’t understand why I cried.”
“No, I don’t think it’s dumb at all. It’s a powerful metaphor.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a metaphor or not,” she said.
“What about the story about the two kings and the two labyrinths?” This story is included in its entirety in a footnote on “Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari”.
“Where the king builds a labyrinth and challenges the other king to solve it, and the other king gets lost, and then the other king is embarrassed so he invites the other king to his own labyrinth, and then he abandons himblindfolded in the desert?”
“Yeah. Does it matter if that’s a metaphor or not?”
“No,” she said. “A desert is a labyrinth.”
“A jungle is a labyrinth.”
“We build labyrinths,” she said.
“We build jungles,” I said.
Five months later, in the Notre Dame Basilica in Montréal, Quebec, Canada, indoors and alone on a cold, rainy day, surrounded by hewn stone and loud gold, I’d remember those words inside my head twice each.
“We build labyrinths; we build jungles. We build labyrinths; we build jungles.”
We were in front of the bar.
“Are you going to buy me cigarettes?”
“No.”
She groaned. She squeezed my hand.
“Pleeeease, Daddy!”
“Don’t call me daddy.”
She laughed. It was a strong, husky laugh.
“Alright. Okay.” She jogged up the stairs to the bar.
I threw away my 7up can. I went up the stairs. Some guy was giving the girl a cigarette.
“Are you going to get mad at me if I smoke this, Daddy?”
“Hey, knock it off with that. Somebody’s going to hear you and think I’m some sorta weirdo.”
“Aren’t you some sorta weirdo? We’re both some sorts of weirdos. I had a shot while you were downstairs. The fire shot. It tasted so good.”
“You know, I have a theory about alcohol.”
“What?” She couldn’t hear me.
“I think everyone’s just pretending alcohol tastes good — ”
“ — Yeah, it’s gross — ”
She got a little drunk. She got a lot drunk. My friend turned the lights on. My friend stayed behind to close his bar. My other friend and I and the girl got on the last train. I told my friend I’d see him again the next time I was in Osaka. I have not been back to Osaka since then.
The girl and I went back to the hotel. We had sex. We talked. We had sex in the bathtub. We talked in the bathtub. We had sex in the bed. It was four in the morning. The conversation had grown dark. I’d chosen a fancier hotel than I’d had in Kyoto. It had air-conditioning I could control. We turned it all the way up. We were freezing in there. We were hugging under the blanket to stay warm. The cold spread from the rims of my ears to the dark center of the drums. She told me about her boyfriend who wasn’t really her boyfriend. He’d moved back to Denmark. I told her of my first, second, and third experiences being punched.
The third punch was from my friend Murasaki, who one day asked me to lean forward so she could whisper something in my ear. She punched me hard on the cheekbone instead. She recoiled her hand in pain. Murasaki was schizophrenic, and committed suicide a year later.
The girl told me about her mother and father. She told me about their being happy. She told me about her cat and her dog. She told me about her math class and her Korean history class. She told me she wanted to be an author of fiction. She told me that she’d once brought a Blu-ray of the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” to her friend’s birthday party because her friend wanted to watch “Star Trek” on her own birthday. “I put the Blu-ray disc into the Blu-ray disc player and we watched the entire movie. She was so mad. She was very mad. She asked, many times, ‘Is this an action movie? Unni is this an action movie??’ And I said, ‘Just wait . . . just wait.’”
“What does she think of the movie, now?”
“She’s a faker. The last time I was in Korea she told a boy we went to high school with it was one of her favorite films. I told her, you’re lying, you hated this film when we watched it together. And she said, you’re wrong, unni, I enjoyed it and I didn’t know I was enjoying it.”
“She is building a labyrinth.”
We were silent for a little bit.
I told her of the fourth and fifth punches. She told me that she didn’t know what she was going to do with her life.
She told me that her boyfriend who was not her boyfriend might come back to Kyoto from Denmark after Christmas. I told her I hoped he did.
Check-out was at noon. We had slept less than an hour. We had taken two baths and had sex eight times. We were lying in the middle of the bed at nine in the morning, in a daze. Well, I was in a daze. I hope she was, too. It’d be weird to have been in a daze alone.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “It’s so — I think about him every day. Every time I think about him I remember every time I’ve ever thought about him. I’m going crazy — ”
I held her tight. She had curved her tall body so that her head was on my chest; her feet were on top of my ankles.
“Hey — hey. Look. I’m a lot older than you, okay? Let me tell you. Let me tell you what I think I know. They’re like . . . they’re like books, right? They’re like books on a shelf and you don’t have to read them.”
She sniffed. She sighed. She fell asleep.
I held her for a while. I blacked out. I woke up with air-conditioning-dry eyeballs and sweat-drenched ice-cold skin. She was kissing my neck. We had sex. It was instantly hot under the bed covers. I tugged at the covers until they were un-tucked from the mattress. We had sex for a while. It was cold and slow. It was nice.
The phone on the nightstand rang. I didn’t answer it. Someone knocked on the door. We didn’t answer it.
“We should get up.”
We took a quick shower together. She tied her huge hair up on top of her head. The bun on top of her head was the size of a volleyball.
We didn’t speak in the shower.
I changed into a fresh linen shirt and a fresh pair of shorts. I put on my sneakers. I packed up my suitcase. We left the hotel. We walked to Shin-Osaka Station in the brutal heat.
I purchased a non-reserved bullet ticket. That meant I could get on any train I wanted at any time of the day.
“Do you want to have a cup of coffee?” I asked her.
She did not hesitate. “Of course,” she said.
We went to a Doutor cafe. She got a little ham sandwich and a black iced coffee. I got a cappuccino and a little plastic tray of fruit.
“Didn’t you already have a can of coffee in the hotel? Aren’t you going to be hyper?”
“Nah. I’m used to this.”
“My mother takes me to cafes on Sunday. We go to very nice cafes in Seoul.”
“That’s nice.”
“She takes me to the fanciest cafes, since I was a little girl. And I drink a little coffee and I eat a little cake. I have many memories of cafes,” she said.
“How old were you when you started drinking coffee?”
“I was four years old.”
“Wow, that’s young. You know, in America, we say that if you drink coffee it’ll stunt your growth.”
“What does ‘stunt your growth’ mean?”
This had only happened six times in her acquaintance: suddenly she didn’t know a word. Her accent and pronunciation were so flawless that it barely occurred to me that she might not know some words.
“It means we think if you drink coffee when you’re a kid, you won’t be tall when you grow up.”
“I am a one-hundred-and-seventy-eight centimeters-tall girl,” she said. “So that’s not true.”
“It’s certainly not true, yes. I’m just saying, uh, in America, we don’t usually give kids coffee because of that superstition.”
“Okay.”
She expanded her bendy straw as far as it would go. She curled it in a little pig-tail shape.
She rested her hands flat on the table. She sipped her coffee.
She looked up.
“Hey,” she said.
I looked up.
“Can you tell me about the sixth and seventh punches?”
I took a medium-deep breath. The breath stopped. I stuttered.
“Uh. They’re . . . actually not interesting stories. Seven is like Four, and six is just — just senseless.”
“Okay,” she said. She sipped her coffee.
“Do you — ”
“Tell me about the man who pointed a gun at you.”
I rubbed my dry hands together. I slid my dry right hand into the back of my summer-sweat-wet, air-conditioning-cold hair. I sipped my little cappuccino.
“Okay,” I said.
“Oh . . . okay,” I said, again, more frightened this time.
“other sounds, other loves (another sound, another love)”
(or, “fortunate at least far enough beyond many if not most nightmares”)
(((re-ordered) excerpts from another story, which function here as) a story within “just like hamburger; exactly like hamburger” by tim rogers)
by tim rogers
4.
“I need youse boys to listen to me.”
I was seven years old. My stepmother was from Philadelphia. I am thirty-five years old. My stepmother is my mother.
“Your biological mother is still out there. Youse guys know you have two sisters. Jamie and Mandy. Jamie and Amanda. Jamie is five. Mandy is three. You need to listen to me.”
My then-stepmother lowered her voice.
“Your biological mother popped those girls out. She popped out two girls in two years. She can pop out two more girls. She can keep on popping them out. She’s probably popping them out right now.”
My then-stepmother took a long drag of her cigarette.
“I want youse to listen to me. You’re going to grow up someday. Jamie and Mandy are going to grow up someday. You need to be careful. You need to be very careful. If you aren’t very careful, you might make a little Mongoloid baby.”
I was seven years old; my big brother was nine years old: my then-stepmother / now-mother told us that God will not forgive you if you make a little Mongoloid baby on purpose with your sister.
“If you make a little Mongoloid baby on accident, that’s not your fault.”
My then-stepmother, now-mother told my brother and me that an accidental little Mongoloid baby is a challenge from God.
“Sue?” my brother asked.
“Yes?”
“So if I make a baby with my sister it’s going to be a retard?”
“Yes.”
“What if I make a baby with my cousin?”
“If you make a baby with your cousin, it’ll be a retard.”
“What if I marry someone and I don’t know she’s my cousin?”
“If you marry your cousin, your babies will be Mongoloids.”
“I know — I mean . . . I mean.”
“You need to be very careful.”
“What do you mean be careful?”
“You need to use protection.”
“What’s protection?”
My then-stepmother, now mother took a long sip of her cigarette. She blew the smoke out over her shoulder. She looked from my brother’s eyes to mine.
“You’ll know what protection is.”
My then-stepmother, now-mother’s ultimate advice was to always know who your cousins are.
Always know who your sisters are.
Always use protection.
You’ll know what protection is.
“Sue, why did she have cereal in the refrigerator?” my brother asked.
“Why did who have cereal in the refrigerator?”
“Barbara put our Count Chocula in the refrigerator,” I explained.
My then-stepmother, now-mother tapped ashes into the sea-green circular ashtray with a toothy comby wall across its diameter.
“We don’t do it that way here,” she said. “I don’t do it that way.”
*
I survived until the end of the Facebookless Age without once meeting and capitalizing on an oblivious opportunity to fornicate with one of my sisters and in doing so manufacture an unfortunate child. Facebook came to be; years passed: one of my sisters found me. Soon all of my sisters found me. I am the Facebook-acquaintance of my sisters and their children, who are of age to use Facebook.
In the years between the end of college and my sisters landing upon my Facebook, my primary expressions of socialization transpired in Japan, where I was living. I socialized via rock and roll music — observing it, or (poorly) performing it — and/or via fornicating with Japanese girls and women. Japanese girls and women were not my sisters. I knew my sisters would not be Japanese. The Japanese women’s being not my sisters was far from my mind at the time, a distant infinity-minus-some-integer to their being attractive and enjoying the same goofy music I enjoyed. I’m only mentioning that they were not my sisters, right now, because I’ve been talking about my sisters: Japanese girls and women were not my sisters, because I was not and am not a Japanese boy or man, which is the sort of boy or man who would have a Japanese girl or woman for a sister. Furthermore, Japanese girls never have names like “Amanda”, much as you can spell “Amanda” perfectly using the more-limited-than-English Japanese syllabary.
In the summer of 2005, when I was yet unacquainted with Facebook, or my sisters, I was working at Sony in Tokyo. I wore suits. I lived in a small apartment by myself. My apartment was a three-minute walk from Minami-Senju Station in the old part of Tokyo. Even on long summer days, I got home after sundown. I walked past my building and into the 7-Eleven at the end of the block. I bought a sugar-free electrolyte drink almost every night. I walked back to my building with my shirt unbuttoned, sweating and gulping the drink. When I got back into my apartment, I opened the veranda door. The breeze blew in. The voices from the karaoke bar across the street blew in. The sound of a death-frightened cat blew in. I flipped open my laptop. I did what I still do with email: let it stay open long enough inside the client to mark itself “read”.
One of these sweaty nights, as I peeled my unbutton shirt off of my sticky back, I saw an email from someone named Amanda amid the nonsense and the garbage.
She said she was in Tokyo. She was there with her college friends. They had stayed in Tokyo for a week. They had gone to Osaka and Kyoto for a week, “to see the temples” (I had yet to See The Temples, myself, yet I had heard enough about them to know they were in Kyoto, not Osaka), and then they had come back to Tokyo, where they were staying for a week. Here is the part that interested me most:
“I wasn’t going to do this, though what the hell? I like your writing. I would be lying if I pretended your writing about Japan wasn’t one of my reasons for studying Japanese. I read on your blog that you live in Minami-Senju and that there are backpackers at your supermarket all the time, so naturally I looked up the backpackers’ hostel and it turns out it was cheaper than anywhere else. I shopped at your supermarket for a week and I saw you at 7-Eleven. I wanted to say hi, and I didn’t. I thought about it a lot when I was in Osaka. Now I’m back in Tokyo. I’m here for six more days. If you’re up for meeting some weird girl from Canada, here is my phone’s email address.”
Her phone was a rental cellphone. It had the word “rental” in its far-too-long email address twice.
I sent her a message.
“Hey, hi, it’s Tim. When I was seven years old my mom told me not to talk to girls named Amanda, because I have a sister named Amanda who I’ve never met.”
I stood up. I undid my belt. I was going to take a shower. Before my pants hit the floor, my phone buzzed.
I whipped it open. It was a text from my friend Jeff. It was simple.
“hey wanna chill out like real soon”
I replied: “you know it buddy”
My doorbell rang. I threw a t-shirt on.
Jeff’s bike was parked sideways in front of my door.
“Hey, yeah, uh, sorry, I was just in the neighborhood.”
He lived a block away.
“Come on in, man,” I said.
“Actually, I can’t stay. I was just gonna say — do you want my bike?”
“Oh.”
I looked at the bike. It was green and shiny. It had a fresh light brown leather seat.
“I got the papers here.”
Jeff pulled a little folded rectangular booklet-thing out of his windbreaker’s inside pocket.
“Here you go.”
I took it. It was a little notebook thing with some important somebody’s official seal stamped in red on the inside under a bunch of numbers.
“The cops are going to want to see that like twice a week, dude.”
“Alright.”
“I’ll just put this over there with the other bikes at your building.”
“Cool.”
“Anyway man, I gotta go. Uh, hey, maybe I’ll be back in the fall, huh?”
“Hey, maybe you will.”
“See you, dude.”
He didn’t come back in the fall.
I went inside. My wallet was lying on the nearest right-hand corner of the coffee table, adjacent to my cellular phone. I picked it up. I put the bicycle papers in there. I went outside. I looked at the bike. I poked its seat with my finger. It was a good softness. It was a wide seat. I considered how it’d make my prostate feel.
My front door was fifteen feet away from the bike parking lot. I’d left my front door wide open. I walked back to the door. I kicked my sandals off in the entryway. The living room door was open. My cellular phone vibrated on the pine coffee table.
I picked it up. It was a text.
“Hi! It’s Amanda. I guarantee I am not your sister. Do you want to meet at the 7-Eleven? I can be there in two minutes.”
I told her I’d be there in five.
I put my sandals on. I took a little walk. I purchased a liter of milk at the 7-Eleven. I stood outside the 7-Eleven. It was dark and hot. I was wearing sandals and shorts and a loose short-sleeve button-up shirt. The humidity was blue with moon-haze. The liveliness of karaoke bars whose windows were open was on the breeze.
A girl stood in front of me.
“Hey! Hi! I’m Amanda.”
“Are you sure you’re not my sister?”
She giggled. She shrugged. She gestured both palms to heaven.
“You tell me!”
We both laughed. This was funny because she and I were obviously different races.
“Do you know the Saizeriya by the station?” she asked me.
“Are you heckin’ kidding me? Of course I do.”
“Yeah — yeah, I know. You, uh, you write about you and your friends eating there all the time. Uh, were you hungry at all?”
“Well I was gonna drink this milk.”
“We could go to the Saizeriya.”
“Yeah, let’s go to the Saizeriya.”
We walked down the wide ghost town street. The street dipped down into a tunnel under a freight train yard. We walked up the rusty electric-blue-painted staircase structure. We crossed a bridge with high chain-link fences on its sides.
“Is it true this freight yard is built over a samurai burial ground?” Amanda asked.
“Well, yeah,” I started to say.
“I mean, I know you said it was in a post on your blog, though like, I wasn’t sure.”
“Oh, well, if it is or isn’t, I don’t know, so like, when I say ‘yeah’, I mean, like, that’s what my friend told me, and she’s lived here forever.”
“Is she just your friend or is she your girlfriend or what?”
“She’s just my friend,” I said.
“Oh, cool.”
Amanda was wearing a little dark flower-printed dress. She had on pink flip-flops and red glasses and short curly hair and red lipstick. She had a little clutch in her hands. She held it behind her back.
“How soon before this town looks like everywhere else in Tokyo?”
“Oh, you mean those condos?”
“They call them ‘manshon’, right? Mansions?”
“Yeah.”
“Look at ’em go, over there.”
In the distance, on the other side of the freight yard, urbanity was growing. Atop the many towers in progress were construction cranes. None of the cranes were moving. Little orange lights inside the girders twinkled. A loud train braked on one side of the bridge, headed for the other. I drank some milk. She told me about The Temples.
We sat in Saizeriya. She ordered a focaccia and a drink bar. I ordered a green salad and a drink bar. We drank bad cappuccinos. She told me about Osaka. She told me about the games she’d bought in Akihabara.
“Do you really have a sister named Amanda?”
“I mean, what is a sister, anyway?”
“Heck if I know. I got brothers.”
“Are you the youngest of three children?”
“Y-yeah. How did you know?”
I shrugged. “I guessed.”
“That’s a good guess.”
“I mean, I have to say, I’m usually right. I sort of want to figure out why I’m usually right.”
“Maybe you’re picking up on something.”
“I don’t know.”
“So you have a sister named Amanda?”
“I mean, I never met her. Well, just once. I was four years old. Her sister ate my Return of the Jedi cookies.”
“She has a sister? Is her sister your sister?”
“Yeah, she is.”
“How old was she?”
“She was two.”
“What kind of cookies were they?”
“They were these weird square chocolate Pepperidge Farm cookies.”
“Huh.”
“Wait, so, whose kids were they?”
“They were my dad’s ex-wife’s kids, and, uh.”
“And your dad is remarried?”
“Yeah, I mean, he’s married to my mom. The only mom I know, I mean.”
“Was this like, was she jealous of your biological mom wanting to hang out with you?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. You know, I remember asking her how old she was on my birthday that year. And she said, ‘I’m twenty-five’. That’s as old as I am now. And, uh, now that I think about it: I was four. June seventh, nineteen-eighty-three. She would have been twenty-nine that year. So she was twenty-eight. She lied to a four-year-old about her age.”
“You remember your fourth birthday?”
“Well, yeah.”
“I don’t even remember my tenth birthday. Hey, so do you literally think of your sister every time you meet a girl named Amanda?”
“I don’t meet too many girls named Amanda — and, well, yeah.”
“That’s so weird! I mean, since you never really totally met her and all.”
“It’s not that weird, it’s, uh.”
I told her about my mom’s warning.
“No way! Who would say that to a child?”
“Yeah, seriously. I mean, I Googled it and like, you know, apparently it’s all just superstition. Like, all those British royals are inbred, they say, and they all live to be like 95.”
“You sat around on Google thinking about banging your sister?”
“Well, that wasn’t it — I was, uh, I was talking to someone about something.”
We finished our cappuccinos. We paid for our food.
“Can you show me where you live?”
“Yeah.”
We stepped down off the blue bridge. We walked to the end of the block. We turned a corner.
“That’s my house right there.”
“Oh, cool.”
The light changed from red to green.
“Yeah, that’s it.”
She grabbed my hand.
“Can I use your bathroom?”
We went into my house. She used my bathroom. I turned on the TV. Baseball was on TV.
She sat down next to me on my sofa. She put her head on my shoulder. I rolled my head to look her in the eye. We made out a little bit.
We were having sex a half an hour later. I was on top for a while. Then she got up on top. Then we were doing it one of the other ways. We were doing it on my futon on the floor.
“Shit, my knees hurt,” she said. “Hey, get on your back.”
She got on top again. She planted her feet flat on the futon.
“You sleep on this thing every night?”
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t you get a bed?”
“This is better for your back.”
We were silent for a bit. The window was open. The curtains were fluttering. It was late. The sound of the karaoke bar floated in.
“I’m gonna cum,” she said. “Oh god; oh god yeah; oh fuck yeah.”
She orgasmed. She seemed to have a very good time doing so. Her lips curled. She was pretty. It was wonderful to look at her, so wet with sweat, on that hot and breezy night. She was motionless, eyes closed, squatted on top of me, for thirty silent seconds.
She opened her eyes. She looked me in the eye.
“Hey, what’s your mother’s name?”
“My biological mother?”
“Yes.”
She started grinding again.
“It’s . . . uh. It’s Barbara.”
She stopped.
“Oh my god. Oh shit.”
“What? What?”
“That’s my mom’s name, too!”
She laughed. I laughed.
“What, really?”
“Yeah!”
She laughed. I laughed, too. She stopped laughing.
She punched me in the face harder than anyone has ever punched me in the face.
I can still hear the exact sound I made.
“Uough!”
She slapped her hand down on my chest.
“Ha, ha, ha! Oh shit — oh my god I’m sorry! Did I hurt you? I thought you’d see it coming!”
“Oh wow I sure as heck didn’t — ”
“Oh fuck, you’re bleeding, your lip is bleeding — ”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Aw, god damn it, I’m not going to kiss you if you’re bleeding.”
“Hey, I don’t blame you — ”
“Ah, shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t think I was actually gonna — ”
“It’s alright — it’s alright.”
“Are you gonna cum or what?”
“Yeah, I mean, I can.”
“Just fuckin’ do it, man.”
I did.
I rinsed my mouth with peroxide. The inside of my lip had slammed against my upper teeth.
She and I slept on that futon for a couple of hours. We woke up. We had sex again.
“What time is it?”
“It’s like 4am,” I said.
“I should go. Hey, do you wanna walk me home?”
“Sure.”
We stopped at the 7-Eleven. It was freezing with air conditioning in there. My sandals chilled instantly. She bought a tall can of beer. I bought a liter of milk. We stood outside the convenient store amongst a couple of bums. I drank some milk. She drank some beer.
“This was great,” she said. “This is like the best thing I ever did.”
“Wow, really?”
“Yeah, totally, that was — tonight was really nice. I really mean it. Wow.”
“Well, if you want to hang out again in your last six days — ”
“Hey, I might come back. I might teach English. Let’s hang out if I teach English, okay?”
“Yeah, hey, sure.”
She rounded the corner. I went home. I soaked a couple of cotton balls in peroxide. I stuffed them under my lip. It burned. I breathed nice and slow. The curtains fluttered. I fell asleep on the sofa with the television on and quiet, with my hands behind my head. I woke up. I put on a suit. I went to work.
She came back six months later, to teach English. She was living up in Tsukuba. She sent me an email. She said she had a boyfriend in Tsukuba. She said he was an English teacher. She said he was a “sweet fellow” who was terrible at sex. She asked, and I quote, if I would like to be “an accomplice in an affair”. I said that creeped me out a little bit. She said, “I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if he found out.”
I said, okay.
She took the Tsukuba Express line to Minami-Senju Station. She sent me a text.
“I’m in front of the station. Don’t scroll down this message until you see me.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I’m not wearing any panties.”
We bought some bread-things at the supermarket next to the backpacking hostel where she’d stayed. She’d gained about thirty pounds. She was very pretty.
“Just fuck me like you’re trying to kill me!”
“Oh . . . sure.”
“Hit me!” she said. “Just fucking hit me!”
“Okay.”
I couldn’t do it.
“Hit me, you faggot!”
I slapped her in the face.
“No, no, use your fist!”
I couldn’t do it.
She got on top.
“Come on. It’s easy.”
She grabbed my fist. She picked it up. She carried it to her cheek.
“Aim for right here.”
I hit her. I don’t think I hit her hard enough.
It was boiling hot in my room. She was covered in my sweat and her own sweat. Tomorrow’s forecast was rain. I’d have to wait to hang out the futon.
We walked to the station with umbrellas. She told me, “That was good.” Her breath was visible. She gave me a hug. She was soft and pleasant-smelling and bundled in a puffy coat. She never contacted me again.
I told a beautiful girl about this in an ice-cold air-conditioned hotel room in Osaka, Japan on the night of 13 July 2015.
“You didn’t ask her to punch you?”
“No.”
“Why did she do it, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“She didn’t warn you?”
“She just did it.”
“What a bitch.”
“‘We hurt the ones we love,’” I said.
“You think she loved you?”
“Something like that. We hurt the ones we love, and some of us love everyone.”
“‘Socrates is a man,’” the girl said.
2.
Mister Salmon was a Vietnam veteran. He’d been a marine. He was old and he had marine hair. He had double-bridged glasses. He wore a tie with a short-sleeved white shirt. He was white and wrinkly.
Mister Salmon gave us Sharpies. He told us to draw black circles on one end of a long strip of paper. We dipped the ends of the paper without the circle into a beaker of water. We waited. The water infected the paper. The black circle ran. My partner was a boy named Lester. Lester was black. I was white (I still am).
“Whoa,” Lester said. “Yo, why it do that?”
The black ink ran down the paper. It was becoming a rainbow. The black ink was splitting into every color it contained.
“Mister Salmon, why it do that?”
“Because black is beautiful, baby,” Mister Salmon said. Mister Salmon’s wife was black. None of us would know that until we were in high school.
Mister Salmon went to tend to another pair of partners.
Lester shook his head. He muttered. “Bitch,” he said.
The bell rang. I went to home economics class. Lester was also in my home economics class. He walked ten feet to my left.
We were sewing pillows in home economics class. The pillows were from packaged kits. The purpose of the assignment was to learn how to use a sewing machine, how to sew by hand, and how to embroider. My pillow was a whale. I had to sew three little fish onto the front of the whale. One was yellow; one was red; one was blue. I had to embroider around the perimeter of each fish. I was behind on my work. I wasn’t working on it at home. I would rather read books. I was reading “The Three Musketeers”. We got to home economics class. Mrs. Worthy was standing in the back of the classroom.
“Just, everyone, don’t get your sewing supplies. Please sit at your desks. Please sit at your desks; we have a special presentation today.”
The bell rang. Mrs. Worthy took attendance. She instructed everyone to rise. She led us out of the room. We walked down the hall. We rounded a corner. We entered a small room with no windows, tables, or chairs. Its ceiling felt low.
“Please be seated on the floor.”
A cherubic woman entered. She was carrying a duffel bag. She put the duffel bag on the floor. She removed a cubical instrument. She removed a plastic wand of some apparent electronics.
“I’d like to introduce Cathy,” Mrs. Worthy said. “She’s a very special friend of mine. She’s going to talk to us today about something important.”
Cathy pressed the plastic wand to her throat. She began to move her mouth. A horrible sound crawled out of the tiny speaker. It was a human voice beneath thousands of pounds of radio static. It sounded like a computer underwater. The voice was oceans and generations away from the comfort of our ears. It was hard to listen to. Empathy surged into my heart. I was, at this time, mute. For a period of three years, which would continue for three more years, putting together a sentence in my head and then speaking it evoked a shrill imagination of difficulty. At age thirteen, I had read Helen Keller’s autobiography, and I had cried. Here was a woman with an electronic wand against her chubby throat, making awful copies of words fall out of a speaker who by its design was born broken.
“My name is Cathy,” she said. “I have no throat.”
The students were silent as stones.
“I had cancer in my throat,” Cathy explained. She let five or ten seconds pass between sentences. “Doctors had to perform surgery.”
The students were quiet.
“They removed most of my larynx.”
I looked at Lester’s big, shiny eyes.
“I have been unable to speak for many years.”
I looked at Mrs. Worthy. She was staring at Cathy.
“Please ask me whatever questions you have.”
A girl raised her hand.
“Yes, you there.”
“Why did they have to remove your trachea?”
“I had cancer,” Cathy replied.
“Why did you get cancer?”
“I smoked,” Cathy said.
No more questions came.
“I want to show you all something.”
Mrs. Worthy stepped away from the wall. She was silent. She retrieved a Tupperware container from Cathy’s bag. In it were many short red plastic coffee stirs.
“Mrs. Worthy is going to give you each one of these — ”
Mrs. Worthy was already handing them to us.
“ — here’s what I want you to do.”
Cathy put a little straw in her mouth. She pinched her nose with the fingers of her other hand. Her other hand was still holding her microphone-wand.
The voice crackled and echoed out of the tiny speaker like ancient history itself.
“Just pinch your nose, and breathe in, and out. Keep doing it. Yes, do it like that. I’ll tell you when to stop. Keep going.”
I did as Cathy instructed. Now her tiny demon voice instructed us to breathe faster.
“In, out, in, out, in, out, in out, in out, in out, in-out, in-out, in-out, in-out in-out in-out-in-out inoutinoutinout . . .”
Cathy let the microphone down.
“Stop,” she said, in a loud, clear voice.
We all stopped.
“That’s what it feels like to have emphysema.”
Now Cathy removed a thin rectangular piece of hard clear plastic from her duffel bag. She passed it to a student on the right.
“Pass that around. That’s a healthy lung,” Cathy said.
She removed another thin rectangular piece of hard clear plastic from her duffel bag. She passed it to a student on the left.
“Pass that around. That’s a lung with emphysema.”
The healthy lung at the emphysema lung arrived in my hands at the same time. The healthy lung was pink. It looked sticky inside that hard shell of solid clear plastic. The emphysema lung was a ghost of the healthy lung. The center of it was an empty bubble with a black rim. The emphysema lung was more space than lung. It was more nonexistence than existence.
A dull click rumbled out of the central heating vent.
“Let me see,” Lester said. I handed him the two lung slices. He looked at them.
Lester raised his hand.
Mrs. Worthy responded with immediacy. “What is it, Lester?”
“So you was playin’ us?”
“Come again?”
“Cathy here was just clownin’ us?”
“Lester, that’s enough.”
Our next class was Mrs. Nichols’ American history. Mrs. Nichols’ had assigned us Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech. Every student’s assignment was to recite that speech in front of the class. The recitations took three days.
It wasn’t even almost Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Lester was first on that day.
“Get up here. Get up here, come on.”
Mrs. Nichols was eighty-eight years old. She had Coke bottle glasses and steel wool for hair. Her right forearm was as wide as a man’s thigh. Arthritis had inflated her arm to that size. Her handwriting was horrible. She was old and loud and rude.
“Get up here, you idjit, come on.”
Lester got up there.
“I, uh, man, shoot, I don’t know. Man, I don’t know.”
“I have a dream! I have a dream — say it, you more-an!”
“‘I have a dream,’ Lester said, and then he stopped.
“Say it, you idjit! Say about the content of their character! Give us some of it! Come on, ya ignoramus.”
I didn’t have to recite the speech. I was mute. Mrs. Nichols didn’t remember that I was mute. She called on me four times. She yelled at me four times. I broke out in a cold sweat. A cute blonde white girl named Jamie raised her hand.
“What is it, sweetheart?”
“He can’t talk, Mrs. Nichols.”
“Moran,” she said. “Well I’ll be. Well — mo-ran.”
Class ended. I threw my bag over my shoulder. I winced. My shoulder hurt. The pain was deep. It shot up into my jaw through my neck. I stopped. I took my backpack off. I put it on my left shoulder. The pain was not as bad. I looked ahead. Jamie and her three friends were headed toward the central hub of the school. Their bags hung from their right shoulders.
Lester walked past me. His backpack hung from his right shoulder.
I slipped my right arm through the right strap. I centered the backpack on both shoulders. The pain was gone.
Some papers fell out of Lester’s book. They flew away from each other. They scattered on the floor. I bent over. I picked up a paper that had fallen near my foot. I picked up another paper near that paper. My backpack balanced on the center of my back. All of my books were in my backpack. I was too fat and too slow to make any trips to my locker during the day. I stood back up. The backpack was heavy. I almost fell over backward as I stood up.
I presented the papers to Lester. Lester was flustered. He narrowed his big eyes at me. He snatched the papers out of my hand.
“Retard,” he said. Then he looked down. My hands were on my backpack straps. Lester’s friend Tyrone walked up beside Lester. He slowed down.
“Yo Tyrone check out this white girl here,” Lester said. “Check this bitch out.” Lester threw his left arm through his other backpack strap. He squeezed his American History textbook under his upper arm. He looped his thumbs under the backpack straps. He jutted his teeth out over his bottom lip. He mocked a few standing prances.
“Hah hah,” Tyrone said.
Lester’s left arm slipped out of the backpack strap. Lester fist-bumped Tyrone. Lester looked back at me. I could feel my chest fat compressing under the backpack straps. I tightened my grip near my shoulders on the straps. I pressed the inside of my fists against the outside of my chest.
“Damn look at this bitch’s little faggot titties,” Lester said. He lashed out a bony hand. He squeezed my right breast.
I punched him in the face. We’d punched through boards in tae kwon do classes. Master Duncan Williams had told us to punch the area behind the board, not the board itself.
Lester’s head snapped back. His left leg left the ground. His right leg twisted. He lost his balance over the outside of his right high-top sneaker. His backpack hung like a pendulum. He fell to the side. The top of his head fell into the wall. He rolled over in air and landed on his face.
My hand hurt. I quickened my pace. I began to walk away. Tyrone called after me.
“Yo, yo, hey.”
Tyrone called in another direction.
“Yo, hey, dude, naw, dude — ”
Now Tyrone called in my direction again.
“Dude, watch it!”
Lester punched me in the side of the head. The other side of my head collided with the brick wall. I fell to one knee. I got up. My glasses fell off. Lester was in front of me. His mouth was bleeding. He spit blood into my face. He punched me in the right eye. He turned around. He ran. I was bleeding. I went to the nurse’s office. The nurse didn’t ask any questions. She put ice on my face.
Lester wasn’t in our next class.
“Where’s Lester?” Natasha asked.
“Homeboy’s gyppin’,” Tyrone said.
I went home. My parents were upset. They called the school.
“Someone hit my kid!” my mother said. My mother stayed on the phone for a half an hour. No one knew who had hit her kid. No one knew of any other kids who said they had hit any other kids that day.
I put on fancy clothes. I buttoned up my shirt. The buttons made little bowties out of the fabric. I was so fat. My face was huge and red and black and blue. My dad put on a suit. My mom put on a sweater. My big brother put on a suit. My little brother was six. We got in my dad’s Dodge Ram van. We drove to the Joan of Arc cathedral in Indianapolis, Indiana. My family watched my Catholic confirmation. I was confirmed William Timothy Erasmus Rogers Junior, under the name of Saint Elmo, patron saint of sailors and explorers. Later I would travel the world, and even then I loved looking at photographs and drawings of boats.
That’s the story of how I ended up at and then endured a Catholic confirmation ceremony with a hot, hard, swollen face, blurry vision, and ringing ears.
7.
Very much like 4., except her name wasn’t Amanda, and it was at her house, not mine. Also, I didn’t punch her. She punched me again, later, in anger. I can’t consider it a separate punch.
3.
My friend Murasaki and I spent a day in the countryside. We were visiting a mental hospital where her friend lived. He was a piano virtuoso. She got off the train at Fujimino Station. I got off the train with her. I walked her up to the turnstile. I told her I was going to go get back on the train and I’d see her later. She pointed off in a direction. She said, “Oh, whoa, look at that. Hey, listen — ” She made a quick gesture for me to lean forward. I fell right for it. I leaned forward. She punched me right in the ear. The majority of the pain resulted from the pinch of my ear between the knuckles and the arm of my glasses. Murasaki jumped backward. She jumped up on her tiptoes three, four, five times. She doubled over. She slapped her fingertips into her knees. “Boom!” she yelled. “Aw, man, I got you! Fuckin’ owned!” She killed herself two weeks later. I don’t blame her and I’m no longer angry at her specifically, though I do think about her at least fifteen times a day, fourteen years later. Whether she meant to or not, when she killed herself, she ruined my life in the largest possible version of that only small way a person can ruin another person’s life.
6.
A man at a rock show was throwing elbows around. I pushed him away from me. He turned around and slammed me in the face. I kicked him in the balls. He threw up.
5.
The old man twenty feet to my left on the other side of the narrow Tokyo backstreet made himself known to me.
He made a quiet noise in his throat.
He made a much louder noise in his throat.
He sucked air and saliva through his front teeth. This rattled his tongue against his teeth.
I looked over in his direction. He was already looking at me.
His lips were wrestling one another. The left and right sides of his top lip were racing toward the bottoms of his shoes.
“Good evening,” I said.
He sucked his teeth again.
I was quiet. I continued stepping forward in silence. We passed a convenience store. The lights of the convenience store passed behind us. We crossed into the dark part of the street. This was where people lived. Wet laundry hung on clotheslines on second-story balconies. Dim light bulbs hung atop tall poles. Orange or blue pools of warm or cold light soaked the pavement every thirty steps. Half a moon hung in the sky. It was cold. I saw my breath.
The old man twenty feet to my left fumbled for a cigarette. He fumbled for a lighter. He lit the cigarette. He put away the lighter. He puffed on the cigarette. I heard his papery lips pop as he took the cigarette out of his mouth. His lips made wet snaps as he blew smoke.
He was quiet. I heard him suck his teeth and tongue again. I looked over at him. He was looking at me. I looked away.
I stepped into a thin pool of orange light.
The old man slammed his shoulder into mine.
“Hey!” I said. “Hey!”
He had already looked away from me. He drifted twenty feet to my left.
He puffed his cigarette. He smacked his lips. He sucked his tongue.
“Can I help you with something?” I said.
“Kuni e kaere”, he said, before I could finish my sentence.
That’s Japanese for “Go back to your country”. I left it in Japanese in the previous paragraph because his tone of voice indicated that he believed I could not understand him, despite my having spoken Japanese to him. He did not want me to be able to understand him.
“Sure,” I said. “Can you buy me a plane ticket?”
“Kuni e kaere”, he said, again.
He puffed. He smacked his lips. He sucked his teeth. He clicked his tongue.
He slammed his shoulder into me.
“Alright now,” I said to the guy. He was already ignoring me. “Hey — hey, don’t do that, alright?”
We had not stopped walking along. He drifted twenty feet to my left. I drifted over to him.
“Look at me,” I said. “Hey, look at me. Look, man, I don’t know what your problem is. Just, man, you need to chill out, man.”
“Nihongo shabetten ja nee,” he said.
That means “Don’t speak Japanese to me”. This was not the first time a drunk old man in the street had used this exact phrase to me. The first time, it had been a very old man telling me that My People ruined His Country during The Big War. I spoke a sincere apology. This man was old enough to verbally acknowledge that the sincerest Japanese apologies are premium forms of passive aggression. So he replied: “Don’t speak Japanese to me”.
The man on that dark night didn’t say anything. I was walking two feet to his right. I tried to say something else.
“Sir, whatever it is people of my race or nationality have done to offend you, I am sorry.”
“Don’t speak Japanese to me,” he said. He sucked his teeth. Silence transpired. “I hope you die of AIDS you fucking faggot,” he said.
We walked on in silence.
I tapped him on the shoulder.
“Excuse me, sir? Could I ask you for a cigarette?”
He went on smoking his cigarette.
“Just one cigarette? Please. Please?”
He quickened his pace. I caught up.
“Can I just have a cigarette? Can you please spare one cigarette? Sir, my dog urinated on my smokes — ”
The man dashed forward and to the right. He drifted to the other side of the street. I slid up beside him. I stepped in front of him. I walked backward. I looked him in the eye. He looked down.
“Just one cigarette! Please! Just give me one cigarette and I promise I will leave you alone for the rest of your life!”
He looked me in the forehead.
“I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” he said.
“Your wife hates you,” I said.
“Mother fucker,” he said. He put his hand on my shoulder. He pushed me away. I almost stumbled. I had still been walking backward.
He crossed to the other side of the street. I jogged over. I walked beside him. I held up two fingers. I pantomimed smoking a cigarette. I held up one finger.
He dug in his pocket. He dug out a pack of cigarettes. He took out one cigarette. He held it out. I took it. I pantomimed a lighter. The man sighed. He took a lighter out of his pocket. He handed it to me. I jogged forward a step. I walked backward in front of him.
“Hey,” I said, in a louder voice than either of us had yet used. He looked me in the eye. I snapped the cigarette in half. Tiny tobacco shavings fell and scattered in the wind. I threw the halves of the cigarette over my shoulders.
“Smoking is bad for you,” I said.
I threw his lighter as hard as I could over his head and into the dark behind him.
He stopped in place. I stopped in place.
“You’ll get emphysema,” I said. “Then every breath you take will feel like you’re sucking air through a coffee stir while pinching your nose shut.”
The man blinked.
“Furthermore, smoking a cigarette while walking is also an act subject to a fine in Arakawa Ward — ”
He swung a violent punch at me. I stepped backward. His punch caught the edge of my jawbone. He swung around in half a circle. He fell onto his knee. He looked up at me.
Another night in the near future from this one, a similar incident would happen. That second time, the man’s punch would miss by a narrow margin. The man would punch again. I would lash out my hands at his chest. He would stumble backward with the push; he would fall over and groan.
This time, the man looked up at me.
“Do you still hate me?” I said.
He didn’t say anything.
“Never mind then,” I said. I walked home.
1.
Eric Barber was The Devil. It was Halloween, 1990. It was humid and cold.
My parents let me and my brother go out on our own. My brother was thirteen and we lived on-post at Fort Meade, Maryland.
I wore the same costume I’d worn the year before: a rubber werewolf mask with costume fur sideburns and blood-red outlines around the eyes and lips. The ears were elfish. Eric Barber’s costume was a red silk cape and a white bodysuit and a red devil mask. He carried a flimsy plastic pitchfork. My brother was Freddy Krueger. He’d bought the official Freddy Krueger claw-hand at Spencer’s Gifts at the Glen Burnie Mall and the official Freddy Krueger rubber mask at the Spencer’s Gifts at the Annapolis Mall. My only friend, Jacob, was a hobo. He wore the clothes he wore to school. He carried a bag on a stick. Our friend Jackie was a witch.
To this day I’m not sure where Eric Barber lived or what rank his dad was. He was a skinny kid an inch taller than me. His facial features and Hitler-youth haircut were eerily identical to those of Marty Butters, a kid in my second-grade class at another elementary school, in Kansas. Eric Barber had braces. Marty Butters had had nasal spray; no one had wanted to sit next to him at lunch because he carried a tiny mirror and a Q-tip in his lunchbox, for pushing around his nasal congestion.
I met Eric Barber in a school on a military base. We were in the same grade. My family had moved in six weeks into the school year. On our previous base, I would have been in middle school. On Fort Meade, sixth grade was still elementary school. The first day I showed up in class, I had big plastic double-bridged glasses on. They looked like wood shop goggles. Eric Barber called me a “nerd” and kicked the backs of my shoes (Reeboks) in line for lunch.
He did this every day. Eventually the plastic inside the heel of my right shoe cracked.
On the playground I met a kid named Jacob. I sat on a bench on the other side of the basketball court fence. Jacob sat with me. He dribbled a kickball and talked about his pet wolf. Eric Barber and his two friends played basketball. Sometimes he threw the ball against the fence to scare me. I didn’t react. Maybe he hated me because I didn’t react. Jacob discussed how his wolf was “almost not a puppy anymore”. He said that one day he would sic it on Eric Barber for me. A girl named Jackie, who lived next door to me, eventually started sitting with us. She was taller than us. She wore a striped T-shirt. She had huge curly blonde hair and big round granny glasses. She was pretty. I liked her. Eric Barber called me her “girlfriend” once and she told him to blow it out his butt. He told her, “Fuck you”, and then he never acknowledged her again. One day, while Jackie was gone and Jacob was dribbling a kickball and talking about his wolf — whose name was “Shadow” — Eric Barber came by and dribbled the basketball against the top of my head.
“Hey,” Jacob said. Jacob stood up.
“Oh, I’m sorry! Did I hurt your little girlfriend?”
“Fuck you, Barber,” Jacob said.
“You pussy,” Eric Barber said. “You know this fuckin liar doesn’t have a wolf, right?”
I wonder if Jacob had a wolf. He said his dad had gotten it in Alaska.
That Halloween Jacob summoned Eric Barber by virtue of his being pathetic. I couldn’t see a thing: I’d left my glasses at home. They wouldn’t fit over or under my mask.
“I hope we don’t see Eric Barber,” Jacob said. We just so happened to be walking through the woods at this time. My backyard was twenty feet from the forest. Down the wooded hill, there was a path. We could follow the path to a long straight narrow street of officer housing. We got candy from a couple houses. My brother went ahead with some of his middle school friends.
“Hey, Rogers.”
I wheeled around.
“Shit, it’s Barber,” Jacob said.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” Jackie said.
“He saw us,” I said.
Eric Barber strode over to us in his devil costume.
“Werewolf, huh?”
He stabbed his plastic pitchfork at my little orange jack-o-lantern candy bucket. The prongs ripped the handle from my hand. The candy scattered. I bent over to pick up the bucket. Eric Barber kicked me in the crotch from behind my back while I was bent over.
Nobody said anything. It was cold and humid and dark. We were at the end of the road; each house on either side of the street had its lights off. Maybe they were out chaperoning their own trick-or-treating children.
“Asshole,” Eric Barber said. He turned around. He and his two friends walked away. I finished picking up my candy.
A boy named Carl moved in next door. He was in the fourth grade. He played videogames. He loved Final Fantasy. Jackie moved away. Jacob moved away. The afternoon skies grayed. Rainless black clouds happened every day. It was cold enough to wear a coat. My old coat didn’t fit me: I’d become too fat. My dad gave me an old flight jacket. It was green. It had a lot of pockets. Some of the pockets had tobacco shavings in it. It was a rugged, sweltering-hot jacket. It came down to my knees. The flight jacket had a huge fluffy white fur collar.
Eric Barber and his friends walked home from the front entrance of the school. Carl and I left from the rear entrance. One day, Eric Barber and his friends exited the rear exit. Eric Barber didn’t say a word. He approached as fast as he could. He probably wanted to pour the entire miniature carton of milk onto my fur collar. He only managed to pour half of it before I quickened my step.
“Run, faggot!”
He high-fived his friends.
“Burn in hell, asshole!” he called after me. Twenty-five years later, I consider this an interesting choice of words for an eleven-year-old to yell at a child that was running away from his bullying.
By late December, the fragments of plastic in the heels of my Reeboks had penetrated the canvas. By mid-January, the plastic shards had cut through one pair of socks and broke the skin on my Achilles tendon.
One day at lunch, Eric Barber’s friend got up and took my chocolate pudding cup. I saw him take it. He made no effort to hide it. He sat back next to Eric Barber. Eric Barber’s other friend beheld the cup and whisper-yelled, “Nice!”
“Silence!” a teacher yelled. Another teacher turned out the lights in the lunch room.
One of the gym teachers approached Eric Barber’s friend.
“Come with me.”
She took him up to the stage at the front of the lunchroom. The lunchroom was also the gymnasium. He stood up there with the other kids who had made a sound. The lights stayed off for sixty seconds. The lights came back on.
Eric Barber didn’t kick my shoes on the way back to the classroom. When I went out to my locker at the end of the day, I saw he’d emptied the pudding cup into a little pile on the floor of my locker.
Our lockers didn’t have locks.
The next day, Eric Barber sat next to me at lunch. He reached into my lunch bag. He took out my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He threw it over the table, over the next table. It hit the wall and fell on the floor. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t do anything. I hated him more then than I had ever felt anything about anything. This was my true awakening to strong opinions about a person. My mom may have made me mad before, when she told me I couldn’t play videogames, or whatever; my brother sometimes expressed entitlement to the Nintendo. I always let him have it. This was different. It was so new and so strong. One day one of Eric Barber’s friends dared him to lick a nine-volt battery. Eric Barber did it and screamed, “Dude!” In privacy, I tried it. It was a peculiar sensation. I can remember it today. I can also remember the chaos storm of sensations and emotions I felt that day, the first day I actively felt hatred for another person.
I was an idiot, then, even more than I am now: my lunch also included Nabisco crackers and a packet of Arby’s Horsey Sauce. That’s a horseradish-like sauce. Arby’s has big packets. My mom used to grab a lot of extras when she brought me curly fries.
Well, Eric Barber took my Horsey Sauce packet. That afternoon, when I left class, it was all over the fur of my coat hood. The coat smelled like horseradish forever, until I stopped wearing it because it was “dumb”. It wasn’t dumb. What a great jacket. I’d wear it right now, if I could. It’d fit me. I wonder where it is.
A blizzard happened on Valentine’s Day. They school called a half day. They closed the rear entrance. They told all students they had to exit the front entrance. Rather than walk through the frozen woods, Carl and I opted to walk the alternate route home. It was longer, though it took us down sidewalks along roads.
We stepped off a curb to cross a street.
I heard Barber yell from behind me. “Heads up, bitch!”
A hard snowball hit me in the middle of the back.
I turned around. I looked at him. He was wearing a long knee-length coat. He was wearing mittens. He had a fancy knit cap with a little fluffy yarn ball on top of it. He was wearing big shiny Gore-Tex galoshes. I stood there in my bare hands and too-big army flight jacket. That was a high-altitude, low-temperature jacket, by the way. It was from World War II. It had belonged to my grandfather. He wore it in World War II.
I wasn’t wearing a hat. Instead I had a huge freakish wig-like hairstyle.
My breath filled the air. Barber’s breath filled the air. We looked at each other.
“Go on and run, faggot!” he yelled. His too-big friends snickered. I suppose they’re both probably bald now; they probably have MBAs. They both probably play golf and don’t know they were ever complicit in bullying.
Carl and I turned to go. Carl stooped. He got a handful of snow. He packed it in his hands as he walked.
Well, six seconds later, one of Eric Barber’s friends stopped being perfectly complicit for one moment:
“Hey, watch it!” he yelled. I don’t know their voices well enough to attach one voice to either face.
I turned around just as Eric Barber fell upon me with an arm-filling dirty, black-gray rain-wet rock-hard ice-triangle. He slammed it down into my neck. It hit hard. It hurt. My right foot slid forward and out from under me. I fell back on my tailbone.
The ice-triangle had broken the skin. Blood was pouring all over my yellow sweater.
Carl strode forward. He slammed his left palm-heel into Eric Barber’s sternum.
Eric Barber’s two feet fell out from in front of him. He crashed to the black-iced pavement. I saw the back of his head slam the asphalt and recoil up.
Carl stomped his foot onto Eric Barber’s stomach. He wound his right arm up and over his head. He major-league-pitched that hard snowball right into the lower half of Eric Barber’s face. He made a little dog-whine sound.
Across the street, two girls stood still. One of them was a girl from the Philippines. Her name was Jasmine. She was in our class. The other was her little sister. She was in Carl’s class. The little sister had braces.
She screamed: “Holy *SHIT*!!”
If it had been twenty years later, maybe she would have yelled “SO OWNED”
“That was awesome,” Carl said, as we walked. “Did you see that?”
The next day in class, Eric Barber and his friends discussed how that had “Destroyed those fuckin’ wimps yesterday.”
The blood on my chest and face convinced my parents to put me into a tae kwon do class. The master — Duncan Williams — was a serious old Vietnam veteran. He was a mean black man with a medium-sized Afro and audacious sideburns.
He wouldn’t let us learn how to kick until we had punched “ten thousand times”. He told us to count our punches.
He showed us his knuckles.
“Do you see these? These two. These are the ones that connect with a man’s face. These first two knuckles. Not the others. Just these.”
He made us do pushups on our knuckles.
“Just these two. Do you see how big these two are?”
He critiqued our form.
“Stop right there. Hold it. Feel the stretch. Feel the muscles pulling apart. Now push up. Channel your chi through your knuckles. Do it.”
At the end of class, we sat in a resting position while he talked to us. He told us about life. We didn’t know what life was, yet.
One day (many days), he told us about muscles.
“If you could see what your muscle looks like after you stretch, you’d throw up. It looks like a bloody mess. It looks disgusting. It looks just like a bloody mess.”
He locked his fingers. He pulled them apart. Backgammon triangles of light shone through his fingers as they pulled away from one another.
“The fibers rip. They shred. They bleed all over. It’s a bloody mess. It’s a filthy mess. And you see these holes? Your body says, that’s it. That’s me all ripped up. That’s my ass tattered. I ain’t puttin’ it back together: I’m fillin’ it in. And so it’s longer, bigger, stronger.”
One day I was struggling on my knuckles. This was in an old ballet studio at the on-post youth recreation center. I’d descended to the floor. My eyes were squinted tight. Sweat dripped through my puffy hard and dribbled all over my glasses. A pool of sweat shined beneath my eyes.
Master Duncan Williams yelled: “I said, ten!”
He walked over to me. He squatted low. I could feel him looking at me.
“I said girls can do push-ups on their knees.”
“I’m not a girl,” I said.
“Okay. If you want to be a man, be a man.”
Master Duncan Williams was the manliest man I had ever seen in my life. I figured, if he was going to say it like that, it must be that easy.
Eric Barber kicked me in the back while we were walking down the stairs to the lunchroom one day late in the year. I fell head-first down an entire flight of stairs. The stairwell had frosted windows. The floor was sun-hot. I landed on my palm-heels. My chin hit the concrete floor. My jean-knees ripped. I threw up a little bit on the floor.
I threw up a lot in the bathroom.
At recess, Carl told me, “You gotta beat the shit out of that guy, man.”
“Hey Homos,” Eric Barber said. He threw a basketball. It hit my face and broke my glasses. My nose was bleeding before the second bounce.
Carl stood up. His fists were clenched.
“Tim’s gonna beat the shit out of you!”
I looked at Eric Barber. I spoke the first words I’d ever speak to him.
“No I’m not.”
“Hah! Yeah! No you’re not, because you’re a punk ass bitch!”
Eric Barber turned around. He dribbled his ball a couple times.
Carl cupped his hands around his lips. “He’s gonna kick your ass,” Carl yelled.
Eric Barber turned around.
“You fairy!”
“He’s gonna make you wish you were never born!”
I remembered the first kid my big brother had fought. The kid had called me a “Reject from Planet Retard”, once. I’d think that’s a planet it would behoove one to be a reject from.
Eric Barber was walking up to us.
He poked his finger into my chest.
“Tomorrow after school, gaywad.”
I took a deep breath.
“Oh. Okay.”
Some kids in class drew up tickets to the fight in their Mead Composition notebooks. They tore them out and handed them around at recess. The fight was to be at the top of the hill outside the main entrance — closer to where we’d deduced Barber lived than I did.
Carl and I arrived at the hill first. Atop that hill one could see Pershing Hill Elementary School, alone and square. Two old willow trees stood atop the hill. Their roots were big and loud and weird, squiggling everywhere.
Two girls showed up.
“Are you really gonna fight him?”
I shrugged. “I guess.”
It was a pleasant day. It was a little hot. The leaves made noise in the wind. Mosquitoes and dust danced. It smelled like grass. I was wearing my only pair of shoes — the broken Reeboks. My feet hadn’t grown in two years. I was eleven years old; it’d be six years before I had pubic hair and seventeen years before I had a male quantity of testosterone.
Barber showed up with his two friends. He took his jean jacket off. He was wearing a white T-shirt. His sleeves were rolled up. He tossed his hand through his hair. He hadn’t had a haircut in a while. The long part of his Hitler Youth haircut occasionally fell into his mouth during class. I could hear him blowing it out over and over.
He slammed his fist into his open hand, again and again.
“Are you all ready to see something?”
“Dude Eric are you really gonna hit a girl?”
“I’m gonna cream her, dude.”
“Shit, man, come on.”
“Come on, bitch.” He looked at Carl. “Your girlfriend is gonna need stitches!”
Eric Barber did a couple showoff kicks. He threw a roundhouse. He threw another roundhouse. He jumped up and down on the balls of his feet.
“Come on, bitch!”
“Are you gonna start?”
Some boys had shown up.
“Did they start yet?”
“Hey, are you gonna start?”
Carl came up to me. He put his hand on my shoulder.
“Are you gonna hit him? This guy’s a pussy.”
One of Eric Barber’s friends stepped forward.
“So hey alright we’re gonna have a fight here and, uh — uh, alright are you two ready?”
“I’m ready as hell!” Eric Barber said. “Mess with the best and die like the rest!”
“You?”
I put my hands up.
Eric Barber did a roundhouse kick. He took two steps forward. He did another roundhouse kick. He kicked with his right leg. He kicked with his left leg. He did a couple doggy-paddle punches in the air. One of them hit me in the right cheek. Luckily my cheek was chubby. I fell to one knee. Heat radiated into my bone; the heat spread like lava into my gums and teeth. The inside of my cheek grew fatter and hot. I felt a sting of acid beneath my eye. Eric Barber had leapt backward. He was jumping from one foot to another. He did a high front kick with his right leg. He did another high front kick with his left leg.
I stepped forward. I grabbed the side of Eric Barber’s head. I yanked his hair as hard as I could. I kicked him in the balls. He screamed. He fell back halfway. I realized I was much bigger and much stronger and, in fact, even a little taller than him. He fell backward. His feet fell in front of him. I was still gripping his hair. He wailed. He cried. I pulled him up to his feet. I punched him in the stomach. He screamed. He slammed his left hand into his stomach in a feeble attempt to guard something he couldn’t predict. He held his right hand in front of his body.
“F-fuck”
I gripped his neck with my left hand. I squeezed my thumb into his Adam’s apple. With my hand imprisoning his neck, I punched him as hard as I could. I felt my knuckles compress the thicker-than-I-imagined flesh of his forehead. I hit it again. I hit him in the lip. His lips bled. I hit him in the top of the head. His right arm went limp. I punched him again and again in the top of the head. I wasn’t strong enough to kill him. He fell onto the ground. I kicked him in the stomach. I kicked him in the stomach again. I kicked him in the balls. I kicked him in the balls again. I yelled, “Die!”
I yelled, “I hate you!” I yelled it again. “I hate you!”
I wasn’t even talking to him. His face was all bloody.
“Hey! Hey!”
His two friends ran up. They pushed my chest.
Carl grabbed me from behind.
“Hey — hey, let’s get out of here — let’s just get out of here before we get in trouble.”
Eric Barber’s friends helped him up. They walked off with him in the opposite direction.
I turned around. I ran up to Eric Barber. I punched him so hard in the back of the head he fell forward and slammed his face into a rock.
He rolled over onto his back.
“Please!”
I kicked him in the face. Here’s the part I don’t understand: I took my shoe off and I slapped him in the face with it.
I put the shoe back on.
Carl and I went home. We walked through the hot woods. I was drenched in sweat. The leaves made sound in the wind. The mosquitoes were alive; some of them bit me. My mom was filling a rubber kiddie pool in the backyard when we got to our cul-de-sac.
My little brother was standing in the backyard, three years old, shirtless, potbellied, waiting for the oscillating sprinkler to come back his way.
My mom made hamburgers for dinner. She made me a Totino’s cheese pizza. I watched her make hamburger patties. When the table was set and dinner was served, what had been bloody was now gray.
The next day at school, Eric Barber and his friends were pointing at me and laughing.
“Look at that faggot,” I heard one of them say.
We had an English assignment. We had to write a “descriptive passage”. I wrote one in pencil while another student was reading theirs. I wrote about a forest fire. I described squirrels jumping out of trees. The first sentence was, “Squirrels don’t weigh enough to die when they fall out of a tree.” The teacher sent me to the guidance counselor.
The guidance counselor said, “Did you have a fight with Eric Barber yesterday?”
“Yeah.”
“Eric’s parents told us you and him beat each other up pretty bad,” she said.
In lunch that day, Eric Barber and his friends sat on the corner of the table. They didn’t look at me. Eric Barber kicked my shoe once more before the year was over. When he did that, he called me a “Psycho”. Summer happened. I saw him at the arcade at the PX once. He was playing The Simpsons Arcade Game by himself. My big brother joined in. Eric Barber looked at me. He still had braces. I saw him here and there in seventh grade. He often wore the same Detroit Tigers t-shirt he had worn on the day I beat him until his blood turned the dust into red mud. He looked left, and then right. He was alone. He was waiting for his mom’s car. I was waiting for my big brother. He smiled when he saw his mom’s car coming. It was October. He didn’t have braces anymore. Shortly before Halloween, he was gone. His dad must have gotten a transfer somewhere else. I found him on Facebook just now. He has an MBA and he plays golf and his profile photo is several years old.
I told a beautiful girl about this in a hotel bed in Osaka, Japan on a hot summer night in 2015.
“You remembered him when a man pointed a gun at you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you feel bad about what you’d done?”
“No. Actually . . .”
“Actually what?”
“When the man pointed the gun at me, I remembered Eric Barber, and I . . .”
“You what?”
“I remembered the feeling of my thumb on his throat — ”
She reached her right arm over her torso. She laid it on my neck. She pressed the thumb into my larynx.
“Like this?”
“Yeah. I remembered that feeling. I remembered the thinness of his skin. I remembered the sensation of his cartilage — ” Now I pressed my thumb — gently enough to be called gingerly — into her neck. “ — right here. How it pushes in. I recalled that feeling, and — ”
“And?”
“I wondered how hard I would have had to hit him to kill him.”
“Did you wish just then that you’d killed him?”
Our hotel room was high up above a highway. Headlights from deep below illuminated the curtains and cut through the room in silence. We were sweaty and the air-conditioning made us cold on each other.
“Yeah.”
“I knew.”
“I wished I’d killed him. It was so real. It was vicious. It was terrible. I wanted him dead. I hadn’t thought of him in years.”
“The man didn’t shoot you.”
“He didn’t.”
“Do you still wish you’d killed Eric Barber?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Maybe I do,” I said.
“I hope I don’t,” I said.
“I . . . hope I hope I don’t,” I said.
“another sound, another love”,
(the daylight ghost of someone ready)
“here i had killed three kittens”,
or, “just like hamburger; exactly like hamburger”
by tim rogers
Two months ago, I told a friend, “It’s rained more here in Oakland in the last two weeks than I’ve seen it rain here in Oakland in the past six years.”
It’s rained for three months. It’s not as impressive an observation to point out that it’s rained more in the past three months in Oakland, California than I’ve seen it rain in Oakland, California in the past six years.
Last night was the hardest rain yet. It rained hard in the afternoon. It stopped. The weather apps told me it wasn’t going to rain anymore. I drove up to Vallejo, California to pick up my friend Vito, so we could drive in his car to Santa Rosa, California to watch his friend do standup comedy. Vito opened with seven minutes of standup of his own. I sat and listened to everyone’s jokes. Everyone just gets up there and talks about their failures. They hate themselves in public. They get up there and they say to the audience, “I’m worse than you”, and the audience can laugh at someone worse than them. I saw the same comedians do the same sets at two different venues. I wonder if it means I hate myself more, or less than these guys, that I can’t just get up there and hate myself for other peoples’ amusement. I hate myself in these cold, dark ways — these words here, for example.
I felt obliged to witness Vito’s friend Erik’s standup comedy, because Erik had helped Vito and I with a commercial we’d shot in Los Angeles back in November. Erik was essential: I was wearing a Grim Reaper outfit — and carrying a skateboard — and trying to get people to talk to me for some schlocky videogame promo. Vito was the camera man. Erik’s job was to grab people and make them comfortable and get them to sign release forms and then talk to me on camera. I asked them ridiculous questions, like, “Have you ever seen a dead body?” or “Have you ever killed anybody before?” Erik was such an irrepressibly positive presence on that day I spent in that jail-hot costume on the Santa Monica Pier — I felt a deep duty to be a butt in a seat for someone who had been my man on the street. At the second venue — a big bar-restaurant in Sebastopol with a nightclub stage inside — someone in line for the bathroom asked me, “Are you a comic?”
“Me? No. Do I look like one?”
“Yeah, you kinda look like one.”
“I think I’d just depress people.”
“That’s funny.”
“Is it? You don’t even know the details.”
“You said it in a funny way.”
“I have a prostate tumor,” I said.
“See, that’s funny.”
The bathroom became vacant.
When the night was over, Vito and I tripped into a massive casino off the highway in Rohnert Park, California. It was as big as five shopping malls stuck together. People were smoking in there. I had vivid flashbacks to life in Japan. The Starbucks was open at eleven-thirty in the night time. I got an almond-milk cappuccino. I watched Vito lose twenty dollars. He made maximum bets on three-dollar slot machine. It took fifty-five seconds. We went to a little diner that had pie. Vito was going to have pie. He had pancakes. I had four eggs with cheese and avocado. I drank the rest of my cappuccino. I drank three big glasses of Diet Coke. The bathroom at the diner was out of order. We drove back to Vallejo. I got in my car.
I pointed toward Oakland. My first goal was to go to the bathroom. I stopped at the first gas station by Vito’s house. It was closed.
I got on the freeway. I took the first exit. One of the gas stations was accepting gasoline payments through a little drawer in a bulletproof window. They wouldn’t let me in. I asked if there was a bathroom anywhere nearby. The lady on the other side of the glass shrugged. I got back in my car. I was low on gas. I drove to the gas station on the other side of the highway ramp. They were closed: no gas, no bathroom.
Now the hardest rain I’ve ever seen in California began to fall.
I got back on the freeway. I got off at the next exit. Both of the gas stations were closed.
Rain had formed a pond at the bottom of the ramp back onto the freeway. I hit the rain-pond with a loud thud. I stepped on the gas. The rear wheels of my 2007 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor spun loudly and with such force that the rear end of the car whipped around, flailing for traction. The car pulled a complete three-sixty. I jerked the wheel as hard as I could manage. The car screamed to a stop. The engine cut off. The wipers stopped. A violent torrent of rain assaulted the metal and glass of the car. I was alone inside a loud metal cave for two seconds. I turned the key. The car started. The wipers moved. I drove under an overpass. The windshield was clear for a second. It was the last I’d see for some time.
A Niagara-Falls’-worth of rain descended on my windshield at plane-crash velocity. I stayed in the right-most lane. I pushed my left foot hard into the floor of the car. I lifted my pelvis to relive pressure from my bladder. I pulled off at the next exit. I stumbled over to both gas stations. They were closed. I got back onto the freeway. I stayed in the right lane. I came up on the bridge to Richmond. After the bridge, I had to move one lane to the left.
Everyone was driving faster than me. My left headlight was dead — I have to tweak the wires to get it to stay on for a couple miles — and my bathroom need felt like a knife in my groin. Then the fuel light came on. My car is drafty and poorly insulated; the windshield won’t stay defogged. I had the air-conditioning on full blast on the windshield. I had the rear defrosters on. My knuckles were freezing.
My right headlight died.
Everyone was driving like a maniac. I was terrified. My car is a Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, so it has no hazards. Police cars tend to have those blinking lights on the top instead of hazards. The button you’d expect to turn the hazards on opens my car’s trunk.
The highways in the East Bay Area of California twist and turn and go up and down bumps and dips. Every now and again some of the lines are faint, or don’t have reflective markers. Clunking down into dips sent up big loud splashes of water; the rear of the car jumped inches off the ground. Faster, better cars passed me at miraculous speed, spraying water onto my windows.
Then a semi truck passed me on the right. It drove through a deep flooded groove, spraying a torrent of water all over my passenger’s side window. When enough of its eighteen wheels had passed in front of me, the spray screamed onto my windshield.
The coverage was total. My wipers were futile. My headlights were out; my knuckles were cold; my bladder was sharp; my tires were old; my fuel light was on. I was blind, and I knew only that the road’s twists and turns and dips and bumps were unknowable to my muscle memory.
For the first time in my life, I screamed in terror. For thirty seconds, I screamed. I knew that life versus death was a coin flip. Any blazing Mercedes could clip me and spin me into the semi truck and kill me. Nobody wanted to drive slower than eighty miles per hour out there. I was a wood chip among buzzsaws.
For thirty seconds, I remembered the time a man on the street in Oakland, California pointed a gun at me. I remembered everything I remembered the instant the man pointed the gun at me. I remembered telling a beautiful girl on a hot day in a cafe in Shin-Osaka Station about the man pointing a gun at me. I remembered telling her about what I’d remembered that day. I’d told her I’d remembered my fight in elementary school — where I’d hit, again and again, the kid who’d bullied me an entire year. I remembered telling her that when the man pointed the gun at me I remembered my fight and I wished I’d killed the kid who bullied me. I confessed to her that it made me know I am a terrible person. I remembered confessing my terrible personhood to a girl in a cafe in Shin-Osaka Station. She’d told me I was beautiful and I was wonderful. So I was in a car inside a waterfall and I was wishing that other people could make me, instead of my making myself. Then I remembered my friend and his wife and their two cats, dying in the middle of the night in their house because their 3D printer leaked carbon monoxide while they were asleep.
Here’s the story of the man pointing a gun at me. It’s a brief story.
I went downtown. I was to meet my friend Zak “Delicious” McCune at a restaurant in Jack London Square in Oakland, California. I arrived before he did. I texted him. He said he was on his way. I did a little thinking. I knew he would be riding his motorcycle there. I knew he wouldn’t be texting on his motorcycle. I mean, even he’s not a tough enough dude to do that. I took my time walking from 12th Street BART to 3rd Street. I arrived at the restaurant. I texted McCune again. He didn’t reply right away. I took that to mean he was on his way.
I waited in front of the restaurant. It was a breezy mild night. It was dark. A breeze was blowing. The doors of the restaurant were wide open. A man sat alone at a large table situated near the entrance. He was writing in a small notebook with a pencil. He wasn’t eating anything.
The restaurant was full of lively patrons. The ceiling in that place loudens every conversation. It sounds like the busiest place in the world in there. I leaned against a lightpole. I looked at my phone. I looked at my shoes. I put my phone in my pocket. I put my hands in my pockets. I was quiet. I wasn’t looking at or thinking about anything.
One voice cut through the white noise of conversation inside the restaurant.
“Yo, you. Hey. Hey, you.”
I didn’t consider the voice was addressing me. I closed my eyes and rested the back of my head on the pole.
“Hey — hey, yo, I’m talkin’ to you!”
I looked into the restaurant. The man who’d been sitting at the table alone was looking at me.
“I said don’t look at me,” he said.
If he had, in fact, said to not look at him, I hadn’t heard him say so.
I didn’t look at him. Now that he’d explicitly told me not to look at him, I made every effort not to.
“You hear me? Hey! Hey! Are you deaf!”
I didn’t say anything.
“Look at me. Hey! Look at me.”
I darted my eyes up. I processed the man’s appearance. He was wearing a big baggy brown coat. He was wearing baggy blue jeans and brown work boots. He had a gray zip-up hoodie on over a red flannel shirt which was half-unbuttoned over a white thermal shirt. He’d closed his little notebook on his finger.
“Look at me. Huh? What are you lookin’ at, faggot?”
I looked away. I looked at my feet. I looked left. I looked right. I didn’t hear any motorcycles.
“I asked you a question. Son of a bitch!”
He stood up. He charged out of the restaurant.
“You fuckin’ deaf, huh?”
I looked at him. “Hey, uh — ”
“Nuh-uh. Nuh-uh, faggot.”
Now he took a gun out of his jacket. I didn’t see where it came from.
He pointed it at me. It was — well, I don’t know guns. It wasn’t tiny and it wasn’t huge. It was medium-sized. It was shiny. He pointed it at me. He held it at hip level, with his elbow bent. He gestured it to the side.
“Don’t you fuckin’ look at me, bitch. Go over there. Go over there. You heard me. Go over there.”
The instant he said “Go over there”, I had turned my back and started walking. I walked faster and faster until I was at the end of the building. I slid around the corner. I put my back against the wall. My heart was beating hard. I could feel my heartbeat in the middle of my upper back.
I counted to a hundred. I was drenched in sweat. My heartbeat only got faster and faster. I waited for a red light. I ran across the street. I went into the Buttercup Grill diner. I told the hostess my friend would be joining me. I sat in a booth. I ordered a Diet Coke and a plate of nachos with extra guacamole. I texted McCune.
“Hey, I’m in Buttercup Grill. Let’s just eat at Buttercup Grill.”
“What the hell, man,” he said. “I just parked my bike.”
“I’ll be in Buttercup Grill.”
“Ah, man.”
“Hey, a guy pointed a gun at me on the street and I freaked out okay.”
“Dude, that sucks,” McCune said in his text.
Thirty seconds later, McCune was in Buttercup Grill.
“Dude, what happened on the street?”
“Some guy just came out of the restaurant and told me not to look at him. And he pointed a gun at me and I thought he was going to shoot me.”
“Wow, dude. That sucks.”
I’m sure McCune didn’t believe me. I don’t blame him for not believing me. It hadn’t happened to him: it had happened to me.
I remembered three moments while the man was pointing his gun at me:
1.
2004, Tokyo: I knew a guy who’d been an amateur boxer. He asked me where the best shop was to buy new-old-stock video game hardware. I showed him a shop with 15 mint-condition Sega Mega Drives.
“How about that, huh?”
He regarded them in silence.
“I think I’ll get ‘em,” he said, in English, in a non-native accent.
“You’re gonna get one?”
“Nah, maybe buy all of ‘em.”
“All of them?”
He shrugged. We were wearing raincoats.
“Yeah, I’ll get all of ‘em.”
I took him aside.
“Hey, I already feel like a big enough weird foreign person in here, and like, I’d feel weird if someone I introduced to the place just straight-up bought like all of their cool rare stuff just to sell it — ”
“Nah, I’m not gonna sell ‘em.”
“You’re not?”
“Nah, just maybe keep ‘em.”
“Well, why not just buy like one, and keep one?”
“It’s a store, man,” he said. “They sell the stuff.”
He bought one. I went back a week later. They were all gone.
A week after that a bunch of friends and I all had a dinner at a bad diner we liked. He wasn’t in Japan on a valid long-term working visa. He was prowling for a wife. He had just been in Korea so that he could reenter on a fresh tourist visa.
Someone asked him how Korea was.
“It was disgusting, man!”
“Aw man, really? I was thinking of going.”
“Hey,” I said, “just because This Guy doesn’t like it doesn’t mean you won’t — ”
“ — Listen to me,” This Guy said, with authority, “they have toilet paper on the table at restaurants.”
“Eww! What the hell for, man!”
“For napkins! I said to the girl, you have got to be fuckin’ kidding me, man!”
“Hey,” I said, “you know, an object itself is not everything that happens or exists in the rooms where you’ve seen it or others like it.”
“Nah, fuck that, man.”
2.
2003, Tokyo: My friend invited me to her house for a little dinner party. Her house was a little house. She invited a bunch of her band friends. It was a bunch of dudes in loose pants with scraggly beards and weird straw farmboy hats and loose tropical shirts. She slid her little sofa chair over against the closet. She unfolded a serving table. She chopped vegetables in the kitchen. The kitchen was so close to the living room / bedroom / dining room that she did not leave the conversation. She turned the TV on. We let the people inside the TV have a conversation behind our conversation. Taxis were honking horns outside. The little tiny dim drugstore lightbulb flickered in the lighting fixture. She brought out a big stone pot of soup. She put it on top of a round straw serving mat in the middle of the table. She brought out a few bottles of beer and little bowls.
“Hey everybody, this soup doesn’t have any meat in it, because this guy’s a vegetarian.”
“Whoa, weird.”
Everyone ate the soup. She brought out some meat. I ate soup and a boiled egg and rice and a rice cake. It was early autumn. The windows were all open in her tiny room and it felt like summer. I scooped some soup out of the pot.
The dudes were talking about their upcoming shows. One guy was asking me what sort of band I wanted to have.
“I just want it to be loud and to sound like something.”
“Well you just gotta get up there and do it,” he said. It was a rough platitude. I’d heard it before. It’s perfect advice: you just gotta get up there and do it. It’s the kind of advice I never learned how to take. Later, a friend who was a brilliant songwriter would give me similar, more specific advice: “Whatever you got, it can be a song. Just put stuff together and make it a song. Just say, yeah, this is this, and that’s that, and it’s a song. It’s a song if you say it is. That’s what I learned: just put whatever together.”
“Are all the noodles gone?”
“Oh — yeah, it looks like it.”
We all peered into the near-empty stone pot. All that remained was the dregs: a gelatinous mass of red spicy soup with the dust of egg yolks, a few bean sprouts, some corn. A greedy ladle had cut or smashed or mashed everything that remained. It was soup-soup.
“Let me just throw this away,” my friend said.
She stood up. She opened the bathroom door. She stepped back over to the table. She leaned forward. She held the pot up in her two hands.
The apartment was so small you could see straight through the living room and kitchen from any position. When someone opened the bathroom door, you could see the cozy little toilet sitting in there under an overhead shelf piled high with Dragon Ball comics. Her aunt owned the apartment building she lived in. Her aunt was old; the building was older. You had to pull a handle on a chain to flush her toilet.
She carried the pot over to the toilet. She tilted it. I could hear the soup and vegetable fragments and cabbage scraps glopping into the toilet bowl. The dudes’ conversation went on uninterrupted. I was looking between two dudes’ heads at this action happening in the bathroom.
For a moment, I considered the hideous spectacle of food waste floating in the toilet. It turned my stomach.
She pulled the chain, and the toilet roared. Then I thought: you know, what we usually put in there is a lot uglier and a lot grosser.
I remembered this in the exact same mental process that I remembered the man hating the Korean tradition of using toilet paper as napkins.
Four years after a man pointed a gun at me, driving in the terrifying rain, I remembered the man pointing the gun at me, and I remembered what I remembered when the man pointed the gun at me, and then I remembered other times I’d remembered what I’d remembered when the man pointed the gun at me.
I’d remembered the flushing of the soup down the toilet, for example, in 2016, when I went to the bathroom after a film was over. The bathroom was crowded with other people who’d just gotten out of the movie. I ducked into a stall. I immediately recoiled: the toilet was full of popcorn. Sinking into the popcorn was a huge, fresh, coiled thick rope of human feces.
Someone had really wanted to see what that looked like.
3.
1990, Fort Meade, Maryland, USA: I fought a boy who had bullied me for a year. I hurt him a lot. In the moment a man pointed a gun at me, I wished I’d have killed that kid.
The day after a man pointed a gun at me, I went to San Francisco. A loud old lady asked me where I was going. I told her where I was going. She told me what bus to get on. I said, is that the right bus? She said, of course it’s the right bus. She said it was the same bus she was getting on. “Nobody wears shorts in San Francisco,” she said. “That’s how I know you’re a tourist.” I didn’t tell her I wasn’t a tourist. I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. It was the wrong bus. I was twenty minutes late to my haircut appointment. The hairstylist was not happy. I got a passive-aggressive haircut. I had bad haircut luck after that.
*
I told a beautiful girl about this in an ice-cold air-conditioned cafe on a sunburn-hot July day in Osaka, Japan in 2015.
“I am so sorry that happened to you.”
“Th-thanks.”
“I’m so sorry your friend didn’t believe you.”
She gripped my hand under the table. She’d finished her ham sandwich and her iced coffee.
“Some of my friends have been mugged at gunpoint, or knifepoint. Though like, that was somebody stealing something. The robber wanted something. I didn’t understand this person. I didn’t know what was wrong with him, and — I didn’t know why he was doing what he was doing. I thought, this is it. I have no idea why this is happening, and — ”
I was so tired. She and I hadn’t slept a real sleep in at least sixty hours.
“We need to be careful,” she said. “Sometimes I want to live in a sensory deprivation chamber.”
“ — and afterward I just . . . I just hated the life that flashed before my eyes. My life is always flashing before my eyes. I mean, it’s not — it’s . . . it’s books on a library shelf. You know? And I chose those . . . scraps to remember at the end.”
“I don’t think they’re scraps. I think they’re a story.”
“I mean — yeah, maybe they’re a story to someone else. They’re just not a story to me. You know? And I went back home and I didn’t tell my girlfriend about it. And I felt terrible. I felt awful. I felt like I didn’t love her and I didn’t love anyone. I felt so afraid of everyone. I learned I’d always been afraid of everyone in the world.”
“I’m hearing my own words,” she said. She squeezed my hand.
“And she and I just — I couldn’t connect with her anymore. I felt guilty. I felt like I didn’t love her. I told her I loved her. That day, I felt like I only wanted to love her. And I thought of this girl I met in Hawaii, and I think that’s where I just — ”
“When were you in Hawaii?”
“July twenty-second, two thousand and ten: Japanese immigration didn’t let me back in the country. They took my visa! They sent me to Hawaii. I was in Hawaii. My girlfriend was going to come and see me, and I felt that whole, ah, like, like I didn’t love her — like I just wanted to love her. You know? And I met another girl and she was so wonderful. She was so great. She was a vegetarian, like me! She had never tasted alcohol, like me! She had never spoken a profane word of English, like me! She was perfect. And she was lovely. She had an eight-year-old son in Texas. And we met and we ate a pizza and we bought some snacks and we spent a night on the beach. And the night before my girlfriend came from Japan, me and this girl had sex in the apartment she was subletting. It was the best night of my life. It was totally perfect and I forgot absolutely everything else in the world all night. And when it was over I . . . I remembered everything. She was asleep and the sun was coming up. I sat in the bathroom and my bladder hurt so bad. I was just sitting there on the toilet and — I never cried like that before. I just cried for so long. It was like, right there, it was so crystal-clear: my life was over. I had failed to become a real person. I was going to break up with my girlfriend and go back to America and give up my life — ten years in Japan! — and that, just . . . Ahh, I admitted to myself that everyone in the world is better than me. I am worse than everyone in the world. I’d just found the perfect example of a person who is better than me. It’s not that I hate myself — it’s that I like everyone else more than I like myself. I sat there naked on that toilet in Hawaii just having a funeral for myself, and they were the deepest, darkest, most fearful minutes of my life. I was surrounded by everything I knew. It was an ambush. My hands were shaking. I could feel my heartbeat in my eyes. I could barely breathe. My lungs were hungry for air no matter how hard I gasped. And I had put the memory away until now, and now I’m going to think about that bathroom every time I think about flushing soup down a toilet, or someone threatening someone with a gun, or you, or a fistfight, or a labyrinth, or Don Quixote[, or driving in heavy rain[, or anything]].”
The girl was crying. She squeezed my hand.
“I think what you are describing sounds like an anxiety attack?”
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t be surprised! I mean, why not? I’ll have had one of those; sure.”
“We have to be careful,” she said, again. She squeezed my hand tight. “We have to be so, so careful. I have to be careful . . . I’m not being careful.” She took a deep breath. She closed her eyes. She’d already told me all about her love.
“I think about him all the time — I told you this. Just all the time. I’m always thinking about him. I’m remembering every day with him all day every day. I can’t stop it. It’s . . . it’s going to kill me.”
We threw away our trash. We held hands. We found the restroom. We used the restrooms. The bathroom soap dried my hand-skin. I put my arm around her. We wandered over to the turnstile. It was far hotter in the station than it had been in the little cafe. The station was an oven. My linen shirt stuck to my lower back immediately.
I remembered the bicycle my friend Jeff had given me eight years ago.
I wouldn’t tell her what had happened to the bicycle.
I remembered two years ago, in Chicago, saying goodbye to another friend.
“Just like hamburger,” I said.
“What is?”
Christmas, 2013: Indianapolis, Indiana
I was visiting my parents in Indiana for Christmas. I’d just gotten back from two days in Chicago. I’d had business there. Also, I met a friend from the internet. We enjoyed many meaningful meals and conversations.
I was wearing pajamas in my parents’ living room. I was drinking coffee. My little brother’s two-year-old was repeating a two-syllable non-word over and over again. My coffee went empty. I went out into the kitchen.
“Child, if you want a cup of coffee, you know you can let your mother know!”
“Ah, I can get it myself.”
“No, no; give me that here.”
She took the cup from my hand. She poured a cup of coffee for me.
“Your little brother’s boy Steve is the sweetest little boy. I’ve never seen such a sweet boy — he is so loving.”
I sipped some of the coffee.
“We’re going to get parquet floors here maybe next year. We got an estimate.”
“That’d be nice.”
“I know you’d like it; it’d be fancy.”
“I love a good parquet.”
“You know we’ve got a tutor coming to talk to Steve, you know, because he’s not talking yet and they’re saying he should be talking.”
I finished my cup of coffee. My mom was putting clothes in the dryer. She came back to the kitchen. She poured me another cup of coffee. She gestured out toward the laundry room.
“You remember that house next door right over there, right?”
“I mean, I remember seeing that house out that window, yeah. Did we ever know someone who lived there?”
“No, no — it was on the news! It was a puppy mill! They were breeding puppies in there.”
“Oh, wow. That’s gross.”
“It was disgusting! It was filthy. They said it was disgusting. They had police officers and detectives in there.”
“Wow.”
“They say the place was a complete mess. Yeah, your dad and I looked over there and we were saying, what are all those cops doing over there?”
I drank my coffee. The family cat poked her head out of the half-open bathroom door. She hissed at me. She slipped back into the bathroom.
That afternoon, my brother, my father and I drove downtown to see a performance of “A Christmas Carol”. When we parked the car in the garage downtown, we heard a meowing.
A stray cat who my parents had been feeding had crawled into the engine.
“Oh my god. Oh my god.”
My dad was almost hysterical.
“Holy — she could have died in there. She could have died!”
We put the cat into the car. We took it home.
That night, my mom told us about the time she killed three cats.
“Do you boys know my best friend who died Barbara Graef? She had two daughters; I babysat her daughters before I met your father. They had a cat and their cat got knocked up and had a litter of kittens. Well one day in the dead of winter I went to her house to pick up her kids to bring them back to my house to watch them. And her cat was a barnyard cat, so they let her live outside, and they let the kittens live outside. Me and the kids got in my car and I started the engine and let it warm up and I drove home. The whole way there I was hearing something. It sounded like something in the engine, like rats in the engine. And I got home and I told my brother Ed, I think there’s something wrong with my car, and we popped the hood, and here I had killed three kittens.”
Halloween, 1988: Wichita, Kansas
My big brother and I had seen RoboCop. We convinced my parents to let us watch Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the Thirteenth.
I wanted a hockey mask for my Halloween costume. I was nine years old.
My big brother wanted a hockey mask. He got a hockey mask. It glowed in the dark.
I got a skeleton mask instead.
I wanted a black cape.
“No, no. No. You don’t need that. If you’re gonna be a skeleton, you don’t need a cape.”
“I just want a cape.”
“You can’t have a cape.”
Instead I wore a skeleton mask on top of two layers of white long johns. I carried a plastic pirate scimitar and a jack-o-lantern bucket.
My brother wore a hockey mask and a flannel shirt and jeans. He carried a butcher knife. Jason was an easy costume.
Halloween, 1989: Wichita, Kansas
My brother wanted to be Freddy Krueger. He wanted to buy the official Freddy Krueger glove. Everywhere was sold out of it. My mom bought me a twenty-dollar rubber werewolf mask. I wore it with my white thermal long-johns, with a red flannel shirt on top, and jeans. I wore black gloves. We poked some holes in the tips of the gloves. I put on some big long creepy fingernails.
My brother tried on my skeleton mask from the year before. He wanted a skeleton suit — a black suit with the bones drawn on the outside. We were looking around for one at the supermarket. My brother picked up a big scythe.
“I gotta get one of these!”
“Put that back! Put that back!”
“Aw, mom.”
“I won’t have you carrying that — and doing that — and that’s final, do you hear? Do you hear?”
“Aw, mom, why — ”
“The grim reaper is a servant of the devil! That’s blasphemy.”
Halloween, 1990: Fort Meade, Maryland
We went to garage sales, yard sales, and estate sales around Maryland on the weekends.
At an estate sale at an old, big, dusty house, I found a huge, beautiful black cape. I didn’t know what silk was then, though I’m recalling the sensation of the fabric now: it was silk.
“I wanna be a vampire,” I said.
I tried on the fancy silk cape. It was far too long. It dragged behind me. It was only a dollar.
At home, I tried on the cape, the skull mask, and my brother’s skeleton suit.
“Hey! Hey! You can’t wear that. Look, you’re gonna give your mother a heart attack if you wear that for Halloween. Do you hear me? Take that off.”
I took off the mask and the cape.
“Do youse boys remember my best friend Barbara Graef? Well, she had a friend, Debbie Werst.”
“Oh.”
“We all went to high school together. You remember when I told youse my face was paralyzed for a year because my sister threw a dodge ball at my face when I was in second grade? Debbie Werst was dating the boy who’d put my sister up to throwing that dodge ball at my face. We all went to a Halloween party. I was a witch, and my best friend Barbara Graef was a witch, and Debbie was a nurse, and Debbie’s boyfriend was The Grim Reaper. I never liked that guy! He was a son of a bitch if you pardon my language. He was always picking on us and everybody. Well Debbie’s boyfriend had an old fifty-seven Chevy. They got real drunk because they were irresponsible, and that son of a bitch crashed that fifty-seven Chevy into a ditch and both him and her died.”
My mom became an omniscient narrator. She began to speak of things that, now almost thirty years later, I have to wonder if she had had the power to see them. Maybe she didn’t need to have seen them. Maybe this is her religion; maybe this is, finally, her imagination.
“Debbie’s head broke apart on the dashboard. It was awful. Debbie’s head broke apart in the impact of the crash and it split her skull open. Her skull was split open and her brains were coming out of her skull. She was covered in blood and her brains were coming out of her skull. Listen to me: the brains looked just like hamburger; exactly like hamburger.”
Today I imagine the grade-A ground beef-meat puffing out of the crush-cracks of the corpse skull. It expands with the randomness of bath bubbles. It hisses as it puffs. Its growth stops. The meat is silent and red, a sponge of dead blood, just like hamburger; exactly like hamburger.
October 1999, Bloomington, Indiana:
After weeks of quizzes on diagrams, our anatomy lab instructor was going to show us cadavers.
I was up late every night, socializing. The semester was half over. An anatomy lab at seven in the morning was murder. I rode my bike or skateboard down the hill toward the class at six. I tried to show up early. By late October, I was showing up just on time. My head always hurt. My throat always stung with the acid reflux of a sleep-deprived early morning. The formaldehyde exacerbated my exhaustion and indigestion.
The instructor rolled back the metal hood on the cadaver. He raised a man’s dead body from a bath of chemicals.
He announced that he’d made the necessary incisions before the lab.
He grasped the curtain of abdominal skin with a pair of long forceps. My eyes jumped down to the man’s tiny shriveled penis, and shocked-straight white pubic hair. The instructor pulled the skin open. I’d scored a one hundred percent on every quiz up until that day. I knew the diagrams by heart. I knew what was where. I could see organs connecting to organs connecting to organs in tracts in my mind.
“Now, let’s take a look in here. I imagine this is the first time for most of you.”
He pulled back the curtain.
The inside of the human body was complete nonsense. It was a wet crumbling brick of nightmare rainbow meat in there. Despite our capacity to witness miracles and imagine magic, we are mere dead food for the universe, and we must be afraid of this deadness, and we must love each other. It is ridiculous if we do not.
More does not happen than does; if we only know that we know nothing, we do know something: about nothing. Most of the infinite is unknown unknowns. We here are just like hamburger; exactly like hamburger. We must be afraid of this deadness, and we must love each other. It is ridiculous if we do not.
Whatever happens inside these scrunched, wrinkled fiber-bags of rotten-fruit-colored chopped hollow jumbo spaghetti bits is an accident of liquid physics. Our sentimentality is a coincidence. We are no smooth earnest factories; we are no diagram-perfect assembly lines. We are crowded hard bags of accidents down through which blood and other juices leak; we squeeze and our liquids spurt and rise. We must know the stupidity of this meat and we must permit it to terrify us. We must be afraid of this deadness. We must love each other. It is ridiculous if we do not.
May 2005, Tokyo, Japan:
I was seeing a girl. Her house was on the top of a hill. Japanese bicycle brakes make contact with the metal rim of the wheels. Bikes squeal with a dolphin-deafening intensity when the rider brakes down a hill. I slept with this girl three nights a week. Her apartment was tiny. I slept under her dry cleaning. She patronized the dry cleaner daily. I listened to the nightingales in the neighborhood. I determined that they have two words: “I exist”, and “So do I”. I’ve written about this many times before (well, who hasn’t?). I listened to them and I puzzled over how one of their conversations would ever get to the subject of love. One early morning I remembered the cadaver. I imagined the instructor yanking on a cord under the bladder; I imagined the man’s penis tip popping for an instant. He was digging a probe in toward a small blue aspirin-sized nodule.
“This is The Love. This man died of complications resulting from treatment for cancer of The Love.”
Last night, in the torrential rain, I thought of the man who aimed a gun at me; I remembered the relationship that died after that; I remembered realizing I only wanted to love someone; I remembered my funeral for myself on a toilet in Hawaii; I remembered telling a beautiful girl about all of this on a hot day in Osaka; then I remembered the smell of dry-cleaning, the nightingales, the sound of bikes squealing, an early morning sleeplessness daze, and my imaginings of the cadaver. I remembered the man who died of complications resulting from treatment for cancer of the love, and now I saw a new nodule next to the love: The Death. This human died of complications resulting from treatment for cancer of The Death.
Then I remembered Christmas, 2010.
Christmas, 2010: Indianapolis, Indiana
I was drinking a cup of coffee. I finished it. I went out into the kitchen to refill my cup of coffee.
“Son, if you want another cup of coffee, you can tell me.”
My mom was sitting at the dinner table. The dining room blinds were half-closed and the lights were off. The gray clouds diffused the sunlight which reflected off the snow and entered the dining room in cold slashes. She had the newspaper spread out wide. She had her reading glasses perched on her nose. She had a bag of pretzels on top of the newspaper. She had a stack of bills and a checkbook on top of the newspaper. The wall-mounted television was on. She pushed her chair backward. She hurried into the kitchen.
“Here, here, give me that. Son, that coffee is bad. You probably like it cold, though, don’t you — is that how they drink it in Japan?”
“Well, you can get it cold.”
“They got it cold at Starbucks.”
“I like it cold sometimes.”
“I’m gonna make some fresh hot coffee.”
“Alright.”
“You can go sit out there and I’ll bring it to you when it’s ready. Just go out there and chill out, man.”
She sat at the dinner table. Oprah Winfrey was interviewing JK Rowling. JK Rowling was talking about her battle with depression following her separation from her children’s father.
“You rich bitch,” my mom said. “You got a million billion dollars and all you do is whine, whine, whine. I’ve heard enough. Baloney.”
I stood in the living room. It was all lit up like Christmas. It was noon and it was dark outside. The snow was heavy like clean pillows all over everything.
“The coffee’s ready,” my mom said.
I went out to the kitchen. She was bringing me the coffee. I took it from her.
“Do you wanna sit out here? You can watch TV.”
“Ah, maybe I’ll — ”
The TV was playing endless commercials about losing weight.
I sipped my coffee and took in a couple commercials. The commercials blended into white noise. I was alone with coffee and an impression of a desolate, dark, cold, snow-piled noontime outside.
My mom broke the silence.
“If they ever needed anyone to go into the jail and kill all the pedophiles, I’d do it. I’d sign up. I’d shoot them in the head. I’d stab them all in the heart. I’d do it.”
Tuesday, 14 July 2015: Shin-Osaka Station, Tokyo, Japan
We friended each other on Facebook.
We friended each other on Line.
“I wish it would go away,” she said. “Does it go away? Like, at all?”
“I think it might someday.”
“Oh.”
“As far as I know, it doesn’t go away. It’s — you see, it’s — it doesn’t ever go away.”
“I am imagining it doesn’t.”
“You — they’re like books, okay? They’re books, and they’re all the same size, and you close them all, and you put them all on the shelf, and you leave them there, and if you ever want it, you go find it, and you open it up, and you look at it.”
“Don’t cry,” she said. My right eye was overflowing. She lifted my hand with hers, and with her left thumb she wiped my cheek.
“You don’t have to look at it all the time. Just because it never goes away doesn’t mean you need to be looking at it all the time.”
“Can I tell you again that you remind me of him?”
“You remind me of her.”
“I’m glad.”
“I’m glad.”
“It’s hard. I hate it — I hate myself. I hate everything; everything is ridiculous.”
“Hey,” I said. “Hey. Look at me. I want to tell you something. I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone.”
She looked at me. She smiled. She believed me when I said I’d never told anyone. She knew I knew I’d never told anyone.
“I — look. Look. I’m thirty-six years old. I’m twice as old as you. I’ve heard and read a lot of words. I’ve seen sort of a lot and I’ve lived in a lot of cities. I’ve talked to a lot of people. I have some idea of how many people there are in the world, and — and I can’t say I ‘know’ a lot of people. I definitely can’t say I know everyone. I’ve heard some people say you can’t ever know a person; I’ve heard some people say that it grows in you — you don’t know someone for a long time, and then you know them, and you love them, and hey — I’m serious. I’m smart enough to know — well, I don’t know how smart I am, though I know that I ruined my life and that’s okay, because I know some things now I wouldn’t have known then. Okay? I mean, I — ”
Her eyes hadn’t left mine. Her lips were parted in a tiny smile. Her top teeth peeked from the bottom of her top lip.
“ — I know you might doubt I can know this or think this, though I’m old enough to know I’m right. I know myself well enough to know that I know you. Before it’s too late, I want to tell you this. I want to tell you what I never tell anyone in time. I never tell anyone this. It’s just — these are words people use a lot, and I didn’t make these words up and I didn’t decide what these words mean to so many people around the world, and I didn’t give these words their power, and maybe I’ve been a cynical jerk about these words, and maybe I’ve doubted these words and disbelieved their power and that is why I have neglected them; maybe I don’t want to admit I believe in anything big or spiritual, and maybe I don’t want to be part of some boring club, though I know these words have power, I mean, oh god, god, they have real power, and — and I want to use them just once, and you make me feel safe, and you make me feel not like a liar or a thief: I love you, okay?”
She was staring at my eyes. She was crying.
I squeezed her hands. She squeezed my hands.
“I just want you to know that. I want to tell you that. I want you to know that whatever happens to you, for the rest of your life, wherever you are, okay, wherever you are, and whatever happens, you can talk to me. Okay? Maybe I won’t reply to you right away. Maybe it’ll take me a day or two, sometimes. Just — I want to be your friend forever, okay? I want to be your friend for the rest of my life. I want to know you for the rest of my life, okay? And I mean it. You trust me when I say I mean it. Don’t you?”
She raised her hand, and my hand with it, to wipe tears off her cheek. She hugged me.
“Anytime,” she said. “Anywhere.”
“You know me,” I said.
“I know you,” she said.
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you,” she said.
She looked at her feet. She looked up. She looked at me. She smiled.
“You’re so cool,” I said.
She scoffed. She rolled her eyes.
“You’re like seriously the coolest person I can think of off the top of my head.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“I’m serious.”
She looked me in the eye.
“Thanks. Thank you. Thank you so much.”
I hugged her. I put my face on her shoulder.
“I feel — I feel — like — like I’m four-hundred years old, and I — ” I started to say. My lungs trembled.
She patted me on the back of the head.
“I know,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m going to get on my train now.”
“Yes — goodbye.” She stepped backward from me. Our hands held each other’s. We backed away from each other. My fingertips were gripping hers.
I stepped away. I turned around. I hurried to the turnstile.
“Wait! Wait!”
I turned around.
“Wait! Come back!”
I jogged back.
“What?”
She made a face like she was about to sneeze. She flinched her head backward and then forward.
“Ah, heck, I can’t do it. I was going to surprise you. Your glasses are too pretty.”
“I’ve got a new pair waiting for me in Tokyo.”
“You told me.”
“I’m just reiterating, because I’m excited — ”
“I know you’re excited. You, um, can you take your glasses off, please.”
I grinned. She had a huge smile on her face. Wow, what a smile. She was so beautiful. What a perfect person. She makes me love everybody. I’ll never know anyone like her again because I’ll never know anyone like anyone again. I’ll love her forever and I’ll never see her again. In that moment, I understood the entire experience of loving her forever. She and I understood forever. I’m so sad about the persons I’ve failed to love forever, and I always will be. I’m happy I loved her forever; it is a great joy to know I spent two short days inside someone else’s full understanding of me.
“Alright.” I took my glasses off.
“Don’t close your eyes.”
I opened my eyes. She punched me on the right cheek, as hard as she could. My gums were bleeding. For three days I had a little bruise where my skin grazed my cheekbone.
A station employee dressed in a little short-sleeved police-officer-like uniform sprinted over. She wore a little hat on her head and white gloves on her hands. Her hands dangled by her sides as she ran. her rubber shoes squeaked to a stop between me and the girl. She held her two white-gloved hands up. She made an “X” of her forearms. She made cold eye-contact with me. She lowered her center of gravity. Her right foot slid back. She was maybe twenty-six years old. She looked back over her shoulder.
“Miss, are you okay?”
“Yes,” the girl said. She tapped the station employee on the shoulder. “I’m okay. Yes, yes, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She stepped back away from the station employee. The station employee stood sideways between us. She held her arms up at shoulder level. She presented one flat white glove-palm to each of us. She looked at the girl over her shoulder. The girl looked at my eyes.
“Are you sure you’re okay, miss?”
“I’m okay,” she said. “He’s my friend.”
She was smiling; so was I.
“We’re friends,” she said. “We’re childhood best friends.” The station employee looked from the girl to me and back to the girl. She looked from me to the girl. She looked confused.
I waved at her. I am happy and fearless when I remember this in the dark: here we are persistent in the world, loving each other, alone, and forever only for each other’s memory: hot in the sun, humid under neon, quiet by a river, the cold of air-conditioning spreading from the flap-rims to the dark middles of the ears’ drums huddled under a blanket, sweat-sticky, cold on each other, sharing body heat and sweat-cold, clawing her hair off her face so I could look at her eyes, sweating in a train station, a pain in my face and teeth, drinking a cup of coffee, drinking a can of 7-up, dropping a bottle of a Sprite: lemon loving lime, just like hamburger; exactly like hamburger.
8. (1.)
I stepped through the turnstile. I didn’t look back. I purchased a bottle of Suntory Kuro oolong tea. I turned around. She was still standing where I had left her. I took my phone out of my pocket. I took a picture of her. I sent it to her. She saw it. She took a picture of me. She sent it to me. I saw it.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said.
On the train I looked at the picture she’d sent me of myself. I looked at the picture I’d sent her of herself.
I saw I was so far away from her. She saw she was so far away from me.
