Eleven Twenty-Three (12 page)

Another orange streetlamp goes out as we
pass.

“Are we going to talk about it?” Tara asks
quietly.

“Oh
shit
, Tara.”

But like a miracle, just as my girlfriend
brings marriage up yet again, my best friend Hajime’s blue house
appears around the corner and everything is temporarily
copacetic.

“We’ll talk about it later,” I mutter. “I
promise.”

Tara sighs.

The roof on Hajime’s back porch was ripped
off during the hurricane triad of 2004, and he lost the shed in the
side yard just this October during Brooke. He has never taken the
time or monetary effort to replace any of it. As we ascend the
steps and knock on his back door, the wood creaks under our feet
and the wind picks up. The oversized green umbrella slumped over a
white patio table flutters erratically and an empty Ravenswood
bottle on the rail tips over and falls into the ragged yard
below.

Hajime comes to the door wearing black and
white pajama pants and a faded Disinformation t-shirt, indicating
he will be hallucinating tonight. He is smoking one of the
cigarettes his father brings back from his business trips to
Hiroshima and looking fairly benign. I can hear annoying
conversation behind him.

“I didn’t think you two were coming,” he
says, holding the back door open for us. “We were getting
antsy.”

“I didn’t want to come,” I say, half-smiling
and streaming past him into a kitchen littered with dishes used
over a week ago. “May I borrow one of your cigarettes?”

“I don’t want it back once you’ve borrowed
it, but I think I can accommodate you,” he says. “Tara, you look
ravishing this evening.”

“Thanks,” Tara smiles, hugging our host.
“It’s cold in here, Hajime.”

“It’s our way,” he says, but I can’t be
certain what to make of this comment.

We follow him through the foul kitchen,
pausing in the dining room so we can take a look at the
half-finished gray, black, and crimson-stained canvas he is
currently working on. Hajime explains it as an allegory for the
disintegration of isolationism throughout the world, which he
believes is a bad thing. I am not so sure. Next to the painting on
the dining room table are three half-dismantled security cameras,
their wires and bolts and inner workings exposed.

In the living room, the usual Saturday night
crowd of moderately gorgeous young people has congregated, not a
single cigarette-less hand in the bunch. Go! Go! 7188 plays from
Hajime’s laptop. A muted program on Japanese spirit photography
goes unnoticed on the television. There are ten chocolate peanut
butter cups bunched together on the coffee table.

At the top of Hajime’s guest list tonight are
Michael and Jasmine, the most attractive ones here and apparently
very concerned with the plight of feral cats in western Florida.
Jasmine, once the product of several of my masturbation fantasies,
is just as pretentiously beautiful and unique as her name might
suggest. Her eyebrow is pierced, along with the bottom lip and,
from what numerous ex-boyfriends reported on Facebook, the hood of
her clit. This month, her hair is black and pink. Jasmine’s eyes
have always bothered me in their greenness, but her now-boyfriend
Michael’s are useful in that they inadvertently give away most of
his chart-topping pathological lies. They go up and down and dart
around every time he’s embellishing, according to Hajime.

As we enter the room, Michael tops Jasmine’s
statistics on feral cat populations with some kind of first-hand
account in which he actually saw three rednecks take shots with a
rifle at the innocent wild animals outside an apartment complex. As
Michael tells this story, he stares at the floor. I roll my eyes
and decide to tune out everything he says.

It’s cold in Hajime’s house.

Across from the first hip Bohemian couple are
Hajime’s brother-in-law Mark and his wife Mitsuko, who is eating a
strawberry Pop Tart with one hand and smoking a Camel Light with
the other. Her hair is jet black with two blood-red streaks that
hide her sleepy eyes, a flawless pierced nose, and the kind of
small perfect lips you can’t help but notice on a gorgeous drowning
victim. She frowns when she sees me and I glance at Tara. Memories
of summer lodge in the back of my throat like poisonous jagged
glass and I feel light-headed. I didn’t know for certain that
Mitsuko would be here tonight, and her barely concealed grimace
assures me that she was hoping against hope that I wouldn’t be here
either. Her cold look hasn’t registered with my girlfriend,
however, as Tara is already plopping down in the other recliner and
taking the joint that’s being passed to her. Meanwhile, Mark is
working on his Japanese diplomacy skills by eating microwave egg
rolls with a pair of chopsticks. Hajime scoffs at the sight and
gives me a look that I guess I understand before sitting down on
the floor.

Tara’s roommate Julie comes strolling in from
one of the bedrooms, where she has been chatting away on her cell
phone with super-boyfriend Matt. She removes her glasses, cleans
them off with the hem of her sweater, and sits down in the
recliner. Her blond hair is much longer than before we left,
draping her shoulders and running all the way down to the small of
her back. When Julie spots us, she blows me a kiss and gives Tara a
quick thumbs-up/thumbs-down, a remnant of an inside joke neither of
them remember the punch line to anymore. Both girls half-heartedly
chuckle at their shared past and Julie balances a little white pill
on her index finger before licking it away and swallowing it.

Everyone greets us and fills us in on this
Saturday night’s topics: feral cat populations, Barack Obama,
cross-dimensional telepathy using Ketamine as a chemical catalyst,
the 2008 election, Jon Stewart, Afghani marijuana, old classmates
who are pregnant, a rare sexually transmitted disease called
Monogamy, where Tara and Layne have been…

“Coffee and toast,” Tara explains.

“Sweet tea and hash browns,” I add, raising
my hand like an idiot.

“They didn’t have those things in China?”
Julie asks, sipping water to help dissolve whatever pill she just
ingested. If her drug habits have not changed, it’s some form of
off-brand Percocet.

“In China, you want Chinese
stuff
,”
Tara explains. “But we’re home now, so we’re back to our old
late-night dining habits.”

“In that case, I’ll be sure to order up a big
plate of AIDS when I visit Africa,” Hajime quips, patting my back
and fishing out a clove from his pocket. “When in Rome, they
say…”

“You guys talking about all this food and
venereal diseases is making me hungry again,” Mitsuko says,
finishing her Pop Tart. “I’m thinking Chinese…”

“Did you ever notice that if someone has to
talk you into going out for Chinese food and you’re not really in
the mood, the fortune cookie message at the end always sucks for
you?” Jasmine says, picking at an imaginary tangle in her perfectly
rebellious hair.

“Blah, blah, blah,” Michael comments.

This is not what he actually says, of course,
but I have tuned him out.

I look down at my feet. There is dust on the
hard wood floor, and as I notice it, more falls on my pant leg.
Glancing up, I see that there is a large crack in Hajime’s ceiling.
I doubt he has seen it. Tara and I have private suspicions that
Hajime is intentionally ignoring the needs of his house to collect
the insurance money once the next real hurricane sweeps Florida and
destroys what’s left. Either that or he is planning on one day
using his entire property as some kind of ridiculous art
installation.

“Michael, is it just me, or do you have a
story for every conceivable topic one of us might bring up?” Hajime
asks. Snickers are heard throughout the living room.

“My baby has just had a full, interesting
life,” Jasmine quickly retorts, hugging on her blond and beautiful
sex partner. “Right, Michael?”

Michael nods sheepishly and tells another
story, this one about a guy who always told stories.

I look over at my best friend. Very similar
to his almost permanently stoned and hateful younger sister
Mitsuko, Hajime has intentionally defied just about every known
Japanese-American tradition, much to his parents’ chagrin. He makes
ends meet by working part-time as a painting instructor at the art
museum downtown and part-time installing surveillance cameras for
his father’s commercial security company that may have, in fact,
been responsible for cameras in practically every textile plant,
storage facility, distributor, and secret government installation
unit in the Southeast. Hajime hates his parents’ cooking and only
occasionally looks at sushi with interest, laughs condescendingly
at anime and manga, never touches a video game console, and counts
Bill Hicks and Robert Anton Wilson among his favorite contemporary
thinkers. I met him in high school a very long time ago, when he
attempted unsuccessfully to organize what he called FATS, the
Fellowship of Atheist and Taoist Students, which would have been a
direct attack on the Christian Athletes. I assured him I’d be the
first to join, but Hajime’s idea failed when no teacher would
sponsor a group of godless, harmoniously transcendental teenagers
declaring peaceful religious war on what were generally considered
the school’s best students.

After that, it’s always been one cause or
another, this conspiracy or that, updates on political upheavals or
long rousing conversations on a revolution that’s always just
around the corner. One night he talked for almost an hour on the
false sense of security we’ve gained through useless technology,
even as he repaired a broken surveillance camera from a bank
downtown. In 2006, he passed out flyers on the truth about 9/11 to
the townsfolk heading into the local theater to see
United
93
. Then there was the two-month stint when Hajime was
absolutely certain that if we didn’t boycott Mobil and Exxon
immediately, countless oppressed peoples throughout the Asian third
world would be tortured and killed. I’ve gazed for hours at
different abstract smears on white canvases while Hajime explained
what he was really saying in each piece.

His statements always change; his ability to
make one does not.

“So now then,” Jasmine says. “Everyone is
here. Who’s going to do this?”

The eight of us stare down at the ten
chocolate peanut butter cups laid out on the table. I start making
numerological connections again.

“Not me,” Julie says, raising her hand. “I
only do drugs that make me feel the way I’m supposed to feel but
can’t. Not to mention I am a very sleepy girl right now.”

“You were already discounted before the
proposition was even announced,” Hajime scoffs. “Get out of here,
pill-head. The Skittle party’s down the street.”

Julie smiles lasciviously and shoots Hajime
the middle finger. It occurs to me that they may have slept
together again at some point in the recent past. Julie rises from
her chair, stretches her pale skinny arms out, and yawns
melodramatically. She bids us adieu, gives me a welcome home hug,
tells Tara not to forget to lock the front door when we get home
later, and then slouches out of the house. From the front porch she
turns around and giggles something about almost being able to see
through us. I shiver when she says this and when I look up she’s
gone.

“Mitsuko and I should probably leave soon
too,” Mark says when the headlights of Julie’s car peer through the
windows.

“I have to be at work tomorrow morning,”
Mitsuko explains. “Not all of us have the weekend off or funerals
to attend.”

“So those two are out,” Jasmine observes,
diplomatically skipping right over Mitsuko’s comment. “That means
everyone else is in, and that includes our returning champions of
the illicit drug scene, Tara and Layne.”

“We have that thing to go to tomorrow morning
at nine-thirty,” Tara says, avoiding the word “funeral” in lieu of
Mitsuko’s outburst. “We can’t.”

“The key term here is ‘tomorrow,’ guys,”
Hajime argues, already plucking up two of the chocolates and
holding them out to us. “I didn’t want to bring it up, but tomorrow
morning is not exactly your event of the century, is it? And you’ve
told me before that it's nights like this one that balance people
like us out during such precarious times in their life, right?”

Neither of us responds.

“Okay then. And besides, this will be a good
experience, an educational one. It will be mild. Right,
Jasmine?”

“Totally,” she says, giggling.

“You said these shrooms were less like the
acid sheets and more like pleasant memory inducers, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“I feel a pang of regret about it, though,” I
say. “If I do this, I am conclusively a bad person. I feel guilty,
Hajime.”

“But you shouldn’t,” Hajime says. “You really
shouldn’t.”

“It’s 1967 dipped in chocolate and peanut
butter,” Jasmine promises, tonguing her lip ring.

“What if it turns out to be 1968 instead?” I
ask.

“It’s not. They don’t come in 1968
flavor.”

“Well, if we do it, how will we deal with
tomorrow morning?” I press, stuffing my hand into the pocket of my
jeans so no one sees how much it’s shaking.

“Well, let’s just do it and deal with
tomorrow morning when tomorrow morning calls to be dealt with. I’m
going to the service too. Remember?”

He hands Tara and I one chocolate apiece.
When I try to take the smaller of the two, he waves my hand away
and places the other in my palm.

“No, no,
this
one is yours, man,”
Hajime murmurs, winking. “You’ll thank me later.”

We stand in hesitation.

“Layne?” my girlfriend says, pretending to be
uncertain but in actuality dying to go too far, just like it was
before we left.

“Oh, fuck it,” I sigh, taking the sweet and
biting off half of it.