Eleven Twenty-Three (27 page)

The waitress came by and began taking away
our empty glasses. Mitsuko’s head lilted and she stared ravenously
at me across the table. She crossed her legs and her foot brushed
against mine again.

“Do you want another drink?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Okay then. You want to go?”

“Yeah,” she said. “But not home.”

“Okay, then don’t go home. But can you drop
me off at my car? In the midst of my twenty-something rage, I sort
of left it in the Applebee’s parking—”

“Just a little career advice, though, Layne:
don’t ever get a job reading signals, because you obviously suck at
it.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, but by then I
knew, and was powerless to stop her.

Three hours later, I stared at the crumpled
sheets and the wet spot she left behind on the mattress for a long
while before eventually bundling the bedding up and taking it down
to the laundry room. The next night I went back to work and
apologized to my manager for leaving during my last shift. He wrote
me up and changed the floor plan so that I was in dreaded Section
11, right next to the men’s restroom. I made twenty-three dollars
in tips that night.

When I got off work, Tara had left a text
message on the phone she was paying for:

sunshine i was just thinking about the
teaching thing 2day and i had a really great idea ithink. have you
ever thought about teaching in another country???

My affair with Mitsuko lasted exactly one
week, from Monday to Monday.

After our first time, Mitsuko came into the
restaurant late that Thursday and asked to be sat in my section.
She ordered a Jack and Coke and watched me clean up my section and
then waited outside until I got off at one-thirty. I turned off my
cell phone and we went back to my apartment. I drank a glass of
water and we ended up on the floor by the couch.

Mitsuko was furious when we had sex, tearing
at my shirt and digging her panther-like nails into my chest as she
rode me. She focused on the living room wall the entire time,
gyrating her bony hips toward it and narrowing her eyes until
finally they were closed. Her moans evolved into squeals, and then
into hushed screams when she came. Once Mitsuko had been satisfied,
though, she immediately went dry and kept asking, “Are you going to
come?” until finally I pretended that I did and the sex was over.
Afterward, she stayed just long enough to browse through my
bookshelves and smoke a cigarette. Then she grabbed my copy of
100 Years of Solitude
from the bookshelf, said, “I’m
borrowing this,” and floated out of my apartment. I jerked off in
the shower that night, imagining life underwater.

The last time I was with Mitsuko alone was
that following Monday. I had the night off and was stretched out on
the couch trying to follow some book called
Red China Blues
.
I had begun doing research on a potential move to somewhere in
Asia, and just as Mitsuko had said, the job market looked
promising—especially in China. I hadn’t mentioned just how
interested I was in teaching again to Tara, just in case I began
applying for something and got turned down. That and it made me
feel terrible to lend credence to Tara’s suggestion when Mitsuko
had posited the same idea just before I slept with her.

My half-working doorbell rang. I knew who it
was immediately and quickly threw on a different t-shirt and some
shorts, tried to manage the cowlick in my hair in front of the
bathroom mirror, and gargled mouthwash. When I opened the front
door, I could barely discern Mitsuko standing in the darkened
breezeway. The overhead light had burnt out and she was frightening
in the late-night shadows. A part of me didn’t want to let her in.
But I did.

“So what are you up to?” she asked, lighting
a cigarette and sitting on the sofa. “I didn’t interrupt another
suicide ideation, did I?”

“I was just…learning about Communism,” I
said. “I think you may be right about the teaching abroad
thing.”

“Well of course I was right, Layne.” She
inspected the half-finished book on the coffee table and the pages
of information I had printed off the Internet. “So you settled on
China after all? I need an ash tray.”

“It’s looking like it. It seems the least
difficult to attain and the most promising of the choices.”

“Have you brought it up to Tara yet?” she
said.

“Not quite,” I admitted, motioning for her to
ash in the empty beer can on the coffee table. “I told her I was
thinking about the idea, but wanted to start applying to different
schools there and see if anything came up before I mentioned the
prospect further and got her hopes up.”

“Your gesture is both noble and callow,
Layne.”

“Yeah, well…that’s me: noble and callow.”

My voice trailed off and I could not think of
anything else to say. I lit a cigarette and looked at the framed
poster for the film
Raiders of the Lost Arc
hanging slightly
crooked on the wall. Then I inspected my socks and wished I had on
shoes. My floor needed vacuuming. I hadn’t done even rudimentary
housework in what seemed like a long time.

“Mitsuko,” I finally began, “I have to tell
you that I really do like you—”

“Layne,” she interrupted, “don’t even
initiate this conversation. If you do, we’ll only end up in an
unnecessary argument with the same outcome anyway. So just—you
know—”

Before she had even completed her statement,
she had already stood up and begun toward the bedroom. The hallway
looked like it was expanding before her, and she crept into the
room very slowly, methodically, glancing back only once to make
certain that I was following her. I didn’t even realize that I
was.

Instead of immediately beginning to strip,
Mitsuko climbed onto my bed on Tara’s side and lay very still over
the covers. I hovered next to her in the dark for a moment before
apprehensively creeping in and placing myself next to her. My eyes
adjusted to the darkness and her face was startlingly pale when I
looked over at her.

“Just pretend,” she whispered hoarsely.

“Just pretend what?”

“That this doesn’t mean anything. That it
never really happened. Things will run smoother that way.”

“What do you mean, Mitsuko?”

“You know what I mean, Layne.” Pause. “This
is the last time.”

“Why?”

“And you
know
why, for Christ’s sake.
Stop making this more difficult than it needs to be and everything
will be just fine.”

She kicked her shoes onto the floor and began
slipping off her jeans. She didn’t look at me.

“Did you patch things up with Mark?” I asked
her. “Is that what happened? How
appropriate
. I thought the
relationship had ‘jumped the shark,’ as he so eloquently put
it.”

“Come on, Layne. You knew that we wouldn’t
stay broken up. It was just…a week off. I’m sure he indulged in a
couple of his own blond-haired, blue-eyed proclivities as well, so
it’s not like this is some goddamned morality play we’re in here.
Besides, what about you and Tara? Don’t you want to continue
that…situation?”

“I don’t think I…want that…anymore.”

“This is the last time we do this,” she
repeated, and motioned for me to start taking off my clothes.
“After tonight we’re ghosts.”

“You mean
bakemonó
?” I sighed.

“Don’t be a smart-ass.”

After that she climbed on top of me, unhooked
her Robitussin-colored bra, and then collapsed onto her back again
to let me do whatever.

That last night we had sex, I thought about
an entire non-future with Mitsuko: Sunday afternoon dinners with
Hajime and the Miriyama family at their beach house in St.
Augustine; nighttime vigils by the ocean; the random trips to
Dubliners just for old time’s sake; suspicious looks and the
occasional groans from Hajime for the first couple of months until
he finally nodded an approval to our courtship; Mitsuko parachuting
crushed up Xanax into my throat; me feebly attempting to escort her
out of a bar when she was shit-faced and starting a fight she
couldn’t possibly win with random bar whores who called Mitsuko a
dirty yellow cunt; another teaching job in another county where my
past didn’t exist—a different perspective on the word “future”;
random surprise visits to the travel agency Mitsuko worked for, at
which point she would wrap her frail arms around my neck and kiss
me passionately to the thundering applause of her coworkers; stoned
and half-watching
Wondershowzen
while munching on edamame;
Mitsuko riding my face in the upstairs bedroom of her brother’s
house while we’re both on heavy dosages of Percocet; the two of us
pretending to understand post-post-modern art at a museum in
Orlando where her brother’s work is being displayed; gazing at
horseshoe crabs wandering listlessly along the shore on a gray
afternoon; kisses under blue lamplight in a bed neither of us own;
avoiding Mark but then making fun of him, of his unimaginative
haircut, his poor punctuation, and his penis, not long after he
vanishes from the End scene; the months of space Tara would need
once we were through, and then the
permanent
space she would
get because I would never be able to confront her again; Mitsuko
and I holding hands on a plane bound for Tokyo, compliments of a
newly deceased grandmother from Kagawa Prefecture; long
conversations revolving around the film
Vital
; listening to
Asobi Seksu on the way to a Marilyn Manson concert; lavender and
sea grass incense candles burning on the rim of a bathtub filled
with soapy warm water and oatmeal; her hand disappearing underneath
mine; a lifetime of concealed grimaces and furtive glances that I
could never possibly comprehend; and all of those indefinite
silences only broken by awkward conversations jumbled in the
translation—

I lost my train of thought after that when I
noticed how completely dry she was no matter how hard I fucked her,
and when I slowed down, changed positions, and finally just
stopped, she never said a word. She never protested. Her eyes were
focused on the ceiling and she had long before that moment placed
herself in a trance where a heartbeat was not necessary for life,
only sheer will. When I slipped my clothes back on and lit a
cigarette in the dark, Mitsuko grabbed her stuff from the floor and
shambled into the bathroom to dress.

When she came out and whispered, “Just don’t
make any trouble after tonight…please?” from the unlit hallway just
before leaving my apartment, she cocked her head in my direction
only once, and when she did, I saw Olivia Glatz’s face.

“You’re
already
a ghost, Mitsuko,” I
muttered to her, terrified, as she put her shoes back on. “You both
are.”

03:14:05 AM

Mitsuko wants to know what they’re going to
do with all the bodies.

They’re everywhere out there.

It’s just after three in the morning and it’s
starting to rain again. The wind pitches and whines, and the gusts
cause the little yellow house on Flint Street to shudder. The
temperature has dropped and the windows are fogging up. Then the
first tiny beads of water begin spattering the panes of glass and
through the blur we can discern the dark outlines of bodies dotting
the lawns and street. We can only vaguely conjecture at the nature
of the moving shadows and the intentions of frantic neighbors we
catch momentary glimpses of while peering through the blinds.

But the bodies—

They were discarded in every direction when
we drove back from my mother’s immolated apartment. There were
children lying in pools of blood in the middle of the road, only
inches away from the parents that broke their necks or bit off
their faces or strangled them with their boot heels before
pulverizing their own head into the ground immediately afterward.
There were gunshot wounds to heads, missing necks, and at one point
we passed an old man sitting in a lawn chair whose eyes had somehow
been burnt out of their sockets. There were enlarged tongues
hanging limply from the mouths of poison victims. There were more
fires than before, which meant half a dozen random, usually naked
or near naked survivors wandering around in the cold, their arms
and faces and legs blackened and peeling off of their bodies like
the rotting skin of discarded fruit.

Tara had come along with me and left the
others in Hajime’s car. She was there to make sure I was okay, but
never said a word or even raised her eyebrows in the form of a
question the entire drive home. She was preoccupied. When she
wasn’t recoiling from the terrible visuals unfolding just outside
of my car, she was staring uneasily at the briefcase attached to my
wrist and sinking into two-minute bouts of desperate weeping over
her now-dead mother and father.

The second eleven twenty-three had taken its
toll.

“So what’s the plan?” Hajime quietly asks the
group now, breaking us out of our scared shitless reverie.

I’m sitting at Tara’s kitchen table again,
sipping from watery coffee and smoking a cigarette while gazing
through the window at the changing traffic light. Seemingly every
square inch of my body aches and groans. The handcuff from the
briefcase is already digging into my wrist. My skin feels hot. Tara
is seated next to me, her face red and chapped and her lips
shedding layers of skin that she quickly bites off with her front
teeth.

Mitsuko and her husband Mark stand by the
bar, passing a small pipe between them and taking hits of weed with
too many stems in it. Mark looked genuinely glad to see me alive
when we came through the door an hour ago. Apparently hopes were
low and everyone assumed I was dead. Ever since then, I find myself
looking in his direction, nodding uselessly.

Chloe could care less about anything right
now. She has been all but catatonic since she watched her father
Bill clench his eyes shut at 11:23, open them a moment later, and
calmly go into the bedroom to stab his wife Nancy about forty times
with a pair of scissors. He was giggling so hard that he could
hardly keep his hand steady enough to open up his own arms
afterward, she said. Right now she’s sitting on a bar stool
watching infomercials that are randomly interrupted by black
screens and messages like “Let no tears be found upon your corpse’s
face” or “Escape the disintegration of the new millennium.” She
occasionally glances over at me and blinks, an admission of
nothing.