Hikikomori and the Rental Sister: A Novel (11 page)

Again she sets the razor and pulls. “This is fun,” she says. “Are you nervous?”

“Cheeks are the easy part.” She sets, she pulls, deliberate and precise. Between my legs it begins to stir. I need a different thought to suppress it. In middle school I’d think about dead cats, piles and piles of dead cats. Worked every time. “Your brother died because he wouldn’t accept Japanese blood?”

She rinses the blade and for a few seconds stares into the sink. “No, he died because they forced it into him.”

“It was tainted?”

She lines up the next swipe at my face. Her black eyes are complete concentration. I feel as though I am a lump of clay being carved into a sculpture. “Tainted?” she says. “He would’ve said so. But not like a disease like AIDS. Tainted because it was Japanese. See, my mom isn’t Japanese, she’s Korean.” She flips the razor upside down and starts on my neck. “The thing about Japan is that . . . how do I say it? If an American says he’s American, he’s talking about the country. About the constitution and the flag and all the amendments. And the founding fathers. But with the Japanese—” She stops to guide the razor up my neck. “If a Japanese says he’s Japanese, he’s talking more about his blood than the government or the flag. America is values. If you agree to the values and take the tests then you can become American. But in Japan it’s not so simple. We have all sorts of labels to describe what kind of Japanese person you are or aren’t. Depending on where you were born or who your parents are. Am I explaining this right? Sometimes Americans take it the wrong way. It’s all very complicated. I don’t even think I could explain it in Japanese.”

With a towel she polishes away the mirror’s coat of steam. “The other kids, even the parents,” she says, “never let us forget we were part Korean. It got pretty bad sometimes.”

“What’s wrong with Korea?”

“Nothing. But that’s not the point.”

“So he wanted to be Korean and not Japanese?”

“It’s not that, either. He thought of himself as totally Japanese. I do, too. But it was like he wasn’t being allowed to be who he felt he was. Not that everyone was mean. Most weren’t. But you only pay attention to the mean ones.”

“Wasn’t it the same for you?”

“He took it harder. We’re different. None of that stuff really bothers me. Then again, I wasn’t the one who kept getting beaten up because of it. I can’t tell you everything that was going on in his head. If I knew maybe I could’ve done something.”

My Adam’s apple gives her trouble. She uses short strokes. She tells me to hold my breath. I feel even more like a nascent sculpture, crawling into life from a vacuum. Is this girl my god? Shall I worship her?

She begins on the other cheek. “He didn’t want any more Japanese blood,” she says, “but they gave it to him anyway. I’m not saying it made sense. I guess it did to him.” Tears in her eyes glisten. She wipes them away.

“I’m sorry. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want.”

Again she rubs away the steam. She pulls the razor across my cheek and even with all that cream it sounds like sandpaper. “He had been back from the hospital for three days. By the time I got home from school that afternoon the men in yellow jumpsuits were cleaning it up. His body was gone. Mom was crying. Dad was staring out the window at a pine tree.” She holds my chin in her fingertips and turns my face left, then right, then left, then right. “When was the last time someone kissed your smooth cheek?”

She slices away the last of my beard. “When they finally let me in his room, it was so strange. It was perfectly clean, like nothing happened. The yellow jumpsuits erased what he did. They erased my brother. Mom told me how she found him. He was naked in the middle of the floor. The whole floor was a pool of dark red. He finally drained out all that Japanese blood.”

She massages my face again with a steaming towel. I close my eyes and plunge into the moment. Let it never end.

“Thomas, you’re beautiful.” I roll my eyes in an exaggerated way: I can’t afford to let her know that I believe she means it. “Is it weird to say? I just mean that it’s a transformative.”

“Transformation. And it’s not. It’s just a shave.”

“But you’re a whole new person. I did good, didn’t I? Not even a scratch.”

We lie next to each other on the bed. My shirt is back on. My face feels fresh. She might be right about me being a new person. “Do you talk to my wife?”

“No, not really. Sometimes.”

“She used to bring men to the apartment,” I say. The girl takes my hand. I can feel her pulse. If we held each other tight enough, would our beating hearts synchronize?

“You heard them?”

“She’d leave the door open.”

“Did you ever go out there?”

“And do what?”

“She wants attention.”

My wife must have expected that in my room Megumi’s and my feelings would tangle. Did she decide it was worth the risk? Is she confident that, whatever happens, she will win out in the end, or does she not care about any of that and just wants me to be out in the world again, even if it’s not with her?

“Anything you want,” Megumi is saying. “I’ll go get it.” I harbor no specific cravings, or more precisely, I deny myself cravings that can only go unfulfilled.

“Roast beef and Swiss,” I finally say, “Lettuce, tomato, onion, mayo. Lots of mayo. Salt and pepper. On a hero.”

It’s ridiculous that while she is out getting lunch I am lonely, yet here I am at the window, shade pulled back, peeking down at the empty street, waiting, wasting no opportunity to catch a glimpse. I try the bed, but her absence, her lingering wake, consumes me. My gaze ricochets off the walls. Back at the window I stare into the distance. How far away is the sky?

It’s even more ridiculous that a roast beef sandwich could reduce me to tears, yet here I am. Just my right eye, not my left. I can barely swallow.

“What’s wrong?” she says when she gets back.

I shake my head. We eat on the floor, our heros unwrapped, the white paper forming our placemats. We dump our chips into a pile. I drink a can of Coke. She drinks ginger ale. Between us are pickles. I imagine that we are sitting in the grass, on the bank of a slow river.

“I know what you’re doing,” I say. “Do you really think a sandwich will make me long for the world?”

“I just thought you might want some lunch.” She tries a bite of my roast beef. I try a bite of her ham and egg and tomato. “It’s really warm out today,” she says. “Like spring. I wish you could’ve come with me. It’d be fun to walk together.”

The afternoon unwinds. The window burns golden. She runs her fingers across my new face and says my skin is smooth. Her fingers are just as smooth. Smoother.

“I told you about my brother. Tell me about your son.”

“I killed him.” Looking into the mirror after she shaved me was like rummaging through the dark corner of a forgotten drawer and discovering an old photograph.

“You didn’t. If you killed him, you’d be in jail.”

“What do you think this is?”

She sits on the bed. I lie with my head on her lap. With her fingertips she inspects my hair and ear and neck. I don’t mind. The late afternoon sun has sunk and shines directly through the window, casting a wide beam of light across the wood floor, a beam of brilliance that suddenly appears and disappears with the stray passing of clouds.

I am falling, no doubt, the ground beneath me has crumbled away and I am swallowed into the blackness, and nothing’s left for me but to fall, to feel the wind in my face, to resign myself to the depths, and I wonder if there ever really was any solid ground beneath my feet, or if I was perched on the tiny tip of a thousand-foot needle, balancing way up high, appearing still and solid and steady, but constantly contracting my muscles in perfect orchestration to keep my balance, lest the slightest breeze knock me over. The girl sent me falling. I reach out, but my arms are mercilessly short and there is nothing to grab to break my plunge, only the air itself, slipping through my fingers as I squeeze. But at this moment, I have nothing to fear. At this exact moment I am not so much falling as floating—so long is the shaft through which I descend—the wind through my hair, my stomach queasy, bobbing in a void. How long since I last felt so free? My muscles need not contract endlessly now, I can finally relax. I hope I land in some soft place, or even better that I never land, that this falling becomes my new state of being.

“My neighbor Morris’s son was teaching my son how to draw pictures on the sidewalk with colored chalk. Houses and trees and the sun and dinosaurs. I sipped Silke’s coffee out of a mug we bought in Paris. She was supposed to come down when she was off the phone. It’s funny the things you remember. I had one shoelace untied. I was wearing these old ratty sneakers—cross-country racers, actually—leftovers from college. They fit like slippers. I know for sure one was untied but I can’t remember which one, and when I imagine it in my mind and look down at my shoes, sometimes I see the left one untied, and sometimes the right one. Anyway, then we heard a cardinal up in the maple tree. I heard a cardinal but Morris heard only a bird. What’s that, he said. A bird, I said. No shit, he said, what kind of bird? Don’t swear in front of my kid, I said, and it’s a cardinal. We peered into the leaves, trying to find the bird, and finally there she was, a gray female cardinal, singing away on a Saturday morning. Then, such a sickening noise, the screech of rubber against pavement. So loud, so close. A woman screamed. And just like that it was over, no sounds of any kind, no song, no screech, no scream. A frozen moment.”

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing then. It could not be real. Not a denial of what I know to be the truth, not that kind of disbelief, but something much deeper: the complete inability to comprehend that such a sight was even possible, within the laws of physics or any other law by which real things happen.

“That stupid cardinal. We took our eyes off our kids for what, thirty seconds? Thirty seconds of looking at a cardinal. Now, of course, after replaying it over and over in my mind I see that the cardinal was giving me a warning. From high on her perch she saw my son run into the road and she saw the speeding car close the gap. She was telling me to look out, to protect my child. She was a siren, and I just stared at her, listening to her song, not doing a goddamned thing, like I was staring up in amazement at a screaming smoke detector in the middle of the room, surrounded by flames, oblivious.

“Silke screamed from upstairs in the window, and the frozen moment was over. The white mug from Paris crashed to the cement. I leapt down the steps and into the street. My son lay on the road, bloody, barely conscious.”

I kneeled over him and held his hand and touched his face. That’s the right thing to do, isn’t it? We’re told not to move the victim, it’s better to wait for the professionals. My son wasn’t crying, just groaning, and barely. From the looks of him, an impartial observer might have said it was already too late. What could the professionals do? Send the professionals back, no need for them here. Send them somewhere they might do some good. Not here. Too late.

“But I was not an impartial observer. I debated: maybe if I picked him up so carefully and took him into my arms and hugged him hard enough I could squeeze out all the hurt. I heard a siren off in the distance.

“Silke rushed down and we became mirror images of each other. I was on my knees and held his right hand and gently stroked his forehead full of cuts. She knelt on the other side, holding his left hand and stroking his forehead. The siren grew louder but never seemed to come. I held his hand as he lay dying. The driver of the car stood behind Silke, bawling, hysterical, horrified at what she had done, and I remember thinking she had chosen the perfect spot to stand: not too far away, as though she weren’t responsible, as though she were trying to escape the scene, and not too close that she was intruding on us, who wanted nothing to do with her. There was only one spot that fulfilled those requirements and she was standing on it. Some human instinct drove her there. She was the only one crying. I wasn’t crying. Silke wasn’t crying. I had to lean in close to hear his fading gurgles. We were so focused on comforting him we didn’t think to cry. Soothing words, soothing touches, that’s all we could offer.”

“It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay, I said, stroking his forehead even as he spit up blood, running out the corner of his mouth and down his chin and cheek, and I had an instinct—my left arm actually twitched—to pick up his bib and wipe off the blood as though it were pureed peas. But he wasn’t wearing his bib, and it wasn’t pureed peas.

“The paramedics said, ‘Stand back, please.’ And just like that our jobs as parents were over.”

Stand back, please. You’re no longer needed.

Fifteen

She orders Thai for dinner. I give her cash and she goes to the front door. When I suggested Japanese food she puckered her face and said the Japanese food here is no good.

We share everything. Tom yum soup. Pad thai. Sour sausage with raw onions and raw ginger and peanuts. Panang curry. We go back and forth between the dishes. “How come Americans don’t like to share their food?” she says. “In my country we are always sharing. Korea, too. One big pot in the middle. But Americans need their own plates of food. Even if two people order the same thing, they each need their own private plate. Why is that?”

“I’ve never thought about it. Is that true?”