Hikikomori and the Rental Sister: A Novel (17 page)

“Well, wait a minute.” I try hugging her. She is stiff, unyielding. I have overstepped some boundary. I release her but stay standing close. “It’s just that I’m scared to let you leave.”

“You mean you are scared to be alone, or you are scared for me to be alone?” Right to the heart of it, as always. I have no answer; I honestly don’t know.

“It just seems wrong to be apart right now,” I say.

“Wrong to be apart. Look, I know what you’re getting at. Last night it all came over me at once and it felt so hopeless and . . . I never seriously thought about doing anything so drastic before.” Her face does not contradict her words, and I make sure my own face displays credulity. The situation demands it. She continues. “I’m just glad, I thank god that it didn’t spread, that nobody was—”

“You think they bought our story?”

“There’s nothing to buy or not buy.”

“A kitchen fire that got out of hand.”

“That’s exactly what it was.” Her eyes are dead level. Not even a blink.

“They said we could take a look starting this afternoon.”

“There won’t be much left.”

“Maybe we could go together.”

“I told you, I’m going to get some clothes and then I have to go to work.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

Taking deep breaths and ever so slowly and loudly exhaling is a surly way to highlight the very frustration that one is purporting to suppress, but Silke was always able to pull it off in a completely natural, disarming way, as though it were something she was totally unconscious of. She does it again now. Another thing about her I had forgotten. “We can’t undo last night, or any of it,” she says. “And you want some sort of answer, something definitive, but you want it just so you can feel at ease and don’t have to pace back and forth in uncertainty. So you don’t have to suffer. And it’s not that I want you to suffer, but that’s just not how this works. I don’t have any answers, not yet. And if you’re honest, you don’t either.”

“So then now what?”

“Now I go to work. Just like I have been. And now you stay here and wait. Like I have.”

Twenty

I wander Megumi’s apartment. Just like Silke said I would. Dissipating energy and uncertainty. I don’t hate it when she’s right; I hate it when I should’ve known earlier, so I could have spared us both from her having to point it all out to me. The clock hands in the kitchen say nine thirty, plus a few seconds. The day ahead seems endless. When did that change? I used to never feel the future; I could sit idle in my room all day, perfectly calm with no sense of anything slipping away. But now the future screams for attention. An anxious mood envelops me.

Megumi’s extra keys are hanging on the hook. Silke did not take them. When the fire started, my own keys and wallet were still in my pocket from shopping with Megumi. A small bit of luck.

I hail a cab. The lurch and sway is a little too much. I open the window and position my face for the right amount of air. The weather has turned. Winter, finally over.

From the outside there isn’t much to see, except that some of our windows have been replaced with sheets of particleboard. The window from which my wife nearly leaped is not boarded over. The square hole is still there. It takes all my strength and willpower to avoid tracing the likely trajectory with my eyes.

The rest of the building seems fine. The street is as usual. I look at Morris’s windows, but they reveal nothing. If he shows his face, I am ready.

The staircase harbors the smell of smoke but not as strong as I imagined. Nature gets right to the business of moving on. It does not dwell.

A single boot print on the door. Next to the knob. That’s all it took for them to get in. The door is ajar.

Two men in heavy-looking parkas are standing in the living room with their hands on their hips and staring up at a scorched spot on the ceiling. “Yeah I don’t think so either,” the bigger one says. When they become aware of my presence, the smaller one asks if he can help me, a question that sounds oddly funny to me.

“It’s my place,” I say.

“You’re the owner?”

“I mean I live here. I rented.”

“You don’t live here no more.” They look at me the same way they did the spot on the ceiling. Something to inspect. “It says here you refused medical treatment.” Not an accusation, exactly, but nor is it casual conversation.

“We were fine,” I answer. “We are fine.”

“Permits,” the smaller one says. “That’s going to be the pain in your ass. The permits.”

“But it says there were only two of you. Where’s the third occupant?”

“It’s not that the damage is all that bad,” the small one continues, “but all these walls got to come down and get replaced, so that’s electrical, gas, the whole shit. This one’s load-bearing over the staircase. Securing the permits is going to be a nightmare. And then Housing will take a look at the pipes and they’re probably old and out of code, so that’ll all have to get replaced.”

“Third?”

“We just want to be sure we account for everyone.”

“Not just your unit but probably the whole building might need new pipes. If the fire doesn’t kill you, the reconstruction will. Be glad you’re just renting. We’re talking a year. At least.” The smaller one then picks up two cups of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee that have been perched on what used to be the sofa, which itself had at some point been flipped over and pushed askew and now smells damp and musty. He keeps one cup for himself and hands the other to his partner. He heads into the kitchen. The reflective block lettering on their parkas indicates they belong to the fire department. Beneath they are presumably wearing badges.

“It’s just my wife and me.”

“Right. You, your wife, and someone in the smaller bedroom. Looks like it was a woman’s room.” His eyes are eager and suspicious.

I suddenly wonder if this is the can-be-used-against-me type of conversation. If I have rights. “That was my wife’s room. We were having a sort of . . .” But I don’t know what the word is.

He sips his coffee and takes a quick glance down the hall. “So only two people lived here. You and your wife.”

“Correct.”

“And was anyone else here at the time of the fire?”

“No, just us.”

His eyes turn indifferent. He looks strangely disappointed. “When the fire started you were where.”

“In my room. Sleeping.”

“Follow me,” he says. At first my feet feel cold, but it turns out they are wet. I don’t remember stepping in anything wet, but I must’ve. He picks up a burnt scrap of something. “Now I’m guessing that wife of yours thought these curtains hanging in the window here were real pretty. And they were. Right up until the point where they caught fire and started what you got here which is your classic kitchen fire. They get out of hand real quick. Was she in the habit of leaving the kitchen while she was cooking?”

“No, no, she—”

“You know how many times I’ve heard that? And yet here we are. And look at this—a smoke detector with no battery. You’re cooking one night, the damn thing goes off, it’s annoying, you take out the battery. Right?”

The smaller one says, “It’s supposed to be annoying.”

Even so, their admonishments are rote and without conviction now that there is no third person, no death, nothing to get to the bottom of. Professionally, a humdrum case.

“Show me where you kept the fire extinguisher. That’s right. There wasn’t one.” He finishes his coffee and surveys the scene. The charred walls, the soggy ash and pulp covering the floor. “You got to have a fire extinguisher. This whole thing could’ve been prevented.”

So true!

“Mind if I look around?” I ask.

“Knock yourself out.”

The stacks of boxes in what used to be my room are burnt or wet or both. Inside, the photographs and negatives are all warped and blistered and scorched. The television is on its side on the floor. The mirror where Megumi shaved my beard is covered in soot. I want to write something in it but I don’t know what. The shampoo bottle has melted into an amusing shape. These things are no longer mine or anyone else’s. They simply exist as objects to be carted off.

One photo on my dresser survived, sort of, the one of me as a boy pointing at the river. I try popping it out of its frame but it is fused with the glass. When I pull, it rips. Destroyed. I take one last look at myself as a boy.

There is only one more thing to check. The most important thing. In the bottom of the middle dresser drawer. The clothes are a little damp. I lift them up and my brown pocket-size notebook is sitting there obediently. Unscathed.

I wish I could ask them exactly how the curtains ignited, without attracting the wrong kind of attention. She was not, I think, cooking. Maybe I should just take my cues from them. If they don’t feel the need to investigate further, neither should I. They’ve seen this before. They know what is provable and what is not. What makes the difference and what does not.

Twenty-one

When Megumi returns from work Thomas is sleeping on the sofa. He does not snore. She sets the UNIQLO bag on the floor and the groceries on the counter.

She rinses a fresh batch of rice for dinner. Enough for three. Her cooking is a skill-in-waiting, learned from her mother as preparation for a future that has not yet come. It’s nice to finally cook for someone. She mixes the miso sauce and gets the hamachi marinating. She tries to do it quietly even though all she really wants is for him to wake up. Scallions are next, rinsed and sliced. Growing up, she never thought it strange that her mother cooked only Japanese food, and not until she came to New York and met a lot of Koreans did she see how proud they are of their food (and how it shapes their very identities) and wonder what conflicts must’ve boiled within her mother.

For the moment her new brother has a Korean name. That will have to be addressed. A Japanese alias—official or otherwise—makes everything easier, no question, but at what cost?

He wakes. “Rise and shine, sleepyhead.”

“I passed out,” he says, righting himself.

“You poor thing. Look inside the UNIQLO bag. I bought you and Silke some fresh clothes. Just simple stuff until you get your own. Where is she?”

“She left. She went to work.”

“Is she coming back?”

“I don’t know.”

“Thomas, what happened?”

“It was a freak thing,” he says. “I went back there today and the fire inspectors or whoever they were, they showed me the spot in the kitchen where the curtains caught fire. It all spread from there.”

“You guys are lucky to have gotten out.” She wants to probe, but she does not.

The thought of showing up at his place to find it burnt and Thomas gone—as in gone—is too painful to even consider. Some instinct censors the thought before it grows beyond a flash. She wonders what part of the brain is responsible for protecting her from herself, and which part controls that part, and why sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

“And that it didn’t reach any other apartments. Maybe because we’re on the top floor. The fire department got there pretty quick. Just as we got out.”

Megumi joins him on the sofa. She squeezes his hands. “If something would’ve happened to you I don’t know what I would do. How I’d handle it.”

“I guess I was due some good luck.”

“I think that came out wrong,” she says.

“My good luck?”

“No, I mean that I don’t want it to sound like if something would happen to you I’d only be concerned with myself. That it’s not because of my . . . I’m not explaining it right.”

“I think I understand.”

“I could do it better in Japanese. It’s just that when someone leaves, you suddenly feel sick. Not only because they’re gone but because . . .” She stops for a moment to gather and translate her thoughts. “Because you are suddenly scared that they didn’t really know how you feel, and now it’s too late.” She squeezes his hand tighter.

“Don’t worry,” he says, eyes soft, “they know.”

“But do they? I wish I could tell you in Japanese. In English I only know the . . . see, I don’t even know the word to describe the words. I only know the simple words. Not the big words with so much more meaning. Do I sound dumb in English? Because in Japanese I’m pretty smart.”

“You’re smart in English, too.”

“I’m saying that when someone leaves, what makes you sick is that no matter what you said or didn’t say they can’t know—”

“You don’t think they can feel it?” he says.

“They feel something. But not enough. Not the whole thing. You want to make them understand but you can’t. It’s like that kind of communication doesn’t even exist.”

His eyes become too much. She looks away. She frees his hands.

“Are you worried about her?” she asks.

“No, not really.” A lie. The kind of lie that’s not even meant to disguise itself as a lie. An open lie everyone involved appreciates. So now the acting begins. The complications. Face value, useless, except to conceal or pretend to conceal or make a show of not concealing. All to guard against an unfavorable outcome and lay the groundwork for a favorable one.