This One Because of the Dead

by Laure Baudot

  “Wow,” Jeremy says to the empty room, and without thinking, reaches for his phone.

  That he’s still angry at Lise only occurs to him once he hears the ringing. He realizes that he has no idea if she’s at home or at work. The bedside clock reads eight, but is that a.m. or p.m. in Toronto? “Lise! I’m in the Hilton.”

  “Holy cow. How did you not know that beforehand?” From beyond comes a baby’s wail. She must be in the pediatric department of their neighbourhood hospital, where she works as a registered nurse.

  “Declan must be doing better than we thought.” He carries the cordless into the living space, surveying an off-white corner couch, a glass desk, and a single orchid in a slender vase.

  “I was right to tell you to ask him for a raise,” says Lise.

  “You’ve never seen this many skyscrapers.”

  “Skyscrapers?”

  “The architecture, the light. You would love it.” Then, the question that has lingered for the past twenty hours, all the time he’s been travelling. “Has Lowell been around?” he creaks out.

  She doesn’t seem to notice. “Why don’t you call him?” Her voice fades as if she’s moved her head away from the phone. “We’re swamped.”

  “I wish you could see the view.”

  “Don’t forget you’re there to work,” she says, zooming him right back into focus.

  Like with making the phone call in the first place, he reacts automatically. “Give me a break, will you?”

  “I’m just saying. Sometimes you get distracted.”

  For the first two thirds of the flight from Toronto to Tokyo, he’d brooded. He knew the fatigue magnified every image he held in his mind, but he couldn’t help it. He needed to know what was what: how and when things started between Lise, his girlfriend of six years, and Lowell, his friend for twice as long. Had it been at their friend’s engagement party, one year ago, during which Lowell and Lise had spent a lot of time together in the outdoor swimming pool? Or had it happened gradually, during the winter evenings when Lowell came over to watch the hockey game, Saturday night after Saturday night, to the point where if he didn’t show up, it seemed like a family member was missing?

  Truth be told, he wasn’t sure there was anything actually going on. But things felt serious enough to shake him.

  What happened was this: four days before his flight, Jeremy had come home to find Lowell and Lise in front of their rented bungalow. Lowell was in the front yard, bent over, and seemed to be moving some flat stones. Sweat was at the base of his neck, below his newly buzzed hair. Nearby was a half-empty beer bottle. Lise sat on the first step of their house. She wore cut-offs, and her toenails were painted fluorescent orange.

  Here’s her husband, doing the heavy lifting, had been Jeremy’s automatic thought. For a split second, before the anger set in, it was merely an observation without judgment.

  “Declan let you off early, eh?” Lise’s elbows were on her knees, her hands hanging, relaxed, between her slightly parted legs.

  Jeremy’s bowels felt like he’d eaten too many spicy wings the night before.

  “Lowell is helping me set up my moss garden.”

  Her eyes widened, and Jeremy pictured two fluorescent green dragonflies, like the ones that caught them by surprise during their first walk together, years before, on Cherry Beach.

  Lowell didn’t say anything. Keeping his eyes lowered, he lifted a stone and grunted.

  In the airplane, Jeremy’s gut cramped so badly that he slumped down in his seat and squeezed his eyes shut until he finally fell asleep. He woke only when a stewardess pressed down gently on his right shoulder. Her hand was delicate.

  That was the first hint of what was to come: everywhere he went in Japan, he would be treated with courtesy as fine as crepe paper.

  When he checked into his hotel, the woman at the front desk warned him that his room wasn’t ready. There was a couple there, she told him, pausing on each word as if it were a stone in a river that she was stepping on in an attempt not to fall.

  “They don’t want to leave?” he asked, still stupefied by emotional and physical fatigue.

  “They are just married, so …” She smiled, and he understood that she was trying to prod him out of himself, into the humour of a shared joke.

  A small smile of his own made its way to the surface. “Right.”

  In the end, so he wouldn’t have to wait, she gave him a different room. “It has a beautiful view,” she said, and he nodded. By this point, he didn’t care what the room looked like; he just wanted to lie down.

  As soon as he got to the suite, he crossed to the bedroom and collapsed on the bed, face down, his still-shod feet dangling over the edge. He entered a darkness deep as a body bag.

  Sometime in the night he was awakened by a woman screaming. Wails rose and fell over an orchestra soundtrack. He thought it strange that, in this luxury hotel, he could hear television from another room.

  Since his meeting isn’t until lunch, he showers, dresses, and leaves his room. The elevator arrives in seconds, the doors gliding open with barely a rattle. A screen mounted above the doors shows, first, interior shots of the hotel, then a man and a woman dressing for a wedding. The man knots a black tie; someone zips up the woman’s satin dress. They seem to be neither white nor Asian but a mix, presumably so that no viewer feels left out. The woman’s bare shoulder flashes above her ivory neckline like a bronze doorknob. The couple enters a room before a crowd of onlookers, and walk up the aisle toward a podium. The next shot is of the man cupping the woman’s chin.

  Last year, Lowell told Jeremy he should marry Lise. Lowell was attending motivational seminars then, the kind where they gave him pithy idioms such as Anything is Possible, and vowed to help him find the Roadmap to Success. He had also started to work out and began internet dating. “They all want that,” he said. “The ring, the house. My point is, don’t wait too long.”

  But Lowell didn’t know Lise, not really. Jeremy had overheard her tell her mom that she and Jeremy didn’t want a public ceremony. They loved each other; they didn’t need to show it.

  Jeremy forces himself to take a breath, the way his G.P. recommended last year. That was after he landed in emergency with what he thought was heart trouble, but which was actually a panic attack. The G.P. had attributed it to overwork. Jeremy thought that it was likely caused by the past eight months of him acquiring too much responsibility, too quickly.

  The G.P. also told him to quit smoking, something Lise had asked him to do for years. Jeremy has not heeded their advice. Smoking is his minor way of keeping part of himself out of the claws of the establishment, of remaining true to himself. Whatever that is. He isn’t sure anymore, if he ever really knew. But now, on the heels of Lise’s possible betrayal, his anger and pain wrestling, Jeremy’s glad he didn’t capitulate on the smoking. It’s not going to kill him yet — he’s relatively young, has a few years to go before he absolutely needs to quit.

  In the lobby, the woman who checked him in is back behind the wrap-around reception counter. He doesn’t remember her being so beautiful: her smooth forehead, the narrow bridge of her nose. Her black hair parted in the middle, swept back by an ivory comb into a thick bun. Her white blouse tucked into a navy pencil skirt. Over her left breast, a tag reads Tomiko.

  This morning, he feels a courage that comes from rest. “I want to thank you.”

  “Pardon?”

  “For the new room you gave me.”

  Her eyes flutter, she looks elsewhere, then returns her gaze to him. “I remember.”

  “The view, as you told me, is wonderful. You gave me a gift.” He is thinking these exact words and is surprised that he’s actually said them. He isn’t usually so effusive.

  “People often enjoy the top rooms, sir.”

  Declan had mentioned the public baths.

  Jeremy do
esn’t love getting naked in public, but since Tomiko assured him the bathing is strictly same-sex, he figures he can handle it. Besides, he doesn’t feel ready to leave the hotel. What else should he do, apart from scarfing down the remaining green-tea chocolate snacks in his hotel room, which he ate before figuring out that they cost one hundred and fifteen yen — the equivalent of ten dollars each?

  The baths are in the basement. Jeremy has to walk past the hotel’s workout area to get there, and he averts his eyes from a row of men on the elliptical machines. These machines have always struck him as particularly boring and also existentially problematic, as they go nowhere. As for exercise: you train and become buff, for what? Only to spend the rest of your life maintaining all of that? A colossal waste of time.

  Someone has left a copy of The Economist on a bench in the baths’ locker room. It’s open to an article on karoshi, described as a Japanese form of corporate suicide which translates to “death by overwork.” The article describes a thirty-year-old man who died after putting in long hours of overtime at his automotive job. I’m happiest when I can sleep, he told his wife the week before he died.

  Jeremy is startled by the clang of a locker being banged open. A man, naked but for a white towel around his waist, is pushing a knapsack into a locker. “Sorry.”

  The bathing room smells like iron and is filled with fog. There are two square pools, separated by a low tiled wall. On the side from which the steam rises sit two middle-aged men with closed eyes. Jeremy dawdles a bit, reluctant to drop his towel. He now has a gut, probably from what has become, over the years, a beer-a-day habit. He’s also always been shy about his tallness. When he and Lise first made love, they saw afresh their height differential. Only after fits of giggles did they get the hang of it, how to match his long frame to her tiny one.

  As he is about to step into a pool, someone says “No,” and Jeremy almost slips.

  One of the men, with a barrel chest and rubbery jowls, points to the wall, from which hang hand showers. They are all at waist level, so low to the ground that Jeremy assumed they were for children. The man gestures toward them, then to bottles hung on the wall, and says, “There are stools.”

  Jeremy upturns what he had mistaken for a bucket and sits down, knees splayed. He begins to wash, as the man’s eyes bore into his back. His knees keep bumping his chin.

  Afterward, it takes him a full minute to immerse himself in the searing bath water, but once in, he relaxes. The bath, the suite, Tomiko: he’s never been this pampered. Is this what it’s like to have money, then? The bath cocoons him and he closes his eyes.

  Declan owns Linkage, a small but rapidly growing company that matches Toronto businesses with Asian manufacturers. He had started with Japan for sentimental reasons, having taught English in Japan after university.

  Jeremy likes working for him — Lise was right about that. He likes the work itself, would lose himself in each task. He feels the same way searching for products requested by the company as he does when doing a crossword: that same sharpness of focus and loss of time. Afterward, he would look at the clock in the corner of his screen and be surprised that an hour had passed.

  Declan had asked Jeremy to do the Tokyo trip from his hospital bed. He stared at Jeremy, his balding forehead sweating and his skin yellow from a complication of the West Nile virus, caught while Declan camped on the Bruce Peninsula. It made Jeremy uncomfortable to see his normally fit boss look so weak.

  “When were you supposed to leave?” Jeremy asked.

  “I know it’s rushed.”

  “It’s just not the best time.” He was thinking about how, only a few days before, he had come across Lowell gardening with Lise. He was still trying to decide what, if anything, to do about it.

  “When Lise asked me to hire you, I wasn’t sure it would work out,” Declan said. “I think you’ve surprised yourself, right?”

  Lise and her mother talked about Jeremy’s smarts frequently and usually in front of him. Claudette, Lise’s mother, had once marvelled at how quickly he did both the Saturday Sudoku and the crossword. “What are you doing at that factory?” she’d asked, referring to his old job at a furniture warehouse.

  “He just doesn’t like to work hard,” Lise said.

  “She’s right.” Jeremy blushed, then smiled because Lise knew him so well.

  His own mother, too, had once declared that his brain would get him places. And it had. He had been the first in his family to go to university. After that, though, he saw no need to use it further, at least not in the realm of work. Beyond a fundamental discomfort about becoming one of the masses — a discomfort he shared with Lowell — he didn’t see the point in becoming a successful career man. He wanted a low-key life: hanging with Lise, going to the occasional hockey game with Lowell. He wanted just enough money to get by.

  Lise was the first person to demand more from him. It was Lise who asked him to leave his job as a stock manager at the warehouse. And when he moved to Declan’s company, it was Lise who talked to him about getting a raise.

  At first, he thought she only wanted him to tap into his unused potential. But then he began to notice that she seemed to want more and more things. At first glance, what she asked for did not seem frivolous. She didn’t yearn for clothes, jewelry, or makeup. Instead she talked about new paint, furniture, and potting soil. In their life together, in which things were often up in the air, what she coveted seemed to signify a longing for permanence.

  Jeremy wonders when Lise had started to imagine him as a member of the rat race. When did the girl who liked going to the Scarborough Bluffs to sit on a rock and watch the sunset, become the girl who hankered for so much stuff? He wondered if she had been like this all along. Had he fallen in love with one person, only to discover over time that she is someone else? Only now, it’s too late. He doesn’t want to leave.

  Still in the bath, Jeremy’s eyes open. He’s had two thoughts. One: that the things Lise wants are those that bring her beauty. Two: that the old pattern they fell into on the phone this morning — her trying to re-focus him, him fighting her efforts — is a good sign. It means she’s still got a stake in him.

  He starts to wonder if, for Lise, there’s a choice involved. If how he conducts himself on this trip will impact how things turn out between them.

  Declan had advised Jeremy that the Japanese were big on convention. “Bow, don’t shake hands. And — you know me, I have to say the obvious — be on time.”

  The Tokyo company, Sujimichi, makes handmade fabric upholstery, which an upscale Toronto furniture store has requested. Jeremy’s job is to establish a relationship with the owners, Ren Watanabe and his father, Akeno. He’s good at this kind of initial contact; he’s got a knack for small talk. “You’re great with the plebs,” Declan jokes.

  Jeremy gets to the hotel restaurant early, so he’s already seated when Ren arrives. Ren has the dense and bouncy physique of a jogger. Like every Japanese businessman Jeremy has seen pass through the lobby, he wears a black suit, white shirt, and black brogues. His father is ill, Ren tells him, and will have to meet Jeremy tomorrow, during their scheduled factory tour. He has arranged for a driver to pick Jeremy up in the morning.

  “Online business would have been better. But my father is old-fashioned.” Ren hands Declan’s contract back to Jeremy. “If you don’t mind, we will sign it tomorrow, with my father.”

  So Declan was right in suggesting that Watanabe senior wanted to put a face to Linkage. Ren leans forward. “Would you like a beer?” The beer is stronger than Jeremy is used to, and he feels a buzz more quickly than expected. Ren has already finished half of his when he asks, “You have visited the Tokyo Imperial Palace?”

  “Not yet.”

  “The palace reflects the history of Japan.”

  “I was thinking of starting by buying a present for my girlfriend.”

  “That’s very imp
ortant, indeed. Do you know where to purchase it?”

  “Kiddyland?”

  “The toy store?”

  Tomiko had recommended it. “I was told that adults enjoy it too.”

  “Of course.”

  An hour later, they’ve enumerated Toronto tourist sites, they’ve compared Japanese and Canadian climates, and Ren has invited Jeremy to dinner. “Food is a very important part of Japanese culture,” Ren says. Then, he adds, “You should visit the Harajuku girls.” He explains that these are young women who dress up like dolls. He grins. “They just wanna have fun.”

  “Pardon?”

  “A little joke, Mr. Evans. Please excuse me.”

  Only then does he recognize the Cyndi Lauper reference. Jeremy’s shoulders relax, and he smiles at Ren.

  Hundreds of men and women traverse at the Shinjuku crossing, which Declan told him is the busiest intersection in the world. Most are businessmen. They walk fast, their briefcases close to their hips. Jeremy and Lowell used to mock these kinds of people, men they considered bland, with no aspirations beyond work. These men seem to Jeremy to be the living dead.

  Jeremy has a moment of doubt when he glances down at his own suit, which he hadn’t bothered to change out of after his meeting with Ren. What happened to the guy who used to loaf about, reading Kurt Vonnegut? What happened to the person Lise met at an open mic night, when they were both newly minted university students, just arrived in the big city?

  Kiddyland takes up five floors and is filled with tchotchkes that Lise would call useless: flowered phone cases, plush animals, tiny plastic replicas of sushi. Jeremy, who has a row of McDonald’s snack-pack toys on the rim of his office computer screen, blinks away tears from a sudden happiness. He’s the proverbial kid in the candy store, spins around a few times before starting to touch objects, to pick them up and examine them.

  Lise sometimes surprises him. Last year, at a Kitchener craft fair, she paused at a table of artisanal glass swans, so Jeremy bought some for her. When they got home, she lined them up on her dresser: male, female, and goslings. Remembering this, Jeremy finds the perfect present for Lise: tiny glass creatures, which he guesses are Japanese anime characters. He chooses only one, for they are exorbitantly expensive. Though he’s counting on the success of the meeting with Ren, and on that raise he’s sure to ask for now, he doesn’t want to push his luck. For himself, he picks out a pair of chopsticks shaped like Star Wars lightsabers.