by Otaro Maijo
The human need for sex is as strong as the need for food—another idea I got from my brother, but I think so too. And sometimes that need wins out, even over the sadness of losing your kids. Maybe lust is so stubborn it can even find a way to take advantage of the death of three little boys, to make some amazing fucking.
Which is a totally shitty thought.
But then I guess the human sex drive is a pretty shitty thing.
Though I also guess that without it, none of us would even be here. Our very existence depends on that shitty sex drive.
Pretty nasty, when you think about it.
Which is not to say that the Yoshibas’ sex was absolutely that kind of sex, but it pretty much looked that way to me.
Yoji and I talked about the Voice of Heaven for a while. Then, when we got to my house, we somehow just couldn’t say goodbye.
Of course, I didn’t want him to go—though part of me also wanted to get away from him. Still, there was more stuff I wanted to say before we went our separate ways.
And I’m not sure why, but Yoji seemed to be in no hurry to leave either. Maybe he was worried that seeing the Yoshibas had somehow traumatized me. Or maybe he wanted to find out whether there was a guy somewhere who liked me and would be jealous about Sano—though all that already seemed like ancient history now. Or maybe there was something else he wanted to say. Or maybe he didn’t have anything to say but just wanted to hang around with me a little more…or not.
Yep. Or not. “Well then, I’ll be seeing you,” he said. “Are you coming to school tomorrow?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “Are you?”
“Probably. I’m not sure I can do anything more about Sano.”
“That was pretty amazing,” I said, “seeing them fucking like that.”
“What? Oh, yeah, amazing.”
I wanted to have amazing sex with Yoji. Or not even amazing—just nice, plain sex. No face shots, no freaky acrobatics, just your ordinary missionary position, nice and slow, with a sweet little orgasm when we were both ready. But I couldn’t really tell him that. Instead, I asked whether he wanted to come in. Maybe have some tea?
“No, I’d better be getting home,” he said, giving a little wave and turning to go. But instead of heading toward the station, he turned and went back the way we’d just come.
“If you pass the playground again,” I laughed, “check to see if they’ve come back for seconds.”
“I doubt they’ll come back,” he said. “If they do, I’ll call the police.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Why not? We can’t just let them go on doing that on a playground. I feel sorry for them too, but…Anyway, see you later.”
“Right, see you later.”
I stood at the door, making no move to open it, and watched him go. I’d managed to get Yoji all the way to that door, with no parents or brother waiting inside, and still no sex. There was something truly pathetic about that—and at the same time not.
If we’d had sex after seeing the Yoshibas, would we have used their sex to make ours more intense? Would that have worked? Would our lust have been strong enough?
Maybe not. Maybe it would have been weak; maybe we would be repelled by the memory of what we’d seen. Or maybe I had it wrong. Maybe Yoji was scared off by the realization that we were so close to having sex. Maybe that’s why he turned on his heel and ran off like that. Maybe I was afraid myself, and that’s why I hadn’t been clearer about trying to get him inside, into my bed.
No, that wasn’t it. Who was I kidding? Yoji just wasn’t interested in having sex with me.
Was that it?
That was it.
What could you expect, once he found out you’d done it with Sano? What is a guy like Yoji going to think about a girl who has casual sex with every guy she runs into? Is he going to want to do it with you? How stupid are you? What do you expect?
How stupid am I? Pretty stupid, I guess. I guess with Sano I just had the feeling I wanted to have sex with a boy, and it didn’t much matter which one. Just like I always assumed all boys’ things spring to attention when presented with any anonymous muff. But maybe it doesn’t always work that way.
I realize now. Not every boy is right for every girl, and for boys too, not every girl is the right one. That’s just the way it is. At least for some girls and some boys.
I’m pretty much one of those girls who gets horny and gives in to the urge, but I suspect Yoji’s not like that. I was going to need some sort of strategy to get him in bed. Some sort of trick. A tactical advantage.
But at that moment I was just really disappointed. I stood there at the door, watching until he was out of sight. Then I went inside. Oh cruel, cruel world…and all that crap.
But what’s so cruel about it? I’ll tell you what. It was cruel that I hadn’t been able to have sex with Yoji, and crueler still that I hadn’t even been able to kiss him. But cruelest of all was the fact that I was the sort of girl who was always always thinking about fucking and kissing and nothing but fucking and kissing and everything that went with them. It was cruel to be me.
It was different for Yoji. That much was obvious.
Yoji was thinking about Sano. He was thinking about those kids who might stumble into that little park and catch the Yoshibas fucking. And he was thinking about the Yoshibas. Even the fact that he had forced them to stop showed that he was concerned about them. He didn’t want them to get in trouble for what they were doing, didn’t want other people to see them like that. That’s what he was thinking about.
And you had to admire him for that. He’s a noble soul.
And I’m an idiot. An idiot who never thinks about all the things she should be thinking about.
But then again, what kinds of things have I got to think about? And what good would it do for me to think about them anyway? I don’t understand much of anything.
But it would be even worse to give up and not think about anything at all. Just like you’re expected to do the right thing even if there’s a chance you’re being hypocritical when you’re doing it, so too you should try to think the right stuff even if you didn’t really believe any of it. That’s just the way things are, Aiko.
So I lay down on the sofa in the living room, fully intending to put my brain to work thinking about where Sano might be—but before I’d thought about it for more than five minutes, I was sound asleep.
Like I said, I’m pretty much an idiot.
7
So Kerstin was there in my dream, and I was there with her. We were two different people, but she looked exactly like me. We were out in this big grassy field next to the Tama River, looking for a soccer ball. It was starting to get dark and we still couldn’t find it, and we began to notice that everybody else had gone home. We got more and more nervous. “Where’s the ball? Where’s the ball?” Like that. I felt like I was going to cry, but then I could see Kerstin off in the distance, just her silhouette, holding up her hand like she wanted to let me know she’d found it. But somehow I knew she hadn’t. What she had found in the bushes was the bodies of the three little kids, all chopped up in pieces, and she was trying to lure me over so she could scare the hell out of me.
She waved again and again to get me to come, but I wouldn’t budge. I was trying to figure out how far it was to the road from the spot where I was standing. If I sprinted, could I make it there and stop a car to get help before Kerstin caught me?
But when I looked back at the dark mass of the bushes, Kerstin had vanished. I looked around at the field, but there was no sign of her anywhere.
No, not vanished. She had hidden somewhere, and I was sure she was sneaking up on me. Probably with some part of one of the kids clutched in her hand.
I woke to find my brother perched on my back, bare legs sticking out of his shorts, reading the sports pages. My heart was poundi
ng from the dream. “Get off,” I muttered, my face pressed into the sofa, but he stiffened his legs and tried to keep me from shaking him off. The rest of his body is pretty scrawny, but thanks to years of soccer his legs are thick and muscly. It suddenly occurred to me that those heavy limbs pressing down on my back must have caused my nightmare. But was that really possible? Did dreams really work like that? Could I really have gotten the idea for the soccer ball in my dream from his legs, even while I was sound asleep? Not likely. That would take ESP or something.
Whatever.
Maybe he’d been talking while I was asleep; maybe I’d heard his voice and made the connection to soccer and then gone looking for the ball.
Whatever.
“What are you doing sleeping?” he said. “What’s for dinner?”
“How should I know?” I said.
“Where’s Mom?”
“She said she’d be working late tonight.”
“Then why didn’t you make dinner?”
“Because I was asleep,” I told him.
“Which is why I asked what you were doing sleeping.”
“I was tired. So I slept.”
“What kind of an excuse is that?”
“No excuse. Just human nature. People sleep when they’re tired. When they’re not tired, they don’t sleep.”
“That’s not what I meant…Awhh, forget it. Stop chattering and get cooking.”
“I don’t feel like it,” I said. “You do it.”
He didn’t look happy about it, but he got off my back and shuffled out to the kitchen. I’ve got him pretty well trained. Fortunately.
“What’re you going to make?” I called after him.
“What?” he called back. I could see him opening the lid on the rice cooker and peering inside. “Shit! You didn’t even make any rice.”
“Sooooorry!” I called back. Not that it was my job to make rice, but I didn’t mind a little apologizing, seeing as how he was going to make dinner.
“How about pasta? I’m totally starved, and I’m not too good at making rice.”
“Pasta’s fine,” I said.
My brother is a pretty good cook. He doesn’t have much of a repertoire, but the few things he makes are tasty. Mom’s a good cook too. She even went to cooking school way back when, and I guess my brother picked up some stuff just by watching her. He’s a quick study. In fact, he’s pretty quick at everything.
First, he peeled and crushed a knob of garlic. Then he seeded a hot chili and chopped it up fine, took some bacon out of the freezer and unwrapped it. Next he cut up an eggplant, dumped it in a dish, and put it in the microwave. After he’d finished chopping an onion, he put a frying pan on the stove, heated some olive oil, and tossed in the garlic. Next came the chili, the bacon, and the onion. When all that had been frying for a few minutes, he added the eggplant, which had been softening in the microwave, and cooked it some more. Finally, he opened a can of tomatoes, mashed them up, and added them to the pan. Salt, pepper, a few tablespoons of stock, a drizzle of soy sauce. And a pinch of sugar to finish it off. Then he turned off the heat and let the sauce cool. While it was cooling, he boiled a pot of water and put the pasta in. When it was just about done, he turned on the burner and reheated the sauce. After draining the pasta, he added it to the pan and warmed it all up. Voila!
As I lay there on the couch, I found myself following his progress with my nose. The smell of the oil heating in the pan, the fragrance of frying garlic. And finally, the unmistakable smell of tomato sauce wafting in from the other room. It smelled good! In fact, I knew it was good, since he made this spaghetti a lot.
Whoa.
Just as my mouth was starting to water for real, the phone rang. Brrring, brrring, ring, ring, ring, ring.
“Telephone!” I called.
“You get it,” he called back from the kitchen.
“I can’t. I’m weak from hunger!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he shouted. “You’re in there, you answer it.” But as he said this he came into the living room. He really is well trained.
While he was answering the phone, I got up and went into the kitchen. I got out some plates and began serving the pasta. This was a job I could manage.
Up close and personal, the pasta smelled even more delicious. And really garlicky. Not that I objected. It really was mouthwatering, and my mouth really was watering. A man should know how to cook. As I was dividing up the pasta between two plates, I started hearing what my brother was saying in the other room.
“Really? Are you serious?”
Serious about what?
“That’s terrible,” he was saying. “Is she okay?”
Is who okay? Mom? Had something happened?
No, it couldn’t be Mom. If something had happened to her he wouldn’t be standing there asking if the guy on the other end of the phone was “serious.”
Then who? Or what?
“Don’t do anything stupid,” he said. “Try to keep everybody calm. Okay, right. I know, but…okay. But that’s where you’re wrong. They’ve got nothing to do with it, really…Don’t say stuff like that. Don’t talk about who’s going to take responsibility. Nobody’s really responsible in a case like this…I know, but you don’t really know what’s going on, so don’t get all excited. Wait till we know more about it. We can figure it out later…For now, just let it slide. Wait a bit…”
The line seemed to go dead, and my brother stood for a moment staring at the receiver in his hand. Then he set it back in its cradle.
“Idiots,” he muttered.
Who or what?
“What?” I said.
“What? Oh, nothing.”
“Who was that?”
“A friend.”
“Did something happen? To Mom?”
“What? Oh, no, not that kind of friend. It was about the Yoshibas. You know, the people who had all that trouble. The Round-and-Round Devil.”
“I know, but what happened? What’s up now?”
“It only gets worse. Mr. Yoshiba just committed suicide.”
“No, that can’t be right.”
“I’m afraid it’s true.”
“It’s not. I just saw him.”
“Saw who?”
“Mr. Yoshiba.”
“Really? Where? Why?”
“I went to the playground today, and he was there.”
“Alone?”
“No, I went with a friend.”
“Not you, Mr. Yoshiba. Was he alone?”
“Oh, no, he was with his wife.”
“Really? But how did they seem?”
“What? What do you mean, how did they seem?” Shit! They were fucking their brains out, right there on the bench, but I could hardly tell my brother that.
“What time were you there?”
“In the park?”
“Yeah, in the park.”
“A little after three, I guess.”
“Three?”
“But you’re serious? Mr. Yoshiba really killed himself?”
“It looks that way. They said he hanged himself in their bedroom.”
But how could he have? He must have gone straight home. Could he really be dead?
“I don’t get it,” I said.
I didn’t. And I’d lost my appetite too. No way I could eat pasta now.
Or at least that’s how I felt at that moment—a natural enough reaction. But in the end, I ate, and it was delicious. I was thinking about all sorts of stuff while I ate, so I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as I usually did, but I still managed to put away a big plateful, zuru zuru musha musha! Yum. My brother ate his too. Neither of us said much, but the TV was on so it wasn’t dead quiet.
When we were finished, we changed the channel to our favorite comedy show, Downtown, but we didn�
�t feel much like laughing. Natural enough. I’m not sure how other people react to stuff like this, but I guess I found out that hunger trumps sympathy, for me at least, but they both trump laughter. You could write it like this: hunger > sympathy > laughter. My brother’s phone never stopped ringing the whole time “Downtown” was on, but it was all texts. Every time one came in, he tapped out an answer, but almost before he could hit send, another one arrived, interrupting his answer.
During a commercial, I asked him what all the texts were about. He said they were about “nothing,” but I knew that wasn’t quite true.
Then the show came back on and I got up to go to the bathroom, but when I got back to the living room, he had vanished. I heard a noise from the front hall and went out to find him putting on his shoes.
“Where are you going?”
“Out,” he said.
“Out where?”
“To see a friend.”
“Why?
“Why what?”
“Why are you going out? Did something happen?”
“No, nothing in particular.”
“Stop fucking around and tell me what’s going on!” I told him.
“Stop making a scene. Just let it go.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I’m worried. If you won’t tell me where you’re going, I’ll follow you.”
“There’s nothing to be worried about.”
“It’s a little late to be saying that now. You can’t tell me it’s nothing.”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”
“Okay, then you won’t mind if I come along. In fact, I’m not even asking, I’m just coming.”
“No, you should stay here.”
“Then you’ve got to tell me what’s going on.”
“Okay, okay. The truth is, my friends are in a bit of a jam.”
“What kind of a jam?”
“Those guys who called before were way crazy. Something really weird has happened.”
“ ‘Guys’? How many friends are we talking about?”
