by Bryan Hurt
She pushed out a laugh, panic beating in her chest. She didn’t wear perfume or lipstick and she had never heard of powdering one’s armpits. “Mais oui,” she managed, looking into her lap.
SHE DIDN’T KNOW what he did with the photographs. Kept them in albums, maybe—hid them away, a secret pleasure he might visit in the night while his family slept. Or he could be posting them online at a fetish site, getting “likes” and comments from viewers around the world. She wondered what they’d have to say about her labia, her untamed pubic hair, her arid armpits.
Though it was taboo during these gigs, she couldn’t stop herself from asking about the wives and children she knew must be stashed away in an apartment or house in this compartmental city. It was one thing she liked about Tokyo, the cubby-ness of it, the ease with which one could get lost yet still feel part of things. No one on the planet knew where she was. She could look without being seen.
When she’d asked Mr. Ukaga after their third meeting if he had a family he replied in English, “There are two daughters.” He didn’t offer anything more. Something about his tone, his face when he’d spoken, the phrasing—“there are,” not “I have,” as if to distance himself from them, or to acknowledge them in the smallest way possible—left her with nothing to say. She finished dressing. As she left, he handed her his business card and told her that his hobbies were opera and cooking.
She walked back to the station that night instead of taking a taxi. Though cab drivers were the most discreet people in a city full of discretion, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d be discovered moonlighting in this not-quite-legal profession. It was strange: ever since Mr. Ukaga had started taking the pictures, she’d felt different. Not just more visible but more solid. As if he were bringing her to life with his gaze.
*
THE MORNING AFTER their fourth encounter, she took a walk through Shimabukuro to the gleaming Sogo building. First stop: women’s clothing. She bought a thick black sweater with skulls embroidered across the chest—not her style, but that didn’t matter since she’d be returning it later. The salesgirl stapled the receipt to the outside of the large plastic Sogo bag and Tara continued shopping.
In the imported candy section, which smelled like strawberry Suave shampoo, she slipped a pack of root beer gummies into the bag on top of the sweater. She rode the escalator to the second floor and in the electronics section added two CDs (Catalonian music, a mix of up-and-coming Japanese songwriters) to her take. The small items slid into the folds of the sweater. Undetectable. The paid-for sweater was like a lead vest at a dentist’s office: it protected what was underneath it.
She walked the floor, ending up in accessories. Cheerful panpipe music descended from a place too high up to see, like a light snow you didn’t notice until it accumulated on your sleeve. Tara felt happy there in that huge store with its unending square footage and its bright lights and hum of commerce and things upon things upon things in all their colors and crispness, waiting to be touched, to be used, to be made valuable. She slid a scarf from a rack. It was blood red with turquoise specks. She wrapped it around her neck, fluffed it. The soft material reminded her of Butterball, her childhood cat. She’d mistreated him, tugged his whiskers, tossed him high into the air and onto the couch, rubbed his belly too hard. But he still curled up in her lap afterward. Yes, she’d used him for her own amusement.
That was the thing about being objectified, she thought. It implied usefulness, purpose. She picked up a thick plastic coin purse with a cartoon daisy on it. Printed across the bottom were the words, Dinosaurs went extinct around the time of the first flower.
She took the scarf into the dressing room along with three pairs of lace panties. With nail clippers, she snipped the tags off the panties and put them on over the underwear she was already wearing. She left the dressing room, put the scarf back, and went down the escalator. She lingered near the sales bins at the front of the store. Her heart thundered. The store was crowded; no one looked at her despite her height, her light hair. Despite five years in the country, she couldn’t understand them fluently, couldn’t read most of the signs around her. She’d been in a sensory-deprivation tank once during college—an experiment in the psychology department that’d paid eighty-five dollars for half a day’s work—and living in a foreign country was not unlike the hour she’d spent in the tank.
Her blood was fuzzy. She walked toward the sliding doors. Stepped outside. Her immediate desire in these moments was to look at every item she’d stolen, admire it, feel like life had bestowed a bonus. But she knew better. She kept walking, step, calm step, step—
A hand on her arm. Its grip was not light.
“Issho ni kite”—come with me—said a woman’s voice, and she was pulled back into the store.
BY THE TIME the worst was over, it was almost 9:00 p.m. She’d been sitting in a back room on the first floor of Sogo for almost three hours. The police had come, taken down her information, her foreign registration number, grilled her about connections to violent criminals. They made her show them the contents of her bag but let her remove the panties behind a screen. She paid for the items she’d stolen with cash from her wallet. They said in Japanese, then wrote down in English, what amounted to: “We can take you to jail, or you can call someone to pick you up if you promise never to come back.”
The only numbers in her phone were work-related, along with a few coworker acquaintances, an Australian ex-boyfriend, and her ninety-two-year-old neighbor who came over at least once a week to bring homemade pickles and ask her to turn down her music.
Then she spotted Mr. Ukaga’s card in her wallet.
He showed up within an hour, quite a feat considering he’d come from work in Ikebukuro during rush hour. He spoke authoritatively to the fat woman who’d grabbed her arm. They bowed to each other but the woman held her bow longer, and lower. A young security guard fiddled with the computer. After a second, a black-and-white image of Tara appeared on the screen. She was in the candy section, holding the gummies. She looked 100 percent guilty.
Her face burned. How could she have thought she was being smooth?
How could she have thought no one was looking?
Mr. Ukaga watched the video intently. When she slipped the candy into the bag, he murmured. Both she and the security guard glanced at him. Only Tara noticed the slight bulge in his pants.
IT WAS A Friday, but he took her to the love hotel anyway. “I will pay twice,” he said. She asked if they could stop for a bottle of something stiff and he had the taxi driver wait at the curb while he fetched champagne from an import shop. He popped the cork in the back seat. It was the first time she’d had the real stuff, direct from France.
“What’s your first name?” she asked after a long swig. Bubbles spilled over the bottle’s rim and onto her blouse. She didn’t care.
“Toshio.”
“Toshio, what do you do with the pictures of me?”
He motioned for her to drink more. “I throw them away when you leave, of course. It would be unwise to be found with such things.”
She was deflated. His reasoning made sense, though. Why had she expected him to treasure these grotesque images? These disembodied parts that were scarcely identifiable? Why had she assumed his fetish was in the keeping, not in the doing?
At the hotel, they went through the routine: horse, makeup, perfume. He in his robe. Pictures of everything. He’d planned this, she realized; he’d brought the supplies when he came to pick her up at the store.
She’d stop this job. She didn’t need the money. She liked the money—loved it, even—but every part of it now felt tedious. From her knees, she said, “Did you know? Dinosaurs went extinct around the time of the first flower.”
“What a thought,” he said, scooping the Polaroids from the ground. She thought he might throw them into the trash immediately now that the secret was out, but he only set them on the side table beside the lipsticks. “The first
law of thermodynamics.”
“Conservation of . . .” she began, forgetting the rest. She sank to her knees. But he stopped. Walked to the door, slipped the cactus cover off the fire alarm. He laid his hand on the red, exposed box.
“It’s emergency. Ha. Ha. Come to Pah-ree?” His prick softened into a sleeping mouse.
“Paris?” She smiled.
He hopped, hand on the alarm. “Yes, yes. Bring magnanimous.”
“Is this a role-playing thing?”
“No play.” His face was serious. “We go.”
She didn’t understand. Was this a game? His price for having rescued her today? If so, she had no idea what the rules were. How to please.
“We could go. But we’d need to study. You know I’m not really French, and they hate when you can’t speak their language.”
“It’s okay! Bring magnanimous. Dinosaur. Flower. Dee-no-sare! Fleur! Does not matter.”
She thought about what he’d said—there are two daughters. He hadn’t mentioned a wife.
What if he was serious? What if she dropped her assistant teaching job, her shoe box apartment with its frayed and molding tatami, her GRE test date in Osaka, already paid for? She could reschedule the test in Paris. She could study at a sidewalk café, sipping wine, eating a beignet, watching people go by.
She heard the familiar click-whirrrrr of the Polaroid. Mr. Ukaga did not wave the photograph in an attempt to make it develop faster. Instead, he stared into it. He leaned close to the fire alarm.
“Toshio?”
He did not respond. A full minute passed.
“Toshio?” She was worried. “Let’s talk. I need to think about Paris. Okay?” She took a step toward him. He looked up at her, looked at the photo. Looked at her. Then he pulled the alarm handle. A deafening blare filled the room. It was so loud she could feel it in her chest, on her skin. She threw her hands over her ears and ran for her clothes. Harsh yellow safety lights flooded the room, making it look like what it was: an unfinished concrete box. She picked up the cactus cover and slipped it into her bag.
He was oblivious to her as she dressed. Completely naked, he sang along with the blaring alarm tone, matching its pitch with a Pavarottian bellow. His belly was round and puffed and smooth like a drum. His mouse penis slumbered in its shadow.
“Are you okay? Get dressed—someone’s probably coming!” she yelled. He continued to sing. She looked at the photo in his hand. Her face, mouth slightly open. There was nothing special about it.
She left him there, the drone of the alarm so loud it felt like it was coming from inside her head. Even as she emerged out of a side door, even as she made her way down the dark avenues into the bright ones, did that alarm sound in her mind.
Ether
by Zhang Ran
translated by Carmen Yiling Yan and Ken Liu
1
All of a sudden, I’m thinking about an evening from the winter when I was twenty-two.
A pair of pretty twin sisters sat to my right, chattering away; at my left sat a fat boy clutching a soft drink that he kept refilling. My plate contained cold chicken, cheese, and coleslaw. I don’t remember how they tasted, only that I’d reached for the macaroni and dropped some on my brand-new pinstripe trousers. I spent the entire second half of the meal wiping at the crescent-shaped stains on my trousers as the chicken cooled on my plate, untouched. To hide my predicament, I tried to strike up a conversation with the twins, but they didn’t seem very interested in college life, and I wasn’t knowledgeable about ponytail-tying techniques.
The dinner seemed to last forever. There was one toast after another, and I would raise my long-stemmed glass with whomever was standing, and drink my apple juice, perfectly aware that no one was paying attention to what I did. What was the banquet for, anyway? A wedding, a holiday, a bumper crop? I don’t recall.
I sneaked peeks at my father, four tables away. He was busy chatting and drinking and telling dirty jokes with his friends, all his age, with the same thick whiskers and noses red from too much alcohol. He didn’t glance at me until the banquet was over. The fiddler tiredly packed his instrument, the hostess began to collect the dirty dishes and glasses, and my inebriated father finally noticed my presence. He staggered over, his bulky body swaying with every step. “You still here?” he slurred. “Tell your ma to give you a ride.”
“No, I’m leaving on my own.” I stood, staring at the ground. I scrubbed at the stain on my trousers until my fingers were numb.
“Whatever you want. Did you have a good time talking with your little friends?” He looked around for them.
I said nothing but clenched my fists, feeling the blood rush to my head. They weren’t my friends. They were just kids, eleven or twelve years old, and I was about to graduate from college. In the city, I had my friends and my accomplishments. No one treated me like a little boy there, seating me at the children’s table, pouring apple juice into my long-stemmed glass in the place of white wine. When I walked into restaurants, a server would promptly take my jacket and call me mister; if I dropped macaroni on my trousers, my dining companion would wet a napkin and gently wipe it clean. I was an adult, and I wanted people to talk to me like one, not treat me like a grade-schooler at some village banquet.
“Fuck off!” I said at last, and walked off without looking back.
I was twenty-two that year.
I open my eyes with effort. The sky is completely dark now, and the neon lights of the strip club across the street fill the room with gauzy colors. The computer screen flashes. I rub my temples and slowly sit up on the sofa. I down the half glass of bourbon resting on the coffee table. How many times have I fallen asleep on the sofa this week? I ought to go online and look it up: What does holing up at home in front of a computer and falling into dreams of bygone youth mean for the health of a forty-five-year-old single man? But the headache tells me I don’t need a search engine to know the answer. This aimless way of life is murder on my brain cells.
I close the chat window and sign into a few literary and social network sites, hoping for something interesting to read. But just as my online friend said, everything seems to grow duller by the day. When I was young, the Internet was full of opinion, thought, and passion. Exuberant youths filled the virtual world with furious Socratic debate, while the brilliant but misanthropic waxed lyrical about their dreams of a new social order. I could sit unmoving in front of a computer screen until dawn as hyperlinks took my soul on whirlwind journeys. Now, I sift through front pages and n
otifications and never find a single topic worth clicking on.
The feeling is at once sickening and familiar.
On a social media site I frequent, I click the top news article, CITIZENS GATHER AT CITY HALL TO PROTEST HOBBYIST FISHERMEN’S INHUMANE TREATMENT OF EARTHWORMS. A video window pops out: a gaggle of young people in garish shirts, beers in their left hands and crooked signs in their right, standing in the city square. The signs read SAY NO TO EARTHWORM ABUSE, YOUR BAIT IS MY NEIGHBOR, EARTHWORMS FEEL PAIN JUST LIKE YOUR DOG.
Did they have nothing else to do? If they really wanted to march and protest, couldn’t they have found an issue actually worth fighting for? My headache is returning in force, so I turn off the monitor. I flop onto the worn brown couch and tiredly shut my eyes.
2
In the scheme of an enormous aggregation of resources like this city, a low-income, forty-five-year-old bachelor is utterly insignificant. I work three days a week, four hours a day, and my main duty is to read welfare petitions that meet basic requirements and pick the ones I empathize with most. In an age where computers have squeezed people out of most employment opportunities, using my “emotional intuition” to approve or deny government welfare requests is practically the perfect job, no training or background knowledge required. The Department of Social Welfare thought some measure of empathy was needed beyond the rigid rules and regulations to select the few lucky welfare recipients (from petitions that had already passed the automated preliminary checks, of course), and therefore invited individuals from all strata of society—including failures like me—to participate in the process. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, I take the subway from my rented apartment to the little office I share with three coworkers in the Social Welfare Building. I sit in front of the computer and stamp my e-seal on petitions I take a liking to. The quota varies day to day, but my work typically ends after thirty stamps. I use the remainder of the time to chat, drink coffee, and eat bagels until the end-of-shift bell rings.
