The Lonesome Bodybuilder

by Yukiko Motoya

  Hakone hummed and said nothing. She looked like she was giving it some serious thought. Her eyes were focused on the booth’s cloud-glass partition, but her mouth was still chewing away steadily at the steak.

  “Do you think he’s too immature? Is that the problem?” I asked.

  “No, it’s not like that. I’m not sure why. Maybe I don’t really know, myself. But I’d like us to stay as separate people for a little longer.”

  “Separate people?”

  “I mean, getting married, that means swallowing everything about the other person, the good things and the bad. What if there ends up being more of the bad? You’d both be in trouble then, wouldn’t you?” Hakone said. “Do you know the story of the snake ball? I don’t remember where I read it. Maybe someone told it to me, a long time ago. There are two snakes, and they each start cannibalizing the other one’s tail. And they eat and they eat at exactly the same speed, until they’re just two heads making a ball, and then they both get eaten up and disappear. I think that’s the image I have of marriage—that both me and the other person, as we are now, will disappear before we can do anything about it. But I guess that can’t be right. I think?”

  “Snake ball, huh?” I poked at a piece of grilled eel laid on the rice, and pictured a bright white ball covered in scales.

  Hakone quenched her thirst with cold roasted green tea from the vending machine. “But it only applies when the snakes consume each other at the same rate. Between me and Senta, I might end up swallowing him all in one big gulp.”

  I took a mouthful of grilled eel seasoned with plenty of sansho pepper. The Lake Hamana eel was firmer and more succulent than the one from the Mikawa region.

  I was secretly impressed by Hakone’s story. Whenever I’d gotten close to someone in the past, I’d had the feeling that little by little I was being replaced. The other person’s ideas, interests, and habits would gradually take the place of my own. Every time I noticed myself acting as though that was who I’d been all along, a chill went up my spine. The fact that I couldn’t stop, even if I tried, was proof that it wasn’t actually a matter of anything as benign as acting or pretending.

  Men entered into me through my roots like nutrients dissolved in potting soil. Every time I got together with someone new, I got replanted, and the nutrients from the old soil disappeared without a trace. As if to prove it, I could hardly recall the men I’d been with before. Strangely, too, the men I’d been with had all wanted me to grow in them. Eventually, I’d start to feel in danger of root rot, and would hurriedly break the pot and uproot myself.

  Was that the fault of the soil, or did the problem lie in the roots?

  I’d expected marriage to be an even more constricting flower pot than my previous relationships. But after four years, I hadn’t tried to escape from the soil that was my husband. Hearing Hakone’s snake-ball story, I finally felt that something that had been cloudy to me had become clear. All this time, I had been feeding myself to those men. By now, I was like the ghost of a snake that had already been eaten up by many other snakes, and I’d lost my own body long before getting swallowed up by my husband. Didn’t that explain why I didn’t much mind whether it was a husband I was living with or something only resembling a husband?

  One night, after dinner, I was surprised to notice my husband engrossed in his iPad rather than the variety show playing on the TV.

  “What are you doing on there?” I peered over his shoulder.

  “Huh?”

  “Is it a game?”

  “It’s a game.”

  “What kind of game?”

  There was no response. I gave up and cleared the table and went for a bath, but when I came back, my husband hadn’t moved.

  “Bath’s free.”

  “Okay,” I heard a muffled voice say. I finished towel-drying my hair and stepped out onto the balcony to bring in the laundry I’d hung out that afternoon. The zelkovas planted in a clump just beyond the railing were overgrown with green leaves that looked like a neglected hairdo. I recalled seeing a circular in the mailroom about plans to prune the plantings.

  “Uwano recommended this game,” my husband said at last.

  I was folding laundry on the living room floor. “Uwano again? You’re talking about him a lot lately.”

  “I think you should try it. It’s good.”

  “No thanks. I don’t like games.”

  “That’s exactly what I told Uwano. Here, take it.”

  “I’m folding laundry.”

  “Let the cat do it. Go, Zoromi, go do it for her.” He moved the cat off the space beside him where she’d been asleep, and beckoned to me. Normally he was never this insistent. I guessed he must be feeling needy.

  My husband seemed anxious to make a snake ball with me. When he made me sit with him while he watched his variety shows, claiming it was more fun than watching alone, it had to be that he was trying to erase the chilly gaze that he felt I was directing at him. He probably thought that once he and I became one, he would never again have to worry about being judged by others.

  I sat down on the couch and looked at the iPad screen. I was expecting some cutting-edge visual effects, but what I saw was an image representing what looked like oceans and continents, drawn in simple lines like in old Nintendo games. Small discs of different colors twinkled all across the map.

  “What are these?” I asked.

  “Oh, those,” my husband said, turning his shoulders toward me. “Coins.”

  “And what do I do with these coins?”

  “Touch one and see,” he said, so I tried pressing on a brown disc with my finger. I heard a tinkling sound like coins dropping into a piggy bank, which I’d been hearing constantly all evening. I waited for something else to happen, but that was it.

  “It didn’t do anything.”

  “Look at the bottom of the screen. You’ve banked some money.”

  Sure enough, there was a number at the lower-right-hand corner of the screen. “This is a game where you collect money?”

  “Yeah.” My husband nodded while sucking on a strip of dried squid.

  “Are there any bad guys?”

  “Huh? Bad guys? No.”

  “So you collect the money, and then what?”

  “When you’ve collected enough, you can buy your own land.”

  “You buy your own land, and then? What happens then?”

  “More land gives you more coins.”

  “Does it?”

  “Yeah. Then you collect those, so you can bank money again. Then you can buy even more land.”

  I didn’t say what I was thinking, but he must have sensed it.

  He pulled the strip of squid from his mouth, and said, “It’s because you’re a housewife, San. You can’t understand how men don’t want to have to think about things when we get home.”

  “What is it you want to avoid thinking about that badly?”

  “The answers to questions like that, for example. Hey, give it back if you’re not even going to play.” My husband took the iPad from my hand and sank his head back to the game. I fled from the tinkling of coins falling and the suckling sound of him chewing on dried squid.

  After that, my husband took to tinkling the fake coins incessantly, everywhere—in the bath, on the toilet, even under the covers. “Why don’t you try a different game?” I’d ask, but he’d only say, “I like this one.”

  I could have understood if the game offered a vision of a wonderful world more exciting than real life. But what was so appealing about the insipid map that looked like a stage backdrop and its ever-twinkling coins? I thought perhaps the game got more interesting the longer you played, but whenever I looked over my husband’s shoulder, the screen always looked the same. It seemed that all he was doing was almost robotically placing his finger on the discs. Every time I would ask, “You really enjoy it that much?” he’d say, “That’s not what it’s about,” in a curiously languid tone.r />
  “Hey, do we have any more of those pears someone gave us the other day? The pears?”

  My husband looked up from the iPad for the first time in a while, and what I saw nearly made me shriek and run from the room. The positioning of his features was deteriorating faster than ever. His face was barely maintaining a form that could even be recognized as human.

  He seemed not to realize that anything was amiss, and simply looked at me with his terrifyingly wide-set eyes, and said, “Are they all gone?”

  “No,” I said. I was feigning calm, but my voice came out higher than normal.

  “Can you peel me one?”

  “Okay.” I turned on my heel and went back into the kitchen. There was a tremor in my hand holding the paring knife.

  When I served him the peeled pear segments on a plate, the husband-like creature excitedly reached for a cocktail stick. “You know, I think pears might be my favorite fruit,” he announced.

  How could he even see straight? The husband-like thing picked up the cocktail stick and popped a pear segment into the mouth, which was positioned perilously close to his jawline. His teeth must have been in their right place, because they made a champing sound as he chewed.

  “Aren’t you going to have any?” the husband-like thing said.

  I wasn’t sure that I wanted to. But it would have been suspicious for me to say no.

  When I sat down next to him, the husband-like thing picked up the TV remote and started flipping through channels.

  “This really takes me back.” On the screen, a quiz show was posing a question about an ad that had been on heavy rotation just after we’d gotten married. “We used to sing this song all the time. Remember?”

  Instead of responding, I looked down and nibbled a slice of pear.

  “Do you remember, on our honeymoon, how I chewed up all the fruit for you so you could eat it?”

  “You did?” I said distractedly.

  “Sure. You’d just gotten braces, and you said the metal hurt and you couldn’t eat anything. So I ordered a fruit platter from room service, and chewed it all up and spat it out onto the plate, and gave it to you.”

  “You fed me fruit you’d already eaten?”

  “And you smiled and ate it all.” The husband-like thing’s voice sounded indistinct, as if it were coming from behind a wall of water. “Maybe that’s why it’s so easy being with you. When you did that, I knew you’d probably eat up my poop with a smile too.”

  That night, my husband left the iPad outside the bedroom. For the first time in months, his hand crept into my bed, under my comforter. I wanted to pretend I was asleep, but then he went to switch on the light, so I reached out and caught his hand almost by reflex.

  In the darkness, my husband swiftly removed my pajama bottoms. When I thought about whether the thing that had started to move on top of me was my husband or just something like him, I felt a terrible dread and kept my eyes firmly shut. Then I felt skin slacken, and bodies start to yield, and then I could no longer tell whose sensations I was feeling. Snake ball! My body was starting to coil, and I tried to stop thinking by closing my eyes even more tightly. That only made the boundary between the skin of our entwined bodies even hazier. My husband the snake opened his mouth and swallowed me headfirst, and I desperately resisted his sticky, moist membranes, but soon the inside of his body became a pleasurable place to be. By then I was actively feeding my body to him to be devoured. He seemed to be enjoying eating me up so much that the sensation of it spread to me, and I felt as though I were tasting my own self.

  After Hasebo’s wedding had come and gone, and I’d returned to my usual sequence of undistinguished days, I ran into Kitae by the checkout in the pharmacy.

  “My,” Kitae said, her voice clear and effortless, “it’s been quite a while since I saw you. How have you been?”

  “Fine, thank you.” For some reason I couldn’t meet her eyes. I bowed and looked down at the floor where it reflected the fluorescent lights.

  Kitae, who’d joined the line after me, looked into my basket and pointed. “I use the same fabric conditioner. Isn’t it good?” and then strode off over to the kitchen goods aisle.

  I decided to wait for her outside the pharmacy. The cicadas were chirring at full volume. As I was comparing prices on brands of toilet paper, Kitae came out of the automatic sliding doors carrying full bags. “San, dear, you’re looking a little tan,” she said, studying me closely from head to toe.

  “Am I?”

  “You certainly are. You used to be all pasty, like a sheet of paper.”

  “I’ve been busy with errands lately,” I said, instinctively stepping backward under the shade of the awning.

  “That must be why I haven’t seen you around.” I couldn’t decide whether she’d believed me or whether she’d just accepted my excuse.

  “And have you been well?” I hesitated about asking after Sansho, leaving an awkward pause in the conversation.

  Kitae seemed preoccupied by the tatami shop opposite the pharmacy, saying something about the owner. “His wife’s sick, poor man. They’re going through a hard time.” She started walking slowly up the slight hill of the main street.

  I hurriedly fell into step.

  “Where do you normally shop?” Kitae asked, a little out of breath.

  “Where do I shop?” Similarly out of breath, I looked up toward the new supermarket that stood at the top of the hill. I used it often, because it had a wide selection and good prices.

  “Oh, that place. I thought so,” Kitae said, sounding disappointed.

  “Is it bad?”

  “I wouldn’t say bad,” she said. “It’s just that as soon as it opened, everyone started shopping there. Isn’t it such a shame when we have such a traditional Japanese main street right here?” She waved to the employee sitting behind the counter in the dry cleaner’s. “Of course, I understand the appeal of being able to pay for everything at once, but you lose the human touch, don’t you.” At the middle of the hill, she stopped to catch her breath. She watched the line of people waiting to buy a bento outside the Chinese restaurant, then took out her usual white terrycloth handkerchief and wiped her brow. “So, San, are you about to do your shopping now?”

  I nodded. I’d been thinking about tonight’s menu as I left the apartment.

  “Then come with me for a bit.”

  “You mean to the local shops?” I asked.

  “I’ll introduce you to my grocer, and the butcher, and the fishmonger I use.” She neatly folded away her handkerchief, and set off purposefully, overtaking a young person wheeling a bicycle.

  “And so the mountains ended up being the best solution.”

  I couldn’t tell if Senta was listening or not, because he was stuffing his mouth with prosciutto while making small huffing noises. He seemed to be in a rush to get his next plate of food, even though I’d told him there were no time restrictions. Hakone, who’d taken a spoonful each of several different dishes on an appetizer plate, sat down beside Senta and started intently conveying food to her mouth.

  “It’s so different from our usual all-you-can-eat place,” she said, cradling her cheeks in her palms as she savored the mixed seafood marinée. “The place Senta and I always go has so many choices, it’s almost a joke. We assumed that was the point of going all-you-can-eat, but actually, the better places stick to what they’re good at, I guess. Or it’s more like they really refine each dish.”

  A server stopped by the side of our table, so I asked for a refill of sparkling water.

  “We’re in your debt. You took me out once already, and now you’re treating us to this high-class all-you-can-eat,” Hakone said.

  “It’s called a buffet,” Senta butted in.

  “Don’t worry about it. A thousand-yen bento to thank you for seventy thousand yen? And I knew Senta would enjoy it too.”

  Hakone picked up the finely decorated bowl of chilled vegetable potage.

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nbsp; “We’ve been going hungry since last night to make the most of it, Sis.”

  “No problem,” I said vaguely, and sipped my freshly poured sparkling water. I’d invited them to a hotel lunch because I’d recalled Senta grousing about not being allowed to eat his fill when they ate out.

  While I received an agreed-upon amount each month from my husband for living expenses, Senta and Hakone shared their finances, even though they weren’t married yet. Hakone held the purse strings and, having a good head for money, made a rule of feeding Senta a bowl of rice before they went out to eat. Since Hakone was the one bringing in most of the income right now, Senta couldn’t really complain.

  “So does either of you know a good mountain somewhere?” I ladled a spoonful of curry from a silver sauce boat over my saffron rice. I’d deliberated for a while between it and the beef stroganoff, but in the end I’d given in to the curry’s dark allure.

  “A mountain? Do you mean for the camper van trip?”

  “This is a different mountain.”

  “She’s going to abandon a cat,” Senta said.

  “What? No! You’re throwing Zoromi out?” Hakone said, looking up from her platter.

  “No, no. Not Zoromi. It’s a cat belonging to someone I know.”

  “Oh. I thought you meant Zoromi!”

  “I’m not going to abandon Zoromi. This person’s cat started peeing all over the apartment. It’s been a year, and they’ve tried everything. She and her husband finally decided to let him go live in the mountains.” I spooned more curry onto my rice.

  “‘Go live’ is one way of putting it,” Senta added quietly. “Sis, aren’t you gonna tell them the truth?”

  “I don’t need to—she knows, really.” That was why Kitae had held on to Sansho all summer. “She promised her husband she’d do it once the weather gets a little cooler.” After taking me shopping at the local shops, Kitae had bowed her head and asked whether I could drive them up to a mountain somewhere. I sighed. “I hate a problem without a good solution.”