The Island Dwellers

by Jen Silverman

  “What?”

  “The jeans, the jeans. And you won’t argue with me. And then we’re going to lunch and you’re not going to complain about money, we’re just going to eat what we want. Like rich Japanese girls.”

  I blink at her, lick my lips, taste the slickness of lip gloss that isn’t mine. Risa stares back at me, arms folded, waiting for argument. I don’t have the energy anymore. All I can think about is that suddenly this thing between us has weight and shape and substance. It has existed outside of our apartment, it has existed in a world that other people exist in too, and that makes it real and live.

  “The money,” I say weakly. “Risa, the money, though.”

  Risa reaches up quickly, fingertips brushing my lips. “Shinichi wanted us to spend it,” she says, “today. For my birthday. If I ask for more, he’ll give me more. It’s okay.”

  And that makes my stomach twist because it’s worse than I thought. I know girls who said that, back home, girls who asked for more and got more and eventually the men got tired of them, got tired of More.

  “Risa,” I say again. “Please, be careful—”

  “I’m fine,” she says automatically.

  “But something could happen.” And I don’t plan to say it but then I hear myself suddenly: “Don’t sleep with him, are you sleeping with him? Don’t sleep with him.”

  Risa stares at me, and then she laughs. She steps forward fast, winds her arms around my neck so that she’s pressed up against me and I’m pressed into the wall again. We stand there like that, so strange and good, the weight and shape of her. If I can hold on to her like this, everything else will recede, Japan won’t touch her and Shinichi won’t touch her, and Colombia, not even Colombia will touch her. Just me. Only me.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Risa says against my neck. “He likes to give me things and I like to take them. It has nothing to do with us.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN AT LAST I MEET Shinichi, I’m not prepared for how polite he is, or how much of the oxygen in the room he absorbs, so that there isn’t enough for other people. I’m not prepared for the niceness of his black suit, for the way he walks into the expensive café—where Risa has convinced me to join her—or for the men who accompany him. Some of them stand in the doorway, some of them walk behind him, well dressed and watchful, some are men and some are still boys. One of them is a very small man, the size of an eight-year-old, and I catch the glimpse of tattoos running from the insides of his wrists up under the sleeves of his sharp suit. I turn to Risa as a thin thread spins itself tight in my chest—“Who are they?” I whisper, and she says, like it’s normal, “It’s okay, Yuliya, they just work for him.” She nods toward the small man: “That one is Yuki-chan, he’s nice.” I look at Yuki-chan. He looks back at me, face impassive, and something prickles in my gut.

  Of the things I am not prepared for, the most nauseating is the way Shinichi sits down beside Risa as if he has a right to be there. He orders her a drink, without asking what she wants, and orders me one as well. He reaches out, adjusts the fall of her hair into her eyes, adjusts the necklace she’s wearing.

  “I like this one,” he says, in Japanese, and she says, “I know.”

  The rest of the conversation is over my head. I know only the most basic words at this point, and so I sit there shell-shocked. He doesn’t acknowledge me for a few minutes; he just sits and drinks Risa in with his eyes, and she laughs and chatters away in a stream of broken Japanese that I didn’t know she could command. And then, without warning, he turns toward me and smiles. It astonishes me briefly—the warmth of that smile, the confidence, the power. He says something to me, and Risa nudges me, so I say, in my terrible Japanese, “Hajimemashite.” Nice to meet you. He laughs, says something to Risa, who is also grinning behind her hand. I hate her, very briefly, for laughing at me with him.

  But then he leans over and kisses me first on one cheek and then the other, awkwardly but with determination. It is the first time I have ever been touched by a Japanese person. I’m stunned into paralysis.

  “Gaijin no aisatsu, deshou?” he says to me, and I recognize the words foreigner and greeting. Risa is laughing openly now. I’m still shocked—by his sudden closeness, by the heat of his body—but I nod. He nods back, looking at me closely. And then he smiles and motions to one of his boys who comes over immediately. Shinichi gestures to me, and the boy bows. I nod back. The boy asks me something in Japanese that I don’t understand, and when I look to Risa, nervous, Shinichi leans forward across the table.

  “Desaato,” he says, gesturing to the Western-style pastries under glass. “Amaimono kirai no?”

  “He wants to know if you like sweet things,” Risa translates.

  “Risa,” I say, and the tight feeling in my ribs is back. “Can we leave soon?”

  Risa sighs. “Be nice,” she says. “He just wants to talk to you.”

  “It isn’t me he wants to talk to,” I say.

  “Be nice,” Risa says again, “we’re just having coffee.”

  Shinichi is looking back and forth between us now. He asks Risa if everything is all right, and I don’t have to speak Japanese to understand that. She smiles and nods, everything is fine, Yuliya is shy. She says something to the boy, flashes her smile, and the boy goes to the glass case and returns with a plate of pastries. He places them on the table, withdraws immediately with a bow. Shinichi’s got these kids on a leash, I think, they’re scared of him and they’re hungry for what he has, and I don’t even have to know the word yakuza to know about that. My country has them too, powerful men attended by scared and ambitious boys. I’ve seen this a hundred times, it’s too old and too clear to need translation.

  The rest of the meeting is a blur. I don’t know what’s being said, but I understand better than Risa what isn’t. I watch Shinichi surround her with his glances, his nods, his constant attentive service, and I watch Risa love it. Not him—I’m jealous but I’m not stupid—it’s the power, of course, what nineteen-year-old doesn’t love power like that. At the end, Shinichi stands up. His men all straighten. He holds out a hand, Risa takes it and stands as well. He says something, and while his boys go pay the bill, he leads Risa out toward the street. Yuki-chan precedes Shinichi by a few paces, eyes scanning the street as we step out into it. A black limousine pulls up in front of us, and Yuki-chan leans in the window, says a few words to the driver.

  “Risa,” I say, a warning, but she shakes her head.

  “He’s just going to give us a ride, it’s okay.”

  “A ride where,” I say, and she glances at me over the thin pretty curve of her shoulder, Shinichi already opening the door for her, and she says soothingly: “Home, Yuliya.” And there’s a promise in her smile, even as she flicks her eyes away from me and back toward Shinichi.

  I get in the limousine, and watch the world slide by removed and tinted. Nobody in the outside world can look through the smoke-colored glass and see me. And right then, in that exact moment—and only for that moment—I understand what it would be like to want this and have this, and why Risa will never say no.

  * * *

  —

  I DON’T WANT HER TO see him and so she compromises by not telling me when she does. She doesn’t talk about him at all. She pays for things with money that she swears is from the factory. But I know that she’s lying. She has so much of it, and she’s sending more and more home every day. And then come the days when she says that she worked an extra shift at the factory, stayed late, slept while I was at work, that she’s sick, that she’s busy. We’re not sleeping together anymore. She’s hardly ever home when I am, and the futon is empty without her. I try to sleep in the furrow that her body has left. Her smell on the pillow is the thing that lets me know she was there at all, and then, eventually, it fades. I know that she has stopped sleeping at our apartment long before I know that she has
, in fact, quit the factory job.

  She doesn’t tell me. Perhaps she wouldn’t ever have told me, would have kept up the lie forever, but one of the other women, from Cape Verde, tells me. She says, “Your Colombian friend is lucky, hey,” and I say, “Lucky, what do you mean lucky?” and she says, “If I found a rich Japanese, I wouldn’t be working here either.” It’s only when I confront Risa, that she confirms what I had guessed: Shinichi has bought her an apartment, and he visits her there, and when she is not with me and our cockroaches and our thin walls—which is always, now—that is where she is. I’m ashamed to admit that I shout, I cry. She stays calm, and a little impatient. I try to kiss her. She doesn’t stop me, which is sadder than if she had pushed me away. I want her to get angry, I want her to remember that fighting for someone is loving them, that I am still fighting for her. Instead, she tells me that I don’t even need another roommate, that she’ll still pay for the room.

  “It’ll be better for you,” she says. “You’ll see.”

  “I’ll still see you,” she says. “Things will be like they were.”

  She says, “Please stop crying, I’m just a few stops away.”

  But she’s farther than that. And we both know it.

  We have one last direct conversation about Shinichi, before a great silence falls between us. It is in Risa’s new apartment, in a neighborhood where neither of us would—before Shinichi—have dreamed of living. I’ve come over, and she’s cooked for me. The wary politeness between us is new. So too is all the space. My body is used to pressing up against hers, I’m used to putting my face against the side of her neck and breathing her in. But now we sit politely on opposite chairs, while I fill her in on the gossip from the factory. It’s all an old story of too many hungry people shoved into the same small space in a country that isn’t theirs. Risa listens to who got knocked up, who drank too much and beat his wife, who got beat up but said she fell—and then Risa says: “You’re better than that. You shouldn’t be there.”

  I feel it like a slap, but when I reply, my voice is quiet. “Where should I be, then? Here, like you?”

  But Risa isn’t trying to fight. “Yes,” she says softly. “Why not? You’re smart, you’re pretty, Shinichi has friends—”

  “I didn’t leave a ruthless man to come to a new country and find more ruthless men,” I say. The words fall into the air with surprising weight because, except for the nightmares, I’ve never made reference to what happened before this.

  “Japanese men like Shinichi, they aren’t like that,” Risa says, still soft. “They’re not running around trash heaps with guns and drugs like dirty little boys. They dress well, they’re educated, they’re—”

  “They’re doing the same fucking things,” I say without heat. Japan is making me cold, I argue coldly, I grieve coldly now. “It doesn’t matter if they’re Colombian narcos playing war or Japanese yakuza in Armani. They’re the same fucking men. They look at you and they all see the same thing.”

  “And what’s that?” Risa asks.

  “Just a body,” I say. “Among other bodies.”

  “But that’s what I see when I look at them,” Risa shrugs. “I’m not going to fall in love with him.” And then her face softens and she says, low, “It’s still going to be you.” That hurts more than any of the fights we’ve had. I take a deep breath to keep the cold there in my chest. I can function as long as I can stay cold. But Risa is still talking.

  “He loves me,” she says with certainty. “He would never hurt me. He’s like a kid with me, he just wants to see me happy. And his friends, Yuliya—”

  I cut her off, and my voice is so steady, I barely recognize it. “Men like this—they don’t like to lose. Even things they stop wanting, they don’t like to lose them. If you ever wanted to leave—there would come a point where you couldn’t do it. Maybe you’ve already passed that point, I don’t know. You’ve seen me.” I gesture to my body, scars under clothing, and Risa flinches but doesn’t look away. “I did what you’re doing,” I say quietly. “The game you’re playing, it could go even worse for you, and nobody here to help you.”

  Risa and I are both silent for a long time. It’s raining outside, and cars hiss by. A train, far away, and I think again of our little apartment, now mine, at the end of the JR line. Far from here, dirtier than here. At last Risa says, “I have you, right?” But it’s a question.

  “What?”

  “You said nobody here to help me but I have you. Don’t I?”

  I lock my jaw against everything I want to say. Come home with me, let’s get out of here, fuck this country and fuck yours and fuck mine, let’s go somewhere else together, you and me, now, now, now.

  “Yeah,” I say. “You have me.”

  * * *

  —

  AND THE DAYS PASS INTO weeks, and weeks into months, it is November, and then December, the bright colors of the fall leaves have faded into winter drab, and then it is January and the new year. I see Risa two times a week, and then once a week, and then weeks pass in which I don’t see her at all. I sleep alone. The walls are thin and uninsulated. I lie in bed holding myself, and pretend that the only thing keeping me awake is the cold.

  Risa tells me in the second week of February that she’s going back to Colombia for five or six days to visit. She says she misses her mother. I’m glad that she’s going back—the more distance between her and her new life, the better. I go over to her apartment the evening before she leaves; Shinichi is coming over later, and so I come early. We don’t talk about this, but Risa and I are careful now to make sure that Shinichi and I don’t cross paths. We sit and drink tea, and I can’t help but note the elegant teacups, the expensive tea.

  She talks about Colombia, her little town, her mother and her two younger sisters. She asks me how my mother is doing and I say that she’s well—I got a letter from her a few weeks ago, the rent is paid, there’s food on the table, can I send more money. I don’t remember what else we talked about. I wish I did. When it gets close to eight, Risa glances at the clock, and I know that Shinichi will be coming soon. So I tell her that I have to get home, I have an early shift tomorrow, and she seems both saddened and relieved. She walks me to the door and leans into it smiling at me.

  “I’m glad you came over to say goodbye,” she says, light.

  “Of course,” I say. “You’ll be back in a week, right?”

  “Right,” Risa says, “in about a week.”

  “Well…let me know when you’re back, okay?”

  “Okay,” Risa echoes, and then she steps forward into the hall and wraps her arms around me in an embrace so tight, so impulsive, that I’m overwhelmed by the memory of the two of us in a Shibuya changing room, my back against the wall, her lips on mine. But she doesn’t kiss me this time. She just hugs me, hard, and then lets go.

  “Risa,” I start, but I’ve never been good at saying anything I want to say, and she cuts me off anyway.

  “Be good,” she says, as if I’m the one going on a journey. “Make friends okay? Make some friends.” And she slips an envelope into my hand.

  “I don’t need friends,” I say automatically. “Hey, what is this?”

  And she turns, framed in her doorway with the light spilling from behind her. “Nothing,” she says, “open it later, okay? On the train.”

  Something in her tone makes me ask: “You will call me when you get back, right?”

  Risa smiles at me, blows me a kiss. “Claro,” she says. “See you soon.” And she stands there waving to me until I turn away, walk down the stairs.

  I open the little envelope on the train, and I don’t know what I’m hoping for. I know better than to hope for a love letter. But a note perhaps: I miss you. Instead I find twenty one-man bills. Twenty man. It feels like a ridiculous sum of money—almost two thousand dollars. I stare at it as the train stations rattle past, as
if I don’t know what it is. I miss my stop, don’t realize it until we’ve already gone two more stations down the line. Then I tuck the envelope into my bag and hug the bag tightly the rest of the way back, either terrified that someone will stop me, or terrified of the money itself.

  * * *

  —

  AND AFTER THAT, SHE’S GONE.

  The first few days that she should be back, I wait for a call that doesn’t come. I go to an Internet café and email her. Maybe she decided to extend her trip. Maybe she’s having such a good time with her mother and her sisters that she’s rethinking this whole Japan thing. But no response. More days pass. I go find one of those bright green public phones outside the local conbini. I feed it ten-yen pieces and dial the number of the expensive mobile that Shinichi got her. It rings, twice, and then a recorded voice comes on in Japanese and talks for a long time, and the connection cuts off. I put in more ten-yen pieces, the same thing happens again and again.

  I go to her apartment at the end of the first week. I stand in the street looking around but I don’t see any black limos, so I go up the stairs and knock on the door. Nobody answers. I put my ear to the door but I don’t hear anything. I call her name through the keyhole, but there’s no sign of life. I want to slip a note under the door but I don’t want Shinichi to find it. In the end, I leave.

  I come back the next day and knock. Then the next. I try her phone a few more times, but the same automated voice talks to me in Japanese and then cuts off. I’m beside myself. I ask the few people from the factory we were both friendly with, but nobody knows. I’m the one who was closest to her. Many of them don’t even know she went back to Colombia.

  As the days pass, I start to wonder if she even went back at all. Did she lie to me? But why? I can’t sleep at night. I lie awake and think about her. I feel like I’m losing my mind. I don’t know where to go, how to ask for help. It is so easy for girls like us to fall through the cracks—in our own countries and now in this one.