The Island Dwellers

by Jen Silverman

  “Yeah, sure, of course.” I immediately wish I’d stopped after just saying “yeah.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Maureen informs me, “and I just don’t feel that you’re a good fit for this project. I appreciate the work you’ve put in, but I think it’s time to part ways.”

  In the silence, I think, But we spooned! a split second before I think, But I wrote you five sets of thirty pages!

  I’m not sure which one to say, so I settle for: “I guess I don’t understand what makes this not a good fit.”

  “It’s just become clear to me,” Maureen says, “that it’s time to move forward. Aesthetically. For both of us to move forward.”

  More silence. I want to say so many things but I don’t begin to know how. What comes out is, “Do I still get paid?”

  “The payment was for a first draft,” Maureen says. Her voice sounds a little more certain now—this is more comfortable territory.

  “I’ve written over a hundred pages,” I say.

  “None of them,” Maureen tells me, “ultimately, are usable.”

  I open my mouth to tell her that none of the beginnings are usable because she wouldn’t let me obtain endings, but: “You should unpack,” I hear myself say. “You should get some decorations, and you should just…unpack, Maureen.”

  “Excuse me?”

  I’ve stunned myself into a brief silence. When I realize that was, actually, what I meant to say, the follow-up realization is that I don’t have much else to add.

  “Goodbye,” I say. But I still wait for her to hang up on me—which she does.

  * * *

  —

  I SEE ZARA ONE MORE time, in the span of bewildered weeks after Maureen fires me. It feels like a breakup in a way that baffles me, and infuriates Ev. I find myself struck low by strange dizzying spells of sadness. I find myself talking out loud as I fill the dishwasher, as I wait on the sidewalk for the light to change. Every time I hear myself, I’m trying to explain something to Maureen. Why it could have worked, what I could have written next, but mostly, why she shouldn’t give up on me. In the end, this is why I reach out to Zara. She’s the only other person I know who knows Maureen, and who can tell me I’m not crazy—or that I am.

  Zara isn’t thrilled to see me, but that’s no shock. She’s chewing cinnamon gum, and she keeps glancing over her shoulder. She hasn’t been fired yet, and I try not to show that I find this surprising.

  “You gotta move on,” she says, flatly, five seconds into my explanation. “I told you, it’s not personal with her.”

  “But she called me at three A.M.,” I say, a little lamely. “She had me come over.”

  “So?”

  “So…that’s personal.”

  “No,” Zara says, not unkindly. “That’s Maureen.”

  “But she’d email me—like, five, six times a day—”

  “Yeah,” Zara says, “and that’s called psychosis.”

  I’m quiet, stymied.

  “Look.” Zara takes a breath, as if she’s explaining something to a child who is both frustrating and endearing. “Do you like…have any friends?”

  I blink at her. “Of course I have friends.”

  “Okay,” Zara says, still patient. “But like, who are they?”

  So I do a brief tally in my head. There’s Ev, who’s technically my cousin, and who has started emailing me Craigslist housing ads. There’s Kayla, my best friend from high school, who lives in Costa Mesa with her husband (stoic, Air Force) and her first child (loud, constant). I texted her when Maureen fired me, hoping for sympathy, and a day later, she texted me back a picture of her kid covered in poop and said, “Somebody fire me from this.” There’s Maria, my best friend from college, who moved to Japan to teach English to Japanese businessmen, and who I haven’t heard from in years.

  I’m still thinking when Zara says, getting less patient, “Who do you see every day?”

  And the answer, the only answer, is: “Maureen.”

  “Right,” Zara says. “I’m only saying this to help you. You need a friend. You need a boyfriend. You need a job, but not a job where you can, like, fall in all the way. You need a job you don’t care about. You need to go to the gym. Okay?”

  I don’t know what to say other than the simple correction: “Girlfriend.”

  “Great,” Zara says. “Get a girlfriend. It’s called Tinder. Do you have an iPhone?” I nod. “Give it to me.” She takes my phone. “I’m downloading Tinder, I’m downloading OkC. There might be special lesbian ones, but you need to do the legwork on those. Go on some dates, practice the art of being a human with other humans, and if someone calls you at three A.M., run for the hills.” She hands my phone back to me, all brisk efficiency. “We aren’t friends,” she says, “no offense but I just have too much going on in my life, and Maureen is already more than enough. Good luck.”

  She turns to walk away.

  “Zara,” I say. “You are really really good at your job. I hope you don’t get fired.”

  She gives me an odd look and then says, “I mean, not that it matters, but I’m quitting at the end of the summer to work in a talent agency.”

  * * *

  —

  I SPEND THE REST OF the day wandering around Central Park. I feel strangely light, untethered from the rest of the city. I sit on a rock for a while and watch people walk by. There are lots of couples, and most of them seem vaguely unhappy. There are lots of dogs, and they seem happier. There’s a guy blowing giant soap bubbles from a net, and little kids keep popping the soap bubbles and then both they and the soap bubble guy get upset. I open up the apps on my phone and then it all seems overwhelming and I close them again. I wonder how I could have been in New York for six months without realizing that I had no friends. I wonder if I had any friends in Philadelphia. I had people that I saw, more so than here, but were they my friends? Suddenly Zara has thrown my life into question.

  When the shadows start getting longer, I slide off the rock and start the walk back through the park toward the exit that will spit me out by Columbus Circle. I am making lists and tallies in my head: Is the barista who always remembers my order a friend? Is someone a friend if they’re nice to you on the subway, when everyone else is shoving you in the kidneys with their book bags and elbows? Is someone maybe not a friend if they need you for things that are unrelated to the things you need them for? Or is friendship a complicated equation, influenced in incalculable ways by things like employment and loneliness and money, and sometimes someone is your friend and then later, a minute later, that same person is not your friend anymore at all?

  And if that’s the case, I realize, as I reach the subway lights, then maybe Maureen was my friend after all. Briefly. In moments. Not always, but between breaths maybe, or in certain lines of certain emails, or the night I came over, in the space right after she fell asleep and right before I fell asleep—in that moment, I think, in that moment at the very least, we were friends.

  And that thought makes me suddenly sad and relieved at the same time, so much so that I have to stop and take several deep breaths, one and then another and then another, before I descend the stairs into the subway.

  Noriyuki was telling me all about Japanese pit vipers when he noticed the bruises on my arm. According to Nori, who had never eaten one, their meat healed wounds and made even the most flaccid old man into a raging sex addict. “The way you kill mamushi,” Nori was saying, “you have to starve them to death. You keep them in this jar for months, the longer they sit there, the more concentrated it gets, whatever special thing is in their body. And then—” He stopped and asked, “What’re those from?” and I realized that he was looking at my arm.

  I had been copying his homework; I glanced down. From the crook of my elbow up to my wrist, all along my inner arm: soft ripe bruises, like plum blossoms. We were quiet. Then I said, “
An accident.”

  Nori didn’t push it. After a minute he started telling me about the snakes again, how his cousin in Hiroshima has been keeping one in a glass jar for three months, in his bedroom. “He can’t have sex in that room anymore,” Nori informed me. “Mamushi take all that energy and they become these—conduits—of power.”

  “Not powerful enough to get out of the fucking jar, though, huh,” I said, and shoved his homework back at him. He didn’t mention my arm again, although I caught him looking at it.

  * * *

  —

  THE FIRST TIME I GOT Anthony to hit me, we were arguing about something that I can’t even remember now. And watching him shout at me, that old predictable line Nobody, nobody will ever love you the way I do, I realized that I was bored. He shouldn’t be begging for me to love him, not when I was seventeen and he was twice that. If I mattered to him like that, it must mean that he was even more fucked-up than I was. And that was pathetic. It must have shown on my face because he stopped yelling. We stood in the sudden silence, late-afternoon sunlight flooding from the open balcony door and the sounds of Roppongi below: A car horn. Somebody laughing. A guy’s voice.

  I’d wanted to say something mean, but I couldn’t think of anything brutal enough, and the stupidity of the whole thing was weighing on me, how laughable and stupid. So I picked up my sneakers in one hand and started to walk out.

  Anthony was barring the door before I reached it. “Ancash! Where are you going!”

  “Home.”

  “You go home? That’d be a first. You’re just going to find someone else to fuck you.”

  It shouldn’t be so easy for a kid to humiliate an adult, but somehow it is. “It wouldn’t be hard,” I drawled.

  I tried to shoulder past him, but he grabbed me by the wrist, jerking me off balance, and as I stared at him, startled, hit me across the face. The impact couldn’t have made much of a sound, but it echoed in my mind like a car backfiring.

  He dropped my wrist, took a step back. He was breathing hard, as if he’d been the one who got hit. I put my hand to my lips and when I took it away, my fingertips were tingling too. The pain drained away leaving behind something like anger and something like satisfaction.

  I grinned at him.

  “Do it again,” I said.

  In the end, he did. He didn’t want to. But I didn’t give him a choice—it was either that or watch me leave. Again, across the face, again, and then again. I thought later that maybe I shouldn’t have done that, made him do that. Something like that, it can make you strange inside. But I didn’t let him stop.

  After that, it became part of our whole thing. Part of the routine. And even on the days when I didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want to talk to him, I’d go back to his apartment. When he was hitting me it was like he wasn’t even there at all and I was alone, in the middle of a storm, thunder, hail, fists raining down, and at least I felt alive.

  * * *

  —

  THE DAY NORIYUKI FOUND OUT about Anthony, if indirectly, was the day we skipped out of Tokyo to go a few hundred miles south to Hiroshima. Noriyuki was waiting for me by the udon stand on the corner, two blocks from our international high school.

  “I have ichi-man,” he greeted me. “We could make it as far as Hiroshima.”

  “And what’re we going to do in Hiroshima?” I asked.

  “Help my cousin catch snakes,” he said, and smiled.

  Noriyuki was just as wild as I was—the only difference was that he was nicer. Everyone loved him. Japanese by birth, he’d spent most of his childhood in Manhattan, and now here he was back in Tokyo. His father was a minister of internal affairs, mine a diplomat. I knew some of the other diplomats’ kids hated Tokyo, but given Nori, Tokyo was great. England had been monotonous, Korea was a drag. Tokyo had moments of genuine possibility.

  “I don’t have that much on me,” I said.

  “How much do you have?”

  I felt in my pockets. “Two hundred yen.”

  Nori shook his head in disapproval. “That’s not even gonna buy you porno manga, kid. You need to start paying attention to the value of money.”

  “Thanks, grandpa,” I said sarcastically. “I gotta make a stop before we leave.”

  “Home?”

  I looked at him incredulously. My allowance was constantly in suspension—there were many things my father didn’t appreciate, and my general outlook and behavior topped the list. Nori lifted his hands in self-defense.

  “Okayyy, not home. A stop where?”

  “Roppongi,” I said, and started walking so he’d have to follow.

  * * *

  —

  ANTHONY WAS HOME WHEN I showed up, like I knew he’d be. He worked as a bartender at night at Bar Brasilia, which meant he spent the afternoons asleep. He answered the door with his hair tousled, jeans undone. My knocking had woken him. He was surprised to see me, and pleased, and then suspicious.

  “What do you want?” he demanded.

  “Good morning, Anthony,” I said, ignoring the question.

  “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  I leaned against the doorframe so my shirt would hitch up a little, so he could see the finger-span of bare skin between the shirt edge and the top of my jeans.

  “I’m about to go to school,” I said smoothly, “to further my education, but I find that I’ve forgotten my lunch money.”

  Anthony gave me that look. A moment of silence between us, sizing each other up. I knew that Anthony would give me what I wanted because he was too deeply in the habit of doing it now, and Anthony knew that he could get something from me, some physical gesture of affection, because he knew how little value I placed on those.

  Anthony cleared his throat, rubbing a hand over his unshaven jaw. “How much.”

  “Ichi-man.”

  Another beat. It was about a hundred USD, but then again I didn’t usually ask Anthony for money. I could see the gears whirring in his head. He wanted to ask me why, and knew in advance that I wouldn’t give him a straight answer.

  I stretched. Knew what he saw: muscles jumping along my forearms, the finger-span of skin between shirt hem and jeans becoming a hand-span, the top of a hip bone jutting. I dropped my arms and then took a sudden step forward, leaning in. I caught his lower lip between my teeth, held it for a second, then gave him a fast, harsh kiss and stepped back just as quickly. The Germans perfected this technique in World War II, they called it blitzkrieg. The Japanese, unfortunately, perfected a different technique—the technique that Anthony used most often. They called it kamikaze, and it ended with the pilot crashing his own plane.

  Anthony turned and went into his apartment. He came back a minute later, with crisp new bills in his hand. I took them, casually, tucked them in my pocket.

  “Why, thanks, Anthony,” I said.

  “I’ll see you tonight,” he said, and the warning was clear in his voice.

  Nori was waiting below on the sidewalk. When he saw the money he demanded, “What the fuck did you do?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just borrowed from a friend.”

  “Yeah right,” Nori said, grinning. “She must be loaded. And you must be fast.”

  He shoved me, inviting me to laugh or shove him back, but I knew that Anthony was watching us from behind the curtains of his living room window. I couldn’t bring myself to play any more little games, no schoolboy horsing around on the sidewalk. Anthony was already jealous, and the irony was that, of all the people he would be right to suspect, Nori wasn’t one of them. I’d never touched Noriyuki and I never would, not even if he asked me. Which he wouldn’t.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE BULLET TRAIN TO Hiroshima, Nori told me more about the mamushi. If they bit you, you died. If you didn’t die, you could be kept in the hospital for up
to eight months. Also, he informed me, the mother snakes kept their babies in their stomachs and gave birth by vomiting. “That’s pretty much what your mom did too,” I nodded sagely, ducking his mock-punch. “And you turned out okay.”

  We got to Hiroshima by late afternoon, and his cousin showed up at the station in a jolting pickup truck. His name was Katsuhiro and he greeted Nori with a grunt and me with a narrow-eyed stare. Nori introduced me in a fast-paced Hiroshima drawl; I made out my name and something about America, and that was about it. After a moment of indecision, Katsuhiro smiled shyly at me, searching for long-forgotten grade-school English.

  “I am fain sank yuu ando yuu,” he proclaimed proudly, and gestured us into the back of his pickup. Nori climbed up first and checked around before he let me vault up after him.

  “Sometimes he keeps things back there,” he explained as I climbed up.

  “What things?”

  “Porcupine babies.” Nori shrugged. “Squid.”

  I opened my mouth but Katsuhiro took off with a squeal of tires and I fell backward into the bed of the truck. Nori, who was hanging on for dear life, laughed at me. His eyes were bright, the way they always were when he was involved in some kind of rebellion. I especially liked being with him in moments like this, watching cool Tokyo Nori laughing like an excited country kid. He noticed me looking and cocked one eyebrow, that old parlor trick. I glanced away, over the edge of the truck bed, and watched Hiroshima City fall into rice fields.

  * * *

  —

  ANTHONY ASKED ME ONCE, ONLY once that I recall, if I’d ever loved anyone. He wasn’t implying himself; he never asked if I loved him, but rather why I didn’t. It was toward the beginning, when he still thought I was twenty-one, and I still bothered to lie because sleeping with Anthony interrupted my daily monotony, and I didn’t want to lose it.