The Island Dwellers

by Jen Silverman

  “Agnes,” I say without thinking, and then find that it’s true. “I want to take care of Agnes.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I ARRIVE AT HER apartment, Agnes has taped newspaper over all the windows so that the whole place is bathed in a weird, hazy gray light. All of her appliances are unplugged, and when I see the row of new locks installed on the inside of the door, I understand why it took her so long to get it open.

  “Hi,” says Agnes. Her eyes are like bruises.

  Glancing around her apartment, I see that she’s taped cut-open Trader Joe’s paper bags to her wall, and is making a list of pros and cons on them with a Sharpie. The PROS so far read: Power, Privilege, Convenience. The CONS are: Vulnerability, Inconvenience, Death.

  I ask Agnes what the list is about, and she says it’s about U.S. citizenship on the whole. She tells me that yesterday she made a highly detailed list about the pros and cons of moving to Sweden, but the list was so long that it covered all of her walls, and she ran out of space, so she had to take it down and start thinking more in broad strokes.

  “Cool,” I say. “When was the last time you ate anything?”

  “I’m eating.” Agnes gestures to the empty cans of tuna fish in the sink. When I stare at them, she admits that she ran out of fresh food a week ago.

  I ask Agnes why not just go to Sweden, see what it’s like, and eat some fresh vegetables there. Agnes tells me that she’s been watching the part of the Edward Snowden documentary on loop where he’s hiding in the hotel room in Hong Kong. She says that the second you go anywhere, your name is on a flight manifest, there’s video of you walking through airports, your passport is recorded, your arrival and departure are performed for the viewing pleasure and archival purposes of a million hidden eyes. She says, “It’s probably safer to stay indoors.” She says, “Tunnels would be better, if there were subterranean tunnels, if I could maybe live in the Catacombs that would be better, if there were a way to get to Paris.”

  I ask Agnes if maybe she doesn’t agree that we should delete the Edward Snowden documentary off of her laptop. Agnes looks at me uncertainly. “It’s on Netflix anyway,” she says.

  “Maybe there are other things you could watch right now.”

  “That won’t help,” Agnes says wearily, “it’s all still out there.” And she sits down on the floor.

  I sit down on the floor also. It’s kind of nice being close to the ground. There’s something calming about refusing to remain standing in the face of hopelessness. I want to capsize, so I do. I lie on Agnes’s floor with my face against her cool kitchen tile.

  “What are you doing?” Agnes asks, interested.

  “It feels better down here,” I say.

  Agnes capsizes also. Faces half-smushed against the floor, we stare at each other.

  “I missed you,” Agnes says.

  “I missed you too,” I tell her. And then I ask her a question that has been floating inside me this whole time, but I don’t realize it until I say it: “What’s so wrong with being watched?”

  Agnes frowns, with the half of her face that isn’t attached to the floor. She doesn’t understand the question.

  I try again. I try to put my thoughts together, but I’m tired too, and they don’t seem to want to arrange themselves properly. I say, “I just feel like…I think there’s something wrong with me. It might not be in my brain, or my tits, but it’s something, somewhere. I don’t know where it is, and that makes me scared all the time. And I guess I feel scared because I feel alone, most of the time I’m alone in my bathroom or my kitchen or even in Oliver’s house, pushing at bits of myself and waiting for something to go wrong. And some people believe in God, which comforts them, and I don’t know what God really does for anyone other than watch them. He mostly sort of just watches them, right? And then they’re comforted. And I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in the NSA. So maybe I could find that comforting. Like, no matter how alone I feel like I am, somebody somewhere, behind a tiny camera, in some control room somewhere—that person is watching me, and that person will know if something bad happens to me. Even if I never see him or her. There’s two of us who care about what happens to me. You know?”

  Agnes nods that she hears me. I watch her think about it. And then I think about Oliver, alone in his tiny apartment, being watched by a parade of other people’s pets. Lizards, rats, a starling, who knows what else to come—their tiny beady eyes trained on his endlessly forlorn face, in the closest he might ever get to unconditional love.

  That makes me sad. It makes me so sad that I want to call him and say, “Keep the goddamn starling.” I want to say, “I will never be able to watch you the way an abandoned pet can.” I want to say, “I understand you, but I don’t love you, and I thought those things could be the same, but they’re not.”

  I say to Agnes, “Or we can just watch each other. And it won’t matter who else is staring.” I say, “I believe in you, anyway.” I say, “Maybe not God, and maybe not the Western medical establishment, but I do believe in you.”

  Agnes doesn’t say anything. But after a minute she reaches across the kitchen floor toward me. I reach out also. And we lie on the floor, with the windows papered over and underwater light filling the room, hand in hand, while the world rushes and pulses and hums somewhere outside of our thin, thin walls.

  When Kryzstof called me and asked me to come over immediately, I did. If I had known there was a dead body on his floor, I might not have. But then again, I might. You never know with me.

  He was jittering off the walls when I showed up. Long pool-player hands shaking for a cigarette or a line of coke, his Swedish accent thicker than usual. I was about to ask him what the fuck, when I looked past him and saw the body. It was facedown, in the tiny laundry room—from where I was standing, I could see a pair of shoes poking out past the doorway. “What the fuck,” I said. He was glassy-eyed, already in full panic mode. “Oh shit,” he kept mumbling, until finally I snapped his name: “Kryzstof!” He straightened up, nose running, hands twitching, and looked at me like a rabbit, awaiting my order.

  “All right,” I said. “Who else do you know that we can call?”

  Kryzstof shook his head and his straw-blond hair flew everywhere. “Nobody, I don’t know anybody,” he said wildly. “This is Tokyo.”

  “You know everybody,” I corrected him. “They’re just scum. Think hard.”

  Forehead wrinkled, fingers interlocked, Kryzstof rocked back and forth gently. I could see him whizzing through a mental card catalog of foreigners—the wiry drug dealers from Paris, the Namibian sex offender with the big grin and the gold tooth, the trio of scraggly Brits who smelled like sweat and evil. At last he said, “The wolf.”

  I blinked at him.

  “Japanese. Always at that little, what’s it, Bar Jamaica. You know him, all the gaijin know him.”

  I shook my head.

  “He speaks better English than the English.”

  I shook my head again. “What’s his name?”

  “Nobody knows for real, gaijin just call him ‘the wolf.’ Or Kira.”

  “Why Kira?”

  Kryzstof managed to focus on me for a blank second. “Because it sounds like killer.”

  “Oh,” I said. At the word killer, it seemed like Kryzstof was about to lapse back into his hand-wringing head-shaking coma, so I grabbed his cell phone and thrust it at him: “Call him.” When he hesitated, I added, “Or you’re on your own.”

  He made the phone call in the bathroom with the door closed. Outside the window, mid-afternoon Tokyo hummed to itself. Sunny, thickly humid, the rainy season tapering off into regular wet heat. All in all, a nice day. Kryzstof finished the phone call and threw up. He flushed a few times before he came out. I gave him a cup of tap water. We sat in his kitchen with his cell phone between us, and the body lay untouched
in the tiny laundry room, and we waited for the wolf to arrive.

  * * *

  —

  HE WAS NOT, WHEN HE did arrive, terribly sympathetic.

  He was charismatic, I’ll give him that. Not remarkable, not at first—another attractive and dissolute Tokyo boy, I thought. Sharp high cheekbones, an earring in one ear, the lines of a tattoo trailing from under the left sleeve of his T-shirt. Yakuza, most likely—Japanese mafia. Or chinpira—what they called the punk wannabes, full of piss and strut. True, there was something a little sharper about him than the other yakuza I’d met—he dressed simply, there didn’t seem to be anything affected in his manner. But it was his English that surprised me. The perfect, scornful, poison-dart sarcasm of the British delivered in that hard-to-place accent that screamed international schools. Kryzstof’s Japanese was hopeless and evidently the wolf knew it, because the whole time that he was there, he spoke in fast, disgusted English.

  The first thing he said was, “Where is it?”

  “In the laundry room,” Kryzstof said miserably.

  The wolf flickered a flat dark look at me. “And the weapon?”

  “No weapon,” I said. I would have continued, but the wolf seemed to take that as his answer, and pushed past me into the laundry room. Kryzstof chewed his nails. He looked, right then, like the little blond boys they have on Swedish postcards, doing something naughty. After a moment, the wolf leaned back around the door.

  “Do you have any idea how much shit you’re in?” he asked.

  The body lay faceup. I studied it carefully for the first time. It was the size of a child, although it belonged to a man, probably in his midthirties. Short dark hair, a silk shirt with a bizarrely garish Hawaiian flower pattern, rings on his left hand.

  “I didn’t kill him,” Kryzstof said, his voice uneven. “He was just—we were—”

  The wolf knelt down by the body. He muttered something to it, then gently rolled it over. I heard Kryzstof make a sound beside me, as if he was trying not to be sick. I didn’t feel sick though. I couldn’t look away.

  The wolf lifted up the back of the Hawaiian shirt. For a moment, I thought the body was wearing another shirt underneath, and then I realized that his skin was covered in ink. A dragon coiled up his spine, winding around some clouds and daggers, unleashing itself across his shoulder blades. A carp jumped upstream, after the dragon but not catching it.

  “Yakuza,” the wolf said, into our silence, in case we didn’t recognize the significance of the tattoos.

  “He collapsed,” Kryzstof said weakly. “I swear, I didn’t hurt him.”

  “Irrelevant,” the wolf told him. “He’s dead on your floor.”

  I’d been more than willing to bully Kryzstof, but I wasn’t about to let somebody else do it. “Hold up,” I said. “He called you to fix things. So what’s the plan?”

  The wolf looked at me for a second. Not like he disliked me, or even harbored any sort of annoyance. Just like I was trussed up and he had a butcher knife and was calculating where to make the first cut. I won’t lie, it threw me a little. Then he said, politely, “We’re going to take away the body. And you will help.” Before I could agree, he turned to Kryzstof. “You stay here,” he said. “Scrub everything.” Then to me: “Get a suitcase.”

  I looked at Kryzstof. He swiveled his gaze between me and the wolf, like a kid watching his divorcing parents work out the terms of custody. Well. Fine. I didn’t need to be the leader of this operation.

  “Where do you keep your suitcases?” I asked brusquely.

  “Bedroom,” Kryzstof replied, still shaky.

  I walked past him into the room beyond, and found a giant red suitcase with wheels. In the other room, I heard Kryzstof raise his voice for the first time. “Don’t you want to know?” he asked, the anguish plain. “Don’t you want to know what happened?”

  A brief silence followed. And then the wolf said, flatly, “No,” and turned away. I took that as my cue to drag the suitcase in.

  * * *

  —

  I CHECKED THE TIME. THE train still hadn’t come.

  The wolf was on his third cigarette, leaning against the vending machine on the platform. No matter where you get stranded in Japan, no matter how godforsaken it is, there’s always a vending machine. And always the usual contents: two kinds of cold tea, three kinds of coffee (too-sweet Emerald Mountain Blend in the turquoise can, something bitter in the dark blue, poor man’s coffee in the waxy cardboard box), two sports drinks, one going by the unlikely name of Aquarius and the other by the unfortunate one of Pocari Sweat, and then an assortment of fruit juices.

  The pounding in my head reminded me how little I’d slept. I wanted coffee, but if I bought anything I’d have to approach the wolf, and I was willing to let well enough alone. The red suitcase lay on its side next to him, unassuming, deceptive. I’d been called heartless before, but the wolf’s equanimity was getting to me. Nobody should be that untouched by a dead midget.

  Just as I was beginning to wonder what came next, he turned and came walking back toward me. You couldn’t quite call it a walk. A swagger, more like. A lope.

  “You gonna cry yet?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Do this all the time?”

  “You do this all the time?”

  He shrugged. “Whenever gaijin pay me for it.”

  “How come your English is flawless?”

  “How come your Japanese is shit?”

  I sighed. “That’s Kryzstof.” And then, in Japanese: “I speak some.”

  The wolf lifted an eyebrow. “How much?” he asked, switching to Japanese.

  “Enough so that men in bars buy me drinks.”

  “That’s not your Japanese, that’s the way you dress.”

  I switched back to English. “So where are we going? And what are we gonna do?” Now that we were talking, I might as well ask the burning questions.

  He ignored them completely. “So is he your boyfriend?”

  I wondered for a moment if he was referring to our friend in the suitcase. “Who?”

  He made an impatient gesture. “The skinny kinpatsu.”

  Skinny blond definitely didn’t apply to the four-foot gangster. “No,” I said, firmly.

  He jerked a chin at the suitcase. “You kill him?”

  “Jesus no.”

  The wolf cracked a crooked smile. “Then how come you and me are on this platform? You and kinpatsu fucking?”

  I straightened up, looking the wolf directly in his serial-killer eyes. “Who I fuck has nothing to do with who you bury.”

  The wolf’s crooked smile widened. “You’re not fucking,” he decided, and lit another cigarette.

  I opened my mouth to tell him off, hesitated at the prospect of being left alone with a body in a suitcase, and then the train pulled in. It was crowded, full of little old ladies throwing elbows with the best of them. The wolf put the suitcase between us and looped one long arm through a handhold above my head, letting his body sway with the motion of the train. When we rounded a corner, his shirt rode up. Before I looked away, I saw the intricate dark web of a tattoo, starting near his hip and stretching up his ribs.

  I stared down at my shoes, as Tokyo blurred past. The loop line went in a tight circle, hitting up all the major tourist traps like Shibuya and Akihabara, so either we were getting out somewhere soon, or we were reenacting my personal version of hell. When we stopped next, a bunch of schoolgirls crowded on, giggling and texting. As one of them almost tripped over the red suitcase and shot a dirty look at the wolf, I thought to myself: There’s a lot to be said for an ordinary life. There’s a lot to be said for waitressing in LA.

  * * *

  —

  THE WOLF GESTURED US OFF the train at Shinjuku. He knifed through the crowds dragging the suitcase behind him, and I followed un
til we got to the gates for the bullet train. There I ground to a halt.

  “I’m not taking another step until you tell me where we’re going.”

  “Yokohama,” he said, like it should be obvious.

  “Yokohama like the port city Yokohama?”

  “Do you know another?”

  “What the fuck is in Yokohama?”

  The wolf sighed. “Yuki-chan liked Yokohama.”

  “Who the fuck is Yuki-chan?”

  The wolf gestured to the suitcase.

  “Wait,” I said, reeling. “Wait. You know this dude?”

  “Yes.” The wolf turned to buy his ticket. I reached out and grabbed his arm, then thought better and dropped it. He turned around nonetheless, and for a moment I wondered if I’d overstepped.

  “Yes?” he inquired, courteously.

  “Hold it,” I said. “You know the dead guy. Like—first-name basis.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t mention that.”

  He quirked an eyebrow. “Was it relevant?”

  “You don’t think—?” I cut myself off, as my voice was rising. I took a deep breath. Then another thought struck me. “Oh shit.”

  The wolf tilted his head to one side.

  “You’re going to kill me,” I said. My voice was surprisingly calm and firm. “Like a revenge killing.”

  He stared at me for a second, and then that crooked grin played out over his mouth. “No,” he said, with a deliberate seriousness that definitely looked like mockery. “No revenge killing. Do you have any other questions?”

  “You’re going to kill Kryzstof.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  The wolf sighed again. People walked by quickly all around us, heads down. A few of them glanced our way, surprised by the sight of a Japanese man speaking fluent English to a gaijin girl, but they kept walking.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Rachel.”