Lost Girls and Love Hotels

by Catherine Hanrahan

  It’s “Make a Scene!” day at Air-Pro, when we role-play challenging airplane scenarios—screaming babies, belligerent businessmen, terrorists, vegans. I think of my mother, the way she’d say “Don’t make a scene!” when Frank got weepy in the meat section of the supermarket.

  It’s hard for me to concentrate at work. The role-playing helps. It always helps to be someone other than me. Today I am the drunk old pervert businessman.

  We arrange the chairs to approximate the cabin of a jumbo jet, and tape signs around the room—“cockpit” on the whiteboard, “galley” on the podium, “emergency exit” on the door.

  The first recruit is Nami, a fair-faced girl with a mouth full of braces. Her head is perpetually turned at an angle, as though the world was forever presenting her with quandaries. Nami stands in the corner with a chirping coven of nervous recruits, smoothing down her fitted blue skirt compulsively. I know she is terrified of me, like all the rest, but I no longer get a perverse satisfaction from it, from the panicky little bows, the suspended conversations as I pass by. I feel like a reluctant sadist.

  Ms. Nakamura claps her hands, and we take our places. I slouch down in my seat, slip into character. I see myself in a crumpled, ill-fitting suit, potbelly spilling over my belt, a salt-and-pepper mustache adorned with almond skins and spittle. From the depths of my lipid-clogged heart, an angry sort of lust rises. I clear my throat and push the imaginary bell on my armrest.

  “Dewars!” I scream. It’s not my voice. There’s a collective gasp from the other recruits sitting rigidly in economy class.

  Nami teeters down the aisle, steadying herself on the backs of chairs as if there was turbulence.

  “Yes, sir?” she squeaks. “How can I be of assistance?” Her lip quivers.

  “Assistance!” I scream. “Whiskey, girl! I need whiskey!”

  “Yes sir!” Nami makes it to the podium, pours an invisible drink, twisting the cap back on the imaginary bottle, with undue care. She takes a deep breath, her chest puffing up like a little chicken breast and deflating with a whoosh of air.

  “Your whiskey, sir.” She leans down from the waist, hands me the drink. She smells of vanilla and powder.

  “Ever seen a trouser snake?” I ask.

  “Pardon me, sir?”

  I make a grab for her ass and get a handful of buttock-enhancing padding. Screaming, Nami darts out the exit, clip-clopping down the hallway to the washroom. Ms. Nakamura claps furiously, two fingers against her palm. “So real! So real!” she says. I down the imaginary whiskey in one gulp, pull my hand across my mouth, and think about ritual suicide.

  On Nami’s “Make a Scene!” report, I write: “Your smile and posture were lovely. You were handling the situation beautifully right up until you depressurized the cabin, killing all of the passengers and crew.” I sign it “Satan” in an illegible scrawl.

  In the lobby, I see Madoka, sitting hunched over, reading a flight attendant magazine and sucking on her bottom lip. I sit down next to her, and she jumps. Fumbles with the magazine. Concealed behind the facade of International Stewardess is a thick manga—spy-girls with catsuits and guns. Secret missions and round cantilevered breasts. Madoka looks at me guiltily. I click my tongue at her. Give her a wink. The compassion I feel for her is like a whoosh of warm air. It shocks me.

  Nakamura appears out of nowhere and says, “Madokasan! Time to learn how to sit.” She claps her hands. Smiles wickedly.

  I place my hand on Madoka’s shoulder. “God be with you,” I tell her.

  The Log Cabin Room looks like a sauna with a vibrating bed, plastic fireplace, and a leopard-spot sofa. Kazu strolls around the room. Opening a drawer. Inspecting the radio console. Sitting down on the sofa and then getting up again. He looks a little disappointed. “Canada mitain?”

  “No Canada’s a bit different.”

  He walks around me once and then comes up behind me, wraps one arm around my waist. Pulls my hair off my neck and kisses me.

  “No perfume,” he says.

  “Not until they make one that smells like a dog’s paw.”

  “Never mind. I like your smell.”

  We make our way over to the bed. Fumble with clothes. Bodies tense. I look over to the alarm clock. Calculate the time remaining on the room.

  “You have appointment?” Kazu asks.

  “No. You?”

  “I make the schedule. Today I schedule Margaret.”

  “What exactly is it that you do?” I ask.

  “Do?”

  “Your job.”

  “Businessman,” he says.

  “Salaryman?”

  “Similar. Yes.”

  “You sell things?”

  “Helping selling things. Yes.”

  “Do you have an office?”

  “Margaret-chan. We Japanese have a saying.”

  “Yes?”

  “Stay quiet, learn more.”

  “Have you ever cut someone’s finger off?”

  Kazu sits up. The muscles at his jawline tense and shudder, like a small animal stirring under his skin. I wait for something. Behind his stare, I think I can see decisions being made. Options run through.

  “Cutting finger is for apology.”

  “Like…I’m sorry. Here’s my finger?”

  “Yes.”

  I offer up my hand to him. Run it across his forehead, down his cheek. When I go to touch his mouth, he snatches up my fingers. Holds them tight in a little bundle. “Questions finish,” he says and puts my hand on his cock. I nestle my body against his. Blood rushes to my crotch. I tense against him. He moves down. A shudder runs through me at his touch. It’s building in me. A room filling with gas. Waiting for the spark. The French call it “petit mort.” Little death. He reaches his arm under me, lifts my body up to his mouth.

  Lying in the sweet vulnerability of finished lovemaking. A dangerous time. I promise myself never to ask the question again. But I always do. An uncontrollable compulsion to rub off my patina of self-respect in five monosyllables. “Why do you like me?” I ask. Kazu squints at me, and in a flash I run through some of the more tragic responses from the past. You live next door. My girlfriend is really fat. I’m lonely. I have no idea.

  “Because I saw you sucking finger.” He demonstrates with his thumb in his mouth.

  “Thumb,” I tell him.

  “Thumb. In the Space Room, I watched you. It makes my heart calm. Also I like a challenge.” He pulls me on top of him. “Difficult to make you happy I think.”

  Try. Please.

  We lie there. Nose to nose. I’ve grown to love the lines of the Japanese face. The way the nose doesn’t jut out of the face but slinks down. I feel so pointy next to him, with my aggressive facial features. Wonder how he could choose me over the subtle beauty of a Japanese woman.

  “What’s she like?” I ask. “Your wife?”

  He pulls back from me, rolls over, and lights a smoke from my bedside pack. I’ve never seen him smoke. “Difficult,” he says. “She is—” He takes out an electronic dictionary—it’s weird how every Japanese person seems to have one handy. “One moment please.” He punches something in and turns the tiny speaker toward me. “Psych-o-path,” the electronic voice sounds out. He closes the dictionary and slips it in his shoulder bag. “Also she likes brand goods too much—Prada to ka, Gucci to ka.”

  “What would she do if she knew about me?”

  Kazu drags on the cigarette like a seasoned smoker. Like someone in a black-and-white movie. Smoking as an extension of speaking. A form of punctuation.

  “Please don’t think about that.” He exhales. Period. Full stop.

  I like to walk home from the love hotels. Through the little streets they are tucked away on, toward the bustling train stations, the chaos of the intersections. I like the hotels around Shinjuku Station the best. I walk around the monstrosity of the station—something like three million people passing through it every day. One million. Three million. Twelve million. It’s all incomprehensibl
e. From the outside, it doesn’t look like a building at all. Sprawling six city blocks. Cobbled together over the years as more train lines were constructed. Impossible to navigate from the inside. From certain angles it looks evil. I’ve always had a soft spot for the place. When I first arrived in Tokyo, I couldn’t stop walking around Shinjuku Station. It wasn’t just that I was lost, which I was, but I felt as if I’d found my place. The endless anonymous concourse. It had everything I needed. There was coffee and food. I could light up a smoke wherever I pleased. There were no windows, but I’ve never had much use for sunshine. If I walked long enough, the tunnels led me to department-store food halls, where girls in fifties-style cafeteria uniforms handed me strange morsels on toothpicks. Gifts for the weary traveler. There was always a crowd to be swept up into. I imagined being lifted off my feet, dragged by the shoulders of salarymen and schoolgirls to somewhere I couldn’t fathom.

  I walk along the outside at street level. Two levels of pedestrian walkways hug the side of the building. Commuters and students, shoppers and girls handing out packets of tissues emblazoned with adverts—Hai! Dozo, onegaishimasu! I’m in a daze. Freshly fucked. Happy and buzzing.

  On the second level of walkways, I see her. She stands out from the other walkers. She’s tall. Her blond hair catching the sun. Her profile. The nose. Something else. Something that tells me it’s her. She’s moving fast. I start to run. Look ahead half a block to the staircase to her level. I’m running. I seem to have a sense. How to get through the people traffic. Like I’m in a video game and I’m winning.

  I look up again. It’s her. I know it’s her. The dead girl. Alive.

  I keep running. Faster. The moment closing in on me. Like sex. Running toward something and away from something simultaneously. I make it to the staircase. Take the steps two by two. I want to look at her. Hold her by the shoulders and have a look at her. The eyebrows. The wicked arch of them. The light spray of freckles. The eyes that have watched me in all my dark moments. I make it to the top. My legs hurt. They won’t cooperate. When I stumble, catching the edge of the last step with the heel of my palm—concrete against skin—the gaggle of schoolgirls appears. Sailor tops and blue skirts. In front of me, like a wall. Making noises like birds or machines, or machines meant to sound like birds. I lose sight of the lost girl. Gone into the station or down the stairs. Gone.

  I’m fourteen. Frank’s sixteen. Frank is slowly retreating from the world. I’m growing boobs. And getting skinny. It happens over the summer vacation before grade ten. I grow two inches. There’s a heat wave. Maybe I sweat the fat off. My chest swells like bread in an oven. I lie in bed, survey my body under the tent of the cotton sheet. I can see the outline of my ribs. It makes me think of greyhounds.

  Sometimes I lock the bathroom door and strike poses. Sometimes I wink at myself. Lean into the mirror, lips parted for a kiss. Mom says I’m blooming. I smell funny. Like fruit going bad.

  In phys-ed class the next year, the girls eye me suspiciously. I feel like I’ve broken some code of conduct. We’re learning to dive, but I can’t do it. It seems wrong to leap into the hands of gravity that way. For amusement. For course credit.

  The boys start to notice me, too.

  I’m kept after school to learn to dive.

  “Keep your chin tucked in,” barks the teacher. “Keep your legs together.”

  In science class, we make little models of DNA molecules. It’s like a map, the teacher tells us. Everything we are is mapped out in our genes. He has the gene for red hair. That’s recessive. It’s rare. It’s why family members share traits. It’s why some diseases run in families.

  I wonder what’s mapped in me. The crazy gene. The loser gene. My hair is the color of straw. I wonder if that gene is rare.

  I get paired up with Tony Varda. I was taller than he last year, but he’s grown. At first, I’m nervous. Each movement, each facial expression seems forced and awkward. Then I begin to watch him. The thin layer of sweat on his forehead. The jerkiness of his hands. The way he can’t look at me. I let my eyelids go heavy. Look out from under them and curl my mouth up into a half-smile. He fumbles with the little plastic sticks and balls. “Here. Let me,” I say.

  It happens like that. Like instinct. I know how to torture boys. Exquisitely. Maybe it’s mapped in me.

  We go up in one of the little elevators in one of the hundreds of narrow buildings in Asakusa. These entertainment buildings are everywhere in Tokyo. Along all the main streets. They look like dingy office buildings, except for the neon and chaotic signage. In the elevator, I look at the backlit building guide. Forty-eight little bars and restaurants and karaoke places in one little six-story building on a street with hundreds of little buildings, in a city with hundreds of streets like this.

  “Japanese pancake,” Kazu says.

  “Huh?”

  He points to something written in kanji on the building guide. “For eating. Okonomiyaki restaurant.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  The hallways in these buildings are always dodgy. The various odors of all the bars and restaurants seeping into the corridors. Melding into an aroma peculiar to these places—something like old cigar smoke and dirty underpants. Kazu’s mobile rings, and he nods at me in apology, holds his palm out to me like telling a dog to stay and wanders down a few feet away for privacy.

  I look at my watch. Almost nine. Dip one hip down an inch or two and sulk. A door flies open, and two salarymen carrying a third by his armpits stagger out. A wistful country song accompanies them. Then three Thai hostesses. Lurid pink lips. Soft hips compressed in spandex dresses. The salaryman being carried looks like he’s going to vomit. Everyone is yelping. Some money is exchanged. Some bowing is done.

  I walk to the end of the hall and duck out the fire escape for air. There is no air. The exterior of the building is tented by enormous vinyl sheeting, stretched over the frame of the fire escape, advertising beer and loan sharks and hairspray. I imagine a fire breaking out. The advertisements melting in the heat, suffocating the revelers in the building with toxic fumes. The fire spreading to the adjacent buildings, consuming city blocks, eating the city like a neon Dresden. The thought of it raises my pulse. A mixture of fear and morbid glee.

  I yank at the side of one of the vinyl sheets, pull it aside like a curtain, and peek out at the street. Three squat men in white uniforms carry an enormous fish as big as two of them put together. I can hear their grunts of effort over the noise of the street. They pass a group of Japanese hostesses. Puffy down jackets over their slinky dresses, calling out to passing salarymen. Pretty girls with pain in their faces. When the fish carriers pass, the girls call out to them, too. Gambarimasu! Do your best.

  “Are you okay?” Kazu asks. He’s standing in the fire escape doorway. A look of real concern on his face. I watch him for a second. Behold this look. I don’t want Tokyo to burn down.

  “Yes,” I say and take his hand.

  The okonomiyaki place is full of wood and smells like smoke and onions. A few groups of three or four people are scattered in the booths that line the room. The comforting din of it relaxes me. We find a booth in the back. The center of the table is a griddle. Kazu switches it on and signals for the waiter.

  “Have you tried Japanese pancake?” Kazu asks.

  “Only from the konbini.”

  Kazu waves his hand. “Convenience-store kind is not so good.”

  The waiter plunks down a large bottle of beer and two squat glasses. He and Kazu speak to each other in clipped, guttural Japanese. The kind that men use together in comfortable situations. They share an abbreviated little laugh, and the waiter disappears.

  “Why did you come to Japan?” Kazu asks me.

  “International human friendship,” I say with a smile.

  “Serious answer,” Kazu says without a smile.

  “To be alone.”

  “In Japan? Alone?”

  “It’s an easy place to be alone.”

  Kazu watches me for a m
oment. Picks up the beer bottle and pours me some. After he puts it down, I reciprocate. The beer foams up a little and spills onto the table.

  “When I was a young man—sixteen, seventeen—” Kazu tells me, “I wanted to be a chef. I was apprentice at a big restaurant. Very high-level Japanese cooking. Every day I was in a small kitchen.” He makes a chopping gesture. “Maybe ten or twelve other cooks. So close our elbows always are touching elbows. Six A.M. to maybe ten o’clock nighttime. Six days a week.” The waiter pours the batter onto the table and Kazu shoos him away, pokes at the blob of batter, squid bits, and cabbage, perfecting its shape. “After working every day, do you know what I had to do? Part of Japanese culture? I had to take a bath with the other cooks. Giant round bath. All together.” Kazu unclips his cuff links. Small diamonds that might look garish on anyone else. Rolls up his sleeves. His shirt is immaculately pressed. I imagine his wife leaning over an ironing board, dressed in Dior and stiletto heels. “It is not easy to be alone in Japan,” he tells me.

  “So why didn’t you become a chef?”

  He sniffs, offers me a shake of his head for an answer. “About alone in Japan. Yes. Now I’m thinking my grandfather did it. I remember now. After retirement he walked to the sea every day. One hour from the house. Every day he sat in the same place, on a big rock, and smoked tobacco all day. His father was a fisherman. My grandfather, forty years post office. After that, watching the sea. Sitting on one rock. Smoking and watching from sunrise until nighttime. Alone.” Kazu’s eyes become glassy for a moment. Nostalgia taking hold. Then he comes back. “My family was thinking he was weak of mind. Fault of age.”

  “Did you think so?”

  “In truth I wanted to try it. When I was a boy. Sea watching.”

  “Go with him?”

  “No,” he says. “Alone. Different rock.” He takes a smoke out of my pack, but doesn’t light it. Just turns it in his hands. “Tell me what happened to you in Canada.”