Lost Girls and Love Hotels

by Catherine Hanrahan

  I adjust my posture. Shift my butt back on the bench and straighten my back. “I saw the white girl who’s missing. The one on the posters. At Shinjuku Station.”

  “Different person, I think. Answer my question please.”

  “No. I recognized her.”

  “Many blond-hair gaijin in Tokyo, I think.” He reaches over and touches my hair. “Example. Margaret.”

  “I know it was her. I have a feeling.”

  “Ah,” he says. “Feeling.”

  “Maybe she’s hiding out or something.”

  Kazu prods the bubbling batter with the spatula. “I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe she’s in trouble.”

  “You ought to forget this.” In one swift movement, Kazu flips the pancake, but it’s too soon. Batter oozes out the side. “She’s dead,” he says.

  I want to say It could have been me on the posters. “No. It was her I saw,” I tell him.

  “Use your brain. This happens.” He scoops up the fractured okonomiyaki into a little hill in the center of the table and signals for the waiter. “We’ll start again new pancake.”

  Start again. Impossible. “Don’t bother,” I tell Kazu. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

  I go to stand up, but Kazu reaches across the table and grabs my wrist. “You need food. Sit down.”

  We sit there quietly for a few minutes. Sipping beer and staring through one another. Both of us lost in the past. “Natsukashii,” Kazu says absently. A word I don’t understand. But I like the sound of it. The sibilant gush of it. I repeat it back to him. Natsukashii. Feel the uncanny joy of the alien. He nods at me.

  “Is your grandfather still alive?” I ask.

  “Dead,” Kazu says.

  I’m fifteen. Frank’s seventeen. Mired in the theater of high school. Anyone with eyes can tell. All the fat kids look alike. Faces somewhere in the middle of their cheeks. Lips squished up into grotesque puckers. The popular girls, too. Carbon copies. They all have shiny hair and noses like dolls’. Two expressions. Evil and vacant. Ditto for the weirdo loser intelligentsia. Bad posture. Bad eyesight. A penchant for disturbingly violent doodling. Frank falls into the latter category. I’m in limbo. “You just haven’t found your niche,” Mom tells me. The way she says “niche” rhymes with “bitch.”

  Frank and I avoid each other scrupulously at school. I almost despise him when I see him in the halls. His hunched-over walk, eyes darting side to side. Frank is like a car crash in slow motion. I wince and wait for the crush of impact. Finally begin to turn away. Wish it was just over with.

  “So,” I say to Tony Varda. “Sometimes my mom goes away on business.”

  “Yeah?” I can hear his labored breathing, the way he’s holding the receiver too close to his face. I think for a minute that I ought to tell him the receiver harbors bacteria. That he’ll turn into a crater-face if he keeps pressing the phone into his cheek that way. I wonder why guys are so repulsive. Why I like them despite it.

  “You could stay over,” I say. Something happens to the words on their way out. In my throat, they’re jittery, unnatural. But they emerge brazen. I feel vulgar. It feels good.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you say something else?”

  “Huh?”

  “Something other than yeah?”

  He snorts.

  “Don’t you want me?” Vulgar retreats. Pushed out by pathetic.

  “Yeah,” he says with a puff of breath into the mouthpiece.

  My stomach is twisting. It’s in my throat. Say “I like you.” Say “You’re so pretty.”

  “I’ve gotta go bad. Meet me after school tomorrow,” he says. “By the creek.”

  I put down the phone and imagine the two of us lying on a bed of red leaves, canopy of trees over us. Tony touching me like something in a museum. Something that might crumble at his touch. In my fantasy, Tony does not have white spittle collected at the corners of his mouth. In my fantasy, I am not a loser.

  Frank comes downstairs, into the kitchen. “What’s wrong?” I ask him. He’s sweating. His hands are making claw-like movements under his chin.

  “Okay. Okayokayokay.” He sits down. “Where’s Mom?”

  “I dunno—”

  “Is she home?” he screams. “Okay. This is it. It sounds crazy, but this is it. This thing—this guy was in my room.”

  “What guy?”

  “He was short. More than short. He was—he was a troll or an elf or a gnome or something. I’m not entirely sure of the difference. If I were to venture a guess in spite of my ignorance, I’d have to say he was a gnome. And he was like prismatic. A rainbow gnome. He was there and gone so fast.”

  “Frank—”

  “Don’t tell Mom.”

  “But—”

  “Oh what’s happening? What’s happening?”

  “Maybe it was a dream,” I say. I touch his shoulder.

  Frank grabs my hand. “It wasn’t a dream.” He says the words slowly, deliberately. The neighbor’s dog lopes in the kitchen door. Smiling. Looks at the two of us and licks his chops.

  “It was the beginning of a new era,” Frank says.

  On mock-interview day at Air-Pro Stewardess Training Institute, Ms. Nakamura instructs me, “In classroom, firm but kind. In mock interview, only firm.”

  Ms. Nakamura is in some special mock-interview day get-up. Her hair is pulled back so tightly I can see that she’s had to pencil in her eyebrows an inch below where the shaved-off ones are. Her normal little tight suit replaced by a white shift dress with a dramatically long white coat worn precariously over her bony shoulders, like a cape. It makes me nervous to look at her. As though at any moment laser beams might shoot out of her eyes and burn me up.

  “You will conduct the interviews with Mr. Shawn from head office.” Nakamura starts to swivel around on her high heels. “Mr. Shawn!”

  Mr. Shawn appears in the doorway of the interview room. He has a dimple in his chin, pasty skin, and eyes set so close you are forced to focus on the dimple to avoid going cross-eyed.

  He walks over stiffly, as though his arms will not rest comfortably by his side. “Shawn,” he says. “Head office.”

  Before I can introduce myself, Nakamura tells me that Mr. Shawn is “very tough cookie” and shoos us into the interview room to prepare.

  “It’s a piece of cake, really,” Shawn tells me, handing me the interview sheet. “I ask the questions in blue. The pink ones are yours. We go back and forth.”

  I look at the sheet. Shawn’s questions are things like “Tell me about your international experiences” and “What current affairs are you interested in?” I have to ask things like “How do your parents feel about your career goal?” and “What would you say to a passenger who hands you a dirty diaper to dispose of?”

  Mr. Shawn leans back in his chair, gazes out through the two-way mirror at the recruits standing stiffly. “Shit, I love my job. These girls are prime.”

  “Prime what?”

  “We have a joke at the head office. All of the cabin-related questions can be correctly answered with ‘Give him a blow job.’”

  I just stare at him. Sitting slackly. Cross-legged. His socks don’t match. Above the socks, a grotesque patch of pale, sparsely haired skin is visible.

  “You know, like, ‘What would you do if an obviously intoxicated passenger asks for another drink?’” His eyes resemble two pissholes in the snow. “Give him a blow job! Get it?”

  The first recruit performs perfectly. Her face frozen into an expression equally wistful and fanatically ambitious. At moments, during the interview, as she details her love of animals and the novels of Milan Kundera, her desire to provide superior cabin service and “experience the architectural delights of many countries,” I almost envy her. Her single-minded purpose. Her innocence. I try to remember back to the time, around the age of eight, when I wanted to be a veterinarian. How I’d hover past bedtime with library books devoted to the profession. Dogs in tiny casts, horses giving bir
th in grotesque detail. Somehow these girls had retained some of that wonder that I struggle to recall.

  Although she never once answers her cabin questions with offers of oral sex, Mr. Shawn gives her a nine out of ten, and, with a creepy stare, compliments her on the way she holds her body.

  Mock-interview day passes like a skipping record. Beautiful girl after beautiful girl. I begin to champion them, these specimens of the unjaded. Firm becomes firm but kind, becomes just kind. My parents support me in my career choice. Eager to escape the hamster wheel of office work and domesticity. I’m interested in the exciting world of aviation. To stay in hotels in strange cities, like an expense-paid pajama party. I want to share with the world the culture of Japan. Have sex with big men with big cocks. I would suggest to frightened passenger that he take deep breaths and read the in-flight magazine. Maybe I’m not so different from them—we all want to fly away.

  On the way out, Mr. Shawn shakes my hand. “Well,” he says. “Don’t worry. It will get easier.” I lean into the handshake and call him an impotent little weasel boy. He deflates suddenly. Wide eyes and pursed lips. Foreign woman. Cryptonite to the Western supermale in Japan. He reflates. Nods, “Oh, good one. Ha ha. You had me there for a sec.” I give him a firm little squeeze on the shoulder. In the elevator, I share a high five with two of the recruits, make it to the street, breathe in steam from a noodle-vendor’s cart and something more unusual—the rarefied air of international human friendship.

  And then Kazu doesn’t call. A day. Three days. Four days. A week. You feel yourself deflating. Losing substance. He never gave you his phone number. You are in Siberia. In a flimsy hut. The wind howling around you.

  Funny how it happens. How things change. You tell yourself that love is for other people. People with soft hearts and fixed addresses. You believe your heart pumps blood. That’s it. That sex is a need—like food and water—that people who make it into something else watch too many romantic comedies.

  Intimacy is a word with eight letters.

  A word with a sly hiss to it.

  But then it begins, like love affairs do, with a chance meeting, and then a raw empty something needing to be sated, something you didn’t notice before. But suddenly it squawks like a hungry bird, day and night, refusing to be ignored. You love and revile it, this sore shrieking something. Or is it nothing? Or everything? It doesn’t matter. It’s yours. It’s you.

  Suddenly you are a walking cliché. The sum total of every love song penned. Even the Japanese ones, with the words you can’t catch—you recognize yourself in the fragile thrum in the singer’s voices. Life is suddenly so banal compared with the transcendence of the love-hotel tryst. When the walls heave and huddle closer, you ride the Yamanote loop line around Tokyo. Round and round again, until your butt gets sore, until you feel like you could stay there forever, looking at the advertisement with a geisha brandishing a power drill. After two or three hours, you start to wonder if the get-from-point-A-to-point-B function of the subway might be a complete ruse. You start to suspect that maybe everyone—the pregnant woman in her cutesy bib dress and bucket hat, the sullen teenager carrying her six-hundred-dollar handbag and touching and retouching her lip gloss, the salaryman sleeping, mouth agape, in the corner seat—maybe they are all going nowhere. Just riding the train to kill time. Kill memory. To enjoy the spectacle of anonymity. The thought is a temporary buoy. You stay as long as the imagined collective ennui entertains you. You stay until the light changes, the salarymen and schoolgirls disappear, and the train is filled with fashionable twentysomethings, so scrupulously cool, so effortlessly hip you want to smash their faces in. Best to leave, when the violent impulses start.

  You get a bottle of wine. After half a bottle, the need is diluted. You start to feel less like a detached Siamese twin. More like a garden-variety fuckup. Pick up your mobile phone and tell it, You are not my master. Drink some more and wait for Ines.

  “Darling,” she says as she flings the door open, “I’ve procured love pills.”

  Perfect.

  Ines is in her underwear, applying mascara. Mouth open. Bent over at the waist. I’m looking at her butt. It’s honey brown.

  “Where’d you get the tan?” I ask.

  “Granny. She was Métis or Tunisian. One of the two.” Ines stands up, solemnly inspects her handiwork in the mirror. “She’s dead now.”

  I look down at my legs. I’m so white I’m nearly blue. “Tell me a secret,” I say and fold my legs under me like a hen on her eggs.

  “There was a time, not so long ago, when certain Celine Dion songs could make me weep and sway.”

  “Come on.”

  “Okay, Ines isn’t my real name.”

  “That I knew.”

  “Your turn.”

  “I think I’m destined to go nuts.”

  “That I knew.”

  “Seems to happen to everyone around me. Except my mom—she went—” I pause, “New-Agey.”

  “Same difference.”

  “I just wish I could fast-forward to old age. Youth is like being in an airplane in a tailspin.”

  “Enjoy the ride, gorgeous.” Ines slips a shapeless tube of black fabric over her head, transforms it into a slinky dress. She sighs at her reflection in the mirror, as if being beautiful had become banal, tiresome. “I’m going to wear outrageous hats when I’m old.”

  “I’m going to collect commemorative teaspoons and figurines.”

  “Date men with walkers and fat life-insurance policies.”

  “Dye my hair blue.”

  “It’s already blue sweetie.”

  “See? I’m already halfway there. Bring on the knickknacks!”

  “Let’s go, huh?”

  “Oh God, not let’s go.”

  “It doesn’t matter where we are,” Ines steps into her kitten-heeled mules, drags me off the bed and links elbows with me. “Just that we are there.”

  I make a low growling sound in my throat. “Let’s go,” I mutter.

  Bar Let’s Go is a place where no one thinks they belong but everyone ends up. If you go to Bar Let’s Go, staying sober is not an option. It’s a very good idea to arrive intoxicated, otherwise you’ll have to down several martinis in quick succession to blunt the reality of Bar Let’s Go.

  You are in a room that, if bathed in light, would resemble a government office stripped of the desks and chairs: four walls, no character, purpose-built, a temple to the god of wretched excess and bad design. Pass through the doors, pay the thousand-yen cover charge, and buy into the myth that good things happen when we poison ourselves in a dark, smoky room full of people we vaguely despise.

  Pimply white boys from Minneapolis or Mississauga revel in their newfound pulling power. Japanese office ladies sip pastel drinks and troll for a bit of strange before they consign themselves to domestic servitude.

  All I can hear, all I can sever from the confused din is talk of the missing girl. Snippets of theories, conjecture, morbid fascination. I heard she’s in Thailand. In hiding. In a cult. In a bodybag. Ines and I plant ourselves at a table and suck on martinis, waiting for pill-boy. She’s not the first to vanish. The pills better arrive soon. I’m starting to shrink away again. The cops don’t care. The missing girl has made us, the melanin-deficient diaspora, feel special by virtue of our connection with something tragic. Everyone seems to have shared a drink with the dearly departed, been a schoolmate, a coworker, had a friend who knew someone who sat across from her on the train. Everybody wants to be a survivor of something appalling—the person at the epicenter of the earthquake who walks away without a scratch, walks away with a story to tell again and again at dinner parties, a story to imbue their lives with an aura of luck and immortality. Tragedy makes excellent chitchat.

  “Okay Marge. It looks like your face is melting. I insist you have fun.”

  “I’m in one of my funks. I’m sorry.”

  “Play the worst-case-scenario game.”

  “Tell me how.”

&
nbsp; “It’s like this. When I was in high school I went to a house party. After the cops bust the thing up, everyone starts piling into cars to go to a bar. I want to be in Trevor Spence’s little red MG, but Sadie Trembley beats me to it—wily little bitch. Short version, the stud runs the car into a tree. Rumor is she was sucking him off—I mean, how cliché. Sadie goes through the windshield face-first. Sixteen metal pins and four operations later she still looks like Frankenstein.”

  “Frankenstein’s monster. Frankenstein was the mad scientist.”

  “Whatever. Point is. Worst-case scenario I could be living with my mother, writing technical manuals and avoiding mirrors. But I’m here in a tragic club in Tokyo. With you, darling.”

  “Ah.”

  “Makes me feel better every time.”

  “Feed on the suffering of others to pump myself up.”

  “Exactement.”

  Ines disappears into the ether and strobe lights, and I’m left perched on my stool to contemplate the ashtray. The room—the crowd—is all shyness and reticence. The calm before the come-on. A few tourists in khaki shorts and Teva sandals storm the dance floor, jerking about robotically, exchanging knowing looks. The rest of the people, still huddled in nervous little tribes, look upon the tourists with disdain, waiting for the dance floor to thicken so they, too, can jerk robotically—in relative anonymity, shrouded in bodies.

  A Japanese girl in white knee-high platform boots, white lipstick, and eyeliner to match bounds across the empty dance floor. The mouth-breathing white boys stop talking, slack-jawed as white-boots clops toward the tables, her skirt riding up on her little thighs until it’s little more than a wide belt. Her hands are in the air in some sort of high-speed perversion of the queen’s wave. She’s not so much sexy as unknowingly hemorrhaging sex. No one trying to be sexy would run that way.

  Then, through the clamor of heavy breathing and bass beat, I hear my name. Or a high-pitched butchering of my name. Mah-ga-let! The bouncing, squealing girl is bouncing toward me, squealing my name. I squint at her. She looks vaguely familiar. And frightening. Her head seems huge as she trips, recovers, lunges toward me. It’s Madoka Wakiyama. The new recruit. Looking very unstewardessy.