Read by Strangers

by Philip Dean Walker

  When you come to, he’ll have bent you over a plastic bench against the wall of the cabin near the plastic window. You’ll feel around to make sure he’s wearing a condom. He won’t be because you’ll have forgotten your golden rule of always being safe (you, more than likely, also forgot to insist upon this in your e-mail). You’ll push him off you, but he’ll have a reserve of strength that you will not have expected. Keep trying; keep fighting. Get out from under him. Your chances of catching something increase the closer he gets to ejaculating inside you. Scream. He’ll put his hand over your mouth and bear down harder on you. Bite his fingers. You’ll taste the metallic bit of a ring in your mouth, and it’ll be the first indication to you that he’s married. “Ouch, you goddamn fucker!” he’ll say, and he’ll punch you in the face while he’s still fucking you. After he comes, he’ll pull his pants back on and call you a faggot. Don’t argue with him. Just ask for the bag. He’ll say, “Fuck you,” then leave you on the floor of the cabin. When you hear his car pull away, think about how you’re going to get home. You can hitch a ride back to Perkins. Or walk. Use the water fountain outside the cabin to clean yourself up. Wash between your legs. Take a shower when you finally get back home. Grab the wooden box you keep your stash in and dump it out on the glass coffee table. Arrange the little white flakes into one manageable row and Hoover it up. Ignore the small bits of lead and dust. Light a cigarette and put some Blondie on. “Atomic.” Go to bed.

  TAKE A COUPLE of weeks off. Find the old man you went to that first time. Gene. When his maid stares at you too long while he’s in the bathroom, tell her “What the fuck are you looking at?” in Spanish, and then tell her to mind her own goddamn business. Ignore her when she utters “Maricón” under her breath. Tell Gene your services cost a hundred and twenty dollars now. He’ll be nice enough about it, but there’ll be a flash of distrust in his eyes, a whiff of unfamiliarity. He’ll sodomize you with thick cigar containers greased up with Vaseline. At one point, he’ll push one in too deep, poking your vital organs, it’ll feel like. Is this what the extra forty is for? you’ll wonder. When he can’t get hard enough to fuck you, he’ll slap it against your thigh until he comes—thin, but chunky like watery gruel and tofu. Consider swiping something on your way out. One of those crystal dishes or the Majolica plate or a green-painted egg. On your way out, hawk a loogie into his building’s flower bed of white peonies. Say, “Fuck you” out loud. Light a cigarette. Call Marcus and get a bag. Shoot it up this time for kicks. Don’t wake up until Tuesday.

  PICK A NEW name. You don’t feel like a Dylan anymore. How about Paul? Or Tommy? You look like you could be a Tommy.

  Ten Seconds

  THE ONLY WAY to really describe our film, Ten Seconds, is that it’s a documentary/performance art/drama hybrid. It will be called “genre-bending” by some critics. A “snuff film” by others. But don’t be fooled. This is pure art of the moment. It’s spectacular anticipation valued over career longevity. Really, it’s just ingenious.

  We’re planning to approach Zosia Mamet for the lead. She played the kooky, fast-talking, slightly rodent-like Shoshanna Shapiro on HBO’s Girls. Her character smokes crack by accident at warehouse parties and gets de-virginized by homely men. She’s the daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet and Academy Award-nominated actress Lindsey Crouse. She once played a lesbian on Mad Men. Why Zosia? Well, she’s clearly up for anything, which is exactly what we need for this role.

  The whole theory behind the film is that after a person is beheaded, there’s enough blood in their head to allow for a final ten seconds of consciousness. Ten seconds in which the eyes still function. Ten seconds in which the mind still comprehends. Ten seconds during which that little movie in the back of your head (“your whole life flashing before your eyes”) plays out until the house lights dim. Forever.

  When we contact Zosia about this project, we’ll be sure to tell her that there are several other actresses we have in mind, but that she’s the first one we’ve actually approached (actresses love hearing that). We’ll tell her that Lena Dunham was never even considered for the part. We’ll make it sound like this is the most coveted film role of a generation. But she will only be cast if she agrees to do the film outright. She will know nothing about the film or the nature of her role until she agrees. In fact, she’ll know nothing about the film until we actually begin shooting.

  She’ll have ten seconds to make it count. Only ten seconds. What will she see as her head rolls down the slight incline we’ll erect for its final descent? How quickly can art be captured before it simply bleeds out of her?

  A Cup of Fur

  WHEN TETSUYA REACHED into the top drawer of his desk at work, his hand brushed against a breast. It reminded him, with a surprising fondness, of his mother back in Tokyo. Shortly after his father died, when Tetsuya was a young teen, she had fallen down the stairs and broken her arm. The cast she wore was so big that it covered the middle of her left shoulder all the way down to her wrist and was held in place not only by its own plaster, hard as drywall, but also a metal rod that ran diagonally to support it.

  Getting around the house was difficult at first, but she quickly picked up the twists and turns through doorways and negotiated the side tables populated by villages of ceramic figurines. She became agile, adopting a confident yet bulbous swagger while gliding through the house. With the recent crack in their family, it seemed fitting to Tetsuya that she should emerge from the battle of a marriage that had ended in suicide with such a magnificent wound.

  On a lazy Sunday morning, Tetsuya had been sitting in the kitchen eating a grapefruit while his mother showered upstairs. Then he heard a loud crash of glass breaking, still falling, and he was up the flight of stairs as fast as she’d fallen down them. Concern taking over his usual sense of privacy, he opened the bathroom door. The sliding glass door of the shower displayed a hole the size of a mammoth fist; sharp slivers of glass dangled precariously then fell to meet the bits below. His mother stood there, naked and dripping, staring at her cast, amazed at its sheer, solid bulk. When she saw him, her hand fluttered in a panic, and with the choice of two places on which to land, it went down below to cover the dark patch, of which Tetsuya had caught only a brief, blurred glimpse.

  The cast covered one of her breasts, but the other was prominently exposed. Before he had enough sense to leave with his mother’s safety verified, he got a look at that breast, and his mind took a picture of it that would project onto the white screen at the back of his head at random moments for the rest of his adolescence. Until he finally had a breast of his own to gaze at without restriction, his mother’s would be the only female nakedness he knew and, like some prototypes, the origin of his concept of perfection.

  As Tetsuya’s hand reached inside the desk, he at first mistook it for a hardened apple or a paperweight someone had left behind. He lifted the clay breast delicately, as if it might hatch. True to Mei Ling’s Greek passion for detail, the aureole was slightly darker, glazed perhaps, with small bumps surrounding a finely shaped erect nipple that begged to be pressed like a button. The note attached to the bottom said simply, “A piece of me.” She had never mentioned anything about doing sculptures of her own body. As he studied it, he saw only a dim resemblance to her breasts, those breasts he knew so well. He placed the clay piece back in the drawer.

  TETSUYA WAS NEW to Singapore. His Tokyo office had transferred him there two months before, and as was customary to his nature, he didn’t complain. Things in Tokyo had not been going well. He’d been living with his mother since graduation. At twenty-two, this had seemed a convenient choice for both parties. Rent anywhere in the city was ridiculous, and his mother was lonely. The food was overpriced and had become a bore. Tetsuya never would admit it to anyone, but he wasn’t a fish person, which severely restricted his choices in most Tokyo restaurants. His mother, a housewife her entire adult life, doted on him. She loved to cook foreign dishes for him, particularly Mexican and Korean. />
  He’d always considered himself lucky to have such a reliable mother. They’d been on their own for years. In the beginning he’d resented her, secretly blamed her for having driven his father to suicide with her suffocating kind of love, her unreasonably high expectations. His father had lost his job when the asset bubble burst in 1991 and the next day stepped in front of the Shinkansen at Ueno station, as so many did that year.

  Tetsuya’s mother had been the one harmed most by his father’s sudden exit and had handled the ordeal with a silent, admirable grace. If she’d been tormented, she dealt with it privately. She’d refused to exhibit any shame, which was what practically everyone—including her own parents—had thought was called for under the circumstances. She was the one upon whom Tetsuya always could lean.

  The longer Tetsuya had stayed at home, however, the more intense his mother had become. She was suffocating. It was as though his time away at school had given her the necessary fuel to create new reasons he should stay at home, dire needs only he could meet. Who but Tetsuya, for instance, could possibly accompany her to the cinema? What about her shopping trips to Ginza? Was she expected to hold her own shopping bags? And with whom was she to take lunch? She longed for his company and held him prisoner; she hated for him to go out.

  “Where is there to go? What is there to do?” she’d plead.

  “Mother, I have friends outside of this house. I have to leave.”

  On the rare nights he left her, he’d return home to find her in his room sitting on the floor, waiting. At twenty-five, Tetsuya decided it was time to move out.

  His friend Kazuo had asked him to move into an apartment with him in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. It was an expensive area, but Kazuo’s uncle owned the building and was prepared to offer them an apartment at a very reasonable rent, granted his nephew and Tetsuya occasionally cared for an infirm, childless woman who lived on the top floor. The woman had been something of a mentor to the man in his youth. She had taught him ikebana—Japanese flower arrangement—and conversational English. She’d opened her doors to him, keeping him out of the streets, and had shielded him from an almost certain troubled future. Tetsuya welcomed the change that the move to Shibuya might bring. He liked meeting new people.

  His mother, of course, wasn’t thrilled with the idea. She insisted he visit her three times a week and call with even more frequency. And of course, he complied. After all, he did owe her.

  Keiko, the old woman on the top floor, was not a pleasant human being. Her apartment was rank and untidy, and two minutes into Tetsuya’s first visit, he suddenly understood why Kazuo’s uncle no longer had time to care for her. Although the agreement had been a joint one with Kazuo, the burden somehow had landed solely on Tetsuya’s shoulders.

  He visited with her in the mornings before work, did light shopping on the weekends, and even changed her linens when she had the occasional accident. He saw slight traces of the chipper woman she had been, happy to guide his friend’s uncle as a boy. But what had possibly been eccentric and entertaining in her younger years had become cloying and irritating. What Keiko said and did disturbed him at times. She seemed to resent him for not being someone else (whom, Tetsuya could not say). Once, when he came through the door unnoticed, he found her muttering something about a cat of hers that had run away. Instead of feeling remorse, she appeared vengeful, as if the cat were now an enemy that must be sought out and destroyed.

  When Tetsuya’s company, a burgeoning chemical manufacturing outfit that specialized in women’s fragrances, proposed a promotion and a transfer to their Singapore office, he quickly agreed. When he informed Keiko of his plans, the news instantly resurrected what he assumed was her former self. She advised him, endearingly, to stay off the streets at night. One time, she told him, on a vacation to Singapore, she and a friend were attacked on their way home from a restaurant. “They are jealous of Japanese people. Our freedom is very desirable to them,” she warned. She told him to write to her and even jotted down her address, although the only difference from his own was her apartment number.

  He told her he had to leave, so she kissed his cheek gently and said she had enjoyed his company and thought she’d probably miss him. Then she turned away, as if he were already gone, and stared out the window at the street below. Tetsuya showed himself out, clutching the slip of paper with her address.

  AT FIRST, TETSUYA was convinced he’d made the biggest mistake by moving to Singapore.

  His mother called him every day in the beginning. She spoke about the most commonplace things. She said that she needed to be reminded to pick up eggs for the week because there was a special or that she’d found a stone shaped like a face in the park near Sugamo and what did he think that meant and should she send it to him? Her voice sounded far away, forced into unnaturally high tones he’d never heard her use before. Tetsuya imagined her excitement while she dialed his number and then the slow, steady letdown that came halfway through their conversation as she realized that her son no longer needed her, that he surely could get by without knowing the price of bread for the week or the hair appointment it had taken her weeks to book. Sure, he needed a mother like everyone else, but now she seemed to be just another thing to return to nostalgically from time to time in his mind. She was part of the same fading photograph, the details of his life receding into the background and becoming part of a great, white wash. He knew everything and everyone in his life eventually would find its way to that place.

  Singapore smelled. Tokyo had been no great joy, but there at least had been a certain charm to its odor: old, wet flowers waiting to be tossed. The Singapore smell was decidedly different and made him think twice about going outside.

  His first day at the new office was a welcome change from the time he’d spent in the surrounding environs. The building itself was brand new and located in a high-end business district—both gloriously smelling like nothing. If he had to package the scent as one of those dangly car trees, he would’ve called it “Corporate Chill,” and the tree would’ve been a light gray, the color of fresh cigarette ash.

  Tetsuya’s office was at the end of a long hallway with the restrooms for the floor right around the corner in their own niche. The company had given him a secretary, Mei Ling, whom he shared with one other employee, a man named Ji Min. Tetsuya and Ji Min met only briefly upon his arrival.

  Everyone used English in the office, and Tetsuya was comfortable with that. The years he’d studied with native-speaking tutors had given him a mastery over the language and a bit of a New Zealand accent, as his primary tutor had been from Wellington. He’d even managed to triumph over the unconquerable “r-l” confusion by making the word licorice part of his daily vocabulary.

  Never having had a secretary in the past, he wasn’t sure what to do with Mei Ling. Fragrance research and development wasn’t something he necessarily needed assistance to perform. Having worked on the chemical-manufacturing side of the business in Tokyo, he had more than enough experience in carrying out market research and conducting fragrance field trials and whatever else needed to be done. That was why he’d been promoted to his position in the first place. Ji Min was an obsessive perfectionist and worked Mei Ling long, inconvenient hours. Tetsuya was happy to just let her proofread his reports and get the occasional coffee.

  At first she seemed to have taken offense to the limited duties, as if he somehow didn’t trust her to perform the simplest office tasks. However, she spent only a couple days around Tetsuya before this notion was dampened. His intentions and demeanor were too kind. He was spectacularly unjaded and without agenda. Most people found him refreshingly odd, almost like a tourist, withholding judgment until the end of the trip.

  One day, with Ji Min out of town, Mei Ling came into Tetsuya’s office earlier than usual. She wore a white carnation in her hair and brought two cups of coffee. She had begun to put more effort than necessary into making the perfect cup after finally coaxing out of him the way he took it.

  �
�Thank you, Mei Ling,” said Tetsuya, as she handed him his black mug. He invited her to sit down.

  “Everyone is very pleased that you’re here, Takeda-san. They wonder how the Tokyo office ever saw fit to let you go.” She wore a white skirt and a black blouse that was unbuttoned to reveal the edges of a brassiere of the same color. The carnation nodded along with the movement of her head, as if in agreement.

  “I needed a change. Honestly, Japan can be a bit monotonous, you know. Have you worked here long?” he asked.

  “Only a year. This isn’t where I really want to be, though. I consider myself an artist. Chemicals and fragrances are so predictable. They follow such a rigid formula.”

  “What’s your medium? As an artist?”

  “I sculpt in clay,” Mei Ling said. “Small, abstract pieces mostly. Right now, though, I’m working on a study of my roommate. I’ve done her arms, neck, and four fingers of her left hand. But I’m having trouble getting the thumb right. It’s such an odd shape. She works on the fifth floor of our building. That’s how we met.”

  “Why your roommate? Only willing model?” he asked, his hands running through his coiffed, gelled hair, something he almost never did.

  “She has body-image problems. I want to show her how beautiful she is.”

  Tetsuya watched as she rubbed the space below her neck, that hollow. So sexy. She noticed his eyes and brought her hand up to the carnation as if it had been disturbed.

  He spoke next without much forethought, another uncharacteristic move. “Would you like to get out of here for a little while? Maybe get a cup of coffee?”