Hikikomori and the Rental Sister: A Novel (22 page)

If only the world could stay away, if only it weren’t lurking out there, beyond the mountains, waiting. Waiting like those spiders in Yoyogi Park when she was a child, walking with her father. Waiting in their webs, seeing everything but doing nothing, nothing until the right moment, when some bug gets trapped. If only it were always as simple as this.

“I’m trying to give you a cool style,” she says as she puts on the finishing touches. “But it’s going to look sort of choppy. Uneven. Hope that’s okay.”

She takes the after pictures, of him alone and of the two of them together. She sits on his lap. She smiles.

“I can feel the breeze against my scalp. I feel like I could run really fast. Or fly. But how does it look?”

“Thomas! You’re so handsome. See for yourself.” She leads him by the hand to the mirror. He bursts out laughing.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, nothing,” he says. “For a first try it’s pretty good.”

“I did my best.”

“I know you did. I like it. No, I love it.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really, I’m just laughing because I don’t know who that guy is. I don’t recognize him.” He turns his face from side to side, slowly, checking the view at different angles and he slides his fingers through his new cropped hair. “Megumi, you’ve made me into a different person.”

She runs her fingers through his hair. “And you, me.”

Late that night, after dinner, they soak together in the mineral-clouded water. The moon is thin and sharp, and a million specks of brilliant starlight fill the sky. With a bamboo bucket she pours water over his head, warming his face. He does the same for her. It is after midnight and they are alone in the onsen. The wet rocks glimmer in the soft light of the lanterns. Their light makes the darkness darker. The bamboo creaks, as though secrets are trapped inside.

His head tilts straight back; he looks up at the stars. Under the surface of the cloudy water he finds her hand and holds it. “It seems we’ve both been stuck for a while,” he says.

“Yes . . . I’ve been stuck, too.”

“I wonder what’s out there waiting for us.”

“Only one way to find out.”

“What if when she comes back, I’m not there? What if I left, what if you and—”

“I’m going back to Japan.” She blurts out the words, and until now she hadn’t admitted her decision, even to herself. “I wasn’t sure how to tell you. My father and mother got back together . . . and I have a new little brother. He’s three.”

A cloud covers the moon.

“It’s my real life,” she says. The water laps soft and warm against her bare shoulders. Has she stung him? Was she too blunt? “They need me there. My little brother needs me.”

He squeezes her hand tighter under the water. “You get older and your real life gets narrower and narrower,” he says. “Sometimes you just think, Maybe . . .”

“Even if we aren’t everything, that doesn’t mean we’re nothing.”

“I wish I didn’t have to let go.”

For a long time there is only silence.

“I’ll miss you,” he says.

“Do you know my heart?” As soon as she says it she knows it doesn’t sound right in English. She tries again. “Can you tell what’s inside?”

“I can feel it. What about mine?”

“I can feel it, too.”

“Don’t forget, okay?” he says, putting his head on her shoulder.

Megumi holds out her pinky. Thomas interlocks it with his own. “Promise,” she says.

That night she does not sleep. She sits on the balcony alone or she sits on the floor next to sleeping Thomas, watching his chest rise and fall, watching him turn, watching him dream.

In the morning, at the entrance to the changing rooms, he asks if he can bathe alone. The look in his eyes tells her his meaning.

“Are you sure?” she asks.

He hesitates for a moment, but then nods.

“Okay then,” she says, looking into his eyes, barely able to speak, a bitter pit already forming in her throat, “see you later, Thomas.”

She enters the changing room. She takes off her clothes and washes her body and she soaks underneath the creaking bamboo, and in the hot water she cries, naked, uncontrollably, her nose running, her eyes swollen nearly shut, her breathing erratic, as though she is gasping for life and breath.

This whole time together, all this time, and now this, so fast. Ripped apart! Too fast!

She buries her face in her wet hands. The other bathers pretend not to notice. They wish for her to go away. She is spoiling the tranquility. They cannot hear the rustling leaves above her sobs. But her tears will not stop falling.

She walks slowly up the narrow path to their room. Inside she finds his yukata folded neatly on the bed. His clothes are gone. Thomas, too, is gone.

Sitting atop his yukata is his notebook. On the cover he has printed the title in black ink. My Life through Scars. Her eyes swell and overflow.

Twenty-five

Whether I just happened to walk past the camera store or the store somehow pulled me toward it, I do not know. I stand on the sidewalk facing the front window and dozens of cameras stare back at me, like little cyclopean puppies waiting to be adopted. It is daytime, afternoon, and I am amid the swirl of people and of life. They sometimes bump into me as they pass and I do not convulse; I feel a strange energy, as though I have discovered someplace new.

One particular camera keeps staring at me, an old Hasselblad with an 80mm lens. I go inside. The man pulls it off the shelf for me. I am surprised that my hands are ready for the weight of it. They have not forgotten. They have been waiting to hold this camera again, the same kind that I used every day in my studio. My fingers know right where to go. I look down into the viewfinder. What a comfortable way to see the world.

I hand over my new credit card, with no idea if it can cover such an expensive purchase. What did Silke set as my limit? And now the clerk and the store will know my name. It’s a new world.

On a bench in front of a café, in the shade of a green awning, I pull the camera out of the box and load two backs with film. My fingers do not fumble, not even a little.

I walk through my new neighborhood, and I take pictures on the street as if I am an explorer. This world, unseen before now. I focus on a cat investigating the tire of a parked car and press the shutter. The cat and I go our separate ways, we both have lives to lead, but now I have something immortal, I have a picture of that cat sniffing a tire. Already that moment, that 1/125th of a second has passed, but I’ll always possess it.

The whole time in my room I felt like a photograph in Silke’s wallet. She carried me around always but I remained mute and motionless. And now here I am. Human beings are meant to move.

But my walk is unbalanced, lopsided. My body is cleansed, cleaner than it’s ever been, but I don’t feel quite right. A huge part of me—the new me—is empty. I have gained a lot, I have regained my life, I have made my choice, but without Megumi I feel as though I am missing a vital organ. One of my lungs. One of my eyes. I’ll never get it back. All I can do now is adjust. What a sad, impotent endeavor. Getting used to it: the slow, systematic destroyer of passion.

I left something else for her besides my book of scars. I hope she understands my meaning. I think she will. She found something inside me that nobody else could ever find. She has a direct channel. Kindred spirits groping in the dark for each other, blind, pure nameless feelings intertwined. Forever.

Pale blue paint. Silke was right. The first coat is drying. I sit in the center of the room on the floor eating a ham sandwich and sipping a Miller High Life. She was right.

With the camera I could work again. I could open up a small studio and begin again taking pictures of things and put those pictures in advertisements and packages and websites. Each morning my wife, Silke, could make me a pot of her coffee.

Dipping the roller in the paint, swishing it back and forth a bit, spreading the paint evenly over the wall, this is work. This is improvement. This is me saying I was here, that I have made a change. I have painted the four walls of a room. The smell of the previous residents is gone, and I open the windows to let the fresh air mix with the paint. I clean the rollers and brushes. I pull off the blue masking tape. I crumple up the vinyl drop cloth and take it downstairs to the trash.

A spring training game is on TV, Yankees and Phillies. I watch even the late innings, when the stars have showered and gone and the hopefuls work on their swings. The rhythm of baseball soothes me. Always has. Even now when I think of the day I took my son to the game I am soothed, soothed by the knowledge that I once took my son to a baseball game. I remember it. I will always remember it.

She sets down her suitcase. “Thomas, what have you done? It’s beautiful.”

“You,” I say, “not me. You picked the color, I just covered the walls with it.” She kisses me on the lips and I do not resist. She tries not to act stunned.

“And your hair!”

“Do you like it? Megumi cut it.” I think of the look on her face when I left her at the onsen. I struggle to keep my expression neutral, to not betray my emotion.

“So you saw her.”

“I did.”

“How is she?”

“She’s going back to Japan to be with her family.”

We order pizza and eat on the floor in the living room, huddled around the pizza box as though it is a fire, a hearth, while watching the detectives on Law and Order interrogate a suspect. “I can’t believe you found the perfect color and painted the living room.” She opens a can of beer and we share it, alternating sips, back and forth, as we eat and watch.

We are silent until the next commercial. She takes a bite of pizza and before she swallows she says, “Maybe one day we can visit her. I’ve always wanted to go to Japan.” Tears fill my eyes but do not fall.

“I’m beat,” she says, “do you mind cleaning up?”

I turn out the kitchen light when I’m finished and I stand in the bedroom doorway. “Would you have really gone through with it?” I ask.

She lets out a breath. “It wasn’t a test, or a cry for help, if that’s what you mean. I’ve cried enough already, don’t you think? I snapped. I would’ve really done it.”

“What made you snap?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“No?”

“Does it matter why, exactly, you withdrew, and why, exactly, you refused to come out for so long? I can guess pretty close, and you could try to tell me, but I’ll only understand the broad strokes. Nobody can ever really understand. Your reasons are private. My reasons are private. Not because we shouldn’t know, but because we can’t ever really know. The more we say the less we understand.” She pulls the blanket up, all the way to her neck.

“Then what makes you think everything is okay now,” I ask, “and what makes you think it’s going to be okay?”

“I said it wasn’t a test and that’s true, it wasn’t. But when you came out, when you did what you did, I realized I had an answer I wasn’t even looking for, and once I had it, once I knew the truth, how could I ignore it? How could I be the same?”

She stops. She expects me to say, What answer did you find? But I am cautious. I wait—I, the silhouette leaning against the doorframe.

“You could’ve stayed in there and died,” she says. “Or you could’ve run right past me and out the door.”

“I could never—”

“But when you pulled me out of that window I had my answer. You chose to save me and yourself and us.”

“A stranger would’ve done the same thing.”

“A stranger, maybe, and someone in love, but not someone who hates, and not someone who’s indifferent. Only someone who cares enough to risk his own life.”

“It’ll fade. I have no shining armor.”

“It isn’t always going to be pretty, I know that. But at the very heart of it, when everything was stripped away but life and death, you chose me and us and life. And yourself. You took me into your arms and pulled me back. That’s how I know.”

“I tackled you, is what I did.”

She chuckles. “I didn’t see you coming. I felt you before I saw you. I felt everything. Before we even hit the floor, I knew.”

She is right. The moment came, and in the flames I did not freeze, I did not fail. I sprang. Finally my instinct found me. I caught it and squeezed it tight, and I hope I’ll never let go.

I step into the room and close the door behind me. In the darkness I take off my clothes and lift the blanket and lie down next to my wife. Her body is warm.

Twenty-six

Megumi walks up the stairs to her apartment. A small plastic shopping bag imprinted with the words THANK YOU hangs from one hand. The old wooden staircase creaks with each step and she feels the grooves with her feet, worn into the steps by all those who’ve climbed up and down before her. Maybe she, too, over the last few years of up and down has contributed ever so slightly to the grooves in the steps. Maybe they have grown a little deeper under her weight. She has made her mark. Maybe one day someone will decide that these old grooves are too deep, too slippery, too dangerous, and will tear out the staircase and destroy her mark and replace it with a beautiful new staircase with steps perfectly straight and true and no evidence of those who came before.