Hikikomori and the Rental Sister

  Hikikomori AND THE Rental Sister

  A NOVEL

  JEFF BACKHAUS

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2013

  One

  I am crouched in the darkness behind my bedroom door, listening for my wife to crack the silence with a sneeze or cough or some other little noise that tells me it’s not safe to leave. She is down the hall, in the room meant for children, and I know she leaves her door open, and that her ears never sleep, that they listen for my exit noises, the retracting dead bolt and creaking floorboards. Heart without peace, she might just be lying in bed awake, holding her breath. A river of sweat flows down my spine and pools between my legs, but I cannot move, not until I’m sure she won’t hear me slinking out.

  With two fingers and a thumb I turn my dead bolt. The sound seems to shake the entire apartment. Next, slowly, the knob lock. When the echoes finally subside and the silence returns, I pull open the door just enough to peer down the hall. The greasy odor of Chinese food spills in, her lonely dinner, probably left open on the counter and already beginning to spoil, the winter flies laying their eggs. Leaving food out overnight used to be a no-no.

  My eyes adjust to the shadows, and I look down the hall and into the living room. Streetlight gleams through the windows, folding over the arm of the sofa, wrapping around the lampshade, but I see no movement, no human silhouette. On the left, her door is open. I watch and listen for another quarter hour or so. Hard to tell how long.

  Sometimes she detects my exit, not passively, not the way you detect a hint of guilt in your lover’s eyes, no, she ambushes me, and her weapons are pleas and tears and wild, girlish punches. So, the vigilance and the crouching.

  It’s time. I grab my sneakers and stand up and zip my heavy winter jacket. The pooled sweat runs down my thigh. I slip out of my timeless cocoon and into the hallway and close the door behind me, silently untwisting the knob. If my wife wakes up while I’m out, she’ll see my door is closed, as normal, and she won’t pause to investigate. She’ll empty her bladder or swallow a cool drink and go back to bed.

  I should stoop low here and quickly pass her door out of sight, but I can never manage it. Standing upright I look into her room. She is sleeping, weighed down by a thick wool blanket, which I bought for her—for us—one cool autumn weekend at the beach. Her hair has spilled onto the pillow in long, gentle waves, and I remember the nights when I lay in that luxurious spot, the scent of her hair lulling me to sleep. My left hand begins to quiver, waves of pain and regret. I dare not linger.

  I creep into the kitchen. The open containers of Chinese food are sitting on the table. Wrappers, chopsticks, an unfolded fortune. I consider throwing the containers away and cleaning up the mess for her, but too much time and noise and I don’t want to spook her.

  Through the dark living room, past the old upright piano and into the entryway. Every floorboard squeaks, a little or a lot. I move quickly. I place my loosely tied sneakers on the floor and slip in my feet. My hand has settled, the waves have receded. I step out of the apartment and into the fifth-floor hallway. It’s quiet, but my neighbor might be spying on me, eye to the door.

  Down the stairs, out the double front doors, and I am outside, in the world. The blast of raw winter air is refreshing. I wonder if the sweat in my beard has frozen. I suck in air through my nose, and it feels like the totality of winter’s cold is concentrated in my nostrils. After a shiver I push the air out my mouth—warm now—an evanescent cloud.

  Up and down the block, no people, just a row of frozen, lifeless cars and dirty snow piled up along the sidewalk, a little gray mountain range. The streetlamps impart an icy glow, not so much illuminating as casting long, thick shadows, making the street somehow darker. Apartment blocks rise above me along both sides of the street, and all the windows are black and I imagine the people inside sleeping, warm in their beds. While they sleep I walk, which after another month in my room is no longer automatic. My arms aren’t supposed to swing so far, I know, and I struggle to find a natural rhythm.

  I turn a corner and another and up ahead on 107th Street a vagrant sleeps on the sidewalk, his back against the wall, legs straight out, feet splayed. Resting against his stomach sits a piece of torn cardboard on which, in black letters, he has scratched an indecipherable plea. A stained paper cup has fallen out of his leathery hand, a few coins scattered about. His crotch is soaked and he sits in a pool of foul liquid. A bolt of empathy strikes me as I remember that, if not for my wife, I might be the one sleeping there on the freezing sidewalk.

  I look closely at the vagrant’s chest. At first I’m not sure, I wait and watch some more, and then I finally see it, so slight, the up and down, the breathing. Life, air, in and out. Soaked in piss, still a man. He will eventually wake up and go about his day. He will repulse people. They will give him wide berth so as not to inhale his stink.

  I walk on. A taxicab drives past, the passenger’s head slumped against the window. Even now, in deepest, coldest night, certain people move from place to place. After a left turn I spot the friendly blue awning on the corner at the opposite end of the block. Pristine white light from the convenience store floods the sidewalk and rolls into the street, a simple and defiant patch of brilliance amid the darkness.

  The automatic glass doors slide open, and the cashier perks up from behind the counter. He gives me that look every time. I doubt any other customer gets that look. It’s reserved for me, the man who comes in every few weeks to stock up, always in the dead of night, always alone. The cashier doesn’t know me from my life three years ago; as far as he’s concerned I have always been this way, sneaking into the store, stocking up, retreating.

  I know what the cashier is thinking. He’s imagining what I am in the weeks between my shopping sprees: serial killer, pedophile, kidnapper, or terrorist cooking up bombs in the basement. Maybe tonight he picks one and runs with it, kidnapper perhaps, and so in his mind my supplies, the frozen dinners, aren’t for me but my captive. Not bombs in the basement but a prisoner, a woman, or more likely a girl. So into the store at four in the morning walks a kidnapping pedophile shopping for food and supplies to keep his prey just barely alive. But the cashier won’t call the cops. As far as he’s concerned, I’m only shopping. The rest is none of his business.

  I know what people think of me. Except that nobody thinks of me, because there is no reason to think of me, because I live apart, because I have locked out the world.

  I grab two red plastic baskets and head for the aisles. Frozen turkey dinners, frozen waffles, dried soups, ramen, macaroni and cheese, butter. Saltines and a block of cheddar. Canned peaches and string beans. Canned chicken. Canned ravioli, which my son loved and I hated, yet now I eat it. I take the full baskets to the counter and set them down, but my shopping is not finished. I head to the magazine rack.

  He watches me pick out magazines, with his own eyes now, but he has been watching me the entire time, as I strolled up and down the aisles. There are cameras throughout the store, and I know the monitors are behind the counter.

  I bring the magazines to the counter, where he has already begun scanning my frozen dinners across the red laser beams, a synthetic ping heralding success, a congratulations of sorts and probably the only encouragement he gets all night.

  I pay in cash. No need for him to know my name. I have my own money, though money—the issue of money—hangs over me always. My supply isn’t that of a working man, replenished every two weeks, topped off; my supply is finite, leftover savings, a stash. I say nothing as the cashier bags my groceries and magazines. I don’t look him in the eye.

  The automatic glass doors slide open and I step outside, underneath the friendly blue awnin
g, and then back down the block, plastic grocery bags looped heavy around my wrists, biting into my skin. Snow has begun to fall, making the sidewalk slick. From time to time a flake melts on my face. An icy sting, then a warm trickle.

  The vagrant still sits against the wall. He’s dusted white with snowcover, like a pile of garbage. I set down my bags and pick up his paper cup, fixing it upright on the sidewalk, then I dig into my pocket, pull out the change from my groceries, and drop the coins into the cup. But it’s so cold tonight, and he’s covered with snow, there must be a better place to sleep, over a steam grate, in a shelter, or even at the bottom of an empty stairwell, a little closer to the warm earth.

  I kick his foot, just a tap, just to wake him. No response. Again, harder this time. Still no response. I bend down closer to get a good look at his chest, to look for the up and down. But I can’t be certain.

  I give him another kick, a big one. “Wake up, it’s snowing.”

  “What the hell?” he says, trying to focus his eyes.

  “It’s snowing.”

  “Who the fuck are you? Get away!”

  He pulls his hood over his head and draws it closed around his face. I loop the grocery bags around my wrists and walk on.

  Back at my apartment building I climb the seven steps to the front door but I do not enter. Not yet. I set the bags down and sit on the top step, facing out toward the street. My warmth melts the snow and my jeans soak it up.

  In a few hours the sun will rise behind the clouds, a gray morning, and the lights will come on one by one, and people will come out and sweep off their steps and warm up their cars and scrape their windshields. But for now everyone is still asleep. My wife is still asleep in what used to be our son’s room. I make a fist of my quivering left hand and watch my breath cloud up and disappear into the darkness.

  Two

  The patter of his little feet echoes against the hallway walls, so much motion, so little movement, a child’s untamed gait. He knocks on my door. “Daddy?”

  His sweet voice, my precious revenant back to visit me, but I cannot let him in. His dark eyes looking up at mine: unbearable. There is no evading a child’s sharp, innocent glance.

  But it couldn’t be my boy knocking at the door. That’s impossible. Where is my mind? It’s Silke, my wife, who knocks. She tells me she made eggs for breakfast, and that she made too much and that I can have the rest if I want. I hear her set a plate on the floor outside my door and, after a pause, her retreating footfalls. The front door opens, then closes.

  Food at the door is her simplest gambit, naïve and—in its own little way—heartbreaking. But I know she may have closed the door without leaving and taken off her shoes and tiptoed back to the end of the hall. My interaction with the world is all zigging and zagging, the communication of avoidance, a dance of great feeling and intricate steps: signals and sounds, interpreted and acted upon this way and that.

  The coffee’s fragrance is still lingering from her breakfast. In happier times she woke me up with that coffee, she welcomed me home with that coffee, she kept me alert with that coffee during late nights working. She tried teaching me more than once how to make it. I could never get it right. But now the coffee and its fragrance is just a reminder of how one Saturday morning I destroyed our family. It’s not her fault; to her the coffee is mere routine, a necessary jumpstart to her day. I’m sure she has no idea that each cup renews my guilt.

  Sometimes she does not come home at night and in the morning there is no coffee scent. Business trips, probably. No way to be sure. Sometimes I hear the luggage wheels, sometimes I don’t. Days and weeks with the apartment to myself. But even then I stay behind my dead bolt.

  She must be gone by now, it’s safe to get the eggs. I once thought of installing a peephole but all she’d have to do is cover the lens with a piece of tape and I’d be as blind as before and she’d have gained a little victory over me.

  I have turned sour, it’s true, and scared and scarred, but there is a certain destiny to life, and I know what viciousness I’m capable of. So, I’ve stopped time. The future will never come. I’ve tried explaining it to Silke, through the door a long time ago, that she and we and the world would all be better off with me in here, but she doesn’t believe it. She refuses to believe it.

  When I was young I asked my mother what happens after you die. “If you’re good you go to heaven,” she said.

  “Then what?”

  “That’s it.”

  “But what comes after heaven?”

  “Nothing, heaven is forever,” she said, and I left the room satisfied, but then I thought for a bit and came back and Mom was folding laundry.

  “So it never stops,” I said, “it just keeps going and going and going?”

  She smiled and nodded and I’m sure she meant it as comfort but the concept of forever terrified me. Too big to wrap my little head around, heaven sounded like hell.

  When Mom died, Dad continued on, alone. He did not throw me away and start over. Surely he saw his wife in me, but he shed no tears. And his fortitude, his mettle and grit, and his benevolence, they ended with him. My dad did not bequeath me with the same; he forgot about my inheritance, or he always meant to give it to me but lost his chance, because one day in spring he went out to get the mail and on his way back—halfway between the mailbox and the front door—he fell to the concrete, a heart attack. He was wearing his bathrobe and held a handful of utility bills. Just like that.

  In the casket he had his hands folded on his chest. He was perfectly still. He looked exactly like me. I was looking at my own funeral, ahead in time, when some unseen voice shouts: Tessler family! Everyone move one spot to the right! Grandpa, you’re in the grave now. Thomas, you get in the casket. Little Tessler Boy, you’re in the hot seat now, and pay attention, because you’re next.

  I think my mom came down to get my dad. I think she was lonely up there in endless heaven.

  The eggs are cold but delicious. Apparently she made too much toast, too, and spread it with my favorite strawberry-rhubarb jam. I am not used to fresh eggs: soon I’ll be sick. But for now they are delicious. I wash the plate in my bathroom sink and set it on the hallway floor.

  I have sat cross-legged on my bed and read all the books by all the major physicists, so I am well acquainted with the concept of time as we currently understand it, and a tenuous understanding it is, for nobody seems to know quite what time is and whether it flows or only appears to flow, whether it has a beginning or an end, whether it can be stopped, and whether there are gaps between moments, and if so, what those gaps might be.

  My television is on, but I don’t watch it. I find a show with a peaceful rhythm—baseball game, soap opera, courtroom drama—and put the volume on low and go about my business. The best days are the courtroom-drama marathon days, when I can set the channel and leave it there all day and be soothed by the pleas of the guilty and innocent. My television is like a metronome, so I can march in place forever, a beating heart to tell me I’m still alive.

  I wake up in the dark, above the covers, television flickering in my face. I hear the last gurgles of her flushing toilet. She is home.

  From in the hall she says, “I see you liked your eggs.”

  I point my head toward the door. “I ate my eggs.” My voice sounds foreign to me. All day long thoughts flow like torrents but words never escape, and now here they are, like worms falling out of my mouth.

  “You ate them but you didn’t enjoy them?” she says.

  “I ate them and I enjoyed them.”

  “You could say thank you.”

  “Thank you.” She is chatty tonight, and her words slur together, as though her sentences are one long word.

  “Too much salt?”

  “Salt?”

  “Were the eggs too salty?”

  “No, they were perfectly salted.” I regret opening my mouth, words and worms. Nothing comes out right.

  “What about pepper?”

  “Did you
come here to talk about salt and pepper?”

  She doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t leave. She knows better than to try the knob. She pushes the empty plate aside, and in the slit beneath the door are two shadows, her feet, just standing there. Life flows smoother when she doesn’t come down the hallway, when she doesn’t talk to me—or when I have the sense not to respond. Yet she stays, yet she comes down the hall, yet she believes in me. She thinks I’m the same man she married. And maybe I am, and maybe that’s the problem, that I always have been this man and always will be.

  “Don’t you want to know where I’ve been all night?” she asks.

  “It’s late,” I say, “maybe you should go to bed.”

  “I’m not tired.” The two shadows move, and I hear her back slide down the wall and the dull thud of her ass landing on the floor. Even after so long, there are still things to learn about my wife. I search for meaning in every sound through the door. Her voice these days is different. More urgent. “You’re not even curious . . .” she says.

  “You should go to bed. It’s late.”

  “I should go to bed. It’s late. Is that right? You think you know what I should do?”

  A far-off siren floats into my room. Someone out there is having an emergency, someone is life or death. I squeeze my left hand into a fist.

  “Don’t you want to know?”

  “Are you sure you want to tell me?” I ask. “Are you sure you want me to know what you’ve been doing?”

  No hesitation, hardly a pause, and the brutal sound of plate colliding with door rips through the apartment. The shattered pieces ricochet off the walls and crash to the floor. Then there is silence.

  Hours later, when I am sure she is asleep, I open the door, collect all the shards and take them into my room. My acrimony is sharp and real but it dies in a flash and I’m left with only deep remorse that starts at my core and eats its way to my skin, where it sits and chews, a constant, burning sorrow that she doesn’t realize exists—my bitterness is all she knows anymore—which makes the sorrow burn even hotter, and on and on it spirals.