Hikikomori and the Rental Sister Page 3

  My window shade burns golden with the day’s last sunrays. Were I to raise the shade, what a sight I’d see, what a crisp winter sunset.

  The front door slams. She returns after a hard day at the skyscraper office. Her high heels click through the living room and down the hall to her room. I am not the pet, the dog in its cage waiting for Master’s return to be let out, to run in circles and jump and bite: I am the dog that has been digging holes in the lawn, the one who can’t raise his eyes. I move to the door to listen.

  She talks to me from the hallway. I learn about her day, about the bitter weather and her chapped lips and asshole boss. Quaint concerns. There is nothing new. She talks to the door, not to me. I do not respond. She asks me how my day was, as if my days can be one way or another. She asks if I saw anything good on television, if I read anything good on the Internet. But there is nothing left for me to say.

  “Do you need anything?” she asks. Her simple offers are the hardest to bear, like she’s pressing on a bruise. She has not yet given up on me. It is her nature to care—she must care and give care and take care—and it’s something I didn’t fully realize about her until we had our son.

  “I think about you all day,” she says. She waits for a response, as if I might say me too, or come out and give her a hug. She says that sometimes she comes down the hallway real quiet and just sits there listening to me. There’s not much to hear, but she listens anyway. “Don’t think I’m trying to spy, okay? I’m not nosy, I just . . . I’m afraid that if I speak . . . it starts out so simple, just that I miss you, that I want to talk to you like I used to talk to you, maybe even hear your voice again, but then I always end up so angry. I hate when I get angry.” She releases a deep breath. “And besides, I don’t know if it’s better to leave you alone or come and talk. Am I the problem, or can I help?”

  She is sitting on the floor now. We are mere inches apart, but all we have are our voices. “Why did we get married in winter? Winter is a horrible time to get married.” Today must be the day. It must already be January. Late January. The twenty-second. “I can still see a future. Can you? We could try again, we’re young, it’s not too late . . .”

  “Won’t it always be between us?” I say. “We’re tainted. We’ll always have this dark thing between us, dividing us. How can we be together if we’re separated by this atrocious thing?”

  “Or maybe it doesn’t divide us. Maybe it keeps us together. Have you ever thought about that? Maybe it’s glue.”

  Are we really bound together, forever, no matter what? What dissolves the glue, what grants freedom?

  The doorbell rings. “That’s our anniversary dinner,” she says.

  She eats alone in the kitchen. Pizza. Pepperoni, from the smell of it, and bitter onions. She uncorks a bottle of wine. The gurgle of two glasses being poured. They ting together, as a toast. She says something but I can’t make it out.

  Before I withdrew, when I lived out there, I sometimes wondered what I would do if my wife didn’t come home. I wondered what would happen if—wrong place, wrong time—she got hit by a car or a stray bullet, if one day I came home from work to find only gaping silence and the reminders she left behind, her perfume, her jewelry, her ticket stub collection from so many of our dates. And her dirty laundry in the hamper, I would feel so foolish, but I couldn’t just throw away her dirty clothes like read newspapers. During those wondering times I hoped that if there was a heaven or some great next life, that it wasn’t the kind that could look down on Earth, so she wouldn’t have to see me wandering the empty apartment like an abandoned pup. So she’d be spared my tears, my meals taken alone. So she wouldn’t suffer through my sleepless nights and empty days.

  And then there were the early mornings when I’d wake up before her but stay in bed and listen to her somniloquies and brush the hair from her face and I’d wonder what would happen if the stray bullet or speeding car hit her but did not kill her, but instead left her paralyzed, trapped in her body, if all she could do was blink. I wondered which of us would feel more helpless. And I wondered which of us would find it more unbearable.

  “Darling,” she says, “I saw someone today.” The sun has set, my room black but for the streetlamps pressing against my window shade, scattered light diffused like mist. “I saw someone who I think can help us.”

  “Don’t you mean me?” Me. The one with the problem.

  “I mean us. We’re still together, aren’t we? Anyway, this woman, she . . . Thomas, this is it, my last idea for you. Your last chance. I can’t stay out here forever, alone. This isn’t the real you, but after this I give up. So give her a chance. Here, read this.” She slides an envelope under the door.

  The burning starts again, the chewing, all over my skin. The searing pain of inexpressible remorse. How long before it eats me entire?

  I did not come inside one day, shut the door, and decide never to come out. I needed a day to grieve. Then a week. A month. Tired, I took a nap. When I woke it was dark. The walls were high. There was no way out.

  On my dresser is a pile of framed photographs, face down. I don’t need people looking at me. But sometimes I turn over a few of the photographs. That naked smiling baby in the bath, cigarette-butt penis and giant balls, and that baby on the floor, struggling to keep his head up, it’s me. I wish I could’ve stayed that way forever. It seems I’m caught in some giant flow, moving in one direction, but I think I’ve stopped it. Within these walls, I have stopped it.

  The little boy standing on a shiny, wet stone pointing at the river: that’s me, too. Look at my smile, at the water rushing past. I am pointing at the river but I’m looking into the camera, a peculiar expression on my face, happy but tinged with sadness, as though I grasped even then that the photograph would outlive the subject.

  Four in the morning and she is out there cleaning the apartment, floor to ceiling. A bucket of water: filled, emptied, filled, emptied as the night goes on. She splashes and scrubs, she slides furniture across the floor. The vacuum cleaner sucks on the rug. Bottles spraying. Paper towels ripping. The violent snap of plastic garbage bags opening. Every month or so, maybe every three weeks, the same thing. She doesn’t sleep.

  I crouch over the envelope. My name is written in careful letters, a woman’s writing but not Silke’s. The letterforms are soft and fluid, as though the ink is barely sticking to the paper, as though my mere breath might scatter her gentle strokes. I do not open it; I leave it on the floor, my name staring up at me.

  Five

  The next day. Or week. Hard to tell. There is a pest at my door, a dispatch from my wife, a new thorn for my side. She says she’s from Japan. Asks if I read her letter. Says she wants to be my sister. Says she just wants to talk, says I should open the door and let her in. Says she has a gift for me. Wants to hear my voice, to know I’m alive. Says I’d enjoy her company. Says we’d have a good time together.

  But I don’t need a sister. My parents said that, before me, there was a girl who would have been my sister, had she survived, but I wonder if, had she survived, they would’ve conceived me. They might’ve been too content and too happy to make another. And even if so, the same sperm would not have fertilized the same egg to yield the same me. No, I am here because my sister isn’t. My parents created, lost, and created again. Whence sprang that urge to create, to add to the existence of things, to set another ball rolling? They had to try again, to again taste the godlike power.

  I, too, created and lost, but I will not create again.

  Go away, girl. Be someone else’s sister.

  But she stays at the closed door and talks. I unfocus my ears and hear only sounds, sweet sounds like a bird, all rhythm and cadence, sounds but no meaning, just up and down like notes on a page.

  Fly away, bird. Be someone else’s pest.

  The letter still lies there, unopened on the floor where my wife slipped it in. The pest has been chirping for quite some time now. Maybe she lives inside my head, there and nowhere else. Or maybe the
voice comes not from inside my head but from the envelope. I push it back under the door, ridding myself of it. The voice goes silent.

  But then as I stand up, as my knee cracks, the envelope appears from the slit once again but this time it’s torn open and empty, followed by a single sheet of paper, unfolded, displaying more of that same graceful handwriting. Oh, you clever thing.

  Now I focus my ears and listen for what she says next. But no words come. I wait, but nothing. Only silence. An opened letter, so clever, but nothing else. So much chirping and now you’re mute? Tell me more. Let me listen.

  Silence. Then the clicking shut of the front door. Down the hall and through the living room, somehow without me hearing. She must have floated. Before I know it I am at the window. The shade is pulled down to the sill. I pause, then go back to my bed. I don’t need to look outside to know the pest is scurrying away.

  Six

  As Megumi walks to the bus stop, Silke calls from her office. “What did he say?” she asks.

  “Didn’t say anything, just—”

  “Nothing?”

  “I heard him moving around in there, but in an hour he didn’t say anything.”

  The M10 bus approaches and Megumi quickens her pace. She rarely takes the subway. Compared to the Tokyo subway, it’s slow and foul and primitive, so instead she takes the bus, which is also slow and foul and primitive but at least she can look out the windows at the people on the street, people she’ll never know.

  “Now what?” Silke says. “What do we do?”

  “Smooth stones in a stream.”

  “What?”

  “Smooth stones in a stream. They don’t become smooth overnight.”

  “I see . . .”

  “It’s nothing to worry about. Remember, I don’t stop coming.”

  “I just thought—”

  “I know you did. But don’t worry. I’ll call you next time.”

  That night Megumi eats dinner alone in her apartment. Naoko calls and says the girls are headed out, western bars this time. She needs no convincing.

  The bar is dark and humid, bodies packed tight. She and the girls are targets. She feels their stares, their desires. On her way back from the bathroom, someone grabs Megumi’s ass. She stops and turns but in the crowd it’s impossible to tell. Coward.

  “Megumi, be careful,” Miku says. “You’re spilling.” Beer from the wide glass is sliding down her cheek and neck. She wipes it off with the back of her hand.

  They are drunk and sweaty when they stumble outside into the night, coats on but open, handbags hanging from their arms. Megumi sucks in the cold air, and goose bumps cover her skin. Miku slips on an icy patch and falls but then gets right back up and says, “Where to?”

  “How about my place?” Naoko says. “I have some weed.”

  As Megumi lights the pipe, Naoko pours three glasses of sake. “Aren’t I a great host?” she says.

  “Kampai!”

  Megumi settles onto the sofa. Smoke hangs in the air and crawls into her lungs and she is warm again. “To my brother!” she says, raising her glass. They all drink.

  “To your brother,” Miku agrees. She takes a hit, hands over the pipe, and a somber mood passes over them.

  Megumi’s skin is hot and red. She wants a glass of water, but she does not leave the sofa. She feels the entire circumference of her eyeballs, two stormy planets lodged into her skull. Who put them there? Time passes either quickly or slowly, she can’t tell the difference.

  “Hey, where are the guys?” Naoko asks.

  “Who?”

  “There were so many hot guys at the bar, but where are they now? Why aren’t they here?”

  “Looks like we forgot to bring them home,” Megumi says.

  “Megumi, I thought you were supposed to bring them, you’re the hot one,” Miku says as she swallows another glass of sake and pours three more.

  “You think any of those white guys can tell us apart?” Megumi says.

  Miku pours a glass of sake down Megumi’s throat. She chokes as she swallows. They laugh. She lifts her feet and lies down on the sofa.

  In the middle of the night she wakes to a putrid stink. She coughs as though the stink is coming from inside her, as though coughing will expel it. Naoko is sleeping on the floor, naked. Miku is curled up in a ball, still fully dressed, next to a pile of vomit.

  She sits up and stretches and steps over the girls on her way out. The narrow downtown streets are empty. She presses her arms to her chest against the cold. Her head pounds with every heartbeat.

  At home she spreads out her futon on the floor, covers herself with a blanket, and falls asleep. Later, she reaches in the dark for her ringing cell phone. “Moshi moshi,” she answers. The blended voices in the background have the unmistakable Japanese melody, and she pictures him sitting alone at a dark Shinjuku bar, in some twisted, neon-hued back alley, tie loosened after work, drinking himself into oblivion.

  “It’s my heart, Megumi. It beats so fast, like it might burst right out of my chest.”

  “Dad, what are you saying? Are you having another heart attack?” She sits upright.

  “No, it’s just that—”

  “Do you need to go to the hospital?”

  “Why won’t you come back to Japan?”

  She hangs up on him and pulls the blanket over her head. For a while there is silence, peace, then the phone rings again. She does not answer. Another silence, then more ringing. When it is over, she falls back asleep.

  A chime wakes her, a text message from her father: I’M LONELY. She stares up at the ceiling and wonders how old the cracks in the plaster are, and how many before her have stared up at them. The cracks remind her of the spider webs in Yoyogi Park that she used to see during long Sunday walks with her father. She would hold his big hand as they walked, and he looked at the trees and birds and turtles, but she looked at the webs—wide enough to span the trees—and the spiders that had spun them, spiders as big as her head, just sitting in their webs, waiting, seeing everything but doing nothing.

  She calls her father. “Get out of the bar, okay? Go home and get into bed.”

  “It’s been long enough, you’ve proved your point . . . you can come back now. People forget.”

  “Have you eaten?” She hears him take a hard swallow of booze, then a grunt.

  “We don’t have to stay in Tokyo,” he says. “We could move somewhere else, both of us together, a fresh start. I’m sick of the fucking office. Reporting for duty, Sir! Maybe I could start my own shop or something. Work with my hands, do something real. And you could work out front at the counter. You and me.”

  “Go home. And pick up a bento along the way.” Heavy breathing into the phone, she can almost smell the alcohol. “Tell me you’ll go home and eat something, okay? Dad?”

  “If you were here I wouldn’t be out here like this tonight. Does that make sense, do you know what I mean? Well anyway the inside of my mouth is all sticky. I’ll call you later,” he says and hangs up.

  The day’s first dull light presses stronger and stronger against her eyelids. Trying to ignore her racing thoughts only makes it worse. She finally gives up trying to fall back asleep.

  She folds up her futon and places it on the shelf in the closet, then fixes herself a simple breakfast of rice, salmon, and orange wedges. The window next to her small table is always left open a crack, letting a bit of winter’s bite into the apartment. Today is like yesterday, gray and steely, a uniform ceiling of clouds pressing down on the rooftops. She looks out at her apple tree, the only apple tree on Reade Street, leaves fallen, now showing off its true shape, graceful branches cutting through the air like frozen ink strokes.

  She puts the dishes in the sink for later. After her shower she soaks in steaming hot water. Above the tub is a small window that she always keeps open, and through it she can see the windows of nearby buildings and she wonders if someone is spying on her as she bathes. Let them spy. The tub is the reason she took the apart
ment three years ago. A porcelain, claw-foot tub, deep, just like in Japan. Ofuru. The kind she can sit inside with hot water up to her neck, the kind she can fall asleep, slip down, and drown in.

  Her father is probably not leaving. Probably still at the bar. Just one more glass. Kampai!

  Megumi, he used to say, most people think the day begins when you wake up in the morning and ends when you go to bed at night. Going to bed is the last thing they do. But I make it the first thing I do. A good night’s sleep ensures a good day, so I begin my day by going to bed. Tomorrow begins tonight! But he has forgotten his own advice.

  She wants to keep soaking, to float all day in hot water, but she has to go visit Thomas Tessler again, who so far is just a pile of silence behind a locked door. When she leaves her building, a cat is sitting on the top step. It stands up and stretches and rubs against the iron railing. “Were you waiting for me again?” she says in Japanese. “Don’t you have any warm place to stay?” The cat looks up at her, circling at her feet. “I’m sorry, sweetie, you can’t stay with me and I don’t have any food with me this time.” The cat rubs against her leg. “Okay, wait here.”

  She goes upstairs, returns with a small plastic container of the dried salmon left over from breakfast, and sets it on the step. From a half block away she turns around to check but the cat is looking the opposite way, licking its paw.

  The sun hasn’t shone in a long time. After three years here, she isn’t sure what New York is, in the larger sense. She’s sure there is a larger sense, because in Tokyo she always had in mind both where she was at the moment and how that place related to the entire city. But in New York, she has no sense of context, no idea of what lies beyond where she is at that moment. Her New York is nothing more than what is right in front of her face. Streets, addresses, bus routes, walk or don’t walk.