Hikikomori and the Rental Sister Page 5

  The sound of his mattress, then the creak of a floorboard: he moved, and sounds as though he’s right next to the door. “Thomas,” she says, “I’m sick of talking to the door. Go get a pen and paper. I want you to write a question on the paper and slide it under the door. You can do that, right? Just any question at all, whatever you want.” She knows he won’t, of course, that from his room will come only silence. She stretches her legs and opens her eyes wide and then, from under the door, a single sheet of white paper. Eight and a half by eleven. She sits upright. In the exact center of the paper, in small scribbled letters, it says go away. She tells him that go away is not a question, and slides the paper back under the door. It comes back a few seconds later. To the original he has added some extra words and a question mark, so that it now reads Will you please go away? She’s sorry, she says, but she can’t go away. Not yet. Try a real question this time, she says, and pushes the paper under the door. But it doesn’t come back. Okay, she says, here’s a question for you. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  The paper slides into the hallway. He has written the word No. She slides it back. “My brother,” she says, “was just like you. He withdrew into his room, too.” She blurts it out before she can snap her mouth shut. “Thomas, can you open up? So much easier if you open up. Don’t you think? More potential for conversations or whatever else.”

  She paces up and down the hall. She sneaks into Silke’s room. Queen bed, unmade. Open closet packed with clothes. She looks through the hanging dresses and tops, a mix of cheap and expensive, all stylish and all size four to six, all too big for her. On the shelves are stacks of folded jeans and sweaters. Underneath, on the floor, a pile of shoes and boots. She tiptoes around the bed, to the dresser. Some thin leather belts. A small jewelry chest. She opens a drawer and thumbs through Silke’s earrings. Back in the hallway, the eight and a half by eleven is sitting on the wood floor, slightly askew. She reads the question.

  “No,” she says, “my brother’s not in his room anymore. He spent four years inside but he’s out now.”

  She slides back the paper. She hears the pen scratching against the paper, and in a moment it’s back in the hallway. She reads his ragged handwriting.

  “Yeah, I guess you could say I helped him out,” she says, pushing back the paper. “Why won’t you let me in?”

  When the paper comes back, he has flipped it over, and on the new side of the sheet there is only one question. Is your brother okay now?

  She stares at the question, wondering about the truth, and wondering what she should tell Thomas. She lies back down on the blanket. “Yes,” she says, “I suppose . . . you could say he’s doing better now.”

  He’s happy?

  “He’s dead. Today’s the anniversary.”

  Thomas does not respond.

  “He was assaulted,” she says. “Is that the right word? Maybe fight is better. He got into a fight. But, he didn’t start the fight, and he didn’t fight back.”

  It was the middle of the night, she tells him, and he had sneaked out of their apartment to go to Family Mart for some food. He loved ham and tomato sandwiches with cut-off crusts. The fuckers stole his sandwiches, and later the police gave her all the things they had collected from him, and the plastic shopping bag was splattered with dried brown blood. She read the receipt. She doesn’t know why she read it, maybe just because he might have read it, too, before he was assaulted. The receipt showed three sandwiches. But there were no sandwiches. Beat him and sliced him and stole his sandwiches. Probably took them somewhere and washed them down with beer.

  They got a call, and she and her parents rushed to the hospital. The nurse behind the desk said they had to go quickly to his room, because he was being uncooperative. Not acting in his best interest.

  “A doctor and some nurses and two big men—I’m not sure what the word for them is—and the big men were tying my brother’s legs and wrists to the bed. He fought them, he kicked and punched the air. Two more big men rushed in. It took four of those big men to pin him down. While he fought, his purple and bandaged and swollen face smiled at me. Racist blood. That’s what he shouted at the top of his lungs, over and over. Don’t give me that racist Japanese blood. He was looking at our father. But they tied him down and gave it to him. Then, suddenly, he stopped fighting. He was lying there, perfectly still. As the blood flowed into him, all the rage drained from his face, like spring snows melting away.”

  For him the fight was over, she says, but only she knew what that meant. She knew what he was going to do. She started crying. Her mom and dad left the room, then the big men and the doctor. It was only her and a nurse and blinking lights and plastic tubes. And a bad smell. She took a seat in the chair next to his bed, reached out, and held his hand. He closed his eyes. “His hand felt so hot in mine. Such life inside him. I told him it wasn’t too late to change his mind. I begged him. I told him I didn’t understand. And do you know what he said? He said, ‘You only want to understand so you can stop me. But there is no stopping me. If you truly understood me, you wouldn’t even try.’ ”

  A sudden metallic sound startles her. She opens her eyes and sits upright. She stares at the knob. It seems to take forever. Finally the knob turns a quarter turn and stays there, like he won’t pull but also won’t let go, like his arm is absorbing the torque while he reconsiders. She stays quiet and waits. She tries not to even breathe. Then the door opens, only an inch or two, enough to see inside through a narrow strip of light. The knob unwinds. She waits for the strip of light to grow wider. Instead, she hears the floorboards squeak and the mattress springs compress.

  Nine

  I am not looking at her, I cannot look at her, but in the corner of my eye I sense her, a slight movement toward me, just a shadow, a figure in my room, someone besides me, and my world seems to have run out of space, is barely bigger than my body, and I have nowhere to go, I am trapped here on my bed and I am not breathing. She stands still now; the shadow keeps her distance. I let out a breath and gulp down another, like I’m diving down to the bottom of the ocean. I stare just in front of my crossed legs at a spot on my bed, my eyes a powerful microscope, and I can see the tiny threads and the little creatures nesting in their weave. My gaze is searing hot. I might set the sheet ablaze.

  She moves no closer but I see her head twisting around, taking in my surroundings. What have I done? I look down to see if I am wearing clothes today, for I feel naked, chills running in waves over my skin. She left the door wide open, my oxygen rushing out, leaving me with nothing, water rushing in, I float up to the ceiling and take a last gulp of air before drowning. Reduced to a pebble beneath this girl’s foot. Not a plea for sympathy, merely an observation: I see how I must look to her. It’s good Father and Mother aren’t here to see their creation, the sum of their sweat. I hope no heaven exists from which they look down on me and regret rearing me.

  Perhaps she is not here. Perhaps I am still listening to her story and my mind has raced forward to contemplate the possible effects of an as-yet-unmade decision and what I am seeing and feeling is not real but a prediction of what I would see and feel were I to open the door, and as such I am learning a lesson: that the locks belong secured and the door belongs shut.

  I’m suddenly aware of an odor, wet and loamy. It’s oozing out my skin, my wild hair, my clothes and sheets. I’m sure she can smell it, even from across the room, and maybe she can discriminate the urine and semen, little drops here and there marking my territory, if indeed they are present, for I can’t remember what I have done and not done in here, there being until now no reason to remember, to keep track of things. It’s my odor that keeps the shadow there, no closer. I have been unearthed like a cracked skeleton, evidence of some previous, now extinct existence, here this whole time just beneath your nose, waiting to be noticed.

  But I am the one who opened the door. I retracted the locks and turned the knob. I am the host. She, the guest. I stare at the gaping hole. I manage to prod
uce a syllable: “Door.”

  “You want it closed?”

  My eyes go wide. She closes the door.

  “Nice to meet you, Thomas,” she says. “Thank you for letting me in.”

  The shadow moves closer and the image sharpens, a girl, the long black hair I remember from the window, and now a white face and small red mouth. I cannot yet see her eyes. I look away.

  I lick and lick inside my mouth, massaging my palate with my tongue, but there is no saliva, no lubrication, dry on dry and all this friction, I’m afraid I’ll catch fire. “Sorry,” I say.

  “Sorry for what?” the red mouth says.

  “Brother.”

  “Thank you.”

  There is something between her and me, something in the air, particles of some sort, but the certainty with which I know the particles exist between us floating back and forth is exactly the uncertainty I have about their meaning. My odor wafting into her nostrils, she is taking me inside her.

  I glance at her eyes but then look away. I do not wish to begin the interrogation. Black hair, white skin, red mouth, this is the pretty little pest my wife sent to my door. What does she expect we’ll do?

  Yet the interrogation has already begun: my odor, my wild hair and bristly beard, the acute angles of my limbs as I sit cross-legged on my bed, they are answers to her questions. She is taking in the sights and smells, collecting data. I am a specimen, a trapped bug. She turns and scrutinizes my room and my stacks of boxes and my clothes, judgments cementing. She thinks she already knows me.

  Her head swivels. She takes another step toward me.

  “Get out!” I yell, and finally my saliva is back and so I try again: “Get out!”

  After she leaves I fasten the locks and rush to the window, an animal movement, an ape keeping watch, I pull aside the shade and there she is, long black hair, but this time she turns around and looks up at my window and I see her eyes and she sees my eyes, two pairs of mirrors reflecting light back and forth. She smiles at me. I snap my head back and hide behind the shade.

  Every cell of every muscle is hollow, empty, and I’m surprised I don’t just float away and pop like a bubble. How refreshing exhaustion is, to be completely aware of my emptiness, to feel that the slightest breeze would scatter me into oblivion. But of course there is no breeze. I will not scatter or pop; I will simply lie here exhausted from her visit.

  How easily shame comes. It must have slipped through the open door, loose inside my room, and now it devours me, sharp teeth and stickywet tongue.

  Ten

  “Wait three days before seeing him again,” Hamamoto says. “Now you must find the proper balance. Don’t be too soft . . . don’t be too hard.”

  But she cannot wait three days. The next morning, as soon as she is sure Silke will have left for work, she rides the M20 to the M10. Winter sadness creeps into her. The sidewalk snow piles have turned to little rocks of black ice. A thin white film covers the concrete and buildings, imparting a frozen, ashy quality, drying out like old bones. The city is a giant cemetery, buildings towering over her like gravestones, cracking apart in the cold.

  She knocks on his door. The dead bolt retracts. She waits a few moments. Then she opens the door herself.

  His room has a thick smell. He’s again sitting cross-legged on the bed, looking at a magazine.

  “Hi, Thomas,” she says.

  “You say my name wrong.”

  “I do?” she says, moving closer to him, slowly. “Will you teach me?” He does not look at her. “Can I sit here?” she asks, motioning to the bed. He moves over to create more room, and she sits facing him on the bed. “Tell me how to say it.”

  Suddenly he gets up and moves to the middle of the room. He sits on the floor. After a moment she does likewise. They sit opposite each other. Thomas wears an old black T-shirt. Dark blue jeans. Bare feet with very short toenails. His face is covered with dark hair, and the hair on his head is full and longish and random, clumps jutting this way and that. He looks how she imagines a painter looks, though maybe real painters don’t look like what people think painters look like.

  His eyes search the wood floor and finally land on Megumi’s socks, colored fuchsia and blue with a little pocket for each toe. He looks at them for a long time.

  “Cute, right?” she says as she wriggles her toes, ten little fuchsia balls at the end of her feet. His lips show the slightest crack of a smile, but then she blinks and it is gone. “Tell me how to say your name.” She wants to reach out to touch him gently on the shoulder, a simple gesture of comfort and care and sincerity, as if to say it’s okay, she’s here, she’s here to tear apart this world he’s built, she’s here to destroy it and send him back out there with his wife, back among the ills and also the beauty, but he’ll be okay, because she’ll be right there next to him, every step, all the way, until the end, until he’s forgotten all about this little world, until he never wants to see it again. He won’t be alone.

  “Thomas,” he says, demonstrating the proper pronunciation. “Thomas.”

  “Toemas?”

  “No,” he says. “It’s German: Toe-mahss.”

  “Toemass? Like that?”

  “Not aaaa like a sheep. Ah, like ‘open up and say ah.’ ”

  “Toemahss.”

  “Good.”

  “But you aren’t German, are you? Why pronounce it that way?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “Why do I think?”

  “No, not ‘why do you think?’ Why do you think I pronounce it that way?”

  “Because you told me you pronounce it that way. You just showed me. You said I got it right.”

  His jaw clenches. His fingers curl tightly. “I mean,” he says, “can you guess why I pronounce it that way?”

  She is embarrassed. Sometimes the simplest English phrases trip her up. She can go on and on about complicated thoughts and subjects, but then someone will ask her what the date is and she’ll start describing how it tastes so good so many ways but her favorite is simply dried, as a snack, but you have to be careful how many you eat because, well, you know, you might need the bathroom.

  She can’t guess why he pronounces his name that way. She shakes her head.

  “Because my father pronounced it that way when I did something good.”

  She has never met a foreigner who could pronounce her name correctly. When foreigners say her name she doesn’t feel they’re talking to the real her but some shapeless approximation.

  “Want to learn my name?” she asks.

  “Megumi,” he says.

  “Close. But try to not make an accent. Make each syllable the same. Not: Me-gu-mi. Me-gu-mi.”

  “Megumi.”

  “Better!” She smiles. “Now, make each syllable shorter. Don’t hold the vowels so long. Not: Megooooomiiiiii. Make it faster. Make it more . . .” She searches for the word from childhood piano lessons. “. . . staccato. Make it more staccato. Dit-dit-dit. Fast. Megumi.”

  “Megumi.”

  “Yes. Yes! Now keep it stuck in your head.”

  “Megumi,” he says.

  “Thomas,” she says.

  Finally he looks into her eyes, but only for a moment. Then he looks away. He has such large eyes, dark and deep and sad.

  Silence. The space is cluttered with stacks of boxes, tall piles of magazines, crowded shelves, a desk messy with papers and magazines and a laptop computer, a garbage bag filled with empty boxes and wrappers, but it’s not a filthy room. There’s a certain order to it.

  The thick smell, on closer inhalation, is a humid mix of lingering food, like chemicals heated in the microwave, and of secreted human oils and dead skin cells, the smell of a person living a still life. There is also a faint bitter smell, like burnt coffee. She notices a mug next to the television and a can of instant.

  He stares at the floor, his body stiff, muscles coiled so tight he’s almost shaking or shivering. Just like her brother. She had no idea what memories her brother was cha
sing away, fighting off with those coiled muscles, and she always expected him to snap, go crazy, maybe even pounce on her. But then she’d take a slow step toward him and place her hand on his head and he’d begin to weep and his muscles would slacken and his entire body would melt into a puddle on the floor.

  “You want me to come out,” Thomas says.

  She’s supposed to say yes, that life is out there not in here, that he can’t stay in here forever, that the future isn’t so bad. “Life is out there, not . . .”

  But—she’s not sure why—she cannot continue. Silence overtakes her.

  “There’s no use for you here,” he says. “You can’t help me, and I don’t want to leave.”

  “But if you don’t think I can help, why did you let me in your room?”

  He crosses his arms over his chest. “My wife asked me to talk to you. And now I have. I’ve let you in, and now you can report back to her how hopeless it is and we can all go back to the way things were.”

  She scoots a little closer. He holds his ground. The space between their knees is now just a sliver. “You’ve talked, but you haven’t said anything.”

  “What would satisfy you?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never done this before.”

  “This isn’t your job?”

  “This is the last thing I ever wanted to do.”

  He suddenly looks up at her.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “But I’ll always be honest with you. At first I didn’t want to come. Your wife forced you, my boss forced me.”

  His gaze holds her eyes. It does not waver. His eyes hide his thoughts. They take in, they collect, but they do not let out. A one-way valve.

  “You think I’m a waste of time,” he says. “You think I should just die.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Like your brother. You said he’s better now because he’s dead.”

  The stacks of corrugated boxes tower over them. The little refrigerator hums. A garbage truck rumbles down the road.

  “I don’t want you to die.”