Hikikomori and the Rental Sister Read online

  Suddenly she hears—as though it has been going on for some time but she’s just now realizing it—moans, gentle at first but then more intense. Two voices, two moans, man and woman. “You like it like that?” The voice is not Thomas’s. Is Silke so bold, so wicked to do it right in front of Thomas, taunting him to come out and do something about it? She wants to rush out there and—and what? Politely explain how distasteful it is to sleep with another man in front of your husband?

  “Just like that just like that just like that . . .” But the voice is not Silke’s. Abruptly, it stops. Footsteps to the bathroom, a few seconds of running water, then footsteps back to the living room. She’s brushing her teeth. Then the sex sounds return. The television. She’s watching while she brushes. Behind the groans and slapping skin she again hears the running water, and spitting.

  Silke doesn’t wait for the on-screen couple to finish. She turns off the television. The house goes quiet.

  For a while Megumi hears nothing, then the sound of mattress springs compressing. Does Silke always sleep with the door open?

  More moans, loud moans, only Silke’s voice this time, from her lonely bed. She calls out Thomas’s name as she does it. “Deeper,” she says. “Is that all you’ve got?”

  Megumi tries not to listen.

  Fourteen

  At sunrise I awaken but next to me the pretty little pest still sleeps. Scant space between us, I can smell her dark, foreign scent, pleasant and strange. I lean in even closer, her black hair tickling my nose, and I inhale. So alluring. Will her rich scent stick to my pillow? Her eyes are closed, dark lashes sticking up like little feelers. Her skin is white in the way we (if there is still a we I can claim allegiance to) might find unhealthy but I’m sure she finds healthy and pure. Her lips are stuck together in the corners but parted slightly in the middle, a tiny hole for gentle breathing, vulnerable. She breathes in the air I breathe out. Can she not feel my stares?

  My wife’s shower faucet squeaks closed. The metal rings slide along the rod. While she pats herself dry (I used to do it for her) I sink my head into the pillow, my nose just barely touching Megumi’s tangled hair. I breathe deeply.

  The girl bolts upright as though possessed and looks down on me with bulging eyes and her mouth opens but before she makes a sound I put one finger to her lips—so soft—then point to the door, meaning my wife is still here, getting ready for work.

  I sit up, and she whispers to me. “What are you doing here?”

  I whisper back. “What are you doing here?”

  She looks into my eyes, dumbfounded. “You were missing,” she whispers.

  “I’m right here.”

  Silke’s high heels click down the hallway. She knocks on my door. “Thomas, are you awake?”

  I find my full voice. “Yes,” I say to the door, “I’m awake.”

  “I’m sorry about last night. I’m not sure what to say, just that I’m sorry. Can you forgive me?”

  “Of course,” I say, looking at the girl’s red mouth, “I forgive you.” The girl puts her hand on my leg. A tiny bit of her weight is transferred to me.

  “I’ve been patient, haven’t I? I’ve tried to help you,” Silke says. “Have I ever blamed you?”

  What have these three years done to her beauty? Her green eyes that used to glow so bright, have they gone dark and sallow? Were she to put her head on my lap, would I find stress wrinkling through her face, would I find gray strands among the gold?

  My heart is beginning to swell with uncontrollable, directionless, aimless emotion. I fight it, I squeeze it dry, but it always swells up again, heavy, sodden. I wish the girl weren’t here to witness this.

  When Silke leaves for work the air clears, the pressure dissipates, but the aftertaste lingers. I make Megumi a cup of microwave coffee, then one for myself. She gulps it down. “I was so worried about you,” she says. “Where were you?”

  “Pork chops, right? I smelled them when I sneaked in.”

  “She said you were supposed to come out for dinner.”

  “It must’ve been pretty bad last night. She never apologizes.”

  She searches for clues in my face, something to tell her what is appropriate and what is not. “It’s okay,” I say, “you can be honest.”

  She nods her head, her look says it all. I take a sip. My coffee is not as good as Silke’s. “I got on a bus,” I say. “I rode it back and forth, all night, until I was sure she was asleep.”

  She pets my beard. “How long has it been since when you shaved?”

  “I have no idea. Months and months. A year? Over a year.”

  Her fingertips worm through my hair and land on my cheeks. She squeezes. “I wonder what you look like under there,” she says.

  “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  She lets go. “You should let me find out for myself.”

  In the distance a siren wails. My left arm quivers. I hide it under my back. Ambulances stalk the city, picking up and dropping off. Now another siren joins in, syncopated whoops and chirps, fighting selfish traffic, fighting time.

  “Come on,” she says, “let’s shave it off.” She pulls me up by my hands. Our faces are close. Her dark scent. From behind, with her hands on my hips, she steers me to the bathroom.

  I stand facing the mirror and she moves left and right in the cramped space, searching for the perfect angle. First, with my orange-handled scissors, she snips away the farthest reaches of my beard. Squiggles float to the floor. “Take off your shirt,” she says, but she doesn’t wait for me, she pulls it up herself. I reach for the sky.

  In the mirror my chest is pale under the bare incandescent light. Not much hair. I used to have more muscle. They have gone a little slack. The contours are subtle now, just enough to remind me what I was. What I could be.

  “Have you done this before?” I ask.

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  She snips. I suck some squiggles up my nose. It tickles. I sneeze. “Hold still,” she says with a smile. “Lean forward,” she says, “I’m not that tall.” To maintain the position I must brace myself against the sink. “More,” she says. The squiggles fall softly, like snow. The scissors open and close with a metallic bite. “You’re beginning to take shape,” she says. The soft underside of her arm brushes my shoulder, barely a whisper, but my entire body feels it. I get goose bumps. She goes on cutting.

  When she is finished trimming she holds a hot, wet towel against my face. Through the towel she massages my cheeks and jaw and forehead. Drops of warm water slide down my chest and disappear into my pants. “Don’t you already feel fresher?” she asks.

  She pats my cheeks with shaving cream. “It’s not foam,” I say. “You don’t need quite so much.”

  “It’s the good stuff.”

  “The good stuff? Where do you learn those expressions?”

  “I pick them up. I’m always paying some attention.” She finishes applying the cream. “Now it’s like you have a whole new beard. A snow beard. Maybe this is how you’ll look when you’re old. Like Santa. Did your father have white hair?”

  “My father died before he could go gray.”

  She tells me I need to hold still. “I don’t want to cut your juggler.”

  “Jugular.”

  “Just hold still. Did I put on too much cream?”

  “Way too much.”

  “Hold still.” She finds the proper angle. She presses the razor to my cheek, up high by the bone. She pulls it down to my jaw. A vertical tract of clear skin surrounded by white. Too much cream. She rinses the blade in the running water. Some of the hairs stick to the porcelain, others plunge down the drain. Blobs of cream stick. Slowly they erode, lose their grip, and slide down the porcelain into the hole.

  Again she sets the razor and pulls. “This is fun,” she says. “Are you nervous?”

  “Cheeks are the easy part.” She sets, she pulls, deliberate and precise. Between my legs it begins to stir. I need a different thought to suppress it. In mi
ddle school I’d think about dead cats, piles and piles of dead cats. Worked every time. “Your brother died because he wouldn’t accept Japanese blood?”

  She rinses the blade and for a few seconds stares into the sink. “No, he died because they forced it into him.”

  “It was tainted?”

  She lines up the next swipe at my face. Her black eyes are complete concentration. I feel as though I am a lump of clay being carved into a sculpture. “Tainted?” she says. “He would’ve said so. But not like a disease like AIDS. Tainted because it was Japanese. See, my mom isn’t Japanese, she’s Korean.” She flips the razor upside down and starts on my neck. “The thing about Japan is that . . . how do I say it? If an American says he’s American, he’s talking about the country. About the constitution and the flag and all the amendments. And the founding fathers. But with the Japanese—” She stops to guide the razor up my neck. “If a Japanese says he’s Japanese, he’s talking more about his blood than the government or the flag. America is values. If you agree to the values and take the tests then you can become American. But in Japan it’s not so simple. We have all sorts of labels to describe what kind of Japanese person you are or aren’t. Depending on where you were born or who your parents are. Am I explaining this right? Sometimes Americans take it the wrong way. It’s all very complicated. I don’t even think I could explain it in Japanese.”

  With a towel she polishes away the mirror’s coat of steam. “The other kids, even the parents,” she says, “never let us forget we were part Korean. It got pretty bad sometimes.”

  “What’s wrong with Korea?”

  “Nothing. But that’s not the point.”

  “So he wanted to be Korean and not Japanese?”

  “It’s not that, either. He thought of himself as totally Japanese. I do, too. But it was like he wasn’t being allowed to be who he felt he was. Not that everyone was mean. Most weren’t. But you only pay attention to the mean ones.”

  “Wasn’t it the same for you?”

  “He took it harder. We’re different. None of that stuff really bothers me. Then again, I wasn’t the one who kept getting beaten up because of it. I can’t tell you everything that was going on in his head. If I knew maybe I could’ve done something.”

  My Adam’s apple gives her trouble. She uses short strokes. She tells me to hold my breath. I feel even more like a nascent sculpture, crawling into life from a vacuum. Is this girl my god? Shall I worship her?

  She begins on the other cheek. “He didn’t want any more Japanese blood,” she says, “but they gave it to him anyway. I’m not saying it made sense. I guess it did to him.” Tears in her eyes glisten. She wipes them away.

  “I’m sorry. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want.”

  Again she rubs away the steam. She pulls the razor across my cheek and even with all that cream it sounds like sandpaper. “He had been back from the hospital for three days. By the time I got home from school that afternoon the men in yellow jumpsuits were cleaning it up. His body was gone. Mom was crying. Dad was staring out the window at a pine tree.” She holds my chin in her fingertips and turns my face left, then right, then left, then right. “When was the last time someone kissed your smooth cheek?”

  She slices away the last of my beard. “When they finally let me in his room, it was so strange. It was perfectly clean, like nothing happened. The yellow jumpsuits erased what he did. They erased my brother. Mom told me how she found him. He was naked in the middle of the floor. The whole floor was a pool of dark red. He finally drained out all that Japanese blood.”

  She massages my face again with a steaming towel. I close my eyes and plunge into the moment. Let it never end.

  “Thomas, you’re beautiful.” I roll my eyes in an exaggerated way: I can’t afford to let her know that I believe she means it. “Is it weird to say? I just mean that it’s a transformative.”

  “Transformation. And it’s not. It’s just a shave.”

  “But you’re a whole new person. I did good, didn’t I? Not even a scratch.”

  We lie next to each other on the bed. My shirt is back on. My face feels fresh. She might be right about me being a new person. “Do you talk to my wife?”

  “No, not really. Sometimes.”

  “She used to bring men to the apartment,” I say. The girl takes my hand. I can feel her pulse. If we held each other tight enough, would our beating hearts synchronize?

  “You heard them?”

  “She’d leave the door open.”

  “Did you ever go out there?”

  “And do what?”

  “She wants attention.”

  My wife must have expected that in my room Megumi’s and my feelings would tangle. Did she decide it was worth the risk? Is she confident that, whatever happens, she will win out in the end, or does she not care about any of that and just wants me to be out in the world again, even if it’s not with her?

  “Anything you want,” Megumi is saying. “I’ll go get it.” I harbor no specific cravings, or more precisely, I deny myself cravings that can only go unfulfilled.

  “Roast beef and Swiss,” I finally say, “Lettuce, tomato, onion, mayo. Lots of mayo. Salt and pepper. On a hero.”

  It’s ridiculous that while she is out getting lunch I am lonely, yet here I am at the window, shade pulled back, peeking down at the empty street, waiting, wasting no opportunity to catch a glimpse. I try the bed, but her absence, her lingering wake, consumes me. My gaze ricochets off the walls. Back at the window I stare into the distance. How far away is the sky?

  It’s even more ridiculous that a roast beef sandwich could reduce me to tears, yet here I am. Just my right eye, not my left. I can barely swallow.

  “What’s wrong?” she says when she gets back.

  I shake my head. We eat on the floor, our heros unwrapped, the white paper forming our placemats. We dump our chips into a pile. I drink a can of Coke. She drinks ginger ale. Between us are pickles. I imagine that we are sitting in the grass, on the bank of a slow river.

  “I know what you’re doing,” I say. “Do you really think a sandwich will make me long for the world?”

  “I just thought you might want some lunch.” She tries a bite of my roast beef. I try a bite of her ham and egg and tomato. “It’s really warm out today,” she says. “Like spring. I wish you could’ve come with me. It’d be fun to walk together.”

  The afternoon unwinds. The window burns golden. She runs her fingers across my new face and says my skin is smooth. Her fingers are just as smooth. Smoother.

  “I told you about my brother. Tell me about your son.”

  “I killed him.” Looking into the mirror after she shaved me was like rummaging through the dark corner of a forgotten drawer and discovering an old photograph.

  “You didn’t. If you killed him, you’d be in jail.”

  “What do you think this is?”

  She sits on the bed. I lie with my head on her lap. With her fingertips she inspects my hair and ear and neck. I don’t mind. The late afternoon sun has sunk and shines directly through the window, casting a wide beam of light across the wood floor, a beam of brilliance that suddenly appears and disappears with the stray passing of clouds.

  I am falling, no doubt, the ground beneath me has crumbled away and I am swallowed into the blackness, and nothing’s left for me but to fall, to feel the wind in my face, to resign myself to the depths, and I wonder if there ever really was any solid ground beneath my feet, or if I was perched on the tiny tip of a thousand-foot needle, balancing way up high, appearing still and solid and steady, but constantly contracting my muscles in perfect orchestration to keep my balance, lest the slightest breeze knock me over. The girl sent me falling. I reach out, but my arms are mercilessly short and there is nothing to grab to break my plunge, only the air itself, slipping through my fingers as I squeeze. But at this moment, I have nothing to fear. At this exact moment I am not so much falling as floating—so long is the shaft through which I
descend—the wind through my hair, my stomach queasy, bobbing in a void. How long since I last felt so free? My muscles need not contract endlessly now, I can finally relax. I hope I land in some soft place, or even better that I never land, that this falling becomes my new state of being.

  “My neighbor Morris’s son was teaching my son how to draw pictures on the sidewalk with colored chalk. Houses and trees and the sun and dinosaurs. I sipped Silke’s coffee out of a mug we bought in Paris. She was supposed to come down when she was off the phone. It’s funny the things you remember. I had one shoelace untied. I was wearing these old ratty sneakers—cross-country racers, actually—leftovers from college. They fit like slippers. I know for sure one was untied but I can’t remember which one, and when I imagine it in my mind and look down at my shoes, sometimes I see the left one untied, and sometimes the right one. Anyway, then we heard a cardinal up in the maple tree. I heard a cardinal but Morris heard only a bird. What’s that, he said. A bird, I said. No shit, he said, what kind of bird? Don’t swear in front of my kid, I said, and it’s a cardinal. We peered into the leaves, trying to find the bird, and finally there she was, a gray female cardinal, singing away on a Saturday morning. Then, such a sickening noise, the screech of rubber against pavement. So loud, so close. A woman screamed. And just like that it was over, no sounds of any kind, no song, no screech, no scream. A frozen moment.”