A Tale for the Time Being (47 page)

Fine. Whatever.

That was yesterday.

She flounced away and I kept on writing, watching her out of the corner of my eye. She started talking to a customer at one of the nearby tables, and the guy turned around to look at me, and I
couldn’t believe it, but it was that creepy hentai I mentioned at the beginning. The one with the greasy hair and the bad complexion who liked to watch me pull up my socks? He’s a
regular, but he seemed like just a peeper, and not like the type who would actually have enough cash to pay for a date. Babette was doing a real sales job on him now, which actually I found kind of
insulting if you want to know the truth. I mean, I’m a fairly adorable sixteen-year-old girl in a school uniform. You’d think he would be happy to be given the chance to date me, right?
Finally he took out his wallet and handed Babette some money. Babette folded up the bills and tucked the roll between her tits and then glanced over at me.

“Date,” she mouthed.

Sighing, I closed my diary and followed her out into the coatroom, where she fished out the thin wad of cash, peeled off a few bills, and handed them to me.

I looked at her, surprised.

She shrugged. “Ryu spoiled you,” she said. “It’s time you got realistic.”

“I’m not doing it for this!” I said, handing back the bills. “I have some self-respect, you know.”

Her smile spread, slow and dangerous, across her cute doll face. She backed me up against the wall of coats and grabbed me by the chin, digging her knuckle deep into the soft part where the
jawbone makes a vee, just above the throat. I gagged on the pain, which was sick-making.

“That’s amusing,” she said. “People like you don’t deserve to have self-respect. So you better get over it.”

She took my cheeks in both hands and pinched so hard that my eyes filled with tears. She pulled me toward her until my forehead was almost touching hers, and her two eyes became one, a single
hideous eye, dark and glittering, surrounded by ruffles and lace.

“You’re lucky I’m generous and sharing with you at all,” she said. “The trouble with you is that you’re too American. You’re lazy and selfish. You
should learn to be loyal and work hard.” She gave my face one last hard shake and released me.

I fell back against the coats and slumped down the wall. She cocked her head and looked me over, and then she reached down and stroked my burning cheek.

“So pink,” she said. “So pretty.” And then she slapped me. She located my date’s coat and threw it at me. “Have fun,” she said, pivoting so neatly that
her petticoats lifted, and from where I was sitting on the floor I could see the frill of her panties as she flounced out the door.

I don’t remember the hentai’s name. Maybe I never knew it. He was waiting for me in the reception area by the nude lady in the fountain. I handed him his coat. He took it and
didn’t even look me in the eye. He mumbled something that I didn’t quite catch and walked out, expecting me to follow. The tiny elevator was empty, and we stood there awkwardly,
watching the doors close, not knowing what to say or how to make conversation. A few floors down, the doors opened again and a big, happy party pushed in, laughing and drunk, and suddenly I was
jammed up against him. I could feel his sour breath on the back of my neck as he groped underneath my skirt, pushing against me from behind. I wanted to scream,
CHIKAN!
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like you’re supposed to do on the subway when some perv starts fondling you, but I stopped myself. He’d paid, after all, and if he wanted to get a
head start, what could I say? When the elevator doors opened and everyone got out, he held his overcoat in front of his pants and stumbled down the street, glancing back every couple of steps to
make sure I was still following. I could have slipped away, but I didn’t. I just followed because he’d paid, and that was the honorable thing to do. I couldn’t believe how
pathetic he was, but I had no self-respect, so it didn’t matter. He had no social skills to speak of. He didn’t offer to buy me a cute sweater or a keitai. He didn’t offer me a
drink, and the kind of hotel he took me to didn’t even have a minibar. There was no champagne, no brandy, just a vending machine in the hall with cans of beer and One Cup Saké. One Cup
Saké reminded me of my dad because that’s what he’d been drinking the night he fell onto the tracks in front of the Chuo Rapid Express. It was totally depressing, but my
so-called date was too cheap to buy me one, anyway.

If you don’t mind, I’d rather not go into a lot of detail about what happened next because just thinking about it makes me feel sad and sick, and I haven’t even had time to
take a bath yet. Let’s just say that the bed wasn’t round and it didn’t have a zebra-skin cover, but the rest of my imagining was pretty accurate. When we got to the room, he
didn’t waste any time, and while he did things to my body, I just went to the silent frozen place in my mind that was clean and cold and very far away.

And really I don’t remember very much, only that partway through, I was lying on my stomach when my keitai started to ring, and I drifted back to this world just enough to wonder who was
phoning me. I thought maybe it was Jiko, and the tears started leaking out of my eyes because I knew how sad she would feel if she could see me now, and I missed her and wanted to talk to her so
badly. Then the thought occurred to me that maybe she knew I was in trouble, and that’s why she was calling, and maybe right now she was clicking her juzu beads and saying prayers for my
well-being. And maybe the sound of the phone ringing actually did save me, because thinking of Jiko made me realize that I didn’t want to end up being one of those girls who the police have
to find on the floor days later, because that would break her heart, and if you live to be a hundred and four, you don’t deserve to have your heart broken by your careless
great-granddaughter. And just at that moment, my date did something that hurt so much, the pain shocked me back into my body, and I heard myself cry out, and then I reacted. I pushed him off me
long enough to twist out from under. Ryu had taught me how sometimes men enjoy a little ijime, so I summoned up my superpower and pushed the hentai down onto his back, and then I straddled him and
started smacking him hard across the face. And wouldn’t you know it, he was delighted. I used his belt to tie his wrists together, and I didn’t even have to hurt him too much to get him
off. It’s amazing how quickly a man can turn from a sado into a maso. I know what old Jiko would say. Sado, maso, same thing.

As soon as he fell asleep, I got up and checked my phone, and sure enough, the call was from her. She knew and she had saved me! But when I read the text message, I saw that it wasn’t from
Jiko, after all. It was from Muji. Just one line. I read it, but I couldn’t take in the meaning. I read it again.

.
.
¹⁴⁹

I stood there in the middle of the tacky mirrored room, staring at the little screen. My so-called date was snoring on the bed. I looked up and caught sight of a naked girl in the mirrors,
endlessly reflecting. Her body was raw-looking, gawky and awkward. I hugged myself and the girl did, too. I started to cry and we couldn’t stop. I turned away from her and quietly gathered up
my school uniform and put it on. I tiptoed over to the pile of clothes belonging to my date and quickly went through his pockets. I emptied his wallet and took the last remaining bills. I bundled
his clothes up into a ball and forced myself to stop crying long enough to turn the doorknob. As I slipped out of the room and the door clicked behind me, I heard him call. I started to run. I
pictured him frantically searching for his clothes, so I dumped them in the stairwell at the end of the hallway. I could have taken them with me and thrown them on the street, but I didn’t
need to. I guess I’m a nice person at heart.

When I got outside, I kept running, cutting through the crowded narrow alleys of Electricity Town. Akiba at dusk is really something, a huge, strobing hallucination of neon lights and giant
manga action heroes that loom down at you like they’re going to crush your head. And then there’s the noise, the crazy jangle of the pachinko parlors and game arcades, and the screaming
hawkers and kyakuhiki
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calling out to the drunken salarymen and tourists and otaku who merge and swell like plankton in the sea.

Usually I love it. Usually I feed off all that energy, but you have to be in the right mood, and I wasn’t. I pushed through the crowds, keeping my face down to hide the tears. All I wanted
was to get home to my dad. I needed my dad. I needed to tell him that Jiko was dying, so he would drop everything and take me to the station, and together we would catch the next express train
bound for Sendai, and since it was night and the buses wouldn’t be running, we could take a taxi all the way from the station up to the temple. We could be there in no time at all. Maybe five
or six hours. And when we arrived, everything would be peaceful and quiet, and Muji would come running out to greet us and tell us that Jiko was fine, and it was all just a false alarm, and she was
so sorry for calling us and disturbing us for no reason, but now that we were here, would we like to have a bath?

This was what I wanted. To find my dad, to know Jiko was fine, and to take a bath. I concentrated on these thoughts on the train, all the way to my stop, keeping my head down and wiping my nose
with the cuff of my uniform sleeve.

The apartment was quiet when I got home.

“Tadaima,” I said softly. My voice sounded hoarse from all the crying.

There was no answer, which was not unusual if my dad was on the Internet and couldn’t hear me. I wondered if my mom was still at work. Had Muji phoned them? Maybe they’d already left
for Sendai without me.

“Dad?”

I heard the toilet flush, and then a shaft of light cut across the darkened hallway as the washroom door opened. I took off my shoes and stepped up into the entryway. There was a shopping bag
from the local supermarket on the floor, in the place where we put things we don’t want to forget. I opened the bag and looked inside, and then I closed it and walked toward the light.

I found him in the bedroom, dressed in his dark blue suit, neatly shaved and putting on his socks.

“Dad?”

His bony feet looked sickly white. He looked up. “Oh,” he said. “Naoko. I didn’t hear you come in.”

He was looking right through me, and his voice was flat and lifeless. He bent down to adjust the sock. “You’re home early,” he said. “You’re not going out with your
school friends tonight?”

Wow. He still believed I had school friends. That shows you how clueless he was. I watched him from the doorway. There was something strange about him, even stranger than usual, like he had
turned into a zombie.

“Where’s Mom?” I asked.

“Zangyo,”
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he said. He stood and straightened out his trousers.

“Are you going out or something?”

“Yes,” he said, sounding a little surprised. He was even wearing a tie. It was the tie I bought for him that first Christmas, when he was still pretending to have a job. It
wasn’t silk, but it had a nice butterfly pattern on it.

“Where are you going?”

“To meet a friend,” he said. “Someone from my university days. We’re going to have a drink for old times’ sake. I won’t be long.” He spoke the words
like he’d written them down and memorized them. Did he really think I’d believe that?

Zombie Dad was putting on his suit jacket.

“Did anybody call?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No.” He put his wallet in his suit pocket, and then he paused and frowned. “Why? Were you expecting someone?”

It figured. Muji was such a space case, and besides, she knew he never answered the phone.

“No, I just wondered.” I studied him as he stood there. He looked okay in his suit. It was a cheap, ugly suit, but it was better than the dirty old trainer he wore in the house.

I followed him out into the hallway and watched as he used the shoehorn to slide his heel into his loafer.

“Don’t forget your bag,” I said.

He reached for it automatically, and then he froze. “What bag?” Pretending like he was confused. Like he didn’t know.