I Called Him Necktie (11 page)

Three rice balls. Tempura. Seaweed salad.

If Tsuyoshi were alive he would be thirty-one years old. A good age. He separated the chopsticks. An age when you can look back, and forward too. Would you like some?

I nodded.

Here, take a rice ball. Is it good?

Yes. It’s the best rice ball I’ve ever tasted.

He laughed, wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. Invisible tears. I wish I could sit with him like this and eat Kyōko’s bento together. I mean. Like with you. Don’t you think? He indicated with the chopsticks in one direction then another. In some way they are all here in the park. The man there with the young woman on his arm. That’s Hashimoto. The old woman with the walking stick who is limping behind them: His wife. The one with the book over there, pen in his mouth, is Kumamoto. In the shade of the tree, pulling her skirt over her knee: Yukiko. The man sitting by the fountain feeding the pigeons. He could be the teacher. All of them here. Under this sky. You only have to look.

If that’s so, I wanted to say, then I would like to be your son. But I didn’t say it. Instead I asked him a favor. There is something, I began.

What is it?

There is something you could do for me.

Well, tell me.

Please tell your wife the truth, this very evening, that you have lost your job. You owe her that. After all that has happened, all that has not happened.

I promise you, I will do it. And you, you promise me that you’ll cut your hair short, this very evening. I’ve waited long enough, not saying it, you look dreadful with that shaggy mane.

I laughed with him: Good, it’s agreed.

On Monday we won’t recognize each other.

Will you come?

Yes, of course.

And then?

A new beginning.

That afternoon I was the one who fell asleep. I fell asleep and dreamed: I was in my room. Cold sweat on my hands. I lay stretched out on my bed, a corpse. With all my strength I tried to move. Then I heard Father’s voice: Nothing to be done. The boy is dead. I wanted to call out: No, I’m alive! But I had no mouth. Above me was a mirror. I saw I had neither mouth nor eyes. With eyes I didn’t have, I saw that my face was a white wall. Mother’s voice: It’s too bad, about him. He never found his face. At this moment the curtains opened. A harsh light came
through the window and fell on the white wall, which was me, and suddenly in the mirror I saw the wall crumble, and then the four walls of my room crumbled away too. Wide open space all around me. Someone touched me. I ran after him. As I ran I got back my mouth and eyes. A stinging on my cheeks. I noticed I was crying. My tears were red threads, flowing down me. I have not forgotten, I cried, how to weep for you, my dear child.

When I awoke he was no longer there. Beside me, over the bench arm, hung his tie. I put it in my pocket and felt the material, warm silk. A new beginning, he said. I dragged myself through the park, over the intersection, past Fujimoto’s, home. My parents were standing looking worried in the doorway. There you are. Thank God. We were going to. But I was too tired to respond with anything more than my weary, thoughtless: Tadaima. I am home. My parents, with one voice: Okaerinasai. Welcome back.

This very evening. We had an agreement. I kept to it. With the scissors in my right hand, I cut strand by strand, until my head felt light and cool. Once cut, the hair all over the floor was no longer mine, and I thought, it would be the same for him. Once spoken, the burden of the truth would fall away and afterwards he would not be able to explain why he had put it off for so long. Like me he would stand in front of the mirror and find himself strange and familiar at the same time. He would think of me and say to himself: To cut your hair is to admit the truth.

Yet the familiar prevailed. The question: How should it continue? Our friendship was the larger space into which
I had stepped. I decorated its walls with pictures of the people we described to each other, and the thought that I might have to leave it, through a door leading I knew not where, to expose myself to the unknown, that thought hovered dangerously. I almost hoped he would postpone his confession again, turn up on Monday and imply silently that he had failed. It was a mean hope. I pushed it away. I spent the whole weekend pushing it into a corner. On Sunday evening there was only the feeble wish that I had taken the chance to tell him I wished I were his son.

Nine o’clock. That must be him. Short-sleeved shirt, Hawaiian pattern. He came towards me, his face strangely youthful. No, a mistake, it wasn’t him. That one there behind him though. Shoulders bent forward. Stealthy walk, as if he wanted to avoid someone. Yes, that was him. Then: No. And again: Yes. Then: No, it’s not. And: Wrong again. How could it be? Surely something must have detained him. A delay. Surely. He would be here any moment now. The figure by the bushes. Was that a man? Or a woman? Or a child? What if he? I waited. Eyes scanning. Surely it was a misunderstanding. So many people, they came and went. I hadn’t noticed them before. What if something happened to him? With every false sighting I discovered a reason for his absence. Once it was a headache, then it was the death of a distant relative, a summer flu, someone urgently needed his help. With the tie grasped between my two fingers I waited, it was no longer clear for whom.

Midday. In the park, bentos were being unpacked. Sitting scattered in little groups, eating, drinking, chatting. I thought of Kyōko and wondered whether, out of
habit, she had really gotten up at six o’clock even today. Or whether she had stayed in bed, had asked him not to go. Whether she knew about me. And whether she would come here to tell me the news if something had happened to him. The woman up there, that could be her. I had the impression she was looking for someone. I am here, I almost called out, but then I saw, she was already happily arm in arm. All at once I was ashamed I had ascribed such importance to myself. I turned up my collar. Who was I, to think that Kyōko must be looking for me? Who was I to think she must feel some obligation towards me? I watched her as she disappeared behind one of the trees. As they walked the salaryman beside her very gently laid his hand on her neck.

And there it was again. The feeling of being a nobody, or less than nobody, a nothing. It was a subconscious feeling. It shackled me and said: Run! I tried, struggled to and fro, moved not a millimeter. I shook with the effort it had taken to get this far. After Yukiko’s death it was this shaking, a constant tremor just beneath my skin, which reminded me inwardly and outwardly that despite all the striving, despite all the battles I fought to be normal, I was somehow different – because of this.

I hid it as best I could. So that no one should notice I was hiding it. And if it couldn’t be hidden, then I was the one who laughed the loudest, pointed it out and said: How funny! Usually I kept my hands in my pockets. Whenever my name was called they began to shake. Had I been caught? Had they found out? I, who pretended to have seen nothing, was particularly anxious not to be seen. And who is more invisible than he who conforms? With
my hands in my pockets I pretended to be someone, a person with a guileless expression. That was the pressure I was referring to. Not the tests, not the grades. The pressure consisted of having to act out my lack of expression. The struggle for credibility. The first space I retreated into was not my room in my parents’ house, but my smooth forehead. If the talk turned to Yukiko, the teachers mentioned her story, now and again, for the lesson it held, I buried my hands deeper still, walked, whistling casually, to the toilet, where I locked myself in and waited long minutes until the shaking had worn off. Taguchi, someone knocked on the door, what are you doing in there? I: You know what. Oh, ok, a snigger of recognition. Boy, you take a long time. I came out with a blank grin.

At home I avoided eating at the table with my parents, the trembling fork and trembling spoon beneath their gaze. So they probably didn’t notice, since I adopted certain strategies to force the shaking back down under my skin and to hold it hidden there until, alone once more, a relief, I let it reappear on the surface. I ate in my room more and more often. Neither Father nor Mother asked the reasons. You know how it is, they said, it’s a difficult age. Had they asked, I could have given them no better answer. Their understanding of my difficult age was the best excuse I could produce: Please excuse me, but I don’t feel like sitting with you. Please excuse me but I don’t care to explain why. Shaky stare. Of all people it was me whom I least wanted to observe.

But I saw myself.

I stood to the side and saw myself.

Wobbly camera.

I saw the impossible, the attempt to outwit myself. It was normal to have looked away, I told myself. The most normal thing in the world to have ignored Yukiko’s strangled Please help me! To have walked on at the moment when her gaze met mine, held it, and suddenly realized: He won’t help me. No help is to be expected from him. This disappointment, as I left her, for I had walked on, stopped two street corners further on with a cough, heard a gentle clap, as if something very delicate had been squashed, torn, crushed by something very coarse. And who wouldn’t have done the same? Then run away even faster? Who wouldn’t have done the same? That’s how I persuaded myself and realized how I believed myself, definitely wanted to believe myself, how the belief calmed me, the calm was a delusion. Forget Yukiko. You have already forgotten her once. I watched how I gave myself the appearance of having forgotten her. She was the black dot on a white surface. If you overlook it for long enough, it stops existing. Reality is variable, merely a marker for a changing quantity. You bend it to shape. Not a crime. It’s only a crime if you take the unbent reality as more real than reality, and defend it as such against your better judgment.

If only I had cried, just once. I watched myself not crying. Jaw firm. Swallow. Break something. Quick. The mirror there, broken. And again. Smash your fist into it. A reassuring pain, masking the real one. The one that is not there. Which you force yourself not to feel. Sweep up the fragments. And away with them. To know, to know better, that not crying is crying. And yet you do not cry. Firm up the jaw. Swallow.

There were others like me. Easy to recognize them. Difficult to recognize myself in them. I recognized them by their wayward gait. Red blotches on the neck when you spoke to them. Exaggerated cheerfulness. A tense representation of normality, by which they demonstrated their difference. I found them repulsive. All of them. I found they were dilettantes in their transparency, who threatened me and my struggle for credibility. One mistake on their part and it would require even greater effort to protect my false face. What connected us was also what divided us from one another. Each of us in our shell. At the slightest vibration we drew in our heads.

On my seventeenth birthday Father suggested driving together to the sea. Today we are driving to the sea, he said. Just you and me, father and son. That was his way of suggesting something. In the car we listened to old hits. Sake and women, went one, there is nothing more beautiful. Father sang along, while I stared silently out of the window. It felt to me as if we weren’t moving. It was the houses, the rice fields, the clouds that were moving, not us. The pale moon. A strip of blue beneath it. It came nearer. The sea.

Father took the lead, his shirt billowing like a sail. I trudged behind him along the beach. The roar of the waves. A seagull fought against the wind. Two rocks. Let’s rest here. It’s a long time since we sat together like this. The first time, I replied. Embarrassed throat clearing. As always happened. It feels good to be together like this. We should do it more often. Together like this. He took off his shoes, his socks, stuck his feet into the sand. We do it too rarely. He laughed. I recognized him by his thin voice.
I would have liked to pull his sleeve. To say to him: You don’t have to do that. Hide from me. Your sadness. You don’t have to laugh it away. He cleared his throat again, buried his toes deeper. You know, being grown up is not so bad after all. I mean. You have a goal and you are doing your best to get there. Keep your eye on it and aim for it step by step. If you stumble, pick yourself up again. In the end you’ll have reached it. The goal. You’ll look back and see how far you’ve come. Footprints in the sand. And you will be happy. All your doubts about the path you’ve taken will melt away. Do you understand? Yes, I nodded. Did you ever have doubts then? My question slipped out. Who? Me? He paused, his feet buried up to the ankles. No, what makes you think that? I’m just saying in general. What I want to say is. You must not allow yourself to be distracted. A gentle tap on the shoulder. It’s good talking together like this. Father knocked the sand off his feet, pulled on his socks, his shoes. We walked on. Broken shells, clattering stones. A boat on the horizon. Turned around, came home.

Strange. But the realization that Father was hiding something too, this realization comforted me, that he too, overwhelmed with shaking, had forced it under his skin. At least for a while. It was simply like that, as he said: You must have a goal. You must do your best. You must achieve it. To be happy at some point. Only a little jump was needed. Over to the safe side, over to those who don’t think too much, about how much it hurts to have betrayed others as well as oneself. I wanted to get there, made a run for it, was still running. Would have jumped, had not Kumamoto, the relay runner, passed me the baton of sincerity at the last moment. Admit it. Was that
what he shouted? Finally admit it, you suffer from the same illness. My Yes was the door closing behind me. Father’s despair. It came too late. When he stormed into the room bellowing and raised his hand against me, I had long been untouchable. He saw it, I am sure of it. In reality he was the one who shied away from me. He deliberately missed.

Pale evening sky.

The park began to empty. The lights went on. One more minute. Perhaps he would come now. Just then when I stood up. Happy! Stay here! A straining leash. Warm dog’s nose on my neck. Happy! Stop that! Happy! Come here! Happy! Be good! The Shiba did not obey. Again and again he jumped at me and licked my face. Rough tongue. He wagged his tail. I pushed him aside and stood up. Happy! Come! I heard him barking for a long time after I left our bench.