Real World (5 page)

Boku-chan wound up spending a total of twenty-five days basically wandering around Tokyo. She hated getting all smelly sleeping on the streets, so the last half of her stay she slept over at Dahmer’s, which made their relationship go from bad to worse. The reason being that Boku-chan was a slovenly “guy”—and she was also an impolite country hick. She’d sleep past noon, eat whatever she could find in Dahmer’s fridge, leave the room a mess, and borrow Dahmer’s clothes without asking. When she took a shower, she’d just leave it running forever and forget to put away the shampoo and soap. Dahmer typically did the cleaning and washing for her mom, as well as shopping for dinner, and she hit the roof. I think also, like me, she felt vaguely irritated and sad knowing that when this summer vacation was over, so was her childhood. We sat at the counter, sipping our beer and listening to Tracy Chapman singing “Fast Car.” The owner liked the song but I thought it sucked.
“Man—this isn’t what I expected when I said I’m going home,” Boku-chan finally complained, but Dahmer and I kept quiet. We had long since gotten sick of this idiot.
“Next time I come I’m not getting in touch with you guys.”
“Fine by me,” Dahmer said, and glanced at her watch. “Almost time for the last train. I’m out of here.”
Surprised, I looked up. Dahmer usually stayed out all night and took the first morning train home, but on this last night together she was acting cold. She whipped out her purse and paid. Her hair hung down on her forehead, but through it, her eyes were gloomy and grown-up-looking. Boku-chan shot Dahmer a quick glance and said, all smart-alecky, “Hey, Dahmer—guess you want to go back to being a straight-arrow high school student? No big deal, huh?”
“You got that right,” Dahmer said lightly, and looked at me. “You want to, too, right?” Yep, I do, my look told her. And that was my honest intention. If I could be a self-respecting high school student again, then yes, that’s what I wanted to be. But I knew that none of us could ever be an ordinary serious student again. Because we were girls who liked other girls. Boku-chan sat there, silent, toying with a box of Salem Lights.
“Well, Boku-chan. See ya. It was fun.” Dahmer beamed at her and waved good-bye. Her slim white arm was girlish, and I watched it sadly.
“How cold can you get,” Boku-chan grumbled, and, pushing off from the counter with both hands like some old guy, stood up. “I’m going out to drink by myself. Just can’t take it otherwise.”
I didn’t feel like chasing after either of them, so I just sat at the counter. The owner stood there, unconcerned, a cigarette dangling from her lips as she scanned the jacket of a bossa nova CD. I waited until the trains weren’t running anymore and left. This is the last time, I thought. I planned to walk all the way home from Shinjuku to my house, which was in Soshigaya in Setagaya-ku. I decided this would be the last time during summer vacation I’d come home at dawn and make my dad go ballistic. I still felt sorry for my old man for losing his wife, and I was trying my best to live up to his expectations. I felt relieved to have a made a friend like Dahmer, but having spent time with a trashy girl like Boku-chan made me disappointed in the whole 2-chome scene. As I left the bar I felt I’d moved on in life, and then I felt both lonely and a bit proud of myself. I walked down the stairs and was heading down an alley when this huge woman abruptly stepped out from the shadows.
“Hey, you! C’mere.”
It was a man’s deep voice with a Kansai accent. He had on a black camisole and a formfitting tight white skirt. He had on ridiculously high silver mule sandals, and this made his whole body lean forward. His panty line was visible on his skirt. He had an oversize squarish butt, and a jet-black head of hair that was obviously a wig. Only his nails were gorgeous, painted with a green design. Overall he was a shabby, cheap transvestite. If you wonder why I remember all these details so clearly it’s because the guy grabbed me by the sleeve of my T-shirt and wouldn’t let me go, so I had time to take it all in.
“Whatya want?” I asked.
“You’re kind of obnoxious, aren’t ya?”
He smacked me next to my ear with a clenched fist, and my left ear went deaf. I started to fall to the ground but the transvestite held on tightly to my T-shirt and wouldn’t let me fall as he continued to pound me.
“What’re ya thinking, coming to a man’s part of town like this? You’re a woman, pretending to be some cool-looking guy, but you’re the type who gives us a bad name. If you want a woman, leave it up to a man. You’re an idiot. Just plain dumb. So it’s okay for a guy to rough you up, don’t ya think?”
The transvestite roughly grabbed my breast. No guy had ever touched me there before and it was a total shock.
“You got a pair like this yet you try to act like a guy. What a jerk! Bet you wish you had a cock, huh? You’re worse than our crap. So go ’head and try some.”
He pushed me onto a pile of garbage. My nose was bleeding, so I couldn’t smell anything. The owner of Bettina heard the commotion and ran out to help me. I was bleeding a lot, but not really hurt, and she thought she couldn’t just leave me, since I was just a high school student, so she put me in a taxi. I was conscious but covered in dirt and blood as I stumbled into my house. My face was swollen for a while and I didn’t go to school the first week of the second semester. When he saw me all beaten up, my father was dumbfounded, and was scared I’d been raped. He asked if somebody had done something to me. As I listened to his worried footsteps pacing around the house, I lay on the floor and laughed. It was something much worse than rape, Dad, what happened to your daughter. You have
no idea.
I’ve never told anybody about this. I couldn’t tell Toshi or Kirarin, or even Terauchi. Not even Boku-chan or Dahmer. I don’t know why. I never set foot in the 2-chome district again. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of the place itself, but I was afraid of the creatures who masqueraded as people. And I became afraid of myself for stirring up such hatred in others. I knew I liked girls and couldn’t figure out who I was, yet that transvestite, grabbing my breasts, made me realize I’m also a woman. That summer I totally lost my confidence. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t such a shock when Dahmer suddenly disappeared.

* * *

It was exactly eleven when I got home. Dad was waiting outside for me, looking unhappy. He had on a loose-fitting green T-shirt, chino shorts, and Nike sandals, and was smoking. My old man is a freelance photographer. When Mom was still alive he was hardly ever at home, always out “on location,” or so he said. But after she died he announced that he would work at his Tokyo studio. He didn’t go out drinking so much, and never came home later than eleven. His income went down, which he complained about. To me this was a pain. I just wanted him to leave me alone, but ever since I got beat up he couldn’t tell the difference between keeping an eye on me and standing guard.
“Hey, where’s your bike?”
“I lent it to Toshi.”
“How come?’
“Hers got stolen. It’s just for the summer, so she can go to her cram school.”
I slipped past him and went inside. Our Maltese, Teddy, ran over and started jumping on my legs. Teddy, my mom’s dog, is our family treasure. I picked him up and started to go upstairs. I didn’t see Grandpa and Grandma. They must have gone to sleep a long time before. Or maybe they were holding their breath, monitoring the conversation between me and Dad. Since they’re my mom’s parents they don’t really care much about Dad. Their hopes and sympathies are all directed at me. Which is a royal pain, too, and kind of disgusting. Every night I said a little prayer that they might die soon.
“Toshi’s the one who lives next door to the boy who killed his mother, right? You know him, don’t you?”
Dad was obviously curious. He was the kind of guy who followed the news closely and picked up on things. I hated that, too.
“Nah, I don’t know him.”
“What do you mean, ‘Nah, I don’t know him’? That’s how you should talk to your father? I really don’t like the way young people talk these days.”
“Sorry…”
I knew that if this went on too long, Dad would blow a fuse, so I meekly apologized. I also wanted to talk to Worm while he was taking a break.
Resignedly, Dad said, “Go to bed soon.”
“Um.”
I went upstairs, put Teddy down, went into my room, and locked the door. I listened and heard Dad go into his bedroom. I lay down on my bed and took out my cell phone. Worm picked up after one ring.
“Hello. It’s me.”
Worm breathed a sigh of relief.
“Are you still at the convenience store?”
“No, I stood out too much. I’m lying in the parking lot out in back. I can see tons of stars.”
“Are you tired?”
“Um,” he said, sounding like a child.
“Text messaging’s pretty convenient, isn’t it?”
Worm had never had a cell phone up till now.
“Yeah, it sure is,” he agreed, and stopped. “But this one’s an old model and you can only send a hundred and twenty-eight letters at a time.”
“Yeah, guess so.”
Which is why the phone was cheap. I was a little annoyed, though Worm didn’t seem to pick up on this.
“It’s okay, you’re the only one I’m gonna text.”
“But you talked to Kirarin, too, didn’t ya?”
“Who’s that?”
“One of my pals. She’s totally hot.”
“Really,” Worm said, not terribly interested.
“Going to Tachikawa and back in one day made me worn out. Good exercise, though.”
I’d gone out to Tachikawa to meet up with Worm, then pedaled all the way over to Suginami to Toshi’s, an incredible distance.
It was kind of a snide remark, but Worm didn’t seem to care. Instead, he asked, “Hey, tell me something. How come you talk like a guy? I thought it was weird when we talked on the phone yesterday. But when I met you today, you’re kind of cute—although you dress like a guy. What’s up with that?”
This was out of the blue, and I didn’t know what to say. I never really thought about why. I went to a girls’ school and was told I was kind of mannish, so as a kind of gag I started talking like a guy and then it became natural. Dahmer and Boku-chan also always used the rough word
ore
for “I,” and I think it’s the first-person pronoun that fits best. When I’m thinking about something or feeling something inside of me, I use the feminine word
atashi,
but someday I’m sure this will change to
ore,
too. Worm’s pointed question made me remember that incident—the one when the transvestite grabbed my chest, yelled at me, and roughed me up. This curbed the secret feeling of closeness I was starting to have for him. So he’s a guy, after all. The kind who hates women dressed as guys, who denounces them. Did that make him my enemy? I sullenly stayed quiet, but Worm went on.
“A while ago I saw the evening paper at the convenience store. An article about me. I wanted to see, like, what the world’s thinking about it. It didn’t seem real. It was like I was dreaming. I looked up and there on the TV was the front of my house and some reporter babbling away. ‘What sort of ominous thing dwells in this suburban neighborhood? What happened to this boy who’s disappeared? Is the same darkness in this boy hidden in this seemingly quiet neighborhood?’ It felt so weird.”
“D’ya feel like you wanna go back to the real world?”
“I can’t,” Worm said coolly. “This is my reality now.”
“So why’d you make a reality like that happen? It’s you who made things that way, right?”
I was a little irritated. I suffered more than anyone else because my mom died, and because I’m gay—but I wasn’t responsible for these things. And now here was this guy who, just the day before, had created a new reality, one where he’d killed his mother.
“I don’t know.”
Worm didn’t want to talk about it. Just like when I’d met him.
“I’d like you to pull yourself together and tell me about it.”
“Why? Why do I have to tell somebody else? It’s personal,” he said.
“I want to know.”
“How come?”
“I want to believe that if I’d been you, I’d have killed her, too.”
Worm didn’t say anything. Silence continued for a long time. I looked at the windowpane, the curtain still open. My blank face, cell phone pressed against it, was reflected in the glass. The glass was perfect, not a scratch on it.

* * *

The first time Worm called my cell phone was after dinner, when my dad and I were in the middle of a fight. Dad was so upset he could barely speak, all because I told him I wasn’t going to take the college entrance exams.
“Then what do you plan to do with your life?”
How should I know? If I had to give a quick answer, all I could think of was working behind the counter of the Bettina, or else learning to be a transvestite. If I said that, my father would definitely cry. Dad’s proud of working in the media, but he’s actually a boring guy who’s pretty conservative.
“So you’re going to be like Winnie the Pooh, huh? Knock it off!” He was really pissed. “It might sound good right now, but what about later? Stop acting like a baby.”
I wasn’t acting like a baby. I really didn’t have a clue what I should do. After I went into high school and my sexual orientation became clearer to me, I was faced with two choices: either deceive everybody, or come out of the closet. But I still hadn’t decided which route to take, and so I had no energy to think about college. Those were the times when I was glad Mom wasn’t alive anymore. I didn’t say anything and Dad started in with one of his sermons. Grandma brought out some peaches she’d peeled and stealthily crept back to her room. I could sense that Dad was choosing his words carefully, aware that my grandparents were eavesdropping.
“If you don’t go to college, you’ll regret it. I’ve known a lot of young people who didn’t go, so I know what I’m talking about. Once they go out into the world they finally realize how blessed they’d been and regret having thrown away the chance. The girl who’s my assistant is like that. She told me she doesn’t know why she didn’t go to the photography department at the Japan Academy of Arts. She failed the exam once and never took it again. But I admire her. She got a job and is doing her best. She’s found her own path in life, wanting to be a photographer. You don’t even have that. You haven’t gone out in the world. Once you do, you’ll be sorry you didn’t take this opportunity. But then it’ll be too late.”
It’s not too late. I’m already out in what you call
the world.
A world of emotions that’s different from what my old man’s talking about. I wanted to tell him this, but that would mean revealing I was gay, and I wasn’t ready for that. Irritated, all I could do was pretend to sulk.
“Anyway, you like the arts, so you should go somewhere where you can study that field.”
“It’s too late,” I said, attempting a compromise. Saying it was too late was my way of buying time. I hated myself for it. Dad’s face suddenly lit up.
“It’s not too late! You can go to a cram school. I’ll find out which one’s good.”
From the next room my grandpa cleared his throat in relief. It wasn’t easy living there. After Mom died, even if Dad had wanted to move out and be free, he couldn’t. He has a twenty-year mortgage and had built a house for two families to live in. Even if Grandpa and Grandma passed away, the land would most likely go to the immediate heir: me. If it came to that, I might kick Dad out, a thought that made me feel a whole lot better. Just then my cell phone rang from in the pocket of my shorts and my father pointed to it.
“Your cell phone’s ringing.”
The screen said the caller was Toshi.
“It’s from Toshi.”
Looking somewhat tired and unhappy, Dad reached for his cigarettes. He seemed relieved it wasn’t a guy.
“Hey. What’s up?”
“Sorry to bother you.”
I was surprised to find it
was
a guy. Phone pressed to my ear, I slowly eased my way upstairs. Downstairs, my grandparents had come out and I could hear Dad explaining things to them. “Senior year in high school is a tough age,” he was saying. “Hard to tell if they’re adults or still kids.”
“Who the heck are you?” I asked the guy on the phone. “And what’re you doing with Toshi’s phone?” I waited until I was safely back in my room.
“You’re Kiyomi, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
Instinctively, I knew the guy had picked up Toshi’s phone somewhere and was randomly dialing all the girls’ names on it. My voice is so low hardly anyone ever guesses on the phone that I’m a girl. Besides, the name Kiyomi could work for either guys or girls. The guy apologized weakly and was about to hang up.
“Hold on a sec, pal,” I said. “I’m a girl. But how’d ya get hold of that phone?”
“I found it and thought I’d return it.”
I told him all he had to do was dial the number under Home. “Got it,” he said, and then said this: “Hey—if you’re a girl how come you talk all rough like that?”
This pissed me off, so I asked him, “How the hell old are ya?”
“Seventeen. I’m a senior in high school.”
“You’re a real loser, you know that?”
I was just about to hang up when he said this:
“I, ah—killed my mother today.”
I thought this was a great joke, so I played along.
“Yeah? I killed my mom three years ago.”
This wasn’t a lie. I might not have done it with my own hands, but inside it felt like I had.