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Sometimes, when I'm staring down a room of Japanese stewardesses-in-training, looking across a sea of shiny black coifs , the chorus line of stockinged legs, knees together, toes to the side, when I'm chanting, "Sir, you are endangering yourself and other passengers!" for the umpteenth time, I think that I should have let my brother stab me. I shouldn't have run when Frank came at me with the carving knife, yelling "Satan! Satan!" I should have faced him, arms outstretched, eyes closed in sacrifice and let him put the blade into me.
~
I realised about a month ago that no matter what I do, Air-Pro Stewardess Training Institute will never fire me. So I've started to push the envelope. I stroll into the lobby in ski pants, a "Sex Machine Guns" tee shirt and ballet slippers. I still have my Louise Brooks style bob that everyone thinks is so cute, but I've dyed the tips robin's egg blue.
The staff scream "Ohayogoziamasu!" at me as the elevator doors open. I see them register my outfit, struggling to maintain their professional smiles, but shuddering, ever so slightly.
"Morning," I grunt, heading to the bathroom to change into my little blue suit.
Mikiko runs up behind me. "Margaret-san! O-genki desu ka? You look so funky. Like a rock star, ne? You are really, really nit-wit!"
"It's too early, Mikiko." She follows me into the bathroom. "Did you just call me a nit-wit?"
"My boyfriend Kevin always says I'm nit-wit. Like Meg Ryan. I love Meg Ryan. Do you love Meg Ryan?" Mikiko stares at me expectantly. She's a pretty girl with a bad overbite. Since her double eyelid surgery, she has the look of a startled animal. I expect one day she will pounce on me, tear at my jugular. I keep my distance.
"Yes. Love her. I'm going to get naked now." Mikiko just stands there, eyes popping, big white teeth tipped with hot pink lipstick, resting on her lower lip. "Privacy?" I say.
"Oh! Sorry! I have a good news. Today is starting a new recruit, Madoka-chan!" We call the students recruits, here at Air-Pro (or trolly-dolly bootcamp as I refer to it). Our slogan hails, "Air-pro. Putting young women in the air. Where they belong."
I struggle into my nylons and suit, scowl at my reflection in the mirror. I look like a slightly punkish women's prison warden, matronly and freakish. Sitting down on the terry-cloth-covered toilet seat, I light a smoke and take out my mobile phone. I listen to Frank's recorded message.
"Hello, Mags? This is Frank. I just wanted-your brother, Frank. I really wanted to thank you for the birthday card. Mags, can you call me? I have a new phone number. It's 1-that's the country code, 4-1-6- Mags, I got your card. It was so nice. Do you have my phone number? Okay, it's 4-1-6-5-4-5. Thanks for the card. Wait! You have to dial the country code. I have it here somewhere. This is Frank, Mags. Okay, so here's my number if you want to call. Did you know my birthday was last month? I'm a hundred and twelve years old, Mags. Are you there, Mags?"
I haul on my cigarette, listen to the message three times, trying to feel the rhythm of his mind, find some logic in his disparate thoughts-speeding, merging, fracturing, forgotten. I'm sure there must be bliss in chaos. I'm banking on it.
~
I'm six. Frank's eight. We're standing in front of a cage, looking at a monkey, at a service station somewhere between Moncton and Halifax. We're on one of our marathon family roadtrips, driving from Toronto to Fredericton. Dad's afraid of flying. Dad claims most airline pilots are drunks and womanizers, that they're too busy nursing a hangover or goosing the stewardesses to be trusted with our lives.
Dad's about to pop a vein. The car's conked out again and the mechanic tells Dad that he should sue the guy that sold it to him. "Ford Pinto," he says, shaking his head, "You'd be better off driving a sewing machine." My father works at a Ford dealership. He sold the car to himself.
Frank's standing a couple feet from the cage, hands at his hips, leaning forward and squinting. He wears pop-bottle glasses that dwarf his head, glasses that he's crushed or lost three times already.
"Actually, he's not a monkey," Frank says. "He's an ape. See? No tail. Monkey's have tails. Apes don't."
"Don't get too close," I say. Dad warned us: "You can look at the monkey, but DON'T GO NEAR THE CAGE!"
"He might be a gibbon," Frank says.
I take a long sniff of the air-the smell of gas and sweat and hands greasy with junk-food. Looking over my shoulder, I see Dad, hands balled up, biceps flexed, stomach held in. Mum's lolling her head around, like she's working out the kinks in her neck, trying to look anywhere but at Dad.
"Look! He's thinking something," Frank says. The ape's head is tilted, shiny, black marbles of eyes scanning Frank's face. Frank takes a step towards the cage, and the ape points at him with his wrinkled black hand.
I hear Dad scream at the mechanic. "Just fix the God damn car and save the Ralph Nader routine!" I turn to see Mum pulling at Dad's arm, Dad yanking it away from her. When I turn back the ape has Frank's glasses.
I scream.
Dad jerks his head around. It takes a moment for him to register the scene in his mind. The ape is examining Frank's glasses, turning them in his strange humanoid hands. He holds them up to his eyes and then pulls them away, grimacing.
"WHAT THE-!" Dad runs towards us and moves Frank out of the way. Frank wears a queer grin and touches the skin around his eyes.
"Okay," Dad says to the ape. "Come on now, give me the glasses." He's trying his best to sound soothing and calm, but he sounds kind of creepy and psycho. "Good monkey."
"He's an ape," Frank says.
"SHUT IT!"
The ape moves to the back of the cage and twists the wire frames. He holds one of the thick lenses between his teeth. His lips curl back and he smiles a toothy grin at Dad. I think for a moment that Dad might cry, standing there impotently, his golf shirt soaked with sweat. After a minute or two, the ape hands the twisted frames to my father and spits out the lens with a loud "Puh-too!" Then he does what looks like a kind of dance around the cage.
In the car, Dad keeps asking Frank questions without waiting for an answer. "Are you deaf as well as blind? I said 'DON'T GO NEAR THE CAGE!' What part didn't you understand? What kind of a moron are you anyway? Can you tell me that?"
Franks hangs his head. I wonder if he's crying. Dad keeps on for miles and miles. Every now and then Mum interjects with, "Come on, Ted," in a plaintive whine. Frank finally turns his face towards me and I see he's smiling, contorting his face to conceal a laugh. He reaches over, grabs my hand and squeezes.
~
Ms.Nakamura, the school director, catches me in the hallway for yet another surreal pep-talk.
"Margaret-san! Aree! What happened to your hair? Never mind. We have a new recruit, Madoka-chan. This is big challenge for us. She is like a big chunk of stone."
"Stone?"
"You know what's inside stone?"
"A diamond?"
"Flower! We will whip the flower out of her! Yes? Firm but kind. Let's go!"
Ms. Nakamura clickety-clicks down the hall. She looks like a tall woman who's been shrunk, like a doll, in her immaculate black suit, her skirt that constricts her stride to a practiced hobble. I'm sure Ms. Nakamura was born wearing heels. Her hair is jet black and pulled up into a big mushroom, sprayed into taxidermic rigidity. Once, I saw a strand of silvery-white hair that had escaped her attention. It snaked up from the nape of her neck and caught the light, glimmering like the inside of a seashell. I stared at it, mesmerised, until her creepy red talons were in my face, fingers snapping. "Margaret! Time to recite chicken or fish!"
Madoka is lingering outside the classroom, eyeing the advertisements-cosmetic dentists, photographers adept at creating shapely airbrushed ankles, hair removal specialists, esthetics salons that use electrodes to zap fat. She's scratching the back of her calf with the heel of her shabby pumps.
"Madoka!" Ms.Nakamura calls. Madoka turns. "This is Margaret-sensei. She is a native English speaker!"
Madoka grabs my hand and shakes it too hard. My arm moves from the shoulder, like a rubbery string. Her smile is lopsided, pushed out on one side by a greyish snaggle-tooth. She's hiding a wad of chewing gum in the back of her mouth.
"Hajimemashite! Pleased to make your acquaintance!" Her voice is jumpy like a child's, with a hoarse edge to it, like a little girl chainsmoker. "I'm so exciting," she says.
Ms. Nakamura's face quivers with a creepy little spasm. "Let's begin our training to become cabin crew," she pauses, giving Madoka an up and down look, "or worst case scenario, ground staff."
I teach cabin crew and airline interview English, Monday to Friday, ten to twelve. Teach is the wrong word. I pronounce cabin crew and airline interview English. Ms. Nakamura teaches the recruits what to say. She regards it as a science, arguing the primacy of the word "beverage" over "drink" with pointless dogmatism.
The classroom is filled with thirty girls, groomed within an inch of their lives, moving and speaking in precise, identical ways-an Asian-fetishist's wet dream.
Madoka makes her way to an empty chair in the front row, grinning madly, all teeth and gums, flopping into her chair with a loud sigh.
Ms.Nakamura clears her throat. "Recruits! Meet your new classmate, Madoka Wakiyama." The recruits chorus "Nice to meet you!" robotically. Madoka squirms in her seat. Her cheeks redden. Her eyes bulge. "Exciting," she mumbles.
Ms.Nakamura asks Madoka to tell the recruits about her hobbies.
"I like reading," she answers. Thirty manicured hands go to thirty glossy mouths and a collective giggle fills the air.
"Don't you have a helping people hobby?" Nakamura asks. Madoka tilts her head.
"Example! Rie! What is your hobby?"
Rie stands, lifts her chin. "I study sign language. I want to communicate with all people of the world."
Nakamura beams with pride. "And Sonomi?"
"My hobby is sign language. I want to communicate with all people of the world."
"Thank-you, recruits." She addresses Madoka, "See? Helping people." She gives me a nod and I pick up my interview dialogue sheet.
"Listen and repeat," I drone. "I AM COMMITTED TO BECOMING A CUSTOMER SERVICE PROFFESIONAL." The recruits trill the words back and I hear Madoka's voice above the others, loud and jerky. It sounds like music.
~
I'm ten. Frank's twelve. Frank says he wants a wound. A wound, he says, makes you special. People look at you differently if you're scarred. "They imagine things about you," he says. Frank talks about Martin Penner, a boy from school who's face is compartmentalised by a white worm of a scar, as though his head had been split open like a dropped cantaloupe and put back together hastily. "Car Accident," Frank whispers. He's not sick yet. He's just weird.
It's been a year since Dad left-went to a convention and never came back. His shoes are still lined up in the hall closet. Sometimes I catch Mum ironing and folding his hankies, like he'll come home any time with a cold, and an old crusty handkerchief in his pants pocket, and she'll be ready for him. Mostly she's okay, though. Sometimes, in the evenings her friends come over, single women from her office, younger than her. They wear ribbed catsuits with zips up the front, ponchos that reek of patchouli oil, big wiry earrings that swing from their earlobes like little satellites. They drink wine and hiss-"He's an asshole"-about Dad and other men.
Mum's in her own world and Frank and I are in ours. We spend the lazy timelessness of Sundays in the basement. Frank calls the half-finished rec-room his "lair." I'm the only one who hangs out in the lair with him. He doesn't have many friends. He's small for his age, with delicate girlish hands, sharp little features, like a cat, almost pretty. He reads The Guinness Book of World Records like a bible, reciting from it sometimes. Disconnected facts at odd moments. "The smallest woman in the world was —." "The world record for longest fingernails is held by —."
Frank finally decides that he'll cut one of his pinky fingers off. He plans it for a whole week, going through the knives in the kitchen and finding the sharpest one, figuring out the best joint to slice at. Just the tip isn't dramatic enough, he reasons, but too close to his palm and he might sever a tendon. He'll drop the finger down the garbage disposal so they can't reattach it.
Frank chooses a Sunday afternoon when Mum will be sleeping in front of the TV. He prepares a bag of ice and positions me at the doorway to scream for help. We get our stories straight.
"We were hungry so we decided to have bagels and peanut butter but the bagels were all frozen and the knife just slipped. Okay?" He's twitchy with excitement.
I'm scared. "Okay," I say. But when he picks up the knife, I scream.
"Mum! Frank's gonna cut his finger off!"
Frank gives up on the wound idea. He's down in the lair all the time, but I'm not invited anymore.
~
I'm awoken from a scrap of sleep by the phone
"What-"
"Margaret? Is that you?"
"Yes, Mum."
"You sound tired."
"I'm fine."
"They die from overwork, you know."
"Who does?"
"The Japanese!"
"I'm fine, Mum."
"Well everything's good here. The economy's picking up. Lots of jobs! I made that rhubarb pie that you love so much. No one to eat it though. Shame. Oh, and I saw that friend of yours from high school, Mandy, or Mindy. She's working at the bank now. Put on a lot of weight."
"Mandy Ferguson wasn't my friend, Mum. I hated her."
"Oh, you didn't."
"I did. She spread rumours about me- said that I was a lesbian and I had eleven toes."
"Stop."
"I had to wear sandals in winter and fuck the basketball team to prove her wrong."
"Ha. Ha."
"I'm not coming home, Mum."
"You're going to stay in Tokyo forever?"
"No, I'll go somewhere else. Eventually."
"You're like a vagabond. My daughter's a vagabond."
"I still have that LaPerla lingerie you gave me last Christmas."
"So?"
"Vagabonds don't wear LaPerla, Mum." I flip on the television, watch three girls in bikinis participate in a hard-boiled egg peeling contest. "How's Frank?" I ask.
"Oh, you know. He's okay. They've moved him into some sort of group home. It's nice."
"Do you visit him?"
"Yes, of course I do."
"How often?"
"Often, Margaret. You're one to talk."
"I can't visit him, Mum."
"Not while you're traipsing around the planet, you can't."
"I upset him."
"He misses you."
"He thinks I'm a messenger of the devil, Mum."
"Yes, well."
This is where the tears start. "I've got to go," I say. "I'll call you on Sunday. Promise. Okay?"
"Bye, love."
"Good-bye, Mum."
~
I'm fourteen, Frank's sixteen. I wake up from a nightmare and hear him in the next room. He's rummaging through his chest of drawers. Open. Close. Open. Close. I go to his door.
"What are you doing?"
"Looking."
"For what?"
He turns and looks at me. His face is flat, void, rheumy-eyed. I think for a moment he must be sleep-walking. "Nothing," he says, sitting down at the end of his bed. He's fully dressed. Jeans, a pullover, socks and running shoes. A strong, sweet smell comes off him. I go back to bed, but I don't sleep.
~
I'm becoming more like Frank. Paranoid. I think sometimes that the trolly-dollys will come to me in the sweet vulnerability of sleep, snatch my mind and put it out with the raw trash-eggshells, coffee grinds, gaijin brains. I'm afraid I'll wake-up possessed by the urge to shave off my eyebrows and draw them in using a stencil. But then I think, maybe it wouldn't be so bad. Maybe they are the happy ones, their lives narrowed down to the consuming desire to hand out hot towels in a pressurised cabin. A simple goal. Reachable. Maybe I'm the stupid one, traipsing the earth, drinking down loneliness like a slow poison, trying to understand the whys and hows. Coming up empty. Waking up tired.
~
I'm sixteen. Frank's eighteen. He's just finished high school and hangs around the house all day. Mum has to remind him to take a shower. He's prone to crying fits so Mum says things like, "You smell a little ripe, dear," or "A good hot shower will make you feel like a new man."
Most nights, Frank sits on the front lawn, cross-legged, clutching a spiral notebook and a pen, watching the traffic lights intently.
Mum stands in the kitchen, parts the curtains and peeks out at him.
"What's he doing?" she asks.
"Fuck if I know."
"Language, Margaret."
"I think he's losing it."
"Don't say that!" She sits down at the table, pulls the ashtray over and lights a DuMaurier. "He's just over-sensitive." Mum's lost weight. She's up at six every morning, jogging for an hour. I see her sometimes, running full speed, right up to the driveway, the cords of her neck stretched taut, skin shuddering over her cheeks. Her body has become like a greyhound's, skin shrink-wrapped to muscle, the thick triangle of her trapezius supporting her head like an over-sized pedestal. I tell her I'm proud of her, but I secretly miss the batwings of fat under her arms. I miss normal.
Mum's sent Frank on an errand. Milk. Toilet paper. Cigarettes. I go into Frank's room. The curtains are closed, as always, and the room smells like neglected damp towels. I find his spiral notebook and open it. Page after page of the words green, yellow, red, columns and columns of it, greenyellowred, greenyellowred, greenyellowred, in a jittery, childlike scrawl.
I turn to leave and Frank is there. Arms like dead things at his side. Expressionless. I'm not sure when he grew so tall, when his small impishness stretched out into the skinny, greasy haired man in the doorway. I'm afraid of him.
He walks past me, to the television, pops in a video and sits down on the bed. It's a nature video, a monkey sitting in the elbow of a tree, chewing at a mango pit.
"Frank?" I say. He doesn't look at me. I walk toward the door.
"Watch the monkey scare the children," he says suddenly. I turn, look at the screen, but it's just the monkey, the tree, the mango pit. I wait for the children, but they don't appear.
"Watch the monkey scare the children," he says again. Blue light flickers over his face.
~
It's "Make a Scene!" day at Air-pro, when we role-play challenging airplane scenarios-screaming babies, belligerent businessmen, terrorists, vegans. I think of my mother, the way she'd say "Don't make a scene!" when Frank got weepy in the meat section of the supermarket.
Today I am the drunk old pervert.
We arrange the chairs to approximate the cabin of a jumbo jet, and tape signs around the room-"cockpit" on the whiteboard, "galley" on the podium, "Emergency exit" on the door.
The first recruit is Nami, a fair-faced girl with a mouth full of braces. Her head is perpetually turned at an angle as though the world was forever presenting her with quandaries. Nami stands in the corner with a chirping coven of nervous recruits, smoothing down her fitted blue skirt compulsively. I know she is terrified of me, like all the rest, but I no longer get a perverse satisfaction from it, from the panicky little bows, the suspended conversations as I pass by. I feel like a reluctant sadist.
Ms. Nakamura claps her hands and we take our places. I slouch down in my seat, slip into character. I see myself in a crumpled, ill-fitting suit, potbelly spilling over my belt, a salt-and-pepper moustache adorned with almond skins and spittle. From the depths of my lipid-clogged heart, an angry sort of lust rises. I clear my throat and push the imaginary bell on my armrest.
"Dewars!" I scream. It's not my voice. There's a collective gasp from the other recruits sitting rigidly in economy class.
Nami teeters down the aisle, steadying herself on the backs of chairs as if there was turbulence.
"Yes, sir?" she squeaks. "How can I be of assistance?" Her lip quivers.
"Assistance!" I scream. "Whiskey, girl! I need whiskey!
"Yes sir!" Nami makes it to the podium, pours an invisible drink, twisting the cap back on the imaginary bottle, with undue care. She takes a deep breath, her chest puffing up like a little chicken breast and deflating with whoosh of air.
"Your whiskey sir." She leans down from the waist, hands me the drink. She smells of vanilla and powder.
"Ever seen a trouser snake?" I ask.
"Pardon me, sir?"
I make a grab for her ass and get a handful of buttock-enhancing padding. Screaming, Nami darts out the exit, clip-clopping down the hallway to the washroom. Ms. Nakamura claps furiously, two fingers against her palm. "So real! So real!" she says. I down the imaginary whiskey in one gulp, pull my hand across my mouth, and think about ritual suicide.
On Nami's "Make a Scene!" report I write: "Your smile and posture were lovely. You were handling the situation beautifully right up until you depressurised the cabin, killing all of the passengers and crew." I sign it "Satan" in an illegible scrawl.
On the way out I ask Mikiko where Madoka is. She clasps her hands under her chin and whispers, "Ms. Nakamura sent her for 'Intensive Remake'"
"That sounds awful." I was hoping she'd come to her senses and quit.
"Iya, Iya! Madoka will be fixed," Mikiko sighs, wistfully, peers up at the fluorescent lighting panels on the ceiling.
"Fixed," I repeat. Like a TV set on the blink. Like a cat.
In the elevator, the students eye me nervously. I have the urge to bark. Growl a little. When the doors open, I leap out, break into a run, zigzagging through the crowd, clipping shoulders, shopping bags swing like pendulums from the hands of startled commuters, cars screech to a halt for me. I hit a clear stretch of sidewalk, feel the wind in my face, the sharp smell of exhaust fumes and ramen broth in my nose, lactic acid eating at my thighs. Near Tokyo station I hit a bottleneck, a queer forest of black coats, blue suits. A politician, wearing white gloves, stands atop a van, screaming into a megaphone. "I have no religious affiliations! I am an honest man!" The blackboard scratch of feedback vibrates in my ear.
What's wrong with me? What's wrong with me?
If I had a clear path, I would run until I dropped, until my legs, or heart or lungs quit. I'd crumple to the ground like a collapsible plastic camping cup. Flat. Spent. Too tired to think.
~
It's Thanksgiving. I'm back from university for the weekend. Frank's on medication. He sits in the living room staring blankly at the television, rolling imaginary beads between his fingers and thumb.
"Frank! Come and help me with the gravy."
Frank repeats, "Gravy."
I sit at the kitchen table chewing celery sticks into spikes and harpooning pimento stuffed olives with them. Strings of celery stick in my teeth. I've gained five pounds from the cafeteria food and the waist of my jeans digs into my belly. I don't want to be here. I want a drink.
Frank's face is puffy, freckled with acne over his nose, on his chin. I watch him stir the flour and water. He stirs like a watched person. He does everything like a watched person.
"Can I have a beer?"
"It's early," Mum says, pulling back the quilting of her oven mitt and making a show of checking the time. "Oh, go ahead. Make me a gin and tonic, will you? Do you know how?"
"Uh, gin and-" I snap my fingers, grimace. "Tonic?"
"Smart ass."
Frank repeats, "Smart ass." He begins to laugh but ends up shuddering.
I hand the drink to Mum and whisper, "Is he Rainman?"
Frank turns and screams, "WHO'S PEEPING?"
With her oven-mitted hand, mum pats his back, shoots me a look. "Shhhh," she says.
The beer makes me want a cigarette. I wonder what the cigarette will make me want.
~
Friday night. I go to a little bar in Rappongi. I'm a regular-the strange gaijin who drinks alone. I sit in the last bar stool, next to the framed photograph of John Lennon. Jiro, the owner, does his best to communicate with me with the English he's learned from Beatles songs.
A trio of young salaryman occupies the barstools next to me. They sit stiffly, pouring each other beer from tall bottles, raising their drinks to a lazy chorus of "kampai!" Every few minutes one of them steals a glance at me.
"Hard days night, ne?" Jiro says, wiping the bar. A cockroach scuttles by and I flinch.
"Not dangerous." Jiro says, herding the roach around with a menu. "More clean than Koreans."
"Jiro!"
"I made a joke."
"That's not nice."
"Gomen ne! More clean than American."
"That's better."
"Work? How?" He asks. He sweeps the roach off the bar and I hear it crunch under his foot.
"Same as usual." I take a gulp of beer. "Hellish."
Jiro smiles. His face is like a parched riverbed-dry, deeply grooved, mud-coloured. "Let it be," he says.
The alcohol hits me quickly, a familiar warmth spreading through my limbs, an uncoiling. I order another beer. The salarymen send over a cup of warm sake. Tonight I will get pissed, I decide.
I wonder how easy it would be to become a drunk, not a regular functioning boozer, but a real one-a puffy-faced, hollow eyed hag, slurring insults at strangers, staggering wasted at ten in the morning.
"Where from?" one of the salarymen asks. He has sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes and an aerodynamic cowlick that lifts his hair off his forehead like a gust of wind.
"Narnia," I say.
"So ka!" He stares at me, his lower lip hanging down idly.
Jiro leans over the bar. "He loves you, yeah?"
"Yeah, yeah." I say.
As though it was not unusual at all, Jiro produces an oversized plastic toy mallet from behind the bar, and hits the mesmerised man over the head with it. The salaryman leans into a series of little bows and turns back to his drink, mumbling apologies. For a moment I love Japan.
"They say your eyes are like a animal eyes," Jiro says.
A roommate in University told me once that she was sure I would go mad, eventually. She was willing to bet on it. "You've got it in you," she said, emboldened by a four-pack of wine coolers. "Something about your eyes." She started laughing, the kind of laugh where no sound escapes except a low clicking from the throat. "My brother is schizophrenic," I said. She laughed harder. "He thinks the traffic lights are messages from outer space." She doubled over, moaning, eyes watering, waving her hand at me to stop being so funny.
The good part of drunk has passed. I'm struggling to focus my eyes. The smell of me is overwhelming-pasty tongue, booze, smoke. I'm thinking of sleep, but it seems like another planet.
The salarymen are slipping off their stools, barking things at one another, missing the glass when they pour beer.
~
I'm twenty-two. Frank's gone-drifted into the fog of madness, leaving behind a Frank-shaped shell. A reminder. He's started doing yogic feats of stillness. Sitting by his bedroom window, legs crossed, arms held in awkward positions, like a still from a kung fu film.
In the bathroom, hidden behind the toilet, I find a balled-up tissue filled with half-dissolved pills.
Mum confronts Frank at dinner. "Are you taking your pills?"
Frank's face twitches a little. "Yes."
"The pills help you so I want you to take them-swallow them, okay?
Frank jerks his head to he side. Smiles.
"Frank?"
"Mmm-hm."
"Okay, lets eat."
What are those Buddhists on about, I think. Stay in the moment. Fuck the moment. I want to go back or go forward-anywhere but here, now. But I can't go back-back to family dinners, begging mum for a sip of her wine, teasing each other, telling stories, eating so much I have to undo the top button on my jeans. Can't go forward-can't meet Frank halfway, in some shadowy place where the world is like a reflection in a fun house mirror, where the nuts and bolts of life disappear into a trippy dreamscape. A place like that must be better than this.
"Who's the smallest woman in the world, Frank?"
No answer.
"Frank, what's the world record for breath holding?" I think I see something behind his stare, a fragment. But it vanishes.
Meet him halfway. "Green, yellow, red! Green, yellow-"
Mum slams her fork down on the table. "Stop it, Margaret!"
"Fuck, Frank! Say something!" I grab his hand, cold and papery, but he pulls it away, jumps out of his chair.
"Margaret!" Mum screams.
I see a warped reflection of Frank in the shiny black of the refrigerator door, his arm held over his head, the glint of the blade. That's when I start running.
~
In the narrow hallway leading to the toilets, I let the cowlicked salaryman press me against the wall, his hand groping around the buttons on my shirt, his mouth open too wide like he's trying to get a good bite of a big apple, teeth hitting teeth with a disturbing scrape that's loud inside my head. The feeling of being touched, the sound of his voice, mumbling through the kiss "Suki, suki" (I like, I like)-the awkwardness of it all makes me want to cry.
I put my hand to his chest and push him away, surprised by the willingness with which he retreats. Surprised too, by the draft that rushes down the narrow passageway and cools my skin. I indulge myself for a moment, then walk away to pay the tab.
"Happy bean throwing ceremony!" Jiro calls to me as I'm leaving. I don't know what anything means anymore.
~
I see the devil in 7-11. I'm standing in line, cradling my litre of Coke, and my assorted greasy hangover foods, fighting the urge to stretch out on the shiny speckled linoleum, the cold against my cheek, the ground close. I glance at the shelf below the counter. And I see them. Satan with his eyes gouged out. Satan with loops of elastic stapled to his ears. Row upon row of Satan masks. Someone's trying to tell me something. I grab one of the masks when my turn comes up. The clerk scans the devil's bar code, then looks at me, smiling.
"Setsubon," he says cryptically. I nod, press my lips into a smile, fumble with my change and make for the door. The boy calls after me in awkward English. "Devil go out! Good luck coming in!" A sliver of moon winks at me through the clouds. I'm going mad, I think.
In the morning I'm still drunk. I decide to walk to work, slipping my jacket on over my flannel pajamas, the elastics of the devil mask over my ears. In Yoyogi park I find a bench, plant myself on it and eat potato chips, slotting them through my mouth-hole.
Suddenly there are children. An army of them, kitted out in their blue and white uniforms, yellow caps, stiff leather bookbags strapped to their backs. They wear shorts even though it's winter-a Japanese thing-makes them strong apparently. The bobbing mass of yellow hats moves towards me. Behind them I glimpse a beleaguered teacher, megaphone held to his face, barking commands. Ignored. He drops the megaphone to his side, hangs his head and collapses into a bench as though the weight of his body has finally defeated him. The yellow hats move in.
The smell of them makes me swoon-dried saliva and scalp, a sweet, fetid whiff of childhood. I think of Frank, cozy in his womb of madness. Madoka, blissfully labotomised, powdered, painted, painless, perfect. Why is sanity so hard?
Watch the monkey scare the children. But they're not scared. I am. Watching them come at me through the tunnel vision of the mask-cherry-cheeked, swaths of black hair across foreheads, high ponytails like antennae, tiny teeth crowded together, flashing like an animal's threat. There's silence for a moment as they encircle me. One boy, his chest heaving with excitement, pulls his arm back, raises one knee like a pitcher and throws a handful of little brown pellets at me. Soy beans. The rest of them follow suit, screaming and hitting one another as they wind up. They're chanting something rhythmical like a nursery rhyme. The beans hit my mask with a satisfying "Ping!" and I stand there until the gentle patter ends, until the yelps and laughter and chanting fade into a honeyed gasping for breath.
The children are herded away by the teacher. Apologies are made. The yellow hats disappear into a cluster of cherry trees. I stand like a planet, the constellation of soy beans radiating from me, lodged between my face and the devil mask, spilling from my pockets. I see, as if for the first time, the quality of the air, the Tokyo morning air, bluish light filtered through it, the sun, like a yolk hanging languorously behind the trees-the air with it's giddy bite of anticipation. I breathe it in like a gas, like anesthesia, but it doesn't put me to sleep. It wakes me up.
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