The Island Dwellers Read online

  I could barely put words together. “But you said—you said—”

  “For a semester, my God! I drank a lot, I smoked some weed, I didn’t…a baby goat, my God.”

  I looked at Elias. I saw a new man standing before me. Curly hair. Stocky build. Young Elias goes to synagogue with his father. Young Elias takes the subway. Oh Jesus. Young Elias, if he has an accent at all, has the broad smack of Queens in his voice.

  “And all that shit about my sister, about my mother? What the fuck! My mom is a dentist, she never—like, where did you get this shit?”

  The baby goat died. The Venezuelan sun sputtered out. Cici was hit by a meteorite, as was Frank. The soft sadness in Elias’s liquid, lyrical eyes…was a mixture of outrage, laughter, and resentment.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, because there wasn’t much else to say.

  “What the fuck,” Elias muttered softly. We stared at each other. Then: “You didn’t ask,” he said, an accusation, “you didn’t ask.”

  “You don’t talk,” I heard myself saying. I hadn’t known I felt this way until I was saying it. “You just run and sweat and make gestures and run errands and ignore me, unless we’re fucking you ignore me. I didn’t ask because I didn’t think you’d tell me.”

  “What am I supposed to tell you!” Elias was on the balls of his toes again. “It’s not like we’re dating, it’s not like we’re like…”

  “We’re not?” Now my voice was spiking. This note of outrage was so pure and true that it struck Elias out of his own indignation and into silence. He stared at me wide-eyed.

  “Cynthia…I thought you also…I thought…”

  “What are we doing if we aren’t dating?”

  “Hanging out,” Elias said, with the game lameness that only a twenty-seven-year-old boy can muster. “You know. Chillin’.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. I grabbed my laptop, threw it into my bag, grabbed my coat, shoved my feet into my shoes. Razor and toothbrush in the upstairs bathroom, goodbye. I will not go up those stairs for you.

  “Cynthia,” Elias said, “wait.” But—panties in Elias’s laundry, goodbye. You were a good pair, and a new pair, but I am not digging through this boy’s laundry for you. I will not wait.

  “Cynthia!”

  “We were dating,” I said, with cold and forceful outrage. “You stupid, conceited child.” I walked past him, out the door. Right before the door slammed, Elias grabbed it, shoved his head out, and shouted after me: “Chinga tu fuckin’ madre, in Venezuelan!”

  I guessed, as I marched toward the subway, that he’d picked up some Spanish on study abroad after all.

  * * *

  —

  SETH WAS ON THE COUCH when I came in. He’d made himself an open-faced smoked herring sandwich, with a small tossed salad of baby kale, capers, and a lemon-mustard dressing. He had his feet up and was watching Jon Stewart, but he paused it when I came in.

  “You’re back,” he said, and watched me.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “I hope it’s okay that I’m still here.”

  “Yeah,” I said, kicking my shoes off. “It’s okay.”

  “You want a sandwich?”

  I looked at his, and was reminded that I hadn’t eaten. At the same time, my stomach felt odd and upset. The way Elias had looked at me, the way he’d talked to me…the disdain in his voice. You didn’t ask.

  Seth’s voice cut in, easy and gentle. “Or you just want some of mine?”

  “I want some of yours.”

  I sat on the couch next to Seth. He smelled like Tom Ford and laundry soap. He smelled like herrings and capers. He smelled like Seth. He held up the sandwich and I took a bite.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Shouldn’t that be my question for you?”

  Seth shrugged. “It’s nice being on our couch.” Then: “You look…I don’t know.”

  “Elias accused me of…well. A lot of things.”

  “Mansplaining?”

  “Worse than that. Being wrong. And being…um. Impervious. I think. To his actual details.”

  “Impervious to his details,” Seth said, drawing the words out. “Well, what makes his details so goddamn important?”

  I had to laugh. “Yeah,” I said. “What does make his details so goddamn important?” And then suddenly I was really laughing, and I couldn’t stop. The goat and the laundry line and the sad sister, that sad fucking sister. Versus, what, Queens and a synagogue and his mother extracting teeth, and maybe a brother, two brothers, however many brothers. Just details. That’s all. What made anybody’s details so important?

  “Hey there,” Seth said. He looked a little worried. “Take a breath. Take a bite. Okay? Relax.” I took a breath and then another. I managed to stop laughing. “There,” said Seth. “That’s better.”

  “It’s nice,” I said, “being on our couch.”

  I took another bite of his sandwich.

  I was suddenly starving. I was going to eat the whole thing.

  Risa says, “I’ve got this.” She says, “Nothing will happen.” She says, “Japan is the safest country in the world so I don’t know what you’re so worried about.”

  This is after Shinichi has offered to buy her an apartment, but I don’t know it yet.

  This is after Shinichi explains to her: “If I buy you an apartment, I could visit you there. It would be our secret, just the two of us.”

  This is after Risa meets Shinichi’s son on her way out of Shinichi’s penthouse, and he asks his father, “Who is this?” and Shinichi says in front of her, right in front of her, “No one.”

  This is right before Risa asks me, “Do you know this yakuza? What they are?” And I search my mind but it’s just another foreign word in a sea of foreign words, and later I will wish that of all the words I’d known this one, so that I could say, Beware.

  But no.

  Right now it is night and we’re alone together on my futon, naked. Risa is propped up on her elbow, laughing, playing with my short hair, rubbing her fingers through it like you would with a dog. I’m telling her that I don’t like it when she leaves the factory by herself, when she walks alone in the dark. I’m telling her that anything could happen to her, and what would she do? Who would know?

  The light is soft on her collarbones, on the long easy lines of her wrist and arm, the slats of her ribs when she leans up to turn off the light. These days, I’m always staring at her. She says, “Well, you would know.” She says, “Nothing happens here, it’s too safe.” She says, “Yuliya, you’re staring,” and I am, I am, I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. Something so beautiful might cross your path every two million years, and if it does, you’d be a fool to shut your eyes for even a second.

  * * *

  —

  RISA—HER SMALL ANIMAL EARS CLOSE to her head, her sharp little lynx-teeth, the ferret-jut of her cheekbones. Whenever I remember her, she’s caught in a moment of impatience. When you move so quickly, you get tired of waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

  On the days when her shift ends before mine, she leaves the factory, comes back to the gaijin boardinghouse, takes out her thin metal hair-clip, picks our lock and infiltrates our tiny apartment like a criminal. She doesn’t carry keys, even though she has one just like I do. She says we should leave the door unlocked—“This is Japan,” she says, “who’s going to break in?” When I get back from my shift, I’ll find Risa sprawled on my futon in front of the tiny whirring fan, with her shirt unbuttoned and her skin glistening with sweat. She makes fun of me, with my key safety-pinned inside my pocket, the way I walk—shoulders bent and head always down. “Relax!” she tells me, impatient. “There’s no danger in Japan.”

  Risa. Eighteen and fierce and feral and she smells like strong Colombian tobacco, sometimes like hashish even when she denies smoking wit
h the Turks downstairs. She was the first tenant in this small factory-owned room, arriving only a few days before me. How quickly she went from stranger to roommate to provocation to my obsession. I dream about her at angles, always turning corners away from me. In my dreams, I catch the exposed flash of sunlight on her skin—the back of her neck, the swerve of her inner arm, the curve of a breast. She knows I dream about her and she laughs at me with her crooked mouth and her bright eyes. “What’s the big deal?” she says in English, bad-ass like an American rock star or cowboy in those stupid movies she’s addicted to. “¿Qué tienes, mujer?”

  The big deal is that I’m twenty-six. The big deal is that I’m a coward. The big deal is that I’ve never seen anything like her, and I never will again.

  “No soy Lolita,” says Risa, unconcerned. “And you—no eres hombre.”

  “Is it only a crime if it’s a man?” I ask.

  “It’s only a crime if I don’t want it,” Risa says, and grins.

  And Japan is good to her. This country is an assortment of surprises, strangenesses that catch her attention and her awe. One night she comes in from the street, breathless with excitement, her hands sharp with the scent of gunpowder. “Pero no tienen pistolas aquí,” she says wide-eyed. “Sólo cohetes.” But they don’t have guns here, only fireworks. Japan has many gifts for Risa, but Japan’s gift to me is Risa. And that’s more than I could have thought to ask for.

  * * *

  —

  RISA IS OBSESSED WITH HOW we got here. All of us gaijin, as they call us.

  “How did you get here?” she’ll ask in her imperfect gangster English. Complete strangers. She’ll walk up to them in the street: “¿Cómo viniste aquí, vos?” And they’ll tell her, just like that, like it’s nothing.

  She asks us both her favorite question one night: “How did we get here?” This is the beginning of August, she is sitting at the end of my futon, which has been for months now our futon, and I’m sitting next to her. We pass a lighted joint back and forth, Risa got it for free from Shinichi, but I don’t know that yet. And she asks it again, just like that but a little different this time: “How did we get here?” with unsimulated awe. A country of fireworks and not handguns, it never fails to inspire awe.

  I exhale thick sweet smoke and say: “On a plane. You from Medellín. Me from Saint Petersburg. And we’ll work in this shithole until we have some money, and when we die here, more people like us will come here on planes like the one we took and they’ll take our jobs and work like we worked and die like we’ll die and that, lyubov, my love, mi amor, that is how we all Get Here.”

  Risa says I’m a fucking liar and takes the joint back. She says: “We got here because we’re all on our way to something better and this is the way you take to get there.”

  “Yeah?” I say. “Then how come everybody hates us and the food is strange and there’s nowhere to work but factories.”

  And Risa says: “If you left the house more you’d see it’s not all like that.”

  “I leave the house to work,” I say, and press my lips together in my mother’s firm line.

  Risa knows not to push it. She has a loud bossy mouth, but there are certain things she knows not to push. And at night sometimes when I have the old dreams and I wake up shaking in a cold sweat, she knows not to ask. She gets me a glass of water, sits there while I finish it. When we shower together, she doesn’t touch the white lines of old scars on my skin. She doesn’t touch me unless she knows I’ve seen her—she says my name before she shakes me awake in the mornings. “Yuliya,” she says, “daijoubu, daijoubu, it’s okay.” As if it’s normal, Japanese in her mouth.

  This is how I keep track of the days we’ve been here: as the count rises, so do the number of Japanese words in Risa’s mouth. I don’t know where she learns all of them. The factory, she says. The street. Later she will say, “From Shinichi,” and I will say, “Who?” and she’ll say, “This guy, I’ll introduce you sometime.”

  By the time she does, I will have learned to hate him. The weight of his name in her mouth is too heavy, too big, it leaves no space for mine.

  * * *

  —

  THE TRUTH ABOUT ME, AT this time, is how frightened I am by everything. Risa most of all, of course, but not only.

  When my shift is over, I come scurrying home, hide myself away until it’s time for work again. Risa makes friends with a group of Nigerian guys who sell hats by the train station. She likes to tell me about them—she says they love Japanese baseball, they make her laugh, she wants me to meet them. I say I will, but we both know I won’t. The country is too alien for me to make friends, its angles are off, I feel dizzy all the time. It’s easier to stay inside.

  “You’re my friend,” I say, and Risa scowls but she’s pleased too.

  “Until I get tired of you,” she says. But she won’t. After all, she chose me. I’ve seen her with coins and jewels and broken bits of things from the gutter. Doesn’t matter what it is—she keeps the things she finds.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE FIRST DAYS OF September, Risa turns nineteen. I ask her what she wants to do, and she says: “I want to go into Tokyo. We work and work and we never get to see Tokyo.”

  The idea terrifies me, it dries the spit in my mouth. “We don’t have any money,” I say, trying for nonchalance—and that’s when she brings out a crisp roll of bills, one man, two man, three man, she counts to six man and stops but there’s still more, smaller bills. “Shinichi said we should amuse ourselves,” she says.

  My hatred would burn whole forests to the ground.

  “Then tell me what you want to do,” I say, and smile. It’s a terrible smile, paper plastered over a gaping hole, but Risa is counting the money again and she doesn’t notice.

  So: Tokyo.

  It’s a neon chasm. Loud and fast and clean, the cleanness of it scares me more than anything. No city should be so clean. A city without trash is a city of the dead, a city of bodies that take in nothing and generate no waste. We pass pachinko parlors and when the doors open, in a rush of air conditioning and inhuman noise, I think I’ve discovered hell. Risa, on the other hand, has never been more excited.

  I wouldn’t know how to go about spending six man in one day, more than my share of the month’s rent, but Risa doesn’t seem to have any difficulties. We go to Shibuya and walk through streets lined with shops, and she buys herself clothes, outrageous expensive scraps of clothing. She wants to buy me clothes but I say no. I say it’s a waste. The truth is, I don’t want to wear Shinichi’s money next to my skin.

  She lets me say no at first to baseball caps, scarves, wristbands. But then she gets tougher. “Shut the fuck up,” she says, pulling jeans off a shelf and a green shirt. “Come on,” and she shoves them at me. “Go put these on.”

  “Risa, stop.” I’m embarrassed, people are watching.

  “Just put these on,” Risa insists. “They’ll look good.”

  “Come on,” I say, trying to push her hands away. “I don’t need clothes.”

  “Then what do you need,” Risa demands. She’s angry, but more than that, she’s hurt, and both of these things confuse me. “Tell me what the fuck do you need, porque yo no sé, you won’t let me give you anything.”

  I stare at her, slack-jawed. The Japanese are all watching from the corners of the shop, but I can’t take my eyes off her. I suddenly don’t understand what is happening.

  “I didn’t know you wanted to give me anything,” I say, stupidly. “Why do you want to give me things?”

  Risa blinks at me and then she shakes her head. “Oh for God’s sake,” she says, “you’re worse than a man.” She turns away, then turns back: “You think I don’t have anywhere else to sleep? You think that?”

  “No—”

  “Because I have a lot of other places I could sleep.”


  “I know you do, I’m sure you do.”

  “And I could get my own place,” she says. “I could just move if I wanted to, there’s places that are a lot nicer than where they put us.”

  “I know that,” I repeat helplessly.

  “No you don’t know that because you’ve never seen anything, you’ve never gotten on the fucking train and gone anywhere, you just go to the factory and go home. This is the first time you’ve gotten on a train since you got here, do you know that? And I had to beg.”

  I’m just staring at her. “Risa,” I say, “I don’t understand what you want from me.”

  Risa takes a deep breath and turns away. Then she turns back to me. “Put on the jeans,” she says. “Go into that little changing room and put them on. That’s what I want.”

  So I do. It’s simpler than standing there and looking at her and not knowing what to do or say, wanting so badly to do something right.

  Alone in the confines of the small dressing room I lean my forehead against the mirror for a moment. I look for words but find only images: Risa curled on my futon, asleep; Risa hands on hips, annoyed; Risa walking through the Tokyo streets like a kid at Christmas. I pull on the jeans, turn in a circle before the mirror. I’ve lost weight. They’re a little loose, but they look good.

  “Are you ever coming out of there?” Risa’s voice, close and impatient on the other side of the changing-room door. Before I can answer, she opens the door and slips in. She’s already laughing.

  “You’re not supposed to be in here,” I start to say, but I don’t finish the sentence because Risa leans forward and kisses me. It’s the first time we’ve ever kissed in public—or, if this isn’t public, then in a place that is not our apartment. She pushes me back against the changing-room wall, so I kiss her harder. It’s like a switch being thrown in my brain, and I can’t think, I can’t stop, and when she breaks away, she says, “I’m buying them for you,” as if she’s continuing a conversation we’re still having.