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poetry inchoate desires odd jobs |
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Absence by Lola Huston author info When asked whether he had gotten used to Japan yet, Lyle Walters always answered Yes because it was like being asked whether you were having a good time at a party. How could the villagers have responded if he had answered truthfully? He was not used to the little speaker outside his kitchen window which played the Light Cavalry Overture in electric beeps every morning at 7:30, followed by village announcements by a wheezy old clerk he couldn’t understand. He was not used to—in fact, he hated—being called Rairu Uohtaazu. He was not used to waking up on the floor every morning. His first conscious thought every day was, What am I doing here? What’s wrong? followed by the dreary, dim awareness that he did not have a bed. Neither was Japan used to him. Old villagers, seeing him walking down the road, zigzagged in their paths to get a closer look at his curly blond hair. Women squirmed and covered their mouths when he spoke to them. He invited people over for dinner and found that they mostly stared at him as he ate and asked him questions about bread. Lyle was, at least, inured to his job at the village middle school—Make that junior high school; they were adamant that this was the proper English translation. Despite the minor daily differences and frequent class cancellations, a certain blunt slowness prevailed in his working life, and he had gotten thoroughly used to that. He sat at a desk. Tracksuited teachers stamped documents and made notations in record-books. (He used a kanji dictionary and carefully translated a page on the sly one day. It was a record of who put the brooms away after the daily clean-up. This particular volume went back four years.) Teachers jogged in double-time, arms bent in urgency, from their desks to the tea corner. Students came to Lyle’s desk to gawk at him. When he smiled and said, “Konnichi wa,” they gasped and scurried away. He was also used to standing in the classroom, reading aloud from the textbook as the children gazed listlessly past him, and to loitering in the corner while the teacher diagrammed “How many balls do you have?” on the blackboard in furious strokes of chalk. He would stare out the window then at the carved expanse of rice paddies creeping through their own seasons, and then to the hills and their hovering mists. The view included only three buildings: an aluminum farmhouse always decked out in hanging laundry, the poured-concrete village office, and his own apartment building, made of industrial vinyl. The problem was that he could not seem to get used to much more than this. Lyle was so rarely spoken to beyond formulaic greetings and the English teacher’s “Let’s go” before class, that when people did address him, he forgot his Japanese and his manners. He spoke too bluntly. He forgot to bow until he noticed his interlocutor doing it. He forgot to say “Itadakimasu” over the school lunch of whole squid glaring at him through a coating of deep-fry batter. The other teachers started visibly and made this benediction somewhat more loudly than usual before they plunged into their cold rice. One particularly fuzzy-headed day he even took three steps into the hallway in his street shoes. Luckily, no one saw. His cheeks burned as he kicked off his loafers and slid into his brown plaid slippers. They were decorated with a pair of smiling yet tearful bears and the caption, “How are you feeling today? I’m lonely.” He had found them in a pinch at the local shop. They were the least feminine slippers available. He scuttled into the staffroom and noticed that he was late; the mandatory morning meeting where he always sat passively had already begun. He smiled an apology and quickly sat down. They must really be pissed off, he thought, for no one looked at him. He read the notice board across from his desk and learned that all English classes were canceled that day. (Later, a translation of the full notice revealed why: The students were preparing for an upcoming ping-pong tournament for the entertainment of prefectural nursing home residents.) After the meeting ended, he turned to apologize to the English teacher for coming late, but she sprang away in double-time as though she didn’t see him. He glanced at the teachers’ sudden insect busy-ness around him, sighed, and resignedly pulled out his copy of The Tale of Genji. No one asked why he was late—Which makes sense, anyway, Lyle thought. No need for me to be here for the morning meeting. No need for me to be here. Later he went to the tea corner and even as he reached out to press the button on the hot water dispenser, the math teacher jolted across his path with his own cup, thoroughly blocking Lyle’s way and forcing him to step back. So they are angry, after all, Lyle thought, or at least he is. At lunchtime when the trays were laid out for the distribution of eel in corn syrup, he noticed that there was one tray missing: No one had counted him. Well. He glumly fetched himself a tray and shivered at how closely the teachers swarmed about him without touching him. Make conversation, he thought. “I like eel,” he announced brightly in Japanese. No one looked up. “Do you like eel? American junior high school students do not eat eel at school lunch.” No response. Fuck ‘em, he thought. The trays were full; teachers began to claim them and carry them to their desks. Lyle grasped a tray with both hands. The vice-principal came up on his left and reached through Lyle’s body, through his back and out his chest, took the same tray, and carried it off. Lyle screamed. He stumbled backwards and the gym teacher walked cleanly through him. His own body and clothes were mist and the gym teacher’s solid mass moved through them with no resistance, no reaction but a tingling wave of nausea for Lyle. He screamed again and the teachers murmured, “Itadakimasu.” He leapt onto his desk, jumped up and down, waved his arms, and screamed some more. Shaking, he ran to the little hand-washing sink and looked into the mirror over it. There he was, dead-white and trembling, but definitely there. He stretched out his hands and looked at them; he could not see through them. He quickly tugged at his face, hair, arms and felt ordinary flesh and clothes. He turned on the faucet and felt cold metal, then water, and splashed his face. He saw the streak and drip and shine in the mirror and on his own eyelashes. He mounted the music teacher’s desk and stood squarely in her lunch. He watched his feet go transparent and felt a sick tremor as they hit the plate and bowls. The music teacher leaned forward, picking up her rice bowl, and her face passed through Lyle’s shins, producing a stronger, humming sort of current. He climbed down, faint and quivering. He took a hefty dictionary and dropped it onto the science teacher’s tray. The book landed without disturbance, like a coin dropped in water, and sat translucent with a plate of eel and bowl of tripe soup opaque within it. The science teacher replaced his rice bowl onto the tray through the dictionary, which was formless as a projected movie. He thundered through the halls of the school, bellowing, throwing and breaking things, waving objects before unblinking faces. His most awful test was trying to touch people, penetrating shoulders and heads and feeling nothing but a numb tingle where he made contact, or should have. He was unseen, unheard, unfelt. Objects lost their mass when he touched them, and yet were not missed. “All right,” he said at last. “You’re not here.” He panted with the exhaustion and panic of a real body. “Deal with it.” “I suppose I shouldn’t stay here.” He walked back into the staffroom and gathered up his things. “I’m leaving,” he shouted in English. He looked at the vice-principal. “You stink. You smell bad. Your teeth look like something I might find at a polluted beach.” The vice-principal calmly clipped his nails over a trash can. Lyle walked out and headed for his apartment. The street was deserted. Out of curiosity, Lyle entered the Takahashi house so familiar to him from the classroom windows. It was dim and chilly, the hallway lined with neatly stacked and tied piles of different kinds of garbage. He followed the sound of a television. In the living room, old Mrs. Takahashi sat seiza, a wrinkled little pyramid of a person. She and her aproned, middle-aged daughter-in-law were watching a soap opera. Her husband, old Mr. Takahashi, sprawled asleep on the tatami in long underwear. No one spoke, and certainly, no one knew he was there. Lyle went home and dialed the Foreigners’ Crisis Hotline. “No one can see, hear, or feel me,” he said in a loud, steady voice. “Hello?” said the cheerful Californian at the other end. “Can I help you? Hello? Are you there?” He hung up. He took a pen and paper, wrote I AM HERE and saw it plainly. He held it up to the mirror and saw EREH MA I. He took his pen, paper, and dictionary and went back to the Takahashi house. The women were still watching TV. Lyle held up the I AM HERE to the younger Mrs. Takahashi’s face until her nose and lips poked through without response. He recalled that iru, “to be, to exist, said especially of living things,” has a kanji, though seldom used. He looked it up in his dictionary and copied it carefully. He held it up briefly between Mrs. Takahashi and the TV. She shrieked and flinched. “What’s the matter?” asked her mother-in-law, alarmed. “Are you all right?” “I—I thought I saw something,” the younger woman gasped. “Some writing.” Old Mr. Takahashi snorted in his sleep. Lyle waved the paper at old Mrs. Takahashi. “Aah! I see it! It’s moving!” she screamed. Lyle folded the paper up and put it in his pocket. “Now it’s gone!” He gently tapped both women on the head, feeling hair, skin, and skull, and shouted, “Koko ni imasu.” The women screamed and old Mr. Takahashi sat up. “Osawagase itshimashita,” said Lyle, grabbed his dictionary, and ran home. He scoured his bookshelf, pulling down every Japanese language study text, every book on culture, society, and manners. He put a Japanese CD on and imitated the syllables carefully. He did not sleep. The next morning he was at school in a crisp shirt and tie at 7:50 sharp. He put on his brown plaid lonely bear slippers and sang out, “Ohayou gozaimasu!” and was met with a chorus of reply in near-unison. In the staffroom, all faces turned towards him, chipper and smiling. Everyone bowed. Lyle returned their bow, palms on his thighs just above his knees, fingers splayed. “Ogenki desu ka?” “Hai, genki desu!” He bent his arms at waist level and jogged double-time to his desk, swiped his forehead and sighed a little with the effort. The vice-principal chatted with him about the weather. The gym teacher told Lyle about the big game the night before. When he reported a particularly impressive play, Lyle responded, “Eh!? Sug-GOI!” and ran his fingers through his blond curls at the back of his head. Some students burst into the staffroom, grinning and shrieking, “Rairu-Sensei! Ohayou gozaimasu!” They began to tell him in depth about the upcoming ping-pong tournament at the prefectural nursing home. Lyle hung on every word and interjected a taut “Mn” every few seconds, punctuated by a firm nod. God, this is boring, he thought, still grinning for all his life. |
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Lola Huston is a writer from the midwest who has lived in Japan since August 2001. She is inspired by the great cities of the Kansai region in Japan. Somehow life in San Francisco keeps occurring to her.
All material copyright the authors, printed with permission. |