Last night, the American and I
strolled about a small bay’s waters, looking out at
After evening’s darkness had
descended, shimmering creatures paraded along the crowds, filling the night with
vibrant green, white, and blue orbs. A
dragon, a Cheshire cat, a princess in trailing blue gown (fitting her foot into
her once missing glass slipper), figures of light threading out a mass of
blooming flowers passing before us. He
wrapped his arms round my shoulders as we sat, gazing out on the line of bright
characters migrating by. As I shifted my
back up against his chest, I whispered his name. What I imagined it was. I couldn’t place my finger on it.
We rose with the throng of other
visitors. He placed me on his shoulders,
so I could laugh out across the crowd, so I could gaze out at the waters
glinting, the last few minutes of fireworks blasted then arcing, to fulfill a
sky full of galaxies filling our ears with thunder, then appearing, then fading. How quickly we had found beauty with each
other. We hardly required words. I clutched his head then started tickling his
scalp, my fingers creeping through his curls of brown hair. I could sense his smile wafting up and about
me. He growled.
“待って、待って！”
“What?” He was in the process of lifting me up off
his shoulders and into a tree.
“待って・・・Wait!
Wait.”
“Oh.
Matte? Wait? It’s ok.
Don’t worry. You’ll be safe up there!”
“Wait! Wait!”
I struggled as he set me into the
limbs of a tree. I wrapped myself around
one of its limbs, laughing. It was too
high up here. It was also wonderfully
elevated here. He beamed up with wide,
rosy cheeks.
Soon we were departing, walking along
the fountain dedicated to the world. I
called out, “写真撮って下さい,” and a girl flashed the camera at my new
found lover and me. He was really
something.
I often stand beside Chiriko, on the
train, hands raised up and clutching the plastic-coated rungs, as the line
rattles through the underground then smoothly speeds past apartments, over
rivers, and glints down on bits of farmland, roof, or window. Since high school, Chiriko and I have
remained close friends – we both lived within the same district of high school,
then we both applied to and somehow succeeded in entering 早稲田大学.
Our social groups have tended to differ though; she has always been a
grade above me. After Chiriko lived with
Kyoko for a year, a girl I never knew, she asked me to move in. The other girl planned to study for a year in
the
Today though,
I woke in a hotel and departed as quickly as I could (he wanted me to stay; I
felt awkward and wanted to escape for the university shortly after sex), barely
pulling my bag in against my chest, before the doors slammed shut on 半蔵門線 with the whistle of the conductor. I leaned in against the door, its metal like
ice held soothingly to my warm forehead.
Everyone stood about as calmly as possible, near or against each other’s
pressed uniforms and dress shoes, sneakers and styled cotton pants, platform
heels and skimpy skirts. My own loose
t-shirt and bed-rumpled jeans edged quietly against the crisp, buttoned blouse
of a perfectly-groomed secretary. I felt
the graze of a newspaper behind me, the man with burgundy hair in hedgehog
spikes there jerking forward and grasping for a handhold as the train suddenly
lurched.
I arrived at the transfer station and
dashed up the stairs beside spiky hair just about the time Chiriko must have
been rushing down her own flight of stairs somewhere in 九段下 station.
I pushed on into the last ride to the university, 東西 line, and then stood balancing with my
heels. I found myself whirled about into
a circle exactly midway between the two pairs of inner doors connecting to the
other cars at either end, the opposing outer doors at either side of me.
Listening to
the heavy electronica spilling out the ear phones of a boy standing straight
but staring sleepily at my shoes, it took me a few minutes until I decided to step
nearer the head of the train. From there
it would be faster, to exit and climb up to the open streets. I opened the pair of inner doors and entered
another car. Cruising toward the end
cars of the speeding train, careful not to step on any toes, not to fall on
anyone, fingers suddenly brushed my shoulder.
I was on the verge of murmuring ごめん and silently striding onward when I heard
Chiriko:
“おーい！Where were you last night Naomi? I thought you would join us at Womb. I called you but got no response.”
“あのさ, wanted to call you but my batteries had run out. Forgot to charge my cell.”
“本当？残念だけど・・・ we missed you,” Chiriko wriggled her nose
distastefully as the train slowed to a stop, another station, and we balanced
each other against a stranger until the train ceased movement.
“そう・・・ごめん。又今度行くよ。”
“Have you been home? You look tired, weren’t those the same
clothes you wore yesterday?”
A hint of
shadow must have stained the curves of skin about my eyes, though my cosmetics
surely obscured my weariness from most eyes.
Chiriko knew me too well. Chiriko
looked me up and down, admiring the loose style I had adopted for at least two
years now. The vintage black jeans,
stylishly slashed, billowed out from my legs as a wind slithered in from the
open doors and rose up through the passengers.
As the train resumed its pace, my lilac t-shirt with silver buttons
settled lightly about me. I studied her
eyes, the reflective fragments across them.
“Mostly. I added
this,” I tapped the baseball cap (the sudden gift he had placed on my head
about an hour ago, when I had lifted my bag and opened the weighty door to
depart) turned backward upon my head.
“Last night, 私もよ.
Even though I missed your invite, I did get out.”
“そう？Right on, good! You probably hit Roppongi,
ね?
Met anyone?”
“Not 六本木 but elsewhere.”
“で?
New hat, ね。”
“出会っちゃったの.
I met someone.”
“まじで？Where at?”
“He was…実はアメリカ人なんだ. Actually an American.”
“きゃあああ! 本当! That’s wonderful Naomi! So, last night? Sweet talker?
A black guy?”
“No, no,
three months ago we went to that American army base, you remember?”
“うん.”
“楽しかったよね. Wasn’t it fun?”
Naomi nodded,
“Sure was! Strange place though. You remember that big black man? Seemed to
understand Japanese, even spoke a little, seemed to know what he was saying
too, usually.”
“そうだっけ.”
“I want to
see him again, so bad. マジ会いたーい. あの日, that
day, he smothered me with confidence.
あの夜, that
night, we danced to live jazz, then shared secrets, visited a hotel.”
“やっちゃったの?”
I glanced her over. Her large,
triple-looped silver earrings swiveled about.
She threw her arms out with aroused memory, wide black sleeves hanging
down.
“His skin,
absolutely gorgeous, I watched, wanting to feel his rich smothering of
muscles. And, he was sweet, you
know? He woke me with roses… Naomi,
sorry, you were speaking of the base.
Who’d you meet there? You went
again?”
“A few times,
I went back to the base and finally met his blue eyes. I’ve visited the base several times over the
past two years, you know, but finally, Monday, I truly met a real man, the real
thing. Actually, I first saw him
Saturday but couldn’t wait much after Sunday.
I thought of his body, out there among all the other bodies and returned
Monday. I wanted to know if there was
more to him, and there he was. Ready to
be found.”
“Wow! So?”
“Monday night
we went to
“Oh?”
“Well, I’m
not sure, maybe there’s only last night from here on.
You can’t trust them really. Such
guys might not…”
“Oh?
Did you get his number? Did he
say he’d call?”
“Yes.
He did. Perhaps he does care more
than I might imagine.”
“Perhaps? Of course he does. Can you talk with him?”
“まあ, あの・・・ no, no, not really.”
“Oh… but you had fun?”
“I try to, but he doesn’t really hear
me, he just hears the sound that he marks as Japanese. It all flows together. で, 英語いちお分かるんだけど, I often
understand his English, but I
haven’t really responded in English very well, I couldn’t…”
“Hm.
Well, keep trying. You can speak
English next time. He’ll like your
accent,” Chiriko winked.
What am I doing…? “What… what should I do?”
“Well, you’ll wait for his call, ね?
Until then, we can have some fun.
Are we going to class?”
“あのさあ・・・”
“ね, ね, 行こう行こう。Let’s
go out.”
“Oh?”
“No need for classes
today, is there?”
“True, though
we better find out what we’re supposed to write for that essay. Last week she said she’d discuss it with us,
remember?” We did have one class together, in the international center where we
struggled through a politics of translation class. I could rarely join in on the English
discussions, but I figured I could pass through writing a couple good essays. I did want another day of bypassing the
chores and words filling up university.
“そうだね.”
Usually a great deal of sleep serves to refresh me. After four hours of my part-time job
serving beer and salted, green 枝豆, I often look forward to pulling a fuzzy
Pikachu to my chest and drifting, apart from this life. My dreams are always cast away, unwanted in
my restful absence, allowing a well-deserved break. I wake with Pikachu’s fat, yellow, mouse body
still embraced. I imagine his
electricity humming protectively about me during my unconscious state.
Yet, recently, my roommate informed me, I murmur,
chuckle, and groan while I sleep.
Chiriko crept into my bedroom once to see if I was okay, and I had
curled up at the end of my mattress with both arms hanging out over the wood
floor, as I apparently muttered about sailing directionless on the high sea,
and then groaned as if ill. The things I
can learn from her between decanters of alcohol. I had reminded her there was a typhoon
storming across
My dreams have never been apparent, but over the past few months similar dreams
have hung about me. There is a portion I
have grown quite familiar with: consistently waking up in the same spot where
my eyes open to find a gleaming bale of hay before my nose. Turning the hay to its side, I discover two
pens. I might touch them, the pens;
notice their largish black and blue bodies.
I kept a journal in high school, when my days were all rote memorization
and useless English courses. But now, I
only write lines across those bar tabs not yet filled out, grasping at previous
unconscious visions.
Dreams, in which I remember my heavy, descending lids on the bed of a
hotel after sex with a large man; I hazily recall slipping to sleep on a couch
watching television in my own flat; there was a fragment where I sat on a mass
of inky papers I studied with bleary eyes falling shut. I dreamed bordering reality on a train
passing a platform and wailing its horn, as I vaguely sat with my knees against
a standing woman’s thighs and my head drooping forward; on a stool in a bar I
was watching two foreign, dark-skinned couples laughing over a game of
billiards, then I was passing out with the last sip of cassis liqueur mixed
with squeezed orange. All these dreams
of falling into other dreams. When I
dozed off within a dream, I would gradually fill up with static, what smothers
the TV that has lost a connection. After
the static and the dozing in whatever scene it was I dreamed, I awoke, still
within the dream, to that place: peering awkwardly at a very square, quite
close, gleaming yellow, bale of hay.
Before I woke to the conscious world under my blue covers needing to pee,
I woke to the bale of hay, the two orphaned pens. When I rose up from crouching and tucking the
pens against my left palm, there was a sense of movement across a meadow. Then someone else kneeled a few feet from me,
grinning. Her great lips stretched. And the same black hair, the red crescent
lips, the weighty breasts and their nipples poking at the blue pajama shirt. There was a tired tilt to the oval head,
something that struck me when I looked in the mirror any drab morning.
Blinking my dark eyes horrendously, she leaned on her knees toward me,
the tilt to my head spilling strands of smoothly brushed, black hair across my
vision. The other woman, so much like me
but so narrowly shaped, laughed shortly and casually brushed me. We crawled across the field, after speaking,
her magnificent lines, the pulse of her fat, protruding lips. She led me away from the cut grass to the
border where the dream tapers off, overwhelmingly obscure, the sound of motors,
and then the wash of waves on sand.
After I woke outside my dream, I lingered over it. I languidly sounded out my name, 尚美.
Hearing it’s sound slink across subdued air, I spoke again, “私は・・・誰？尚美・・・だよね？誰だったのかしら？私だったのか、それとも、あの人、迷った女性？ (I…
who am I? Naomi… I am, aren’t I? Who was that? Was
it me, or, her, that lost, stretched out woman?)”
I sniffed and noted the sweaty, fish
odor of a man’s cum hovering about.
Sound of a shower nearby. A hotel
room.
I realized this was the fourth one in
a row this month. One week, a few months
ago during winter vacation, there had been three of them, but there had been an
entire day between each hope and clutching of hands. Usually at least seven days passed between
the departing of each penis. I’d come to
just label them as they were. Sometimes
it would stay around for a series of several days like this scent drifting
overhead. During those longer periods of
companionship, I would start to relish an hour in which the penis began to
express at least one other attached part and become something. Something more entire. More present than that which dies and draws
limp.
So far, this hadn’t really
occurred. No embodiment that I first
thought I saw when I sat in front of one of the military bases and a tall,
light brown-haired man, winked a blue wink at me, and I winked a dark wink
back. There was an embodiment in the
lift of his thick legs, and I imagined us dancing for hours together, when I
heard his language, spilling out before me a few days later. I tried to listen and understand, commenting
in my language on the strange rich quality I had never noted when attending any
English course before. Was he truly
speaking properly? It was a strain, of
course, to implement English words into my conversation.
I had woke with my hands latched to
my thighs and could feel my inner lips chapped dry, but now, listening to the
sound of the falling water with attentive ears, I began to relax and loosened
my fingers. I could sense my breath
flowing smoothly. I slid my hands up
past my waist, up along my chest; I noted someone’s drying liquid ooze slightly
from the region between my softer flesh, near which my fingernails had left
residual slash marks upon. Later,
studying my composure in the bathroom’s mirror, I would notice how the marks
had turned yellow and brown. I slowly
brushed off my skin, leaned up, shook out my hair, and then laid myself back,
cozily sinking on the mattress. I sensed
I was waiting.
When the man finished his shower, the
door opened and he stood, with towel wrapped round his waist, looking at me,
“Oh, you’ve woken up eh? Are you ok?”
I recognized that, the last
phrase. It was simple, marking something
I could recognize as my mind steadily cleared of dream. I couldn’t help but smile, with gratitude, in
embarrassment. I had almost forgot, the
kindness of Western men.
I spoke, but it fizzled into - yes.
Am I ok? I wasn’t completely sure. I clutched my breasts as he strode up to the
bed and pulled the sheets closer about me.
He smiled too, and I gazed up at those blue, movie star eyes. His was a gaze filled with eternally open,
cloudless skies which could soar about among great multitudes, a soul veering
weightlessly through opening vaults.
They shut, the eyelids sliding
down. Then I felt his firm, washed
hands, on my shoulders, a solid warmth awakening me wholly. Blinking, I watched his eyelids swivel back
open. His eyes were not gazing into mine
anymore. It unnerved me. I was thinking of getting up and approaching
the toilet. I watched those eyes admire
my lips, neck, and bulge of my hands on my breasts. “Gorgeous.
Absolutely,” the creases of his lips round his English.
I was entangled in bed sheets. He twisted me roundabout. My nose squished in against the white
mattress sheet. I remember speaking up,
raising my head,
“待って、待ってよ。”
I paused; raising my self up further,
I thought he would loosen the bed sheets from me, understand my personal desire
to crawl off the bed. There was the
sensation of wooziness.
Then I felt his hands on my rear. Other words might work I realized. I tried,
“止めて。”
“朝、今は良くないわ。”
“嫌。”
But then my
head was pressed back down. A slight
anger flashed about me, briefly. I
quickly thought less.
With that
strange dream woman still lingering, and annoyed, I spoke once more, a direct
request styled more as a statement, usually needless for clear communication, “嫌。そのこと悪くて止めなさいよ。” His
sweaty hovering, then I could feel pressure moving in from between his
hands. I wasn’t sure what to do at this
point - with it between me, within me, thinking, it must be love then, and then
it must be love, it must be love.
This series was so exhausting. His few English words had vaporized mine
before mine had even been released into the murk of scented hotel air. I dislike language. It’s too faulty, worse than my body. There are all these images pasted against my
skull, dripping onto the clumps of brain and the crevices between, soaking deep
down, and leaking to other, lower regions.
I could glimpse him rising over me and wished I could speak English,
really speak English, even when emotion drains out, with bare action rumbling over
these half-appropriate feminine attempts.
He heaved himself over me. I could hear him growl out a phrase, “You’re
so fine,” then slap my behind, a sting spreading across. Surely I wouldn’t mind, if I wasn’t set on
waking and crawling under a cleansing stream of water. Shoving inside me - there was some desired
control vacant this morning. I heard him
again, “You’re perfect. So smooth and
full of sound… fine looking princess.
Relax.” I wondered what time it
was, how many minutes until I had class.
“You like that?” He slid his hand
about my neck and pulled my hair. I
didn’t answer. He was rude after
that. He should have known my answer before
that point or the next. And, there was
that, his belief, and I gave in, imagining it was last night. This was just like the amusement rides we
plummeted in. “Lean down. Let go.”
“待って・・・”
Copyright 2004, Ryland J. Kayin Lee
(cannot be published without permission from the author)
If you have any good comments or suggestions please tell me!