The Long Highway Pt. 19

Writing about something in the past tense is like laminating it or spraying fixative on a pastel drawing that might otherwise float away. That's why I sometimes write about present events as if they happened earlier and are fixed in time.

I was walking downstairs from my father's place, where I was spending a night while he was in the hospital. Slipping out to buy dinner, a hamburger from a corner restaurant I would bring "home" in a bag. It wasn't my home, of course, as my parents were divorced.

A guy passed me on the stairs, the final flight leading to the front door, the light from inside reflected on the glass there. We crossed paths on the narrow staircase, he heading up. I stopped, turned around to face him above me.


"My name's Mitchell. I live on the third floor." That's the top. I meant my father's apartment, of course.

He was chunkily-built, khaki wearing, a professional just returned from work? Seeing his surprise, not to say irritation at my self-introduction, I explained, "My father has lived here since forever. I thought everyone in the place now was over sixty or even over three hundred. Ha ha ha. You're young, so I wondered."

He nodded he understood but made clear he did not intend to stop and talk, reveal how he had come to reside in a small apartment building occupied only by the same tenants for as long as I'd known. They seemed to have grown into the place, as if it were a tree.

My humor missed its mark. The crack about three hundred years didn't register with the thirty year old. Maybe the slightest lip curl of a smile came but it didn't linger. He was busy, prepared to take the stairs by bounds.

The musty staircase. It was carpeted. You always felt dust in the air. The pale, flowered wallpaper.

I ended up going out that night and meeting someone. A friend at work had invited me to a party. I'd demurred but now changed my mind. Spending the evening alone at my father's would feel like keeping company with ghosts. Dad was still alive but his future demise visible.

There were women in my life other than Akemi even after she and I began seeing each other. Women from my part of the world, Western, that is. Even while I was with Pam, mind you. I played things fast and loose. To describe my state as one of confusion wouldn't be wrong.

At the party a rapport cropped up between me and a European woman. Scandinavian. Dark-haired. Not the stereotype, though big, tall and bony, the Nordic physique there all right. We were attracted. Something was going on.

At her place, she came on top. I felt her desire from her motion, coming on strong. I shifted so she felt my cock directly, its strength, heft, its length. We were not connecting yet- I wasn't inside, that is; we were still clothed. It seemed we would but I wasn't sure I wanted to. She was attractive but comparatively heavy. I felt the difference from Akemi, was only into her now, her body also dynamic but lighter.

Something disengaged us. Noise from outside. We had gotten up to have a cigarette- she did- on the balcony that ran along the apartments when we heard a lot of noises, distant enough they sounded like a burr or wave that came and went. Turned out to be from a restaurant downstairs.

"It's probably not loud enough to reach us in the bedroom," Eleanor said- Eleanor not a Scandinavian name, yet she was Scandinavian. I found being with her like having a meat and potato dinner after getting used to fruits and vegetables- that would be Akemi, of course.

But sure enough we heard the sound of the voices outside the restaurant from the bedroom as well, loud and clear, at least enough to distract, the rise and fall, and came back to the veranda. Eleanor climbed onto the cement ledge- painted a metallic pale green- to call down a complaint. I warned her, "Look out. You're too high." She was in danger of falling but sure she wouldn't. Had drink or weed from the party affected her judgment, or was the recklessness she showed the same that had brought her to bed with me, a stranger?

I saw again that she had a good body, framed against the open space behind her. I could easily picture her without clothes then.

Why didn't I follow through? I felt bad for Akemi, though she'd probably have found it natural I went with a Western woman. More importantly, I wasn't as attracted to Eleanor as to her, not nearly. Akemi had spoiled me for Eleanor's type, for any but her own.

I left around dawn, explaining I had stuff at my father's needed for morning at the college. It was my luck to teach on a Saturday.

Nor was Akemi the first Asian woman in my life. I saw a Vietnamese woman before her. She was beautiful in a different way, from an ethnic Chinese family, her complexion light, affecting when her face flushed pink from feeling. We separated on good terms. She was marrying someone else from Vietnam. We recognized the choice as best for us both but felt sad as hell. Our goodbye fuck was a strong one, her skin pale as porcelain, her cheeks the pink of early spring.

Then someone else complained. A voice in the night from further down the building facade reached us. "Hey, I'm trying to sleep!" a man we couldn't see yelled to the restaurant customers, who must have been in outdoor seating in front. We'd passed tables with umbrellas on our way in. Green with white stripes maybe. There were lights but it was hard to make out the color at that hour.

That person's complaint spared us the need to deliver one of our own.

Eleanor and I ended up not getting closer.

I met the young professional guy in my father's building again in the morning.

"How are you?" I asked.

He was friendlier now, not wary like before. At the mailboxes, checking his before going out.

"I didn't sleep well," he said.

"It happens," I said.

"And when it does, it sets off all sorts of alarms in your body. Even your arms can hurt."

"Maybe it happened because you have some inner conflict, like I do," I said. Trying to fit Akemi into my life. She was so different from everything I was used to, yet I needed her. Pam also had to go.

I taught the students pronunciation, how sounds mix in rapid speech, "t"and "y" become "ch" (Don't you? Doncha?) and "d" and "y" become "j" (Did you? Didja?) and the difference between speaking and writing- the spelling of words remains the same no matter how you say them. I tried to keep the lesson moving. Attention drifted if you didn't maintain a rapid pace. Students made a good-faith effort but had other things on their minds than what I was showing them. I'd planned to write on the white board a sample dialogue to work from but decided instead to just say it; that would be faster. And that project too, like so many others, got delayed as I kept adding to the lecture new points- I thought each important but in the aggregate they threatened to drive students away. Yawns were visible. I saw some people hadn't slept well the night before, as I hadn't. They were adult, just like me.

I wondered about the person who'd complained, yelled to the restaurant. Had that noise kept him awake? It certainly hadn't been sounds of Eleanor and I making love, because we hadn't.

Speaking of sound:

Walking in Japan with two guys I knew, also living there, teaching English while I was just visiting. The differences in our circumstances were as great as the similarities.They'd come to the country on their own. I was put up by Akemi. They had more in common with each other than either did with me. They were independent. I had Akemi to fall back on. Etc.

"This is the part of Tokyo I find most disorienting," I told them. It was Kabukicho, the entertainment district behind the Shinjuku shopping hub. We strolled through like sailors on leave.

Clamorous. Full of neon. Shady characters.

I wasn't sure my friends understood at first. They seemed surprised by my reaction to the place, so I explained, "I think it's the noise that makes me feel I'm having out of body experiences." The audio assault was relentless, like the visual.

I continued, "So it's good to walk with people like you two, who can also experience it as outsiders, know what I feel.

"I realize," I went on, "that the calm voice of a BBC reporter delivering the news or even NPR" (American public radio) "brings me a sense of peace. I find those measured tones reassuring."

Kabukicho was where you saw the Yakuza, those skinny guys in bronze-colored Armani suits or musclebound heavies, pimps and touts, barkers in front of doors drawing customers to the spilled neon, and where you found the brothels, black-suited salarymen slipping into the pink-lit entranceways for a night of release away from their families.

I felt like I'd just snorted a heap of cocaine from the palm of my hand and was waiting for the high to come on. What did someone call that, Bolivian marching powder? I also felt like getting down on the pavement right there and doing exercises. To feel I was in my body, I guess. No explaining some impulses.

You definitely wouldn't find the reserved sounds or sights of the West, Europe or America, in that Tokyo precinct. Nor were they part of Akemi. The strangeness, the ceaselessness of it did test your nerves, but that exoticism was also part of the excitement, thrilling if you could bear it.

No, I wasn't sure if my friends got what I meant but guessed they did. Two Western guys, one Australian, the other from Pittsburgh, were almost certainly into Japanese women like I was. Otherwise why really would they have come there when they could be home watching a football game- or I guess it would be rugby.

In Japan- all of Asia?- you didn't find the quiet, reserved tones you did in the West. There was reserve, mind you- of course- but it seemed a matter of controlled mayhem. In Japan, beneath the hyper-polite surfaces, you felt you were in a world of senses and sensation.

In a way it was the sounds wafting up to us from the restaurant that made me leave Eleanor the Scandinavian that night. The voices of the customers at their tables enjoying food and drink, company, the night air, had seemed like Akemi imploring, "Leave that Westerner, the individuality, the prosaic predictable heaviness, and join me in the wide open universe, in poetry."