L. Navid Osbert (東京)
21 September, 2009
One of the advantages of a nomadic lifestyle is that you tend not to have much to carry when it comes time to move again.
The last thing I did after packing up all of my personal belongings into bags was run a bath. I set the bags in the hallway just before the genkan, brushed my teeth, and undressed. I decided to trade the t-shirt I’d been wearing for a clean one from one of the duffel bags, because in packing I’d worked up a small sweat. I folded my clothes, set them just outside the bathroom door, and checked the time. Still two hours before Kay was to arrive to pick up the manuscript boxes and collect the apartment keys from me. After that I was back on the road. No idea where to right away, but there are plenty of cheap hostels and guesthouses in Tokyo or most anywhere in Japan for that matter, so there was no reason to rush a decision. I had been tossing about the idea of finally going back to the States, but not in any effort to find someone who’d known me before the brain damage. That just seems like an unnecessary strain on everyone involved.
Instead I was wondering if I’d feel something in America. I have to admit I feel something in Japan. Something different than when I was in any of the other places. Calling it “something” doesn’t communicate much, does it? A kind of charge in the air, perhaps, a barely-perceptible vibration in the earth, an unconscious change in posture and gait. The sensation of returning. Would it be stronger back in that place that my passport says I belong to, where I can’t remember having ever been?
It has occurred me, though, that this could all be in my head. It could be the simple power of suggestion — for reasons unknown to me I speak, read, Japanese. I have unremembered history here. This much can be deduced. So perhaps this sensation of being in a familiar place is something I’m letting myself imagine, perhaps I don’t feel anything but wish I did so much I’m convinced that I do. Like a religious experience. Yes, I’d have to say it’s something like that.
I guess that’s really why I’m still here. Because I feel something in those boxes too.
The intercom buzzed while I was in the bath. An hour and forty minutes early. I couldn’t very well ignore it, since even if it weren’t Kay it might have been the gas or electric company come to turn off service. So, a little grudgingly, I got up, toweled off, and threw on my clothes in a hurry. If I’d been thinking I might have gone to the monitor screen to see who it was before I opened the door, but I was startled and hurried.
It was Kay. Without one word of apology for being early, even at her eyes catching my wet hair, she let herself in. She slipped deftly beneath my arm and then pulled the door shut behind her. She shut it so suddenly that for a moment I was still pushing it open while she was pulling it shut.
“Hello,” I said.
She ignored me, digging in her purse for a moment. Finally she looked up at me, gave me a kind of eye contact that I felt elsewhere in my body too.
“I’m breaking the rules here a little bit,” she said, “so please don’t sell me out.”
“I’m done,” I said. “There wouldn’t be much point in selling you out.”
“I really think you should reconsider,” she said. “I think you belong on this project.”
“I haven’t contributed anything so far but disbelief.”
“That’s not true. And what sane person wouldn’t react with disbelief? Maybe disbelief is what this project needs.”
“It’ll get plenty with or without me, I’m sure.”
“I’m going to do you a favor,” she said, “something I’m not allowed to do. Because I believe that you belong on this project.”
The wetness in my hair and moisture on my skin from the impromptu toweling after the bath were being crowded out by a new layer of sweat. I just waited for her to go on.
She dropped her eyes and looked to the side, lowering her voice too as if there might actually have been somebody listening there in the entryway to my soon-to-be-vacated apartment. She seemed to be thinking for a moment, before finally returning her attention to me.
“You wanted to meet your predecessor, didn’t you?”
