Bicycle Days (11 page)

“This place is very good,” Park gasped. “Very good.” He waved Alec down the stairs.

The theater was dark and hot, the air like steam. Several dozen folding chairs were set up in rows around a circular stage, most of them occupied by the types of men Alec had seen on the streets above. He and Park kept to the back, standing with their backs against the wall. Alec realized that there were actually two stages, one round and central, the other a glass-bottomed rectangle that moved on tracks above the audience. The stage lights were dim, mysterious. Strange, almost tribal, music played over the loudspeakers.

Suddenly, five men sitting close to one another in the audience jumped to their feet and formed a circle. Shouting in unison, throwing their right hands into the center, they played Rock, Paper, Scissors. Alec couldn’t believe he was seeing a game from his childhood used to determine who would participate in a live sex show. Two men dropped out, then a third. The two remaining men leapt up on stage. One of them was barely five feet tall, with the scrawny legs of a young adolescent. He eagerly climbed a ladder to the floating bed above. The other man was overweight, his stomach hanging thickly over his belt. He stood next to the woman on the central stage. Leaving on their shirts, ties, and socks, both men stripped off the rest of their clothing. The music grew louder, beating through the small room. From vinyl bags, each woman brought out clear plastic gloves and a Wet-Nap—the kind Alec had seen advertised on television to wipe babies’ bottoms. Like surgeons preparing for a routine operation,
they put on the gloves, one finger at a time, and then roughly wiped the men’s genitals.

Park put his mouth close to Alec’s ear. “That plastic,” he said, meaning the gloves. “It is also on their tongues.”

Alec looked at him. “On their tongues? Are you sure?” Park gave a knowing nod.

On stage, the women were attempting to bring the men to the necessary level of excitement. The overweight man was having obvious difficulties. His face was wet with perspiration. His soft belly stuck out of his shirt where a button had come undone. Finally, he knocked the woman’s hand away so he could use his own.

Alec felt himself grow cold. He tapped Park on the shoulder. “What are we doing here?”

Without taking his eyes from the stage, Park said, “It is instead of the Turkish bath. It is also an education, Alec-san. Yes, it is very important.”

“This isn’t an education, it’s sick,” Alec said. At the sound of his voice, a couple of men in the audience turned around to stare at him. Alec lowered his voice. “I mean, look at the women, Park-san. They don’t show any emotion. It’s like they’re dead.”

“You are near to right, Alec-san,” Park said. “These women, they are mostly from the Philippines. They come here very alone, with no money, and soon the Yakuza control their passports. The Yakuza are like the American Mafia. And these women, they make maybe thousand yen in one day. That is not enough to have life.”

The glass-bottomed stage glided above their heads. Instinctively Alec looked up, glimpsed the backside of a woman trapped under a man, her flesh obscenely distorted against the glass. On center stage, the other woman had finally given up on the overweight man. Sweaty and dejected, he crawled on his hands and knees, picking up his clothing. As he stepped back down into the audience, several others jumped up from their seats to compete for the vacant spot. Expressionless, the woman moved to the edge of the stage, spread her legs, and bent over.
An elderly man in the front row, not five feet from where she stood, leaned out of his seat to get a closer look. His face was as blank as the woman’s.

Alec was afraid he might pass out. Glowing and pulsing, dirty and hot, the room seemed like an interpretation of hell. Two more naked women walked on stage carrying a large trunk. One of the women was bald, with a shiny white scar stretching diagonally across her abdomen. She pulled a leather bullwhip from the trunk and handed it to the elderly man in the front row.

Flushed with excitement, Park said, “Part two is now beginning. It is sure to be action-packed.”

Alec closed his eyes and thought again of the neon pulsing over the wet streets above, flashing like an ambiguous beacon from a distant place.

I
t had been a long night—even Mrs. Hasegawa had gone to bed by the time Alec returned home from Kabuki-cho. He walked into the dark silence and the house seemed a different place, each room a capsule of unknown shadows. On the way to his room, he stopped as he often did to listen to the sounds of the family sleeping, soothed by the knowledge that life was continuing as usual. He sat down on the wood floor. He closed his eyes in the darkness, and then he could not move.…

He had been thirteen and just beginning to learn basic physics in school. He discovered that there were theories for the forces that bind atoms together and theories for the forces that break them apart. He saw a film in science class that showed how individual parts of a whole are physically driven away from each other. The film was in color, and at first Alec thought the
molecule self-destructing up on the screen looked like a flower blooming, its tight bud bursting open. But then it went too far. Atoms scattered, pulling the flower apart, creating a formless mass.

The teacher poked the screen with a yardstick. He talked about theory, about how it could be used to explain the chemical behavior of all matter. Sitting in the back of the classroom, Alec shook his head to himself, because he knew the teacher was wrong. He felt sure that he could watch the breaking apart of a hundred different things a hundred different times and it would never once happen in just the same way. There were too many separate parts and too many different directions in which to go.

There was a scientific name for the process by which molecules break apart, but Alec could never remember what it was. He gave it his own name, destruction theory, and that was how he came to think of it. It seemed that science was all about the world’s breaking apart, piece by piece, right in front of everyone. And he thought that there was little left to wonder about after that, except whether theory spoke not just about cold matter, but about families, too.

Perhaps it was then that he first realized that things had already begun to come apart at home. That mothers and fathers and brothers were all not so different from atoms, really, the way they bounced off one another and into their own private places, where there was no room for anyone else.

As long as he could remember, his father had belonged to an all-male club. Alec had never seen the club before, but he knew of it because Mark had gone the year before, when he had been thirteen and Alec twelve. Alec had lain awake that night for what seemed like hours waiting for them to return. He listened through his closed door while Mark put on his pajamas, brushed his teeth, and got into bed. And then, quietly, he went into Mark’s room and asked him what the club was like, whether it was dusty and cold and cobwebbed the way he had always suspected it was, even though their father almost never
talked about it. Mark didn’t answer for a minute. He rolled over, turning his face toward the wall, which was streaked with shadows, and said that he hadn’t liked it, that it had been strange and quiet. He wouldn’t say any more after that, except that he was tired and wanted to go to sleep. And Alec didn’t push him for more, because Mark seemed afraid to him then, and that made him afraid, too. He went back to his room and crawled into bed, thinking about the club, wondering what his father did while he was there, whether he talked and laughed more than he did while he was at home. He knew it would be his turn to go the next year, when he would be thirteen. He fell asleep waiting for it to happen.

A year later, the two of them stood alone in the cool, musty billiard room. The room was dark except for a rectangular light suspended above their table. Rows of other tables shrouded in dust cloths surrounded them, reminding Alec of a graveyard. He took a deep breath and smelled the staleness of the room. His father bent low over the long stretch of green felt and drove the cue ball hard into the multicolored rack.

“No luck tonight,” his father said, checking to make sure none of the balls had gone into the pockets. “Your go.”

Alec stared at the table until the colored spheres blurred together, until he had to shake his head to make any sense of it. He lifted his pool cue, feeling its weight. Off to the side, where his father stood in the dim light, he heard a brief clipping sound, and then the sudden flare of a match. Thick clouds of cigar smoke began to drift under the overhanging light.

“Dad?”

His father was looking at the end of his cigar. “Hmm?”

“What are we playing?”

“Eight ball. You know how.”

“I don’t think I remember.”

“Sure you do. I taught you and Mark a long time ago. Mark and I played only last year. He was good.”

The cue was too long for him, and Alec settled it as best he could on the rest made by his thumb and forefinger. The wood
was smooth, and it slid easily back and forth. He lined up behind the cue ball.

“Keep your head down low over the ball, Alec,” his father said. “That’s the only way you’ll really know where it’s going.”

Alec bent his head so that he was looking almost straight down the length of the cue.

“And don’t forget about your legs. That’s where the balance comes from.”

Alec spread his legs a little wider. He was having trouble keeping his hands still. The movement of the cue against his skin was no longer smooth, but awkward, uneven. He took a deep breath to calm himself. It was full of dust and smoke. He made his shot. The five ball missed the pocket by about half a foot.

His father stepped up to the table and sank the three ball with a quick shot into the side pocket.

“Looks like you’re stripes, Alec.”

Alec nodded. “Stripes.”

“See the way I’m lined up behind the cue ball here? Where my head’s pointing, the spread of my feet? All of it’s important. And your breathing. Don’t forget to stay relaxed.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“You just have to concentrate, that’s all. Don’t think about anything else.”

Alec watched the cue ball hit the dark green six ball and send it rolling softly down the table and into the far corner pocket.

“Do you come here a lot, Dad? I mean, to the club.”

His father was chalking the tip of his cue. “I used to play a lot of pool when I was your age. Did you know that, Alec? Almost every day. Your grandpa bought a beautiful table so he and I could play together. And we did.”

“So you come here to play pool.”

“Sometimes.”

“You mean you play pool here sometimes?”

“I come here sometimes after work, perhaps a couple times a week. And sometimes when I’m here I play pool.”

Alec noticed that his father still held the lit cigar between his
fingers as they gripped the cue. He wondered whether some of the ash might fall onto the felt and burn a hole through it. He watched his father attempt an impossible bank shot. The dark yellow one ball hit off the edge of the corner bumper, just in front of the pocket, and bounced back out to the middle of the table. His father muttered, Shit, and took a couple of steps back from the table, so that he now stood partly under the blanket of darkness that covered the rest of the room. The red tip of his cigar glowed through it like an eye.

“In the library at home, Dad,” Alec said, “There’s that space. It’s big, isn’t it? I mean, there’s nothing there except that rug. We could’ve put a table there, don’t you think? We really could’ve put it there. At home.”

He waited, but his father didn’t say anything. Alec couldn’t see his face, but he wasn’t even trying to anymore. “If we’d had a table at home, you could’ve taught Mom to play.”

“Your mother never liked the whole idea of pool. She wouldn’t have enjoyed it.”

Alec bent down quickly and took a shot. The cue ball bounced aimlessly off the bumpers, hitting nothing.

“Your go,” he said.

His father stepped back into the light of the table. “You’re not concentrating, Alec. Keep your head down and watch the ball. Remember what I told you.”

“You don’t understand, Dad.”

His father lined up for another shot. “No,” he said.
“You
don’t understand.”

There was little conversation after that. The air had turned heavy with cigar smoke. Alec looked through it at the darkened, unused tables, standing stiff as tombstones all around. His father stood always on the other side of the table, the jacket of his soft gray suit still buttoned, his concentration focused on the game. He seemed very far away then, and Alec remembered what Mark had said about his visit to the club, how strange and quiet it had been. And he thought that what Mark must have really meant was that it had been lonely.

The game ended. Alec wanted to go home, but once again his father was bending low over the table and breaking the rack. Sound pierced the room for an instant. The balls scattered, some careening sharply off the bumpers. Alec watched their movement and thought again of the science film he had seen, of destruction theory, of how the flower had split apart into millions of particles. The table seemed to grow brighter as he stood there looking at it, as if it too might burst apart at any second. And he felt suddenly as though it was happening all around him, this coming apart of things. As if his father standing at the end of the long table, pool cue in hand, was at that moment no different from the science teacher with his yardstick raised toward the screen, pointing and explaining while the picture in front of him was being broken down into unrecognizable pieces.