Bicycle Days (21 page)

Alec’s eyes snapped open, he awoke in the heat, to the heat. Sweat had soaked the heavy cotton of the futon and comforter. The window was open to the night, but the darkness itself seemed a wall, blocking any movement of air in or out of the small room. For a moment it was still a dream, a nightmare, something to wake up from. He was trapped in nothingness and heat, unable to breathe. But then he felt the damp cotton against his skin.

He stood quickly, opened the sliding screen, but the hallway was just as stifling. Ten feet away, the door to Yoshi’s room was closed. Alec could hear the constant hum of an air conditioner from inside. He considered waking Yoshi, perhaps sleeping on the floor of his room. But it would be too unusual a thing to do, and trying to explain would be too difficult. Instead, he reached across and slid open the glass door, stepped onto the narrow balcony. His mouth gaped open and he inhaled deeply, pushing his face into the blanket of air like a burrowing animal. He couldn’t get enough.

Thirst finally moved him. Grabbing his yukata from his room, he put it on and headed downstairs. The house cooled by degrees as he followed the stairs. Each stair was a pocket of shadow, the darkness gradually lifting as he neared the second floor.

A light was on. Mrs. Hasegawa lay sprawled face up on the tatami, snoring. Her flowered house dress was rumpled, her thick, veined legs emerging awkwardly from under the hem. The fluorescent light gave her skin a pallor. Alec smiled when he saw her. Quietly, he stepped around her legs.

The account books lay open on the low table, the numbers exactingly drawn in black ink, the miniature yen signs in red. There were no ink smudges, nothing was crossed out. Everything was perfectly aligned. Checking to make sure she was still asleep, Alec flipped back a couple of pages. He was surprised by how consistent the numbers were, how orderly and machinelike. Just about to turn the page, he noticed several light marks at the bottom, almost off the edge. Looking more closely, he realized that they were tiny Japanese characters written in pencil:
“Yukiko’s dress by Monday.” He smiled, turned to another page and, in the upper right-hand corner, read: “Shirt for Alec.” He thought of the shirt she had bought for him at Mitsukoshi.

Another page and then another and another, each one holding another reminder or message. He turned back to the first page he had seen and read the most recent note, a single word, practically illegible: “Tired.” Intermingled with the lifeless numbers and columns, he realized, was a journal of sorts, a mind expressing itself in bits and pieces, expanding and contracting, afraid to take for itself an entire sheet of blank paper. He looked from the book to her and knew that he must not wake her.

Tiptoeing into the dark kitchen, he took a bottle of
mugi-cha
from the refrigerator, poured himself a glass. It was a physical process—opening, grabbing, lifting, pouring, replacing, closing—by now completely instinctive, yet the moment he heard the heel of the bottle touch the lip of another one, he knew that it had gone wrong.

A bottle of milk crashed to the floor, painting it in uneven patches of white. “Damn,” he hissed.

“Eh?” Mrs. Hasegawa’s sleep-filled voice came from the other room.

“Damn.”

“What’s that?” she asked, and he knew that she was sitting up now.

“Nothing,” he said, now in Japanese. “Everything is fine.” He was trying to pick up the larger pieces of glass from the floor but having difficulty in the dark. He felt one piece slice his fingers.

He heard her labored breathing as she stood up. “Alec! Is that you?”

“No. Yes. Please go back to sleep, Mother. There is no problem.” He groped on his knees in the wetness.

“What are you doing?” She walked into the kitchen.

“Wait!” Alec shouted. But it was already too late; he saw her take a step, her broad face twisting as a piece of glass pierced her bare foot.

“Please don’t move, Mother,” he said. “Let me help you.”

Carefully he stepped around the puddles of milk, moving on the outer edges of his feet to avoid the splinters of glass. He grabbed the roll of paper towel from its plastic holder above the sink. She watched him walk awkwardly into the eating room.

“Don’t get blood on the tatami,” she said.

Alec nodded and spread several sheets of paper towel, already bloodstained from his own hands, on the tatami. Then, slowly, he helped her hop on one foot to the covered area and sit down. Droplets of sweat formed an intricate pattern on her upper lip. They were both silent as he brought out the first-aid kit from the top drawer of the Western-style bureau, leaving a light smear of blood on everything he touched.

He gently took her cut foot in his hands. Using a cotton swab, he probed inside the wound, looking for the glint of glass. She didn’t speak, but he heard the sharpness of her breathing. When he had finished, he cleaned the cut, taped on a gauze bandage.

She had been silently watching him work, her face an intense mixture of interest and pain. Now she looked quickly from her bandaged foot to Alec’s face, and nodded her head in satisfaction.

“Good job,” she said. “I was afraid you were drunk.”

“I did not drink tonight. But I was afraid, too.”

“Hands,” she said.

Alec gave her his hands. She cleaned the cuts and put Band-Aids of varying sizes and shapes on them. Her thick fingers were surprisingly agile.

He looked around the small room, at the bloodied paper towel, at the gauze and Band-Aid wrappers. He shook his head. “It looks as if we were attacked by samurai.”

Mrs. Hasegawa let out a belly laugh and slapped her thigh. But as she looked at him, he saw her features tighten in concern.

“Are you sick?” she asked.

“Me? No.” And then he realized what he must look like, hair still matted down with sweat, face pale.

“You look sick.”

“It was very hot in my room. I could not sleep. I thought perhaps some
mugi-cha
 …” He stopped. She was looking at
him as though she didn’t believe what he was saying. “It is difficult to explain.”

“It was hot,” she offered.

“Yes,” he said. “And I had a bad dream. And I could not breathe when I woke up. I became scared. It was very strange. I do not really understand what happened.”

“You have a fever.” She looked adamant.

He shook his head gently. “When I was small, sometimes I had this same feeling of being …” He paused, hanging, trying to think of the Japanese word for “trapped.” Nothing came to him, he closed his mouth. In frustration, he slapped his hand on the tatami, felt the sting from his cuts. It was always so difficult. So exhausting. Just to talk. Even when things were going smoothly, they never really got any easier. Now, right now, he needed it to be easy, needed the words and feelings to flow from his mouth like water, constant and strong and clear. So he could relax, close his eyes, and when he opened them again, he would already have told her everything in his mind. He would be free of his thoughts—free, just for a moment. They would belong to her then. She could do what she wanted with them.

Mrs. Hasegawa grunted softly, encouraging him. Alec looked at her. She reached over, brought out the bottle of Scotch and two glasses. Neither one of them wanted to go back into the kitchen for ice and water; they drank it straight.

“My family had a house in the country.” He said it slowly, concentrating on the Japanese, forcing the words to be right, to be what he wanted. “And every Friday night we would drive to this house, about three hours. I was very small, and I would become tired. My parents always sat in the first seat, the front seat. And my older brother was in the backseat. But I always moved down to the small space between the two seats—on the floor of the car. Yes?”

Mrs. Hasegawa nodded.

“I liked it because it was warm,” Alec said, staring at a spot on the floor, “and I would sleep for a while. But sometimes when I woke up I would be too hot, and unable to move because the
space was so small. And breathing would be difficult, there was not much air. But I would not say anything, or try to move to a different place. Instead, I would listen to the noise of the car and the voices of my family, and realize that they did not understand what was happening to me. Do you understand, Mother? They always thought that I was okay. So I would lie there and wait for someone to mention my name. As long as it took, I would wait. Then I would move up, next to my brother, and allow myself to be …” He hesitated, wondering if the word was too abstract to convey his feelings in translation.

She grunted, hardly more than a breath.

“To be free,” he said finally.

Silence. Alec thought how inadequate words were sometimes, the way they all possessed the same basic acoustical properties. As if no one word could ever be more important than any other. He couldn’t stand the thought that she might not have really grasped what he had said. He searched her face for some kind of confirmation.

Mrs. Hasegawa hadn’t moved for some time. She stared at a spot on the tatami, the light horizontal lines of her forehead intersected by deep grooves of concentration that curled up from between her eyebrows. The movement of her eyes as they traveled along the floor to his face was indirect, unsure. When she spoke, it was a question.

“And tonight, in your room, it was the same feeling?”

Alec nodded, feeling as though he had just finished a race of some kind. And then he lay back, feeling the give of the woven fibers under his weight. Eyes closed, he heard her get slowly to her feet and leave the room. When she returned, she slipped a thin pillow under his head.

“Sleep,” she said.

He heard his own voice. “Mark is coming.”

“Sleep,” she whispered, lightly stroking his hair.

His head felt warm under her gentle touch. He smiled without knowing it.

He fell asleep that way.

A
lec waited for Mark outside the restaurant, unsure of where to stand. If he had been in New York, he might have leaned against a streetlight or a parked car with his hands dangling from his front pockets. But he wasn’t sure that image would go in Tokyo, so he stood stiffly at the curb with his arms folded across his chest. He watched the masses of people move along the sidewalk and tried to think about nothing. But Mark’s face—the angry face he had lost sight of in his dream—kept coming back to him, fading in and out. Long minutes passed by, though he didn’t look at his watch; not once. And then he heard a familiar voice, and the picture in his mind was no longer lost in shadow, but brightly lit, and he felt for an instant as though he were falling. Then the voice again, so clear in a city full of people.

“Alec?”

He turned around. “Jesus. Mark.”

Mark laughed nervously and hugged him. They went inside.

The restaurant was noisy, the small tables spaced only a few feet apart. In one corner, a group of about ten people was busy toasting a grinning, red-faced man dressed in a polo shirt and sweatpants. Alec led Mark away from their shouts of
“Kampai!”
and raucous laughter, to a table near the entrance to the kitchen. Through hanging curtains, a grill could be heard sizzling and popping, filling the room with the greasy odor of frying meat.

Alec realized that he had grown accustomed to feeling big in Japan and was a little disconcerted to find how much smaller he was than Mark, whose chest and arms seemed even more muscular than they had during his football-playing days. Otherwise, Mark looked much the same, his strong cheekbones and nose framed by the heavy line of his dark eyebrows. His hair had grown longer, the brown curls playfully flopping down over the collar of his white button-down shirt and across his broad forehead, giving him, Alec thought, a look both wild and innocent.

A waiter arrived with beer and small dishes of yakitori. Alec poured for both of them:

“Kampai,”
he said.

“Cheers,” Mark said. They clinked glasses. “So. You look pretty good.”

Alec smiled. “Do I? I haven’t been getting much exercise. But thanks. You look good, too.”

“Thanks.”

“How do you like the beer?”

“It’s okay,” Mark said, taking a sip. “Yeah, it’s pretty good.”

“The Japanese make good beer,” Alec said, wondering why he was even bothering to say it.

“Yeah.”

“So what have you been up to? I got your letter, but I couldn’t really tell what was going on. I mean with the job and stuff.”

Mark shrugged, looking away. “There’s not a whole lot going on right now. I’ve been offered a couple of things, but nothing that’s any good. So about all I can say is that I’m still looking.”

“You still living at home?”

“Yeah. Where else? No job means no money, which means that Mom and I are still roommates. It’s starting to get me down—I’m going to be twenty-four in a month.”

“I know when your birthday is,” Alec said. “What about Dad and the business? I thought he said he’d start you off as a manager or something.”

Mark looked at him. “That’s what he said.”

“So?”

“So whose career would that be, Alec? It’d be his, not mine. That’s just the way he wants it. I don’t see you rushing to join up.”