Exit West(5)

Saeed seemed surprised and extremely excited when she suggested he come.

“Nothing is going to happen,” she explained. “I want to make that clear. When I say you should come over, I’m not saying I want your hands on me.”

“No. Of course.”

Saeed’s expression had grown traumatized.

But Nadia nodded. And while her eyes were warm, she did not smile.

? ? ?

REFUGEES HAD OCCUPIED many of the open places in the city, pitching tents in the greenbelts between roads, erecting lean-tos next to the boundary walls of houses, sleeping rough on sidewalks and in the margins of streets. Some seemed to be trying to re-create the rhythms of a normal life, as though it were completely natural to be residing, a family of four, under a sheet of plastic propped up with branches and a few chipped bricks. Others stared out at the city with what looked like anger, or surprise, or supplication, or envy. Others didn’t move at all: stunned, maybe, or resting. Possibly dying. Saeed and Nadia had to be careful when making turns not to run over an outstretched arm or leg.

As she nosed her motorcycle home, followed by Saeed on his scooter, Nadia did have several moments of questioning whether she had done the right thing. But she didn’t change her mind.

There were two checkpoints on their way, one manned by police and another, newer one, manned by soldiers. The police didn’t bother with them. The soldiers stopped everyone. They made Nadia remove her helmet, perhaps thinking she might be a man disguised as a woman, but when they saw this was not the case, they waved her through.

Nadia rented the top portion of a narrow building belonging to a widow whose children and grandchildren all lived abroad. This building had once been a single house, but it was constructed adjacent to a market that had subsequently grown past and around it. The widow had kept the middle floor for herself, converted the bottom floor into a shop that she let out to a seller of car-battery-based residential-power-backup systems, and given the uppermost floor to Nadia, who had overcome the widow’s initial suspicions by claiming that she too was a widow, her husband a young infantry officer killed in battle, which, admittedly, was less than entirely true.

Nadia’s flat comprised a studio room with an alcove kitchenette and a bathroom so small that showering without drenching the commode was impossible. But it opened onto a roof terrace that looked out over the market and was, when the electricity had not gone out, bathed in the soft and shimmying glow of a large, animated neon sign that towered nearby in the service of a zero-calorie carbonated beverage.

Nadia told Saeed to wait at a short distance, in a darkened alley around the corner, while she unlocked a metal grill door and entered the building alone. Once upstairs she threw a quilt over her bed and pushed her dirty clothes into the closet. She filled a small shopping bag, paused another minute, and dropped it out a window.

The bag landed beside Saeed with a muffled thump. He opened it, found her spare downstairs key, and also one of her black robes, which he furtively pulled on over his own outfit, covering his head with its hood, and then, with a mincing gait that reminded her of a stage-play robber, he approached the front door, unlocked it, and a minute later appeared at her apartment, where she motioned him to sit.

Nadia selected a record, an album sung by a long-dead woman who was once an icon of a style that in her American homeland was quite justifiably called soul, her so-alive but no longer living voice conjuring up from the past a third presence in a room that presently contained only two, and asked Saeed if he would like a joint, to which he fortunately said yes, and which he offered to roll.

? ? ?

WHILE NADIA AND SAEED were sharing their first spliff together, in the Tokyo district of Shinjuku where midnight had already come and gone, and so, technically, the next day had already commenced, a young man was nursing a drink for which he had not paid and yet to which he was entitled. His whiskey came from Ireland, a place he had never been to but evinced a mild fondness for, perhaps because Ireland was like the Shikoku of a parallel universe, not dissimilar in shape, and likewise slung on the ocean-ward side of a larger island at one end of the vast Eurasian landmass, or perhaps because of an Irish gangster film he had gone to see repeatedly in his still-impressionable youth.

The man wore a suit and a crisp white shirt and therefore any tattoos he had or did not have on his arms would not be visible. He was stocky but, when he got to his feet, elegant in his movements. His eyes were sober, flat, despite the drink, and not eyes that attracted the eyes of others. Gazes leapt away from his gaze, as they might among packs of dogs in the wild, in which a hierarchy is set by some sensed quality of violent potential.

Outside the bar he lit a cigarette. The street was bright from illuminated signage but relatively quiet. A pair of drunk salarymen passed him at a safe distance, then an off-the-clock club hostess, taking quick steps and staring at the pavement. The clouds above Tokyo hung low, reflecting dull red back at the city, but a breeze was now blowing, he felt it on his skin and in his hair, a sense of brine and slight chill. He held the smoke in his lungs and released it slowly. It disappeared in the wind’s flow.

He was surprised to hear a noise behind him, because the alley to his rear was a cul-de-sac and empty when he came outside. He had examined it, out of habit and quickly, but not carelessly, before turning his back. Now there were two Filipina girls, in their late teens, neither probably yet twenty, standing beside a disused door to the rear of the bar, a door that was always kept locked, but was in this moment somehow open, a portal of complete blackness, as though no light were on inside, almost as though no light could penetrate inside. The girls were dressed strangely, in clothing that was too thin, tropical, not the kind of clothing you normally saw Filipinas wear in Tokyo, or anyone else at this time of year. One of them had knocked over an empty beer bottle. It was rolling, high-pitched, in a scurrying arc away.