Homesick for Another World(66)

“We should put the clothes back on the hangers,” Takashi said, lazily pulling up the rope.

I was pretty shaken up. I wanted to talk about the man with Takashi, but Takashi wouldn’t look at me. I helped pull the rope back in, and we untied the garments and put them back on the rack. I wanted Takashi to tell me that he was happy I was safe inside the room, and that he’d have been sorry if I’d died. I wanted to discuss the angry man. I wanted to say I believed in guardian angels, but I was scared Takashi would roll his eyes. He blew his nose into a white dress shirt and pinched a pimple on his neck. We sat on the floor with our backs against the couch and watched the sky darken behind the parking structure across the alleyway. The orchestra rehearsal had ended hours since. I knew my mother would be angry that I wasn’t home in time for dinner. Takashi pulled a cigarette from his purse and lit it. We passed it back and forth, blowing the smoke at the sliver of moon visible from where we sat on the floor by the window. Finally, Takashi told me his theory about the man in the car. “He was a hallucination. We’re in a vortex. We’re in a black hole. We’ve always been in it. Nothing we’ve ever seen has been real. Only this room is real.” He ashed his cigarette onto his tongue. “You shouldn’t have thrown that blue shirt out the window,” he said. “Now our reality has been punctured. And I have to pee.”

“You shouldn’t have thrown out that gray wig,” I said. My heart raced again when I thought of how that gray wig had flown past me, a tiny kitten pawing through the air. I don’t know what happened to that gray wig. Maybe the man in the car caught it and brought it home.

I told Takashi I didn’t want to be his girlfriend anymore. He said nothing.

I felt very depressed after that. All of eternity seemed to be laid out in front of me, and there was nothing but the couch and chairs and music stands, the wrinkled costumes, the radiator, and Takashi. That was hell there, in that locked room. When the cigarette was finished, Takashi tried to kiss me. I just turned my head away.

Not long after, a janitor came and let us out. “I smelled smoke,” he said, eyeing the crust of blood around Takashi’s chapped lips.

I cried as we walked down the secret staircase and through the dark, quiet hallways of the music school. Takashi found his violin and I found my composition notebook in the place we’d left them, under a table in the concert hall where the orchestra had rehearsed.

Outside it was a warm and pleasant evening, like nothing was wrong. Takashi waved good-bye at the bus stop and I walked to the tram. At home, I sat in the kitchen and my mother gave me a cold boiled potato, black instant coffee, and a small container of diet yogurt.

“You should try harder to please me,” she said. “For your own good.”

“I’ll try harder,” I told her. “I promise.”

But I never did try very hard to please my mother. In fact, I never tried hard to please anybody at all after that day in the locked room. Now I only try hard to please myself. That is all that matters here. That is the secret thing I found.





A BETTER PLACE


I come from some other place. It’s not like a real place on Earth or something I could point to on a map, if I even had a map of this other place, which I don’t. There’s no map because the place isn’t a place like something to be near or in or at. It’s not somewhere or anywhere, but it’s not nowhere either. There is no where about it. I don’t know what it is. But it certainly isn’t this place, here on Earth, with all you silly people. I wish I knew what it was, not because I think it would be great to tell you about it; I just miss it so much. If I knew what it was, maybe I could make something like it here on Earth. Waldemar says it’s impossible. The only way to get there is to go.

“Waldemar,” I say to my brother. “How do we get back to the place, to the thing, whatever?”

“Oh, you have to die. Or you have to kill the right person.”

That’s his answer now. For a long time he thought only the first part was true, but over time he’s thought long and hard and figured out that there is a second way. The second way is much harder. I don’t know how he figured it out, but thank God for Waldemar, who is so much wiser than me, though only a day older. I took some extra time to come out of the woman. I had doubts, even so early on, about this place here on Earth with all the dumb things everywhere. It was Waldemar who persuaded me to come out finally. I could hear his cries and feel his little fists poking through the woman’s skin. He is my best friend. Everything he does, it seems, he does because he loves me. He is the best brother ever, of all brothers here on Earth. I love him so much.

“Well, I don’t want to die,” I tell him. “Not yet. Not here.”

We talk about this from time to time. It’s nothing new.

“Then you’ve got to find the right person to kill. Once you’ve killed the right person, a hole will open up in the Earth and you can just walk straight into the hole. It will lead you through a tunnel back to where we came from. But be careful. If you kill the wrong person, you’ll get into trouble here. It wouldn’t be good. I’d visit you in prison, but chances are slim that the right person will be sitting beside you in your prison cell. And the prisons they have for little girls are the worst. There, the only way to the place would be to die. So you’ve got to be really sure about the person to kill. It’s the hardest thing to do, to be so sure about something like that. I’ve never been sure enough, and that’s why I’m still here. That, and because I’d miss you and I’d worry if I left you all alone.”