A Tale for the Time Being (39 page)

I started having periods in Sunnyvale, when I was twelve, which is pretty normal in America but early for Japan. I was fourteen when we moved back to Tokyo, but then suddenly my period just
stopped for almost the whole year, probably on account of all the stress and ijime. I think my body was trying to go backward in time to my younger, happier days. Anyway, it didn’t start
again until the last class that day, when Sensei was announcing that the U.S. had started bombing Afghanistan, and suddenly I felt myself starting to bleed. Stupidly, I’d gotten out of the
habit of carrying around pads and supplies. I knew it wasn’t safe to hang around after school for even a minute, but I wasn’t going to make it home without a big bloody disaster, so as
soon as the bell rang, I grabbed my stuff and ran to the washroom.

The junior high school I was going to was old, and the old-style Japanese toilets are different from American ones. The bowls are in the ground and you have to squat over them instead of
sitting. I was squatting there with my skirt up and my stained panties down at my ankles when I heard the washroom door open and close. Someone had come in.

As quietly as I could, I wrapped some toilet paper around my hand and made a wad. A noise, kind of a scrabbling sound like rats climbing the wall, came from the stall next to me. I froze. The
stalls are built all the way to the floor so you can’t see under, thank god, but still it’s a terrible feeling to be squatting with your panties down and your bare butt hanging out,
listening to rats. Nothing makes you feel more vulnerable. I held my breath. Everything was still. I hiked up my skirt and leaned over to stick the wad into my panties, when I heard the sound
again, only this time it was coming from the top of the partition. I heard someone snicker and looked up to see two raggedy lines of little keitai phones thrust over the partition walls on both
sides, aiming down at me. I stood up real quick and pulled up my panties.

“Oooh!” a voice cried. “Nice shot!”

One by one, the phones disappeared. I pulled my skirt down and backed into the corner of the stall.

“Gross!” someone said. “There’s blood! She didn’t even flush!”

I leaned against the tiled wall, hugging myself. Should I flush? Should I try to escape? If I’d had a rifle I would have shot myself in the throat.

“Baka! It’s blurry!”

I pushed away from the wall and reached for the latch.

“That’s not blurry! That’s her pubes!”

I unlocked the door and opened it. They were standing at the sinks, clustered around Reiko, comparing their keitai screens. I ducked my head and pushed past them toward the exit, but Reiko held
out her hand like a traffic cop.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Home,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

Someone grabbed me by the collar then and pushed me into the corner, where Daisuke was filming with a video camera. Three of the big girls forced me to my knees and then onto my stomach. The
floor tiles smelled of urine and bleach and felt cold against my cheek. I could feel someone’s hard knee in my back, pinning me down, and someone’s hands yanking my skirt up to my
armpits. Someone else kicked me in the ribs.

“Pass me the rope.”

They had planned this. They held my hands together, and then they pulled my skirt up over my head and used a skipping rope to tie it like a sack so I couldn’t see. They held my ankles so I
couldn’t kick and then they pulled off my panties.

“Ooh, score!” I heard one of them say. “There’s stains! You get more for stains!”

“That’s disgusting. It stinks. Put it in the bag before I have to throw up!”

“Daisuke, you baka. Are you shooting this? We need video.”

It was dark inside my plaid skirt sack, and hot and wet because I was breathing hard and my breath had nowhere to go. I could see only the faintest bit of light and shadow through the weave of
the skirt fabric. Someone stuck a toe under my ribs and rolled me over onto my back, and now the shadows were moving above me, and the tiles were cold against my bare bottom. They were talking
about who was going to rape me first. They decided to make Daisuke do it.

“Hand over the camera,” Reiko ordered. “Pull down his pants.”

They held my legs apart and made him kneel and then lie down on top of me. I could feel the weight of his scrawny body and his bony hips poking into me, but he was way too scared for anything to
happen, so they kicked him off and I heard him run away. They started talking about how they needed a rape scene for the video, but after Daisuke’s failure, nobody wanted to try. Maybe they
were all scared. I don’t know.

“Somebody’s gotta do it.”

“She’s bleeding. It’s too gross.”

“You guys are pathetic.”

“Fine, so you do it, Reiko. It’ll be a lez scene. That’s even better.”

“Baka. I’m no lez.”

I just lay there, perfectly still. It was pointless to struggle or scream. There were too many of them, and no one would hear me or come to help, but really it didn’t matter, because I was
thinking about Number One, and he was giving me courage. They could break my body but they wouldn’t break my spirit. They were only shadows, and as I listened to them arguing, I felt my face
relax into a gentle smile. I summoned up my supapawa, and soon the shadows were just mosquitoes, buzzing in the distance and bothersome only if you let them be.

“Hey,” I heard someone say. “She’s stopped moving.”

“She’s not breathing.”

“That’s way too much blood.”

“Shit. Let’s get out of here!”

Do you remember what it feels like to be a little kid playing dead? You’re out in your backyard in Sunnyvale with the other kids, and there’s a war going on, and
suddenly BANG! somebody points a stick at you and shoots? So you fall to the ground, clutching your chest. The earth is cold and damp. Your enemy is watching you die, so you make it good, groaning
and clutching at your bleeding heart, but by the time you’re done, the war has already moved on to a different part of the backyard.

You lie there, feeling the cold of the earth pressing against your cheek, your chest, your whole body. There are wet patches on your knees from where you first went down. You shiver. The earth
smells like mud and rain and lawn chemicals. It makes your head ache, but you don’t move. You can’t move because you are dead.

Where did everyone go? you’re wondering. Did they forget about me?

How much longer do I have to lie here?

Will they just play around my dead body and then go home? How will I know if the game is over? What if nobody tells me?

It’s boring to be dead!

Finally, you can’t take it anymore, so you roll over onto your back and open your eyes, and above you is the great, big, goofy, cloud-spotted sky. You blink, half believing that it’s
not pretend and you might actually be dead. Slowly you move your arm, your leg, to see if you still can, and then . . . hey! You’re not dead! Relieved, you scramble to your feet, pick up
your gun, and declare yourself alive again, and run off to rejoin the war.

That’s what I felt like, only I couldn’t see the sky at all, only the hazy blur of the fluorescent light tubes through the plaid fabric. The bathroom and the hallway outside were
silent. The tiles were still cold, and I could feel the sticky blood against my bottom. Slowly I sat up and pushed at the knotted fabric above my head until the rope gave way and released me from
my skirt. The bathroom was bright and empty. I used my teeth to untie the rope around my wrists. They hurt, and so did the place in my rib where someone kicked me, but mostly I was okay. I wet some
paper towels and went back into the toilet stall to clean myself up, and then I took the train home.

They posted the video on the Internet that night. One of my classmates emailed me the link. The image quality from the keitai phone cams was crap, grainy and shaky, and you couldn’t really
see my face too clearly, which I was grateful for, but the video was awfully clear. With my arms and head tied up in my skirt and my naked legs kicking, you could almost say I looked like a giant
prehistoric squid, squirming and oozing ink from my ink sac in a futile attempt to confuse my predators.

Next to the video was a link to a burusera fetish
¹⁴¹
site where hentais could bid on my blood-stained panties. The auction was scheduled to last
for a week, and the bidding was fast, but this time I didn’t feel any satisfaction at my rising hit count. I shut down the computer, remembering to clear the cache in case my dad happened to
get curious.

We still only had the one computer, so I had to share it with my dad. For a long time he never went online, but after his whole obsession with the Falling Man started, he was on all the time.
And once the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, that was it. He put away his philosophers and his origami bugs and spent all day following the war, which was really inconvenient because I was dealing with
this highly sensitive burusera material, and I didn’t want him snooping on me when I was monitoring the price of my panties. It gave me the creeps. He would lurk around behind me, waiting for
his turn, until finally I had to ask him to leave so I could have some privacy. But even then he’d poke his head into the bedroom like every five minutes.

“Just let me know when you’re off, okay?” he’d say, until finally I gave up and let him have a turn, at which point he’d hog it for hours. When Mom asked him what
he was doing, he lied and told her he was looking for a job. She pinched her lips together and turned away before the cutting words escaped from her mouth. She didn’t believe him, and neither
did I, because we’d both been checking out his browsing history and we’d seen the websites he was hanging out on. Weapons technology pages. War blogs. Military fan sites. Al Jazeera.
Missile footage that looked like first-person shooter games, only grainy and dark. Bombs exploding. Buildings collapsing. Beatings. Bodies.

2.

It was me who found him.

I stopped going to school after the Panty Incident, while the auction was in progress. Instead, I left the house dressed in my school uniform and went to an Internet café, where I could
change into street clothes, and either I’d hang out there and watch the bidding and read manga if the weather was bad, or take the train into the city and look at the shops. Then I changed
back into my uniform and came home in time for supper.

The days were getting colder and the leaves on the ginkgo trees that lined the streets were turning to gold. It was raining a lot, too, and the rain knocked the leaves to the ground where they
lay plastered on the wet black asphalt like little gilded fans. Ginkgo trees remind me of Jiko, and it always makes me sad to see the leaves and nuts getting crushed under people’s shoes and
turning into yellow smears that look and smell like dog shit or vomit.

On the day the auction was ending I don’t know if I was depressed or nervous, knowing that some disgusting hentai would soon be rejoicing over my panties. It was not a nice feeling, kind
of heavy and dirty and blue, so I went to the DIY craft shop in Harajuku to cheer myself up. And it was lucky I did, because that’s when I found my beautiful
À la recherche du
temps perdu
diary, and I remember feeling cheerful on the train home, like as long as I had a secret diary, I could survive.

But as soon as I let myself in the door with my key, my optimism vanished. I knew something was wrong on account of the smell. The apartment smelled like stinky ginkgo trees. It smelled like the
alley on a Saturday morning after the hostesses brought their dates home drunk. It smelled like garbage and throw-up.

I took off my shoes and stepped up into the kitchen.

“Tadaima . . . ,” I called. Have I mentioned tadaima? Tadaima means “just now,” and it’s what you say when you come in the door to your home. Just now. Here I
am.

Dad didn’t answer, because, just then, he wasn’t.

He wasn’t in the kitchen. He wasn’t in the living room. Volume I of The Great Minds of Western Philosophy was sitting on the table, and the television was off. This was a detail I
especially noticed because he always had the television tuned to CNN or BBC so he could catch the latest breaking news about the war. But the screen was blank and the room was silent. He
wasn’t in the bedroom, either.

I found him in the toilet. He was lying on the floor, facedown in a puddle of vomit, and I wish I could tell you that I rushed to his side to help him, but I didn’t. I walked in and saw
him and gagged on the smell, and then this big empty space opened up in time when everything was quiet and still. I think I may have said “Oh, sorry” or something stupid like that and
then backed up and closed the door behind me.

I stood there for a while, staring at the door. It was like I’d walked in on him while he was taking a dump and caught sight of his penis or something. I can’t explain it. It felt so
private and personal, him lying there, and I just knew he wouldn’t want me to see him like that, so I backed across the hallway and sank down against the wall until I was sitting on the
floor.

“Dad?” I asked, but my voice sounded like it was coming from another person who lived far away. “Dad?”

He didn’t answer. I had my keitai on a chain around my neck so I called 911, and then I remembered that in Japan the emergency number is 119, so I called that instead, and then I sat there
until the ambulance came. The paramedics put him on a stretcher and took him away. I asked if my dad was dead, and they said no. I asked if he was going to be okay, but they wouldn’t tell me.
They wouldn’t let me ride with him. They wanted to call for a policewoman to keep me company until my mom came home, but I told them I was almost sixteen and used to being alone. The
apartment was really quiet when they were gone. I stared at the card in my hand. The paramedic had written the name of the hospital where they were taking him on it, but I didn’t know how to
get there by train. I called my mom’s number but just got her voicemail, so I tried leaving a message.

“It’s me.”

I hate talking to machines, so I hung up and texted her instead.