The Collective (13 page)

Joshua chewed on his tonkatsu curry, and I munched on my yaki donburi, thinly sliced beef with onions and bean sprouts served over rice.

“Those girls were civilians,” he said. “What can you expect from civilians? Of any color? They can’t understand. They see an unremittingly sad film, and they think it’s depressing, whereas we’re fucking enthralled, because the catharsis for us is in witnessing great art, seeing the undiluted truth, in the shared recognition that life is pain. You need to go out with an artist. An Asian artist.”

“You find me a nice Asian artist,” I said, “and I will.”

Later that summer, Joshua told me to come over to his house, he had a little surprise for me. He opened the front door and introduced me to his new roommate—Jessica Tsai.

I broke the lease to my basement apartment in the Back Bay and moved into the house on Walker Street.

That first month, with just the three of us in the house, was idyllic. There were three bedrooms on the second floor, the master and two smaller ones that had once been home offices for the Meers. Joshua couldn’t bear to sleep in his parents’ old room, although he said one of us was welcome to it. Jessica and I didn’t feel it’d be proper, either, and moved futons into the two smaller rooms, while Joshua encamped in the converted attic upstairs, an expansive, sunny haven with dormers and skylights and its own bathroom.

Jessica was hired as a waitress at Upstairs at the Pudding. She also got a daytime gig proofreading at the law firm Gaston & Snow downtown. She would look for a third job—her student loans were quadruple what I owed—but none of this employment would start for a few weeks, so she had much of August at her leisure, time to relax and work on her art.

Serendipity visited me, too. Palaver’s managing editor, a feminist poet who had never gotten along with Paviromo, quit without notice, and he asked me to take over her slot. The salary was shit, and still I wouldn’t have benefits, but it was a full-time job, allowing me to take a leave from teaching freshman comp at Walden College.

For once, we could all take a breather. We went to the Kendall Square Cinema and Brattle Theatre to watch indie and foreign films, to Jillian’s to play pool, to Jae’s for pad thai and the Forest Café for mole poblano, to Redbones for ribs and the Burren for Guinness, to Hollywood Express to rent DVDs, to the Harvard Book Store and Wordsworth to browse books, to Tower Records, Newbury Comics, and Looney Tunes to scope out CDs.

Joshua’s musical tastes now leaned toward Fugazi, Outkast, Massive Attack, Beck, and Marilyn Manson, but he was obsessed at the moment with Jeff Buckley’s Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, a double-disc set of unfinished songs. He played it incessantly. Whenever the opening chords for “The Sky Is a Landfill” wafted down from the attic, Jessica would groan, “God, why does he have to keep playing that thing over and over? It’s driving me fucking insane.”

It was a strange album, at times soulful, bluesy, psychedelic, and incoherent, filled with weird, discordant riffs, Buckley’s falsetto spooky and haunting, all the more so knowing he had died after recording the demos. Joshua was convinced that Buckley had committed suicide.

“It was an accident,” I told him.

“He goes for a dip wearing jeans and Doc Martens?”

The story was that Buckley, frustrated with the production of his second album in New York, had fled to Memphis and cloistered himself in a cabin with just a mattress, a four-track, and his guitars. He had quit drinking and smoking and was working nonstop. He had just completed writing all the songs for My Sweetheart the Drunk when, enigmatically, he took an evening swim in the Wolf River Harbor, fully clothed. He was last seen floating away on his back, singing Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” at the top of his lungs. The official cause of death was listed as an accidental drowning, the theory being that he had been pulled into the Mississippi by an undertow created by a passing tugboat. Joshua didn’t buy it.

“He’d finished the album. That’s what he’d set out to accomplish, and he was done. He didn’t have any more reason to live. Writing the songs, not releasing them, was his raison d’ętre.”

When we were at Mac, Joshua had once taken us to the Washington Avenue Bridge, from which John Berryman had jumped. Jessica had asked why he’d done it, and Joshua had said, “Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.” I had thought Joshua was making a general declaration about existence, but it was a line from Berryman’s book Dream Songs. “Who knows why he did it,” he told us. “Most people inclined to kill themselves don’t out of cowardice. That’s why William Carlos Williams said the perfect man of action is the suicide.”

That summer on Walker Street, Joshua’s other obsession was with Haruki Murakami. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle had just come out in paperback. Previously he hadn’t been much of a fan of Murakami’s—too lightweight and gimmicky, too many pop culture references and cyberpunk sleights of hand—but this novel was a monumental breakthrough, he believed, right up there with Blood Meridian and The Remains of the Day. (Joshua had photos of McCarthy and Ishiguro on his bulletin board, along with Kafka, Jim Morrison, and Thích Quang ?uc, the Buddhist monk who had been famously photographed in the moment of self-immolation on the streets of Saigon, reportedly not moving a muscle or making a sound as he charred and shriveled.)

Joshua had heard Murakami was living in Cambridge, somewhere between Central and Inman Squares, while filling a titular post as a writer-in-residence at Tufts, and Joshua spent several days crisscrossing the neighborhood, trying to find the pumpkin-colored house that Murakami was reportedly renting. He read interviews in which Murakami said he rose at five a.m. and wrote for six hours and then went running, read for a bit, listened to some jazz, and was in bed by ten p.m. He kept to this routine without variation, Murakami said, because the repetition induced a deeper state of mind, a form of mesmerism.

So Joshua, formerly a sedentary, inveterate night owl, decided to change his schedule and start running himself, and he enlisted me to train him. I had continued running after Mac, doing the loop nearly every day on the Esplanade between the Museum of Science and the Mass Ave bridge when I’d lived on Marlborough Street.

We bought shoes for Joshua at Marathon Sports. He had in mind two things: first, to emulate Murakami’s work ethic, helping him wrap up a draft of his novel, and second, to possibly spot Murakami along the Charles River, his preferred route, and befriend him, perhaps become running buddies with him, do the Boston Marathon together.

I thought I’d start Joshua off with an easy jog down JFK Street to the Eliot Bridge, but Joshua—a chain-smoker since high school—was sweating and hyperventilating after a mere quarter mile.

“You’re going to have to quit smoking,” I told him.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, bent over, hands on his knees.

“And eat better.” At the moment the only meal he was making for himself was a fried egg and bologna sandwich on Wonder bread, slathered with mayonnaise and splotched with soy sauce. He considered himself a gourmand, yet could subsist on the worst junk imaginable.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said.

Maybe his dietary habits never improved much, but in time he did become a diligent runner. It was always he who would drag me out on cold or rainy weekends. He would never miss a day. It was one of the few things that gave him peace, he would tell me.

He never ended up meeting Murakami. We would soon learn that he had left Cambridge three years earlier, in 1995, compelled to return to Japan after the earthquake in Kobe and the sarin-gas attack in Tokyo. Yet before we knew that, Joshua would look ahead expectantly as he puffed along the Charles, and whenever he saw a middle-aged Asian man approaching us, Joshua would say, “Is that him?” It became a private joke between us. In the years to follow, anytime we saw an Asian man with a broad forehead, sunken cheeks, and short bangs, one of us would say, “Is that him?”

Jessica had stopped running quite a while before then, her joints beginning to bother her. She had become an Ashtanga Vinyasa devotee, and she was going to Baron Baptiste’s Power Yoga studio in Porter Square. I accompanied her for the first time one night in mid-August.

The class was for all levels, and it was first-come, first-served, cash only, ten dollars a head. A line of people waited on the sidewalk for the door to open. What struck me immediately upon entering the studio was the heat—sweltering and oppressive, the thermostat intentionally set at ninety degrees, hotter than it was outside. “Baron calls it healing heat,” Jessica told me as we filed in.

The place was bare-bones: no dressing rooms, showers, or lockers. Everyone—mostly young women, mixed with a few post-hippie graybeards—began stripping off their T-shirts and shorts and piling them against the walls and in the corners. I was astonished by how beautiful their bodies were, Jessica’s included.

I had seen her over the years—she’d sometimes take the train or bus up from Rhode Island or New York to visit us when Joshua was in town—but she had not ventured out of Provincetown at all during her fellowship. In the intervening year, she had cut off her hair, not much longer than mine now, and it was spiky and highlighted with burgundy streaks. She had acquired an eyebrow ring and a tongue stud, and she favored clothes in the cross-genres of Goth/punk/grunge. Zippered corset tops, cargo pants, skater shoes, a Mao cap with a red star. She had also gotten tattooed—not with 3AC, but with a large green feather, a peacock quill, that plumed up the inside of her right forearm, and also, to my regret, a tramp stamp of barbed-wire twists that defaced her lower back.

But her body—good Lord, how she had transformed her body. In her sports bra and skintight spandex shorts, she was lithe, sinewy, and buffed. So were most of the other women, and as they packed into the room and began warming up in front of me with sun salutations and downward dogs, I was afforded close-up views of curved, supple ramps of ass and distinctly delineated furrows of ungulate. I thought it impossible I’d be able to make it through the ninety-minute class without embarrassing myself with an erection.

I needn’t have been concerned. This was not yoga as I had imagined it. There were no smoldering sticks of incense or Tibetan tingsha cymbals to guide us into oneness, no Sanskrit chants or quiet moments of sitting meditation to harmonize our pranas. This was an unadulterated, ball-busting workout. This was boot camp, absolute hell on earth.

The instructor, Kenta, was Japanese American, dressed in a long-sleeved T-shirt, loose pants, and a bandanna. He was not an imposing man—short, and even, it seemed, a little pudgy. He walked with a strut and spoke with a nasal voice that betrayed a faint metro lisp. But he led the class through a series of torturous stretches and lunges and contortions. Cobra pose, warrior pose, I couldn’t keep up with the poses, couldn’t flex or twist the way everyone else did. Soon I was out of breath, in pain, and sweating. Really sweating. I had never sweated so much in my life. With the heat turned up and the doors and windows sealed, with all the straining bodies so close together, the temperature must have been over a hundred. It was a sauna, a convection oven.

“Superglue your nips to your kneecaps,” Kenta ordered the class.

Sweat dripped onto the floor and was puddling—not just from me, from my mat neighbors, too.

“Don’t let fear interfere,” Kenta said. “You might feel like you’re struggling, but just transport yourself into the eye of the storm. Now sweep up and inhale.”

Sweat from my neighbors hit the backs of my legs, the wall mirror, the ceiling.

“You feel that decompression?” Kenta said. “It’s all about letting go. Now rotate.”

Sweat from my neighbors flew through the air and splattered my face.

“Awesome,” Kenta said. “This is warm molasses. Love your body. Don’t push. Just flow.”

I had to pause repeatedly to rest. I’d drop down into child pose, kneeling pathetically, and then rise and try to follow along, grunting and squealing. I lost my balance several times and fell over, almost instigating a dominoic catastrophe.

“I thought you were in shape from running,” Jessica said when the class ended.

“Some of those poses were inhumane.”

I stumbled through the door, into the relief of the cool night air. “Your wrists don’t hurt?” I asked. I hadn’t noticed her modifying her poses or using any of the foam blocks or apparatuses.

“No. Yoga seems to help, actually.”

“I don’t know if I can walk home. Let’s take a cab.”

“It’s less than a mile. Come on.”

We stopped at the White Hen on Mass Ave so I could buy a jug of Gatorade. “Is Kenta gay?” I asked.

“No. Why do you ask?”

“He seems gay.”

“He’s married and has two kids. He used to be a professional kickboxer. Before this, he was a trainer for the Celtics. Have you become homophobic?”

“Of course not.”

“Homophobia’s always a sign of latent homosexuality.”

“I’m not homophobic, and I’m not gay. I was just asking,” I said. “Slow down. My legs are killing me.”

“I love the feeling after class,” Jessica said. “It feels like I’ve just had incredible, hot, sweaty, slippery sex.”

Sex. Sex with Jessica—hot, sweaty, slippery, or any other variety. I had been imagining it quite frequently in the two weeks we’d become housemates, in even closer proximity now than we had been on the fourth floor of Dupre. “Do you ever talk to Loki?” I asked.

“Loki? Not in years.”

From Skidmore, Loki Somerset had gone to Yale for a combined PhD in film studies and East Asian languages and literatures. RISD was only two hours up 95 from New Haven, so they had seen a lot of each other and had even begun talking about marriage. But then Loki spent a summer in Beijing and fell in love with a Chinese woman (“I guess I wasn’t authentic enough for him,” Jessica told me). Last she’d heard, he had gone back to China for a postdoc at the Beijing Film Academy.

“Have you been seeing anyone?” I asked as we crossed Linnaean Street.

“No, not really, nothing serious.”

This was her patented answer, invariably circumspect about the particulars. I didn’t really know anything about her romantic life in the last four years, whereas, if prompted, I was unfailingly forthcoming with her.