Cover Story: One hundred paper cranes

Third-place winner

With a sharp slap against my shoulder, a cleaning attendant screams into my ear, rousing me from the stupor that has left me in a train car, at what appears to be the end of the line. Next to me a woman sleeps with her head against my shoulder, arm wrapped inside mine, the scent of her perfume soured by the stink of liquor and smoke on her breath. It is still dark outside, the station platform quiet and small enough that I know we must be far away from Tokyo where my evening began.

Ikimashoo ... Stoppu ...Lasto stoppu. Go... now, ne. The attendant stands over me, only inches from my face, rigid with boredom and impatience. On his breath, I pick up whiffs of radish, egg and oolong tea over a layer of cigarette smoke. My stomach lurches and I am ready to heave up on his shoes. The attendant wants us to leave the train. Behind him stands his cleaning crew waiting to sweep the flattened cigarette butts, scattered newspapers, pulp comic books, empty snack wrappers and beer cans from under my feet. The train car and the seat we occupy are filthy, though not for long. Within minutes, the Japanese attendants in their white hard hats and crisp blue coveralls will leave the car gleaming, ready to cart another day’s worth of salary men and women to Tokyo and back home again. One of the attendants holds out a white-gloved hand, grunting at me to hand over the can of beer between my legs that has spilled against my thighs and into the plastic seat of the train, leaving dark, damp rings on my pants and a sour smell around me. The front of my new blue Kenneth Cole is covered in trails of cigarette ash and puzzling stains, clues no doubt to my seat on an empty train huddled together with a black-haired beauty, asleep and snoring. Two ugly black holes gape back up at me from my lap, another pair of trendy trousers ruined. My shoes are splashed with what looks like a layer of mushroom soup and a cigarette has burned itself out between my fingers. I’m a dirty mess, a feverish muddle, and I don’t care; I only want to sleep and be done with this unwelcoming place. And for the first time in a string of hazy hours, I think of Kumiko, a long train-ride away and wrapped alone inside the familiar folds of our bed in our tiny Shinjuku one-room. She will wake up angry with me again for walking out on a fight, it too only a wrinkle of routine furies.

Doing what he does best, the cleaning attendant stabs at my feet with his little broom, ignoring my slumped body stab stab sweep slide his blue coveralls a blur of movement before me. He mumbles displeasure, gruff, foreign syllables and noisy, huffing breaths into his chests and at my ear. Henna gaijin, he grumbles at me, no cultural niceties for my sake. All he sees is a bizarre outsider. And for all I know we’re somewhere in the Japanese Alps by now, an all-night ride north by north-west to some rice field along the monotonous line of cities and towns that extends without distinction from Japan’s finest megalopolis. It doesn’t matter though; I am an everlasting alien wherever I go in this country.

Trying to wake the woman on my arm, a horrible wave of understanding washes over me, and I realize that she is not a woman at all but a clever young Filipino man in women’s clothing named Giá. With his petite frame and Bangkok breast job, most don’t even blink. He’s as good as the real thing, nearly. I have gone too far, too far from my glassy-eyed English students and language games, far from Kumiko and the fight we had again over my visa. My visa runs out in two months and I want her to marry me so that we can stay together. I love her but she doesn’t trust me. She thinks that I am only after permanent residency and a passport to better jobs beyond the human tape recorder role I’ve taken in one of countless pop-up language schools peppered over the Tokyo cementscape. So again, our love for each other has gone missing amid words of assault in two broken languages, a gap that no dictionary can fill. Following each fight, Kumiko works the folds of colored origami paper into an elegant and telling crane, a symbol of happiness and hope, and her gentle reminder of the words we have wasted. My cell phone beeps and blinks as if annoyed that I have not answered its monotonous cry. You have six new messages, it reads.

Giá wakes and smiles at me through eyes sullied with mascara and sleep. I want to ask him questions, though I don’t know where to begin and the train attendant is pushing us out with more stabs from his broom. We leave the empty train, Giá still leaning on my shoulder, arm clinging to mine, a sign by the platform telling me that we have only gone as far as Saitama: an hour-and-a-half from home and not a bad place to be. There will be coffee close by. At least I will have a place to go. Commercial jingles ring out from platform speakers, women singing in absurdly high pitches about cigarettes and canned coffee, snack ramen and strange soda concoctions. A group of kinky-haired men — Japan’s deceptively dangerous little mafia in silk shirts and designer shoes, elaborate Oriental tattoos their signature ink — stare at us with amusement and self-satisfied comments about the bedraggled foreigners, cigarette smoke lingering around them, making me ill. They yell a mockingly loud Good ... Morning!

But the morning doesn’t want anything to do with me today. My flashbulb memory begins to return in pops of light, a Polaroid snapshot blurred but clearing as I shake last night into something I can see. There is no image safe enough to calm my fears though, each muddled impression dangerous, full of unraveling seams and razor sharp cuts, recurring sins that will not leave me alone. Please forgive me, Kumiko, I think I did something bad. My skin is itchy, my eyes are sore and my throat is dry, a bitter gulp of sticky, station air choking me. Quick-time pictures of last night march on and I have to piss.

Standing in the station bathroom, over the sink and trying to throw up again, Giá wanders up from the stall behind me, the sharp clap from his heavy heeled platforms, remarkably similar to a pair Kumiko owns, echoing across the tile floor.

You such a dream, Jacky, he says lazily in pidgin English, a dirty little dream, all crank and boom-boom-boom. So dependable you Americans.

Giá wears a tight black miniskirt and a tube top adorned with silver scales that quiver like rain drops under the fluorescent lights when he walks. A large pink bow is perched atop his poofy jet hair. He looks like Annette Funicello. M-i-c-k-e-y... He is thin, a short, petite man with no waist and twig legs in black stockings. But he is full-breasted, a C-cup if anything, and wears long evening gloves, pink lipstick and garish white eye shadow that shimmers atop his brown eyes. He puts a gloved hand on my shoulder, rubbing slowly back and forth, carefully, lovingly. Glimmers of last night stream in with the smell again of Giá’s perfume: Laughing, laughing, too much laughing, a hand on my ass and in my hair, karaoke and dancing, brandy and salmon pate, puking in a pachinko parlor, a taxi ride and a train ride so dirty. Splashing water on my face, I nearly chip my tooth with the ring on my finger. Its cheap, electroplated gold is thick around the ring finger of my left hand. But I don’t wear a ring.

What you ‘tink, Jacky? You so sweet. Giá rests his head on my shoulder, winks in the mirror, and flashes his own ring at me, wiggling his finger: an enormous diamond, too big to be real, twinkles in the light.

Did we ...? My chest heaves again and my throat clutches. Giá might as well be pulling my esophagus out with his hands.

Dum-dum-de-dum... dum-dum-de-dum. Dum-dum-de-dum, dum-de-dum-dum-de ... duuuummmm. He mimics wedding bells in his creepy accent and screams I doooo ... his voice so high and jarring that I nearly punch him. There is a sharp stab of pain in my legs, which shake at the knees as if they might suddenly buckle. I am so very sick.

My little scream. What wrong? Turning me around, he wipes my mouth with a silk handkerchief, pushes hair from my eyes and kisses the top of my head, laughing.

Oh, don’t worry, you make besssst husband. He tells me with a smile. I so happy, Jacky. I get live in America. There is every ‘ting.

But you’re a ... ? I grab at the ring and try to pull it from my finger, but my hands are swollen and it won’t come off.

Oh, Jacky, what wrong? Come here. Giá OK. OK? We come ... uh-hmmm ... don’t we ... so far too-gether? Hmmm ...?

I turn and heave dryly into the sink, a painful, ruinous cough. In the mirror, I am frightful, filthy with fatigue and abuses too many to recall. Unwilling to remember anymore and my stomach tightening painfully, I dash for a stall, a place to sit down and pray for some kind of ventilation. Giá wanders over slowly, the click-clack of his heels echoing unluckily again over the bathroom tiles. He swings open the door to the stall where I sit with my pants around my ankles, arms wrapped around my stomach.

Here my American cream-cake, have some of this. You feel better, ne? He holds a small glass pipe under my nose, a tiny crystal rock inside, a lighter lit and ready to burn.

Come on Jack, go up now.

I inhale blue smoke without thinking, wanting desperately to feel better, the metallic taste sliding down my throat, an ugly drainage. Giá pulls the stall door closed and kneels down in front of me, with his hands on my knees, fingers in gloves of red satin calmly tapping away on my thighs, a familiar rhythm, something from last night.

Better Jacky? Giá know how to make you feel gooood. We know don’t we? Hmm?

Kumiko will understand, I was only out for a little fun, a little fresh air, some time away from her and our claustrophobic Tokyo bedroom. I just needed to get outside and play in the dirt for a while — nothing serious, nothing too bad. Now all is a whisper in my ear Let it go, Jacky sweet perfume and amphetamine flash fires stinging my throat, a satin hand on my thigh, a ring on my finger, and one hundred paper cranes swaying in our bedroom window.

Christopher Bundy is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Georgia State University. Before moving to Atlanta, he spent over five years living in and traveling through Asia.