BULLET TRAIN

Antoinette

It would be hard to say, she realised, when the thing happened. Truly happened. At some point there would have been a loosening, a relaxing of the grip. A reassessment. And then she must have reached elsewhere. Leant forward and challenged balance and reached, despite the risk of the fall. Or because of it. But when, amongst all of that, would it be fair to say that the line was crossed?

They agreed on the Hikari train that departed from Shinagawa at midday on Wednesday. It would take six hours, two trains, a ferry, and, for Ana, the hotel shuttle. Kyou had been brief and business-like in her texted responses. 

During the week was acceptable, if she were back by Saturday night. 

The link for the ticket booking had been received. 

She did not require accommodation. 

She appreciated the offer. 

It was destabilising; the thrill that accompanied a message notification was quickly blunted by the bland contents. Ana was left wondering whether the idea had been an awful mistake. It hadn’t felt that way. In the moment, when they were together and out from  underneath the gallery’s fluorescents, it was obvious. Natural. Kyou's taste was fresh on her brazen lips. It was as though there was no-one else left on Earth. What better travel companion could there be?

But there had been no further mention of that night. Not a call, not a message. Neither acknowledgement nor apology. Perhaps there never would be. Perhaps there was nothing to be said. It had simply…happened. They were both adult enough to recognise that nothing more would come of it. Adult enough to—what? Go on as though it was as inconsequential as a brunch date? Perhaps, for Kyou, it was simply as unremarkable as any other encounter. Dismal as that was, it seemed likely. Perfectly safe and perfectly dissatisfying.

It didn't matter. It couldn't. If Kyou didn't care to speak of it, then Ana wouldn't. The evening when she returned from the gallery and undressed for bed, in her beautiful apartment with its lights dimmed and its spaces empty, she watched herself in the window's reflection. Lights from hotels and cranes paused mid-reach and the points of distant stars were captured in her silhouette. 

“What are you doing?” she murmured to her double. “When she is so beautiful and you are so strange?”

When she noticed the missed calls from John, she felt a terrible heaviness somewhere above her stomach. She wanted to tell him everything; she couldn’t face him. She wanted to explain why Bijushima was important, that the risk was nothing—nothing at all—when she thought about what it could answer. It was inevitable. But he wouldn’t understand. It would worry him. Hurt him. If she had called him right at that moment, the truth felt so close and so vivid that it would certainly find a way to burst a seam and pour out of her. She hoped there would come a day when she felt less anxious about him discovering her true madness.

She was mad, after all. She was born into madness. Her parents were a nonsensical combination that produced an heir that embodied such nonsense. A red-haired Japanese girl. A girl too tall and too dreamy; too intelligent and too wistful; too separate and separated. The halves from each parent never seemed to merge comfortably. It was that, she supposed, that she vainly hoped for: a sense of settling, of something like home. And John could have that for her in a heartbeat, but something—madness, maybe—stopped her ever finding him there on the other side.

And so she didn’t call him back. And she thought of Kyou. She thought of how she’d seemed to want—not brush off or dismiss or shrug away, but want—what? Ana? Well. That notion, on top of the heaviness, built to a kind of vertigo. It was too much. Antoinette Kutsuki ran to the spotless toilet and threw up half a bottle of ¥170,000 champagne. 

In the days that followed, Natsuko had also been frosty in any correspondence. She asked whether there had been news of her brother, how studies were going, whether Ana was managing. All things she rarely spoke of or cared about. There was none of her usual verve, no mention of Kai. So perhaps that was that, then? Ana wasn’t sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, she’d wanted nothing more than to prove something to Natsuko with the photographs. ‘There,’ she’d wanted to say, with childish spite. ‘See what I know. See how I got there first.’ But it wasn’t entirely that. Not really. It was a lament, a plea. ‘Look! Look, because you’re missing something. Every day you’re missing it, and it’s beautiful.’ 

After all, Natsuko, of all people, deserved beauty in her life. She was never judgemental, never false. She was a good person. Better than Ana could hope to be. 

At the train station on Wednesday, eleven-thirty A.M. turned to eleven-fifty, then eleven fifty-five, and Kyou was still nowhere in sight. It wasn’t busy, not as though she could be obscured by a crowd. Fellow travellers picked up their snacks and luggage and left the platform for the waiting train. She wasn’t coming. Ana rolled her suitcase towards the door, disappointment accompanying her like a trusted friend. 

She’d felt this way felt on nights when her father was whisked away early from a dinner with John’s family. Ana didn’t care for her father’s presence, but John did. His mother did. The effort they went to in preparing their hair and clothes and topics of conversation, their worries about paying the bill: all sweet little details that the President was blind to. It wasn’t for Antoinette to highlight these and apologise; that would only make matters worse. The best she could offer was, “Il n’est pas sortable. He’s impossible company!” But she noticed the injury to their confidence. She felt it with them.

She’d felt this way when John woke up oblivious on the anniversary of her mother’s death, or when he wrote off films as arty-vague, and all she wanted was to sit in the dark and hold the feeling close. 

It was a state, she now realised, that she had long associated with Kyou Nakajima. 

When Ana found their seats, she was alone. Fellow travellers located themselves about the carriage and got set up with bento boxes and holiday reading. Ana put in earphones from which a soft voice sang of airborne castles and closed her eyes. The train pulled away smoothly, leaving hope and trepidation behind on the platform. No company. No muse. No discussion about what a moment of madness might have meant. 

Ana was rocked back to attention after ten minutes when the doors hissed open at Shin-Yokohama Station and on sauntered Kyou Nakajima, duffel bag over one shoulder, convenience store package in her other hand, train pass pressed between her lips. She was in jeans that were too loose, an open shirt and vest, and, apparently, without her chest binding. She seemed younger without her makeup and gel, and charming in a sweetly oblivious way. It was infectious. It was infuriating. She handed the snack package to Ana and removed the ticket from her mouth to ask, “Seat taken?”

Ana, who felt her eyes might start to water, resisted the urge to hit Kyou on the arm. “I thought you’d changed your mind.”

“Nah. Just had a client away from the centre.” She ran a hand through to smooth her hair. “Mornings are unusual, but, you know, best to start the day in good spirits, so—”

“I’m sure I don’t want to know.”

“Are you?” Kyou smirked.

“I’m glad you made it,” came the honest answer.

Their reunion was short-lived. After settling in, Kyou became engrossed in her phone, hammering away with her thumbs as if her life depended on it.

“Good game?” Ana tried.

“Huh? No. Correspondence.”

“Really. With your mother, I suppose.”

“Clients.” Kyou paused to look up quizzically, perhaps too distracted to appreciate sarcasm.

“Must be a few.”

“Too many.” Kyou answered, sighing as though she were a long-suffering administrator rather than a despicable womaniser. 

“Anything from Natsuko?”

“No.”

“‘No, it’s confidential’, or ‘no, you haven’t heard?’”

“Haven’t heard.”

“Have you tried contacting her?”

Kyou momentarily lowered the phone, took a breath, and put her chin on her fist. With her irises lacking the protection of their blue lenses, her eyes were warmer. She looked warily at Ana. “Do you want me to?”

“She’s upset.”

“Not my fault.”

“Don’t you care?”

“I care about boundaries.”

Ana huffed, replaced her earphones, and sat back, turning instead to watch the world speed by. 

They flew through tunnels that had been blasted through ancient rock. Once the cities died away, there were stretches of newly-planted rice paddies, the water creating a vast mirror for the sky. Other evidence of human habitation was sparse. Little white vans bumbled along empty roads. The farmland stretched out to the feet of forest-lined mountains. What might it be like to live simply? 

Ana soon fell into a hazy dream. 

There was an open, yolk-yellow sky, sick with timelessness. All about were glorious fields of red leaves that flew up wherever she walked. Here and there, women dressed like shrine maidens were bravely pushing leaves into piles that lasted for a moment, then burst apart and scattered again. Endless leaves to be raked by the unlucky, with no tree in sight. 

She skated her  bare feet over the ground. The leaves were soft: too soft to be real. When Ana looked up again, the women had become deer like the ones found on Miyajima. What had they represented? Messengers of the Gods? Their coats were a toasted wheat colour, flecked with white patches like snowflakes. Their eyes were painfully forgiving. They wandered and sat with their young. They bent to eat the leaves. Ana wanted to shout at them to stop, because the leaves weren’t from trees. There was something very wrong with them, something suspect about the redness in their veins and the threatening yellow sky. Then a doe collapsed onto its fawn.

When Ana awoke, Kyou was still as engaged as ever in ‘correspondence.’

“Give me that.” Ana reached for the phone. “This is a holiday, isn’t it? I’ll answer the next one for you.”

Kyou startled. “I don’t think you should—”

But the phone was out of her hands. Ana looked down at the screen then pressed the phone to her chest and checked over her shoulder for witnesses. She laughed.

“Magnificent!” Ana announced, then hissed conspiratorially, “What do you say to a picture like this? I mean she seems to have a small...bathroom? It looks like?”

“I don’t think she’s after feedback on real estate. Give it back.”

Ana acquiesced, gradually. Kyou held her wrist, forefinger and thumb grazing Ana’s skin in the exchange.

“Small bathroom,” Kyou muttered. “You’ve got no game.”

“So what? What does someone want in response to a photo like that?”

“Same as anyone. Fantasy. Acknowledgement. Escape.”

“I would want to escape that bathroom too.”

“I’m not writing that.”

“She probably wants a picture of you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I could take it.”

“You’ve taken enough photos.”

“I’m sure I could take a better picture than that. I’d even keep your head in the frame.”

“Are you a photographer or a pornographer?”

“Photographer. Why? I didn’t say I’d sell pictures of you.”

Kyou shook her head, smiled almost shyly, and ended their conversation by returning to her phone. Ana, with occasional glances, noted that the quiet smile lingered.

About two hours away from Takamatsu, Ana again awoke with a jolt. She took a moment to reorient herself and recognise that she should have been mortified to find her cheek resting against the shoulder of her ambivalent travelling companion. Her own phone was buzzing. John.

“You’ve missed a few of those,” Kyou said without looking up. “Better take it.”

Ana, feeling uncomfortably observed, stood and left for the section between the carriages to pick up the call. 

“Are you there?” John asked. “I can’t see you.”

“Just on audio,” she answered. “Like the old days.”

It seemed enough of an explanation. She hoped there wouldn’t be a multilingual stop announcement to give her away.

“Che—you’re in and out. How are you?” he asked.

“Out,” she said. “On a daytrip. Gathering my thoughts. Trying to write something sensible.”

“Sounds healthy?”

“I think I am experiencing nostalgie de la boue.”

“You should have come with me,” he said. “There’s ‘the simple life’ in every direction. There are more sheep than people!”

“Like those deer.”

“The what? You’re cutting out.”

“Nothing, nothing.”

In an extended, patchy speech, John relayed the sites he had visited that day. A breakfast of so much meat you might be sick. A tour of a farm where sheepdogs were whipping about like stationmasters. A barbeque on a boat. 

“The boat tour was on a lake that has a story I thought you’d like.”

“Of course,” she said, wondering whether there might be a tunnel soon.

“I know. It was something about a guy that had to convince this Māori chief he was good enough for his daughter by fighting a taniwha—like a giant water dragon—who’d taken the girl prisoner in the mountains.”

“And what did the princess think of all of this?”

“Happy not to be dragon food, I guess. Anyway, the guy sneaks up, you know, when the wind is right, sets fire to the dragon, and the shape of the lake bed—the s-shape—is supposed to be the dragon’s body.”

Antoinette saw flashes of pink as they passed by a cherry blossom grove growing along a canal. Who in these tiny towns looked after the trees? Did they thrive without human intervention?

“John, I think I need to return to my seat—”

“Oh, just before I forget. I almost bought you a book. Photography one. Thought you’d find it funny.”

“Yes?”

“This woman photographer, she went some other snowy place—Iceland or Norway? Anyway, she took a hundred photos of this girl making basically the same face on different days while she was at a spa. How boring is that? Can you imagine trying to take someone’s photo in the same way every day for six weeks?”

John sounded greatly amused. Antoinette was quiet. She knew the work, of course; he was talking about ‘You are the Weather’ by Roni Horn. It was a series of images of a girl who the viewer knows nothing about. The photos were close-cropped, and her expression was changeable, but never inviting. She did not aim to please.

Could Ana imagine photographing the same person in the same way for a week, six weeks, a year?

“Perhaps.”

“I need a cigarette,” Kyou murmured. Then she stood and stalked off in the direction of the smoking car. 

Ana fell back into her seat. She pulled out the postcards. She read the one that had an image of a frothing wave looming over a fishing boat. It read:

 

There was once a woman who discovered an abandoned parcel at the fishmonger. Perhaps a butterfish or a mackerel, she thought. But this was a very long hike from the ocean, and the woman may have been thinking with her stomach. It was a little disappointing to discover a baby inside. One did not eat human babies; if anything, they made attempts to eat their mothers.

But this baby looked different. It glowed like treasure. Its little pair of eyes, when they opened to her, held all the sorrow and hope of the ocean. She picked it up and took it with her. 

It would be hard to say, she realised, when the feeling happened. Truly happened. At some point there would have been a loosening, a relaxing of her grip. A reassessment. And then she must have reached elsewhere. Leant forward and challenged balance and reached, despite the risk of the fall. Or because of it. But when, amongst all of that, would it be fair to say that the line was crossed?

It wasn’t clear.

But she had come to love the infant. And love tends to be terminal.