Yoshi called me the minute he knew I’d be at work. He’d let three days pass since we’d returned from Kyoto, but it was obvious that he’d been holding out on purpose.
‘Hey! Ma chérie, how are you? Hah! Me, I am good, I am soooo good. Where are you?’ He sounded a little on the crazed side, but still, I was glad that he’d finally called.
‘I’m at work, Yoshi. There are people here already.’
‘PEOPLE!’ he shouted. ‘What people?’
‘Customers, what do you think?’
‘Oh, okay then, enjoy,’ he jeered haughtily. ‘Have fun.’
‘No, just a second.’ I went into the change room and shut the door behind me. ‘What are you doing now?’
‘I just finished work. I am working until now! I don’t have an easy life, like you,’ he breathed in heavy mock accusation, fading into laughter.
‘Why are you laughing?’
‘Because I am talking to YOU!’
‘Ohhh-kay. So are you going home now, or out with one of your girlfriends?’
‘What? What did you say?’
‘You heard me. I said, are you going out with your girlfriend now?’
‘My girlfriend? No, she is working now.’
‘Oh, is she?’
‘Yes, she is. So I am going home. Alone.’
‘Oh, that’s too bad.’
‘Yes, too bad. Okay, you go to work then. I’ll see you. Hai-bye.’
For the rest of the night I couldn’t concentrate. My mind was going around in crazy circles. I felt like I needed something, but what I didn’t know. There was only the overwhelming feeling of a void that needed to be filled.
Abie asked me how I’d managed to get Nori to give me a laptop, but I couldn’t remember. I might have told him writing would help overcome my abject loneliness. Then Dikla asked if I could get her birth-control pills from Nori. She didn’t want to pay the mandatory $100 fee just to see a doctor, but how exactly was I to broach a subject like that? At least Jodie’s request was simpler: ‘Hey, when are you gonna see your doctor friend again? I really need some sleeping pills.’
‘I hope never,’ I grumbled, and that was her cue to notice. She summoned me over to the powwow table and demanded to know what was up.
‘I want to leave, just take the money and go. I can’t handle this any more.’
‘Why, because of the surgeon? So what?’
‘It’s more complicated than that.’
‘No, it isn’t. You’re just here for a job. The Japanese are crazy, every last one of them, and so is this hostess business. Of course you’re gonna go crazy ... IF you take it seriously. They don’t, trust me. They come because they know they can never get it. You don’t matter. You just happen to fill the part right now. If it wasn’t you, it would be her, or her, or her. And when you leave, they’ll just move on to somebody else. And they keep doing it, for twenty, thirty years.
‘I can understand the old guys, they know the score, but not the young guys. My boyfriend has been to a hostess club twice, when his boss forced him to. He’s Japanese, but he hates it. The second time I told him not to give his number to anyone, his name, nothing. He didn’t understand. You know what he said to me? But last time the girls really liked me. Of course they did, you idiot! Don’t be stupid! But they are stupid about this. They can’t understand.’
‘But I really think some of them are serious,’ I protested. ‘Nori, okay, he’s a loony bin, but Yoshi, well, I think he actually means some of what he says. I think he’s different. I believe in his reasons, even if I can’t ... I don’t know how I’m going to see him any more without feeling like I’m totally betraying him by lying all the time. That’s horrible!’
‘Let me ask you a question. Did you meet Charlie this weekend?’ Jodie looked at me intently and I nodded. ‘And how was he?’
‘He was fuckin’ excellent.’ I smiled in spite of myself.
‘Okay, that tends to complicate things. But look, you’re not betraying anyone. You just take it to the point until you can’t put it off any more, and then eventually the ultimatum comes. They’ll give it to you, don’t worry. That’s just what happens. They get sick of waiting. I had a guy who wanted to know whether he had a chance, so I said we’ll see, I have to get to know you. That kind of shit. Then after three dinners he asked me to meet him in Shibuya and he ate really quickly, just vacuumed up his soba, and then took me by the hand to the love hotel across the street and said now or never. I said never, see ya. And he probably moved on to the next girl.
‘They keep coming, saying the same things, talking about the same shit. Expecting and getting the same response. They have no lives. You and I, we have a life, we have friends. They don’t. They’re power players. All they have is work, and then the hostess club. That’s their culture, and it’s how they survive.’
‘But they spend so much money I can’t help feeling like I’m completely taking advantage of them. You know how much the trip to Kyoto with Yoshi cost? Even before I had to stop keeping tally, it must have been over seven-thousand bucks. For thirty-six hours.’
Jodie’s expression remained unchanged. ‘It’s their choice, Chelsea. You don’t force them to come here and spend hundreds of dollars. Do you tell them, take me to dinner, buy me new clothes? No, they do it because they want to, and they are fucked up. Listen to me. They love the thrill of the chase. I’ve been here a long time, and I see them just keep coming. They never stop. When I first came here, I thought what the fuck is this job? I spent the first night hugging the toilet in that shitty little loo because I drank so much. I cried, and then I laughed, and then I wanted to scream. And then you begin to understand that their minds don’t work the same way as ours. Don’t worry about it, just get drunk, laugh at them, and have a good time. Fuck them. They’re crazy.’
Yet my mind kept going around in crazy circles.
I think about Yoshi a lot.
He is an enormous black hole into which I can’t help but be vacuumed, suddenly, and at warp speed. It’s as if I become an inflated version of myself simply by existing in his presence, and I should hate this — I know I should hate this — but for some reason I like it. I ought to avoid Yoshi like the plague, but there seems to be a problem: I know his coordinates, I’ve written them down, and I just can’t help flying my little spaceship closer and closer. Alpha Omega Six, we are approaching. We are fast approaching. And then I am inside. All doors shut. All exits. But I am not trapped. I am not threatened. I am ... enchanted. By a foreign galaxy roped off in velvet. Privy to a thousand stars. Each one lit just for me. At least that’s the feeling. That’s the mood of his galaxy.
But he is such a mystery, Yoshi. He is so closed in so many ways. And yet he is so open. Is it because of me? Am I the one to unlock him?
Sometimes I think about Yoshi right before I go to sleep. In the darkness, in the silence, I think about a million possibilities that should never enter my mind. I consider, ever so objectively, what it would be like to be with him in reality. What would an ‘us’ formulated with a ‘someone’ like Yoshi really be like? Dramatic, I think. But happy? Try transparent, as in how one would have to become just to attempt a solidification of what might always be a mirage to him. He would be forever anxious about what you loved: him, or just the lifestyle he’d given you. He would need explanation after explanation, reassurance after reassurance — your life as continual proof of purchase. I think about what it would be like to have to do that in a relationship. I think about could that be me?
I also think about Matt right before I go to sleep. After all, he’s right there beside me. It would break his heart to see these tainted, whimsical thoughts recurring through my neural networks, slowly but surely hardwiring into patterns, strengthened by the invasiveness of new chemicals and the enticements of greed, power, lust.
These things are not me. I am certain of that. I look at Matt. I see his breath falling. I feel his skin. He is so certain. And so am I. I am so certain, but ...
Therein lies the problem, spelt out in only three little letters:
B. U. T.