Hana, bless her seventy-three-year-old heart and wrists of steel – seriously, you should see her flip a wok of rice, it’s like watching a tiny, aproned ninja – Hana was on the phone, as usual, when we walked in. “Isoide! Hurry!” she yelled into the receiver, which was wedged somewhere in the folds of her obi, a garment that looked less like a sash and more like a tightly wound mummy bandage. She was also simultaneously battling a fry pan the size of a small moon. Garlic steam, thick enough to chew, billowed around her like a protective aura, safeguarding her perfectly sculpted chignon from the culinary chaos.
We were, of course, late. Mikey, Spencer, Jolly, and myself, Deke – the Four Horsemen of Gaijin Cluelessness, as Hana probably referred to us in her head, if she referred to us at all. I’d been held up by a minor incident involving a rogue bicycle and my brand-new, and admittedly rather flamboyant, cowboy hat. It’s an ongoing battle, this hat and the low-hanging awnings of Tokyo. One day, the awnings will win. I can feel it in my Stetson-wearing bones.
The izakaya, Sumikko, was our usual haunt, mostly because it was cheap, and partly because the kotatsu tables had these ingenious holes underneath, allowing us to dangle our disproportionately long American legs without looking like we were attempting some bizarre form of seated yoga. The décor, as Mikey was fond of pointing out, was “totally illegible.” He meant the calligraphy scrolls, of course, those long, yellowing strips of paper plastered with brushstrokes that looked less like writing and more like a spider had had a very bad day with an inkwell. And the ceiling! Low. So low. You could practically reach up and touch the blackened wood beams, assuming you were the kind of person who went around touching restaurant ceilings. Which, I assure you, I am not.
We slid into our usual kotatsu, already occupied by Mikey, Spencer, and Jolly, who looked, respectively, agitated, smug, and profoundly detached. Mikey, freckled and perpetually simmering, was in full rant mode.
“Shit, man, I can’t take it anymore,” he was saying, running a hand through his ginger curls, which, I always thought, looked like a startled bird’s nest. “I think I’m going to snap.”
Spencer, ever the pragmatist – or, as Jolly would later call him, “the aggressively mediocre” – patted Mikey’s shoulder. “No, you’re fine. You’re cool. What’s the problem?” Spencer, despite being the same age as Mikey, somehow managed to project the weary air of a middle-aged accountant facing an IRS audit. Early baldness, a burgeoning paunch, and a neck beard that looked like it had been glued on as an afterthought all contributed to this effect.
Jolly, meanwhile, just raised an eyebrow. Jolly’s default expression was one of amused indifference, as if the world was a mildly entertaining screensaver he’d forgotten to turn off. He was already halfway through a large bottle of saké, eschewing beer entirely. Jolly was a purist when it came to his vices.
“It’s just…everything,” Mikey gestured around the tiny izakaya, as if the very air itself was personally offensive. “The furniture’s too short,” he slapped the low table for emphasis. “Nothing makes any freaking sense.” He pointed at the giant porcelain cat perched precariously on a shelf, one paw perpetually raised in a gesture that could be either a blessing or a threat. “That cat. It’s been staring at me all night.”
He took a long pull from his beer, a lukewarm Asahi, which, in Japan, is considered a delicacy, I suppose, much like fermented soybeans or karaoke after midnight. “Is this culture shock?” he asked, his voice tinged with genuine bewilderment. “Like, who puts corn on pizza? Corn on pizza, Christ.”
“I pick it off,” Jolly offered, helpfully, as if this solved the fundamental existential crisis of corn-on-pizza.
“Is that all that’s bothering you?” Spencer asked, stroking his beard, which, I couldn’t help but notice, was starting to resemble a small, furry animal clinging to his chin. “Because I got some awesome news that’s going to totally make you feel better.”
“There’s something wrong with me,” Mikey continued, oblivious. “I don’t want to be mad all the time, but I am. Or depressed, or something. Is this what depression feels like?”
Just then, Hana shuffled over, balancing a green glazed platter piled high with what appeared to be…balls. Perfectly round, slathered in brown sauce, zigzags of mayonnaise, and a flurry of what looked suspiciously like dried fish shavings.
“Hai, takoyaki,” she announced, setting the platter down with a flourish and placing a stack of tiny saucers for our use. Takoyaki. Octopus balls. The name alone. It was enough to send Mikey spiraling further into his cultural despair.
“And this,” he pointed at the dish with a mixture of disgust and morbid curiosity. “Who calls their food yucky? Takoyucky. It doesn’t make sense.”
Jolly, bless him, immediately speared one of the suspect spheres with his chopsticks and popped it into his mouth. He chewed with an almost theatrical open-mouthedness, sucking in air to cool the molten interior. It was a performance, really.
“Seriously, what is this shit?” Mikey pushed the plate away, as if it might bite him.
“Are you kidding me? This shit is the shit,” Spencer declared, nudging a ball onto a saucer and dissecting it with his chopsticks like a culinary surgeon.
“No, this shit is shit,” Mikey insisted, crossing his arms like a petulant toddler.
“Listen, you’ll get used to it,” Spencer said, the voice of experience. “I got used to it. I’ve got two years on you. I’m what they call a long-timer. This is just a phase. I mean, you’ve only been in Japan three months. This is normal. Right, Jolly?”
“Some people don’t assimilate,” Jolly mumbled, refilling his tiny ochoko cup from the saké bottle. He was ignoring Spencer, as was his general inclination.
Spencer, undeterred, plowed on. “Mikey, I promise you, you’re going to lose ten pounds and get healthy. You’ll go back to Omaha and be like, ‘Steak? Where’s the sushi?’ Look at me, I don’t hardly even eat meat anymore.”
“Man, you’ve gained at least twenty pounds since we graduated,” Mikey retorted, eyeing Spencer’s burgeoning midriff. “Hell, that was only two years ago.”
Spencer puffed out his chest, attempted to suck in his stomach, and massaged a bicep that was, shall we say, more theoretical than actual. He glanced down at his belly, a landscape of regret and late-night ramen. Amazon.jp, he mused. Perhaps they had elasticated waistbands in his size.
Jolly, meanwhile, was subtly grinning into his saké cup, a smile only visible to Hana, who had reappeared with two more beers. She placed them down, collected the empties with a sigh that spoke volumes about the tribulations of running an izakaya frequented by loud, opinionated Americans.
“Anyway, forget all that for a minute. I’ve got a surprise. This is huge. Are you ready?” Spencer paused for dramatic effect, waiting for Mikey’s reluctant nod. “Okay, the thing is, I know a guy who knows a guy who teaches ninjutsu. I’m talking the real deal. Not this namby-pamby stuff you see back home.”
“Oh yeah?” Mikey sounded about as thrilled as one might be to discover a parking ticket on their windshield. He swirled the foam on his beer, contemplating the existential dread of lukewarm Asahi.
“But it’s really secretive and all. I think I’m going to be able to get us an introduction next month,” Spencer continued, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “In Japan, you can’t just go knocking on a master’s door, right? You know what I’m talking about. So, dude, bro, you can’t bail now.”
“I don’t know,” Mikey said, his gaze drifting towards the illegible calligraphy. “I have zero spare cash. I’m just thinking of saving up for a few more months and ditching this place. Screw my contract. Screw corn on pizza and octopus balls and me having to change my slippers when I go to the bathroom.”
“Mikey, no. The dream, remember the dream.” Spencer held up a fist, his eyes gleaming with misplaced enthusiasm. “Mikey, Michelangelo. Remember seventh grade? We made a pact. Cowabunga.”
“Cowabunga,” Jolly echoed, obligingly, finishing off his saké cup in one gulp. He poured another, the bottle nearing empty.
Just then, the door slid open with a dramatic flourish, bouncing back and nearly decapitating the newcomer. It was me. Deke. Six-foot-three of pure, unadulterated cowboy charm, or so I like to tell myself.
“Yo! You won’t believe what just happened to me,” I announced, plonking myself down and awkwardly wrestling off my boots.
“Let’s see, you knocked your hat off for the one-hundredth time?” Spencer guessed, accurately.
“Yeah, no,” I said, momentarily derailed. “This! This happened to me.” I brandished a pink Hello Kitty bento box, held aloft like a prize-winning trophy.
“Lunch happened to you?” Jolly inquired, his voice dry as week-old toast.
“No, shhh. Be discreet.” I nudged Spencer over, squeezing myself into the kotatsu. Cowboy legs and kotatsu tables are not, I repeat, not a match made in heaven.
“Discreet? You’re carrying a pink Hello Kitty bento box, man,” Spencer pointed out, reasonably.
“Jouki, hitotsu, kudasai!” I yelled to Hana, murdering the pronunciation of “beer” with a Texan drawl that would make a longhorn blush.
Hana, bless her soul, just sighed, brought over a beer, a small bowl of edamame, and a hot towel, and retreated back to the bar, where she was now grilling skewers of onion and chicken over a miniature charcoal grill. She probably wondered, as I often did myself, why foreigners flocked to Sumikko. It was, after all, just a cheap izakaya in a back alley. Perhaps it was the kotatsu holes. Perhaps it was the sheer novelty of being served by a tiny, formidable woman who could flip a wok like a pancake.
Hana bowed her retreat, nodding politely at the two businessmen who had just entered and the lone woman in a suit typing furiously on a laptop in the corner. The woman in the suit glanced up, saw me, and immediately returned to her screen. Undeterred, I tipped my hat in her direction and flashed my most irresistible, gold-capped grin. That gold incisor, a souvenir from a regrettable bar fight in my youth, added a certain je ne sais quoi, a hint of danger, a touch of…well, maybe just a touch of tackiness. I winked. The woman rolled her eyes.
“I think she’s into me,” I confided to my friends.
“See,” Spencer resumed his earlier conversation with Mikey, as if I hadn’t even arrived. “Take Deke here. If anyone was not going to fit in Japan, it’d be him. There’s this huge cowboy who didn’t even graduate high school. There’s…there’s…” Spencer, for once, was at a loss for words.
“The adorably churlish nature,” Jolly supplied, helpfully. “The unmistakable reek of misogyny.”
“Yeah, that,” Spencer agreed. “Just look at him. His students adore him. They keep telling him how Japanese he is, how he’s more Japanese than Japanese.”
“Thank you, Spencer. Thank you, Jolly,” I bowed my head, nearly knocking my hat off again. It was a delicate dance, this hat and the world. I then carefully placed my Stetson on a cushion behind me, lovingly patting out a few imaginary wrinkles. This hat, you see, was not just a hat. It was a statement. It was a symbol. It was, in fact, the most expensive thing I owned.
Jolly raised his saké cup in my direction. “So what’s in the box?” Mikey finally asked, his voice still laced with existential angst.
“Oh yeah, this!” I waited until Hana had disappeared back into the kitchen before I spoke, lowering my voice to a dramatic whisper.
“So, yeah, so I was just finishing up a private class and I’m walking down the alley here, just about to open the door, when this guy jumps right out of the shadows, like out of nowhere, and he’s like all ‘suimasen, can you help me,’ and I’m like all ‘nan desu ka?’”
“Was he trying to sell you a phone card?” Mikey guessed, unimpressed.
“No, no. He was selling…” I surveyed the room, looked over my shoulder. The businessmen were engrossed in their own conversation. The woman in the suit had vanished. Hana was back behind the grill, flipping skewers with the practiced ease of a seasoned pro. We were, it seemed, alone in our bubble of American idiocy.
I pushed the Hello Kitty bento box to the center of the table, displacing half-eaten plates of kara-age chicken and cold tofu. I made eye contact with each of my friends in turn, a theatrical pause for dramatic effect. This, I wanted them to understand, was serious. This was important. I took a deep breath.
“It’s an alien,” I announced.
The reaction was not quite what I’d hoped for. Mikey, Spencer, and Jolly erupted in laughter. Spencer nearly choked on his beer.
“Are you high?” Spencer gasped, wiping tears from his eyes.
“No, man, there was something about this guy in the alley. Something in his look,” I insisted. “He was dressed really odd, like from some old-fashioned samurai flick, but some of the threads in his kimono were glowing, this silver buzzing color. Buzzing!”
“Silver buzzing color?” Mikey repeated, skeptically.
“You are high,” Spencer declared, definitively.
Jolly wiped away a tear with his knuckle, still chuckling.
“No, shut up, man. It wasn’t just him. I saw it. He showed it to me.”
A flicker of something – curiosity? Slightly less derision? – crossed their faces. They almost, almost, began to take me seriously.
“So, what you’re telling us is that you bought ET and have him right there in your Hello Kitty bento box?” Spencer asked, the sarcasm dripping like soy sauce from a leaky bottle.
“That’s what I’ve been saying.” I rubbed the top of the shiny plastic lid, as if reassuring the alien within.
“How much?” Mikey asked, his voice still laced with disbelief.
“Five hundred yen,” I admitted. “And can you keep your voice down? The guy made me promise not to tell anyone.”
“That’s, what, five dollars?” Mikey calculated.
“Yeah, man,” Spencer replied. “Five bucks for a real live alien.”
More laughter. Louder this time.
“Don’t worry, no one here speaks English except us,” Spencer reassured me, gesturing around the empty izakaya. “Let’s see it.”
I unclipped the plastic carrying band. Hello Kitty’s glossy face stared up at us, flashing a peace sign and winking, a disturbingly cheerful mascot for intergalactic commerce. “Happy Lunch Ready Smile,” the box proclaimed. Happy, indeed.
I took a long swig of beer, steeling myself for the unveiling. I rested my giant palm on the lid. “Ready?”
“Just get it over with,” Spencer said, impatiently.
With a flourish, I lifted off the lid.
A brief, pregnant silence descended upon the kotatsu. All four of us leaned forward, craning our necks, peering into the inky black depths of the box.
Then, explosive laughter. Again. It was becoming a theme.
“What the fuck, man,” Spencer choked out, banging on the table. “You got taken. Five hundred yen?”
Jolly chuckled, reaching for his drink again.
“Wait, what?” I was the only one still examining the contents of the box, where the alien, apparently, resided. What I saw was a sushi-sized dollop of…orange mush.
“It’s a piece of uni, man. Sea urchin,” Spencer explained, the patient tone one might use with a particularly slow-witted child. “Someone sold you their lunch. Jolly was right.” He raised his beer in Jolly’s direction, a grudging acknowledgement of his friend’s perpetually superior intellect.
“That’s what I’ve been saying,” Mikey chimed in, seizing the opportunity to reignite his Japan-bashing tirade. “Who eats sea urchin eggs? That’s not right.”
“Actually, they’re gonads,” Jolly corrected, pedantically. “They produce the milt that—”
“That’s even more not right!” Mikey yelled, pulling at his red hair again.
“So someone scraped some uni off a piece of sushi and told you it was an alien,” Spencer summarized, making air quotes around the word “alien.” “And you bought it for five hundred yen. Worse things have happened.”
“No, man, no.” I shook the box, gently. “It was moving when he showed it to me. It has these little eyes and a little face and this little…”
“You really are high,” Mikey repeated, with weary finality. He grabbed a pair of chopsticks from the bamboo cup and snapped them in two with a dramatic flourish. “I’ll give you your five hundred yen back if you eat it.”
“Don’t joke about that. You don’t know how old it is. You could get parasites,” Spencer warned, with the unsolicited medical expertise of someone who had once read a vaguely alarming article on WebMD. “My aunt in Albuquerque once ate some bad hamachi and got parasites.” Spencer actually made the sign of the cross, a gesture that seemed wildly out of place in a Roppongi izakaya.
“Oh, man, I didn’t know,” Mikey feigned contrition.
“We don’t like to talk about it,” Spencer said, solemnly.
Mikey allowed a moment of silence to commemorate the unfortunate aunt in Albuquerque, then turned his attention back to me. “I’m no expert on sushi, but this one looks pretty fresh if you ask me,” he encouraged, brandishing the broken chopsticks like tiny culinary swords. “Slap some wasabi on that puppy and chow. I’ll give you a thousand yen. You’ll make money.”
“Fuck you if you think I’m eating that thing,” I said, pouting. I nursed my beer, feeling inexplicably betrayed by both the shady alleyway vendor and my own gullibility.
Mikey, undeterred, used the chopsticks to flip the orange, pebbly mass over.
“What the hell is that?” Spencer’s voice jumped an octave. He pointed with one hand, covering his mouth with the other, as if witnessing something unspeakable.
All four of us leaned back in again, peering into the box with renewed, and this time genuinely horrified, interest.
“It’s an eye,” I announced, triumphantly. “I told you. I told you.”
“That’s not an eye,” Jolly insisted, though even he sounded less certain now.
“Touch it,” Spencer dared.
“I’m not touching it.” I recoiled, withdrawing my finger, which had been, admittedly, hovering dangerously close to the orange blob. “Maybe it’s a mouth.”
“That’s not a mouth,” Jolly repeated, pulling away, reclaiming his position against the wall, as if the mere proximity of the bento box was somehow contagious.
“Maybe it’s a butt,” Mikey offered, in a voice that would have done a middle-school boy proud.
“Wait, do sea urchins’ man-parts have mouths?” I asked, genuinely perplexed.
“Hell if I know,” Spencer admitted.
“You’re all big boys with iPhones. Wikipedia,” Jolly suggested, helpfully, pulling out his own phone. He wasn’t, however, researching sea urchin anatomy. He was, I suspected, looking up train times.
“Here, let’s try this.” Mikey, now in full surgical mode, held the broken chopsticks like tiny scalpels and began a layman’s dissection of the orange mass.
“Stop! You’re hurting it,” I protested, genuinely concerned for the well-being of my five-dollar alien gonad-eye-butt.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Spencer scoffed.
“The fuck?” Mikey jumped, recoiling abruptly. “There’s a bone in there. Or cartilage or something.”
“Jolly, Google sea urchin and cartilage,” Spencer insisted, his voice rising in pitch.
Jolly ignored him, setting the alarm on his phone for the latest possible time he could escape Roppongi and still catch his train back to Shinjuku. Getting stuck in Roppongi all night was, as we all knew, a fate worse than death. Or at least, worse than lukewarm Asahi and takoyaki.
“You’re making a mess. Here.” Spencer, in a moment of bizarre inspiration, poured some of his beer onto the dissected orange chunk. He added a splash of soy sauce for good measure.
“Look what you did,” I yelped, yanking the bento box towards me, cradling it protectively. “Cut it out.”
Spencer and Mikey erupted in laughter again. Alien soup. Spencer even made a slurping noise, which was, frankly, disgusting.
“You guys suck,” I muttered, feeling increasingly morose. With one arm still protectively wrapped around the bento-bako, I finished my beer in two long gulps and shouted for another.
An awkward silence descended. The kind of silence that hangs heavy in the air after a joke falls spectacularly flat, or after someone has been deeply and profoundly embarrassed. Hana, bless her again, brought over a fresh beer, whisked away the empty, and retreated back to her grill. After she left, Spencer, attempting to salvage the evening, tried to steer the conversation back to less…gonad-centric topics.
“So my idea was that we could train here for a couple of years under Master Suzuki-sensei,” he began, his voice regaining its earlier enthusiasm.
“Master Suzuki-sensei?” Jolly interrupted, raising a skeptical eyebrow.
“Yeah, that’s his name,” Spencer insisted. “Anyway, we could train with him for a couple years, then go back to the States and open our own ninjutsu school.”
“Yeah, maybe, I guess,” Mikey mumbled, still staring at the illegible calligraphy.
“We’ll call it Now-You-See-Me, Now-You-Don’t Ninja Academy,” Spencer declared, beaming with pride at his own brilliance.
Jolly choked on his saké, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He picked up the almost-empty bottle and poured the last of it into his water glass. He stoppered the bottle and pushed it away. He knew he was drinking too much. He knew it, and yet, he couldn’t seem to stop.
“The fuck, man!” I jumped, banging my knees against the low table, sending dishes and drinks skittering.
On the other side of the room, the woman in the suit, finally having had enough of our drunken gaijin antics, closed her laptop, paid her bill, and left, muttering something in rapid Japanese that I didn’t understand but suspected was not complimentary. The businessmen followed suit, slipping out into the night. Sumikko, once a haven of quietude, was rapidly emptying. Hana stood behind the bar, refilling my beer mug, her expression unreadable. She probably wondered if we were going to order any more food, or if she should just start cleaning the grills and call it a night.
“I don’t. What?” Spencer looked genuinely confused.
“You put that alien thing on the back of my hand when I wasn’t looking,” I accused, scrubbing furiously at the back of my hand, which was now an angry shade of red.
“Are you insane? I’ve been sitting here talking to you the whole time.”
Jolly, ever observant, tipped up the bento box to show the others. It was empty.
“Hey, where’d it go?” Mikey asked, his voice a mixture of confusion and morbid fascination.
“You tell me, asshole,” I glared at Spencer, still scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing. “It was one of you, one of you did it.”
“Maybe you accidentally ate it,” Spencer joked, but I was still furiously scouring my skin, and no one laughed.
A beat of silence. Spencer rolled his eyes at Mikey and circled his ear with a finger, the universal gesture for “this guy’s nuts.” Mikey laughed uncomfortably, but he was clearly preoccupied with his own internal dramas, still weighing the merits of ninjutsu school versus community college and graphic design. Jolly, meanwhile, sipped at his drink, glassy-eyed, lost in a pleasant alcoholic haze. He was thinking of a boy back home, a boy he might still be in love with, a boy who was probably, at this very moment, dating someone far more sensible and less prone to drunken karaoke in Roppongi.
“Fuck you.” My voice was barely a whisper, but it hung in the air, heavy and ominous.
“What?” Spencer looked up, his forced smile faltering.
“I said, fuck you, man.”
“Hey, dude—” Spencer’s smile became even more forced, bordering on manic. Both Mikey and Jolly, sensing a shift in the atmosphere, suddenly snapped to attention. Something very bad, very…un-Sedaris-like, was about to happen.
I leaped to my feet, my knee clipping the table, sending a cascade of dishes and half-empty beer mugs crashing to the floor. I grabbed the saké bottle by the neck, its green glass tinted like a malevolent jewel, and pointed the heavy end at Spencer, who was sitting right beside me, trapped against the wall.
“Hey, man,” Spencer started doing a kind of frantic jazz hands, his eyes wide with dawning horror. “It’s cool. It’s cool.”
But it was not cool. Not even remotely cool. I slowly, deliberately, pushed the bottle into Spencer’s chest, backing him further against the wall.
“Why the fuck you always riding me? What the fuck is always so funny?” I was hunched over, screaming the words through a mouth suddenly thick with rage. My eyes, I suspect, did not look entirely right.
“Ha,” I said, a sound devoid of humor, devoid of anything resembling human emotion. I stood to my full height, towering over Spencer, took the neck of the bottle in both hands, and brought it back, high over my shoulder, like a baseball bat ready to swing for the fences.
All three sitting men had the same two thoughts, in rapid succession: first, that I was enormous, a hulking behemoth of cowboy rage; and second, that the sheer force of impact, if I chose to swing that bottle, would be…devastating.
“Hey, come on, dude, chill.” Spencer, his voice trembling, eased himself up onto one knee, attempting to placate the monster he had inadvertently unleashed. I took in the movement, loaded my stance, muttered something indecipherable, a guttural sound that was less language and more pure, unadulterated fury.
“I didn’t mea—,” were, tragically, Spencer’s last words.
My tensed body uncoiled, my hips turned, and the bottle swung. It connected with Spencer’s skull, right above the ear, with a sickening, wet crack. The man with the unfortunate neck beard and the too-early beer belly crumpled onto the table like a discarded rag doll.
Jolly and Mikey stared, paralyzed, registering the absolute absence of movement, the sudden, brutal extinguishing of a life. One of them, perhaps Mikey, perhaps Jolly, thought, with a bizarre detachment, that the saddest thing of all was that Spencer would never get to perfect his back-fist-spinning-corkscrew punch.
Mikey, poor Mikey, pissed himself. Jolly, meanwhile, ignored the lifeless body sprawled across the table and instead marveled at the beautiful, almost artistic, spray of blood that had fanned out across the wall. It started where Spencer had been sitting and stretched, a macabre Jackson Pollock, four tables down and even up into the wooden rafters. The pastel woman in the beer poster now had a crimson tear tracing a path from her eye to her kimono collar. Jolly looked down and saw that even his own clothes were speckled, tiny red constellations against the dark fabric.
Mikey let out a mewling sound, a pathetic whimper that finally drew both Jolly’s and my attention.
I turned to face Mikey across the table, the gore-slicked saké bottle now pointed directly at his freckled face. My chest heaved, my face was engorged, a dangerous, apoplectic red. A wet, gurgling sound emanated from my throat. The veins on my neck and forehead stood out in stark relief, a delicate blue network against the crimson rage. A summer sky on a coconut-scented beach, Jolly thought, his mind drifting again, even as terror clawed at his insides.
The dreaminess abruptly shattered. Jolly scrambled to his feet, grabbing Mikey, attempting to haul the younger man, the newbie, the one with the startled bird’s nest hair, up and away from the impending horror. He was trying to find the right words, the words that might, somehow, defuse this escalating nightmare. But there were no words. He knew it, even as he searched for them. He knew exactly what was about to happen.
The bottle came down again. This time from above, a brutal, descending arc of glass and fury. Jolly threw himself onto Mikey, shielding him, pinning him to the urine-soaked tatami mat floor.
Mikey’s mouth was open, his bottom lip trembling violently. He was frozen, immobile, paralyzed by terror. He saw his mom, suddenly, vividly, remembered the soft padding of her old floppy slippers on the hallway carpet, the comforting sounds of her moving around the kitchen. He smelled pancakes, sweet, buttery pancakes swimming in syrup. He hated Japanese food. He wanted pancakes. He wanted his mom.
There was a flash of movement, a blinding, sickening flash, and then everything went dark. For Mikey, at least.
I was alone now. My gurgling worsened, a wet, rattling sound in my chest. I dropped the bottle, clawing at my throat, pinching at my tongue with fingers that felt numb, alien, no longer a part of me. I collapsed, my knee landing directly on my beloved cowboy hat, crushing the pinch front, ruining the carefully sculpted brim. If I had been in my right mind, I might have mourned the hat. I might have wondered where all this sticky, suffocating fluid in my mouth and nose was coming from. I might have tried to spit it out. Cough. But I had, in a sense, been dead for minutes already, dead inside with rage and cheap beer and a profound, unshakeable sense of inadequacy. Now, my body thrashed, kicked, and finally, stilled.
The izakaya door slid open, quietly, almost tentatively this time. An old man, his hair mussed, dressed in a worn hakama and hemp shirt, entered. The threads in his cloth, just as I had described, buzzed with a faint, silver light. He nodded to Hana, who barely registered his presence, and proceeded directly to the table where the four of us lay tangled and motionless amidst the carnage. He stepped carefully through the mess, his movements precise, almost balletic, avoiding the pools of blood and shattered glass, careful not to soil his tightly woven sandals. He removed another small bento box from the deep pocket of his hakama. With a practiced thumb, he popped off the lid and pressed the empty container against my clammy hand.
The spongy, orange mass, the alien, the gonad-eye-butt, whatever it was, detached itself from the bone, the blood, the viscera, and rose, shimmering, to the surface of my skin. Two eyes, like black sesame seeds, twinkled, observing the newcomer. A quick, almost imperceptible shiver, and it hopped into the box.
“Good boy,” the old man cooed, his voice surprisingly gentle. “Ii-ko, good boy.”
The orange creature churred and mewled, a soft, unsettling sound, as the man replaced the lid and slipped the bento box back into his pocket.
Carefully, he stepped back through the carnage, making his way to the bar where Hana was wiping down the counter, already resigned, already turning off the grill, already contemplating bringing the leftover yakitori skewers home for a late-night supper. She imagined she would be hungry by the time she got home. These nights, they were always so…long.
“I’ll send over the others to clean this right up,” the old man said, his voice quiet, matter-of-fact.
Hana bowed and smiled, a weary, knowing smile. She didn’t need to say a word. She simply followed the plodding man to the door, watched his softly glowing back as he disappeared into the narrow, darkened alley.
Hana reached up on her tiptoes and lifted off the rod holding the noren curtain. The faded cloth read Sumikko. The izakaya was now closed. She stepped back inside, bone-tired, the smell of blood and soy sauce clinging to the air. It had been another one of those too-long nights. She made her way back to the bar, thinking about bringing one of the more expensive bottles of saké home with her, as well as the yakitori. She turned off the grill, plunged the izakaya into darkness, and readied to leave. From across the room, amidst the silence and the stillness and the lingering scent of carnage, Jolly’s cell phone alarm started to beep, a cheerful, incongruous sound in the aftermath of such profound and senseless violence.
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