🔏Ch_32

Girl With No Name

The lobby of Keiko’s apartment building wasn’t much more than a torn-up carpet, decaying art-deco architecture, and an elevator that was definitely built before safety regulations existed. K depressed its black, typewriter call button, and it rattled from an upper level. After pulling the accordion fence back with a clatter, she waved me inside. 

Three stomach-lurching floors up, the elevator stopped with a shiver, and we escaped into a hallway abuzz with fluorescent lights. The same soccer match bleated out through every paper-thin wall, and the tacky carpet stank of mildew. If you’re wondering whether I mean “tacky” as in tasteless or “tacky” as in a little sticky, I mean both. We stopped halfway down the hall at one of a dozen dark green doors. K stabbed her key in the deadbolt, pushed, then shouldered the door. It opened with a sound like sticky-tape. “Y’know my favorite thing about the west? I don’t gotta duck through doorways.”

That she could find anything to like about the place was a sign of some supernatural optimism. The swollen walls were gooey with icing-white paint, covering cracks caused by the buckling foundation. Crumbly blinds filtered the last vestiges of the sun, painting the whole room bug-guts yellow. There wasn’t so much a bed as a cot with blankets piled on it, and wasn’t so much a kitchen as a sink set in a chipped, tile countertop that couldn’t have been installed later than 1969. “This is the place Lear got you?”

Keiko kicked her shoes off at the door before dropping down in the center of the stained carpet. “Yeah. Told ya, your buddies don’t like me.” She lit a cigarette, the smoke a welcome reprieve from the apartment’s natural wet-dog odor. “But it’s better than nowhere.” 

I toed my tall shoes off one at a time. “Is that where you were staying before? Nowhere?”

“Just like mom used to make.”

I ran mental fingers over her history. “She kicked you out?”

“Wouldn’t you?” Keiko shot me that misaligned smile. 

“What about your dad?”

“Dad was content to be a checkbook. He only came home long enough to ask her why I was still there. There’s a saying in English… you get married ‘cause you get a girl pregnant?”

“Shotgun wedding?”

“Yeah. I was the shotgun.”

“How old were you?”

“None, I think.”

I simpered. “No, dummy, when she threw you out.”

“Ah. Sixteen.”

At sixteen I was in college prep courses—calc, trig, physics. She was surviving on her own while I was still preparing for my life to begin. “I’ve toked up in worse places,” I said, dropping my bag on the carpet before dropping down beside her. “Could use some bean-bag chairs though.”

“Bean-bag?”

“It’s- never mind, it was a bad joke.”

“So how’s this work? I don’t have any spoons to bend.”

“That’s heroine,” I said, digging in my laptop bag. “At least, I think it is…  anyway, that’s the kind of stuff you shouldn’t fuck with. Anything you need a needle for, anything that’s a rock or powder, stay away from it.” I pulled out my pipe and the plastic bag with its inkjet sticker, then dug for my grinder.

K lifted the baggie up like an alien specimen. “Ba-oh-li-wou-do dream. What’s that mean?”

“It’s the strain.”

“Strain?”

“Yeah, like… the type.”

“I thought it was weed-type?”

I had to tighten my lips to keep from laughing. My fingers closed around the tiny metal tin. “There’s different types of weed,” I said, snatching the bag from her. 

“Why?”

“Gives you a different high.” I thumbed the grinder open. Keiko still looked puzzled. Pinching the bag, I shook a couple buds into the grinder before closing the cap. “Think of it like this. All women are women.” The tension of the bud shredding strained against the twist of the tin. “But you have a type you like, right?”

Keiko leaned back on her elbows and eyed me with something like suspicion. “Yeah.”

“It’s like that.”

“What’s your type?”

“Of weed?”

“Of woman.”

I picked up my pipe, attempting nonchalance. “How do you know I’m not straight?”

Keiko snorted in apparent defeat, leaning back on her elbows. I returned to packing the bowl. K tilted her head, sucking her cigarette in silence. Her shirt hung just slightly off her shoulder, peeling back from her dark tattoo. It was filled in and far more extensive than in the photo she sent to Aoi. It had to wrap almost full around her body. There was just a strip of naked, pink skin from her throat down to her sternum, where it disappeared under her shirt. A clawing wave crashed into her shoulder. A spidery chrysanthemum bloomed across the swell of her breast. 

“That’s how.”

Looking up, I discovered Keiko grinning at me in that wicked, knowing way. I flushed, glared, thumbed the leaf harder than necessary, as if I could press the smile off her face. “Where’s my lighter,” I grumbled. Keiko produced her tacky, gold zippo from an inside pocket, still smug. I snatched it out of her hand. “I should save it for myself. It’s wasted on you.”

I’d long assumed the scaly, helical body embossed on the metal lighter was a dragon, but on close inspection, it was a snake. I ran my thumb across the relief, following its complex coils to the tail. I lit the bowl but sucked in too big a breath. It sent me into an eye-watering coughing fit.

“Ooo, tough drug girl,” K taunted. “Thought you did this all the time.”

“It’s been a while,” I said, voice tight. “I’d like to see you try.”

“I smoke a pack a day, baby, I’m gonna be fine.”

I scowled, waving her over. Keiko put out her cigarette in this weird little bag she carried around, then tucked in beside me much closer than necessary. I passed her the pipe. “Once the bowl—that’s this part here—is lit, then inhale. Hold it in for a few seconds-“

“I know how to smoke.” 

The lighter hissed to life as I lit it for her. “You know not to call me ‘baby’ too but you can’t seem to get that right. Now, take a really deep breath in.” I know, but she was pissing me off. 

Keiko sputtered, wheezed, coughed and coughed, waving the pipe away and holding her throat. “What the hell?” she choked.

I took a short hit, relaxing my throat so the smoke sighed out cleanly, feeling only a smidge guilty.

“That shi-it’s awful. Are you fucking with me?”

“Might be. You want another?”

K waved me off. “I don’t feel anything. Except like I swallowed hot coals.”

“Give it a minute.”

Keiko fell back on the carpet, staring at the ceiling. “Why are you hanging out with me anyway? You won’t even hang out with your real friends.”

Something in it seemed accusatory. “You practically bullied me into it.”

“You drove here.”

“What else was I supposed to do with you on the back of my bike?”

Keiko sighed and sulked. “Sorry, then.”

Oh, hell. I thumbed the tacky gold lighter, still heavy in my hand. “I don’t know… you’re so slick all the time. I was surprised to find something crime-y I knew more about. I wondered how you were when you couldn’t play it cool.”

“Doing drugs isn’t cool in America?”

“Not knowing how to do them isn’t.” I made to take another hit. “Wait, how did you… I mean… I’m n-not from America.”

“Yeah? Where are you from then?” Knowing. Teasing.

“F-from… I’m… from here.”

“Yeah? Then why does everyone say you speak Spanish with an accent?”

I huffed, sunk into my shoulders. “It’s so annoying when you do that! How did you figure it out?” 

K rolled up to a seated position to mock me. “‘It’s legal in, like, ten states.’ States of what?” She took the pipe and lighter from me, counted the syllables out with her fingers. “A-me-ri-ca.” She took a hit, only coughing once this time. 

I swore under my breath. The gaping hole in my personal firewall, like always, was me. I refused when she tried to pass the pipe back. This wasn’t very relaxing after all.

“Was I Google just now?” Keiko asked.

“Huh?”

“Y’know, collecting info on you or whatever.”

“...A little.”

“Sorry. Bad habit. Used to do this and that in Tokyo. Good to have ears, yeah?” 

“So you’ve really never been high before?”

K hummed an affirmative as she took another hit. “Some guys in the family did speed or coke, stole family money, got their girls hooked, like that. Boss warned me never to touch the stuff.” Speaking soft Japanese, Keiko raised the pipe like a toast to a cardboard box in the corner of the room, propped up so the longer flaps acted as open double doors. Set by the box was a cactus flower and a charred cone of incense; inside, her pearl-handled switchblade and a torn photo. I squinted to make out the three figures depicted. In the center, a young Keiko hooked her arms around two men. One I recognized as Uchida if only by mass. The other was a skinny but muscular youth in a tracksuit, head shaved, wearing a relaxed expression—Sakata, I think. Keiko had the huge, fluffy ponytail from her early mugshots, and looked very young. The big and goofy grin was sweet and awkward, far from the wry smirk I was used to. The torn edge was on Uchida’s side. Disembodied by the tear was the cuff of a dark-gray suit and a hand wearing a flashy, platinum watch.

Her nudge startled me enough that Keiko put up her empty palm. “Y’alright?”

“Yeah.” I looked away, took the pipe from her. It was cloudy, green glass and a texture like muscle without skin. By accident, it was one of the few tokens I’d brought South with me. I bought it in a head shop on Euclid with a friend when I was 20. We thought we were so cool. What did that friend think of me now?

“This stuff is weird,” Keiko said, dropping flat on her back again. “I feel really smart, but I sound really stupid. Is this what being a man is like?”

I couldn’t help it—I laughed, falling back on the floor beside her with a lengthy and pixilated giggle.

“What do you like about it?”

“You don’t like it?”

“S’not that. I thought it’d be like being drunk.”

“It relaxes me, I guess. I have a hard time doing that on my own.”

“Mm. I agree with U.H., I wouldn’t want to be you. Seems real stressful.”

“It is, I guess.”

“There a reason?”

Being an international fugitive is a little stressful. “Probably the pesky generalized anxiety disorder.”

“It’s funny, most criminals are too dumb to worry.”

“No way. There’s tons of criminal masterminds. No one on the crew is dumb.”

“I am.”

“No you’re not, Keiko.”

“No, I am. Did… a lot of dumb shit in Tokyo.”

“Like what?”

“Ahh, you know it all already. You’re like… super-Google.”

I frowned. It was true—I did extensive research on everyone I associated with. It was an invasion of their privacy, of course, but I was a fugitive—all alone in a strange country. I had to protect myself, didn’t I? 

“What was it like in America?” K asked. “I knew someone who studied there, told me a lot.”

So strange to talk about it openly. I should be worrying about saying too much. A part of my brain—one which was usually much quieter—told me to relax. “It was… normal. I had an office job. Went out with my friends. Nothing interesting.”

“So you weren’t a criminal there?”

Ah. Like that. I didn’t answer, and Keiko took the hint and changed the subject. “Where did you go out? I mean, what kind of places.”

I stopped myself before saying the name of the district. “Just… the hipster part of town. Vintage shops, record stores, music venues. There was this burger place we went to. And the burgers were... fine, but they had this amazing potato salad. Like… I am not a potato salad person, but this place? Oh... my God. They put a spice in it that made it like… red? And it tasted like…” My memory reached for the spice that gave it its dense color. I could picture the squat bottle stuffed inside a narrow cabinet between the fridge and the stove in my midtown loft. The memory of squatting to shuffle through the jars and bottles made my knees ache. I tried to trace back to the sentence that brought me here. My THC-addled mind had me chasing my own tale, tucked in a dark corner booth with a red forkful of potato salad, the formica gooseprickling my forearms. Slurred bitching about disorganized management and bad code. What was it like, the drugs asked, to be that girl?

“...tasted like what?” Keiko’s question jolted me back into now. 

After a few more unscenic circuits in my head, I said, “I can’t remember.” 

How did those people talk about me now? With hushed whispers in Midtown? With clinking glasses in Five Points? How would that root-canal catch-up conversation go? 

Oh, I left Ek Inc. for a senior analyst gig at Coke. Jim and I got a dog, she’s a bit of a handful, but the kids love her.

So cute! I’m smoking weed with an ex-yakuza. We’re going to rob a Chilean presidential candidate’s fundraiser. Anyway, what kind of dog is it?

I stared at the ceiling. A circuitous crack up there reminded me of the perimeter—a fractuous, anatomical heart of highways spreading out from Atlanta’s city-center. “Do you ever miss Japan?”

“Fuck no.”

She was too quick to answer, and I was too slow to respond. “Do you think it’s wrong to miss a place that burned you? That disappointed you so… thoroughly that you feel like you can’t be home ever again. Like you don’t know what home even means anymore. But you’re still homesick.”

I knew right away it was too much. I felt her looking at me; her arm touching my arm. Warm tension thrummed up to my stomach as the drugs asked, hey, remember how fucking good I make sex feel? I imagined that spindly arm reaching over, pressing my shoulder to the carpet and blowing smoke in my face.

I looked harder at the ceiling and said, “listen to me, all philosophical. I’m just high talking out of my ass.”

K got up. “You hungry? I’m starving.”

I got up too. “Yeah. Now that I think about it, I haven’t eaten anything today.”

“Do you have... eto…” Keiko made a motion like pushing a wheelbarrow. “...food stalls?”

“Yeah,” I said. “If we go down to the plazas, there should be a few late-night ones there.”

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Sorry for the late update yall… I forgot ^^;;