Goucher College Fiction Workshop

Kami

Lindsay Stuart Hill

That brings me back to what I was originally saying, which would be that yes, I went out to Tokyo Sushi alone. It was a Saturday night, too.

So I drive out there wondering if I have enough gas to get me home again, and figuring that maybe it would be better to walk back anyway because I’m going to drink enough sake to drown a fish. That kind of night, that kind of logic.

I only think about her twice on the ride there. The first time it’s remembering when the power died at her house and the jets went off in the hot tub—that comes out of nowhere. Maybe it’s from the way the passing headlights wiggle in the rain. Well, I don’t know, anything’s possible.

Then I glance in the side view mirror and think of her sitting beside me, painting her face to look like Princess Mononoke. Because were always going somewhere, always running or biking together, always rushing to a new sushi restaurant or one of her anime parties or conventions. Just constant motion. I like to tell myself it was the heart of our relationship, and that’s why all I can do now is sit on my ass: I’m still trying to catch my breath. “Change is the only truth,” she used to say. At one point I started to understand—when I read the Daodejing, when I started watching Cowboy Bebop and Sailor Moon, when I finally bothered to go beneath the surface of her world. And then, just when I felt so proud of discovering that the girl I had believed to be so simple was in fact crazily complex, I realized I had been wrong: she was just as one-sided as I had first thought. Her rushing wasn’t the heart of some life philosophy. She really did just always want to be somewhere else—specifically, Japan—and that’s where she went.

I’m going somewhere with this, I swear. So I drive to Tokyo Sushi alone. I must have said that at least twice already…Anyway, I don’t know why I decided to go at all. It’s a family place, and there are so many people shoving past your table with sizzling chicken and fish you feel like you’re eating in the middle of the kitchen. And I don’t even sit at the bar; I sit at a table for two, next to the koi pond. No, they’re not goldfish. I made that mistake on our first sushi date. Koi, commonly misspelled coy—the way she acted toward me for the first month or so. Every time I tried to kiss her she’d giggle and shove her face in my pillow, or suddenly become interested in my posters of… and there you go, I can’t even remember the posters I used to have up three years ago, before my walls were plastered with Faye Valentine, the Four Noble Truths, and the Shinto shrine at Itsukushima.

So I’m sitting alone in Tokyo Sushi, thinking, who does this? Who goes out for sushi alone? You know—feeling like a single old man, surrounded by noisy families, each its own little zoo. And those ridiculous koi fish, worth a hundred bucks apiece, stuck in that tiny pool, staring at me, opening and closing their mouths like they’re speechless. There’s no way they’d survive in a real river with a real current. Really, the whole scene is just pathetic.

At the table next to mine, a little girl orders rice and milk, then mixes them together with a few packets of sugar and eats the whole thing like a bowl of cereal. She has two neat yellow braids that flap against her shoulders when she shakes her head, and she won’t try either of her parents’ dishes no matter how many times they shove spoons in her face. All the while I can’t help thinking to myself, well, it’s not like the parents have ever tried real Japanese food—this is America, after all. They probably use the menu numbers to order so they won’t embarrass themselves. But it’s not their fault; they can’t be rushing off to Tokyo or Osaka on a moment’s notice. Not with kids and, who knows, a golden retriever at home, maybe a goldfish or two.

And then I start thinking about how she never wanted any of those things: golden retrievers and goldfish or a big yellow house with a porch and a sun room. I used to dream about pillars when I slept in her bed, huge golden pillars holding us up, holding the house up, keeping my organs from collapsing in on each other. Back then I didn’t get it: everything around me was already starting to pop, quietly as a soap bubble.

And that’s why I find myself sitting alone in Tokyo Sushi on Saturday, unable to decide whether to get assorted sashimi or California eel rolls. Because right now Japanese restaurants are all that’s left for me, sad as that sounds. You’d think it would be the opposite—we went out for sushi at least once a month.Even now the place is starting to feel different. Leering with a plastic shine, the potted ferns around the koi pond seem dangerously fake. The sushi bar chefs, dressed in white, seem to disappear into the wall behind them, so that only the edges of their clothes seem to show up, like the lines of an empty coloring book. And the dark Teriyaki plate one family is sharing, even with its steaming meat and vegetables, looks like nothing but a big hole in the table from far away.

With her I felt the whole world was animated, filled with great tectonic plates of color shifting and overlapping. But in reality, color is just a shell, frail as plastic, imitating some distant ideal that doesn’t exist.

Still, I order my sake and sashimi—you know, trying not to think about it too hard. The waitress comes and goes, leaving me alone again so fast I almost forget I ordered at all. I feel shaken up by the kitchen noise and the children squeezing between the tables on their way to the bathroom, so I close my eyes and think about how we used to lay out our beliefs for each other, when we first started dating. It was my idea, I think. I wanted to make sure there weren’t any major hang ups.

But it’s hard to remember whose beliefs were whose, and anyway, they all feel useless now, like the stories your older brother used to tell you about monsters in the attic or why your parents loved him more. Borderline bullshit, most of them. True love, karma, heaven…

Then my plate of sashimi arrives. The slices of fish give off a shallow glimmer, almost like gems. Cautiously, I prod the pieces of tuna with my chopsticks, almost believing that they might wriggle to life. There’s one belief I keep coming back to, one glimmer of a belief: kami. Spirits of the animate and the inanimate. They’re everywhere in nature—rocks, trees, animals. Beautiful and ordinary. That’s the way she used to describe them, anyway, and I bought it completely. I had to—she used that word to name herself. Cameron became Kami, and I should have seen then what a false concept it was. Because the center of everything is not motion or spirit. Not light, not pillars, not rivers, not color. Just emptiness. Nothing at all.

Where was I? Of course—eating sushi alone on a Saturday night. Like I said, I swear I’m going somewhere with this. So I pinch a piece of carp between my chopsticks and raise it in a toast to the koi. “You’re all about as good in the pond as you are on the plate,” I say. “To going nowhere.” And I laugh, almost choking on the fish.

So here I am, eating at Tokyo Sushi alone, coughing up carp…This is a story. I’m telling a story, so it has to have a point. There has to be a point in here somewhere, in the story or at least in my mind. I have to be going somewhere with this. Something has to happen. Something has to happen, and the happening will lead to the heart of the story. Will you judge me if nothing happens? I don’t tell stories that often, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now. Do you want a climax? I’ll give you a climax.

So I cough and cough with a mouthful of fish until it feels like I’m drowning. My eyes fill with water and the room wavers, as if it’s about to pop. It almost looks like the pieces of sashimi fish are wriggling, like they’ve been resurrected. In that moment I think about Kami, because I can’t help it—about how she’s on the other side of the world, and how weird it is to be able to say that and have it be true. About how almost-thirty is the time of life when everyone is supposed to be settling down, but no one’s settling. And about how I can’t imagine being a father to someone now, someone who I’ll eventually discover is just as hollow a cage of bones as I am. I cough and cough, and the rice girl’s parents run to me when they realize, but I’m slipping away, like a river. The restaurant is finally quiet, and it’s then that color seems to fill me again. I remember everything: the posters I used to hang on my walls and what lay beneath them. And I’m gone.

So I’ve told you a story. Are you satisfied? Are you as stuffed with meaning as I was with sushi? I suppose I need some sort of falling action or resolution. Maybe I’ll make it the truth, what really “happened.” You do realize that climax was bullshit, I hope. Well, not so much the part about the room popping, or Kami living on the other side of the world, or settling down, or what it would be like to die. But let’s keep it simple. I coughed once. I swallowed the rest of my sake. I didn’t order another drink. I finished my sashimi, I paid the bill. Real life just isn’t that interesting. I even had enough gas to get me home.