A Tale for the Time Being (41 page)

A gasp went around the room that sent shivers up my spine. The
supapawa
of my bald and shining head radiated through the classroom and out into the world, a bright bulb, a beacon,
beaming light into every crack of darkness on the earth and blinding all my enemies. I put my fists on my hips and watched them tremble, holding up their arms to shield their eyes from my
unbearable brightness. I opened my mouth and a piercing cry broke from my throat like an eagle, shaking the earth and penetrating into every corner of the universe. I watched my classmates press
their hands over their ears, and saw the blood run through their fingers as their eardrums shattered.

And then I stopped. Why? Because I felt sorry for them. I climbed down from my desk and walked to the front of the classroom. I turned to face my teacher and I bowed, pressing my palms together,
and then I turned to my classmates and bowed to them, too, nice and deep, and then I left the room. It was fine to leave then, and I even managed to feel a little sad, knowing I was never coming
back.

3.

My dad had gotten so good at not looking at me that after I shaved my head and defeated my classmates with my awesome
supapawa
, I went home and waited for the rest of
the day for him to notice that I had no hair, but he never did. Mom noticed right away, of course. The minute she walked in the door that night and saw me in my hoodie, she freaked out and demanded
that I tell her what had happened. I skipped over the whole Panty Incident and instead just announced that I was dropping out of school and leaving home to become a nun. I was half serious. Part of
me really wanted to do that, to go to old Jiko’s temple and sign up for a lifetime of zazen and cleaning and pickle-making.

No way, Mom said. I was too young to leave home, and I had to go to high school first. Big mistake. She should have let me, but instead we fought for three days, and in the end, I agreed to at
least take the entrance exams, which were coming up. It didn’t matter to me, since I knew I’d never get in anywhere good, but I promised her I’d try, and at least it got her off
my back.

That same week at the public baths, I saw the bar hostess I’d almost hit with The Great Minds of Western Philosophy, and even with no hair, she recognized me immediately. But instead of
looking away like most people, she narrowed her eyes and inspected me, and finally she nodded.

“It’s cute,” she said. “Nice shape. You have a pretty head.”

We were sitting in the soaking tub, up to our necks. In the clouded mirror, I could see my smooth white skull, bobbing on the surface of the steaming water like a boiled egg.

“I don’t give a shit about pretty,” I informed her. “I’m a superhero. Super-heroes don’t need pretty.”

She shrugged. “Well, I don’t know about superheroes. But it couldn’t hurt, could it? To be a little pretty?”

I guessed not. “My mom is freaked out,” I told her. “She wants me to buy a wig.”

She nodded and stretched her pretty arm and watched the water drip from the tips of her graceful fingers. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll take you. I know a good
place.”

Like I’d even asked.

She told me her name was Babette, which is not a typical Japanese name. Babette wasn’t always Babette. Before that, she was Kaori when she worked as a hostess in an
Asakusa club, which was before she got fired for sleeping with the mama-san’s boyfriend. She was sick of the club life anyway, she said. The patrons were too sentimental and wet. She changed
her name to Babette and got a job at Fifi’s Lovely Apron, which was a very cheerful and upbeat place to work when it was still lovely, before it got lonely.

Babette’s life passion is cosplay, and at Fifi’s she can wear her pretty little petticoats and pinafores and stockings and lace. When she’s all dressed up for work, she looks
like a fancy cupcake decorated with marzipan flowers and sparkles and sugary hearts, so sweet and delicious you just want to gobble her right up, but don’t be fooled. There is nothing wet
about Babette.

Since I wasn’t going to school anymore, I didn’t have much to do during the days, so we made a date and took a train to Akiba together.

“I like riding with you,” she said. “People look at us. We could get you some pretty fashions. You would look very shibui
¹⁴²
with a nice outfit and your adorable bald head. Maybe you could dress up like a nun. Or no, wait, a baby doll! Yes. With a lacy bonnet, you’ll look just like a pretty little bald baby doll.
Oh, that’ll be totally sweet!”

“You’re supposed to be helping me get a wig,” I reminded her, but secretly I was pleased.

Akihabara means Field of Autumn Leaves, but the fields and leaves have all been replaced by electronics stores, and these days people call it Akiba or Electricity Town. I’d never really
hung out there before. I thought it was where manga otaku and loser geeks like my dad went to sell their computer hardware when they ran out of money, but I was totally wrong. Akiba is wild and
weirdly awesome. You walk through these narrow alleyways and shopping streets lined with stores and stalls spilling over with circuit boards and DVDs and transformers and gaming software and fetish
props and manga models and inflatable sex dolls and bins filled with electronics and wigs and little maid costumes and schoolgirl bloomers. Everywhere you look, you can see bright anime posters and
gigantic banners hanging from the tops of buildings, with pictures of towering moe
¹⁴³
girls with round sparkling eyes the size of kids’
swimming pools and humongous luscious tits busting out of their galactic superhero reformer costumes, and all you can hear is the crazy
clang! clang! clang!
of the game arcades, and the
ping! ping! ping!
of the pachinko parlors, and loudspeakers screaming limited-time offers from the storefronts, and the little French maids in the street crying out to otaku boys as they
walk by. There are no fields or autumn leaves around here anywhere.

Babette steered me through the crowds, holding me by the arm so I wouldn’t get distracted or lost. I felt like a goofy tourist with my mouth hanging open like an American, which reminded
me of Kayla. I hadn’t thought about her in a million years, and suddenly I wished I could somehow make Kayla materialize in the middle of Akiba Electricity Town, just to blow her little
Silicon Valley mind. This was a side of Tokyo I could totally get into, and I couldn’t wait to find a wig—at that moment I was thinking long and superstraight and pink, like Anemone
from
Eureka Seven
—and maybe some kind of cute costume so I would fit in with the scene, when we happened to pass the window of a DVD store stacked with rows of flat-screen TVs. Tinny
fight music blared from the speakers. Fireworks exploded as the title burst onto the screens.
INSECT GLADIATORS!
Then the fight announcer screamed,
Next up, Orthopteran Cricket versus
Praying Mantis!

We stopped and watched as a monster cricket wrestled a pale green praying mantis into the corner of a glass terrarium. The image was repeated on every screen, and the video picked up every
microscopic detail.
Look at those powerful bolt-cutter jaws, crunching that mantis’s eye! Pulverizing her gossamer wings!

The fight ended when the cricket tore the mantis’s head off.

And the winner is . . .
Orthopteran Cricket! Next up, Staghorn Beetle versus Yellow Scorpion!

The pale scorpion used its pincers to flip the staghorn beetle into the air. The beetle reared up and fell over on his back, exposing his underside. The scorpion’s segmented tail curled
over to deliver its venomous sting.
Sasu! Sasu! Yellow Scorpion stings!
The staghorn beetle shuddered. In the small, bare terrarium, he had no place to hide. His spindly legs writhed and
flailed in the air, until they didn’t anymore.
It looks like Staghorn Beetle is the loser, yes, he’s dying, he’s dying, he’s . . . DEAD!

Neon-colored titles flashed across the screen.
Yellow Scorpion Wins!

I started to cry.

I’m not kidding. Until then nothing could make me cry, not losing all our money, not moving from my wonderful life in Sunnyvale to a crappy dump in Japan, not my crazy mother, or my
suicidal father, or my best friend dumping me, or even all those months and months of ijime. I never cried. But for some reason, the sight of these stupid bugs tearing each other apart was too much
for me. It was horrible, but of course it wasn’t the insects. It was the human beings who thought this would be fun to watch.

I crouched down next to the building and hugged myself and cried. Babette stood guard over me, fiddling with the eyelet lace on the edge of her pinafore and lightly tapping my hairless scalp
with the tips of her fingers like she was testing a melon or practicing scales. From the inside of my head, her fingertips felt like raindrops bouncing off my skull. After a while, she lit up a
cigarette and smoked it, and by the time she stubbed it out under the six-inch heel of her platform boot, I was okay again.

“Sorry,” I said.

“No problem,” she said. She inspected my face, and then started digging in her handbag. “You crazy about bugs or something?”

“Not really. My dad is. He likes to fold them out of paper. It’s one of his hobbies.”

“Weird,” she said, pulling out a tissue and wiping something from my cheek. “What’s his other hobby?”

“Committing suicide.”

She handed me the tissue. “Hmm. Well, if he’s still alive, it sounds like he’s not very good at it.”

“He’s better at bugs.” I blew my nose and stuffed the tissue in my pocket. “He won third prize in the Great Origami Bug War for his flying staghorn beetle.”

“Awesome,” she said. “You must be proud of him.”

“Yeah,” I said, and for a moment I actually was.

“You okay to go shopping now?”

“Sure,” I said, following after her.

We bought a cute little knit cap for me, and a shoulder-length wig, and a lacy petticoat, and a pair of loose socks, then she took me to Fifi’s to meet the maids. Babette was only a couple
of years older than me, but she knew just how to take care of me and make me feel better.

1.

“That Babette seems pretty cool,” Oliver said.

“She seems like a nice friend for Nao to have . . . ,” he said.

“It’s good that she finally has somebody to talk to . . . ,” he said.

“I’d like to go to Akiba . . . ,” he said.

“It’s sad about the bugs.”

She closed the diary, took off her glasses, and placed both on the bedside table. Pushing the cat off her stomach, she switched off the light. “Good night, Oliver,” she said, turning
her back to him.

“Good night,” he replied. The cat curled up in the gap between them and fell back to sleep. They lay there, side by side, in silence. A few thousand moments passed.

2.

“Did I say something wrong?” he asked into the darkness.

She could pretend she was asleep, or she could answer. “Yes,” she said.

She could almost hear him thinking. “What?” he asked, finally.

She spoke to the far wall, keeping her voice even. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I just don’t understand you. The girl is attacked, tied up and almost raped, her
video gets put up on some fetish website, her underpants get auctioned off to some pervert, her pathetic father sees all this and instead of doing anything to help her he tries to kill himself in
the bathroom, where she has to find him—after all that, the only thing you can say is Babette is cool? It’s sad about the
bugs
?”

“Oh.”

A few more hundred moments passed.

“I see your point,” he said. “But it’s good that she has a nice friend, isn’t it?”

“Oliver, Babette is a pimp! She’s not being nice to Nao, she’s recruiting her. She’s running a compensated-dating operation out of that awful maid café.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

3.

He sounded genuinely surprised. “Are all the maid cafés like that?”

“You mean are they all brothels? Probably not. But this one is.”

He thought about this for a while. “Well, I guess maybe I was wrong about Babette.”

“Yes. You were.”

“But it’s not true that Nao’s father didn’t try to help.”

She lost it then, sat up and switched on the light. “Are you fucking kidding me?” she said, bringing her fists down hard onto the puffy folds of the comforter. “He learns about
the hentai site and so he takes pills and tries to kill himself? How exactly is that helpful?”

He didn’t look at her, or he would have seen she was even angrier than she sounded and he might have backed down. The cat knew. The minute Ruth started pounding on the covers, Pesto was
off the bed and out of the room. They heard the sound of the cat door slam as he slipped out into the safety of the night.

Oliver stared up at the ceiling and defended his point. “He did try to help. He was bidding. He was trying to win the auction. It wasn’t his fault that he lost.”

“What?”

“Bidding.” He looked confused. “On her underpants. You didn’t realize that?”

“How do you know?”

“C.imperator? The guy who lost the auction? That was him. That was Nao’s father.”

She felt the heat rising to her face as she listened.

“
Cyclommatus imperator
,” he continued. “Don’t you remember?”

She didn’t.

“It’s the Latin name for the staghorn beetle,” he explained. “The one he folded out of paper? It was a flying
Cyclommatus imperator
. He won third place for it in
the origami bug wars.”

Of course she remembered
that
. She just hadn’t recalled the Latin name, and she hated that he had. She hated that now he felt he needed to speak slowly and carefully and explain
everything as if she were an imbecile or had Alzheimer’s. He used to use this tone of voice on her mother.

“Nao recognized the Latin name immediately,” he said. “That’s why she was so upset. As soon as she saw the suicide note, she knew. ‘I should only make myself
ridiculous in the eyes of others if I clung to life and hugged it when I have no more to offer.’ Her father was referring to the bidding, and Nao figured it out, which was why she went to
check her computer. That’s my theory.”