Bicycle Days

Acclaim for
John Burnham Schwartz

John Burnham Schwartz

Bicycle Days

John Burnham Schwartz is the author of
Reservation Road.
He lives in New York City with his wife, filmmaker Aleksandra Crapanzano.

T
he noise of the silver balls was deafening. It enveloped the senses, locking Alec in no less than the Japanese men who sat transfixed, rows and rows of them, their faces inches from the pachinko machines. Every few seconds a ball would hit home, sending another stream rushing out through an opening at the bottom. Without once interrupting the motion of their thumbs as they worked the levers, the men would collect their new supply, occasionally wiping a bead of sweat from their cheeks with a twist of the shoulder. But always the noise. The vibrations would rise to a crescendo as a new jackpot was struck, only to sink again. The rhythm rose from these constant pulsations, a whirlpool of anonymous men and silver balls.

Alec pulled his face away from the window front, erased the trace of his breath with his shirt-sleeve. The air was muggy, and he felt for a moment as if there weren’t enough oxygen in it. He stood on the wide, busy stretch of Waseda Avenue, his bags scattered around him, just a few blocks from the Japanese
homestay family with whom he would be spending the summer. His watch read seven o’clock. He couldn’t remember if he had reset it when he arrived. The confusing bus ride from the airport, much more than the flight from New York, had robbed him of all sense of time.

He had woken with the sense that something was wrong. His first thought was that he had missed his stop. Terrified, he looked around him. It was the same bus he had been on before he had fallen asleep, filled with the same people, the driver wearing the exact same pale blue hat. The bus looked like every other bus Alec had ever been on. The red vinyl seats reminded him of the Greyhound he used to ride to his aunt’s house in Vermont. He took a deep breath and rubbed his head where it had been knocking against the window. A young woman sitting across the aisle looked away when he noticed her; he was sure she had been staring at him while he slept. His head felt as though someone had been pounding on it with a rubber hammer. He traced the ache to his left ear, which was being attacked by a constant stream of freezing cold air. It surprised him that the air-conditioning could be so accurate. When he sat back, his head against the synthetic white cover, the air went directly into his ear. But he couldn’t figure out where it was coming from—there was no vent visible, no way to turn it off.

Beyond the window, the sparse greenery of the suburbs between Narita Airport and Tokyo was merging with the outskirts of the city itself. The block forms of tall apartment complexes, gray and gold in the twilight, rolled out to greet him. Laundry flanked the balconies like children gathered for a parade. There was no longer any green, only solid, urban matter: slabs of concrete and sheets of iron; timber walls and tile roofs; the glistening bodies of Hondas and Toyotas bumper to bumper, stretching off the highway and down into the streets below. Neon signs had come on all over the city, cloaking the buildings and streets in electricity, promising an explosion of light when the sky turned dark.

The bus eased off the exit ramp, and Alec felt Tokyo close in
around him. The highway had been elevated, and he had looked out over the entire city, the distant observer. But the bus was in a maze of narrow streets now, and the city had moved close to him. Everything was concentrated; the neon brighter, garish, the buildings tall and dark above their electric signs, the people pushing, moving.

He sat back in his seat for a moment, too tired to do anything else. It had been like this since his graduation from college, three weeks before. That afternoon his family and friends had formed a circle around him, crying and congratulating him. His father had hugged him. It was a brief, fierce, awkward hug, followed by an embarrassed silence as Alec bent down to pick up his mortarboard from the ground. His mother had hugged him, too, but then held on longer than that, stepping away with her hands tightly gripping his arms, her eyes on his, as if she had finally caught sight of him after a long absence, only to realize that he was about to disappear again. She told him to come home soon, or whenever he wanted to. And to write or call collect anytime, because she would be there to talk to him. Anytime. And it seemed to Alec as if the day had ended with that word, because he couldn’t remember what came after.

The bus was stopped at a light, and Alec looked down a side street. An old bicycle with a metal basket leaned against a dark one-story house. A teenage boy in a white apron and paper hat walked swiftly out of the house, carrying a tray of stacked empty dishes above his right shoulder. The light turned green, the bus jerked forward. Trying to see, Alec craned his neck against the glass. The bike was moving fast, gaining on the bus. Alec gasped as the boy came abreast of the bus, a flash of white, weaving and dipping and somehow managing not to lose the tray, which he held aloft on one hand, the one solid part of a sculpture that was all fluid motion. And then, at the next corner, he was gone.

The driver’s voice came over the loudspeaker, announcing his stop, Takadanobaba Station. Alec quickly checked his sheet of directions, then jumped to his feet to gather his bags. The aisle seemed endless as he hurried toward the front of the bus, his
luggage catching on the seats, dragging over them, hitting the silent, staring passengers on their heads.

But the bus ride was already a memory. Alec bent down to pick up his bags and felt sweat begin to trickle down his side. A roar from across the street caught his attention. An ape was suspended from the second story of a building, its chest covered with Japanese characters spelling King Kong. At regular intervals, the ape would beat its chest with both hands and growl. Alec looked at it for a moment, then moved on.

Up ahead was a gas station. He checked the directions and veered left down one street, then right at the next corner. He was now only about two minutes beyond the neon chaos of Waseda Avenue. People lived here—in pillbox houses of wood and tile and tin, down streets barely wide enough for a car to pass through.

Alec walked to the end of the street, then turned left again, checking the numbers on the doors as he struggled with his luggage. He stopped in front of a four-story house with a garage taking up most of the first floor. “Hasegawa Company” was written on the glass door in adhesive Japanese characters. He put down his bags, looked once more at the sheet of directions, then back at the door. Poised, a stone lion sat just to the left. Alec repeated a couple of Japanese phrases to himself, ran a hand through his hair, and rang the doorbell.

A teenage girl came running to the edge of a steep flight of stairs and squinted down at him. She continued to peer at him, making him even more uneasy. As he began to turn away, the girl seemed to see him for the first time. After screaming something in Japanese, she sprinted down the stairs and let him in. She wore a striped knee-length dress that looked brand-new. And black knee socks.

“You’re Alec-san,” she said in Japanese, turning the “l” in his name into an “r.”

“Yes,” he said. “Please excuse my lateness.”

The girl made many rapid sounds after that, but Alec didn’t
recognize any of them. He gathered his bags and followed her inside.