The Island Dwellers by Jen Silverman

Author:Jen Silverman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

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AND THEN IT IS MARCH, but still too cold for any real promise of spring. And then April, and the cold thaws gradually, and then May, and May is beautiful. Even in the factory they have caught firefly fever, everybody is talking just like the Japanese about how beautiful the fireflies are, how we should all go see them. Some Japanese-Brazilian boys from work invite me with them to see the fireflies over Tokyo’s choked and filthy canals. I say that I’ll take the extra hours of sleep over watching insects blink at each other. The boys laugh and pretend to be insulted but mostly laugh. They say, “You have no sense of beauty,” but they say it in Portuguese. I am still adjusting to hearing pure thick Brazilian-Portuguese in mouths that look—but are not—so Japanese. It is not that I am making friends in Risa’s absence. But the Japanese-Brazilian boys have started talking to me whether I want them to or not, and occasionally they come over to my apartment and bring weed, and we all smoke it together.

May becomes June, and the rainy season begins, and now I have been here exactly one year. I look at myself in a mirror, once, in the back of Koje’s hat shop when I’m visiting him. I am thinner, the angles of my hip bones jut. My face looks different too—older, the mouth set, the eyes cold. I look like someone who does not smile in public. And I look like someone who does not feel fear.

June becomes the dead weight of July, and in the third week, the rain tapers off, there are whole days of sunlight and thick wet heat. But still no sign of Risa. Nothing in five months. I replay that last meeting in my mind again and again. Risa’s smile and the envelope with money and I’d asked her to call me and she’d promised, she’d promised….

I haven’t spent that money. I keep intending to do something with it but then I find myself hesitating, as if I’m waiting for a moment that will make itself clear to me. As August begins, I keep thinking: Last year at this time…and then images flood me, all of them Risa, sprawled loosely over my bed, my floor, draped against the window, boneless in the heat. And my body, boneless with desire. I ask myself: Did she want me the way I wanted her? Or was I just something exciting, like Shinichi became exciting? Was I so easily forgotten? I ask myself questions that I hate myself for asking, but then I get angry at Risa: I wouldn’t have to ask these if you were here.

It’s in the last days of August that I think I see her.

I’m standing on the train platform with the Japanese-Brazilian boys and we’re all a little stoned, heading back home from an excursion on our day off, and then I look across the tracks and there she is.

Maybe.

This person, maybe Risa, doesn’t see me.

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