The Only Happy Ending for a Love Story Is an Accident by J. P. Cuenca

Author:J. P. Cuenca
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth

17

What we see now is the first meal we share in a Korean restaurant in Odaiba. Behind the outline of Iulana Romiszowska’s blond, messy hair, the bay shines in tones of blue, sparkling in millions of minuscule mirrors in movement in the thread of water. From here, the perpetual flow of cars and trains over the bridge of Tokyo is soft, the city looks like an inoffensive toy.

I take a piece of raw meat to the Korean grill with the hashi, and while I wait, I drink an Asahi beer and watch the smoke rise in a straight line to the metal exhaust fan. This image distracts me and I almost don’t notice, behind the fatty cloud that takes over the space between me and Iulana Romiszowska, that the specter of Mr. Lobster Okuda approaches the table.

My father, his hair and beard completely white, wears a kimono with the family insignia on it, wooden sandals, and on his nose he wears a pair of round dirty glasses. In his right hand he carries a lobster mask with antenna and rubber claws dragging on the ground.

A foreigner this time, son?

Mr. Lobster Okuda always picked the least appropriate times to invade my reality, but to disrespect the first meal that I share with Iulana Romiszowska in a Korean restaurant in Odaiba is something completely off limits.

Oh, what the ashes of your dead mother whisper into my ears!

To disguise my irritation in seeing the ghost of my living father, a faded and badly finished reflection of myself, I ask the waiter for another beer. Every time I see old people, especially my father, I feel that I am no more or less closer to death than any one of them, and this leaves me profoundly unsettled: they make me think that perhaps I have aged before my body.

Mr. Lobster Okuda, as always, ignores me and declaims, without meter, terrible verses behind Iulana’s shoulders:

Shunsuke, behold!

Behind the irises

of Iulana Romiszowska

Her orbits hold

Air squadrons

Tigers lurking in ambush

Water clocks

The light fades in those Russian eyes

And the time of those clocks is dishonest

And the time of those clocks is obscene

Iulana Romiszowska, like the other customers in the restaurant, is incapable of seeing the apparition of Mr. Okuda. Without dropping her eyes from her gaze outside the room, she removes her chin from the palm of her left hand and drinks an apple soda. She dilates her nostrils while she sucks the liquid rising through a straw. She closes her mouth in a small circle, stretching the white skin of her cheeks.

Learn to see

The geometric construction

Of the workers, Shun!

The workers who sculpted the features

And carved the curve of the lips

of Iulana Romiszowska

The workers who opened with hoes

Her marble veins

The workers who on her skin forgot:

A shovel, a hammer

A wooden stump, a stair

A saw!

For a brief moment, I imagine myself recognizing the territory of the beams of that body with trembling fingers, like a blind man who reads the gospels in Braille, and I stick my fingers in the direction

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