Chapter 2

Ironic. Mitchell was waiting at the college early in the day and there were books in the waiting room and one happened to be in Japanese and a guy sitting near him picked up the light and slightly tattered softcover and opened it and sort of turned it around, this way and that, but with apparent comprehension, and Mitchell asked with interest, “Can you read that?”

“Yes,” the guy said matter-of-factly but must have been pleased with himself.

“I tried once,” Mitchell murmured. To learn the language, he meant. He felt a surge of envy, regret, warmth flooding him. Which was ironic. Because it wasn’t like he’d lost Akemi or anything. This was early in the day, before she failed to come home from her dance class, leaving Mitchell bereft, fretting.

The reader, bulky guy, a student, part-timer, Mitchell guessed from his appearance- he didn’t look the intellectual type, like someone who’d know Japanese, not a language easy to master. Could he really read it? How much?

Didn’t matter. What did was that Mitchell himself couldn’t.

He felt bad about thinking badly of the other person, wishing he was ignorant as he looked (and judging his looks). More power to him. He said “Wow” or something, acknowledging his achievement. The guy nodded matter of factly and continued reading the page open before him, or just looking at it? Maybe he was only able to pick out some of the characters as Mitchell could.

This was around the time Mitchell had told Akemi about the Hollywood scandals. Akemi was interested in American pop culture (is there any other kind?) and he thought she’d enjoy it. The Fatty Arbuckle affair. Of which he himself knew little. He’d read a book once. Some kind of orgy gone bad, involving the obese actor. Nineteen Twenties, was it? Mitchell liked bringing up with Akemi anything to do with sex, and the more over the top the better. Streaming cum. Ass fucking. He liked shocking her, the look of wonder on her face, smile that lit up, as amused with Mitchell as with the story. She didn’t shock easily.

God he liked fucking her.

(That story, the “Hollywood Babylon” thing, was an old one. Mitchell thought of his father, who wasn’t young anymore and during a recent health scare had said, “I thought it was the start of the big one” and his doctor had reported otherwise but nodded soberly it was true everyone eventually confronted “the big one”- that is, their death. Why did Mitchell’s thoughts turn toward the negative, he wondered. The relentless bad news in the country might be a cause. But it couldn’t make Akemi happy. He’d hoped their marriage would brighten his outlook, and it had, it had!)

In that waiting room he thought if Akemi had written a book, maybe an illustrated one, manga or the like it would be, he wouldn’t be able to read it. Again, regret. Akemi was a painter, of course, worked on canvas and not with words.

Mitchell wrote some. How that came about is another story.

He liked nuzzling her breasts, even through her shirt, a sky blue one especially, anyway most recently, the scent stayed with him, hers and the crisp cotton, deep sky blue. Her curves soft and vibrant as the ocean.

Mitchell had something he wanted to tell Akemi, not important but interesting; he thought she’d like it. A sentence that struck him at work in the morning, amusing turn of phrase from a movie, scene he’d shown the class, fiction but pertinent to news of the day, which Akemi also followed, found astonishing. Orwell’s “1984”, just a few minutes of it, which few if any students had seemed to get, but no matter; that one good bit alone made it worth his revisiting the film. But in the course of events he’d forgotten the sentence. Too much happening in the day, filling his mind with a slew of other stuff. He’d even gone for a run.

The forgotten thing left an impression, a form, emptiness where it had been, blank shape that couldn’t be filled—negative space, as Akemi might have said—though she really didn’t talk about her work that way, not like an art student. She was an accomplished painter. Mitchell respected her work immensely, saw it was well beyond him. As to the piece of film he’d shown in the classroom—lights off, some students using the occasion to nap, most of the rest on their phones, light sources distracting—reality no longer seemed remote from the horror-show future it depicted. You had authoritarian rule, blurring of the line between fact and fiction.