“Good.” She handed him the printouts. “These are the bathroom schedules. Everyone gets an initial two minutes in the morning using this schedule, which begins at five o’clock. At six-fifteen the second rotation begins, which allows you an additional five minutes. If you miss your turn, you automatically go to the end of the schedule. There’s soap, and water for brushing your teeth in the bathroom. You get your shower water from the tank in the basement. You’re allowed sixteen ounces.”
“No electrical appliances in the bathroom,” he said wearily.
“The apartment rules are on the other sheet. You’ll feel better as soon as the aspirin starts working. I’ll make you a cup of tea and you can lie down.” She started past him into the living room, but he put his arm up with surprising speed.
“It’s a great idea, but it won’t work,” he said.
“Why not? Did Mr. Ohghhi … my alien buy another piano while I was downstairs?”
“Worse,” he said. “He wants us all to go out on the town. ‘I want to drink sake and see a sutorippu,’ was the way he put it.” He handed Chris a card that said, “Luigi’s Tempura Pizzeria and Sutorippu. Topless. Bottomless. Continuous shows.”
She looked at him suspiciously. “Are you sure you’re not the one who wants to see the sutorippu?” she said. “Mr. Ohghhifoehnn …” She stopped and read from her hand, determined not to let him intimidate her. “… ahigrheeh doesn’t know enough English to say a sentence that long.”
“How do you know?” he said. “You’re so busy worrying about how to pronounce his name that you don’t even listen to him.”
“Well, you definitely shouldn’t go,” she said to change the subject. “This Luigi’s place is down in Shitamachi, on the equator. You’re shuttlelagged enough as it is. The last thing you need is full gravity.”
“I’m doing okay. Your vitamin A must be working. And anyway, we don’t have any choice in the matter. Your boyfriend said we had to do whatever Okee wanted, and what he wants is to watch a strip show.”
Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh slid open the door to his room. He had combed down his wispy hair and put a pink tie on over his long orange coat. “Topless,” he said happily. “Bottomless. Continuous shows.”
They took the bullet. It was jammed. Chris spent the trip wedged between a large bearded man and a middle-aged woman who looked like she was the kind who did get nauseated on the shuttle. Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh had bought a large paper kite on the platform when Chris wasn’t looking, and he and Hutchins were holding it above their heads so it wouldn’t get crushed.
The bullet got progressively more crowded as they got closer to the ginza and Shitamachi. In the crush to get off at their stop, Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh’s kite got torn and Chris lost her shoe. Hutchins dived into the tangle of legs as the doors were closing and rescued it.
“Thank you, Mr. Hutchins,” Chris said, leaning against a pillar to put it back on.
“Now you’re mispronouncing my name,” he said, with a grin that looked like he was feeling better. “It’s Pete.”
Luigi’s Tempura Pizzeria was about the size of Chris’s hall, if you took out the piano, only with such low ceilings that Hutchins had to duck. It was nearly as crowded as the bullet had been. There was no sign of a stage that Chris could see, and the tables were too small to dance on.
The waiter led them through the mob to a tiny table, pulled it out from the wall so Chris could sit down, and then shoved it back in place, pinning her firmly between Hutchins and Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh. The waiter handed them menus that were bigger than the table and then stood there, holding a hand terminal and a stylus and looking impatient.
“In the tempura pizza, is it just the tomato sauce that’s deep-fried in batter?” Hutchins asked. “Or do you dip in the whole pizza?”
“Have eat?” Chris asked Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh, pointing to the pictures on the menu. “Fish? Rice?” Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh smiled blankly at her and nodded. “Eat?” She picked up a pair of chopsticks and pantomimed eating. “Have eat?”
“What are you going to have, Okee?” Hutchins interrupted. “The sashimi lasagna looks good. I don’t know about the linguini with eel sauce.”
“Why do you talk to him like that?” Chris whispered. “You know Mr. Ohghhi …”—she consulted her hand,—“foehnnahigrheeh only speaks a few words of English.”
Hutchins took hold of her hand and looked at the palm. “Why do you have his name written on your hand?” he whispered back.
She tried to pull her hand away. “Stewart says the Eahrohhs are very sensitive about how their names are pronounced.”
“Is Stewart the guy on the phone, the one you’re engaged to?”
“Yes.”
“Did he tell you to talk to Okee like he’s deaf and feebleminded, too? ‘Have eat? Fish? Rice?’ ”
“Mr. Ohghhi …” She tried to look at her hand, but Hutchins folded it firmly shut.
“Okee speaks better English than Charmaine. He’s only talking that ridiculous pidgin to you because you’ve got him intimidated with all this correct pronunciation stuff. He’s afraid if he talks to you, he’ll mispronounce something, so he doesn’t say anything. If you’d quit worrying about how to pronounce his name, and just talk to him …”
“Your order, signor?” the waiter said.
“Go ahead,” Hutchins said. “Ask him what he’d like to have for dinner.” His hand was still firmly closed over hers. The waiter tapped the stylus on his hand terminal.
“Mr Ohghhi …,” she said.
“Okeefenokee,” Hutchins said. “Like the swamp.”
“Okeefenokee,” she said timidly, “what would you like to have for dinner?”
Mr. Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh’s smile straightened out into an expression Chris hadn’t seen before. His cheek knobs seemed to grow more orange, and two lines formed above his nose. “I’ll have the sushi and spaghetti,” he said. “And you do have any sake? Majori? Good. I’d like a bottle. And three cups.”
Chris stared at him.
“And you, signorina?” the waiter said.
“She’ll have the sushi and spaghetti,” Hutchins said.
“ ’Scuse me,” Charmaine said, brushing past the waiter. She was wearing another hapi coat, made of a glittery fabric you could see through. “They told me you guys were here,” she said, “and I would’ve come right over only on the way down here some guy pinched me. I had to do one of my fans all over again.”
“We’ll all have the sushi and spaghetti,” Hutchins said, “and bring another sake cup.”
“Oh, gee, no, not for me,” she said, bending over the table to talk to Hutchins. “I’m on at nineteen o’clock. Right after Omiko and Her Orbiting Colonies.” She leaned over farther.
“Great,” Hutchins said.
“Would you like to sit down?” Chris said.
“I can’t. On account of my fans.” She looked around the room. “This is a great place to work. Three guys have proposed to me already.”
“Charmaine came up here to find a husband,” Chris told Hutchins.
“Yeah,” Charmaine said. She leaned over Hutchins. “I wanted to go someplace romantic, someplace where guys wouldn’t treat me like I was a piece of real estate. I guess you think that’s kind of a crazy reason, huh? But I’ve met some people whose reasons are even crazier. Did you know that sweet old guy who lives above me on the steps came up because he’d always wanted to meet an alien? And this weird guy I met tonight told me he came up because he figures these arrows guys are going to kill us all, and he wants to get it over with. No offense, Mr. Fenokee,” she said, turning to lean over Okee. His face twisted up in an unfathomable expression.
“Why did you come up to Sony, Mr. Hutchins?” Chris said hastily.
“Not to get married. So you thought Sony was a romantic place to come?” he said, watching Charmaine lean over the table.
“Gee, yeah,” she said, leaning over even farther. “I mean, the stars and the moon are right outside and everything. I
t’s bound to have a romantic effect on a guy. It might even have a romantic effect on my old boyfriend, but I doubt it. I mean, he acted like he was a prospective buyer and I was a two-bedroom split-level. He kept calling our wedding a closing, and instead of going on a honeymoon, he wanted to ‘establish occupancy.’ Can you believe that?” She sighed an impressive sigh. “But I don’t know if Sony’s going to be any better. Omiko says the marriage contracts up here are really real-estate deals, with property clauses and everything, and that people get married all the time just to get their hands on a place to live.”
“Does your fiancé have his own apartment?” Hutchins asked.
“He lives with his mother,” Chris said stiffly. “Stewart says the lack of space on Sony makes property very valuable, and the marriage laws are bound to reflect that, but it doesn’t mean …”
“Gee, your fiancé sounds just like my old boyfriend,” Charmaine said, leaning over about as far as she could go. “I mean, there’s gotta be a romantic guy around somewhere.”
The waiter came back with the bottle of sake and four porcelain cups the size of soup bowls.
“ ’Scuse me, I gotta go get ready for my number.” She wriggled away between the tables.
“Now there’s a woman whose property value is in the high forties,” Hutchins said, pouring out the sake.
“My wife has large cups, too,” Okee said.
Hutchins poured sake on the table. Chris bit her lip.
“They are not painted and made of …” Okee stopped and searched for a word. His face was screwed up into that odd expression again. He looked like a newborn baby about to cry.
“Porcelain?” Chris said calmly, picking up the empty sake cup and handing it to Okee. “These cups are made of a kind of glazed clay called porcelain.”
“Porcelain,” he said, the two lines above his nose deepening. “My wife would like these cups.”
Chris passed the empty cup to Hutchins so he could fill it. Now he was the one with the odd expression, and she didn’t seem to be any better at interpreting his than Okee’s.
“Cups,” he said thoughtfully, and poured some more sake on the table.
“I didn’t know you were married, Mr. Okeefenokee,” Chris said, mopping up sake with her napkin.
“Yes,” he said, and his face screwed up again. He drank down his bowlful of sake in one swallowless gulp and set it in front of Hutchins. “My wife and I drink …”—he said an unpronounceable word with enough s’s in it to defeat Molly’s lisp—“out of cups like these. It is better than sake.”
“ ’Scuse me,” Charmaine said. She had put on her headdress, which consisted of giant red-lacquered chopsticks stuck at various angles into her brass-colored topknot. If she bent over Hutchins like she’d been doing before, she would do herself an injury. “Can I borrow Mr. Fenokee for a minute? The girls in the show all want to meet him.”
Okee took another incredibly large swallow of sake and followed her through the crowd.
“Don’t you think we should go with him?” Chris said, watching the bobbing red headdress work its way through the crowd.
“He’ll be all right. How did you know he was talking about the sake cups and not Charmaine’s, um, selling points?”
She reached for her cup of sake. “Just because they were the first thing that sprang to your mind.…”
He put his hand over hers. “I’m serious. How did you know for sure he was talking about the sake cups?”
“Because he asked me at breakfast what the coffee cups were called, and I told him they were cups, so I knew he knew the word, and he doesn’t seem to be able to absorb more than one meaning of a word.”
His grip tightened on her hand. “Give me an example,” he said urgently.
“All right. Yesterday at breakfast we had rolls, and he asked me what they were called. When I told him, he took two of them and went out and gave them to Molly and Bets. ‘Here roll,’ he said, and Bets said, ‘We asked if you could get us a role. In the alien movie. Not this kind of roll,’ and threw it at him.”
“A regular Shirley Temple. Did you try to explain what a role in a movie was?”
“Yes, I told him there were two words that sounded like roll and that Bets meant an acting job in a movie, but I could tell he didn’t understand. He started nodding and smiling the way he always does when I tell him he’s got to stop buying things.”
“Because there isn’t any more room in your apartment,” he said, and caught up her hand in both of his. “That’s why …”
“ ’Scuse me,” Charmaine said sharply. She had brought Mr. Okeefenokee back. Chris hastily withdrew her hand from Hutchins’s.
“You’ll never guess who just showed up,” Charmaine said. “My old boyfriend. He said he came up to Sony to find me.”
“That sounds pretty romantic,” Chris said.
“Yeah, I know.” She sighed. “I told him I’d go out with him after I get off work, but if he says one word about escrow or closings … I gotta go. Thanks, Mr. Fenokee.”
Okee had several lipstick prints on the top of his bald head, and his face had smoothed out into that new expression, his mouth straight across, his cheeks bright orange.
“After we see the sutorippu,” he said, “I would like you to get married.”
The waiter appeared suddenly and slammed down three orders of sushi and spaghetti in compartmentalized bento-bako boxes. “Will there be anything else, signor?” he asked Hutchins. “The first show is about to start.”
Hutchins didn’t answer him. He was still looking worried. Chris wondered if his aspirin was starting to wear off. She hoped not. Between the shuttle-lag and the sake, he would really crash. Okee motioned the waiter over and said something she couldn’t hear.
“Please move over next to the gentlemen, signora,” the waiter said, and waved her over toward Hutchins, motioning her to turn the chair around so it was facing the wall. She moved the chair so hers and Hutchins’s were side by side.
“Chris,” Hutchins said, leaning toward her and yawning, “there’s something I’ve got to tell you about this subletting situation.…”
There was a sudden blast of music, and the wall in front of Chris rolled up and revealed Omiko and her Orbiting Colonies. Chris was glad she’d moved her chair. She would have fallen over into the orchestra pit. Mr. Okeefenokee was watching the activities on stage, which involved clear plastic stars and tassels, with the broad smile and wobbling nod that usually meant that he was going to buy something.
“If he buys Omiko and her orbiting colonies I’m evicting him,” she shouted at Hutchins over the deafening music. He didn’t answer. A heavy weight came down on her shoulder. He’s probably smiling and nodding at those LaGrangian points, too, and doesn’t even realize he’s got his hand on my shoulder, she thought. “What about the subletting situation?” she said suspiciously, and turned to glare at him.
He was sound asleep, his mouth a little open and his face looking somehow more tired in sleep. “Well,” Chris thought, feeling oddly pleased.
The music ground up to a finale, and Omiko put enough spin on her colonies to induce full gravity. Hutchins began to snore. “My wife does that,” Mr. Okeefenokee said, watching the stage, and let out a wail like an air-raid siren.
Hutchins slept all the way home on the bullet. Chris spent the trip explaining to Mr. Okeefenokee why he couldn’t buy anything else. He smiled and nodded, trying to juggle the two dozen bento-bako boxes and Fan Tan Fannie’s fan against the uneven motion of the bullet. Chris held the box containing the porcelain sake cups.
“There just isn’t any more room in my apartment,” Chris said. “Tomorrow I’m going to see my fiancé and ask him if he can store some of the things in his apartment, but …”
“Tomorrow you and Hutchins get married. Have closing. Honeymoon.” He pronounced honeymoon “hahnahmoon.”
“People who get married don’t really have closings. They have weddings. And they don’t just get married. They have to be in l
ove, they have to know each other.”
“No?” Okee said.
“No. I mean, they have to be friends, to talk to each other.”
“You and Hutchins talk. You are friends.”
Chris glanced at Hutchins, who had his arm slung through one of the hanging straps to keep himself more or less upright, wishing he would wake up and explain things to Mr. Okeefenokee. “You can’t just be friends. You have to spend time alone together so you can talk without other people listening, and so you can …”
“Neck,” Hutchins said, yawning. He eased his arm out of the strap.
“Neck?” Okee said, with the smile starting again that meant he didn’t understand. He put his hand on his neck.
“Mr. Hutchins means kissing,” Chris said, glaring at Hutchins. He was looking at Okee, though, with that thoughtful expression on his face again. “This is our stop.”
It was raining when they came out of the station. People were asleep on the sidewalks, huddled under umbrellas and makeshift tents. There were half a dozen asleep under the overhang of Chris’s building. Inside, Mr. Nagisha lay curled up by the front door with his arm around his lap terminal and disk files.
“Shh,” she said, and tiptoed to the stairs.
Hutchins tiptoed after her, stopping to take off his shoes. Mr. Okeefenokee followed, juggling his bento-bako boxes. Fan Tan Fannie’s fan dragged across Mr. Nagisha’s nose. He sneezed but didn’t wake up.
Chris started up the stairs. The old man was stretched out like a corpse on the third step up, his hands crossed on his breast and the baseball cap over his face. His running shoes were on the step above him, and his feet in their pink socks stuck through the banisters.
There were at least five extra people sleeping on the landing, each clutching an overnight lease contract. Mr. Nagisha must be making a killing. Molly and Bets’s mothers were asleep sitting up against the banister, still holding an open copy of Variety between them.
Molly was asleep against the door of Chris’s apartment, wrapped in a sleeping bag with blue kittens on it. Chris couldn’t get the door open without cracking Molly on the head. Hutchins took hold of a corner of the sleeping bag and pulled her out of the way, yawning. “Here’s Dorothy, but where’s Lillian?” he said, and yawned again.