Impossible Things

  “Shh,” Chris said, and unlocked the door.

  Hutchins and Mr. Okeefenokee both seemed to snap awake at the whirr of her key being read. Okee hoisted up his dragging fan and managed to make it through the door before she did, and Hutchins straightened to his full height and cleared his throat. Chris looked at him warily and opened the door to her room.

  The blankets she had left stacked on the end of the couch were draped unevenly over it, the tail of one of the quilts trailing on the floor. In the middle of them, sound asleep, lay Bets, her golden curls spread out endearingly against the pillow and her thumb in her mouth. She was hugging a teddy bear and a frayed pink blanket. Chris glanced at Hutchins, wondering if this was what all the throat-clearing had been about, but he was bending over Bets, shaking his head. “I was wrong about the kid’s acting ability. She’s doing an amazing imitation of an innocent child asleep.”

  “Bets,” Chris said sternly. “Wake up. What are you doing in here?”

  Bets sighed, a sweet, babyish sigh, and turned over.

  “I know you’re awake, Bets,” Chris said. She knelt down and snatched the teddy bear away from her. “Tell me what you’re doing in here, or I’ll call your agent and tell him both your front teeth fell out.”

  “You better not,” Bets said. She sat up, her cheeks pink and her eyes bright with sleep. “You better give me back my teddy bear.”

  Chris stuck the teddy bear behind her back. “Not until you tell me what you’re doing in here.”

  “The door was open and I came in here just for a minute and your bed looked so soft I guess I just fell asleep.” She shrugged daintily.

  “She ate my porridge all up, too,” Hutchins said. “Where’s your phone, Chris?”

  Bets stood up in the middle of the couch. Her pink nightgown had a ruffle around the bottom that almost covered her bare toes. “My mother says we’re first on the list and you can’t just sublet your room to some boyfriend of yours. She says …”

  “I did not sublet my room to anybody. Mr. Okeefenokee sublet his room to Mr. Hutchins.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Bets said. “Then what’s that doing in here?” She pointed up at the ceiling.

  “What is that?” Chris said, looking up at the hammocklike arrangement of straps and white padding hanging from the ceiling. There was an aluminum ladder hooked onto the wall above the couch.

  “It’s an astronaut’s sleep restraint,” Hutchins said. “Okee bought it at the NASA Surplus Store. It was used on the space station, but don’t worry. It’s been reinforced for seventy percent gravity. It won’t fall down.”

  “It won’t fall down because you’re taking it down. I agreed to let you stay in Mr. Okeefenokee’s room, not in here.”

  “I know, but Okee has trouble understanding more than one meaning of a word. That’s what I was trying to tell you at Luigi’s. You told him there wasn’t any more room in your apartment, so he thinks ‘room’ means ‘available storage space.’ ” He pointed at the ceiling. “He apparently decided this space was available.”

  Chris didn’t wait for him to finish. She marched down the hall and pounded on the door of Mr. Okeefenokee’s room. “Mr. Okeefenokee!” she shouted. “I have to talk to you.”

  “Shh,” Hutchins said. “You’ll wake up that DeMille crowd scene outside.”

  “I don’t care if I wake the orbiting dead. You’re not sleeping in my room.”

  “You’d better give me back my teddy bear,” Bets said.

  Okee pushed open his shoji screen an inch and a half and peeked out.

  “Mr. Okeefenokee, there’s been a misunderstanding. Mr. Hutchins can’t sleep in my room. I said you could sublet your room.” She could see the smile coming.

  “Remember ‘role’?” Hutchins said. “Remember ‘cups’? Remember ‘neck’? I spent fifteen minutes trying to explain the difference to him this afternoon.”

  “And then you suggested that we go out for dinner so we wouldn’t get back here until it was too late for me to do anything about it,” she said furiously. “You probably timed it so it was raining, too.”

  “Look, I’m too tired to argue with you, and in about five minutes I’m going to be too lagged to even make it up that ladder and into bed. So if we could please talk about it in the morning …”

  “There’s nothing to talk about. I’m calling Stewart.”

  “What for? He told you to do whatever Okee wants. Okee wants me to stay.”

  “Stewart was not talking about a man sleeping in my room.”

  “I’m not sleeping in your room. I’m sleeping in Okee’s room, which happens to be above your room.” He shuffled off down the hall. “I’m going to bed. G’night.” Bets padded barefoot after him. They disappeared into the living room.

  Chris punched in Stewart’s number and let it ring. After the first ring, she hit the time key on the screen. It flashed twenty-three o’clock. Stewart’s mother went to bed at twenty-one-thirty. Chris hit the hang-up button.

  Okee was still peeking at her through the tiny space in the sliding door. “All right,” she said, “he can stay tonight, but tomorrow …”

  “Tomorrow you and Hutchins get married,” he said, and slid the screen shut with a bang.

  Hutchins was already in the sleep restraint, one arm dangling limply over the side. Bets and Molly were in Molly’s sleeping bag, which they had dragged over next to the couch. Their eyes were squeezed shut and their hands were tucked up under their cheeks.

  “I said Mr. Hutchins could stay,” Chris said. “I didn’t say anything about you two. Out.”

  Molly sat up and rubbed her eyes with her chubby little fists. “We have to thtay to thyaperone you,” she said, “tho people won’t think you’re a thlut.”

  Chris was suddenly too tired to argue with them. It’s the sake, she thought irrationally. He tried to get me drunk so I’d let him stay. He had the whole thing planned.

  She undressed in the bathroom and put on her nightshirt, even though there wasn’t enough room in there to raise her arms over her head. Molly and Bets had kicked their covers off. She put Bets’s pink blanket over them, turned off the lights, and got into bed.

  She could hear Hutchins breathing above her in the darkness, a heavy, even breathing that meant he was already asleep. Poor guy, she thought in spite of herself. When she had emigrated to Sony, she’d barely made it through customs and into the Hilton before collapsing. There was no way she could have made it through a dinner and a sutorippu. Half a sutorippu, she thought, feeling pleased all over again at the way he’d fallen asleep during Omiko’s act.

  Bets turned over and murmured something that sounded like “I’m going to be a star!” A sound like the shuttle taking off roared from Mr. Okeefenokee’s room. It went on for a full minute, subsided, and then started up again.

  “What in the hell’s that?” Hutchins said. She could hear the sleep restraint creak as if he had sat up.

  “It’s Mr. Okeefenokee,” Chris whispered.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Snoring, I think. He does it every night.”

  “You’re kidding,” he said, and she could hear his head flop back against the pillow. “No wonder you wanted to get rid of him.”

  “I didn’t want to get rid of him I like him. It’s just that it’s such a little apartment, and he keeps bringing things home with him, like the piano, and I’m running out of room for … where’s the piano? It wasn’t in the hall.”

  “I helped him shove it into his room this afternoon,” Hutchins said. “It sounds like he’s got a spaceship in there, too. You don’t suppose he bought one at NASA Surplus when I wasn’t looking?”

  “He might have,” Chris said ruefully. “I didn’t see him buy the bento-bako boxes tonight. Or Fan Tan Fannie’s fan.”

  They both listened to the whooshing roar for a while.

  “How long does this go on?” Hutchins said finally, in between takeoffs.

  “Sometimes he stops,” Chris said, thinking how she wo
uld have felt if she’d had to put up with this and shuttle-lag, too.

  “And sometimes he doesn’t. But either way you have to put up with it because your prospective buyer told you to let him do anything he wants. Has he ever heard him snore?”

  Chris didn’t answer. She was thinking that the next time Stewart tried to put her on hold she should play a tape of Okeefenokee’s snoring.

  “I’ll bet he has,” Hutchins said, answering his own question, “and that’s why he pushed him off on you. Why is he staying here anyway? How come he isn’t with the rest of the Eahrohhs or keeping your boyfriend and his mother awake tonight?”

  “He had to have a place with high ceilings,” she said, and hoped he wouldn’t ask how high Stewart’s mother’s ceilings were. “He has vertical claustrophobia.”

  “Which explains why Okee couldn’t stand to ride the bullet tonight or sit in Luigi’s. Did your prospective buyer tell you that? Face it, he found out about the snoring.”

  “How’th a perthon thuppothed to get any thleep around here?” Molly shouted in Chris’s ear.

  Chris snapped on the light. “You’re the one who wanted to sleep in here,” she said. Molly was standing over her, clutching her rag doll and Bets’s blanket. Bets was rolling up the sleeping bag. “You’re doing thith on purpothe to get rid of uth,” Molly said darkly, and stomped out in her footed pajamas after Bets.

  “She wants to be alone with him so they can—you know!” Bets said loudly, and slammed the door. Chris turned out the light.

  “It’s an ill wind …,” Hutchins said. “I wonder why Okee needs high ceilings. Or if that’s what he really needs.”

  “What do you mean?” Chris said.

  “Remember the incident of the rolls? Maybe he needed sealings, S-E-A-L-I-N-G-S, whatever they are. The Japanese word for ‘ceiling’ is tenjo, but tenjo also means palace. Maybe he really asked for a palace. Have you been in his room since he moved in?”

  “No. He comes out when he wants to talk to me, and when he leaves, he locks the door. The first day when we went shopping in the ginza, I was going to go in and help him put things away, but …”

  “He wouldn’t let you. I know. I offered to go get my bicycle and leave it outside. I wonder what he’s doing in there besides making lift-off noises,” he said thoughtfully. “Do you have a key to his room?”

  “No. I gave him mine. And besides …”

  “I know, your prospective buyer told you to let him do anything he wants to.” He was speaking into a sudden silence from the other room. He stopped talking. “You don’t suppose we woke him up, do you?” he whispered. The whisper made him seem somehow closer.

  Chris didn’t answer. There was another long minute of silence, and another sound started up, high-pitched and rising.

  “What’s that?” Hutchins said.

  “It’s what he did at Luigi’s. When the stripper came on.”

  “No more sutorippu for him. And no more sake.”

  The sound rose to the same keening note it had in the nightclub and then dropped and rose again. Whether it was because of the high ceilings, though, or because there was a wall between them, it didn’t sound like an air-raid siren this time. It sounded like an impossibly high trumpet, sweet and somehow sad.

  “I think Omiko and her Orbiting Colonies reminded him of his wife,” Chris said.

  “Ummm,” Hutchins said sleepily. “I missed her. That was when I was sleeping on you.”

  “I know,” Chris said.

  “Hutchins?” she said the next time Okee’s solo faded, and was answered by a faint snore that was nothing like Mr. Okeefenokee’s. “Good night,” she said, feeling pleased all over again.

  • • •

  “I don’t believe you,” Chris heard Bets say from the hall. “Why would he do that?”

  “You don’t have to believe me,” Hutchins said. He was in the hall, too. That meant he had climbed down the ladder past her and it hadn’t even woken her up. She wondered what time it was. “All I said is that if I were Spielberg, I wouldn’t want two million little girls following me around, begging me for a part in my movie. I’d come up to Sony in disguise so I could get close to the aliens and decide which little girl I wanted in the movie. Sort of a close encounter of the Hollywood kind.”

  Chris got up and pulled on a robe.

  “He could be anybody,” Hutchins went on, and Chris wondered what he was talking about. “Me or Okee or one of Mr. Nagisha’s cousins, but whoever he is, he could be watching you right now. He could be giving you a screen test this very minute.”

  “Mr. Nagithya’th couthinth aren’t watching uth. They got thrown out,” Molly said.

  Chris came into the hall. Hutchins was standing against the wall where the piano had been, holding two towels and two shower bottles. Molly and Bets were sitting on the floor in fuzzy robes and bunny slippers looking at a movie magazine. A young man with blond hair whom Chris had never seen before came out of the bathroom, trailing his shower bottle hose, and grinned at Chris as he went out the door.

  “Who was that?” Chris said.

  “Charmaine’s old boyfriend. The lawyer. He moved in this morning,” Hutchins said.

  “Mr. Okeefenokee didn’t sublet another half of my apartment, did he?”

  “No, he’s living on the landing. But, listen, speaking of moving in, I want you to know I really appreciate your letting me stay here last night. I was so lagged, I’d probably be dead this morning if you hadn’t. And I wanted to tell you why I …”

  “Mr. Nagisha’s cousins got evicted,” Bets said, studying a picture in the movie magazine. “We told Mr. Nagisha they were cooking on the stairs in violation of their lease.”

  “You girls won’t even be extras at this rate,” Hutchins said.

  “I don’t believe you,” Molly said. “Thpielberg wouldn’t dreth up like an alien.”

  “I didn’t say he’d dress up like an alien. Maybe he’s dressed up like Charmaine. And if he is, I’ll bet he doesn’t appreciate being called a thlut.”

  “I thtill don’t believe you,” Molly said. “You’re jutht doing thith tho we’ll act nither.”

  “Fine. Don’t believe me. It’s your funeral.”

  “But Mr. Nagisha’s cousins weren’t supposed to use the bathroom till after nine,” Chris said. “What time is it?”

  “Nine-thirty,” Hutchins said. He handed her a towel and a shower bottle. “What time’s this lunch with your prospective buyer?”

  “I’m meeting Stewart at thirteen-thirty,” Chris said stiffly. “Nine-thirty! Then what are you doing in line? You were supposed to be”—she squinted at the schedule on the wall—“seven forty-five:”

  “I traded places with Charmaine. She had a date with her old boyfriend, remember?”

  “We mithed our turn, too,” Molly said. “And it’th all your fault. If you hadn’t kept uth awake with all that thnoring and talking …”

  “Speaking of thnoring,” Hutchins said. “Okee said to give this to you.” He handed her a flat metal disk on a short chain. “You wear it around your neck.” He opened the odd-looking clasp and moved around behind her. Chris caught a glimpse of metal under his shirt collar.

  “When did he buy this?”

  “This morning. He got up early and went out to get rolls and coffee for breakfast.”

  “He went out by himself? What else did he buy? A set of encyclopedias?”

  Hutchins fastened the chain. The disk came right to the hollow between her collar bones and seemed almost to stick there. Chris tried to pull it out to see what was on the back, but the chain was too short. “What is this thing?” she said.

  “There’s an earplug thingee that goes with it,” he said, and dropped it into the palm of her outstretched hand.

  “My mother says we should have stuck cotton in our ears and stayed right where we were last night,” Bets said. “She says possession is nine tenths of the law.”

  “Did you put her up to this?” Chris said to Hutchins. br />
  “Not me. It’s not a bad argument, though. Go ahead. Put it on.”

  Chris looked warily at the smaller round disk and put it in her ear. “Mr. Okeefenokee didn’t go out again, did he?”

  (No,) Hutchins said. His lips didn’t move. (He’s in the bathroom. And after breakfast … Oh, that reminds me.) He dug his hand in his pocket and came up with a handful of crumpled yen. (I had to get money out of your purse to give Okee for the rolls and coffee. This is your change.) He handed it to her.

  Chris looked at the little girls, but they had their heads together over the movie magazine again.

  (After breakfast he’s going back to bed,) Hutchins said, still without opening his mouth. (He says our talking kept him awake last night.)

  She jammed the yen in her pocket, still watching his mouth and wondering if the thing around her neck was some sort of ventriloquist’s device. “What is this thing?”

  (Okee called it something that sounded like “the Everglades,”) Hutchins said. (It picks up subvocalizations and amplifies them so any other person similarly equipped can hear them. Go ahead, say something. Under your breath. Your lips don’t have to move. In fact, all I do is think the words.)

  (He said our talking kept him awake?) Chris said cautiously under her breath, her hand on the disk.

  (Yep. He said tonight we were supposed to use these, which means he wants me to stay here tonight. And besides, if I spend the whole day moving out, I can’t keep an eye on Okee. He’ll probably end up buying a steam calliope.)

  (You’ve done a great job of watching him so far,) she thought. (When did he buy these subvocalizers?)

  “I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully, and she could tell by the way the little girls looked up from their movie magazine that he had spoken aloud. It hadn’t sounded markedly different from when he used the subvocalizer, only a little farther away.

  Molly and Bets were watching Hutchins suspiciously. “Well, I don’t know either,” Chris said, as if they had been carrying on a rational conversation, “but I’d say his time in the bathroom is definitely up.” She tapped on the bathroom door. “Mr. Okeefenokee, your time is up.”