Men Without Women

  Once she’d finished, the two of them would move wordlessly to the bedroom, as if borne there by an invisible current. Scheherazade quickly removed her clothes and, still silent, joined Habara in bed. She barely spoke during their lovemaking, either, performing each act as if completing an assignment. When she was menstruating, she used her hand to accomplish the same end. Her deft, rather businesslike manner reminded Habara that she was a licensed nurse.

  After sex, they lay in bed and talked. More accurately, she talked and he listened, adding an appropriate word here, asking the occasional question there. When the clock said four thirty, she would break off her story (for some reason, it always seemed to have just reached a climax), jump out of bed, gather up her clothes, and get ready to leave. She had to go home, she said, to prepare dinner.

  Habara would see her to the door, replace the chain, and watch through the curtains as the grimy little blue car drove away. At six o’clock, he made a simple dinner and ate it by himself. He had once worked as a cook, so putting a meal together was no great hardship. He drank Perrier with his dinner (he never touched alcohol) and followed it with a cup of coffee, which he sipped while watching a DVD or reading. He liked long books, especially those he had to read several times to understand. There wasn’t much else to do. He had no one to talk to. No one to phone. With no computer, he had no way of accessing the Internet. No newspaper was delivered, and he never watched television. (There was a good reason for that.) It went without saying that he couldn’t go outside. Should Scheherazade’s visits come to a halt for some reason, he would be left all alone, his ties to the outside world severed.

  Habara was not overly concerned about this prospect. If that happens, he thought, it will be hard, but I’ll scrape by one way or another. I’m not stranded on a desert island. No, he thought, I am a desert island. If he could fully grasp that concept, he could deal with whatever lay ahead. He had always been comfortable being by himself. His nerves could cope with the solitude. What did bother him, though, was the thought of not being able to talk in bed with Scheherazade. Or, more precisely, missing the next installment of her story.

  Not long after settling in at the House, Habara had grown a beard. His facial hair had always been thicker than that of most other men. Of course he wanted to change his appearance, but there was more to it. The main reason was to help kill the copious amount of time he had on his hands. Once it had grown in, he could luxuriate in the sensation of stroking his beard, or his sideburns, or his mustache, for that matter. Or he could spend hours trimming his facial hair with a razor or a pair of scissors. For the first time he realized how useful a hairy face could be, simply as a diversion from boredom.

  —

  “I was a lamprey eel in a former life,” Scheherazade said once, as they lay in bed together. It was a simple, straightforward comment, as offhand as if she had announced that the North Pole was in the far north. Habara hadn’t a clue what sort of creature a lamprey was, much less what one looked like. So he had no particular opinion on the subject.

  “Do you know how a lamprey eats a trout?” she asked.

  He didn’t. In fact, it was the first time he’d heard that lampreys ate trout.

  “Lampreys have no jaws. That’s what sets them apart from other eels.”

  “Huh? Eels have jaws?”

  “Haven’t you ever taken a good look at one?” she said, surprised.

  “I do eat eel now and then, but I’ve never had an opportunity to see if they have jaws.”

  “Well, you should check it out sometime. Go to an aquarium or someplace like that. Regular eels have jaws with teeth. But lampreys have only suckers, which they use to attach themselves to rocks at the bottom of a river or lake. Then they just kind of float there, waving back and forth, like weeds.”

  Habara imagined a bunch of lampreys swaying like weeds at the bottom of a lake. The scene seemed somehow divorced from reality, although reality, he knew, could at times be terribly unreal.

  “Lampreys live like that, hidden among the weeds. Lying in wait. Then, when a trout passes overhead, they dart up and fasten onto it with their suckers. Inside their suckers are these tongue-like things with teeth, which rub back and forth against the trout’s belly until a hole opens up and they can start eating the flesh, bit by bit.”

  “I wouldn’t like to be a trout,” Habara said.

  “Back in Roman times, they raised lampreys in ponds. Uppity slaves got chucked in and the lampreys ate them alive.”

  Habara thought that he wouldn’t have enjoyed being a Roman slave, either. Of course, being a slave was a downer under any circumstances.

  “The first time I saw a lamprey was back in elementary school, on a class trip to the aquarium,” Scheherazade said. “The moment I read the description of how they lived, I knew that I’d been one in a former life. I mean, I could actually remember—being fastened to a rock, swaying invisibly among the weeds, eying the fat trout swimming by above me.”

  “Can you remember eating them?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “That’s a relief,” Habara said. “But is that all you recall from your life as a lamprey—swaying to and fro at the bottom of a river?”

  “A former life can’t be called up just like that,” she said. “If you’re lucky, you can catch a flash of what it was like. It’s like catching a glimpse through a tiny hole in a wall—you only get a snapshot of that little bit. Can you recall any of your former lives?”

  “No, not one,” Habara said. Truth be told, he had never felt the urge to revisit a former life. He had his hands full with the present one.

  “Still, it felt pretty neat at the bottom of the lake. Upside down with my mouth fastened to a rock, watching the fish pass overhead. I saw a really big snapping turtle once, too, a humongous black shape drifting past, like the evil spaceship in Star Wars. And big white birds with long, sharp beaks that targeted the fish like gangs of assassins; from below, they looked like white clouds floating across the blue sky. We lampreys didn’t have to worry about them, though—we were safe down among the weeds.”

  “And you can see all these things now?”

  “As clear as day,” Scheherazade said. “The light, the pull of the current, everything. Sometimes I can even go back there in my mind.”

  “To what you were thinking then?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you were thinking.”

  “Certainly.”

  “What do lampreys think about?”

  “Lampreys think very lamprey-like thoughts. About lamprey-like topics in a context that’s very lamprey-like. There are no words for those thoughts. They belong to the world of water. It’s like when we were in the womb. We were thinking things in there, but we can’t express those thoughts in the language we use out here. Right?”

  “Hold on a second! You can remember what it was like in the womb?”

  “Sure,” Scheherazade said, lifting her head to see over his chest. “Can’t you?”

  No, he said. He couldn’t.

  “Then I’ll tell you sometime. About life in the womb.”

  “Scheherazade, Lamprey, Former Lives” was what Habara recorded in his diary that day. He doubted that anyone who came across it would guess what the words meant.

  —

  Habara had met Scheherazade for the first time four months earlier. He had been transported to this House, in a provincial city north of Tokyo, and she had been assigned to him as his “support liaison.” Since he couldn’t go outside, her role was to buy food and other items he required and bring them to the House. She also tracked down whatever books and magazines he wished to read, and any CDs he wanted to listen to. In addition, she chose an assortment of DVDs—though he had a hard time accepting her criteria for selection on this front.

  A week after he arrived, as if it were a self-evident next step, Scheherazade had taken him to bed. There had been condoms on the bedside table when he arrived. Habara guessed that sex was one of her assigned duties—
or perhaps “support activities” was the term they used. Whatever the term, and whatever her motivation, he’d accepted her proposal without hesitation, allowing himself to be carried along by the flow. They went straight to bed and made love, leaving him in the dark as to the meaning of it all.

  While the sex was not what you’d call passionate, it wasn’t entirely businesslike, either. It may have begun as one of her duties (or, at least, as something that was strongly encouraged), but at a certain point she seemed—if only in a small way—to have found a kind of pleasure in it. Habara could tell this from certain subtle ways in which her body responded, a response that delighted him as well. After all, he was not a wild animal penned up in a cage but a human being equipped with a full range of emotions, and while sex for the sole purpose of physical release might be necessary, it was hardly fulfilling. Yet to what extent did Scheherazade see their sexual relationship as one of her duties, and how much did it belong to the sphere of her personal life? Habara found it impossible to draw a line between the two.

  This was true of other things, too. Habara couldn’t figure out if the everyday services she performed for him stemmed from affection—if “affection” was the right word—or if they were just part of her assignment. He often found Scheherazade’s feelings and intentions hard to read. For example, she wore plain cotton panties most of the time, the kind of panties Habara imagined housewives in their thirties usually wore—though this was pure conjecture, since he had no experience with housewives of that age. The kind you could buy in bargain-basement sales. Some days, however, she turned up in really fancy, seductive panties. He didn’t know where she’d picked them up, but they sure looked expensive: frilly, silky things dyed in deep colors. What purpose, what circumstances lay behind the radical difference? He sure as hell couldn’t tell.

  The other thing that puzzled him was the fact that their lovemaking and her storytelling were so closely linked, making it hard, if not impossible, to tell where one ended and the other began. He had never experienced anything like this before: he didn’t love her, and the sex wasn’t all that passionate, but he was so closely tied—one could even say sewn—to her physically. It was all rather confusing.

  —

  “I was a teenager when I started breaking into empty houses,” she said one day as they lay in bed.

  Habara—as was often the case when she told stories—found himself at a loss for words.

  “Have you ever broken into somebody’s house?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so,” he answered in a dry voice.

  “Do it once and you get addicted.”

  “But it’s illegal.”

  “You bet. The police haul you in if they catch you. Breaking and entering plus robbery, or at least attempted robbery. Nothing to laugh at. You know it’s dangerous but you still get hooked.”

  Habara waited quietly for her to continue.

  “The coolest thing about being in someone else’s house when no one’s there,” Scheherazade said, “is how silent it is. Not a sound. It’s like the quietest place in the world. That’s how it felt to me, anyway. When I sat on the floor and kept absolutely still, my life as a lamprey came back to me. It was so cool—it felt entirely natural. I told you about my being a lamprey in a former life, right?”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “It was just like that. My suckers stuck to a rock underwater and my body waving back and forth overhead, like the weeds around me. Everything so quiet. Though that may have been because I had no ears. On sunny days, light shot like an arrow from the surface straight down to me. Sometimes it fractured into a sparkling prism. Fish of all colors and shapes drifted by above. And my mind was empty of thoughts. Other than lamprey thoughts, that is. Those were cloudy but very pure. Not transparent, but still without blemish. I was still myself, yet at the same time I was something different. It was a wonderful place to be.”

  —

  The first time Scheherazade broke into someone’s house, she explained, she was a high school junior and had a serious crush on a boy in her class. Though he wasn’t what you would call handsome, he was tall and clean-cut, a good student who played on the soccer team, and she was powerfully attracted to him. Yet, as with many high school crushes, hers was a love that could never be reciprocated. He apparently liked another girl in their class and took no notice of Scheherazade. He never spoke to her—indeed, it was possible he was unaware that she even existed. Nevertheless, she couldn’t get him out of her mind. Just seeing him made it hard for her to breathe; sometimes she felt as if she were going to throw up. If she didn’t do something about it, she thought, she might go crazy. But confessing her love was out of the question. That was a recipe for disaster.

  One day, Scheherazade skipped her morning classes and went to the boy’s house. It was about a fifteen-minute walk from where she lived. She had researched his family situation beforehand. His mother taught the Japanese language at a school in a neighboring town. His father, who had worked at a cement company, had been killed in a car accident some years earlier. His sister was a junior high school student. This meant that the house should be empty during the day.

  Not surprisingly, the front door was locked. Scheherazade checked under the mat for a key. Sure enough, there was one there. Quiet residential communities in provincial cities like theirs had little crime, and so people were relaxed enough to leave a spare key under a mat or a potted plant.

  To be safe, Scheherazade rang the bell, waited to make sure there was no answer, scanned the street in case she was being observed, opened the door, and entered. She locked the door again from the inside. Taking off her shoes, she put them in a plastic bag and stuck it in the knapsack on her back. Then she tiptoed up the stairs to the second floor.

  His bedroom was there, as she had imagined. His small, neatly made wooden bed. A full bookshelf, a chest of drawers, and a desk. On the bookshelf was a small stereo, with a few CDs. On the wall, there was a calendar with a photo of the Barcelona soccer team and, next to it, what looked like a team banner, but nothing else. No posters, no pictures. Just a cream-colored wall. A white curtain hung over the window. The room was tidy, everything in its place. No books strewn about, no clothes on the floor. All the pens and pencils in their designated spot on the desk. The room testified to the meticulous personality of its inhabitant. Or else to a mother who kept a perfect house. Or both. It made Scheherazade nervous. Of all the luck, she thought. Had the room been sloppier, no one would have noticed whatever little messes she might make. She would have to be really careful. Yet, at the same time, the very cleanliness and simplicity of the room, its perfect order, made her happy. It was so like him.

  Scheherazade lowered herself into the desk chair and sat there for a while. This is where he studies every night, she thought, her heart pounding. One by one, she picked up the implements on the desk, rolled them between her fingers, smelled them, held them to her lips. His pencils, his scissors, his ruler, his stapler, his calendar—the most mundane objects became somehow radiant by being his.

  She opened his desk drawers and carefully checked their contents. The uppermost drawer was divided into compartments, each of which contained a small tray with a scattering of objects and souvenirs. The second drawer was largely occupied by notebooks for the classes he was taking at the moment, while the one on the bottom (the deepest drawer) was filled with an assortment of old papers, notebooks, and exams. Almost everything was connected either to school or to soccer. Nothing important. She’d hoped to come across something personal—a diary, perhaps, or letters—but the desk held nothing of that sort. Not even a photograph. That struck Scheherazade as a bit unnatural. Did he have no life outside of school and soccer? Or had he carefully hidden everything of a private nature, where no one would come across it?

  Still, just sitting at his desk and running her eyes over his handwriting moved Scheherazade beyond words. If she didn’t do something, she might lose control. To calm herself, she got out of the chair and sat o
n the floor. She looked up at the ceiling. The quiet around her was absolute. Not a sound anywhere. In this way, she entered the lampreys’ world.

  —

  “So all you did,” Habara asked, “was enter his room, go through his stuff, and sit on the floor?”

  “No,” Scheherazade said. “There was more. I wanted something of his to take home. Something that he handled every day or that had been close to his body. But it couldn’t be anything important that he would miss. So I stole one of his pencils.”

  “A single pencil?”

  “Yes. One that he’d been using. But stealing wasn’t enough. That would make it a straightforward case of burglary. The fact that I had done it would be lost. I was the Love Burglar, after all.”

  The Love Burglar? It sounded to Habara like the title of a silent film.

  “So I decided to leave something behind in its place, a token of some sort. As proof that I had been there. A declaration that this was an exchange, not a simple theft. But what should it be? Nothing popped into my head. I searched my knapsack and my pockets, but I couldn’t find anything appropriate. I kicked myself for not having thought to bring something suitable. Finally, I decided to leave a tampon behind. An unused one, of course, still in its plastic wrapper. My period was getting close, so I was carrying it around just to be safe. I hid it at the very back of the bottom drawer, where it would be difficult to find. That really turned me on. The fact that a tampon of mine was stashed away in his desk drawer. Maybe it was because I was so turned on that my period started almost immediately after that.”