Hanging On

         August Waters, of Stand Up English School in Hiroshima, a man almost never ill in his fifty years, took to his bed with a very bad cold. With Remembrance of the Dead (“Obon”) holidays going on, it was a very busy time for his school. As he lay in bed, August regretted having fired his two assistant teachers, Noriko and Mariko, the month before.
         In the past, although several years older, August had been an English teacher along with them. The previous owner, taken with his accent and ability to put customers at ease, had retired shortly after, handing the school over to him.
         Noriko, who had secretly desired the school, and who’d worked there longer, quit immediately. But the good-natured Mariko, studying linguistics at Shudo University, worked hard and well as before. The old owner died about six month’s later, followed by his wife in another six months or so. And then the economy had collapsed.
         In anything to do with keeping English consumers satisfied, August truly was a master. A man with a firm manner, moreover: if a customer failed to produce a sentence accurately, he was not satisfied until picking out the errors one by one he’d made the grammar and intonation absolutely smooth. In doing this he never rubbed the customers wrong. His smile was beautiful. Customers claimed that when they’d been taught by August Waters, their lives seemed so much better. He was proud of the fact that in ten years he had never so much as inadvertently upset a customer.
         About two years after she’d left, Noriko straggled back, asking for her old job. August, out of friendship for a former workmate, had rehired the apologetic Noriko. But during those two years, Noriko had fallen in with bad company. She was prone to neglect her work. Inveigling Mariko to go with her, she messed around with a dubious man who seemed to know a whole slew of pachinko addicts. In the end, egging on foolish Mariko, she even got her to pilfer money from the school. Feeling sorry for Mariko, August had often advised her. But when it came to theft, there was nothing more he could do. About a month ago he had fired both of them.
         Now, there was an extremely pale, lethargic boy of twenty-two called Michael, and Kinko, a girl of about twenty-five, whose head was abnormally long from front to back. At busy times on holidays, these two were good for nothing at all. Lying fever-racked in bed, August felt a solitary annoyance.
         As it neared six, the first customers came in. The squeak of the automatic glass door as it slid open and shut downstairs, and the dry sound of Kinko’s high, broken English grated on August’s irritated nerves.
         A customer’s voice rose to where he lay.
         “My name’s Yamada. I have a presentation tomorrow night, so please correct my English report.” It was a man’s voice.
         “We’re sort of busy right now. Would seven be all right?” Michael’s voice asked.
         The man seemed to hesitate a minute.
         “Well, please do a good job, then.” Saying this, he left, only to duck back and add:
         “Sorry to trouble you, but could you ask your boss to do it?”
         “I don’t know. The boss…” Michael began. Interrupting him, August shouted:
         “Mike! I’ll do it.” His voice was sharp but husky. Not answering him, Michael replied to the customer: “Very well.” The glass door squeaked open and shut. August could feel the air conditioning being sucked from the building each time it did.
         “Damn.” Muttering to himself, August took out his arm, pallid and faintly stained from the blue-dyed pajamas he wore during summer, and stared at it. But his body, weary from the fever, was as heavy as a firmly planted object. With drowsy eyes, he gazed at the dusty lamp hanging from the ceiling. Dead flies and mosquitoes clustered at the bottom of the bowl-shaped shade.
         Without listening, he overheard told in the school. Two or three business men, talking about such things as the quality of the small neighborhood restaurants and the bad manners of young people today, agreed that cool rooms like this made even these annoyances not so bad. As he heard such talk, August started to feel a little better. After a while, he languidly turned over on his side.
         In the whitish, cloudy light that came in at the kitchen door, his wife O-Ume, the baby on her back, was getting supper ready. Savoring his lightening mood, he watched her.
         “I’ll check the report now.” Thinking this, he raised his heavy body on the bedding. But a dizzy spell forced him face down on his pillow for a while.
         “Do you have to get up?” Gently asking this, O-Ume, her wet hands dangling in front of her, came into the room.
         August meant to say no, but his voice didn’t carry at all.
         She put the baby at the bottom of his bedding. The two-year-old barely moved. When it turned to look up at him, August saw only the emptiness of its stare and its obscenely round face. His stomach turned to ice and he shifted to avoid the sight.
         Pulling back the covers, O-Ume put the medicine bottles and ashtray to one side. August tried again to sit up.
         “It’s not that,” he managed to say. But his voice was so hoarse that O-Ume did not hear the words. His mood soured again.
         “Shall I help you up?” As if pitying him, O-Ume went around behind her husband.
         “Bring me the computer and send me Yamada’s file.” Perry flung the words at her. O-Ume was silent a moment.
         “Can you do it?”
         “It’s all right. Bring them.”
         “…If you get up, you’ll have to put on a jumper.”
         “I told you it’s all right and to bring them. Are you going to do it or not?” His voice was fairly low, but loaded with ill-humor. Pretending not to hear him, O-Ume got out the jumper and put it on him from behind as he sat up. With a sudden show of energy, August tore the jumper off himself.
         Muttering to herself, O-Ume slid open the door to the half-room and, walking downstairs, brought back August’s laptop. There being no other place to put it, she arranged a pillow.
         Even at ordinary times, when he was in a bad mood, August was unable to proofread well. Now that he was sweating and shaking with fever, he could not at all think as clear as he wished. O-Ume, who could not beat to watch him work himself into a rage, repeatedly said, “Why don’t you let Mike do it?” But there was no answer. At last, though, August’s endurance gave out. After about fifteen minutes, as if both his will and strength were spent, he sank down on the bed again. Immediately sleepy, he dozed off.
         At seven, Yamada came back and took the corrected presentation with him.
         O-Ume made up some rice porridge. She wanted to give it to August before it got cold, but afraid that if she roused him from his exhausted sleep would put him in a bad mood again, she held back. It got on towards seven-thirty. If she delayed too long, it would be past the time for his medicine. She shook him awake. August, not all that displeased, sat up and took some nourishment. Then, lying down, he fell asleep again at once.
         A little before seven-forty-five, August was roused again for his medicine. This time, he lay drowsily awake, thinking of nothing in particular. His fever-hot breath, trapped by the edge of the quilt which he’d drawn up to his eyes, unpleasantly mantled his face. In the school below, too, it was dead quiet. Listlessly he looked around him. On a pillow by the bedding, the computer waited peacefully. The orange glow of the dimmed fluorescent bulb cast the room in shadows. In a corner, O-Ume, suckling the baby in bed, lay with her back bathed in the corpulent glow. He felt as if the room itself were pulsating with fever.
         “Boss…boss…” It was Kinko’s timid voice, just at the top of the stairs.
         “Yes?” August answered with his mouth muffled by the edge of the quilt. Whether his husky, suffocated-sounding voice was inaudible or not, Kinko again called: “Boss…”
         “What is it?” This time his voice was sharp and clear.
         “Yamada-san has complained.”
         “Complained?”
         “He said there are mistakes.”
         “How can he tell that?”
         “I don’t know. He says it’s all right if you check it again, but he wants you to be more careful.”
         “Is he here?”
         “No.”
         “Send me the file.”
         “You’re sick. Wouldn’t it be better to send him to another school?”
         Saying this, O-Ume drew her bathrobe together over her naked breasts and got up. The infant didn’t even cry out as others would, but lay there playing with its lips.
         August, silently reaching out his hand, taped the laptop into life and scrolled through the report over and over. Sitting by his pillow, O-Ume softly put her hand to his brow. With his free hand, August brushed her away as if it were a fly.
         “Kinko!”
         “Yes?” Right at the top of the stairs, Kinko answered.
         “Call Yamada-san and tell him I’ll have it back to him in twenty minutes.”
         “Yes.”
         Computer on his lap, August sat up and began to proofread.
         O-Ume, thinking it would do no good to say anything, sat by quietly.
         After a while, the letters began to swim across the screen and he felt as if the stagnant atmosphere of the room had begun to stir a little. Controlling his trembling hands, August tapped at the keyboard, but do what he might it did not go well. Before long, O-Ume looked over her husband’s shoulder.
         “Ah! Dangerous!” Crying out, O-Ume painted at a misspelled word still underlined in red which August seemed to have missed. She looked angrily at her husband’s face as he slowly turned to look at her. His eyebrows were quivering.
         “It’s British, not American, English. That’s why.”
         He tossed the laptop onto the quilt and got to his feet and started for the stairway.
         “You shouldn’t go down there…”
         Lifting an angry voice, O-Ume held him back. But he did not listen. Without a word, he went down the stairs. O-Ume followed after him.
         There were no customers in the school. Kinko was sitting vacantly in the chair behind the front counter.
         “Where’s Michael?” O-Ume asked.
         “He’s out chasing after Tokiko,” Kinko answered with a serious face.
         “What? He went out saying that’s what he was after?” O-Ume burst into laughter. But August had the same grim, set face as before.
         Tokiko was a strange young woman whose family, five or six doors down, had a sign in front that said Cosplay Supplies and Comics. She was said to be a graduate of one of the girls’ universities. At that shop, there were always one or two tourists, some students, and some otaku lounging around.
         “We’re closing, so you can go,” O-Ume told Kinko.
         “It’s still early.” Without reason, August opposed her. O-Ume said nothing. August took off the pajama top and then put a work jacket over his black undershirt. Once he was properly seated, it looked like he’d always been dressed for the part. O-Ume collected the discarded top and asked him if he was alright. Then, as if at last feeling easy, she sat at the reception counter and watched August’s face as he composed himself. Kinko, in the second cubicle, was flipping through a fashion magazine.
         At this juncture, the glass doors slid open, and a short young man of twenty-two or –three entered. He was wearing a new suit with an emerald green neck tie and black shoes as shiny as they could be.
         “I just need a free conversation. I’m in a big hurry. Can you do me?” Saying this, he stopped abruptly in front of August’s cubicle. Clearing his throat, he thrust out his jaw and said, “Hi! How are you? I’m fine.” He carried himself like a gangster, but his accent was that of a youth from the country. From his knobbly fingers and his rugged, swarthy face, it was clear that during the day he worked at hard labor.
         “Go get Michael. Quick.” Motioning with her eyes, O-Ume order Kinko.
         “Okay.”
         “Please come in.” August’s cheerful voice filled the school.
         “You’re not well.” O-Ume spoke in a low voice.
         “How are you?” August motioned from the young man to sit down.
         “It’s just a quick lesson, that’s all. I don’t want to be a trouble.” Looking from the one to the other with a puzzled grin, the young man said, “Are you sick?” As if flirting, he blinked his small, caved-in eyes.
         “Yes, he has a slight cold…”
         “They say there’re some bad colds going around. You have to watch out.”
         “Thank you!” August spoke with forced courtesy.
         When he had settled into his seat, the young man said again, “I just want to talk.” Then, adding: “I’m in a hurry, you know?” He gave a little smirk. Silently, August adjusted his jacket.
         “I’d like to be there by nine or nine-thirty,” the youth went on. He wanted August to ask him where.
         Immediately there floated up to August’s eye a heavily painted girl in some gaudy karaoke box, with a voice that pierced the brain like shards of glass. When he thought that this vulgar little gangster wannabe would be spouting a few English phrases to seem more impressive, scenes that made him want to vomit passed one after another through his weakened mind.
         “What are your hobbies?” Even before hearing the answer, August felt like pouring a stream of abuse over him.
         “I like sleeping and watching TV.”
         “Oh, really? And what do you do?”
         “Sorry?”
         “What do you do?”
         “What?”
         “What is your job?” The smile hung on August’s face like a dirty sock. His hand was trembling under the table. What’s more, when he’d been lying down it hadn’t been that bad, but now that he was sitting, water mucus began to drip from his nose. From time to time he snorted it back in, but soon afterward the tip of his nose again began to itch and the mucus gathered in a drop all ready to fall.
         From upstairs, there was the sound of the baby’s pathetic mewling. O-Ume went back up to it.
         Even as it went on about the young man’s life, friends and likes, the young man’s face had a placid look. It didn’t seem to move in time with his words, and he had no intonation what-so-ever. Such a stolid lack of concern got on August’s nerves until he was in a fury. Although he knew his tone was becoming more impatient, he did not change it. His feeling was that nothing mattered anymore. Even so, at some point he’d turned gracious again. If a sentence was the least bit rough, he had to go over it. The more he went over the mistakes, though, the angrier he became. The young man seemed to forget the correction from one moment to the next. August’s body slowly grew weary. His mind, too, was weary. The fever seemed to have grown worse.
         The young man, afraid now of August’s bad mood, became nervous. Fifteen minutes in, having exhausted the topics of his own life, he’d begun to fidget. Long stretches of silence followed each question. In the next cubicle, Kinko had fallen asleep, head resting on the magazine she’d been reading. Even the voice of O-Ume, cooing to the baby, had stopped. It was dead quiet. The night inside and outside the school was as still as the grave. There was only the sound of August’s voice.
         His fretful, angry mood turned into a feeling of wanting to cry. His body and mind were utterly exhausted. He felt as if his eyes were melting from inside with fever.
         As seconds stretched into minutes, August realized the customer had nothing at all left to speak of and no interest in asking questions. His mouth gaped open as he searched the ceiling, avoiding August’s eyes. His irregular, white teeth were revealed.
         The exhausted August could not sit still. He felt as if poison had been poured into each and every one of his joints. He wanted to throw it all away, to drop down on the floor and roll around.
         He reached over with both hands and did something he’d never done before: he pushed the customer by the shoulders. The young man’s eyes bulged with affronted anger. From the top of his head to the tip of his toes, something passed swiftly through August. It took with it all his weariness and disgust.
         His once-feeble fingers tightened round the customer’s throat. At first, between his fingers, the skin shone a golden brown; then a pale white as the blood was squeezed from the area. He stared at it. The skin seemed to pulse with a pallid hue. His fingers tightened further, reaching their maximum grip. The customer began to flail at him, but panicky, uncertain that this was really happening. A sort of rough, raging emotion surged up in August. He gritted his teeth as he fell across the table, pulled by the young man’s attempt to escape. Still he hung on.
         No sound escaped the young man’s lips. He could not break August’s grip. He fell back into his seat, August’s fingers clenched tight around his throat. The emotion of relief came upon August with extraordinary force. His breath grew shallow and fast. It was as if he were being pulled body and soul into the customer’s gaping mouth. There was nothing he could now to resist that feeling. The young man stopped moving.
         As August released his grip, a rasping sound escaped the young man’s lips. Slowly, the young man’s face turned the color of clay.
         Almost in a faint, August, as if falling, sat down in his chair. His tension immediately went out of him, and his extreme fatigue came back. Dead tired, closing his eyes, he looked like a corpse. The night, too, was as still as a corpse. All movement was in abeyance. Everything was sunk in a deep sleep. Only the windows, like mirrors with the darkness beyond, coldly regarded the brightly lit scene.