Slow Boat Read online

  That also marked my return to education. Every morning, I made the trek to school with everyone else. To The End of the World.

  They made me.

  OK. About the other kids. What kind of “pupils” were they? What did these dropouts have in common? Not a damn thing. Each one was like a snowflake. Like, unique. Well, some were sort of typical. They got chronic headaches or stomach aches. Some simply couldn’t stomach school lunches. There were perfectionists and the opposites of perfectionists. Fat kids and skinny kids, bullies and crybabies. It was a zoo—a human zoo.

  One kid per cage.

  We were like brothers. And sisters. There were girls in the dorm, too. Our living quarters were strictly separated, but we made the walk to school and back together.

  There’s one more thing I need to mention about The End of the World.

  It wasn’t bad. When I first saw the village, I was convinced I was going to be stuck in some shabby, cobweb-infested schoolhouse. All wood, no windows—just a giant box. But that was all in my head. This place was all right, not in any way inferior to my school in Suginami.

  Really, if I had to choose, I’d say I was happier at The End of the World.

  The ruins of the stone Buddha (nothing left but his ankles) on the way to school. The thatched roofs on old farmhouses we could see from the schoolyard. The smell of dirt and grass all around us. Now and then, misguided cicadas would land on the monkey bars and cry their hearts out. Even in class, we could hear thirty different kinds of birds singing outside. Behind the school a warning sign read: BEWARE OF BEARS. This place had it all.

  But—most important of all—she was there.

  She showed up about three weeks after I did.

  The day after the last day of school, a new load of loser-track kids gets dropped off. Seven boys, four girls. Summertime at Camp Dropout. Even though I’m still pretty new to the place, I find myself playing mentor to kids even newer to this game than me.

  We line up, face-to-face, checking each other out. Nobody says a thing. Not a hello, nothing.

  And there she is. She’s in the sixth grade—a year above me—and I guess you could say she’s a looker. Except my eyes aren’t on her face. Because the magnetic thing about her is, like, her… chest. I mean, whoa. My first impression: this girl has some serious boobs.

  I’m a little young to notice things like that, but I’ve got stirrings. And something kicks in, makes me stare. This girl’s not a freak or anything, but stuffed into her tight little bra are the finest, fullest-formed sixth-grade boobs in the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan Area. Some things you just can’t hide. And some things are hard to ignore. (I guess I wasn’t ideal mentor material.)

  Aside from her boobs, nothing about this girl really stood out. At first meeting, that is. But within twenty-four hours, it’s clear to everyone that she’s nothing like the rest of us. What’s so different about her? Not what you’re thinking. It’s her mouth. It never shuts. Ever.

  This girl talks and talks and talks.

  Talk—even a lot of talk—isn’t necessarily rare or weird, either. But in my brief time on this planet, I’d never met anyone who talked the way she talked. I was amazed. To use the language I have now, I’d call it hyper-talk—not overtalk. She doesn’t blab endlessly on some boring subject, or gossip about stupid things, or ask a bunch of mind-numbing questions. Blabber like that I could handle. All the kids could. Because that’s how kids are. But she was on a different plane. If she was just darting around, hitting sixty topics in under a minute, we could’ve coped. No sweat. But what came pouring out of her mouth was more like a mash of sixty conversations happening simultaneously—jump jump jump—and she’d go on like that for an hour straight, barely stopping to breathe. What do you do with that? No way you could, like, try to have a conversation with her. What’s she saying? Total gibberish, right? Maybe. Maybe not.

  She was like an alien.

  Or maybe she was manic? No, this was something else, something—I don’t know—superhuman? I was only ten or eleven at the time, same as the others. But I felt something, like an aura. I could tell she wasn’t fake. She was kind of real. Like, her hyper-talk was about something deep. Even someone in their twenties probably wouldn’t get it—forget about a bunch of grade-school rejects. No hope. So the kids kept their distance.

  Within a couple of days, her mouth had totally devastated our peace and quiet (if we ever had such a thing). She rattled everyone’s cage.

  In class, it was even worse. We were supposed to be on summer break, but class went on at The End of the World. Like always, only different. For the summer, misfits of all grades were thrown into a single classroom. The powers that be had some plan in mind, to get us to adjust, or readjust, to being in a school environment, being around other students. It was a strange sort of rehab. They wanted us to communicate with other students and relate to kids in other grades.

  Communicate.

  Her hyper-talk ruined any chance of that happening.

  We didn’t have assigned seats. It was, like, sit anywhere, next to your friends, or some kid you don’t know, or on your own—if that’s your thing.

  The director was like a saint, kind and easy. But the kids were not.

  “Back off, weirdo.”

  “Ugh. Don’t even think about sitting here—I don’t care what grade you are.”

  “Omigod. Shutupshutupshutupshutup. Put a sock in it!”

  “Pleeeze, does anyone have a spare pair of headphones? I can’t take it any more.”

  “Yo, Grade Six,” somebody yells to her, “try speaking Japanese for once!”

  “I am speaking Japanese!” she yells back. Then—two seconds later—she’s back in orbit, rambling about some alien life form. Next thing you know, she’s going:

  “… Millions-in-Ethiopia-starved-to-death…”

  Then, without skipping a beat:

  “… You-ever-see-Eight-Samurai-with-Hiroko-Yakushimaru?”

  You who? Anybody, I guess.

  Anybody at all. But who could respond to that? By the time she says something, she’s already in the middle of the next thing.

  Our class was totally at the mercy of her careening motor-mouth.

  And where was I in all this?

  Sitting there, speechless. I didn’t talk for the longest time. The other kids left me alone, or left me out… of everything. Now, for the first time, I was watching it happen to another kid. They avoided her like the plague, rejected her, shut her out.

  I didn’t share their view of her. For me, it was the total opposite. I wanted to get closer. I mean, yeah, I wanted a closer look at her boobs, too, but that wasn’t all…

  Activities, activities. Before summer started, they had us play sports or “pitch in” with garden work. Around ten days after I got there, they had a big party for the Star Festival. One Sunday, we all went into the mountains, to pick wild plants or something.

  But summer was different. Every day was something. Going to Okutama to check out the giant trees, making charcoal, making noodles from scratch, even going to the local hot spring. A healthy body is a happy body. They kept us moving. Volunteers, counsellors and occasional social workers. This was our so-called summer break, and we were busier than ever.

  OK, flash to the main event: the big barbecue.

  We take a bus to the Akigawa River. We’re given tasks. Mine is setting up the grill, which I manage to make level, despite my serious clumsiness. When we finish our jobs, we can do anything we want until it’s time to cook and eat. Free time. Some kids hang around the director, asking barbecue-related questions or whatever. Some other kids—they called themselves “explorers”—get lessons from a local guy on making goggles from bamboo segments to check out the river bottom. Some other kids—outsiders with nowhere to go—head down to the river to skip stones.

  When it’s time to start cooking, I get closer to the girl—through a three-step process. Step one: hop. We’re skewering kebabs at the director’s instruction. Onion, corn
, eggplant, beef. Fresh fish from the river. The girl’s sitting there, gleefully piercing a marshmallow.

  “… and-the-Marshmallow-Man-bounced-through-the-city…”

  “I ain’t afraid of no ghost,” I say, almost in reflex, as I wrestle with a gnarly red bell pepper. She stops and turns and looks right at me—big smile on her face.

  “Ghostbusters, right?” I say, pleased with myself. “I saw it over New Year’s. Wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be funny or scary.” It’s been seven months, so my memory of the movie is a little sketchy. Still, I’m pretty sure she was talking about the final scene.

  She opens her mouth to respond. But what comes out doesn’t really sound like a response. It has nothing to do with ghosts or marshmallows or anything. More like she’s weighing the pros and cons of dance parties. And the words just keep coming.

  Coming at me.

  Wha—? Dance parties?

  Total gibberish, like I said.

  I just smile. Don’t know what else to do.

  She’s smiling, too—saying something about, like, a mermaid with human legs.

  Mermaid? Because this is a river? Wait, don’t mermaids live in the ocean? A mermaid could never survive in the Akigawa. The water’s way too shallow… you’d need a fresh-water imp, like a kappa… shit, now I’m jumping around. Anyway, before I know it, the mermaid’s history.

  But we had a real moment there. A close encounter of the third kind.

  Step two: skip. When we finish eating, we’re supposed to make art with stones we found in the river. We’re supposed to think about the shape of the rock or how it feels in our hands and, with that in mind, draw something on it. Presto—a rock of art.

  This was almost twenty years ago. I have no memory of what my rock looked like. But I definitely remember hers. Her mouth moving at warp speed—like always—and there was this force field all around her. So no one got close. That’s why I had no problem seeing what she was making, even though she was pretty far away. At first, I thought she was drawing a drowned body. Or maybe a dog? But the neck was too long for that. It had a dog’s face, but the body started to look like… a dragon.

  I know that dragon! I’ve seen it somewhere.

  No, I didn’t “see” it. I saw it—at the movies.

  Time out. What if everything she says comes from movies? What if everything she knows comes from movies?

  What if she’s not just making them up?

  Maybe she’s bouncing from one world to the next—World A, World B, C, D, E, F… all the way to Z, and beyond. Maybe I’m beginning to understand. Like, make Japanese out of what she’s saying. Not everything, but most of it, maybe.

  So this dragon-like creature—it’s got to be Fal-something, the Luck Dragon. From The NeverEnding Story. I saw it over spring break. On a movie screen. Which was what we did in 1985. Remember? Before VHS was the one format to rule them all. Back when Beta was still around. When, if you wanted to rent something, you had to pick which way to go. 1985. Movies hadn’t really come home yet.

  You had to go to the movies—the movie theatre.

  I didn’t really know movies—only went three or four times a year. I was more into dreams… Then it hit me, like a bolt of lightning. Her movies are just like my dreams! All I have to do is imagine that everything coming out of her mouth is a dream. Analyse. Sure, I’m only ten or eleven, but I’ve had a bit of training. Shit, I was well on my way to cracking the dream code. Before they took all my dreams away.

  But now I have a new one. Her.

  Step three: jump. Read her like a dream.

  On the bus ride home, I listen carefully to every syllable that speeds out of her mouth. I map all of her jumps, from dimension to dimension. I don’t let the sudden changes of scene throw me. I don’t worry about plots or anything. I just try to get a feel for the worlds she’s visiting. Just like when I was writing down my dreams. I concentrate on the sense of her words. This might work after all. Long live Freud!

  Movies. That was the key.

  She’s not rehashing stories. She’s reliving the scenes.

  A scene comes to life in her head. Then she moves on to another.

  It’s like she’s playing twenty to thirty heroines at once. Or maybe she casts herself in minor roles. Maybe she’s only a spectator. As I watch her leap from one world to the next, I take a step into hers.

  The problem is that she’s seen every movie ever made. I’ve never seen Splash or Poltergeist or Footloose or Dune. But it all works out. As long as I know that she’s playing the parts of all these different people—or aliens or dancers or mermaids—each with a different story. I just need to keep a couple of basic rules in mind. First: Her world is actually twenty or thirty different worlds. Like a solar system. Second: No matter how things look or sound, she’s still in there, somewhere.

  Is that a yodel?

  Sounds like a nightmare, right?

  But I can follow.

  By the time the bus pulls up to the dorm, I have a mental log of her several alien worlds.

  In class, there’s an empty seat next to her. Of course there is. Because no one’s deranged enough to sit there. Except, well, me.

  I sit down next to her (and her boobs) and say, “Hey”.

  *

  For the first couple of hours, she’s still jabbering away, but with a look of total shock on her face. Like she can’t believe she’s actually communicating. It takes some time for it to click—someone else is wading through the muck of her mixed-up movie worlds with her.

  Her words are getting through.

  This is where strangers meet.

  An alien makes contact with one of her own.

  For the first time, maybe ever, she realizes that she wants to communicate. Then, just like that, she’s talking to me, at hyper-speed.

  So I start decoding her, my dream girl, at hyper-speed.

  I spent the rest of my summer learning all sorts of things about her. Like why she knew—and how she could remember—all those movies.

  “I saw them over and over.”

  “Over and over?”

  “I was at the movies, all day.”

  “What do you mean—why?”

  “When Mommy doesn’t want me around, she gives me a movie ticket (she has an endless roll of them—I think they’re a shareholder perk or something), and orders me to stay there.”

  She tells me all about her little sister—her half-sister—who stays at home when my dream girl is sent (alone) to the movies. Kind of sounds like my dream girl is being banished. She sees the same movie over and over. She sits in the back row, by the door. That way, when Mommy calls, the staff at the movie theatre know where to find her. They relay Mommy’s orders: You can come home now.

  (Pretty sure I don’t have to remind you that nobody had cell phones in 1985. Phone cards had only been around for a couple of years.)

  On standby until Mommy calls. She has things to eat and drink, and she goes to the toilet whenever she needs to. Otherwise, she sits back and enjoys the shows. She sucks them in—or they suck her in. She remembers everything.

  She’s seen Once Upon a Time in America—a brutally long film about a brutal Jewish mobster. Too complicated for any kid to wrap her head around. Still, she’s dipped into that world.

  She’s seen Gremlins. Three rules for Mogwai owners to live by.

  She’s seen The Terminator. An unkillable assassin sent back from the future.

  She talks and talks. She shares her worlds with me. Worlds I’ve never known.

  It’s almost like communing with the spirit world.

  I read her at hyper-speed. And I fall for her at hyper-speed. She keeps me well fed with fresh dreams. And because I’m probably the first person in her life to kind of understand her, she wants to be close to me, too. This isn’t like—this is love.

  Our dates are limited to The End of the World and its remote territories. That basically means the bus stop, the local shrine, the village office, the hot springs, the mountain
trail. Our forest friends surround us: the graceful mourning cloak, the ultra-ultramarine flycatcher, the serow that the other kids see as a three-headed hellhound. Of course, all we do on our dates is talk. Just talk. Or—the way I saw it—interpret dreams.

  Our dreams go everywhere we go. We have access to twenty or thirty different worlds (how many are there, really?), far beyond the reach of—and of no interest to—the others. But we never badmouth them. We never look down on them.

  All that matters to me is that she’s happy with how we are.

  We. Me and my sixth-grade girlfriend.

  My first girlfriend.

  My most momentous moment at The End of the World happened in the schoolyard—by “the weather station”, the closest thing we had to a monument. And it was monumental. When my first girlfriend gave me my first kiss. History of mine! Let the day be marked.

  She’s two or three centimetres taller than me, so she sort of ducks down to kiss me. Her boobs hit me in the chest—with a good amount of force, too. This is all really new to me, but I’m surprised they don’t feel softer. What a letdown. I blame it on the bra.

  In the moment, I have no idea what our kiss means.

  I have no idea what it means when—for the first time ever—she stops talking.

  “Everybody get on the bus,” the director is shouting. “Find a seat, and keep both hands flat on your lap.”

  My memory gets a little fuzzy after that kiss. All data for the next twelve hours or so is irretrievable—forever lost. But the next big scene I remember, for sure. It was Lake Okutama. Maybe we were visiting Ogochi Dam? Or the Centre for Water and Nature?

  It was the last day of summer break.

  Could have been 31st August, or not. Does it really matter? All I know is that it was the day my beautiful summer came to a cold, brutal end.

  The bus was idling in the parking lot. I was following the director’s orders—lining up to get back on the bus. But, after a couple of seconds, I realized something.