Cicada Season

Summer was over, and so were we. The cicadas weren’t shy to shout about it. Their relentless rattle bored holes in the thick shutters of my room, where the sheets clung to my skin as desperately as a teenager does to the memory of their first kiss. Ours wasn’t the first, yet I hadn’t expected it to be the last, either. My bags weren’t packed, yet the ticket on my nightstand unwittingly became a ticking clock. I had told Ryan about my needing to leave Tokyo at some point, and he took the news as calmly as one would about yet another typhoon in September. Neither of us held sugarcoated, wistful notions about my extending the visa, Ryan visiting San Diego, or keeping in touch via email. I would’ve accepted any and all of the above. The solution was none of the above, echoing the ending of Before Sunrise, my all-time favorite romance movie that pulls the rug from under the audience, that is, until the dreaded sequels.

Tuesday, late June in Yokohama. I intended to swear off the touristy hotspots, but the Minatomirai was calling me. If only there were a shortcut.

Yamanote-sen, Track 2. A steady hum of chaos filled the street as commuters rushed to catch the train, the ever-punctual JR train, which graced the platform every two minutes. I brushed past the sea of scurrying suits and briefcases sported by a spectrum of faces, from the stoic to the nonchalant to the downright dejected; only their breathing tempo was the giveaway, not the gaze, which was altogether fixed diligently on the path ahead. I had learned early on that eye contact on the train was an accidental intimacy, not an invitation. Ryan had taught me that, somewhere between Shibuya and Ebisu, when I’d made the mistake of holding a salaryman’s gaze half a second too long and Ryan had leaned over, amused, to murmur: You’re going to get us both in trouble. I hadn’t known yet what kind of trouble I was already in.

We met in March, when the sakura were still a week from peak bloom and everyone in the city was in a state of suspended anticipation. I was renting a room in Shimokitazawa above a used-record shop whose owner, Akatsuka-san, played Chet Baker every morning at a volume just loud enough to reach the second floor. Ryan came in on a Saturday looking for a Mingus record and stayed to argue with Akatsuka-san about whether Kind of Blue qualified as jazz or as furniture. I was reading by the window, pretending not to listen. He included me in the argument without asking permission, simply turning and saying, in easy English: You have an opinion. I can tell.

He wasn’t wrong. I always had an opinion. That was the first thing. The second was that he never tried to manage them.

Most men I had known in a romantic context, a phrase I use loosely, generously, in the way one might describe a minor car accident as an eventful afternoon, had a subtle but persistent method of editing me. Not through argument, but through a particular quality of listening: the kind that waits for you to finish so it can redirect. Ryan listened differently. He listened the way you read a sentence you want to memorize. I noticed it the first evening, when we ended up at a standing bar near the station and I went on at length about Before Sunrise and why the ending was an act of violence disguised as romance, and he said, after a genuine pause: You’re angry at it because you believed it. Not a redirect. A door opened further.

By April the sakura had come and gone, as they always do: showy, brief, slightly manipulative in their beauty. Ryan lived in Nakameguro, ten minutes from the canal, and we had watched the petals fall into the water on a Sunday when neither of us had named what we were doing yet. He brought canned coffee from the convenience store. I had forgotten my jacket. He didn’t offer his, which I respected; he stood closer instead, which I respected more.

What we had, instead of fights, was a particular conversational territory we returned to: the shape of my leaving. One evening in June he said, unprompted, while we were cooking: I don’t think I’m built for the long-distance version of things. Not an accusation. A disclosure. I said I wasn’t sure I was either. We ate dinner. We did not return to it, and somehow that was more honest than any negotiation would have been.

—

What I did at the wrong Yokohama exit was stop.

The waterfront was visible from the walkway, somewhere beyond the construction hoardings and the interchange that split into four directions with signage that agreed on nothing.

“Minatomirai?”

Ryan was standing at a reasonable distance with the stillness of someone who had decided to speak and was waiting to see if that had been a mistake. Grey linen shirt, sleeves rolled, canvas bag over one shoulder. He looked exactly like himself, which I was not prepared for.

“You’re here,” I said.

“I work near here on Tuesdays.” He glanced at my phone, still displaying its unhelpful map. “The waterfront entrance is that way. The sign is behind the hoarding.”

We walked. He walked at my pace, adjusting without remarking on it, one of the small calibrations I had stopped noticing until right now when I was noticing everything. We reached the waterfront, the bay opening ahead with its usual indifference to whatever a person happened to be feeling.

“Did you mean it,” I said, “as a closing statement, or as an opening? In June.”

Ryan was quiet long enough that I watched a ferry complete a significant portion of its crossing. “I meant it as an accurate description of my limitations. I didn’t mean it as a verdict.”

“Those can be the same thing.”

“They can. I wasn’t sure, at the time, which it was.”

“And now?”

“Now I think accurate descriptions of limitations are most useful when they’re not also used as excuses.”

The Ferris wheel was turning. We didn’t stop.

“Nine days,” I said.

He looked at me with the full quality of his attention, and this time I didn’t look at anything else. “Nine days is not nothing.”

—

They weren’t.

We took a borrowed boat out to open water off Zushi and drifted with the engine off until the city became a suggestion. He asked me to read something from memory and I recited three paragraphs of a story I hadn’t shown anyone, about a woman in a train station who mistakes a stranger for someone she used to love and then realizes she hasn’t made a mistake. When I finished Ryan said, after a silence long enough that the boat had drifted a measurable distance: The woman in the station is braver than you.

On the fifth day it rained and we stayed in his apartment in Nakameguro, on the floor with our backs against the sofa because that was where the books were, arguing about Sebald and Yoshimoto and whether a novel could earn its ending or whether endings were always arbitrary impositions on material that would otherwise continue. On the kitchen shelf among functional objects sat a compass in a worn leather case. His German grandmother’s. Inside the lid, an inscription: a direction is not a destination.

His shoulder was against mine and at some point had been against mine for long enough that neither of us was pretending it was accidental, and he said my name once, and turned, and put his hand against my face with the quality he brought to everything, fully present, no hedging, and I understood that this was not a beginning because we had already begun, back in March in a record shop, and it was not an ending because we hadn’t arrived there yet.

On the seventh day we went to Yanaka and found a kissaten with dark wood booths and coffee without irony, and I wrote in my notebook and he read, and I wrote down: I am going to remember this with a specificity that will be, at certain moments, unbearable. He looked up and asked what I had written and I slid the notebook across. He read it, slid it back, looked out the window at a cat conducting a thorough investigation of a doorstep.

“I’m going to look up flights to San Diego,” he said. “After you leave. I’m not making a promise.”

“Looking is not nothing.”

—

On the ninth day Ryan came at seven. I had packed the night before, every option accounted for. We drank coffee at the small table by the window where the ticket had been and was no longer. He set a book on the table between the cups without comment: Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, secondhand, spine worn. Page forty-three marked in pencil. A passage about walking, about moving through a landscape and understanding that the landscape is also moving through you.

He put his hand over mine and we stayed like that while the coffee cooled and the cicadas annotated everything we were feeling and not saying.

At the station gate I thought about Celine and Jesse and the six months that flattened them, and the compass inscription, and nine days which were not nothing.

He put his hand against my face, briefly. “Look up the flights,” I said. “I will,” he said.

I looked back this time. He was still there, recording something accurately, and I held the image of him and then turned toward the platform and the train that would come in exactly two minutes, and the city moved around me with its usual indifference to individual departures, and the cicadas followed me all the way to the platform, or maybe that was just the sound the summer makes when it knows it’s ending.

—

By mid-September the novella was finding its shape. I had taken to working at a café on Kettner with a counter and eight seats and coffee that arrived without irony. The owner had stopped asking what I wanted and simply brought it. I was on page sixty-one, the woman in the train station having arrived at the moment I had been writing toward for months, when I looked up for no particular reason.

He was on the opposite sidewalk.

The height was right. The quality of movement, that particular unhurried exactness. Canvas bag over one shoulder, linen shirt, sleeves rolled. He was looking at something on his phone and then he wasn’t, and for one second, maybe two, he looked up and across the street in the directionless way of someone thinking rather than seeing, and the light caught his face at an angle that was and wasn’t familiar, and then a delivery truck moved between us and when it had passed the sidewalk had rearranged itself the way sidewalks do, indifferent to what any individual person needs them to hold still for.

It was possible. The arrival he had confirmed was next week. Today was not next week.

It was also possible that the city had simply offered up a resemblance, the way the mind finds patterns in things that are only asking to be left alone.

My phone was on the table.

I did not pick it up.

I turned back to the manuscript and wrote the next sentence, and then the one after that, and outside the light began its slow negotiation with the evening, and the street went on doing what streets do, which is continue, with or without anyone in them you recognize.