Yes to the entire universe.

            Yes to headphones and a blanket. Yes to the konbini on the corner: it has high glass walls and metal shelves arranged like the tumblers for a lock. Yes to the room, my room, with its walls that hug the ends of the universe like my headphones. The konbini, the little store, is outside of the known universe and if I step out of my room then the whistle of the vacuum of space being pulled through its narrow aisles is like the sound of ghosts.

Shhhhhhhhh.

SurferGuy holds a long finger up to my lips. I am surprised at how close he is. We are in the hospital. SurferGuy knows everything! He should: he is a ghost, a spirit. He can move so fast. There is no excuse for him not knowing everything. I want to ask him something but it only comes out as, Shhhhh, not a command but a sound like moving quickly through leaves or papers, hush. Deep in the jungle, the sound: Shhhhhh. Neither an answer to the question I had asked nor an invitation to keep speaking. This is a memory of something that has not happened yet.

 
            Here is a brief history: before I got tired of things and stopped leaving the bedroom of my family's apartment the solar system locked into orbit and our ancestors came to the island and found a jungle filled it, fading like photographs to fill the spaces between the trees, and even when the rest of the country grew industrialized and built me a house and phone lines and all that, the ghosts not only didn't leave, they didn't know anything had changed. They're all confused!

Now the mischievous sentience of the wind carves up the streets, not knowing the difference. Trees like buildings with neon signs and vines and glass elevators running veins to the top branches/floors, and Tokyo is built vertically, vertically, up and up and up, but built also, see, in compartments. "Everything is built into the sides of the trees, all up and down," my friend is telling me, wistfully; he is talking about his home and his home is the jungle. I tell him, "I know what the buildings look like," and he says, "how would you know, you never leave your room." And its true—I don't.

The spirits get confused, but I don't tell him; he'd laugh it off. They don't know buildings from trees. And anyway, who would? And anyway, what's the difference?

 
                Once every two weeks a girl who says her name is Suki comes to the door of my room and talks to me through it. Her voice is: medium pitched, relatively feminine, authoritative, like she knows or understands, & maybe she does, "maybe you do" is all I've ever told her when she says she knows what it's like to feel: "rejected, alone, bored of or unwanted by culture, & like nobody understands [me]"; sometimes I think she means it sometimes not at all, and I tell SurferGuy this and he says, "you should totally do her she wants you man." I say she says she is my sister, "Big Sister" you know, and that's why she is worried about me. "You're worried about me?" I ask her. I don't actually ask her, I don't say anything, I just keep my mouth pressed against my door and the light in the universe is green from the paper covering the lamp and my lips taste wood. She gets the idea. "Your whole family is worried, you know. They are concerned about you. That's why they called the agency."

"Did you ask to come see me?" I say through the door.

There's a slight pause. "I volunteered to work there but I was assigned to you." Another pause. "So in that way, if you think about it, I am like your sister, because we don't get to choose the people we are related to."

She says this but I am not so sure. I mean at first, sure, but what about later on?

 

I have asked SurferGuy if he is homesick; "don't you miss the trees?" and he always will laugh and say, "it's different when you're surrounded by something: you don't miss it then, you just forget it is there." I tell him that I read once in an e-mail that you don't ever really know a place until you've left it and then come back to it. "But that is a profane knowledge," SurferGuy tells me. At times when he is very serious about something, which does not happen often, he will switch to a dialect that is much more respectful and deliberate, not the free-form slang he usually uses, and he's using that more respectful dialect now: "to know a place as sacred you can never ever leave it. The moment you do, that knowledge is forfeit. You come back to it and see it for what it is, dirty and naked." "Then you've never seen the forest?" I ask him. No response; the screen stares at me blankly, his name blinks on it. A lot of times he talks to me on the computer, sometimes he sits nearby, and then, I am so used to talking on the computer, I don't really notice the difference. I switch between applications, play some of my game, check messages, swivel around in my chair and shuffle a pile of refuse out of the way—pointlessly—and then swivel back. I knew better than to expect an actual answer, and now SurferGuy has asked, "Did you ever leave your room? Is your room sacred?" I know the answer and immediately I type: "I left it once, a long time ago."

 
                By once I mean once for 13 years or so from when I was born until when I stopped going outside and then gradually became hikkomori and discovered the ends of the universe and the pulse of ghosts that beats against its borders, and SurferGuy tells me there are thousands and thousands of spirits just like him roaming the branches (mistaking one thing for another).

 
                After several months of ignoring Suki, I have gradually begun to talk to her, the way I talk to someone through the computer; through the barrier of my door. She wants to take me to what she keeps calling the Center; "center of what?" I ask her when she finally does convince me to come somewhere for tea. The pun is lost though, and I want to tell her anyway that I know where the Center is, its about four feet off of where my hard drive is, underneath a ceramic lamp shaped like the comic-book character called Spawn, who's body is made of flowing magma, and he broods over the center of the universe, my universe, the only universe, and all of this out here is vacuum and hardly relevant, but out here in the big sucking irrelevance of it all, it's hard to think much of the joke I am trying to make about my own little universe, the only little universe really, and out here my joke is lost to the screeching void, whoooooooosh it goes, past the cup of tea we are sharing out in the real world at a real coffee shop—look at me! I am having a cup of tea with a beautiful girl! We are talking! I have circles under my eyes but I am not contagious! None of you know, or do you!

Yes—yes, well, she did convince me to leave, other than trips to the konbini this was the first time I've been out in years, and I'd shuffled out of my universe and down the short hallway of our apartment with my family huddled together looking at me like they were scared or happy, I couldn't tell.

                Suki had asked if there was anything I'd wanted to do and I said I would have coffee or tea and she said she could drive me right now and so that was that, I went, and here we are.

The Center, Suki, explains, is where lots of other people "like you" come to meet and talk about themselves and play board games and have meals. Suki is good at what she does, she doesn't even flinch at the dirty look I give her when she says people like you and she even backs it up: "I mean people who are withdrawn, who don't leave their rooms." She is being brutally honest as a way of earning my trust. I keep listening: "There is a lot of shame attached to this idea but we don't want for you to feel ashamed. We want for you to feel okay with the other young people who have also become withdrawn. If you are ashamed you can never get better."

                She's good—she's maybe even smarter than she's letting on, hiding some of her intelligence so I will feel at ease—but she still has to feed me the party line, right down to the moments where she is honest and candid and says "just between you and me" and touches my hand with hers and it is painfully evident who goes out in the sun and who doesn't. As soon as she says get better I can hear SurferGuy laughing at me because he likes to joke about what is wrong with me; in this way he is very honest, also: it is not even a derisive kind of mocking, SurferGuy just sees something which to his eye looks like a knot, and he laughs, which is how the spirits interact with the forest, pulling their fingers through its hair, laughing at what tangles.

But the whole reason Suki is talking to me is because she wants me to get better. "Really?" I ask her. She sees this as a hopeful sign and becomes candid with me; I can envision the manual that all the Big Sisters are given that says "don't be afraid to be candid at the right moment, it will help the Hikkomori to trust you." But she is genuinely candid when she says, "I can be candid in saying that although it is my job to be nice to each and every Brother who I speak with, I cannot do much to help them unless they want to open up a little bit to me, and that if they open up a little bit then I feel like I get to know them. To be honest you do have to fake being nice a little bit, to get to know someone, sometimes. I don't like that anymore than you do, to tell the truth. No one likes being fake but sometimes we have to be fake, a little bit. Don't we?"

 
                Before we leave the café, which is crowded but which does not make me nervous, Suki asks me if maybe next time I would want to come to the Center. There is a hint of calculation in her voice, like she knows she is reaching here—"reaching out," I'm sure it is called in the Big Sister manual, or something like that—by asking me point blank to come to the Center "next time" without even asking yet if there will be a "next time". Presumptuous! Like telling someone you are on a first date with that for the next date, we should go rock climbing. So, I don't answer her; instead I ask, "do your little brothers ever get crushes on you?"

"Excuse me?"

My hands get going kind of excitedly as I talk; I've been curious about this. "I mean the hikkomori you talk with, do they ever make romantic advances on you? Do they ever try to kiss you or anything? Or hold your hand? How many other brothers have you had?"

She seems genuinely nervous for a moment but recovers quickly enough: "Usually when that happens," she says, "it is a delicate matter, but it is always a delicate matter, in real life too." She ignores the last part of my question.

"But what do you do." I am sizing up Suki's body, I don't feel ashamed for it, I don't notice if she notices or if she cares. She is probably used to it. She is dressed fashionably but I can tell she is dressed for work—a collared shirt! She would never wear that in real life, I have a feeling—and this is not real life! There is a dirty pleasure in thinking that she is acting like my sister. When I tell SurferGuy about it later I tell him it is like playing doctor with a neighbor when you are little; "I haven't been with a girl for years; I haven't ever been with a girl actually so really Suki is like my sister or the neighbor girl. She thinks I am smart and mature, just withdrawn, but really I am getting over those first sexual ideas that you have when you are six or seven." We have a good laugh about this.

Suki makes sure we have eye contact before she says, "to be honest, it happens sometimes where the—the brothers we see have romantic ideas about us. Usually we have to stop seeing them and assign them to someone else, because it would be detrimental to their development. They get ideas about us, dramatic notions, like we're going to move away to the mountains and live there forever with them—you know, solve all their problems." I nod. "So, it is painful for that to happen, but it is usually in the best interest of everyone."

            Real life! "It is always a delicate matter, in real life too." She said this: I don't think she realizes she said this. I am secretly delighted that she has consecrated this as something outside of real life. I can feel SurferGuy watching, his gaze burning into the back of my neck; outside the wind blows through the Tokyo streets: wind in a city this size never really leaves, it is always trapped at street level and is just squished around like under a blanket, where it rattles the same discarded cigarette packages around for weeks on end—and when a favored piece of litter is finally removed, the wind grows lonely, "even angry." SurferGuy has told me all of this. "Even violent."

             I skip my next two meetings with Suki, but she is diligent. I spend the time doing the things I do in my room; music and old Italian western movies and animated internet porn. When Suki returns as scheduled six weeks later I am secretly delighted but also worried, by all this attention. I tell SurferGuy that I am playing hard to get; when she comes to my door and I can hear the slight sound of her placing her face up against the doorframe so I will hear her voice, she asks me if there was anything from our last encounter that I would like to talk about. She asks, Is there anything bothering me? I tell her nothing and then nothing and then I think she has gone away, but she must have just gone out to have tea with my father, who is the only one home right now, and while my staying in here makes both my parents sad I think it is most difficult for my father, a frail man, an old man; he used to be a drunk but he cleaned all that up and now there is nothing left. I have only physically seen him once or twice a year for the past five years.

            Through the building, I can hear the sound of them having tea. I find myself painfully and almost intensely jealous of my father for talking with Suki right now and although I don't think about running out and slamming my fist down on the table, wrecking his tea set, I do think about the wind from outside, lost and angry, coming through the window like a stuntman, in a burst, showering Suki and my father in spinning shards of broken glass and I think,

            "even if your faces were scared and wrapped up to look like mummies, that wouldn't stop you, o father; you would run away with Suki my one true love Suki my forbidden big sister and with your faces like mummies you would run away and live in the pyramids for ever and ever."

            "But I have a plan!"

            "Oh?"

            "My dad used to be one of those Japanese businessmen you always saw or thought about when you thought about Japanese businessmen in the late 80s or early 90s, the kind where they intimidated Americans with their productivity and efficiency and the exercises they performed in unison like soldiers or butterflies out in front of the corporate yards surrounded by lotus blossoms, their ties canting to and fro with their dedicated movements, achieving perfect harmony of profit margins; fearless and sleeping maybe 3 hours a day, while gluttonous and slow-witted Americans snorted cocaine off credit cards and floundered their business plans overseas, and shit themselves in terror as people like my father bought up one U.S. landmark after another."

            "Even Disneyland?" asks SurferGuy.

            "Even Disneyland. Especially Disneyland." I am sitting alone in my room wrapping my face with a roll of gauze bandage that I have in here; something I stole when friends and I snuck into an old abandoned hospital and found all these boxes of supplies, I was maybe 9 at the time and this was what I took. "Especially Disneyland." I start by holding my thumb against one end of the bandage and then pulling it around the orb which is my head.

            "My dad, he got too stressed out, you know, I think that's why he drank all the time. Maybe he did coke too! Everyone did I think. Wow, I don't know. Anyway he stopped drinking by the time I was ten. Ten or eleven. He was never particularly violent or anything, I remember lying on my floor and listening to the sound of them arguing, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. But I think he tried to kill himself or maybe took a mistress, I don't know, anyway he quit drinking. Do you know he lost 30 pounds after that?"

            "It's hard to imagine your dad being fat."

            "He had a paunch. He was never really fat. But he took a less-stressful job. I think when he was still drinking he expected me to, you know, follow in his footsteps and be a successful businessman. He always wanted me to study hard, anyway. I imagine that's why." I continue wrapping my head up in the bandage so I will look like a mummy. I pull it around and around, being careful to criss-cross the layers and keep them flat.

            "You could work from home. You know. Telecommute."

            I ignore SurferGuy and say: "But he gave that up! I don't think he expected anything once he stopped drinking, and he lost weight and became so frail. The first time I spoke with Suki and she told me about 'people like me' and I got offended she told me that a lot of people feel the pressure of needing to be successful in Japan today, and that makes them want to become, you know, hikkomori."

            "It's a jungle out there," says SurferGuy.

            "I told her that my dad wasn't putting any pressure on me to do anything, and if anything, he wanted for me to not be a businessman, because of what happened with him. But I don't know." My head is mostly covered now, gauze holding my nose tightly to my face. I used to get nosebleeds all the time, for no reason at all; this is one of the reasons kids picked on me and I don't blame them—some little kid who bleeds for no good reason, shit! I'd have bullied me too. But that stopped once I went into my room and I haven't had one nosebleed since being in here and in fact I don't think I can get them; I think I might be immune.

Covering my head up with gauze I can't decide if I want to be able to breathe through my nose or my mouth and I just end up covering all of my nose and about half of my mouth, and I can still kind of breath out halfway through both.

            "You should go out there," says SurferGuy. "You should go out there right now and tell your dad what you think about all that. You should tell Suki too. She would be impressed with you. You could take her away. You could do it right now. Do you know how to drive?"

            "Shut up," I tell SurferGuy. My eyes are covered and I have to dig out little triangles between the bandages so that I can see. The world comes in through those little slits. SurferGuy is there on my computer screen, blinking with nocturnal intensity, crouched just behind the monitor, in the dense bushes of fiberoptics that lead like a long string of neurons from my computer down through the floor, humming into the building and out into the city. When he is uncoiled SurferGuy has a kind of tail that stretches for miles around and he can fold it up and carry it with him and when he is angry the tail comes back around to his shoulder and twitches there, like a disapproving parent. The tail is twitching now but I don't know what's making him angry. I don't think it’s because I told him to shut up: I do that all the time. Sometimes his emotions are inscrutable. He is not like me or you. I pull another layer of gauze around my head so that now just little tufts of hair are poking out the top.

 

*          *          *

            Eventually (maybe inevitably) this will happen:

            I crawl out of the restaurant, repeatedly refusing help even though there seems to be a tiny pool of blood following underneath me, and the only reason people don't help me anyway is because I tell them, "no, I have to do this for myself," and that makes them back off, once they believe that it is more damaging to my dignity to be helped than to writhe across the floor. Suki, trailing me by a few feet, is beside herself, and maybe a little bit annoyed at me. I can barely move because of the pain in my back but by twisting like a bent 'S' I can crab-crawl, down the sidewalk and all the way back into my universe. I'm telling you this story of crawling back home as if I were lucid but the only thing I'm really aware of is the sensation of my hands on the sidewalk, plodding along, getting those little rocks stuck in my palms. I crawl past the Konbini, wishing I could stop to get an energy drink for later, trying to remember how many are in my minifridge—and people stop to look or say something, but not so many as you'd think, and I'm not sure what happened to Suki except she must have thought I was faking this—and it must not be such an abnormal thing for a teenager in Tokyo to crawl down the street, people must do this all the time, and I laugh out loud which seems for a moment to punch my back into place again; I laugh because I wouldn't know if this kind of thing happened all the time because how would I ever see it?—but I do know, I correct myself, even as my spine twists and the musculature underneath spasms and burns all the way down into my thigh and crotch; I do know everything about the world, I feel like, there is nothing I couldn't tell you, and nothing I saw on a given street corner would surprise me much, not any more.

            Behind me I hear SurferGuy laugh too as he carries himself off down Tokyo's narrow glowing electric streets, moving the opposite direction of me for now, laughing like a fool, I think, because he mistakes the constant buzzing of electricity and neon and telephone radiation for some sort of river running through the middle of the jungle. His laughter joins the laughter of a thousand other equally confused jungle spirits, left over from Feudal Japan, I suppose, when spirits like that mattered, well, they still do, and just as they have mistaken dense video arcades for bamboo forests and tall office complexes for mighty oaks crawling with us monkeys—well also, all of these electronic edifices, the signs and advertisements that sprawl vertically from street-level into the sky so that you can see us from space; these he calls "alters". He speaks to me fondly of his brothers and sisters, how they curl up in nests around these alters deep in the jungle, and I suppose he's right because if you are inside the jungle then you are inside the jungle and there is no getting out even when I lean on the handle of my door gently enough to keep from making a noise while Suki has her face pushed against the other side and the closeness just kills you and the stress on this border makes the whole universe shake like the leaves in the trees.

 
*          *          *

 
            When she opens the door, there is no question that the bandages covering my face make Suki uncomfortable. It is amusing because she is adept at dealing with uncomfortable people who are socially awkward and never leave their rooms and talk very quietly about depression and despair and never leaving their rooms as if those things were small pets they nourished. But if someone throws open the door for her for the first time in a month, and that person has their face covered up like a mummy or a car crash victim, then she is thrown off. She will ask initially, "what is wrong," and I can hear the noise of SurferGuy laughing at this, and I will play dumb and she instinctually will drop it. "Are you sure you want to go out like that?" she asks and all I have to do is nod and she doesn't say anything else. She is like my older sister and I am like a younger brother who insists on wearing a superhero mask out into public with her and she will tolerate me because other people will know, he is too young to know, you don't go around wearing masks like that in public.

            Later at a small restaurant she likes, when I excuse myself to go into the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror SurferGuy is crouched there above the machine that dispenses packages of tissues. "You must have the upper hand," he says. "With a mask like that." His tail is coiled around and around the room like wallpaper and still comes up and twitches near his shoulder, like he is angry. "A mummy always has the upper hand!" He rubs his hands together. I can't tell what's wrong but he is making me nervous. "If she looks awkward or unhappy to be with you, everyone will think she is embarrassed to be out with a horribly disfigured car crash victim. They will see her embarrassment, and that you are brave—a real trooper." SurferGuy laughs and the whole bathroom shakes a little. "Hey Yoshi! You are a real trooper!" When SurferGuy opens his mouth to smile I can see six rows of teeth gleaming in there. He seems both happy and angry.

            "What are you going to do?" he asks me. SurferGuy is usually 100% whimsical in what he does from one moment to the next and one feeling or mood rarely seems to give way to another in the traditional fashion, although he is somewhat conscious of this and I think this leads to some of his wild mood swings being slightly forced.

            "I'm going to do it," I tell him. "I'm going to walk out there and break up with Suki."

 

*          *          *

 
            Walking out of the bathroom and back into the restaurant there is a wet sound, a burst of light and a pain that seems to come from almost two feet outside my body; it gathers itself on frog legs and jumps in, I can feel it bite the base of my tailbone and settle into a lower vertebrae. There is something spongy and something liquid but the pain is too overwhelming so down I go. I want to cry out but all my breath has been sucked inside me; I am vaguely aware of Suki standing over me along with possibly half the people in the restaurant. Everyone seems genuinely concerned. SurferGuy, his teeth still in me, grabs hold of my spine and twists like it was a pipe cleaner, he has it in his teeth; his claws are long wolverine talons used for moving between the trees and his snout hangs off of his human-like face and he reaches it in, and he wraps that hang-dog look of his around and around my spine and twists and pulls.

            "Why do you bite me why do you bite me?" I yell this but I don't think it comes out that way, and this is the only thing that is really embarrassing, because I have always been fairly articulate, even if I do speak somewhat quietly.

In pain, a struck animal now, prey amidst the crowded jungle of legs, chair legs, and table legs. Up above at the tops of these trees there may be surprised faces and dishes of dumplings but it's amazing how the roots stay planted, or else just shiver in the winds trapped down here against the restaurant floor. Some of the trees uproot and blunder into each other around me as they make way, moving to surround me, I think, a whole jungle interested in why I have fallen down in a restaurant.

            I think that everyone assumes that I am thrashing around on the ground now because of something to do with my face being covered in bandages. A seizure as the result of brain injuries from my car crash, maybe? Suki was my lover before the car crash and now we both know that my good looks are gone, even if the surgery is completely successful everything will still look not quite right, a jigsaw puzzle, all the different planes of my face shifting tectonics that make going out awkward. Its interesting, everyone thinks how horrible it is to dismiss someone because their face is suddenly scarred, to judge by looks—but how hard a thing! I think it’s horrible to judge someone for doing that, and I think that staying with someone just because their face is hideous now, staying with them because you’re scared of looking shallow for leaving them, I think that’s just as bad, or worse..

            Men put their hands on me, it feels like they are trying to straighten me out and I yell for them to stop because it feels like I am going to break in two. Where was that calm from two seconds ago? What had happened was, leaving the restroom I had walked directly across the little aisle that runs around the sushi bar and made a very deliberate—very confident, for a man with his face bandaged up like this, almost too confident, I worried, so people might guess there is nothing wrong with my face at all—90 degree turn and started to thread the thin aisles that run between the small brown tables in the restaurant's main dining area. My intention was to break up with Suki right then and there, I was going to tell her this was over, it just wouldn't work, I'm sorry but things are mixed up in my life right now and it would be best if we didn't see each other any more and it has nothing to do with my face, nothing at all. "What will people think? They'll think I broke up with you because of your face. That isn't true at all." I am prepared for this, I am prepared for every possible response. But I should have known that SurferGuy wouldn't let this happen. He wants us to get married and have kids; I don't think that is realistic, I like my room and Suki would probably want to move to the mountains, where there is no internet connection—girls like her always do, they have so much of the city in them but they want so hard to escape, you can see it in their eyes, and looking at her face through the slits in my mask of bandages I can see that Suki would want a flattened out piece of land on the side of a mountain with maybe a goat, and you always have to get two goats because they need company and one goat gets lonely and will make a sound that is so forlorn and terrible it breaks your heart just to hear it. Could I listen to that sound? Could I deal with having two goats? Suki is very good at Interpersonal Communication, which is why she does what she does, but even still there are different modes of it, her practiced kind and the kind where she slips into something else, like when she talks about her Grandfather's place which you have to take the train for 40 minutes outside of Kyoto and there it is, sprawled out in the foothills with the suddenness of a city or ocean, and with every kind of animal, "he even kept a kangaroo" she tells me with a serious expression, placing her hand not on mine but near it, and that is so much more genuine. But I can tell right then she would want to move to the mountains and while part of that appeals to me—the isolation, the loneliness, the view—I like the city too much, and I would miss the way it compresses itself like a thick body outside of the universe and pulses like a heartbeat while I sleep and eat.

But no: SurferGuy fears what I will tell her, that I will break up with her and fuck this up. I don't have any insight at all as to why he wants what he wants. I didn't even try to explain things to him because there is no reasoning with the jungle; just try telling SurferGuy that buildings aren't trees, and see where that gets you: he once bit me right on the hand when I reached up to adjust my monitor screen, and I kept that hand in a large woolen sock for two weeks until it healed, bits of wool sticking into the healing wound like fur.

I lurch, I convulse. The ceiling spins and the floor bends underneath me, I am rabid, I am outside of what can be controlled, and I think at some point I hit my nose nad start a minor nosebleed. SurferGuy went from congenial to snarling in about oh-five seconds, just like a jungle cat, I have to remember; I have to remember what he told me, "we don' react like you people react. We have emotions that are so similar to yours but they don't happen for the same reason, we try them on like hats, it is impossible to care about the consequences because there never are any."

           

*          *          *

 
            In the hospital everyone comes to visit me, well, my mom and dad and much older sister who I never really knew all come to visit me, and so does Suki, even; my back gets better and they keep me there for a few days and no one treats me like a pariah once the bandages are off my face, and no one acts like I have been hikkomori for more than five years now and I am even graceful and flirty with the female nurses, and the male nurses come and joke with me and talk with me about baseball and if Miyamoto's hitting streak will continue and they tease me about wearing bandages when there was nothing at all wrong with my face; "I did something like that once," one of the male nurses tells me. "Of course, it was just to impress a girl," and he winks at me. SurferGuy sits outside my window the first night and his breath fogs up the window and his whiskers write profane things in the steam, and he marvels at this white oak tree with all the monkeys inside of it here in the middle of the jungle, and he says his own brothers and sisters have been doing loops around the tree (the building), which he says bodes well for my recovery. "If you were going to die," he tells me, "this place would be anathema to them." When I tell all of this to my mother, who comes for 2 hours each of the 3 days I remain here (I am recovered after only 1 day but do not say this; I have a hard time leaving rooms and I want my re-entrance into my universe to be new and filled with wonder), she makes a sound like, "oh!."

 

*          *          *

 
            I did run away with Suki, once, for a few years; after I left my room and got a job at this shop that makes SuperShakes! for weightlifters and vegetarians and the smell of milk and orange peels soaked into me and stayed there like a second body I carried around with me even after showers, wobbly & inchoate, orange rinds and banana peels and a constant feeling like sand in your teeth, and Suki came in one day right to where I was working and her face was wrapped in bandages like a mummy her eyes like coal hearts at the center of twin pyramids staring back at me with affection and understanding, and there was no question after that, at least for the next few years, and I threw out my back vaulting the counter to be with her but not so bad as before and I didn't even go to the hospital we left right then and I lay in the back of her truck, and her singing in the front with the unraveled bandages trailing out of the back window, snapping in the breeze, and I'd listen to that sound until it seemed to be in-time with the music. We went all the way up to the mountains like this and lived there for two years before it stopped working out between us and I moved back to Tokyo and said cruel things about how I knew she was the type of girl who thought she wanted to live in the mountains but didn't really, even though she stayed and I moved, and that was the cruel thing, I told her she'd hate it staying there but would never admit it and I should know I lived in my room for years and it wasn't really so bad as everyone said it was, so there.

            "Anyway I'm still in my room and that all won't happen for a while and so you probably don't believe me but it really does happen exactly like that." I am lying on my back, arching a bit into the hard floor, doing like SurferGuy taught me to stop a nosebleed with my head tilted and my fingers gently pinching the bridge of my nose; listening to the sounds the building repeats into the back of my head, the sounds clouded with timber and reverb from traveling up through the ventilation shafts.

            SurferGuy takes my hand in his two enormous scaly feathered hands and clasps it there, and he leans close and tells me a secret: it did happen, all of what I just said; I'm not just lying to you, and its this part that is the memory, right here; I'm looking back on all this already, and this is how SurferGuy can be happy and angry at the same time, he wants me to know; because right now I'm standing up there on the side of a mountain looking into the breeze with Suki and there's a small farm behind me, and I'm wondering where all of this went wrong.