Precious Things: Takana Koichi

“So I ran faster, but it caught me here. Yes my loyalties turned, like my ankle, in seventh grade… He said you’re really an ugly girl, but I like the way you play, and I died, but I thanked him…”
---Tori Amos

She turned the strange hemi-sphere in her hands, and after watching the little man in comic book limbo, she held the rounded side up to her split lip, she let her warm breath fog the glass, she felt him inside it, not so long ago he had held this very object in his hands, and it was as if he had held her by proxy. Here was the Sarariman, of course, and it was Takana Koichi, sprung from his humble beginnings, brilliant, just like Serge, into a world of vertiginous mobility and broken conventions. That was who he wanted to be, anyway. He wanted to escape the grinding of the his drone-like existence, he wanted to be more, to have more, than what was allotted him, but he wanted far more even than what he had achieved: he wanted to have it all, and the twenty years that it took him to get there, and a future full of possibilities… that was what she interpreted this strangely coded message to mean. It had to have been from him, who else could have known to send that poor old war-hero,-type, a pathetic character in the true sense of pathos, with this amusing, perplexing, undecipherable toy, charged with deeper significance, teasing her into questioning her own over-analytical nature. It was just like him, just like a man, to speak in terms of comic books, a genre so very alien to her, and so very… male. It truly amazed Elsa that men and women ever really found companionship in one another.

She turned, the weight of exhaustion bearing down upon her. The ordeal in the airport seemed a million miles away. Hans was dead, of that she was sure, but hadn’t he really been dead to her for the last ten years. Didn’t all people die for her once she walked out the door, never to return? The grieving process was the same. She was suddenly glad that her father was dead, buried too were the dark secrets that Hans’ uninvited penetration had threatened to uncover. She felt suddenly sorry for Heike, the waitress, who would be left alone with the two young children, and would undoubtedly assume that Hans had been murdered by some crack-head in LA desperate for his cash, fiending for his next fix. Maybe it was better that way, she would finally be free.

Elsa’s face was tender, but had cleaned up well enough in the first-class lavatory, the puffy lips, adding a sexy pout to her otherwise straight-lined face. She had been unable to sleep for more than a few brief moments on the flight, getting extra special unwanted attention from the flight stewards who were probably more concerned about a possible legal torte than her actual well-being. She could feel the old familiar tears welling up, not in her eyes but deeper, inside her tightening chest. Her inner thighs hurt, and the burn when she relieved herself was one more reminder of her own weakness. She was just exhausted and she didn’t want to ask herself too many questions. It was getting late and she needed to find a place to sleep, and suddenly it occurred to her that there would already be a reservation for her, somewhere within the Ginza district. There were several possibilities, but she had no desire, at this point, to go hunting on foot, so she simply decided to take a taxi to Serge’s favorite spot for afternoon trysts, and if there were no reservation there, then she would just pay the room herself.

During the entirety of the flight, in a campaign of self-deception, she had ignored the unexpected violence of her ghosts, the violence of the act that had been perpetuated upon her by the wrong man, the act which under other circumstances, with Serge’s arms spread wide, his fingers enlaced with hers, his mouth on her neck, his chest pressing gently into her back, and the boundless trust which she instinctively felt for him, cradling her, would have been welcome. Instead she played and replayed their last encounter, and she invented and reinvented the ways she would have done things better, a different sort of violence altogether. She would find a way to captivate him, she had to, this was a matter of life and death, or at least it felt that way. She pondered whether in a kiss you can really transfer the invariant core of what you are trying to express - a kiss – untranslatable - a language unto itself. How could she form the right shape of her tongue around his, probing with the proper intensity, to show him that she would, _will_, do absolutely anything he asked, and still be aloof and inaccessible enough for him to want to try his luck, teasing him to beg for what he really wanted. She felt weak. Weak, not only for traveling half-way around the world for a man, but for being so transparently, foolishly, girlishly willing to do so, time and again, for never being able to say “no” to a man who needed her.

Did Serge need her? He would if he didn’t already. He had to know that she was still desperately in love with him - despite, or precisely because of, his year of virtual silence - he knew that he could pull his strings and her arms would fly upwards reaching for him in her sleep. She inwardly prayed for the clemency of his open arms, but of course, _that_ put her at an overwhelming disadvantage coming to the negotiating table. No, she promised herself, this time it would be different… she would have a few tricks up her sleeve. The sleep-deprived, half-crazed laughter burst unexpectedly out in a sort of a gasping giggle.

She crossed the busy avenue, avoiding cars and moped-riding-messengers alike, narrowly missing a head-on collision with an impatient taxi driver. She looked fondly at her wrist. What was everyone’s hurry at this hour? Did business never stop? She flagged him and indicated in English where she wanted to go, and closed her eyes. She felt the jerking motion as the car pulled to a halt. Her driver said something that she did not understand, but he pointed at the numbers on the screen and she paid him, trying to remember what the appropriate tipping habits were in this country. She got out, stiff from so much sitting, checked her bearings, yes, this was the place that they had come to play out some of the more elaborate fantasies, which required more than just office furniture. Although, now that she recalled, tying his hands gently behind his back with the silk tie that his mother had bought him years before, seated at his desk, pants around his ankles, with Elsa climbing gingerly on top of him, his mouth grazing her breasts as she leaned forward, his teeth pulling at the edge of her bra, sliding down carefully, electrically connecting, draping her legs through the negative space beneath the unused armrests, while sucking on his neck, following his jaw-line to his ear and rocking back and forth, slowly, so slowly, feeling his muscles contract towards her, tightening and going slack against the pressure of the expertly tied knot, was a very, very fulfilling experience.
Yes, the previous unpleasantness was behind her, so what if her DNA, left floating around in the isolated men’s latrine so many thousands of miles from here might implicate her in some way? She had relinquished her Swedish citizenship long before DNA archiving had been a common practice, and besides, she didn’t ever have to go back, did she?


Unsure of what to expect, she walked into the lobby and the concierge looked up at her as if he had been waiting with an important message.