'Dreaming About Fish', by Sarp Sozdinler
I thrust my toothpick into the bowl of meatballs as the European duo onstage started criticizing the art scene in Japan. As latecomers, Jowi and I were sitting at the makeshift bar near the exit door, which lent us a false sense of independence from the sitting crowd.
“People are afraid to spice things up in Tokyo,” Jowi said, then swerved on her stool to spit the last bite of meatball out onto her palm.
I took off my peacoat and folded it on the bar counter. The bartender greeted us with a gentle nod before filling our Styrofoam cups with mulled wine (“on the house”). He, too, was probably a foreigner like us with his accented vowels that sounded like a birth certificate in auditory form but he didn’t speak the language with the lilt that often gave us away. We both downed our drinks before any of us could find a chance to say thanks. The drink was a bit too tangy for my taste but neither Jowi nor I could afford to be picky, certainly not with the current state of our bank accounts.
The show continued in the next room over, which was not technically a room but an extension of the floor isolated from the rest with tall white curtains. Jowi and I picked the stools we thought might draw the least bit of attention, but we ended up relatively central after the camerawoman placed her device by our side. The bartender brought in the rest of the meatballs and set the bowl on the low stand before us, beside where Jowi flung the turquoise backpack I’d bought her the previous Christmas. Across the stand from us, the European duo from before and a bald Korean man sat next to one another in folding chairs. Though no one had entered the gallery after we did, the crowd looked somehow more populated on this part of the floor. Everyone peeled their jackets off one by one, which reminded me that I’d forgotten my coat back at the bar.
The sound of footfalls filled the room as a tall bony woman with wavy blond bangs and a green wool turtleneck walked in through a slit between the curtains. She introduced herself as the performer of the upcoming act and said that she was Lithuanian, hoping it would make a difference.
“I don’t like to call myself an artist,” she said, and her words amused the Japanese part of the crowd for some bleak reason. “You can take me for a storyteller if you must.”
With a smile she pulled a stack of xeroxed booklets out of her black tote bag and started handing them out one by one. She stepped aside to observe our reactions as we flipped through the pages with clueless eyes.
“I’m going to have to ask each of you to choose a character from the booklet and roleplay it,” she said in an attempt to ease the tension brewing on our faces.
“You are free to read out your lines or act them out. It’s entirely up to you.”
I checked the index page on the flip side of the front cover. The characters listed had such pretentious names as Linguist, God, Lithuanian, Francis Bacon, Classicist, Hippocrates, Nobel, among others. Each character had a set of typewritten lines we could follow without a hassle: some long, some short.
“Tell me your first name when you pick one, so I can keep track of who’s who,” the artist announced, and I looked down at my hands once more.
Jowi rushed to be the first among the crowd and said that she’d like to pick Kurban Said; the artist replied that this character was for herself to play.
“I figured you’d pick the Lithuanian,” Jowi confessed, but the artist shook her head.
“Fine,” Jowi folded her arms over her chest and said, “Biographer, then,” and slowly pronounced her name after a sigh.
The artist asked for the correct spelling and followed Jowi’s instructions as she scribbled something in her notebook. After she was done, she raised her gaze back to the crowd for more volunteers. People picked their characters one by one, including the European duo: she chose Leiris; he, The Archeologist. I didn’t pick any, even though everyone was encouraged to perform at least once. The camerawoman chose two: Dream Hunter and Princess Ateh.
“Since the beginning of time,” she said to kick off the performance, crossing one leg over the other on one of the vacant stools by the curtains, “people rose from the ground and fell from the skies in a vicious circle. They barnstormed their way out from one World War to another. They split the atom and invented wars. They plucked themselves from the mold of the earth millions of years ago and learned to slide through the clouds like shooting stars or flesh missiles after a millennia.”
Jowi bided her time before she got on with her part.
“Regardless of time or geography,” she then read out loud, “flying babies made a memorable entrance to wherever they landed as the loudest, most unpredictable guests on the list—and the loosest with manners.”
I gazed about the crowd while Jowi vocalized the rest of her lines: just a few were all-ears, and some looked genuinely confused. The bald Korean man leaned forward from his chair at one point and picked a large piece of meatball from the bowl.
“Though a lone-wolf profession by nature, those storks broke the routine some days and dropped them babies in large numbers. Like lovers in the dark, babies found each other in midair and merged through a knot of limbs, not only missing luck but also the first tool endorsed in civil aviation: the chute.”
The camerawoman didn’t realize it was her turn and was reminded of the fact by a round of nervous giggles.
“Sorry.” She smiled while trying to find the right page, which she did only after a few failed attempts. “In the face of gravity, all forms of attachment proved to be a burden. For the fallers knew that their bodies were but a jail, a firetrap sealed with promise, addiction, and failure, which they lapsed in and out in good faith.”
Her gaze skimmed the room as she paused for emphasis.
“From the city to the woods or the desert, wherever they wound up, free-fallers fell.”
I checked my phone when the Classicist’s turn came. It was a little after four and I still hadn’t heard back from my gynecologist. I flung the phone back into my bag and wondered if Jowi and I could be doing something more entertaining and less snobby than this, like seeing the new Miyazaki movie. This part of Tokyo was a dead spot at this hour (too soon for the night to start and too late for the afternoon people to care about), and there wasn’t one event that I knew would be beginning anytime soon—at least, not one that served free food. Jowi and I didn’t really need to pursue our chances this way, but we liked to pretend being two broke girls in a strange land. Tokyo was far from cheap, and there was no shame in the game. Every other week, another line of expense would show up unannounced at our doorstep, like this drainpipe that decided to break out of nowhere or those city taxes that irregularly filled our mailbox. To keep up with the demands of adulthood, Jowi had started working for a Chinese man who introduced himself to his employees as the Love Doctor, but he was organizing fundraisers for the abuse victims in Africa, so no one dared make fun of him, at least not in public. I just hoped my agreement with the art supply store would soon evolve into something more than a mere part-time job.
Everything fell into our range of fair dime. We worked it all out. We carefully picked what events to crash on the criteria of how impressive the catering looked in the venue’s recent Facebook pictures. We avoided those that gave us too bohemian an impression (like tonight’s gentrified gallery, a lapse in our otherwise good judgment), or too ambitious (like this embassy officer’s farewell party in Aoyama last August where they hired security personnel just for keeping an eye on the open buffet). Other times, we were just being small-time crooks and daring each other to borrow stationery from our workplaces or lift forks and knives and soaps from shops and cafes we frequented. Mugs, too, whenever we felt like going a bit wild. Bottled waters came in easy and free, like the rain in Tokyo.
“I’m not at all pleased with your d-d-deeds and intentions,” stuttered the girl who was playacting God, and her words snapped my attention back into the room.
Her pretend masculine voice was so phony it made Jowi and me cringe. The artist’s mind seemed to have drifted away when I looked up, and I caught the bartender staring at my belly.
“Look at the babies long enough and you’ll go mad,” Jowi leaned toward me to say in barely above a whisper.
I rested my head on her shoulder and thought about home the whole time I gazed into the meatballs, wherever or whatever that might be.
—
About a week ago, Jowi and I were ranking baby names in her bed upon reading about the news of Katy Perry’s pregnancy. Jowi believed all her failures in life could be traced back to her mother’s decision for a baby name. She claimed there was an undeniable relationship between certain first names and fate. Have you ever met a philosopher called Josh? she’d said on the first morning of her new job. Or a plumber named Pythagoras?
“How about Fukushima?” I offered jokingly. “It’s long. It’s catchy. Full of strong consonants.”
“That’s not even funny,” she said, though couldn’t stop chuckling herself.
The rate of her finger-taps on the phone fit the pulse of the city beating through the open window.
“You know, they say strontium still poisons the water in the whole of Japan, right?”
“I don’t even know what that means,” I laughed.
“Neither do I.” She reached over to set her phone down on the nightstand.
“Should I be worried?”
She shrugged and then we fell silent for a moment. The smell of curry ballooned out of the downstairs ramen shop and hung in the stillness of our room.
“You know,” I said, “if you’re really too concerned about the radiation”—I glanced into the half-full bottle of water standing next to Jowi’s phone on the nightstand—“you probably shouldn’t have come to Tokyo.”
“Look.” She tossed the linens aside and snaked out of bed in an instant, “I just don’t feel comfortable serving tap water at the party, all right?”
I propped up on my elbows in bed.
“What party?” I asked.
“Housewarming,” she said.
“Weren’t we supposed to have it in July?” I waited for a reply. “It’s been, like, three months.”
“Yeah, the theme is Late to the Party, so we’re having it this Friday.”
“What?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not a theme.”
“Yes, it is. I planned it back in July, so it makes sense.”
“What? Where was I?”
”Probs busy checking your belly in your room the whole damn time.” She grabbed her pants from the hanger by the mirror. “You’re getting pretty large by the way.”
“Thanks,” I said, then found a crease that would give me the best chance of shade in bed. “How do you even dress up for a theme like that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Just think of all the parties you’re late for already, okay?”
“Like what?”
“Like, I don’t know, Christmas, Halloween, Valentine’s. Your First Communion. Your pregnancy.”
“God, that sounds awful.”
I squinted at her reflection in the mirror.
“Will there at least be free booze?” I asked. “Please let there be free booze.”
“Only if we go to that art show the night before,” she said. “I bet there’ll be plenty of free stuff there.”
I rolled over onto my back in bed and opened the gallery’s Facebook page on my phone.
“They seem to serve French wine and meatballs,” I announced after a moment of scrolling up and down. “And they look surprisingly good.”
“We’ll bring our plastic bags for the wine just in case,” Jowi said, tying her hair into a bun. “We wouldn’t want a repeat of last time.”
“Oh my God,” I cried out. “That happened, like, one time.”
I gazed up at Jowi and then back at her hair-ridden pillow.
“And that was because of you.”
She stooped to go through the pile of clothes on the rug and picked her most favorite yellow V-neck sweater. Everything in her room worked in contrast to the neatness of mine: in the far corner, two bookshelves imitated WordPress backgrounds and stole highlights from some dreamcatchers and flowerpots by their side; a chargeable lamp unit illuminated a desk puzzle that chopped an oil-painted spring valley into two-thousand pieces. One of the round clocks on the wall behind her had the words new york typeset on it in a modern uppercase democracy, while the other read: tokyo.
“I don’t think I feel my baby anymore, Jo,” I said into the room, apropos of nothing.
Jowi pulled her sweater over her head and pretended not to hear me for a while.
“Did you go see a doctor yet?”
She then spun on her heels to say. Her eyes framed me with a razor-sharp focus as if she could lure the answer out by the sheer intent of her gaze.
“I just figured it out this morning,” I said. “But I had a dream last night.”
The wrinkles on Jowi’s forehead deepened with worry as she sat on the upturned laundry basket.
“I know it isn’t supposed to make any sense,” I said, “but I can tell something in me has changed.”
Without a spectator, I didn’t even find a good reason to move my arms, so I let them be under the pillow.
“I found this fish trapped in my bowels,” I went on in the absence of conversation, “and I was trapped in a room full of exploding gas bombs myself. The thing flapped about and gasped for air as I watched it die, but my arms and legs were so stiff I couldn’t move.”
I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand, which was damp and salty with running tears.
“I think my body was trying to tell me something, Jo. You know how they say your mind pick up these little things before anything else.”
”Fine.” Jowi rested a fist in the curve of her waist. “So what?”
A bolt of dissatisfaction ran through my body.
“I still kinda feel attached to that fish,” I said.
“How I see it,” she sighed, “you might just be having a nasty bladder infection all right.”
My face took its time to settle into an expression of defeat: “How bad?”
“I wouldn’t worry too much.” She shrugged. “Though, I’d say you should probably get it looked at by a doctor and stop dreaming about fish soon enough.”
—
“The womenfolk flourishes in the environment of water,” Jowi mock-shouted so the bartender could hear.
We were rifling the racks in the cloakroom though the session with the Lithuanian artist was still underway in the next room over.
“Where they can conceive children and shed their skin.”
“What?” I said distractedly as I slid out a sheepskin coat.
“Hippocrates.” Jowi held up the artist’s booklet in her hand, shook her head. “Can you fucking believe that? Jesus.”
“I can understand the part with the children,” I said as I gazed into the mirror. “But why shed the skin?”
“Because obviously you can’t separate one from the other.”
Jowi rolled her eyes to the crotch of a white-marble sportsman statue that stood by the door and looked as smooth and blank as the early evening sky in Tokyo.
“Like two lovers in the dark.”
I put on the sheepskin coat before the garment mirror and tried to imagine my baby in the personage of the sportsman: faint green veins showing from his temples and forearms; the vaguely flabby abs of a young man who worked out but didn’t have a consistent schedule. A pair of smelly feet.
“I don’t think I can do it, Jo,” I said out of nowhere.
“Do what?”
Jowi hugged me from behind and placed her chin on my shoulder. Her hands clutched my belly and the layered meat wobbled in her clasp like a jellyfish in an earthquake. My black-spotted self in the mirror seemed to have been yielding to a chin pointing out, dimples in the fading, and a nose evolving in a way that made me look less like the young person in my mind.
“Shit, I almost forgot.” Jowi let me go in an instant. She zipped open her turquoise backpack to reveal a bottle of mulled wine wrapped in a black plastic bag. “Happy Housewarming.”
I widened my lips into a flat line and smiled into the mirror. I turned around on my heels to look at Jowi, and then out the door, and then back at her. Tokyo stretched out behind the glass door, but the stillness confused me. It didn’t seem right, like I was not there, in that city, in that gallery, but sitting on a couch back in New York and watching Tokyo on TV. The dirt, the dread, the stinking pushiness were kept away from me behind the glass walls, hidden from my senses.
“I think it’s going to rain tonight,” I said, snatching the wine bottle from Jowi’s hands.
“Why not?” Jowi said, opening the door for me.
When we stepped out, the sky was already getting darker and turning even the whitest building gray. The smell of curry showed us the way. ●
A writer of Turkish descent, Sarp Sozdinler has been published or forthcoming in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Trampset, Vestal Review, DIAGRAM, Normal School, Lost Balloon, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected and nominated for numerous anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and Wigleaf Top 50. He's currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.
Photography by Nataliya Vaitkevich