I check my phone one last time before ending the day, and still nothing from Drew. My mind races to fill in the blanks—he’s busy with work, his phone is dead, he’s hospitalized in a coma. My mind wants it to be anything but the possible truth: Maybe I’m not good enough for him.
I turn off the lamp.
On my nightstand, illuminated by the red light of the alarm clock, is the bottle of painkillers Kathi gave me to manage for her. It’s in the spot some people would put a photo of a loved one, a trophy, a souvenir. It’s our pact. It’s my proof that we’re on an adventure together, through Japan and Australia and Indonesia and through space-time, through addiction. This bottle of pills, it’s more and more empty, but it’s here.
* * *
Hey, Siri, we schlep to Kinkaku-ji—Temple of the Golden Pavilion—in the rain. A taxi drops us off and we carefully share our umbrella and walk the half mile down a muddy gravel road toward the sacred, iconic temple.
“Are you centering the umbrella on me or you?” Kathi asks.
“You.”
“Impossible. My ass is getting soaked.”
“Sorry,” I say, twisting and shoving the umbrella farther in her direction, my shoulder getting wet, our feet still shuffling along in slop, behind other tourists laughing and pretending they’re not in hell.
We turn a corner, and there it is. We lay eyes on this historic site, glistening from the glare of the rainy day, tourists all around us taking pictures, marching forward toward the masterpiece.
It’s a sweet, magical moment.
Snap: The Golden Temple. “Look how fucking famous it is!”
Kathi turns to me, I look at her, bracing for our touching exchange.
She says, “Okay, wow, let’s go.”
She turns and starts to trudge back to the waiting taxi. I lurch behind her, keeping her head safe from the rain.
“Wait. We’re not going to go in?”
“Nope,” she says, her back to me, her feet shuffling, shuffling toward the taxi.
“But we came all this way. In the rain. Shouldn’t we see what the inside looks like?”
“We can google it,” she says.
In the cab, she lets out a whoosh of air, an exhale of accomplishment, as if to say, We saw it, history, architecture, wonder. And then—
She says, “I’m bored.”
She says, “Time for another pill?”
I say, “You’re all out.”
Kathi locks eyes with me and says, “This changes your grade to a C.”
* * *
Dinner is a royal and gruesome affair.
Assistant Bible Verse 134: Always carry breath mints, cell-phone charger, puke bags.
Here at the Hoshinoya, the emperor’s chef heard that the Kathi Kannon wished to dine at the hotel, so he planned a special dinner for us in a private room off an enormous white-sand-and-stone garden raked to perfection. Kathi and I sit at a tiny table as two waitresses prepare the settings in front of us, each of them occasionally stealing a glance at my American celebrity boss and, every now and then, making eye contact with me, smiling as if to say, You’re so lucky to be eating here.
The waitresses bow and leave the room, and Kathi and I sit, visible boredom rising in her like a tide. “What the fuck is happening?” Kathi asks, brushing her hair out of her eyes. “I’m starving.”
Before I can answer, the waitresses return with two plates of lobster sashimi, except these crustaceans, on both Kathi’s plate and mine, are still alive, their guts exposed, waving their antennae at us, begging us for mercy. Kathi and I stare with eyes the size of tennis balls.
The waitresses put the plates on the table in front of us and then look at us, awaiting our reaction. The room is immediately and eerily silent, like someone accidentally hit the mute button on a war film.
“Oh, goodie,” Kathi says. “I can’t wait.”
“What?!” I whisper to her.
She leans in to me. “Acting.” Kathi looks up from the plate, back to the waitresses. “Wow,” she says, bowing. “Arigato gozaimasu.”
I follow her lead. I bow. “Arigato gozaimasu,” I say as the servers exit.
Kathi and I look at the living sushi, then at each other.
In my mind I hear only the voice of my father, screaming, EAT IT! That’s what he said when I was a child and I asked for spinach so I could be like Popeye. My sweet mother said I wouldn’t like it. She said spinach doesn’t taste good directly out of a can, how Popeye eats it. But she humored me, twisting, twisting, twisting the can opener, draining the water, lovingly putting a spoon of the spinach onto a plate. I had a taste; I didn’t like it.
“EAT IT!” my father shouted from across the table. “We don’t waste food in this family! She opened the can, now you open your mouth!” I grabbed my fork, a child’s fork, with a thick plastic casing and dulled prongs. I stabbed the mound of spinach and put a leaf or two in my mouth. “EAT IT!” I threw up on my plate, my insides spilling out, my inner world now bile and rage in a puddle in front of him. This happened again a few years later over Brussels sprouts. And a couple years after that when I opened Oreo cookies, ate the cream filling from most of them, then threw away the chocolate cookie top and bottom. I buried them deep in the trash, but somehow he found them, of course. “DON’T WASTE FOOD!” he yelled, fishing the cookies out, soggy from coffee grounds and eggshells. “EAT IT! TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR LIFE!” Again, I barfed at our kitchen table. And every time I retched, the reaction was the same: He was disgusted not by the puke but by his son, his son’s weak stomach, weak everything. Each time he simply got up and left the table in a huff, leaving me alone to clean the plate full of my mess. I was too young to know that I actually won those three battles. That he retreated and I foiled his attempts to force me into spinach and Brussels sprouts and garbage Oreo cookies. Instead, at the time, I viewed his walking away as my own failure, my own lack of enough charm or appeal or worthiness to keep him at the table, to keep our family whole. And his searing scream still lingers with me.
EAT IT!
The creatures on the plates before us stir; they won’t be ignored.
“We have to get rid of them!” Kathi says.
EAT IT!
I’m looking at the lobster’s little pained face.
EAT IT!
I’m looking at its splayed intestines.
EAT IT!
I’m looking at its antennae.
EAT IT! EAT IT! EAT IT!
“Maybe we should eat it?” I ask.
“Are you fucking crazy?!”
“My dad always said to eat everything, kids are starving and stuff—”
“Your dad?” Kathi spits. “Who the fuck cares what your dad thinks? You’re an adult! Fuck him!”
And just like that, my dad’s screaming stops for a moment, a reprieve, my overbearing father reduced to breath from the mouth of Kathi Kannon, him suddenly powerless and emasculated, dying in that moment, squirming like our dinner before us.
“Okay,” I say. “Fuck him!”
“Quick!” she says, grabbing her Hermès purse and plopping it on the table. She pulls out her wallet, her keys—Mom’s locket crashing down on the table. She pulls out a bag of Weight Busters cereal, rips it open, grabs a handful of the lightly frosted whole-wheat O’s, and starts stuffing them into her mouth.