“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Eat some, hurry!” she orders, holding the cereal out for me. “We need the bag!”
I grab two handfuls and start chewing. It isn’t until she finishes the last of the cereal that I realize what she’s doing.
Kathi points to the flailing lobsters. “I’m not eating Laurel and Hardy, are you?”
“No,” I say with a mouthful of dry oats.
“Then, quick! Get them in here!”
I grab chopsticks and plop the squirming guys into the empty Weight Busters bag. One critter and then the second.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper, as I lower them down.
Kathi puts the crackling cereal bag in her purse and closes it just moments before the servers arrive with the next course—something liquid, gray, and inelegant, with floating lumps, in two bowls, one for each of us.
“Wow,” Kathi says, acting. We can hear the prior critters moving around in the cereal bag.
Crackle. Crackle. Crackle.
“Wow, thanks,” Kathi says as the bowl is placed in front of her.
“Should we clear some plates?” one of the servers asks, looking around the table, eyebrows furrowed. “Where are the shells?”
“Oh,” Kathi says, mild panic in her eyes. “We were very hungry.”
As the suspicious servers leave, Kathi exhales, then turns to the latest serving. She leans over and sniffs her bowl. “Fuck,” she says. “I think it’s alcohol.” Kathi picks up a chopstick and pokes one of the lumps, and a living shrimp spins around, glares at her, and tries to jump from the bowl. “FUCK! These shrimps are drunk!” she gasps. “They want us to eat these goddamn lit baby shrimps!”
Kathi grabs her purse and we quickly try to pluck each innocent being from their drunk destiny into the Weight Busters bag. We’re fast and stealthy but breaking a sweat. She stuffs the cellophane bag back in her purse.
The servers arrive with the next round. As they approach, I keep one eye trained on Kathi’s purse, fearing at any moment an innocent little life will come crawling out and drag itself across the floor, to everyone’s horror.
“Mmmmm,” Kathi says.
I look down at a bowl of live octopi flipping us off with each of their tentacles.
The waitresses leave and Kathi dumps her new plate directly into her purse. “Gimme yours! Quick!”
“Eww. Your purse! Who’s gonna clean that?” I ask.
“The cereal bag is full,” she grunts. Looking down into her purse, she says to the critters, “Hey, no pushing!”
The waitresses keep coming, the purse keeps getting more and more full with the most exquisite delicacies in all of Japan, raw, squirming critters and beasts and something tarantula-like. I try to gently pluck each of them to safety with the chopsticks, but the servers are impossibly fast.
Kathi looks to the door. “Use your fucking fingers! There’s no time!”
I flick a couple of terrified crawfish off the plates, and Kathi whips the purse to her side as the next course arrives, a big smile on the face of the server.
“You sure are fast,” Kathi says to them.
“For you, special guest, special dinner,” the waitress says, putting down in front of us a plate with a little fish bending back and forth and gasping for air so desperately we can hear it.
“But do you have anything fresh?” Kathi asks, sarcasm as alive in her words as our latest course.
The servers look confused, dejected.
“Just kidding,” Kathi says. She points to me and says, “By the way, this is my assistant, not my lover, just in case this is a hidden-camera show.”
“Arigato gozaimasu,” one of the waitresses replies, bewildered but polite.
My face twists with the awkwardness of it all, my fingers starting to feel numb from the jelly or whatever was on the last delicacy now in Kathi’s care.
Another course resembles the lower half of a seahorse. Another, like seaweed, except it keeps trying to stand. Yet another, unrecognizably flayed, its exposed heart still pitter-pattering.
Kathy says suggestively to the servers, “Maybe the next thing out will be Baskin Robbins Cookies ’N Cream ice cream?”
A polite giggle, and the waitress says, “Only five more courses.”
“Only five more,” Kathi says, her purse desperately twitching under her arm.
“Don’t you want to snap a picture of this, Cockring?”
“I only brag about the good stuff,” I say.
* * *
I carry Kathi’s purse back to the room.
“I’m not touching it!” she says.
“I don’t want to touch it!” I yell back, but I know where I fit on the totem pole.
Once inside, I walk over to the sliding paper partition that separates our villa from the outside, the cool, fresh air hitting me, the sound of the river flowing below filling the room. I toss what has to be thousands of dollars of living, mutilated fish from the purse, out of our hotel room and into the river outside. I look back into her purse and, still clinging to life, clinging to the inside lining of that designer bag, is one of those critters my father’s voice was yelling at me to eat. He’s breathing heavy, his tentacles waving at me, praying I’m his savior. I also toss him over the rail and watch him splash into the river, not dead, perhaps life inside and ahead for him yet, free from me and my father’s barking orders.
I turn to find Kathi behind me.
She says, “I’m giving you the best shit to write about.”
She says, “This will all be funny one day.”
* * *
I’m in a kimono filling out postcards, my body freshly washed and slightly less stressed following the evening’s dinner of mutilations. Kathi pokes her head in my room; she’s also wearing a kimono, the two of us, trauma twins.
“I’m bored,” she says.
“Does your tooth still hurt?”
“My whole being hurts,” she says, looking at my postcard spread. “Who are those for?” she asks.
“Various people, friends in L.A.”
Kathi flips through the postcards, reading the messages to Drew, Jasmine, Bruce (ugh), and my signatures on each: “Love, Charlie,” “Love, Charlie,” “Love, Charlie.” But she pauses, holding a fourth card, upon which the signature is just “Charlie.” Kathi flips the card over to read the address. “Who’s this one for, in Perris, Louisiana? The one you don’t love.”
“It’s for my dad,” I say.
“Why didn’t you write ‘Love, Charlie’ on your dad’s postcard?”
I look up at her. “Dads are complicated.”
“Tell me about it,” she says. “So are mothers.”
“Tell me about it,” I say, knowing I’ve said it in a tone of somber care, the kind of accent that births a beat in the room, one so delicate even Kathi holds for a moment. I continue, with a deep inhale, “My mother dropped dead in front of me when I was twelve.”
“Your mom is fucking dead? How am I just hearing about this?!”
“I don’t love the subject. Don’t be sad—”
“Sad? It’s fucking riveting!” she says, plopping down beside me. “Leave out nothing!”