1
The Eleventh Day of Christmas
KRISTAL
The urge to draw hits me just as I’m about to wrap my chopsticks around the sakizuke course. This isn’t the usual delightful impulse to capture someone or some scene down on paper, but a total compulsion. My skin crawls with the need to pull out my drawing pad as the vision of this latest “loved one” fills my head and twists my stomach, making it so I can’t eat. Even though I really, really want to.
I’ve been waiting for over a year to eat at Sukiyabashi Daniel, San Francisco’s hottest new sushi restaurant. It was founded by Daniel Ito, a Michelin star chef, whose father and uncle also became Michelin Star chefs while working at his grandfather’s world-renowned sushi restaurant in Tokyo. Typically, a chef hailing from such an eminent sushi family would have continued his career in Japan.
But according to the People magazine article I’d read about the restaurant last year, Daniel had decided to open his own eatery after being disinherited and kicked out of the family business after he came out as gay. With a generous investment from a Japanese billionaire, he’d set up shop in San Francisco.
The resulting omakase-style restaurant was a humble mix of tradition and outrageous fusion, and it was still creating quite a stir on both local and national foodie blogs when I arrived back in the human realm on the first day of Christmas.
With only ten tables available, it had been nearly impossible to get a reservation last year. In fact, when I called to confirm my reservation a few days ago, the host had declared me lucky. “You only had to wait a year, honey. If you made a reservation today, it’d be eighteen months!”
I’d been so looking forward to this meal. Why, Santa, why did the uncontrollable urge to draw have to hit me before I even got a chance to take my first bite?
Okay, technically, I know why. Really it’s my own fault. I had no business looking around curiously at the other diners while the restaurant’s sole waiter brought out the first course. Shouldn’t have wondered why tonight there were eleven tables set out instead of ten… or let my eyes linger for so long on the couple, who were sitting at the only round top in a restaurant filled with square-shaped ones.
Why hadn’t I looked away, instead of speculating to myself about why they’d been served first, even though they were seated the farthest away from the non-traditional zero-seat sushi bar?
Usually, I keep my eyes down when I’m out in the human world during the twelve days of Christmas. Each of us elves has a special ability, granted to us by Grandpa Claus upon the night of our adoption. My bestie cousin, Krista, and many of the other elves consider their unique ability a gift, like the superpowers we all dreamed of having as kids before Santa adopted us.
But in my case, Santa’s gift is more like a curse.
And curse is what I do under my breath as I glance again at the beautiful people sitting at the eleventh table. A man and a woman, who I’m guessing to be in their thirties, based purely on their fashion choices and the fact that they can afford to drop so much money on a meal where the chef gets to decide exactly what they eat.
He’s dressed in a tux, and she’s wearing an evening gown like they’ve either just returned from or are about to go to an opera. And they’re both over-the-top attractive. Like, glowing with ethereal beauty. Long, thin, and gorgeous, they look like supermodels, posing for an ad urging you to buy something ungodly expensive. He’s Asian with well-defined cheekbones, gorgeous half-moon eyes, and a strong nose—I know I’d have all sorts of trouble capturing it on paper. She has dark brown hair and tanned skin that could have marked her as coming from anywhere: Mexico, Europe, or a tanning booth on Union Street.
But she’s not from any of those places I already know. She’s from Brazil. Specifically, the city of Jaraguá do Sul—at least that’s where the loved one I have the overwhelming urge to draw lives. Instead of tucking into my first course, I reluctantly pull out my drawing pad and sharpie and sketch the portrait of a woman who looks so much like the modelesque brunette, I can only assume she’s her sister.
She’s beautiful, too, but in a more wholesome way.
She looks nice. Like a sweet big or little sister. And according to the date I add last in the upper left corner of the portrait, she’ll be dead within three months. Crap.
Ten years I’ve had this gift, and every picture I draw still fills me with sadness. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Santa wants me to remember always that I’m not the only one, that I’m not alone as I was that night when he found me crying over my mother’s body.
I get it. I guess. But my stomach churns because a few days ago, my human mentor, Jae-Hyun, sat me down for a long conversation about committing to my natural talent as a manga artist. He’d asserted quite rightly that he could teach me more if he didn’t only have twelve days a year with me. He even offered me a job in his comic book store, along with the use of the small apartment above the store for free if I agreed to stay on for more than twelve days and seriously commit to my study of the art form. As expensive as San Francisco apartments are, I should have jumped at the opportunity.
I wanted to jump at the opportunity. But instead, I’d told him, “One more year. Just give me one more year at the workshop, and then I’ll come back and be your full-time student.”
That’s how long I figured it would take for me to get my mind right for living in the real world, where things like this would happen, if not every day, enough times to break my heart.
I look at the sharpie portrait I’ve drawn. Then back to the perfect-looking couple on their perfect-looking date. Which I’m about to ruin big time.
Crap.
2
Time to Pretend
HAYATO
Eloa is even better than the agency promised. I hadn’t been expecting much when I contracted with a discreet San Francisco escort agency to satisfy certain needs while I attended the inaugural investors meeting for GoX Aeronautics, the aerospace start-up of one of my business partners, Rodrigo Gutierrez. After all, San Francisco is no Tokyo when it comes to making tasteful arrangements for hot dates. It’s not even London, where I attended university.
But Eloa is as charming and witty as she is beautiful, and she has extensive knowledge of art. She’d been an exact fit for the San Francisco MOMA’s fundraising gala. And now, sitting at Sukiyabashi Daniel, I notice quite a few men sneaking glances at her while their own dates aren’t looking. Admiring and probably wishing that they, like me, got to take this vision of beauty and poise home with them tonight.
Yet, I couldn’t be more bored.
Yes, Eloa is beautiful and charming and sophisticated…just like every woman I’d ever contracted as a date. But I find myself shifting in my seat, wishing I’d just taken her straight back to the hotel after the gala instead of inviting her out for a several-course meal. The first sakizuke course had just arrived, and this hot date already feels…. I struggle for the words to explain it to myself.
It’s like when I discovered “Time to Pretend” by MGMT shortly after finishing business school. I’d liked the song so much, I’d put it on repeat and played it everywhere. On the way to my then-marketing job at Nakamura Worldwide, my family’s multinational automotive company, at the gym—I even set the song as the ringtone on my very first iPhone. Then one day, I could no longer stand it. I’d listened to it over and over again until I’d broken it. To this day, that song does nothing for me. It’s a memory that no longer moves me.