Anybody at all. But who could respond to that? By the time she says something, she’s already in the middle of the next thing.
Our class was totally at the mercy of her careening motor-mouth.
And where was I in all this?
Sitting there, speechless. I didn’t talk for the longest time. The other kids left me alone, or left me out… of everything. Now, for the first time, I was watching it happen to another kid. They avoided her like the plague, rejected her, shut her out.
I didn’t share their view of her. For me, it was the total opposite. I wanted to get closer. I mean, yeah, I wanted a closer look at her boobs, too, but that wasn’t all…
Activities, activities. Before summer started, they had us play sports or “pitch in” with garden work. Around ten days after I got there, they had a big party for the Star Festival. One Sunday, we all went into the mountains, to pick wild plants or something.
But summer was different. Every day was something. Going to Okutama to check out the giant trees, making charcoal, making noodles from scratch, even going to the local hot spring. A healthy body is a happy body. They kept us moving. Volunteers, counsellors and occasional social workers. This was our so-called summer break, and we were busier than ever.
OK, flash to the main event: the big barbecue.
We take a bus to the Akigawa River. We’re given tasks. Mine is setting up the grill, which I manage to make level, despite my serious clumsiness. When we finish our jobs, we can do anything we want until it’s time to cook and eat. Free time. Some kids hang around the director, asking barbecue-related questions or whatever. Some other kids—they called themselves “explorers”—get lessons from a local guy on making goggles from bamboo segments to check out the river bottom. Some other kids—outsiders with nowhere to go—head down to the river to skip stones.
When it’s time to start cooking, I get closer to the girl—through a three-step process. Step one: hop. We’re skewering kebabs at the director’s instruction. Onion, corn, eggplant, beef. Fresh fish from the river. The girl’s sitting there, gleefully piercing a marshmallow.
“…and-the-Marshmallow-Man-bounced-through-the-city…”
“I ain’t afraid of no ghost,” I say, almost in reflex, as I wrestle with a gnarly red bell pepper. She stops and turns and looks right at me—big smile on her face.
“Ghostbusters, right?” I say, pleased with myself. “I saw it over New Year’s. Wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be funny or scary.” It’s been seven months, so my memory of the movie is a little sketchy. Still, I’m pretty sure she was talking about the final scene.
She opens her mouth to respond. But what comes out doesn’t really sound like a response. It has nothing to do with ghosts or marshmallows or anything. More like she’s weighing the pros and cons of dance parties. And the words just keep coming.
Coming at me.
Wha—? Dance parties?
Total gibberish, like I said.
I just smile. Don’t know what else to do.
She’s smiling, too—saying something about, like, a mermaid with human legs.
Mermaid? Because this is a river? Wait, don’t mermaids live in the ocean? A mermaid could never survive in the Akigawa. The water’s way too shallow… you’d need a fresh-water imp, like a kappa… shit, now I’m jumping around. Anyway, before I know it, the mermaid’s history.
But we had a real moment there. A close encounter of the third kind.
Step two: skip. When we finish eating, we’re supposed to make art with stones we found in the river. We’re supposed to think about the shape of the rock or how it feels in our hands and, with that in mind, draw something on it. Presto—a rock of art.
This was almost twenty years ago. I have no memory of what my rock looked like. But I definitely remember hers. Her mouth moving at warp speed—like always—and there was this force field all around her. So no one got close. That’s why I had no problem seeing what she was making, even though she was pretty far away. At first, I thought she was drawing a drowned body. Or maybe a dog? But the neck was too long for that. It had a dog’s face, but the body started to look like… a dragon.
I know that dragon! I’ve seen it somewhere.
No, I didn’t “see” it. I saw it—at the movies.
Time out. What if everything she says comes from movies? What if everything she knows comes from movies?
What if she’s not just making them up?
Maybe she’s bouncing from one world to the next—World A, World B, C, D, E, F… all the way to Z, and beyond. Maybe I’m beginning to understand. Like, make Japanese out of what she’s saying. Not everything, but most of it, maybe.
So this dragon-like creature—it’s got to be Fal-something, the Luck Dragon. From The NeverEnding Story. I saw it over spring break. On a movie screen. Which was what we did in 1985. Remember? Before VHS was the one format to rule them all. Back when Beta was still around. When, if you wanted to rent something, you had to pick which way to go. 1985. Movies hadn’t really come home yet.
You had to go to the movies—the movie theatre.
I didn’t really know movies—only went three or four times a year. I was more into dreams… Then it hit me, like a bolt of lightning. Her movies are just like my dreams! All I have to do is imagine that everything coming out of her mouth is a dream. Analyse. Sure, I’m only ten or eleven, but I’ve had a bit of training. Shit, I was well on my way to cracking the dream code. Before they took all my dreams away.
But now I have a new one. Her.
Step three: jump. Read her like a dream.
On the bus ride home, I listen carefully to every syllable that speeds out of her mouth. I map all of her jumps, from dimension to dimension. I don’t let the sudden changes of scene throw me. I don’t worry about plots or anything. I just try to get a feel for the worlds she’s visiting. Just like when I was writing down my dreams. I concentrate on the sense of her words. This might work after all. Long live Freud!
Movies. That was the key.
She’s not rehashing stories. She’s reliving the scenes.
A scene comes to life in her head. Then she moves on to another.
It’s like she’s playing twenty to thirty heroines at once. Or maybe she casts herself in minor roles. Maybe she’s only a spectator. As I watch her leap from one world to the next, I take a step into hers.
The problem is that she’s seen every movie ever made. I’ve never seen Splash or Poltergeist or Footloose or Dune. But it all works out. As long as I know that she’s playing the parts of all these different people—or aliens or dancers or mermaids—each with a different story. I just need to keep a couple of basic rules in mind. First: Her world is actually twenty or thirty different worlds. Like a solar system. Second: No matter how things look or sound, she’s still in there, somewhere.
Is that a yodel?
Sounds like a nightmare, right?
But I can follow.
By the time the bus pulls up to the dorm, I have a mental log of her several alien worlds.
In class, there’s an empty seat next to her. Of course there is. Because no one’s deranged enough to sit there. Except, well, me.
I sit down next to her (and her boobs) and say, “Hey”.
For the first couple of hours, she’s still jabbering away, but with a look of total shock on her face. Like she can’t believe she’s actually communicating. It takes some time for it to click—someone else is wading through the muck of her mixed-up movie worlds with her.