written for countervalue(at)lj for help_japan. hearts!
01.
The moment Fuji saw the glockenspiel, he was madly in love.
The location was a garage sale off the highway, nondescript, part of a neighborhood that evidently prized Japanese architecture. The NEET kid running it said his parents were out of town and he wasn't allowed to leave and anyway he wasn't really a NEET, he was just "in between stages". The kid had clean dark hair and glasses, an aesthetic combination that was similar to the entrepreneur Ohtori. Most of the stuff being sold were clothes, spices, antiques of the questionable sort, and a 100% authentic Pokéball. The NEET's boyfriend was on hand to explain his boyfriend's eccentricities and the NEET said shut up, you can't explain that sort of thing, to which the boyfriend shrugged noncommittally and said oh you Pokefag, and that made NEET really upset for a number of reasons.
But what really caught Fuji's eye was the glockenspiel. He wanted it badly.
"It belonged to a mutual friend," the NEET's boyfriend said without being prompted, "a long time ago we tried to start a band and his friend's girlfriend's sister's TA had all these spare instruments from college. NEET here can't leave, you see."
"I do have a name— " NEET protested and was ignored.
"We played an informal get-together thing called The Financial Aid. Say, are you guys in a band?"
Shiraishi looked to Fuji and Fuji shook his head. "We play Haydn. Sometimes Debussy."
"Violin and piano," Shiraishi clarified.
"Oh," said the NEET. His boyfriend didn't seem too impressed either, and left to go hit on the two new girls who had stumbled upon a pair of swim goggles from the 70s. One girl was Angela, whom Shiraishi vaguely recognized from his Lit Hum seminar. Angela was half-Jewish, half-Chinese. He didn't recognize the other girl but he knew Angela was a lesbian, which was why NEET's boyfriend wasn't having much success.
The other girl whom Angela was with giggled at whatever she was texting and she kept telling Angela, "Lookit, lookit, it's Glenn honey." Her giggle turned into a laugh which made Shiraishi look up to find something that wouldn't be there. He absently wondered if laughter could permeate an endless sky, if black could turn to blue, whether or not time was some kind of funky futuristic slang. Having paid, Fuji tapped his shoulder and they left. Neither Angela nor her girl friend had noticed them. This was spring, 2009.
02.
They had a whale of a time getting the glockenspiel back to the dorms. The subway was as crowded as Washington Square Park got when you placed a case of PBR in the center of it and waited five minutes. Shiraishi almost fell into the lap of a sweet-looking forty-ish Latina and a baby indiscriminately wiped its drool across the keys.
"Isn't that sweet," cooed a Stuyvesant girl, which earned a harsh smile from Fuji.
For his part, Shiraishi was tempted to ask Fuji why on earth he was so disposed to own a glockenspiel. After all, the school orchestra would more than likely be open to rental, and it would not be difficult to gain access to it (to make a long story short: last spring's fling, legal substances, Earl Grey with lemon, and chemical engineering). Or better yet, he could start a club for fundraising and reach his goal within three days. But you don't question people in love, even if the object of that person's affection is a glockenspiel, and especially not if said person is notorious for his capricious dabblings.
(Capricious dabblings, as a general rule, defined the relationship scene at Morningside Heights.)
"Well, now that that's all set, I'd better get started," said Fuji. He fished out a cloth from under the bed and set it under running water. Shiraishi awkwardly stood by the doorway. "And if you're going to stand there awkwardly, you might as well come help. We've got to study."
"On what?"
"Study. This beauty."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. You know." Fuji suddenly smiled. "It looks like a Sally, doesn't it?"
"Who?"
"Sally. Miss Sally Glockenspiel."
"Uh—"
"I'm serious. Look at Sally here. Sally's going to be living here in Wallach with us, for the rest of the semester. What day is it?"
"March. March twenty-first. Fuji, I—"
"That's right. Today is March twenty-first, this is Sally, this is Shiraishi-kun, I'm Fuji. I'm a Philosophy major and Shiraishi-kun is still undecided because he is uncertain of his future, like young Mister Benjamin. He's leaning toward Environmental Biology at the moment, isn't he? Yesterday he wanted to be in the English department. Tomorrow, he'll be an East Asian studies major with a minor in Neurotic—Neuroscience. This is Sally. Say hello to everyone, don't be shy. Sally's a glockenspiel; she likes to sing when she thinks no one is around."
03.
It was true Shiraishi didn't know what he wanted to major in. He was also a transfer student but anyway that is a digression.
"Clearly, the university saw some kind of potential within you," Kiku Honda said. "After all, rarely do they accept transfers. It's just not done. It's just not." Kiku, like Fuji, was a Tokyo international. He was a freshman in the school of engineering who turned sixteen in February. He took six courses his first semester, highly advised against, and did so overwhelmingly well that his classmates openly questioned why he wasn't laboring away at MIT or Caltech. Kiku simply said he liked the city; liked to be in small bursting spaces. "It gives you," he demurred, "opportunities."
And the university was all about opportunities. In fact, it was because of the College's numerous opportunities Shiraishi met Fuji so many times over such a short period of time that they decided to give friendship a shot. Fuji lived in John Jay as a first year and Shiraishi would tramper over from Funald and they would sit, all sprawled out, with their humanities textbooks and library copies of the Iliad and Machiavelli.
When Fuji met Sally, they were still in test-drive mode but the honeymoon ended soon thereafter. Monday mornings were spent in dining halls and afternoons were alternatively divided between studying and racing off to see a cheap off-Broadway show. They discovered New York together, or what was left of it. When they had to take Contemporary Civilizations, they talked Plato and Kant and "What is Enlightenment?" on Low Steps with ten other sophomores.
One Friday night, Fuji waited for Shiraishi's Arabic class to end before they traveled all the way to Long Island to visit a club featuring a band called Bad Luck. They stayed overnight at a sketchy youth hostel, drank McDonald's coffee for breakfast, and raced back to campus before Sunday was done. Shiraishi lost a shoe to a hobo and almost tripped out on caffeine. He learned two lessons from the trip: to learn to let things go, and that Fuji was allergic to pineapples.
04.
("That was fun," proclaimed Fuji.
"That was dumb."
"No it was fun."
"Okay, fine."
"Okay what?"
"It was fun."
"Really?"
"Sure. Whatever."
"Really?"
"Yeah," said Shiraishi, "it was. Fun."
Funner than listening to a British geology professor ramble off in half-funny jokes, or arguing with Miss Butler about marriage. Funner than frustratingly deal with the administration but knowing that even though it was annoying as hell, you couldn't live without their free food and museum coupons. It was falling in love with the city all over again, even though he was so over that stage; he'd thought. And the co-ed dance groups tried to coerce you into joining, just as young Senator Alexander bribed the female underclassmen to vote for him and Four Loko was mass produced in the basement of the physics building. The Delta Gamma girl slept with her political science professor every other Thursday evening in a Brooklyn hotel and one of Fuji's friends doubled as a go-go dancer on Saturdays, from eight to two. Fuji and Shiraishi liked to argue over the universe and how it goes on and on and on.)
05.
"Can laughter permeate an endless sky?" was Shiraishi's title for his final paper in Philosophy of Literature. He was supposed to discuss Sartre and Marxism in relation to existentialism, pre- and post-WWII. But somewhere along the way he began to analyze the Vitruvian Man and phi and really tragic Greek tragedians, like Aristophanes and Socrates. Actually, Socrates wasn't a tragic Greek tragedian, just tragic and Greek. And it was beginning to near that state of mind when anything could be a reliable source, so he figured it wouldn't hurt to quote Jason Bateman as a reliable source on the human psychology. He had Fuji read it over and Fuji asked: "My God this is terrible. It's brilliant."
There were certain virtues of philosophy that Shiraishi enjoyed. It was like intellectual masturbation: you were as nervous and uncertain as a rushing freshman for Alpha Delta Phi, and after you took the plunge it was all right. You did it a little more often and realized it was really very pleasurable, though at times socially ostracizing and inconvenient.
"Come with me," Fuji had coaxed, "be a Philosophy major. Let's talk Plato and why he was important in the attempted syntheses of Eastern and Western Philosophy."
Alfred, the Political Science senior, had little advice to give but that: "Jeffrey Sachs is a beautiful human being. I would take him out for hamburgers and lick ketchup off his body."
"I still think you should transfer to SEAS," Kiku Honda said. "I'll do the paperwork for you. Next semester, I'm going to be working on a chemical-detecting robot that'll be used for research on the moon. It will be tre-men-dous."
Two weeks later, against all odds, Shiraishi declared a major in Biochemistry.
06.
"Has it ever occurred you that if you had to fall in love anywhere in the world, New York would be a pretty ideal place to do it?" Fuji asked.
"Huh?"
"This place, sitting here on any bench. Any place. Have you ever tried it?"
Shiraishi bumbled. "Well er— "
Fuji laughed. "Shiraishi-kun, has it ever occurred to you to live a while, without your headphones on? They're just so loud. I can't stand the noise."
"I don't own headphones."
"But you're always wearing them. Or else they're resting around your neck."
"You mean the noise. Has to be. The noise around my ears?"
"Yeah." Fuji reached up and traced an imaginary constellation with his pointer finger. They were lying on the south field cleats and Shiraishi's butt was wet from the grass. "See that place up there? It's a garden of stars. When I was younger I didn't like to think of them as stars. I'd never known a star before, like, really known, so in my mind they didn't exist. I knew what a forget-me-not was though. Stars became forget-me-nots and until I took a proper class in astronomy, that's what was real to me. Watch me pluck it. There! another memory gone." He sounded sad.
"Another memory?"
"Gone," said Fuji, "just gone. Look at my fingertips. They've been bloodied because I've touched it. I touched something that wasn't mine. Memories aren't always yours, you know."
"I don't think you're making any sense," Shiraishi scrunched up his face. "Is it extended metaphor day? Was it some girl's diction? Or was it something we talked about today and I forgot?"
Fuji didn't seem to hear: "I used to think of the stars at night as a beautiful phenomena. I quickly decided that I wanted to cultivate my own garden of forget-me-nots. It'd be my equivalent to having my own galaxy. I really just wanted to rule the universe but this sounded like a nicer explanation."
"O-oh."
"I saw an advertisement for them—forget-me-nots, I mean—on the television while I was visiting Lerner last week. The TV channel was turned to HLN and the lady was tall and on the obese-side but she reminded me of a cashier from a grocery store who resembled my mother's friend. I like their blue color . . . it's facetious, but at the same time, very genuine. It makes me sad and happy at the same time. I wonder how that works."
"Paradoxical emotions."
"No, real emotions," Fuji maintained.
"No, an illusion," Shiraishi countered. "It's falling in love with a place you've never been to." (He had no idea what was going on.)
"Not true. No one just falls in love. One decides to be in love. It's why it's so easy to no longer be in love. 'I don't love you anymore. Good-bye.'"
"Hmm."
"Still, I say my dream's about as real as roses raised in space or Elizabeth Taylor's perm." He laughed and as he did, he brought his hand over his mouth, like it was just a joke. "I don't remember: what was I trying to say? Was it a lost beauty? What do you think?"
There were plenty of answers, none of which Shiraishi could manage to say. They talked for a little longer before the sky turned ill black. Shiraishi's pants were wet. Fuji didn't apologize but he did suggest that they go to Tom's for food. Shiraishi cited general fatigue, Fuji goaded. It was like always but it felt different this time, perhaps because it was so late at night, perhaps because there was Sally waiting for them in Wallach. You never could tell about the new girl thought of you and everyone else. He hoped she was not the type to judge quickly; he disliked complication, generally.
"I wonder why the stars weren't out tonight?" he asked.
"They were out."
"Those were planes, Fuji, and you know it."
"Planes don't shine like that."
"Well it's dawn. There aren't any stars out at dawn."
"That's silly. Everyone knows there are always stars in the sky, it's just when it's not night, they look like forget-me-nots."
"Yes. Right."
"Forget-me-not."
"Stars."
"What's dawn got to do with it again?"
"We've got classes in a few hours. I need aspirin. How do you feel?"
"Truthfully? You wouldn't believe this, but: I feel really, really happy."