Alternative Tokyo

The bell chimes. The woman behind the counter calls out a greeting that he can’t understand. She reminds Victor of a song-bird, small and chirping.

He sees Peter immediately, tapping at the screen of his watch, frowning in concentration. It would have been hard not to notice him. He’s the only other Englishman in the room, the only other person not Japanese. Peter wears a dark coat and bright red scarf that is the most colorful thing in the muggy restaurant on this winter day. Mittens sit next to him on the table. Though it’s only mid afternoon, the dark of the alley is deep enough for a pink glow from a sign across the street to fall across half of Peter’s face. At the bell, he lifts his eyes and his mouth drops open at seeing Victor standing in the door.

“God,” Victor whispers, walking up to the table. He thought he was prepared to see him again, a very young man this time, but no. Peter’s face is more boyish than it had seemed halfway across the world on a screen when they had spoken before meeting. His eyes are large, his features soft, pert nose and full, pink cheeks. No, Victor was not prepared for the reality of him, this warm body that makes small movements, for hands worrying at the end of a scarf. Peter is smallish and clean, his hair shining, his fingernails impeccable. He wears his clothes layered against the cold of the day, though the restaurant is overwarm from many bodies and the heat of cooking. Peter’s lips have gone slightly chapped and red and he worries at them with his front teeth as Victor crosses the restaurant.

Peter stands. He pushes back the bit of gray at the front of his hair that is the only concession to his age, an anomaly. Victor watches Peter shift in place, trying to make himself move forward toward him. He watches the smile spread over Peter’s face. Finally, Victor reaches the table.

“It’s you.”

“It’s me,” says Victor.

They gaze around the crowded dining room, currently full of middle aged men on their lunch breaks eating alone and frowning, and settle for sitting across from one another, hands clasped in the center of the table. A few men look up at the sound of English and spend a moment studying the foreign faces, but only that. They go back to slurping their soup, to the projections on their watches and to their newspapers. Victor’s mind races and he sputters the first thing that comes into his mind.

“You’re so young.”

“Twenty four,” says Peter.

Peter’s proclamation is half defensive and half prideful, preening a little at the success of meeting up so soon, at least in his life. Victor reaches over and touches Peter’s hair, caresses the familiar streak of gray. It has been there in eight other lives and this movement, brushing it from Peter’s forehead, makes the reunion real for him.

“Still this, though.”

Peters smiles at the feeling of Victor’s hand against his forehead. He is rather cat-like, moving his face subtly along with the stroking. That is all it takes for the restaurant, the chatter of Japanese around them, the rain, all of it, to go away for Victor. He wishes they could leave. His body has met with Peter’s and even the table length of distance is painful. He lowers his hand and Peter takes it again.

“You don’t…I don’t know, you don’t hate it do you? A gray twenty-something.”

“I won’t answer that ridiculous question.”

“And you?” Peter asks Victor. He worries at his chapped lips again. “How old are you?”

Peter knows. Victor knows he knows because he’s told him, but it’s something they need right now. An easy question. An easy answer.

“Forty one. We can never get it right.”

“It’s fine. It’s always me anyway. This way there are-”

Victor’s heart thuds.

“Years,” he says. He croaks. “Years and years.”

The woman from the counter comes to take their order and speaks to Peter in Japanese and he answers in the same. They chat like old friends, which Victor isn’t sure they aren’t. Peter motions across the table once and says something that makes her laugh. His eyes are bright, animated as he speaks. The waitress leaves two small glasses of hot tea, bows slightly, and walks away.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Peter says. “I ordered for you.”

“I’ll eat anything. Your Japanese is good. I think, anyway.”

Peter laughs. His hair is just long enough to tuck behind his ears and he does.

“It should be, after three years of speaking it every day.”

“I saw that you teach now. English?”

He knows that to be the case as they’ve spoken about it before, after the agency found Peter for him last month, but he too needs something to say as they ease out of these first minutes together. Peter nods and Victor squeezes his hand tighter. It is, in this cold winter afternoon, the only skin Peter has showing besides his face and Victor wants to drink it in.

“I found you. I can’t believe this face. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to see you so young, to really see you as a young man. And this is a very good face.”

At this Peter begins to blush. Two blooms of pink appear on the apples of his cheeks.

“Aren’t you going to ask what I ordered for you?”

“No,” says Victor.

With a quick movement, he kisses Peter’s hand.

“I suppose we should introduce ourselves,” he says. “Really, not just talking over these-”

He motions with his head to the bulky watch on his wrist, flashing messages at him even now. He doesn’t like it at all. Letters, it used to be. Letters that took ages to reach him, letters sent when they were called different names and the world moved more slowly. Peter nods. He laces their fingers together.

“Peter.”

“Victor.”

⁂

They go to the hotel after eating, to collect the bag Victor dropped off that morning.

Peter waits downstairs while Victor goes up. He only has one large duffel bag, left sitting in the middle of the still made bed.

He never slept here, was never really going to.

Victor settles his bill and he and Peter walk back to the subway together. He follows Peter’s lead; paying for the ticket, walking, where to sit. Drowsiness hits when the train moves. He tries to keep his eyes open but slumps against Peter.

“Almost there,” says Peter.

He thinks Peter wakes him when their stop comes, but he isn’t sure if he slept or not. Their hands brush and Victor follows the red scarf through the crowd.

His apartment is hardly more than a room, and a small one at that.

There is a tour anyway, including an explanation of what all of the buttons on various appliances, written in a language Victor doesn’t read, do. He peeks in the refrigerator and it is full of unfamiliar foods, or familiar ones in strange packaging.

He is jet lagged. He lies down on the small bed and Peter sits next to him, massaging his wrist with his free hand while he speaks in Japanese to someone on his watch. Victor nearly falls asleep like that, a soft hand rubbing his wrist, listening to his love’s voice. Forty one had not felt so old in London, getting on the plane. Forty one had not felt so old when he wasn’t in the bed of a man almost two decades his junior. But he consoles himself with the thought of how long they’ll have this time. Twenty four, he thinks to himself over and over. He’s only twenty four. Even his youngest death before was thirty seven. They could have thirteen years this time.

He takes a deep breath, rolls over to press his nose against Peter’s hand, and realizes that Peter smells the same as he always has. It anchors him in this storm of newness and he clings to it. His exhaustion takes over.

When he wakes, he has been undressed. Peter is asleep beside him, naked. Quietly as he can, Victor gets up from the bed. He cracks the blind. Darkness. The city’s glow just peers over a neighboring building. Peter lives in a hidden pocket of quiet and shadow.

Not knowing why, he dresses and puts on his shoes at the door. He steps out onto the landing and goes down the stairs. At the street, he crosses and then walks until he reaches one of the convenience stores and enters. Another bell. Another greeting. The store feels as clean and safe as a hospital.

He fills his arms with food and goes to the counter. The man scans his purchases and says something Victor doesn’t understand. Victor blinks and the cashier turns the screen of the register toward him so he can see the total. He fumbles with the money in his pocket and holds it out to the cashier helplessly. The cashier motions at Victor’s watch and, obviously exasperated, says something in Japanese. Victor shrugs and the other man shakes his head, says something else that commits itself to Victor’s memory along with the grin it’s delivered with. The cashier plucks a few bills from Victor’s hand and then hands back his change, which Victor pockets.

“Er, thanks,” says Victor.

Finding his way back to Peter is easier than he had hoped. When he opens the door, he sees that Peter is awake and sitting on the bed, still undressed. The look of worry on his face eases as the door closes.

“Food,” says Victor a bit lamely and Peter smiles, patting the space next to him on the bed. Victor joins him and drops the food onto the mattress.

“What have we here?” asks Peter.

“I,” says Victor, “have no idea.”

Peter reads each label to Victor, feeds him bites of the new foods as he teaches him the words for what he eats. He draws the characters on the back of Victor’s hand with his finger and the two of them laugh. Peter never dresses, so Victor tries to replicate a few characters on his bare stomach. When the food is gone, they lie down. Victor begins to fall asleep, but suddenly remembers a question he had and lifts his head from Peter’s chest.

“Hey,” he says. “This man said something. In the store. What does it mean?”

Victor repeats the phrase as best he can and Peter laughs.

“He called you a grandfather. He means you’re old, I’m afraid, which is simply not true.”

“It’s these watches,” Victor says. “Never got the hang of them.”

“But they’ve been around since you were small.”

Victor sighs tiredly.

“I really don’t think I’m suited for this life, love. I was better before.”

They talk until nearly sunrise. Victor’s eyes droop and he is barely aware of being undressed again. Peter murmurs to him to relax, to rest. The warmth of Peter’s body envelopes him and then, he sleeps.

⁂

The apartment is half filled with steam from a shower the next time he wakes. Morning brightness fills the little apartment. Peter is not in the bed, his shoes are not by the door. A wet towel hangs on the bedpost.

He left a note, a handwritten one and not a message on the watches. Victor thrills at it, to see his handwriting again. It’s not as neat as it was before and he spends some time getting to know how his love writes now, charmed by how messy the mix of cursive and print is.

“Work. I’ll come home at lunch for you. Rest. Love, Peter.”

Small pieces of paper are taped onto the walls and the appliances, decorating the place like a party, like a holiday. On each, an English translation is written for what a nearby button does. There is a poem of sorts next to the shower, describing how it works. Verses laying out the steps in this sweet, sprawling handwriting, handwriting that brings Victor back over a century to a letter clutched in his dirty hands. He was a soldier then and letters were all they had. Victor reads the note Peter left for him carefully, lays it just as carefully atop his clothes so that it doesn’t get wet, and follows each step. Soon, he is rewarded with warm water flowing down his back.

There is a spare towel laid out for him, thin and green. He wraps himself in it and walks back to the bed.

It isn’t long after he picks fresh clothes from his bag that the door unlocks and Peter arrives home.

That night, Peter cooks them an intricate meal, or what seems to Victor to be one, on the small range in his apartment. Victor watches from the comfort of the bed as Peter shreds cabbage and mixes up some sort of batter. Peter appears comfortable, hardly thinking about his task at all, or about the messages his watch sometimes projects onto the wall in front of the stove. Occasionally, a face will appear, one of his friends, and Peter has a short conversation that Victor can’t follow. The words are anyway half swallowed by the sizzle of the food frying on the stove. A few times Victor hears his own name. A Japanese television program plays on Victor’s watch, but he changes to the news and is grateful when English fills his ears again. Peter looks back once when he hears the change, but soon returns to his cooking.

“Nine lives is all it took you to learn to cook,” says Victor with a laugh when Peter brings the plates to the bed. Peter eats with chopsticks but has brought a fork for Victor.

Peter doesn’t smile at him in return. Victor knows what’s coming. Panic tightens around his stomach.

In his ears, the sound of screeching tires. A blaring car horn. He’s had forty one years to think about this, forty one years and a few weeks spent at the end of his eighth life to think about how Peter died before, and he’s not sure at all he hasn’t invented the sensation after having so long to think about it. His body goes cold and then hot, leaving him with prickles all over his skin.

“Will we talk about it?” Peter asks softly. “About last time? We must talk about it.”

Victor looks down at his feet. His heart begins to thud again, pounding in desperation, but it’s too much and he feels like it’s choking him.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have gone. I didn’t know though. I didn’t know it would happen while I was away. It’s never been an accident before.”

Peter’s warm, gray eyes flash with anger.

“You weren’t away,” he says with uncommon force. “We had a fight and you went back to England and left me in America. I was alone when I died. I haven’t been able to shake it, Victor. It’s dug into me. I think it’s a part of me, now.”

“Me too,” says Victor.

Peter’s lips narrow, pressed together, and his brow furrows. It’s a strange thing for Victor to see this anger. Peter has never been really mad at him before and he recoils from it.

“It’s a part of you? I see it at night,” says Peter. “I see the ambulance, my mangled bike on the side of the road, my stupid shoe next to it. The blood on the ground. There are sirens in my ears when I dream. I feel myself trying to call out for you. I can’t breathe. I feel my bones break, Victor. And you weren’t there.”

As the words hit Victor, he begins to cry and seeing it, the expression on Peter’s face softens. He sets his plate on the floor and moves closer to Victor, placing his hand on his knee.

“We need to talk about it,” he says.

“I’m here,” whispers Victor. “I’m here, where you are. I’m going to learn Japanese. I’m going to-”

“I know.”

Victor had known when it happened. A week had passed since arriving in London after their fight and, despite the unbearable strain of being apart, he hadn’t even tried yet to speak to Ellison, whom he had left in America, where he’d been born his eighth life. His world collapsed over tea on a Thursday morning as he readied himself for work. He felt a snap inside his gut, something in him breaking, and there was a horrible bleachy smell in his nose. He dropped his cup to the ground as dizziness hit, as his senses flooded, and it shattered at his feet. The hot tea scalded the top of his foot. His head smacked the table on the way down and there was pain and red in his eyes, painful flashing dots. He lost consciousness to the sound of American voices, to a tingling in his fingers and toes. Darkness like a vice, wringing out the light. When he came to, he was in London again, on his kitchen floor with a gash in his forehead. His neighbor leaned over him, a bloody rag in her hand from trying to clean him up, and he knew without a doubt that Ellison was dead. Eight deaths and he had been there for all of them but that one.

“You didn’t have to do what you did,” Peter says. To Victor’s relief, he reaches over and smoothes his hair back. “I’m just as mad about that as I am everything else. Why in the world would you do that yourself?”

“It was all I could think of to get back to you, to try to make it right. I didn’t want to wait. I wanted to get started again so I could see you.”

Peter pulls him close and presses their foreheads together.

“I was safe. I was safe and waiting.”

The two men sit for a while like that, Victor sobbing on Peter’s shoulder. Peter moves his hand to the back of Victor’s neck and strokes his hairline. Victor lifts his head and looks Peter in the eyes.

“We’re okay,” Peter assures him, kissing his cheek. He picks back up his plate and begins to eat. It’s a shaky moment, somewhat forced, but it helps Victor to breathe again.

“Can I use those?” Victor asks, motioning to the chopsticks.

“Sure.”

Peter hands them to him and places his fingers where they need to be. With his hands on top of Victor’s, he helps him secure a bite of food between the chopsticks and then helps Victor lift it to his lips. Peter then does the same again, except for the last step, when they put a bite of food to his mouth instead of Victor’s. They finish eating this way, every movement slow and done in tandem, and Victor puts the plates in the sink.

Peter’s watch blinks at him, and for a moment a young woman’s face appears on the ceiling. She’s Peter’s age; her long hair straight and to her shoulders and she wears big glasses. Peter shuts it off mid-message.

“A walk?” asks Peter.

“That sounds great.”

A drizzle starts as Peter shows him the neighborhood. They go into a few shops and Peter buys him an ice cream and tells him about his day at work. Victor’s feet begin to tire and the walk works, does what he thinks Peter wanted it to do. Exhausted, distracted, he lets go of things a little and untenses. The last stop before home is a large toy shop. It stretches, tall and thin, up several stories. A skylight displays the moon like a painting on the ceiling. Peter shows him a hologram dog that he wants to buy. It sits sweetly at his feet looking up with big eyes.

“It’s a bit silly…” says Peter.

“Not at all.”

Victor moves toward the dog, this collection of light, unsure what to do when it yips and rolls over. He puts his hand out but quickly draws it back.

“Do you remember Pippin?” he asks. “That dog we had in 1937?”

“Of course. He kept me sane when you were gone.”

For a moment, he wishes he could go back. When a warm dog lay on his feet and his love wasn’t so brazenly young, wasn’t someone whose death made such a clatter in his ears now. His love had been named Daniel then and had worn small reading glasses, had a few wrinkles just around his eyes. Victor understood that world better, having tea from a stained cup, sitting up on a night dense with fog at the window, a homemade quilt pulled over them. He doesn’t know what to do with this bright, hard world that makes him feel like he’s trapped in an eggshell, or with the pain on Peter’s face. Peter’s youth is beautiful and disconcerting and unfamiliar.

“Peter. I want to go home.”

Peter squeezes his hand.

“Of course.”

They leave the store and arrive back to their apartment damp and change before getting into bed, leaving their clothes to hang in the shower.

That night he has another Japanese lesson, a few words Peter teaches him as he falls asleep.

Boy. Girl. Birthday. Green.

The grip Victor’s last life had on him for the evening loosens further hearing Peter’ s voice and putting, or trying to put, these new words to memory.

Orange, Peter teaches him. Victor repeats it in a drowsy mumble. His eyes are heavy, but the horrible noise of shattering glass has gone from his ears. Peter smells the same as he has in eight other lives.

“Umbrella,” says Peter in Japanese with a yawn.

Umbrella.

Victor isn’t sure if he speaks it or not. He rolls over and places his cheek against Peter’s bare chest. Peter holds the back of his neck with his soft hand.

“You can sleep.”

I feel my bones break.

“More?” asks Victor.

His body moves with Peter’s sigh. Lips against his temple.

“I think that’s enough for today.”