Yukiko Motoya - The Lonesome Bodybuilder - Stories

“Touch one and see,” he said, so I tried pressing on a brown disc with my finger. I heard a tinkling sound like coins dropping into a piggy bank, which I’d been hearing constantly all evening. I waited for something else to happen, but that was it.

“It didn’t do anything.”

“Look at the bottom of the screen. You’ve banked some money.”

Sure enough, there was a number at the lower-right-hand corner of the screen. “This is a game where you collect money?”

“Yeah.” My husband nodded while sucking on a strip of dried squid.

“Are there any bad guys?”

“Huh? Bad guys? No.”

“So you collect the money, and then what?”

“When you’ve collected enough, you can buy your own land.”

“You buy your own land, and then? What happens then?”

“More land gives you more coins.”

“Does it?”

“Yeah. Then you collect those, so you can bank money again. Then you can buy even more land.”

I didn’t say what I was thinking, but he must have sensed it.

He pulled the strip of squid from his mouth, and said, “It’s because you’re a housewife, San. You can’t understand how men don’t want to have to think about things when we get home.”

“What is it you want to avoid thinking about that badly?”

“The answers to questions like that, for example. Hey, give it back if you’re not even going to play.” My husband took the iPad from my hand and sank his head back to the game. I fled from the tinkling of coins falling and the suckling sound of him chewing on dried squid.

After that, my husband took to tinkling the fake coins incessantly, everywhere—in the bath, on the toilet, even under the covers. “Why don’t you try a different game?” I’d ask, but he’d only say, “I like this one.”

I could have understood if the game offered a vision of a wonderful world more exciting than real life. But what was so appealing about the insipid map that looked like a stage backdrop and its ever-twinkling coins? I thought perhaps the game got more interesting the longer you played, but whenever I looked over my husband’s shoulder, the screen always looked the same. It seemed that all he was doing was almost robotically placing his finger on the discs. Every time I would ask, “You really enjoy it that much?” he’d say, “That’s not what it’s about,” in a curiously languid tone.

“Hey, do we have any more of those pears someone gave us the other day? The pears?”

My husband looked up from the iPad for the first time in a while, and what I saw nearly made me shriek and run from the room. The positioning of his features was deteriorating faster than ever. His face was barely maintaining a form that could even be recognized as human.

He seemed not to realize that anything was amiss, and simply looked at me with his terrifyingly wide-set eyes, and said, “Are they all gone?”

“No,” I said. I was feigning calm, but my voice came out higher than normal.

“Can you peel me one?”

“Okay.” I turned on my heel and went back into the kitchen. There was a tremor in my hand holding the paring knife.

When I served him the peeled pear segments on a plate, the husband-like creature excitedly reached for a cocktail stick. “You know, I think pears might be my favorite fruit,” he announced.

How could he even see straight? The husband-like thing picked up the cocktail stick and popped a pear segment into the mouth, which was positioned perilously close to his jawline. His teeth must have been in their right place, because they made a champing sound as he chewed.

“Aren’t you going to have any?” the husband-like thing said.

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to. But it would have been suspicious for me to say no.

When I sat down next to him, the husband-like thing picked up the TV remote and started flipping through channels.

“This really takes me back.” On the screen, a quiz show was posing a question about an ad that had been on heavy rotation just after we’d gotten married. “We used to sing this song all the time. Remember?”

Instead of responding, I looked down and nibbled a slice of pear.

“Do you remember, on our honeymoon, how I chewed up all the fruit for you so you could eat it?”

“You did?” I said distractedly.

“Sure. You’d just gotten braces, and you said the metal hurt and you couldn’t eat anything. So I ordered a fruit platter from room service, and chewed it all up and spat it out onto the plate, and gave it to you.”

“You fed me fruit you’d already eaten?”

“And you smiled and ate it all.” The husband-like thing’s voice sounded indistinct, as if it were coming from behind a wall of water. “Maybe that’s why it’s so easy being with you. When you did that, I knew you’d probably eat up my poop with a smile too.”

That night, my husband left the iPad outside the bedroom. For the first time in months, his hand crept into my bed, under my comforter. I wanted to pretend I was asleep, but then he went to switch on the light, so I reached out and caught his hand almost by reflex.

In the darkness, my husband swiftly removed my pajama bottoms. When I thought about whether the thing that had started to move on top of me was my husband or just something like him, I felt a terrible dread and kept my eyes firmly shut. Then I felt skin slacken, and bodies start to yield, and then I could no longer tell whose sensations I was feeling. Snake ball! My body was starting to coil, and I tried to stop thinking by closing my eyes even more tightly. That only made the boundary between the skin of our entwined bodies even hazier. My husband the snake opened his mouth and swallowed me headfirst, and I desperately resisted his sticky, moist membranes, but soon the inside of his body became a pleasurable place to be. By then I was actively feeding my body to him to be devoured. He seemed to be enjoying eating me up so much that the sensation of it spread to me, and I felt as though I were tasting my own self.

After Hasebo’s wedding had come and gone, and I’d returned to my usual sequence of undistinguished days, I ran into Kitae by the checkout in the pharmacy.

“My,” Kitae said, her voice clear and effortless, “it’s been quite a while since I saw you. How have you been?”

“Fine, thank you.” For some reason I couldn’t meet her eyes. I bowed and looked down at the floor where it reflected the fluorescent lights.

Kitae, who’d joined the line after me, looked into my basket and pointed. “I use the same fabric conditioner. Isn’t it good?” and then strode off over to the kitchen goods aisle.

I decided to wait for her outside the pharmacy. The cicadas were chirring at full volume. As I was comparing prices on brands of toilet paper, Kitae came out of the automatic sliding doors carrying full bags. “San, dear, you’re looking a little tan,” she said, studying me closely from head to toe.

“Am I?”

“You certainly are. You used to be all pasty, like a sheet of paper.”

“I’ve been busy with errands lately,” I said, instinctively stepping backward under the shade of the awning.

“That must be why I haven’t seen you around.” I couldn’t decide whether she’d believed me or whether she’d just accepted my excuse.

“And have you been well?” I hesitated about asking after Sansho, leaving an awkward pause in the conversation.

Kitae seemed preoccupied by the tatami shop opposite the pharmacy, saying something about the owner. “His wife’s sick, poor man. They’re going through a hard time.” She started walking slowly up the slight hill of the main street.

I hurriedly fell into step.

“Where do you normally shop?” Kitae asked, a little out of breath.