DAISUKE SHEN AND THOM HAWKINS / excerpt from IMAGINARY AFFAIRS
I almost went to bed with Osamu Dazai. He asked me, Is it okay to kiss you? I said, Yes of course, why not? We were standing by the river. There were no cherry blossoms. I hadn’t spoken Japanese in months. I was embarrassed because my grammar was coming out all wrong and he was embarrassed to be in front of me while dead. I think that both of us felt an intrinsic acceptance of the other. We laid down by the river and he took my hand, and told me that while I was very beautiful, he preferred that we not continue past this point (though whether or not anything had even started, who could say, the kiss hadn’t even been performed).
I pulled out a box of Lucky Strikes and he said, These are good American cigarettes.
I said, The best. My gums are fucked, I shouldn’t be doing this, but I believe one should have at least one vice that life cannot take away from them. He nodded in agreement.
As we smoked cigarettes by the rushing water, we began to speak a little on the nature of pain. Or rather I guess he felt the need to still explain to me why he didn’t want to bed me, though I didn’t need one. Regardless he began to tell me of his involvement in various affairs and intense romances and how they left him more confused each time.
ME: What is confusing about them?
DAZAI: I loved those women. I loved them. But there’s always something in me that feels suicidal when I’m near them.
ME: Forgive my asking, but is that not your natural state for everyone?
DAZAI: Yes, but this is different.
ME: I’m going to smoke another cigarette. Would you like one?
DAZAI: Yes.
ME: I think it would be inaccurate to say your sadness in love is due to misogyny.
DAZAI: Quite so.
ME: I’ve been tormented by men all my life. Really, I think I understand how you feel.
DAZAI: What causes the torment?
ME: I love men and hate men because I want to be a man.
DAZAI: Oh…
ME: Does that sound similar to what you are experiencing?
DAZAI: My childhood was hard and I was quite effeminate. I lived during a period where transgender people were not understood or talked about.
ME: I hate to tell you but now they’re talked about all the time, but in a way that’s pretty awful.
DAZAI: Why must everything be a source of shame?
ME: Well, you are a writer. And writing is a shameful profession.
DAZAI: I know. I know.
ME: And I think perhaps we were born to feel like creatures landlocked in a crematorium. We’ll never escape out of all this ash.
After that last sentence, I could tell I was making everything worse. He had this perfect, chiseled face made gaunt from solitude. But nothing in him was decaying. It was as if death had preserved him like a taxidermied bird, still radiant and poised in flight. We continued holding hands for a little while and he told me he would think about what I said regarding his potential afflictions with gender. I told him not to categorize or seek too much understanding, and he said, As if I’d ever attempt such a thing again! I laid him in the water. He backstroked his way back into the afterlife.
Later, I walked into a tea shop and felt like everything was ending all over again. My father’s funeral. My mother’s sanity. My gumline. My relationship with K., with P., with C. My paying only $600 in rent to live in Brooklyn. When the server came to refill my cup, she opened her mouth and said:
I am filling your cup with pain. It is the color of rust collecting on a cheap Target pot. When you drink your pain you will understand that making $90,000 a year copywriting for a period underwear or deodorant company would be perhaps more useful to you than whatever it is you’re doing now. If anything, the fact you didn’t already think of doing this means that you are satisfied, perhaps even happy, with the pain you endure in life. You understand I’m being both factually as well as metaphorically accurate, right? You understand that you have no real choices here?
I nodded in return, but not conclusively up and down or side to side, but in angles. I made a V with my chin. I realized that I might have been communicating with Dazai the same way—my mouth had forgotten how to speak Japanese, but my chin could trace the kanji. It was a secret channel for communicating pain. I watched the server’s chin as she continued:
“You will endure the pain, but only barely. You will seek it out in all of its varieties. You will collect it as one does eggs—fragile and hollow, lit on a shelf from a minimum of two angles. You may not experience all of the pain directly, but you will observe it. You will still feel it somewhat, even if it is happening to someone else. It won’t be so much empathy as sharing, you will experience co-pain. You will keep a journal with your finds and you will report back here each month.”
The server’s chin was flat and shaped like a unopened package. At first I had trouble following, until I imagined a pinprick of blood in its center and let my eyes fall out of focus so I could trace the blur of this line like neon on a rainy night. Then it spoke to me. It had seen things, this chin, many of them up close. It had a history that potentially preceded the server herself. Was reincarnation for chins only? It is said that the size of a chin corresponds to one’s ability to lead. You lead with the chin. Others may lead with the nose. There’s really only those two types of people—chins and noses.
Red ink spilled from the server’s silvery chin and appeared in the air as if brushed onto rice paper, a screen in front of me, spelling out backwards the trouble ahead. “Danger,” the chin repeated two or three times, then “Forest” and “Snow” and “Crane.” While I deciphered the crawl, the server continued to give instructions:
SERVER: Your notes you shall shred with your fingers.
ME: How small?
SERVER: Smaller than your pinky nail. Then feed them to a carp.
ME: Where can I get a carp?
SERVER: At the market, north of Broad.
ME: Aren’t those dead?
SERVER: Not quite. You may have to help the fish to masticate the pulp, and then squeeze the body from from to back until they excrete the paste.
ME: How long will that take?
SERVER: No longer than forty-five minutes. Put on a podcast and it will go quickly. I recommend Helgea Duponte. She has a podcast called “This Absurdian Life.”
ME: Won’t the carp start to smell after a day or two?
SERVER: Of course, You shouldn’t use the same carp two days in a row. Only the freshest carp. Otherwise they’re just too dead and it will take hours to get a page through their digestive system.
It was difficult at first to communicate in this way, but I adapted. My first lesson. I even tried to speak back with my own mochi chin, but I forgot that I needed to do the kanji backwards and the server did not acknowledge, continuing to transmit: “Room” and “Lava” and “Cloud.” It didn’t make any sense yet, but I continued to take dictation.
SERVER: Do you have a stainless steel tea ball? You’ll need one. Fill it with the excreted paste and let it steep in twice-boiled water for forty-five minutes.
ME: Listen to more Duponte?
SERVER: No, never while steeping. You must observe silence, otherwise you jumble the message.
ME: Then I drink the tea?
SERVER: Not there. Bring it here.
ME: You want me to bring tea to a tea shop?
SERVER: Of course, it’s the perfect cover.
ME: Then what?
SERVER: Drink the tea.
I watched the server’s chin for some sign that they were kidding, but it only spelled out a single word, “Dope.” As in the drug, not the person.
ME: So you never read the journal?
SERVER: I don’t need to. I watch you drink the tea.
The conversation made me feel despondent and insecure about my facial structure, and my inability to binarily identify myself as chin or nose, just like my inability to attach the bidet I’d bought online. It arrived approximately at the same time I came back home from the shop, at 18:18. I turned it clockwise, I turned it counterclockwise. I banged on it with a hammer and then with a Philips screwdriver. There had been no instructions left inside the box save for a rather ominous note: You can’t control your appetite for love. It moves through you like a diuretic. The more you drink the more you shit. Use the code URPASTLUVSWILLALWAYSHAUNTU for 20% off your next purchase.
I understood this was a dangerous sign. Panicked, I ran into my bedroom and shut my door. I spoke or rather typed through the hole in the wall to my neighbor, a former TikTok influencer turned agoraphobic who I termed as something like a friend.
@ TYLERBEATZ : hey man are u ok
@ 9s2a1 : idk
@ 9s2a1 : feeling sort of fucked up :/
@ TYLERBEATZ: I saw you got a bidet that’s pretty cool, lol
@ 9s2a1 : haha yea. what have you been up to
@ TYLERBEATZ : I’ve been inspecting the mildew on my walls. looks like there’s another flood coming
@ 9s2a1 : goddamnit
@ 9s2a1 : sorry this is sort of weird but im feeling kinda vulnerable rn. you’d say we’re friends right?
@ TYLERBEATZ : 👍
This did not inspire confidence. I wanted to say something to my neighbor then, I don’t know, something in me wanted to be held. Could I speak to him with my voice, not just through a keyboard, and ask for him to come outside, even if just for a moment, to crack open my door and cradle me in his muscular arms?
I tried to push the wall, just to see if it would give. It fell through immediately, as if made by cardboard, and who did I see sitting on the other side but a man-sized carp wearing an Arc’teryx jacket and a gold chain around his scaled neck?
Ahhh, he screamed, or rather spoke. It seemed more for the sake of seeming surprised than actual shock itself.
We stood (or he sat) there for a minute, each regarding the other with shyness and an unspoken understanding that each of us were false cutouts of ourselves, masquerading as pleasant people.
Will you be making me into paste now? he said. He seemed at peace, as if he’d been waiting for this moment all his life.
I don’t want to be a murderer, I said.
Men kill carps all the time. It’s in their nature.
My hometown team in Hiroshima were the Hiroshima Carps. We were on a ten-year losing streak when I was a child, but then we won and didn’t stop winning.
I hadn’t said it to be inspirational. It was just an observation. But I realized that my words had touched him, and now he cried with all the emotion of an Italian opera singer who, after having lost her voice, had suddenly regained it again.
Can I hold you? I asked. I still wanted to be held. Tyler’s fish lips parted, a sheen of slime stretched over the opening, and then separated. I reached through the wall and picked up the giant fish, sliding Tyler into my lap, the dorsal cradled into my right elbow and tail extended between my legs. I squeezed, but not too tightly. I wasn’t sure what was comfortable for a fish. I remembered Kurt Cobain singing “It’s okay to eat fish, cause they don’t have any feelings.” I knew that wasn’t true because my friend Reykja, an amateur ichthyologist, told me that fish have nociceptors, which are like a human’s pain receptors, but sense the kinds of conditions that are uniquely harmful for fish, like temperature increases or externally applied pressure. (They could not sense pressure from the inside, she told me, which is why goldfish are susceptible to overfeeding.)
Is this okay for you? I asked Tyler. Do you need a glass of water?
Tyler’s fish eyes searched for my own. It was disconcerting not to be able to look him in both eyes at the same time. I’d had trouble trusting previous lovers with wide-set eyes.
I remembered my quest. Can I feel your pain? I asked.
I felt Tyler’s tail go taught between my legs and I instinctively reached down and stroked from anal to caudal fin.
I keep my pain in my mouth, Tyler told me, in a nodule just inside my upper lip. Put your finger in there and feel it.
I did and felt soft tissue with a concentration of tense fibers that moved around under the pressure of my fingertip. Tyler’s mouth opened wider. I shifted my position so that as I fingered Tyler’s mouth with my left hand, I could stroke his caudal with my left. Tyler’s scaly body straightened and writhed under the external pressure and I worried that I was causing pain.
It did not stop me, though, from trying to pin down the tough spot in Tyler’s pain nodule.
His gills and pectoral fins flexed, pushing further into my grasp.
This wasn’t about the mission anymore. This was about needs—Tyler’s and my own. Despite what Reykja had told me about nocireceptors, Tyler seemed to like this sort of pain, so I kept at it.
I could feel him slipping from my arms, fins flailing. I wrapped my legs around Tyler’s tail, rubbing the inside of my thighs on this slippery appendage. As Tyler fell forward, so did I. My finger became a fishhook to hold me to the lateral line and now I was on top as I felt for his pain.
Suddenly, Tyler tensed and relaxed and I felt some excreta spill from behind the anal fin. I cupped it, preciously. I didn’t want to leave him unsupported on the floor, but I was also curious and I knew exactly what I needed to do.
I rolled over and reached for my tea ball. The Carps win again.
Daisuke Shen is the author of the forthcoming short story collection Vague Predictions & Prophecies (August 2024, CLASH Books), as well as the novella Funeral (with Vi Khi Nao, KERNPUNKT Press 2023). They live in New York City. Their website is www.daisukeshen.com.
Thom Hawkins is a writer and artist based in Maryland. He has written books soliciting anecdotes from people on a particular topic (In Name Only, A First Time for Anything, Alphabetical Orders, Musical Madeleines) and has co-authored several poetry books (Thirty Placebos; O, DeJoy; Slight Refreshments). His video art and drawings have been displayed at exhibitions or in performances in Baltimore, Wilmington (DE), Philadelphia, and New York. Thom has also appeared with the Baltimore Improv Group, Ignite Baltimore, Ignite DC, and on The Stoop Storytelling podcast.