The Dead Are More Visible Read Online Free PDF

She would not have admitted that she hated sleeping alone, but I knew it. Always, after the night’s last sex and cigarette, we would turn away from each other and lie back to back, space between us, to fall asleep, but when I woke up in the small hours she would be furled into me, face on my shoulder or pressed into my nape, sleeping hard.
    Actually—be honest—I felt the same way about sleeping alone. Actually, in my sleep, I did the same thing as she did. Pressing myself into her, my heart full.
    On a cold night of rain, the prospect of a good dinner and drinks and then sex and twined sleep—belly pleasures shared with a keen partner—stirs an expectancy under the heart that’s a facsimile of real love. For drifters and outsiders, that may have to do. The night before my flight out, we had an excellent dinner at Brain Noodle, hot sake, appetizers, sashimi and chanko nabe , all on her yen, then I walked her home through the rainy streets, sharing her umbrella, which I held. She slipped me a windowed pay envelope as we walked, hips jostling. “I thought it would be better to give it to you now, rather than afterward … after tonight. In the morning.” Behind her fogged glasses her look was as deadpan as ever, but her tone was distinctly droll. I laughed, a little drunk. I took the envelope and said, “I can’t stay until morning, though. I wish I could. I still have some packing to do and I have to be at Narita at ten.”
    That night the sex sustained itself not just on the knowledge that this wouldn’t be happening again, but also, I felt, on a covert fuel of aggression. She slammed her body against me, worked me mercilessly with her mouth, refused to let either of us rest, all the while locking me into a sexual staring match that was unnerving after almost a year in Japan, where I was no longer used to maintaining eye contact for more than a second, even with her, a lover. Now her gaze was more like an assailant’s. You forced me to fire you , her eyes seemed to say. I didn’t want to. I wanted this to go on. But my school is too important to risk . I found that I was angry too, my bites and sucks and thrusts and clutchings all forceful, rough. A firing is like a jilting; even if you fully understand the reason, in your gut you feel panic and anger.
    For a long while we couldn’t exhaust that anger and desire, but at last, after an orgasm that for me was almost painful, as if pulled into being by the roots, I collapsed and we lay side by side, staring into space, for now too tired even to smoke.
    “I’ll need to go now,” I told her. “Soon, anyway.”
    Her voice was amused: “Go means ‘to come,’ you know. In Japanese we say ‘to go.’ Iku .”
    “I think you told me that once. They don’t mention that in my primer.”
    “I suppose you will forget your Japanese.”
    “I don’t think so—not anytime soon,” I said honestly. “You’ll remember to say goodbye to my students for me? Especially the Saturday kids?”
    “Of course. I’ll say that you are called off by a family emergency.”
    “Which is hilarious. I have no family.”
    “You will have.”
    I propped myself on an elbow and looked at her—she did not look back—and it struck me that she was right. Somehow she knew it and, just then, so did I. The facsimile of love, however convincing, would no longer do.
    I lay back down, emptied, my whole body in a flaccid state.
    “I won’t forget all my Japanese,” I said, staring down at my pale paunch, still growing despite all the running and sex. “I’ll always remember how to say ‘corpse.’ ”
    “Ah, yes, your lesson book. You asked. I intended to tell you. I know the one.”
    I turned to look at her again. In the near dark I could see how the makeup had smudged around her eyes.
    “There was a scandal about that book. I was at a university then and people spoke of it. One of the professors was an officer at the war, and afterward he was imprisoned by the Americans, I