Please enjoy this preview of my forthcoming book. Its working title is The Lost Kamikaze.
To kindle inner peace: atomize the past, and don’t cut off your pinky in a strip club. The rest is self-explanatory, especially if you’ve ever walked a tightrope.
“Do you admit to your crime?”
“I do.”
Secretly, I don’t.
I bury the knifepoint in the mat. My balls shudder as men in sunglasses stare me down. Ray-Bans inside, I want to say. That’s a crime. But only ghosts joke in a crisis.
Chop.
Disappointing party, all in all. Maybe atonement is the better word, since it demands sacrifice when sorry doesn’t cut it—like when I was nine and sliced my thumb fixing a pork roll. Fifteen paper towels for a tourniquet until my mom realized I wasn’t absorbing any juice spills.
“Did you cut yourself, Thomas?”
“Yeah.”
“With the big knife?”
I could say, “No, just the butter knife,” and probably get away with it. But I said, “Yeah, the big one.”
“Why would you keep quiet about something so serious?”
I apologized with a kid’s dearest trick: suppressed resentment. She couldn’t understand. She panicked over irregular moles, abrasions, my hair clippings at the barber’s.
Safety is success.
Later that night I crept downstairs to finish the job, hack away the unclean digit, but my dad caught me opening the drawer. I pretended I was sleepwalking.
“Oh? Oh? Where am I? Pluto?”
Thanks to a fractured attention span (blame parenting, not flashing screens), my plan for repentance faded. I concerned myself with digging worms, sketching monsters in a white notepad, jumping off various ledges. My brain didn’t dump the vow completely, I guess. My life warped around it, leaned on it for support, like ivy climbing a lattice. It said: mistakes make you dirty.
In the plane, post-hospital, I tap the armrest with my dead finger and its twenty-four stitches while humming Depeche Mode’s “Policy of Truth.”
I wonder how I’m going to explain this back home. Boss, family, girlfriend waiting to hear about the trip.
The trip? It was a fight for my dumb soul. Midway or Wake Island or Guadalcanal, just without the valor and sacrifice.
I can already hear my dad prompting me, “One word or less. Go.”
Painful?
Agonizing?
Failure?
Stupidity?
I scratch my head. Learn from history’s footprint on your face.
Shoguns in feudal Japan repaired their shattered teacups with gold or silver lacquer to make the items even more precious than before. The Asian Artifacts curator at the Freer Gallery had to say the technique’s name a dozen times before I could remember it.
“Kintsukuroi.”
“Kin-tsu-ku-roi.”
One word or less.
Tokyo spreads out beside me, then below me, and finally it recedes into imagination, a neon score to replay until my little melody fades to silence. The city carved me apart like a tentacle under the takohiki, left my capillaries to grope their way back into a usable form.
I feel like Frankenstein: a hodgepodge corpse, reanimated. And like the monster of Shelley’s villa inspirations, I wanted desperately to communicate with the outside world, even if it were only to grunt against the tines of pitchforks.
Grunt.
The plane shudders as it vanishes into cloud cover. Three thousand miles of Pacific. I stare into my food-tray’s marbled plastic like it’s the code to the glum certainty of my life. In a sense, it is, and this is not even meant to be ironic.
My restored pinky twitches; it feels atonement, maybe. At least it reminds me to take a good, hard look at how I’ve been spending my time. I doubt I have ever truly done this before—I believe what we in the United States call Rock Bottom precedes such an honest appraisal of one’s actions. And Okinawa, coupled with Tokyo City, certainly stands as my all-time low.