I’m starting to think she did steal stuff from me. The Japanese Waif. I don’t remember how much I’ve talked about her in this space but she was quite the presence in my life for several months before Covid. She went into full-tilt lockdown and we did not see each other for months. The timetable is lost on me now but when we did try to get back to our fuckfests it was just never the same.<\/p>\n
She’s the one I met on a Q66 bus, I think it was August or September, 2019. There was one other passenger on that bus when she boarded at Woodside Avenue. She took one look at me and, in a bus that was basically empty, sat down right next to me and just started talking and talking and non-stop talking. It was not a monologue. She listened. It was true conversation. But when she clumsily turned the subject matter to obscure classical piano composers and payphones I was just starting to think “This is too easy” when she stopped talking, put her hands over her face, and said “I know who you are. You’re Mark Thomas!”<\/p>\n
Her face was beet red and she started crying. All I could think to do was put my arm around her. It was a sweet moment. Who said romance on the Q66 bus was dead? She’d been a fan of my web stuff for years, originally finding me on account of her reliance on payphones in earlier years. She used my website like a phone book for finding payphones in Flushing and Jackson Heights. She continued to communicate with others solely through payphones until the bitter end, when there were still payphones out there but they were increasingly sparce and virtually 100% unreliable. She turned to burner phones instead.<\/p>\n
She stayed off the radar because she was here illegally. Or something like that. Much of her narrative and timeline do not make sense to me and never did but she was sweet, cute, and an absolute animal in bed, as I quickly discovered less than an hour after we met on that Q66. She is hardly the first Japanese woman I’ve known who made no secret of her fetish for white American men.<\/p>\n
She claimed to be 26, which was about half my age at the time, but I’ve come to doubt she was anything less than 40. The texture of her skin and the inconsistencies in her timeline…<\/p>\n
One day she got disappeared. A man identifying himself as her upstairs neighbor and business partner called from her burner phone to say she’d been deported. She’d been in trouble with ICE on account of her compulsive shoplifting, and by his account she just could not contain her impulses. This was out of absolutely out of nowhere to me, and yet somehow the discrepencies in her accounts of her life made this seem almost poetic. She was textbook klepto, dressing up in Abraham Lincoln disguises and making herself a total pain in the ass for Flushing-area grocery stores and clothiers.<\/p>\n
Is any or all of this story real? I will never know. The phone call from her business partner might have just been something she got him to do because our sex wasn’t any good anymore. But a key part of our lore had been that she stole from stores and entities but never anything from me. Now I have reason to question that. In one of our last conversations she made a strange, opaque comment about feather dusters. I did not connect this comment to the fact that I owned a set of feather dusters. She was just saying that she wished she had more of them. It reminded me of her apartment, its curious combination of spartan and messy. It was not dusty.<\/p>\n
I did not dwell on it. She would sometimes blurt out seemingly incongruous thoughts that were later explainable. This one was never explained until, possibly,\u00a0 today. I was dismantling my desktop PC when I thought I’d get one of my rarely-used feather dusters to clean off the PC’s innards as well as its outards. In my closet there used to be a set of 4 dusters. Now there is only one. Feather dusters are not the sort of thing I would throw out. I also remember thinking a few weeks ago that the set of undeveloped rolls of film on a bookshelf used to number over a dozen. Why are there only 5 now? That bookshelf is next to the closet where the feather dusters used to be. And what ever happened to that pile of ~20 copies of the first edition of Apology Magazine<\/em>? They are gone.<\/p>\n These absent objects make her body feel present again. I feel her teasing me again in experienced, knowing ways that no 26-year old would have yet mastered.<\/p>\n Skepticism aside, I do believe she was deported. The gentleman who called me that night was entirely credible and knowledgable about kleptomania and compulsive shoplifting. He also knew details about me that he could only have known through her, and she had mentioned him to me many times in ways that made that phone conversation make sense, her landscape of lies notwithstanding.<\/p>\n A couple of weeks after her vanishment I changed the sheets and discovered she was also a bedwetter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m starting to think she did steal stuff from me. The Japanese Waif. I don’t remember how much I’ve talked about her in this space but she was quite the presence in my life for several months before Covid. She went into full-tilt lockdown and we did not see each other for months. The timetable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-ckY","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47428"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47429,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47428\/revisions\/47429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}