his palms over his ears, but the sound of the vacuum still seeped inside.
6
THE NEXT MORNING HIS BODY, AS WELL AS HIS CLOTHES, HAD dried and he prepared himself to go. But Maiko explained that she was lonely, she missed her sister, and suggested he stay at her apartment until he found a place of his own. He felt, nearly, happy and almost forgot the mushroom smell. She offered to help him too: she could repaint his skin.
“Then get dressed. We’re leaving,” she said, and gave him a straw hat to cover his head.
“This is ridiculous. Now I’ll really stand out.”
“Let them think whatever they want.” Maiko pushed them out and locked the door. “We’re going. Here, take my arm.”
They linked arms and Maiko laughed. She teased the hat a bit and then they set off, her maribou mantle clasped around her neck.
The sun was beaming, the sky clear, and the road dry. The only evidence of yesterday’s rainstorm sat in the gutter—a pile of wet leaves. Once outside, he was relieved to be free of the musty apartment.
“Has it really only been a day?” he asked.
“It’s always like that here. One day, it’s one thing, and the next day, like nothing’s ever happened.”
His reattached arm still felt strange to him, but even stranger was that he had no control of his movements, linked as he was to Maiko. When she stopped, he had to stop. When she turned, he followed. His body didn’t have the weight to alter their path.
Although he wanted to see everything—the shops for hatters, druggists, and the cyclists, the pedestrians, the people inside cars—Michael kept his gaze mostly focused on the ground. Occasionally he looked up to take in what everyone wore. Everyone was dressed slightly strange. Colors that seemed mismatched made up a single outfit. And his straw hat turned out to be the least unusual headpiece. Some pedestrians had hats with large feathers or oversized eyeglasses with thick, tinted lenses. And the hairstyles! Several women had elaborately shaped hair, held in place by wires, vines, even bird nests.
“This is Willard’s,” Maiko announced after they had crossed many busy streets. Suddenly, they were standing before the doors where only yesterday Michael had watched the young girl splash in a puddle before being swept away by her mother in a taxi.
“Wait here,” Maiko said. “I’ll be back in five minutes.” She unclipped her maribou mantle and wrapped it around him. “Don’t talk to anyone, and don’t move.”
He continued to stare at the ground, counting the number of spots where gum had been spat out and smashed into the concrete. Maiko returned ten minutes later with her purse bulging with small cans of touchup paint. She put her mantle back on, and then led him to the side of the building.
“Look at them,” Maiko said, as they passed the mannequins in the display window, furs draped across their still necks. “No one will buy furs from these girls. They’re lifeless.”
Michael paused before the window. One of the mannequins had a broken thumb. In the glass, he saw the outline of his dented face.
“And look,” she said, “No one’s even stopping for them. No one will ask them for autographs later.”
She was agitated, her maribou mantle sliding off and exposing her bare shoulders. She sucked in her cheeks and pouted like a fish. For a moment, he thought she was going to begin competing with the models, posing in the street, but they kept walking. In the sunlight, he noticed that Maiko’s mantle, which had appeared luxurious and rich in the dark apartment, was actually quite tattered, and the fur was flat and had missing tufts. He was swept along with her long strides, and they were almost back home before he realized she had been crying.
Back in the apartment, he stripped to his underwear, standing on sheets of the day’s newspaper, shy of the exposed parts of his body. Maiko painted on a glowing, fresh coat. It was slightly off from his previous skin tone color, making him appear somewhat gray under the kitchen light. Just as the repairs to his arm transformed him in a small way, the new paint altered him too. Each of these was a good thing, he told himself, believing that underneath these temporary changes he was still the same.
He had to stand for several hours to dry. While he stood, he listened to the programs on the radio: a concert, then a radio play, and finally the news, read by a fiery broadcaster who didn’t hesitate to interject his own opinions about things. It was a voice Michael recognized immediately.
“This is how bad it’s become in the city,” the anchor ranted. “Now even mermaids are trying to live there. But they obviously can’t survive there. They’re just another kind of immigrant. Too many are flooding the city and causing more harm than good. One flopped onto the road the other day and caused my bus to crash. And does the city know how to respond to emergencies like this? If you were on the highway anywhere nearby, you’d have your answer! Put it this way: I didn’t make it back to the studio until the next day.”
So he’s a radio host, Michael thought, his heart drumming.
“We don’t need to listen to this dreck.” Maiko came into the room and snapped the radio dial off. Michael sighed and continued to wait to dry in the silence. Of course the one-eyed man would be a radio host. He could hide behind the airwaves to share his opinions. Why would someone like that steal from somebody like me? A radio personality should have plenty of money.
At the kitchen table, Maiko flipped through the remaining sections of the newspaper. She was holding the classifieds section when she paused to study his features again. “What will you do here? Once you’ve recovered?”
“What do you mean?”
“Here in the city. For work.”
He shrugged. He glanced at the brush she had used on him. “Paint.”
She stared. “You’re an artist?”
He shrugged again.
Her gaze grew hard, her mouth turned down. “That may have been fine when your were a man of means. But now you need to survive. What kind of work do you do? Actual work?”
He was silent. Even the thought of saying it pained him.
“You’ll need one. You’ll need money.” She appeared very serious about this.
“I used to work in accounting,” he blurted. “Bookkeeping.”
It took a few years, but one day his father gave Michael an occupation to go with his new body. Since he couldn’t risk going outside and damaging himself and he didn’t want to see anybody (which was his father’s coded way of saying nobody wanted to see him), Michael was given a pile of bills to go over. Why don’t you go ahead and compare them to the checkbook ledger, his father had suggested. At the time, Michael had been drawing for hours a day and growing frustrated by the crude results. This, he realized, was his father’s way of telling him to give it up.
Despite the sad facts of the story, Maiko’s face brightened. “Perfect. A city always needs bookkeepers. But wait, you need a work permit.”
There was a long pause. He wasn’t ready to make a decision
