move your mouth now.”
He watched her, and it was strange and exciting that he could observe her so close and she didn’t seem to mind. She hummed out haikus and brushed her bangs, and glue stuck to the strands of hair.
“This needs to set a bit before I can remove it,” she said. He continued to lie on the table, waiting. Then, like most sensations in his paper body, it took a few moments to realize that her hands were resting on his stomach. He stayed still, for it was more important to him in this moment to show that he wasn’t afraid, even though he felt himself trembling inside; it was more important to no longer be like an adolescent from the inland but like a city dweller who could handle any surprise thrown at him. Her hands moved in ever so slow strokes, and through the eye holes of the mask he saw her head turn to look at him.
“You’re so lucky,” she finally said. “You’ll always be young. You don’t have to worry about getting older.”
“But I want to be older. I want to look my age. Someday I want gray hair and aches in my joints.”
She laughed. “You say that now.” Her hands brushed along his chest.
He didn’t know what to say. With the mold on, it was as if a huge weight pressed upon his entire body. He thought he might be suffocating until finally she pulled off the mold and wiped away the jelly. Then, the mask in her hands, she added more paper pulp to the mold to shape it and compensate for the distorted, dented side of his face.
“This needs to dry,” she said, “before I can paint it.”
Despite having the mask removed, he still felt he had a huge weight pressing upon him. “I’m going for a walk,” he said, sitting up.
“But it’s night time,” she said. “It’s not safe.”
“I’ll be fine. I won’t talk to anyone.” She frowned. He tried to ignore her stare. After putting the straw hat on, he pocketed his pencil. As a substitute to a shower, he decided, he would walk at night where the coastal air felt like cold water. If he stayed inside any longer he would explode. “I need some air after having the mask on.”
She studied him, looking for a reaction, he assumed. He didn’t know what to give her as a response.
“Don’t be too long,” she said.
9
In the evenings, we drink wine from the north and watch the sun set over the city. This is something you will never see because you never made it as more than an inland artist. It’s time you know that all of your failures hang from our walls. We had to see them every day. Even when you made me, your other sons laughed and made fun of it. The most terrible thing for me to realize is that I am your greatest creation. An object that is trapped in a stifling body and is forever ruined because of your “vision” is the best thing you ever gave to the world. And that is why you will never see it again.
As he wandered the neighborhoods and passed more pudding shops and coffee houses, he remembered at home the scent of the stacked bags of coffee stored in the gymnasium. He walked by restaurants that reeked of fish sauce and sandwich shops with the perfume of onions, and he took in all the sights of the people inside and out. How they moved behind the glass, how they interacted with their surroundings on the sidewalk—he imagined how he could act like them, how he could be any one of them.
He hiked the hill at the end of the city and sat under a crop of apple trees. Maiko had said that years ago a farmer had tried to start an apple orchard, but the city claimed the land as theirs, and the farmer had to give up his property and eventually became a poor shoe shiner. From this view under the branches, Michael was shocked to see how dark the city was. Most of the lights were turned off now. He wondered what time it was. Behind him, the lighthouse occasionally panned its single eye of light across the city before swinging it over the dark ocean, splashing its beam over the radio tower not that far north. Below the tower, a blue police light mimicked the motion of the lighthouse. Once he got a work permit from his new job, he would be equipped to cross into the north.
The darkness of the ocean was no different than the darkness that spilled onto the hills inland. So far apart and so similar, he thought. What had frustrated him most of all about his situation was to have time stopped in his own life but to have seen his brothers, all younger than him, grow into adults while he was stuck. They had transformed from skinny sticks to full grown men with facial hair and dry knuckles from working in the coffee field. They ate like lumberjacks, even though they were coffee farmers, and they were responsible and loyal to their work and each other. Michael’s paper body stayed the same, and no hair grew on his painted jaw or above his rolled paper lips. His arms never changed, stunted in this shell of a body he had to wear, no matter how many bags of coffee he dragged across the gym floor to the scale.
But now here he stood, above the compact city, its lights and sounds and smells below him, all within his grasp. He had been afraid upon arrival, but of course there were bumps along any road. They made sense, he told himself, only when he had some distance to look back. The sensation of a line, from his feet to his head, pulsed inside him, the beginnings of a sense of control. He wouldn’t be like the dead mermaid. She had tried to change too much, from a fin to a set of legs. He now understood that he would always have limits with his body, but at least he could mimic others and slowly blend himself into the city.
Below the lighthouse, he imagined himself and Maiko drinking wine, watching the whales from a rooftop apartment. That version of himself was not fully inside him yet. But somewhere in this city it existed, and he could absorb it as he had absorbed the rain and the energy around him.
To the east lay the darkness of the bay. In bookkeeping, the point was to find a balance in debits and credits. Here, the balance was not visible. The small lights all over the city did not equal the darkness, especially of the sea. He pictured what lived inside the water, what was just below the dark, flat surface. He pulled out the pencil and added to his letter. I’ve seen whales at sunset; their fins silhouetted against the sun.
When he returned to the apartment, he saw a large man in an unbuttoned coat leaning against the wall, holding himself up with one hand. Someone was crying—or the night wind was howling. A car drove by and its headlights illuminated the man’s shirt, stained with bright red blood.
“Are you all right?” Michael asked. As he approached, the man let go of the wall and tried to walk forward, but he instantly collapsed. Michael’s first instinct was to step away, afraid that his paper body would be crushed by the weight of the man, but something overtook him, a kind of courage he had not felt before, and he braced his legs to absorb the impact. The man’s body balanced itself on Michael’s shoulders, and Michael was able to use his arms to hold the man. During all this, the man moaned several times, and his bloody shirt swept across Michael like a giant paintbrush.
The apartment door opened and Maiko appeared. She stood for a moment, registering what had happened, and then she cursed. She ran to the man’s other side and helped balance him. The man kept muttering words that made no sense.
“No-no-no,” the man said.
“Who did this?” Michael asked. The man looked into Michael’s eyes, and before Michael would have been terrified of the attention, but this time he told himself not to look away and held the man’s gaze.
“Northerners,” the man said.
“Stay away from northerners,” Maiko said, but she was staring
