50. But she's sleeping

It is well past one a.m. in D.C. where my cousin lives. If my neck weren’t on the chopping block, I might wait until a more civilized hour to call. 

I try the number as Dita gave it to me with the extra digit and, not surprisingly, don’t get through. “One of the numbers has to go.” I drop the last digit, and, presto, the phone starts ringing.

“Hello?” It’s my aunt. She sounds wide-awake. Must be the jetlag.

“Hello. Ammteh Michelin, this is Rémy.”

“Rémy! It’s so good to hear your voice. What are you doing?”

“Ammteh, I haven’t got much time. Is Naila there?”

“Yes, but she’s sleeping.”

“Listen: I need to talk to her right now. It’s extremely important.”

“Shall I wake her?”

“Yes, yes! Yal’luh, wake her up!”

“Khalass, Rémy. I’ll get her.”

Naila is still half asleep when she comes to the phone. It always takes my cousin a good half an hour to sweep the cobwebs out of her head and start talking coherently, but I don’t have the time for pleasantries.

“Naila, you sent me a package a few weeks ago.”

There is a muffled grunt on the other side of the phone. Hardly the kind of unequivocal affirmation the situation demands.

“Naila, you’ve got to wake up and listen! You sent me a package, right?”

“Yeah,” she says, blowing her nose into the receiver.

“What did you send me?”

She mumbles something about dryer sheets, charcoal for my narghilè. These are the same things she mentioned in her mail.

“What else did you send?”

“Um, I don’t remember.”

“Naila, you’ve gotto remember! What was in the package?”

After a pause, she says, “Vitamins?”

“Vitamins? What the hell do you mean by vitamins?” My aunt must be eavesdropping. “Listen, Naila, my place was raided by the police this morning.”

“Oh, my God! I’m so sorry, Rémy!” Now my cousin is awake. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so . . .”

“Naila, what did you send?”

Adderall is the muted answer.

“Adderall . . .”

In a way, it is a relief to hear that a fairly common prescription drug might be what all the fuss is about. Things could be much, much worse and I admit so to my cousin.

“I want to say it’s all right, Naila, like, hey, no problem, but I can’t. I’m in a shitload of trouble . . . not nearly as much trouble as I could have been if the police had, say, raided my place last week . . . if you catch my drift.”

She does. After living with me for ten months last year, there isn’t much my cousin doesn’t know about me.

“The thing is, Naila,” I continue “and forgive my vulgarity, but I feel as if the cops are pointing their fingers at me and accusing me of farting when, in reality, I’ve shit my pants.”

Halfway around the world, my cousin laughs nervously.

“What are you going to do?” she asks.

“Not a fucking clue. I don’t know what my options are, for one. I don’t even know if I’m legally obliged to talk to the cops. And, I don’t know how contained this is.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Party,” I answer.

“Oh, right.” 

The Party is the nickname Naila and I gave my friend dé Dale, who has a habit of replying, “I am the party,” whenever someone asks him if there are any parties going on.

My cousin begs me to leave Japan. “You told me you were thinking of leaving,” she says. “Now’s your chance.”

“I can’t, Naila. Bastards took my passport away.”

“Oh, haraam, Rémy, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I haven’t got much time left on this phone card. Listen. I’m not angry with you, Naila. So, let’s save the apologies for later . . . I have to go in Sunday morning for questioning. I’ll try to call again before then, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Just in case, God forbid, I don’t get through to you again, if you are ever asked, tell them . . . well, tell them the truth: I did not ask for the Adderall to be sent. I did not want it. Did not need it. I did not even know it was coming. Okay? I didn’t ask, didn’t want, didn’t know. You got that?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’ll call again. Bye.”

“Be careful, Rémy. I’m so sorry.”

“Remember: I didn’t ask, didn’t want, didn’t know . . . Didn’t ask, didn’t . . .”

And then the line goes dead.

The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.

40. Smart Drugs & Not So Smart People

Windbreaker comes around again and asks if I like traveling.

“Yeah. I go to Southeast Asia—Thailand, Malaysia, and so on—about once a year. And, I try to visit a new country at least once every one or two years.”

“You do drugs when you were there?”

“Pardon me?”

“You do drugs when you were there?”

“Where?”

“Thailand. Did you do drugs in Thailand?”

“Huh?”

“Have you done drugs in Thailand? You know, ecstasy?”

On the bookshelf just behind Windbreaker is an article my friend dé Dale clipped for me from The Bangkok Times a few weeks ago. It describes Thailand’s illicit trade in narcotics, yaba in particular.

“You must be joking.” I say. “Of course, I haven’t.”

“Oh? Why not?” Windbreaker seems surprised.

“Why not? Because I have zero interest in being thrown into a Thai jail is why not!”

“How about Japan, you ever do drugs in Japan? You ever smoke ‘ganja’?”

“Ganja?”

“Marijuana.”

“Marijuana? No. Never.”

“You’ve never smoked ganja?”

“Look, I’d be lying if I said I’d never smoked,” I admit, somewhat apologetically. “In college, you know, I 'experimented' with it just like everyone else. Hell, even President Clinton did. But, no, I have never smoked marijuana in Japan.”

Cross my heart and hope to die.

A taller cop, thinning on top and shabbily dressed, takes a large case off the top of my refrigerator, places it on the dining table and opens it. Inside is a water pipe, broken down into about eight pieces.

“What’s this?” he asks, holding up the Bohemian glass bowl that forms the base of the pipe.

“It’s an narghilè,”I say. [1]

“A what?”

“A water pipe from Lebanon,” I explain, “for smoking tobacco. The tobacco is in the cabinet across from the fridge. Top shelf.”

If there anything in my apartment is suspicious, it’s that pipe, but, rather than pack it up with all the other things the cops are now confiscating, he returns the narghilè to its case and puts it back on top of the refrigerator. You can smoke dope with one of those, not that I’m going to tell them.

The same cop, clearly not the sharpest tool in the proverbial shed, asks if I am Muslim.

“How many Muslims do you know keep a well-stocked bar?”

I have a small shrine of sorts dedicated to St. Max Kolbe—patron saint of, among all things, addicts—stocked with Ron Zacapa Centenario, Absinthe, Bombay Sapphire, Satsuma potato shōchū, Tres Generacionestequila, Pernod, and so on to keep the home fire burning.

He sighs irritably, then, starts hunting through the contents of my refrigerator where, in addition to the usual perishables, I keep vitamins and other supplements on the top rack of the door.

“What’s this,” he asks, holding up a small bottle of filled with a green liquid.

“It’s Champo-Phenique,” I answer. “It’s for insect bites and cold sores.”

He bags it up as evidence. Then, he removes a small box. “And this?” 

“I have rhinitis,” I explain, pulling a handkerchief from my back pocket and honking the klaxon good and loud for effect. “It helps.” Sniff-sniff.

The box contains about a month’s supply of Modafinil, a mild stimulant I’ve been taking for the past three years—I happen to be slightly jazzed up on it this morning. Did I give the truth a slight twist by saying it helped with my rhinitis? Not really. It does help me keep my eyes open when the allergy meds I take daily are trying to pull the shades down.

But Modafinil does so much more, something that I’m not about to let them in on, because, as they say, loose lips sink ships, a fact that is made all the more poignant when your boat is filled gunwale-to-gunwale with plainclothesmen. Modafinil taken with a cocktail of the Cognamine and other nootropic smart drugs will have you soaring like a rocket all night and landing softly as if onto a giant marshmallow. Astonishingly enough, none of them are controlled substances in Japan.[2]

The cop drops the Modafinil into a Ziploc bag to be sent to the lab, then closes the fridge having done his bit.

[1]The names for water pipes vary from country to country. In many parts of the Middle East water pipes are called narghilè (pronounced “arghileh”). “Hookah” comes from the Indian word for the pipe.

[2]“Nootropics” are drugs that are said to enhance cognition, memory, and attention. Many of the drugs mentioned above have since become controlled substances in Japan. (Party poopers.)

The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.

17. The Infirmary

At the end of the corridor we come to a wall of bars. The orderly asks me to turn away as he fiddles with the lock.

When the barred door is opened, I’m told to walk through and face the other way again. Even still, I can watch him from the corner of my eye as he locks the door. Of all the keys dangling from a chain on his belt, he’s using the one with a blue rubber collar on it.

The orderly leads me up four flights of stairs and down a wide hallway, the walls of which are covered with posters of Kyūshū’s scenic spots—Takachihō in Miyazaki Prefecture, the hot-spring town of Beppu in Ōita.

Down another flight of stairs we go to the third floor, where, turning a corner, we arrive at the infirmary, a cramped, dimly lit, and dingy room.

Entering, I find two thugs seated on folding chairs. One looks up with weary amusement, and, elbowing the other, whispers, “Check out the gaijin!”

Holding up a paper cup in his scabby red hand, the orderly gestures towards a toilet in the rear. I take the cup and head for the lavatory.

On the wall above the toilet is a calendar.

It’s been ten days . . . Ten days since last Sunday . . . I should be in the clear by now, but Christ . . . you never can tell, can you, what will show up if they know what to look for . . . God, what was I thinking?

I take a deep breath and start dribbling into the paper cup.

A moment later, I emerge from the lavatory and hand the warm sample back to the orderly who dips a slip of paper into it.

“Right, nothing out of the ordinary here,” he says and makes a notation on a form attached to a clipboard. Returning the cup to me, he tells me to flush it down the toilet.

After washing my hands, I sit down opposite the orderly at a clunky old steel desk, easily as old as this tumbledown jail, and answer a questionnaire.

“Number?” he asks.

“Rokuban,” I reply.

After asking my name, age, date of birth, and so on, the orderly wants to know if I’m gay.

“No,” I reply, indignant.

What the hell are you throwing out a question like that with those two bruisers sitting just on the other side of this curtain?

He ticks a box that says “No”, then moves onto the next question: “Have you got pearls or piercing of any kind in your genitalia?”

Enough with the pearls already!

“No, I do not.”

“Have you got any tattoos?”

“No.”

“You ever go to Soapland?”

“Excuse me?”

I know exactly what he means. It just flabbergasts me that anyone would ask so matter-of-factly whether I got my pipes cleaned at massage parlors.

Listen: part of me clings stubbornly to the belief that there is no reason to pay good money for a commodity that still remains abundant and free. After all, even at the age of forty with my graying hair and all, young Japanese women still manage to find me only slightly less attractive than they did when I was ten years younger. The day I have to go to Soapland in order to get my knob polished is a day I dread with the same trepidation I suspect many women must face menopause.

“No, I have never been to a Soapland,” I tell him, mildly indignant.

“Right,” he says. “No worries about AIDS, then.”

Well, that was thorough.

After making a notation on the form, the orderly scratches a dry spot behind his ear with the end of the pen, sending a small flurry of dandruff fluttering down.

“Do you drink?”

“Yes,” I answer, averting my eyes from an eczema snowdrift forming on the desk.

“How much?”

“Depends.”

“On average?”

I shrug. On average, I suppose I don’t drink much, but I do go on the occasional binge if the mood strikes me. I can polish off a bottle of Ron Zacapa Centenario in a day and a half and not feel the worse for it. I can hold my own in the company of Russians over a bottle of raspberry-infused vodka. I drink, but I’m no drunk.

“A beer, maybe two, a day,” I offer the orderly.

“Tobacco?”

“Yes.”

“How many cigarettes a day?” he asks, ticking a box on the form.

“I don’t smoke cigarettes,” I reply.

“What? You smoke, right?”

“Yes, but I don’t smoke cigarettes.”

“What do you smoke then?”

“Narghilè,” I reply. “A water pipe.”

“Marijuana?”

“No, no, no. Tobacco.”

“With a water pipe?” It doesn’t seem to register in that scabby head of his, and, to be perfectly honest, I couldn’t care less if it did.

“Yeah,” I say. “With a water pipe.”

“How often?”

“Once or twice a week.”

“How about drugs?” he asks.

“Drugs?”

“Do you take drugs?”

They guy must be high to think he’ll get a straight answer to a question like that.

“Aside from alcohol and tobacco and caffeine and the occasional aspirin? No. No drugs.”

“Marijuana?”

“No.”

“Methamphetamine?”

“Methamphetamine? No.”

“Right, stand up against the wall over there. Cover your left eye with this,” he says, handing me a plastic spoon.

The eye chart is across the room on the opposite wall and I have to look over the heads of the two thugs to read it.

The test reveals that my eyesight isn’t nearly as good as I believed it was, but it’s little more than a ripple on the sea of upsetting news I’ve had all week.

Next, the orderly sits me down before a sphygmomanometer.

I stick my arm through the cuff. A button is pressed and the cuff inflates, constricting my arm. Red numbers flash on the screen.

“Your blood pressure’s quite high,” he says grimly.

“I just humped up four flights of stairs,” I remind him. What’s more, I’m in jail!

“Stay there and I’ll retake it in a few minutes.”

As I wait, the orderly tells one of the thugs that the doctor is ready to see him. The goon stands up, dawdles past me, and disappears behind a shabby gray curtain where the doctor is waiting.

“What’s the problem,” the doctor asks, his voice tired and unsympathetic.

“My foot itches.”

“Show me.”

“You’ve got athlete’s foot,” the doctor says flatly. “Don’t scratch it. Next!”

The man returns to his seat, cursing under his breath, and the other inmate stands up with a groan and walks around the curtain where the doctor asks again: “What’s the problem?”

“I’ve got the runs.”

“It’ll pass,” the doctor replies.

The orderly returns to retake my blood pressure and half a minute later says, “Mild hypertension. Tsk, tsk.”

Boy, that’s the least of my worries right now.

I am instructed to lie down on the examining table and wait quietly for the doctor.

Lying on my back, I notice a strip of flypaper the color of earwax hanging from the ceiling directly above my head. Speckled with the black remains of flies and gnats, I am reminded that the two thugs, the orderly, who must surely be an inmate himself, and I myself amount to little more than bugs trapped on flypaper.

After a few minutes, the doctor comes to the examining table, where he gives my abdomen a few perfunctory taps.

“How are you feeling,” he asks while looking pensively out the window.

“I’m a bit depressed.”

“Yes, well, aren’t we all, aren’t we all.”

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.