An island renowned for its rejuvenating powers, where soldiers were sent to recover in hot springs whose water repairs bruises, cuts and burns alongside the interior spirit. Bleak, seldom approached by tourists, earthquake-prone and unfashionable. Julia went there to disconnect from routine and the current that flows through modern life and its conveniences. Her axis shifted and everything about the city reminds her of losing him.
She can’t stop thinking about him because whenever their eyes met, she was looking back at herself in another person’s body, possessed from the inside. Within seconds she knew she’d met him: the stranger of her fantasies. He was the man she visualised whenever she imagined her future. An athletic man whose kisses were savage, whose lips articulated desire, whose silvery eyes revealed astral planes when his face was close to hers. The few words they exchanged hovered in the air between them such was the power.
She could say it was ‘love at first sight’ but she suspects love requires time and doesn’t happen as instantaneously as it did. Though if he did feel the same and it was real, it would be easy to believe in its miraculousness. Wholeness – oneness with herself, alone or around others – went along with him and the emptiness she has instead continues.
She came to the island to distract herself with swimming, novels, nature and relaxation. Back in Shinjuku, after her Japanese class, she’d started retracing their movements that night until the groove to find him was obsession. She wandered the streets around that same cafe selling bowls of cheap noodles. The cafe where they met, where she’d first noticed him and the aesthetic curve of his skull, succinctly hollow against his nape. Men like him, other lonely businessmen, leaning over the counter with their wooden chopsticks. He kept his balanced steadily in the angle of his hand as though any sudden movement could be potent.
She recognised his suit, propped into form by his shoulders, saw many times the familiar shape of his head. When she tried to snatch one more glimpse into his eyes, none of the faces were his. Men stood to leave – like the moment he’d seen her for the first time – as she watched from a corner again. She hadn’t hesitated that night to kiss him, which wasn’t like her. He was the most beautiful man in the city, but he was nowhere. Yet she thought she saw him at the train station, though the gloss of a cafe window, sitting unfussed at a bar. Lights wound around her body in a daze as she deteriorated into tears among a pillar of neon signage.
She travelled on the overnight ferry to the island known for tropical fish and white beaches. Comfort was sea spray blowing onto the deck. It was her campfire. It was the bicycle she rented from the only convenience store. There were few luxuries away from the mainland and none greater than silence. The island was empty and out-of-season restaurants sat shuttered because tourists only came during the first weeks of May and August.
Perhaps he was married.
What if he were dead? There’d be no way to know. After they’d done it in a cheap hotel, he’d left no more than his name and now her mind won’t stop itching and dwelling on him. He bored a neediness into her, polluted her uniqueness with his rough touches. But she wants more than emotional wounds and violent desires from him. She wants to experience being cared about by this man she idolises.
#
Once she’d kissed him, overcome by the unknown she chose to act like other women and brave it, instead of confessing she hadn’t been with anyone for over five years ever since becoming single. He bought them a beer from the convenience store and they sat together in the street, on a concrete bollard in front of the wooden facade of a new skyscraper, trying to talk to one another in English. “I really liked you when I saw you,” he said, which sounded like a promise. Julia didn’t want to put him off so she told him nothing except she was a student from France, all the while squirming at the uncharted voltage in her groin. He smiled and asked if she ever went to happening bars.
“No, I’m not one of those girls,” she replied.
“Me either.” Then he kissed her again and pulled her to her feet. “Let’s go somewhere.”
“OK,” and she fumbled her bag.
There were dozens of love hotels in the surrounding streets and he chose one that had rows of sequins adorning its entrance. They bought a room for three hours from the vending machine in reception, paying equal shares. In the elevator, he grabbed the bottom of her shorts and pulled them upwards and she gasped.
“I’m going to dominate you,” he said, biting his bottom lip to prevent a smile. When he opened the door, he pushed her towards the bed. The room smelt of stale smoke beyond its electronically conditioned air. “You like me?” he said. “Take off your clothes.” Julia shook her head and froze. He lay on top and kissed her, while she stroked his hair. She wanted their tongues touching – eyes closed – lasting, imagining he was hers, enjoying the taste of warm blood and beer. He pressed into her and her body was numbed by sensation. He lifted off her T-shirt and lightly scratched her bare skin, which made her breathing deepen. “Get in the shower,” he told her.
“Can’t we stay like this?” She sat in her bra on the edge of the bed, watching him unbutton his shirt and step out of his trousers. For the first time, she looked around the room, which had mirrors on every wall and a window into the bathroom instead of the night outside. She watched him start the shower running.
“Go on,” he said and paraded her by the shoulders into the steam, walking her into the shower. He laughed and pushed his underwear to the floor. As water saturated her shorts, she reached for him and they kissed, smooth and warm, believing together.
#
On the island, Julia wakes when the sun appears. At dawn today she snorkelled in the shallows before it grew too hot. The ocean had so many fish they had to swim away from her arms. She swam in a realm of exotic colours like those grown in a chemistry kit. She took a deep breath through the pipe and her body passed across underwater lichen. Her hair swayed onto her face, copying seaweed growing in crags. Breaking waves caused a hissing sound within her skull. Sunlight pierced the surface onto plankton suspended like dust. She watched a shoal of yellow and black triangular fish dart through and around a rock.
Once she’d dried off, she cooked breakfast on the camp stove before sunlight gained too much heat, and the hot and humid weather made movement too much effort. Her brain had to survive dehydration so she rode to a tree and stretched out in its shade with an energy drink. Our bodies are weakened without salt and minerals so each gulp soothed and replenished her cravings.
While lying on the grass, she thought about how to find him to make him hers. Yu could be short for many other names: Yu-ichi, Yu-taro, Yu-taka, Yu-ta, Yu-to, Yu-ya, Yu-ji, Yu-suke. Yu might not even be his real name. He was a businessman, nothing special – at least a million copies of him passed through the railway station before breakfast.
Shadows grew longer until the final hours of daylight when she got in the mask and flippers to watch the other world again. Rocks glowed orange at dusk and she supposed his aura of self-importance was insignificant. She definitely didn’t need him and his stupid ego.
Another hot spring is at the bottom of a gorge, which was where she went yesterday. Tonight she parked her bicycle at the top of its steps and explored a different route, a lantern-lit path down through the trees. Insects danced in the air to the drone of cicadas as she followed its slope. In her head, she was sharing a meander through the woods with him, although his absence was more immense than any presence.
When she came to the shore, the tree she’d spent her days lying beneath was near the end of the path. She usually went there by bicycle, so its familiarity was welcoming from another angle. There was nobody around and waves made a soothing, stretched and distorted noise. Their rolling didn’t completely end before the next beat: they continually boomed. A streetlight on the quay disturbed the tranquillity and she decided to return to her tent.
When she reached the bottom of the lantern-lit steps again, she noticed the footpath continued along the shoreline in the opposite direction, away from the tree. She kept walking into the night and onto flat rocks. On her left was a steaming pool of water. She tested its temperature with her fingertips before stripping out of her T-shirt and shorts into her bikini. She’d found the island’s shoreline hot spring.
She could hear waves breaking out of sight, so she slid over the dividing stones. It was less than tepid in the next pool so she returned to the first, which was further from the tide. She climbed out and moved barefoot across thermal ground.
An even warmer pool resembled a natural bath. Floating on her back with her ears submerged, hearing muffled, star upon star shone as though she’d left the planet to become extra-terrestrial. Enveloped in the water, making invocations to shooting stars that left lingering brilliance as they fell overhead, she regained a sense of completion. Her depression lifted as she observed the Milky Way. The thrill of gazing at our own galaxy was enough to soothe her troubles. Lying there healing was the most alone she’d ever felt, yet she was cleansed — inside and out — by her solitude.
“Yu, why aren’t you with me? Why don’t you care about what you mean to me?” she said to herself.
It didn’t matter now. Life had found another route.
Healed by minerals, cured by experience, she thought about the hill, about cycling through fields of flowers back to the campsite to drink hot chocolate from a steel mug, to toast marshmallows in the flame of the portable stove. She thought about drifting on the inflatable bed.
Floating embryonic, watching bejewelled heaven, the water remedied Julia exactly as intended. Even if her loss was sorrowful, she’ll be fine again in time, laugh again, love again. Even if she didn’t dare daydream anymore, she could situate herself in the cosmos while lying in that hot spring, so she knew as she rose out of it refreshed – she just knew – the universe had its purpose for her.
Michelle Egan holds an English degree from the University of Exeter. She's writing a novel set in rural England in the 1990s and lives and works in Rome. This is her first published short story.