November 2003 Issue - Essay # 10
Bed
Head
By Raymond
Nakamura
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I
awake to the scrunch of dry beans in the small pillow under my neck. I
don’t usually remember my dreams but this morning I recall something
about monkeys dancing around a bowl of a seaweed-flavoured cereal with
little Asian girls in green pig tails who squeak like rubber ducks. My
nose is cold, but at least it’s not wet, so at least I haven’t been
reborn as a dog or something. But where the heck am I? I’m in bed. Not
the kind of bed I slept in as a kid, but the kind of bed my Japanese
ancestors might have known — a futon on the straw mat floor of a
little crumbling house with no heat. The futon that I fold in half to
toss into the cupboard so I have more living space. The futon that I air
out in the sun once a season so that
it doesn’t become squashed like a rice cracker. I remember now
— I’m in Why
am I so dozy? Oh yeah, late night partying on the seashore. Out with the
full moon, shivering on the cold rocks measuring barnacle after bloody
barnacle, marking down their positions in my little notebook by
flashlight for my so-called thesis. Well,
if I’m up, I should get up. I read somewhere that lying in bed tends
to lead to negative thoughts. But I can see my breath —not an
encouraging thing. I don’t want to get out of my warm futon. The
voices of my Japanese colleagues at the marine lab mock me, “You’re
Canadian, you must be used to cold weather.” And
my exasperated reply, “But in It
hardly ever goes below zero Celsius here, but still, that’s pretty
chilly if it’s inside your house. My only heat source is a low square
table called a kotatsu, with an electric heating element underneath, in
the middle. A blanket hangs down to the floor like a skirt that creates
a warm inner sanctum into which you insert your feet and maybe your
hands if they’re turning blue. You wear a quilted house coat to keep
the rest of your body warm, though my short thinning hair doesn’t
provide much insulation on top. The Japanese think that warm feet and a
cold head improves circulation and makes you think better. Not exactly a
shining example of sharp thinking if you ask me. My
windows, frosted not from the cold but manufacturers promoting modesty
combined with my negligent housekeeping, scream with an white haze that
reverberates off the white, unadorned walls of my room. When I moved in
two years ago, I had to patch up the walls with plaster and paint to
make it look respectable. A horizontal strip of gnarled pined trees
adorn the sliding doors that separate my bedroom from my living room and
kitchen. They provide some colour, along with the wood veneer ceiling
and the unfinished wood beams that frame the squarish room, about one
and half body lengths a side. As I slip on my glasses, the walls look
brighter than I expect, even glaring, but not quite as white as say, a
white room in an insane asylum. Not that I would know. What
month is it? I know I’m going to visit some relatives for New Year’s
but I don’t remember having gone there yet. So I guess it’s still
December. At least I shouldn’t have to worry about getting bitten in
my bed by the insatiable fangs of a finger length centipede that invade
my springtime sleep. And I won’t have to recoil from the scratchy
blare of perky exercise music that pours out the village loudspeakers at
What
day is it? Odds are it’s a day I should be getting up to go to the
lab. I think I left my watch in the other room. It doesn’t usually
matter when exactly I get up to go to the lab, so I don’t have a clock
where I am sleeping. Most
days are the same. Get up, squat on my porcelain slipper of a toilet and
do my business while reading a Japanese comic book until my legs go
numb. Dress in a T-shirt and sweater and track bottoms. My first summer,
I counted and measured the cockroaches I caught overnight in the roach
motel under the sink. I plotted them on a graph of frequency over time.
Somehow the analysis of them distanced me from the grossness of them.
Then breakfast of that weird high density foam bread toasted with a
pre-formed slice of white plastic cheese food. Click on the ancient two
burner gas table to boil some water in the kettle I got as a door prize
at the opening of a new houseware store in the village. Maybe some green
tea or a pasty bowl of instant corn soup. Head to the lab in my sandals
with no socks. The Japanese think frozen toes are a test of character.
Try to make sense of my mountains of data on the growth and survival of
barnacles. Realize that I should probably start again from the beginning
but struggle to salvage something worthwhile out of the mess. And so on. If
it’s Tuesday, I get to teach some of the angelic local children
English to earn my so-called living. I’ll have to make sure I don’t
have too many clothes laying around or at least have them piled in some
cupboard. If I don’t they’ll say in Japanese, “Teacher, what a
messy house you have! Ha Ha Ha!” And I will mutter in English, “Shut
up you mouthy brats.” And then I will attempt to amuse them for half
an hour with games using important English words like “apple”,
“big” and perhaps, “curmudgeon”. And
if it is winter, as I am assuming it is, perhaps I’ll have to take a
nap and then wake up again in the middle of night to catch the low tide.
Okay,
I’d better get psyched up to begin the day. I do some isometric ab
crunches and pelvic tilts to increase my blood circulation. Maybe one
day these exercises will make me a better lover. Yeah, right. At
last, I throw off my covers and crawl toward my living room without
enthusiasm. I slide open the door and scrabble for the watch I left on
my kotatsu next to a bowl with a few dried kernels of rice. “S-U”
says the watch. Sunday, my one day of rest. Oh boy, I can do laundry
today and let it freeze dry in the rigid air. I shuffle to the big old
TV. I can ride to the next town for groceries, on my rusting bicycle
along the seawall, till the wind slaps my cheeks raw. Pull the knob.
Slowly the beast awakes. I
can scrawl whiny letters to my friends in I’m
going to call my Mom to tell her I’ve had enough. |
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Author's Biography
This piece is based on my experience living in |
Essay
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