It happened slowly at first. She’d been distant since you returned from visiting your family at Christmas. Nothing visible, nothing so tangible that you could latch onto it and ask questions, but rather an undercurrent: the way she would sometimes stare at you blankly when she thought you weren’t watching; the way she’d sometimes fall silent mid-sentence, running her manicured nails over a desk or tabletop in circles as if in a trance; the way she’d agree to dinner and then say she couldn’t at the last moment, after you made the reservations and picked out a tie. Small things.
When she first suggested, seemingly out of the blue, that you move to Japan with her for a summer or half year it didn’t seem like a bad idea. She could be closer to the wooden prints that so inspired her artwork; she could emerge herself in a culture she’d always been fascinated by and you, worldly adventurous you could have a whole new set of stories to discuss at cocktail parties and business brunches with similarly worldly colleagues. You hadn’t seen her this animated in months. Your boss had no objections. You agreed.
At first it was exciting. The crazy rush with which she booked the tickets, the phone calls in a mixture of English and broken Japanese to find an apartment to lease, the haphazard packing, trying to guess what you would need, what you could bare to part with and what you would keep. She bough summer dresses and sandals, threw body spray bottles into tote bags filled with paintbrushes and pieces of her portfolio, carved wooden prints from years past. You organized, she threw things with only the most cursory nod to keeping clothes and oil paints in separate compartments of bags. You commiserated over contradictory airline spokespeople and obnoxious travel agencies and felt alive.
It was only later, months after you arrived and settled in, that you really began to notice something wrong. You’d managed to secure a tiny unfurnished apartment on the outskirts of Tokyo, the floors lined with worn tatami mats that felt foreign under the soles of your feet. The furnishings were sparse: a cheap mattress, a desk, a table and a chair, a mushroom-shaped florescent lamp. She’d expressed disinterest in the subject of decor, and so it was you who went out trying to navigate this crowded city in which you now lived in between typing invoices and online conferences while she flitted from museums to studios of artists you’d never heard of, sometimes gone for entire days at a time. The distance you’d experienced back home was amplified even moreso in this distant land where you couldn’t understand the sharp jabber of speech around you, the thick rapid clicking in foreign tongue. You, always in control back home, were reduced here to rely on English-Japanese tourist dictionaries and guidebooks. You grew used to the small flood of relief when the person you were talking to with a roll of the eyes switched to English and told you to rephrase the question with an impatient air. You weren’t used to such things. You turned inwards, noticed details you’d never have considered back home. Migraines plagued you during the day and insomnia at night.
You noticed the way she would move stiffly sometimes, jump at the swinging of a door or the slamming of a distant window, the way she would talk sometimes and suddenly stop, the way she would almost flinch when you touched her and then forcibly relax, as if willing herself to stand you. As if forcing herself to bare the distasteful; she wasn’t like that before, you knew. It didn’t used to be this way. You noticed how, eating a small bowl of rice she would bring the grains to her lips one or two at a time, chewing, swallowing. How half an hour later she would push away a bowl still half full, like a demon from a half-remembered folk tale. The thought lingered in your mind. You noticed how she’d taken to drinking plain water instead of juice, how she switched her coffee to black from milky-white, how her collarbones jutted out a bit more then before. You noticed how in a store she would mutter, “I wonder how many calories in that?” and when you offhandedly chided,
“What does it matter? You’re already probably the thinnest one in this store,” She glanced around and muttered back,
“That’s because I’m trying to avoid their terrible problem.” You noticed the crisp lack of emotion in that. You noticed all the invitations to dinner she declined, the slew of “I stopped to eat on the way home. I’m not hungry.” You would walk to the store at the corner and by a packaged dinner and eat that alone and try not to think of how before she’d never have said those things, never have looked at you with that snake-cold glare in her eyes.
You couldn’t pinpoint the first time the idea solidly entered your mind, when scattered emotions coalesced into a single unified and seemingly-logical though: this isn’t her. Not the real her. This is someone else. She didn’t act that way. She didn’t speak that way. She wouldn’t have said those things. She wouldn’t be doing those things. You couldn’t remember when exactly the thought first entered your head but when it did it rung true, and it stuck. Yes.
She took to locking herself in the tiny basement room of the building she used as a studio for days at a time. Before she would show you a new piece, bubble over excitedly about ideas, about how it was coming out, moan when she made a mistake, laugh with glee when it came out even better then she thought it would. She would thrust a finished piece at you ceremoniously and say, “What do you think?” Now she did not speak about what she produced. She’d roll out of bed hours before you, more the insomniac then you and sometimes when you were awake you would see the outline of her ribs under the gauzy nightgown that she wore to sleep. She would dress and go downstairs without stopping to eat or even drink a cup of coffee or tea, and she wouldn’t come up until evening. Questions and concerns were met with a stony silence. She swished tea around in her cup at night in sulky silence. “I’m not hungry,” she’d reply. Like the demon in that story she would pick at grains of rice.
One day when she went out and you stayed in, a terrible headache confining you to the bed with a compress and a bottle of Tylenol the thought of going in to her studio suddenly entered your mind. You knew it would be a terrible breach of privacy, a terrible betrayal of trust and you’d never do that to her except…it wasn’t really her, was it? This thing, this demon wasn’t really her and so it wouldn’t be so bad to see what it did down there would it? No, not at all. And so you took the key she’d thrown so casually on the now-cluttered table, certain you wouldn’t think of picking them up, and padded down the flights of stairs barefoot until you reached the basement. And you clicked open the lock and flicked on the light and stared. You stared at the crowded assortment of wooden prints that greeted you. They were different from her other works, the ones she’d made back home and showed you proudly or self-consciously. They varied in size and style, some blatantly imitating the traditional Japanese prints she saw in museums, others so radically different as to have nothing in common with those but medium. They were painted in dark tones with luminous flares, a somber black and grey luminated here and there with florescent blue, orange, red. They were monsters, skeletons dancing, starving children moaning, skins and bones or just bones alone. There were women cut neatly in half, men dismembered, sexual organ mutilated. Scenes of rape, sodomy. The skeletal corpse of a sexually mutilated little girl. All were in various states of incompletion; before she’d never worked that way, insisting she could only maintain one concrete image in her head at a time. All were elaborately carved, detailed, colored and shaded with precision, and you stood in the doorway of this room of horrors and you wanted to gag. Bile rose to your throat, you shuddered unable to stand it but unable to look away. You needed to vomit, needed to vomit and you couldn’t and finally something snapped and you backed out and slammed the door shut and leaned against the wall next to it. Your head was pounding even more. The world titled to a side. That wasn’t her. She never made things like that. She never thought things like that. Nothing human could think such things, paint such things, it wasn’t her at all. A demon. A skeleton demon that picked at grains of white rice at the table and grew paler and thinner and colder by the day. An imposter demon had taken her place and dragged you off to this strange land. You trudged back up the cold stairs. Your head pounded on.
After that you returned her cold glances. You watched impassively as she picked at the plain white rice in her bowl before pushing it away. You did not urge her. You stomach didn’t gnaw at you in worry when she wandered out of bed in the middle of the night and didn’t come back for hours. You weren’t surprised when her fingertips brushed over your skin and were ice cold. When she flinched. You worked longer, harder, took on more tasks that could be done long-distance and offered to meet with local clients. When she went downstairs into that room of horrors your eyes would follow her back with a cold stare. You answered her dryly, sharply, coldly. You took to sleeping as far away from her as possible on the single bed, because the apartment was small and there was nowhere else to sleep. Both of you clung to the far edges of the mattress and left a vast empty space in the middle. You physically avoided her.
The headaches continued nonetheless. You popped pills like candy and the pain still pounded on in your skull. At home you would have long since gone to a doctor but here it didn’t seem worth the effort. Besides, you knew what the source of it all was: it was her. The demon imposter was doing something to you. You had to avoid her. She’d destroy you if you didn’t. You began to plan going back without her, plot how to get away.
One evening you were sitting at the desk typing up a summary of information as asked when she walked into the apartment, putting down her bag and taking off her shoes. She sat down next to you on the floor. You move your chair over, farther away from her. Her eyes followed you. A vague pain nibbled at your skull.
“You never touch me anymore.” She said finally, her voice barely above a whisper, brittle. It was a trick, you were sure. This pale bone demon wanted pity. She wanted to slit your throat.
“Why should I?” you asked after a moment. You felt angry all of a sudden, tired of this charade, of pretending you didn’t know she what she was. Why was she here, why was she doing this to you?
“I know what you are.” You told her, careful to keep your voice steady, controlled. “Why the hell should I want to touch you?”
“You know…” her voice broke. She stared down into her hands, tracing her fingernails against the bone of her wrist. She used to be alive, before this imposter stole her. There used to be enough of her to touch, to hold. Fleshy, bouncy, bright. This bone thing reminded you too much of those carvings. Like that sodomized girl the joints of her elbows seemed larger then the rest of her arms, flat bones. You could barely stand to look at this thing.
“Why the hell are you doing this? What are you? Do you think I’m that ******** stupid? That I wouldn’t notice? Why the ******** are you doing this to me and what the ******** are you and what the ******** hell do you do down there in the hellhole of a room?!” the words burst out of you, anger breaking the dam of false calm you’d tried to construct. You’d never yelled at her before. But now that you did you didn’t regret it. Why should you feel guilty about yelling at this thing? This monster, this demon creature who wasn’t her at all? Tears rose to her eyes, the first sign of emotion you’d seen in her in months. She rocked once back, once forth.
“You don’t understand – he didn’t…I didn’t want him to…I, I tried. I, I…I can’t do this.”
“Well, I can’t ******** do this anymore either. Not with you. I saw those ******** things you make down there. It’s sick. I know what you are. I know what you’re ******** doing to me, I won’t let you anymore.” You were screaming at her now, screaming as she stood up and stared at you and rocked back on her heels or maybe shook.
“I don’t. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not. I didn’t. I’m not doing anything. You couldn’t have…you’re acting crazy. You--”
“Stop lying to me! What did you do with her? Where is she?!” By now the pain in your head had become acute. You stood up too, towering over her though you were only a few inches taller. You wanted to shake her, shake this thing that had taken her place, this imposter who had stolen the woman you loved and replaced her with a cold bone demon or dying thing that stood there and cried as you berated it, shake her and shake her until she explained, until she changed everything and you were back in a country where you understood everything, where you lived with a woman who smiled and laughed and made beautiful pictures out of wood and paint and went to museums and art galleries and restaurant openings with you, a woman you could discuss the Economist and Surrealism with in the same conversation, and not this. Not this ceaseless banging of pain in your brain that made you want to kill yourself out of sheer frustration.
And she, she slid out of your grasp, out of your reach, she slid or fell back onto the floor and shook with laughter or sobs uncontrollably, laughing and crying as you stared, and finally she turned her head up and stared at you in the eyes and asked,
“Do you think I don’t want to know where she is?”
