Plastic Love

The man at the end of the bar had not moved in forty minutes, and Yumi Katsuragi had counted every one of them between dance steps.

That was the trouble with being the Queen of Twenty-One. She could feel eyes the way other women felt weather.

Twelve past midnight. Shinjuku, December 1984. The Vingt-et-Un Disco was packed to the mirrors, two hundred bodies under a mirror ball, the air tasting of gin, hairspray, and hot dust on a hot plate.

The bass lived in the walls. The sweat lived in the air. Nobody minded. December was the cruelest month to dance in Tokyo, which was exactly why every one of them had paid eight hundred yen for it.

On the floor, in a red dress, the reason they had all come. Black blunt-cut hair, earrings that threw the strobe back in white sparks. The regulars said she danced like the music owed her money. The regulars were wrong. It was the other way around.

Yumi danced like she was paying off a debt. Every drop of the beat, paid in full.

It was the only honest work her body knew. Days she was a desk clerk in Otemachi, gray suit, gray gloves, a name badge in small print. Nights she was the Queen, and the Queen felt nothing at all. She had built her that way, on purpose, two winters ago, the week the phone call came about her father.

Her creed was simple, and she had written it herself: never love seriously. Love is a game. Plastic keeps. For two years, plastic had kept her alive.

Black coat. End of the bar. The stool under the dead bulb.

He had come in at twenty past twelve, wet through at the shoulders, gloves still on, rain coming off him in a slow ring onto the brass rail. He ordered nothing. He watched her the way a camera watches: level, steady, blinking for nobody.

Everyone watched the Queen. But this man was not watching the dancing. He was watching her, like a man checking a photograph against its original.

“Do you know him?” Ken set her soda water on the rail. Plastic tumbler, of course. In three years he had never once served her glass.

“No,” Yumi said. “But he knows me.”

“How can you tell?”

“Nobody stares that long at a stranger.”

The song broke into its bridge, strings over the beat, and the floor cheered a thing it had heard a hundred times. In the DJ booth, Mika rode her faders under mirrored aviators, a strip of tape on her mixer reading 89.9 FM in nail-polish letters. Every few minutes she leaned into the microphone and said nothing the music could not say better.

A gray suit reached Yumi first, tie pulled loose, his company’s whole year on his breath.

“Champagne for the lady. The real stuff. Not the house stuff.”

“Thank you,” she said. “No.”

“One glass. I’m a gentleman.”

She let him take her wrist for exactly one second. Then she turned it inside his fingers, set a stiletto heel on his instep, and placed his hand back on the bar, gentle as a nurse.

He laughed, because the room was watching and laughing was cheaper than bleeding.

“The house pours champagne for the Queen,” Ken said, moving the bottle out of reach. “The Queen pours nothing for the house.”

“That jaw,” she said, stepping off the floor. “The city is full of them lately.”

“Retirement homes for that jaw,” Ken said. “Out past the harbor.”

The stranger had not smiled at any of it. Good. Men who smiled were selling something. Stillness was what men looked like when the thing they wanted cost more than money.

She walked the length of the bar to prove to herself she was not afraid. Her heels went click, click, click against the brass rail, and some old animal part of her kept the count like a rosary.

“Katsuragi Yumi,” he said as she passed.

She stopped without turning. Her pulse did not. It climbed four beats and stayed there.

“Depends who’s asking.”

He laid a photograph face down on the bar. His sleeve rode up with the motion: shoulder holster, matte black, fitted.

Ken dried the same glass twice.

“Whatever you’re selling,” she said, “I don’t buy. And I don’t owe.”

“It’s not for sale.”

“Then it’s free. And I don’t take that either.”

He turned the photograph over.

A man on a train platform in a camel coat, holding a paper bag printed with a red seal: MARUYAMA BAKERY. The station sign behind him read KOBE, SANNOMIYA. An orange date stamp sat in the corner: 84.11.28.

Four days ago.

Her glass stopped halfway to her mouth. Ice slid and clicked.

The club went on around her, bass and mirror light, two hundred strangers dancing, and none of it reached her. That coat. The rain spots at the hem that never brushed out. The missing button on the left cuff, the one he lost the week before the car went off the road.

She had signed his death certificate with the hand that now gripped the bar. The same hand would not stay still.

“It’s a fake,” she said. “My father died last winter. His car went off the road at Hakone. I signed the papers myself.”

“Look at the coat.”

She looked longer this time. The hat was new. The coat was the coat.

“It’s a double,” she said, and her voice came out flatter than she wanted. “People sell those. Who paid you?”

He squared the photograph to the edge of the bar with one finger and watched the dance floor instead of her face. He was giving her privacy, she realized. The coldest man in the room was the only one giving her privacy.

“Sixteen months ago, a car was pulled out of a lake at Hakone,” he said. “The driver’s seat was empty.”

“You were there?”

“I read the report. The report is not the story. The story needed a body, so the story got one.”

Under the bar, her knee stopped its bounce. It had been bouncing since the funeral. Nobody had ever noticed. He had been in the room for under an hour, and he noticed.

“Who sent you?” she said. “See the date stamp.” “That is not an answer.” “It is the only one that is free.”

“Who are you?”

“A debt collector.”

“I don’t owe.”

“Not you. Him.” He nodded at the face-down photograph. “The debt is a cassette tape, Miss Katsuragi. Your father built a ledger, and the tape is its receipt. He wants it back before other people find out it exists.”

“What’s on it?”

“Names,” he said. “The kind this city buries people for.”

“I have no tape. I have a rule about strangers.”

“I know your rule. It’s why you’re still alive to quote it.”

Somewhere behind the amber light, a bottle of champagne went back onto its shelf unopened.

“What other people?”

Behind her, the song ended. In the half second of silence between tracks, two hundred dancers breathed at once.

“Omura Group,” he said. “Kuroda Credit. The police who work for both.”

“And you? Which one are you?”

“The one he paid.”

“Why tell me now?” she said. “Sixteen months, and he picks tonight?”

“Because the people looking for it picked last week.”

She turned the photograph face up and looked at her father, alive four days ago, standing in Kobe with a bakery bag in his hand like any Sunday of her childhood. He had bought those rolls every week after her mother died. He never once came home without them.

The first feeling in two years arrived all at once, and it was too big for the room.

She put her hand flat on the photograph, the way you hold a door closed.

“Then collect,” she said.

“It’s been collected twice already.” He stood and put on his hat. “You’re the third owner.”

He was gone before the next song came in. No coat-check ticket, no tip, no shadow on the wet glass of the door.

The doorman stamped a new arrival without looking up. The night went on being a night. Mika’s needle found the next record, a synth line like rain heard from underwater, and the Queen of Twenty-One took her mark and waited for the drop. The room leaned toward her like a field toward wind. For the first time in two years, her hands were shaking on the count.

Ken set a fresh soda water on the rail and did not ask. Above the floor, the mirror ball kept turning, the same way it had turned at midnight, and at noon, and the year before.

In her palm, the photograph was warm from the bar. Warm, like a living thing.

Outside, on the street, a car horn held one long note and did not stop.