Orientation week
Houseward bound
“I don’t know what to say today…I feel like I need to say something about…time…” — journal entry, November 1999
In high school I drove a 1993 white Toyota Tercel with manual locks, windows, steering, and transmission. We called it the Thucel. When we took the scenic route home from school, the last bit of the way was a tiny thrill in the endless stretch of suburban sameness. As we hit the first mailbox at the top of the hill, I’d tap (yank) the car into neutral and we would fly down the narrow wooded road on just momentum and gravity.
The Thucel is long gone, but I honed my instincts on that legendary rice rocket. We learned to drive before there were smart phones, so we just…remembered. (Also got lost. A lot.) And the car remembered too. There was no extra voice in the car, just the one inside your head, telling you that right before the house where the Chinese kid with the sweatpants and the vintage glasses lived with his mom, was a pothole. If you swerved left to avoid it, you could ease right through a rolling stop, then let go of the wheel for longer than seemed safe, and the car would right itself and drive straight on its own. The body was one with the car was one with the road was one with the houses of all the boys you’d beaten in the spelling bee. Even if it never felt like home, the network of roads might as well be drawn on your ribs.
There was space inside our brains just for the space inside this town. What’s more, it saved a lot of coordinates. People’s street names and house numbers, even whole phone numbers, just strings of digits that we tapped out on keypads like we were war-time code breakers, desperate to solve the riddle of our ennui.
In general, I like to know where north is. In Tokyo, I live on a gently diagonal line between Shibuya and Yokohama, so they serve very roughly as north and south; in New York, it goes without saying I always know which way is “up.” Several readers have seen me use the actual compass app to navigate Shinjuku. But I lived a decade in this room, and I can’t point to north. I can reason it based on the sun, but I can’t arrange the surrounding towns on a map. Here at my childhood desk, there is no instinct for the compass, as if I only realized after I left my parents’ house that I could be oriented toward anything but them.
So! It’s the one chance you have a year to stand face-to-face with the people and places that informed your identity, and you tested positive for covid! You traveled across the world to see the people you spend 11 months a year living in isolation from, and now you have to isolate from them! The land of the free, and its freely flying airborne virus, welcome you home. Hail the prodigal daughter!
All told, there are worse places for this to have happened. (Also, my symptoms are mild so far.) My bedroom is bigger than the main room of my apartment in Tokyo. I can at least hear the sound of my parents moving around. I can shout to them. I see the top of my father’s head through the glass while I eat dinner on the porch. I sit with a library I’ve amassed since I learned to read, all my notebooks since I started recording things, and a considerable CD collection that ends abruptly in 2011.
The day is punctuated by meals left by the door, homemade to order, with piles of cut fruit left by the world’s best warden.
There is nothing else to do but overthink my childhood. “My life is a time line of enemies” — the author, age 10. “Dear Diary, Agh. We’re probably going to war. No time to chat. ‘Bye.” — the author on September 20, 2001.
The sentiments are heavily weighted toward adolescence, not only because I left the house at 17, but because once I got a smart phone in college, it was no longer urgent to save physical scraps as proof things had happened. Drawings, poems, photos, letters, I saved actual glitter and rhinestones from Lony when she moved away and stored it in my trunk of memorable junk. My house de-emphasized material possessions, so naturally I saw amassing stuff as a way of getting closer to living a life.
I’ve long stopped collecting souvenirs, so the ones here reflect a particular mentality and period of travel. There’s a little snuff box with a rose on it that I got in Paris on my first trip out of the country, at age eleven. (“It’s great.” — the author’s review of the Eiffel Tower) There’s a hand-woven yarn doll someone gave me in Turkey, lacquer boxes from India, Vietnam, and Hungary from a protracted box phase, a stuffed yak from Nepal, a bunch of random sketchy looking liquor. A heart-shaped bottle stands out in my memory: The toxic plum brandy Slivovitz, which Mamo and I acquired in Croatia. We had smart phones but couldn’t use them; still, a guy walked right up to us in the plaza of a tiny island and said he recognized us from couch surfing and did we want to go out for free on his friends’ scuba boat the next day, which we obviously did.
On the boat, we were fed a lot of Slivovitz. Finally life offered itself to us, and we slugged.
For many years this was very clearly how I was oriented: See as many new things as possible, for as close to zero dollars as possible. (Is this what people mean by “having a direction in life”? Somehow I doubt it.)
In her new novel, Elif Batuman writes about her middle through high school years: “The whole time, six years, I had always been in love with someone. It was the only thing that made it feasible to live that way, getting up at six and remaining conscious until late at night. It was like religion had been, for medieval people: it gave you the energy to face a life of injustice, powerlessness, and drudgery.”
A love, a god, a pain: you look down at your heart, and the needle is aimed straight at it. It doesn’t waver, even if you’d rather it did. Maybe it lasts a week, maybe hundreds. All the people and obsessions, the books and ideas, the languages and jobs, the real and mythical Orients toward which I’ve been variously oriented over the years, they concentrate here, the substance of my shifting north star.