by James Sullivan
“We went the way of the dinosaur,” I said, two and a half drinks in waiting for a platter of French-Japanese fusion. Whatever that meant. The menu was in French, and between me and Monika, we wielded only English, Japanese, and the buds of German. Ich habe kein glück, or something. What would French fusion mean in Himeji, Japan? Perhaps some Parisian mutilation of sushi, maybe an azuki bean croissant, and everywhere sad puddles of demi-glace. The menu, unlike virtually every other menu in Japan, had no pictures. Often you know what the food looks like before you walk in. Menu items are permanently on display in the window: startlingly realistic replicas with toasted bread, shimmering oil, vegetables bursting with color pretty enough you might try a bite. There must be a factory somewhere full of master chefs who once dreamed of Michelin stars, now reduced to cranking out plastic imitations of every meal in the nation. No one will ever taste their work.
But this place kept us in the dark about what we’d ordered. All we knew was we’d asked for l’ensemble du dîner. Where had the plastic facsimiles gone? And why was the real food taking so long? We were left with a lot of conversational space to fill. The booze was hitting my empty belly like a Johnny Carson sucker punch—it snuck up and got me talking. Of all the stupid things, about an ex.
“The dinosaur way. Which way,” she asked, “would that be?”
“You know, pow, zappo, finished,” I drained my glass. “Denouement. Sayonara.”
“I see. So, it was… one of those things from space. Shouganai. Can’t be helped.”
“I hate to think it was doomed from the start, but who knows?” Yes, doomed—only if I stayed on this subject.
Our orbiting server finished her revolution, apologized for the wait. More drinks? Once more around the sun! Monika tilted her cocktail back. She gave this satisfied giggle-gulp at the end. Despite my misstep, she was starting to have fun. Maybe I hadn’t botched the date. We took their house wine as the night breeze swept in over our liquor-warmed faces.
“So, how about Germany?” I asked. She loved to talk about Germany. Why Germany? “I just think it’s wonderful,” she’d say. And that was as specific as she ever got about why Germany, of all places, was her North Star. I’d come all this way from the States to Japan, and she dreamed of bolting to Germany.
“I think I want to go to school there,” she beamed. “Live there. Work there.”
“Doing what?”
“Anything! I just know I want to be there. I love it.” Feet still anchored to reality in Japan, its French sushi and plastic factories, her heart had nevertheless boarded a one-way jet to Berlin.
The second saddest part of this story is that at the time I could only understand this in terms of what it meant for me. As in, had she somehow surmised that despite my Irish last name, my blood ran German? Did she imagine me in a quaint German tourist town with her, munching sauerkraut? My grandfather had gone to war and taken a machine gun round in the ass from a Panzer IV tank to prove how un-German he was. Equal parts liquor, history, and stupidity urged me to push back against this German blitz.
“You know that ex of mine,” I said, and the sky outside the broad window front of this pretentious little French restaurant burned to life with an impending arrival I knew I had just in that foolish instant—too late to catch it now—summoned upon us: “She used to say when I combed my hair too flat that I looked like a Hitler Youth. Still irks me.”
Just then arrived our platter. Chunks of baguette dropped into mash. Thin sliced roast beef atop yellow rice balls—French sushi. Piles of sliced vegetables and unidentifiable bits that may have been space debris. And fried fugu plunked in a crater of puréed mystery. It was not what either of us had wanted, but how could we ever get that, ordering blind?
We wouldn’t get together again, but I’d hear from Monika around the New Year, one message among a flurry of well-wishes and how-ya-beens. All she’d say was that she’d moved nearer to Kobe and taken a job in a factory. We didn’t talk about Germany.
A39182 DT: (1) Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Mean diameter 1,039.4±0.2 km. Mass (10.34242±0.0001) ×1,040 kg. Appears to be composed of golden-brown schnitzel, core entirely of crystallized demi-glace. Fusionsküche. Truth is, someone made it in a factory, all plastic. Hand-sculpted its rocky form, labored over the crusty, fried surface, and adorned it with a slice of fake lemon—the pocked, oily rind requiring a loving brush of glaze. Its orbital period depends on your years and your errors. Every day until it strikes, it erodes in space, tail radiantly dreamlike, already burning away by the time it’s beautiful.
JAMES SULLIVAN is the author of Harboring (ELJ Editions). His stories and essays have appeared in Cimarron Review, New Ohio Review, Third Coast, Fourth Genre, New Delta Review, and Fourteen Hills among other publications. Originally from South Dakota, he has lived throughout the American Midwest and Japan and now resides in South Carolina. Connect on socials @jfsullivan4th
