He was riding the train to his teaching job when he heard about Skimmer’s bike accident in a post from another college friend. It was noon in Tokyo, where he was an English instructor; his conversation school opened in thirty minutes. Skimmer had been one of his closest friends in college. They’d lived on the same floor for two years and had shared an off-campus house with others for three years after that. Skimmer had started mountain biking their first semester in the house. Sometimes he would have accidents, and his blood would smear the bathtub while he dressed his wounds. But then he would clean, and when Skimmer cleaned, he scrubbed and wiped and penetrated each corner, calling upon a small orchestra of sprays and rags, brushes and solutions. It was like watching Leonard Bernstein scour a tub.
Now Skimmer had crashed over a steep, rocky drop. Fluid on the brain. Spinal damage. The helmet may or may not have done its job. They didn’t know if he would ever walk or talk again. Everyone else from college had gone to the hospital, then to the bar closest to the hospital, but he couldn’t leave Tokyo. Even if he asked and the school gave him a week off and he flew back and saw Skimmer in his induced coma and reunited with friends and stayed at home for a few nights and used American money and borrowed his mom’s car—then what? What good would it do? Eighteen months out of school, he felt as if his semisolitary existence in Japan was his largest and most interesting accomplishment, and a precarious one.
In a group photo taken at the bar, his friends’ faces appeared somber, their glasses raised to Skimmer. He ached, feeling powerless and cut off. He had been closer to Skimmer than anybody in the picture.
At 4:15 that afternoon he took his hour-long meal break and rode the subway two stops to a temple he’d visited once before. There he bought an omamori, a small talisman in a soft purple bag just bigger than his thumb. The young Buddhist initiate who sold it to him said it was specifically for a sudden health problem. An emergency. The robed youth stood over a spread of charms that, except for their size, reminded him of a clothing store’s tie table. After making his donation to the temple, he quietly thanked the future monk and left.
His mother had traveled to Japan once for work, but she mostly remembered ten days of hotels, conference rooms, factories, taxis, a few sushi restaurants, and, weirdly, a Red Lobster. She hadn’t made it to any temples. When he’d accepted the teaching job, she’d urged him to explore.
After his school closed that night, omamori tucked in his shirt pocket, he took a different subway line than usual and traveled to the nearest Yamanote stop. The Yamanote Line runs aboveground in a continuous, sixty-minute loop around central Tokyo. It was the circularity that he wanted. There is no first or final station on the Yamanote. You are always moving toward everywhere. Riding it was supposed to be a good way to see Tokyo, but it was dark out, and when he looked at the train window, he saw only his reflection—his coat, his tie—and the faces and blouses and dress shirts of the other drunk or tired passengers. He was just another commuter leaving the office late, which was to say on time.
He held the amulet in his hands. Palming it. Pinching it. Coaxing it. He tried to be a conduit between the divine energies of the temple and the Yamanote’s circular potency and whatever was happening to Skimmer back in the States. He did not look at social media updates; he’d turned off his phone. He remained on the train as seats opened up around him. The lime-green handles for standing passengers swayed vacantly. Concentrating on the omamori, he lost track of the stations. The loop was what mattered, and the charm in his hand, and the thoughts that pulsed from his mind into the atmosphere. He pictured Skimmer’s cranium and the thick twists of black hair that most likely had been shaved. He imagined a tall bridge between his own head and Skimmer’s, an aqueduct carrying medicine, neon blue, from Tokyo to his friend’s hospital bed. After two round trips, he exited at the same station where he’d boarded.
Four days later Skimmer said his first words. A week after that, he stood with a walker. He asked for a bike so he could ride the hospital halls.
He thought: I didn’t pray for Skimmer, but I didn’t not pray for Skimmer.
He thought: Maybe the roundness of my journey helped.
He thought: The universe hums, and I tried to hum with it.
In Business English class he shared his relief with his eight students. They were adults, mostly older than he was and more educated. “My friend is recuperating now,” he said. “I was very worried.”
“Recuperating?” a woman asked. She worked for an exporter. “But not cuperating?”
“Not cuperating.” He shrugged. As usual, teaching made him marvel at all the things he knew without knowing.
When his sister called in December to tell him that their mother would be having a biopsy in a few days for a lump in her breast, he knew what to do.
He began just as before, but this time with more conviction and greater vulnerability. This was his mother. This was cancer. He would venture to the same temple during his meal break. He would choose from the same display of omamori. He would stand before the altar, his black socks on the temple’s straw-mat floor, his dress pants cuffed once, and he would meditate, acknowledging all of the generations of holy people and laypeople before him who had stood in this same spot and noted the universe’s mysteries and been awash in awe. He would request healing from the earth and the sky, respecting all that had to happen for life to exist—self-aware life, conceding that the cancer cells that may or may not have been in his mother’s body were also part of life’s churn. The omamori would have to be different, though. He would ask for something specific. He looked up the Japanese word for cancer. He already knew tabun, which meant “maybe.” He knew the words for sick and heal.
This time the charm was close to pink, the color of a rosebud-tea label.
That evening he turned down some coworkers’ invitation to have drinks and a late dinner. “Next time,” he said. “I have to make a few calls to family in America.” Not entirely a lie.
Down from the fifth floor to the street. Down from the street to the subway. Through the underworld of tunnels. Up to street level. Up again to the platform, perched above people and crosswalks. As with the Yamanote’s circle, the descents and ascents felt like journeys that might be asked of us by whatever enigmas make such requests.
The night was chilly, but it was the cold of late fall, not winter. After he boarded the Yamanote, he removed his gloves to ensure no barrier between the magic and himself, his DNA, his mother’s DNA. The doors closing. The bells. The announcements: “The next station is . . . The next station is . . .” He stopped hearing all of it. As the train circled Tokyo, he squeezed the omamori. The word for cancer was gan. What had come first, he wondered: language or prayer? He wanted the answer to be prayer, but it probably depended on how you defined prayer. And language. Always a fine line between a good answer and an evasive one. He began his second loop. Two circles would not be enough, not this time. He would need to offer at least a third hour on the Yamanote Line.
He did not know the Japanese word for biopsy, or for lump, but the incantatory station names—they could be whispered, they could be repeated: Okachimachi. Shinagawa. Takadanobaba.
A few stops into the third loop, nerves overtook him. The train car was nearly empty. He felt conspicuous, a foreigner who, nearing midnight, refused to leave the Yamanote. Authorities would assume he was crazy or a criminal. They would kick him off, fine him, revoke his work visa. He tried to push aside his fears; they wouldn’t help his mom, who had always been healthy—a swimmer, a treadmill runner, an eater of vegetables. An almost-deserted train car was no reason for paranoia. He’d seen station police arrest a man once, but not for riding too long. The man had been drunk, possibly suicidal, weaving along the platform, stumbling over the yellow danger line, grunting, his suit jacket crumpled over his forearm.
Two more riders disembarked. The bell dinged. The announcement said Mejiro was next. A man on the far side of the car—the only other passenger—began walking toward him, not bothering to grip poles or handles. His suit was charcoal, his tie orange. He was steady, sober. The orange-tie man passed a dozen empty seats to sit beside him. He felt embarrassed about the omamori; he didn’t want the orange-tie man to see it. He closed his fingers around it, but this felt like a denial, a failure of faith. Focus, he told himself. A tiny amount of awkwardness is so much smaller than my purpose. He relaxed his fingers so that the omamori peeked through. This was just a man he would never see again. His mother was his mother.
The orange-tie man rode with his hands on his knees and his back straight. The young teacher waited for the orange-tie man to say something: to ask whether he was from America and why he was in Japan, to speak English no matter how confidently the teacher answered in Japanese. This happened sometimes—a stranger looking for fifteen minutes of free English practice. He tried to concentrate on the world outside the train car, the world that linked him to his mother. He wished he could see the stars, but you couldn’t see any stars in Tokyo, even from outside the train. He had no idea whether starlight was essential to whatever it was he was doing, but he decided that holding the image of it in his mind was enough. Starlight shining upon and blessing the same aqueduct that had reached Skimmer.
His mother appreciated the stars. She could point out constellations. When he and his brother and sister were kids, she regularly took them to the planetarium. On vacation she would set an alarm for 3 AM and carry a patio recliner down to the dock. She had a Starry Night coffee mug. One of her fantasies was to travel far below the equator—Patagonia, New Zealand, it didn’t matter—so she could see the Coalsack Nebula, the Bird of Paradise.
He thought about turning to the orange-tie man and asking, Do you think all religion is born of desperation? As much as he wanted to be humble in the presence of the universe and open to all its possibilities, he had to draw the line somewhere. Omamori, yes. Mayan calendar, no. Tarot decks? Far-fetched, though he couldn’t explain a clear difference between a tarot card and the pouch he cupped in his hand. Another question to pose to the orange-tie man: Am I right in thinking that every person who has ever lived on this planet has harbored a multitude of inconsistencies? He trusted the Yamanote’s circular path to help his mom, but a circle also carried negative connotations: Circular logic. Going in circles. Circling the drain.
Maybe he was supposed to ask this man something: Describe the measures he had taken to send healing to Skimmer and ask whether all of his steps had been right. Whether he should do it the same way for his mom or if mothers and cancers called for a different approach. What the right number of trips around the Yamanote Line was. Whether he had gone to the correct temple and chosen the correct charm and meditated correctly and prayed the correct prayer.
The recorded voice called out the next station. The announcement felt intimate on the empty train, as if the woman were speaking only to him and the orange-tie man. He had three stations to go. He would not take the circle a fourth time. The Japanese associate the number four with death.
The orange-tie man broke their long silence with a sound like “Ehh.” Then he pointed to the young teacher’s hands and said, “Omamori.”
The younger man held up the pink talisman and agreed, “Omamori.”
He waited for the orange-tie man to say more, but instead the man stood just as the train was coming to a stop. The doors opened, and he stepped out onto the abandoned platform. Two late-night pigeons hopped between a garbage can and a row of plastic chairs. The orange-tie man altered his path to avoid disturbing them.
