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As a little girl with eyes half-closed, as if the memory of soap bubbles would always make them burn or itch, Akira slept spooning her mother. The mother owned the only Laundromat in town on the tiny island surrounded by puffer fish, sea squab, poisonous honey toads that some claimed could sing and lure. Akira and her mother prided themselves of cleaning what belonged to others. Clothes, said the mother were the outer self. Dirt=chaos.
She said the sea was full of such chaos. That's why so few tried to leave the island. There was no one on the mainland who could clean their clothes like Akira and her mother. People, said the mother in her usual dry voice, only leave the island when they want to get dirty. The balloon fish usually kill them on the way back. They never heed warnings.
Akira's father died from such an attack. He tried to get dirty with a woman from the city. His body was found floating on water, three times its normal size, faceless as a cloud.
Akira sometimes thought of their island to be in the shape of an oval fish tank, and she and her mother and Mrs. Kamura, a regular customer, were tiny golden and orange fish, well-fed and happy, safe from the deceptive calm of the sea, its underbelly of chaos.
When Akira reached the age of twenty or so, her mother confessed of night sweats, of bearing the weight of the ocean, that she was the one who drove Akira's father to other women. She said she did not iron his shirts properly, nor take in the seams to his long coats when she should have. She said she still felt old moths from rooms where she never loved the father. At night, she sleepwalked, tore all her clothes with the same knife the husband once used to gut poisonous fish.
The Island Patrol found Akira's mother floating in the sea, her face horribly disfigured, bloated.
Akira assumed control over the Laundromat. She vowed never to leave the island, yet life was little more than a daily routine of wash & dry, receipts for pick up or deliveries.
One day a stranger began bringing his clothes to the family Laundromat. Sometimes he paid Akira to steam-iron his clothes, have them pressed into perfect lines. Sometimes they struck up small conversations about the local cafe with wireless internet, about the books they read or heard about, about their favorite fish, like eel or salmon, or some delicacies they saw in magazines, like Bombay duck.
The stranger, older than Akira by about twenty years was always well-dressed in suit and tie. But when asked about his job, the stranger would say that he was retired. Akira felt that he wasn't old enough to retire and increasingly, she found herself attracted to him. She noticed that he rarely smiled.
Akira and the stranger began a short-lived affair. One night, in bed together, the stranger, staring at the ceiling, said he could no longer go through with it, that Akira panted like his ex-wife, that during sex he could hear the voice of the honey toads luring him.
Akira never knew he was once married.
He admitted that his wife had fallen in love with a visitor from the mainland, that the lover had poisoned and abandoned her. She drowned herself in the shallow water of their backyard pool.
Akira vowed she would not give up on him the way her mother once gave up on her father.
She asked in so many words if he had any old clothes of the ex-wife.
He said he did. She told him to bring them to the Laundromat and she would wash them and press them and burn them once and for all.
And would it really rid me of her memory? he asked.
Yes, she said, you'll see.
After the clothes were burned, leaving a lingering helix of smoke in the sky, Akira asked the stranger to help "fold" her in the dryer. He repeated several times--What?
She said it would not be difficult. She was a small woman. She knew how to breathe in tight spaces.
That's crazy, he said. You'll suffocate.
Do you want to be rid of all the pain? she asked.
Yes, he said, but this was...
She said she wanted to be his new wife. He would never wear dirty clothes.
He finally obliged. Akira, curled into a fetal position inside the dryer, tumbled around and around. She closed her eyes and imagined herself as a tiny fish, breathing through its gills, keeping the small oval fish tank pure and safe from all kinds of dirty love.
The dryer stopped.
Akira resembled a little girl, coiled into the full loop of herself, wearing a smile.
The stranger removed her stiff crumpled body, still warm from the dryer heat. He cried without tears, blamed himself. Then, realized that Akira--like the tiny island he lived on, like the way he obsessed over the ex-wife, like the thought of tiny yellow fish jumping through his fingers--would always surround him. He folded her into perfect thirds and squares, carried her under his arm, took her home.
From that day on, he wore nothing but Akira. Nothing but Akira.
Even to bed.
And his bed became a beautiful flat sea.