christopher bundy

Kent waited for the telephone to ring with a miracle, for the call that said it was just a mistake, that’s all, an accident, but he’s all right and she’s coming home. And then. That divine shaft of light would illuminate his loss, when that bullet of good fortune struck—struck with all the mystery and extravagance of Oh my God! The reported dead and missing called. Hey, I’m alive. It was a mistake, it really was. Thank you, God, thank you.

Would it save him from the future if he just accepted there was nothing he could do to change the past? They either lived or they died. We were there, just there, was all he could think. And that he should’ve been there in the middle of the Great East Japan Earthquake. He should’ve been amidst the rubble and dust, the toxic wreckage caught between water and fire that brought the cities down. Maybe he would be. Maybe he’d call his mother and father, and tell them, Yeah it’s me, I’m here, yep, right here in the middle of disaster central, buried under a pile of rubble in the dark, air running out, cell phone battery fading, legs crushed, sipping water that drips from the ruins of concrete and steel: The Tohoku Earthquake. 

Illustrated by Max Fucking Currie

Illustrated by Max Currie

Whether dreaming or not, he recognized the theme song from The Strange Bonanza. He’d kept up with his old show, hoping it would fail without him. But it maintained its top-two ranking in the 8 to 9 p.m. slot. He recognized a few of his old cast mates.

Petite Plum screamed at the camera, a string of absurdities Kent couldn’t follow. Joe Three-toe with his pencil-thin moustache and his famous foot was there.

Reina Morioka, the elder matron of Japanese soap opera, who he believed had come on to him in his dressing room one evening after a shoot.

Nami Panda sat smiling, her white-white teeth gleaming against the J-pop star’s carroty makeup.

Kokoro Kodo’s magnificent tits nearly popped from her shiny satin top, squeezed into a rising bubble of soft flesh.

On each end of the talent console a young woman in bloated blue satin dress, oversized bloomers underneath, and colossal blue bow atop her head roosted like a sexy Alice blown up while high on magic mushrooms. Around them set designers had created a wonderland of giant monitors with images to satisfy any ADHD audience: blinking lights, and varieties of Styrofoam kanji and patterned shapes, all in vivid colors as if Alice had fallen not into a rabbit hole but a Tokyo department store display window. The console girls beamed and giggled on cue.

Kent watched the show, but spent most of the episode thinking of Midori in her red leather cosplay suit. He’d seen her in a new way, the glistening fabric, wide-eyed mask, pale yellow cups, and magnificent leather V. The plumping tummy. Just as Ozman had gone trance with his katana, Midori had disappeared inside an interior terrain, a place where Kent Richman didn’t exist or matter. And he wanted in, wanted to peek inside, find out what the big deal was. For Midori, Oji-san and his friends, their costumed life was home. Kent Richman could be happy with that.

Illustrated by Max Currie

Ozman resurfaced much the way Kent had played his own revenge scene in a made-for-television drama that never made it to the television. He starred as the twin brother of a New York English teacher working in Japan who goes missing after a run-in with high-level yakuza. Kent played both twins, the dead one in flashbacks. The protagonist has come from the United States to get to the bottom of his twin’s mysterious disappearance. Upon discovering the yakuza connection, Kent’s character tracks down the people responsible for what he discovers is his brother’s death and exacts his revenge with violent ferocity. But not before his character meets and subsequently falls in love with his dead twin’s Japanese girlfriend. Kent recalled staring down into the camera (or the face of the yakuza baddie), his own face filling the frame, just as Ozman’s mug filled the frame as he peered down at Kent in a POV shot: maniacal sneer, rain dripping from his face, eyes wide with zeal, head shaved to a wet sheen. Except for the shaved head, Kent too had sneered and dripped and gone Jack Nicholson in The Shining all over the scene. A film critic for Tokyo Journal who had been invited to a preproduction rehearsal wrote: “Mr. Richman plays the vengeful brother like community theater on steroids.” Soon after the article ran, the movie lost its greenlight status.

Kent suspected he was dreaming again, lost in some series of cause-and-effect fantasy, his paranoia and ill state producing hallucinations bred by his worst fears. He’d thought of little else since he learned of Ozman’s escape. Until he noticed the black-handled chisa katana in a lacquered scabbard around Ozman’s waist, Kent believed he was safe in his reverie, if still on the ground outside Cedars and in a stupor.