Free I Called Him Necktie by Milena Michiko Flašar

next door, so I would succeed in the classroom, I resolved to do it from day one, to make a wide berth around the desk three rows in front of me. After all there was plenty of room not to meet each other, and as I’ve already said: I had practice. Nothing was easier for me than to go past someone in the most inconsequential way. What I could not know was just one thing, that this determination would be tested on the very second day.
    No idea who set things in motion. It began with a harmless aside: That one smells. I heard it. Clearly and distinctly: That one smells. Then silent finger-pointing, a wrinkling of noses. Yukiko’s voice, a whisper: Please don’t! More laughter: She smells like she’s got a fish under herskirt. Someone grabbed at her. I saw it. Clearly and distinctly: She shot back. What are you looking at, in my face. I looked away. I saw nothing. And so I saw nothing of anything on the third and the fourth, or the fifth and sixth, or any of the days that followed.
    This smell, came the cry from gaping mouths, whoever smells must pay five thousand yen. What do you mean, you don’t have it? Tomorrow you’ll pay. Dammit, you smell like a pig. Oink-oink. A dead hamster smells better than you. Hey, math whiz! How do you divide an ox into a cow? What started as a harmless aside grew into a litany with gathering speed.
    Yukiko could have used a friend.
    Someone to speak up for her.
    But I.
    I had no voice. I didn’t join in the others’ talk, nor did I protest against it. The thing was to stay outside if inside the world was falling apart. On that morning, when Yukiko came in to the classroom, her desk had been switched, and turned around. There was a caricature of a grunting pig on the blackboard. It was lifting one leg. Her name was underneath. She wiped it off, stroke by stroke. Yukiko became Yuki. Yuki became nothing. With the damp sponge in her hand, she eventually turned around, with a searching look, settling on me. In it was a sweetness, the glow of long ago: I swear to you, I’ll dissolve into stardust. That’s how she looked at me. As if she wanted to tell me: I’ll dissolve.
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    If I had. If I were. There is nothing more depressing than the past conditional. The possibilities it indicates will never be fulfilled, and, despite that, or because of that, they determine the present reality. If I’d somehow intervened then, if I’d been in a position to do that then, I wouldn’t be sitting here today.
    I left it to Yukiko to defend herself. Yet she did little more than simply stand still. A magic chalk circle, it got smaller and smaller. She resembled an animal playing dead. For a while it worked. But then the attackers gained the upper hand, and they wouldn’t stop until they had sniffed out her weakest points. A careless movement and they knew, that’s where they should keep advancing. The game was no longer a game, it was life and death. On the way home I did not see how she was pushed up against a wall, I did not see how they shook their fists at her in the dark passage, I did not see how her skirt slipped above her knee in the empty parking lot. I went on, a silent witness, as I had learned to be. If I intervened, at that time it was still a present conditional, a completely possible possibility, I would be the next in line, that was fairly certain. Better not to let anything come near me. Better to turn off here, before anyone sees me.
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    So now you know.
    Yes.
    And do you understand? That I ...
    .... you have said enough.
    No, not enough. There’s more.
    The tip of the cigarette glowed.
    Today they’re doing overtime. He opened his eyes and seemed to be searching for a point on which to focus. Blinking, he looked first at me, then at the bar, at me again, then at the floor. The floorboards creaked, a drunk went astray on his way to the toilet. Aimlessly he stood between the tables, someone should have taken him by the arm. But he just stood there, a statue without sense or purpose. It’s