It’s as though my girlfriend has magically intruded into the room and joined the conversation. As though my guilty conscience has manifested itself. Dumb luck.

“That was Rose,” I say.

“Yes,” Yuka says. “She sound strong.”

“She is.” Too strong. It seems like she could live without me. When I first told Rose about my six-month Tokyo fellowship to write articles about Japanese trends, Rose was nothing but encouraging. When I asked, But what about us? Rose said, I’ll wait. She never assumed that waiting would be hard for me.

“They just remind on the TV that tomorrow is Bean-throwing Ceremony Day,” Yuka says.

“What’s that?”

“I take you tomorrow,” she says.

She leaves at midnight to catch the last train. I fold the bed into the wall, get a beer, and fold it back down. While I sip the beer, I flip through the channels and take notes:

Leonardo DiCaprio hawking credit cards.

Harrison Ford—beer.

Bruce Willis—cigars.

Jodie Foster—cars.

And the President, wa tourism.

Between commercials: people eat live bugs to the screaming laughter of a studio audience.lking on the beach and through a wheat field, plugging Japanese

The email from Rose reads:

“With the world this crazy, I’m thinking about our plans to one day have a baby. Don’t you think bringing a baby into this insane world is, I don’t know—insane? Do we even have a future? Are we really on the brink of global nuclear war? I’m going to call you. Then I’m going to get started on these petitions. My god, I have to feel like I can do something.”

Rose is good friends with the apocalypse. I type:

“People are having kids left and right. Not everyone suffers over the thought of it. They just do it. I want to go to doctor and say, get us pregnant. I want to close the blinds and raise our baby, to relish the baby’s first word and first step, to work in the preschool co-op, to block out the bullshit we can’t control that spews out of the radio, T.V., newspaper. I don’t care how many petitions someone signs or how many peace marches we attend. We have no control over what world leaders decide to do. The end eventually comes for us all, anyway. We might as well live.”

This line of argument, I know, makes Rose go ballistic. She’s been known to throw a shoe or a book at me. She says I’m inert. Which was why she was happy to see me actually do something—meaning, come to Japan. It wasn’t enough for me to do the dishes, weed the garden, write freelance articles, go to the gym, eat dinner out with friends, play Scrabble, and read novels. Life has to have a bigger purpose.

I hit delete.