Affirmation of the day: My body is a vessel for my
awesomeness.
SHINJUKU DISTRICT, TOKYO, 10:00 P. M.
I just bought an old house in Ibaraki Prefecture, in the middle of rice fields,
with only one access road. I will move there as soon as it is renovated. It is
too dangerous to remain in Tokyo, where I can be attacked at any time.
Maybe I’m being paranoid, maybe I’m completely wrong about all this,
maybe the house is a terrible investment; only time will tell.
It’s all because of the postcards. The damn postcards, all with the same
picture of Jackson Heights.
At first, I completely ignored them. The messages on the back were
pretty innocuous: “I MISS YOU” and “YOU GOT AWAY.” Okay, so Ali
couldn’t handle me dumping him. That was not my problem. Even when the
tone of the postcards changed — the handwriting grew angrier, shakier, and
the messages said “YOU LOOKED BEAUTIFUL THAT NIGHT” and
“YOU ARE MINE” — I just chalked it up to sour grapes.
To hell with Ali and his stupid postcards. I was unbelievably busy
working my ass off at the store. Hustle & Shine blew up, a result of our
slick social media campaign. Local Japanese rappers started wearing my
stuff — Kohh, Miyachi, then Punpee — and posted on Instagram — and then
this Atlanta rapper, Youngster, he wore one of my charms, a jeweled Bugs
Bunny, to the MTV Video Music Awards and even rapped about it in a hit
tune — “Hustle & Shine made me a bunny / Shiny, totally yummy.”
Suddenly all the LA crews wanted my bling: I made an Astro Boy studded
with princess - cut pink diamonds for Big Papa; a curvy Motoko Kusanagi
outlined in rubies for Mo Ni CA; a grinning Monkey D. with pearl teeth for
THE HOLIDAY. It was crazy. What I meant as a Warholian in - joke — like
the Beastie Boys ripping VW emblems off the hoods of cars and wearing
them as ornaments — became a serious status symbol, and the more I
charged, the more sales increased.
We were all over social media. Rappers flew all the way to Tokyo and
swaggered into my store with their crews, all tats and beanies, and the
media buzz grew. Tokyo Weekender wrote about the store, and then
someone back in the States thought it was a good story, and I was profiled
in the Los Angeles Times, followed by a long article in the Style section of
The New York Times. Full - color photos of the bling, pictures of me in the
store in Tokyo. I was thrilled. The family would see these, of course, and
know how well I was doing.
But — nothing. Not a word from Papa. No congratulatory text from
Maryam. The only person who acknowledged my success was Kyle Nowak,
who sent me two dozen roses and a card that said “You go, girl.” But soon I
had other problems. Much larger ones.
The postcards from Ali. They were getting weirder, more insistent, but I
just ignored them. If I did not respond, Ali would get tired of sending them,
right? Then another one arrived, buried in the mail, and I sighed and
glanced at it — and then my blood ran cold.
The message on the back was written in those familiar spiky capital
letters: “BAR ASHOKA — REMEMBER?”
I canceled all my interviews for that afternoon. I climbed into bed and
curled into a ball. Ali was not sending me those postcards. All along, it had
been the Jackson Heights Killer. JHK. Him.
Nobody knew the name of that bar exc ept JHK and me: grimy Bar
Ashoka in Jackson Heights, nestled under the elevated subway, trains
roaring overhead every few minutes. It was too loud in there for
conversation, so most customers stuck to serious drinking. I had walked
into the bar that night, thirteen years ago, and there he was: tight curls,
white wifebeater shirt, corded muscles, a bad boy grinning at me, tipping
his beer bottle in salute.
JHK hadn’t been gunned down in Florida. He’d been in hiding, and now
he’d emerged and somehow tracked me down. Had he seen photographs of
me on our social media accounts? Read about Hustle & Shine? However
he’d found me, he wanted to insinuate himself into my life. And the worst
part was that I couldn’t tell anyone else; if I went to the Tokyo police and
told them that a serial killer — thought to be long dead — was now sending
me postcards, they would write me off as a crazy foreigner.
I was on my own. And if JHK had the resources to find my mailing
address in Japan, what was to stop him from getting on a plane and coming
here?
I called Takeda - san and said that the apartment I was in was totally
unacc eptable: More dead cicadas were inexplicably piling up on my
balcony. The weirdo downstairs continued to complain that my loud
footst eps were interfering with “the peaceful way of living.” Whatever that
meant. I told Takeda - san that I needed to get out of the city, move to
somewhere quiet. The next day, we drove out of Tokyo, and the urban
sprawl was r eplaced by flooded rice fields on both sides of the road,
holding the reflection of the sky. An hour and forty - five minutes from
Tokyo, in Ibaraki Prefecture, we found an akiya, an abandoned house: two
centuries old with curved eaves, a black tile roof, and a rec eption room with
a raised tatami floor. The elderly owners died, and their family did not want
to “dishonor their memory,” so they let it sit unoccupied for fifteen years.
Now it’s on the market, a steal at thirty thousand dollars. Of course, I’ll
have to put about a quarter of a million into it to make it habitable, but it’s
worth it.
And that’s not all I did. I had to confirm that JHK is sending these
postcards — but who could I turn to?
I finally remembered Orlando Epps, the original detective on the case.
Back in the day, he was fearless — he told the press that the NYPD did not
care girls were dying in Jackson Heights because they were not white. The
Post dubbed him “Outraged Orlando” and the NYPD tried to shut him up,
but he wouldn’t stop: In interviews, Epps called for more resources, for
more manpower. And when the NYPD declared the case closed, Epps
insisted that they’d caught the wrong man, a copycat. Epps was in his late
sixties back then. Was he still alive? Would he believe that the killer was
back?
I found Orlando Xavier Epps online and reached out to him by email. He
remembered me and said he’d look at the postcards — and yes, my diaries
from that time would be very helpful. Could I have them delivered? He no
longer had an office, but he met people at a diner in the Financial District.
He emphasized that this was a time - intensive investigation, and was I sure
that I wanted to pay his hourly rate? I r eplied that he had a blank check.
That’s when I had to in volve Maryam. At first she humored me in her
calm psychiatrist’s voice — “Clearly, you’re triggered, sis. Are you
sle eping?” I screamed, “You owe me big - time. And this time, don’t go
blabbing, okay? This time, you ke ep your mouth shut.” There was silence,
and then Maryam said calmly, “Fine. I’ll go to Southampton and get your
diaries. I’ll deliver them to Epps. Then I’m done.”
Meanwhile, I have to ke ep the store going. At work, Takeda - san ke eps
telling me that I look stressed. Of course he phrases these sentiments in his
elliptical Japanese way: “Maybe it is desirable to sle ep a little? Perhaps take
a day off, and I can arrange some sightseeing for you?”
How can I tell him that only in the store, surrounded by my pinkuniformed, perpetually
bowing staff, do I feel safe? That I dread going back
alone to my apartment and checking the mailbox downstairs, pawing
through the brightly colored junk mail covered in cartoon bunnies and teddy
bears — I can never tell whether they are ads for ramen or for divorce
lawyers — to see if there is another postcard from him.
And the postcards have now changed: The grayish image of Jackson
Heights has been r eplaced by a stark white postcard bearing the message “I
NY.” The heart, of course, is in red. Sometimes I get two or three a day,
and on the back, painstakingly lettered in capitals, is a new message, getting
tauter:
“WATCH OUT I WILL FIND YOU.”
“I WILL FIND YOU BITCH.”
“I WILL FIND YOU.”
JHK’s mania is swelling, growing, becoming unbearable. Eleven
thousand kilometers away, I can feel it.
Orlando Epps is the only one who can help me. Maryam agreed to take
him my diaries — so why isn’t she answering my calls? She knows that I’m
eagerly waiting for news. Did Epps find anything in my diaries that will
help us identify JHK?
I’m forced to consider: Did Maryam really meet Epps, or is she lying? Is
she betraying me again, exactly as she did before? She’s capable of
anything. I could get on a plane to New York and meet with Epps myself,
but then I’ll be heading back to JHK’s hunting grounds.
It’s so hard to know the right thing to do.