Somewhere in Neo Tokyo, there is a Chinatown speakeasy with orange lampshades and pink curtains, bartenders dressed in cheongsams and bobbed hairstyles, in an alternate history where Trans-Pacific travel is done by airship and Polynesia is a world superpower.
Behind the bar of the speakeasy, a girl in a turquoise cheongsam mixes Vilnius gin into a coconut. The Del-O-Vision above the bar announces that the rain will continue tomorrow in Neo Tokyo, and then plays some Hawaiian steel guitar, the blurry images of distant palm trees and an island sunset like a distant memory in the mist-filled concrete night.
She serves the coconut cocktail to a woman at the end of the bar, a rather disheveled woman wearing a tuxedo. Her elbows are on the bar, a messy head of flame red hair hanging over her hair. The door opens, admitting throbbing light from the neon dragon sign across the street. A woman walks in, a thin face and a tall, thin body wearing a brown leather bomber jacket. Korean, Taiwanese, and Australian service patches cover the shoulders and back of the jacket. Her green eyes roam to and fro over the speakeasy. She strides through the bar in a confident click of flight boots. She sits next to the redhead in the tuxedo, looking over at her with a half-smile, looking down at the gin tiki cocktail in the coconut sitting untouched on the lacquered bar.
I miss you, the redhead says, stirring her coconut cocktail.
The tall, thin woman in the bomber jacket puts a hand on her shoulder, her half-smile replaced with an expression of chagrin. The Hawaiian steel guitar music stops, the fighting betta in the aquarium set into the side wall turns in a slow flourish of indigo fins.
The redhead though about the last time they had been together, in the hospital in Manila fifteen months ago. Her heart had been aching ever since in her absence, and no visit to the pagoda, no meditation before a jade statue could calm the anguish. She would leave the Del-O-Vision on all night in her small apartment, hoping to hear some news about the battles in Tonga and Kamchatka, the news chatter and music mixing in with the sound of the monsoon rain on the roof.
The feelings of longing hung like an airship over her, distracting her fingers as she picked through rambutan and loquat at the corner market, making her forget her steps as she walked from her skinny tenement building to the Emerald Club every night to work the early shift.
She missed her yesterday. She would miss her tomorrow. And she missed her right now, even as she was sitting next to her.
The Creole Journals 