An Occurence at Maison Jeunesse

This morning I had my first English conversation with a brother and sister new to the apartment complex who were also going to work for ECC. They struck me at first as a timid pair who must have went knocking about door to door until I had invited them into my little space. I can't be sure how I didn't get their names but it never once came up.

The girl was attractive, with marbly blue eyes and a sort of greasy teenager look that was fitting given that she had accepted the job not long after working alongside high school students at a local Pizza joint in New Jersey. The brother seemed to suffer from the same oily inheritance and his well-worn Nintendo t-shirt was in constant duress, losing a fight against sausagy arms and a Santa size tummy. I asked them how they liked New Jersey and the guy seemed willing to let the girl answer for the both of them.

She told me how great it was to be near all the cities but that she also liked the country because of banjos and black people. I didn't ask her what exactly she meant and she continued to say that 'If I have a kid in the city, I'll get him a banjo but it'll be a shame he won't be able to play it. You know all the people who play banjos live in the country.' I had no evidence to the contrary so I let that one slid too.

Here, the brother jumped in and mentioned the hiring session in Toronto. They had been, but experienced a blackout or some such difficulty that cut short an otherwise in-depth orientation. Both were surprised to hear me relate, what I considered basic information: length of stay, commuting arrangements and even pay specifics. Jumping in again, the brother cut me short in an aggravated way and joked that 'I had too much time just sitting around to read all that stuff,' and while he was painfully right, he came across as ignorant and insecure. The girl picked up on my talk about money, which I referred to in yen, and didn't quite seem to get the scale of pay. She told me how she had recently purchased a home with her boyfriend back home and now worried that she might have to save longer than planned to get back to him.

'So you are going back to the states, to New Jersey?' I asked. 'Oh, yes,' she replied. 'I don't have much of a choice. I've already put 800 dollars down on the place.'

'But you could save that working here in like two months,' I told her. To which she simply stared at the floor as if it were easier to do the math on the blank tile. Perhaps sensing his sister's distress the brother pulled out a laptop and wanted to show me something he thought I might get a kick out of. I realized that the girl had gotten up and left. The brother gave me a 'watch this' nudge and, as the screen filled up with an anime cartoon of military jeeps trading gunfire and dodging rocket explosions, I heard a tinkering in my kitchen which fully woke me from my sleep. I scrambled up, grasping after the pair of idiots who slipped back into the nothing I had pulled them from.

One might turn to a troubled psyche for interpretation but they needn't, really, go farther than isolation and a large plate of poor Japanese-spaghetti before bed to understand the vividness of my encounter and the disappointment, like yours upon facing a cheap literary trick, of its non-reality. Oh, well. It's morning and even if I've still met no body, whose to say ghosts aren't people too.