Unwanted Gift

Where was I headed to again? Ah, that’s right. The konbini. I needed milk tea and fruit for breakfast the next day.

“Hey, miss!” A man with a black toque and a stained sports jacket came closer to me with quickening steps.

I looked around, but no one else appeared to be in the area. It was late at night and, the street was empty. I was alone. My stomach twisted into an uncomfortable little knot, the way it always does when I’m met with a situation like that.

“You! I have something for you!” He called out again and I realized that I wasn’t struggling to understand what he was saying.

My eyes flickered right, and a narrow alleyway seemed to be my last possible route for escape. He drew closer, and the closer he got, my darting eyes must have queued him to the gears turning in my head. With a quick jolt, my arm was trapped in his grasp.

“I’m not trying to hurt you, okay?”

The man looked maybe twenty-five years of age and smelled of musty clothing with cigarette smoke embedded into its fabric. Through his crooked and prematurely yellowing teeth, I could faintly make out a Kansai accent. He could have been handsome, if I had met him on a day that he had taken a shower.

I tried to wriggle my arm free again, insisting, “Sir, I don’t want anything. I’m just trying to reach the convenience store. Please, let go of my arm.”

“I don’t care about that. I need you to take this.” He looked at me with intensity, and the streetlights cast a menacing look on his face that made it seem dangerous to refuse him.

I looked down to see a black, drawstring bag secured under his left arm. “Do you want something from me?” I said, in an attempt to seem unaffected by such a jarring and unwanted circumstance.

“There’s no time for that.” He shoved the black bag into my arms, almost knocking the wind from my stomach. “All that’s inside is a toaster.”

I looked up at him, a puzzled expression now replacing a fearful one. “Sir, I really don’t need a toaster, my...um, roommate already has-”

“I don’t care what your roommate already has. I’m telling you to take this home with you.” His eyebrows furrowed and I came to notice he was not as threatening as I had initially thought. He seemed desperate. “You can understand me, can’t you? You speak English?”

I nodded.

“It’s a gift, just take it.”

“Are you going to try to take something in return?” I asked.

“No. Nothing at all. Your gift to me is taking this off my hands. Please.”

I looked at him and felt the unusually heavy toaster in my hands. Maybe it was expensive and he had stolen it. I wanted to give him something in return so that he would just let me go. I tilted my body to the side and reached into one of the deep pockets of my coat.

“Here. Take this,” I said. “Now, this is an exchange. I don’t owe you anything if this is an exchange.”

He looked down at a little black notebook in my hand. It was leather-bound, and the pages inside were soft and easy to write on. I had barely broken it in. Only one or two pages had poorly written lines littered over the paper. When my brother had gifted it to me for my twenty-second birthday just a few days earlier, I was sure he had said it was Italian. I was sure of it, at least that’s what my brother’s letter said when I got the package in the mail.

“I told you, I don’t need anything in return,” the man insisted.

“Yes, and I told you I want an exchange. I insist you take this if you want me to take your toaster.”

He looked at me for a moment, and in his dark eyes, I could see his agitation growing. He snatched the book out of my hands. “Fine. Yeah, fine,” he stammered.

He turned away from me and searched for a place to retreat to, just as I had done minutes earlier. Then he turned back to me and his dark eyes pierced me beneath the shaggy hair that stuck out of his toque, “Take this home first. You can go to the konbini after. Just take it home right now.”

“Why? So you can follow me home? I have pepper spray in my back pocket, just so you know.”

“I don’t give a damn about that,” he gritted through his yellowing teeth, “Just take it home.”

He turned away from me for the last time, and I watched him carelessly stuff my black notebook into his coat. It pained me to see such a fine notebook go to waste just days after receiving it, but I tried to justify my decision as a decision that ensured my safety. Yes, it could’ve been a load of crap, but I wanted to convince myself otherwise.

Walking home with the toaster under my left arm, I carried it in the same position the man had carried it in. I walked home at a quick clip, tempted by the thought of pulling out a cigarette. With every few steps, I checked behind me and then pulled my gaze forward again in a systematic pattern. I, for the first time, wished I had a roommate there to greet me when I walked in the door.

Upon finally entering my closet-like apartment, I locked the door behind me and shut every window, drawing the curtains for good measure. Failing to take off my sneakers and jacket, I sat in the middle of my bedroom, the black drawstring case in front of me. With careful hands, I pulled the toaster out of the bag. I looked at it from all angles, stainless steel, clean, brand-new.

I wondered why that man seemed so desperate and why he didn’t just take it to a pawn shop. He could have gotten a pretty good stack of money for it. Ducking my head and peering into the openings, I found small sheets of paper, bound together with elastics. Now more confused than ever, I impatiently tipped the toaster upside down and shook it with two hands.

Bills - yen, to be exact, came tumbling out. Stacks upon stacks of yen were strewn across my bedroom floor. I dropped the toaster in front of me and kicked myself away from it. With a tight chest, I stared at it in horror before using my foot to slowly inch a stack towards me. Hesitantly flipping through the pages in my hands, I counted one stack. How could it have been real? I inched myself closer to the toaster once again and emptied its contents entirely. I counted each bundle and multiplied it by the value of each stack.

“1.7 billion yen…” I whispered to myself as I grabbed the traveler’s handbook next to me. I scribbled down the exchange of yen to Canadian dollars and calculated the weight in a currency that I could fully understand.

I did not understand. How was I supposed to understand how $20,000 was just shoved into my arms by a smelly, yellow-toothed, almost-handsome man?

Upon looking in the toaster again, I realized it was completely hollow. It was just the exterior of a toaster, all its contents on the floor. There was nothing for toasting left in the toaster. My mind began to race, and I envisioned someone breaking through the door. I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of nausea as I quickly stuffed the money back into it’s metal casing.

Never once did I consider spending that money. Maybe someone else would’ve had the guts to take it for themselves, but as a foreigner, I felt I was being set up. For the next two days, I stayed holed-up in my apartment. Finishing my Kanji practice seemed impossible, and so did reading or writing, or anything for that matter. I listened to the radio and watched a few television programs, but the toaster in the middle of the room was not going to let me have peace for even one minute.

It stared at me; a white-hot stare that made it uncomfortable to look at but impossible to ignore. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t have anyone to help me. Paranoia became my unwanted companion that startled me with every voice in the hallway of my apartment building, every ringing of my telephone, and every stomp of a foot from someone above my room. When I finally let myself sleep, I would sleep next to my horrible “gift” and hope it would be gone in the morning.

A Friday night, I think it was, I was asleep on my floor next to the toaster and I heard a rattling at my window. I desperately wanted it to be a figment of my anxiety, but of course it wasn’t. The window rattled, and I scampered to my feet in a panic. Behind the curtains, a dark figure wrestled with the fabric and tore it away. I thought about picking up the toaster and flinging the heavy, metal box at the intruder, but then I thought maybe the intruder could help me from the horror that sat next to me on my bedroom floor.

As the curtains danced in the air and settled on the ground, I saw a familiar face for the first time since I had arrived. There he was. He wore the same jacket and the same black toque, but he still smelled poorly, and his hair was still a mess.

My eyes went wide. I tried to speak, but my words failed me. There he was, crouching down on the floor, pulling something out of his jacket pocket.

“I came to return something to you,” he muttered, quietly.

I remained silent.

“I know you said you wanted an exchange, and I’m here to make another.”

With a light thud, my black notebook hit the floor. I looked down at my notebook and then back at the man in front of me. He didn’t smile, but he didn’t look desperate the way he did when I first met him. I found him harder to read the more I familiarized myself with his features.

He slowly leaned forward and took the toaster in his hands. Once again, he tucked it under his arm before he turned to take his leave.

“I thought you said you weren’t going to follow me home?” I choked out before he had the chance to climb back out of my window.

“And I thought you said you had a roommate.”

He left after taking the toaster with him and I never saw him again after that. When I picked my black notebook off the ground, I found a strip of coupons for the konbini and a note inside.

Thank-you for looking after my toaster. You helped me in ways you will never understand.

I still keep my black notebook in my bedside table twenty-five years later. I still run my fingers over the pen marks left by the almost-handsome man. That notebook reminds me of the scariest threat I had ever encountered. There that money was, in my memory, masked as a toaster with no functional toasting mechanisms. There that toaster was, its purpose hollowed out and replaced with money. That money, I thought, seemed to cause more trouble than it was worth.