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Friday, September 12th, 2008
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11:53 am - a missing section
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I get off the streetcar. A young punk in shredded jeans and a black t-shirt, pins stuck through his earlobes, is pissing against the wall of a store. His girlfriend squats beside him, picking at her teeth with a single, black-painted nail. I walk into the Market. A young girl with thick dreds passes on a bike, the right side of her bare leg badly bruised at the knee. The sound of laughing and thudding music enters the street from the front entrance of a bar. To my right, in a small, shaded park, a group of hippies sit on the grass, smoking weed and talking quietly. One of them, shirtless, his thin chest sunk deeply around his ribs, craddles a large African drum between his knees. He looks at me, blinks heavily, turns back to his friends.
At the end of the street a group of young hipsters mill outside a bar, most of them smoking. Their voices cut into the air, loud, abrasive laughter, guys arguing. The sound of a bottle being smashed on the pavement.
I scan the crowd but Ryan isn’t in it. I walk up to a young blonde smoking by herself near the curb.
“This is the Boat yeah?” I ask. She looks at me like I’m something she coughed up. I smile at her.
“Uh, yeah,” she says.
I turn around. He’s here somewhere. The event he created on Facebook listed a graffiti project and then dancing at the Boat, so he’s either in the club already or still tagging somewhere. A little further ahead is the entrance to an alley. I walk over to it; at the far end end a small group of people stand watching a couple guys huddled next to the wall.
I walk into the alley, loose gravel and shards of glass crunching under my feet, weeds piercing the cracks in the pavement. The left wall is easily 30 feet high, solid brick painted peeling white. To the right are the backs of houses, poorly constructed wooden fences barely stopping their yards from leaking into each other. The space is dim except for a couple flashlights someone’s set on a couple crates. They shine against the wall, the backs of the artists; the one on the right is Ryan. Even with his back to me I can tell it’s him – the smooth line of his neck and the short crop of hair, the slight hunch in his shoulders that’s identical to Ryota’s.
I approach the group: two guys and two girls, plus Ryan and the other guy tagging the wall. The four of them standing look at me, but the artists don’t notice. One of the guy’s – black and rail thin – nods at me. The other, white, and bigger, doesn’t acknowledge me. He brings a bottle of Coke to his lips, swallows it, passes the bottle to the black guy, who does the same. Whatever’s in the bottle flashes clear beneath the Coke lable. Both the girls eye me.
“What’s up?” I say. The black guy shrugs.
“Hey,” says one of the girls, the less attractive one, in a small black dress, her heavy breasts puffing out the top. Her friend – prettier, slimmer, and bleach blonde, takes a cell phone out of her pocket and begins texting something.
“Sorry, just saaw these guys working down here and thought I’d come check it out.”
“You like graffiti?” asks the first girl.
“Mhmm.”
“You here for the Boat?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“They’re really good,” she says, as if it follows naturally.
“Who is?”
“Oh, them.” She nods to Ryan and his friend. The gay couple laughs, the black guy handing the white guy the bottle. Ryan works a can of black paint at the base of the wall, his friend filling in a looping coil with pink. The image is nothing I recognize; colour patterns, intersecting lines, a few loose circles. I can’t believe anyone would want to watch someone painting this, and then I notice the digital video camera set up on one of the crates, near the flashlights. The black guy sees me looking.
“We’re gonna time lapse it,” he says.
“Cool. And the restof you just like drinking in alleys.”
The bigger girl smiles, but the black guy looks at me just like the girl back at the curb did, like I’m something nasty he stepped on. He’s definitely gay – I wasn’t sure at first, but only a good looking woman or a gay man can give off looks like that.
Ryan stands up, shakes his arms out, turns to face us. He has a bandana tied around the lower half of his face. It once must have been white but it’s stained with so many coats and shades of paint that it’s nearly impossible to tell. He pulls the bandana down: his face is narrow, with high cheek-bones, wide lips. His black hair hangs in sharp points from his forehead. He’s pale; he looks exactly like Ryota bled of colour; his eyes are wider. He spits, drops his (empty) can of paint to the ground.
“Shit my knees hurt,” he says. The black guy offers him the bottle of Coke. Ryan takes it, sucking from it heavily, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Who’re you?” he says.
“No one,” I answer. “Just came down an alley.”
He shrugs, turns to the other artist.
“You almost done?”
“Almost,” he says. The black guy walks over to the video camera and turns it off.
“Let’s get out of this alley,” he says. The prettier girl has her cell at her ear, talking quietly. Her friend tries to look comfortable standing next to her. I lean against the back fence, trying to get a better look at the work they did on the opposite wall, but it’s too big to see fully. A point I put my eyes on won’t take in the whole of it. At the edge, beneath the work, is a fresh coat of white, underneath that, the outside rim of the previous mural.
“You like it?” asks Ryan.
“It’s big,” I say.
“Has to be, has to be. Anyway it’s better than the shit that was here before. More than half the work in the city is garbage. It should all be painted over.”
Something about him pisses me off.
“Maybe whoever threw that up before you wouldn’t agree.”
“I don’t care what they think,” he says, laughing.
“Come on,” says the white guy. “I wanna dance.”
“We’re all getting bored back here. And we’re attractin people off the street,” says the black guy. Ryan laughs. The other artist stands up.
“I’ll clean this up.”
“I’ll help,” says Ryan.
“Naw, it’s ok. I don’t feel like dancing.”
“You never feel like dancing.”
“Come on,” says the pretty girl. She puts her phone away in her purse.
“Yeah,” says the heavy girl. She glances at me, and it’s like she’s asking me to come too; it isn’t flattering – she’s probably just tired of hanging out with a bunch of gays. They start filing out of the alley. The second artist switches off the flashlights, starts packing them and the cans of spray paint into the milk crates. Ryan looks back at me, turns around and follows his friends. I wait for them to clear the corner and then I move to the far end othe alley.
“Can’t man,” I hear Ryan saying. “Got some stuff to take care of.”
“Come on!” says one of the girls.
“Sorry hun. Dance yer little tail off for me though, k?”
I watch him walk into view the opposite side of the street. He moves fast, pausing briefly to light up a cigarette. I round the corner and follow him.
He winds his way down the street, out of the Market, turning left on Dundas. The lights at Spadina wash the pavement, glint, yellow and red, over the hoods of passing cars.
He walks like Ryota, but softer, or maybe just more gay. He tosses the cigarette away affectedly in the middle of an intersection, pauses to let a car turn right and carries on past Spadina. After a block he turns into an alley. I turn with him; it smells of rotten fruit and drywall. On the left are piled bags of trash, the crumbling remains of a gutted building – scrap wood, electrical wiring, cracked cinderblocks, dust. Next to the pile is a dumpster overflowing with more of the same, an electrical pole supporting the weight of a circuit box, dozens of black cables. On the opposite side of the alley is a metal door next to a stack of milk crates. Ryan walks up to the door. I stop, then move around behind the electrical pole next to the dumpster.
He knocks on the door, once, hard. There’s a pause, and then it’s pushed open, just a crack. Ryan says something too low for me to hear. The door opens wider, and steps around and walks into the building. The door swings shut, and I can see the tag scralwed on it. His tag, the one from the show, and from Japan. The mnemonic.
The alley is quiet; a cat slips into view around the side of the dumpster, paws quietly at the trash. It looks at me, its eyes glinting points of light.
I wish I had a cigarette.
The door bursts open. Two guys step out – the two guys I followed here from the subway. They’re dressed almost exactly the same, in the same “uniforms” – business casual with name tags hanging at their necks.
I freeze, which is stupid, start walking which is worse – they see me instantly. The door closes behind them, and the car darts off behind the dumpster.
“Hey...” says the Middle-Eastern, grinning “Now I remember you.” He laughs.
“Shit, of all things you remember this dumb bastard?” says the black man.
“It’s a start,” he answers. To me: “Yo, what the fuck I tell you last time?”
I churn through responses, trying to land on the one that’ll get me out of here. Should I play it aggressive? Passive? Like it it didn’t happen.
“Huh?”
“You heard him,” says the black man. “Sure as shit you heard him last time. I know ‘cause he wouldn’t shut up about it.”
“Told you it wasn’t a good idea. Shoulda listened.”
“What the fuck are you guys talking about?”
I start walking and they cut me off. Behind them, the street is tantalizingly close – a couple teen girls pass on Dundas, walking bikes. Neither of them glance into the alley.
“No man, you aint leavin yet.”
“I think you got the wrong person or something.”
“Hey,” says the Middle-Eastern, to the black man. He tilts his head toward him, but keeps his eyes on me. “He doesn’t remember?” There’s a level of uncertainty in his voice that wasn’t there before.
“Maybe he does and maybe he doesn’t.”
“Yeah.”
“Shit, I don’t care if he doesn’t or not. Makes no difference to me – I remember. And I remember us tellin him not to come by no more.”
“Well,” starts the Middle-Eastern.
“What?”
“Well, I didn’t say that.”
“Huh?”
“I mean not exactly. I told him it was a bad idea but not that he shouldn’t come around again.”
“You told me you did.”
“Did I?”
“You dumb fuck. Why the hell are you telling me this now?”
This would be funny if I wasn’t scared, but I am; I realize it for the first time. When I met the researcher in Japan I’d been wary, but not scared. These guys are different, especially the Middle-Eastern; he cycles through versions of himself even faster than the researcher did, his personality shifting on a dime, from hard-ass to deferential and back. I turn around, start walking up the alley, away from the street (a mistake? But at least I’m moving.)
“Where you going?”
“Yeah man, stop a minute.”
They fall into step on either side of me. I swivel my head between them, the black man on my left, the Middle-Eastern on the right. The black man’s wide face is super-imposed over the faded, brick backs of buildings, the Middle-Eastern’s over fences, garage doors, the opening of another alley.
“My name’s...” The Middle-eastern starts, breaks off. He takes the tag hanging at his neck and reads it. “Jerry.”
“And I’m Ben.”
“Now where you headed?”
“Home.”
“Home huh?”
“That’s right.”
“You know, I think you should slow down and talk a minute.”
“We won’t keep you long.”
Ben puts his hand on my shoulder. It’s heavy and warm. I brush it off with difficulty. He puts it back, and pulls back; I skid to a halt.
“What the fuck man? Get your fuckin hand off me.”
“Don’t go takin that tone. You think it’s alright stalkin people?”
“What? Who’s stalking anyone?”
“Still don’t remember huh? You followed us back round here one day. Now, our friend Ryan tells us he had you followin him here tonight. And here you are. You think that’s right?”
“Why not?” I say, dropping the pretence that I don’t remember. It doesn’t seem like it’s working. “I did it all the time in Japan.”
“You think this is funny?” Jerry’s eyes are glazed, like plastic replicas. He licks the corner of his mouth. Ben’s hand on my shoulder has the weight of a prostethic. My stomach turns, and I run for it.
A hard shot to my foot: the pavement stands up to meet me; pain explodes at the side of my head, I taste blood. A brick hits me in the stomach, just below my lowest rib (not a brick – one of their feet, but felt like a brick); I retch, spit, curl into a ball. He kicks me again. Which one? One of them.
“This aint Japan fucker!” screams Jerry.
Lying on the ground, gasping, foreshortened pavement leading to an empty garage. The garage’s roof is made from a sheet of corrugated green plastic, the wall on the right the brick, on the left, a shitty wooden fence. At the back wall are a collection of boxes, old paint cans, and a large, wooden pagoda, complete with pedestal and an offering of fruit, a few burnt-out sticks of incense. What the fuck is that doing here? the thought is hard as the ground under my cheek.
One of them kicks me in the gut again.
“Hey, fuckin watch it!”
I look up: Ben has his arm around Jerry, holding him back (it hit me then, as hard as the kicks, as off as a pagoda in a back alley.) I spit laughter, roll onto my back.
“What’s so fuckin funny huh?” asks Jerry. He lands another kick. I groan, laughing harder, my hands cradling my stomach.
“Ben and Jerry? Are you fuckers on crack or something?”
“What?”
“You guys are fuckin ice cream!”
“What?” He says it again, his voice cracking. He seems to slump into himself, Ben’s grip on his shoulders loosening. He suddenly looks confused, like a lost child. “You sayin that aint my name? It’s written right HERE man.” He takes his tag and holds it up at me. “It SAYS so.”
“Oh shit man, really?” I get up to my knees, spit again, a loose trail of saliva hanging from my lips. “Well then I guess it must be your name. Shit. Somebody fucked you guys up real good huh?”
“You wanna talk about fucked up? Huh?” He springs forward, aims a kick – I catch his foot in my hands, my fingers nearly breaking; a cold laser of pain slices the length of my arm; I ignore it, turn inwards, drag his leg around with me. He lets out a muffled shout as he hits the ground.
“Shit!”
I get to my feet, run, stumble, my palms scraping the ground as I catch myself. I look around, see Ben pulling Jerry to his feet, and don’t bother waiting around to watch.
I run, turn down the nearest alley, a blur of graffiti and tags on the walls around me. My foot catches on something; it clatters away, hollow and metallic – a can. It lands in the gutter running alongside a doorway.
“Hey! You fuck!” The voice echoes along the walls, mixes and dies in the ragged sound of my breath, the drumline of my feet on the pavement.
I burst out of the alley, onto the street, nearly slamming into an old, bent woman pushing a shopping cart. Light burns my eyes: headlights, all yellow, streaking, the neon hung in restaurant windows, blue fish, red characters. Inside, happy people eat at tables with gleaming plastic table cloths, waiters in cheap suits.
I want to and don’t look behind me. I can hear them, running. At least they’ve shut up now; breath burns my lungs, lights burning my eyes, signs dripping off the sides of buildings – ALL YOU CAN EAT; FACTORY PRICE; SUN MING HONG; ORIENT HARVEST – a cab’s headlights and for a second I have an insane urge to flag him down (should have – they won’t do shit in public. What are they going to do? Drag me out of the cab? They might.) The cab barrels through the yellow light and, and running, I nearly fall into the hood of a car turning right, dodge it, narrowly; the squeel of tires. Someone yelling – Ben and Jerry? The guy driving the car? I don’t wait to find out.
Run. Legs move and eyes follow; I see myself reflected in store windows, over headless mannequins, displays of imported tank tops, cuts of meat, in the glass windshields of parked cars – and it’s my face, it is mine, the same face I’ve always had – an alley opens on the right and turn into it, swallowed in the shade of towering brick walls, a stench of leftover Chinese food, baked oil. At the end of the alley, a lower brick wall, graffitti – the word SKISM sprayed there, in red – and behind that someone’s back yard. I run to the wall.
“You’re done now! Done!” The voice (Ben’s? Jerry’s?) comes from the far end of the alley; I jump, hit the brick wall, the breath ripped from my lungs, fingertips straining at the top edge, muscles screaming – I pull myself over as a hand grasps my ankle. I twist it loose and fall onto damp earth on the far side.
I lie on my back. A mud-purple sky hangs above me, framed by the roofs of buildings, the wall. Breath pours from my mouth, gasping.
I can hear them scrambling on the other side of the wall.
“Ya see that?” says Jerry.
“Mutherfucker can jump. Shit.”
“Hey Ben!” I yell. “You talk like a fuckin stereotype ya braindead fuck!”
“Muchterfuck we’re not through with you by a damn sight!”
“Fuck this guy man, Jesus Christ.”
Something flies over the wall. It hangs in the air, black and solid, blotting a cut of sky.
“Shit!”
I roll; it lands – a brick – on the ground a foot from my head. I get to my feet, stagger forward. In front of me is the back end of a house, a glass door black as a mouth in the center of a narrow wall. I move around the side of the house to a gate, fumble with the latch.
“Hey!” I turn – Jerry’s head at the wall. “You’re not goin anywhere.” He pulls himself over the edge. I leave the latch, haul myslf over the gate and drop onto a concrete landing on the far side.
My left ankle aches, and my hip, a creeping, sick sore in my side where they kicked me. I run anyway, down the street. I want to run right, get back on Spadina, into the light, the signs of life (cabs, the rattle of a streetcar, some drunk kid yelling at his friend); I turn left instead, down a quiet, residential street of dead houses and blank cars.
I cross the street. There’s a large bush ringing the lawn of one of the houses, I dive behind it, pull myself over the grass and sit down in the small garden backing the bush, swaddled in shadows. I learn forward, press my face close to the bush. The leaves are cool against my skin, feel like they’re coated in a layer of plastic. Through the gaps in the leaves, the bony twigs, I can see a section of road, the porch of a house on the opposite street.
They walk into view, dress shirts untucked, dirt stains on the front of their pants. They stop in front of the house. Jerry laughs, but Ben looks worried.
“Lost the fucker...” His voice carries across the street.
“Yo that was pretty fucked up huh?”
“Man what you go kicking him around for? We weren’t told nothin about that.”
“I just lost it man, you know, I get like that sometimes. Hey you don’t believe him do you? About our names I mean?”
“Ah man, shut the fuck up about our names alright? It doesn’t make a difference what the fuck your name is. All you gotta worry about is what we’re supposed to tell him about this.”
“We just tell him he got away.”
“Fuck,” Ben says. He starts walking away. Jerry follows him. “You must be dumber than I thought if you think he...” his voice trails off as they move out of earshot.
I breathe out, lie back into the soft earth. There’s no way any of that just happened. A pair of goons named Ben and Jerry hanging in the back alleys of Chinatown? In business casual? That has about as much chance of being real as I have of figuring it out.
I stretch myself out, crushing the flowers in the garden. A low gust of wind rustles the bush’s leaves.
“What the hell happened to you?” Her voice shook as she said it, her face twisting. She hesitated, took a step towards me. I bent down to take my shoes off, slowly, working around the pain in my side.
“May,” I start, and the lie I’d prepared died on my lips. I drew a blank – I couldn’t remember what I was going to tell her. It was the first time since I started with the drug that I’d forgotten something, and the absence of memory was another kind of pain.
“May I have no idea who you are,” I said.
“What?”
I sat down in the middle of the hallway, stared at my feet. She stood in front of me, motionless.
“I don’t remember you. Not like this, not the way you remember me. I don’t remember a relationship with you, or you ever being in Japan. It’s all gone. I took so many pills. It’s all bullshit.” I sighed, looked at her. “It’s all bullshit.”
“You’re taking mneme?”
“No. No, I’m not taking mneme. I don’t think I am. I took it in Japan.”
“But that’s not possible. How can it be in Japan already?”
“I don’t know. I thought I did. I thought I found out where it was coming from, but all that was bullshit too.”
“You don’t remember me?” She sat down next to me. I struggled beside her. She let me put my arm around her shoulders. The press of her body next to me caused my ribs to ache.
“Not like this.”
“Then how?”
“I remember a girl named Miho who looked like you.”
“And she was your girlfriend?”
“No. She was my friend’s girlfriend. We were just cheating together. But maybe we weren’t. Doesn’t matter now.”
“This is really messed up,” her voice was quiet. “And I don’t get it. Tell me what happened. Why are you hurt? Who did this to you?”
I closed my eyes. With them shut, I could imagine it was Miho next to me. For a second they were the same girl. And then the moment ended, and I told her what happened, about Ben and Jerry, tailing Ryan back to a door with his tag on it. She listened silently.
“That’s really random,” she said, when I finished. “But it makes about as much sense as anything else. You definitely got beat up.”
“I did.”
“Fuck,” she sighed. “I’m going to get rid of these pills.”
“It’s hard to do.”
“What is?”
“Getting off it. The withdrawal is bad.”
“What withdrawal? K stoppped taking it for about a month before she did it again last weekend. And she was fine.”
I shrugged. She stood up and went into the living room and I followed her. She took the bag of pills out of the drawer. I took my shirt off, gingerly. There were a number of dark bruises already visible on my side. May saw them and gasped, put the bag down on the desk. She touched my skin, gingerly.
“This is really messed up. I don’t know what to do with this. I just want to get away from this.”
“So do I.”
“You know what? My parents are away. They’re vacationing with some friends. You want to go up there for the weekend?”
“Up where?”
“To my parents’ – you don’t remember that either?”
“I don’t remember anything.”
She closed her eyes, touched the side of her face with her hand, set the bag of pills down on the desk.
“Why?” she said, and looked at me. Her eyes were hard. “Why did you lie to me?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“You’re right,” I said, and leaned against the desk. I glanced at the bag of pills, saw myself taking one and leaving this scene behind. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“Just tell me why.”
“Because I wanted to be with you. Because you knew me.”
“It’s a pretty fucked up thing to do.”
“I know it is.”
“You should have told me the truth.”
“I’m telling you now.”
“And you’re telling me that you don’t remember me at all. That all the time we spent together is totally gone for you. Like it never happened. Do you have any idea how that feels? Like, what am I supposed to do with that? How can I even believe you? With these fucking pills, I don’t even know if this is happening or not. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and you’ll tell me you do remember it.”
I’m telling you now.”
“And you’re telling me that you don’t remember me at all. That all the time we spent together is totally gone for you. Like it never happened. Do you have any idea how that feels? Like, what am I supposed to do with that? How can I even believe you? With these fucking pills, I don’t even know if this is happening or not. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and you’ll tell me you do remember it.”
“This is real though. It is really happening.” I remembered Miho saying the same thing to me in Japan, and knew that like me, May wouldn’t believe it. Or that she couldn’t.
“I’m going to see if I have any disinfectant or something,” she said.
“Ok.”
She walked into bathroom. I looked again at the bag of pills lying on the desk. Before she came out again I took a couple and put them in my pocket. I don’t know why I did it. I think at the time I felt it might have been my only way out.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Monday, August 18th, 2008
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1:01 pm - more work for work
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“Yeah. What’s it of?” She came closer, put her small hands on my arm, drew her fingers over the tatooo. “It doesn’t hurt does it?” She squinted. “No, it’s healed. You know what it reminds me of? That time we went to see that exhibit while we were in Osaka. What was the name of that artist?”
I had been to Osaka. It was before I started taking the drug, on one of my first vacations in Japan. I’d gone out there because a friend of mine from university was teaching there, and she said I could crash on her couch. We’d spent almost the whole week going to bars and getting drunk, walking hung-over around the city or in Kyoto, taking pictures of temples that all started blurring together after awhile. One morning, half-asleep on the subway, I noticed a poster for a Yoshitaka Amano exhibit. I’d liked his work since I was a kid playing the Final Fantasy video games he’d done the concept art for. The exhibit was for that week only, and I decided to check it out. Another plus was that it was free.
I remembered doing that but I’d done it alone. She wasn’t there. She had never been in Japan with me. But she remembered this. I looked at the tattoo again: it did look like something inspired by Amano.
“Yeah,” I said, tugging on her hips. She kissed me absently on the chest, still playing her fingers over the design. “That’s exactly what it is.”
“It’ll take some getting used to.”
“It will.”
She shook her head, kissed me again. This time our mouths came together naturally. I guided her to the bed.
I started looking for a job. May was a grad student footing her own bills. Most of her money came from grants and some from loans. She’d been payig her own way for awhile and didn’t need my shelp, but it didn’t stop me from feeling like I owed her.
Looking for a job and getting one are different things. I was an Engish major and former ESL teacher – all I was qualified to do was teach or go back to school. I didn’t want to either. If I could help it, I wanted to stay away from ESL. The thought of correcting the sentence “I went to shopping” once more was enough to send me into a blind rage. I don’t know who I was angry at exactly – it wasn’t the Japanese. Maye it was myself for choosing such a bullshit degree. Thankfully, I got hired at a newswire before my money ran out.
The office was downtown, in the thick of the financial district. The building was a drab, 8-storey box that disappeared from memory as soon as you took your eyes off it. Unless you were doing mneme (which I wasn’t.) I shared my commute with hundreds of other dead-faced office workers. These were not salarymen; their lack of a jacket, designer shirts and deliberately coloured ties were of a different class entirely. The men put more effort (and product) into their hair and the women walked with a masculine sense of responsibility and entitlement wholly lacking in their OL counterparts.
I went to work more or less dressed like them, but I told myslf I was different, that my face as I rode the subway had an ironical edge to it, as if to say “I’ve seen some shit you people never dream.” I told myself I felt like a returning soldier, without the war guilt and stress disorders. That’s what I told myself, but the reality was I was just like the rest of them, just like I’d been in Japan. Nothing had changed except for the scenery.
The job itself was a potent mixture of intensity and boredom: all the stress of a newspaper and all the pettiness and politics of an office.
I’d never heard of the industry before I interviewed, but the process was straight-forward enough. They took documents, mostly from publically traded corporations, that the companies were legally required to write, and sent them over “the wire” (a word sequence I’d come to hate as much as “go to shopping”.) All this meant was that we formatted the client’s word or pdf documents into a raw text that could be read by the internet, and sent it off to news sites like Yahoo! or emailed them to business editors. The turn-around time for these documents was expected to be fast (often a company’s stock listing was riding on the successful distribution of the release), and the result was a trickle-down effect of anger and paranoia: the shareholders were pissed about their stock values, the CEO was worried about the shareholders, the CFO busted his ass to please the CEO and the accountants, PR professionals and lawfirms he farmed his work out to were getting shit from him. All this bitterness and negativity wound up on my desk, day in and day out, but especially during quarterly periods. In a way, given the volume and the repetitive tasks I had to perform, it was like working on an assembly line. Except that nothing was produced. I was just a funnel, a conduit for mountains of data that no one would care about within a week. I liked that aspect of it. It was very post-modern, but I kept that bit of analysis to myself. No one likes working with a social critic.
The office was pretty diverse. Besides myself and the few other white dudes, there were a smattering of people from the islands, Jamaican ex-patriots and Trinidadias, a handful of Asian canadians and an Iranian guy. The IT department was staffed with Chinese and Indians, the finance department was a UN council meeting. I got along with everyone pretty well, did what my boss asked me to do without complaining, and did it for 8 and a half hours a day, Monday to Friday. The money was alright, and I’d been hired for the evening shift, which started at 2:30 in the afternoon. This suited me fine. It was pretty similar to the teaching schedule I’d had in Japan, and it allowed me to stay up and drink any night of the week, which I did, frequently, but not as often as I wanted to; most of my friends had already left chasing oil money or gone domestic – paired off and happy to spend their evenings cooking and sleeping together, or whatever it is those types of couples do. Even Justin, after I’d moved off of his couch, was rarely around. I mostly hung out with May, and her friends were mostly girls. It wasn’t a bad situation, but when it comes to drinking heavily, nothing beats and overly straight male.
Which made me think of Rick. I emailed him, told him I wanted to talk to him. He told me when he’d be online, and I stayed up to meet him.
Rick: so you got back with her huh?
He knew about May. I wondered if he’d always known. I looked back over my conversations with him, but there wasn’t much to go on one way or the other. The only thing that stuck out was that one night he, Yuki and I had met up with Itaru and Miho. “There’s a new girl?” When Yuki said that I thought she meant newer than the girl I’d told Daisuke about, but maybe she meant something more. But she had also been wasted. And as far as Rick was concerned, he’d encouraged me to get with other women, but that didn’t prove anything.
Which was true, but it was also the first time he’d mentioned her to me. It was also the first time I’d talked to him in a long while when I hadn’t been taking copious amounts of mneme. There had to be something significant in that.
Me: i did, yeah.
Rick: after what she did and everything huh, not speaking to you for months?
Me: yeah.
Rick: sorry man, but that’s pretty weak.
Me: just figured when i was with her again that none of it mattered
Rick: you’re a better man than i am.
Me: obviously.
Rick: fuck you.
Me: how are things back in nihon?
Rick: same shit, different day. had a student puke in class today.
Me: junior high?
Rick: yeah. all over her desk. i had to clean it up too. apparently english teachers double as janitors here.
Me: you’re living the dream man.
Rick: reiko’s pregnant.
The words sat on the screen, black on white, completely disassociated from anything that’d come before him. Disassociated from anything he’d ever said or done, at least around me. Reading them, I couldn’t be sure that it was actually him on the other end of the network. Was he sitting there, pink face layered with sweat, small eyes puckered, waiting for me to respond? Who else could it be?
Me: pregnant?
Rick: yeah. knocked up, with child or whatever.
Me: shit.
Rick: that’s what i said.
Me: weren’t planning it?
Rick: nah, course not. i seem like the planning type to you?
Me: you don’t. well congratulations.
Rick: thank you.
Me: can’t help thinking what my grandmother said before i left for there. ‘you just be careful! we don’t need any yellow babies in this family.’
Rick: your grandmother’s a racist.
Me: she is, yeah. shit man, i mean, is it congratulations?
Rick: it is.
Me: so you’re going to keep it?
Rick: we are.
Me: that’s fuckin honourable right there.
Rick: a white knight.
Me: racism.
Rick: totally racist.
Me: i’d like to indicate that i’m laughing, except i hate LOL.
Rick: LOL.
Me: big news.
Rick: very big. things are changing.
Me: they must be.
Rick: they are. trust me. i mean, you’re young and the rookie of the year and everything, but live a few more years and you’ll see it. you think you’ve got some control over it, but life moves man. with or without you.
Me: yeah.
Rick: really. this is something i totally see now. it moves despite you. these days, i’m more of a passenger than anything else. i’m being driven, and i can’t see the driver.
Me: profound words.
Rick: like i said man, things are changing. take this shit seriously. i am. but look, i gotta sleep. it’s like 2 AM here.
Me: yeah cool, give my best to Reiko.
Rick: will do.
He signed off. For awhile I sat staring at the screen. It was hard to believe that he’d written most of that. I felt like an asshole for being sarcastic with it. Having a baby wasn’t a joke. At least, it wasn’t a very good joke. Still, Rick talking like that didn’t fit. I imagined someone else on the other end of the computer, but that didn’t fit either. It had been Rick, just not the Rick I remembered. It had been a version of him. Whether that change was a result of unexpected father hood or because my entire collection of memories of her were fucked was up for debate. I didn’t have the answer.
But I knew what he’d meant about feeling like a passenger – forming a healthy drug addiction will do that to you. Especially to something like mneme. But that wasn’t exactly right: it wasn’t that I didn’t have any agency when I used mneme; I wasn’t entirely a passenger. Some part of myself drove the events I experienced, something buried deep inside of me. A part without a name. It was seeking that out to the end that had kept me taking the pills. That, and the chemical addiction.
Clean, whatever’d been in me trying to express itself was gone. It’d burrowed back under the sand of my unconscious and it was sleeping. I was free.
The cell rings.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” It’s May. I lean back in my chair.
“What’s up?”
“Nothing. Just wanted to call and let you know that I’m going to be late. Some people from the lab and I are going out for a bit.”
“Alright.”
“You want to come?”
“Nah.”
“Worried we’re too smart for you?”
“Something like that.”
“K, well, I’ll see you later.”
“Alright.”
I hang up, put the phone down on the desk. It was nice of her to offer, and I probably should have gone. But fuck it, why do I want to hang out with a bunch of grad students? There was a reason I stopped going to school.
I stand up and go to the kitchen. Now that I know it’s going to last for awhile, it’s harder being alone. The appartment is suddenly too quiet. I open the fridge, and look through the meagre offerings inside: slightly too old bread, a bit of humus, some vegetables and a whack of condiments and sauces. There’s rice and noodles in the cabinet, but nothing I want to eat.
This is not my appartment.
I close the fridge, move back into the living room.
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t even know this girl.
I sit down on the desk, run a thumb along my jawline. I don’t know her and I’m living in her place. There’s something fucked up about that.
She wanted you to be here. She wants you to be here. That’s what she said, and that’s how she’s acting. She doesn’t disappear in the morning. She’s real, and she doesn’t alternate looks or personalities every time you see her. Her boyfriend isn’t your friend. Her boyfriend is you. This is a good thing, and it’s what’s been a part of your life for a long time.
But I don’t remember it.
Get going like this and you’ll never get out. Trap yourself in a head loop forever.
I close my eyes. Opening them, the only thing left is the laptop on the computer. I want to know who this girl is I’m dating, supposedly in love with. This girl who loves me, and has welcomed me back. I log onto Facebook, click on my friend’s list. From there, I click on May. Her profile picture is a shot of her from before I came back – a picture I’ve never seen before, although for all I know I’m the one who took it. In it, she’s laughing, white teeth bleached below gums. She’s sitting at a chipped, wooden table, a half-empty pitcher of beer beside her arm. What’s she got to laugh so hard at? Who said something funny? She’s wearing a black tank-top and her thin, angular shoulders reflect the light of the flash. She looks good, but she isn’t Japanese here. This is the South Asian in her.
She was never Japanese. Never acted like it. There were so many times she acted something else.
I click on her list of friends, scroll through them. There are over 200, none of them names I recognize, but some or all of them may be people I know.
I find Ryan on the second page. I wasn’t sure if he was going to be here, but there he is. Luckily, he doesn’t have his profile blocked (it’s working, very smooth and very much the way I want it to. It’s almost enough to make me believe this isn’t real memory. But it can’t be; it can, but it isn’t.) His picture is a half-profile (only a bit of his nose and his lips are visible, as is a shoulder, and an arm draped across his knee); a thin, black line is tattooed from his wrist to his elbow. It’s Ryota’s tattoo.
A momentary inrush of data and sensation: Ryota’s tattoo on Ryan’s arm, from the kitchen, the sound of the fridge buzzing – static, interrupted, off and on, by short clicks – my eyes blink, and the screen flickers in front of me, grainy as film stock.
“Ok.”
I shouldn’t say anything out loud. It’s not like this is horrifying. It’s nothing new, and it’s not even very intense. I’m used to this kind of shit by now. But I’m clean. I don’t have ay pills here. They’re gone. I flushed them down the toilet.
All of it builds, and the best word for it is curiousity; do I have any pills? Am I clean? I pull open the desk drawer and root through scraps of paper, pen caps without pens, sticky notes, bits of junk – there aren’t any pills here. The drawer of the desk is where I kept them in Japan, but this is May’s desk. I stand up, walk over to the pile of stuff I’ve shoved in the back of May’s closet. I take out my backpack, open all the pockets: some loose change, mostly yen, receipts for things I don’t remember buying, the ticket stub for the Ninja Tunes show at Ageha, a single, black sock and a plastic toothbrush holder.
To be sure there weren’t any pills here I’d have to search the entire appartment, open every drawer and behind every piece of furniture, rip open the mattress. If I did bring any pills back with me, I could have hidden them anywhere.
I walk back to the desk and sit down. The image on the screen hasn’t changed: the tattoo is the same, and he’s sitting in exactly the same position, the same amount of his face sliced off by the edge of the picture. His name (Ryan Olsen) hasn’t changed either.
I click on the link for the rest of his pictures, scroll through them. Most of them are shots of him at bars or in clubs with friends (mostly white, a few Asians, and largely male; thin guys wearing thin, graphic tee’s, skinny jeans and neck scarves – probably gay, but possibly not, or at least not all together.) A few pictures of his face in close-up, affectedly scowling or in the middle of laughter, one of him standing knee-deep in water, bare-chested, looking into the distance, another of him in a white t-shirt and black cardigan – something Ryota would wear, but not exactly. It doesn’t matter – he’s as close to Ryota as he needs to be, the tag at the show and the tattoo on his arm better proof than anything he’s wearing.
I go back to his main page. Further down, is a link to his website. I click on it: the following page is blank, a white screen. I refresh it, and watch as the browser struggles to load it. Eventually, a flash intro appears: the word INERT, in green, in the center of the page dissolves into a stylized tree, which dissolves into a rock that dissolves into a single drop of blood. The drop sits in the center of the page: a hyper-extended circle in red on a field of white and then it explodes; dozens of small, multi-coloured squares track across the screen, bump into each other, the frame, and change direction, bounce again – particles defining each other’s courses.
I click on one of the squares at random and enter the site’s main page. There are links to a blog, other design sites, and a section for “works.” I click on this link and am taken to a page with a number of thumbnail images laid out on a grid. Most of the work is graphic design, digital representations in monochrome greens and pinks of trees, simple rock formations, although some of the images are still photographs, all of which are also of trees and rocks, some of which have been spray-painted; images have been tagged to the bark of trees, onto the surface of rocks, mostly the single drop of blood, but sometimes words, or just colour patterns. There are a few pictures of tags he’s thrown up on walls, but none of them are the tag Crystal used in her show, the one from Japan. I search the rest of the site, click on every link, but the tag isn’t there.
I know I saw it at the show because I wasn’t on drugs, but I only know Ryan looks like Ryota because I was; I don’t know what Ryota looked like. I only know what I remember him looking like and I remember he looked like Ryan. I remember the tag and then there it was again, in Toronto. Unless it wasn’t, but if it wasn’t, it means I have drugs here, somewhere, hidden, and I’ve forgotten about them.
Wouldn’t they have stopped me at the airport if they’d seen a bag of pills when they X-rayed my luggage? But mneme just looks like allergy medicine. Maybe that’s what I told the people at customs. Maybe they believed me.
And maybe there are no drugs. But if there aren’t, why would I “remember” this tag before I’d seen it? How could I have projected Ryota as Ryan if I’d never met him before? I don’t think I’ve met him before – I’d never met Crystal, and he’s her friend, not May’s. But maybe I have. Maybe I know him from someone else, some other acquaintance that has nothing to do with May or her circle of friends. Maybe I’ve seen that tag and met Ryan before I even went to Japan.
That explanation makes the most sense. And anyway there’s nothing I can do about any of this except let it go.
My phone rings.
“Hello?”
“Hey.” It’s May. I can hear the sound of people talking loudly behind her. “So a bunch of peope cancelled and the people who didn’t aren’t any fun.”
“Too bad.”
“I totally want to get out of here. Think of an excuse for me.”
“Alright, tell them I’m sick.”
“That’s a pretty lame excuse.”
“Lame excuses work on lame people. Trust me. They’ll think you’re sweet for wanting to take care of me.”
“Do we still have beer in the fridge?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Good. Let’s get drunk.”
I laugh.
“Ok.”
“I’ll see you in a few.”
“Great.”
She hangs up and I hang up and I put the phone down on the table. I look again at Ryan’s profile picture, the tattoo running up his arm. I can’t change that it’s there, and all it is is a tattoo. I close the browser and put some music on, go into the kitchen. I pull open the fridge to see if there’s anything I can cook up to snack on with May.
I let it go, tried to; I didn’t want to be in that headspace anymore, piecing together connections and working out what and who was real and what wasn’t, but that’s a hard thing to give up. Every day, on the subway or walking the street, sitting in a café with a coffee, I’d listen to other people’s coversations like they had something to do with me. Like they were meant for me.
Two women on the subway:
“And you know I like to be on the front of the train. I don’t know why. That’s just always been the way I like riding to work, and I was sitting there this morning, and I swear I saw it happen. He was standing on the platform, and I was just sitting there, and the train got closer and he just jumped, right there in front of me, and I just about lost it. I mean... that is, I wanted to lose it, but I couldn’t scream, couldn’t even move. It was like I was asleep. Someone else screamed though – I remember hearing that – and the train shuddered, all the walls just trembling. The driver must have slammed on the breaks, and when it finally stopped we all had to get off the car, and it was the weirdest thing, I mean it was like they didn’t even have any emergency procedure at all. They just told us to leave, and no one was asked to give a statement, or told what to do. And they were clearing the platform, or trying to, but the worst thing, and I just can’t understand this part – I’ve been asking myself why all day – but people were going over to the edge and looking. I mean, how horrible is that? It just really goes to show a lot about people, that they feel like they need to look at something like that. At least a dozen people walked right over, and I watched them, their faces as they turned around, and all of them regretted it. You could tell that much. All of their faces just went pale, just completely colourless. And I just kept asking myself why they’d do that. Don’t they know what they’re going to see?”
“It’s human nature.”
“I guess. It’s scary though. I mean, this need they have to see it. Can’t they just let it be?”
“I think it’s the news’ fault. They get their cameras right up in everywhere, and people just get used to seeing things that way. There’s no sense of privacy anymore. No decency.”
“This one lady was really upset by it. I saw her outside, and she was speaking to a policeman, or a TTC security guy, whoever, and she was shaking. I mean, her whole body was shaking. She kept bringing her hand up to her mouth, like she wanted to cover it up, and her eyes were just wild. She wasn’t looking at the officer as she was talking. It was like she wasn’t looking at anything. She was just staring, but what she was seeing was that poor man on the tracks, I just know it.”
“That’s horrible.”
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Monday, June 30th, 2008
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8:18 pm - gta, from page 14
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She took me back to her appartment. The lights were off, and she didn't bother turning them on. Silent, she took off her shoes, left them stranded in the narrow hall, led me into through the kitchen and into the bedroom. Her window was open; a car drove by, and someone was talking in Chinese on the street. She took off her clothes, let them fall in a shadowed pile on the floor. Her face was tilted down, a half-profile soft lit by the window. She stood with her back to me, one shoulder blade visible, and her side, the curve of a hip. I put my hands on her stomach, pressed myself against. I was still dressed; she flinced, involuntary, at the touch of my belt at her back.
"Why are you still wearing clothes?"
"No reason."
"Are you comfortable?"
She turned fully to face me. A warm breath on my neck, the skin and smooth indents at the small of her back, the small brand of her nipple at my chest - all of it the same, exactly,
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, June 6th, 2008
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11:20 am - more work for work
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We went back to my appartment for a long night of shadows and skin. It was emotional and then it was tiring - eventually, she fell asleep next to me. I was exhausted, but couldn’t let go of consciousness. I lay awake in bed watching car headlights reflected on the ceiling, listened to her breathing against my neck. She stirred occassionally, murmured Japanese words I didn’t understand. At some point I must have drifted off too. In the morning she was gone.
I woke up, oddly free of confusion or angst. I felt rejuvenated, and it didn’t matter to me if I’d met with Miho or not, whether she’d been real or fake. The memory of her body, how it moved, everything she’d said remained and I knew those memories weren’t going anywhere. Mneme had etched them in me. I'd let something go, and it didn't concern me anymore if it had happened or not - what i wanted to know was who caused it to happen.
Around noon I checked my phone: the number the guy in the club had given me was still there. I was't surprised to see it. Nothing else made sense - mneme was going to go to the trouble of giving it to me just for the hell of it? No. Things were coming together, and the drug wasn't going to start backpedalling now. I dialed the number.
“Moshi moshi,” said a man. He spoke slowly, his words syruppy and well-formed. He sounded high. Or like he’d just finished a long massage with a very happy ending.
“Anoh,” I said, carefully. “Eigo o hanasemasu ka?”
“Nn,” he said, meaning yes.
“Yeah? Um, good. Well, my friend gave me your number – ”
“Your friend?”
“Yes. He gave me your number and – ”
“He gave you my number?” A hint of playfulness.
“He did.”
“And you called.”
“Yes.”
“So maybe you want something?”
“Well.”
“It is not a crime to want something.” Definitely playing.
“I guess not.”
“Probably I can help you.”
“Your English is very good,” I said, stupidly. I was just trying to keep up.
“Do you think so? Thank you.”
“I’ve met a lot of people with good English recently.” Again, I didn't know why I said it. It came from nowhere, some drawer in the back of my mind I keep stocked with useless comments. He laughed.
“Really? Well it is a useful language.”
“I guess it is.”
“You guess?”
“Um.”
He laughed again. His voice was soft, almost throaty; I almost felt his breath, hot and wet, through the receiver and it made me want to hang up the phone, drop everything. I could have, could have ended everything right there, stopped taking mneme and rode out the rest of my time in Japan like a respectable foreigner. I could have, but I didn't - he didn’t give me a chance.
“If you want to meet,” he said. “That’s fine.”
“Ok,” I said, for lack of anything else.
“Do you know Kouenji?”
I closed my eyes and sat down at my desk, pressed a finger into my temple.
“Yes,” I said. “I know Kouenji.”
“If you like, let’s get a coffee there. I know a nice café near the station.”
“Alright.”
“You sound like you are upset.”
“Sorry.”
“Please remember that it was you who called me.”
“I know.”
“I will be wearing a black jacket and black sunglasses. And you?”
“A white hoodie. Ripped jeans.”
“I am sorry to be impolite, but may I ask if you are white?”
“Yes,” I said. “I am. And I take it you’re Japanese?”
“Of course,” he said, his rich laughter breaking free again. “What country do you think this is?”
I sat on the train and watched the city slip by. Appartment boxes, office towers, advertising, electrical poles and wires repeated, fell out of sequence and repeated again. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my hoodie. The car was unusually empty. Other than me, there were a pair of teen girls in short skirts, an elderly woman clutching a small purse in her lap, and a large salaryman with his head buried in the pages of a newspaper. He yawned as I glanced at him, brought a hand up to cover his mouth; the paper lowered enough for me to see his face - I'd seen him before. Where? He was ordinary looking enough: a little overweight, balding, his cheap-looking grey suit creased at the joints. I scrolled through my memory, saw him getting on the train with me at Shinjuku, sitting down and opening his paper, but that wasn’t the first time I’d seen him. I went back farther, flipping through the of images of salarymen (real or invented) I'd stored up over the past weeks with the help of the drug. Finally, I landed on him - he was the man who’d sat next to Itaru and I in the cafe the day we first met.
He didn’t look at me or acknowledge me in any way, but he shouldn't have been there - what were the chances of winding up on the same train in the same car in a city the size of Tokyo? Was I seeing him again as a result of the drug, or was it just a random encounter? How many of the same people did I see, day in and day out, and never know it because I'd forgotten them? Maybe, even in Tokyo, it’s possible to walk by the same person again and again only to forget them, each time losing the memory as completely as you lose the piece of trash you saw lying in the gutter, the colour of the heels the woman opposite you was wearing on the train. Maybe the only reason it was strange to see him again was because I remembered it.
I didn’t take my eyes off him. At any minute, I expected him to put down his paper and look at me, pull out a phone and dial my number. But he didn't. He just sat there, reading quietly until the train stopped at Kouenji and and he got up to leave. So did I. I watched him from the corner of my eye; aside from the paper he'd folded carefully under his arm, our movements were nearly identical: I walked to the nearest door, and he walked to the door nearest him. We both waited as the platform slid into view through the windows in front of us and when the doors opened we both left the train at the same time, but once I got on the platform I
stopped moving. I pretended to look around, as if I didn’t know which exit I wanted. I waited for him to move, thinking he wouldn’t, and he did; he walked, leisurely, down the platform to the left. He didn’t look back.
“Hey,” someone said. I recognized the voice from the phone. I looked away from the man with the paper. Next to one of the off-white, metal pillars a young guy in a black jacket and black sunglasses was standing. I recognized him immediately: it was Ryota, Itaru’s effeminate dealer.
“Hey,” he said again, waving me over with a lazy, offhand gesture. Behind me, the train pulled out of the station. I looked quickly back in the direction the man in the grey suit had gone: he was still on the platform, standing in front of a vending machine, trying to decide what brand of tea he wanted. I walked over to Ryota.
I wasn’t exactly surprised to see him. By that point, I was ready to meet anyone I knew at any moment, in any context. At least I thought I was. But if I’d had to guess, I wouldn’t have guessed I’d meet him, mostly because I remembered Itaru having to translate for him, and here he was in front of me, apparently fluent in English. Still, fluent or not, I was prepared to accept it, at least for the time being.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, sharply. He looked at me strangely, but he shrugged, and led the way down a flight of stairs. We left the station and walked into the street.
“Where is this café?” I asked.
“What’s the hurry?”
“No hurry,” I lied. I was preoccupied with the man in the grey suit. I thought he was looking at me; it felt like invisible insects were crawling on the back of my neck, soft, swaying hairs playing over my skin. I knew there was no reaso to be uncomfortable, but knowing didn’t help. I wanted to put as much distance between him and me as possible.
“I just need a drink,” I said. “Long day you know? They serve alcohol at this place?”
“No,” he said, frowning slightly. “If you want to drink alcohol I know somewhere else.”
We walked on the road beside the station, then turned left, into a corridor running beneath the tracks. Taking a low flight of stairs on the far side, we emerged into a tight confine of sidestreets and alleys. The light was fading, the colour gradually seeping out of the sky. Shadows deepened along the walls of the concrete buildings, their edges softening. Distances and the relationship between objects grew harder to guage: one building ebbed gently into another, traffic poles faded into a grey background of vague shapes. The usual crowd of vintage pickers had disappeared, bundled off in trains to head back to their own corners of the sprawl. A few people continued to browse, but their hearts weren’t in it. I watched one girl, she was maybe 17 or so, scrounge listlessly through a pile of discount shoes. She yawned, deeply, her mouth reduced to an ink spot.
Ryota walked confidently into the gloom, turning down one sidestreet and then another. The bar he took me to was nestled in the center of an alley, about a fifteen minute walk from the station. Outside stood the familiar, grinning statue of the naked racoon. Two men in t-shirts and jeans were seated on a wooden bench next to the entrance. A third man stood a little apart from them, his arms buried to the elbows in a tin drum filled with water and ice. He smiled at us as we approached, and pulled an arm from the drum. He held a fish in his hand, but not a fish like any I’d ever seen before. The thing was tobacco brown, wide and flat. Its mouth ran 180 degrees along the width of its body. Small spines dotted its back and the tips of its fins ended in jagged points. Water and flakes of ice slipped along its scales and over the man’s forearm. He took his other arm from the drum and opened its mouth, started chanting in Japanese, using the fish like a ventriloquist’s dummy. The guys on the bench laughed.
Ryota didn’t pay any attention to this. It was like he didn’t even see it. He just walked into the bar and didn’t wait for me to follow. The man holding the fish nodded at me, slowly. I felt like I was dreaming. I pushed the door open and entered the bar.
Inside it was dim, the air hazy with smoke. Plastic, multi-coloured lanterns hung from the ceiling and dozens of bottles of sake and shoju were crammed onto a rickety network of shelves behind a counter. The bartender was in his twenties, his black, medium-length hair pulled back from his head with a thin cord. He was hunched in front of a laptop, his face bathed in the white glow from the screen. It was quiet enough in the place to hear the sound of his fingers on the keyboard. As if aware of the fact, he clicked his mouse twice, and a downtempo, ambient beat filled the room.
There were five other people in the bar: a middle-aged couple wearing jean jackets, and a table of three youngish guys talking quietly amongst themselves. Everyone was smoking, and none of them looked at us as we walked in. Ryota had chosen a table in the far corner. He sat down and took off his jacket, swept his bangs away from his eyes. I joined him as he was pulling out a pack of cigarettes. He offered me one and I took it. There was something steadying about the act of lighting it, drawing the smoke into my lungs. The physicality of the action helped affirm reality on some level.
“So,” said Ryota. Looking at me, there was a slightly mocking tilt to his eyes. “I guess by now you’re not sure if any of this is happening, right?”
“What?”
“You are using nemu yes? So that’s probably how you feel.”
“Yeah, I guess. Pretty much.”
“It’s a strange feeling. I know.”
“How long have you been using it?”
“Awhile now,” he said, his fine, sardonic smile widening fractionally. “Who knows for sure? That’s the interesting thing about it.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask anything. That’s why you called me isn’t it? I know you didn’t call me to buy any.”
“You don’t remember me do you?”
“Hmm? Should I?”
“Yes. We met a few weeks ago. Itaru and I came to see you in Shinjuku.”
“Ah, Itaru.”
“You know him?”
“Of course. I’ve known him a long time.”
“But you don’t remember me.”
“No. Were you there that night?”
“Yes.”
“I just remember him and Miho.”
“She was there too. And so was I, and at that time you didn’t speak any English. Now it’s flawless.”
“That must be strange for you.”
“It is. Very strange. Why is it so good? I mean, you’re a drug dealer in Tokyo. I can’t imagine it’s very profitable to speak English as well as this.”
“I’m not just a drug dealer.”
“Still.”
“But you’re asking like you assume we’re speaking English.”
“What?”
“It’s equally possible we’re speaking Japanese right now, and it’s me asking you how you’d picked up the language so flawlessly.”
“Is that what you’re hearing? Japanese?”
“No, as a matter of fact it isn’t. We’re speaking English,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette into the enamel tray in front of him. Afterwards, he ran the tip of his right index finger over the surface of the table; it was covered with scratch marks, tags in black marker; drawing his finger over them, it was like he was crossing them out, one by one.
“But the point is you have to give up thinking like that. You can’t know if this conversation is even taking place, so why worry about what language we’re using?”
“I know I don’t speak Japanese.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Well then you’re lucky. As for me, for all I know we’re sitting in a café in Frankfurt speaking German.”
“But you said you think we’re speaking English.”
“I do think so, yes.”
“So we’re back to my original question. Why do you speak English so well? I keep meeting people like this, on the drug, and all of them have good English.”
“It’s because of the drug,” he said, simply. “It changes what you remember, but it also helps you to remember. I watch an English movie and I can remember every word of it, along with the Japanese subtitles I read on the screen below. If you put your mind to it, and take enough nemu, you can learn any language fairly easily.”
“Is that how Itaru learned?”
“Yes. We’ve practiced together, although in his case, he doesn’t practice enough.”
“But why bother?”
“English is an international language. You’re an English teacher aren’t you? I’m sure you have many students with no clear reason about why they study. What’s so difficult to understand?”
“Fine,” I said, letting it go. “Mind if I grab a drink?”
“No.”
“You want anything?”
“No thank you.”
I stood up and walked over to the bar. The bartender looked up at me from behind his laptop. I ordered a draft beer. He poured me one, then he went back to work on his computer. I drank some of the beer, my eyes moving over the labels on the sake bottles behind the counter. The skin on the back of my neck was crawling again; I could feel Ryota staring at me, boring into the back of my head with his slim, almond eyes. I turned around and he was busy examining his nails. I walked back to the table and sat down.
“You remember that night in Shinjuku right?” I said. “Even if I’m not a part of it, you remember Itaru and Miho coming out to pick up some mneme?”
“Yes.”
I wanted him to confirm that much at least. Even if I wasn’t part of his memory, I wanted to know that it had happened, if not to me then at least to someone else. If I could be sure of that, I felt like I could start to bring the events of the past few weeks into focus, but I shouldn’t have bothered. There wasn’t any point. It was like he said – I had to stop thinking like that. How could I be sure of anything? The smallest amount of doubt about the tinest detail threw everything else into question. I changed direction:
“Where does it come from?” I asked.
“You mean nemu?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m not sure myself. I’m not at the end of any supply chain, you realize.”
“But you do have some idea? When did it start showing up?”
“By the time I first tried it, over a year ago...” He trailed off, and looked up at the ceiling, as if trying to collect what remained of his fragmented memory. He pressed one of his fingers against his bottom lip, exhaled slowly.
“But you know, it’s impossible to be sure,” he said, finally.
“So just tell me what you think.”
“Will that satisfy you?”
“No, but it’s a start.”
“Well, I’d say it didn’t appear much before I first tried it. No one I introduced it to had ever heard of it before. I’d go to parties and I was the only one there who had any idea there was a new drug on the market. So I’d say I was one of the first to begin using it, at least among my circle of friends.”
“And where did you get it?”
“An ex-boyfriend of mine,” he said, arching one of his eyebrows. He must have expected me to comment on that, but I could care less who he fucked.
“You’ve been buying it from him since then?”
“I don’t make a habit of seeing my exes, no.”
“So where do you get it?”
“Honestly, it’s an unusual arrangement. When we were together I knew he bought a lot of the stuff, but he wouldn’t tell me where he got it from. I assumed he wouldn’t talk about it because he was getting it off some other guy he’d dated, or even someone he was seeing on the side. It didn’t matter to me – as long as the sex was good, what did I care what he did with his time? And the sex was good,” he said, laughing, although his eyes remained glued to mine. His pupils hovered like two fine, black points in his head. I knew he was baiting me, that expected a reaction, but I wasn’t going to bite. Gay or straight, sex addict or choir boy, all that mattered was if he could tell me what I wanted to know.
“Hmm,” he said, after a moment. “Nothing huh?”
“Nothing what?”
“To be honest, I agreed to meet you today because I thought you might have a message for me.”
“Message?”
“You haven’t noticed?”
“Noticed what?”
“The messages.”
“What are you talking about?” I began to realize that I’d misjudged him. He didn’t care what I thought about his sexuality – he’d been looking at me like that because he wanted something from me. Just like I wanted something from him. I leaned back in my chair, drank some beer mechanically.
“Of course,” he said. “Everything is different for different people. I’ve introduced many people to the drug, and they all have different stories. I could spend all day telling you stories about what it was like for each of them, the things they told me. But since none of it’s real, there’s no point in hearing about it is there? None of it’s real, so the stories have no value. But like I said, I’ve been using nemu far longer than anyone I know, except for my ex, long enough to know that even if it isn’t real, there are things you can see inside the trip. Over time, it looks like the drug is trying to say something to you.”
He laughed. The disbelief must have been showing on my face.
“It’s just a drug right? Just chemicals activating various parts of the brain? Yes maybe. But maybe not.”
“So what’s it been trying to tell you?”
“Each person’s message is their own. You shouldn’t go telling those things to just anyone. I don’t even know you.”
“But you thought I might have a message for you.”
“Yes, because of something I heard in your voice when you called. But I realize now that I was wrong. You’re searching for something, just like me, but what we’re searching for isn’t the same.”
“You’re probably right about that.”
“I know I am. For me, it doesn’t matter where nemu is coming from. I have no interest in the source. All I care about is where it’s taking me.”
“That’s probably healthier.”
“Healthy or not doesn’t matter. We have only one life, yes, but we shouldn’t be afraid to spend it.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Maybe not, but you still haven’t told me how you get the stuff.”
“No I haven’t. I must have forgotten.” He laughed at his own joke. Or was there some other reason for the look of self-satisfaction creeping over his face?
“Like I said,” he went on. “It is an unusual way to conduct business. When things between my ex and I started to get too annoying, as they always do, I decided to cut it off with him. But I wasn’t ready to break up with the drug too, you understand, so like you, I asked him where he was getting it. He seemed relieved that I was interested.
“‘Actually,’ he told me. ‘I want to stop this.’ It was too much for him, the trips and the odd memories. He went on and on about it, complaining that he didn’t even know who he was anymore, or where he was going. Essentially he was a very weak person. I tried my best to make him feel better, but basically I thought he was pathetic. I was happy to be leaving him.”
He shrugged.
“He told me that he had met a man at a bar who introduced him to the drug, and had offered to start selling it to him in larger quantities. The deal they made was that my ex would go with the money to Tokyo station and he would put it inside a coin locker and then he would leave. The next day when he returned, he would find the drugs waiting for him in the same locker. He said he never once met the man again, and I believed him. All of their interractions were done over the phone. I told him that the whole thing seemed ridiculous, and that anyone dealing drugs like that would run into trouble eventually, but he said it’d worked so far. He asked me if I wanted to continue with the arrangement in his place. He would tell me how much money I needed, and give me the key to the locker. The man and I would never have to meet, and there would be no reason for him to know that anything had changed. My ex got more and more excited as he explained all this to me. I think he was probably afraid just to stop making payments altogether, and was happy he had someone he could pass the responsibility to.”
He shrugged again, sniffing derisively. It was a completely masculine gesture.
“Not that it mattered to me. Let him think he was passing me a burden – I can always use the extra money, and I’ve been doing it this way ever since.”
“Where is the locker?”
“Why would I tell you something like that?”
A bang, like a gun going off; the metal door was thrown open, rang against the wall. I turned: two of the men from outside were hauling the ice drum into the bar. One of them was shouting at the other. Both their necks were strained, their arms knotted with veins, the teeth grating hard in their jaws. I looked back at Ryota – he was studying his nails.
I thought about what he said, and knew that like everything else in life I just had to accept it. Since everything was questionable, there was no reason to question any of it. In the end, was it really that strange to meet a drug dealer who spoke fluent English, or watch a couple guys haul in a tin drum with a fucked up fish cooling inside it? There was nothing to say that couldn’t happen, that in this world things like that never did. I was on an island, and the natives trolled the seas all day, every day. Who knows what kind of bizarre shit they haul up in their nets? Just because I’d never seen a fish like that didn’t mean it didn’t exist, and just because none of this felt real didn’t mean that it wasn’t.
I took my beer and drained it. Empty, I could see the tags scrawled on the surface of the table through the bottom of the filmy glass. Most of them were Japanese characters I couldn’t understand, random doodles, but one of them stood out. I’d seen it somewhere before, but i couldn’t be bothered trying to sort out when. What difference did it make? I laughed.
“To be honest,” I said. “I’m kind of freaking out.”
“Yes,” he said, not looking up from his nails. “It’s fucked.”
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
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7:32 pm - to work on at work
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“This is a good place,” he said.
“Yeah I like it.”
“Are you hunry?”
“I could eat.”
“How about yaki niku?”
“Always good.”
“Good. I’ll order.”
Itaru sat and smoked. I did the same, leaned back on the mats the way he was leaning back, smoked the way he smoked. When I realized what I was doing and gave it up, stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray and put my arms on the table.
The waittress showed up with our beer. She knelt down on the mat next to our table and set the mugs down. Itaru thanked her, spoke with her quickly. She took his order mentally, writing nothing down, her head nodding mechanically. I picked up my beer and downed a quarter of it. The waittress bowed slightly, rose to her feet, clutched a thin, veiny hand at the small of her back as she stood up. I watched her hobble to the kitchen, felt bad that I lived in a world where an old woman like her had to wait on a guy like me, and then drowned the thought in a another mouthful of beer.
“Maybe I asked you this already,” I said to Itaru. “But what do you do?”
“You did ask me. The first night we met. English people always ask that question. Like ‘how are you.’”
“It makes us feel relaxed. I don’t think we know how to start a conversation without saying that.”
“Japanese is similar. We always have some kind of code to follow.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“The codes are different between Japanese and English, that’s why there are so many difficulties.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Are you enjoying nemu?”
“I’m not sure,”
“It can be... I’m not sure the exact word. Feeling bad. We would say ‘kimochi warui.’”
“Maybe you could say ‘unsettling.’”
“What is that?”
“You see this?” I said, taking my mug of beer in my hand. “Right now, on the table the glass is settled. The beer is not moving. But if there’s an earthquake or if I move it like this – ” I shook the mug. Some of the beer slopped over the side of the glass, dripped smoothly along its edge to the table surface. “That’s unsettled.”
“Yes,” he laughed. “Sometimes nemu is like that. You are a good teacher.”
“Thank you.”
“Did you take nemu today?”
“I didn’t. Did you?”
He shrugged.
“Maybe. After some time you will not remember if you took it or not. Maybe you did and maybe you didn’t.”
“Is that healthy?”
He shrugged again.
“I’m fine. I pay rent, have a girlfriend. What’s the problem?”
“None, I guess.”
“How have your trips been? The first trip you had sounded very good.”
“They’re usually like that. Sexy I guess. But not always.”
“You’re lucky to get any ones like that.”
I thought about telling him what had happened the night before, that I’d seen him in Kawasaki and I wasn’t sure if it was real or not. I wanted to ask him, but I kept my mouth shut. I figured if I mentioned that the rest of it would come out eventually, and the last thing I wanted was for him to know that I’d been false remembering fucking his girlfriend.
Our meat arrived. The waittress set it down on the table along with a pair of tongs. She turned on the grill, checked that the gas was burning properly. I looked at the white plates in front of me, the thin strips of pink and red flesh arranged on top of them, the watery blood pooling at the edges. Itaru took the tongs and began arranging the meat on the grill, ordered another round of beer. The waittress nodded and left the table. Smoke rose from our cigarettes to the yellow ceiling.
“I first tried nemu a year ago,” he said.
“Where did you get it?”
“Do you remember Ryota? My friend in Shinjuku? He gave it to me. I was working in Kouenji. Working for a real estate company as a katchi. Do you now this?”
“No.”
“A katchi stands on the street, giving advertisements to people. He tries to get them to come inside his store. To attract new customers. So I was working there, and Ryota was working at a used clothing store. Have you ever been to Kouenji?”
“No I haven’t.”
“You would like it. It’s a very interesting place. Many used clothing stores. Unusual fashions. I recommend it.” He took some pieces of charred meat from the grill and laid them out on the plate in front of me, poured sauce into a small tray and passed this to me as well. I took a piece of beef, dipped it in the sauce and stuffed it into my mouth, savouring the juices. Itaru called out for another round of beer.
“I was working there and I wasn’t going to school. I didn’t want to. I never liked school. It was always the same, every day. The same lesson, over and over again. The same clothes on everyone, the same faces. I don’t mean uniforms. I mean the clothes everyone wears, all of them thinking they are different when they are not. College or university is usually a time for Japanese students to be free, but that’s not how I felt. Everyone just changed one kind of uniform for another, and after college we would all put on a third uniform - a suit and a tie, or grey skirts for the girls. That’s how I felt. Everyone was still in a uniform, and so was I. We all talked about the same things and did the same things. This is not what I wanted. So I stopped going to school, and got a job as a katchi. I also moved from my parents’ house and got a small appartment. That’s how I lived. It wasn’t much better than school had been – I still had to wear a kind of uniform, but at least I was living for myself. At night, I went out with my friends, and smoked weed and drank. I wasn’t so crazy, but I enjoyed doing it. I felt more free than before. It was different.”
“That’s interesting,” I said.
“Is it?”
“Yes. People don’t usually talk like this here.”
“They would not in an English school, probably. But Tokyo is big, you know? It’s hard sometimes. It’s too big, and it becomes heavy. I think many people feel this way. I was using drugs, beer, lots of things as a kind of vacation. I couldn’t afford to go on any other kind.” He laughed. The waittress approached with a second round of beers. She set them on the table, gingerly, her motions stiff and precise. Itaru set some more meat on the grill. I watched the way his hand moved with the tongs, lethargic and relaxed.
“Ryota was similar to me, but a little older. He went to college for fashion design, and he was a good student. Unlike me, he could graduate. And after he was finished he started working at a store in Kouenji. He was working there for more than a year when I met him. I was looking around in the store and we started talking. He is gay, you probably saw, and maybe he liked me. He put his hand on my shoulder, but it was fine. I told him I am not interested in men and that was it. It was true - I'm not interested in men, but I thought he was interesting. More interesting than most people, the people you see on the street. On the street everyone is the same. Do you know what I mean? Salarymen all wear the same suit, school girls all have the same colour hair, the women all wear the same heels. Again, uniforms. And so many of the rest of us don’t want to be like them. We want to be different, but then we are all different in the same way. Ryota was different in a different way.” He shrugged. “I cannot explain it very well.”
“No,” I said. “I think understand you.”
He took out another cigarette, took pieces of meat from the grill and placed them on the plate in front of me. I ate, washed down the taste with a wave of beer. I was incredibly relaxed. Listening to him was simple. I wondered about his English, why it was so good, but it seemed to fit. I accepted it as another aspect of being there. There were a lot of things like that, things that fit but shouldn't have; it was unusual to hear a Japanese criticize their own culture, but Itaru was doing it, it was odd that he wanted to hang out with me, but there we were. I told myself that I’d met an interesting person, and that was all. I figured with 30 million people living in Tokyo the chances of running into someone like him were pretty good. I took it at face value, thought that meeting him had been a random, chance occurrence. Later, it wouldn't be that way – coincidences would come to seem planned, or at the least, manufactured, and after awhile I’d stop believing in such things as “chance occurrences” altogether. But that night in the restaurant with Itaru I was happy just to sit and listen. It was a smooth, zen-like state, and I was in Japan.
“I was happy to meet someone like Ryota,” he continued. “He did not care about what people thought. He did what he wanted, mostly. And when he offered me to try a new drug, of course I tried it. He told me that it was something very new, that he had only used it a few times before. But he said that it was like having another life. I didn’t hate my life, but having another one was an interesting idea.
“When I first took nemu I was alone. I was in my appartment after work and I was bored. I had nothing to do, no girlfriend, so I took the pill. And my first trip was very interesting.” He nodded to himself. “It was something to remember.”
“What happened?”
He sucked back on the tail-end of his cigarette, drank a mouthful of beer. I did the same. The waittress returned to clear our plates, and I ordered another round. Itaru shook his head and said something in Japanese. The waittress laughed. It was a dry sound, like leaves rustling.
“We’ll get some habushu instead.”
“Sounds good.”
“Something for you to remember,” he said. “Like my trip.
“That night, after I took the pills I remember leaving my appartment. I went down the hallway and I went outside for a walk. I didn’t know why, and I didn’t know where I was going. I was only walking. I have never done that before. Also, it was strange that the road was empty. There were no cars, and no one else was out. I was alone. It was like being in a dream, but I was awake, I knew it wasn’t a dream. I walked, and came to the interesection near my appartment. There is a convenience store there, and the lights were on, but no one was inside. It was empty. I looked down the road to the left and to the right, and also there was no one there. It looked like everyone had disappeared. This was something I had not experienced before. But soon I felt something strange. I could see that no one else was on the street, but at the same time I did not feel alone. There was someone else there with me. Not another person. It is a difficult feeling to explain. The other someone was the road. But not only the road. The sky, the buildings, and the light from the convenience store. The person with me was the whole city. And it was fine, very peaceful. We both watched each other. It was like being at a bar with a friend and saying nothing. Or if you are waiting for the train beside your girlfriend, and there’s no reason to talk... I can’t explain it.”
He shook his head in frustration.
“Anyway, I walked by myself but I didn’t feel alone. Soon, I passed another convenience store. This one was a 7/11, and again it was empty. The lights were on, everything was bright, the sign was on, but no one was inside. I felt like having a beer and some senbei, so I just went in and took them. I sat down on the corner in front of the store and I drank some beer and ate the crackers. I think if I was younger I would have been crazy in there, kicked and punched the racks of food, knocked them over. Maybe I would have smashed the windows just because I knew it wasn’t real. It was all like a dream. But I didn’t feel like doing any of that. I felt calm, and I didn’t need to do anything else.
“I finished the beer and I stood up. I started walking again. I didn’t have anywhere to go, so I went back to my appartment. In a way, I was bored. Yes, I was calm, but calm is boring after awhile. I thought nemu was an interesting drug, and it was interesting to be the only person on the street. But it wasn’t very fun. I wanted something more. And then, something happened.
“I walked back to my appartment and I saw someone standing next to my building. He was leaning against the wall, and there was a dark shadow there. I could not see his face, but he seemed very casual. I went to him and saw that it was Ryota. He looked very serious, like he had been waiting a long time.
“‘Ryota,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’
“‘I’m waiting for you. You’re late.’
“‘I am?’
“‘Yes. You invited me to your appartment. You don’t remember? Where have you been?’
“I thought that the trip was over then. I thought the only thing nemu would show me that night was the empty street. Here was my friend, and he was telling me that I invited him to my house. I could not remember doing this. Of course, it was possible that I was still in the false memory of nemu, but behind me, on the road, a car drove by, and a young girl on a bicycle came up the sidewalk. The world had people in it again, sounds, and this made me think the trip was over. I apologized to Ryota and we went into my appartment together. I tried talking with him, but he was very quiet, and much more serious than usual. He barely spoke to me, so I thought he was probably tired.
“Once we got inside my room I offered him some food, and he agreed. I stayed in the kitchen to prepare some edamame and he went into the bedroom. I could hear him turn on the television. He was watching the evening news. On the news the announcer was talking about an accident that had occurred earlier in the day. They said that a man had lost control of his car, and it had driven over the sidewalk, crushing another man on the street. The news announcer said that this accident happened in the same area I lived in. When I realized that, I left the kitchen and went into the bedroom to watch. Ryota was sitting on the end of the bed, and I could not see his face. The side of his body, and some of his hair, was blue from the TV screen. He was sitting exactly still, not moving at all, like a statue. I knelt on the floor beside him.
“The picture was from above, from a helicopter. It showed the car, and the site of the accident. The camera then moved back, and it showed more of the street, and many rescue workers moving around. There was an ambulance there, and two police cars. The crash was blocked off from the road by yellow tape. The camera then showed the street, and I saw the rescue workers lifting a body from the ground. They placed the body on a stretcher, and brought it to the ambulance, but I knew that this person was dead. No one was in a hurry – everyone moved very slowly. There was no need to rush, since they couldn’t save him. The body was wrapped in a black bag. The news announcer was saying the name of the victim.
“At first, I didn't hear it. I was just sitting and watching. It was strange to see such a quiet area like mine on the news. Why hadn’t I heard anything earlier? Why didn’t I see anything like this when I was outside? It must have been nemu.
“And then what I had heard came back to me. The victim’s name was mine. I felt cold, like someone was pouring water over my whole body. I closed my eyes, and listened to the announcer describing the victim – where he lived, how old he was, what he did for work. Everything he said was about me. I shook my head, and put my hand to my face. It was very, very difficult to hear these things. I looked over at Ryota, but he was gone. I turned around, and the appartment was empty. His shoes were gone, and it was like he was never there. I was alone, and on the television the news announcer said that I was dead.
“I knew I was still inside the nemu trip, but it was difficult to be calm. I thought of the quiet street, the empty roads. I thought of how free I felt walking, and calm. Was I dead? Did I take this drug, go out for a walk, and get killed in a sudden accident? If I was remembering this, didn’t that mean that I was still alive?”
He shook his head, and took a piece of meat from the grill.
“So for me, you can see that my first experience with nemu was very different from yours. For me, sometimes I think I am already dead, and everything I am living now is just a memory in the last moment of my life. Of course, I do not really believe this. I wake up in the morning and it is a new day, and I work and am with friends, and it is difficult to think that this is not life. I know this is my life. But sometimes that same calm feeling will come back to me, the same feeling I had standing on the road alone, and I will wonder. Just enough to make things interesting.”
He smiled.
“Isn’t that a strange story? Maybe it is too depressing.”
“No,” I said. “It’s a good one.”
He finished his third beer and I did the same. We had nearly run out of meat.
“Later, I told Ryota about this trip and I thought he would laugh and tell me not to worry. But he didn’t. He said what I had seen was serious. Ryota believes that what happens with neumu has an important meaning. He said that with nemu sometimes you will be shown things you need to see, things to guide you. He told me about the Indians in America, and how they sometimes took drugs to help them see things they needed to see. There is a word for this, but I don’t know it in English. It means something like a ghost, a ghost to help you reach your goal.”
“A spirit guide?”
“It could be that. I don’t know if I believe the same things, but it doesn’t matter. Even if there are no real spirit guides I was happy that I met Ryota, because he introduced me to Miho. They went to school together, studying fashion.”
I looked up.
“Miho studied fashion?”
“Yes. You don’t remember? She told you this I think.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t remember.”
“She is very talented. She’s working at a small fashion store now, in Harajuku.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yes you did,” he said, smiling. It was a cold, hard smile. He took the last piece of meat from the grill and put it in his mouth. “You did know it, but maybe you forgot what you knew. You see? It is a strange drug.”
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
We finished the last of the meat, payed our bill and left, the old waittress waving feebly at us from the doorway. I walked Itaru to the station, and then I went home. I thought about what he’d told me, and realized that none of it really answered anything. I already knew that he was buying nemu from Ryota, and although the story of his first experience with the drug was interesting, I wasn't any closer to learning where it came from. I told myself that it didn’t matter; I liked Itaru, and it was good to hang out with him. I felt he was someone I could trust, even if I knew his entire store of memories was completely fucked. At least I could trust that he believed what he told me was the truth, and that was good enough. He had a relaxing way about him, he told a good story, and I respected the fact the he could tell it in a second language. He made me feel ignorant that I couldn’t do the same, and so I respected him more. I couldn’t even bring myself to resent him, despite (or because of – I didn't know which) the fact that he was with Miho.
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, May 22nd, 2008
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5:30 pm - haiku a day - 05/22/2008
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| Saturday, May 17th, 2008
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1:45 pm - haiku a day 05/16/2008
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| Friday, May 16th, 2008
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4:21 pm - haiku a day - 05/16/2008
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a girl is crying
right next to me, on the train:
it's wrong to hug her.
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
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3:21 pm - haiku a day - 05/14/2008
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work hard to please me.
work hard - maybe it will work.
you work for my smile.
current mood: jaded
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
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5:26 pm - haiku a day - 05/13/2008
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well last friday got a little crazy. hella crazy. so i didn't get to do any more 'theme-based' haikus. so i'd like to pick that up again today.
ii) nothingness
a spiral is drawn.
it grows, ever larger, from an empty center.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Friday, May 9th, 2008
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5:56 pm - haiku a day - 05/09/2008
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i'm reading italo calvinho's 'invisible cities' and it's blowing my mind. that's the second time my mind's been blown by a book in the past two weeks. i don't know if i can deal. first 'star maker' by olaf stapledon and now this? it's wack. wiggidy wack.
inspired by 'invisible cities', and since it's a slow friday at work, i'm going to do some themed haikus today.
i) transience
rain falls on pavement.
people walk, and dim shadows
move on the surface.
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, May 8th, 2008
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9:34 pm - haiku a day - 05/07/2008
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pale glass and concrete,
metal struts, jagged, gaping:
the young tower's bones
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(comment on this)
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| Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
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10:12 pm - haiku a day - 05/05/2008
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| Monday, May 5th, 2008
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9:49 pm - haiku a day 05/04/2008
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| Thursday, May 1st, 2008
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10:10 pm - haiku a day - 0501/2008
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i put on a suit
and then i get a paycheque -
this is natural.
...
something (i think) is funny i said tonight:
'adhara your attitude is as laissez-faire as our economic system.'
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
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11:55 pm - haiku a day 04/30/2008
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| Monday, April 28th, 2008
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10:19 pm - haiku a day -04/27/2008 / 04/28/2008
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04/27/2008
suppressing all pride,
anger, hurt and resentment
is no easy thing.
04/28/2008
kyo ni futari
nihon-jin to ishyo ni
hanashimasu.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Saturday, April 26th, 2008
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12:29 pm - haiku a day - 04/26/2008 (A, B)
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A.
wake up, head all fucked,
mouth dry as dead, poison dirt:
don't mix beer and wine.
...
one more:
B.
she is leaving you
so she's gone / she is gone but
you won't let her go
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Friday, April 25th, 2008
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9:56 pm - haiku a day - 04/25/2008
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a layer of gauze
gently wrapped around my mind:
so tired i can't think.
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, April 24th, 2008
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8:53 pm - haiku a day - 04/24/2008
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