Monday, July 22, 2002

The city train was more crowded and I felt people staring at us, not in any kind of antipathetic way but out of naked curiosity. We were so obviously different. Their gazes followed us in and out of the car and almost every moment in between.

Thursday, July 18, 2002

The train was full of somber, inconspicuous commuters; working people; young pigeon-toed women clutching their handbags, paunchy men with their arms crossed. After we shared perfunctory background information about ourselves – he's "going to university" for physics, I'm starting a new job – Roger managed to steer the conversation to Her Majesty the Queen: she has more power than you might think actually, and I thought, what is it with the English and their queen? Here we are in Tokyo and I have to hear this. I looked away during a pause in the conversation and perceived a wild burst of fiery red light in the darkness right outside the window. I turned to see a hovering, laser-projected logo on the tunnel wall and it said:

Yahoo!

The ride took about an hour and a half and we still weren't there. We got off at some arbitrary station that seemed deep in the city but then we realized it was the business district – a forest of office buildings with corporate logos on the top, empty for the night. A sweaty man with glasses offered to help. "Where are you going?" he said haltingly. We tried to tell him and he said OK, and he made some strange remark about girls, were we looking for girls, and we said ha, no no, but he did tell us what connection to make to Shinjuku Station. We thanked him and he bowed and nodded and thanked us.

Wednesday, July 17, 2002

We went out to dinner that night with Jo and Michael and his wife and the kids, at a good French restaurant. We sat at a long table in the back and had spicy Australian wine and I had the lamb and it was all very good, and we talked about this and that and I admired Jo diagonally, in vain.

Then the next morning it was time to go, just like that. Kevin had to go to work and so Kate drove me to the airport and walked around the terminal with me a little while, killing time. We browsed a clothes store – it was odd to be engaged in such mundane behavior so soon before our separation. But finally I had to pass through the gate and we embraced and like always Kate said, "You're shaking!" and I said yes I know, I'm a trepidatious man.

I landed back in Tokyo nine hours later, at about 7:30 at night, went through customs, took the shuttle to the hotel, checked in, and there I was, in Tokyo with the night ahead of me. I went down to the lobby and noticed a line of taxis outside. I got in the back of a taxi and told the driver I wanted to go into Tokyo. He didn't understand a word. I wrote "Shinjuku Station" in my little notebook and tore out the sheet and gave it to him. I had read about bars and nightlife at Shinjuku Station.

He scribbled something and handed the paper back. It said "25,000." That was like, $250. I briefly considered giving it to him but figured there had to be a better way. He gestured with his hands and said something in half Japanese, half broken English, articulating how far away we were, how that was a normal price. I said no thank you and slipped out of the cab.

I was asking someone at the front desk how to take a train to town when a young English guy sidled up to me.

"You going into town?"

"Yeah."

"So am I. Let's go together."

"Sure." I didn't want to say no. How do you say no to a complete stranger in a place that's strange to both of you? But I had fantasized about being alone in Tokyo, of having a solitary and unpredictable experience. And I was sorry to give that up.

We got our directions and took the shuttle back to the airport and descended to the lower levels of the terminal, where the trains were. The deeper you went, it seemed, the less English there was. At the bottom there was nothing anywhere but Japanese characters: exit signs, train schedules, poster ads, everything was a colored blur of lines and squiggles. I had a sense of truly entering a different world, where my reference points had vanished. We went to the ticket booth and with difficulty got the man to understand what we wanted, and we found a train to take. We could take the express or the cheaper local commuter train and the English guy, Roger, said he wanted to save money so I said OK fine, and we took the slow train, and I already began to regret having met him.


Thursday, July 04, 2002

After the fights Kevin and I walked through the downtown Olympic Park, the strange mass of international tourists, the tents and kiosks with pins and other souvenirs. We looked for a place to drink but everything was crowded and awful so we took the monorail out of the neighborhood. We got out and walked up a steep pedestrian street with young street life, musicians and people sitting in the middle of the pavement watching. We walked across a big empty green bordered by office buildings and lit by just a few lamps and there was no one in sight.

On Friday, my last day, we went into town in the car and ate breakfast at a chic café, the kind with wooden chairs and flowers and everything written on a chalkboard. We had parked in a cul-de-sac near steps that led down a steep hill facing the city and someone put the baby down on the top of the steps and I took a picture of her from above and beside her on the pavement there was a junkie's discarded needle.

We drove around more, went to Kate's parents house again, went to a great big shopping center out in the country somewhere with a long escalator up to the supermarket. The aisles and aisles of packaged food, the weary people stopping on the way home from work, the inescapable light, it always makes experience immediately mundane. I strained for evidence that this was still exotic in some minute way, as I was far, far away from home, but I could not, and felt hollow and tired, infected with the petty melancholy of something idly pleasant reaching its end; like a child on a Sunday night.


Tuesday, July 02, 2002

Last Friday I went out after work just like always, liberated, with limitless possibilities and mysteries ahead. Jason and I met up with Christina in front of the Ciel Rouge on 7th Ave., and it wasn't open yet of course, so we walked down to 14th Street and found an old Irish bar with a long green awning. "It looks like they might have beer there," said Christina.

Inside it was dark and cool and it smelled dank and dead-flowery somehow, a sharp, rich stink from industrial-strength cleaning agents and hundreds of man-years of bad cologne. It seemed like we were in some other city in a faraway state – when we left I said maybe the Southwest somewhere – the place was too cold and spacious and empty for Manhattan.

After one drink there we went up to the Ciel and sat in the back garden and P. C. came too, and Jake, and Jason's friend Ed and Lis and Nora finally, and I drank mojitos and picked wet mint from between my teeth, and everyone talked and had a good time. Christina went to the Knitting Factory and Jason and Ed left, then everyone else got up to go and it was dark now and I hadn't even noticed. Jake and P. C. and I met P. C.'s friend Bret and this other guy Tom and we walked to a pool hall nearby. It was some weird new-looking place with a bar upstairs and tables downstairs and everything was chromy-clean and slick and awful. Jake left and the four of us played, Tom and I beating Bret and P. C. in a few games, and I guess I drank Heineken, I'm pretty sure. 

The interior architecture seemed to preclude conviviality or even the most incidental human contact.

We walked farther east now, to Paddy's. I want to describe how we knew upon walking in that we had to leave but I'm not sure how. The crowd was not precisely unfriendly but sort of leeringly territorial, flush with the idea of themselves. We turned on our heels and walked uptown to some other place, a place I'd been, and ordered drinks and sat like assholes in chairs by the wall, waiting for God knows what to happen.

Finally Bret left and Tom and P. C. and I met Christina back downtown at Bar 81. We sat around the corner of the bar and drank and talked and I was starving so I went with Christina to get pizza and we got back and drank some more and played pool. I was unhinged, dancing around the pool table. In fact did not play so badly. But I wish I had been more conscious.

After the first few hours of blackness I got hit hard in the morning. I craved sleep but it only seemed to come in fitful spurts punctuated by agonizing nausea. There was no comfort anywhere. I got up once and took some Advil and water and assessed the true scope of my misery.

Then I woke up at 4 o'clock and felt fine.