silence

EELS4

Down to the stumps now, two joins gone from each leg. Two smooth skinned caps between me and the floor. I am sinking lower and lower. The remaining eight cables tighten, the forgotten four hang listlessly around me. I want to imagine listening to their frustrated snapping, but they make no sound.


Mechanics and light. Longer cylinder. Smaller focus. The cables retract, jerking my legless torso towards the ceiling. One girl, maybe six, sinks weeping to her knees in the middle of the mall as her mother marshals her three siblings in exasperation. Click. She looks up quickly but stays down, sobbing, a marathon runner who can run no more. Brief second of respite as the cutter hits the dead air between my legs, breathing in frantic refills before plunging onwards. Both legs gone, sacrificed to her need for photographic memories. Click. She loses dignity. I lose a slice of hip. Always one more sale, one more store, one more shop assistant ready to urge on stragglers with boundless enthusiasm. I am, surrounded by all I despise, by the symptoms of the epidemic. The camera flashes over item after item, sale-sorted and ‘new line’ tabled piles, lines and rows. Clicks. Penis and testes gone before I can fear their loss. Lose change. There is no appeal for me in fingering racks of sweaters or fondling designer bag leather. Is that what I am missing, that connection between the carnal and the consumed? This is life. Sex gives life. This much I know despite my painful lack of experience. Now it’s too late. So many slips between the understanding and the attainment. It’s too hard. This is easy. Why don’t you try it? She steers us into Ralph Lauren, a shrine to cheap garments with ultra-expensive logos. Polos arrayed rainbow fashion. Fuschia. Click. Lime. Click. Aqua. Click. Maroon. Click. I am growing used to the pain as I shrink. A shopping mall in Odaiba may be the only thing to remember me by. Third world beggars on skateboards, pushing themselves along dusty pavements using calloused hands at the ends of over-sized arms. Begging for coins from tourists, but tourists are Japanese exports, not imports. Trends are for those without ideas anyway.

Meika steers a course between blindingly-lit displays, radioactive icebergs in the dark carpet sea. Titanic customers searching for the items that will complete a unique look preferred by their million closest friends. This is a process for logic, not the impressionable. It should take approximately three minutes. Style, colour and size. In that order. No vacillating. Thirty seconds to select the cut. One minute locating garment in least garish colour and most appropriate size. Trying on optional. Remove from display. Proceed to counter. Exchange money for goods. Ninety seconds to process payment. Depart store. Regret everything.

Large red polo shirt takes forty-seven seconds to locate and cull from the stack. Too big for her, probably for me too. Certainly will be in twenty photos’ time. ¥8000: ¥200 for the shirt; ¥7800 yen for the tiny man on the horse. Will it fit you? Maybe one bigger? Shopping for the ogre she has never seen, creating my image from the outside in.

‘Are you a loyalty club member, lady?’
‘No.’
‘Are you aware of the many benefits of joining our rewards scheme?’
‘No.’
‘Would you like to take an application form?’
‘No.’

Twenty-one seconds of the shop assistant’s face progressing through the miniscule changes in appearance that only trained observers can identify: affected congeniality, eager suggestiveness, surprise, shock, bewilderment, despair. Caught ultra-close through the optical zoom. Minefield acne scars betray the painstaken haircut. A casual observer would note only a slight uncurling of the plastic smile, a tiny narrowing of the eyelids, and an infinitesimal hardening of vocal tone, no more than the difference between a statement and a question in a foreign language.
The camera points down, catches fingernails drumming time on the counter glass, every tap increasing the tension in Salesman’s voice. She is playing Wheezer’s sonata, the finger movements all I remember of him now. Could be Mozart, could be SMAP. I don’t listen to music.


A millimetre perfect refolding of an already immaculate arranged shirt precedes its envelopment in feathery tissue paper, which is then bound with a strip of Lauren-branded ribbon. An opaque plastic drawstring bag follows – more corporate heraldry. She reaches across the counter to salvage her purchase before it is embedded in a block of concrete carved into the shape of a polo player. Her forearms are hairless and smooth. New vision from the forbidden floors. But Salesman is not done with it yet. He pulls away as politely but resolutely as possible.

‘If you will excuse me, lady, I will just pop it in a bag for you.’
‘It’s already in a bag.’
‘That isn’t THE bag, miss.’

He reaches below the counter and, with a flourish, withdraws a stiff cardboard bag that echoes as he opens it. Resting this new covering on the glass, he steers the pre- and rewrapped package inside as carefully as if delivering it in reverse. He stands the cardboard bag up so that its massive logo can remind us both of where we are, flicks the sides to remove any lingering creases, and slides it across to Meika two-handedly. He thanks her loudly for her custom, bows until his breath leaves clouds, and then disappears.


Back into the current, the bag bulging with bags rather than goods, one more pregnant reminder in this nursery. Whisking us away again like children late for school, the beckoning hands of shop assistants now waves of farewell, as if they know that their work is done. We have done our bit. Back to the Wheezer’s wet dream on wheels, a place to sit, to pause and think. A very successful trip, don’t you think? The tunnel tilts downwards, towards the bulging bag. So much fuss over one shirt. The tunnel lengthens, burrowing deep through the layers, the eels jerk me from side to side in mid-air, desperation in their movements, as if they know they will die if left in me. I strain for the floor with long-gone toes, trying to ground myself, to fight them, but I can only hang immobile as she takes each piece of me. The bag looms in the window like a multi-lipped mouth waiting to swallow, but in the space where the tongue should be, neatly furled and bright red, there is nothing.

The small boy picks up shells from the storm-dirtied beach, always looking for the creatures inside. Hollow after hollow, the sea’s roar scornful behind him. His face screws up in disappointment. Father reads a newspaper in the dunes, hidden from everything.

EELS2

A fat man’s breast in a cheap sky blue skirt. View zooms back from the fat, allows more male cleavage in. Suddenly there is a space between me and the cotton covering his sweaty milkless nipple. He is too close to her, his porky fingers klip-klopping silently as if playing a midair sonata in the hope of luring her closer. I can still hear what he is saying, but the words are no longer clear. She has stopped listening, and so must I.

She tunes in again. Cutesy pong ping noises, the electronic orchestra of modern life. ‘Odaiba’ ringing out in a polite but urgent voice. Constant reminders of your place and responsibility to follow directions in the most non-threatening manner possible. Spaces bordered by sounds, the aural map of the city with your route painstakingly defined.

The tunnel swings to the left, scanning a carriage half-full of pre-programmed consumers dedicated to future spending. One last lingering view of the metal cocoon before ejaculation into the retail orgy. There is emotion in her vision, I see through her lens and feel the frenzied elation of signs, but deep within that feeling, hidden below layers of admiration and optimism, there is an all-pervading boredom, as if nothing she does will make any difference. Maybe that is why I am here, must be the reason she is showing me all this. Even she can’t stop it, so how can I? Is there no way to stop this mindless fervour, this shrink-wrapped seduction that consumes people over and over and over again?

There is lust in the eyes of the other passengers, glistening behind thin-rimmed glasses, through side-cut fringes. Every spare inch of wall space is foreplay, plastered with advertising for English schools, shopping centre grand sales, mobile phone companies and JTB holiday packages. Every face is smiling, bathed in the glow of morning and the prospect of enlivening an existence by purchasing some service or good previously and unaccountably absent. So much for the advertising. The three-dimensional faces surrounding me are not joyful, but rather pensive, as if waiting for some unheard command to adopt the approved expression of the day, or worried that their performance here will disappoint. Japan Rail signs suspended from the already low ceiling caution that “Any masterpiece just becomes noise disturbance when emanating from earphones”. Two green alien silhouettes on a white background explain this for those who can read neither Japanese nor English. The aliens have featureless heads attached to featureless torsos by hourglass necks. Their emotions are just as difficult to guess. The other passengers seem more interested in their mobile phones, the electronic umbilical cords of this age. Wheezer uses his to check the schedules for the service he is already on. He jots a notation in a frayed notebook, drawing another circle beneath a column of identical marks.

The carriage doors slide open, exhaling relief and compressed air. Breathe while you can. Welcome to the newest world. I know this tale of the new Tokyo. The only way to find an unfilled place was to create it from nothing, a modern-day Atlantis built on reclaimed earth in the middle of Tokyo Bay. Odaiba, the future city, the last chance to create something free from the empty-headed delirium of life.


Everything feels so real, but cannot be. I am lying on a futon in a dimly lit apartment room, surrounded by empty cartons and the stench of my parents’ shame. I am inside, she is waiting outside the door in her striped socks, all energy in the face of my lethargy. But she has powers and secrets I cannot share. I am not floating, I am seeing, watching through her camera’s lens. Her face must stare back from the reflections in the carriage windows or even in the eyes of the fat man, but the window never stops long enough for me to catch it, to pick her out. She flits away on impossible angles, and the most I can hope for is snatches of her trailing shadow, handfuls of dark that fill but don’t flesh her silhouette.

I imagine her as I must: the sum of the Polaroids tacked to my wall, an unfinished collage with white bordered scales for armour. Emptiness above, the irony is poisonous, because I want nothing more than to know what is there. I need a face to make her real, so she can become a memory instead of a dream. There is only one way I will ever know, and fifty-nine nails stand ready to resist that urge.


She follows the other passengers as they shuffle off the monorail in their invisible shackles, eyes flicking from image to image as they follow the middle path. Proclamations loom on every side, sights and sounds advancing in leaps and bounds. The forest of advertising and the soundtracking storm of commercial messages are the only nature they will experience during this trip. The daypacks and walking sticks favoured by weekend hikers have been abandoned in favour of an ample stock of low-interest credit and the approved attire of the week. Printed messages appear in both English and Japanese; the announcements solely in the latter. Foreigners are not the targets here; not yet. I read about ‘year sales’, ‘happy down prices’ and ‘climax bargains’ – time, emotion and sex. Shopping is for life, not just for Christmas. The window stays open, forcing me on in their wake, the smell of photo booths, perfume and baked goods filling my prison. They are being drawn in, moths to the bright lights, forever fluttering but never finding the inside. Wheezer’s heavy breathing has been replaced by the cries of small children, the rustle of banknotes, and the shicking of mental checklists being marked off in every head.

She turns away from them, sneaking through a fire door so furtively that I expect a security guard to call after her. Come with me, Masa-kun. The dank stairwell smell lasts seconds, replaced by an odour I had almost forgotten and cannot immediately place. Light fills the box, blinding me again. The eels whiplash back, slamming me into the wall. Their struggles become plaintive, burrowing deeper as if afraid to be seen, as if my body is safer than what lies beyond the glass. The smell grows stronger; tiled bathrooms in once-visited restaurants, an artificial mix of the sea and the forest in a can. Air freshener worlds sanitized for your enjoyment. Why must all toilets smell like nature? No-one shits outside anyway. An olfactory world for 150 yen per can. Yet there is salt in this ocean breeze, and the smell of cut grass around sandy baseball fields, and the acrid taste of industrial fumes, of stagnant sewers underfoot where last week’s dinners have found their niche. The smell of memories buried deep; of scattered food on the playground; of baseball team liniment; of fresh air.

EELS1

I stretch tentatively, first side to side and then in front. I feel like a puppet; can feel thin metal cables in my flesh. Three in each arm: shoulder, wrist, elbow. Three in each leg: hip, ankle, knee. There are no barbed hooks cutting into my flesh, no adhesive pads to bind me to them, but I can feel their ends twitching just below my skin like the jaws of an eel. With my right hand, I try to pull the left wrist cable out, seeking the pain that will reassure me this is real. My fingers can’t find a purchase; it is slick with oil, memories of fish market tuna dripping their last onto newspaper. I trace the cable away from my arm, seeking its anchor point above my head, but I can’t reach high enough. I loop it around my hand and tug at it, but there is no reaction from either my body or the binding. The embedded tip wriggles as before, impervious to my efforts.

There is nothing else but darkness, but in that cold enveloping something I feel almost at home. I am alone here, hidden from everything. The floor is unyielding but tilts away from me. I can feel a pounding noise beyond wherever I am, not close enough to be distinct. Something like the relentless rhythm of a metal press in a distant factory. Alternately reassuring and infuriating; the knowledge that I am not entirely alone. Mosquitoes circling summer night sleep. I feel my legs and arms, finding comfort in the knowledge that my flesh is intact. There is no water welling inside me, no discomfort to speak of, just an all-consuming sense of displacement. This is not my room. No scuttling in the corner, no beam of light from under the door, no tatami beneath my feet. Metal floor and immediate silence; total darkness and distant pounding.


Nervous fingertips explore a round metal protrusion a step to the right, sliding over its friction-less surface to meet in the space beneath. They dance along and across it. The flat end is before me, curved sides extend to a featureless metal wall perhaps sixty centimetres away. My eyes adjust to the darkness, seeing nothing but accepting their uselessness. Knocking on the wall sends echoes neither far nor long – my invisible prison is built for one. The round shape becomes a cylinder: a cannon with no mouth aimed at a man with no face. I step closer, tracing its circumference with my hands. It is nearly as wide as my arm span. There is nothing to reveal its purpose save for a diagonal line dissecting the metal of the gun mouth. I slide my index finger down it from top to bottom, a single knuckle-deep path. No tributaries or veins to follow.

I feel out the rest of my fingertip world, leaving a trail of fingerprints. There is not far to go. If I should commit some crime here the police would not find resolution difficult. Metal walls as plain as I can tell, distinguished now with my sign. The cannon’s mouth is the only feature I can make out. Rampant imagining sees me blown apart in an instant like so much surplus flesh. Is there a word for human meat? Like pork or lamb or beef. It should be called ‘memory’. The remnants of what once was a person, slowly disintegrating as time betrays presence.

I rearrange my body of memory in a corner. I wedge myself into the unyielding joins of the walls as best I can, knowing that simple imprisonment is too easy. The cables lodge no protest at this rearrangement, almost as if they had wanted it from the beginning. They refuse to entangle, ensnare or release. I am lowered and crumpled, free to stay wherever they permit me. The eel-heads begin to squirm more violently, and I know they must soon tear my flesh.


They say that deprivation of one sense heightens the others, but the darkness reveals nothing. No smells, no taste, no sound other than the feeling of it somewhere far away.

It happens without any notice, the slick smooth sliding mechanical drive. Unseen parts switching and locking into place, heralding the transformation and, at that moment when I have convinced myself nothing will come of it, there is suddenly light, noise, and a world outside. The muzzle springs open, split down the knuckle crack, metal halves disappearing impossibly into a thin rim as the light from without blinds me. The sound of a small train clatters everywhere, echoing on the metal surprisingly loudly. Cutting through the din, I can make out a layer of chatter flushed with the inane tones of the every day, punctuated by the desperate wheezing of an excited man, the robotic pleasantry of random station announcements, and the distinct chirp of her. Entranced, the eels cease their writhing.


Wheezer: ‘This is the world’s best driverless mass transport system. The automated guideway transit system for the future city.’

Meika: ‘You sound like a tour guide. You really know this stuff? How fast can the train go?’

Wheezer: ‘It isn’t a train, actually, but models such as this are not so much designed for their speed as for their reliability and punctuality.’

Meika: ‘But if there is no driver, what happens if it crashes.’

Wheezer: ‘Don’t worry about it, little lady, there can never be a crash. The Yurikamome driverless system is the product of the finest minds in our nation. 100000 passengers a day and never one crash. Sixteen stops from Shimbashi to Odaiba and never so much as a wheel out of place.’

Meika: ‘Oh my, you seem to know so much about trains.’

That voice speaks volumes in the gaps between words.

Wheezer: ‘Perhaps if you are free one afternoon you would like to accompany me on one of my little expeditions. There are some incredibly complex junctions on the Yamanote Line I have been looking forward to studying for some time now. Another camera is always welcome.’

Can’t blame the man for trying. Or can I? The train geek has seen her face and he doesn’t know her at all. I have parts of her, half an image on a wall, he has the whole flesh right in front of him, the luxury of memory stored in his brain. Weeks of listening to her warbling, of enduring hours of inanity for each Polaroid fraction of her. And for all that I have two legs and a slim waist, topped by a void, a laugh, and a smell. He is much easier to imagine: a sweating, balding man with thin-rimmed glasses too tight for his nose. Little red marks where they pinch the bridge, inflamed by the salt in his perspiration. Short-sleeved shirt, high-high pants, sensible shoes and white socks. Lots of pockets in the pants for all the things that train otaku think they need.

Pencils and memory sticks and tissues and breath-mints and notebooks full of train-related minutiae. This multi-pocketed single-faceted man has the other half of my picture, and he has done nothing to earn it. Years spent jotting down train numbers, counting carriages, profiling drivers, wrestling with stopwatches and studying with timetables. Decades misspent in the pursuit of meaningless data, geek trivia to be shared with people who never talk. Even he has her face neatly filed in his memory, there to savour for a rainy day or more likely a lonely night, a fridge-full of three-dimensional Meika snacks to chew and drool over whenever the solitude becomes too much. He gets the ten-course meal while I suck on grains of uncooked rice which look the part but can never satisfy on their own.

My eyes begin to adjust to the glare, and I get up and move across to face the cannon’s mouth. I see a black ring, a cylinder stretching impossibly far into the distance. Just another trick of the light, but in the centre, at the end, there is life.

PHOTO

'Masa-kun, oh Masa-kun!’ A mother calling a young child. Hint of teacher summoning unruly student. Slightest hint of menace in the multi-coloured voice. Starts in her mid-riff. Warms to the task as it rises. ‘Masa-kun, I have given you many photos of myself.’ Seventeen at last count. Nearly twenty pieces of her to learn. ‘But I have none of you. No-one does. Only the old ones from before, but they are school photos from five years ago.’ Relics of my allocated five seconds. Step forward, turn right, smile, flash, next. Hurry hurry children, so many to get through. I have three more schools to do today. Now one of the teachers. That is a nice suit. From Aoki? How much? Really? That is a very good price indeed.

‘I want to take a photo of you. I am tired of talking to a door, Masa-kun. I know the door is very important to you, Masa, but you are skin and bone and blood, not wood. You don’t have to open the door. We can start with a foot if you like. Nothing big, just a foot. If that isn’t too bad we can keep going. Is that OK, Masa-kun?’

I don’t say anything. There is too much at stake. I have no desire for a photo. But if I don’t give her one, then what? Will she stop giving me kitty polaroids? That can’t happen. I need them to understand her. I am nearly halfway there. So much rides on this decision. A photo lets her in. Just a tiny bit. Never through the door. Not that. She can hear me thinking anyway. She must be able to. She can make me do whatever she wants. But not open the door. Maybe a photo isn’t so much. What do you think, Meika? ‘A photo can’t hurt you, Masa-kun. It just stores a little piece of you, a back-up only. It doesn’t take a part of you away with it, just a memory of you in the moment it was taken. Can you spare me a part of one moment, Masa-kun? I have three more photos for you.’ Plain bribery, a child’s trick, all dishonesty. Give me this and I’ll give you that. How the world works today. But I want those three photos. Three plus seventeen makes twenty to one. One photo of my foot by the slot. That’s all. One snap of my grimy, smelly, filth-encrusted foot. The dirt is now part of the calluses. More a paw or a pad than a foot. Long black nails curling into themselves. Almost a claw. Not the foot I remember. Not one I study through the slot. Not a part of me anymore. Not me. I can give that to her. She won’t get closer to me than that. ‘One photo, Masa-kun, that’s all I ask.’ Left or right is the only decision remaining. Toss a mental coin. Right it is.


The trapezoid of weak light by the slot. The bright invader of my gloom. Bravest of the watts surviving the entry. A frame for the claw at leg’s end. I can’t look at it. This abominable sign of what I am now. I endure it because the alternative is worse. The pain of laughter and stares outside. Cramps can disappear. Muck can be washed off. Nails can be trimmed. The world can’t see me like this. But she isn’t the world. She’s just a girl with a camera. I plant my foot in the light. Soil and light combine for growth. I imagine my foot growing if it lingers. Sprouting extra toes and broadening at the instep. Prize organic feet, are they cage or free-range? Masayuki: winner, amateur grower division, Tokyo Show, 2009. Blue ribbon feet, black ingrained skin.

The light feels warm on my feet. Dipping the toes into a weak sun. Just like being at the beach again. Flesh on show, best in show. I don’t know how it should pose. Raised or flat; front-on or side view? Front-on is easiest. No chance of her getting both feet in her shot. No two-for-the-price-of-one customer specials today. Not ever. I centre the right in the light. Five toe-claws to the fore. Left off to the side. Face inches from the door. All of me so close to outside. Two inches of wood from me to there. I haven’t been this close in five years. I can’t smell it, not past my stench. But I know it’s there. In the hall with her and her camera.

I hear more scuffling and scrabbling. ‘Are you ready, Masa-kun?’ Does it matter? ‘Are you smiling?’ For a picture of my foot? ‘The rest of you speaks when your mouth does not, Masa-kun. Hold still now.’ There are shadows in the light now. A chime as the digicam is switched on. Orange glow on my ankle from the flash. Bigger shadows: she must be focusing. ‘Ready? Ichi, ni, san!’


The flash explodes through the slot. Bursting and filling the dank air like fireworks. Bouncing off stained walls and curling posters. Dancing across the filthy floor. Split second glimpses of my world. Jarring visions of my shame. And the light is not fading or flying. Becoming impossibly stronger instead. White light arcing and spinning, weaving its web. I am still rooted to my spot. The left foot still awaits its glory times. But the light is gathering around me. Sweeping up the memories and the dust. White brilliance melting into silver. Silver rushing everywhere around me. Closing in on me, shy to the touch. No relenting now, my mind cannot function. This is impossible. The thing that can’t be happening is. The silver is settling, collapsing on itself. The mercury falls inwards, dragging me along. I am collapsing, origami in the rain. The silver speech shrinks, drawn inwards, downwards. Towards the slot, towards the camera’s lens. It is the mouth of this word. The home of this exclamation. Spat out into the world to fend alone. Now it returns with me.

She draws me in, the mouthless face getting bigger and closer. I am dreaming, falling, drowning. And stop.

5PIECE

MAST

I tried another’s eyes before. Maybe two years ago now. The last time he came.

I hear his weight shifting from foot to foot. So long accustomed to enduring stoically, he is unsure how to breach or even address the cocoon of silence I have woven. I imagine it glowing, absorbing his words and deflecting his phrases, throbbing with soundless energy fuelled by his rising frustration. I don’t resent him, just who he is. As a father, he is probably no better or worse than other trapped fathers, doing his best to enthuse about the affection he is supposed to show at school baseball games and weekend excursions. He is a two-sevenths father. I am his part-time project, no rival for the position of man of the house, a role he fills well enough. It’s not like there were any other applicants. His greatest failing is in the ‘god’ function: his national duty to mould me in his image, reactive and malleable, duty-bound and unquestioning, a robot with the ability to bleed. I have made myself bleed, does that void the manufacturer’s warranty. What can he do? Return me to the manufacturer? That poses certain physiological difficulties.

‘Your grandfather took me to the mountains when I was twelve. His hometown was there, a small village sunk into a valley that used to have a river. Just outside Matsumoto was a peak, I can’t remember the name now. I’m not even sure he told me what the name was anyway. It doesn’t matter. We stood at the bottom looking up; it must have been summer because I remember the sweat stinging my eyes. He pulled two white towels out of his pack. He tied one around my head like a labourer does when they are outside. He tied the other around his own. My towel was too tight, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. He was smiling, so pleased with himself for having thought of this eventuality. He had two metal water bottles tied to his belt, and with every step he took they clunked together. The sound became sharper every time we drank. There was a gravel path leading up to the top. There were boulders to climb over, tree branches to duck under. He made me hold his hand in the places where the path skirted cliff tops. He warned me not to tell my mother about those parts, because she would be so very worried. She thought it was just a walk. He never said anything to her about a mountain. So we followed this path, and it was so long because it was never very steep. Winding around and around the mountain until I was dizzy. I wanted to cut up the slope to get to the top faster, but he told me stories of other little boys who had done the same thing. He pointed far down into the valley, where the rocks danced in the heat haze, surrounded by pebbles bleached white by the sun.

“See those pebbles down there?”
“Yes, father.”
“They aren’t pebbles. That’s where the boys who cut the path wait. They have been waiting a long time.”
I didn’t say anything to him. I didn’t believe him and I am sure you wouldn’t either. The valley of bone pebbles was a warning; his father probably told it to him as well.

We stayed on the path all the way to the top. It took us three hours in the shimmering sun, light from above and heat reflecting from the stones of the path below. A direct route would not have taken much more than an hour, most of it shaded by trees and overhangs. Just before the summit there was a false crest, and we stopped to drink flasks of green tea and eat somen from plastic bowls he dug out of his pack. We were on the mountain side, and there was nothing in front of us but peaks and slopes, with the highest capped permanently by snow. Tufts of greenery stuck in the valleys like an old man’s nostril hair, sparse and resilient. Veins of dark rock slithering up the slopes. Hidden blood pulsing through the shadows and defiles. Weakening by the thin air; struggling to reach the head. I asked him why we had stopped there, so close to the true summit, but he shook his head and said nothing. We finished our noodles, tipping up the bowls so the salty liquid would not be wasted. He flicked them with his wrist before replacing them in the pack. Like he was tempted to throw them off the mountain just to see how far they would float but checked himself at the last minute. The last few drops flew from the plastic, staining the boulder we had been sitting on like the first drops of rain.

We reached the summit in less than five minutes. It was guarded by a white and orange radio antenna, towering over the bare peak with no sign of how it got there. The wire mesh fence around it was rusting in places, as was the once clear sign warning in both English and Japanese that any interference with the antenna would be punished.

“They built the path after the war, when everyone was desperate for work and didn’t mind what they were being paid for. The Americans wanted a network of radio masts down the spine of the country to relay their military signals. The war was over. Money meant more than pride by then. Your grandfather helped make the path. The local men spent six months digging and cutting and carrying sacks of gravel up from the valley floor. Six months to build, all so they could put a radio mast up here. When the trucks arrived with the parts, the American officer took one look at the mountain and called for a helicopter. He and his men never even set foot on the path. The radio network was never finished because technology made it redundant. The tower has been sitting up there ever since because no-one wants to take responsibility for bringing it back down.”


Looking out from that side of the mountain, the rocky arteries in the distance were disrupted by houses and even factories, replaced by highways to nowhere populated by day-trippers too lazy to climb. Off to the north, the wall of the dam seemed to bulge in the heat, threatening the toy towns downriver. But the disaster will never happen, not while the concrete holds.’

I wait for more, for the moral, the hidden message, the meaningful truth I am supposed to derive from this marathon telling. If you can call one person talking at another a conversation, then it is the longest he and I have ever had. The material of his suit pants shimmies as he bends, the light through the slot disrupted by the shadow of his hand and its contents. He pushes an envelope into the darkness and walks away. The timing of his footsteps is irregular.

The white envelope is stuffed with ten thousand yen bills, clean and crisp as if brought direct from a bank. I count them out to one hundred, a million yen in a pile by my toes. A small white card is stapled to the envelope. I tear it off, snakebite holes in its top right corner. He always had neat handwriting. The characters are aligned like tiny black soldiers, clear against the white card even in this gloom.

“You chose your own path, Masayuki. I cannot follow you. Goodbye.”
He won’t approach the door again, not even on birthdays or during O-bon. Mother brings a bowl of udon at dinner time, sniffling as she pushes it under the door. Thick white noodles cords adrift in a fishy broth. This night’s serve is too salty. My sense of triumph vanishes. She can’t be bought off that easily.