AIR CON

The black curtain is only moved after nightfall. During the daylight hours it stays in place across the forgotten doorway, held in position by the grime as by the cheap tacks pinning it to the walls around the sliding glass doors. I don’t know why they never tried to get in this way, across the naked balcony with its green metal railings. The stainless steel poles for washing hang overhead, threaded through the grey painted hooks embedded in the concrete ceiling. The building stands at the edge of the high-rise section, the last structure this tall for miles, looking out to the south-west where Fuji-san once stood in the distance. From here out it’s all mid-size apartment buildings and primary-coloured shopping complexes, their names written in English on their rooves. The apartments loom not tall enough from the darkness; rows of identical lights all pointing away like a thousand double-decker buses with plenty of passengers but nowhere to go. The shopping centres are surrounded by multi-storey car parks, the battlements to their retail keeps, floodlit all night so that no one will forget their existence during the night. Freeways flow between and around them, networks of overpasses and off-ramps that seem too numerous even for this city of twenty million insoles. The money was there to be spent, is the reasoning, what does it matter if this highway didn’t need another lane in each direction, or if that river didn’t need to be bridged? You can’t stop progress, they all say, we must keep moving. None of them seem to realise that progress means moving forwards, not just getting to the places you have already been in a few minutes less. The rivers of concrete pulsate through the darkness, arterial flows rarely stopped by blood-clot traffic jams. But these are no ordinary arteries: running in all directions, crossing each other, doubling back on themselves, merging into the distance before splitting again. They never end or begin, because for that you would require a heart.

The sliding doors look as they should, as if they haven’t opened in years. Stuck in place by a paste comprising lint, insect carcasses and airborne sweat particles which have flown from me during increasingly rare incidences of physical exertion on my part. Each summer’s humidity deepens the grime, adding new layers before the frozen nights of winter permafrosts them in place, writing the history of this room in dirt. The grooves along which the doors could once slide freely are encrusted with this muck, and the rounded sides of the glass panels are ill-served to act as icebreakers. I have long tried to cultivate the opacity of the glass, but despite being a much-smudged imitation of its formerly pristine self, it stubbornly resists all my entreaties to block out the light. The curtain does its work instead, sagging and musty, pinpricks where the tacks first went in now obscenely stretched like tribal ear lobes. It hangs infinitesimally lower each day, ever threatening to let in the world outside but never quite having the courage to betray me. Each night, when the forest-like outlines of the buildings below have been replaced by the ordered galaxy of firefly lights, I let it rest on the mats below, sleeping as I stir myself to action.

The parallel was too easy, easy enough for me to even consider it once. A sleepless night when I wondered whether it could be possible. No great tradition of it here but traditions have to start somewhere. We have imported so many other ideas there is no reason why this one couldn’t be adapted to this all-consuming culture. I write a single character on a flattened tetra carton and slide it through the slot. That part may take time. While I wait, I break the habit of more than a year and unpin the bottom right corner of the curtain, letting it swing back with the release of tension to allow a thin beam of light through. It looks like a laser, a beam from a robot’s eye burning brightly on the corner of my futon, scaring the dust particles that loiter guiltily in mid-air. Suddenly, I am afraid – what if I am right? I worry that it may be days until I am discovered. The irony of my predicament does not escape me, but the idea of my helpless body in death is very different to the choices I make for myself.

They descend at dusk like creatures from an alien world. I hear movement and crouch beside the curtain, sweating in the blanket warmth of summer. The apartment seems hotter than usual. Maybe I am sick again. I peer through the slimmest of cracks, straining my eyes in the dying day’s memories of light, desperate to know what they are doing so I can be ready. My fingers grope for the hammer, a conditioned response to any unexpected events. They can’t find it, and I cannot take my eyes off the slivered men for a second. Their voices float through the dirty pane, the angry voices of simple men forced to do something they don’t understand.

“The grandmother is dying in that bedroom? No wonder with that curtain blocking off the light! Since when does darkness make someone feel better?”
“I can’t believe we have to climb down from the bloody roof for this. Can’t they survive without an air conditioner for a few weeks? It will be autumn soon anyway. “
“Why can’t we just tip-toe through? If she’s dying anyway it won’t make any difference.”
“He said that she’s hooked up to all these machines and we might have tripped over them. Look at that door: it’s filthy. Probably wouldn’t open anyway.”
“I can’t believe he lets his wife get away with that. I would divorce my wife if she let our place get to that state.”
“You aren’t even married.”
“Well, if I was, that would be enough.”

They flit across my vision slit, my eyes racing to catch them and focus. Segmented beams of headlights and swatches of shiny orange reflector vest, glints of metal-buckled harnesses and safety gloved thumbs. Sliding carefully down the face of the building on ropes to land on my balcony. Are they are some hikikomori removal squad, ready to burst in and drag me back into life. It has happened to others: crashing and grasping hands and wailing and kicking and biting and threats and restraints and being handcuffed to a nice clean hospital bed while they sponge the accumulated filth off you and ask questions until your eardrums bleed. They will put me in an all-white room with mirrored glass on either side so that the medical specialists and psychologists can study me and read my dreams.

“Nearly five years? That’s the longest yet!”
“I hear there is one in Hokkaido who has been in nine years. He’s fought off three extrication attempts with a can of deodorant and a lighter.”
“They’ll never get him out. Not worth the trouble. I don’t know why we bother with these ones at all. Let them stay there until they starve.”

The pride in my achievement will be tempered by the knowledge that the nameless, faceless guy up north has been in longer. Time for the quality not quantity argument. Fewer people than cows up there. Less eyes on the country hicks, not like the motion sensors of Tokyo. Not like Mrs Sato. Impossible to judge without talking to him. That’s never going to happen.

“What did his parents say?”
“They’re in the next room; had to be sedated. Charges may be brought against them for wasting municipal funds.”
“Perhaps if those goons in the snatch squads stopped using tear gas grenades we wouldn’t have to keep paying off the neighbours to not go to the press.”
“The neighbours should be charged as well, what kind of idiots believe that someone can homestay for five years?”
“Does that make them good or bad neighbours?”
“Depends on who you ask.”
“What did you say his name was? I need it for the form.”
“No idea, the guys who brought him in didn’t tell me.”
“How many have we had this week?”
“Six, if you count that one who jumped out the window on his first night.”
“Do we start agin or just keep going?’
‘Makes no difference to me. ‘
‘Listen, we’ll call this one ‘Seven’ until the paperwork comes through. Much easier to remember him that way.”
“Fine with me. Saves a phone call.”

I have been here five years and even in my dreams they do not know me. The temptation lingers uncomfortably, like the half-memory of an unlocked door, but I cannot show them who I am. Some grimy creature bursting out from a black space containing a dying pensioner.

The shock would be too much for them. One might even fall off the balcony in surprise, but there are no guarantees. If I knew for sure I would do it. But he won’t so I won’t. I wouldn’t be Masayuki to them, just ‘crazed hermit’ or ‘deranged hikikomori’. I have spent too many days alone to waste them on a forgettable paragraph on the inside page of a tabloid.

There should be front page headlines, “Tokyo Man defies society for five years” or “Recluse sees through nation’s lies”. But that might make me a visionary, an oracle, a figure of authority for a public aching to be told what to do. I would appear on panel programs, between the musical bimbo of the week and an ancient but still revered one-joke comedian in his trademark novelty sunglasses. Everything I have fought for would fade into nothing, one more banished shadow under the unrelenting studio lights. I look at every day here as one more layer of substance. They may be thin layers but they accumulate and gather significance as they grow. I am rebuilding myself from the ground up, layer upon layer, slice upon slice. I don’t know when I will finish. I know I am not finished yet.

I cannot go out like this and breath their air. Is this part of their plan? So obvious that they thought I might overlook it. Air conditioning. Air. Conditioning. Conditioning air. The scourge of Japan – that invisible force that manages mass coercion, collusion and cooperation. A toxic nerve gas that excises only the decision-making and creative sectors of the brain, replacing them with a greater desire to nod, agree and follow.

I must stay focused. Dreams of fame and mass conditioning threaten my concentration. My blood is betraying me, lusting for the national reverie, a stream seeking an ocean. I will let it go, but I am not going with it.