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.