from The Method Actors

It's a melancholy truth: when Jacques is sad he likes to get high and ride trains all day. Alone. He'd waited around at the hotel room for almost an hour, made coffee in the spotless kitchen and smoked some cigarettes, stared out the window down to the Shinjuku station train lines. And Michael hadn't come back. The first time he'd seen him in literally months, and he just hates it when his mood ruins what could have been nice. Out at Y's not much had been said. Too messy to go inside, they'd stood on the veranda and given Y their respective knots of cash, and taken their respective bags of shrooms, though Michael's, he'd noticed, had been packed inside a sexy little white leather Inéd satchel that he'd admired absently. Y was terse and over-polite as usual, ashamed of his house but, you know, never enough to clean up.

‘Meredith is here, looking all over for you,’ Jacques had said.

‘Soon,’ was what Michael had said. ‘Don't tell her you saw me. I'll see her soon.’

‘I like your suit, big guy,’ Jacques said, and Michael had laughed and looked at him strangely, and but when you're sad you maybe pick up on things like that, but somehow just don't have the flair to do or say anything about it. So they walked through Ageo to the station, boarded the Takasaki, both of them in sunglasses for this was a glaring beautiful blue-white winter day of little temperature and awesome light. Omiya was the place the next words were said. Twenty minutes away.

‘You take the Saikyo, I'll take the Keihin-Tohoku and the subway, and we'll see who gets to the Prince first,’ Michael said. ‘Hey?’

‘I shall win,’ Jacques said.

‘Maybe.’

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‘You are going to see Meredith at the Prince? She has been staying there.’

‘Maybe.’

He watched Michael check the timetable over the ticket gates, and the crowds rolled around them in the great arena of Omiya station, so many thousands of scarves. Two foreigners, both overfamiliar with this place but in completely different ways, paused in the middle of the stream. Jacques stared through his sunglasses, looking for Michael's eyes behind his. Where did he look? What did the Warboy see?

‘Hey, Michael?’

‘Yeah?’ He turned.

‘You okay, and everything?’

Black glass watched. Then Michael smiled, and said, ‘Come here.’ They hugged. Then they stood awkwardly for a moment, and Jacques felt himself too wrapped up in his own business to really feel this.

Michael checked the timetable again.

‘Coming soon,’ he said.

‘Only in theatres,’ Jacques said, and then he was gone.

Underneath the Zegna jacket, the scarf and the Helmut Lang turtleneck, only Jacques knows he is wearing his new J-girl hippu-hoppu T-shirt that reads in Japanese: I MAKE BOYS CRY. He's sitting in the monorail—post-lunch-hour rush, he's got a seat—because he's started this day this way, and he's going to ride trains all day. The Haneda monorail winds out of Hamamatsucho station over the trash islands of Tennozu Isle, over Shuto Expressway No. I near where a kogyaru girl driving in platforms had lost control of a car named a Cynus and killed herself and two others in a four-car pileup the week before. Along the canals, elevated, there are only two perspectives: the very near and the very far. The head above the seat in front, the chrome prison bars of the luggage racks above, and the trees around the bankrupt Daiei superstore on Oi Central Port Park, the bridges over the canal, the petrol shining in gentle rainbow stains in the little geometrical shapes of water that appear abruptly beneath the train after the giant buildings of JAPEX on the Isle. Then the racetrack at Oikeibajomae to his right, and the five-storey stables, the dirty end of the glamour looking out all page 112 plastic buckets and dung-stained straw onto the concrete voids, charged with iron and electricity, pierced by the pillars that hold the monorail so high.

Then it's over real water, after Ryutsu-Center and the baseball diamond where occasionally can be seen the Self-Defence Forces in kendo practice, as the canal begins to widen and is subject to tides more palpably: there or not, spiky, amputated posts from out of nowhere right in the middle of the river, and sometimes around them seagulls walk on water. The monorail clings to the edge of it, past and over a little rocky corner by a carpark where a bashed boat relaxes slimed-green on the stones, and old fishermen in waders don't talk to one another. Showajima, then Seibijo and the spare monorail train on the alternate track down on his right, and on his left the first few planes on another trash island, and the Air Traffic Control College where fresh out of high school the kids go to study six days a week and live in dormitories with no aircon. He knew a British boy who was living with a Japanese boy who had waited three years for an interview to be a steward with All Nippon Airways, and there were so many like him the interview only lasted three minutes and then the dream was over and he had to think of something else to do. Then it's Tenkubashi, Shinseibijo, then the airport proper, and then it's back again. And if you get tired of the detail, on one side the denseness of the city stretches away in a gray ragged stroke leaching up into the blue, on the other it's all trees and stadium lights like black flowers from the horizon and almost-sea and acres and acres of brilliant winter sky.

But who can see it when they're this brand of sad? Things mix and fragment; lost in a thought or a memory for minutes he sees nothing till the train jolts from the platform in the wrong direction and he realises he has reached the end of the line. Or not a thought in his head as it banks beautifully out of Hamamatsucho, over the edge of Hama Rikyu garden, and around the corner of a skyscraper so close he could wave to that office lady were she looking up from her computer, were he so inclined.

Jacques waited at that hotel for a long time, and then he knew Michael wasn't coming back and he grabbed the little microwaved mushroom and slammed the oven door and headed down and to the page 113 station. What a joke. Experienced, he'd got to Hamamatsucho in less than fifteen minutes. Chuo, Yamanote: time those changes right. Who cares. The skills are just your muscles after a year. You don't take pride in what you take for granted. It is Jacques’ twenty-fourth birthday on the twenty-sixth of December, and no one in this city knows. Though most people here accept that, that no one knows, and tell others the date and just pretty much get over it, he hasn't told anyone.

That isn't why he's sad.

As they always do, at the Oikeibajo stables the train doors shut in three increments: the first assertive, the second sure, the third tentative, somehow elderly. He puts his feet up on the seat in front of him and leans back, his neck cushioned by the soft knot of his scarf on the vinyl antimacassar. His gloved hands are in his pockets, warming up, and by his left hand there is the hard square of his MD player, and in his right he squeezes the little blue shroom moist in its baggie, and looking down at a stablehand leading a big chestnut horse out a stable door and round into a straw-littered alley between the buildings, he catches a glimpse of its gigantic cock casually gushing a far-off but incredibly still visible white flood of urine down onto the asphalt like poured and spattering milk.

Fingering the shroom, like the Tour de France sceptics angrily shout, he murmurs, ‘Dopé, dopé,’ idly to himself. And smiles. And then stops.

What was that phrase in German? Was duverlachst wirst du noch diener. What you laugh at, still will you serve. He'd rather serve than laugh. At the gentle temple of a hot tissue-skinned cock, softer skin than his cheek where he'd always brush it across, because lips and tongues are made for that sort of thing, for sucking and licking, but cheeks are for love and polite pecks, and the juxtaposition turned him on. But only if he'd shaved. He'd heard some boy say knowingly that pythons have claws beneath their scales. But what a lame metaphor. Things are taken and left much easier than that. The knocking of the monorail as it starts off again and he closes his eyes. And soon he gets idly kind of hard. Warm and tired and sad and hard. A diener is something in English, too, right. Yes, a morgue attendant. Yes? Is it? Or deiner. Is it. Who cares, he gives up on the thought, and tries to vividly, vividly remember the burning shy hot spot of the touch of a cock to his page 114 cheek. Blood and life, and trains and sex and sleepiness. Then onto his tongue, a full rosy white—or, like Simon's, rosy-brown—mute tube inside his mouth, fat and hot and fit to burst. The quietness of his stomach to his forehead, a gasp far away above is all he hears and may as well not be there. To lie with a hard Simon-thigh under hand. As he had a hundred times. This is Jacques’ lazy sad Tokyo day, now; two years spent in the fingers of this old city, and he feels so, so sexual every other day but with barely the energy to do anything about it.

He's kind of flush with cash, too.

Paid on the tenth for a casual blagged translation job for Japan Tobacco exactly two weeks ago, just before the terrible dinner. Sniffling with a cold, he had been led by the guard at the gate into a building that resembled and smelled more like a hospital than anything. Two very nice Japanese, a boy and a girl in matching beige JT overalls, led him into a meeting room, and there they didn't even remotely suspect he wasn't a native speaker, and he helped them to translate a document on measures to reduce tobacco dust build-up around machines on the factory floor. Because it turned out tobacco dust was the key thing that attracted tobacco beetles, which in turn got ‘processed,’ causing—Jacques could remember his exact rephrasing of their notes—‘in 1998, thirty-nine incident of customer exposure to beetle.’ Eyes closed, he smiles to himself and remembers asking if he could smoke, and there was a little pause while they searched for English, and then one or both of them said, ‘Of course.’ He had kind of hoped they'd offer him some free JT products but no luck. And sniffling, spacing out in the hot room in the well-guarded heart of Japan Tobacco, trying to focus on the English words, he offered the two quiet employees a cigarette, and they both said no thank you I don't smoke and he didn't even laugh.

An extra ¥80,000 and one bad dinner and two weeks later I MAKE BOYS CRY. He guesses he's glad, but not really.

Beside him on the seat is Michael's book, Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, and there's a girl sitting on the other side of the train on a seat that faces inwards. ‘Texte intégral,’ Michael had said when he'd given him the book, the night after the night after the party at the Prince, and Ko's automutiler. The girl on the other side is wearing page 115 amazing boots. Mauve snakeskin to the knee, zipped long on the sides, mahogany heels so high the arches are like overpasses. Kickass, Simon would say. Jacques’ forehead itches in a short thin line heading straight back from his shaven widow's peak. He remembers going to a Rammstein gig with Simon just before he left. How Simon in his desperation then was all sexual energy and frantic emotional openness. At his little cold gaijin house in Mejiro they dyed their hair using some J product with untranslatable instructions. They sat by his little heater waiting for this dye to dry, picking the hard black drops from each other's naked shivering shoulders. Then at the gig Simon was drunk and Jacques was high and Simon pretended not to be a little freaked by the singer's giant strap-on dildo that shot sparks out all over the audience in a melodramatic fountain, and even cheered a little at the feigned fellatio performed on the guitarist, and all the campness he's found Americans don't usually get in German metal Simon seemed to open himself up to just a little. And then in the heat and the sweat of the gig, moisture dripping from the ceiling of the Akasaka Blitz, the dye they didn't understand and hadn't washed out as they should have—but together—began to seep from their hair and run down their faces and necks and ears and into their eyes, and those crazy J just loved it, and touched them, Jacques and Simon, stealing the stains and smearing it on their own faces like a Dionysian orgy. And Simon went a little crazy in a good way for once, and they smeared it on each other, tore off their ¥6000 Rammstein tour T-shirts and to cheering all around them smeared the leaking dye all over each other's bodies, and the banging electronic bass like a migraine over it all, dancing and kissing and groping each other madly in the cheering crowd who wiped the dye from their bodies on themselves. And then outside into the winter never so cold as shirtless, torsos and faces smeared black they staggered home because no taxi would stop for them. That's what Jacques misses: in love and being can go very crazy. For Jacques, eau de vie. Sex is the source. His forehead itches, and the girl in boots is asleep and dreaming, her eyelids flitting and twitching, struggling to match the things she's seen. She has a purple T-shirt under her fur coat, with ONE THING THAT MAKES BEAGLES SUPERIOR IS OUR NATURAL HUMILITY printed on the chest. Pure craziness in love, glee in Glizy, page 116 abandon in Bendon, revel in Revlon. Fire for effect. The monorail lurches from Tennozu Isle for the second time in this direction. A man strides long as the train's floor leaves him behind. Jacques didn't understand the call-signs in Cacciato for a while, and took ‘Orphan Indigo Papa’ quite literally; such a sad English phrase.

Down to his left there is the unused baseball diamond that verges on the canal. There are men in khaki with wooden swords practising kendo. Their bodies’ movements miniature, abrupt and sharp; the clack of contact only in his head. Six white jeeps are parked by the dugout. But the last one is a darker khaki than the uniforms.

Jacques takes his right gloved hand from his pocket and sees the shroom's a little squashed in the baggie, and the condensation's mixed with the blue coating to make drips of blue on the plastic, and a little fat solid V of blue moisture in the bottom corner of the bag. Have a joint or eat a shroom is the biggest question he's going to ask himself today, because he has a tunnel wound. Like O'Brien's Nam GIs, on all-fours, in The Shit, shot: high into the chest and going steeply down inside. Today, my main man, we do what the hell we marijuana. Or? You only microwave a shroom to mitigate the dose. Why would he do that? The little adhesive label has blackened in a semicircle, partially obscuring the purple inked message. What remains is AT ME. Some of the drips have squeezed from the ziplock and onto his glove.

He remembers trying valiantly to study Japanese in the time he was in love. Japanese For Busy People; trying to neaten up his grammar with a basic textbook. Working briefly hard at Lesson 14, page 103: ‘Yesterday's Enjoyable Kabuki’. But Appendix L was ‘Parts of the Face and Body’. He flicked to page 204, and found himself drawing little sketches in the margins. Ago; chin, jaw. Kami; his hair. A homonym for spirit or ancestor. Onaka; stomach. Ashi; his foot, or leg. Oshiri; buttock. Just the one? So he drew only one, obliquely, catching the light on the downside of the muscle, falling into shade. Sebone; his spine. Pronouncing the words slowly and succulently as he drew, savouring them in Japanese, gave him the same feeling English enunciation once had done. It was the body foreign and angelic, newly-shaped; defined differently and curved in emphasis. He had spent a long time flicking his pen nib to get the density and curl of public hair page 117 just right. Foot, or leg. It made the words bodily again; distinguishing and distancing until he really saw. Koshi; hip. Who doesn't love his koshi when you're up to your neck in it? And his long tan Chinese American back that gets a long tan Japanese word. Senaka. Se is for the small; na, for widening and the modest flare; ka, for the K and geometric bloom of his shoulders, and for the beautiful fragile collarbones sheltering the shallow hollows that begin the crest of his chest, the hollows in the lee. The wind at his back was breath, hands sliding up his sebone and spreading over, deep inside him as his head was bowed: Se—na—ka—a—a—a.

His innermost rind, relict of a love, drying on Jacques’ body in the night.

Matsuge; his eyelash, look, widowed on your pillow in the morning.

Oh.

Jacques abruptly tears the bag open, and with a little shudder at the bitter ashy taste and just a single chew he eats the mushroom. Chomping only after it's gone to get that ashen liquid off his teeth. And another shudder, tears in his eyes. The monorail glides into Seibijo and the Traffic Control College; one stop from Tenkubashi, then Shinseibijo, then Haneda Airport, and then let's do it all over again.

After domo—the equivalent of ‘hey,’ ‘thanks,’ or sometimes just some kind of polite grunt of acknowledgment—the first casual J phrase he ever learned was typical of the crowd he always moved quickly into, out of and back on his own again. He hates cliquey fags. Epon nuite. Jerk it off. He's never had to use it, because gay J boys here most often get so enamoured of him he has to gently fend them off.

Kudasai.

Oh, please.

The doors judder shut, and the monorail glides on again.

There are no sanctuaries in memory but there is sanctuary in movement. As if imitating the winter mid-afternoon sky, the bright blue drops in the baggie cyanise and darken slightly with exposure to the air. He folds the baggie into his pocket again. He could eat the shroom quite casually in the train for a couple of reasons. The first that the car is almost empty, but for him, the girl in the T-shirt and fur coat page 118 and boots, and one salaryman asleep too, at the far end. The second that shrooms are legalised here, though the possible technicalities of public consumption are obscure to him. The third, though, is that for foreigners it just often seems for good reason that there are no rules here. Though you will pay through the nose for your apartment and your employer must agree to be your guarantor, once you've got money you are quite free to do and be what you want in your jail of Japan.

The night after the night after the party, and Ko, and his blessures volontaires, back in June, Michael and Jacques had met at the Starbucks in East Ikebukuro. Both sleepless, harried, and white. Jacques’ abiding memories of that night would be a pool of blood on the kitchen slate bigger than the boy, and being taller than the paramedics who wore orange plastic helmets. As if this, their height, their absurd helmets, their Japaneseness meant they couldn't be trusted. One of them had a cupped two-handsful of a bloody bundle, bent over it like a boy with a newborn bird, and Ariel, Anton, Shannon, what of the rest? The party huddled in the living room or left, and Ko's face was disconnected from everything that seemed to fade away; he smiled from an acrylic stretcher, pale as a page. His eyes like coloured hollows filled with ebon ink; a maroon glisten, that was spatial with something like peace. Almost all Jacques could ask Michael—co-Warboy with Ko, war scholar, Japonais atrocité spécialiste, the exemplary man (or was that Ko?)—in Starbucks, passionless, drained and uninflected, was why. And they sat in silence in the air-conditioned murmur of the upstairs Ikebukuro Starbucks until Michael finally began to talk. And it wasn't long before Jacques began to shake his head and murmur, non, non. And at last placed his hand over Michael's whispering mouth. Into Haneda Airport station now and outside there is a hint of a suggestion of twilight, just a whitening at the hem of the sky, and a pixel or two of violet bleeding into the faded blue above. And in silence for further static-filled moments as Jacques struggles to bring anything he knows or remembers to bear. The doors smoothly open, and two women with wheeled and frame-handled suitcases board in beautiful caramel cashmere overcoats, one nougat and the other honey, and Jacques sits up a little straighter and lifts his feet from the seat. But they head towards the doors to the next car, to align their seats with their final station's exit.

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The doors judder shut and the train glides out, his back to the direction they're heading in now.

Jacques had finally told Michael of Un Grand Guignol. How he saw it was all about location, a certain notion of realism and primitive catharsis. Played out as it was in a chapel that was all that remained of a convent destroyed in the Revolution, 20 bis rue Chaptal in Montmartre. It was tiny and close-up and began at the beginning of the twentieth century. How it was said the most famous Guignol actress had been a woman named Maxa, who in her time at the theatre had been murdered, all told, more than ten thousand times, and raped more than three thousand times. One woman. Tranche de mort. It was all Jacques could come up with to answer what he'd been told. Slice of death was the aesthetic, and his was an aesthetic defense. Minimalist plots and 2-D characters and one act durations, multiple plays to a bill, each culminating in cathartic moments of hyperviolence that caused audience members to faint and vomit at stage properties that emptied the offal bins of the butchers of Montmartre. And of course it was a smash hit and a favorite of Paris society for decades. In balconies obscured by trellis-work, dukes and princes and heads of industry made love to their mistresses, titillated by the horror. Even World War One couldn't tarnish the Guignol's shine. Audiences watched and vomited and hyperventilated and staggered into the alleys fainting and returned again and again. Jacques didn't know if the attraction was about the distinction between their lives and the theatre, the manifestation of a dream, a terrorism of the imagination, or if it was the refraction of certain brutal daily realities in turn of the century Paris. Condensed and shown with a high consideration for grim and utter physical realism. He guessed he was naïve, that Tokyo had softened him. He supposed he believed that certain sights dealt shocks to the head that were curable only in the craziness of love. And that without love some crave more horror, and some crave only sleep. Jacques had told Michael about Un Grand Guignol to try and illustrate a point. La terreur n'est pas francaise. Fear is not a French emotion, to quote the poet. But revulsion still remains. But Jacques found himself too battered to say it with feeling. Michael was quiet a while, then, staring into red velvet of a Starbucks couch, said, But Rimbaud also asks us, un homme qui vent se mutiler est page 120 bien damné, n'est-ce pas? Jacques nodded with the recognition; the comprehension. A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn't he? Michael said, Ko knew it was futile, yet he did it. Do you know what the biggest horror is? It's a test. It's his own private shibboleth for us, to see how we'd react. To see what we would do. And there are so many different sets of rules here that no one trusts their own; thus no one will react. I think it's the strongest statement he could make. To see if he is truly banging his head against a brick wall. I guess I think he was amazing. And if he is damned, then, as he tells me, he and I were damned a long time ago. Il a seize ans,said Jacques. Tout pourtant m'est permis, said Michael. And yet everything is permitted me. Here it is different; and he deserves our respect. Ko was a genius, and they breed and cull them young here. Damnation shifts by nation.

The train slides into Shinseibijo and the sleeping girl in the boots stirs. Jacques realises she's been going back and forth with him for at least two cycles now. That perhaps his little hobby is shared. But now she stirs, and sits upright with the sudden bleary panic of the passenger who's gone too far, and ducks for a line of sight beneath the window's rim, looking for a station sign out on the Shinseibijo platform.

The doors clump open, and she checks the seat either side of her, too dazed to remember if she had bags or not, and she rises unsteadily high on her hugely heeled feet and clomps across the car floor and out onto the platform. Two men in suits let her pass and step inside. They check the car, glancing past the foreigner, and take the inward-facing seat she left. The PA plays the recording. Shinseibijo. Shinseibijo desu. A tone rings to warn that the doors will close soon, and Jacques stares back down along the length of the thin, open-air platform to the narrow concrete cord of the monorail track curving away through the void beyond the train. A man in military khaki appears at the top of the steps at the middle of the platform, out of breath and carrying a heavy-looking leather attaché case. He pauses, for a moment indecisive as to whether he'll run for this particular train and risk defeat or wait around ten minutes for the next. The tones ring again, but the doors don't move. He has urgent business so he makes his decision; Jacques wonders if he's with the kendo training men near Oikeibajomae, if there's water between the two that forces him to take the train just these few stops. page 121 He decides, and abruptly makes a run for the door to the car from which Jacques watches. Sitting facing backwards, Jacques watches the split in his uniform's jacket part at his crotch in a well-tailored flexing khaki lambda as the man lopes directly toward him, holding his cap on hard with one hand, the other lifting the attaché case out towards the car almost comically like an offering or a baton in a relay race. He almost makes it. He's ready to jump inside like the late always do, and once inside, panting, like a fast-forward button released they'll pause, and then walk as casually as they can to the next carriage, eyes averted from everything but the door and the seat they'll take where their indignity wasn't observed. But of course he's too late, the first phase of the door cycle starts, that violent double guillotine, one third of the tantalising gap. He's almost there, could get a shoulder in, and push the rubber-edged windowed panels open again just enough, or gain the grace of the driver, who'll call a scratchy amplified ‘Go Chui, kudasai!’—Caution please!—but retract those doors just a vital second. Or he'll risk putting a foot in the door of Jacques’ car, so dangerous, who really knows the strength of these doors when they're in their final phase. What if they're so strong, and with the platform's end just ten hopped meters away, a barely man-width gap between the railing and the train, then a broken ankle and a dangle and ten dropped meters to the road. The second door phase gentler now.

Clu-clump.

The driver's seen him.

‘Go chui, kudasai!’

And the tones ring again. The man's eyes are wide with desperation to make this train; Jacques sits up straight with a sudden excitement and a sharp unexpected burst of adrenaline. What will happen? The man runs straight towards the foreigner, attaché case up in the air, as if to say, a vital message for you! Almost there, and the doors start the final gentle phase, and Jacques is safe inside, it's too late for the soldier's shoulder, he'll just carom off the metal, he won't risk a foot, all his weight is forward, no one's stupid enough to use their fingertips—he jams the attaché case between the doors and they clump closed and squeeze. Almost immediatley the monorail begins to glide from the station. The soldier pulls at the case. Realising it's too late. A terrible page 122 mistake has been made. There's something bulky in the inner half that's caught in the doors like a barb. Jacques can see in the car's fluorescent lights the inner half-a-case suspended in mid-air, so utterly incongruous in a moving train to see a door so violated. Halfway in, halfway up. Not even comical, for Jacques; just odd. And through the angle of the window's glass distortion, the look of the moment just prior to bewilderment on the soldier's face, walking beside the moving train, tugging at the protruding end of his case. Inside, like an odd reflection minus him, the soldier's suspended case pivots and jerks. His watery face jumps something nearer to horror as the train accelerates quickly; he's starting to jog, he sees the chrome railings of the platform's end coming up, and Jacques sees his refracted shock completely ebb, the shake of his head as he simply stops and lets the attaché case go, marooned half-up, half-in the monorail doors, gliding faster and faster from him, abandoned in khaki on the concrete staring.

Jacques gives him a little wave as he turns and fades.

From the west, clouds unfurl from the horizon like spools of white videotape set rolling on some frictionless plane, curling into Tokyo regenerating as they discard themselves. Jacques stares for a while at the case suspended in the doors. He briefly checks out the two salarymen who had glanced at the awful mistake then looked away again. Twenty seconds pass, and the monorail pulls into Tenkubashi. They rise to their feet and move to the doors. As the train slows to a halt they take a hold of the chrome pillars either side, and when the doors open and the attaché case thuds to the floor in the exit the man on the left nudges it sideways with a casual instep, and they disembark.

Jacques shivers, and saliva fills his mouth in an oily geyser of nausea, the ashen oil still greasy on his teeth. Doors close, on to Ryutsu-Center and Oikeibajomae and he decides. Too nasty a taste to ignore, he'll go down in Seibijo station, minimalist though some of these monorail stations are, to hunt down a canned coffee vending machine or at the very least the cold tap in the bathrooms. Before Seibijo he stands, and at the doors he stares down at the attaché case's bruised leather, and its brass clasp on a triangular flap like an envelope. The train pulls in. Seibijo. Seibijo desu. He checks the car quickly but there's no one home, page 123 and the glass in the doors to the next so dirty and security-wired it might as well be opaque. The doors shudder open and he bends and then he steps out on the platform with the attaché case under his arm.

The monorail crawls on.

He drops a ¥100 coin in a machine by the platform steps and removes a can of Georgia Café Au Lait, drinks it up on the platform and then at the bottom of the steps he sees his first execution on the sidewalk opposite the ticket gates. It's an old man sweeping outside an abandoned tollbooth office, its anodised windows freckled with stone-thrown holes. His broom is made of twigs and the soldiers are the ones from the baseball diamond, carrying their boken, wooden practice swords, gently arced, with rounded handles merging into the triple planes of the spines of the polished pine blades. They are passing by the old man when a soldier in the middle cleanly breaks the handle of the broom in two with his boken. The soldiers stop. They begin to sympathise, saying ah, sumimasen, sumimasen, gomen nasai, in serious sincere tones, ringing around the old man. Jacques stands in the ticket gate, left hand clutching the attaché case, his ticket in the fingers of his right hand, paused over the ticket slot to exit. In shadow, unseen and unnoticed, paused here, watching. The old man is bowing, his hands scrabbling with pieces of the broken broom, gathering the twigs that are moulting from the split handle. He backs away dragging the twigs until his buttocks touch the aluminium of the toll both and in the goldly anodised reflective windows Jacques can see the soldiers’ faces, spread amongst the holes in the glass, and beyond them can see a darkness that is the place he stands, and some of their faces are blank and expressionless, some are animated, speaking faux-seriously, apologising for the soldier's mistake. One points with the tip of a well-weighted boken at a twig the old man has missed. The old man reaches for it and the soldier next to him with a two-handed grip casually flicks his boken down. There's the sound of a heavy stick hitting fingers, a second's silent pause, and then the old man shrieks. He seems to flinch all over, seems to shrink from his own dimensions, assume a mass diminished. He holds his broken hand to his chest like an expression of something heartfelt. This is how I feel, he seems to say. A different soldier prods page 124 him in the stomach with the thick pine tip of his sword. Immediately opposite, the soldier who broke his hand steps forward in a perfect wide-foot stance and two-handed slices diagonally down with a cry, and the sword strikes the old man's head and the sound is not a clean thock, but clotted, deadened by contract with his ear. Jacques’ train ticket is suddenly sucked into the gates because his hand must have slowly drifted downwards and the tiny belt inside the gates whirs and subsides and the plastic doors clunk open. He doesn't move, just watches two of the soldiers use clean, precise strokes to destroy the old man's arms and knees, and then the soldier who struck first is let forward to beat him to death with blows of the boken to his old thin skull, drops of blood flying back from the wooden sword on the upstroke, the soldiers parting, no-sound of his crushed upward face receiving the strikes.

There's some sensor in the ticket gates that knows Jacques hasn't moved, so the gates stay open. He watches the soldiers walk away, not looking back, not noticing this paralysed French boy in the ticket gates of Seibijo station.

Sitting down on the end seat of the bank of plastic chairs up on Seibijo platform, Jacques sips his ¥100 heated can of Café Au Lait, contem-plating the borrowed attaché case in his lap. The ashen taste in his mouth, diluted a little by the sugary warm coffee, had done a decent job of dissuading him from smoking a cigarette. The clouds furling in from the west over the almost-indigo are dampening the day's winter light down quickly, and it probably won't be long before the streetlights, and maybe, if he's lucky, if it's a racing night, the stadium lights at the racetrack come on. He turns the attaché case end for end on his lap, and sips his coffee. Traffic passes on Shuto Expressway, across the canal tributary that runs alongside the road beneath him under the monorail tracks. Idly, with one hand, he turns the case end for end once more. And his keitai begins to vibrate, moaning in his pocket.

On the little screen reads, MEREDITH.

It turns out she's had a change of heart, and just as Michael had told him that day in Starbucks, using almost the same words Michael had told him she would, she asks Jacques for the contact he knows.

‘His name is Yu Hayakawa,’ Jacques says. ‘He is the youngest page 125 professor of comparison literature at Rikkyo University, and Meredith, if I would be you, be kind of careful.’

‘Why?’ she says.

‘He is Michael's girlfriend's husband.’

She doesn't really want to talk to him, too caught up in this scheme where the play plays the players and not the other way round. Jacques sips his sugary milky coffee, and washes it in his cheeks, sucking it back through his teeth in noisy ruminative squeaks and pops. Thinking, my sisters would like Meredith. He turns the case one more half turn until the clasp and flap are by his belt buckle, where he will open it and see what's inside. The line on his forehead itches incredibly. Would Geneviéve like the fact that though he's not in fact lying to Meredith, he's certainly doing more than not telling the whole truth? Would Geneviéve think he was guilty? Of spectatorial acquiescence; a tourist's bland passivity? Of believing more in Michael's conviction than his philosophy? He always thinks of earnest Geneviéve when faced with a moral dilemma. When they were little, Jacques and Geneviéve and Sandrine would sit inside the darkened wardrobe in Sandrine's room, and they would pretend they were going down to Narnia. Though in the story, Lucy, Edmund and eventually the others go through, in Sandrine's wardrobe, to Geneviéve's whispers, they would always go down. Now we're going down to Narnia, she'd say. Shhhh, now we're going down to Narnia. Down and down and down, shhh. And he and Sandrine, with Geneviéve as God, would sit in the dark in collapsing cardboard boxes full of painted blocks, and believe until it was true. Jacques presses the little brass button of the clasp, and lifts the flap of the attaché case, and drops his can of Café Au Lait with a dull clang on the platform, and into the pool of lukewarm coffee that spreads in the shape of a wide brown keyhole into the concrete some of the swarming spiders that spill from the case in a writhing clustered flood into his lap drop and quickly drown but some walk lightly off on the meniscus.

He gets halfway down the steep steps inside the station sipping his can of coffee when his keitai shivers and moans in his pocket. It's Meredith. And Jacques remembers what Michael had told him, how she would come looking, how she would be seeking a translator. And Michael page 126 likes to start shit, he supposes, because he wants to send Meredith to Yu, tall quiet Catherine's husband. Moustached smug Yu. So Jacques does it, whatever, his loyalty today is to loss. He finishes the call inside the white corridor before the final steps down to the Seibijo gates, drops the phone back in his pocket. He hitches up under his arm the lost attaché case that he's going to hand in to the station master at the office by the gates, if there's even a station master at these tiny minimalist stations, and as he descends the final set of stairs he fumbles in his pocket for his ticket and can't find it, so he pulls off his glove with his teeth as he comes to the foot of the stairs and the body of the old man is till there across the street, hunched unnaturally, his neck broken, skin of his bared legs not bloody but mottled oddly with the blows, and the ticket gates are closed and Jacques has no ticket in his pocket.

The soldiers walk away, not looking back. The old man's blood runs in a thin rivulet straight to the curb and down into the gutter where it pools in a narrow trench, another gutter in the gutter. From here it looks black like a thick smooth split in the concrete, and the old man's body is a collapse freeze-framed, a photograph, part-way through the fall.

In the darkened reflection in the anodised windows of the tollbooth, Jacques watches himself as he climbs over the gates and then steps sideways, until he's a darker shadow against an aluminium pillar lined with a slot for the station doors to slide down. His reflection above the body is pocked with blacker holes. On the pillar next to his shape is a white rectangle. He turns and sees that taped to the pillar is a MISSING PERSON poster. The hostess, Lucy Jane Blackman. She has blonde hair tied in pigtails and half a grin. Twenty-one years old. The missing person, a British, was last seen. His forehead itches terribly now, and there is no station master here, no office even. Nauseous, he scrabbles in the pocket of the Zegna jacket and pulls out the buds of his Minidisc earphones. He checks his breast pockets for MDs and finds DJ Honda, Rammstein, Duran Duran's Seven and the Ragged Tiger, Wham's greatest hits, The Final. It's a Muji MD and he pulls it out of its sleeve and loads it in. He toggles the switch to Play Mode, to Shuffle, presses Play, and >>>I, once, enough that anything might happen.

page 127

Baritone George Michael says, You do the jitterbug.

Jacques steps out of the darkness to Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, watching himself in the pocked gold windows go left and under the monorail tracks, attaché case under his arm, ears dotted black like his deaf father's dotted silver, and circling around he disappears from the reflection as he avoids the tollbooth and the heap of bloody clothes.

The loud music is like silence, and Jacques follows the dirty asphalt road under the monorail tracks. With the tide at neap the tributary is filled to the concrete walls of the canal on his left. On his right is a chainlink fence the length of an anonymous commercial building like a giant aluminium kanji-littered box. He's breathless, his heart in his head. You put the boom boom into my heart. You send my soul sky high when your loving starts. The stolen case is in his hand that's sweating, and what he feels is a downward spiraling anxiousness, a twisting of himself, and he's heading along the chainlink fence that's edged with all kinds of jetsam and debris like cans and onigiri wrappers and a spewed glistening mound of audio tape, fluttering looped penants espaliered by an old wind along the foot of the barrier. He's walking back toward the city in shock, noticing everything visual in hyperreal glitter and delineation, each object framed partially by another, shifting as he passes. A gigantic warehouse after this one and one block back settles into its own unpeculiar dominance of the fence and just as slowly and abruptly cedes its power to the next closer warehouse like a compére cedes the stage; the building bows out whitely in fractured angled retrograde. Yeah Yeah it goes a bang bang bang till my feet do the same. He breathes in shallow gasps, glancing down the lanes between the great structures, checking for further signs of life, anything, anyone, and when he glances down the fence protruding is the white fender quarter-mooned black by the partial tire of a jeep. It's a twist on his face, a squint like a nobut fatalistic yes and he sees that yes he's come this far and that this is the entrance to the baseball park he'd seen before. In his time on the monorail they have shifted the jeeps and there are only three now, this first white and the two behind a yellow stained khaki. They are parked in single file between the looming wall of the last warehouse fenced closely by a ninety degree turn of the chainlink, from which corner he page 128 sees the back of the dugout's bricked wall beside the last jeep after a brief gap and another smaller warehouse on the corner of the fenced drive opposite him. There's human movement there, through that gap, and he turns down the drive close to the fence and he can see the white of the water of the main canal terminating this drive, far from the illusion of shelter the monorail tracks provide but somethin's buggin me, somethin ain't right, my best friend told me what you did last night. The music's loud, loud and silver in his ears, stereo-imaged by the good bud earphones like it's broadcast from the physical center of his skull and going out and through his ears and into the world, and the thin line of irritation at his shaven widow's peak itches so incredibly, and it's lucky he reaches up to scratch right now because when he walks straight through the drifting spiderweb it wraps and sticks across his hand and not his eyes. He makes a sound, half a grunt, half an exhalation, like uh, that's inaudible to himself as the chorus calls, cries in giddy delight—wake me up before you go-go!—and he flails at his face and at the clinging tickly minute tentacling on his cheeks and ears and shaven sensitive scalp and swipes at the back of his hand to get the stuff off me hanging on like a yo-yo but there's no spider there and still he stops and scratches madly, shuddering, running his hands hard over his skull, turning to unwind out of this winding sheet of drifting web as if it won't adhere, eyes focused in some impossible near-distance for that escaped and mindless scuttling thing, and though he finds no such on himself, not in the collar of the turtleneck nor on the coarse velvet of his scalp, he throttles himself briefly with both hands for better guts and spiderblood on a neck than a live and frantic angry thing intently crawling there, and though he does find nothing he sees indeed in turning comically about the chainlink fence beside him is not riddled but unriddled with web and quiet clustered waiting bodies, the metal frames delicately and completely filled and filigreed by holes in holes in holes and in the windless indigo air the spiders one at least to every chainlinked cell have their filament legs spread wide in a hairy tracery of found and poised and silent horror.

Jacques steps shakily back from the spiderweb and between the fenders of the last two jeeps to I don't wanna miss it when you hit that hiiiiiigh and turns the opposite direction and he's seeing through the page 129 chainlinked gap between the dugout and the corner warehouse through a faint and waiting haze of populated web humans passing by out on that baseball diamond. There is no wind, yet an old wind has brought a glistening ribbon of the audio tape in a long loop down the road with him, and he steps on it unknowingly as he walks up, then with his step drags the loop up and around his ankle. There's a graveled gap of a meter or so between the dugout's brick and the small warehouse, and through the web-riddled chain-link Jacques is looking at the khaki backs of at least fifty soldiers in caps and wound puttees and some in hooded greatcoats belted at the waist. Most of them have their hands in their pockets, and most of them have their heads bents lightly as if in Christian prayer. They shuffle occasionally, some of them, shift from foot to foot. One lights a cigarette, passes it to the man beside him, lights another for himself. Then they part and from out of the dugout appear three more soldiers with rifles hung at their shoulders, hands holding the bound wrists of a single prisoner each. They lead them across the muddied earth of the diamond through a loose aisle left by the soldiers, who seem alert and watchful in their expressions, yet somehow slow and purposeless. So many with their hands in pockets. At the end of the aisle they form is a rough gouge in the earth, a sloping-shouldered trench chest-deep; one side sheer, the other more sedate as if the diggers had lost interest or motivation and left an easy way out. The three soldiers lead the three prisoners carefully down the slope, steadying them on the think clay clods. They lead the young men to the steep side of the trench, and there they all stop, as if all these players have momentarily forgotten their lines, all at once accusing himself in the mild serious unpanicked knowledge that this is just a rehearsal; they can try again. There's music playing in Jacques’ ears but the song is winding down and the singer sings don't leave me hanging on like a yo yo yo yo yo …

Take me dancin …
A boom boom boom boom …
Oh!

They awake. The first two soldiers push the Chinese to the ground. They pull their bayonets from scabbards at their belts and lock them to their rifles with practised twists. The first steps up. The man at his feet page 130 hands bound is fetal, pulling his uppermost knee to his chest like a frightened beaten child, offering only his boots and his buttocks and the small of his back, oshiri, sebone, senakaaa the most primal expression, offering that both most and least vulnerable to love and attack. His mouth moving open and shut, watching for the soldier's bayonet, writhing on the yellow clods. With the bayonet fixed the soldier's rifle is very long, and the soldier checks his stance, his feet spread wide, knees bent and weight centred. The prisoner kicks at nothing with the sole of a boot, frantically as a tickled dog, his eyes shut tight then open, flinching, face controting like a smacked child. The soldier stabs him lightly once in the underside of his raised thigh and Jacques sees but does not hear him scream, and his leg judders down in a defensive shudder, seems to spasm, and his chest sidelong is exposed. The soldier is watching him intently as a fisherman with a billy club watching a flapping snapper on a boat deck, looking for this opportunity, and conscioius of his weight and balance, with just his arms, shoulders squared, his left arm straightens, right drives, he bayonets the manchild in the chest.

The dead man dies, curling round his pierced heart.

One or two of the watching shuffle, shift hands in their pockets. A man in a greatcoat turns and walks away. And Jacques’ song fades out totally and at last he breathes.

A plane rushes overhead or maybe it's the monorail, then between songs no analogue hiss but pristine digital clean quiet obtains. There's something on his face, but now he feels no need to find out what. They do the same to the other two, by turns in the quiet and the screams.

It's now Jacques realises suddenly that the man in the greatcoat who left has passed in front of a young soldier, near the back of the crowd, and that the young soldier is actually staring at him through the fence by which he stands. He pulls the earphone buds from his ears. The soldier stares at him, and then down at the attaché case under his arm. He seems to realise something, and hitches up his rifle and shoulders his way carefully through the soldiers towards the dugout. The wind is rising, but even so, the earphone buds draped around Jacques’ neck page 131 make an audible tinny sound, all treble, hissing the drums and saxophone solo of Careless Whisper.

And Jacques just waits, because he has nowhere else to go.

From behind the dugout appears a short, thick officer with wide shoulders, polished brown boots, a badge on his cap, a moustache. He looks briefly through the fence and sees the young foreigner. The young soldier follows behind him as he approaches.

Jacques breathes deeply, intently, concentrating. Nothing how the soldiers at the rear of the crowd are turning to see, staring at him like no Japanese on the street has ever done. George Michael murmurs I feel so unsure, as I take your hand and lead you to the dance floor …

The officer stands in front of him, staring him right in the eye, another first for Jacques, never stared at thus outside the kitchens of Le Toile.

And so he shrugs. What?

The officer's eyes widen, and stares at Jacques. A long moment passes as he assesses the foreigner. Then, he shrugs back, mouth pouting in contempt and imitation. He turns back to the soldier and says something to him. The soldier stares at the ground and says nothing as the officer laughs. He turns back.

Nodding an aggressive, slanted nod, eyes wide, his voice high and strained and scornfully mannered, he says, ‘Nani wo shiteimasu ka?’

Jacques translates. What are you doing?

The automatic mechanism of reply and deferral—he supplies the most obvious answer.

‘Ano, miteiru,’ he says quietly. Uh, watching.

‘Miteiru?’ the officer says in sneering incredulity. ‘Honto? Miteiru, ka?’ The soldier sniffs, and Jacques hears crackles in the distance, thunder, gunshots, and it's then he decides to get himself gone.

‘Sumimasen,’ he says, ‘gomen nasai,’ and he bows and begins to back away, but before he can the officer says, ‘Chotto mate, chotto mate. Nihon-go hanasemasu ka?’

This is familiar.

‘Chotto hanasemasu,’ Jacques says, nodding, his body language all J before this man. I speak a little.

page 132

‘Na-ni … wo shiteimasu ka?’ the officer asks, more seriously. What are you doing?

Jacques’ heart beating very fast, the music tinny on his shoulders, an ashen taste in his mouth and the scent of sour smoke in the air.

‘Chotto, chotto,’ he mutters.

‘Weru ah yu furom,’ the officer says in thickly-accented English.

It's a familiar question, and Jacques replies automatically.

‘Furansu, shushin desu.’

‘So, ka? Dahntonu, Robespie. Dokokujin desu ka?’ the officer smiles, and thinks a moment. ‘Cahntrimahn, yesu?’

Danton, Jacques realise. Robespierre. The merciless Jacobins.

‘Hai, hai, sumimasen,’ Jacques says carefully.

‘Jama de aru,’ the officer suddenly growls, tongue rolling the penultimate consonant.

You are in the way, Jacques translates, knowing it's too late for apologies, nods further, never having been spoken to thus by a Japanese, with such pride and contempt, he's almost bowing, something he's only ever done sarcastically.

‘Sono naka ni nani ga haitteimasu ka?’

Jacques looks up; facial cues give meaning. The officer nods impatiently at the case under his arm.

He looks down at the case and back up to the officer. The soldier behind is a little interested now, past his uncertainty and fear, privy to some possibly serious, international event.

What's in there?

‘Uh …’ Jacques searches for Japanese. Finally, All he can summon is, ‘Ano, kumo, desu.’

It's spider.

‘Kumo, ka?’

The officer turns, grinning, half to the bewildered soldier, and says, ‘Kumo, ne. Doseiai no gaijin, Suzuki,’ and laughs. ‘Kichigai.’

Jacques has heard these words before. He's seen a J-only gay-bashing outside Maniac Love. The same tone, the threatening sardonic growl, the same turn to a crew for support. Gay gaijin. Crazy. Homo no doseiai. Cho yaba shitto.

Very bad shit.

page 133

‘Koko ni oide,’ the officer snaps, and points away past the dugout. ‘Suzuki, ikinasai.’ He sharply slaps the soldier's back, and the scared-looking boy runs down the fenceline.

And here Jacques suddenly finds a clear, coherent thought. This is ridiculous. The rifle bouncing on the boy's back is exactly the same as the antique Michael had stored under his bed at the Prince. He turns unsteadily down the fence for where he can get away.

Koko ni oide means come here.

Thinking: looters. Thinking: is everyone okay. Call his mother, call his sisters. Thinking: under martial law the first thing they do is round up all the foreigners. All his stuff toppled from the shelves. How the cupboard doors bang and bang like in some maddened wind. The monorail cord twisting and flexing, oh that good J engineering, how was it that he'd not felt a thing? Between six and seven, surely, and oh what have they learned since Kobe, and are they prepared. Will keitai cells be down and thank god again he's not in the city, or in the suburbs, there'll be fires, there'll be agonies, there'll be so many deaths. More than can be borne; oh my god the subways. The train lines, the rivers. The engineering is incredible, he'd not felt a thing, so blithe, lost in his head as the city flexed and shook itself, the Kanto planes shivering volcanically down to the sea …

He decides: down to the river. Away from built-up areas, the river will be safe, tsunami don't affect rivers. But it's tidal, though. He knows it's tidal. Any wave will wash up, taking the bridges, sweeping the junks and the flat-bottomed ferries into their moorings, spewing the diesel and flotsam over the decks, into the hatches and down into the engine rooms to bear up more filthy oil out and into the mouths and nostrils, to paint rainbow the wide eyes of the old drowned fishermen carried down in their waders, the river flooding, upwards against the current, everything going backwards, Honshu bucking like a frantic horse, and the fires coming after, telling us, again, you are not wanted here. When you see the wave it's too late. But everywhere's built up. When you see the wave: that's for beaches, not for rivers. The canal's wide here, split in two. It'll be okay. He decides again. Jacques heads for the river.