“This is some meth-riddled crap. I withdraw my submission.”
She boarded the Seibu-Shinjuku express. Six salarymen total. It was second-nature at this point to pick out the ones that’d instantly bend over backwards to be her dog. There are those who are tapped in, mostly salarymen and old geezers. Women are almost never aware, like becoming as sterile and uninteresting as possible would put off the most determined, ravenous dog, the only one that actually posed a threat to her underskirt. But it’s generally a good idea to never stare a rabid dog in the eyes. Looking was unnecessary; she could feel his secret glances and raw carnal desire, clawing out towards her seat pathetic drool slobbering out of his orifices, pockmarked nose gushing with mucus, strong zero, and yen, confined to tight suits stretched over gelatinous buttcheeks unwashed sprayed over with konbini brand deodorizer. He thinks turning the other direction will waft the odor away but it’s the middle of summer, no AC in this car, everyone can still smell. Most of his colleagues need a muzzle to contain their drunken gibberish, barking around each others’ assholes, striving for a chance to sniff. Her own movement is calculated precisely; all she has to do is make one simple gesture, extend a synapse, tickle him a bit, recite from script, tailor it to his personality, and next thing he’d know they’re on a rooftop, or in a love hotel, on top of a bridge perhaps. Much like a dream, the middle parts would be forgotten upon wake, but the general impression of the tentacle-encoiled wife remains. Warm comfort, suffocating himself out of himself into multiple himselves, melting into a slithering motherly embrace. And then along with the yen in his wallet, she’d dissipate just as fast; he’d be left wondering if she was even real at all, with only the diminished weight of his wallet as proof that the experience had been real.
Because how else could he be so sure? Instinctively, he’d check their wristwatch, just like everyone else. Empty out the wallet, compare it against the days’ total planned expenses, yesterday’s balance, test it rigorously against various null hypotheses, repeated daily, ad infinitum, holding out hope that one day it’d all converge upon an absolute precision of knowledge. People can’t trust what’s right in front of their eyes, much less their own experience; they cling to the tits of their oracles for an ounce of sanity, consult them for every small doubt and inconvenience. They don’t know how to waste time anymore and just be.
So what she’d been doing on the train lately, she’d had her eyes glued to the LED monitor trying to read all the kanji. Gotten faster at it. Something just instantly clicked, unlike the first time around trying to learn Japanese. That time, she had tried to translate each letter individually at first, deconstruct and identify each character in isolation, then put it all back together as a whole word, but by then the screen had already changed to the next stop. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be done. When you read in your native tongue, you’re registering a gestalt first; all the symbols coalesce into a whole picture, the overall impression and meaning, the animus, presents itself first; understanding and thought follow. Associations are instantaneous. The entire sentence doesn’t even need to be registered, just an overall arrangement; the language itself is not even really necessary. One time, she walked inside a konbini, said “manko” 「マンコ/ま☆こ(censored)」 instead of “douzo,” while slightly bowing her head. The cashier had simply mirrored her greeting with her own douzo. Gestures, nonverbals, this is the most fluid space to inhabit. All heil the manko!
The Salaryman is the same worldwide. There once was this data scientist who was retarded at math, he’d failed calculus three times at university but somehow ended up in the department getting paid to do a masters because checking boxes was second-nature to him (machine learning was too hard), and he spent his days scoffing at those with lesser degrees, bragging about his dean’s list to any midget high school chick with a high SAT who’d listen. He sent her a speculative diagram of how he was trying to break down exponents from first principles, thought it made him intellectually impressive.
He’d throw out his stats here and there in the open striver coffee shop air, throw in some self-deprecation, then pass it onto another lukewarm academic (at least a masters) sitting next to him, who’d serve it back ice-cold, with more self-deprecation and ironic indifference layered on top, sprinkled with all the worst parts of early aughts nostalgia. These salarymen were playing the same game, but with their bacho as the bucephalus bouncing ball. Striving to get a sniff in, maybe a lick. The flavor was just slightly more konbini-fresh.
The human mind’s ingrained insistence on fixating on the most mundane caca imaginable, its insatiable urge to formalize and measure out and extract maximum bullshit from everything, latch onto whatever is salient and disregard the rest; take this to the extreme, and you get modernity. Its fixation on breaking down gestalts into points, the neurotic attachment to all manner of these states and ideas, obsession with perfect uniqueness, perfect knowledge, perfect measurement, an atomization; each member of the formicarium moving around horizontally, comfortably, inside their self-designated hexagonal tube, and now they’ve extended it to the soul; psychedelic therapy on command, ego death delivered via subscription service, pharmakon through pocket oracle, advertised through kawaii photobooth filters and cute, stylized kanji on high-rise jumbotrons. Maybe if they keep chipping away at the portrait, they can re-create it afresh, re-invigorated, in a more perfect likeness to an ideal form of the original. Inverted madness designed to kill creativity. The architect must have spent countless nights at love hotels, convincing lonely individuals to take a never-ending trip down that inwards spiral, fragmenting themselves out of existence.
The city is for transients; any semblance of connection one could create with another human being was ephemeral; small bodegas become established as pivotal community centers one year, gone the next. She envisioned a society where the idea of ‘replaceable’ was more absurd than that of pure originality. Where humans are clear, engram-free prisms, that can freely reflect more colors than just white.
She looked out the window of the moving train. The flashing Shibuya lights were already overwhelming enough to cause epileptics to spontaneously convulse; they are okay with still or slow-moving light, though. Their complete inability to form the gestalts at all is an extreme, though, and not a particularly fascinating one. Instead, she wanted to meet a genuinely insane person, one who would dedicate his entire life to identifying, categorizing, and mapping out every single individual light that formed each light-trail, then give him a handleless collar.
It never seemed so restless, yet so decrepit in all its illustriousness. Each hour distilled down into mere seconds. The center of exchange is Tokyo, the product, time. The nervous system the mechanism to warp its speed of passage. Constant stimulation leaves thousands parched; there is no space left for memory to form; no transaction is without its expense. The few that manage to survive become patchwork scraps, to be superimposed over and stitched up into new memories.
The salaryman she had her eye set on was different this time. She had a feeling he could see the harlequin.
Some can see him, and others cannot. You will notice, if you ever get into the practice of consulting various people seeking counsel of any sort, that there are three distinct groups; one is utterly hopeless and despondent, you are their only option left, and they have left their psyche completely open to your help, for they cannot defend themselves. The slightest suggestion would send a ripple across the pond of their entire state of being and you can mold them into whatever you’d desire. They will accept any pills, therapies, and self-improvement plans you prescribe, no matter how crazy or lacking in conviction you may seem, but it’s better not to show the latter. The second kind is belligerent, but their defenses are just as flimsy; one need only to remain a stone, identify the main point of sensitivity, and strike. As long as you manage to keep his ego afloat and affirm the validity of this soft point, no matter how monstrously ludicrous, he will remain just as receptive as the first.
However, the third is trickier; there is a certain kind of person who seems very bright and cooperative at first, but underneath, they mock all. The brightness serves to conceal their hidden clowning. There is no way to bring this fact to light, so it remains buried behind the mask. Most people cannot, or refuse to see, much to their peril. You can have hours of conversation, thinking yourself productive, only to realize after many a wasted breath that he has turned circles around you and has been directing the conversation the entire time, pulling you along on a string to see your limbs flail. But this type also has a weakness; he is under the illusion that he is a self-puppeteering marionette, that you cannot see how he moves the strings. He is usually right on both accounts, and therein lies your deficiency; you should quit your practice and do something instead that isn’t quackery. Throw out all your psychoanalysis literature and simply live. But if you can’t even manage to do that properly, turn to deconstructing myth like a classical Sophist instead! But before you do so, you must ask this type about his mother at least once and record his reaction.
In casual social interaction, this person is friendly, amicable, charming even, but you get the slightest notion that there is something else at play; underlying paranoia is present throughout, and it’s the first thing a perceptive analyst will notice. If this character possesses lesser ability, you can quite easily pluck off the mask. But often, this type has developed airtight coherence, and the harlequin chooses to poke through only every now and then, mostly to fuck with you.
When two such actors meet, they immediately recognize each other; the resultant union is unpredictable, a curious dance to see who can shift the eye of the net in the most interesting way.
One stop away; they had been staring at each other without breaking eye contact. One by one, his colleagues, then the rest of the car empties out.
No words are exchanged; she simply takes his hand and leads him onto the platform. After some walking: a shag outside the Shinjuku station, going through the motions. She takes his hand again and leads him through the tunnel.
“Are you going to take me to a love hotel?” he asks after a while.
“Maybe.”
“Hey, have you ever fucked in public before?”
Boring question, but straight to the point.
“Oh loads of times. How about you? You don’t seem so innocent yourself.”
“How can you tell something like that?”
“I just know.”
“Ah, so you’re a clairvoyant. You read my mind then!”
“Yes, and you were thinking, how many times can you fuck in public before it gets old?”
He exhaled.
“You seem like fun. You can keep leading the way, you’re completely in control of my fate. Does this delight you?”
She felt her nerves stand on end. It was delightful.
“You ask a lot of questions, for a Japanese. And you have way more tattoos than the average salaryman. How’d you get your company to let you in, and how’d you manage to stay for so long? You must be a kancho by now.”
He laughed heartily, “I have my secrets too, mystery girl. But tell me, why are you so jaded? That’s not very kawaii of you, but then again, you must know everyone can tell you’re a gaijin already, so you probably don’t care about that kind of thing.”
“Ahaha,” she exclaimed, “and ruder than the average Japanese too! I like that.”
He gave a sly grin and continued to stare ahead.
“I grew up in the west,” she continued, “so we were more disinhibited, maybe more intense. What I find mundane now, maybe you’d think it was a crazy night out in Kabuchiko. I could be wrong though.”
“Go ahead.”
“You know, there used to be a time where things felt enlivening, uncharted territory. Maybe we were just young. Oooo, let’s take a bunch of drugs while your parents are gone, let’s go to this secret rave, light a locker on fire, fuck in public. Scare the shit out of people, make as many people uncomfortable as possible. Tired of being a puppet, we become actors instead, and we do a little clowning. The aspect of passion is what made it fun. But nowadays, it’s like people can’t even be bothered. Nothing is surprising anymore because everything has become similar. Now you get an apathetic populace.”
Like walking corpses.
“I guess the most logical next high is the freaky BSDM shit, but I personally think that’s so mundane, don’t you agree? Everyone’s heard about it, seen it, or done it. There’s no shock value there, unless you’re a devout theist, in which case I understand why that’s become so popular nowadays among the youth; it’s extremely stimulating, the most kinky role to play. The most enchanting way of being now would be to over-activate your disgust response when presented with underwhelming overstimulation.”
“I concur,” he replied, “Actually, very much so. I used to do all that kind of stuff as a university student.”
“I did it as a teenager.”
“Well, it’s not a competition. But you know what I think? Incest seems like the one area that stirs up peoples’ passions. One of the last areas on earth you’ll find you can drive people irate. It’s still barely been explored. Maybe we could try that next.”
“Ha, well maybe if we looked alike. But I’m clearly a gaijin.”
“Anyways mystery girl, where are we going, and what plans do you have for me?”
“I think I’m going to take you to Kabuchiko. We’ll walk around and see what happens.”
They passed by a group of tall black guys speaking in a Russian accent, hovering around the entrance to the alleyway like overweight Shinigami. She decided to slow down just a bit more when they got closer, noticing the salaryman was getting a little too comfortable in his illusion of directiveness.
“Hey that wasn’t funny,” he said once they were within the confines of the labyrinth of Golden Gai.
“Yea it was,” she giggled.
“I see what you did there, but I’m not going to spoil everything just yet. Mystery girl, continue to lead me to my destiny.”
He gave a mock bow, then they continued down a few more alleyways. She’d act like they arrived at the exit, then suddenly turn into another alleyway. When they finally arrived at her desired destination, it wasn’t even a kilometer away from the black guys.
“Well that was fun!” she exclaimed.
He sighed. They entered a small, cramped room that looked like a log cabin, decorated like a Thelemite’s sigil cum tribute chamber, and they sat there together, watching the group of university students get progressively more drunk.
“Hey, I need to get you to do something,” she started.
“Anything,” he jested.
“By the end of the night, you have to touch one of these guy’s dicks. Doesn’t matter how you do it, but you have to or else.”
He groaned. “Or else what?”
“Or else I’ll make you sleep outside with those black guys. They’d reeally love you. You’re that perfect twinky salaryman phenotype, it’s impressive.”
“Why thank you, I think. But I will do it. This reminds me of that time with the Fag-Watchers though,” he started.
“What are those?”
He just smiled.
“Tell me, what are those?
“No, you wouldn’t get it.”
“I demand that you tell me right now.”
“Ok alright fine. Well first of all, wait let me get a pen—hey bartender, do you have a marker or something I could use?”
“Yep, here ya go.”
“Sweet. Now—hey pay attention—I’m going to get one of these guys. Don’t look at me like that, it’s imperative. Hey you! Flannel kid!”
He pointed at the most drunk university student. “No! Hey you, creepy ojiisan!”
They embraced and shot the shit for a while.
“Hey salaryman, the Fag-Watchers?” she started up again.
“Yeah yeah, just watch,” he shouted back.
“You, flannel kid. Take off your shirt for a second and let me write on your back.”
“AYYYYY.”
The shirt came off, and the kid flexed his biceps as he turned his bare back.
“Now hold still.”
The salaryman uncapped the marker.
“About the Fag-Watchers,” she said.
“Now mystery girl, see here. I’m going to draw a dot, then a line, then connect it to another dot, then we’re gonna keep doing this. It’s like its DNA. And then we’re gonna label each dot with something random. Strong Zero. African. Dullahan. Spreadsheet. Now we create a story.”
The entire time he draws, the university student giggles and moans. The dots get closer and closer to his dick.
“My boss enters numbers into the spreadsheet, but one day, he accidentally left his head in there, so whenever he goes to take us out, he gets depressed he can’t drink any more Strong Zero, so he gets a lucky kancho to turn him sideways and boof it up his asshole for a promotion instead. The street African smells it and wants to get in on the action too, so he starts following us around but we make it to the subway so he can’t go any further because he doesn’t have any money for the fare.”
The last dot is just above the kid’s bulge. He downs another strong zero, then whips out his dick for the salaryman to touch. The whole bar and all his friends are going bonkers.
“See, mystery girl? There.”
He extends his finger and pulls it back quickly. “I touched it. I hope you’re feeling satisfied.”
He laughs like a kitsune.
“Yes that was acceptable, what a lovely story too. But let’s leave now, I wanna get going soon. And you still didn’t tell me about the Fag-Watchers!”
“Oh yeah those, I guess I wasn’t supposed to be laughing like them, that’s breaking the illusion.”
They descended the steps and sat down on a bench in the nearby garden.
“So these Fag-Watchers, they’re like these shadow figures that appear right outside the windows at night. They’ve been following me around since I was 8. One of them’s a little black kid too. I called them the Watchers. I thought I just had an overactive imagination, but one time at university, we all went out to this guy’s party in Ikebukuro, and they appeared and only started watching this one kid. He was kind of fruity, we all knew it, but mostly he was super insecure around women and shy in general, labeled everything in his house with sticky notes and made us all bow three times before entering kind of strange. But the dude was brilliant, you’ve gotta believe me. He’d drop these bombs of wisdom and go Nagasaki on us during trips, completely alter our experience well after the trips ended, one of us ended up marrying the girl he loved because of some random shit this man whispered in his ear late one night after coming down off acid. And the guy knew it too. Well, turns out he was losing it, because that night, I caught him trying to leave the house alone and asked him what he was doing, but he gave me this look, it was like staring down an endless, dark hallway, and he started speaking gibberish. But I could make out that someone was telling him to go and meet up with someone or something and he was just following orders, I saw a Watcher out the window motioning him to go outside. I told him he shouldn’t listen, he didn’t have to, but he just kept saying “faggot faggot watching me, faggot faggot 333” over and over again. That’s where the Fag-Watchers come from. Maybe I should have tried harder to stop him, but I didn’t. Instead, I looked out the window and saw that Fag-Watcher take his arm and stuff it down the kid’s throat, and he was never the same again. He walked back in pretty normal at first though, and for the rest of the night I thought I was just tripping, almost forgot it ever happened. I’ve trained myself to ignore the Watchers’ machinations over the years, you see.
Well, he went completely off the rails after that night. I had to help his mom check him into the loony bin because he stopped speaking Japanese, would keep switching between languages but it was all nonsense. If you listened closely though, you could make out a semblance of what he was saying between all the Faggots. Once he was saying something about moving from side to side, couldn’t find the center, but kept swinging around. Kept going on about these four functions and eight factors in some kind of Russo-German-Japanese-English hybrid, was totally convinced this was the sixth key that would open the sacred door to the original Commandments governing all of humanity, the origin of time as a spiral templex designed with pockets of accelerated time-exchange metropoli to draw in the most energetic human beings to help collectively create a universal numerical codex of language, to “en-faggotfy the unus mundus.” He showed me this piece of paper with his ‘code,’ and it was just a bunch of random triangles and numbers all over the place. Here, I can show it to you.”
It was complete schizo drivel, but also indistinguishable from the data guy’s speculative diarrhea. She got out her phone and they compared the two in silence.
“Hey salaryman,” she motioned towards the top of his head.
“Yeah, mystery girl?”
“You’ve got a bunch of strings hanging from you.”
“So you can see them too.”
“They’re all over the sky.”
