Harajuku Sunday (19 page)

My feet curl about the stones set into the ground, and I make my way to the pool.
 
As I dip into the water, it engulfs me in viscous warmth.
 
Then I am submerged, and then I am bubbling air out of my nostrils as I surface a good ways out towards the far edge of the pool.
 
I look up at the sky and my breath is taken away.
 
A trillion little flakes of snow are falling from the sky, and an owl's low hoot provides the only possible counter-point.
 
The scene is of utter tranquility.

--Beautiful, ne?

The female voice, though low and controlled, startles me, but when I turn in the water, it's none other than Tomoko, without a stitch of clothing and completely non-chalant.
 
She has a thin, slender body, with large almost aureole-less nipples on the barest bulge of breasts and her sex covered by a neatly trimmed thatch of dark hair.
 
Somehow I keep my eyes locked with hers.

--Tomoko, what are you doing up?

--I guess same thing you are, hmm.

A sudden splash of water alerts to the presence of the other two girls as well.

--Eiko.
 
Shiori!
 
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to intrude.

--You're not intruding.

I look back.
 
There's no wavering.

--Well okay.

--Don't even talk.

--But I'm sinking to the bottom of society.
 
Why is this happening?

--Don't worry.

Not sex.
 
Actually we know each other so well that I know that there isn't even a possibility of it.
 
Eiko draws her long wet hair out of the water, Shiori measures hers with a turned forearm, and with a mock bringing together of two fingers, Tomoko gives me the most curious of all possible smiles.

HARAJUKU SUNDAY

SECTION II

VII.

Nietzsche: "If you stare too long into the abyss, it will start to stare back at you."
 
The abyss started to stare back at me that day, in the low-slung, sleazy light of Hisako's apartment, distorted by chemicals.
 
The abyss was the burnt residue of heroin in metal cans, the haze that came across us, sinking us into timelessness, and the hunger for more that always came. "No wait," I said, in hour twenty-three of a near-sleepless weekend, and pushed for an interruption in our downward spiral.
 
We toked instead; or took pills.
 
There are the psychotherapeutic claims made about it.
 
I never "rolled" myself, felt that oft-reported giddiness or euphoria. I merely understood.
 
The Japanese fear this stuff.
 
Their entire cultural edifice is built on command and control.
 
Smoke up, madchen: (we did).

"Etchi shitai?" she asked.
 
Do you wanna do it?
 
OK, I replied.
 
And I removed her clothing, piece by piece until her thin adolescent body lay on the sheets bare and nude. She never moved a muscle to help us: she lay perfectly still, and suffered me to move her limbs.
 
I thrust myself upon her: under drugs we lasted for three hours and both cried out.
 
Thus an entire weekend could pass, lost in our dream world.
 
When hunger came, we checked first if it were light, and walked out for fast food or Yoshinoya.
 
Shibuya, under chemicals, seemed more glossy and normal.
 
Everybody streamed about: they had their agendas.

"Look, don't you wanna stop?" I would say this six or seven times. "Yamenai"

Why do we think sex degrading for a girl?
 
I am no original artist of this question.
 
There are those who don't, true, but the consensus is otherwise general.
 
I felt she had sacrificed no purity for our love; I was the pure one.
 
The thought itself compelled me across her body and onto her face.
 
I thought hostile and degrading thoughts even in the act of love.
 
I wanted to inject through action my scorn and contempt into her mind and thoughts as my body injected into hers.
 
But this was impossible-this was childish thinking.
 
And then, late on Sunday, the clock hands would march inexorably towards the last train, and I would be left, in passing lights, to ponder the meaning of life on a train heading north out of
Tokyo
.

I don't know if I would have "sunk," so to speak, into drug use if not for meeting Hisako.
 
But with her ready supply (she traded her body for drugs, I'm sure) of a virtual pharmacopia, she kept me on heroin until I was a regular.
 
Life became easier: I smiled more to my colleagues, never even thought about the environment of fear and loathing I had inspired through my own behavior, and I discovered new avenues for introspection.
 
The first MDMA trip is like a door opening: you understand your own traumas.
 
Every drug experience after that, once you have sliced open your glistening sac of mind-flesh, puts you on a firmer platform.
 
You become more powerful than the uninitiate. With drugs, the very levels of your consciousness become separated.
 
Those of weak character or timidity become frightened at this point, and have been known to have "bad trips."
 
Hisako, after one very extended hash session, had one of these.
 
They turn to those they need, and beg the protection of physical arms.
 
Those who have lived through fire have no worries: they indulge in their psychopathy, the understanding that at the base of it all, we are not our personalities, we are not our voice, we are not our unvoiced thoughts.
 
We are simply the thread of the Will.
 
Having achieved this wisdom, decades of human experience are crossed in hours.
 
Suddenly, we are hundreds of years old in our young bodies.
 
And our abilities to manipulate less tutored brains becomes more refined.

Sometime in late winter I had asked Narumi on a date.
 
She was thirty and beautiful.
 
But in my mind was only the desire to punish: between the loss of Chie and the early hostility to Hisa, I was playing for cultural stakes.
 
I advanced: chevalier avec fleur.
 
I kept silent, as the joker laughed. Over the course of five days, I worked, in perfect honor, and at the right interval, sent over my number.
 
She enjoyed every second of it; she lapped it up; her friend, at the end, withdrew uncertainly.
 
When we met, I had taken a long voyage to go there.
 
Her next chess move was including our ostensible group of friends. Joker was present: he changed the venue from the desired foreign to standard Japanese.
 
I could barely touch the food.
 
Narumi blushed, and played the bashful bride.
 
Joker worked into me.
 
I invited some other friends since it was going to be a group occasion.
 
In the end, easy-going Trevor called her Naru-chan and got her phone number.
 
None of this was outside the rules.
 
But we were thinking the same thoughts, and when the moment was right, I had enjoyed my fill and backed away.
 
I remember her face, torn up in sadness.
 
Joker was not subdued, asking insistently what was wrong. Later I saw him, and finally he, too, had shut up.
 
One thirty year old woman and one late thirty man: recognized experts in their field, fluent in English, yet I at twenty-three walked away with the sweet satisfaction; I was the teacher.
 
In my defense, I played this game only to demonstrate that I knew the culture better than those who claimed to know me.
 
But this knowledge did not save me from the relentless silence of the disapproving group, and I fell deeper into sickness.

For Hisako, the levers of control were ever more readily available because of her youth and complete decadence.
 
By the time I first met her (October), she had become adept, through trial and error, at exactly how much push she could give one of her victims.
 
Middle-management was her target of choice: men in their late thirties or forties, men who had families and reputations to uphold.
 
She was careful to take only what she could: she was a tax.
 
In the end, she overplayed one hand and accepted the consequences.
 
This hidden brutality I deplore.

For my part, I am guilty, too, of course, but all I can report is that I met her on the way down, and "she seduced me."
 
(All molesters say this.) In the new clear light, I made the choice to move on: I endured.
 
I pondered, for less than a second, withdrawal.
 
Breakthrough finally occurred only with continued drug use.
 
I broke through mimetic consciousness, to inhabit others as more living and ideal than in reality; more powerful in their control over representation than even me.
 
Planning out the scenario, I thought it would go this way: instead it went that, and demanded only minor future revision.
 
They will invent new DSM categories for this; new philosophies must be constructed.
 
But having returned now to the present-day, we have no choice but to spin back again.

"Send me shooting into that murky stream."
 
What brilliance in adolescence.
 
I wonder what has become of him: the poet of our teenage years.
 
My own work, still competent, seems so much more immature.
 
I hint at the dream of sex; he breaks through to the nihilism beyond.
 
After sex with Hisa, there's nothing left to experience: I have done it all.
 
All that remains is pure biological imperative: platonic forms of a young girl's body on primitive consciousness.
 
This I abuse, insofar as pain itself is more than mere sensation.

"Send me shooting into that murky stream."
 
This was childhood: a murky stream of undeveloped impressions.
 
Examine the five-year old, her thoughts unformed; responding simply to kindness and laughter; she does not know of exploitation.
 
With Hisa, I could only perform because she was a whore.
 
There is no way I could deflower a young girl child short of being a faunlet of my own.
 
But our investigations reveal this goes on all the time. Others are deeper into the darkness.
 
It is a wonder all has not already been lost.

"Send me shooting into that murky stream."
 
It calls me yet again, and so I plunge.

Beginnings: on a clear cold September day a 747 plunges out of the leaden sky and lands at a rice-paddy airport.
 
Everything is hushed and controlled: the people walk about with robotic precision, bowing in perfect servility.
 
One is deeply impressed.
 
The red carpet is brought out; the dignitaries, now local, make their speeches which we puzzle over, and do not know what to expect.
 
Although everyone's experience is the same, everyone's situation is different.
 
Or so they say.
 
Actually it's with identical puzzlement that manic 72 hours pass, yet for a few individuals our faces are met with some amount of trepidation.
 
We're known: our pictures posted on the Internet, the reputation of our six-week long battle with the anonymous authorities in
Japan
well-established.
 
Yet engrossed in our own contests of will, we believe in the philosophy: "the tiger has been mounted; now ride it all the way through."
 
This philosophy is later proven incorrect, but we don't know this yet.
 
I don't know about the importance of a fourteen hour flight with a person whispering in your ear their anxieties.
 
A soldier charged with cowardice in
Iraq
reported a similar factor to be of major importance.
 
I do know that the inchoate anger is natural: it's the stuff of aggression and mammoth-chasing for the tribal good.
 
We citizens of the empires idolize this quality, this masculinity.
 
We would have been great officers in Roman times, and put many barbarians to the blade.
 
But here in queasy silence and anonymous replies, the struggle between foreigner and foreigner takes on an edge of violence and genuine hatred we cannot direct towards our masters.
 
Entire friendships are closed off, at minimum; the banal instincts of killing are given throttled-channel, and blood is almost always almost shed, (yawn).