EIGHTY YEARS IN NINE DAYS -- part six -- Hiroshi had to hide. Mariko was directly in his line of vision, across the street, window-shopping at one of the dozens of new boutiques that had opened up in the Ometo-sando area in the past six or so months, and if she turned around, saw him sitting there in the park, his tie loosened, his suit jacket unbuttoned, small can of coffee in his hand, cigarettes dangling from his fingers, she would know right away that his job was no more. He could probably, quickly think of something to say – that he was in the area for a story, a piece on Tokyo’s steady rise as a sort of fashion mecca, perhaps, or a human-interest column about the young, vapid generation who cared only about what they might wear, and how they could pay for it. That would be plausible. Yet he would have to look in her eyes when he told her these tales. She would sense something absent from his own shifty gaze. And then she would know. Better not to abruptly stand and confirm it was she who he saw. Perhaps, if he just slightly nudged his body, ever so slowly, to his left, she would not notice it was him, should she for some reason at that moment look directly across the street. He carefully, in minute movements of his torso, shifted the angle of his body. Moved his legs in the same direction as his waist. Craned his neck away from her line of sight. Everything in cautious alignment. He realized that he must look absurd – a greying man in his fifties, acting as if he was a performer in one of those dreadful, avant-garde theatre shows they were always staging down in Shibuya or Shimo-kitazawa, a mime in slow-motion, absent the white paint on his face. After a few moments, he had managed to angle his body in such a way that only the back of his head and his neck could be seen by her sight if she should look over here. Probably, she wouldn’t recognize him. Certainly, if she stopped and stared, shielded her eyes from the spring sun, looked intently at the handful of middle-aged salarymen sitting shame-faced near the station, she might recognize her own husband. Only: Why would she do so? As far as she was concerned, the boys were at school, and her husband was madly typing away at one story or another up in the eightH floor of his office at the Asahi Shimbun. That was life as she knew it. For a few more minutes, Hiroshi dared not make any more sudden gestures. He did allow himself the sweet treat of a few more sips of coffee, but he justified such a risk because, holding tight the can in his hand, if he didn’t drink it all that might look even more suspect. Best to be natural in this kind of situation. Was this how American secret-agents felt, trying to maintain their cover while waiting to meet Soviet spies to unburden the C.I.A’s covert aims? If so, he knew he could never hack it as a spy. Hiding out from his middle-aged wife was enough of a challenge for him. Finally, he took the risk. He peeked his neck all the way around, peering intently at the other side of the road, feeling like those owls that could twist their necks three-hundred and sixty degrees, only he was minus the hoot. She was gone. Swallowed up by Tokyo. He had never been precisely sure what she did every weekday while he was at his Shinjuku office, not being interested enough to ask. She shopped here, and there; she picked up food for the house, school supplies for the kids. That was all he needed to know. The specificities of her life had always bored him. As long as she was there when she needed him, at mealtimes and at night, that was enough. Yet now that he was jobless, time itself like a wave that kept rising and rising, refusing to descend, and he had an insatiable urge to know all about her life, its gaps and inserts. How did she occupy all of these minutes aligned next to each other? There were so many of them! Hiroshi had never truly understood before how bloody long the day actually was, the blank stages between meals, the subtle shifts in the wind. Mariko had a lot of practice in weathering all the various moods of the day. He thought about following her from a safe distance, watching the way that she navigated the subway, or found her seat on the bus. He suspected she had achieved some kind of grace, allowing herself to give back to the day only what it offered her in return. He had never seen his wife as heroic before, or even deserving, outside of her duties at home, any particular form of respect, but a warm ooze of adulation for her ordinary adeptness sort of spread through his chest, like the way he felt after downing a cup of hot chocolate in winter, all warm and filled up. He finished the last of his coffee, setting the empty tin carefully on the ground. Watching it wobble, then teeter, before finally coming to a stop. Not tilting over just yet. There was a green receptacle only a few feet away, but it felt like some kind of a distance to him, a chasm. Best to sit here and stare at ‘the regulars’ for a moment, wondering if they looked at him the same way he did at them. Usually, Hiroshi arrived here shortly after ten, and the small set of seats near the East Exit of Omote-sando station were occupied by men just like him. More or less. He left his house in the suburbs of Sagamihara around six-thirty, taking the Odakyu Line into Shinjuku just as he had done for a good fifteen years, spending the next few hours in a coffee shop, carefully reading the classifieds in all the morning papers, trying to see if he could slot his fiftyish self into these black-and-white blocks of potential. These other subway-station men, too, probably did the same thing. Did he look as pathetic as they did? There was a slender man in his mid-thirties who always arrived in a crisp suit, clutching his briefcase, looking relaxed and assured, sitting with his legs neatly folded as he puffed on a cigarette, but he often quietly wept for at least fifteen minutes, wiping the tears away with one hand, while the other one deftly tapped away at his smoke. (Hiroshi had once even witnessed the man’s ashes and tears hit the ground at the same time, each kind of melding into the other, nothing but a short stain.) Another fellow looked to be about seventy, rather squat and obese, with a fat face full of cheer and amusement, but something was decidedly off about that one. He had worn a faded grey suit for the first couple of days, but soon the semi-formal jacket was gone, and recently he had resorted to wearing a bland brown t-shirts the colour of after-storm mud. The jovial face was gone, replaced by a blank, unblinking stare. Hiroshi didn’t want to know what that man was seeing. He worried that he’d once seen the same thing, or would see it very soon. He always avoided stares, the possible stares of people emerging from the subway, those lucky folks who had jobs to go to, occupations to endure. Not that they were looking at him; they had their own internal dilemmas to dance with as they started their day. Yet ever so often there would be a look of contempt, usually from some codger who has happily collecting his pension, on his way to play shogi in some posh old-timer’s club. It was the look of a man who wondered why an able chap like Hiroshi, barely past fifty, spent the bulk of his days lurking around train stations exits, too lazy to earn cash, a parasite in a suit. Once, having had enough, Hiroshi held one of these judgemental bastards’ stares with his own angry eyes, defiantly, refusing to look way, wanting to somehow telepathically implant the notion that he had once fought in the war, grasped a large gun, and killed with these very same hands that now gripped nothing so dangerous as a lit cigarette. No point, however. He wasn’t fooling anyone. Best to sit here and just wait until he could go home once again at the usual time, shortly after seven, or even long after eight. Mariko knew that reporters often went out drinking until the last train; lately he’d been telling her that his stomach had been acting up, too much shochu and beer, yakitori and smokes, so he’d let his co-workers take Tokyo without him. She’d merely shrugged. She didn’t keep up with his work; she didn’t even read his columns. Didn’t know that they were no longer run in any papers at all. Why should she? She and the boys all possessed lives of their own live out. Sitting here by himself in a suit had no effect in their world. Except when the money ran out, and it was this thought, the memory of yen, the tangible now of a vacant wallet lusting after paper bills, that made him almost believe he had seen Mariko just a few minutes ago. Letting his eyes drift back to the subway station’s exit, he thought he noticed somebody else familiar shuffling up those stone steps – was that old Yamamoto-san, who’d first got him started out in this business a few decades ago? Impossible. He had died long before, but since this day was its own form of extended death for Hiroshi, perhaps all bets were off. He certainly looked like Yamamoto-san – that same scrawny build, and hunched-over small walk. And behind him – was that Hideki? Had he managed to escape the war after all? Had Hiroshi’s fanciful scenario actually taken form in real life, Hideki escaping his plane and surviving somehow in the salty waves of the Pacific? And there, beside Hideki – his father! Looking not more than forty, fit and hearty. He, too, had survived the ocean, or was it merely the soiled mattress or two of an unstable harlot? They were all here, was the point. He was a newspaperman, after all, and he always reached for the point, pronto. They were all here, walking towards him. Arms out. They brought with them as gifts the scent of the sea and the pungent memory of blood. He felt the hot air of the Philippines suddenly blow through the chill sky. That, too, was a gift from them. Once he had wondered if he would ever make it back to his beloved Japan, if he was fated to die on southern islands not his own, and now he was here, and this foreign wind that they brought was a reminder to him that hopelessness might be postponed, even eliminated. Everything could be made not only right again, but whole again. A perfect circle in time. He blinked. Rubbed his hands together against the gathering cold. Looked all around him, and saw no one special. Checked his watch. Maybe five, six hours before he’d have to head back home for the night. He nodded his head. Loosened his tie some more. Relaxed his belt. Began to wait.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Oct 2013 10:02:45 +0000