Harajuku Sunday (31 page)

Afterwards, of course, nothing could be the same.
 
The cataclysm, so profoundly troubling, so absolutely without cause, invited the destruction of all previous knowledge.
 
And, immature, weak, we accepted the bargain; we got up and left the movie theatre though there was no other place to go.
 
Moving forward, the filaments came forward; they extended their microphones and cameras like the probisci of insects, asking what we thought, and we affected indifference, we wore a mask and made banal responses.
 
I never knew Julian.
 
I never got to know Melanie.
 
But they were part of the gang.
 
And everything that followed, all those consequences like dominoes falling, happened exactly as they did...

“Where does it come from, evil?”

I don't know.

“How do we stop it?
 
How can we make sure this can never happen again...”

We can't.
 
Walking through the corridors of Aoyama dormitory, the radios were blaring.

Maybe Julian's film was right. The midnight ascent to the corridors of power: the revenge shot against the senior government officials who think they are beyond the force of law itself.
 
The mast from the sailing boat would rise; the city would be distantly seen from the bay, and everything would be salt-water, fluttering winds.
 
Blinded by sun, I could not see any pattern in the pure digital static that ensued, the crowd moving, the smell in the air, the taste in one's mouth.
 
I loved Hisako.
 
Or no, I didn't.
 
It was a television show playing out before my eyes.
 
She was a drug-crazed vision or a perfect maiden of northern
Japan
.
 
I was Julian or I was Jim.
 
This was allegory, or all purely naturalistic…but now.
 
6:30am, south of
Akita
, the shore still ceaselessly rolling.
 
Writing in one's head a voice that never ceases.
 
Waking from a half-forgotten dream, there is only a sensation of illusion and elusive just-of-the-verge-of recall.
 
It's cold.
 
The wind comes in from cracks and ill-fitting joints.
 
Wisdom coming, as always, too late, revealed that doing nothing was the best possible choice.

All possible sources of resentment dissolved into nothingness in the end, swept away forever.
 
My efforts came to naught.
 
None of this really happened except in film.
 
Yet something endured, merely for the sake of endurance, to record, to write down, to hope others would learn from the mistakes made.
 
In this possible nothingness upon nothingness the waves still roll in. Farmers’ wives and fishermen’s daughters; the poverty that went unremarked ‘til now.
 
Nothing was accumulated and lack of offspring was a blessing.
 
And yet the wind feels like something; it drafts in, it asks no quarter.
 
Cold, unforgiving: a recollection. I had forgotten something, yes; I had missed the main chance.
 
Otherworldly, implacable, waiting still for full and compete consummation, a girl’s voice from beyond, something that I