It was happening again. The news on the BBC internet broadcast was that another president in the dying days of his presidency had made a gesture towards doing something right for a change. It was traditional for Presidents to issue statements and adopt high ground positions on issues that to all intents and purposes would the concern of the next man in the chair. In this case it was global warming.
Robert looked out of the shower and grimaced. Even though it felt better to adopt a posture of willful blindness there were times when the world insisted on peeling back your eyelids as if to say “look”. Robert accounted himself cursed that his eyelids flipped up like those embarrassing window blinds that escape your control and hurtle upwards to smash into their mounting. Sadly, almost anything could set them to hurtling..
“Too late to save face Mr. Not that you ever cared about that…”
Robert ducked back into the shower and placing his hands against the wall, like a man told to assume the position by a hostile world, let the hot water cleanse him and untangle the muscular knots of a singular frustration. He closed his eyes, not in a desire to look away from an ugly reality, because the water was hot and his vision didn’t need to be squiggied clean by his anti dandruff shampoo. The hot shower made him guilty but he eased his guilt by telling himself that at least he didn’t drive a car. The hot water needling down his back like Freddy Kruger the acupuncturist certainly helped.
A short time later and he was ironing his suit pants on his ironing board and getting ready for work. The television lay on its table, inert and powerless, behind him. Robert hadn’t even plugged it in since he first moved into this apartment. Instead his eyes wandered over his bookshelves thinking about the ideas in them. There was Robert Kagan and his dark political vision of a world that was red in tooth and claw, where Europe was building its walls high and relying on Americans with guns. A world of haves and have-nots with its walls and guns and corps run amok.
A decision was building in him. A point had been reached where it wasn’t going to enough just to go with the flow. He could see where it was leading him and he didn’t like it.
Robert eased himself into the lift and pressed the button for the ground floor. The elevator mechanism dropped him smoothly past level after level of identical floors where only the light levels differed. Each was sterile, tiled and looking out across the Tokyo skyline. The elevator arrived at the ground floor and for a moment he felt heavier. He wondered for perhaps the 10th time that week whether the elevator had a regenerative braking system like the hybrid cars had. He doubted it, but he was damned if he was going to take the stairs in the life-threatening boil and bubble of the Tokyo summer.
He walked out through the high tech security system doorway, which opened as he approached. He didn’t glance at the cameras over the doorway, though he knew they were there. “Fear of crime in a country where all the crime is legitimate and highly controlled” He shook his head in wonder and stepped out into the Boil in the Bag cooking method that Tokyo treats all it’s inhabitants to.
Above him the elevated expressway whooshed and whished engaged in moving people around un-necessarily. It used to be that you lived where you worked, but whatever had happened to that economy of movement it was long gone now. The city was too expensive, too polluted so people moved in and out everyday at considerable expense, creating more pollution. Nomads and pastoralists did the same but they collected something other than road toll tickets. It certainly was a strange world.
A Japanese woman rides towards him, riding on the sidewalk where it’s safe. He doesn’t see the child in the seat over the back wheel until she is almost past him. The little boy is dressed like a tiny sailor of the Kaiser. Japan can make anyone smile. If you look hard enough you can see that humanity endures even in societies that are dehumanizing. The wonder of the human spirit’s ability to say.. “I am the one and only. No, you can’t take that away from me.”
