Robert returned from his job, teaching English to employees of a multinational financial services company, in the evening. The sweat, both wet and dry, made him feel like he’d just gone for a dip in the Dead Sea.
“I am a boil in the bag meal” he said to himself. It was an old joke, almost a friend and companion.
He was under no illusions however that all the sweat was his, since he had just been on the Tokyo subway system in the middle of the evening rush hour. Standing pressed up against people around him he had almost laughed aloud at the mental image of the subway as a close order Lambada machine; an automated bump and grind device.
Around him on the train the Japanese had stared off into space, their heads angling towards a corridor of personal space which would allow them the illusory freedom to ignore that arm or that leg. Robert for his part considered it, looked down on people’s heads, blew pony-tail whisps away from his nose. Being the big foreigner he got a little more room than the Japanese would give to another Japanese.
Making his way out of the station, a Gaijin particle in the human wave that the Pointer Sisters might refer to as a ‘heated rush’ he had almost laughed again, thinking that on the Tokyo subway any man ‘with a slow hand’ would be subject to arrest or getting poked with a knitting needle. ‘Who does this hand belong to’ would cry the outraged female as the offending member was raised high. It would not be a question, despite the phrasing. Japan is an interesting country. You can almost taste the repression.
Robert stood in the shower and let Old Freddy Kreuger needle the “Tokyo Heat Island Crust” off his skin. It was an exorbitant waste of water and heat, but to Robert rising up till his head came clear of the jet, it was like coming up for air. He felt renewed. The shower was where he meditated on the world around him. A perfect balance of soothing water and socio-political frustration. Ying and Yang with a pulse action.
Teaching at a multinational financial services company was an almost visceral irritation. Oh he’d agreed to the work and by his honor he would complete the assignment, but still… The building the company had literally fortified reminded Robert of the Tyrell Corporation Building in Blade Runner; a company whose business was the production of sub-human slaves. The parallels between the movie and the firm; an engine of unfettered American capitalism, appealed to Robert’s very dark sense of humor. This sense of humor prevented him from grinding his teeth too much, but some people said it gave him sharp edges. He could almost imagine a woman sitting beside a sewing machine in some godawful sweat shop in China, churning out cash for the Firm’s clients. She would look up from her sewing machine and say “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.”
His students were nice enough in their way. They were no different from anyone else you would meet in Japan. They were not ogres. They worked to get what they wanted out of life. It saddened Robert to think of a student as being like the duracell battery that Morpheus had held in The Matrix, since they were quite literally the batteries of an engine that was chewing people up, extracting all the goodness from them like some demonic spider, before spitting them out. But like those glowing pods in the movie they seemed entirely unaware of what they had bought into.
Emerging lobster red from the shower, Robert dried off with an old towel, long since frayed and worn out from use, but like an old friend – not to be discarded. The fashionistas would have been appalled, hating the idea that men actually like their old tired clothes. Crossing the room he sat down at his laptop and dried his hair. Sitting back he navigated through the subterranean tunnels of the real world to Doug’s Drivel, a Canadian blog that was almost always thought provoking and invariably human. There he learned that lizards masturbate and about Naomi Klein and her new book “Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”.
