more work for work
We went back to my appartment for a long night of shadows and skin. It was emotional and then it was tiring - eventually, she fell asleep next to me. I was exhausted, but couldn’t let go of consciousness. I lay awake in bed watching car headlights reflected on the ceiling, listened to her breathing against my neck. She stirred occassionally, murmured Japanese words I didn’t understand. At some point I must have drifted off too. In the morning she was gone.
I woke up, oddly free of confusion or angst. I felt rejuvenated, and it didn’t matter to me if I’d met with Miho or not, whether she’d been real or fake. The memory of her body, how it moved, everything she’d said remained and I knew those memories weren’t going anywhere. Mneme had etched them in me. I'd let something go, and it didn't concern me anymore if it had happened or not - what i wanted to know was who caused it to happen.
Around noon I checked my phone: the number the guy in the club had given me was still there. I was't surprised to see it. Nothing else made sense - mneme was going to go to the trouble of giving it to me just for the hell of it? No. Things were coming together, and the drug wasn't going to start backpedalling now. I dialed the number.
“Moshi moshi,” said a man. He spoke slowly, his words syruppy and well-formed. He sounded high. Or like he’d just finished a long massage with a very happy ending.
“Anoh,” I said, carefully. “Eigo o hanasemasu ka?”
“Nn,” he said, meaning yes.
“Yeah? Um, good. Well, my friend gave me your number - ”
“Your friend?”
“Yes. He gave me your number and - ”
“He gave you my number?” A hint of playfulness.
“He did.”
“And you called.”
“Yes.”
“So maybe you want something?”
“Well.”
“It is not a crime to want something.” Definitely playing.
“I guess not.”
“Probably I can help you.”
“Your English is very good,” I said, stupidly. I was just trying to keep up.
“Do you think so? Thank you.”
“I’ve met a lot of people with good English recently.” Again, I didn't know why I said it. It came from nowhere, some drawer in the back of my mind I keep stocked with useless comments. He laughed.
“Really? Well it is a useful language.”
“I guess it is.”
“You guess?”
“Um.”
He laughed again. His voice was soft, almost throaty; I almost felt his breath, hot and wet, through the receiver and it made me want to hang up the phone, drop everything. I could have, could have ended everything right there, stopped taking mneme and rode out the rest of my time in Japan like a respectable foreigner. I could have, but I didn't - he didn’t give me a chance.
“If you want to meet,” he said. “That’s fine.”
“Ok,” I said, for lack of anything else.
“Do you know Kouenji?”
I closed my eyes and sat down at my desk, pressed a finger into my temple.
“Yes,” I said. “I know Kouenji.”
“If you like, let’s get a coffee there. I know a nice café near the station.”
“Alright.”
“You sound like you are upset.”
“Sorry.”
“Please remember that it was you who called me.”
“I know.”
“I will be wearing a black jacket and black sunglasses. And you?”
“A white hoodie. Ripped jeans.”
“I am sorry to be impolite, but may I ask if you are white?”
“Yes,” I said. “I am. And I take it you’re Japanese?”
“Of course,” he said, his rich laughter breaking free again. “What country do you think this is?”
I sat on the train and watched the city slip by. Appartment boxes, office towers, advertising, electrical poles and wires repeated, fell out of sequence and repeated again. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my hoodie. The car was unusually empty. Other than me, there were a pair of teen girls in short skirts, an elderly woman clutching a small purse in her lap, and a large salaryman with his head buried in the pages of a newspaper. He yawned as I glanced at him, brought a hand up to cover his mouth; the paper lowered enough for me to see his face - I'd seen him before. Where? He was ordinary looking enough: a little overweight, balding, his cheap-looking grey suit creased at the joints. I scrolled through my memory, saw him getting on the train with me at Shinjuku, sitting down and opening his paper, but that wasn’t the first time I’d seen him. I went back farther, flipping through the of images of salarymen (real or invented) I'd stored up over the past weeks with the help of the drug. Finally, I landed on him - he was the man who’d sat next to Itaru and I in the cafe the day we first met.
He didn’t look at me or acknowledge me in any way, but he shouldn't have been there - what were the chances of winding up on the same train in the same car in a city the size of Tokyo? Was I seeing him again as a result of the drug, or was it just a random encounter? How many of the same people did I see, day in and day out, and never know it because I'd forgotten them? Maybe, even in Tokyo, it’s possible to walk by the same person again and again only to forget them, each time losing the memory as completely as you lose the piece of trash you saw lying in the gutter, the colour of the heels the woman opposite you was wearing on the train. Maybe the only reason it was strange to see him again was because I remembered it.
I didn’t take my eyes off him. At any minute, I expected him to put down his paper and look at me, pull out a phone and dial my number. But he didn't. He just sat there, reading quietly until the train stopped at Kouenji and and he got up to leave. So did I. I watched him from the corner of my eye; aside from the paper he'd folded carefully under his arm, our movements were nearly identical: I walked to the nearest door, and he walked to the door nearest him. We both waited as the platform slid into view through the windows in front of us and when the doors opened we both left the train at the same time, but once I got on the platform I
stopped moving. I pretended to look around, as if I didn’t know which exit I wanted. I waited for him to move, thinking he wouldn’t, and he did; he walked, leisurely, down the platform to the left. He didn’t look back.
“Hey,” someone said. I recognized the voice from the phone. I looked away from the man with the paper. Next to one of the off-white, metal pillars a young guy in a black jacket and black sunglasses was standing. I recognized him immediately: it was Ryota, Itaru’s effeminate dealer.
“Hey,” he said again, waving me over with a lazy, offhand gesture. Behind me, the train pulled out of the station. I looked quickly back in the direction the man in the grey suit had gone: he was still on the platform, standing in front of a vending machine, trying to decide what brand of tea he wanted. I walked over to Ryota.
I wasn’t exactly surprised to see him. By that point, I was ready to meet anyone I knew at any moment, in any context. At least I thought I was. But if I’d had to guess, I wouldn’t have guessed I’d meet him, mostly because I remembered Itaru having to translate for him, and here he was in front of me, apparently fluent in English. Still, fluent or not, I was prepared to accept it, at least for the time being.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, sharply. He looked at me strangely, but he shrugged, and led the way down a flight of stairs. We left the station and walked into the street.
“Where is this café?” I asked.
“What’s the hurry?”
“No hurry,” I lied. I was preoccupied with the man in the grey suit. I thought he was looking at me; it felt like invisible insects were crawling on the back of my neck, soft, swaying hairs playing over my skin. I knew there was no reaso to be uncomfortable, but knowing didn’t help. I wanted to put as much distance between him and me as possible.
“I just need a drink,” I said. “Long day you know? They serve alcohol at this place?”
“No,” he said, frowning slightly. “If you want to drink alcohol I know somewhere else.”
We walked on the road beside the station, then turned left, into a corridor running beneath the tracks. Taking a low flight of stairs on the far side, we emerged into a tight confine of sidestreets and alleys. The light was fading, the colour gradually seeping out of the sky. Shadows deepened along the walls of the concrete buildings, their edges softening. Distances and the relationship between objects grew harder to guage: one building ebbed gently into another, traffic poles faded into a grey background of vague shapes. The usual crowd of vintage pickers had disappeared, bundled off in trains to head back to their own corners of the sprawl. A few people continued to browse, but their hearts weren’t in it. I watched one girl, she was maybe 17 or so, scrounge listlessly through a pile of discount shoes. She yawned, deeply, her mouth reduced to an ink spot.
Ryota walked confidently into the gloom, turning down one sidestreet and then another. The bar he took me to was nestled in the center of an alley, about a fifteen minute walk from the station. Outside stood the familiar, grinning statue of the naked racoon. Two men in t-shirts and jeans were seated on a wooden bench next to the entrance. A third man stood a little apart from them, his arms buried to the elbows in a tin drum filled with water and ice. He smiled at us as we approached, and pulled an arm from the drum. He held a fish in his hand, but not a fish like any I’d ever seen before. The thing was tobacco brown, wide and flat. Its mouth ran 180 degrees along the width of its body. Small spines dotted its back and the tips of its fins ended in jagged points. Water and flakes of ice slipped along its scales and over the man’s forearm. He took his other arm from the drum and opened its mouth, started chanting in Japanese, using the fish like a ventriloquist’s dummy. The guys on the bench laughed.
Ryota didn’t pay any attention to this. It was like he didn’t even see it. He just walked into the bar and didn’t wait for me to follow. The man holding the fish nodded at me, slowly. I felt like I was dreaming. I pushed the door open and entered the bar.
Inside it was dim, the air hazy with smoke. Plastic, multi-coloured lanterns hung from the ceiling and dozens of bottles of sake and shoju were crammed onto a rickety network of shelves behind a counter. The bartender was in his twenties, his black, medium-length hair pulled back from his head with a thin cord. He was hunched in front of a laptop, his face bathed in the white glow from the screen. It was quiet enough in the place to hear the sound of his fingers on the keyboard. As if aware of the fact, he clicked his mouse twice, and a downtempo, ambient beat filled the room.
There were five other people in the bar: a middle-aged couple wearing jean jackets, and a table of three youngish guys talking quietly amongst themselves. Everyone was smoking, and none of them looked at us as we walked in. Ryota had chosen a table in the far corner. He sat down and took off his jacket, swept his bangs away from his eyes. I joined him as he was pulling out a pack of cigarettes. He offered me one and I took it. There was something steadying about the act of lighting it, drawing the smoke into my lungs. The physicality of the action helped affirm reality on some level.
“So,” said Ryota. Looking at me, there was a slightly mocking tilt to his eyes. “I guess by now you’re not sure if any of this is happening, right?”
“What?”
“You are using nemu yes? So that’s probably how you feel.”
“Yeah, I guess. Pretty much.”
“It’s a strange feeling. I know.”
“How long have you been using it?”
“Awhile now,” he said, his fine, sardonic smile widening fractionally. “Who knows for sure? That’s the interesting thing about it.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask anything. That’s why you called me isn’t it? I know you didn’t call me to buy any.”
“You don’t remember me do you?”
“Hmm? Should I?”
“Yes. We met a few weeks ago. Itaru and I came to see you in Shinjuku.”
“Ah, Itaru.”
“You know him?”
“Of course. I’ve known him a long time.”
“But you don’t remember me.”
“No. Were you there that night?”
“Yes.”
“I just remember him and Miho.”
“She was there too. And so was I, and at that time you didn’t speak any English. Now it’s flawless.”
“That must be strange for you.”
“It is. Very strange. Why is it so good? I mean, you’re a drug dealer in Tokyo. I can’t imagine it’s very profitable to speak English as well as this.”
“I’m not just a drug dealer.”
“Still.”
“But you’re asking like you assume we’re speaking English.”
“What?”
“It’s equally possible we’re speaking Japanese right now, and it’s me asking you how you’d picked up the language so flawlessly.”
“Is that what you’re hearing? Japanese?”
“No, as a matter of fact it isn’t. We’re speaking English,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette into the enamel tray in front of him. Afterwards, he ran the tip of his right index finger over the surface of the table; it was covered with scratch marks, tags in black marker; drawing his finger over them, it was like he was crossing them out, one by one.
“But the point is you have to give up thinking like that. You can’t know if this conversation is even taking place, so why worry about what language we’re using?”
“I know I don’t speak Japanese.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Well then you’re lucky. As for me, for all I know we’re sitting in a café in Frankfurt speaking German.”
“But you said you think we’re speaking English.”
“I do think so, yes.”
“So we’re back to my original question. Why do you speak English so well? I keep meeting people like this, on the drug, and all of them have good English.”
“It’s because of the drug,” he said, simply. “It changes what you remember, but it also helps you to remember. I watch an English movie and I can remember every word of it, along with the Japanese subtitles I read on the screen below. If you put your mind to it, and take enough nemu, you can learn any language fairly easily.”
“Is that how Itaru learned?”
“Yes. We’ve practiced together, although in his case, he doesn’t practice enough.”
“But why bother?”
“English is an international language. You’re an English teacher aren’t you? I’m sure you have many students with no clear reason about why they study. What’s so difficult to understand?”
“Fine,” I said, letting it go. “Mind if I grab a drink?”
“No.”
“You want anything?”
“No thank you.”
I stood up and walked over to the bar. The bartender looked up at me from behind his laptop. I ordered a draft beer. He poured me one, then he went back to work on his computer. I drank some of the beer, my eyes moving over the labels on the sake bottles behind the counter. The skin on the back of my neck was crawling again; I could feel Ryota staring at me, boring into the back of my head with his slim, almond eyes. I turned around and he was busy examining his nails. I walked back to the table and sat down.
“You remember that night in Shinjuku right?” I said. “Even if I’m not a part of it, you remember Itaru and Miho coming out to pick up some mneme?”
“Yes.”
I wanted him to confirm that much at least. Even if I wasn’t part of his memory, I wanted to know that it had happened, if not to me then at least to someone else. If I could be sure of that, I felt like I could start to bring the events of the past few weeks into focus, but I shouldn’t have bothered. There wasn’t any point. It was like he said - I had to stop thinking like that. How could I be sure of anything? The smallest amount of doubt about the tinest detail threw everything else into question. I changed direction:
“Where does it come from?” I asked.
“You mean nemu?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m not sure myself. I’m not at the end of any supply chain, you realize.”
“But you do have some idea? When did it start showing up?”
“By the time I first tried it, over a year ago...” He trailed off, and looked up at the ceiling, as if trying to collect what remained of his fragmented memory. He pressed one of his fingers against his bottom lip, exhaled slowly.
“But you know, it’s impossible to be sure,” he said, finally.
“So just tell me what you think.”
“Will that satisfy you?”
“No, but it’s a start.”
“Well, I’d say it didn’t appear much before I first tried it. No one I introduced it to had ever heard of it before. I’d go to parties and I was the only one there who had any idea there was a new drug on the market. So I’d say I was one of the first to begin using it, at least among my circle of friends.”
“And where did you get it?”
“An ex-boyfriend of mine,” he said, arching one of his eyebrows. He must have expected me to comment on that, but I could care less who he fucked.
“You’ve been buying it from him since then?”
“I don’t make a habit of seeing my exes, no.”
“So where do you get it?”
“Honestly, it’s an unusual arrangement. When we were together I knew he bought a lot of the stuff, but he wouldn’t tell me where he got it from. I assumed he wouldn’t talk about it because he was getting it off some other guy he’d dated, or even someone he was seeing on the side. It didn’t matter to me - as long as the sex was good, what did I care what he did with his time? And the sex was good,” he said, laughing, although his eyes remained glued to mine. His pupils hovered like two fine, black points in his head. I knew he was baiting me, that expected a reaction, but I wasn’t going to bite. Gay or straight, sex addict or choir boy, all that mattered was if he could tell me what I wanted to know.
“Hmm,” he said, after a moment. “Nothing huh?”
“Nothing what?”
“To be honest, I agreed to meet you today because I thought you might have a message for me.”
“Message?”
“You haven’t noticed?”
“Noticed what?”
“The messages.”
“What are you talking about?” I began to realize that I’d misjudged him. He didn’t care what I thought about his sexuality - he’d been looking at me like that because he wanted something from me. Just like I wanted something from him. I leaned back in my chair, drank some beer mechanically.
“Of course,” he said. “Everything is different for different people. I’ve introduced many people to the drug, and they all have different stories. I could spend all day telling you stories about what it was like for each of them, the things they told me. But since none of it’s real, there’s no point in hearing about it is there? None of it’s real, so the stories have no value. But like I said, I’ve been using nemu far longer than anyone I know, except for my ex, long enough to know that even if it isn’t real, there are things you can see inside the trip. Over time, it looks like the drug is trying to say something to you.”
He laughed. The disbelief must have been showing on my face.
“It’s just a drug right? Just chemicals activating various parts of the brain? Yes maybe. But maybe not.”
“So what’s it been trying to tell you?”
“Each person’s message is their own. You shouldn’t go telling those things to just anyone. I don’t even know you.”
“But you thought I might have a message for you.”
“Yes, because of something I heard in your voice when you called. But I realize now that I was wrong. You’re searching for something, just like me, but what we’re searching for isn’t the same.”
“You’re probably right about that.”
“I know I am. For me, it doesn’t matter where nemu is coming from. I have no interest in the source. All I care about is where it’s taking me.”
“That’s probably healthier.”
“Healthy or not doesn’t matter. We have only one life, yes, but we shouldn’t be afraid to spend it.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Maybe not, but you still haven’t told me how you get the stuff.”
“No I haven’t. I must have forgotten.” He laughed at his own joke. Or was there some other reason for the look of self-satisfaction creeping over his face?
“Like I said,” he went on. “It is an unusual way to conduct business. When things between my ex and I started to get too annoying, as they always do, I decided to cut it off with him. But I wasn’t ready to break up with the drug too, you understand, so like you, I asked him where he was getting it. He seemed relieved that I was interested.
“‘Actually,’ he told me. ‘I want to stop this.’ It was too much for him, the trips and the odd memories. He went on and on about it, complaining that he didn’t even know who he was anymore, or where he was going. Essentially he was a very weak person. I tried my best to make him feel better, but basically I thought he was pathetic. I was happy to be leaving him.”
He shrugged.
“He told me that he had met a man at a bar who introduced him to the drug, and had offered to start selling it to him in larger quantities. The deal they made was that my ex would go with the money to Tokyo station and he would put it inside a coin locker and then he would leave. The next day when he returned, he would find the drugs waiting for him in the same locker. He said he never once met the man again, and I believed him. All of their interractions were done over the phone. I told him that the whole thing seemed ridiculous, and that anyone dealing drugs like that would run into trouble eventually, but he said it’d worked so far. He asked me if I wanted to continue with the arrangement in his place. He would tell me how much money I needed, and give me the key to the locker. The man and I would never have to meet, and there would be no reason for him to know that anything had changed. My ex got more and more excited as he explained all this to me. I think he was probably afraid just to stop making payments altogether, and was happy he had someone he could pass the responsibility to.”
He shrugged again, sniffing derisively. It was a completely masculine gesture.
“Not that it mattered to me. Let him think he was passing me a burden - I can always use the extra money, and I’ve been doing it this way ever since.”
“Where is the locker?”
“Why would I tell you something like that?”
A bang, like a gun going off; the metal door was thrown open, rang against the wall. I turned: two of the men from outside were hauling the ice drum into the bar. One of them was shouting at the other. Both their necks were strained, their arms knotted with veins, the teeth grating hard in their jaws. I looked back at Ryota - he was studying his nails.
I thought about what he said, and knew that like everything else in life I just had to accept it. Since everything was questionable, there was no reason to question any of it. In the end, was it really that strange to meet a drug dealer who spoke fluent English, or watch a couple guys haul in a tin drum with a fucked up fish cooling inside it? There was nothing to say that couldn’t happen, that in this world things like that never did. I was on an island, and the natives trolled the seas all day, every day. Who knows what kind of bizarre shit they haul up in their nets? Just because I’d never seen a fish like that didn’t mean it didn’t exist, and just because none of this felt real didn’t mean that it wasn’t.
I took my beer and drained it. Empty, I could see the tags scrawled on the surface of the table through the bottom of the filmy glass. Most of them were Japanese characters I couldn’t understand, random doodles, but one of them stood out. I’d seen it somewhere before, but i couldn’t be bothered trying to sort out when. What difference did it make? I laughed.
“To be honest,” I said. “I’m kind of freaking out.”
“Yes,” he said, not looking up from his nails. “It’s fucked.”
I woke up, oddly free of confusion or angst. I felt rejuvenated, and it didn’t matter to me if I’d met with Miho or not, whether she’d been real or fake. The memory of her body, how it moved, everything she’d said remained and I knew those memories weren’t going anywhere. Mneme had etched them in me. I'd let something go, and it didn't concern me anymore if it had happened or not - what i wanted to know was who caused it to happen.
Around noon I checked my phone: the number the guy in the club had given me was still there. I was't surprised to see it. Nothing else made sense - mneme was going to go to the trouble of giving it to me just for the hell of it? No. Things were coming together, and the drug wasn't going to start backpedalling now. I dialed the number.
“Moshi moshi,” said a man. He spoke slowly, his words syruppy and well-formed. He sounded high. Or like he’d just finished a long massage with a very happy ending.
“Anoh,” I said, carefully. “Eigo o hanasemasu ka?”
“Nn,” he said, meaning yes.
“Yeah? Um, good. Well, my friend gave me your number - ”
“Your friend?”
“Yes. He gave me your number and - ”
“He gave you my number?” A hint of playfulness.
“He did.”
“And you called.”
“Yes.”
“So maybe you want something?”
“Well.”
“It is not a crime to want something.” Definitely playing.
“I guess not.”
“Probably I can help you.”
“Your English is very good,” I said, stupidly. I was just trying to keep up.
“Do you think so? Thank you.”
“I’ve met a lot of people with good English recently.” Again, I didn't know why I said it. It came from nowhere, some drawer in the back of my mind I keep stocked with useless comments. He laughed.
“Really? Well it is a useful language.”
“I guess it is.”
“You guess?”
“Um.”
He laughed again. His voice was soft, almost throaty; I almost felt his breath, hot and wet, through the receiver and it made me want to hang up the phone, drop everything. I could have, could have ended everything right there, stopped taking mneme and rode out the rest of my time in Japan like a respectable foreigner. I could have, but I didn't - he didn’t give me a chance.
“If you want to meet,” he said. “That’s fine.”
“Ok,” I said, for lack of anything else.
“Do you know Kouenji?”
I closed my eyes and sat down at my desk, pressed a finger into my temple.
“Yes,” I said. “I know Kouenji.”
“If you like, let’s get a coffee there. I know a nice café near the station.”
“Alright.”
“You sound like you are upset.”
“Sorry.”
“Please remember that it was you who called me.”
“I know.”
“I will be wearing a black jacket and black sunglasses. And you?”
“A white hoodie. Ripped jeans.”
“I am sorry to be impolite, but may I ask if you are white?”
“Yes,” I said. “I am. And I take it you’re Japanese?”
“Of course,” he said, his rich laughter breaking free again. “What country do you think this is?”
I sat on the train and watched the city slip by. Appartment boxes, office towers, advertising, electrical poles and wires repeated, fell out of sequence and repeated again. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my hoodie. The car was unusually empty. Other than me, there were a pair of teen girls in short skirts, an elderly woman clutching a small purse in her lap, and a large salaryman with his head buried in the pages of a newspaper. He yawned as I glanced at him, brought a hand up to cover his mouth; the paper lowered enough for me to see his face - I'd seen him before. Where? He was ordinary looking enough: a little overweight, balding, his cheap-looking grey suit creased at the joints. I scrolled through my memory, saw him getting on the train with me at Shinjuku, sitting down and opening his paper, but that wasn’t the first time I’d seen him. I went back farther, flipping through the of images of salarymen (real or invented) I'd stored up over the past weeks with the help of the drug. Finally, I landed on him - he was the man who’d sat next to Itaru and I in the cafe the day we first met.
He didn’t look at me or acknowledge me in any way, but he shouldn't have been there - what were the chances of winding up on the same train in the same car in a city the size of Tokyo? Was I seeing him again as a result of the drug, or was it just a random encounter? How many of the same people did I see, day in and day out, and never know it because I'd forgotten them? Maybe, even in Tokyo, it’s possible to walk by the same person again and again only to forget them, each time losing the memory as completely as you lose the piece of trash you saw lying in the gutter, the colour of the heels the woman opposite you was wearing on the train. Maybe the only reason it was strange to see him again was because I remembered it.
I didn’t take my eyes off him. At any minute, I expected him to put down his paper and look at me, pull out a phone and dial my number. But he didn't. He just sat there, reading quietly until the train stopped at Kouenji and and he got up to leave. So did I. I watched him from the corner of my eye; aside from the paper he'd folded carefully under his arm, our movements were nearly identical: I walked to the nearest door, and he walked to the door nearest him. We both waited as the platform slid into view through the windows in front of us and when the doors opened we both left the train at the same time, but once I got on the platform I
stopped moving. I pretended to look around, as if I didn’t know which exit I wanted. I waited for him to move, thinking he wouldn’t, and he did; he walked, leisurely, down the platform to the left. He didn’t look back.
“Hey,” someone said. I recognized the voice from the phone. I looked away from the man with the paper. Next to one of the off-white, metal pillars a young guy in a black jacket and black sunglasses was standing. I recognized him immediately: it was Ryota, Itaru’s effeminate dealer.
“Hey,” he said again, waving me over with a lazy, offhand gesture. Behind me, the train pulled out of the station. I looked quickly back in the direction the man in the grey suit had gone: he was still on the platform, standing in front of a vending machine, trying to decide what brand of tea he wanted. I walked over to Ryota.
I wasn’t exactly surprised to see him. By that point, I was ready to meet anyone I knew at any moment, in any context. At least I thought I was. But if I’d had to guess, I wouldn’t have guessed I’d meet him, mostly because I remembered Itaru having to translate for him, and here he was in front of me, apparently fluent in English. Still, fluent or not, I was prepared to accept it, at least for the time being.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, sharply. He looked at me strangely, but he shrugged, and led the way down a flight of stairs. We left the station and walked into the street.
“Where is this café?” I asked.
“What’s the hurry?”
“No hurry,” I lied. I was preoccupied with the man in the grey suit. I thought he was looking at me; it felt like invisible insects were crawling on the back of my neck, soft, swaying hairs playing over my skin. I knew there was no reaso to be uncomfortable, but knowing didn’t help. I wanted to put as much distance between him and me as possible.
“I just need a drink,” I said. “Long day you know? They serve alcohol at this place?”
“No,” he said, frowning slightly. “If you want to drink alcohol I know somewhere else.”
We walked on the road beside the station, then turned left, into a corridor running beneath the tracks. Taking a low flight of stairs on the far side, we emerged into a tight confine of sidestreets and alleys. The light was fading, the colour gradually seeping out of the sky. Shadows deepened along the walls of the concrete buildings, their edges softening. Distances and the relationship between objects grew harder to guage: one building ebbed gently into another, traffic poles faded into a grey background of vague shapes. The usual crowd of vintage pickers had disappeared, bundled off in trains to head back to their own corners of the sprawl. A few people continued to browse, but their hearts weren’t in it. I watched one girl, she was maybe 17 or so, scrounge listlessly through a pile of discount shoes. She yawned, deeply, her mouth reduced to an ink spot.
Ryota walked confidently into the gloom, turning down one sidestreet and then another. The bar he took me to was nestled in the center of an alley, about a fifteen minute walk from the station. Outside stood the familiar, grinning statue of the naked racoon. Two men in t-shirts and jeans were seated on a wooden bench next to the entrance. A third man stood a little apart from them, his arms buried to the elbows in a tin drum filled with water and ice. He smiled at us as we approached, and pulled an arm from the drum. He held a fish in his hand, but not a fish like any I’d ever seen before. The thing was tobacco brown, wide and flat. Its mouth ran 180 degrees along the width of its body. Small spines dotted its back and the tips of its fins ended in jagged points. Water and flakes of ice slipped along its scales and over the man’s forearm. He took his other arm from the drum and opened its mouth, started chanting in Japanese, using the fish like a ventriloquist’s dummy. The guys on the bench laughed.
Ryota didn’t pay any attention to this. It was like he didn’t even see it. He just walked into the bar and didn’t wait for me to follow. The man holding the fish nodded at me, slowly. I felt like I was dreaming. I pushed the door open and entered the bar.
Inside it was dim, the air hazy with smoke. Plastic, multi-coloured lanterns hung from the ceiling and dozens of bottles of sake and shoju were crammed onto a rickety network of shelves behind a counter. The bartender was in his twenties, his black, medium-length hair pulled back from his head with a thin cord. He was hunched in front of a laptop, his face bathed in the white glow from the screen. It was quiet enough in the place to hear the sound of his fingers on the keyboard. As if aware of the fact, he clicked his mouse twice, and a downtempo, ambient beat filled the room.
There were five other people in the bar: a middle-aged couple wearing jean jackets, and a table of three youngish guys talking quietly amongst themselves. Everyone was smoking, and none of them looked at us as we walked in. Ryota had chosen a table in the far corner. He sat down and took off his jacket, swept his bangs away from his eyes. I joined him as he was pulling out a pack of cigarettes. He offered me one and I took it. There was something steadying about the act of lighting it, drawing the smoke into my lungs. The physicality of the action helped affirm reality on some level.
“So,” said Ryota. Looking at me, there was a slightly mocking tilt to his eyes. “I guess by now you’re not sure if any of this is happening, right?”
“What?”
“You are using nemu yes? So that’s probably how you feel.”
“Yeah, I guess. Pretty much.”
“It’s a strange feeling. I know.”
“How long have you been using it?”
“Awhile now,” he said, his fine, sardonic smile widening fractionally. “Who knows for sure? That’s the interesting thing about it.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask anything. That’s why you called me isn’t it? I know you didn’t call me to buy any.”
“You don’t remember me do you?”
“Hmm? Should I?”
“Yes. We met a few weeks ago. Itaru and I came to see you in Shinjuku.”
“Ah, Itaru.”
“You know him?”
“Of course. I’ve known him a long time.”
“But you don’t remember me.”
“No. Were you there that night?”
“Yes.”
“I just remember him and Miho.”
“She was there too. And so was I, and at that time you didn’t speak any English. Now it’s flawless.”
“That must be strange for you.”
“It is. Very strange. Why is it so good? I mean, you’re a drug dealer in Tokyo. I can’t imagine it’s very profitable to speak English as well as this.”
“I’m not just a drug dealer.”
“Still.”
“But you’re asking like you assume we’re speaking English.”
“What?”
“It’s equally possible we’re speaking Japanese right now, and it’s me asking you how you’d picked up the language so flawlessly.”
“Is that what you’re hearing? Japanese?”
“No, as a matter of fact it isn’t. We’re speaking English,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette into the enamel tray in front of him. Afterwards, he ran the tip of his right index finger over the surface of the table; it was covered with scratch marks, tags in black marker; drawing his finger over them, it was like he was crossing them out, one by one.
“But the point is you have to give up thinking like that. You can’t know if this conversation is even taking place, so why worry about what language we’re using?”
“I know I don’t speak Japanese.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Well then you’re lucky. As for me, for all I know we’re sitting in a café in Frankfurt speaking German.”
“But you said you think we’re speaking English.”
“I do think so, yes.”
“So we’re back to my original question. Why do you speak English so well? I keep meeting people like this, on the drug, and all of them have good English.”
“It’s because of the drug,” he said, simply. “It changes what you remember, but it also helps you to remember. I watch an English movie and I can remember every word of it, along with the Japanese subtitles I read on the screen below. If you put your mind to it, and take enough nemu, you can learn any language fairly easily.”
“Is that how Itaru learned?”
“Yes. We’ve practiced together, although in his case, he doesn’t practice enough.”
“But why bother?”
“English is an international language. You’re an English teacher aren’t you? I’m sure you have many students with no clear reason about why they study. What’s so difficult to understand?”
“Fine,” I said, letting it go. “Mind if I grab a drink?”
“No.”
“You want anything?”
“No thank you.”
I stood up and walked over to the bar. The bartender looked up at me from behind his laptop. I ordered a draft beer. He poured me one, then he went back to work on his computer. I drank some of the beer, my eyes moving over the labels on the sake bottles behind the counter. The skin on the back of my neck was crawling again; I could feel Ryota staring at me, boring into the back of my head with his slim, almond eyes. I turned around and he was busy examining his nails. I walked back to the table and sat down.
“You remember that night in Shinjuku right?” I said. “Even if I’m not a part of it, you remember Itaru and Miho coming out to pick up some mneme?”
“Yes.”
I wanted him to confirm that much at least. Even if I wasn’t part of his memory, I wanted to know that it had happened, if not to me then at least to someone else. If I could be sure of that, I felt like I could start to bring the events of the past few weeks into focus, but I shouldn’t have bothered. There wasn’t any point. It was like he said - I had to stop thinking like that. How could I be sure of anything? The smallest amount of doubt about the tinest detail threw everything else into question. I changed direction:
“Where does it come from?” I asked.
“You mean nemu?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m not sure myself. I’m not at the end of any supply chain, you realize.”
“But you do have some idea? When did it start showing up?”
“By the time I first tried it, over a year ago...” He trailed off, and looked up at the ceiling, as if trying to collect what remained of his fragmented memory. He pressed one of his fingers against his bottom lip, exhaled slowly.
“But you know, it’s impossible to be sure,” he said, finally.
“So just tell me what you think.”
“Will that satisfy you?”
“No, but it’s a start.”
“Well, I’d say it didn’t appear much before I first tried it. No one I introduced it to had ever heard of it before. I’d go to parties and I was the only one there who had any idea there was a new drug on the market. So I’d say I was one of the first to begin using it, at least among my circle of friends.”
“And where did you get it?”
“An ex-boyfriend of mine,” he said, arching one of his eyebrows. He must have expected me to comment on that, but I could care less who he fucked.
“You’ve been buying it from him since then?”
“I don’t make a habit of seeing my exes, no.”
“So where do you get it?”
“Honestly, it’s an unusual arrangement. When we were together I knew he bought a lot of the stuff, but he wouldn’t tell me where he got it from. I assumed he wouldn’t talk about it because he was getting it off some other guy he’d dated, or even someone he was seeing on the side. It didn’t matter to me - as long as the sex was good, what did I care what he did with his time? And the sex was good,” he said, laughing, although his eyes remained glued to mine. His pupils hovered like two fine, black points in his head. I knew he was baiting me, that expected a reaction, but I wasn’t going to bite. Gay or straight, sex addict or choir boy, all that mattered was if he could tell me what I wanted to know.
“Hmm,” he said, after a moment. “Nothing huh?”
“Nothing what?”
“To be honest, I agreed to meet you today because I thought you might have a message for me.”
“Message?”
“You haven’t noticed?”
“Noticed what?”
“The messages.”
“What are you talking about?” I began to realize that I’d misjudged him. He didn’t care what I thought about his sexuality - he’d been looking at me like that because he wanted something from me. Just like I wanted something from him. I leaned back in my chair, drank some beer mechanically.
“Of course,” he said. “Everything is different for different people. I’ve introduced many people to the drug, and they all have different stories. I could spend all day telling you stories about what it was like for each of them, the things they told me. But since none of it’s real, there’s no point in hearing about it is there? None of it’s real, so the stories have no value. But like I said, I’ve been using nemu far longer than anyone I know, except for my ex, long enough to know that even if it isn’t real, there are things you can see inside the trip. Over time, it looks like the drug is trying to say something to you.”
He laughed. The disbelief must have been showing on my face.
“It’s just a drug right? Just chemicals activating various parts of the brain? Yes maybe. But maybe not.”
“So what’s it been trying to tell you?”
“Each person’s message is their own. You shouldn’t go telling those things to just anyone. I don’t even know you.”
“But you thought I might have a message for you.”
“Yes, because of something I heard in your voice when you called. But I realize now that I was wrong. You’re searching for something, just like me, but what we’re searching for isn’t the same.”
“You’re probably right about that.”
“I know I am. For me, it doesn’t matter where nemu is coming from. I have no interest in the source. All I care about is where it’s taking me.”
“That’s probably healthier.”
“Healthy or not doesn’t matter. We have only one life, yes, but we shouldn’t be afraid to spend it.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Maybe not, but you still haven’t told me how you get the stuff.”
“No I haven’t. I must have forgotten.” He laughed at his own joke. Or was there some other reason for the look of self-satisfaction creeping over his face?
“Like I said,” he went on. “It is an unusual way to conduct business. When things between my ex and I started to get too annoying, as they always do, I decided to cut it off with him. But I wasn’t ready to break up with the drug too, you understand, so like you, I asked him where he was getting it. He seemed relieved that I was interested.
“‘Actually,’ he told me. ‘I want to stop this.’ It was too much for him, the trips and the odd memories. He went on and on about it, complaining that he didn’t even know who he was anymore, or where he was going. Essentially he was a very weak person. I tried my best to make him feel better, but basically I thought he was pathetic. I was happy to be leaving him.”
He shrugged.
“He told me that he had met a man at a bar who introduced him to the drug, and had offered to start selling it to him in larger quantities. The deal they made was that my ex would go with the money to Tokyo station and he would put it inside a coin locker and then he would leave. The next day when he returned, he would find the drugs waiting for him in the same locker. He said he never once met the man again, and I believed him. All of their interractions were done over the phone. I told him that the whole thing seemed ridiculous, and that anyone dealing drugs like that would run into trouble eventually, but he said it’d worked so far. He asked me if I wanted to continue with the arrangement in his place. He would tell me how much money I needed, and give me the key to the locker. The man and I would never have to meet, and there would be no reason for him to know that anything had changed. My ex got more and more excited as he explained all this to me. I think he was probably afraid just to stop making payments altogether, and was happy he had someone he could pass the responsibility to.”
He shrugged again, sniffing derisively. It was a completely masculine gesture.
“Not that it mattered to me. Let him think he was passing me a burden - I can always use the extra money, and I’ve been doing it this way ever since.”
“Where is the locker?”
“Why would I tell you something like that?”
A bang, like a gun going off; the metal door was thrown open, rang against the wall. I turned: two of the men from outside were hauling the ice drum into the bar. One of them was shouting at the other. Both their necks were strained, their arms knotted with veins, the teeth grating hard in their jaws. I looked back at Ryota - he was studying his nails.
I thought about what he said, and knew that like everything else in life I just had to accept it. Since everything was questionable, there was no reason to question any of it. In the end, was it really that strange to meet a drug dealer who spoke fluent English, or watch a couple guys haul in a tin drum with a fucked up fish cooling inside it? There was nothing to say that couldn’t happen, that in this world things like that never did. I was on an island, and the natives trolled the seas all day, every day. Who knows what kind of bizarre shit they haul up in their nets? Just because I’d never seen a fish like that didn’t mean it didn’t exist, and just because none of this felt real didn’t mean that it wasn’t.
I took my beer and drained it. Empty, I could see the tags scrawled on the surface of the table through the bottom of the filmy glass. Most of them were Japanese characters I couldn’t understand, random doodles, but one of them stood out. I’d seen it somewhere before, but i couldn’t be bothered trying to sort out when. What difference did it make? I laughed.
“To be honest,” I said. “I’m kind of freaking out.”
“Yes,” he said, not looking up from his nails. “It’s fucked.”