衛星ーSatellites

I rode that bus until I saw train-tracks. I had little idea as to where I was, only that heading back along the tracks would eventually bring me back to a station on the Seibu Kokubunji-line. The novelty of my jimbei and the extra confidence that it had brought me had worn off. It wad dark and it was quiet. I felt boxed in and alone between the privacy walls of the houses to my right and the chain link fence on the rail-bed on my left. There was no wind, and I could hear footsteps and whispers from more than 50 yards down the corridor. I was getting increasingly antsy when stray pedestrians and couples leered at me as I clacked along the footpath,

カラン、コロン 、カラン、コロン 、カラン、コロン 、カラン、コロン 。。。

The rhythmic wooden sound of my footsteps seemed to match the beating of my lonely heart. This kept up for I don't know how long. That's when the disingenuous apology emails started to come.
ブンブン、ブンブン　- -Soon-Mi.

—I'm sorry about tonight. It's just that it was a club event. We'll have lots of fun tomorrow so please don't be upset. Did you find your way back to Taka-no-dai station all right?

F**k that. I know you don't care. I'm inconvenient for you so you're taking the "club-members only" to avoid being seen with me tonight. Or is it staying the night with me you can't stand? I pondered what to type in response over a dozen or more strides. This is where I started the nasty habit of needlessly prevaricating on the severity of my circumstances by email in order to make her feel guilty. I kept that up until last November, when she stopped talking to me. Of all the sh*tty things I did to her up to and since then, this is the only thing I've never apologized for. I doubt I ever will either. memeshii yo!

―Don't be sorry. It's not your fault, it's mine. I'll see you tomorrow. I'm a little lost though. I think I got on the wrong bus.

ブンブン、ブンブン
―where are you?

―If I knew that, I wouldn't have said "lost". Don't worry, I found some train tracks. If I keep walking, I'll get to a station eventually.

ブンブン、ブンブン
―Taka-no-dai?

―I don't know. I'll let you know when I get to a station.

ブンブン、ブンブン
―If you don't find one soon, please call me. I'll come get you.

You wouldn't. You'd let me wander till I found sanctuary or my feet rotted off. You wouldn't know where to start looking, so you'd tell me you're coming for me and wait for me to point out that if by chance I found some landmark for you to navigate to me, that it'd be faster and easier to find my own way than for you to come escort me home. Maybe I should though. Maybe I should make you walk alone in the dark while the party rages somewhere back down the road. See how that feels.

Momentarily I came up on Taka-no-dai station exactly as my earlier intuition predicted. I decided to let her wait though. I hoped vainly that I was causing her to worry. I had changed trains at Kokubunji and was near Kunitachi when I let her know that I had sighted a train station,
―I can see a station!
―What one?
I paused another two minutes.
―Koigakubo! (The station in between Kokubunji and Taka-no-dai.) The idea was to increase the pathetic link between the me and my audience by playing up the fictive comic irony of having taken a wrong turn and walked all the way to the next station when I could have feasibly gone the other way and arrived within minutes. Same basic tactic as before: Cute. Stupid. Love me.

ブンブン、ブンブン Here comes the response, oh poor you Teddo, shaanai naa kikiki...

―You're an idiot. How did get that far out of the way?

Another brilliant plot foiled. Great, I've basically ratified everything she already thought about me. Can't you at least come to the conclusion that it's your fault because you sent me home without any directions? Watch, I bet she's gonna cancel on me tomorrow night too. I got out at Hino station and forced my blistered feet another half-mile up the hill to my apartment. I considered cutting my losses and just going to bed, but I hand't any food in my belly or my fridge and there was an outstanding promise I had to the staff at the fish grill in Hachiōji to make it out one more time before I left Tokyo. Only five more days now? Then my summer of lame would be over. I changed up and hit the road.

I was at the fish grill by about 10 o'clock. Special. Tuna sashimi, potato salad, charcoal grilled red fish whose name I did not know. Cheap Shōchu. By the time I was through the appetizers and my first glass, I had already asked Kasumi out. She'd tried to talk around it in order to avoid rejecting me, but I wasn't in the mood for "reading the atmosphere" as they say here. She leveled that she had boyfriend who she'd recently snagged after two long semesters of going stood-up and unnoticed. How do you ignore a girl whose that good looking? Like she's 7/8ths at least. I mean, I saw in her short-shorts after her shift ended last time I came and almost ended up in church the next morning because shape of her ass was the best argument for intelligent design that I've ever seen. Maybe he wasn't ignoring her. Maybe he just knows what he's doing.

Unlike me. Look at me, I write essays on dating tactics like I'm some kind of net-guru and the hottest girl I've ever landed was a total accident. It's all f**king coincidences. If her daddy had stuck around she'd prolly never have turned out a brain-case paris-hilton wannabe with a thing for Kiefer Sutherland, and I'd've never had the chance with her. If I hadn't rolled into the club with two CEOs on expense accounts and ran a bill of $800 for the party, she'd've prolly never emailed me. If they hadn't tossed their spare yen on me, I would've never had the cash for the $150 sushi dinner and the $120 hotel room a week later. I'm nothing without my money. All my charm and eccentricity are bought and paid for grandpa's well invested jew-gold and the leisurely lifestyle my father gave me. People only liked me in high school because I had a car and a hot tub and my fridge was always full. Without all that sh*t I'm just another frustrated manga-nerd with 0 degrees latitude, jealously reading about some rich kid's adventures in Japan on the computer screen.


I can't be that bad. She payed for the hotel herself on the second night, and bought me dinner. She told me she loved me after the third home-run in 24 hours. ...BCG cried the day she left me. I never spent a penny on her. She told me my words were beautiful. She told me I'd be famous one day, that she was glad she knew me before it happened.

.
.
.

I always end up at the same place. Like a satellite. Stuck. In geostationary orbit. Moving at incredible speeds—3.07 km/s over Japan, 30 km/s around the sun, 630 km/s around the galactic center, 967 km/s away from the local supercluster—relatively nowhere. Neither unique- -just a cold object in space on a limited lifespan receiving information and shooting it off in a different direction a million-billion times before I expire. F**k this. Life's not worth having principles. I opened my phone and went to my inbox and opened the email from the bar skank.

That's funny. I don't recall offering to repay the drink. I must've been drunker than I thought. ww (^ ^#)> You're quite persistent Mr. Smith, maybe I should give you a chance.


—Hey, sorry I didn't get back to you sooner. It was my last week on the job, so I was really busy. I'd love for you to buy me a drink, but I'd rather take you out for dinner as an apology.

I was finished the entree and into my third glass of K-hooch when she wrote back.
—Well then, let me know when you have time. I'll make it worth your while. (insert winking emoticon here)
.
.
.
—Of course. I'll let you know. Have a good night. Jaa ne~

I sat, sobering up with my heart beating, half in my batting stance, for five minutes trying to compute whether or not I'd follow that up. And then, in a guilty flash, like a cell-phone camera in love-hotel with the lights off- -Soon-Mi's reproach from my sniveling self-deprication four days ago came back to me.

---

'There's nothing good left in me is there?' *sobs*
*sighs* 'It's not like that...there are many good things about you...you're...very kind, and you look closely at the things around you, and...think deeply. Maybe that's your problem. You make bad decisions because you think about things too much, and you don't accept simple answers like the rest of us.'

---

Hold yourself to a higher standard Teddo. There are golden rules left in the universe so long as you believe in capital "R" relativity. The satellite is a testament to the glory of human achievement. Proof that we reach beyond our bounds. The greatest escape from the place of our lowly origins and the confines of our mortal scale.

I promptly deleted 東山祥子 out of my address book, and promptly hated myself for it. There goes my last home-run chance of the summer. Soon-Mi is going to cancel on me tomorrow afternoon, right before I'm about to leave for Yokohama, and we'll have another protracted falling out and then I'll leave and I'll never see her again and there's not a goddamn thing I can do about it.

I made eye contact with Kasumi. She smiled at me and hoisted a tray of beers and edamame over her head and trotted off upstairs. I yelled at Toshi and the other one (forgot his name) and asked them if they wanted to hit the clubs tonight. Toshi got excited, the other one made excuses. Toshi said he knew a place and he'd call me after he closed up. I settled up and told him I was going to go somewhere where drinks were cheaper for the next hour or two. That was a lie. I was going to somewhere expensive and fake.

I sucked back the rest of my drink and fired off a quick and meaningless email to Yuki.

“I still love you.”

Meaning, in the words I suppose, but she’d long since changed her address. I’d been getting bounce-backs on every single one of my email accounts for a long time. 謝り wasn’t the first time I’d tried apologizing to her. It was the first time I admitted to it. My apologizes had been rebounding off satellites into the vastness of space for over a year. Received by no one on earth. Maybe millions of years after I cease to be, some alien race from a star I’d seen sometimes nightly from my various dwellings on tiny earth will intercept and decode them and know that I was sorry for what I’d done to Yuki Saitoh. Perhaps they wouldn’t understand. Perhaps their civilization won’t be cursed by myths of love—or perhaps they in their less-finite alien wisdom will have discovered a way to say “dreams don’t come true” without being pretentious and arguing that “dreams can come true” without being naïve. It’s silly though that we assume an alien race might be more advanced than us. Technological capability set aside, if they have a language then they have a literature. If they have a literature then it is likely just as stupid, misleading and pointless as ours. Tales told by idiots full of sound and fury… There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. More things. Alien literature. Think of all the books on earth in languages I don’t know that I’ll never read. Think of all the possible books in the vastness of space from alien worlds I’ve never dreamt of, in futures and pasts unimaginable.



Space.




Space is infinite. I wouldn’t know, I just read that in a book once. I should stop trusting what I read in books.

I closed my cellphone and stepped out. It smelled like rain but the sky was clear. I decided I skip on over to the “Sunshine Club”. The first Cyba-kura I’d ever set foot into in Japan all of two year ago. I was going to use my own money to pay a beautiful girl to talk to me, and maybe give me a cell-phone number to go with her fake name. It was a fifteen minute walk to the club, past all the same Chinese "massage" girls that I saw on Thursday and up the stairs. It was 30 minutes to be seated, and another 15 before a drink came, and it was another 15 before the girl. She sat down and lit a cigarette just before midnight.

'Oh, I'm sorry, do you mind if I smoke?' was the first thing she said to me. I waved permissively. She introduced herself as "Aoi". It sounded fake. I could tell right away by her demeanor she was just doing this for the money and hated the customers at this place.
'What's your last name miss Aoi?'
'- -Saitoh.'
I avoided making any biographical remarks. 'Common last name.'
'Sou desu nee...What's yours?'
'Smith.'
'Haha, just like the English textbook.'
'...So you're a student?'
'Yes. How'd you guess?'
'You're younger. Lots of girls your age do this for a part time job.'
'You go to Cyaba-kura often then.'
'No. This is my third time.'
'I see...'
'So...where do you go to school?'
'Kanagawa [blank] University'
'Major?'
'I don't know yet...I was thinking environment. What do you think?'
'I think it suits you.'
'Thank you. What did you study in collgee.'
'English lit and Japanese...'
'Really? ...'
'Yeah.'
.
.
.
'Sorry, you said your name was Aya?'
'Yeah- -no, "Aoi"'
'Right- -Aina, do you like sports?'
I watched her twitch, a half second later than you would expect a person to if you just snubbed their supposed name like I just did. It was definitely fake. I'd have to get the real one out of her if I wanted to get her talking. Let her know that I appreciate how fake this is. Make me seem realer to her. Then she'd ask why I was here. Then I'd tell her the story- -half of it. Then I'd have something to work with. I agreed the specialty fee to keep her at my table. It took me about 20 minutes to break her. I basically kept asking questions about her childhood and screwed up her name intentionally and then re-asked questions from five minutes earlier in different phrasing until she accidentally referred to herself as "Mimi".
"Mimi hey?"
She froze up and put her head down on the table and started laughing.
'You're not a pro are you?'
'No.' she said, lifting her head up 'It's club policy to have a fake name. Too many weirdos hang around here, give trouble to the girls.'
'Weirdos like me?'
'No,' she said, laughing again, 'You seem pretty normal too me.' She poured me my third complimentary brandy mizu-wari.
'So, how long you been doing this?
'Just two months. I started because it's so expensive living in Tokyo.'
'More than Wakayama?'
'A lot more.'
'You're actually from Wakayama? That wasn't made up too?'
Again she laughed. 'Yes. I am actually. But I moved to Chiba when I was in middle school.'
'Explains why you don't have an accent.'
'You can here that?'
'I can. I can speak Kansai-ben too, wanna hear?'
'Sure.'

＊　　＊　　＊

I got her card. It had a club phone number on it right under the fake name, but she didn't write her email address. I gave her mine, and told her to mail me if she wanted to talk somewhere "more real". She told me to come see her at the club again if I had time. I left. All in all dissatisfied. Notwithstanding basic pleasantries, she failed to pay trivial compliments on my Japanese and my humor, and she let herself talk for too long while not asking enough questions about her client. I got only half the ego boost I was looking for and no new leads. And because it was Saturday special rates applied so I ended up paying a $30 surcharge ontop of the $30 "one-girl" fee, and the $30 hourly rate with taxes came out to 10001¥. That was a waste of f**king money and I was never going to see her again. I could only hope that Toshi was going to show me a better time.

I got back to the fish-grill at 1:05 and waited until 1:50 for Toshi to close up. I was exhausted. As we skipped from place to place he did most of the talking. He told me about coming up in Shizuoka and his surfer years, and showed me pictures of his wife and kid. He's 24. I recited a condensed version of why I had nothing better to do on a Saturday than lounge around a Hachiōji Yakizakana shop for three hours. Sometime during my 8th inning, I sighted a dyed-blonde and a brunette-highlights/semi-perm with LV bags and lace-up sandals. They kept looking at me, and one of them even waved.
'I should go talk to those girls.' I said abruptly after a long period of silence.
'Better not man. I think one of them is the Bartender's girlfriend.'
The Bartender was enormous. 'You're right.' I said. 'Better not.'

Some time close to four, we were walking down another street and he said it was near his house, and he should probably go home because he had work the next day at 12. I apologized for being lame and too drunk, and he said we'd have a better time next time, go to a Cyaba-kura maybe. I said goodnight and plodded off in some easterly direction, unsure of where to go next.

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Batting Stats!!～
At Bats 74
Hits 25
1B 5
2B 4
3B 10
HR 7
BB 5
RBI 20
Struck Out 25
AVG .338

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Part of trip: The Summer of Lame

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