Because I Expect Nothing

Because I expect nothing, it doesn’t matter if nothing makes any sense.

I spent the day at Yoyogi Park and wandering Shibuya, Harajuku, Omotesando, and Aoyama with Ben and Seth. Ahh. A day. It was a day.

Because I expect nothing, it doesn’t matter if nothing makes any sense.

On the day I went to Shinjuku to find out from Rars that my blog and photos had been found, I met a new guy named Anthony. As we rode the train out of Shinjuku, I asked him how long he’d been in Tokyo. Four days, he replied. Oh, which school? Ginza school, he said. Ginza school is about two minutes away from Yurakucho. I told him he should stop by sometime. I told Ben about Anthony, mentioning the fact that Anthony was also an Aussie from Sydney. A few days later Ben met Anthony. Turns out that Anthony went to Ben’s high school, was one of Ben’s older brother’s mates.

I had, in the last week, a conversation with a student about another teacher, a woman who left over a year ago. (I asked Ben about her and he said that she was like me in that she was very smart. He did not say how she was unlike me.) We are walking down the street in Aoyama and Ben’s phone rings and he answers and it’s the former teacher who is now in another country. Ben speaks with her for a bit then hands me the phone. I talk to a drunk woman, a very genki woman, a woman who is very smart, yes, but also very very unlike me. I speak briefly with her and then hand the phone back to Ben. While he continues to chat, we continue to walk, looking for a Thai restaurant we'd passed earlier. We turn the corner into Omotesando and run into a couple that Ben knows. One member of the couple used to be the head teacher at Yurakucho when the woman who is on the phone worked there. The other member of the couple is also a former teacher. Ben puts the head teacher and the former teacher on the phone with each other, then he introduces us to the other former teacher. We ask the standard question: Where are you from? Oh, Chicago, the former teacher replies. Seth’s from Chicago, Ben says. Seth says, Where in Chicago? Turns out they grew up a few miles from each other.

I meet the other new teacher at Ginza school. She has just finished training and is still hyper-genki-fied. As she in-your-face’s me, I want to tell her, Honey, take a breath, okay? There are no trainers watching you right now. You can either be a real person for a minute or I can wrestle you to the ground and knock The Kaisha out of you. She asks the standard question: Where are you from? I answer Albuquerque. Oh, she squeaks, I’ve been there. I ask why. She replies, My grandparents live in Albuquerque.

Because I expect nothing, it doesn’t matter if nothing makes any sense.

Many people wear t-shirts with English writing on them. Sometimes the writing doesn’t quite make sense, but I’ve decided that the writing always suits the occasion somehow. I’ve decided to work nonsensical t-shirts backwards. I’ve decided that the nonsensical t-shirts that I encounter everyday are like the fortunes that one draws at random in the shrines in Japan.

Last night, for example, as I came up the subway stairs into the Ginza, I passed a man wearing a t-shirt. It said, “You will be sorry.” Having come to Ginza on my night off for a going-away dinner and drinking party that I hadn’t really wanted to attend, I was already feeling pretty sorry.

Today’s t-shirt was “Do you have to repeat a mistake?”

I pulled out a pen to write it on my arm. I have paper, Seth said watching me. Thanks, I said, I have paper too. Some things you have to write on yourself I asked, Did you see Memento? He has. He understands.

Later, as we wander from Harajuku back into Shibuya, I write the words BREAK ME on my palm. BREAK ME is not something I’ve seen on a t-shirt, but it is something that I have to write on my body at that moment. BREAK ME is a kind of prayer, my request to the universe that I use when I find myself being jaded to wonder.

Because I expect nothing, it doesn’t matter if nothing makes any sense.

I wake, feverish.

We have been drinking and drinking and drinking. Seth gets up and goes to the bathroom and he’s drunk. He’s the kind of drunk that the Japanese call deisui. He’s smashed, I mean, smashed nearly to pieces. I’m deisui too and I need to go to the bathroom too. Just to freak Seth out, I decide to go into the men’s room. I go in, squat, and pee all over the floor, because I squat the way Japanese toilets require you to, but there is no Japanese toilet in the room. When I finish, Seth is still in the stall. Disappointed that my joke didn’t work, but not wanting to stick around the men’s room, I go back out to the bar.

“We’re leaving,” someone says to me. The person who has spoken to me is one of two dark-haired women who I almost don’t know. The two women are only dream-familiar to me, I mean. I tell her that Seth is still in the bathroom. One of them goes in to collect Seth. She comes back. I ask, Where’s Seth?

She says, Seth’s dead.

Dead, I say. Seth’s dead?

“Let’s go,” she says.

I follow her out of the bar. We go out to the car and as I climb into the back seat, I can smell Seth’s scent in the car. The car has a hatchback and I can see that there is a large object at the back of the car. The object is covered with a heavy, carpet-like cloth. I think, That must be Seth’s body. And then I know that it is because the object moves, uncovers itself. Seth sits up and I think, ah, chigao. No, Seth, I think, chigao. You’re dead.

I wake and remind myself of something I’ve known for years. I remind myself that dreams about death are really dreams about change.

Because I expect nothing, it doesn’t matter if nothing makes any sense.

I came to Tokyo for a reason. What is that reason?

I came to Tokyo to wrangle a demon, a big one. I won’t name him the way I name the others, because speaking his name is not a pleasant thing to do. Instead I’ll call him The Demon I Came To Meet On The Kanto Plane and I will tell you that he is one of the major demons, one of the demons that shapes my life and all my interactions with other people.

Because I expect nothing, it doesn’t matter if nothing makes any sense.

On Friday, the handsome businessman came to Ben’s class instead of mine. I ran into him in the lobby and he apologized and it seemed as though he were going to often an excuse but I didn’t give him time because I didn’t want to want to hear an excuse from him.

I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed, but I have yet to figure out why.

We thanked each other for a pleasant evening the last time we saw each other and his thanking me and my thanking him was only our engaging in so many Japanese social niceties.

Even while I returned the thanks, my face burned and burned, hot.