A Future Paucity

“You can say anything in English,” one of the highest level students says to a Japanese teacher. Then he tells her that he will shoot her in the head. She is disturbed by this, but when she tells me the story, I laugh. and say to her, “Did you tell him, ‘You’re right, you can say anything in English--you fucking idiot’?” She says, “Uhhhnnn. I should have said that.”

We are waiting for the last train out of Ginza when we have this conversation. The last train out of Ginza gets me near Higashi-Mukojima, but not into Higashi-Mukojima. It will be another train and a cab ride before I am home. Home is still an hour and two-thousand five hundred yen away.

Ben, the Japanese teacher and I step off the train at Nippori. Ben complains because had we gotten off at Ueno, we could have caught the same train we’re waiting for, only earlier. “We’d be sitting right now,” he complains. I laugh and hit him with some more you-can-say-anything-in-English English, “Why don’t you quit your bitching?” I say.

It is cold and he’s left his suit jacket at work. He rolls down the sleeves of his shirt and jams his hands into his pockets. The Japanese teacher is warm with drink. I am dressed warmly. She and I laugh at Ben. “We’d better get fucking seats on this train,” he says, shivering.

The train pulls into the station and I pull out my gaijin card and push my way to the head of the line. I am first on the train. Knowing that Japanese hesitate to sit next to a foreigner, I take a seat three seats from the end. This way there will be three open seats, two of them to my right. But the Japanese teacher sits next to me. This does leave the last seat open, but since she is not foreign, people do not hesitate to sit next to her. Ben is the last of our group of three to get on the train. Before he can sit next to the other teacher, a man takes the seat we had been trying to save.

I burst out laughing as Ben does the Japanese musical chair train dance, dodging and weaving as he tries to find an open seat. The Japanese teacher and I watch and laugh and laugh. We try to be quiet--everyone here is eerily quiet on trains--and fai. Finally Ben finds a seat opposite us. He wedges himself between two guys who are not pleased with the situation.

I double up with laughter. So does the Japanese teacher. Ben starts to make faces at us and to act like some of the other train passengers, first reading over the shoulder of the man next to him, then slumping over in feigned sleep, much to the dismay of the man who he slumps against.

The Japanese teacher and I pull out our phones, laughing. “Ya can’t take pictures on the train,” Ben admonishes us. We unfold our phones and hold them up in front of our faces, framing images of Ben. I am laughing so hard that the images blur.

We have been drinking in Ginza with a few of the students from The Kaisha who hang out with Ben and have since day one. They are a great group for the most part. One of them is delightful. He is an enormous nerd, quite handsome and partial to three-piece suits. He majored in economics and who now works as an auditor for an enormous international banking firm. Last night, he endeared himself to me by using several phrases that you just don’t hear students use: “universally recognized” was one. “Doppelganger” was another. He also coined a phrase that I engraved in The Brain for my own future use: In describing what happens when one doesn’t do laundry for weeks on end, he said, “You get into a closet crisis.”

“Closet crisis,” I repeated. “I love that term.” He beams at my praise.

Cleaning Up

It is early and I am cleaning up ‘round the apaato. I move my dresser and find something I have never seen before: a hand-grip exerciser. Huh? I do not own a hand-grip exerciser. The Brain grapples with this unfamiliar object. I think: Ben has a key to my apaato, a just-in-case key. I wonder: Has he been in my apaato? Perhaps just to have a look around? I wonder, but the thought that Ben might have been rooting around in my apartment doesn’t concern me really. I have nothing to hide--not just from Ben, but from anyone. But even if Ben had come down, why would he leave behind a hand-grip exerciser?

I put the hand-grip exerciser on my altar, a symbol in the dream that is my waking life, a symbol that I am not yet able to interpret in the dream that is my waking life.

I continue to clean. I need to change the sheets on my futon, so I lift it up and find something else: A student’s attendance slip. Huh? I have seen this before. Students sign in at The Kaisha using a card to access their schedule on a computer. The computer prints out a slip that they hand to the teacher. This is one of those slips. On the slip is the student’s name and the name of the class. On this slip is the date and my name. This slip has a note written on the back. I routinely write notes about students on the back of slips, little reminders of things that I’ve talked to students about. The name on the slip that I find under my futon is that of the handsome businessman. On the back of the slip is the note I’d written about him the first day I went out drinking with him, a note about his hobby. I don’t put the slip on my altar. It is a symbol in the dream that is my waking life, but I can interpret this symbol.

Please Correct Him

I am sitting across from a man who does medical research for one of the most prestigious laboratories in Japan. There are only the three of us in the room: Me, him, and his Brain. His Brain takes up the most space and we have to move several desks to the room’s periphery to accommodate it. He is practicing a presentation that he will give in English at a conference at the end of this month. The presentation is about the derivation and use of mathematical formulas to determine the conditions necessary for cell-type diversity in multicellular organisms.

I correct his English pronunciation of the terms he uses in his Real Life, in his research. I correct “probabilistic” and catalytic” and “auto-catalytic.” I correct “contiguity” and “contiguous.” I teach him that native English speakers use “greater than” and “less than” rather than “over one” and “under one.” I write a simple mathematical formula on the board to explain what a native speaker pictures in their head when they hear “over one” and “under one.” I teach him “greater than or equal to” and “less than or equal to.” He picks up these corrections with a frightening acuity and applies them in successive statements. I long for students who do this on a regular basis as most of my students appreciate the corrections I make to their grammar and pronunciation--but then completely disregard it when they speak outside the classroom.

Each of The Kaisha teachers with whom The Researcher studied has a story about him. One woman has been sitting in the same room with him and his Brain for the last year or so, in private lessons. I ask her what they study and she tells me that he talks and she nods and tries not to fall asleep. She is the teacher who is very fluent but who has to sound out words over three syllables in length. Another teacher tells me that the researcher’s behavior is...strange. He illustrates it with a story that I won’t repeat. It is strange. The teachers don’t much like him because he is the very definition of otaku. If you look up geek in the dictionary, there is his picture.

It is a pleasure for me to spend this fifty-minute hour with him. I am pleased at the chance to follow a complicated argument, pleased at the what is going on in the classroom during that hour. We are both wrestling with an idea that we each only know a piece of. He has a much greater piece, of course, because it is his work. We wrestle and our wrestling match is complicated by our attempt to meet on some equal ground. He can’t tell whether or not I understand his arguments and that concerns him. He can’t tell whether or not I understand his arguments and he is not sure whether or not if it is important that I do. Both of us are pleased when I appear to be able to.

My Brain is running the whole time we are in the room together with The Researcher. I am chasing his Brain up mountains and down into valleys, the landscape at once familiar and dreamlike. The ideas wend first into the rare air of mathematics, Lindenmeyer systems and modified quantifier elimination formulae. Then we are hurled down the more familiar alleyways of arguments and experimental procedures and conclusions. In some places, the air is rare and it is hard to catch a full breath. In other places the arguments are so rich that it is hard to breathe them in.

In the end, he wants another private lesson and he schedules one with me. He does so at the front desk, in Japanese with the woman who has, up to that moment, been his teacher. She is glad to be rid of him. I am glad to have him.

Later, The Balance Of Power

I am teaching. The handsome businessman is seated on my left and while students do a listening exercise, I happen to glance at the handsome businessman’s textbook. His head is bowed in concentration over his text which is open before him on his desk. I catch sight of my name--my full name, first and last---which is written in capital letters on one of the pages. He has written it and drawn a circle around it. I am amused and a bit...disturbed by this.

Later, as we drink, we talk about his work. This amounts to talking about engines, reciprocating and turbine engines. We talk about the various complications associated with each and the delicate balance of power and safety and speed, a balance that is easily upset by various conditions. We are both tired but we want to talk to each other. I am tired and so instead of trying to figure out how this conversation fits into the dream that is my waking life, I listen and respond as though it is an ordinary conversation. This is a dangerous kind of tired and I know that but I indulge it anyway.

Later, we have to catch the last train out of Ginza. He passes up a train that would save him twenty minutes on his commute in favor of the train that I am taking. Both trains will get him to his destination, but twenty minutes is a significant convenience, especially for a businessman heading home at the end of a long workday. As we stand on the platform of the Yamanote line, I ask him to show me pictures. He doesn’t understand the incongruous request. “Pictures,” I repeat. “Pictures?” he asks. I say, “Get out your phone. I want to see pictures.” Ahhh. He pulls out his phone and shows me pictures of his four year old daughter riding her little pink bike in front of his apartment building. He explains that his teenagers refuse to have their pictures taken. He does not explain the lack of pictures of his wife.

The train arrives. The last train out of anywhere in Tokyo to anywhere else in or out of Tokyo is always packed. This train is no exception and we are pressed against one another. Tokyoites know, from years of practice, all the tricks for minimizing the discomfort of being packed onto trains. In some places in Tokyo, the trains run at 400% capacity. Because the Japanese are very conservative about touching in public, Tokyoites have learned how to arrange themselves in crowded public spaces in order to avoid the uncomfortable feelings associated with being pressed against strangers. The handsome businessman, a lifetime Tokyoite, does not use these tricks. We are pressed together he and I, face to face, familiarly. I am not uncomfortable. I smile at him as he speaks, our faces close, our bodies touching.

Dream

This is still Tokyo and I am still dreaming. I am still dreaming, but I am tired and it is difficult to interpret the dream as I go. I collect the imagery and put it on my altar. I collect the imagery and put it into writing. I collect these times against future times and a future paucity of dreams.