I’ll leave at four fifteen, when the rain’s over

It’s raining out. Mellow winter afternoon light sieving through an old fashioned translucent orange drape adorned with flower motif vertical stripes. Mildly warm yellow walls rough plastered and cave like, clearly not an upmarket establishment. A hundred dollars rent a week in the home of a Hispanic taxi driver on the upper west side of Manhattan, right in the middle of the black district Harlem. The room slants sideways, from the closet and the cabinet on the right to the door and the single iron-frame bed on the left, making everything appear to be perpetually toppling fifteen degrees. Scattered boots and footwear and stockings and socks. A pile of unwashed sweaters and cardigans vital in the harsh New York winter on top the fake ornamented French cabinet. A sixty litre backpack slumps against it, long emptied and waiting for the trip back to where it came from - Singapore, island in the tropical equatorial sun. A black plastic bag that fills up with unwashed laundry (but never dirty; nothing she wears is ever dirty) towards the end of every week and emptied out by the start of the next. A make shift rubbish can fashioned out of a tissue paper box at the end of its life. Bags from Zara, Topshop and Uniqlo, and a pile of slightly disarrayed white papers printed with details of several New York apartments she has scrapped from the office junk pile, thinking it might be useful somehow; in any case she could throw it away if it’s too much and too useless. A stack of Rubber Maid airtight containers on the cabinet top, one containing unsalted Nabisco tops which are crunched down every night as the preferred fat-and-sugar-free snack, one containing a Korean red-bean pastry bun that she has taken home from the office (one of those days when she actually has real food for lunch) where the Korean employee next office had on Friday put out a tray of those delicious Asian things on the pantry top and she found herself drawn to it and unable to resist when they are left over at the end of the day. The tuna bun she has already eaten on Saturday afternoon and it was to her a semblance of what Heaven would be like. The third empty container with the blue lid and steam opening houses five days a week two slices of Pepperidge Farm multigrain and invariably either half a 3.5oz can of tuna/Alaskan salmon/chicken breast meat chunks or a sliced half-apple. Beside the containers sits a white mug imprinted with a sketch of the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum she had visited on the second day of her arrival. In the mug layer upon layer of microscopic green tea residue coats the once smooth ceramic. In the incinerator somewhere far away lies the remnant of three tea bags a day which she consumes as a necessity to life in general. Not so long ago, perhaps half an hour ago, she had been lying on the grape wine red duvet basking in the twenty three degrees Celsius air of the pipe heated room (which in autumn threatened to bake her while she sleeps but now proves to be life saving in winter) and listening to Thee Michelle Gun Elephant’s early youthful bursts of energy and world-challenging nonchalance towards things. Ideals which she thought every decent twenty-three year old should have. Then on comes Boogie, the song which moves something inside her convoluted inner organs - convoluted for so long that even if she opens up and dives into it she would not be able to straighten anything up because they have already taken on an identity and a form. As it is, she is no longer nineteen, or twenty, or twenty-one, or twenty-two. She is no longer even the twenty-three year old in late June of 2009 before she flew to Tokyo. And now she is no longer the twenty-three year old of early October before she came to New York City. Boogie played and resonated bass-lessly (because she is playing from a Lenovo laptop, small and light and fuss free – all laptops ought to be like that, just that the screen is too small for serious Photoshop and AutoCAD work; but even then, she thought she might even make it work, if not for the fact that computer renderings would probably consume too much for this lightweight here. But, anyway, she has very little regard for renderings or people who think that reality can be represented by manicured graphics. But the irony is, those are the people who generally suck at producing renderings, anyway) from the four walls of the compact and economically furnished room. She would like to have bass in her music, of course, but it couldn’t be helped with laptop speakers. Music without bass is like – she wanted to say a house without a foundation – but that’s inaccurate. It is not a house at all. It is a house that lacks. And so Boogie came on. And that is why she thought nobody will ever understand her, because they are too stupid. Sure, there is 5% of the population who are not stupid, but they are just as isolated as she is. As she is now, completely and totally isolated from anyone who was ever slightly close to her, in any way. And she doesn’t dislike it. Boogie made her think about a lot of things. She is still changing, and still going on, and Boogie sums it all up and Boogie doesn’t know and neither does she. But she thought, and she knew, that when she’s thirty or forty she won’t be listening to Boogie anymore. Because thirty or forty year olds who still listen to music with lyrics are really the bottom of the pile. She will definitely be listening to Liszt or the likes. Real music now, without words. For a long time now, she thought words are too limiting. But there’s not much she can do, right now, because she doesn’t possess her own space with a set of good speakers. Listening to good music without good speakers is like reading a badly translated novel. But as it is, most people won’t even care, because they don’t know the difference between a good novel and a bad one. That’s why, she thought, that’s why there is so much crap in the world.

From outside came the pattering of rain. Glancing out through the lifted drape and the rain splashed glass, she realized that it is still going on, the cleansing of the earth. Two nights ago she watched the 1994 film Picnic by Shunji Iwai, who, to her, is a genius. Of course she has watched that a long time ago, but with nothing to do on Friday night and no internet access (she free-loads on signals when they’re available, if not, it doesn’t bother her much because she doesn’t maintain any crucial communication with anyone anyway) she watched it again. She thought the kiss was epic. Asanobu and Chara probably really and finally fell in love at that point. It was raining, in that scene. Coco was holding a tattered black umbrella eighty percent filled with holes over the trembling and frightened Tsumuji. Tsumuji was tortured by his sins, while Coco wasn’t. Coco, didn’t care – about her sins, his sins, or anyone’s sins. Coco, was free.

Free. She thought people who talk about freedom don’t know what they are talking about. Once they are free, she thought, they begin to feel unsettled and they wish they could see some boundary and some sense of connection to the earth. She thought, people think it is so easy to be free, she thought, but they couldn’t even lift one finger themselves to open the lock that is there holding them back, a lock that doesn’t exist in all but name. She doesn’t mean political freedom or tangible, black and white things like that, of course. She doesn’t mean anything that you could discuss about with people in smart suits and notepads, or anything you could talk about with the feminists or the activists or the whatever organizations non-governmental or not that pepper the society. Societies and organizations are to her already one step in the other direction. What direction, she is not sure of, but certainly they are not the kind of people she would let within a mile of her inner organs.

She’s leaving at four fifteen, presumably when the rain’s over, to meet a couple from Singapore. Her boss has introduced them to her via email. Her boss is really nice, he thinks it would be great for them to meet up and they could perhaps orientate her in this big city. But she thought, that’s sure nice, but I’ve already been here for two months. In the email, the woman wrote – let us know if you need any help. That is very sweet, she thought, but if I needed anyone’s help, I won’t be here now. Nobody has ever given her a grain of help in anything that really matters. Isn’t it stupid, she thought, to offer help to someone just in name? She thought, if I had to wait for help in anything that matters, I would be like the ninety-five percent of people who would die without achieving anything. She thought, the ninety-five percent who live though life normally and happily with their friends and their troubles and their support and their families and their human ties and their warm environments of grossly understandable human connections and relationships and mediocre attempts at everything that they do. Then they die. Then I die, she thought.

Then I die, she thought. And who was better off? She is only twenty-three. Cut her some slack, she thought. Maybe by the summer of 2010, she would have understood a little more. Or not. In any case, she will go on. She will give her best at everything that she does. Because that’s called character. She is, despite everything, really staunch in this thing called character. She will leave, at four fifteen.


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posted by sj @ Sunday, December 13, 2009 3:06 PM | permalink |