Tabidachi (Starting a Journey)

Hello hello! Boy, am I glad to be here! It's the first writing exercise I've done after a long while. LJ still wins hands down in terms of formatting and publishing ease, although I haven't lost hope that after slogging in the HTML code long enough, this blog will finally take a decent shape.
 
Tabidachi - Starting a Journey
Summary: It all starts with a pickup line, even in the oddest kind of circumstance.

Note: The Yoshida Brothers' 2003 namesake album inspired this. Tabidachi is the first song.

The first thing that came to his mind when West stepped into the train car was how the stench of humans repulsed him so. Odors that came from stale aftershave, unwashed dried sweat, and just day-to-day mixture of musk and growing germs made him want to gag. He never had any difficulty with non-human waste, yet the thought, simply the thought of touching another human body was beyond his imagination. It was practicality — next train in ten minutes and just as aromatic as this one—that kept his feet moving deeper into the confine, searching for a solid, undisturbed space to stand during the thirty-minute ride. Preferably one where the air-conditioner blew through the vent in generous bursts. Preferably one least conspicuous where he could look up to the ceiling and swallow the air without incurring questions.

Usually trying to stay afloat above the stink failed immediately, but the beauty of adaptation is that after a while, one will get used to it. And that was what happened. It was like being submerged in a tank full of amniotic fluid and the pressure would make the liquid raze your lungs until they remembered how to breathe in water again. A shudder would take place and then he would be fooled into thinking that the air cleared up.

If he had his way, he would be living inside a sterile bubble, never letting go of the isolation regardless of bodily threats.

But he had had training. Social rehabilitation programme, Mrs. Jenkins called it. Letting you go to the society, one step at a time. Designed especially for the loners, the ones who live mostly inside their own heads. The ones who didn’t know how to look at you in the eye and say how are you. Opening the door to the world beyond what that Jenkins woman nicknamed his ‘hell’ and creating opportunities for him to meet other people. Make friends, create associations, and network. How he loathed that word. There was nothing that he hated more than realizing he was a part of a larger system that touched everybody in this world, and nothing he could’ve done would void it or at least lessen the insult.

West was a special case in the programme. No criminal record, clean attendance, and no alarming habits like skinning cats alive or collecting desiccated body parts. He’d known one boy who did that — Yari Moskowitz’s room looked like the result of a mass burial, except that more than one species were interned there. It would not be discovered if Yari was as diligent as maintaining his collection as he was zealous in procuring them. The dead giveaway that made police and social workers raid his place was the persistent discoveries of bone splinters and dried rodent heads under his windowsills. His mother, the overworked and under-appreciated single-parent who held two jobs, decided one day to clean his room because she could smell something rotten coming out of it. What she discovered spurned a hysteric call to 911 and within the hour, she let them take her twelve-year-old son away to be re-educated.

Yari wasn’t bitter about his mother and he continued being a slob. The re-education, however, wasn’t doing him any good since he got more withdrawn, if possible, and he was prohibited from coming within ten feet around small animals.

The train jerked to a halt, and somebody bumped into West’s shoulder. The young bleached-haired woman next to him mumbled an apology and went back checking her blackberry. It was just an instant, but he caught the whisper of her thought,


… wonder how many have seen my profile…?


and to his dismay realized he was doing it again. He would like to tell her that despite whatever notion she had of herself, she Did Not Matter, and a few years back he would’ve said it. But the re-education had brought control and he bit lightly on the tongue, enough to apply pressure, trying to contain the antipathy rising as bile. He inched away from her. Didn’t help much. The floodgate was wide open.

Tapping into a part of the network was what he called it. Other people might call it using its popular term, mind reading, but he begged to differ. There was nothing intelligent like reading involved in this kind of occurrence. There was no effort; it was like being faced with the scenery in front of you or confronted with noises, your body reacted instinctively, drawn to the stimuli. You can’t stop your ears from hearing, bar plugging it or destroying the eardrums. And despite the irritation, he was rather attached to his brain, the organ that made him go through these unpleasant tingles now and then. It wasn’t an ability, more like a condition. He really didn’t want to know what the other person was thinking — didn’t care to know what slithers in their minds, their utmost desires, their losses, and perpetual degradation. Everybody was going the wrong way, including him, who got caught in the network.


…shall I go to the supermarket or the deli…?
   …the nude looks better, but black is sexier...
     …her tits are showing, the slut…
       …oh god oh god oh god, help me…
         …I’m so tired, so tired, why the hell is that guy looking at me like that, stop it freak…


This was why he hated trains. Too many people, too many worms, too many of everything and he didn’t want any of them. Worse, sometimes they didn’t come as words whose shapes were distinct and he could train himself to ignore, but as images. Before words, before sounds, before the naming of things, there were just the sights, deep rooted recognition of ideas burned into the retinas--things unnamed and could not be named, things whereby the human vocabulary was severely tested and failed. A face of a person, a distended pair of stockings, an underwear with blood on it, a bell, a piano, an empty bottle, a street, a pie chart, and many, many more tangled in the lattice of interspersing thoughts. Each with its own history and story, and sometimes just an abstract of emotions.

He covered the lower half of his face and took a deep breath.

There was a man in a suit leaning against the metal bar next to the train door. He’d been unemployed for three months and was on the ride home from a job interview. Prospect didn’t look too promising and he worried about the bills. A woman sitting on the seat to his left had her eyes closed. She was pretending to sleep so she didn’t have to see the old lady who latched to the handrail above her. It was easy for her to pretend, as she’d been doing it for most of her adult life. The youth next to her had his gaze fixated on a pretty blonde standing in front of him. Her buns were in his direct line of sight and he itched to touch himself. The blonde herself had not been blonde till yesterday, and she was feeling quite good because she knew people stared at her.

Seven more stops.

Crowd coming in and out, the train getting more jammed. The bottleneck near the doors prevented people from coming further into the interior. A bunch of private high school girls in their short skirts, their young breasts jutting out, deep in gossips and everything else that mattered in their conjured world. Nearby, a balding man lusted after them while his wife continued chattering about their own daughter’s problems.

Again the train came to stop, six more stations.


… I think I’m having my period…
   …stupid, lazy man…
      …why is it so hard to just say I wanna quit…


The words continued to float and he didn’t have an effective method to shut them out. Every single of of these bodies inside the train had something to say. He disliked the whining, especially the ones that got repeated over and over again like a prayer till the meaning was lost. Obsessions, he could understand, but there was few things more repulsive than the perverse joy of being a victim. Shut the fuck up, he wanted to shout.


…this stinkin’ city like no other…
   …does he know about us…
     …look at her thighs, I’d die if mine were that big…


The fifth stop before his rolled into view and the train came to a halt. The bleached-hair ed woman exited, trailing her questions, and was replaced by a bespectacled man in white T-shirt and green-colored jeans. His head was covered in a bright floral scarf and his left wrist bandaged. A brief glance told West that his neighbor had a good face—straight nose, thin lips, and wide mouth. A university man, an underground poetry man, a struggling artist man, a psychiatric patient man, or just a man who liked to read books titled “Drinking Fat” upside down.

He was also a man who was awfully quiet mentally.

The realization that he could sense nothing from the man next to him scared West for a minute. For the first time in many years he felt at lost, he couldn’t immediately place the person next to him in the hierarchy of the world. There was no label, no description that screamed themselves out to him, no black and white decision. He was as blind as the others in regard of this entity. With him, the switch was permanently ‘off’.

The man caught West staring.

He lifted up his book and said, “I know you’re wondering if I’m a nutjob, but rest assured, I’m not. This is an exercise to train the mind.”

West didn’t know what to say, so he fell back into the program. The first thing that Mrs. Jenkins’ school had taught him. “Hello. How are you?”

The not-a-nutjob didn’t miss a single beat. “Fine, thank you. If you have questions, I’ll be more than happy to answer.”

“Good to hear that. I’m fine myself.”

“That’s good. Nothing better than being able to say it. We need more fine people, then it’ll be happier world.”

Since West had not been a particularly attentive pupil, that was the extent of his social grace, but not-a-nutjob was already back to his book and didn’t seem to mind that the conversation was cut short.

A short while later West discovered that as time passed, the voices were getting softer and softer. Like a giant sponge was absorbing them all and what remained were only echoes. They were still there, however, under an untouchable layer--a fraction of what they had been, a buzzing noise struggling to burst.

He had no doubt that the man with glasses was the cause.

A person out of the loop, detached from the network. The null point, the void, the absence, the one whose presence was enough to put a figurative gag in every single voice in his proximity. If West amplified, this man subdued.

Why, they were perfect for each other, and the closest thing to a miracle that he allowed himself to believe.

So West did a rare and brave thing.

“Excuse me,” he said to the man, preparing himself for the phrase Mrs. Jenkins had used in their fifth-week lesson. The one he thought he would never use.

The man averted his eyes from the book and looked at him. “Yes, what can I do for you?”

Mrs. Jenkins had made her class repeat the sentence a dozen times, because she said it never failed when they said it in the movies. The stupid, stupid old cow who had been too ancient for the modern world, where courtship took place in the cyberspace, and all of her lifetime’s worth of experience came close to nothing.

But he had liked the phrase, had savored the taste of it on his tongue, and had prepared for this day for along time. And finally when he asked it, the question came loud and clear.

“Would you like to have dinner with me?”













***