Slum Online Page 2
Most of the students sat hunched over their desks, dutifully transcribing the lecture notes from the blackboard to their notebooks. A handful of people were lower still on their desks, busy trying to make up for the sleep they’d lost getting to class. I was the only one in the room looking up at the ceiling. I stifled a yawn. Professor Uemura continued scribbling on the board. He could crank out a page’s worth of notes every two minutes. The man had a real gift for writing on a blackboard. Some of his lectures came dangerously close to filling up twenty pages.
On the desk in front of me were a limp sheet of wide-ruled loose-leaf paper and a blue attendance card. The paper was only a quarter full. Five minutes in I’d given up on the whole thing. The real mistake was embarking on such a noble endeavor in the first place. In the time it took me to write down one character, he’d written somewhere between three and five. For each line I copied down, he got another two lines ahead. When the eraser came sweeping down in a remorseless arc over the words I was still struggling to copy, I knew I was done with my mechanical pencil for the day. Since then I’d been lost in the world of portable music.
Had I known this professor would be such an attendance Nazi, I’d never have taken the class. My friends had lured me in with assurances of easy credits. Sure, all you had to do was show up. But showing up meant subjecting yourself to ninety minutes of paint-dryingly boring lectures.
I flicked my mechanical pencil with my index finger. It spun across the palm of my hand, slick with humidity and sweat, rotating about 45 degrees too far before it went tumbling across the loose-leaf paper to land on the desk with a hard clatter. The guy in the chair in front of me shifted slightly in his seat. The fluorescent lighting cast a pale green shadow on his shirt. I felt a faint breath of warm air caress my cheek under the weight of the stagnant air.
I hated rain. Elementary school had been a string of field trips played out against a backdrop of rainy days. Our athletic meets were regularly rained out and rescheduled from the weekends to Wednesdays. The first time I worked up the courage to tell a girl I liked her, an unseasonal typhoon was roaring outside. I later broke up with said girl during a driving rain that fell all day. On the day I learned I failed the college entrance exam, and a year later when I finally passed it, a drizzle so fine it fell like mist from a humidifier blanketed the city. I’d even heard from my mother that on the day I was born, a nasty day in late June right in the middle of the rainy season, the air had been a thick pea soup, damp and clinging.
So I was generally unpleasant on mornings during the rainy season. That I had previously acquired the particular variety of attendance card handed out today—and thus had shown up at the beginning of class for nothing—did nothing to lighten my mood.
“This seat taken?” It was a soft sound, barely enough to derail my train of thought. I looked up from the desk. “Your bag. It’s taking up a seat.” She took a deep breath, chest rising, falling. The gentle curve of her bangs brushed restlessly against her forehead. A steady stream of pinky nail–sized water drops dribbled from the tip of the umbrella clutched in her right hand.
I pulled the earbud from my left ear.
“Can I sit here?” she mouthed more than spoke. Her voice had the saccharine squeak of an anime character.
I glanced around the room. Pairs of long, rectangular desks stretched from just in front of the lectern to the back of the classroom. Each desk sat three people, and they were all full. All, that is, except the seat next to mine.
I moved my bag out of the seat. The girl gave a quick nod of thanks and sat down. I restored my headphone to its place in my left ear, and the music blossomed from tinny monaural to full and vibrant stereo. Resting my chin on my hands, I resumed my observation of the fluorescent lights.
Fluorescent lights flicker off and on at a rate of something like fifty or sixty times per second. I read somewhere that there’s a tiny little man who runs electricity through the mercury vapor inside the tube to make it glow. When the light flickers, it’s the little man catching his breath. And when the light gets old and starts randomly blinking off and on, well, that’s the little man’s fault too. Sometimes I wonder if it would be possible to see each individual cycle of light—on off, on off—the way swordsmen in samurai novels can peer through each individual drop of rain as it falls from the eaves of a roof. There are people who can push a button sixteen times per second, so why not?
I shifted my gaze from the light to the girl sitting beside me. She was still getting her things out of her bag. Her notebook was easily three times as thick as mine, and her mechanical pencil wasn’t 0.5 mm—the accepted standard—but a hefty 0.7. Clearly, she didn’t mess around.
She opened her notebook. Neat rows of kanji filled the college-ruled pages from the top-left corner to the bottomright. Her handwriting could have passed for the work of a professional calligrapher. It was about two hundred fifty-six times neater than mine. If you measured the space between characters with calipers, they’d probably have no more than a millimeter’s variation. She had probably sent off for one of those calligraphy-writing kits they advertise at the back of manga. And it hadn’t just sat around on a shelf collecting dust once it arrived. No, this was a girl that did her homework.
She scowled and let out a long frustrated sigh. Reaching once more into her bag she pulled out a plastic case. Within rested a pair of round, silver-rimmed glasses with extremely small lenses. She placed the glasses on her face with both hands and promptly joined the masses copying notes off the board.
She was left-handed. Her right hand smoothed back her jet-black hair while her left produced picture-perfect characters with breathtaking speed. The silver rims of her glasses scattered metallic light as she looked at the blackboard. Still wet from the rain, the shoulders of her Naples yellow blouse clung to her skin. Her damp hair clumped together, casting a spiky anime-shadow across the back of her neck.
She had a faint, sweet scent about her, like the olive tree growing in our neighbor’s yard. I felt my breath catch in my throat.
This wasn’t the sort of girl who stockpiled attendance cards so she could sleep in. She highlighted passages in her textbook and notes, which strongly suggested she actually read them. She didn’t cram for a test the night before, and she sure as hell never had to do a makeup test. She’d probably graduated with honors from a private high school. Daddy’s little girl. Daddy the famously rich banker or politician. In short, she was just the kind of girl I wanted nothing to do with.
Making no effort to be quiet, I opened my bag and shoved my blank loose-leaf paper and mechanical pencil inside. I hefted the bag to my shoulder, pushed back from the desk, and stood.
“Mind handing this in for me?” I held out two blue attendance cards. Across one was scrawled Etsuro Sakagami, but the other was blank. It was the only spare blue card I had, but I didn’t really care.
Her eyes opened wide behind those tiny glasses. “Today’s blue,” she muttered.
“What?”
“Today’s cards. They’re blue.”
“Yeah, so?”
“The cat’s blue. The one in Shinjuku. If you find it,” she said with a smile, “all your dreams will come true.” It was an unlikely smile. The sort of smile you’d expect from someone who’d just returned from a grueling ten-year journey and stumbled upon the blue cat of happiness. If you sold that smile in a hamburger shop, it’d sell better than the fries. That was what it looked like to me, anyway.
I stood there holding my bag as Professor Uemura pounded at the blackboard with a nublet of chalk not long for this world. I had about twenty seconds before he turned around to face the class. I was fairly certain the blue animal from the urban legend to which she was referring was a bird, not a cat, but instead of pointing out her mistake, I forced a smile. “Whatever you say. Thanks.”
“Um, your notes.” A quarter-filled sheet of paper still lay there on the desk. The fluorescent lights turned it the same shade of sickly green as that guy’s shirt.
I turned away before she could speak and made my escape.
I hadn’t given her the card to be nice, and I wasn’t flirting. It just didn’t seem fair that I should get credit for attending because I had learned to game the system, while this girl who went to class and actually paid attention would be counted absent. It was that sigh of hers, I thought. It planted the seeds of guilt in me. Giving her one of my cards was the only way I had of paying penance.
Almost-empty bag and soggy umbrella in hand, I opened the door that led out into the hallway. I pushed a button on my music player to skip to the next track—I needed something more upbeat. Rain drummed against the windows rhythmically, like water from a sprinkler, as the chill of the air folded itself around me.
I walked along Ome Highway toward Shinjuku. It was 8:57, that strange time when the Shinjuku of the night prepared for sleep, and the Shinjuku of the day crawled out from under its collective futon. The only people wandering the streets at this hour were university students, the homeless, and people on their way home from jobs in the sex trade.
When it wasn’t raining, I was actually fond of tramping around Shinjuku without any particular destination. If I’d had someplace to go, I would have gone there, but RL—real life—was vast and confusing, and I couldn’t figure out where I should be. In this city, there weren’t any NPCs standing around to hint at where the next big event would be, no online guides to point you in the right direction. Since I had nothing better to do, I resolved to walk around until I wore myself out and I couldn’t lift my legs another step. There wouldn’t be any battles, no objectives reached or quests completed, but the exhaustion would make me feel as though I’d done something with my day. Or just maybe, if I walked off every last bit of the grid that made up this RL city, I’d stumble across something special.
A dream world reflected in tiny drops of rain surrounded me. A low mist hung in the sky, obscuring the skyscrapers and the looming hulk of Tokyo City Hall from view. The only thing that seemed real in the haze was a sports car parked illegally with one wheel on the sidewalk. The car was blood red. I quickened my pace and vaulted across a puddle of water.
My university was in west Shinjuku. I turned right along Ome Highway in front of the Shinjuku Police Station and continued walking south past Keio Plaza Hotel. I turned again just after the Shinjuku Monolith Building, and from there it was a straight shot to the trains. The scenery in west Shinjuku could get a little monotonous. There were plenty of freaks hanging around to spice things up, but the real show was out at the east side of the station.
I came out of the underpass as a Yamanote Line train raced by, and metallic sound FX reverberated ninety centimeters above my head. I crossed beneath the large Alta screen and headed for Kabuki-chō. I still didn’t know where I was going. Wherever my feet took me, I guess. If you made it through the squalor of Kabuki-chō Itchōme and kept on going, you’d come out in Nichōme, the gay district.
I found her on the outskirts of Kabuki-chō, standing by a place that was either up-and-coming or down-and-out—it was hard to tell. The surrounding buildings took the word seedy to entirely new levels. Spots of rust marred the iron fire escapes, and everywhere were stacks of crates brimming with empty beer bottles. The stench of stale, drunken vomit permeated the air in front of the bar, or pub, or whatever this establishment was supposed to be. A blue laser traced the name of the place on the asphalt in front of the door. In daylight, it was impossible to make out what it said. The oscillator in the laser must have been broken, because every few seconds the image would wobble and the beam of blue light would shoot off in some random direction.
I’d seen the woman before on other walks through Shinjuku about this time of day and had pegged her for a prostitute, but it was just a guess. I didn’t know the first thing about her. Whoever she was, she couldn’t have been the most model citizen if a class-cutting, street-wandering student had run into her enough times to know her by sight.
She didn’t look especially young or old, and it was hard to tell if she was wearing any makeup. Her hair had been dyed a reddish brown, and she wore it long and disheveled. Her clothing looked expensive, but she hadn’t gone out for any frills. Across her shoulders she wore a shawl, or maybe it was cloak, but she always had it.
I don’t know how long she’d been a fixture here. The files in my head for this city only went back as far as April. Maybe it had only been a few months like me, or maybe she’d lived here a decade. We’d made eye contact plenty of times but never exchanged any words, so I didn’t have much to go on.
Whenever I came across her, she’d be standing there staring off at nothing in particular, with the look of a bat just waking from hibernation, searching for its first meal in months. I don’t even know if bats hibernate. In the narrow strip of sky before her eyes, a ragged clothesline flapped in the wind, oscillating at a rate of roughly sixteen times per second.
I chose that day to talk to her because I got it in my head that maybe this woman, standing under that blue laser in an obscure corner of the most cliché slum in Shinjuku, might know something about the cat. True, the only thing in common between the two was the color blue, but I had a feeling that the cat was the only flag waiting to be triggered to start the next event in my life.
“Have you seen it?”
At the sound of my voice, the bat lady shifted her eyes. It was the only indication she’d heard me at all; her face and body remained carved from stone.
“Seen what?” She had a deep voice.
“A cat, actually.”
“Calico? Black? White with black spots? What’s the tail look like?”
“Nah, it’s not like that. It’s a blue cat.”
The woman moved. She let out a tired sigh, the sigh of a middle-aged man who knows his best years are behind him, and placed her hand on her hip. I hadn’t noticed it while she was standing there, but she had all the right curves in all the right places. “You too, huh?”
“Excuse me?” As I spoke, the bat lady started walking toward me. The wayward laser display cut across her leg, painting some undecipherable glyph on the white flesh of her calf. “You mean other people are looking for it?”
“It’s an urban legend. All the girls around here have heard of it. You know those dyed chicks they sell at fairs? They say some pet store owner got the idea to do the same thing with cats, but one of them, a kitten, died. Now it haunts the streets of the city.”
“It’s a ghost?”
“That’s the story.” The girl in class had said that finding the cat would make dreams come true, but the ghost of a dead puss out for vengeance seemed more the stuff of nightmares than dreams. The bat lady pulled a long, slender cigarette out from under her cloak and lit it. “You won’t have much luck during the day. Better try at night.”
“Ah, right. Ghosts don’t like the daylight and all that.”
“Won’t be easy finding it. I hope you do, though.”
“Nah, I’m not really lookin’.”
“Oh? Don’t give up before you even start. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find something, maybe you won’t. It’s the searching that counts. Good luck.” She turned suddenly in a flutter of hair and fabric and walked inside. I knew she was a bat.
I didn’t go back to school that afternoon.
The next morning I missed the train I normally took to get to class. I ride the Tōbu Tōjō line from Mizuhodai Station to Ikebukuro, where I switch to the southbound Yamanote line. It was a little after rush hour, so the trains weren’t too crowded.
The metal-on-metal sound FX of wheels on rails pierced through the soundtrack pumping in my headphones. A dim urban landscape scrolled past outside the windows. It wasn’t raining, but the sky was clad in gray. I leaned back against the vertical handrail beside the door, taking in from the corner of my eye the brightly colored posters hanging in the aisle. For about one stop the rail had felt cool and refreshing, but it had already warmed to match my
body temperature.
By June, the crowds had usually thinned out. Every April, the trains overflowed with overeager freshmen, but a month or two of school was enough to dull anyone’s enthusiasm. I hated each and every one of them. They were scrubs, ignorant of the laws of the rails. The subtle, silent language of the rush-hour commuter was foreign to them, so they shouted like tourists trying to make themselves understood. They bitched. They moaned. They caused trouble. They turned molehills into mountains. They were a pain in the ass.
I was a veteran. I’d been battle-hardened thanks to four years in rush hours—three in high school, one before entering university. I could spot a scrub a mile away. The hicks fresh off the farm were the worst. I’d even seen them in all-out brawls with salarymen, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred it was the poor salaryman who’d been wronged in the first place.
The trains were the domain of the salarymen. On the streets you cut dump trucks, taxis, and pizza delivery boys on their 50 cc bikes extra slack. You looked the other way if they bent the rules because you were just a guest on their turf. On trains it was the salarymen. They were holy men and this was their sacred ground. So no matter how empty the car was, I was content to stand quietly in my little corner by the door, out of respect.
My train pulled in to Shinjuku Station.
I set off on foot down Ome Highway. Before noon, campus was even emptier than the trains on the Yamanote. I glanced at the bulletin board on my way in and headed for my sociology class. The lecture had started seventy-five minutes ago; my timing couldn’t have been better. I took a seat along the window side of the lecture hall, two rows from the back, and filled in my name on the attendance sheet lying on the desk.
A man with thinning hair stood in front of the blackboard, lecturing with a mic in one hand. His hair looked like strips of dried seaweed. The color, the thickness, the sheen—perfect verisimilitude. The professor’s name was…I forget.