for Jared         

Need to make it to the end of this first line the end
Alone is safe with holes like him holes of black hair non
-Metaphorical holes that smoke although you know them
To be of room temperature, the bright furniture
Sticks queer lights to the tips of his eyelashes
Won’t a flame, if seen through the slit in its core, look like the orchid of
                                                                                          self?
‘Exactly so,’ he says.
Must by all means stay on the same step the contact
‘D be lost were he to trip up higher the higher he
Will go you will go and genitals if any have to wait
Inside the straight argument, the soft monument
Of one-and-a-half fingers at the zipper unfastens
Does the papercut, applied to human nature, not flatten the sex to a
                                                                                          both?
‘Most true,’ he says
As if naked from the waist.
And must seduction, hence, not be a property of the second you doubt?
‘At any rate,’ he says
Just as scraping.
And the beloved, need he not consent to what he cannot know he is?
‚Very well,’ he says
Before he grows tired of
his own end?

No, no, no, not against Capitalism itself
Not this time
No, thanks, not at this moment when I’m
On my way to
Somewhere I don’t have the time to read
A newspaper how stupid is the idea
Of stopping passers in the street
To hand them the present
Yesterday’s present
While a train slows down underneath
How stupid is that.

No, I don’t want to talk to the customer service
I’m in love
With the idea, no, thanks, really, of wasting
Things without your
Phone number I’d enjoy to eat
Access conditions like beef—this idea
Of making users call back
To get them to know you
Their provider
Like an orthodontist always insists
On a next check: Fuck

Not the system, no, no, but your intuition
Which kills my pleasure, yes: plea-
Sure inside
The wrong life I find
No, not sleep and innovation although
Sleep and innovation that sounds
Not bad not
Half bad
Inside the wrong life I find
I have the time to read
Anything but the stupid newspaper
Anything on a train that gets slower and slower
Or in a dream or something like that

To bring an axe to Atsuko
Saturday late
To see Terry the first time in public
Even later, well, unless he sleeps
At Nicholas’ apartment and if, yes,
That would be better much
More practical because Annie,
Sweet Annie she lives
Vis-à-vis since Lisa, her tango teacher,
Left her for France

And France isn’t a girl’s name
France isn’t a boy’s name
France is the name of that place
Where heads rolled
And de Sade sold
His wig for a melon-sized skull

To show the Weissenberg kids how to catch
Fireflies at dusk
To give Hannah the book from her mother
After reading it first myself though
Atsukos’s sister thinks that’s a crime, well,
A small one but still not
Quite ethical and to Annie,
Sweet Annie I tell
This and this too: Lisa, her former lover,
Wrote she hates Spain

‘Cause Spain is not a girl’s name
Spain is not a boy’s name
Spain is the name of that place
Where bulls died
And Lorca cried
His lungs out in turn for an olive

And Annie is ill now
But I was ill first
The air on that day with the axe was too cold

And Terry still waits there
But I will not go
The only one must be the one who is stood up

Practice
On the second half of acting: practice
On -us and on -dom
Six years
On one not altogether broad trail
Six long years
Call me one who
Overdoes it with practice with
Staying true to who is still
Six years later
Six long years later
About to finish
The same sex or e.g.
The same short story,
Someone to who
You offer a free position and
Who rather
On the internet
Practices
How hyperlinks are written and innocence
On the backside of this Xtube face must be read
More than once
Six full years of my life
Of the second half of my life
To practice
I came.

1
You deserve it
You deserve it, deserve it, deserve it.


2
The glove compartment
Is there like a Christian
Skill in overtaking, we’re taking
Our provisions from our bags, each one his own
The Savior
Didn’t want to be simpatico, he wanted love
Even for those who didn’t want, he ate
At the same table with his murderer
Don’t you hear?
The fanner
Makes this noise, since recently
It sounds like foaming
Inhuman heat
Hard shoulder ghost train sidewinders
Rear bench pressure
Cheesy blankness
Accident fantasies, the four of us
Are flying, thrust up from the wreck, the two of us
Landing safely, the children
Of Jesus on the driver’s seat and the passenger seat
Bounce exactly back into the flames.


3
His ass, yes
But the rest not

Peter, Peter in all the changing rooms
Of all indoor swimming pools
Of all the chlorine-gravid footwarm crossing zones
In front of all lockers
Next to all same-aged
Between stompin' hard heels, sailing swimming caps, and screaming
I see that
White
Soft
And, I dunno...oval...
Peter (or God, whoever reads this first)
Why
Me facing, and why
A vulgar idiot like you?

Were the perfect
Spread fair, I had
Severed your ass with a blade
And to the sleeper in my empty bed
Given it as her pillow.


4
The following kindergarten episode from my life
Was freshly dubbed just a moment ago
And now goes like this:
While the four year-old K. is painting in
A sheet for five or six year-olds
She comes near
She, the princess
From Sweden
Or her mother is from Sweden and she,
Just as blond
Just as free
Just as self-assured
As any image of a young Swedish mother, she
Comes and asks me,
Me the best drawer
And worst gymnast
And inconspicuous joiner in games, me
The question
Of all kindergarten questions
She says
In this new version:
“Will you friend me?”
And with those same lips
She offers me
To friend me, too, in case I would
Friend her, the two of us—
No, she says nothing about us. Just like then
In this version no less, K. reacts
Too complicated
Out of constraint,
In clandestine disdain
With a meek idea of what love would be
The eruption of the Q & A game, that is, to the inside as it were
Where language is wild
Aggressive and scared like a
Small animal with raindrop-sized teeth,
K. replies, after a marked moment of hesitating
Something like:
“Do friends have to friend each other?”
And this said, once more everything is
Lost.

1

He should have been used to the fact that encounters like this one happened to the body at its most unfit time.

He was certain to be particularly unsightly right now: an overtired tourist, his hair mazy, dried blind as there had been neither a socket in the bathroom nor a mirror in his room, a cement-grey jacket sagging over his arm, and a gait, uphill, which had to be reeking of cheesy feet. Whence the words hit him by total surprise. Shanghaied him.

He stood there like someone who’d been attempted to trip up, who saw it but didn’t dare to react. He stood there like a conscious fool, silent—no, worse, mute, at a loss for the simplest of commonplace phrases in the country’s language. Every second turned him into even more of a fool.

But that as well, like the gross heaviness of his limbs, might only be an interior view. The woman suddenly looked scared. Her almost aggressive glance when she had squinted at him in passing yielded to an expression of terror, or shame. She slapped her own mouth with her hand as though she had committed an unpardonable faux pas. Which she had.

Now the evening would depend on composing a more or less accurate sentence. On composing and pronouncing it without mistake. Or he could answer her in English, of course. She had asked in English.

He considered. Someone in his blood calculated.

The woman was in her early twenties. Quite smallish (which made her look, according to one’s point of view, even younger or a little like an object: one couldn’t help moving her between one’s fingers, twiddling her to and fro). Her outgrown perm added a slutty charm to her face.

Additions and subtractions left something extreme as their result. He finally replied, though he felt neither up to her nor to the situation. When she lifted her bag, along with her eyelids, he caught a glimpse of her wristwatch’s dial. It was shortly after six. For her the evening must have been just about to begin. She smiled now.

2

After an overstretched journey with pick-up trains, confusion in Yamato where he had to change, confusion searching for the suburban line in Nara, and a half hour waiting at the station forced upon him by a droning downpour, he’d made it to the ryokan. Surprisingly slim, like a discrete private home, the hotel stood vis-à-vis an impressive four-storey wooden building he had first mistaken for it. The owner, an old hunched matron who crawled up the stairs because she couldn’t walk them anymore, welcomed him with an excitement that he wondered was cordiality or merrymaking. She explained to him that the huge black block at the other side of the street was a clinic. A specialized clinic. Specialized on what, he didn’t understand.

As he kept repeating to himself, the house had a nice cozy atmosphere. With its six-mat size, the room wasn’t luxurious, but neatly furnished and in any case better than the depressing cells of the standard Western style accommodation where you had to scrape by the bed and didn’t even find a closet to unpack your suitcase. Using the toilet required some acrobatic exercise. He removed his briefs from under the yukata before he hushed trough the corridor, and not without a certain pride did he peer between his legs at the fat, light-brown turd which didn’t break off until its tip touched the faintly yellowed surface of the narrow bowl embedded in the ground.

Back in his room, he realized there was no alarm clock. No clock at all. He intended to get up at seven again the next day. He’d have to if he didn’t want to miss the train Reiko had picked for him. She’d be waiting for him in Ise on the platform.

It was probably okay to ask the owner for a waking call. He postponed that conversation, only cheered a jovial good-bye while lacing his shoes, and almost crashed into two ladies in old-fashioned travel attire at the doorstep. Their disenchanted gaze crawled up the house’s front. Behind them, a happy-faced man, whose type was that of the one woman’s cousin and the other’s husband, carried an immensely heavy-looking, somehow brutally deformed sports bag on top of two trunks.

3

After he had fumbled around between books, cookie boxes, his and her clothes and others from her whose crumpled innocence delighted him and raised a little jealousy, he found a sort of egg that told the time.

6:03 said the saucer eyes of an indefinable aniline-blue creature, apparently the mascot of a pharmaceutical corporation. He turned the egg and opened it. A dozen tiny white pills came rolling into his palm.

She seemed to be sound asleep. Her arm and a corner of the blanket held each other tight as though each was ready to replace a part of the other in case of an emergency. The toes of her left foot (she lay more or less on her stomach) had dug into the slit between mattress and frame.

Outside, a bird’s monotonous rasping chirp sounded like an overlarge cicada. When he slid back one of the shutters and the mosquito screen, his attention was caught by the mop-sized wet leaves of a shrub whose branches had been creeping out over most of the roof. Their almost white blaze reflected the rain-laden sky.

He stuck out his head through the crack and cocked his ears. Yes, it was true: a fine, nearly invisible drizzle was drumming mildly onto the shingles, supplying the bushes and small trees in the garden with a ... rustle. He spent a long time searching for an adjective. He could find none. It was a very earthly, quite specific, but in no way extraordinary rustle. Nothing alien to language. His mind was simply too dull, or he didn’t want this splendid gravity of standing and searching to fade.

He stood unchanged, face covered with a layer of driblets, when the egg-clock started to beep. He could hear the duvet fissle. Her hair and her skin.

Somewhere behind the ocean of roofs and the strangely isolated green balls of the Japanese pines, which floated above them as though the residents had thrown them in the air and then forgotten there, a commuter train sped past on its way to the center of town.

***

Lord, sure—as far as I am concerned. What I cannot explain to myself is: how I could become a father without at least a moment’s hesitation. It is one of those mysteries others call “the way things go,” for they don’t dare admit that the unhesitating conceals the evillest secret of man.

Julia was a bright, bold little student when I met her. She fucked up her BA for the two us to have time. We lived at her mother’s apartment, who had to spend the autumn in a cardiac clinic. Everywhere, between the standard items of a bourgeois existence, Julia’s things lay scattered and signaled the discontinuance of something: barely smoked cigarettes; undrunk coffee with cirrus of curdled milk; chocolate stains from collapsed Nutella-spread slices of bread; a VHS cassette that was stuck aslant in the recorder’s slot and amazed us with holding its position for weeks. Although we aired the rooms until our teeth chattered, the whole flat reeked of sex. One day, after we’d returned from a futile attempt to see a movie, the bathmat was floating in the tub on top of a green-yellow sludge. A memo from the cleaning-lady clung to the mirror: Had to soak this first b. o. the stains. Julia wanted to die of shame, while I found nothing wrong in having become a decadent pervert in the eyes of a lower employee.

When I shot my load just so, without pulling it out first...

She admired my indifference. She understood that indifference was what it was, that I was fine and that I didn’t care what would become of it, but she converted it into love by loving me for it: a sublime indifference, like a single lacquer-black cloud floating above life in whose shadow we moved ahead. From that day on we fucked without a contraceptive and without wasting a thought on what we never, not until the very end termed the consequences. This, we knew, would have trivialized it more than we could bear, and the causal nexus was clear anyway. When the doctor calculated days back after the test, it became apparent that the weeks-long rapture, this endless discharge of semen and semen and semen, had had no effect whatsoever. With a probability bordering on certainty, Julia had got pregnant right at the very first time.

I went through a period of fear, while she considered whether she should have an abortion or have the baby. She changed her opinion daily, several times a day, and after it had looked as if the matter was doomed to end up at the clinic and she just needed sufficient time in order to have nothing to blame herself for, I gradually started to realize that the scale was about to tilt to the other side. Julia listed the reasons: She loved me, and once the wild times of this initial phase were gone I sure wouldn’t muster the imprudence to knock her up anymore. Hence, this was her only chance to elicit a scion from me, the man with the most crazy DNA in the world. Moreover, having graduated, she, no doubt, would focus on her career and postpone the wish to have children.

‘And maybe for too long. You know how slowly time passes at universities, and how it seeps away between book pages. I don’t want to end up as an old spinster, who lacks a family though she never renounced the ideology of family life. And that’s why...I’d rather have it too early.’

Could be she just waited for some genuine resistance from my part. Sometimes I believed that she wished for nothing more urgently than for me to put my foot down and forbid her to play with our future.

‘You’ve arranged yourself entirely in this state of uncertainty about my decision,’ she once said, smiling. ‘I get the impression that among the two of us you are the woman. Don’t you think?’

That evening I declared that I would leave her did she insist on carrying the child full term. I used this expression ‘full term.’ I remember how her face contorted in disgust.

A friend came to stay overnight in Julia’s room. Anne and I remained at the kitchen table at the far end of an evening spent with watching videos and smoking weed. We emptied a bottle of bitter Hungarian herbal liqueur, discussed the imminent students’ strike, and incidentally stacked up the dishes, while Julia’s sonorous snoring broke in cable car-like tremors through the wall. For someone like me, I tried hard to seduce Anne. I even tried to slip through the closing door crack after having said ‘good-night’ —but of her former interest in me little seemed left. Either she sensed it that something poisoned the air between me and Julia, or Julia had already told her everything on the phone. Anyhow, I found myself standing on the bathmat at four in the morning, regarding, full of sadness and anger, the pale yellow rings that the extra soaking hadn’t erased.

I struggled to figure out how much obedience a threat would extract from her. More than once Julia had assured me she’d rather die than lose me. Yet, though that had sounded honest and reliable like a child’s oath, it occurred to me now I was likely to depend on it that she didn’t mean the same with dying as I. Her dying was something quite practical—something like kissing, sucking, crying, wiping your ass, not the great unfathomable death that encircled my world in its tiny spot of trying to go on. She would, as I was loath to comprehend, react reasonably, even when the death concerned the fortune of our love, and it didn’t surprise me at all when she explained she’d have the baby all the same.

‘Anne is going to be the godmother. She said, she’ll start knitting the christening robe right away, so it’ll be ready by September. With her Teutonic thoroughness that might be an adequate schedule. I ordered her to make something that suits a terribly agnostic christening at the wet dock. And, will you leave me now?’

She really did expect me to. She considered it perfectly likely.

‘Do you think that if...’

I left Julia. It hit her harder than I had thought. She made an admirably large number of admirably inventive attempts to win me back, promised to do everything in her power to rescue me from the hell I was in, concocted fictions of our living together that couldn’t fail to please me (she knew me repellently well). At some point there even arrived a sort of slave contract with the mail, where she covenanted to be available for any kind of sexual abuse and earn my living through prostitution. The child she didn’t mention. She sacrificed her dignity to me, her body, the part of her soul that she owned—but all for the price of a decision made, whose sovereignty outbalanced the offered humiliation, and rendered it worthless in my hands. Wherefore, after a period of contemplation, I declined.

Julia betrayed me with other men. I betrayed her with staying alone, celebrating my solitude like a great foreplay, admitting to the casual insinuations that would have me as the lover of her (...) or him (...). If we both felt it was betrayal, our own behavior as much as the other’s, it only showed to what extent we still misconceived of our relation as something existing. The news about her marriage reached me in...

Its literal translation would be ‘the taste of first love,’ Mr. Nakayama, the more Japanese of the two Japanese teachers, said.

They so visibly pleased him, those digressions that were at first a little frivolous and then exposed a soft romantic something of a joke. The group knew. We laughed as we were expected. Mrs. Shump, the oldest student and the one with the hardest troubles to memorize what she’d learned, joined in loudest as always.

While he enjoyed the success, Mr. Nakayama picked at the silk scarf patterned in mint green and gray which had been carefully tied and folded into his collar. He threw a quick glance sideways, searching for his partner. Mr. Miyahira acknowledged the content or the effect of the words with an equally well-practiced nod. Then the lesson went on.

‘The particle no connects two, well, nouns,’ Mr. Nakayama explained, returning to the regular examples in the book: jugyô no owari, the end of class; chûshoku no jikan, the time for lunch; taikutsu no musô, the daydream out of boredom...

‘As you will have realized, we use a variety of prepositions, which define the relation between the first word and the other one rather clearly. In Japanese, however, the relation remains indefinite. A no B – this can take on every possible meaning. Sometimes it becomes apparent from the context of conversation, but for most of the time the Japanese don’t care about it at all. Which is likely to confuse the non-Japanese.’

I wasn’t confused. Not by indetermination, at any point. What had arrested my attention was how desperately most examples in our Japanese primer tried to bond with a student’s desire to be relieved from the tedious and frustrating labors of learning. Was that an attempt to chum up with us the authors had made—a team of 20 experts from Tsukuba who, if one could trust the introduction, had spent seven years of research on this ‘straight way to real Japanese’? Or was it just a symptom of their resistance against that deadly stupidity rehearsing a foreign tongue imposed upon adult human beings, capable of thinking, when it forced them to beg for something to eat, a handful of stamps, or the description of a route with the words of a three year-old child? To read those inadvertently offensive phrases had been most painful for me from the very beginning. And even more so having to invent one by myself, because when Nakayama’s frisky finger came to rest on one of us we unmistakably came up with the same type of silly insubordination. We outperformed each other with demonstrations of how little we were willing to be here. Although it was by our free will that we were. In case of the college students at least.

Mr. Nakayama and Mr. Miyahira would not be impressed. They were too much of a pro as teachers, and professionals no less it seemed as Japanese. The Internet communities on education praised their summer classes as the best you could get for your money. And in fact, the little man with the dandy-like white strand in his hair, the elegant blue suit (the same one though every day), the thin fingers and the subdued, almost whispered Japanese, which at times rippled like creased paper, and his plump, usually checkered collaborator—they worked on us from opposite angles in the most effective manner, formed, through power of the words they made each of us repeat dozens of times, complexions and gestures I had never observed with myself. On the evening of the third day I caught my upper half bowing while giving my name on the phone. The woman on the other end (a secretary at the branch office I’d be transferred to in autumn) hesitated—probably just caught off-guard by being greeted in her mother tongue, but to me it was as if she had sensed the jerk through my spine like a flickering in the noise of the ether.

‘What did first love taste like?’ asked Sebastian.

Mr. Nakayama flipped backwards through the textbook’s pages looking for the dialogue in order to remind us of the connections with no it contained. Which left a few seconds after the laughter had faded off unattended. Sebastian’s question hadn’t been bold; he’d rather posed it to himself, slowly, almost holding back, as if there was something that had to follow, which he didn’t want to block or run away from. In all its casualness the query sank into my mind like a warm drop of liquid trickling down a throat in a very fine line. I—Aaron—Marleena—Mrs. Shump—the junior CEO—and Ken, the Japanese-American: we hadn’t so much as perceived the question’s meaning when we found ourselves permeated by a physical pleasure. Or displeasure. How had first love tasted? Mr. Miyahira, too, looked up from his brochure which concealed the answers to today’s drills, slightly bent his head, stayed silent, and seemed to hunt for something this side, as it were, of words, in English or in Japanese.

Strange how one may have a precise memory of past emotions without feeling them anymore, maybe was what I thought. And even more strange when the feeling is there but no memory. The taste? I tried and changed the search’s keyword: the flavor, the ... aroma of my first love, of Myrja? The scent, a piercing scent of...

‘Cigarettes,’ Sebastian answered his own question, after time for another three or four examples with no had elapsed.

The laughter that followed differed terribly from that Nakayama’s joke had evoked. It revealed a lack in strength before it had fully set in, and not until its fading did it take on a certain pat emphasis. But worst of all, it was no common, choric reaction. Every one seemed to imply something else with his laughing, or hers, even Mrs. Shump.

Laughter is but a reflex, I wondered. Has a reflex, something made of cheek muscles and phrenic contractions, such a power as to turn people away from each other, every one towards his own single-minded forgetting, inaccessible to anyone else? My eyes scanned the corner for Marleena’s reaction. She polished her glasses, shaking her head, oblivious to my stare.

All the same (or precisely because of that), the laughter echoed inside me for quite a while. Before the usual trip down to the language lab, as we spent our morning break performing the Japanese radio gymnastics at the corridor of the so-called Philosophers Tower, I gigglingly fucked up the lateral steps (which earned me an extra turn with the ‘help’ of Nakayama’s commands). At the cafeteria table, while Sebastian and Miyahira debated the Kyoto protocol in a somewhat funny moralistic tone, a piece of turkey breast slipped from my mouth as if the lip had been numbed by a dentist. And when we said good-night and lingered for a second at the stormiest spot on the campus, Ken asked what made me, me who always looked annoyed and whose face moved at the constant edge of a yawning, ‘beam. ‘Cause you’re beaming, man. I don’t know what it means, if it’s good or bad, but you’re beaming.’

When I fell asleep, still an echo of that laughter, with the quiet, patient thoroughness of the words that had effected it, ran along my ice-cold legs. It accompanied me through a dream where, on a panic escape through gassed subway shafts and sewer tunnels crawling with cockroaches, I continued to hum the name Myrja Modersson. Myrja Modersson had been my first love, and her first and only kiss had tasted of weird Swedish toothpaste. Which was not true, as I immediately knew waking up.

***

Thus Sebastian perpetuated his slower rhythm of asking questions and giving answers within my life: a pale-haired ethnology student with gray eyes, shaved eyebrows and long, curled-up fingernails you strangely wouldn’t recognize until he touched you.

Surprisingly he flew off to Japan before me. He stayed two semesters at Nagoya University while my company sent a colleague to Tokyo first, and when I finally secured another free position at our Japanese branch he was already packing.

‘You’ll get used to it,’ he repeated on several occasions during the afternoon we met after all. A chewy sort of afternoon, too short for what Marleena had called a fresh start. His plane home would depart on the same evening eight-ish. We spent hours at Nagoya Station lifting plushies with a crane from labyrinthian mini jungle landscapes until they’d get stuck at some twig and bump down. At the machine next to ours one could try the same with living crab.

‘Did you meet anyone from the class?’ I asked him. ‘The world is small, they say.’

‘The junior CEO, last December. Gathered with a few Japanese co-workers in a restaurant. Must ‘ve been their Xmas party. Spoke not a word of Japanese, but seemed to do fine. They were all loaded, yelled White Christmas. Had a lot of fun.’