Monday, April 18, 2011

4

In four days I will be in her room after I go there unannounced to check on her. I will arrive wearing my deer hunter outfit I`ve adopted for the crisis after a friend gives me a hunting jacket. Her painting is not influenced by the quake she will tell me. It is good painting. I will wonder whether she is using it to run away or if it makes no difference. Soon after I arrive we will be having sex and a big aftershock hits while she is on top of me and I will make her put on her military bikers helmet.

It has become very cold and the walking helps. I follow the tracks from one stop to the next but the road no longer runs parallel. The old phone I have has no internet, which has been working for those who can`t make calls, so I have been following a salary man who is using his iphone. He disappears and I take a wrong turn onto a dark winding road that comes out into an open space. A railway bridge massive stretches away over a wide river. Occasional taxis already hired come along the winding road and away down the river. From some kind of outpost at the river I see the nearest road crossing looks far away.

Going to a high point on the bank, I climb through a fence and then up onto the bridge through inadequate barb wire.
As I start to walk along the bridge the river surges below, quake water swashing up the banks. At the far end of the bridge a radio below talks from the blue tarp of the shoreline hovels of the homeless. They stand hand on hips watching the water a few feet from their doors. They look up at the approaching tap of my boots on the metal bridge.
There is no place down on the other side, barbed wire is better placed at the best spot. I walk on over roads and people, too high to jump down to, and trying to disguise boots noisy on railway gravel and metal plating.
The tracks merge with a second line and with me in the middle. A brightly lit but abandoned station is beyond, the exits of which will now be locked. I go back and climb a fence to jump over onto a pole with footholds that`s behind some buildings. I wait for a quiet moment then jump down from a wall where a lone walker double takes but keeps on walking.
The next town is larger, the line for taxis longer. A ridiculous map next to the police box abandoning North and South for top and bottom confuses me. Saitama to the north is a memory from two years ago and I`d never been there before. Am I walking south or north? I remember the sun from before and realise I`m walking south.
I stop in a coffee shop and order an ice tea when two minutes later I`ve cooled off and want a hot drink. A girl has a terrifying alarm on her phone. Her and a pal eagerly hover at the window to watch the street. Inside is starting to rattle. I pay and leave.
I walk past an area cordoned off over which is a walkway with a man on top of it staring down into a massive crack.
Out of town the road splits from the railway again. The number of people walking the other way out of Tokyo has become a steady stream to push against.
A crossroads is reached. Never seen here – some men run across the road to beat the traffic. They are running because the man in front is running. The first man vaults a hard to see low chain fence. The second man does not see it and slams down hard. The running men run off.
I help up the man telling him in Japanese to go slowly. After, I wonder whether I had said to talk more slowly.
I stand at the crossroads for minutes before I see a sign for Koenji and decide to abandon the now unseen railway and to follow the highway that will get me closer to Higashi-Koenji.