Dreams of Speaking (17 page)

As Alice turned into rue Franc Bourgeois, she saw ahead of her, in the crowd, someone she recognised. It was not a friend, or a colleague, but a woman resembling herself. The woman had come out of a bakery holding a cardboard box tied with string, and as she stepped across the threshold from the store to the street, Alice saw her face in a three-quarter profile. It was an almost dreadful moment, a kind of teasing apparition, a joke,
a mistake. Yet the resemblance was remarkable. The woman's hair was cut differently and a little longer, just past her shoulders, and she may have been slightly smaller in height, but overall the likeness was unmistakable. Alice began following the woman with the cardboard box, not sure exactly why, not sure what compulsion drove her. On the other hand, she reasoned, why wouldn't one follow one's chanced-upon double?

The woman with the box walked directly to rue Rivoli, then headed towards the Hôtel de Ville. The pavements were crowded with pedestrians, and once or twice Alice lost her, then saw again her bobbing head and firm trajectory. Alice was trying to decide if she should catch the stranger, and tap her on the shoulder, and surprise her in the way she herself had been surprised, but something inhibited her. Dusk was descending and perhaps this, above all, this sense of an indeterminate time of shadows and mauve air and the blinking on of sodium-vapour lamps, the time of ephemeral passage and uncertain presences, caused her to hesitate. She bumped into shoppers and workers hurrying home; she felt lumpish and slow. People's bodies were obstacles; their pale faces passed indifferently. This was, she supposed, closing-time clamour, the hurry towards exits and journeys home. All of a sudden the woman again disappeared. Alice accelerated a little, rushing forward, and realised that the woman had gone down the steps, into the Métro. Streams of people passed her, engrossed by destinations. Alice had paused only for a moment, but perhaps had lost her chance. She headed downwards into the concrete caverns, with their tunnels and signs and tiled routes into darkness, with their mechanical wind and tumultuous roar.

Alice had lost her. She should have been bolder and claimed the happy accident of resemblance. She walked back up the stairs, feeling her failure. And almost at once she began to
doubt what she had seen: could she have simply imagined, or needed a mirror?

That night Alice dreamed of Mr Sakamoto. She was pushing through crowds, looking for someone. Figments and spectres swam in the air. People walked right through her: she was a nothing, empty space. Shop windows did not reflect her image. She descended steps and saw before her twin branching tunnels. Choosing the left, the more dimly lit (and thinking, in dream-thought: this is rather foolish), she came upon Mr Sakamoto waiting on an empty platform. He looked happy to see her. He smiled and opened his arms broadly in a welcoming gesture. His overcoat formed a shell; he became a refuge.

Tokyo from the sky.

Night navigation by aircraft, formally sheer terror, is one of the consummate art forms of the twenty-first century. Out of deep black, extending all the way to space, comes a pool of illumination, a nocturnal fire. It tilts and slides, as if insecure and unearthly, yet as the plane descends it begins slowly and by gradations to balance, becoming a disc, a shelf, a platform of arrival. At some thousands of metres one can detect concentrations of light and traceries of streets. One can look down upon systems, mysterious as any computer. There are logical patterns of identical shapes, mostly cuboid, rectangular, exceeding the boundary of the eye. There is a confusion of horizons and non-horizons, a fellowship of continuous spaces.

From her pod-like window, with her face pressed to the glass, Alice watched Japan come closer and closer. The plane dipped and circled. At a certain point she could make out billboards, vast and effulgent, coloured with a palette even Georges Claude would find astounding, and, beyond that, headlights of cars, the beaded tracks of highways and roads, the photosynthetic flare of shopping and commercial districts.
Electrical city
. This was Edison's dream. This was light in every form, dividing the shimmering world from the velvet darkness.

The plane landed with a thump, seeming to impress itself in the tarmac.

 

Alice stayed her first night in a hotel of crushing anonymity. The staff at the narrow front counter bowed and smiled, made intelligent signs to direct her to the elevators, but the ‘businessman's choice' felt like a mausoleum. Lighting was dim and sombre; the corridors of the hotel, undecorated, had a fusty and airless atmosphere, and the room into which she gained access with her chunky key was a small brown box, dominated by an intrusive television mounted like a gigantic bug on the ceiling. There was a miniature shower cell, a telephone, and green plastic slippers wrapped in cellophane. The smell of stale cigarette smoke was all-pervasive. The windows would not open. The lamp was not strong enough to read by. It did not feel like Japan. It did not feel like anywhere. Outside, in a chasm seven floors below, traffic moved in restless queues, this way and that. From this distance the cars appeared wholly automatic, with no actual drivers or human component. Alice was reminded of funerals – their eerie systems of motorisation in removing dead bodies, their distended time.

A few weeks ago Mr Sakamoto had e-mailed, setting out the choices: the tourist hotel (which he recommended, but Alice decided she could not afford), the love hotel (strictly for liaisons; ‘just in case,' Mr Sakamoto said), the businessman traveller's hotel (a.k.a. budget) and the sleeping capsule (the claustrophobe's nightmare). It had been a simple choice. She had booked on the internet, attracted by the fact the hotel was in the mellifluous-sounding Nishiogikubo district, and was the cheapest available on the list. Her disappointment was huge. Alice realised she had been entertaining in her head a kind of literary Japan – of screens and wooden floors and tastefully
minimalist interior design. There was perhaps a
shackuhachi
flute playing somewhere in the distance and the sweet, tinkling sound of dripping water. Although she knew these items were unlikely to feature in a cheap Tokyo hotel, some part of her yearned irrationally for their reassuring appearance, for some indication, in any case, that was not this denuded hotel-land, blanked by corporate dullness.

Alice glanced around the room, her gaze coming to rest on the telephone. She would ring Mr Sakamoto tomorrow, when she arrived in Nagasaki.

Alice slept poorly and could not remember her dreams. In the middle of the night, her eyes flew open. Something, somewhere, had awoken her with a jolt. Outside the window was the whitish sheen of ambient neon light, and a billboard flashing, make-believing, speaking to everyone and no one.

Ground level. Daylight.

Tokyo was all verticality and titanium shine. Curved surfaces reflected people as jellyfish. There was fluted steel, trapezoidal glass and plasma-screen messages, escalators aplenty, virtual and actual realities. In the brown chemical haze, in the confusing thrum, Alice tried hard to orientate herself. She was helped at last by a myopic, crew-cutted stranger who directed her with hushed tones and butterfly gestures of the hand. When she could not understand, he helped her into a taxi.

The city was shifting its pixels, achieving and losing definition. Alice had a headache. A helicopter throbbed above, like a UFO. She closed her eyes, clutching her backpack, and summoned Mr Sakamoto's face, said hello to him, smiled and imagined him expressing delight at her arrival. Travel contained this instructive discombobulation. Alice was learning her
foreignness, experiencing the
unbecoming
of places. Yet in her bafflement and travel-tiredness she was still exulted; the great city swung around her as the taxi pulled away. There was a frieze of colour, light, synthesised community. Glass towers bent above, replacing the sky.

The railway station was a booming labyrinth, stuffed with hurrying people. No one moved slowly. Fast motion was not, it seemed, exclusively cinematic; it was the quality that excited Tokyo citizens into post-modern haste. The crowd seemed to Alice good-looking, well-dressed and athletically speedy. Everyone but she knew where to go, and went there in a rush. She stood still, full of perplexity and admiration. There were signs she could not read –
kanji
,
katakana
– and glistening stalls of foodstuffs, trinkets and toys. Three stalls in her compass sold mobile phones: she was triangulated by their appeals and their handsome salesmen. One stall had as its emblem a cartoon phone with a smiley face and waving arms; it looked vaguely like a baby, as if phones were evolving nonsensically towards the human.

Almost at once a friendly stranger, a woman in her fifties dressed in a smart navy suit, stopped and asked Alice in English if she needed help finding her way. Alice gratefully agreed to be led to her platform. The woman expected no thanks, but bowed slightly and left quickly. Alice boarded the
shinkansen
to enter a super-woman-speed, to zip like a speeding bullet, on a powerful locomotive, towards Mr Sakamoto, towards Nagasaki.

 

Could it be that one of the purposes of the invention of trains is to recover reverie? In the slide of landscapes and cityscapes there is a slide of consciousness, a drift, a pleasure of seamless conjugations. As Honshu flashed by, smudged by motion and the powdery light of industrial pollution, Alice entered the
transport of her own random thoughts. The philosopher Henri Michaux once proposed the idea of a train-cinema. Along the route between Paris and Versailles, there would be placed a series of movable sculptures, activated by the speed of the train passing by. A superimposition and fusing of images would occur, so that the passenger would see outside the window a ‘plastic' cinema, a spectacle of odd beauty and dislocated enchantment. Alice loved this idea. It seemed to her both thoroughly modern and to conjure the archeology of film – the turning of images, the persistence of vision. She settled back in her seat. It was deeply comfortable. The bullet train generated a hum, a kind of just-audible whisper of the friction of air. The passengers around her were asleep, or silently reading. They were all in altered states of being, all drifting somewhere. A child awake, a cute boy in a Yankees cap, stared out of the window, unblinking, as if hypnotised by a magician.

Alice was remembering a time with Stephen. When they were lovers she had often taken him with her to the movies. Like many philosophers, he began with an attitude of contempt, that this was a minor art form, an opium of the masses, sequences of facile and depthless distraction. ‘Idiot art', he called it. Gradually, however, Stephen was won over. He forgot to resist and entered the spirit of images. Comedies, art cinema, even westerns – he learned to give himself fluently to screened experience. In the end they were almost undiscriminating. They went to film festivals, retrospectives, mass-release blockbusters.

It was in the middle of winter – they were both blunted by flu – when they went to see the 1964 Japanese classic
Woman of the Dunes
. The story was simple: an amateur entomologist from the city is looking for insects in a desert. There are montage shots of dune formations, grains of sand and scampering
beetles. Having missed the bus back to the city, the entomologist, Jumpei, accepts hospitality from the locals. He enters a deep sand pit by a long rope ladder, and stays overnight with a woman in her ramshackle house. When Jumpei wakes in the morning he finds that the rope ladder has been removed, and that his hostess is outside, shovelling sand. He has been imprisoned as her ‘helper'. The two are condemned to shovel sand so that they are not engulfed and buried. The other villagers lower water and supplies once a week to the woman and her unending labour is part of a peculiar natural economy – if her house is buried by sand, the other houses too will be lost. Sand leaks through the walls of the shack, it piles in pyramids at the doorstep, it falls in coarse grainy veils and sudden collapses. It has a ruthless incessancy. The man is overcome by anguish when he realises his entrapment. He looks up, but can see only a circle of sky and the taunting faces of the villagers, lined around the pit, waiting to haul up bags of sand. Jumpei must dig, or die. The woman says to him: ‘Last year a storm swallowed up my husband and child. The sand came down like a waterfall.' This bleak announcement makes Jumpei frantic, but he cannot escape. Inevitably, the man and woman become lovers; there is a bathing scene of riveting eroticism. But overall the tone is hopeless. An indescribable melancholy envelopes the couple. At one point – a moment Alice found particularly affecting – the woman wishes for a radio, so that they might hear the world outside, so that they might know of a life beyond their deadly sand-trap. In the end there is no release, only the grim beauty of the black-and-white cinematography and the weird seduction of so stringent an allegory.

When they came home from the movie, Alice and Stephen made love. She kissed his chest as the Japanese woman kissed Jumpei, and tried not to think of the sand and the desert and the images that seemed so antisensual and unJapanese.
Stephen, too, she could tell, was in some halfway state of the imaginary, some dim zone between the screen and the body. He locked into her with a kind of desperation; he climaxed holding her fiercely, as if he were afraid of dying. Alice was a long time following, delayed by sand. Afterwards they lay side by side, both slightly feverish, both overtaken by the aftershocks of the movie they had seen. In low voices they spoke of it, and analysed its effects. Alice told Stephen about the cave-in in her father's mine, and his futile attempt to rescue his friends. She thought again and again of the phrase: ‘The sand came down like a waterfall'. Stephen said that the movie was a poor attempt to represent Sisyphus. Eternal struggle, doomed effort, final meaninglessness. It scared him, he said. It was a damn scary movie. He had hated the bathing scene: ‘the man was so passive', but he thought the actress wonderful.

Stephen fell asleep and later roused in a nightmare. He was making choking sounds and his arms flailed wildly, so that he accidentally struck Alice across the face.

‘Help me!' he called out.

Alice switched on the bedside lamp. Stephen's eyes were open but he was still asleep. She touched his hot face and brushed back his hair. She leaned very close to his ear and whispered, ‘It's all right, I'm here. I won't let you go.'

Stephen's eyes at last closed. His breathing eased. He slowly descended back into the territory of sleep and Alice was left behind, awake, staring into the black room that was refilling with images.

In the morning a bruise stretched across her cheek. Stephen did not recall any event in the night, so Alice told him that she had bumped into a door, stumbling, when she rose in the dark. She remembered her scarlet fever, and the hospital, and the nurse who had struck her. She remembered
James's distressed face and the radio broken on the floor, exposing its innards. She thought how curious it was that wounds by intention and accident look just the same. And how the special sadness of illness, its betokening objects, its loneliness, its timeless and fretful desolation, flow back into the present, unbidden, as a swoon before dawn.