The Constorium of Greater Minds

It’s the height of winter in Tokyo. A Sunday night in the height of winter. Outside the air is bitter and clean, as clean as the air ever is in the city and the sky is so clear, clear and crisp and yet there are no stars. There are never any stars in Tokyo. Inside the apartment it’s warm, too warm and in the living room, sitting on the couch it’s difficult to keep from closing your eyes and succumbing to sleep; a sleep that if you’re not careful might grip you through to spring.

“Ready,” Lisa asks from the doorway to the living room.
“Are you going now,” Deepa asks before I have a chance to respond. She is jealous of me; the way girlfriends get jealous of each other’s boyfriends after about two months into a relationship. About the time when you start showing up at the apartment every weekend, sleeping over, occupying the time that was once spent talking about men, time one of them now spends talking to a man.
“Yeah, I think I’ve got everything. You want to come along?”
Deepa doesn’t know that I’m leaving Tuesday but I still can’t help being slightly annoyed and when she says no, I need to keep working, I’m relieved.
“You sure?”
Yes, she’s sure, I say to myself. Let’s go.
“Yeah, you guys go,” she says.
“Alright, we should be back around midnight.”
“Alright, stay warm.”
As we close the door, Deepa shouts at us to stay warm, once more.
Stepping out of the lobby and into the city the cold air feels refreshing after the embryonic warmth of the apartment. I feel revitalized and suddenly overcome with an adolescent giddiness. Taking Lisa’s hand in mine I swing our arms up above our heads and back down again like a pendulum.
“It’s fucking freezing,” she remarks.
We are on our way to the hospital so Lisa can have her cold checked out. She’s been feeling sick for a week now and needs something stronger than an over the counter medication. The hospital is in kichioji a neighborhood I’ve never been to. The name of the hospital is Saint Marks and I find this fact mildly interesting when I hear it, that even in Japan you can find a Saint Marks hospital. To get there we have to walk down meiji dori to the omotesando subway stop and take the oduara line to Hiro and from hiro take the Oedo line to kichioji. From the subway station it’s a ten-minute walk.
This quiet stretch of sidewalk along Meiji Dori, as it cuts through the center of Harajuku on the neighborhoods western border is deserted on a cold Sunday night. The traffic is minimal and except for the occasional murmur as one of the city’s iconic black cabs floats by the street, too, is quiet. Without talking we walk hand in hand past the Turkish embassy, past the small bicycle shop, a rainbow of frames hanging in the window. Once we are passed Beams and passed H&M, well into Harajuku proper we begin to pass a few smartly dressed couples on their way home from dinner, a team of girls with shopping bags, three guys that look as if they could work at any one of the shops in the back alleys and side streets of Harajuku, fitted hats and black rimmed eye glasses.
Soon we arrive at the intersection of Meiji Dori and Omotesando. The intersection is empty except for a handful of people waiting to cross the street by Condomania. The intersection is empty and all of a sudden the city feels empty, empty in a way that only cities can feel late at night in the middle of winter; a cross walk, teeming with people by day, quiet and deserted by night makes me feel so alone. The lights of storefronts, one after another, after another stretching in four directions as far as the eye can see and the humming of car engines idle at the intersection make me feel alone. With the cold, and the emptiness of the crosswalk and Lisa walking next to me and me, feeling alone, we turn left and stop in front of the elevator entrance to the subway station.
Once underground, in the warm artificial light and otherworldly warmth of the station the feeling of loneliness recedes. Lisa and I race down the stairs and onto the platform. I’m laughing and watching her as she runs ahead of me to the center of the platform and crashes to a halt against a large yellow mosaic tiled pillar.
“How do you feel,” I ask her.
“I feel sick, I think I’m going to die.”
“Don’t say that,” I say. I know it’s silly but when she says that I actually imagine her dead. Not so much what she’d look like dead but for an instant I see a flash of what my life would be like if she were dead. It depresses me, for an instant I am depressed.
“Don’t say that,” I say again, but with a wry grin on my face.
“It’s true, it’s true. I feel as if I might die.”
She emphasizes the “aye” sound in die, lets it drag on a little before it fades out. She sounds like I child when she says this.
“You’re not going to die.”
You’re not going to die. What an absurd thing to say. I mean honestly, what an absurd thing to say.
“Here’s the train.”
We flop down on the two seats closest to the door. The subway car is empty except for an old lady at the opposite end. I sprawl out, stretch my legs out as far as they can reach, slide my backside down to the very edge of the seat and lean my head back against the sill of the window. I must be a vision of exhaustion, although I’m not tired. And thinking to myself, Alex, you’re not tired and sitting like this is not good for your posture, I right myself and sit up tall. Lisa leans her head against my shoulder and I watch our reflection in the window across from us. I turn my face to the side and kiss her on the crown of her head and I watch myself in the mirror as I do this. She is watching me, watching myself in the mirror and she smiles. Her hair smells good, it’s wrapped in a bun at the back and she has a hair band on to keep her bangs from escaping. Her hair smells cold and clean like the night air and it is soft and warm against my cheek and her smile is warm and reassuring in the window across from us.
Suddenly sitting in the empty subway car (the old woman exits at Aoyama) I am again overcome with a feeling of aloneness. Yet this time it isn’t a feeling of being alone and by myself, it is a feeling of being alone, completely alone with Lisa. And even though we really are alone, at least in that subway car, it is a feeling different from the real and immediate sense of being alone on a subway. It is a feeling like we are the only two people awake in the city at this instant, the only two souls stirring in a city of thirty-six million. With each stop on the line, each opening of doors, each open door greeted by an empty platform, a ghostly, melancholy platform, a platform bathed in somber artificial light, warm and stuffy like an alien womb we move deeper underground, farther from civilization and the closest living thing. The underground veins of Tokyo like the entrails of some slumbering beast pulse with a heat unnatural. Lisa and I are so alone. At hiro we exit the train and as we do a young couple enter at the opposite end of the car.
We walk up two flights of stairs, take a left into a large cavernous main hall, along one side of the wall is a panel of coin operated lockers and then a row of turnstiles, across from these a giant map of the area and on either side of the map large yellow placards pointing to various numbered exits and listing several landmarks to be accessed from each exit. We walk past the maps, past the exit signs, following the signs for the oedo line. Down a flight of stairs and along a yawning corridor, all concrete and cold and empty and foreboding and down yet another flight of gray concrete steps that finally spit us out onto the platform. During our journey through the underground labyrinth of hiro station we pass not a single fellow traveler. The next train won’t arrive until 1035 as noted by the LED sign above our heads. We take a seat on an empty wooden bench halfway down the tracks.
“Eight minutes. Fuck,” I grumble under my breath.
“The world is so cold,” Lisa says.
The way she says it I know she isn’t speaking figuratively and I chuckle. She is always making simple and ostentatious statements like that.
“So fucking cold.”