Clippings

“There’s a place where it’s always light,” the woman said. “Bright, everywhere. No place dark. Bright like a mist, like something falling, always, every second. All the colors of it. Towers you can’t see the top of, and the light falling. Down below, they pile up bars. Bars and strip clubs and discos. Stacked up like shoe boxes, one on top of the other. And no matter how far you worm your way in, no matter how many stairs you climb, how many elevators you ride, no matter how small a room you finally get to, the light still finds you. It’s a light that blows in under the door, like powder. Fine, so fine. Blows in under your eyelids, if you find a way to get to sleep. But you don’t want to sleep there. Not in Shinjuku. Do you?”

… “No,” Chia heard herself say…

“No,” the woman agreed, “you don’t. I know. But they make you. They make you. At the center of the world.” And then she put her head back, closed her eyes, and began to snore.

Yamazaki had spent one entire morning attempting to diagram the sewage-collection arrangements for the group of dwellings he thought of as comprising Skinner’s “neighborhood.” Widespread use of transparent five-inch hose had made this quite exciting, like some game devised for children, as he’d tried to follow the course of a given bolus of waste from one dwelling down past the next.

“Recovering?” …
“Apparently he’d been to a meeting that very day.” …
“What did he do there?” …
“According to our witnesses, he openly horned a tablespoon of his substance of choice, took the podium by force, and delivered a thirty-minute rant on President Millbank’s pantyhose and the assumed current state of her genitalia. He then exposed himself, masturbated but did not ejaculate, and left the basement of the First Baptist Church.”

This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care. History there had become a quantity, a rare thing, parceled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.