hospital in tokyo, a long time ago in japan- working release copy

One hot day in summer in south Tokyo. Is there a south Tokyo? I always think so but perhaps it doesn’t exist.Wait, think carefully now as your memory is failing, one thing at a time, this is not the moment for you to get continuous like this. Yes, well, continuity just doesn’t work here. “did you take your drugs this morning?” She asks. Let us start at the beginning, after all most times you start at what you think of as the beginning, Though sometimes its the middle. You normally go into hospital as a patient but you can also arrive as the partner, the family member, the friend or the delivery person. delivering what? Don’t ask. So a few days ago, perhaps even a week, you take her in the car, your hands in hers, she is delirious, almost unconscious, a bag in the back seat with completely the wrong stuff in it. You in jeans, shirt, jacket and Ecco shoes, swish, swish, swish. She is in perfect black leggings, white shoes, lilac shirt, blue denim jacket, with a floral print lining. Then in the emergency medicine, the casualty wards, the business of hospital, doctors and nurses. Before this telephone calls, emails, the ping of message arrival, paging her boss, the service doors closing on the outside world. At which point she gets more delirious and it is past midnight with flickering neon lights. Here then after forms, insurances, credit cards, signatures, beds, alarm clocks, nurses asleep over desks. ludmilla is body checked, scanned, the portable scanners runs over her body, anesthetized and sleeping, an IV drip in her right arm. You can then relax in the easy chair which makes you think of nightmarish and weird dreams of cats, diagonal and white walls and cyber drift. You wished you could smoke a cigarette/\you don’t smoke a cigarette/\you don’t smoke/\we don’t smoke. You don’t even go outside the hospital at some point, and you’ll try and relax in the growing dawn, though at this time of the year in Japan it never gets really dark (4 am) because of the acres of neon and led lighting. Then later inside, through the window the cities lights are visible over Tokyo bay, and people are walking into the 24 hour convenience stores. (So are you remembering the discontinuity of the everyday…?)

Sometime later you wake and find yourself looking at a Resident who is saying to a Nurse “OK let’s take her into surgery at 7” They stand over you and say “We will remove the piece of metal and…” What was the piece of metal they are removing, shrapnel, a pin? You are too drowsy to recognise the voice from the previous night and you wait nervously outside the operating theatre. How do you understand what the Japanese Doctor is saying? In fact you knew what the surgery was for, but do not understand it. You though would like really to be catching the ferry from Corfu to Italy with Ludmilla and to travel on by the slow train northwards, the kilometres drifting slowly by or be on the motor boat travelling across Tokyo Bay. Instead you are here hoping she is alright, knowing she will be fine, but too scared to go back to the hotel…

All goes well because she wakes up feeling better and more lucid than before. You hold her hand and feel relieved that she is OK. The Resident says “It went well, we took this piece of titanium out replaced it with a carbon fibre pin. The baby will be fine… congratulations. “ There and then everything that must happen in the morning happens. You understand that that she is not going to be returning to the countryside, the hills and clean air. She sends you off to acquire clothes and other essential rations from the hospital store which is by the main exit/entrance and in trying to find it you inevitably get lost, ending up in a dark concrete corridor dripping with moisture and what looks surprisingly like ectoplasm. You know she has sent you away so she can think about the baby. You realise you are in the basement thinking about the baby and it’s floor -2 or -3. Then around an extremely dark corner you find an off duty doctor who is smoking a cigarette, who directs you down a short passageway to a lift which goes to the main reception area. At the main desk before you go into the shop you sign all the additional bureaucratic paperwork off to allow the operation, which has already taken place, to happen and then you go into the hospital shop to perform the required hunter-gatherer acts of looking for teeshirts, leggings, underwear and toothpaste, deodorant, soap, towels, nightgown (bearing the legend “love kills”) and other sundry items. Modern hospitals not supplying adequate towels anymore plus some phonecards so that Ludmilla can phone her friends to tell them that she is all right and you buy a couple of braindead bookstall novels and a Japanese biography of Isabel Mallo. She was getting very specific by the time you left her. On the way back you try an find a simpler route back along the corridors and manage only take a couple of wrong turnings.

And then back at the ward only to discover Ludmilla needs some additional things, which are mostly hygienic purchases of the sort which are not supplied by the hospital store, and vitamin and mineral pills. But also some sandals or slippers as her shoes are not suitable as her ankles have grown “disgustingly fat” . You compile a list this time and head back out. You are so tired that spacetime has become distorted and you feel terribly lost […] Neither of you can manage to talk about the baby that neither of you knew about before[…] You understand that that she is not going to be returning to the countryside, the hills and clean air. This time on leaving you find the side exit by climbing over piles of scaffolding and pass through a film set (the doctor looks familiar perhaps off a K-Drama program you watch them rehearsing a classic hesitant kissing scene) before ending up in the main car park which seems slightly bizarre as you hadn’t known it existed before. Kids and other youths who direct you round the corner to a side entrance which leads directly into corridor, full of overspill patients without insurance who have no money to pay for beds in the wards, past consultation rooms, radiology suites, empty stretcher trolleys and rooms vacant because of death, though that may be a dead body on that bed you think. .

The woman at the information desk greets you like a long lost friend. You ask her where you can get the remaining items on the list., the things not at the hotel. She tells you to walk out the main exit and walk downtown, it’ll take ten minutes because the hospital is basically a big shed in the centre of the district. So you take a cab to the hotel, extend your stay for a few more days, collect what you can from the suite, have a shower, dress in clean clothes. Thinking you would like to collapse on the bed and sleep. (These days every morning i wake up and drink a glass of water, take my blood pressure medication and the memory enhancement pills, which I take against Alzheimer’s and dementia, though I do not know if its working. Is my memory worse than before, I have no idea. I dress in clean clothes.) This would have been fine normally but your body hurts for some unknown reason, probably exhaustion, and you imagine cool hills, the alps and the Jean Giono book of the hill slopes and the man planting trees. The shapes of the city begin to reappear and your almost overcome by tiredness, your back is hurting a little and you think of coffee and a late breakfast but the virtual link between yourself and the woman (your woman) afterwards you call another taxi and head back towards the hospital. In the downtown area looking for the last few items on the list, after a number of streets, think five or ten, then some more have passed it is obvious that you are lost.

You are holding onto the mental links that always connect you across the burning hot heart of the city. Normally at home your mental connections run through some piece of telecommunications equipment across the internet, mobile phone etc. You feel better carrying the stuff you have gathered across the city. Lost but still gathering. Lost but walking back toward the hospital Lost amongst the brick buildings that overheat, concrete and glass ones designed by Lou Malmo or Ryu Sackimoto. Wishing for sleep you/he comes across a post-modern building with so much glass dry-docked on a tarmac beach. Beneath the stones another kind of beach. White pyramids etched on the pillars above the doors. Above this door a sheep, perhaps its a lamb. Lost, you still feel that mammon is dead, then around the corner the hospital in sight, a Lagonda garage, a store, wrecked cars, wrecked lives, wretched lives, then a supermarket, students running down aisles looting food and videos. You buy an ice-cream, chatting to the attendants who tell you that nobody pays during a riot and they send you/him off down the Avenue in Chone 23, which is something like a bad dream because in this city of Tokyo all blocks are different and you cannot tell up from down, left from right, “and where is the suchi place now ?” mopping your face, why is it so hot? , a bad dream, overcome at the sight of the towel and dressing gown and then searches out the hospital. “That way” your directed. Maybe some coke ? a cab perhaps ?

<< I suppose I have a story to relate. At certain times in some season or other we migrate to certain places and this story is about the last time we were in Tokyo.Japan. It was an ill-remembered event in our personal history. My reluctance to write this in the first person, well I’ll blame that on being old and the desire to cut the discourse into segments, the distinction being made between the structure of the discourse itself an the extralinguistic situation…>>

He has been too long in stress and sleep, adrift in irreversible spacetime. Almost as many people as in Europe. More than any human could ever imagine knowing. He feels as if he is back in the North African desert walking to the coast with Ludmilla, but you/he doesn’t know anything, where is it ? Where is he? Tokyo, this hospital ? Everything feels like falling over. Falling. Late afternoon. He came to the hospital with just her and is leaving with three people. The sun is high over the city across the bay he walks down the street, continues down White Lion Street, then up Kurosawa to 48th and past into Chone 23, the convenience store and since it will be glorious sunshine there, first this way and its the hospital. Arms hanging down he carries his purchases down strange streets toward the car park and then suddenly he is down by the cafe he’d been in years before with a woman from Berlin he’d loved for a few months at the time. Except that in those days he’d been cool, cute even, between two points on a trip founded on Zen. Nothing of this matters as he passes a flock of people in VR glasses, its as nice as when he first saw it. He thinks that tomorrow he must walk up the round tower. Inssssside the city limits birds do not sing or even exist here, a 100 foot drop on a plastic rope that hangs outside the hospital room window, it stretches attractively with the ghosts of vanished people moving around just outside of his vision. He can see some part of the city he recognizes through the spaces.

He walks into the hospital grounds, across the light orange (orange ?) surface, first a right foot then a left foot right foot left foot right foot left foot across in front of the street and plastic cars (oh Bowles where are you now when I need you ?) like asteroids heading down the gravity well. And then looking out of the window he watches a peregrine falcon hunting a pigeon. And then again over the soft tarmac, he can hear a familiar piano solo and a smile is back on his face, he’s feeling light headed and It is then that the big other arrives, the disguised real, opening like a wound in the heart. He sees people from the future Ludmilla, a small child and him, walking with friends, futurists and historians, women, animals, cats looking at him as if he is prey. But in his trembling he smells the truth, the abyss opens up before him, to be lost and over loaded, far from the cool pillars, the citron presse, the breeze off of the mountains, the house in the hills, the kitchen devils, the everyday delights of the routines established by Ludmilla who is so close now, a mere 100 metres across the hostile plain and whilst Ludmilla isn’t herself but a wounded person in a hospital bed, precisely that is her. I know I cannot deal with her being ill, Ludmilla has to be well or I start to lose it, he thinks. The smile on his face against the discontinuity and suffering, he washes his face on the ground floor. The ultimate reality of the open maw that is the lie of being lost in the city, then found with her waiting, dependent on him rather Ludmilla in the hills with him dependent on her, planting trees like Jean Giono’s hero.

An hour has passed since he left her, the sense of panic is fading and as he walks down corridors after travelling upwards in lifts, he begins to feel better. He walks into the ward and finds her asleep on pain killers. The nurse says she’s fine and just needs to sleep. [ As things are this strand of reality will not last and ludmilla and I will leave the hospital. I will almost forget this moment when alone and lost , I found myself in the absurd position of not being either alone or lost, and yet, yet, yet, I wondered at my split self. ] He thinks vaguely about a story he read years ago in the Polish Bar on Little Turnstile in London. There must be a similarity between the guy who thought up the story and him, who knows anyway he shrugs his shoulders easing the fear and tension from his back and ends up sitting in the hospital cafeteria drinking lemon presse, espresso and mineral water before finding Ludmilla in her bed reading a mindless woman’s fashion magazine. She has to stay in hospital for four days, she will stay two as the virus is burning calories to carry out the internal repairs. “Do we need to talk about this?” She asks. “No, are we becoming parents?” he asks. “I think so. Yes, I do….” She says. He can’t help but smile. “Then, that’s scary and i, but good and forgive me if i panic agains…” “Idiot, always…” She had never stopped making him smile since the desert. Between hospital visits and delivering books to her he spends most of the time wandering the streets of Tokyo. He extends the hotel booking by a few weeks, to give her time to convalesce and moves to a top floor suite. He carries out the meetings with the people she came to see and reports the long discussions and the detailed recommendations back to her. Your shared consciousness, that part which is shared between the two of you/us/we and only… recovers after the nights sleep, you begin work. All this way and you end up attending my meetings for me… she says the next evening in the hospital.

This is when the big other, the always unknown, the discontinuous reality which leaps and looks at you as you sort books in the library. Later you sip vodka from a cut glass shot glass and reads pages of a novel about the secret life of a secretary… The baby is now an adult. And she interrupts from the sofa; I thought you might leave me then. You mean in Tokyo? Yes, because of the shock of the baby. What would I do without you? I’d only be miserable. She looks at his serious face over the cover of the hyper-modernist novel she is reading. Because you’re mad. She says a touch of her russian accent surfacing, and I don’t know what you see in me. Stupid, he replies closing the book. I see the desert, nomads and riding horse on the steppe. So romantic, still those roads don’t exist in Japan. she says. Well that’s true… we are…. The rest was years ago, before the daily memory drugs, my mind and events failing me these days…