In transit: notes from a daybook
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 3: Webs of Power
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Creed O'Hanlon
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Creed O'Hanlon's biography and other articles by this writer
Kansai Airport: Blind, free-floating within the warm gel of some exotic amnion, a sudden, gritty reflux obstructs a breath and I surface, choking. I claw the bedside table for an open bottle of mineral water. My lungs rasp as I try to suck in air.
I sit up on the edge of the bed and get my bearings by looking out through a sealed, double-glazed window. I never draw the curtains in hotel rooms; the view outside is often the only clue I have of where I am and, more and more these days, I wake in panic, not knowing. It is still well before dawn but darkness has given way to a grey luminescence that distorts the mile-long island of orange lights that is Kansai International Airport. Renzo Piano's angular steel and glass terminal resembles a huge alien shipwreck in the middle of the bay. Small trains shuttle to and from it like parasitic robots, and the surrounding water is black and unnaturally still, as if quelled by an oily spillage.
I arrived last night on a Northwest flight from Detroit, too late to catch the last train to Shin-Osaka and the bullet-train connection to Hiroshima. I tell myself I am on a business trip to give it a bit more specificity of purpose, but really it has more to do with compulsive nomadism than with commerce. I wrangle data, distilling from it information to barter with major corporations. What I do has no real job description, no locus, no regular hours and, I have to admit, no discernible outcomes other than it pays well. I could do it from anywhere.
The girl beside me doesn't stir. Naked, lying on her stomach on top of the covers, her arms by her sides and her legs straight, her round face obscured by a tangle of long black hair, she could be a corpse awaiting autopsy. Her pale skin is as cool and smooth as antique jade. The slight epicanthic folds of her eyelids twitch but the eyes remain closed.
She is 23 years old, less than half my age, and in between flights we live together in hotel rooms and serviced apartments and the first-class lounges of major airports. Sometimes she returns to visit her mother and sister in the small house they share in Asakusa, in Tokyo, but maybe because she is so young, or she is sick of the lack of space or the burden of obligations at home, she prefers the fugitive life with me. She acts as my translator, not just of the language but of the oblique protocols that are intrinsic to every interaction with the Japanese. There is so much that I miss, or just don't get. And not just in Japan.
THERE IS A SLIGHT SURGE IN THE PALE BLUE-GREY GLOW of my laptop's screen as the open mail program downloads a dozen new messages. I check the list of senders. Only one of them is personal and it's from a half-forgotten girlfriend, a film director from New Zealand: "There is something about you that has always intrigued me and also made me wary," she writes. "I always wondered why someone who is so intelligent and sensitive to things could equally be so ruthless and without compassion. It was always a mystery to me and didn't make sense, then I suddenly understood that you didn't have the whole gamut of human emotion that one is usually endowed with, that you are cauterised in certain ways, that your chemistry means you bond differently."
I decide to read the rest later. I use the hotel's over-priced broadband to check my next flight, three days away, from Hiroshima to Tokyo, and reconfirm a flight from Tokyo to Los Angeles that will, in turn, connect with a flight to Dallas. My son's 10th birthday is a week away and I have promised to be there to celebrate it with him, although I know already it will be another promise that I cannot keep. I sometimes have to remind myself that I have a family and that this hyper-mediated existence, in which my life is like flotsam drifting on the surface currents of interconnecting networks – multi-band cell phones, the internet, ATMs, credit cards, mail drops, courier pick-ups and deliveries, teleconferences, airport lounges and airline hubs, client LANs and extranets, regional offices, rent-a-car pick-ups, hotel chains, cable TV and pay-per-view movies that hardly change from country to country – is supposed to be a means to an end rather than an end in itself.
I'm addicted to connectivity and the constant rush of high-speed motion. There's nothing else to it: the accumulation of entry and exit stamps in a passport and three-quarters of a million frequent-flyer kilometres, and hours of down time spent in antiseptic airport lounges amount to a meagre physical accomplishment, and I've long stopped caring about the destinations. They're meaningless, just cipher-like dots that intersect a notional matrix of flight schedules and routes. I transit each of them as often as I jack into digital networks.
IT IS PROBABLY BROUGHT ON BY JET LAG, but the cold tentacles of depression are constricting my brain, making it wearisome to process any thought more complex than getting out of bed. I keep telling myself that whatever it is I'm feeling is temporary, not to be trusted, just part of the rapid-cycling of the particular type of bipolar disorder I suffer. Within days, sometime hours, the fluctuating sine-wave of my labile mood will incline upwards again; right now, it is low enough to encourage me to be contemplative and not yet oppressive enough to cause me to be confused and withdrawn. I take 25 milligrams of a drug called Lamictil to counter it, on top of 2500mg of Epilim and a milligram of clonazepam a day. I feel like the medications coagulate as a sludgy residue in my system, decelerating my thinking but leaving me unassailed by the aggressive sieges or leaden shutdowns of unmanaged madness.
Even when my moods are stable, a part of my psyche still misfires with odd fixations or phobias or undefined irritations. But now I'm aware of them, I exert some control. I can act "normally" rather than surrender to impulse. It's as if connectors in my brain have found clean contact points and the jagged, itchy fuzziness of my thought processes have cleared.
The drugs have sharpened my perception of reality. But there's a down side. Over the past weeks, I've begun to recognise that some of what I used to recall very clearly as personal experience is illusory, that my psyche has concocted delusional memories from random input, manic reconstructions of ideations and dreams (including other people's) and roles I acted or compelled others to act out for me.
Which confronts me with the concept that I am not what I think I am: what I have and haven't done, when, with whom, and where, all have to be re-examined in forensic detail to determine the true narrative.
Which is to say, reality is alien to me. Accommodating it is like trying to adapt to the atmosphere of a different planet. Part of the reason I started a diary was to have a daily record, some way of keeping track.
SHIN-OSAKA: The 23-year-old perches barefoot on the edge of the "green car" seat on the Hiroshima-bound Shinkanzen, her toes curling like tiny, well-manicured, pink talons on the front of the seat cushion. She is gnawing at a rice ball.
All Japanese girls perch. Like fine-boned birds, they squat and balance on their toes while they smoke, drink takeaway coffee or suck up bowls of udon, or chat with their girlfriends who are perched alongside them like sparrows on a telephone wire. Some, alone, stare Zen-like into space or peer for hours at the small screens of their mobile phones, distractedly thumbing the keyboards. With the precise ease of professional acrobats, they teeter on the edge of street kerbs, steps, even metal railings.
There is a persistent frisson of tension between the 23-year-old and me, a cultural and generational dissonance that erupts occasionally in impatient, resentful spats that are only quelled by my silence. It doesn't help that it's hot, humid and it hasn't stopped raining for days.
Japanese women are intricately neurotic, with all kinds of unpredictable fixations and prejudices sieved through the weird subordinate personas they adopt – innocent schoolgirl, servile drone, chirruping hostess, white-pantied sex fantasy – to relate with most men. I keep asking myself what I'm looking for in this young girl. Maybe it's a form of emotional vampirism, needing young flesh and a relatively unjaded and pliable mind to stay my own self-negation.