Mobile Waterboarding

The cell phone clatters onto the bitumen and slides gracefully into an ankle deep puddle, disturbing the reflection of a gaudy neon cherub gaily flashing his flickering red arse to the smoggy predawn sky. I should swear, or curse, but instead slump against the heap of sky-blue garbage bags and hold my head in my hands. I stare at the little silver box as the reflections reform above it, and the cherub resumes his neon peepshow.

Judging by the dawn light creeping into the mirrored canyons it’s going on five. This means I have only half an hour before my line begins service and I can start the slow creep westward, and home. I’ve still got the crumpled piece of paper in my back pocket that lists the times and connections I need to take, scrawled corrections noted in the margins. Home seems twenty thousand kilometres distant, rather than a few hours on an early morning train and, in a sense, I guess it is.

Screamed obscenities issue from the alley opposite. It’s on enough of an angle that I can’t see who they’re directed at, or who’s directing them, but the tone is loud and abrasive. I realise that all the signs above me are labelled in hangeul, the bobble-headed alien script of the Korean and I feel even more disconnected than usual. My mobile burbles once from the puddle, an android with its head held in a bucket, before it gives out. I doubt it will ever ring again. I don’t see who is ringing, but I know. Know that I have my back to the wall here, and now.

I realise I need to get my shit together before I get arrested, and push myself from the garbage bags, scoop up the phone, shake the excess water from the casing and eject the battery. I slip it into my bag as another of the problems I’ll have to deal with later. First, I need to stop this bleeding.

At the bottom of my bag is a head-scarf, covered in the intricate kanji of the names of fish. 鮭. 鯒. 鮪. I wrap the thin cloth around my hand and watch in fascination as the red-black stain first obscures yellowtail, then skipjack.

There is a proverb that a co-worker once taught me: neko ni katsuobushi. The cat takes the fish. He had to explain this to me as he wrote the characters in loose, broken strokes on the blackboard of the empty classroom. Don’t put yourself in a dangerous situation and expect to walk out unscathed. Don’t let your guard down because that cat, he’s going to take your fish. That’s his nature. He’s wired like that.

This morning I have taken my eye off the fish, and I will go hungry.

But then I recall another saying, one that a friend took to heart and recounted to me as we sat in a refurbished flower-shop eating tacos. 七転び八起き. Get knocked down seven times, stand up eight.

I stand and fish the paper from my pocket, adjust the makeshift bandage, and head for the station.

Posted in Mwah on Monday September 22, 2008.