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Alarmingly Strange Stories Underbelly by Rob Morgan |
| -So you say I'm a dreamer. -But I'm not the only one. Rich pressed his forehead to the rain-streaked glass. His grubby clothes scratched against his skin as the monorail bucked over a siding. The people around him jolted in unison, hanging heavily on plastic handles or bouncing on the cheap, hard seats. Rich hated to look inside on the monorail, to see face after face of blank Japanese preoccupation, eyes staring safely into the middle distance. He hated to watch as they all rocked in time with the monorail's smooth shivers, their expressions never changing as they swung from their hangers. Rich's eyes squinted, trying to find an image through the blurred window. He loved the lights of Tokyo, warped and twisted though they were by the mild raindrops marbling the glass. They always reminded him of his few experimentations with crappy street shit. Colours flashed by, winding and oscillating. Neon fish, deep as shadows chased each other with lightning speed across the cold glass. Tokyo at night was a hallucination. In the big squares, Las Vegas on acid, Lights all around you, grinning faces, golden M's. Cars and 'rails swish past, their lights sweep over you , light the back of you trench coat, light your jaw, your eyes buried in the shadow from your battered fedora. But the street was dark. Framed and hemmed by fairy lights and hallucinations, but always the faces around you were in shadow, always it was dark right in front of you , lights framing a patch of darkness over every face. The 'rail was now in a tunnel made from the sides of two skyscrapers which towered above. The windows of the building were a few inches from Rich's face, pressed to his window. Office lights flashed past, identical cubicles through the glass, the light bulb always in the same place. The same light, flickering like stop-motion as window frames obscured it. The closeness vanished and Rich was staring across a wide square. Far away through the mists, a vast face smiled and placed a pill daintily on her tongue. Rich watched dead-eyed, greasy hair flattened against his forehead by the glass. A wink of a brand name, and the face returned, smiling warmly and popping the pill in her mouth and smiling again. Blade Runner. He shouldn't be here. Rich knew this. He should be struggling fur clad up a log-bound northern ice floe, seeking dark pelts. He should be staring at impassive from the back a stained, impitent bus in burnt Iraq. he should be twisting in pure coral water, off a white beach. He should be called Alex, Laurie, The poet. The wanderer. Dragon. Garland. Don Rich. The Slicer. the Spider. He was Richard, an ant in a labyrinth. one of the scaling, climbing insects beneath the pipes and sewers of Tokyo, just another Brit traveller swallowed by Tokyo neon life. Two months ago, he should have been here. He should have been in the lights, discussing techniques with cyber-punks, dodging cops with blade graffiti gangs. Instead he had actually come here, and found that the majority of Tokyo was underground, and was swallowed and disappeared, just another minority of one. |
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