The End of the Moment We Had

by Toshiki Okada

  The performance started. The mood in the room shifted with almost no warning, like an ambush. Or maybe it just felt that way to the guys because we were all drunk and had no concept of time. There was a change in the quality of quiet, like when snow suddenly stops falling. The murmurs of the crowd died down, and the house lights dimmed a little—not that they had been very bright to begin with. So maybe it was just the impression of the lights dimming. The six of us were all still drinking beer, to the point where none of us knew how many we’d had. Everyone finished the little bit that remained in our paper cups—it seemed like the thing to do with the lights going down and the feeling that the show was about to start, and after a bit the performers came out. There was nothing flashy about it, neither their entrance nor the performance that followed, it had a totally relaxed feel. First, a white girl took the mic. She wound the cord a few times, which there didn’t seem to be any reason for doing other than to mark time. She started talking in English. Next to her stood a Japanese girl who was interpreting, and she had a mic in her hand too. The white girl spoke in a rich voice, sometimes suddenly getting louder, and the first couple of times she raised her voice it triggered a screech of feedback, but the feedback stopped quickly enough. She was explaining what the performance was going to be about. Although the explanation was already part of the performance. We’ll be talking about things, but we don’t know what we’ll be talking about, and the reason why not is that we haven’t prepared anything. But we’ll talk anyway. That must have been what she said, because that’s what the interpreter interpreted after her. There aren’t just mics on the stage, she said, there’s also a mic on a stand in the audience, and it’s open to anyone who wants to speak. The audience mic stood right behind where the six of us were sitting, kind of blocking the aisle. If anyone has anything they want to say, feel free to get on the mic at any time. The interpreter said all that in Japanese. Of course nobody got up and went to the mic. The room fell silent. This is, after all, Japan. The girl, and I’m just guessing here, she let the silence go on, thinking maybe that would get past the Japan-ness. But before the silence could get too heavy it was broken. One of the performers, the young black guy who might have been in the movie I saw, walked over to the audience mic and started telling his story. He had dreads, but they didn’t make his head look that much bigger and they weren’t flashy or intimidating, if anything they made him look sophisticated. His story didn’t last long. When I was sixteen I got my first ever job. A janitor in a Dunkin’ Donuts. At the end of my first day, the manager called me into the office and asked, how do you like the job? But I didn’t answer. That was the end of the story. He stepped away from the mic, opened one of the folding chairs onstage and sat down. Silence returned to the room. It lasted a lot longer than the first time. At first everyone thought it would end right away, that someone else would stand up and go to the mic and pick up where the first performer left off. But no one did, and the silence stretched on much longer than anyone thought it would. It must have been part of the performance, an intentional silence. It went on and on, to the point where the least secure people in the audience must have been squirming under the weight of the silence, when finally the girl sitting next to the black guy on the stage made a move like she was going to stand up, and then she actually did stand up, took the mic and started talking. It was just when people were starting to think that the silence had gone on for too long, just as they were facing the need to decide what they were prepared to do about it. Thanks to the girl standing up, everything taking shape in their minds settled back, only half-formed. All their discomfort was neutralized along with everything else they were feeling, then it vanished, as if it had never been there at all.

  This is what the girl said: She was staying at a hotel in Shibuya. That morning she went out for a walk and she happened upon a protest march. It was a few days before the US began their invasion of Iraq. The protest was against the war. She joined in and marched with them. She was surprised at how narrow the column of the marchers was in Japan compared to the protests she had seen elsewhere, and how orderly the police were, escorting the marchers. She heard music that was probably from a portable CD player somewhere in the march, and then somebody handed her a tambourine. That was the end of her story, and the girl sat down. This time there was only a short pause. Then the girl who spoke first stepped up and said something very brief. The immediate Japanese translation told us that the mic was open to all of us. Then another silence. Another long one.

  I wondered what I would say if I went to the mic, tried to picture myself doing it. After a little while a man stood up, but at first I didn’t notice him. It wasn’t until he got right up to the mic that I did. He was middle-aged, with greying hair and rimless glasses, and he had a mellow vibe. We watched to see what he would do. I asked myself if I would get up too, all six of us did, I mean only vaguely, but we did. He said that he found out about this event online. He got on a plane from Kyushu to Tokyo to come see it. I have grave apprehensions about the war that’s about to begin, he said. When I was young it was the war in Vietnam. Back then, there were bands like Peter, Paul and Mary, and we all sang their songs together. But now there are no songs like that. That was when he lost my interest. Is this old guy going to keep talking? I wondered, but that was all he had to say. While he shared his thoughts, the interpreter spoke in a low voice to the performers, telling them in English what the guy said. One of them nodded repeatedly. The man at the mic stood there for another minute even though he had stopped talking, like it took him some time to realize that he was done. When he finally came back to himself, he stepped out of the light into the shadows and went back to his seat. Then he raised his glass from the table to his lips and steadied himself. None of us paid any more attention to him. No one else made any moves towards the mic and the room got silent again. The air was still; you could hear the bubbles in the beer. This went on for a while, the echoes or maybe more like the reverberations of what we’d just heard hanging over the room like smoke. But it wasn’t exactly a vibe relating to what the man had said, if anything it was resistance, annoyance even, except that’s probably not quite right, it was both, a feel in the room that was kind of obviously a combination of resistance and agreement, and I was glad, because that was how I felt too. I wanted to try to put a name to the feel at that moment, like if it existed independently from all the bodies in the room—I mean if someone was observing, from a distance, what would they call that feeling. I considered really thinking about it, but I didn’t do it. I wanted another beer, but I couldn’t get up in the middle of this and go to the bar. I turned to look at the bar anyway, see how far away it was. My eyes swept over the audience, and that was when I spotted a girl, who looked back at me. She wasn’t the girl from the movie theatre. After the performance ended, she and I stood by the bar talking. Then we took a taxi to Shibuya and got a room at a love hotel. It wasn’t a Friday or Saturday so even though we got there pretty late, we had no problem getting a room.

  One of the other audience members who got up in front of the mic during the performance—after a while lots of people got up to say something—was a girl who started off by saying she was an interpreter. By the time she was on the mic, the performance was winding down, and the whole room was full of everyone’s desire for the thing to finish. But she just talked on, nonchalant-like. Or maybe she really couldn’t read the room.

  So I also work as an interpreter—she seemed to be speaking to the Japanese woman interpreting on stage—and as far as what exactly an interpreter does, well, I guess you all know this, but basically they take what someone’s said, in my case I work from English, so I take what someone’s said in English and translate it into Japanese, or the other way around, so I take what’s been said, I mean what’s been said by someone besides me, and translate it and communicate it and that’s the job of an interpreter, right? So tonight I’ve been watching all kinds of people get up and say something on the mic, and like I thought for a change i
t might be interesting to translate what I myself was thinking. So now I’m gonna take what’s on my mind and translate it into English. Is that all right? She didn’t really mean it as a question, and she wasn’t expecting anyone to answer. So she went on. But now I’m like, do I even have anything to say? Which makes me start to think that maybe I don’t, and I guess my only real-izing that now that I’m up here has some of you wondering like what’s with this girl, right? But you know, I guess I really don’t have anything to say. I mean, I’m an interpreter, so I can speak, or like, you know, understand English, so being here tonight and listening to everyone go back and forth really made me feel like I wanted to give my opinion too, but I guess at like the moment of truth I realized that I don’t even have an opinion. Sorry about that. Really, there’s got to be something, um, oh hey I know, so I saw Bowling for Columbine too. I can talk about that, you know, it was really chilling, I was like, whoa, this is how the media gets us all worked up and makes fear take root inside of us, you know? I saw it at the theatre in Ebisu, it was super-crowded. And I mean I think it’s great that so many people went to see a movie like that.

  The girl I went to the hotel with wasn’t this girl on the mic, it was her friend. They came to the performance together. I noticed this girl actively watching her friend get all excited on the mic, and I stared at her. It was a few moments before she turned to look back at me. The first thing that made me like her was how her fringe hung in a diagonal line across her forehead. I think she must have cut them herself. But I never asked her about it. When I was looking at her before she looked back, I tried to guess the odds of her getting up on the mic, like I was placing a bet. In the end she didn’t. Her friend did, but she didn’t. Although I wonder how many people were actually still listening. A lot of people had already talked. Between the time that had passed since the performance started and all the alcohol consumed by all the people who had been sitting there the whole time, the atmosphere was starting to get thick. I was busy paying attention to the fringe of the girl who wasn’t the interpreter. And there were also fragments of what some people had said at the mic sticking in my head, like pricking me. Like there was this one girl—I saw the protest march today too, and I thought about joining in, but in the end I couldn’t bring myself to. And there was a guy who before the interpreter girl talked about having seen Bowling for Columbine went up and said he’d seen it and what he thought about it. There were others. But by that point in the night I was done listening. I wanted to have sex with the girl with the fringe. I was past listening. Since we got to SuperDeluxe, I had two or maybe more than two beers, and together with what I drank before, it was some stupid amount. The six of us had been drinking all night. My eyes felt all bleary. They probably looked that way to her too, when our eyes met, but that was probably for the best—I mean I’m just guessing here—rather than me trying to act cool I was able to just stare right at her, which must have made an impression. Normally, when I’m not drunk, my mind wants to jump from whatever I’m doing to the next thing, and you can see it in my eyes. My eyes are always darting around. But when I drink, the more faded I get, the more I can pay attention to whatever I’m looking at. My eyes stay put, I don’t need to worry about them doing their own thing. They just stay where they are. I thought about how the one performer who went to the protest said she was impressed with how tight and narrow the marching column was. Come to think of it, the marches in America and Europe I saw on the news took up the entire street. I thought about that for a bit. As I did, my eyes started to lose focus, my vision got blurry, but the performance continued, didn’t matter how drunk I was or what I was thinking or what my eyes were doing. The performers started shouting questions from the stage, and the audience was supposed to answer yes or no. There must’ve been ten questions they shouted. But now I can only remember one, which was the last one. Is Bush bad? There was a louder response than for any of the earlier questions, and people shouted from here and there, from everywhere really, the whole audience was shouting, yes! yes! yes! yes! But at the end, overlapping with the last cries of yes!—strictly speaking, a tiny bit after—was a single loud no! It was a man’s voice. Of course all the performers looked towards where the voice came from. They could tell right away who had said it. One of the performers said they wanted to hear what the man had to say, then the interpreter translated the request. The man approached the mic. He walked like he was trying to avoid looking sheepish but also didn’t want to seem too eager. Whatever was on his mind as he walked to the mic stand, it took him a few moments to get there. Then he spoke to the crowd that had been waiting to hear what he was going to say: So, I’m guessing I was called out because you want to know why I said no—and here he smiled in a way that could be read as either natural or unnatural. He seemed to be wanting to give off a casual feel. He continued speaking, his smile still lingering. So, the reason is pretty simple, basically, everyone here said yes, which feels a little creepy, and that was my main reason. I don’t like Bush from a standpoint of policy or anything like that. Rather than thinking about whether or not my answer is actually no, I just felt like at least one person had to say no, otherwise we’d have everybody here saying yes and that doesn’t feel right, it actually feels a little dangerous. That was really it. The interpreter put all of that into English. While she was doing her thing, the man kept smiling. As if reacting to that, the interpreter had a little smile on her face too as she spoke in English. After a brief silence, the black guy who told the story about Dunkin’ Donuts nodded forcefully. He kept nodding and said that if he was watching the performance as an audience member, he probably would have said no for the same reason. The interpreter said that in Japanese. That was the end of that interaction. After that a few more people got up and said things. Up on stage, the performers talked more, in response to the comments from the audience, or not. Every so often through the night the performers played some terrible covers. The guitars, the keyboards, the drums, the vocals, it was all awful. But it didn’t really matter. Some of the songs they played were originals. Those were awful too. After each one someone else would get up and say something and someone would respond. Speaking, music, repeat. As the performance went on, never deviating from that pattern, it became easier for people to go up to the mic and speak. But at the same time the audience was growing tired of the repetition, bit by bit but plain enough to see. Then it got to the point where most of the audience was starting to feel that this loose performance, loose in both the good and the bad sense, would soon come to an end. I felt it too. By that point I was already feeling like I wasn’t in Japan. The girl and I took that feeling to the hotel, where we spent the next four days with it. Several times we tried to figure out where the feeling came from. But we never came up with anything that seemed right. It couldn’t have been just because the performers were foreigners. Nearly everything the performers talked about had to do with the war that was about to start. The clock was ticking down on the ultimatum Bush gave Iraq, and the whole world was paying attention, all they could do was watch and wait. Everyone knew what was going to happen, but it hadn’t happened yet. The performance took place in the middle of all this. So it was obvious that one of the aims of the performance was to spark a debate about what was happening. And sure enough some people went to the mic and said what they had to say about it, while others stood up without having anything particular in mind, Sorry, they said, I don’t really have anything to say but I just kind of came up to the microphone anyway, then they shrugged and waddled back to their seat.