Storywater
His hobby is to spend time reading about living arrangements. He is most interested in those about which people seem to have forgotten, or about which, en masse, (to the best of his knowledge) they’ve never been aware. For a reasonable man of forty-three – average-looking, with a regular income, only mildly asthmatic – he is aware that he lives in unusual circumstances, which is to say he lives alone.
In the evenings he bathes, placating his still-busy mind by leafing through one or two of the magazines he has stacked in piles beside the toilet. (It isn’t that his mind is still passionately engaged with his day’s work – not that, never that – only that it is still computational. His dialogue with himself loiters within the confines of workplace language, a file of practised phrases which he pronounces more confidently than anything else he says, and yet more soullessly, if soul still has currency as a referent.)
Tonight he’s been reading about Gunkanjima. ‘This island,’ he reads (out loud, to himself, enjoying the tinned effect that the bathroom lends to his voice), ‘unknown even to most Japanese, was once the most densely populated place on earth. Since the closure of its coal mines in 1974, however, it has been entirely abandoned. Its nickname comes from the fact that it resembles a battleship when viewed from a distance. Visitors are forbidden.’
Yet someone took the photographs that accompany the article, he reasons, so visitors must not always have been forbidden; or, perhaps, security is not so tight. And how, he wonders, is security maintained? Were someone to man, to patrol the island, would it not be a mistake to call it wholly uninhabited; would a security guard not count as a population of one? Perhaps there were alarms installed; but what, then, of those who installed the alarms, or of those who maintain them, do they count?
He’s reminded of something he read last week on the living arrangements of former American presidents. ‘William Taft,’ he’d read, ‘the United States’ fattest president to date, had a bathtub custom-built to accommodate his massive frame. All of the workers who built Taft’s bathtub could fit into it at once.’
His mind is slipping off of the day’s loop-track like tape from a reel. He props the magazine atop his knees. Its photographs show the streets of Gunkanjima lined with hive-like, many-storeyed wooden houses, flowering elaborately with fungi and moistened dust. What of fungi as population, he thinks (not knowing how ‘one’ fungus would be counted).
He must get out of the bathtub; there is no one to wake him if he falls asleep. He teeters now on the edge of sleep, his mind filled, suddenly, with images of worker bees, humming in bunches in and out of a tub, or hovering, a cumulative airborne weight, in the otherwise abandoned street.
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