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 it 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,
