At Maebashi Station
February 4th, 2009
When I got to the escalator I could hear the train above grinding to a halt, but my legs were tired from so much biking and walking that I didn’t feel like running. On top of that, there was a tall, older gentleman in front of me, dressed in all black with a golf cap, who could just as easily have been an elite businessman as a university professor as a yakuza don; weighted down as I was with winter walking wear and all the accoutrement, and carrying a large plastic bag with an electronic sampler in it, even if I had wanted to run I would have had to pretty much shove past him. And it’s not the possibility that he might have been yakuza or someone otherwise important that forbids that idea, it’s that civilized human beings do not shove past old men or women unless it’s to save them from harm’s way, or unless something a lot more critical than having to wait for the next train is on the line. On top of that, they may inherently be amblers and slow walkers, old men, but you very rarely see them getting to the platform just as the train’s pulling away, or really being late for anything. So if he’s going to the same place I’m going, and he’s not rushing, why should I?
I can be kind of a fast walker, when I have a destination and time is a factor — even if time is not a factor that can be influenced by my walking speed, just the knowledge that there is some overarching deadline or that the quicker I get to wherever I’m going the more time I’ll have to do whatever it is I’m doing there (even if that only means taking a bath and sleeping) for some reason makes me walk faster, or bike faster, or drive faster. I think it’s something about being in transit that makes me want to get it over with to get on to the part that is supposedly the “real” living. Maybe a product of growing up in a home where we were always running late, or often running late myself, or just a disease of the modern culture of scheduling and deadlining and time-saving. Maybe a kind of unconscious insecurity factors into it too; the occasional panic of being around strangers, of not being able to blend in, making me want to cut solitary involuntary exposure time to a minimum. I don’t know, exactly. Anyway, I have to consciously slow my steps sometimes, and this was one of those times. Other than me and the old man, there was one guy further ahead of us, already halfway up the escelator, and maybe two or three people walking through the station behind. In this level of non-crowding, it’s pretty rude to bunch up behind someone while they’re walking.
By the time he was stepping onto the escalator, I’d slowed to a shuffle. And then he started to crumple in front of me like he’d been shot, a black mass of shuddering fabric suddenly no longer supported by that tension and positioning of muscle and bone we take so thoroughly for granted.
He stepped back onto the step beneath him to steady himself, but it was no good, because in trying to keep his balance he’d gripped down on the handrail and slumped against the sideguard — one of which was moving in time with the steps beneath his feet, and the other of which was of course stationary. And what it turned into was a perpetual backwards stumble — he continued to step back, down, but he couldn’t get his feet to compensate at the same speed as gravity was tugging his upper body back and down, because every step he found footing on was moving forward and up, and if that wasn’t enough he had to keep releasing his grip on the only handhold he had to avoid being contorted into an even weirder position because it too was moving forward. So I stopped and waited for him to get his balance, but after four, five, six more steps back it was pretty clear that he was going to remain suspended in mid-fall for eternity, or at least until strength or will gave out and his back and head met the moving ground: escalator one, old man zero.
The fact is if you go out in public at night enough in Japan, particularly crowded streets or train stations or anywhere people are coming and going and mixing, people stumbling and falling isn’t exactly common, but it can get to where you don’t think much of it. I might think differently if I wasn’t a drinker myself, but hey, it’s just alcohol, they just had a little too much. Or maybe not even that — you figure if you get enough people passing through a given place things like stumbling and falling are bound to happen more frequently, just by probability. More cars on the road, more crashes are going to happen. More feet on the ground, more hands or shoulders or faces are going to hit the ground too.
Eventually seeing that he wasn’t gonna be able to do anything about it on his own, I reached out with my winter-gloved hand and put my palm against his back. That’s really all it took, I didn’t even really have to apply force, and then he was straightening up and standing, thanking me before he’d even turned around and then that — oh look, it’s a foreigner! — face. He really didn’t seem drunk at all, nor could I smell anything on him. He thanked me several times, while I was taking out my headphones to hear him, and I said, no don’t worry about it. I mean, I was in this case moved by sympathy, but even if I hadn’t been, I couldn’t have ever gotten to the train if he’d kept falling like that forever, taking up the whole escalator, could I have?
I guess out of embarrassment, he said he’d be more careful from now on, and I said it happens, and then we got to the platform and the train was still there, and we paused to gesture each other to the door first, like the two overpolite chipmunks in the old cartoons, and then he got on, and I got on, and we went to our separate seats and he slept while I read a book and listened to sad songs, warming my feet on the under-seat heater vents, and some stories do have happy endings for everyone.
