Chapter Three:
Tokyo was nothing if not busy. The two girls spent their first few days navigating coloured trains that ferried them about the immense metropolis. Quinn had her photo taken, instantly uploaded to her social profile, at the foot of the Gundam statue in Odaiba. She was dressed in a new wardrobe of Japanese fashion, her long legs protruding from a tiny dress of polkadots. Stevie had handed the camera to a watching stranger in order to best coach Quinn in the appropriate Japanese stance – teeth flashing, hands poised in a pair of peace symbols – as the two girls laughed together.
An anime artist at the pop-up Shonen Jump! store turned her into an anime character with oversized green eyes, sparkles glittering from her fingers in a flourishing hand gesture. She had bowed solemnly, humbled by the artist’s imagination and talent. Stevie was drawn brandishing more guns than she had hands for and a grin that remarkably captured the cat-like quality of her sly humour.
After Odaiba they travelled on the driverless monorail to Ginza. The two girls sat quietly, enjoying the monorail’s respite from the noise of the Odaiba shopping malls, and watched the man-made island drop away as they were surrounded by the advertising-plastered high-rise of central Tokyo. Each station was announced with a simple chime followed by its name, shortly before the monorail docked. The carriages were utterly covered in text and imagery – shifting maps with Kanji and English characters, adverts selling everything from toothpaste, to beachside holidays, to restaurants run by humanoid machines that looked creepily like young girls, and various warnings and reminders. Stevie remarked that she’d wasted her time bothering to learn Japanese when the country was so accommodating to english-speakers. Buildings flashed brightly with colours and words that surrounded smiling Japanese models in phrases and childish montages of scenes from popular culture.
“Hey Q, look!” Stevie pointed at a sweeping image of a building folding inwards on itself, the display suggesting to the viewer that they were travelling inside the office block.
As the image grew larger, Quinn realised that the façade was a digital replication of a densely detailed painting. Faceless figures went about their daily lives as though they were completely normal. Several office cubicles were coloured in fine shades of blue and green and, as she watched, one fell away as though dead, its thin walls flopping to the floor with exaggerated impact. Behind them sat a lone figure looking into the white glow of a computer screen. He was featureless – a nobody and yet somehow encapsulating everybody – and at his foot a tiny girl, no bigger than a hand, pulled at his slacks, crying, ignored. The images faded to a name surrounded by excited phrases in Kanji – Robert Chaff: Mori Art Museum, Roppongi.
“Jeez…” Stevie slumped back in her seat with a dazed expression as the building slid from view. “He’s your man, right?”
Quinn continued to look out the window for several seconds before answering. She was replaying the imagery in her head, imagining herself pulling at the pant-leg of God.
“Yes,” she said softly and smiled at Stevie with a nervous expression, unsure how her friend would interpret the ad.
“Full on, hey? At least if he’s not there tomorrow, the show looks like it will be assaulting!” The girl laughed, her teeth showing between thick, shapely lips.
When they reached Ginza, Quinn dragged Stevie through Ito-ya where she admired and collected stationary and art materials for more than three hours. Stevie desperately wanted to wear a dress made of Hello Kitty plush dolls, but was disappointed to be told that it was only for display purposes. They drank Starbucks iced-coffee amidst crowds of people and, as their arms grew heavy with bags and tired from the long day, they settled onto a train to take them back to their hotel.
Shibuya was the nightclub district of Tokyo. It never slept and there was always somewhere to go provided a person had the energy to go there. Stevie wanted to go dancing, but Quinn had been wiped out by the day and she wanted the opportunity to get a good night’s sleep before the big exhibition opening the following night. Quinn told her friend to go but asked her to wake her when she got home and the two of them kissed one another goodnight.
While Stevie showered and got dressed for an hour or two of dancing, Quinn ran a test which showed nothing outside of what was normal for her, drank a large glass of water, and made herself a pot of rice tea. She settled onto a small couch in a nightie with a thick builder’s pencil and a sketchpad that she had bought earlier. The girls waved goodbye to one another from across the room and Quinn checked her email.
There were several emails from her mum with subject headers of increasing urgency, but as she read through them she realised that they were just desperate pleas for her to call home. Quinn skimmed them all just to be sure and proceeded to clear out the weekly newsletters that had arrived from the few websites she was subscribed to – some art journals from the states, a pair of scientific periodicals that primarily focused on genetic research, and a school pamphlet for Brisbane Girls Grammar. The title of a spam email caught her attention: GenTex – future genetic excellence. For some reason the name reminded her of her father. She imagined that he had probably done some work for them at one point or another, perhaps he had liaised with them about some line of research he was exploring. He was often talking with big corporations about their research, hoping to glean some extra information for whatever paper he was working on at the time. She kept her finger poised over the email for several seconds, debating whether or not she would open it.
With a quick swipe it was gone.
Her mother was beside herself when Quinn called. She expressed all of her maternal fears, and Quinn did her best to neutralise the situation by talking at length about all of the wonderful things she was seeing. When they eventually hung up, over an hour later, Quinn was tired in her bones and she put her tools on the floor before slipping into a light sleep. Stevie woke her less than forty minutes later with a kiss on the forehead and a blanket to cover her from the cool air-conditioning that was unavoidable with the oppressive Tokyo heat.
At three in the morning, Quinn startled awake from a dream she couldn’t remember. Her heart thundered in her chest and her palms were covered with sweat. By the light of the moon she made her way into the small bathroom and vomited. Her skin crawled as though ants were marching in and out of her pores like their colony was buried deep inside her body. She drank mouthfuls of water that tasted strongly of chlorine and turned out the light to sit in the moonlight on the closed toilet lid. Once her eyes had adjusted, she considered running another test but decided that she would rather not know. The sound of the air-conditioner hummed liked white noise, a reminder of the heat even while it kept the room cool and dry. She didn’t want to think about her health, she just wanted to forget about it and enjoy her time with Stevie. She wanted to be healthy and energetic for the Robert Chaff show – her heart leapt at her flittering hope that the artist himself might be there.
Chaff had spoken to her from the moment she had first seen one of his paintings in her father’s office. The painting had been worth a small fortune, but her father had bought it anyway – something about the artist spoke to him as well. Back then Chaff had worked mostly in acrylics but he often used other materials to highlight aspects of his images or to give an untethered feel to his ideas. To limit him to one medium was too restrictive of the breadth of the works he had released since then.
Chaff painted as often as he sculpted. He worked with sound and light, brail and colour, models and shapes. For Quinn the artist’s catalogue reflected every aspect of her life. Each work resonated with the beauty she saw in the world and the isolation she felt from it. She had read about Chaff’s depression and his feelings of social disconnection, and she couldn’t help imagining that the artworks were designed specifically to explore how she was in exile from the world as her life slowly ebbed away. The artist had become a pseudo-kindred spirit from the moment she had begun to interpret the image on her father’s office wall. When her dad had died of an unexpected heart attack the artwork had been left specifically to her in his will. Chaff’s work acted like a gateway to her inner self, but it also reminded her painfully of her father and everything that he had once been to her.
