Tokio Whip by Arturo Silva

…”
    (What did she say?)
    â€œOh, you’re only another part of another love story.”
    (You’ll never get out of these blues alive, Lang.)
    â€œAhi mi! My splendors and miseries lay about me!” Palm out, hand to brow, I fall back on to a sofa, and whisper in tears, “why all this violence?” – and expire.
    (Lang, wake up, Lang!)
    A stolen kiss and a broken word and now look at all the damage transpired. The way you left her then, walked out of the room and she knew you’d come back. The way she left you now, walked out of the city and you now so unsure. Then the short note, and a couple of weeks later a call from Tokio. Love – all of it – had been offered me – (To me, to be so blessed, of all my sex, center of all beauty!) – and I held back. You refused: remember: a promise, loyalty, wholeness, time. Freely refused, and freely condemned. Not God’s will, yours, Lang. And now you are in Tokio where madness seems a form of an unknown love and she is asking you to leave her herself her city.
    And only some few women some few men willing to try again. (What movie was that?). He walked into his own labyrinth, and never saw the sun again. Damn, Lang, can you finally halt what you like to refer to as your desire and refuse to acknowledge as resentment and recall her to you now and give her back what she saw in you once – not faith, but maybe its possibility?
    I saw her figure on the street, a Klein blue bag, a string of hair that refused to stay in place, a swimmer’s legs, and … in her smile was my peace, in her eyes my Paradise. All those Robertas to discover! Our life and times, the unions and separations of those first months together – who left whom then? And why? Not so much indecision as only that when the decision came it would be irrevocable, permanent, the first day and last.
    The will to serve.
    And then the years, the innurral and renewal, and then again until you brought it to its inevitable end, pushed her to it, nothing she desired, never anticipated: that you you turned into. And what disappointment – coming just when you seemed, she thought, so ready! Resentment was hers then, rightfully. And she so ready, “I can only give you everything,” and it really was oh so true and you could not see it for the life of the city you needed to embody – a city you had no concrete idea of, no Tokio of the mind yet. But if this too be a man, what is indeed to be said or done? That is what you recognize now too late to make amends. “Amends”? As if there were repairs that could be made. Not towards her, not now, no longer. In yourself, in prospect. To be a man, woman, child. Finally, at this stage, you must or never be a man.
    Oh, live up to your name now, Lang, now or never!
    Ah, Roberta, Tokio … all the time before me. You, Roberta, new? Changing-changeless. Isn’t that what they say of Tokio? Ah, now, Carole Lombard, she would have understood.
    â€œI opened my heart to the whole ...” – well, to the city – “and I found it was loving.”
    Lang sits in his darkened room, the eyes focussed in thought, the mind hovering above the city he is only recently, slowly, coming to recognize. How does one become a city? What do we mean when we say we fulfill ourselves, our nature, only in the city? That we are only wholly human and moreso in the city, and wholly cities in you, Tokyo?
    (Tokyo, I gave everything to you– body and soul, I’m all for you – absolve me, release me now with grace ascending so that I might live again, and rely on the expectation of a peaceful death. If I am not all yours, not a true Tokyoite, then I am unworthy, a reprobate, and I will get the death I deserve.)
    There is light inside the tunnel, too. With faith, belief, whatever it takes me now. Friendship, toughness, tenderness. “Without which nothing”: Godard’s beautiful ending. “Love