Factoring Humanity

Images flickered, forming for a second, then disappearing. They came and went so quickly, Heather couldn’t resolve them all. Many were distorted. She saw a man’s face — an Asian man — but the proportions were all wrong; the lips, nose, and eyes loomed large, but the rest of the face curved away to obscurity. Trying to remember someone, perhaps? In places, the detail was stunning: pores on the man’s nose, short black hairs — not a mustache, but not enough to warrant shaving, either — above the upper lip; eyes bloodshot. But other details were only sketched roughly: two projections from the head, like lumps of clay — ears, recalled without detail.

Other images. A crowded street at night, neon everywhere. A black-and-white cat. A woman, Asian, young, pretty — and suddenly naked, apparently undressed by the man’s imagination. Again the disconcerting distortion as details shifted in and out of importance: alabaster breasts inflating like balloons, strange yellow-gray nipples the product of his color-blindness; labia expanding to fill the screen as if ready to devour him.

And, incredibly, his feelings, too: sexual desire, for another woman — something Heather had perhaps, if she were honest, felt once or twice before, but never quite like that.

And then the woman was gone, and a crowded Tokyo subway appeared, signage all in kanji.

A torrent of words — yes, words: spoken language. The man was hearing something.

No, he was overhearing, straining to eavesdrop on a conversation.

Straining, too, to maintain a poker face, giving away nothing.

The subway lurched into motion.

The hum of its motors.

And then that hum fading away, shunted out of consciousness, a distraction.

Actual visual images — except for the color-blindness, relatively free of distortion.

And conjured-up mental images, a Daliesque gallery of imagined, or half-remembered, or mythic thought-paintings.

So much of it made no sense to Heather. It was a staggering realization for a Jungian: to know that cultural relativity really did exist, that the mind of a Japanese man might be as alien to a Canadian woman, at least in part, as the mind of one of the Centaurs.

And yet -

And yet, this man was a fellow member of Homo sapiens. Was the strangeness of his mind more a product of his being Japanese or of his being male? Or was it just of his own-ness, the unique qualities that made this — this Ideko, that was his name; it came to her like a feather falling to earth, unbidden — the qualities that made Ideko an individual human being, different from every one of the seven billion other souls on the planet?

She’d always thought she understood Kyle and other men, but she’d never been to Japan and couldn’t speak a word of the language.

Or maybe it was simply that she lacked a mental Rosetta stone. Maybe this Ideko’s thoughts and fears and needs were similar to Heather’s own but were just coded differently. The archetypes had to be there. Just as Champollion recognized Cleopatra’s name in Greek and demotic and hieroglyphics, allowing the ancient Egyptian text on the real Rosetta stone to finally begin to make sense, so too must there be the archetype of the Earth Mother and of the fallen angel and of the uncompleted whole, forming the underpinnings of what Ideko was. If only she could key into it -

But no matter how she tried, most of what he was thinking remained a mystery. Still, given enough time, she was sure she could make sense of it all…

The subway was coming into another station. She’d heard stories about burly men whose job it was to push people into Japanese subway cars, packing each one as full as possible — but there was no sign of any such thing. Perhaps the stories were a myth; perhaps that, too, was an archetype: misconceptions about the other.

A thought did rise up in the Japanese man’s mind — another blatantly sexual thought. Heather was startled by it, but almost at once it was repressed. More cultural specificity? She had whiled away many a long commute with idle fantasies — more romantic than pornographic, true. But this fellow spurned the stray thought and bent his mind back to its rigid control.

Cultural specificity. The Old Testament said that fathers should sleep with their daughters.

She shuddered, and -

No, it was the subway car, shuddering back into motion. Ideko hated to commute — perhaps that, too, was an archetype, a pillar of the modern collective unconscious, a Cleopatra chiseled in granite.

It was intoxicating, this access to another. There was a sexual connotation to it, even without the sexual thoughts — a voyeurism that permeated it.

It was thrilling and fascinating.

But she knew she had to disengage.

She felt an immediate pang of sadness. She now knew Ideko better than she knew almost anyone; she’d seen through his eyes, felt his thoughts.

And now, after this brief, deep, joining, she would likely never encounter him again.

But she did have to press on.

The truth was out there.

The undeniable truth.

The truth about the past.