by Vann Chow
Smith was no hero. Rescuing an underdog was not an everyday thing to him. He was a common Christian man, that believed in simple Christian value, and hence, he had a soft spot. He felt like saving this kid despite the great inconvenience should the assailants come back, or the high possibility that the boy lying here turned out to be a crook himself who had done someone such injustice that he deserved his beating.
“Are you okay? Daijobu desuka ?” He asked. The body on the floor did nothing. Slowly, without stressing his back, he pulled up the legs of his trousers and knelt by his side. The boy was a Japanese of medium height, long, pale limbs that sported a blue Hawaiian shirt, cropped pants and sandals, though one of them were knocked off his right foot, lying astray in a puddle of dark water. He scooped the boy's head in his palms gently, trying to coax a word or two from him. Blood was trickling down his right temple, wetting Smith's sleeves. Smith rotated his hands to take a good look at the wound, and it was then that he discovered the boy was Tatsu, Misa's boyfriend. She's not gonna like what she sees. Smith carried the boy to the main street where he could get help.
Leaning Tatsu on a lamp post, Smith found the boy's cell phone on his body. The first instinct was to go to the recent calls list and ring up whoever's number that was on top. Second thought showed that to be a bad idea – who knew what kind of people had knocked the boy out, after luring him to the dark alley. It would not be a surprise if someone familiar did the trick. Smith's best solution would be to call a number that was listed as Home, OR...
“ ミ サ ” That's Misa in Katakana and the only Misa in the contact list. He dialed the number. Just at that very moment, a taxi turned into the street. Smith had to scramble to the middle of the street to stop it. He outstretched his arms, for who would want to stop for a desperate white man whose hands were smeared with blood, gasping heavily for air from the exertion of having lunged something heavy around just recently, accompanied by possibly a dead body on the side of the street?
The call connected.
“ Kon na jikan ma de, doko e itte ita nodesuka? ” The distinctive voice of hers blared into the speaker. She seemed to have asked, where have you been the whole time.
Smith didn't like the idea of being the messenger of bad news. He held off speaking. He turned instead to the driver.
“Get him to the hospital! Byoin ! And hold this!” he ordered, forcing the mobile phone into the driver's hand.
“Eh?” The taxi driver was already agitated, but when Smith had dropped the boy like a package on the back seat, shifting the boy's feet as far back as possible away from the doors and closed it without getting in the taxi himself, he almost snapped.
“ Moshi moshi? ” A female's voice from the other end said. “ Tatsu! ”
“ Nande sore? What the hell is this?” The taxi driver barked at Smith, stunted by the huge lump of trouble hand-delivered by the big-nosed devil of a white man into his backseat. He would curse the Gods for hours after this. Smith stuffed a ten thousand yen into the man's hand to compensate his inconvenience.
“Keep the change. Now go!” Smith urged. “Go!” He slapped the trunk of the cab angrily until the driver started to make way, hopefully, to a hospital.
From the reflection of the right side-view mirror, Smith could see the cabby speaking feverishly into Tatsu's mobile phone.
“Good,” he said to himself. “at least they are communicating.”
Under one of the glowing lamp posts, Smith took a good look at himself. He looked like he just slaughtered a cow. This was no way to walk around Tokyo. Funny how he should worry about being stopped by the law enforcement officers in this state – where were the police when he needed them?
“Blah!” He shuddered, as he doused his dirty hands into the possibly dirtier dark water puddles and rinsed them clean. A rainy day was surely good for something. After rearranging his appearance, he hailed another cab to get off the premise.
“Andy, where are you at?” Smith consulted his Japan know-it-all.
“Home. Taking a dump? What do you want?” He asked. But instead of waiting for a reply, he continued. “You sounded flustered. Got one of these creepy callers again?”
“It's something else.” And Smith explained what had happened. “Should I go to the police? I'm gonna need you to translate for me. You know my Japanese. They'd arrest me on the count of mutilating their beautiful language.”
“Do you know the assailant?”
“No, of course not.”
“Do you remember their faces?”
“If they come back for me now, yes.” He said. “It was dark.”
“C'mon, man. Don't be stupid. You know nothing's gonna come out of going to the police.”
“They might still be hanging around the noodle shop or something.”
“A lot of crooks are hanging around. You know that.”
“So what'd you suggest I do?”
“You should probably run for your life, I'd say. You're a big shining white man, Cars.”
“There is like fifty thousand people living in Ikebukuro. They won't find me.”
“You don't exactly blend in.”
“I live in Ikebukuro. I can't just leave.”
“The Kyokuto-kan also lives in Ikebukuro.” Kyokuto-kan, the Extreme East Yakuza, a gang famous in the Western world not for its gruesome behind-closed-doors activities and dealings, but for the elaborate, colorful body tattoos of historical warrior figures and poetry some members wore on their bodies.
“You don't even know the details.”
“You didn't see shit! How'd you know the boy didn't cross somebody from the gang. I mean, to stir things up in the Kyokuto's territory? Do you think they are just a few drunks wanting to throw some punches 'cause they have self-esteem problems? The whole district is being run like a pirate ship by men tattooed with Haiku and Kamons from the tip of their noses down to the foreskins of their penises.”
“Don't be so melodramatic.”
“When in Rome, just walk away from pickles like the Romans do. They like to crack their whips once in a while, no big deal. He didn't die, did he? He'd tell the cops what happened if he wants to.”
“Hold on. I need my hand to type the password.”
And Andy's house bell rung. He almost jumped from the sofa at the sound.
“You can't be serious!” Andy turned on the video feed to the security camera by the house door, and Smith's warped forehead materialized on the screen. “Fuck me.”
“Come down to meet me.” Smith knew this was the only way to enlist his help, by way of friendly coercion. “No, wash your hands and come down to meet me.”
“It's almost midnight. There's a 7 AM training session tomorrow. I need to sleep now.”
“I will tell Cheryl we'll both be going in late, on my account.” Smith knew he had the power, and his department had the budget, too, to pay for a half-day leave for somebody. “You can sleep till noon.”
“Go away.” Andy groaned one last time, grabbing the winter jacket laying on the couch. “I love these Proper Office Conduct training, don't you know? I need them.”
“That's the most sensible thing I have heard you say all night,” Smith said. “Now come down and get your Proper Conduct training directly from me.”
13. Tenacity Absolutely Needed
Headache. It creeps on us like a distant relative, readily abusing our respect for the blood-ties for their ends and reminding us that no matter how strong and independent we have grown we are still slaves to our pedigree.
Headache. Its strength underestimated like the strength of a single foot soldier, its damages paralyzing like the confidential information stolen and sent to an enemy's camp. Headache. It comes without forewarning and goes only after raiding us of our morale.
Headache, you son of a bitch.
“Yesterday you were the ‘Face of the Company’, and today you're already coming in late.” To Smith's dismay, the news of his field day with the CAD had also spread like wildfire. The level o
f gossips and bitter innuendos had only added to the list of Smith's problems. With the constant lightning strikes in his head, he could care less to reciprocate the vilifying remarks.
“What have I missed?” Andy leaned forward from his swiveling chair, one of the many tightly packed around the boat-shaped rosewood table of the conference room on the 11 th floor, wanting to hear Mr. Mura, the senior managing director of New Business Development, one of the many that attended the North American account calls, to explain his jest.
Before Mura had a chance to say any more, Smith pressed the call button on the Polycom Soundstation. The awfully loud dial tone cut Mura's intention to acerbate short. Andy squeezed his lips together, slightly upset about his thwarted curiosity. After all, he had spent the whole evening with the man in the police station. The topic of his afternoon excursion did not come up at all.
“Smith, did you have time to read over the analysis of the September survey?” Sumizu, the Assistant Product Manager, asked as soon as everyone in the call greeted each other.
Was this another jab at his TV stint? Or was this rooted from something more far-reaching? Sumizu was famous for his reputation as a walking lump of dissatisfaction.
“I have to go over them more thoroughly.” Smith simply answered. In Japan boardrooms, one does not say outright about a colleague's mistake, so Smith damped his response that otherwise would have been 'I practically have to rewrite the whole thing, so stop bugging me.'
Sensing more should be said on the topic, Carlisse Nupp of New Business Development from the Los Angeles office chimed in. “This is Carlisse. Carson and I have been on it since last Thursday, and we have seen some inconsistency in several of the numbers, in particular between the return rates and defect levels of the–”
“Put the phone on mute,” Mura command, cutting the woman on the line off. All hands reached for the phone as if they would be punished otherwise. He cleared his throat, preparing himself for the upcoming monologue while Carlisse on the other end of the call yapped away to a diverted audience.
“The survey results were very important to us. We have spent thousands of Yen very month to get these results and have them analyzed. If they cannot be interpreted promptly, there is no point of doing them at all, is there?” He raised his bushy eyebrows to add to the effect of his rhetorical question.
In the background, Carlisse was giving her most honest opinion about the misdoing of the Customer Relationship Management team. The manager of the CRM team, Haneda, a Japanese expat happily shipped abroad to man the CRM team in Los Angeles and now free from the shackles of the old world, was never there. No one knew where he was, but all conceded to the fact that if they were in his position, they would do the same. And so, the others had found it unfair to criticize a man who was not present, and was never present, implying that Carlisse's relentless attacks on Haneda's team lack of analytical competence were equivalents to committing office faux pas and her being from the American office and her career too unimportant to be the concern of anyone in the Tokyo's office, meant that whatever she said on the topic should be best ignored.
It was Sumizu who apologized first, as always, even if it was none of his business, as if not doing so, and worst, not being the first, was going to lead him from this eternal burning inferno to another more gruesome one. One must concede that he did have the capacity of the demons from that domain. “I am sure Mr. Smith had more projects than he could manage with his demanding schedule.”
The nerves of the sour man.
“It has nothing to do with my schedule. I can manage full well, of course. This is absolutely not a concern for anyone but me. The extra time needed was not meant for me alone, but to rectify what I have identified as the chronological problem we have trying to figure out what our customers want and how we are coping with that need when we have less than credible data. Whether it is the September survey or the October survey, it is the same procedure that we go through every week to collect them.” Smith made a mental note not to use 'we' next time. “There is no reason why the CRM team should not have accurate and reliable data for us whenever the same group of people uses the same program to run them. I suppose what Carlisse is saying,” Carlisse was indeed still saying it to the invisible audience in the realm between AT&T and Docomo. “is that these procedures that we adhere to so diligently, are fundamentally flawed.” The first step to preserving the icy thin relationship with your egotistic colleagues is to blame everything but them and their kind. But this was as far as he would go along the lines of flattery, Smith thought. They could take it or leave it.
“What is the program they run?” Mr. Mura asked.
Certainly, no program was ever involved in the analysis. While highly adept at their soothsaying crafts, Mr. Haneda's team consisted of either fresh colleague graduates with psychology degrees or comfortably dressed moms who had worst mathematical and computer skills than cashiers at Walmart check-outs. Smith had been receiving them every month from Mr. Haneda's secretary, Miss Rei Taniguchi, who pulled together all the codes these call representatives entered whenever they received testimonials or complaints, then copied and pasted everything on the excel file, with no particular insightful addition. Still, Smith considered her the smartest individual over there.
“It's a sophisticate program that extracts the codes from all callers and compiles them.” The compiling could be interpreted as analysis, perhaps. Smith had to twist the reality a little bit, like he had done, every day, for the sake of survival. “I believe it is called T-A-N,” as in Taniguchi-san. It sounded believable enough.
“Who was in charge of this T-A-N?” Mr. Mura asked. Of course, everything he asked from this point on was irrelevant. It was so obvious that if you put garbage in, garbage comes out, regardless of the program. And the so-called program Smith was marshaling in was no more than a messenger of a VBA script written by someone in the ancient times, at the establishment of the CRM department, and there was no name for it. But seeing that Mr. Mura had been successfully deceived, Smith knew he could maneuver around this non-crisis crisis through this route.
“A gentleman that has retired.” A man near retiree age already programmed for the customer service when the CRM concept was at its nascent period? He ought to be valuable enough to the company to be let retired, and Smith hoped no one noticed that. “Colin Singer. I attended his talk when I was still in Cincinnati.” He made up that name quickly. No one would notice, except Andy. But even Andy was too young to know everyone over there.
“Smith, I want you to form a sub-team with Mr. Haneda and other important personnel and fix this.”
Smith had seen this coming. Smith had witnessed so many totally useless sub-teams formed and dissolved in this weekly meeting alone that would turn his hair gray, being in a few of them himself, for every deferrable issue that popped up. “Sure, we can do that.” Today he did feel like elaborating on his plans. They were always the same. The responses he got were always the same.
With that said, the predictable response showed that he had the project and Mr. Mura in his grip. He could officially do some work on staff training in Mr. Haneda's department, given that he doesn't pop back up in the least favorable moment to provide his objections. They might just be able to convince Mr. Mura to approve the budget on using external professional CRM software, and supports, the whole nine yards, like he and Carlisse had talked about forever.
“Ok. Next topic.” Mr. Mura declared, satisfied, while the world teetered on the precipice above total chaos. Andy, being adept at both languages, jotted the follow-up down into a text file in English and Japanese, to be sent up to the internal team server once the meeting was over.
“Great job, Carlisse.” Sumizu unmuted the Polycom and said what little he could to smooth over the conversation loophole. Smith could only wonder why she hadn't hung up on them.
Another throb in the veins around his temple reminded him of the rule of T.A.N.
T.A.N. – Tenacity Absolutely Needed.
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14. The Greatest Show on Earth
“ Hondoni arigatou gozaimasu .”
Misa put a glass of sparkling grape juice into his hand as he reached out to grab one from the beverage cart. He was filled with doubt whether he had done something wrong once again as if being caught stealing grape juice that he suddenly realized could only be meant for children, except children were not allowed into the parlor.
“Oh, I'm sorry.” He apologized in Japanese, clearly missing the point.
“No!” Misa smiled, realizing Smith's misinterpretation. “Thank you for saving Tatsu's life.
“Oh, you’re very welcome.” Smith had now entered the shock phase. He was shocked that Misa knew it was him that night who called, and even more shocked to find himself being addressed by her, despite having consciously made his way here to the place she worked so that he could observe her, from a distance, and convince himself that that was all.
“In fact, thanks again, it was not the first time you helped me.”
“Don’t worry about it…” Smith replied. “Is your boyfriend okay?”
“My boyfriend?”
“Tatsu?”
“No…he is my younger brother!” Misa laughed at the idea that someone could mistake her brother as her boyfriend. “But yes, he is okay. He has a concussion to the head, and some broken ribs, but he will survive.”
“He should watch the company he keeps,” Smith advised.
Misa retracted her hand from the glass, which they had held in midair for an unusually long amount of time while they talked so that Smith could take the drink.
“I will tell him,” she said. “When he wakes up.”
“You as well,” Smith was referring to the incident at the club earlier. There was the trace of melancholy in her eyes when she heard this. “I'm sorry.”
“Is that all you know how to say in Japanese?” Misa switched to English.