Eli William - Cash Crash Jubilee

When he could see that the delicate operation was finished, Rick walked over to Amon, patted him on the shoulder and said, “Off to Shinbashi for a few drinks?”

Athree-story high railway bridge stretched along the right side of the sidewalk ahead of Amon and Rick. It was built of chipped red bricks caked with an accreted white powder and grayscale grit, signs of decay overlaid to imitate an old piece of architecture destroyed in a massive earthquake several decades earlier. Black steel fencing edged the top where the train tracks ran, and high, rounded archways of gray stone opened from the walls at regular intervals. Each archway was embedded with a slosh-house, izakaya , or other dingy drinkery; their plywood frames covered in chipped, yellowing paint; their flat roofs leaving a small, rounded gap below the vaulted ceiling. Red and white paper lanterns hung on the wall beside and above the archways. They were scrawled with black calligraphic script that advertised the drinks and grilled guts on special at the establishments inside: plum wine and highballs, chicken hearts and giblets, pig intestines simmered in a murky broth. Amon could hear the muffled or distant mutter of ten-thousand inebriated conversations, the rattle of passing trains, the rhythmic beep of traffic lights, the subliminal hum of info-gabber. He could see almost invisible circles of faint lantern-light before archways and packs of drunken salarymen strolling and stumbling arm-in-arm along the length of the bridge, until its gently curving form turned in on itself and faded out of view into the sleek office tower adscape.

The InfoSun was setting. Thin beams of dying infolight slipped through cityscape cracks, suffusing the edges of the distant skyline in pinkish-red advert-radiance—ticking alphanumerics from a motley assortment of websites, service-smiles, monster truck jousting, reruns of viewer-rated Sunday sermons at branches of MegaTemple Investments—a diffuse scatter of symbols and cinematic slivers in tones of tender blood-fire that blazed around the jutting rooftop shafts.

Here and there, sunset lawsuits sprouted from the polished glass and metal of the upper stories, where viewing rights to the infolight’s reflection conflicted with viewing rights to the building. Terrestrial ads violently resisted the solar ads that beamed down upon their propriety surfaces in vibrant burning hues, and writhed against them like some rabid entertisement mold. Tendrils of talking heads in International Ten Second Academic Debate grappling with a desert motorbike training video across the wraparound window of an investment consultancy like flaming vines competing on fast-forward. A growth of glistening, naked backs in Diet Massage Works! emerging horizontally from the sheer, steel wall of a law firm to obscure a real-time update stock list, like an intricately ramified mushroom exploding from a cliff-face. Images from above and below tangled and coalesced viciously into mesmerizing knots of narrative iridescence, each battle representing numerous negotiations between owners of city real estate and the owner of the sun, R-Lite. Animating the struggle over entitlements was a cooperative marketing strategy to make legal disputes visually entertaining, the medium an enthralling icing on the message.

Wearing suits tuned plain black to conceal their profession, Amon and Rick followed a blinking white navi-arrow and turned right into a cavernous archway, broader and dimmer than the others. It opened onto a long, narrow laneway cutting beneath the bridge. Bars operated out of holes in the concrete walls, the reddish glow of grills and flicker of half-dead lightbulbs providing a hazy illumination. Tiny circular tables littered with empty beer bottles, half-eaten skewers of meat, and soybean rinds sprawled into the laneway from both sides. Bottle-necked between this chaos of patios, a throng of salarymen trudged slowly along, side by side. Others sat collar to collar on knee-high stools around the cluttered tables. As though tacitly obeying an unspoken after work dress-code, they all wore their shirts with the top two buttons undone, their loosened ties hung askew at exactly the same angle, and everyone used the same low-end version of digimake that traded blemishes and asymmetries for a generically over-polished look, their hair and skin glossy like paint-it-yourself figurines. The hubbub of drunken blather, laughter, clinking glasses, and grill sizzle was almost loud enough to obliviate the overhead train rumble.

As he jostled his way through the crowd, looking at the expressions of blissful numbness all around, Amon felt nothing but regret. He wanted to be in the frugal sanctuary of his apartment. There he could have conserved money and practiced blinking and breathing while basking in relief at having just barely accomplished their mission. Instead he was bumping shoulders, brushing up chest-to-chest to the smell of sake-tinged breath, stepping on toes, squashing paper cups and the tarry remnants of unidentifiable deep-fried tidbits splat on the asphalt, saying excuse mes to request passage through barricades of bodies—a barrage of expensive transactions. The bargain routes recommended by Scrimp Navi were all cut off on this constricted path and the constant bodily impact made breath reduction impossible.

Once the identity execution was complete, Rick had insisted on talking in person at a place he claimed even Amon could approve, this one particular bar they used to frequent when they both started at GATA, perhaps the most affordable spot in the core of the metropolis. Comparatively cheap or not, Amon saw no point in wasting creditime around town, preferring a FacePhone meeting from home, but when Rick refused to talk anywhere else, Amon eventually conceded. To postpone resolving their problems even a few more hours was no longer thinkable, especially after the events of today. When work finished, they had left GATA together and walked to Shinbashi, the office-jockey hive of stress anaesthesia.

They turned down an even darker alley and after a few steps, hit a dead end, where their navi-beam started to blink, signaling arrival at their destination.

A sign hung aslant above a doorless entrance, dangling at a sharp angle down to the right as though attached by a single tack. It read Self Serve in gray bubble letters.

They entered.

Inside was a long windowless room with a bare concrete floor. Instead of walls, dozens of vending machines standing snug against each other lined the edges of the room. The salarymen patrons were sucking down cigarettes, drinking and chowing on incongruously sumptuous meals. One group picked with chopsticks at a spread of bite-size kaiseki appetizers artfully arrayed on small ceramic dishes: thin strips of burdock root laid crosshatched over sweetfish; tofu simmering in a delicate soy-sauce broth garnished with sesame and mustard leaf; a vibrant palette of sashimi. Another group dug with forks into a heaping spinach and arugula salad ringed by smoked seafood and prosciutto. At the head of a different table, one man in a flaccid fedora carved an entire roast duck, steaming plates of rice and a red dip on the side. The air appeared clear, but it was stuffy with the smell of cheap cooking grease and tobacco.

As Amon and Rick crossed the room towards an empty table near the back, the men burst into sputtering laughter and coughing at a comedy gameshow playing on a patch of open floor in the center of the room. A team of professional water polo players were treading water laboriously to hold an obese man who couldn’t swim over their heads. The goal was to keep him above the surface of a river long enough for him to compose and read traditional poetisements. According to a competition checklist flashing on the left half of the image, the team had succeeded with a series of haikus, but were struggling to keep him up for the duration of the longer tanka, and would soon move on to epic-length haibun. On a bed of hands, the fat man said: