120

If flying from Cairo to Beirut yields shimmering red and green hexagonal light refractions in photographs, and if flying from Cairo to Tokyo yields arcing red, green, and blue color flares on in-flight television, then what kind of light and what kind of shape would a flight from Beirut to Tokyo generate? Would it be red and blue, or blue and green? Would the colors present as undulating waves, crisp, rotating pentagrams, or would they take the more radical form of the Japanese Red Army being extradited from Lebanon?

109

What would be the consequences if Japan Airlines altered their aircraft identity signage so that the tail had a second slightly offset green circle in addition to the current red circle? Against a blue daytime sky it would form a red, green, and blue additive color model, cleverly hearkening back to the initial attempts in the late 1800s to generate color photographs from three separate red, green, and blue filtered black & white images. On the other hand, it could trigger a different chain of events for an approaching aircraft where the pilot happened to be wearing 3-d glasses.

66

Last night on the south side of the Shakujii Gawa I saw two dogs with illuminated collars, one collar was red and one collar was green like the left and right running lights on a ship in the darkness. Their erratic movements gave the impression of an alternately shrinking and expanding vessel, or of a drunk riverboat captain traveling towards me, then abruptly turning around and traveling away from me.

59

Early yesterday morning there was the tiniest glint of sunlight on the black plastic of the rice cooker as I circled around it. Last night there was a smiling, waning crescent moon set against a dark sky and the soft purple glow of the bug lamps along the running path. Today the kitchen soap bottle is refracting long green streaks across the countertop. Tomorrow when the moldy zombies emerge from the hospital next door there will also be red and green. The sequence is as follows: yellow, black, white, black, purple, black, green, white, red, green; yet the implications are inscrutable.

55

41

After an exceptionally violent mid-air catastrophe the paper airplane completes its sudden plunge towards the earth on the top of a dark green bush, the cockpit buried in the foliage. The bodies of the pilot and flight crew are indistinguishable from one another, just unimaginable human configurations and red mist hanging in the air. Nearby a dog’s ears – the same shape as the former nose cone – are attentively listening for the sounds of any passengers that survived the rapid decompression and subsequent impact. There is nothing. Only stillness, save the dog's own panting and its concerns for the victim’s families whirling around in its dog brain. The gurgling of the Shakujii gawa slowly fades back in as soundtrack for the torsos still safely strapped to seats. Beheadings are always such tragedies. Woof.

26

Heading home late at night I stop at a street corner to wait for the light to change and a white dog suddenly appears in my peripheral vision behind a plate glass window. At first I thought that the dog was standing in a bank (the sign on the marquee said Softbank), so I asked the dog about the economic situation in Japan. The dog responded that it did not train in economics – woof – but in communications – woof – hence its current position as representative for a cellular phone company – woof. I asked the dog if communications was an interesting field to work in and the dog stated that it simply wasn't interested in talking to me, or anyone, because linguistically expressing one's deepest beliefs was such treacherous terrain – woof – woof. I stood there, mouth agape, momentarily stunned by the brusqueness of the response. It was without doubt a reluctant spokesperson / spokesanimal. I was channeling the friendly dog Hachiko from a classic Japanese story about loyalty, but it turns out that it wasn't the real Hachiko and that I was only talking to an inflatable corporate mascot that didn't want to get its plastic paws dirty. I was projecting, which was a chancy endeavor at best. Once you think about it, the plastic dog’s attitude towards communication actually makes a tremendous amount of sense, particularly in regards to conversations between species, or between animate and inanimate matter. The light changed from red to green and I was off.

23

During the day I can see that the building next to me is an innocuous hospital of some sort. I see hospital beds, people in hospital beds, people shuffling around the hospital beds in hospital gowns, and hospital nurses wearing surgical face masks. At nighttime a transformation takes place and I am staying in Takinogawa, in Tokyo, in Japan, yet I am next to Dario Argento's Tanzakademie in Freiburg, Germany, from his 1977 film Suspiria. At nighttime the shuffling of feet no longer seems quite so innocent and must be coupled to the supernatural and sinister red and green illumination. Why else would the lights blink, flicker, pulse, and send me messages in Morse code? Sitting at the kitchen counter in the morning having an espresso it is exceedingly difficult to believe that the building next door is a zombie hospital, but I fear in the depths of my heart that it is true.