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Reincarnation

  by Daniel Wolfevich

  Copyright 2014 Daniel Wolfevich

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  Stepping off the bus into Shibuya at night was like stepping into the noon sun. The shrieking glare of three cyclopean light emitting diode displays filled the dark maw of the ravenous night, blinding me and causing my pupils to contract with an audible snap. My heart began to race, as if trying to escape the serpent of fear which was seeking to crush it. On a reflex never lost from life, I lit a cigarette and took and inhaled deeply. As the acrid fetor of burning tobacco filled my nose and smoke filled my lungs, the familiar, age-spanning ritual calmed me. The phantasmal pounding of my dead heart slowed, and fangs I had unconsciously extended slowly retracted. My eyes slowly dilated, my vision cleared. Miraculously, as if I had been teleported to a alien planet, an undiscovered world of light, color and blood lay before me.

  Should I have been surprised by what I saw? Of course not. I didn't just flop out of my coffin one day and decide to hop on a plane to Japan. For the record, I didn't even board the plane, I turned to mist and rematerialized in the cargo hold, after carefully checking that the flight would land in darkness. It would not do for me to discover exactly why the Land of the Rising Sun is so named.

  Why, you ask, did I, a century old vampire, suddenly decide to jump up and move from my home of Providence to Tokyo? On my birthday? One word. Boredom.

  With all the vampire fiction out, it seems everyone wants to be a vampire these days, but no one really thinks about what "living forever" actually means. Imagine, if you will, you are frozen in amber, retaining your consciousness, reason and senses. Within your petrified shell, you do not change. You are forced to observe as time's dull molars grind away the world you knew and left utterly and absolutely alone in a double exposed world. Every building and street overlaid by memory-stained ghosts of their past glory. That chain of memories that ties a vampire to their past is nearly unbreakable. It is our only real tie to life. At the same time those memories weigh us down, pulling us deeper into damning depression. Suicide is the inevitable and twice-damning end.

  As I neared my 100th birthday, I knew I had to do something. If I stayed in Providence, my home in life, my home in death, I would certainly kill myself. But as horrid as life had become, I still feared eternity. I needed to remake myself. Reincarnate myself. I needed change. The problem is, I feared change almost as much as I feared walking into the sun.

  As I said, I should not have been surprised by Shibuya. I had spent my time researching before selecting Tokyo. I may be one hundred years old, but the dark void of the internet holds no mystery for me. I drink the knowledge of the world through its fiber optic veins. From the Stygian depths of my anodized aluminium iPad bubbled glowing pixels filled with enlightenment to solve the enigma of Japan. I learned many things. Enchanted by stories of demon cats with nine tails and mountains where crow faced goblins taught shaved pate monks to fight in forests of pillared jade, I knew Japan was the place for me.

  None of the stories, none of my research prepared me for the reality that revealed itself to senses tarnished by long years of walking Providence by night. Researching a foreign country and believing you know it is like licking the wrapper--or skin--of food and imagining you know how it tastes.

  The reality of Tokyo penetrated my consciousness, with its day-bright plasmic glare of sanguinary neon, corpse-pale carbon dioxide, jaundiced helium, and cyanic mercury washed away my pale imaginings, and injecting bold enthusiasm where ennui had reigned supreme. In a haze of discovery I followed the glow of the titanic displays towards the iconic "Shibuya Scramble," a five way crosswalk where my research told me the population of a small town has been known cross at once.

  The universal glyph for walking shined forth in its luminous glory. The crowds who had previously stood patiently boiled forth, like ants escaping a flooded hive. The men's hair was frozen in unnatural, chitinous formations, held there by substances too arcane to contemplate. The women appeared to have evolved to a higher level. Perfectly coifed hair, designers outfits, they looked as if they had come straight from a fashion shoot, their heels clacking like the arthropodic pincers on the ebony pavement. As with all chaos, order soon emerged, and what had been a mass became an elaborate waltz. The restraint ascribed to the Japanese seemed to be entirely vacant from the faces here. Everything was lively, alive, and far beyond any experience I had seen in my huddled corner of New England even with eternal youth and a hundred years of life.

  A girl with pink hair like crystallized cotton candy piled nearly half her height, stalked towards me in white patent platform heels. Her dress was a layered confection of lace, embroidered with large-eyed cats, who stared with eyes too sad for fabric to contain. Pink contact lenses with heart shaped pupils concealed the depths of her soul and with a languorous exhalation of a gold filtered Djarum she was gone, leaving a miasma of lust in her trail.

  Overcome with delight, I trailed behind her, intrigued by the faint hint of something lurking in the depths behind the painted lenses, coiling like a cephalopod in the dark currents of the spirit. That was it! Despite the glittering pageantry and life, Tokyo had distinct an undertow of sorrow. I could see it now, smell it as clearly as I inhaled the honeyed vapor of the Djarum from her lips, an bitter tinge that defined everything, once you noticed it.

  Mesmerized, it was not until she paused at another crossing that I saw IT. Despite its iconic status, the 109 building is surprisingly bland. Frequently described as a tube of lipstick, the building is an edifice, a temple, where the teens of Japan come to worship. Sheathed in squamous metal plates, I did not see lipstick. To me it resembled nothing so much as a monstrous finger, flipping off the sensibilities of all that is right and decent in the name of style. Need I say, I loved it?

  Gathered near the base, swathed in a haze of burnt tobacco rising like incense from a latter day Aztec pyramid, was a crowd of nubile female supplicants willing to sacrifice their money in pursuit of Goddess Fashion's fickle smile.

  Even with my most critical eye it was clear that the Goddess was well pleased. If I had thought the women at the station were beautiful, these were models of perfection. Every inch of them was perfectly arranged, ikebana flowers made flesh and fabric. A glance at them and you could tell that these Handmaids of the Goddess, none of them over twenty, defined the trends that defined Japan.

  Even so, as I neared the entrance I realized that there was more to see. Drawn by the beauty of the Handmaids, I had missed the worshippers. High school girls entered the building in droves, a ravening horde of the fashion dead, clutching their wallets and looking deliciously insecure in regulation school uniforms. As I watched, I observed some returned blank eyed, holding iridescent polyethylene bags with obscure labels as "Sadistic Action," their minds devoured by the lurking horror of conformity. A few paused to smoke cigarettes and stare at the Handmaidens with envious eyes, hoping within themselves to someday be so glamorous.

  While I could not understand the Oriental speech, I am possessed of keen empathy for the appetites of humanity. As I watched I caught the scent of sorrow once more, this time interlaced with desire. Like ghouls at a funereal feast, disheveled old business men hungrily eyed the young women, lank hair combed over in ever thinning bar codes, hands in pockets, hunched o
ver from the weight of worries and work. Their gluttonous lust lapped at the edges of the crowd; as they circled the girls.

  As I watched one shuffled up to a girl, murmured a few words and tried to pass her a business card. His suit was threadbare, his shoes scuffed, and he licked his lips with a greying tongue resembling a dying slug. The girl sneered in disgust and shook her head, creating a wave of lustrous black curls and synthetic highlights. The man slunk back into the shadows, puffing at a short cigarette with the word "Hope" embroidered upon it. His liver spotted hands shook with shame and his mind resonated with lechery.

  The sound of the blood roaring through his veins played a harmony to the thin flute of hunger in my soul, the lust and anger roiling it to a boiling cauldron. My last meal was an unfulfilling afterthought on the airport tarmac as I prepared to materialize in the cargo hold.

  I cast around for likely prey and realized I had unwittingly become the center of attention. Even in the U.S. my good looks, retaining just a touch of innocent childhood in the body of a young man, were nearly irresistible to women. In Japan it was obvious the added