“So a few weeks back, I saw a guy sleeping on the train.”
“I see that all the time.”
“Yeah, but this guy was sleeping on a girl’s shoulder.”
I’d seen this, too.
“And she was looking at her phone,” he said, “probably playing Puzzle & Dragons or something, while the guy slept. Gentle breaths, in and out. That awkward posture of a person sleeping in a cramped space.”
He took a swig of his beer. Watched memories swirl near the bottom of the mug. Continued.
“I looked at her, and I looked at him, and I figured they were together. I remember thinking how nice it must be to sometimes have a shoulder to sleep on.”
“Instead of just sitting there with your head back and your mouth wide open, looking like an idiot?”
“Right, right. But then the train stopped at Ikebukuro, and the guy woke up. He turned to the girl, muttered an apology, sumimasen, and then he was out the door. She nodded, watched for a moment, and then just went back to her phone.”
“They weren’t together?”
He shook his head.
“They weren’t together.”
We watched a drunken group of tourists stumble down the street. One of them sang. The others laughed. We shared a smile and a wave, and I waited.
“In that moment,” he said, “I thought, damn, here’s an opportunity I’ve been missing out on for the six years I’ve been in Tokyo.”
“This isn’t going where I think it’s going, is it?”
He shrugged.
“So over the next week I tried it out. I sat next to friendly looking people, and as the train rolled from the platform, I yawned and pretended to fall asleep. I swayed to the rumble of the train, and slowly let my head fall on the shoulder of the person next to me.”
“And?”
“And most of the time, it worked. Most people will sit there and let you do it. I don’t know if it’s a Japan thing, but more often than not, they shift slightly to accommodate the weight, and go back to their books, or their phones, or their newspapers.”
I thought of the times I’d seen people asleep on the train. Imagined them swaying towards my shoulder. What I’d do. What I’d say.
I weighed the effort of saying something against just letting it go.
Came up blank.
“What was your success rate?”
“A little over sixty percent, I’d guess. But even then, when you fail, people simply nudge you in the opposite direction. One day, I went from one shoulder straight to another. It was wonderful.”
“Kindness abounds in the darkness of the subway.”
“On the shoulders of its commuters.”
What is that, where you can fall asleep on the shoulder of a stranger, but you can’t approach them face to face? A shared sense of exhaustion? Or an estranged cry for help, perhaps — implicitly understood, and forgiven between stations.
“But why’d you keep doing it?”
“I don’t get out much, man. You know? I don’t have a girlfriend. Haven’t had one in a while. I don’t make friends easy. I work from home, and I’m always alone. I guess I wanted contact. Affection. This was a warmth I could steal. No baggage. No consequences. Just a little relationship that starts at one station and ends at another. No break-up, no goodbye, just a single moment of shared warmth.”
The words echoed in a way that enticed. Tempted. They made sense, and yet the environment felt wrong. Like fixing the colors in a painting that was already upside down and inside out.
The problem here was deeper than the palette selection.
“After a while though,” he said, “I really started falling asleep. I closed my eyes, hit a person’s shoulder, and dozed off.”
“I’ve never been able to do that. On trains, I mean. I’m almost envious.”
“It was beautiful. When it was there, it was a little pocket of bliss in a crowded train. A connection. A moment of peace. Intimacy without the baggage.”
“Sounds too good to be true.”
“In the end, it was.”
I paused.
“Oh?”
“I had trouble sleeping. I couldn’t find that sweet spot on the mattress. My pillows were too soft. The blankets suffocated. I’d wake up sporadically through the night. Woke up in the morning uncomfortable and bent out of shape.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, work suffered. I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t focus. I started taking the train more often. Way more often. I’d ride the Yamanote Line in a loop, sometimes twice, trying to steal enough sleep from people’s shoulders to remain functional.”
It’s funny, the way bad habits snowball. How they start as little hairline fractures that go ignored until the window is shattered and the plane is crashing.
“One day, I was all haggard, unshaven, and I rode the line from Takadanobaba to Ueno, sleeping on the shoulder of a middle aged woman with a Prada handbag. I had this dream I was looking through fields for my old dog, Spooks, and somewhere I could hear The Byrds, playing Turn, Turn, Turn. I hadn’t heard that song in years. Decades maybe.”
“Funny. I don’t think I ever hear music in my dreams.”
“Well, when I woke up at Ueno, I realized it was her. It was the woman. She was humming The Byrds. And she looked at me and said you need to get some rest. And I said, yeah, you’re probably right. She said we all get tired sometimes, and she smiled.”
I waited. He looked for a place to put his words.
“She told me I looked like her son. He was a computer programmer. Like me. She said he lived at home, sometimes came home late, sometimes slept at the office. They kept a bird at home. A parrot. He taught it to say lines from songs by The Byrds. Thought it was funny. He said it would keep her company. I listened to her talk, and missed my stop. I said, where’s your son now? What’s he doing?”
“And what’d she say?”
“She looked at me, and she smiled sadly, and she said, this is my stop. And she left.”
“Woah.”
“I wondered about that conversation the rest of the day. I couldn’t get that look out of my head. Her eyes. Like a beautiful painting colored in pain and loss and kindness. That night, I slept like a baby.”
“Did you ever see her again?”
He shook his head.
“Actually, I bought a bicycle. I try not to ride the train these days. It’s…” he paused. “It’s healthier this way, you know?”
He stared at his empty beer mug. I saw more behind his eyes than what was said. Feelings and emotions he didn’t have words for.
I wondered if in his experiment, he stole warmth from others, or if they stole it from him. I wondered about the give-take ratio in that equation.
Was there a balance somewhere, in that upside down, inside-out painting he’d colored?
I lifted my mug. Empty.
“Another round?”
He nodded.
“Another round.”
Probably, we’d never know.