THIS STORY BEGINS WITH WHAT I SOON BELIEVED WOULD BE MY FINAL DAY UPON (ABOVE?) GOD’S GREEN EARTH:
After nearly fourteen hours of flying from Amsterdam across the great expanses of the wilder and stranger parts of the world (a trip made longer because we can no longer enter Russian airspace), in which I saw from high above the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea and the faint glow of Turkmenistan and Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and much later, the darkness of Mongolia and the Gobi Desert and far off North Korea, it seemed as though I was finally going to end up in Japan again. It had been a mostly miserable experience . . . my back and neck were fucked and I felt sadder than hell about a few things I wish I could wipe from my brain and pretty much all I’d had to eat since Berlin was iceberg lettuce. (If you order a vegetarian meal, you can be sure they will stuff you full of iceberg lettuce and call it a day.)
And then, just fifteen minutes before we were scheduled to land at Narita Airport, we entered a pocket of turbulence that hit the plane like a stampede of flying tractor trailers, or else we had barreled straight into a black hole. The plane flailed around helplessly in the sky for ten agonizing minutes before suddenly dropping what felt like a hundred feet from the sky in the span of a second, causing all the window shades to slam shut, some people launching out of their chairs and almost hitting the ceiling, and scattered screams of terror could be heard from the front of the plane to the tail where I sat gripping the armrests in a cold sweat . . . I turned to the nice Irish girl sitting in the aisle seat (we had been overjoyed it was just the two of us in the whole row) and we gave each other a “Well, this is it . . .” expression, one that was part mortal horror and part reluctant acceptance of imminent (and hopefully painless) death.
Supposing my life was finally over, and thinking that the world had finally got its revenge on me for being born, I closed my leaden eyelids and apologized to God for the millionth time, now for what I supposed was the very last time, for how much of a fool I am and have always been. I long ago made terms with His agent the Grim Reaper, and generally have no fear of death. But in that moment I realized a plane crash was not my ideal way of exiting the world . . . I’d have preferred something more private and, if I’m being honest, romantic. Here in the sky there were too many other people involved. I didn’t like the idea of them dying too.
As the beleaguered commercial aircraft fought against invisible forces and struggled in vain to level out, I heard the awful sound of dozens of people coughing and gagging . . . and then a tidal wave of fresh vomit hit my nostrils, activating my gag reflex . . . glancing around, I saw that half the people around me were utilizing and filling their barf bags. The Irish girl made a face of revulsion and sadness and now closing my eyes once again I sat there drenched in sweat and waited around to die. No joke: I prayed for an angel.
But it was not so. Just as quickly as the end had seemed to have arrived, so too did it dissipate. The doomed aircraft rocketed out of an abyss of white cotton clouds and stabilized. The sound of human retching continued on amidst a psychically felt exhale of palpable relief from all 200+ souls aboard. Even the children stopped crying. I looked over at the Irish girl. She said, “If you can believe it, this is my first time flying alone.” Said I: “I am glad we survived. But it would have been an honor to die by your side.” As a God-fearing quasi-Quaker and a Catholic respectively, there was an unspoken understanding between us that death would not have been the worst fate to have befallen us . . . though I’m sure she would have liked to have seen Japan at least once before standing in front of the Pearly Gates . . .
Once landed, everyone started clapping . . . we deboarded and all around was felt a sort of celebratory mood amongst the passengers and flight attendants. Still, I felt shaken and worn down and horribly alone just then. Almost dying in a plane crash felt like an inauspicious start to a trip I had hoped would save me from the great despair I had recently been feeling in that bone-deep, soul-permeating sort of way that sometimes washes over you like a curse. In the fluorescent hell of Narita Airport I shuffled from line to line showing my passport and having my picture took and my fingerprints scanned and stored in some database somewhere for God only knows what purpose. I declared nothing but my own sorry self at the customs counter and headed to the nearest restroom to splash water on my face and brush my teeth and change my sweat-soaked shirt and tell Laura that I loved her.
I suddenly felt unsure about being in Japan and wondered what the hell I was doing. I was completely spent and wanted to teleport back to Berlin and curl up in my own bed, but of course the only realistic solution to my pain was to get to my hostel in Ueno. There I could collapse till sundown, or perhaps into the next day . . . but first I had to get my ass there. In that moment, the hour and a half train ride on the Keisei Line felt like an insurmountable journey— one which in my mind seemed infinitely longer than even the plane ride to get to Japan. Having no alternative, I summoned some phantom energy from my depleted and malfunctioning body and willed it to move in the direction of sleep.
With tears of exhaustion pooling in my eye sockets, I took the escalator down to the underground train station . . . I had not done so in over fifteen years. The place was crammed with tourists, about a 500% increase of them since the last time I’d been to Tokyo. When I last bought a train ticket in that station, pretty much no one even had smartphones. Now there were influencer-lookin creeps filming everything. I got in a long line to buy a Suica card, having left my ancient one back in the US (who knows if it even works anymore), and hoping Japan had finally turned into a credit-card-friendly country instead of the cash one I had always known. I hate carrying around all that change!
Once I finally got to the counter, a nice woman told me they didn’t sell Suica cards, and that I had to use one of the vending machines in an adjacent hallway. I groaned and got out of line. The machines ended up only selling “Welcome Suica” cards, which self-expire after 28 days. I wanted one of the green cards you can keep forever. I spotted a JR counter nearby and got in that line, hoping once again that I would not need cash. About four or five people ahead of me, I recognized what I thought was the shape of someone I know—the Polish flight attendant Nicole, whom I had not seen since I visited Warsaw in May 2024. Of course, her back was turned, so I couldn’t be sure . . . but her hair and clothes were identical to what Nicole had been wearing when I last saw her. Still, the chances of it actually being her were astronomically insane, and so I reckoned I ought not get my hopes up. And anyway, I thought, in the bad state I was in, there was a fairly high chance I was well within the realm of visual disturbances and full-blown waking hallucinations.
A woman in a green JR vest went up to this mystery woman and asked her something. The mystery woman got out of line. It happened so quickly I did not catch her face. The same JR vest lady came over to me and asked me what I was in line for. I told her I wanted to purchase a green Suica card and asked if they accepted card. She said they did not and directed me to an ATM back on the ground floor. I groaned and got out of line.
As I headed down the hall to check out the subway card machines there, the mystery woman, as if sensing my presence, turned around and gazed at me in disbelief. It was in fact Nicole the Polish flight attendant. She said, “Ryan?!” I fell to my knees and hugged her harder than I’d ever hugged anyone in my life. “Nicole!”
What were the odds? I wondered. Later I would find out they were in the millions, if not tens of millions. Obviously it would have been way more likely for us to run into each other in a major airport in Europe, and it’s not as though we were in some backwater airport in the remotest part of planet Earth . . . but still! Had I been on either side of ten seconds, either earlier or later, I would have completely missed her, and perhaps we would have gone the rest of our lives never knowing we’d both briefly occupied not only the same building but the same room nearly 8,000 miles (13,000 km) from our respective countries.
Nicole is elusive and I had always hoped I’d see her again . . . but you never can tell. I like that about her. When I took a train from Berlin to Warsaw to visit her and her adorable cat Nana and brother Alecks that time, I had one of the best weekends of my life . . . they were so kind to me and we had a real good time drinking by the river and hanging out in dive bars. Her brother even drunkenly made me Polish pancakes in their parents’ kitchen at two in the morning and then we all lay on the living room floor with their dogs piled on top of us and told stories (Nicole told me on the train to Tokyo that the story of me getting a vasectomy almost made her piss herself (lol)). Though yeah: I think about that trip all the time. It was, HEAVEN HELP ME, life-affirming when I badly needed such a thing. I thought: “Ah, the world! Oh, the world!”
BEHOLD:
Nicole has got to be in the running for one of the most beautiful women alive, huh?? And Nana the cutest cat alive . . .
Now that I think about it, during that trip Nicole had me watch a Polish film called BLIND CHANCE (PRZYPADEK), which is about a dude either catching or missing a train, showing three separate scenarios of where his life goes from there based on one seemingly minor incident . . .
Hmm . . . !
Anyway: after I boarded the train in Warsaw back to Berlin, in which a baby was for some reason briefly left alone with me in the train car . . .
. . . I wondered when I would see them again, but I hoped it would be soon. For one reason or another, I have not yet returned to Warsaw . . . as I have said, Nicole is elusive. I respect her elusiveness. And yet I of course missed her all the while.
Here’s something insane and spooky. Last June I had a dream about her which I wrote about on this very website:
I awoke on my couch after noon today and had this heaviness on me. I’d slept restlessly. And for reasons I cannot explain, I had dreamt about the Polish flight attendant. In the dream, I was in a sort of office building, I think in the US. I was sitting on a leather couch in a brightly lit lobby, waiting for something. Across the way, seated in a leather chair, I saw the Polish flight attendant. I turned to my dream friend who, as far as I know is not a real person, and said: “Hey . . . there she is. That’s the Polish flight attendant I was telling you about.” She heard this and waved me over.
Sure as hell, it was her all right . . . but her face had a sort of veil over it, like a shadow in the center of my vision. I could not clearly see her face, only around it. She was wearing the exact same thing she was wearing when I met her in Warsaw a year ago. She was really sweet and kept asking me questions about what I had been doing since we last saw each other. I was so happy to see her again. I leaned over and hugged her.
And then that old familiar feeling crept up on me, and now in the dream I wondered where I was and how I’d got there, and why I was with the Polish girl of all people. Were we both waiting to see a doctor of some sort? How could we possibly run into each other like this, being that we live in different countries? She told me she’d never been to Berlin. Was I in Warsaw? And why was her face hidden . . . ?
. . . I felt a little bit of a sadness looking at her just then, knowing it was all about to vanish into oblivion, and her along with it . . .
Uh, wow! I wrote that exactly seven months to the day before I saw Nicole in Tokyo. Do I have the gift?
And a month before I wrote that post, I had a dream about my friend Emel-Elizabeth, who lives in Estonia. In the dream, I hugged her and told her how much I missed her . . . I had not seen her in over a year. Next day I awoke and told her of my dream (you have to tell someone if you dream about them), and she texted me back immediately saying she’d arrived in Berlin that very day and was only in town for one night, and would I like to hang out? Naturally, I agreed. That night we met at Tramp’s a few blocks from my apartment in Schöneberg and she gave me a lipsticked kiss on the cheek.
We of course could find no plausible explanation for my dreaming of her outside of my spooky power of dream premonitions. I seem to be able to manifest or predict someone’s imminent reemergence in my life simply by missing them a lot, for whatever that is worth. Hey, what can I say . . . I’m a sentimental guy . . .
Anyway:
BACK IN
THE HERE
AND NOW . . .
Nicole and I were so shocked that we did not know what to say to one another. When I could finally string words together into semi-coherent sentences, I told her about my plane almost flaming out over the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Japan, and how of all the people I know whom I could have possibly run into on the other side of the planet on that fateful day, I was glad it was her. There was something truly special about it being Nicole. I did not say as much to her just then, but I had not forgotten my dying wish of being sent an angel. And now I knew that my wish had been fulfilled in the form of a (now-former) Polish flight attendant who was one of the coolest people I’ve ever met in my life. I hugged her again.
Nicole!
Finally we agreed to board the Keisei train together and head into Tokyo—she was only in town that one night and so we had to get moving. She called her brother Alecks, who was also in town and waiting for her in Shinjuku. Amidst the Polish I heard my name. She hung up. I asked if we could hang out and she said “Of course!” . . . to which I replied: “And does Alecks mind?” and she said: “Alecks is so happy you’re here. He loves you.” I had no cash so Nicole bought me a train ticket . . . specifically a child’s ticket. We figured if anyone gave us shit about it, we could plausibly plead ignorance. We fed our tickets to the machine and, after about an hour of waiting for the wrong train on the wrong platform, boarded the correct one bound for Tokyo.
We found seats in the back of the train which faced each other . . . we spoke nonstop during the hour ride into the city, with her having to disembark at Sakura Station to connect to Shinjuku, and me carrying on for another half hour or so to get to Ueno. But before that came to pass, she told me about how she’d quit the airline and was going back to school to study filmmaking. She asked where I’d been traveling around and I told her I’d been all over the world since we last spoke . . . specifically, I’d visited about 25 states in the dying United States, and all the while yearning and being yearned for until it abruptly ended in the most painful way I could imagine. I said one of the reasons I had come to Japan was to try to mend that horrible pain I felt in my heart. That mending had very nearly ended before it had even begun on account of what I had presumed would be my unceremonious midair death.
Nicole said: “I think the universe brought us together today. And by the universe I mean God.”
To which I replied:
AMEN, SISTER . . .
I wondered aloud if I really had died in that plane crash and was now in a sort of limbo identical to Tokyo, and if Nicole were a psychopomp or guiding spirit in the form of a comforting presence sent to ferry me to the afterlife.
To which Nicole, a Polish Catholic, said:
“NO!”
. . . and I believed her.
Nicole got off at Sakura Station and we agreed to meet up that night. It was a whisper of a promise . . . her phone only worked on wifi, and what if something happened, or things changed, and she had no way of telling me in time? But I trusted Nicole and I trusted God. It had to happen. It had to! I kept on going. From behind sunglasses and dead-tired eyes I watched the sleepy suburbs turn into Tokyo as the sun set upon it. The sight of it all reactivated very old feelings and memories in me. And I couldn’t believe the train cars had the exact same smell as I’d remembered them having . . . even the seats were identical. I figured there was a very real possibility I could be sitting in the exact same train I’d ridden All Those Years ago. Thought I: “Wow!”
I got off at Kuramae Station and put my child ticket into the machine. It made a sound like I had committed a felony. An older woman in a pink smock directed me to the ticket counter. I knew they’d nailed my ass. The guy in the little booth told me I had a child ticket. I feigned ignorance. “Ohh! Oh, man. Yeah, I didn’t know . . .” He typed in “550” on a calculator and asked me very politely to pay the fare difference. I said I did not have any cash and he told me the convenience store upstairs had an ATM. I took the escalator up and emerged onto the quiet streets. It was evening now and only a handful of people were walking down the sidewalks. I went into the nearest convenience store, which to my sadness was not Family Mart or 7-11 or Lawson, and could not locate an ATM inside. Sorry everyone: I was so sad and exhausted just then that I gave up on paying back the subway man and instead walked a few blocks toward the Sumida River to get to my hostel. I’ll hit them back eventually . . . unless they catch me first. There’s probably a warrant out for my arrest . . .
My hostel ended up being super nice . . . especially for the meager sum I am paying them (the Yen is currently very weak, which helps). The lobby of the place is a cozy cafe, with the rooms being on the upper floors. The guy at the counter gave me clean sheets and a towel and a bunch of breakfast coupons and I went upstairs and took a shower beneath the jet-blast of that beautiful Japanese water pressure I had so often dreamed about. Afterwards I emerged from the bathroom reborn and immediately collapsed into my bed, falling dick-first into a sort of fever dream. I awoke two hours later feeling the cold nighttime air on my face from a nearby open window and saw I had a text from Nicole . . . she asked me to meet her and her brother in Shibuya in an hour. I looked at the train schedule. I had exactly an hour to get to them if I bolted up and booked it to the station right that very moment, and so that’s exactly what I did.
Back on the street I walked into the nearest 7-11 and took out ¥200,00 ($125~ / €110~) from the ATM and stuffed the wad of crisp like-new bills into my pocket. At the underground station I got a silver and pink Passmo card from the terminal and boarded a train bound for a connecting station where I could catch a train on the Ginza line that would take me directly to Shibuya Station. As the Lone White Guy, I sat down on one of the plush seats and, with peace in my heart, gazed lovingly at the interior of the immaculate train car and everyone aboard. The car was utterly silent. I felt a calmness. I really was back in Japan.
Said I in the Snake Plissken voice:
“BEEN A WHILE . . .”
Shibuya looked even more futuristic than the last time I had been there, which was New Year’s 2010 . . . it also felt much smaller. In my mind it had always seemed as big and looming as Times Square, and now I realized Shibuya Crossing is downright quaint in comparison. Nicole texted me saying they were at “Donkey” and asked me if I wanted a Suntory STRONG ZERO, which is a sort of canned vodka lemonade. I don’t drink anymore, but then I’d also almost died that day, so I took her up on it . . .
I passed through throngs of couples and teenagers and teenage couples to get to the Mega Don Quijote (with a “J”!) nearby. Ah! I thought . . . there it is. I had been in this particular Don Quijote many times. It was a comfort to see it again. I went inside the cramped 500-story store and searched floor to floor for my Polish friends to no avail. Nicole texted me and said they were outside and so I scrambled to get out. Back in the cold Tokyo night . . . Behold! there they were . . . Warsaw’s native children and two of Heaven’s finest angels: world-famous Polish siblings Nicole and Alecks . . . I had asked the good Lord for a single angel, and yet he had mercifully sent me two. The blessing was not lost on me.
I hugged them both and we got to walking, shotgunning those vodka lemonades and quickly reloading at the nearest convenience store, then back outside to smoke Seven Stars cigarettes beneath the overhang of an underground parking garage . . .
Lord . . . I look rough as hell . . . and I see Alecks included part of his thumb in that last picture . . .
This post is over 4,000 words long, and it would take another 4,000 words to tell you everything that happened that night, which ended up being one of the best nights of my life. Instead I will simply say that we hung out from 930 pm till 5 am when the trains started up again, and protein-packed every blesséd moment of our time together with that sort of life-affirming wildness and camaraderie that I so often lust for, and had last felt with these very same souls. We shotgunned Strong Zeroes, ran through the streets laughing our asses off, made dozens of friends at a nearby expat bar Nicole knew about, hung out and talked and got drunk in a ground-floor elevator for two hours for warmth (staying so long the lights clicked off and we used our phone flashlights for light, Nicole and I swapping jackets, and Alecks eventually falling asleep on the floor), got ramen in some underground bunker-ass place (I merely sat with them . . . the broth of course was all pork!), and on and on, eventually ending up back at their hostel in Shinjuku.
I had about five minutes to catch the first morning train back to Kuramae Station, so I hugged Nicole and Alecks like the surrogate family they are to me and said I loved them and would miss them. I said, for GOD’S SAKE, we cannot let that much time pass again. I felt a physical pain to walk out that door.
Outside it was hovering above freezing. I looked up at the half moon in the sky . . .
. . . and hurried to Shinjuku-nishiguchi Station with a little aching sadness in my badly damaged and fucked-out heart. On the empty train I took the end seat and closed my eyes. I leaned my head against the wall and began to dream. I could still smell Nicole’s perfume on my jacket.
