The Thought did Occur to Me

I meet up with BG. He's in town from Tokyo on business. We go out for a meal and end up polishing off two bottles of wine and catch up. He's the first person from Tokyo that I've seen in London. Nobody else comes, which I can't figure out as loads of people went to London when I was in Tokyo.

Woefully drunk, we stagger back to my place to annoy my flatmate with boring stories about our Tokyo adventures. I show BG some of my films from school, and he says I should try to do something in Tokyo. Actually, I've been thinking a lot about Tokyo recently...why I left and the people that are still there. BG gossips about them, and I am intrigued.

"What if I do go back there," I say to him. "Maybe do a documentary on the people I know."

"I will give you $5,000 to shoot anything you want to in Japan," he says.

"You're drunk," I say.

After he leaves, I fall into a fitful sleep. This is what I dream about:

Patrick and I are in a car that converts into a submarine. This car/sub was built to travel to an alien city, which, for some reason, is deep beneath the ocean. Patrick and I are stowing away on the car/sub. The roof is entirely glass, but no one seems to notice that we are the only ones in the car. The engineers start to cover the car in some sort of metallic protective seal. We are supposed to start equalizing, but I can't because I have a cold. I start to panic, but Patrick tells me to relax and gives me some nasal spray. Now I can breathe fine. Suddenly, we are on the landing pad at the alien city. The aliens, who happen to look just like us, don't notice us. We are able to blend in. We go into a shop to buy sweets, and I'm trying to make myself more comfortable by chatting with the cashier. I tell her that we just got into town. She asks if we are aliens or stowaways. I say we're stowaways, but I immediately get paranoid. I look at Patrick in a panic, but he says "Be yourself, and everything will be fine."

I'm thinking that BG is right. Maybe I should shoot something in Tokyo. Maybe something about the economic hostages. That's what we used to call ourselves--"economic hostages." How arrogant is that. But I don't know anything about documentary, really. And I have to work on my graduation film. I'll have to think about it.

The next morning, my flatmate asks me what I did in Tokyo. I tell her I was a writer.

"And, how was it...your writing," she asks.

It didn't suck. I could do what I wanted. I had fans. It was kind of rock and roll.

Please, God...if I go back there...please let it be rock and roll.