Chasing Yuki Through Shepherd’s Bush (excerpt)

You exit the Tube at street level and walk towards the smokestacks, looking for the alley from two nights ago, but all you see is broken windows like fossilized eye sockets. You wade further in the dark towards the chugging industrial yards, sure you’ve never been this far before, that the alley no longer exists, that this is proof you imagined the whole thing, that this is the fissure between consciousness and the physical world you were unmeant to see. Your head tingles with an expansive feeling, as though new neural networks are colonizing the deepest estuaries. But when you walk back in the other direction, you find the alley, closer to the Tube than you remember, and your mind has to cancel its new calibration of reality. Now you recountenance the alley’s existence, but your thoughts spark like a dead lighter as to whether the wool was pulled momentarily over your eyes: in short, you return to flaccid uncertainty.

You leapfrog puddles in the alley and turn the corner—almost bump into a guy in a wheelchair in a line snaking up the metal-grid steps to the warehouse. A bouncer on the steps with a Suge Knight beard unhooks the velvet rope in front of the door and the lineup colonizes the space ahead like soldiers in a DMZ.

You help three other men—creatine-jacked in tight black tees with Adriatic tans and crewcuts—hoist the man in the wheelchair up the stairs. He rolls through the door, disappears.

You nod at the bouncers and bypass the coat check for the dancefloor, which has a bar on one side and a DJ booth on the other beside stairs leading to a terrace. Automated glass doors at the far end open upon fluorescent huts. The dance floor is empty except a suited-up man smoking. You move closer to the glass rooms, where a group of Chinese men throw dice on a table. The door slides open and they stare. One of them hops up and takes you by the arm to his seat. You stare at your pieces, but they’re Chinese characters. “Dis… one. Dis… four,” one says, pointing at two pieces. Not knowing mahjong, you make a move and everyone barks in disgust till you take it back. The man whose seat you took points to a different piece and when you pick it up everyone hollers like this is very interesting and scandalous, but you decide to run out, although the sensor on the door is slow, subjecting you to impassioned cries of “zuo, zuo, zuo!”

More people are dancing, so you go to the bar. “A rum and coke,” holding out a £5 note. The bartender refuses it, which makes you feel somewhat VIP, but when he gives you the glass it looks like Long Island iced tea, a spectrum from dark bottom to yellow top layers ringed with lime. It tastes like medicine through the straw, which makes you cringe in sight of the bartender, but when you mix it and take another sip and it tastes somewhat cherry-forward like a spiked Shirley Temple, you decide that, despite the cocktail’s unknown provenance, you will consume a small amount more, both because “When in Rome” and because of a desire to ingratiate yourself with the bartender.

People are leaning off the terrace railing upstairs and streaming into the dance floor from the glass rooms and from a second staircase behind the bar leading downstairs. When you take out your phone, a bouncer snatches it from your hands, searching the screen for photos, and before you can yell to give it back, he does, with a school-masterly wagging.

Your cranium is a growing concern, swelling and taking in frontiers of sensory input and telling your heart to beat faster, which it suddenly does, and as the DJ—short, bald, mustachioed in a bowler hat—transitions from low-key video-game ambience to tech-house riffs and the floor fills with people from all angles—even the mahjong men, who crouch in a circle outside their glass hut drinking beer and vaping—you start to move uncontrollably and feel the simultaneous urge to shriek in fear and to whimper with the most potent nostalgia and gratitude. The emerald lasers fragment your vision and you’re a many-eyed insect, the light multiplying into more and more tracers floating through deep space, and you take another sip of the laced Shirley Temple, regretting that you did but happy you still know you shouldn’t have. You find yourself surrounded, as though stumbling into a forest clearing, by high-heeled women grabbing you by the hips, hairspray from their bleached and lava-red locks wafting through the sparkles and pendants floating in the air like flakes in a snow globe. You don’t know if they’re pivoting off you as a North Star in their constellation or waiting for you to lead, or just randomly assembling—how close are they?—and you’re too tweaked, too padded in a human-proof straitjacket, to do more than ribbit through bubbling carbonated sweat, but you feel no sense of failure—rather, perfect contentment, except the rare subterranean pang of doom, quickly washed over by the next wave of love.

Through the bodies you see Yuki’s eyes glow. He crosses through bodies, getting closer. Flames ripple from his left ear, lifting you to a new plane of dissonance, until you see a spoon under the flame, held by a hand, and your depth perception revises it a few metres back to the bartender lighting absinthe. Yuki draws closer, and the dancing women admit him to the circle, and he’s right in front of you, holding a conical hat.

“We haven’t met before,” you say, “but we’ve seen each other. You know who I am?”

He nods and bobs to the beat with a mischievous smile that aggresses and disarms. Pinning you with his stare, he says something, based on a reading of his lips, like, “We live together,” the shrill laughter a clarion of tinnitus. You want to tell him everything he already knows, want to tell him you followed him here from the hostel—that it cost you dearly but you don’t regret a thing.

You’re sure, given the gravitas Bluetoothing your eyeballs, the picking up of alien frequencies, that he would admire this, if he doesn’t know it. He says something that you don’t understand but that you’re receptive to… then something crashes—a commotion down the teeming dancefloor, panic as bouncers carry off a girl limp like roadkill, bloody-nosed in a felt dress as a goth-glam girl tries to punch her. The music stops. Strobes circle. The lights and bass drop and everyone cheers, unbottling mania. Yuki weaves off in the direction of the commotion, trailed by the man with the briefcase. You dance a little, throwing your hands up and nodding your head in a simulacrum of a young person getting positive reinforcement from peers. The old dance circle is broken, the women in a shriveled line like a snapped elastic rippling in hair-dryer wind. You don’t know if the feral low-blood pressure vibe of the past millisecond is a projection of an inner state or a new reality, but you take a gulp of the drink and eat the maraschino cherry floating on top, which feels like a Tomahawk missile invading the top left quadrant of your brain, like “reeeeeee!” megaphoned from the penthouse of a mortar-hit skyscraper. Even as the tension subsides and you resume movement, clutching your head, you feel paralyzed, a parked car with its pedal to the metal, a trench forming from a tsunami of flying gravel. The gears of your fortune downshift and you drop the glass to a shattering end. But when you crouch down and grope through legs in the soggy shadows, you find the glass upright and intact. You wonder whether it’s another glass or whether it’s about to become a weapon. When you place the cup on the bar, the bartender scowls like a doctor looking at a cup of urine. You rotate your body 180 degrees and watch the strobe lights stain the ceiling and shoot through the atrium glass to the heavens.

You isolate a background frequency in your head that is committed to leaving, to reasserting first sobriety and then integration in society, to securing the means to explore a Googlable European continent before its total eclipse by tourists, boat men, climate fugees, civil war. But the speakers vroom a demonic motor, a chainsaw running from the solar plexus downspine, a neural bone crushing for which you need to sit alone in a dark room, if you can handle your own thoughts. By the exit, a palm-skirted woman appeals to a neckless bouncer shaking his head. You don’t know what this is about, but you can wait a few minutes to leave, to face the rising sun and scurrying rats of the Protestant work ethic—in fact, you don’t want to leave yet, not when you don’t know what you look like, or if you still exist. On the stairway downstairs, you step on a tissue smeared with red lipstick and run a quivering hand along your chin, which feels like a long, flat, flesh-masked breadstick that, though it may exist now, won’t in 100 years.

You enter the bathroom, bathed in swanky pink pastel. A man, vaguely Norwegian-looking, with wavy blonde hair over his ears and Mesolithic Wagnerian eyes—stern and bruised—stares into the bulb-beaded mirror with crystalline focus. He adjusts his maroon pocket protector and rolls down his right cuff to cover his palm, cradling a vial of golden substance. He seems in a ravenous, pre-coital, pre-berserker state, and doesn’t flinch as you skirt into the last of three stalls, which contains a toilet and an open window letting blue moonlight trickle onto an oozing space in the corner, fed by a drip-drip from an unseen pipe higher up. You lean against the sharp brick wall, which sends a chill through your back up your arms, resuscitated by the cool airstream spraying your forehead. When you close your eyes, the curtain lifts to reveal a primordial backdrop of celestial networks, constellations like sugar and pepper blown across black infinity, towards which you float in the polar vastness, jet skiing a jet stream through space and shivering horribly. Your hands press something firm but there’s nothing for hundreds of miles except a Halley’s Comet cruising in the horizon into a docking position. An unidentified object descends and docks beside it, the comet head a giant pink building block in a baby’s crib. You surf through space, frozen petrified, spine rattling, nervous system teetering between pleasure and pain. Though you’re making but an atom of progress towards the horizon, comets and UFOs are docking in a half-moon, their light multiplying, shooting orange rays towards you that not only transmit heat to keep you alive, but also fog your memories with the story of something deeper, the deepest of roots, a vision of the Fall of Matter: of the Original Disaster that spawned an ancient war clustering and hoarding energy in the Solar System and beyond, the origin of illimitable evil birthing illimitable meaning through the purpose of all sentience: to uncluster and diffuse the energy and effect the unity of spirit.