For most of the trip, as soon as the doors were shut, it was eerily silent, as if on cue, a dead hush brushed over the crowd. Body heat grows more stifling with each passing station. Though the full-blown ventilation raises a terrible hum, I begin to sweat in my red coat. Shizuka is still buried on my chest. I could imagine how hard it is to breathe for her. I find it uncanny that the temperature of the train is rising. It's usually only uncomfortable in the heart of sweltering summers. The summer months of physical action and adventure, human experience and the craving of the flesh, according to Shizuka. We are safe in the depth of winter. Contemplation, reflection, exercise of the mind.

Outside, from between body parts, cityscape flashes by and turns into suburbs, high rises and coloured signs into small squat square matchbox buildings, grey and beige, half walls fencing a makeshift yard, barely any natural growth save a tree and a park here and there. Electric poles, lamps and wires flicker by like bullets. Solitary men and women on bicycles, a car here and there. Everything is still a drab grey. It's winter after all and winter means grey - until the evening, when the city-that-never-sleeps detonates with artificial light, all year round. When the hosts and hostesses, the club-goers, bar-hoppers, karaoke box rockstars, pachinko billionaires, internet cafe Olympians, drunkards and prostitutes, university students and salary men wake and feed, and when I retreat to the comfort of a book.

No one gets on and off at the next station. There's no more room for those waiting, and the passengers seem intent on staying put for the long run, squirming to find the most comfortable position, scavenging for scraps of room to gain a foothold or a perch to support themselves against the effects of gravity, like old men on canes. Still, Etiquette is too rigid, no one wants to draw attention. No one but us.

My suspicion that there is something happening in Yokohama becomes more pronounced. I look for flyers, tickets, brochures, posters and maps again. There are none. I try looking at her. I try to smile. Look at me, she had said. I try not to avoid her gaze. I try to act like an admiring loving lover, but I feel nothing close to love. My heart feels like an empty room, an empty gateway. I want to let my attention wander. The intensity of her eyes is newly overwhelming. She must have used a few more eyedrops or changed her contacts.

She glares at me.

"Do you have signal?"

I struggle to pull out my phone. No bars. "No."

"Odd."

We get a few glances. We have broken Etiquette, again. No black suits yet.

"We're above ground, there's no reason that we should lose signal."

"I haven't had signal since we stepped onto the train," she says.

I watch the rest of the crowd. Hundreds of heads, sight glued on a particular somewhere: outside, books, phones, shoes. My own paperback is at the bottom of my bag, asking to be read.

"Doesn't look like anyone else is having any problems." I say.

"It doesn't seem like coincidence."

"I think so too."

"I think this is working already," she grins. I can't tell if it is delight or triumph. Perhaps she is excited by the notion of danger.

I decide I like her. I like her risk-taking, danger-seeking, adventure-hungry nature. It may be the anti-thesis of my nihilism and complacent passivity. But still, she prefers winter over summer? She is a tenaciously created juxtaposition, an oxymoronic expression, to confound its reader. I see her scowl and know what she would say. But there are no Sounds yet, surely? She looks bothered. I shut up and retrieve my paperback novel and begin to read. Brave New World has been on my reading list for a long time, but I had never gotten the opportunity to purchase a copy. It may be the fact that it has such high critical acclaim and earth-shattering insight that it had intimidated me. But today I begin, with the philosophical aftermath of the Roaring Twenties and the Modernists: the "Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre". "Community, Identity, Stability." The science-fiction classifying, manufacturing and brainwashing, not too unlike our own.

"Good book," she says at one point.

"Fun, really," I reply in between paragraphs.

"The sex is interesting," she says.

It's about Tamagawa station, halfway into the journey, past fifteen minutes of Huxley's satiric wordplay and taciturn vibes of apprehension, when something finally happens.

Shizuka reacts a few minutes too early; her eyes shoot open wide and search for mine, pleading frantically like something had possessed her. I could hear her thoughts saying no, no, no, no. Her brow furrowed in pain. She is falling over - though she couldn't actually fall, suspended in a sea of flesh - I feel her weight solid and limp against me.

"What's happening?" I sound like a nervous schoolboy. I try to hold her up and brace myself, though for what I don't know.

Then there is a shudder through the entire train. I nearly drop my book. It's so sudden, that even the pale greenish lights above flicker, caught in surprise. A jolt ripples from one end of the train to the other. A loud screech, long and unceasing, nails on a chalkboard. I can feel the joints between the cars jam together, and the friction, the crumpling of metal into sparks. Shizuka clings to me and I cling to her. And the door behind me. Everything is shaking and sloshing and swaying. My bones rattle. I hear it in my skull. The emergency brakes are on, the emergency brakes are on. No one questions why. We have nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to see. We stare and grind our teeth and pray to ourselves until it stops.

When the train gives its final spasm, and reaches a halt, like a beached whale, as if on cue, the passengers onboard begin to look around, creatures coming out of hibernation. Where are they? What happened? Who are they? Questions with no answers.

Shizuka's eyes are tear-soaked. I hug her and pat her back awkwardly through the parka.

I ask her what happened. She says, "suicide," and I say nothing. Oddly, such an answer is too predictable, considering our circumstances. When a train pulls to an emergency stop in Japan, there are only two possibilities: an earthquake or suicide.

She wipes her tears with the sleeve of her red coat and tells me she's alright, that it just hurt.

"I'm sorry."

"Why are you sorry?"

"I just felt like saying it."

"I wonder how long the delay will be. My legs are numb."

We're not allowed to exit the train until twenty minutes past the incident. We stay packed in the car, temperature rising, sweat beading our foreheads, minds blank. No one speaks. There is nothing to say. Suicide is a regular day to day occurrence, as natural as the sunrise and sunset. Another life blinks out of existence. Perhaps they are safe from becoming an Image. Shizuka says nothing about Images and the System. But the question is unavoidable. What comes first: death or the final state of an Image? Is the Image a form of afterlife, or is death an alternative? If death were an escape, it might be better to choose death too. No doubt the dead will become a number as they all do: a bill sent to relatives for damages, recorded into national statistics, documented with the police, filed into government agencies, written onto family archives, printed into death certificates and obituaries. There will be mourners, how many depending on how influential and reputable they were; they will have a procession, host a funeral, leave flowers, hold memorials, memories forgotten, life continues on. The idea of it is sad. So close to ghosts are people, that perhaps there is not much difference between living and dying.

When the doors finally open, we find no one waiting at the station. It's like a ghost town. Solemn grey pillars, vending machines, dim broken signs. There are no onlookers. No bystanders. No eyewitnesses. Just station staff and the driver, crew crouched on the rails, the police arriving and making notes, and the dead. There's a wild whistling wind through the station. I ask if she wants a coffee.

"Canned?"

"What else do we have to choose from?"

The vending machine swallows my spare coins and spits out two heated cans of coffee. The BOSS brand splays out in bold font. Tommy Lee "Alien Jones" stands next to us brandishing a can of BOSS coffee. I toss her one.

"Coffee better than no coffee."

She smiles. Her eyes are still tear-stained. It must be painful to hear so much all the time.

"We've got to make it to the top of the ferris wheel." I say.

"Yes. Cosmo Clock 21."

As if something there will hold the answer for us.

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