I’m up in a skyscraper that scrapes the ionosphere. It’s mostly under construction on the bottom of the tower but it’s all finished and full of people up top. There are escalators everywhere and I’m running down them. My Heely skate shoes come in handy as I round the corner and glide down one of the special wheelchair ramp escalators. It’s totally flat but it moves me faster than I can run. When I hit the bottom of the ramp I grab hold of a metal bar encircling the next escalator and I jump up through the opening that separates the pedestrian walkway from the pedestrian freeway. Now I’m flying. My feet tap every fiftieth step on the electric stairway, just enough to keep my momentum but the angle of descent is enough for me to nearly free-fall down dozens of floors.
Although I’m going fast, I know they are not far behind me, Yakuza, gokudō, but not bōryokudan–this group isn’t violent by nature. I think they just want to question me, why, I don’t know but I’m running anyway. It’s not that I mind answering questions, I just like to answer questions with all my fingers intact at the end of the conversation.
In almost no time at all, I’m nearing the underdeveloped part of the tower. The are no longer any escalators and I must take one of the large elevators they use to cart equipment. It also carries a lot of people on sometimes, like tonight, where countless tuxedo and gown clad citizens celebrate on the roof, gazing at the less distant stars, getting drunk off of the high altitude.
For a second, I worry that they may have someone stationed in the lift. Luckily, they had flown in and landed on the roof. They must not have had anyone come from the ground, yet. The elevator takes me all the way down to the basement level, my ears popping all the way. In the lowest level of the building, there are even more people than on the roof. They are getting ready for a Cirque performance of some kind.
I grab a seat, trying to be inconspicuous. The show starts and immediately I am unimpressed. They have giraffe unicycle magicians catching fine pieces of cloth, which are being projected out of thin air, but I can see a black gloved hand throwing them from behind an even blacker drapery. The contortionists are weak and the jugglers falter.