The world was white. Rows of shelves with neatly arranged colours guided me through the light. The grey lines between the ceiling tiles repeated as the fluorescent bulbs invaded into their creases. I turned my eyes down and took off my glasses so as not to be blinded by the searing lights. Yet upon removal my eyes were struck by the freezing air that hummed like white noise through the pleated filter of a convenience store aircon. 

A mirage, or hallucination, as without the atmosphere that covered the rest of the city, caught by the aircon arrogantly, I could smell the polyester. Stifling air that enforced a stony cold upon my shins and exposed arms. 

“That will be 2760 yen.” A high pitched voice erupted. 

I reached into the pocket of my shorts and pulled out my card to pay. The reader's loud ring pierced my weary ears.

“Thank you for your patronage!” The voice called again as I grabbed the bag and started towards the door. 

The quiet mechanical doors of glass and steel hummed open while I slid my glasses back onto my rising eyes. The blinding light of chemistry was behind me as my eyes began to numb from the reflective light of the sky, brighter, and more radioactive than the lights of the store. I struck a wall of heat, as though stepping headfirst into a stone oven whose stone was concrete and whose enclosure was the cramped buildings of urban density. I had to push myself into it to move. Physically fighting against my body as I forced it out into that interminable inferno. I emerged into Shibuya. 

I saw a man walk past waving a newspaper to his face that described the record heat wave which had worked its tendrils throughout the city. I could feel its pulse, beating against my arms and legs, against my head. Whatever senses had taken me within the convenience store was then forgotten, replaced with charcoal where my iced brain once was. The trek home in that acrid miasma took precedence. I adjusted my glasses on my already moist nose and began to walk. 

The bag that held my dinner and smokes swung close to my side as I blended with the crowded Shibuya bustle. It tapped occasionally at my thigh, sticking to the skin from the combination of sweat and plastic. Two cup ramen clattered against each other in the bag. A rare choice, between pork or shrimp for dinner that night. Whichever I chose, the other would be dinner the next day. Pork served the heat, but the shrimp appealed to ideas of tropical retreat. Though, once I got home, only a four year old desk fan awaited me. The heat would remain. Whatever aspirations of coastal delicacy I could perhaps imagine in partaking of that flavor would only be diminished more so from my surroundings. 

The crowd stopped at an intersection and I raised my eyes. I could smell the man next to me, so I turned my head away from him. I saw a mother, she had an infant in one hand and a stroller in the other. From the extended shade I could not make out the contents of the stroller, but the child had a bag of broccoli sitting atop his bald little head. It was probably frozen at one point, and had since melted over his scalp and drenched his polo shirt with plastic flavored water. The mother did not mind her child's sodden state, as she was trying to shake away the hair that had stuck to her sweaty face. I almost felt sorry for the woman.

The light turned green and the crowd in front of me began to move again. The mother disappeared behind the head of various others and the man's stench was replaced by another. I moved with them, pressing the hundred yen sandals onto the asphalt slowly. Taking reprieve as much as possible. The foam sole hardly kept the infernal pavement from burning my feet, but at least it was not bare contact. At least I was spared that. 

A group of schoolgirls who rudely darted through the crowd from behind pushed me aside. I emerged to the left, and saw the entrance to a park. Inside there were only a few people as far as I could see. There was a small family of father, mother, and toddler of impossible to define gender. A janitor stood by, watching them wearily as he wiped under his cap with a white towel that he then hung around his neck. His shirt, too, was white, and he had unzipped the top half of his blue coveralls and tied the arms around his waist to reveal the shirt. Unprofessional, to be sure, but I could not fault the old man. It was hardly as though I was dressed that well either. Certainly, if a coworker had seen me, there would likely be a scandal.

There was a bench by the entrance, facing the street, and I took it as a sign to sit. The wood was warm but not scalding. I got into the bag from the store and felt an ever small tinge of regret for not having purchased refreshments, but then I also did not expect to lose the flow of pedestrian current so quickly. Instead I pulled out a pack of cigarettes and matches. There were not, as I could see, any signs that indicated that smoking was prohibited. Even so, my opponent would be an old man tied up in his own clothes. I could win a confrontation like that. 

So, lighting up and taking a deep drag, I filled my lungs with that enervating ambrosia that cleared my mind of thoughts of old men and families. My head returned to its small confine, and I could see around me for the first time since leaving my apartment. I had sense again to smell and feel and understand. I could see Shibuya for what it was. 

“What is the opposite of petrichor?” I thought.  

There had to be something like that, a word for that stench that rose from the ground. When the sun baked and boiled the immense dross that soaked the concrete at our feet. The asphalt that drank blood and bile regurgitated, and it filled our lungs and tickled our noses. There must have been a word for that sort of sensation, one that lay just beyond my knowledge. Perhaps that smell was what we saw on the horizon? Glimmering just above the asphalt in the far distant road in the heat haze. A vapor of its own. Absorbing the heat that could not reach into its body and keeping it just above our heads. Low to the ground so we could exist within it ever longer. 

There was oil in that ground, and gasoline. The expulsion of those iron coffins that crawled along in traffic before me. Black carriages which dragged themselves further off into places that were beyond my knowing and far greater beyond my care. They drank the vapor and inhaled deeply those noxious condiments which made it up. Tearing apart the steel lungs and exhaling an even greater poison that was hot and rancid. So too would the car behind it drink, and so exhale, and so on. Beside them too I saw the corpses walking as their ragged clothes dripped with the rotting fluids of bodies once pristine. What would decay be without molding flesh? The corrosion of each body as it passed before me was plain, and I could feel it as well. 

I could feel my head melting, becoming smaller from the vibrating molecules in the air and my brain. The biology within my head was fighting against an onslaught of cancerous smoke. It wished, at least, for lightness. Yet I could not imagine myself falling for something like that. A sentiment which existed in such a place. A heartfelt desire, to let oneself be carried off, like a bride in June. Instead my feet were sore and aching from the unbearable pressure my body used to press them into the sidewalk. The stifling space between the sole and the foam, that awful searing which sent pain up into my spine and whirled endlessly in my head. I knew it would be smart to lift my feet, to cross my legs on the bench like a child, but sensibility prevented it. Adult senses of ego prevented it. I did not care if they hated me, as with love, as with hate, both decay the same. When under the unyielding heat of the sun, all I could do was observe my hilarious self, and witness the horror spectacle that the corpses made of themselves. 

One of those men in the crowd, dressed in black, cast a glance towards me. His shoulders were low and barely held the briefcase strap slung across his chest. The strap also nearly failed to hold the oversized jacket onto his thin, emasculated, frame. Bony fingers came from the black trunk closest to me and his sallow, wet, face was, ever so briefly, aimed towards me. 

He saw a woman. Aged beyond her years, wearing loose gym shorts and a tank top that barely covered a grim, skeletal, form. Her body was as thin and unappealing as his own, yet her hair hung low to her eyes as it dripped with sweat. She had seen his gaze, he knew, and we traded no affectation. 

For him, it was unknowable. Though I knew where his gaze rested, and what the form reflected in those eyes was, I did not know what he saw. There was no regard in his expression, and so I gave him none in return. After that split second, he vanished into the crowd from which he had appeared. Recombined with other forms like him, indistinguishable faces set upon personas that passed on the street and helplessly continued onward beneath the gall of the oppressive sun. As he disappeared from view, so too did he leave my memory. 

My head leaned back as it followed the side of a building across the street. A nail salon, a tax agency, lenders, a tea place, and then the roof. Just one building, a pile of stone and rebar. Would there be something up there? A place that, so far above the smog dense detritus of the street, one could breath in a cleaner breath that did not hold that lingering vapor? That ‘un-petrichor’? That must have been why they built them so high, to escape the reek, to escape the conflagration of degradation. Standing upon each other's shoulders to catch a breath, choking helplessly until finally reaching that place above the water line. 

Without realizing it, I allowed myself to fall into a depraved sentiment like that. 

I put out the cigarette and slid the filter into the pack with the rest of its brethren. Grim, to place a body alongside its loved ones like that, but I had no other place for it. As I did I stood and found my place in the crowd yet again. The current took me, and I carried my feet forward slowly.

Heavy steps, leaden steps. I could taste the salt on my lips and every few feet I sneezed as the drops of sweat were inhaled and frustrated my nose. After a few blocks I had to switch the hand that carried my bag, and the newly released extremity was pale and red and sticky. I put it to my head, but the fire that raged there nearly hurt to touch. Better to let the head burn. If  I could no longer use it to think, then I would be immune to the heat as well. 

“Burn me away.” I thought to myself, taking step after step upon the hellish concrete. 

Before long I caught a glimpse of my hunched form in the dark window of a slowly passing car. My head hung low and my neck stretched outwards, like my skull was trying to flee from the body that had become disintegrated. So truly had I wished for that feeling, that I had arrived at my apartment complex without realizing it. 

I climbed the stairs and looked up. I could see the sky on the other side, just ahead. I could run up those steps and thrust myself over the edge, into that blue escape beyond. Yet as I made it to the landing, I instead turned to face another rise of steps. The urge to ascend them in a sprint and fly off the edge there struck me as well, yet the feeling was killed when I reached that landing as well. I stood before the door of my apartment, feeling the radiating waves of heat bouncing about in the corridor of the stairs. 

I remembered that a teenager broke the lock that led to the roof sometime prior. Had it been fixed? It would be unsafe if not. A thing worth reporting, and as such, checking in on. I turned from my door and rose the next set of steps, fighting time after time that sudden urge to throw myself over the increasingly fatal summit. A breeze began to faintly brush through, fixing the incoherent frustration of the heat bouncing and driving it on a singular current through that corridor. It did not get cooler, indeed, it may have gotten hotter, but at least the flow of torture remained steady and consistant. 

At the top of the stairs was a door with a maintenance sign. Next to it there was a ladder painted over with the same vague white that the walls were unceremoniously layered with. Atop the ladder a hatch with no lock. The lock was laying in pieces at the foot of the ladder. Was the ladder hot? I considered it and touched the first rung. There was no response from my palm. It was not cool, but the paint must have insulated the metal from touch, so it was bearable to grip. Without anything to hold me back, I put both hands forward and stepped up onto the ladder. 

Once my feet were free of the ground and suffering the thin rungs of the ladder, a greater feeling of absence resolved itself throughout my legs. Pins, like a million needles creeping and tickling the palms of my feet. I waited in that spot for a moment while I regained my composure. When all was finished, I raised a hand and opened the roof hatch. 

There was a vastness to it. Only eight stories and I had divorced myself from the limited perspective of the ground floor. Little blocked my view except for those buildings from which I had come. That direction emanated a grey fog of decomposition. A lingering fog of corpse gas. It rose from that place, and its tendrils grasped the buildings to their heights. I looked out over the surrounding apartments with disappointment. The wind battered my head with more of the heat, pulling my hair every way. I sat on the infernal gravel of the roof. I had little care remaining for the coarse stones that stabbed and cauterized. 

The city was smoking. It burned and throbbed with the vapor that it had created to fill its own lungs. I pulled the cigarettes back out and lit up again as a pair of pigeons landed on the roof nearby. They pecked at the gravel and a chip bag that was left behind by whoever had broken the lock. Limply chattering and cooing to each other as they ate scraps. Those creatures who nested in the fiberglass facades of million dollar buildings and atop the steel rooftops of those great pillars of urban dominion. Even their children were born with the grey taint of that place, that invisible tendril of venom that inflicted its progress upon all of us. A plane flew overhead and the roar of its engine caused the birds to flutter away into the blinding light reflected off a far away window in the city skyline.

I had really let myself be carried off, however briefly, by an idea beyond my own mind. I chided myself as the smoke entered my esophagus. Human growth is slower than traffic in Shibuya, so I felt affirmed in my belief in such things. I did not want to change, because change meant difference, and it implied that I would be growing beyond what I was. As I was still me, then I was right, so I let myself remain me ever longer. Crawling along the ground among the ants and filling the concrete dens of the city, blinded by the reflections of that great gaseous sphere upon the glass of skyscrapers. 

The cigarette brought my mind closer in on itself. Reeling in, absorbing the carcinogens and allowing them to weigh it down. I exhaled a cloud of grey that softened the burn of my eyes. The translucent static of heat waves filtered through the brief smoke in clarity. More desirable than such focus was the way it hid my repulsive expression. The gravel beneath me numbed and the pressure of the sky upon my arms was unbearably hidden against the veil of light blue. My shirt was heavy with sweat as it attempted to drag me back down to that cramped apartment wherein it could be forsaken without shame. With a free hand I brushed a length of hair that the wind blew into my glasses. 

Salt was on the wind. It blended with the sweat dripping from my forehead in beads. Each drop crossing the bridge of my nose and dropping from the tip into oblivion, or else caressing my lips and being caught on my tongue. It reminded me that the shrimp ramen had more salt than the pork. An experience recalled from the week prior, when the same choice was laid before me. It would be best to avoid the experience of an over-salted day. In that potential outcome I was faced with the image of myself being crouched in the corner of my cramped room, slurping from the cup amid the static silence of an old fan. 

“I’ll eat the shrimp tomorrow.” 

I finished my cigarette as the city burned alive.