Creative Nonfiction by Berit Ellingsen
A video on YouTube of the glowing cityscape of Tokyo at night, set to the somber, autumnal tones of the blues music of Blade Runner, rekindles my desire to go to Japan. I’ve wanted to go there for years, but it’s not an option right now. Instead, I decide to find a similar view in Europe, closer to my home country of Norway.
The flight to London takes little more than one and a half hour. By train or car that amount of time wouldn’t even get me halfway to Oslo. The greater London area has almost double the population of my entire country. The terminal at Heathrow where the plane lands is almost as large as Gardermoen, Norway’s biggest airport. It feels as if I might drown inside the throngs of people. Welcome to the Anthropocene. In a sparsely populated country, the crowded age of humankind is not that noticeable, but it certainly is here in the heart of the old empire. I can’t imagine what it would feel like in Tokyo with its thirteen million people.
I take my chance on the London Underground, despite having experienced two train evacuations due to bomb threats on earlier visits. In many ways I’ve seen more of the British capital under ground than at street level, and only surfaced at tourist locations such as Piccadilly Circus, the Museum of Natural History, and Buckingham Palace. Now, in the bracket between the morning and the evening rush, the Underground is not too crowded. There are nevertheless lots of tourists around, like me. I’m just another traveler in good shoes rolling a suitcase through endless tunnels.
Every time I go to London, I consider avoiding the underground, but due to the frequency of its trains and the relatively low price for a day pass, I always end up using it. And while I remain wary of the crowds and the uncomfortably high temperature of these subterranean bowels, the blast of hot air and screeching brakes as a train arrives always brings with it, for a visitor like me, a sense of adventure. We are not in Norway anymore.
As I expect, from pictures on Google Street View, the hotel I’ve booked sits right above the London Bridge Station, where the underground has a stop. I only need to take a few steps outside before I’m at the hotel entrance. I note this for future visits in colder seasons.
Years ago, Norwegian TV aired a documentary about the construction of a new glass tower in London. The lower half of the high-rise housed offices and a restaurant or two. The top floors were dedicated to a viewing platform that welcomes tourists every day of the week. But most of the upper floors were parts of a hotel. The documentary showed a bit of the rooms, but focused on the high level of service the staff were expected to provide, and the social commitment the hotel had made to the local area, in London’s less privileged southern parts. I was surprised that a luxury hotel cared anything about its community, and made a mental note of the name and location of the hotel.
That is why I now find myself at The Shard, a steep glass pyramid that ends in jagged edges around a viewing platform on the seventy-second floor. Despite the recent Brexit, The Shard is still the tallest building in the European Union, and while it may not be of the robust brutalism most often associated with the novels of JG Ballard, this glass and steel marvel does bring that author to mind. In the lobby on the ground, an impeccably dressed doorman shows me into a narrow elevator which whisks me up to the thirty-fifth floor, soundlessly and in record speed. In some of my recurring dreams I take a super-fast elevator through a very tall building, which feels like a plane about to take off. The elevator at The Shard isn’t quite as fast, but still gives an interesting pop in the ears.
At the thirty-fifth floor the light is amazing, even when it comes from a sagging London sky that seems intent on living up to its Victorian name of The Smoke. Here, a courteous but friendly receptionist checks me in and gives me an offer of two rooms facing different directions of the metropolis below. Which one will give the most Tokyo-like view? When I admit that it’s a difficult choice, the receptionist smiles and points out with obvious pride the view each room will have.
After I select a room facing the London Eye, the Globe, and in the distance, Big Ben, the receptionist takes my suitcase, which is so small I refused porter service downstairs in the lobby, and follows me up to show the room. It’s another soundless elevator trip, this time to forty-seventh floor. Except for in planes, I haven’t been this far up before. The corridor is clad in a thick white and blue carpet, while the wood-paneled walls glow with understated illumination. Here, all sounds vanish into silence, like they do in the high Arctic, but through thick padding instead of vast openness. There are none of the usual hotel noises of slamming doors and rolling suitcases, and on the short walk to my room, we encounter no guests. Am I the only person staying on this floor?
Thus, when the solid-looking door to the sumptuous guest room, which has a stunning panorama view of the city, closes behind me, I’m suddenly aware of being completely alone with a stranger in place that seems almost sound-proof. I move quickly so that there is always a couple of meters between the receptionist and me. When he shows me the enormous bathroom with floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls, I let him go in first and then remain near the door. I ask whether the wind moves the tower a lot, and the receptionist describes the architecture and says that it does not, except during real winter storms. Then he’s gone and I start pressing all the buttons of the air conditioning, the remote-controlled curtains, and the scary electronic toilet.
I spend the rest of the day with a friend in the city and have a memorable dinner in the hotel’s restaurant. With the cityscape now glowing in the darkness, there is only one thing to do: take a bath in the tub on the forty-seventh floor. There are remote controlled roll-down curtains for the bashful, but what’s the point of paying for a room this high up without using the privilege it confers? Due to the slanting sides of this glass pyramid, I can see the edge of the room below, which looks to be a suite. I recall rumors online that when the hotel opened, people could see the reflections of other guests due to the angles of the glass. Since then, thin curtains have been placed strategically to reduce the chance of unwanted mirror effects. Nevertheless, a number of buildings face my room directly, even if none of them reach anywhere near the same height. Someone with a strong telelens or powerful binoculars would be able to see me, but whatever. If I keep the lights off, they won’t be able to see much.
I put on the blues melody from Blade Runner and take a hot bath with the floor-to-ceiling windows uncovered. The overcast night sky glows from the reflected light of the city and thus never gets fully dark. Not even Norway’s largest city, Oslo, has enough light to produce this effect, but I’m sure Tokyo does it with ease.
Later that night I wake from the wind whistling around the corners of my room in the glass tower. Even this wind, with its constant illumination, sounds the same as it does in the high Arctic and in winter in Norway. Because of the height of the pyramid and the speed of the wind at this altitude, the conditions here are probably the closest one can get to the Arctic in London.
I sit up and gaze at the gleaming cityscape as if it were Tokyo. The glow that prevents the sky from attaining a true night seems like the Anthropocene’s final victory over the natural darkness which early humans must have feared as they huddled together over their camp fires. The sight of civilization that gleams from one end of the horizon to the other beneath the artificially night-less sky is beautiful but also oppressive. I’m glad I have been to other parts of the planet that are almost entirely uninhabited and wild, reminding the world of what it looked like before the Anthropocene, and how it may be after.
But wasn’t this what I wanted? A taste of the megacities of East Asia without actually going there? Instead of tossing and turning in bed, I switch on the TV. Among the many channels on offer is an English-speaking broadcasting service from South Korea. Here, a gentle-looking Korean-American chef samples hot dishes from various places in Seoul. When the spicy food hits the back of his throat, he gasps and coughs, but keeps on smiling. This makes me laugh in sympathy and commiseration, knowing that I wouldn’t have been able to eat even the mildest dishes on the show. Not long after I fall asleep to the sound of the wind howling past the glass.
Berit Ellingsen is the author of two novels, Not Dark Yet (Two Dollar Radio), and Une ville vide (PublieMonde), as well as a collection of short stories, Beneath the Liquid Skin (Queen’s Ferry Press). Her work has been published in W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International, SmokeLong Quarterly, Unstuck, Litro, and other places, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the British Science Fiction Association Award. Berit travels between Norway and Svalbard in the Arctic, and is a member of the Norwegian Authors’ Union. http://beritellingsen.com.
Arcturus 