The arrival of a dangerous Typhoon

From your bed, you can hear it rain. Now is the same as it has been for four days; you walk into class 2 minutes late with a chilly, wet head and soaking clothes like you were standing in a shower, the windows are all blurry, that sound is always there, every leafy thing outside is tremoring. Some people have become real worried. A typhoon has been meant to come. The rain has made my bike wet, my notebooks have gotten wet. The bikes at school, parked in their rows of hundreds of them, looking like such junk, all get wet. Tonight it’s here, the enormous typhoon is outside the window and I can hear all the rain hitting from bed. I’ve heard things about it (the typhoon), like that it roughed up Thailand and flooded everything and killed people. It's out there now, wanting to flood my pretty, narrow neighborhood, my tidy ant-farm that I live in. The ambulance is screaming tonight, like every other night, with that loud-speaker-voice that is saying something like, “This is an ambulance, please stop your cars and let us through, we are an ambulance.” Eventually people do pull their cars over and people beneath umbrellas do stop crossing the street so it can get by. The ambulance’s whine sinks away and goes beneath the sound of 10 lb. rain carried down onto the cobblestone, the whistle of wind, and the thud of potted-plants falling over. My eyes have barely opened from coming out of sleep, it isn’t enough to be afraid. There is only that terror, and I am nowhere yet.
The morning comes and I wake up at 9:20, but, as always, it is a small failure. My alarms are set at 7:50, 8:20, 8:30 8:50, they’re scattered like proximity mines that I always manage to disarm. I need to find a better way to trick myself. To have myself believe that there is some emergency, that “GET UP NOW!” or else. I climbed out of bed and put on my pants that I wore the other day and picked a shirt from a hanger in my temp. closet, the same as in the basement of the house in Spokane, Andrea’s. I am dressed now, and I walk through the laundry room and into the living room and there’s a conversation at the table. Renato has come again for an interview at Konami, except that in Japan they don’t just give you an interview, they have these pre-interview seminars where hopefuls submit lots of documents and answer questions and the like, and then after that, out of the hundred applicants maybe ten or twenty are picked. Renato’s Konami pre-interview seminar is today at 2:00. Okaasan is there at the table with Renato and they’re talking. I’ve stepped into something. Hana-chan (this may be the first ever mention of Hana-chan in this blog), the cat, is lying next to my feet. What I’ve stepped in didn’t come from Hana-chan. White, warm Sunrays are coming in through the glass slider-door to the little garden. Looking from Hana-chan to the outside, the sky drops like a curtain into my vision. Unbelievably blue. I think of machines flying through it infallibly, making straight white lines. The leaved things are still shaking around in spurts. The wind is still here. It’s sweeping away every speck of cloud from up there.
I get on my bike, then I'm at school, gliding into the bike parking lot that's to the left of the building where I have my class. All the bikes in the lot, save a few small clusters, lie on their sides on the ground. Almost every one, vandalized. Junk again. The men who tidy up the bike lot aren’t righting the bikes, they’re not around like they usually are: standing together observing the students or formally spacing each bike in the lot. It's a diligent job. They must have given up against the wind. I don't know where they go. How sparse the bikes are today, there are less than usual. The trains stopped running this morning. The Chuo for sure has stopped running. The sky is swallowing me as I look up into it. It is fully over the top of me. BLUE. I’d like to bring it closer, looking so kind. After class, Rachel fights me on the neat grass lawn, the vast one, with trees placed conveniently for shade, with cicada skins, shells, like ghosts!, lying here and there to trick you, scare you, fascinate you, make interesting presents for your friends who like bugs. The Sun feels warm. Before the lemonade can that I bought empties, I take the last sip of all pulp and, while lowering my head again after its all down, a tiny Japanese kid stumbles by in a blue jumpsuit saying some strange words, sucking on his hands, not looking where he’s going.