Startled by his sudden movement, I can only imagine what necessity guides his unaccountable motion.

He knows no pardon, sees no obstacles. He's driven by the need, guided by the iron will. Complete
sovereignty of the body and Buddhist calmness of the spirit. I reckon he "tackles" the toilet this time for
he misses the fridge and passes by the oven, going boldly and directly for its scalp. I say scalp for one
cannot discern whether he wants to slain the toilet or use it for his physiological needs. Approachig the
narrow gorge of the hallway leading to the bathroom he scratches his shoulder against one, and then
the other side of the wall, confident of his strength and absolutely convinced that the walls dare not
strike back. I'm not sure whether the doors open themselves in front of him (some ancient Asian trickery
perhaps!?), or a dexterous stroke disarms the door knob in a furious instance - but it does not matter
anymore because he is already deep inside the room. The doors, still swinging and creaking under the
remaining bits of power unleashed in a flash of his entrance, reveal his firm stature in a posture of sheer
resoluteness. His will firm, his legs ajar, backs straightened, hands reaching his (chinboko)-
you can almost feel the size of it in the air, odour as well - pulling it decisively out through the little hole
of his underpants and releasing, a bit too soon I reckon, a powerful stream of warm piss. He has had 3
cans of coke and a cup of coffee in three hours of absolute stillness.
First time I met Hiro was my second day in the United States; I was at the International Center craving
for some useful information on how to get my way on and off campus and trying to find someone to
split costs for the basement suit I had arranged earlier. I went to the International Center since this
Reaul guy at the airport told me that was the easiest way to get to know the surroundings and possibly a
good way to find a roommate. I thought of the basement as a done deal the moment I had heard back
from the landlords, and finding a roommate was a matter of formality even though I didn't exactly fancy
the fact that I'll be living with a complete stranger. An hour after the IC visit I received an email
introducing Hiro into my life. We had coffee, he said he was studying Japan's National Security System
along with International Relations, which seemed decent enough, and above all he was interested in the
roommateship I offered. That made it a done deal. Everything was going well, a bit too smooth, perhaps.
I was waiting for him in a local Starbucks coffee shop, sitting next to the window and checking out
random passers-by when I noticed an interesting Asian guy. It was Hiro, wearing a long, black trench
coat hiding a completely buttoned up black suit underneath. He was approximately 5.6 or 5.7 feet tall
and slender as a willow but with peculiar walking movements, as though he was once 6.5 feet tall and
300 pound weighing sumo wrestler or bodybuilder that due to some miraculous metamorphic diet
lost weight retaining only some minor features of his bulky legacy. Or he was mocking bodybuilders'
gait, something similar to what John Cleese does in that Monty Python's sketch "The Ministry of Silly
Walks". I really like natural performers, I thought to myself and Hiro seemed to be one of them. Or it
was me trying to grab on any positive thought I could come up with about moving in with a complete
stranger.
Be that as it may, we moved in together at the end of the first week of our acquaintanceship . And those
first couple of weeks went by in peace with a kind of removed hospitality, something like two guests in a
house without a host. Maybe a ghost host of a kind. Not the type of ghosts that haunts basements and
abandoned houses in Poe's stories but more of a preventive ghost, the kind that keeps you from farting
out loud in public, and generally makes one more considerate. I named it P.G. (Polite Ghost) hoping the
house would become more familiar now when we know each other. Oddly enough, that ghost kept
things in order for quite a long time. During that time Hiro turned out to be an extremely industrious
person, capable of spending several hours in front of the laptop in his underpants, plucking his hair and
typing god-knows-about-what in an extremely focused fashion. "Canada will go bankrupt next year!" or
"Japan will attack China in six weeks!" were the type of answers I got for the occasional rhetorical
what's-up.
As the term progressed pacing up, Hero's habits became more obvious. I could adjust my watch
according to them. He was able to work for days incessantly, and these intense periods were followed
by hours and hours of sleep. However, that was not sound and restful sleep, but an uneasy one-to put
it mildly. He would wind and sigh for hours. Whether Hiro was being attacked by a black panther
resembling the one Haines had in his nightmare or he had proper issues with his father, or holy Father
for that matter, was beyond my comprehension. As far as I know psychoanalyses mostly tends to blame
it all on the father, and having in mind that Hiro and I already had a (Holy) ghost a condescending father
figure was definitely something we lacked. Whatever the background of his nightmares was, it was
highly repressed and reserved for the unconscious part of Hiro's psychic life for he would wake up at
three a.m. or five a.m. and immediately start working again. As though he was in a different time zone.
Different universe. The long periods of mumbling and muttering indiscernible words in Japanese did not
influence a bit the working routine he had established.
However, this way of life gave rise to his sloppiness. Or our polite ghost decided to leave us on our own.
He would regularly leave traces of pepper on the dining table that reminded me of mice poop. Plucked
out hairs around the kitchen sink. Awkward blood traces in the shower and bloody paper towels tucked
in deep in the garbage bin. Bathroom rugs soaked in water. I had warned him numerous times of this,
but beside apologies no actual improvement took place. He did seem to look somewhat absent but I not
enough to make me believe that someone could be so insensitive. Or rude. Anyways, I stopped
complaining altogether about it for it seemed useless, and had started thinking of the alternative ways
to get through Hiro's indifference.
Just for fun's sake I decided to start cleaning meticulously after him, hoping that he might realize that
things don't clean themselves. It took me some time to get used to that fact but I decided that the game
was on. Our biological clocks started ticking simultaneously, only in opposite directions. When he
screamed in his sleep I was awake, after each of his cooking attempts I was ready to clean the oven,
after every shower I'd clean the bathtub, empty the dust bin and dry the wet rugs. There was an
unspoken agreement between the two of us, or between me and the furniture, for Hiro was not
affected by its miraculous self-maintaining ability. This agreement took over our linguistic interaction
almost completely, for we talked less and less. Actually, if we ever talked, it had everything to do with
Bosnia, Japan, the US or some other nation.
"This would never happen in Japan!", he said after he clogged the toilet with a heap of paper towels.
"Japanese cars are much more safer on the road!", he noted after an accident of two pickup trucks on
the corner of our street.
"North Korea will wage war against the US!"
In Japan this, in Japan that It felt like I was speaking to the embodiment of clustered Japanese
traditions and customs. When I think of it right now, those nightmare screams were the only
communicative act without a middle man. Without Japan. Or our ghost. They were trying to yell me
something, but I was deaf to their calls. It seems to me that I was attracted by some equally dangerous
diabolical powers for I began to behave exactly as Hiro did: consider him and people around us as
incarnations of their nation. Looking for flags and emblems on clothes, listening to accents, locating
states of origin of humans and checking the made-in signs on brand notes. As Hiro repeated
occasionally, products from Japan are so superb because they had absorbed the characteristics of the
people who made them. "But that does not explain the morsels under your table sir," I thought to
myself.
Regardless or in spite of the foolishness of his ideas and the apparent racism underlying it, I thought of
him precisely in that fashion, as his nation's respectful representative. And I thought the way I perceive
of him, other people perceive of me. Even the supermarket brands started screaming at me: "I too am
America!" But they were lying, everything on the racks was imported, just as we were.
Do strangers ever talk about themselves or they only talk about their nations? I could see the national
spirit hovering over people's heads. Nations talking to each other. Nations making friends. Nations
making love. Are we hiding behind structures cloaked in national metaphors to prove superiority of one
over another? Cultural, behavioral, political superiority screaming out of our discourses, well tucked in
into the form of idle chatter. Women come and go talking of Michelangelo was in my head more like
nations come and go talking about supremacy. Of course this was only me, but it was driving me crazy. I
had stopped visiting IC permanently for the idea of so many people of different nationalities had the
potential of driving me insane.
Somewhere in the midst of my madness Zizek's The Pervert Guide to Cinema came out and watching it
made me come up with an entire psychoanalytical theory of international relations; inter-human
relations as well. In the movie, Zizek reads Hitchcock's Psycho by the means of psychoanalysis and marks
Norman's treatment of the mother as highly charged with sexual energy. Zizek notes that the house
floors match the three parts of psychic apparatus; first floor being the superego therefore highly critical
and moral, influenced and ultimately achieved by the long duree of civilization processes and at the
same time the floor where the mother initially dwells. The ground floor represents the ego, the
organized and realistic part of our conscious life - hence Norman's attempts to get rid of the mother
seem somewhat acceptable, especially when suggested by Marion. The basement stands for the id,
uncontrollable libido buried deep in the unconscious part of the psyche and utterly repressed by the
superego. Well, not utterly for the basement is where Norman's mother eventually ends up.
It seemed so obvious to use psychoanalysis in the case of Hiro and me. Two third world citizens living in
the basement of an American family, quite appropriate. (especially having in mind the issues with
nations I had at the time). They represent everything civilization has achieved by the present day, and
we live "locked up" in their basement, waiting for the opportunity to come out and reveal ourselves
showing all we are capable of doing if we only get the opportunity - the porch being the only place
where we actually collide and the stage where both id and superego perform their acts. So obviously
symbolic that it actually hurts, I thought. The only thing I couldn't figure out was how the two of us fit in
the idea of a single id. There are no two id-s, one cannot simply split the unconscious. Even a
schizophrenic person has only one unconscious part, with a proliferation of the conscious ones.
Something wasn't right.
While I was working on my theory of nations and their "others" locked up in the closet, Hiro continued
with his regular routine. He always had a can of coke in front of him and a several packages of noodle
soup ready at hand if by any chance a hunger impulse managed to burst through his work-oriented
cortex to the part of the brain designated for basic survival needs. I have witnessed numerous occasions
like the one described in the introduction where these impulses collaborated in order to alarm Hiro of
their existence. In time I noticed an interesting clustering of his actions, for whenever he'd got up from
his chair he would take care of so many things at once; cooking noodle soup was often coupled with
fulfilling physiological needs, brewing coffee with replacing the empty coke cans, dish washing with
laundry, etc. and every action leaving a trace of its course.
The only thing that did change is that with the passage of time he gradually became more and more
sloppier and was leaving more and more traces, so in order to fulfill our silent agreement I had to deal
with a whole new set of chores. (One needn't be Sherlock Holms to trace this villain, for he was the
world's messiest H(e/i)ro.) Maybe his guiding impulses got all mixed up, maybe our ghost host had
abandoned us rendering our relationship more immediate, more direct. Whatever might be the cause, I
became more aware of his sloppiness, his redundant mistakes, the dirty stains from the over-boiled
noodle soup, hairs in the bathroom, around the sink, on the kitchen table. Not to mention his lack of
manners. It was driving me I continued cleaning after him.
It somehow happened that while I was resisting my own diagnosis of the two of us and our base(ment)
life, Hiro gradually became completely removed from reality. My psychic health was not at its best at
that time but his behaviour left extremely odd physical traces for his room began to smell strangely
stale, he would walk around in same clothes for days, he stopped wearing socks (that I really dont
understand why) and, most importantly, he stopped paying rent. The last part got the two us apart
eventually for in civilized world, you cannot even occupy the id if you don't pay the fee. However, it did
not bother him much. Since it was only a month until the end of the term, Hiro told me he was going
back to Japan. On our last night of living together he bought a dinner, a roasted chicken, and gave me a
bilingual bible on the way out. I told him "I'm an atheist man!" but I reckon he didnt care much for he
just repeated "Take it, take it." He went that evening and left me wandering who was Judas in our story,
because neither of was could've been Jesus. At least I was given the opportunity to check the part on
the Holy Ghost and its amazing resemblance with our P.G. - regardless of my beliefs or lack of them.
However, that was not the end of Hiro in my life for his physical presence was replaced by the image of
him in my dreams. I dreamt of Hiro on a regular basis, and in a variety of different surroundings none of
which was familiar to me. It went on like that almost two years until I finally decided to visit a therapist
and it took me a year and a half of sessions to finally realize what was missing in my psychoanalytic
theory of nations. There was no splitting of the unconscious after all, it was two completely different
forms of unconscious and two processes of "othering" that had occurred in that basement, maybe even
three separate ones. While the basement with its architectural features was bound to make the two of
us feel different regardless of the actual owners and their political views, Hiro and I engaged in two
separate processes of "othering", that is creating centers and peripheries on the basis our own social
experiences of the place we were living. Hiro actively worked on subject-positioning Japan and himself
in the center of some imaginary Hiro-driven universe mechanically producing outskirts and marginalized
peripheries, despite of globally accepted socio-economical opinion that America (or the West for that
matter) represents some such imaginary center. I, on the other hand, sided with his peripheral
background, remaining critical of the West but at the same time using Western point of view to criticize
Hiro. Our defensive mechanisms were on high alert, making both of us highly sensitive and a bit
delusional.
Anyways, I was glad that the Hiro saga ended and began to use it relentlessly on many occasions as an
anecdote showing not only his frantic behaviour but the way I was influenced by it as well. Either way, it
served me as a valuable lesson and an example how an obstacle in one's psychic life could be
successfully surpassed. My vanity grew to incommensurable heights with an ever increasing tendency
until one peculiar event occurred. I was in Canada for a conference titled Negative Cosmopolitanism and
decided to try to save some money by sleeping in a hostel instead of some fancy expensive hotel. I
booked a room online for one night only because I intended to visit some of the inexhaustible beauties
of Canadian landscape. I checked in long after midnight - I had a few drinks with the people from the
conference - and proceed directly to my room. Even in the hallway I could swore I felt a familiar odour,
but attributed it to the combination of the usual hostel scent backed by numerous stinky feet for there
was a lot of boots in front of bedroom doors. As soon as opened the doors I was overwhelmed by a
second wave of that same odour with its intensity doubled at least. That explains the price, I thought.
With the help of the moonlight penetrating through the window I counted five guys sleeping in the
room, leaving me one empty space on top of one of three bunk beds. This explains the odour, I added in
my mind to the previous remark. I climbed on the empty bed, laid down and tried to count sheep in
order to forget the odour. I was just about to fall asleep sometime around three a.m. when a scream
woke me up along with four other guys in the room. The fifth person was still screaming when one of
them turned on the lights. I wasn't completely aware what's going on until I saw the shoes next to the
bed of the screaming person. As if they screamed as well, echoing "Hiroooo, Hirooo" in my mind. I did
not wait to check whether it was actually Hiro or someone else with the similar shoes having nightmares
that night for the voices were indiscernible, but I certainly did not wait to find out the truth. As soon as
things settled down a bit, I took my things and silently left the room. I signed out immediately, paid for
the room with cash just to be sure I left no traces and order a taxi to drive me to the airport.