Piercing

9

It seems like forever since I’ve been to one of the big hotels, Sanada Chiaki was thinking as she gazed up at the cluster of highrises in West Shinjuku. S&M hotels, with their floors dotted with hardened globs of candlewax, tended to take all the romance out of things. For tonight’s client, whom the manager had described as a gentleman, she was wearing her Junko Shimada one-piece mini with black stockings and a beige cashmere coat, and she’d taken extra pains with her make-up. In order not to be late, she’d boarded a taxi in front of her building in Shin-Okubo at twenty to six. Traffic was a little congested on the big overpass, but she’d still arrived at the entrance to the Keio Plaza with five minutes to spare.

People were queued up outside the entrance waiting for taxis, and luckily the doorman was busy herding them into their rides and didn’t approach her. It always made Chiaki nervous when some big doorman with braid on his shoulders came up and said, ‘Welcome to the Such-and-such Hotel, may I take your bag?’ She’d removed the batteries from the vibrator, and all her toys were in separate opaque vinyl pouches in case anyone saw inside her bag, but still. There was something about the way doormen looked at you.

The lobby was packed with people emerging from a big wedding reception. They were dressed in formal suits and gowns and kimonos and holding gift bags embossed with the name of the hotel, and their voices reverberated off the ceiling and walls so loudly that Chiaki couldn’t even hear her own footsteps. She headed towards the public telephones to call her office, having decided that if the client was a first-timer, as the manager had said, he might be put off by her making that call right in front of him. ‘I’ve arrived at the gentleman’s room’ — it just sounded so cold and mercenary.

All four of the green pay phones were in use. As she approached them, she got out her wallet and extracted a telephone card — the one with the cartoon bunny. She stopped a short distance from the bank of phones and was trying to guess which of the four people would finish first, when she noticed the man on the second phone from the right leering at her. He was in his late thirties or early forties, wearing an overcoat with prominent stains, and he was looking her up and down and grinning. But no sooner had she noticed him than, without warning, he began yelling into the mouthpiece, so loudly that the people on either side of him flinched and turned to look. ‘Just shut up and take care of it, bitch!’ he shouted and slammed the receiver down as if he meant to break it.

Chiaki stood there thunderstruck, petrified by the instantaneous transformation from leering grin to violent, red-faced rage. When the man spun on his heel and marched towards her, it was only by tensing every muscle in her body that she managed not to scream. She didn’t notice that the telephone card had slipped from her fingers until the man bent down before her to pick it up. As he stooped, she turned and staggered away, her body stiff with tension.

It’s no one I know, I’ve never met or even seen him before, there’s nothing to worry about, she told herself, suppressing the urge to run. Where to go? She no longer knew which hotel this was or even why she was here. After twenty-one steps she stopped to look back. She was surrounded by people in suits and gowns and had to stand on tiptoe to scan the room for the man in the overcoat. Not seeing him anywhere, she began to breathe again and ploughed ahead in search of a restroom. She wanted to be alone, somewhere her pounding heart would have a chance to settle down.

In the restroom she entered a cubicle and sat on the closed lid of the toilet seat, still wearing her coat. She didn’t understand what was happening. Again and again she reminded herself that she didn’t know the man in the overcoat, had never met him. But his outburst had brought her to the verge of remembering something. It was as if all the little clumps of dormant memories stashed in various parts of her body had wriggled to life at once.

Her pulse wouldn’t slow down. She stood up and shed the cashmere coat, hanging it from a hook on the stall door. She closed her eyes and tried to chase away the image of the man on the phone by touching her dress where it covered the nipple ring. The material of the Junko Shimada was too thick for her to catch the ring between her thumb and finger, but she managed to confirm the hard, metallic feel of it, a faint reminder of the pain she’d felt the night she did the piercing. Help me, Chiaki whimpered, stroking the outline of the ring. This was what always happened when she lost her sex drive for any length of time: something would jog those sleeping memories and set off a terrifying sequence of events. Still stroking the ring, she thought: I want to be somewhere else. And in the instant of thinking this, she remembered where she was.

It’s the Keio Plaza Hotel, and a gentleman is waiting for me on the twenty-ninth floor.

She looked at her watch. It was almost six-twenty. Maybe, she thought, the young gentleman would help get her sex drive going again, and all the little memories would go back to sleep.