The End of the Moment We Had

MY PLACE IN PLURAL

THE PHONE IS NESTLED between my belly and my thighs as I lie on my side on the futon. It must look like I’m warming an egg. In my mind I keep hearing a line from a song I listen to a lot, although I’m not listening to it at the moment. I have no reason to try to block it out, so it’s been playing over and over. Today is a Friday like any other. But I decided to stay home from my part-time job. I don’t feel like doing anything at all.

At this point I’ve only made up my mind to stay home, and I haven’t called in to tell them yet. The rumpled white sheet forms a ridge around my body, an almost perfect square enclosure which I’m finding it surprisingly hard to move from.

The song in my head was recommended by Nakakido, one of my husband’s friends, and my husband listened to it but it wasn’t really his thing, so he didn’t burn a copy or play it a second time, but I liked it, and ended up listening to it all the time.

My left hand keeps running through my hair, like I’m testing its thickness.

It’s morning. The futon mattress is nearly flat and has these soy sauce stains and other discolourations. Even if I tried, I wouldn’t be able to get them out.

At around two in the morning (I could pinpoint the exact time if I checked my phone but I can’t be bothered), I got a text from somebody named Wakabayashi. I don’t know anybody by that name, so it’s probably somebody my husband knows. The text said something about the first anniversary of Nakakido’s death coming up and everyone should get together. Somehow instead of the text going to my husband, or just to my husband, I was included in the text, or maybe it only came to me. I was still awake when it came in, so I read it then. It didn’t make me sad, if anything it made me feel kind of uncomfortable, since I don’t remember my husband telling me something had happened to Nakakido. I thought he was still alive.

My husband was at work when the text came in, cooking at a diner until I think 6:00 a.m. At the moment he’s somewhere killing time until his next job starts at ten or eleven. He’s probably getting some food or napping. I think about sending him a text.

But my fingers don’t make a move.

The song is still on repeat in my head. My left arm is under me, pressed against the sheet. I’m not looking at the glass pane of the sliding door, but I know that the light pouring in is milky, maybe because I was looking at the door before, or maybe I can just tell without looking.

I hear the tinny melody played by the garbage truck in the distance. I have the feeling that if I get up right now and move really quickly, I could probably get the trash out in time. I’ve been able to before. I think about it but I know that today I won’t be taking out the trash. I doubt I’ll be getting out of bed.

The couple times that I managed not to miss the garbage collection, the sanitation guys were finishing loading up and about to leap onto the back of the truck when they noticed me running towards them, sandals flapping, and they were nice enough to wait for me.

My phone buzzes. I’m thinking it must be my husband.

My phone is red, and seeing it lying upside down like it is now makes me think it looks like a tiny little flipped-over sports car. This isn’t the first time I’ve thought that.

It turns out the phone buzz was a phantom buzz. I stroke the body of the phone. How come the sun is shining outside and everyone’s running around but I don’t feel the least urge to do anything? How come I don’t care? The light in the room feels heavy, like a chunk of ice that’s starting to melt and the edges are beginning to get soft and round.

Any time my phone vibrates I get the distinct feeling that I knew it was about to happen a few seconds before it does.

I notice now that I have two unread messages which came in after the text from Wakabayashi. One is from my mother. The time stamp says exactly 4:00 a.m. I read the message and shake my head several times, trying to get my hair out of my eyes. But that doesn’t do the job, so I brush them off with my hand.

A while back I accidentally left a sweater at my mother’s house. Her text was asking if I was planning to come and get it. It’s the third time my mother has asked. Maybe the fourth.

It’s a sweater with a half-circle fringe, beige, I think, but it could be lavender. Not once has my mother offered to send it to me. At one point I told her it wasn’t the season for sweaters, it was summer, but she wrote back that in summer you need a sweater because of air conditioning. It’s now September of 2005, so the sweater’s been there over a year.

The hum of the refrigerator feels like it’s coming from a living thing, and the noise fills the room. It sits against the wall, across from the sliding glass door that’s next to the futon where I’m lying. It sounds louder than usual, like the volume is turned up, forcing me to pay attention to it.

In front of the cabinet under the kitchen sink, which I can’t see from where I’m lying, are two empty 500ml cans of cheap beer that my husband drank a few days ago. I placed the cans there when I was straightening up.

That song is on repeat in my mind again, having crept up on me without my noticing, and I move suddenly from thinking about the message from Wakabayashi to thinking about Nakakido, but then that floats away too, and I’m free to just listen to the song. Then I realize that the song is no longer playing, which surprises me slightly.

Now that I think about it, I’ve only been to my mother’s once since last September. She always brews a huge pot of coffee. Any time I go to see her I end up having way more coffee than I should. For some reason, my sweater never came up. We had both forgotten about it, and I went home without it. The next day I got a text from my mother saying that I should have taken the sweater home with me.

The big toe on my right foot has found itself atop the middle toe. There’s a thin film of sweat making my toes sticky, which may be why they’re in that position. I move the big toe on my left foot so it’s doing the same thing.

The other text is from a friend. It’s a photo of a stuffed animal that she had washed and was hanging out to dry.

There’s still more than an hour before I’m supposed to be at work. It’s too early to call, no one’s there yet. Although someone could have gone in early. My phone is already in my hand.

The hum of the refrigerator is insistent.

The weather’s changing and there’s a virus going around, so I decide to use that as my excuse. I cough, and then I flip open my phone. The sound it makes, ka-chik, even though I’ve heard it a million times, I still think it’s a great sound. Sometimes I get in the mood to hear the sound and I pop the phone open then shut it several times. But now I just open it once.

My body makes a curve, bent at the hip like a bow. I wriggle against the futon, lift both arms over my head and stretch them back as far as they can go, like I’m trying to turn my armpits inside out.

I’m thinking that when I get a real buzz on my phone, I should pay close attention to exactly what it feels like so that I’ll know to react only when there’s a vibration that meets or surpasses that level of sensation, and any time the vibration doesn’t meet that level of sensation I’ll know that it’s just a phantom buzz, and that I can ignore it. But I know that at the moment I’m not up to worrying about it.

It’s when I stretch lying down like I just did that I can feel how my spine isn’t straight. I spend a moment wondering whether people who keep their ringtone on for when they get a call or a text do it because they’re trying to avoid being bothered by phantom buzzes like I am.

My laptop is where I left it on the nightstand, still on, still open, but the screen is dark, sleeping. I twist around to look at it, kind of rotating, ending up on my stomach. The sheet under me gets pulled along and ends up a little bunched.

The white body of my laptop is not exactly in mint condition. I’ve had the same computer for nearly three years. But I still haven’t named it yet.

I catch sight of my nails, which are painted white. I’ve never once got any illustrations or decorations done on my nails. They’re just all white.

Before my laptop went to sleep, it got pretty hot but now it’s cooled off. I strike a key and the screen wakes up. I was up late reading blogs, dozing off and waking up to read some more, and now the last one I was reading gradually returns to the wakening screen. When that happens, the flecks of dust that were visible on the dark surface of the screen vanish.

The page I have open is the blog cache of someone with the username “armyofme”, who according to the profile is a twenty-eight-year-old woman (that makes her two years younger than me) who “works as a call centre operator at a company that provides outsourced help-desk services, currently dealing with enquiries for an internet service provider in the process of transitioning to fibre-optic cables”, and she blogs about all the callers with their claims that annoy her day after day, and about all her co-workers who are just as bad as the callers, stringing her words together like a stream of curses. armyofme writes a new blog post almost every day.

I just stumbled upon her blog today, I mean last night. How I found it is because there was this guy in my class at art school who used to do comedy stuff, and somebody told me he and another guy have an act that’s been getting them on TV, but since I don’t watch much TV I never knew about it, so I started searching a bunch of things related to my friends from back in school, trying different combinations of words, and after maybe three hours I found myself on armyofme’s blog.

I can hear the garbage truck coming around again. I now realize that when the song on repeat in my head switched off earlier it was because of the garbage truck music.

armyofme had an entry from a few months ago where she wrote about how watching the guy from my art class perform on TV was encouraging for her, but then she got used to seeing him all the time and she stopped feeling encouraged and thought about how he must be having fun, but also that maybe it looks like fun but it’s probably hard work, and in any case he has to be making good money so she doesn’t feel bad about being a little jealous.

It’s pretty normal for me to go looking for websites or blogs or whatever that are about people I know and to end up spending hours surfing. I always feel sleepy, it’s been so long since I’ve felt fully clear-headed and awake that I’ve basically forgotten what that’s like, so for years my whole waking life has been powering down, and now that’s just my body’s default mode. But when I look for blogs and I find a good one and my eyes are glued to the screen, some substance starts flowing from the LCD and pumping into me, and my sleep threshold shoots up, like blood sugar when you’re munching on sweets, so no matter how tired I feel I can still stay awake.

I stretch my body so that I can feel the crook in my spine. I think about people I know who are armyofme’s age and who might write something like this, and I picture the faces of a few girls who could be armyofme. But I can’t say which of them it could be. I mean, I can’t even remember their names.

Last night, or this morning, reading armyofme’s blog kept me energized until I hit my sleep threshold. Even when I did pass that point, I would only nod off for the shortest while and then wake up and get right back to it. I was reading another blog too, before armyofme’s, not anybody who I’m connected to in any way, it’s a guy who writes letters to his college friend who died in an accident the year before. I came across it when I was searching for things about Nakakido.

Not that that blog had anything to do with Nakakido. It must have been one of the other search terms beside his name that landed on it. I ended up reading some of it, but only a little. The writing was a mess, like it was written by someone in a confused mental state. In fact I started to think that there was no such person as the dead friend, and I gave up on it.

In armyofme’s newest post, or anyway the one with the most views, she wrote how people on the phone say talking to an operator like you (meaning her) isn’t getting me (them) anywhere, let me talk to your manager. It happened today, but people who say stuff like that have no idea the way the system works, they probably think that if they keep screaming to talk to somebody more important they’ll eventually get to whoever’s in charge and can finally give whoever it is a piece of their mind and get some satisfaction, but that’s more or less impossible, like no matter how hard they try they’ll never reach anyone with any authority at the fibre-optic cable company because the system is specifically designed to keep that from ever happening, so maybe if their issue is really serious and could turn into a high-profile lawsuit and get picked up by the media and turn into a big story they might get somewhere, but short of that their call will just come into our outsourced call centre, and the highest up it could go would be to the project leader in charge of the fibre-optic cable company account, but even that’s extremely unlikely, because we lowly operators know very well that if we gave in every time someone demanded to talk to our manager things would get messy for us, and we’ve been told to absolutely refuse those kinds of demands, so unless there’s a pushover girl who gets nervous and does what the caller wants, it’ll never happen. And anyway our call centre is just doing work that the fibre-optic cable company has outsourced, the fibre-optic cable company is my company’s client, and I’m sure they’ve told us to deal with whatever claims that come in (I don’t actually know that, since I’m not on the business side of things, I’m just guessing, but I’d bet I’m right), since we’re not located anywhere near them, we’re in Ikebukuro, way past the park to the west of the station in a nine-storey building in an area that’s gone out of style, on the sixth through ninth floors, and I sit on the eighth floor (actually I don’t even know where the client is, though they must be somewhere in Tokyo). Anyway, that’s how it is, so when people call about their claim I tell them the person you’re complaining to isn’t the person you want to be complaining to, and they say they know that which is why they’re shouting that they want to talk to my manager, and the people who are shouting are the ones I want to tell that no matter how much they kick and scream they’ll never get to the person they’re looking for. Of course I can’t actually say that… That’s the kind of stuff in armyofme’s blog. In other entries she actually laid out the details of the clients’ claims, going on and on. I fell asleep after a little while, but before I did, when I was awake, I read all of it. Every so often I would accidentally click on one of the ads flashing in the sidebar, for a new DVD release or a soft drink, or an online credit card application or a job site, and every time I did that a new browser window would open up, and in the few seconds while the page loaded, I felt like I was holding out hope for something, though I’m not sure what. But as soon as the content came on screen my hope vanished. I would go back to the blog and keep reading.

My toes are facing downwards, pressed against the sheet. They’re painted white, same as my fingernails. I work the rumpled bunches in the sheet between my toes so that they’re touching the sensitive skin in there that’s not used to being touched. But I can’t tell from the feel of that skin between the toes whether the sheet is dry or damp, damp from my sweat or maybe from the humidity in the room.

I think about my husband, between his job at the all-night diner and the next one, and I get the urge to send him a text and tell him to hang in there. But the best I can manage is the most basic message, something like hope you’re doing okay and a couple other trite words that mean basically nothing.

I let out a huge yawn.

There’s a spiderweb on the ceiling, but it’s only in the early stages, just a few threads stretched out, not yet intersecting.

Whenever I get a feeling like I just had, like I want to express my appreciation for someone, as soon as I start trying to write them a text I start to focus instead on how exhausted my body feels and how that’s all I can pay attention to, and by that point I couldn’t care less about any nice feelings I had.

My body lies there, and I can’t seem to get any energy into it. I almost feel like I might never find any energy ever again. I send the text to my husband, though it’s just a very short one. The digital signal flies off through a cloudy sky. But the sun is burning hot behind the clouds, so it doesn’t even really feel like a cloudy day, more like a blue sky that’s turned white. My husband will be working at the drugstore today, a job he just started, and I actually do hope it goes all right for him. The display on my phone says 9 September, which means it’s been nine days since he started there. I’m still staring at the ceiling. I don’t see the spider anywhere.

More than once I’ve wondered if my husband has a blog or something like that, and I’ve tried all kinds of search terms, but I haven’t found anything.

The way the panels on the ceiling are joined together, the pattern of artificial wood knots, the circle markings that look like scars where the panels are fitted to the joists, they all look like elements in a diagram or a floor plan, only instead of looking up at it I feel like I’m peering down at it from above. I somehow slip right into seeing it that way, and almost immediately the illusion spreads to all my senses. My body has been secreting oils all night, from my face especially. I run three fingertips from the top of my nose to below my chin and back up again, and even though it feels like a chore I keep tracing the same path back and forth.

By now my husband is sitting on the second floor of Becker’s café in the JR Iidabashi Station, in the non-smoking area, the seat against the wall at the far end of the counter. He’s finished his coffee and is slumped forwards, napping until it’s time for his next job. The text I send him makes his phone vibrate briefly, but he’s not awake, so he doesn’t catch it in real time.

His phone is on a dull white plastic tray covered in scratches and dings. When the text comes in, there are two sounds, the phone’s own buzz and the slight rattling between the phone and the tray.

Across the room from the counter, against the opposite wall, there’s a four-top where five high-school boys in uniform are sitting. One of them is on a chair he brought over from another table, and one of them keeps saying, Let’s open it guys, come on, let’s open it. I don’t know what he’s talking about.

I turn my body so I’m once again looking upward, more or less. I bend my right knee, then try to place the outside ankle against the left side of the hollow behind my left knee.

When I read armyofme’s blog, I didn’t have any intention of committing any of it to memory, but now the idea of what she wrote, the general feeling, and also some specific turns of phrase, they’re whirling around inside my head just like the melody I wasn’t trying to memorize, and they’re blooming and morphing as they spin. I don’t resist it, I just let it happen.

By now the melody is gone.

My laptop hasn’t been touched for several minutes and now it’s gone back to sleep. The screen faded out, taking with it armyofme’s account of her worst caller of the day. As soon as she heard the caller’s voice she knew this one wasn’t going to be easy, and when she asked for the customer number the caller rattled off the eight digits, not clumsily like reading it off a piece of paper but fast like from the practise of having been asked for it so many times, so that she knew for sure this caller’s called before, and in fact when she entered the customer number into the system she saw that the first claim was a month ago but the caller’s service still hadn’t been restored, which she knew had to be aggravating in the extreme, and when she checked the notes, there were a whole bunch that other service operators had entered, and she saw that the caller had tried to get help more than ten times and had complained to the operators that the only explanation for the terrible service was that they were purposely trying to stonewall him, and one of the notes was from an operator who got this caller three times and wrote an exasperated line in the call log about losing at Russian roulette. The blog went on and on, past the bottom of the page, waiting for me to scroll down, but it’s all vanished now. I can see dust against the black screen again. At the moment I don’t feel like wiping it off.

Near my laptop is a fashion magazine I was reading before bed, nearly all in full colour, thick and heavy because of the large number of ads, splayed open on the floor. The vinyl flooring has a wood panel design.

My husband is wearing a blue T-shirt. It has an illustration of a washing machine on it. But he’s slumped over at the counter, so no one can see it.

When we looked at this place before moving in, the tatami was old and discoloured, so the day after we moved in we bought a roll of the vinyl flooring at a department store in Kichijoji, which is a straight shot to here, so even though it was heavy and tough to manoeuvre, we got it home on the train and laid it down over the tatami. At the time we were real pleased with our choice, with the wood pattern, with the whole idea of covering the tatami with the flooring. But we don’t feel that way any more.

The day we laid down the flooring, my husband was wearing the same blue T-shirt. He was down on all fours, and I was standing behind him looking at him, and I remember my eyes fixing on the blue of his shirt.

Once a page from a magazine or a newspaper sticks to the flooring, it’s stuck. It’s impossible to peel it away cleanly, and it always leaves a splotchy pattern of the pulpy soft part of the paper, looking like the connected waterways on an atlas page of a marshy part of the world. The splotches of paper get walked on and rubbed by the bottoms of our feet until they turn dark grey.

When it’s raining and the humidity is high enough, the flooring gets slick.

Sometimes I want to read lying on my back, holding my magazine over me, and sometimes I want to lie on my stomach and read. But a magazine this heavy I can’t read on my back. The pages printed in colour smell of ink. I read on my stomach for a while, propped on my elbows to hold up the weight of my shoulders, but before long parts of me start to ache and I can’t hold that pose very long either.

I lie on my back. I stare at the ceiling and stretch my whole body out, my trunk and legs pulling in opposite directions, like I was trying to rip myself in half at the waist. The ceiling doesn’t stretch, or contract, it just looks the same as always.

At the counter where my husband is sleeping, on the tray he has pushed to one side, next to his mobile phone, is a white mug. There’s a centimetre or so of coffee left in it, which looks more like a shadow at the bottom. Beside the mug is a small wicker basket with the crumpled wrapper that held the hamburger my husband ate before he fell asleep.

One corner of this wrapper has managed to escape being crumpled, it’s kind of flat, and on the back side of it is a splatter of ketchup. In the centre of the tray are a handful of napkins my husband grabbed from the dispenser but didn’t end up using, still in the same bunch from when he pulled them out.

Before he dozed off he pushed the tray to his right so he could put his head down on the counter in front of him. One hand lies on top of the other wrist, and his forehead lies on top of his two hands. He doesn’t need to get going yet, and he’s been in that position for a while. It won’t be long before his hands start to go numb.

His hands smell like sanitizer. The smell mixes with the smell of the meat he pulls from tightly packed plastic bags in the freezer, that meat patty smell, and the smell of the sweet sauce that goes on the meat. His hands smell of all that, as does his hair.

I no longer have the urge to stroke my hair, and instead I run the palm of my hand over my cheek, to my chin bone, to the curve of where my jaw meets my neck. I apply pressure to my chin, so that it hurts a little, so that I can really feel the bone in there.

My husband’s bag, stuffed to bursting, rests under his legs, crammed between his stool and the counter. His hair looks greasy.

Sometimes when my husband is sleeping I sneak my face close to his hands, so that I can smell them. It’s not that I like the smell of meat. I actually find it disgusting. But I keep doing it because I want to make sure I still find it disgusting.

As for his hair, as soon as he shampoos, the smell goes away.

There’s one TV show that I absolutely have to watch, it’s on once a week, on Tuesdays at eleven, and last week when I was watching it my husband was at home. I don’t know if it was because he was asleep or because he just wouldn’t watch it with me but suddenly my frustration at him boiled over, and I knew I shouldn’t have but I started in on him, attacking him, while my show was still on, through the end of the show, past midnight, on and on until who knows how late, basically telling him he was a good-for-nothing coward, which would have been too cruel to actually say so I didn’t, but that about sums up what I was feeling.

When I was watching TV, I was lying there motionless, my body feeling heavy and tired like it is now, training my eyes on the screen, absorbing the flickering light. I can’t remember what set me off, but I started saying wouldn’t it be nice if we had a little more money, don’t you think we should try to do something about that, I really think we should be thinking more about the future, that kind of stuff, trying to make it seem like it was just occurring to me, when of course I had it on my mind, and I was talking with an edge, and once I got going I sat up and leant forwards over my knees on the vinyl flooring.

Before long I was shouting at the top of my lungs, not holding back at all, lashing out at my husband and it was like I couldn’t stop. At one point my eyes were swollen and burning. I had the vague feeling that if I really wanted to talk about this with him, it might have been better if I wasn’t screaming and crying.

Thinking back to that whole thing, I start to feel the laziness in my body tighten up at the back of my neck. It could be that the tension was already there and building up and I only noticed it just then. When I was freaking out at him, I knew that we were both working, and that we weren’t broke or anything, and that this tantrum I was throwing wasn’t doing me or him or us any good. It’s not that I understand all of that only now that I’ve calmed down, I was totally aware of it when I was yelling at him.

For his part, my husband didn’t act hurt or angry at what I was saying, he just sat there passively taking it all in. To me, this was humiliating. Why didn’t he shout back, challenge the outrageous stuff I was saying, why didn’t he get mad at me? That’s why I’ve spent so much time searching for a blog or something of his, because if he had a reason not to shout back I bet he would have written about it. But it could be that he doesn’t write a blog, or that if he does it’s set to private and you have to sign up or register or something to read it, or it’s on a secret page on Mixi or some other social networking site that I won’t be able to find. And if he did that, then I really really wonder what he wrote.

I make my biggest move of the day so far: I put my head where my feet were and my feet where my head was. The sheet where my head was feels damp and humid, and I’m sure that there are some parts of the sheet where my feet were that are cool and dry. I tuck my trunk towards my legs so that my body is in a wedge, then pull my legs away so I’m straight again, and repeating this four or five times rotates me around the bed like the hands rounding a clock. I was right, the sheet at the bottom is refreshingly cool.

While I was yelling at my husband, and after I was done too, he sat there scratching his left bicep like he had a stubborn itch. From his perspective my tantrum must have come out of nowhere. But for me it was a long time coming, it had been simmering, getting hotter, so that once it got to boiling there was no stopping it.

I let my head drop forwards as far as the bones in my neck will allow. Then I lean it all the way back. But I can’t go so far back on my own. To get it back all the way, so that it’s flush against my spine, snap, I’d need someone to help.

The sliding glass door beside me gives off an energy that I think is somehow like a lover who wants me, who wants to get on top of me. It’s almost too much to bear.

This apartment of ours is in the one sunken spot on a swell of land, squeezed into a cluster of buildings, none of them more than five storeys, which isn’t short but feels short, and somehow oppressive. There’s a mix of places: apartment buildings like ours, an exam-prep school, also an Asian goods gift shop, I’m guessing, based on the fact that the window is full of origami and kanji placards on imitation Japanese paper and clothes with fabric that looks rough to the touch hanging from the curtain rods. There are a few, very few, single-family houses, and also a building with gallery space for rent a half-flight of stairs down from ground level. Our apartment building is jammed in right in the middle of all this, kind of like a child being crowded and pushed around by bigger kids. We used to say that being stuck in the middle is why our walls and floors are always sweating. But really it’s because we’re in the cheapest unit in the building, down on the first floor with the worst light. In winter our place feels like a swamp. It smells like one too.

I always place my futon next to the sliding glass door. Rings of grime spatter across the pane, white outlines of where the drops of condensation have dried, almost regular enough to make a pattern. Just beyond our tiny concrete balcony is a patch of land overgrown with weeds that give off a powerful grassy odour. Between the balcony railing and the wall of the next building is less than a metre.

I can’t shake the idea that my husband could have a diary or a blog, whether or not I would ever be able to read it, but supposing he has one, does he write about me? When I ask myself this question, I don’t know if I want the answer to be yes or no.

He’s slumped over on the counter sleeping, head resting on his hands, the tips of his fingers peeking out, and they’ve got a faint red tint to them, like maybe he was handling a red ink-pad.

Suddenly I have the memory of staring through the glass of the sliding door and seeing two cats on the balcony, perfectly still, until they sprang up onto the rail and leapt to the next building and scrambled up the wall and out of my sight. Thinking about such a mundane scene feels a little like a premonition of death.

I notice that the two empty cans of beer I set down on the kitchen floor have tipped over.

There’s mould in the bathroom, but it’s also in the corners of the kitchen, and on one spot of the tatami under the vinyl flooring. I can’t get it out, although I’ve tried. But the mould is worst in the closet, which I keep closed because the smell is really strong. We’ve lived here for several months now, and little by little I’ve got used to the mould smell and the general stickiness, so that it doesn’t even really bother me any more. I’m actually a little surprised that I was able to get used to it, but I haven’t told my husband. He always leaves the closet door open, which I hate.

Why do we have to live in such a nasty, musty place, it’s tiny and it has no light and it reeks of mould, are we going to spend the rest of our lives here? I once said that to my husband. He said, okay, you want to move? Okay, let’s move, is that what you want?

I didn’t say anything. Instead I scooted towards him, I was sitting on the floor facing him and I unfolded my legs from under me and thrust them at him and hopped on my butt in his direction and with my outstretched legs I kicked at him over and over again. For a second he laughed, maybe thinking I was doing a special move of a hero in a kids’ show, and he used his left arm to shield himself, but the next moment he whipped his arm back towards me to pin down my legs. Just before he got me I landed one good kick on his arm, right in the spot where he has three large birthmarks, which make me think of Orion’s belt. But then he had me, and I couldn’t move. I struggled for a bit while he held me down, but he’s a man, and I doubt he even had to try very hard.

His arm on the counter at Becker’s looks bulging, but it’s not from muscles, it’s from the bend in his elbow and from the weight of his head. There’s a burn on his skin from his job in the kitchen, something must have got on him, but it’s already crusting over with a scab.

After I was kicking him, as he was holding me down, I’m pretty sure this happened, I smelt something weird, and it could even have been coming from my own body, I had no idea what it was but it smelt rotten, like maybe it was the contents of a stomach, vomit about to come up. I’m thinking about it now, after it happened, and I can’t believe a smell that foul could be mine. Maybe I was imagining it, because when you actually smell bad, you only pick up the littlest bit of your smell, like a whiff from somewhere far away, so maybe I wasn’t really smelling it at all. But obviously I couldn’t ask my husband, so I have no way of knowing for sure. If I did imagine it, then why? I mean, why did I imagine a stench like that? At the time I think I was sobbing, tears and mucus running down my face.

Slumped over on the counter, asleep, my husband’s bony spine and shoulders twitch from time to time. When the spasm is big enough the counter creaks. But it’s still only a tiny movement, and the noise barely registers. His back is rounded and tight at the same time. He isn’t capable of letting go of all that tension, not even in his sleep.

Whenever I freak out, like I did that time, my husband always comes up with the best-sounding, most optimistic, most unrealistic solution possible. I knew he would do it that time too, I was actually expecting it.

He loosened his hold on me. Even though he let me go I knew that I shouldn’t start thrashing around again, so I stayed still. But I made sure to keep chewing him out, I said what the hell are you talking about, moving, how could we possibly do that, and you know, we haven’t even been here half a year, we can’t just go from place to place, it’ll cost so much fucking money, did you even stop to think about that?

He sat there listening to me, wiping his glasses with a lens cloth which he keeps in the pocket of his favourite jeans, the ones he’s always wearing. I don’t think that little lens cloth had been washed in months, but he did manage to get some of the smudges off the lenses. I guess even though he doesn’t wash the lens cloth itself, at least it is in his pocket when he washes the jeans, which happens once in a while. His lens cloth is here now. His jeans are inside out, stuffed into the washing machine, which I can’t see from where I am. The top of the jeans is spilling out over the top of the machine.

I stretch again. First out, then up, my palms spread to the ceiling.

My husband is wearing his other jeans, the old ones, with the hole in the knee. The crotch is worn thin, with little openings where you can see the flesh of his upper thigh. His blue T-shirt is also pretty worn out. The crew-neck collar is all stretched and shapeless, and the blue is faded. It used to be bright blue. His legs follow the line of the stool towards the floor, but his feet don’t touch the ground.

He listened until I stopped yelling, then waited until he was done wiping his glasses, then said to me you’re right, but you know, take the mould for instance, we knew the place was mouldy but we decided we would deal with it because our priority was cheap rent, but now that we actually live here if you can’t stand the smell of the mould, then of course it’s a shame to lose the money it would take to move but wouldn’t moving be the best thing? That’s what he said. But why couldn’t he say something like let’s just stick it out for another half-year?

I grabbed a kitchen knife and hacked down on the controller cord for his game system. I’m not sure if this was before I tried to kick him and he pinned me, or after.

I severed the cord neatly. This surprised me, because I thought maybe some of the wires inside the rubber casing would put up a fight. Cutting through the cord so easily was kind of anticlimactic. But at that moment there was no room in my body, my face, my heart, to express that let-down.

My head always feels like it’s full of dust balls, grey and jagged, mixed with shreds of metal, stabbing at me. I want to get rid of them, dump them out, like emptying the vacuum cleaner, but even if I managed to do that, to shake them all out, somehow I know they would appear again and multiply and fill me right back up.

If I was really so repulsed by the mould and humidity, there’s no way I would be lying around here like this now. I’d get myself up and get out of these sweatpants, which have this stretched-out elastic at the waist so that I need to tie the drawstrings or the pants fall down, I’d take them off and put on some real clothes and go outside.

The alley that leads from our apartment building to the street feels like an accidental gap between the buildings, so narrow you’d have a hard time walking your bike through. There’s one part of the alley that’s concrete because it’s part of the foundation, but most parts of the alley aren’t so when it rains the ground turns to mud and shoes get all muddy. But it’s been sunny the past few days, so the dirt in the alley should be dry and hard.

The street it leads to isn’t much of a street either, only a car-and-a-half wide. It’s closed to oversized vehicles, but they didn’t make it one-way or anything, except for a stretch in the morning when it’s rush hour. I lift my right leg and point my toes, ballet-like, making one straight line. Or I guess I should say that’s what I was trying to do. I can feel the tendons on the outside of my ankle straining.

The narrow street eventually turns into a wider road that’s a slope with two lanes, where the sky isn’t all chopped up by the buildings and you need to use the traffic mirrors because of the curves as you go down the hill. The slope levels off by the station. But you can’t see the station, because there’s a big bookstore in the way, you can only see it once you cross the intersection. The two-lane road goes past the station and continues on for a bit until it joins Sotobori Avenue which keeps going all the way around the moat of the Imperial Palace. There’s a big sign over the avenue there, with fat white arrows on a green background that direct you to the on-ramp for the expressway.

I have the whole day to myself, but no way I’m going to work up the energy to go anywhere. If I did go anywhere, it would probably be the convenience store or somewhere for a coffee, and it’d cost money.

There is a bunch of convenience stores around the station.

I’ve been staring at the ceiling, and the beam running across the middle starts looking like the centre line of a soccer field.

I’d better put in that call to work.

Sometimes when I look at the sign for FamilyMart, with the blue and green stripes, the green part looks beautiful to me (just the green, not the blue). It’s only at a certain time, when the light in the sky is right. Like how I feel about the red of a traffic light when dusk is about to fall and the sky is a little purple. Only thing is I don’t remember at what time of day the light in the sky is right for the green in the FamilyMart sign, except that I’m sure it’s not the beginning of dusk.

The area around my left bicep starts to itch, so I slide my right hand under the sheets and scratch at it through the fabric.

My husband’s arm emerges from the short sleeve of his blue T-shirt, bending at the elbow in a sprawl on top of the white tray on the counter. The elbow has a birthmark, and it comes to a sharp point and looks more grimy to me than the average elbow.

When I yelled at my husband, demanding to know how he could stand to live in such a mouldy-smelling place, it wasn’t because I’m physically unable to stand it, it’s more the fact we have to live somewhere that’s mouldy, but I don’t think he understood where I was coming from. He’s probably still thinking that I’m suffering from the mould smell itself, and if he’s written about it in his blog, even if he didn’t use any names or write enough specifics for someone to figure out who it was about, I think, speaking as someone who was there, I would be able to identify myself from the details, and if he has written about the whole mould-driving-me-crazy business, I’m sure it paints me in a terrible light.

This scenario of mine is now pretty much running on autopilot in my brain. Like maybe he ducked into an internet café for thirty minutes before work last night and wrote it, so that I could find it and read it within a few hours of him writing it. He hadn’t written yesterday or the day before, so he was really feeling like he had to do it, get it written down. Like about me chopping through his controller cord with a knife, and me knowing that I could fly off the handle and destroy his controller and he wouldn’t do anything to me, and even though I knew he loved his video games, I would do it anyway, and how he would say I’m a spoilt brat, only a child would act that way, and how he was surprised by my chopping through his controller cord, but his surprise was quickly taken over by anger, but he didn’t blow up, he just stayed calm, he was trying to vibe me to snap out of it, and then he had this sudden impulse and he slugged me. At least that’s what he would have written, even though in real life he’s never hit me even once. He didn’t even make a sound when I chopped the controller cord, not a peep of surprise or anger, which actually I think made more of an impact on me, but in his blog I bet he wrote that he shouted, really went off, like hey what the hell are you doing, you’re acting fucking crazy!

I call work. There are people there who are all right, and people there who aren’t and I don’t like. One of the ones I don’t like answers. But that just makes it easier for me to fake it, to recite the excuse I planned, to keep up the act for the few seconds it takes without any wavering, not feeling any remorse. I do feel a little guilty as far as my husband is concerned, though.

I mean, I’m supposed to be at work today. I just made up my mind not to go, so even if I tried to force my body to get up and go, at this point it’s impossible. I’ve been lying on my stomach for so long it feels like I’m just another fold of the moisture that’s collecting in layers all the way up to the ceiling.

I wonder what screen name my husband uses.

Once in a while my laptop whirrs and rattles, the sound of the battery vibrating as the computer performs some function or other, and I hear it every time it goes, which stirs a vague feeling of me being somewhere way deep down, like maybe at the bottom of the ocean.

I press my chin down into the futon. My sight line is just above the keyboard, and when I lower my head a little more the keys become a flat field, the LCD screen looming over the horizon. But almost immediately, seeing things like this feels weird, and all I want is to feel normal, so I flip over onto my back and look at the ceiling again. This time my eyes settle on the fluorescent light that’s hanging from the ceiling. Sure enough, the circular bulbs are gargantuan. Somehow the clock on the wall is the only thing that keeps its original proportion.

If I push any key it’ll wake the screen from its dark sleep, her blog still there in my laptop’s cache, all the words armyofme spun out about the customers who won’t give up, and all their complaints, giant text suddenly replacing the black of the night, scrolling now by themselves, on and on:

You must think I’m a real pain in the ass (in fact I do, sir), but I’m not giving up. My service has been out for a month. A month! I can’t get online, I can’t play my games, I feel like I’m stuck on a desert island. Is it standard practice in your industry to make all these promises in your ads that you never keep? Can you explain that to me? (No, I can’t, sir.) I mean, take this phone call, all these phone calls, you don’t have a toll-free number, I’m the one paying for the call, every second that ticks by, I’m paying for it, don’t you think it’s wrong that you make the customer pay for these calls? (Well, maybe you should hang up.) What’s your name, anyway? Hello, your name? (I didn’t know what else to say, so I actually told him my name.) So what do you think about all this, I mean your honest opinion, I’d really like to know, I feel like if you told me I’d be at least a little less aggravated, so will you just tell me, please? It can just be between us, I just want to know what you really think about this, so just for a second would you put aside your professional responsibilities and share with me your unfiltered, personal take on this, as a human being, I’d love to know. Will you tell me? Are the things I’m saying, in my frustration, am I missing the mark? Am I wrong about this?… He kept going and going. Having someone pour their heart out to me for so long starts to trip me up emotionally, so despite myself I agreed with him, No sir, you’re not wrong, and as soon as I said it I regretted it, but it was too late. He was silent for a moment, and then he said, Right, that’s what I thought, I’m not wrong, am I, and it was clear that he was feeling a little better about himself, but I was thinking about the fact that my manager and my group leader were monitoring the conversation. Their computers have admin software that lets them check in at a glance on what’s happening with all the calls in the call centre. When anyone is on with the same caller for more than twenty minutes, the system automatically flags them and one of the group leaders starts listening in.

I was on the line with the caller for almost an hour until he finally ran out of energy and gave up. While I was logging the call, I got an internal page from one of the group leaders, Mr S. As expected, he gave me a soft-pedalled warning about the call: Hey there, that was a long call you had to deal with, thanks for hanging in there, good stuff… But you know, sorry, there’s just one thing I wanted to touch on regarding how you handled it, if that’s okay… I’m guessing you know what it is I’m going to say, so I hope you won’t mind, I’m going to just jump in…

The moment I got off the line with him I was overcome by helplessness, a feeling like something was squeezing my insides. I could barely breathe. Somehow I made it to the end of the workday. I took off my headset and immediately put on my own headphones, then walked across the floor and out, first to leave. When I got on the Yurakucho Line, I still had that feeling like my innards were being crushed. I wanted to eat a whole pile of fried chicken drowned in tartar sauce. Not because I was hungry, but because I wanted to stuff myself until I felt even worse.

I ducked into the 7-Eleven near my place. There was no fried chicken with tartar sauce in the rows of bento, so I headed to the FamilyMart a few blocks away. They had what I was looking for. The cashier warmed it up for me. I got home and went straight to my computer, where I sat consuming my chicken while I wrote in my blog all the obnoxious things the group leader said to me. I worked the strangling feeling inside me into words. As I wrote, I recalled the sound of Mr S’s voice, the way my arm was fidgeting while I listened: So going forwards, let’s remember, you’re on our side, not the customer’s side, you feel sympathetic, I get it, but we have to present a united front, so if you could remember that going forwards, that’d be great…

But even writing out what S said in as much detail as I could bear to and then uploading it didn’t alleviate the squeeze on my guts one bit. If anything it made me feel worse, like my body was on the verge of spasms, and I was getting more and more frantic.

And that’s when the scroll bar finally reaches the bottom and goes no farther. Then, without warning, the screen switches to a totally new layout, bringing me to a whole different blog. I see the name of the author, but I can’t quite bring myself to process it, which is to say, I can’t write it here. But I know right away that it’s my husband’s blog.

As usual, I don’t know what to do with my body.

From what I read in his blog, it seems that the foul odour I worried I gave off that time but wasn’t sure was real was real after all. My husband found the stench so shocking that at first he didn’t even make the connection—he smelt it, but he didn’t really acknowledge it, not immediately anyway, until he finally started to get where it was coming from, which was when he looked straight at me, but being unsure whether to yell at me or be worried for me, he just sat there and said nothing.

He was completely dumbstruck. He wrote, what is she, part skunk?

Of course he’s never smelt a real skunk. But once when he was a boy he took his dog to the vet for an injection, and it wasn’t the first time the dog had gotten an injection, so it knew something painful was about to happen, and as it stood there on the vet’s exam table, it let out this truly noxious gas, which the vet said was the same type of reaction a skunk has, so you could say my husband has at least smelt something skunk-like before. The odour I was giving off must have been the same kind of thing, he wrote.

The larger of the two circular fluorescent bulbs in the light hanging from the ceiling is dead. It’s been dead for more than a week but we haven’t replaced it.

I’m bored with lying around here on my futon, I’ve been bored for a while now. But I know that when my husband takes the train home tonight, one of the last trains if not the last, my body will still be sprawled out on the mattress. I might even be asleep, deaf to the sound of him coming in. I can always sleep, and when I’m asleep I can sleep on and on.

But if I am awake, I might come right out and tell him that I blew off work and stayed in bed all day. Definitely not because I’m holding myself to a high standard of righteous honesty, and I would probably come right out and say it to anyone, it wouldn’t have to be my husband, although he’s the only person I’ve got, but I would say it because I want to put him in a bad mood. I have a deep need for someone to let me hurt them, I want to pull my husband down here to my level, where I’m wallowing, to be with me and to stay with me, to feel exactly what I’m feeling, I want to take these chunks of negative shit that I’m carrying around like rock candy crammed into my head and body, like bad junk that needs to be thrown away, and I want to pass them on to him, even though I’m not sure they can be passed on, I want to give him as much as I can, even a tiny bit would be enough.

But if I come right out and say to him I didn’t do a worthwhile thing all day, I can’t picture him giving me the reaction that I want, like making a face that shows how fed up he is. I’d be happy if he made any face at all, whether or not I could tell what it meant. I need a reaction from him more than anything else, but he doesn’t seem to grasp that. Why can’t he give any of himself to me?

The bottom of my ribcage is having a shoving match with the floor, the impact only slightly absorbed by the futon and the meat around my bones.

My husband thinks that it’s a good thing to be indulgent with me, he thinks that it’s a way to be kind, and he’s completely blind to the fact that all it does is make me feel worse about what a narrow-minded, petty, lazy bitch I am. I don’t need him to be kind to me or tolerant of how I behave. He’s never picked up on the fact that this is a change he needs to make. I’ve tried to make that clear to him again and again. But he always seems to think that his way is right, he’s never tried to change, never tried to see it from my perspective, not in the least. Every so often it gets to where I can’t stand it.

My husband is not the sort of person who brings work home with him, he doesn’t talk about how tired he is, or complain about his co-workers. Instead he brings home beer. He likes these tall cans of cheap low-malt beer, which is what he was drinking when I chopped his game controller cord in half. Why doesn’t he ever feel any rage towards me, even a little? Even when I do something like that?

When I finally calmed down, he quietly slipped out of the apartment. He was so quiet and downcast he seemed almost apologetic, not angry at all. He put on his shoes with such care that it didn’t make a sound. Then he left, headed out to the closest convenience store.

It’s down the hill, not all the way down, a little before the street hits the wider road.

If you go up the hill instead, there are no shops or stores. Just a postbox a few steps up. It’s a gentle slope at first, with the path stretching up in a straight line. Then you come to a little tunnel. Right on the other side it gets really steep and the path starts to snake back and forth. Eventually you come to a set of stairs.

The surface of the path is asphalt, but the stairs are concrete, a concrete so white that in bright light the dirt on it shows. The asphalt smells like asphalt, and the concrete smells like concrete.

The stairs don’t go all the way to the top of the hill, they stop short around twenty metres from the top. From there it’s a path again. But still concrete. Regularly spaced on the concrete path are circular depressions twenty centimetres across, designed I guess to keep you from slipping.

When the slope rounds off and you can walk easily again, there’s really nothing up there—a pay parking lot, a vacant lot where maybe they’ll put in another pay parking lot, another site that’s just dry, bare earth, a storage shed by an abandoned croquet court. There’s an elementary school and a junior high school. But neither of those has anything to do with us. It doesn’t make one bit of difference to us whether the schoolyard’s full of kids or their ghosts.

There’s a library and a low-slung building that serves as the local community centre.

Part of the hilltop is a park. In the middle is a tall stand of broad-leafed trees. When you go in, though, it doesn’t feel like the trees are pressing in around you. There are other trees dotting the rest of the park too. There’s a long slide that dips down the side of the hill.

I sat waiting for my husband. The TV was on but I just listened, didn’t watch, looked instead at my phone, reading my horoscope. As my husband approached the convenience store, he seemed to be basking in a warm light, the way it was coming from the store. Stepping inside, he took a free help-wanted weekly from the rack by the entrance.

By the time he came back home, I had finished reading my horoscope and was about to check what kind of luck he was going to have this week.

The job listings said that there was a drugstore hiring not far from our place.

The next morning my husband called exactly when the listing said they’d start taking calls. He hadn’t finished his toast yet, but they were taking calls so he called. I sat there and listened while he arranged a time to go there and apply. Then the morning after that he left home and went straight to the drugstore. Before the day was over he texted me that he got the job.

He started the next day. At first it was all training. Instead of this happening at the actual store where he was going to work, he was sent to the company headquarters in Nishi Shinjuku. One of the floors in the building was all training space. He arrived just before nine. There were three people already seated in the room. He thought there would be more.

There were long folding tables on castors, set up like a classroom. In the front of the room was an electronic whiteboard with a printer attached. The three other people were seated at the back, so my husband went and sat with them. One more person joined them, and immediately after that in walked some people whose smiles and haircuts and clothes told you right away they were the training staff.

The trainers introduced themselves and welcomed the new hires. Then they broke down the training: the next four days will be the first part of the course where you’ll work in a group right here in our training facilities, and for the second part of the course you’ll be at the actual stores where you’ll be working and that on-the-job training will be for three days. My husband and the other four new hires were then given a sheet of paper, which listed the year of the company’s founding, number of employees, previous year’s sales, profit overview from the past five years, the year the company was listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Second Section, the year it aims to be bumped up to the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s First Section. The training staff recited everything written on the paper. Then they showed training videos on customer service and operating the register. The lights were lowered for this.

As this was happening more people trickled into the room, until eventually there were around twenty people who all must have been new hires.

I try to just lie flat on my back but my body won’t cooperate. One side or the other seems to drift. I’m all twisted, and it doesn’t seem like I’ll ever be able to get back to normal.

I thought my husband would be going to work at the drugstore from day one. Was the fact that he didn’t tell me what would be happening, even though there was nothing to hide, was that a quiet little dig at me? When he came back from the convenience store he had two cans of beer, but neither was for me. He had only planned to buy one can, but once he was in the store decided to get another. He also got a bag of chips. The help-wanted weekly was rolled up and stuck, not very neatly, under one arm.

Now, though, the weekly, full of useless information from a couple weeks back, is lying on the floor about a metre from my head. It wants to curl up, as if it remembers when it was rolled up under his arm. The pages are messy, the edges don’t line up neatly, showing the pulp the cloudy white paper is made of.

My husband lay down and fell asleep right where he was, before he even finished his beers. The next morning I picked up the cans and emptied them not in the sink but in the toilet, then took them to the kitchen and rinsed them out and stood them up on the floor to dry. Before he passed out, when he was sitting there drinking his beer and flipping through the weekly, which was only a short while, like fifteen minutes, he had his butt on the vinyl flooring and his legs thrust out in front of him. He was trying to make as little noise as he could, even when he pulled the tab on his beer. But I sat there watching him the whole time, and I really stared, I wasn’t trying to hide it. He drank the first can fast, in gulps, and immediately opened the second, even though I later found there was still some left in the first. He stuffed the chips in his mouth by the handful and in no time the bag was empty.

There’s an unoccupied stool at the counter at Becker’s, to the right of where my husband is slumped over, and on the stool next to it sits a young woman with short hair in a light grey suit. She’s been there for a while, looking over every so often at my sleeping husband, looking back to the phone in her hand where she’s been typing something.

A newspaper sits on the counter. It’s open to the financial page and folded in fourths. There’s a pie chart showing the market share of portable music players, under a picture of Sony’s new Walkman and the iPod nano that debuted the other day. Whoever folded the newspaper didn’t go along with the original creases, and the corners of the squared-up paper look puffy.

When I sent the text to my husband and made his phone buzz, she reacted almost immediately. Her thumbs wiggled in mid-air over her own phone as if still pushing the keys, then she peeled her eyes away from her screen and turned to look at his phone. No one else in the café reacted to his phone buzzing, least of all he, who was asleep. She was sitting a little too far away to make out what it said on his screen. More than likely she was wondering what was up with this passed-out guy who sleeps through his phone buzzing in his face.

He had in his white earbuds. I wonder, if he wasn’t listening to his music turned all the way up, would he have woken up to get my message in real time? Even if he did and wrote back, it would just be a chain of the most predictable words, like it was lifted directly from a composition textbook, dry and meaningless.

He has to be at the drugstore in two hours.

The woman slips off her shoes, dangling her stockinged feet from the stool. A few times she reaches down with both hands to massage her calves, which are a little swollen. Her black pumps are on the floor, the left one tipped on its side. The right one is still standing.

After the text came in, she looked for a moment at the earbud nested in his ear. Then she found herself staring intently, considering the ear as a whole. There was a split second when she saw the music seeping out of the space between earbud and ear like a curl of steam or smoke. My husband’s hair is cut pretty short, so the ear looked exposed and helpless. All the more so because he doesn’t have sideburns, just bare skin.

She stared, but she didn’t let herself get lost in the shape of the ear, this fold and that curve, nothing physical like that, instead she focused on the overall impression of a complex object, zoomed out on it, trying to reach the point where the ear stops looking like an ear, even though she knew it was an ear, so as she little by little lost its ear-ness she got the feeling that something unbelievable was happening to her. She stared some more until she just about reached the point of flipping the values of light and shadow in the textures of his ear. She leant her elbow on the counter, then opened her hand like a flower, but almost immediately drew it back to her face, tracing the span between the ear and eye. She decided she would stay there a little longer. But that’s as far as she got.

I’m starting to think I should sit up. For a while now I’ve been feeling it might be more comfortable than lying here. I roll onto my back instead, raise my butt up into the air and bring my knees in towards my face. Then I prop my hips up on my hands and raise my legs straight up in a perfect vertical. I look at my legs, floating against the ceiling. But I can’t hold the position for long, no more than ten seconds, then I have to drop my legs back down so they’re stretched out flat again.

The earbud cord hanging from my husband’s right ear meets up with the cord hanging from his left ear, and the joined cords rest on the counter, brushing up against the sharp pointiness of his bare right elbow resting on the tray. His arm is set at a nearly perfect right angle. The tip of the elbow is covered in marks from old cuts and burns, dark red and purple, that look like stains. After bumping against his right elbow, the cord snakes along the counter to the right, where it reaches the edge of the counter and drops down into the pocket of his jeans. That was where her attention settled, her interest in my husband suddenly fixed on one question: What is he listening to? The music is pumped steadily up the cord into his ears.

The counter is at a window where she can see her reflection and also a view of the café behind her, though the image is not as clear as it would be at night. The tray-return station is reflected in the window too. A staff member comes by every now and again to tidy it up. One is there right now.

The clouds break and let the sun through. Light pours into the café, making anything white-coloured seem to shine and blur at the edges.

The young woman in the grey suit isn’t looking at the reflection in the glass now, instead she directs her focus towards what’s actually in front of her, beyond the window. That’s what she meant to do all along. But it isn’t going as she had hoped.

She raises her hips off the stool slightly and touches her face to the glass for a bit, gazing down at the people coming and going in and out of the station. Between the sidewalk and the avenue is a taxi stand with several cars lined up. Just about at the left edge of the window the avenue meets up with a few other roadways, more complicated than a standard four-way intersection. The waiting taxi drivers are leaning back in their seats, reading newspapers or magazines.

There’s a pedestrian bridge over the intersection, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway passes over that. From where she sits it looks like the bottom of the highway grazes the walkway below.

My husband’s slumped-over upper body expands and recedes with the rhythm of his breathing. The wall immediately to his left is also a window from waist-level up, showing the outside world. Over the ridges of his shoulders and spine she has a direct view of the stairs to the pedestrian bridge. She stares at the people going up and down, at their outfits, at the parasols some are carrying.

A Democratic Party of Japan campaign van is coming up the avenue, blaring its message.

I scrunch up my shoulders and slowly roll my head back, lifting my torso, supporting the weight of my body on the top of my skull. My mouth hangs open.

The guard rails on the pedestrian bridge have a white rust-resistant coating. A kid is pressing his face into the vertical space between two of the bars, peering down at the traffic. The DPJ van passes.

A couple other kids are chasing each other around, chanting I got you, I go-o-o-ot you to the tune of “Momotaro’s Song”, screeching every so often. They’re not on the pedestrian bridge, though, they’re inside the café. She’s looking at my husband again. He’s fidgeting a bit, more movement than he’s made up until now, which she guesses means he’s waking up.

I can see the refrigerator upside down. It seems to be on the verge of taking on human characteristics. It’s about to happen, I can see it. But it never quite does. In the end the refrigerator stays a plain old refrigerator.

For some reason I have a recollection of flipping the mattress to find the vinyl flooring wet and covered in mould like green fur.

The high-school boys who had been making noise in the café are now silent, leaning over their mobile phones. One has gone, leaving four.

My husband’s neck and shoulders suddenly go slack. It’s not clear how this action might be connected to his arm physiologically, but his elbow jerks up into the air and comes crashing back down on the counter. The sound of the impact reverberates through the café. When his elbow strikes the counter she doesn’t look towards it, she looks away, back to her own phone for a split second, before returning her gaze to my husband. This is when he wakes up.

My husband, like me, has never managed to make it down to the deepest levels of sleep. To us those levels don’t exist. Or they’re too far out of our league, something we’ll never be able to have, like a hotel suite or first-class seats on a plane. Coming up with the comparison makes me realize how true it is. In his shallow sleep my husband was dreaming that he boarded the train at one of those aerial tracks that a lot of the stations on the Odakyu Line have, but he noticed right away that he was headed in the wrong direction, so he got out at the next stop and went back the way he was supposed to be going, although he wasn’t actually sure it was the Odakyu Line he got on, trying to get to his job by 7:30, and although his phone told him it was already 7:23, he was pretty sure he would make it in time.

He reaches for his phone on the tray to find out what time it actually is. That’s when he sees the text I sent him: Morning! Long night, huh? You okay? Don’t push yourself too hard.

Tears start to flow down his cheeks, more reflex than emotion. There’s a warm feeling inside him, but it isn’t his own, it’s being forced into him from outside. His tears last only a few moments. His head is hazy, to the point that he’s mystified by the fact that he feels a connection between who he was when he fell asleep and who he is right now.

He rolls his head around to loosen his neck, which is stiff from sleeping in an awkward position.

I’m on my back again, pointing my chin at the ceiling.

The woman in the grey suit is looking at her phone again, no longer interested in my husband. Over the music in his earbuds he can just make out the receding noise of the speech on the loudspeaker of the DPJ van. It seems like the two sounds have always coexisted, superimposed on one another. Having music playing when he wakes up robs him of the chance to wonder what music he might want to hear, and actually he doesn’t even feel like listening to music at all right now, so the song in his ears makes waking up in this less-than-ideal spot for a nap even more of a drag.

When he listens to music with earbuds for a while, it gets to the point where no matter what he’s listening to it just sounds like noise pressing on his ear, and he wants to turn it off but he also still wants to be listening to music, and he gets confused about what it is he wants to do. When he was in his early twenties he would put in earplugs instead, the colour of orange and yellow sink sponges. He never knew where he put his earplugs and was always buying new ones. Then he’d find the old ones in his bag or his pockets.

Now he’s thirty.

He was sleeping with his glasses on, so now the lenses are smudged with the body oil of his arm. He happens not to be wearing the jeans he always wears, so his lens cloth isn’t in his pocket. When he bought the ¥5,900 Zoff glasses, the clerk warned him only to use a lens cloth and not to use napkins like the kind on the tray because they would scratch the lenses, and normally he’s careful to do that but this time he has no other option so he takes a napkin and rubs the oiliness off. He puts his glasses back on, then notices the woman in the grey suit sitting at the counter to his right, tapping out a text, and looks at her.

Her body is solid and largish, her froggy eyes bulging, which I would say is his type. The reason I would say that is because she is me, hair shorter than it is now, when I was half a year into the job at a small advertising-design firm and I would go to Becker’s for breakfast. She turns her eyes back to her phone, where she’s been typing for some time. I can’t read the long passage she’s written out. But I know what it says, it’s a draft of the longer version of the bland little text I sent before, the real version, not just long but full of love and appreciation for him, with nothing about how tired my body feels, no complaints about whatever weird problems I’m having, just my honest feelings put into words in a long message.

But I can’t read the words that are written there.

She looks at him intermittently, which breaks the flow of her writing, and she loses the thread. She erases the whole thing. She gets down off the stool, rights the fallen shoe and wriggles her feet in. Then she steps away. My husband glances over at her large ass. She heads down the stairs. He starts to thumb his phone. Writing a message.

My phone vibrates. Of course it’s just a phantom buzz.

At that moment I register movement in the kitchen. Almost immediately I see it: an unusually large cockroach.

She leaves Becker’s, but instead of going to the office she goes back to the station. The Sobu Line headed for Shinjuku arrives almost immediately. Until a little past Ichigaya the track runs along the green water of the outer moat. The far bank is a grassy slope with trees planted at regular intervals, and partway up the slope it becomes a stone wall, the top of which runs beside the road above. Many of the buildings along the road have signs saying they’re print shops and tutoring centres.

I throw my phone at the cockroach, even though there’s no way I’ll ever hit it. The cover slides off and the battery pops out, still held by the battery ribbon.

The cockroach is unhurt, of course. It scuttles up the face of the fridge, past the lower compartment and almost to the middle of the upper compartment, when it stops. I bet it was the roach that knocked over the beer cans.

I get up from the futon, wanting to kill the cockroach. I grab the help-wanted weekly off the floor and roll it up tightly, back into the tube it once was. The roach darts from the fridge to the wall, scurrying along near the ceiling into the room where I was lying. The grey suit is in a cabinet in the room, the hardest one to reach by far which is fine because all we have in there are things we never take out, old letters, my husband’s old game consoles and cartridges, my work from art school, my grey suit which I didn’t bother to hang on a hanger but is at least in the plastic bag it came in, I think. I’m pretty sure the suit is stuffed in there. By now it’s probably covered in mould. The cockroach slips into the drawer.