Toshiki Okada - The End of the Moment We Had

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.