Toshiki Okada - The End of the Moment We Had

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.