When we were at the hotel, our conversation kept going back to the performance—by the time that interpreter girl went up to the mic, everyone had pretty much had it, I doubt anyone was actually listening to her, which kind of sucks—is what I said, and so she was like, yeah, but you know she’s always, I mean she never really pays attention to the vibe, or it’s like whatever the feel is, it has nothing to do with her, it’s basically always that way with her.
We picked the hotel at random, and the room was pretty cheaply put together, but that was fine. At first I thought the wallpaper was old and grimy, and it was only later that I realized it was just pink wallpaper. She let her thick hair down, so the diagonal line of her fringe was gone. Without that she had a different feel, maybe less subdued. I noticed that her eyes angled up at the corners. The conversation trailed off, maybe we weren’t done talking but there was a break, and we nuzzled in close again, started taking little nips and nibbles at each other, getting back into it.
We stayed for four nights, and on the morning of the fifth day we said goodbye. Only once did we venture out into Shibuya. Otherwise we were holed up in the room the entire time. There was a TV, but we never turned it on. We had no idea what was going on in the outside world, not even the weather. In between sessions of sex we talked, like everyone does, about all kinds of things. I can’t remember everything we talked about. We never told each other our names or phone numbers or email addresses. Pretty much nothing about ourselves, none of the usual stuff you’d chat about, like where you work, or how you hate the people you work with—none of that. Instead we talked about when we were little. Why is it that when you’re all spent after sex you want to talk about your childhood, especially when you don’t know anything about the other person? I don’t think either one of us knew whether we were intentionally avoiding talking about ourselves in the present or whether it just happened. But I think some part of us knew that this was the best thing to do. Like maybe your childhood self is your truest self, but that actually isn’t true at all, so stories from your childhood are convenient that way. I’ve used them to get through casual sex encounters with girls before, and I did it this time too.
We talked in bed. The sheets had that impersonal feel that love hotel beds always have, I could feel it on my back, under the palms of my hands. They were brittle with starch to show they’d been washed, and they gave off this disgust, this contempt for the act of human beings fucking. They didn’t try to hide how much they loathed us. They wanted to make sure we knew. So I figured, well, this bed isn’t for sleeping by yourself, there’ll always be another person, so it doesn’t matter all that much if the sheets aren’t like saying welcome, how nice to have you here, and then I felt like my mind was being read, like I was being seen through. But by who? By the hotel staff. And by the sheets themselves. I was sure of it. I moved my hands to her skin, and her skin was warm. We talked about our childhoods. We tried talking about music but it was immediately clear that we didn’t like any of the same stuff so we just let that topic be. Movies and manga were easier. Like I said, we never talked about ourselves, I mean our real selves, and it was almost like we had at some point agreed on that as a rule, which felt like a miracle. I also knew that under no circumstances could I talk about this miracle. It sounds stupid, but I was scared that if I went and said it then something would change. The rule had to be followed at all costs, I mean it felt that way to me, and maybe to her too. And we did, we followed the rule, for the whole time we were together. Even when we weren’t talking about ourselves, there was enough to talk about. Like the performance, we talked a lot about that. We never got tired of talking about that. Whenever we got to something we couldn’t figure out, we would just have sex again. Neither one of us spoke in a hurry, so the conversation had a nice, relaxed pace. As we got used to each other the pace picked up a little, but it stayed easy. It was like that for the whole time, from when we first went to the hotel. Even going to the hotel just kind of happened, same as the boundaries of what we were going to talk about, without either of us outright suggesting it.
We were lying side by side on top of the sheets, which were all twisted up from the last round of sex. I said to her, I’m really bad at English, so I can’t say for sure, but I thought that performance, you know, this might just be me, but I thought that performance was pretty great, you know? and I genuinely meant it. I had the feeling that the experience was going to stay with me for the rest of my life. It could just be the afterglow from sex, but I really wanted to communicate to her how honestly excited I was about the performance.
Although I might have told her that in the taxi on the way to the hotel, or it may have been that we were already talking about it when we first met at SuperDeluxe. The performance was staying with me like the lingering heat on your skin after spending a day at the beach, warmth that you feel into the night. The show was over and the lights were back on. The area around the bar was a little brighter than the rest of the room, and we stood there talking. It only took a couple minutes of conversation to make up our minds. We left the place and went straight to the hotel. I didn’t say much to the five guys I had come with. I just went back to where they were all sitting, grabbed my stuff, must have said something about what I was doing, and that was that. The girl and I caught a taxi as soon as we stepped outside. Sitting in the back seat, holding hands like lovers, we headed to Shibuya.
The performance made it feel like we were in another country, I said to her, and I don’t think it was just because the performers were foreigners. I whispered that to her or something like it, maybe not fully whispering but anyway in a quiet voice, my mouth close to her ear. But I was also completely wasted, so I probably didn’t manage to say any of that in a logical and intelligible way—even when I’m sober I’m not the best at communicating stuff like that—so the best I could do was to try over and over again, tracing the same line of conversation, and even then I doubt I managed to get it quite right. She was skinny, and her fingers and the palm of her hand didn’t have much meat on them. The feel of her fingers laced between mine actually hurt a little, the bony sharpness of them, it was like they existed to give that pain, and that pain felt kind of good. I wiggled my fingers between hers like to appreciate it. We pretended the driver couldn’t see us. He probably knew what was going on, but he was an older guy who was good at acting like nothing was happening in his taxi, and if he did suspect something, he knew better than to make too big of a show ignoring it, since that would just tip us off to the fact that he knew, but anyway even if he did know I really didn’t care. He must have seen us making out in the rear-view mirror. My other hand was up her skirt, not quite in her panties but rubbing the top of her thighs through her stockings as voices kept going back and forth on the taxi radio. And still I couldn’t get away from thinking how at SuperDeluxe, when the audience members went up to the mic, they were speaking in Japanese, but it almost sounded like English, and why did it sound that way? I went back and forth over these thoughts, running my hands over her stockings, imagining the feel of the bare skin underneath. Although, I mean, I couldn’t be too obvious about rubbing her thighs, so a lot of the time I just had my hand on her thigh, resting. Now I wonder what she was thinking after hearing me say what I said about the performance, or if she even heard it at all. When I said what I said, how come she didn’t answer? Did she try to say something, or try to get me to say more, and horniness got in the way? I’ll never be able to ask her now—I doubt I’ll ever see her again. Maybe if the performers were Japanese, even if they said all the exact same things, the whole thing would have felt different. There was a particular atmosphere there, an informal conversation about the war that was about to begin, a conversation that could never have happened in a room full of only Japanese people. I can’t even imagine it. If a group of Japanese people tried to create the same scene, it would feel wrong, like a fake plastered-on smile, and I wouldn’t go anywhere near it.
The guy and me got out of the taxi and we
nt into a convenience store for water and beer. Then we picked a hotel at random, because one was just as good as another, and got a room. It had a little fridge. That was all we needed. We were both drunk to the point of exhaustion, pretty much numb. I couldn’t say for sure exactly where we got out of the taxi. I remember that the big intersection, the one in front of Shibuya Station that’s always swarming with people, was as busy as usual even that late at night, so we must have gotten out around there. It would have been a little embarrassing to ask the driver to let us off by Love Hotel Hill, so we probably said that the big intersection was fine. But the driver was just a regular old guy, and we were so messed up, we probably didn’t feel like walking and didn’t care if he knew what we were doing, and maybe we had him drop us off by the Bunkamura. There was a Sunkus convenience store across from the 109 building, so we went there first. He wanted another beer. I didn’t need any more alcohol. He bought a 500ml can. I got a litre of Evian. And also some chocolate. Whenever I get drunk and pass out, I wake up with my mouth feeling all dry and gross, like I’m about to come down with a cold. Even when I’m not that drunk, the air conditioning in love hotels is always pretty harsh, it dries you out more than anything else, which makes me feel sick, so if I don’t remember to bring water I always regret it, which has happened a bunch of times, so to make sure it never happens again I think about how bad it was and always make sure to buy myself some water, no matter how drunk I am. At this point it’s basically a physical reflex. The chocolate I got just because I love chocolate and thought I might want some later. I thought I would eat it when we got to the room, but that didn’t happen. We had only just met, so as soon as we got to the room we undressed and had sex. I didn’t get so entirely carried away that I forgot about the chocolate, but I never got around to eating it the whole time we were there, and when we finally left the hotel I took the chocolate home with me. I ended up eating it at my place, while watching the news about the war.
After sex the first time we had sex again without stopping to rest, but he seemed fine, so I figured we might as well keep going, and then I was like this pace is kind of intense, but we kept at it, full speed. Eventually he slowed down, and then he passed out. I figured I’d get some sleep too—though it wasn’t like I was feeling sad to be left awake alone or anything like that—so I slept. We both slept for the same amount of time, very fair and egalitarian, maybe two hours. But it seemed to pass in no time at all. He woke up first and started touching me, which woke me up. I started touching him back, and before long it was like okay, here we go again. I think at that point we both had every intention to keep going like that forever. It turned out not to be forever, of course, more like three or four or five times. At some point, a feeling settled on both of us that we were cutting the cord of time. You know, time which is always pushing us forwards, pushing us forwards, and even if we want it to slow down a little it never listens, so we give up hope of it ever letting up, but for now, just for now, time felt like it’d been unplugged and we had been given a reprieve. That feeling filled our bodies little by little, or maybe it came all at once, but there it was. That was what we wanted, so we tried to make it happen, and it actually did.
Like all love hotels, this one had no clock in the room, and we didn’t want to know the time. Of course we both had our phones. But they were turned off and tucked away in the mesh pockets of our bags. The bags themselves we set down against the wall farthest from the bed, because we didn’t want to have to see them, we didn’t want them to even exist. We were trying to banish time from our little world, to make it possible for us to say, what’s this time thing anyway? We’d have sex, then lie there all mellow. At some point we’d drift off into unconsciousness, beautifully, unaware who fell asleep first. After a short while one of us would wake up, then the other would wake up or be woken up. Then we’d have sex again. Since our little world had no clocks and no sun, it was hard to say for sure whether it was two days or three days or even just one.
But eventually we got hungry. We hadn’t eaten since we’d checked in, and we were starved. I didn’t think a love hotel was like a regular hotel where you could go out for a meal and come back, but we called the front desk and they said it was no problem. So we decided to head to Centre Street and find somewhere to eat. We put on the clothes that we had yanked off and left balled up on the floor.
Until we opened the door of the hotel we didn’t know if it was day or night. Neither of us had been wondering which it was. Turned out it was daytime. We could see the sun in the narrow stretch of sky visible between the buildings that rose in front of us. The sky was murky, the same exact colour as a cloud. But to us that was the only colour the sky had ever had. The sun looked the same as it did the last time we had seen it, which made us feel a twinge of nostalgia, weird as that sounds. We walked down the hill towards the Bunkamura. We passed a barber shop and could hear the “Tamori” show on the TV inside. So it had to be lunchtime. Where should we go? How about one of those, you know, lunch buffets all over Shibuya? We walked up and down Centre Street, checking out the options, and settled on a place that I’d heard about, an Indian restaurant with a ¥950 all-you-can-eat buffet. It was right near the big intersection. I had been wanting to try this place, but for someone like me with a shitty part-time job ¥950 is kind of a lot for lunch. But hey, the day was kind of an exception, and so we went on in. This could end up being like the best curry we’ve ever had, he said with a laugh. It was for sure the most curry we ever had. And even though we were both low-wage earners, we both wanted a lassi so bad that we shelled out the extra ¥250 and chugged it down.
During the days and nights I spent with him, things felt different. I wasn’t in my everyday mode, I was somewhere special. I realized this when we came down the hill to the flat area by Shibuya Station, and it was like we were walking around on the bottom of a huge empty swimming pool bathed in sunlight, although I probably felt the difference earlier, back in the hotel, and even back at the performance, when the feeling first started stirring. Now we were walking in the same Shibuya as always, but it felt like I was travelling in a foreign country. Weird. Then I began to worry that if I kept thinking how weird it was, then that special mode I was in would evaporate and everything would go back to the way it is all the time. So I made up my mind not to pay any attention to this feeling. But after a bit I began to feel I didn’t have to worry because the feeling didn’t seem to be that fragile after all, that it wouldn’t disappear so easily, and once I realized that I relaxed. I stayed in that special mode for the whole time we were together, which was a really amazing thing. I didn’t think I’d ever be so lucky again. Because after that mode switched off, the next several days were terrible. But I don’t think that cancels out the special feeling of those few days in that mode. I have never once wished they’d never happened.
Some tiny part of me kept asking, how is it that I’m feeling this way, like I’m on holiday, and what does it mean? And then I felt like I hit on a kind of answer, and I wanted to tell him about it. But we were busy eating curry, so I didn’t bring it up. Once we went back to the hotel and had sex again and were in the interval before the next round, I told him.
We took a different route back to the hotel, and when we were waiting to cross the big Shibuya intersection a protest march was going by below the huge digital billboard on the Tsutaya Building. The billboard was flashing clips of the week’s hit music videos, and right under the music and the dancing was a news ticker that said LIMITED CRUISE MISSILE BOMBARDMENT OF BAGHDAD BEGINS, and when we read that we were like, I guess the war really started. It was the first time I had ever seen a protest march, and just like the foreign girl at the performance said, the column of marchers, which included some foreigners, was surprisingly narrow. And the air swirling around the marchers was so calm. From close up, I could feel it. Like the feeling on a train a little after morning rush hour. The procession went through the intersection, then angled down towards Aoyama. When the end of the march
started to fade in the distance, we headed home to the hotel. Yeah, funny how at that moment going home became the reverse of normal going home. Going up Love Hotel Hill totally felt like going home. We had only stood watching the march for a tiny stretch of time, so we didn’t give it too much thought, but later it kept popping back into my mind. Like we would be licking each other all over, wordlessly, almost automatically, and the image of the march would creep in to fill the space.
The End of the Moment We Had Page 3