The End of the Moment We Had

by Toshiki Okada

  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 an
d 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 heav
y 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.