The End of the Moment We Had

by Toshiki Okada

  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.