Espresso Love (A Dystopian Japan Novel) #Wattys2014

White Snow

After a while, she leaves me alone, staring off at people around the place, as if she's watching fish swim by at an aquarium. I manage to read three chapters or so of I Am A Cat during this time. After which, I order another cappuccino. Then we eat an early dinner at a Denny's where I order an extra helping and give her my spoon. The whole time, I am overly aware that no one else can see her. To others, I would be sitting alone and speaking to myself if I talk to her - so I say nothing. She tells me she knows where I can stay. She tells me that the flow of time is changing, that she sees the buds on the trees though it's December, that spring is merging with winter and things are converging, like rivers that deposit into the same lake. But these changes are only something I can notice, as far as she could tell. There may be others, she says but she can't be certain. She concludes that this is not good news, that the flow of things shouldn't warp like that, or life will be severely affected. Something hideous and detrimental will occur. I ask why it's changing and distorting but she doesn't know. I ask if she knows about the Collective and the System. She says she has a vague feeling but all she knows is that there is an order to things and that this "lake" everything flows towards will become polluted.

We finish and I pay the bill, total of 1300 yen. Not too much, but not as little as a rice bowl at a gyudon franchise. We walk for five minutes and reach a side street which is unbelievably hidden, looking more like an alleyway than a street. It juts out from the main road at a forty five degree angle swerving behind a large heavy looking office building. If she hadn't brought me here, I might have just wandered past, without ever noticing. Both sides of the small stocky buildings press in together on us. They seem to push in closer and closer, as if we are in an Indiana Jones movie, setting off a trap in the tomb of a pharaoh king. There's a drug store further down the road, a Yoshinoya, an internet cafe and an izakaya bar.

She walks up to an inconspicuous building with an inconspicuous sign. It doesn't say much: only the word Saudade sits above the doorway – the word for nostalgia and longing for someone or something absent in Portugese, an entirely fitting concept. I can pick up a hint of neon pink and purple tubes in the windows but they are tinted black.

"It's safe here for tonight," she says. A man in a grey suit passes by behind us.

"Is this place what I think it is?"

"Oh come on, this can't be so bad, Mr. Maeda." She laughs. Her laugh chills me to the core.

"I mean I can say you don't really exist, but to me you do, so this is kind of-"

"Would you want them to find you then?" She pulls on my arm and opens the door. "There's no other place. This really isn't so out of the ordinary," she stops inside, in the lobby bathed in a dim purple ambient light, like we are in a sci-fi amusement park ride. The front of a glowing machine with a digital display, pictures of each room and pink font greets us. "There are tons of weird arrangements these days," she makes me push the button for 204, which appears to be a stylish modern room in red, "school girls working as prostitutes, paid off by some stressed out old geezer, so they can buy their cell phones, clothes and make up; foreign tourists looking to experiment and find a cheap place to stay; underaged couples sneaking in after school without their families knowing; maybe a businessman who hadn't booked prior reservations – it's not uncommon at all, don't tell me you've never been in one?"

The keycard deposits in my hand and we make our way to the second floor. She walks in front of me like a child lit up with excitement. I tell her it's inappropriate that she has ever been in one in the first place as a seventeen year old. "I haven't been in one, I just happen to know some things," she says, "I just expected you to." I admit I don't remember if I had but I probably haven't.