I turned face-up on the slab of stone, gazed at the sky, and thought about all the man-made satellites spinning around the Earth. The horizon was still etched in a faint glow, and stars began to blink on in the deep, wine-coloured sky. I gazed among them for the light of a satellite, but it was still too bright out to spot one with the naked eye. The sprinkling of stars looked nailed to the spot, unmoving. I closed my eyes and listened carefully for the descendants of Sputnik, even now circling the Earth, gravity their only tie to the planet. Lonely metal souls in the unimpeded darkness of space, they meet, pass each other, and part, never to meet again. No words passing between them. No promises to keep.
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The phone rang on a Sunday afternoon. The second Sunday after the new school term began in September. I was fixing a late lunch and had to turn off the gas range before I answered. The phone rang with a kind of urgency—at least it felt that way. I was sure it was Miu calling with news of Sumire’s whereabouts. The call wasn’t from Miu, though, but from my girlfriend.
“Something’s happened,” she said, skipping her usual opening pleasantries. “Can you come straightaway?”
It sounded like something awful. Had her husband found out about us? I took a deep breath. If people discovered I was sleeping with the mother of one of the kids in my class, I’d be in a major fix to say the least. Worst-case scenario, I could lose my job. At the same time, though, I was resigned to it. I knew the risks.
“Where are you?” I asked.
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“At a supermarket,” she said.
*
I took the train to Tachikawa, arriving at the station near the supermarket at 2.30. The afternoon was blazing hot, the summer back in force, but I had on a white dress-shirt, tie, and light grey suit, the clothes she’d asked me to wear. “You look more like a teacher that way,” she said, “and you’ll give a better impression. Sometimes you still look like a college student,” she added.
At the entrance to the supermarket I asked a young assistant who was rounding up stray shopping trolleys where the security office was. He told me it was across the street on the third floor of an annexe, an ugly little three-storey building without even a lift. Hey, don’t worry about us, the cracks in the concrete walls seemed to say, They’re just going to tear this place down someday anyway. I walked up the narrow, timeworn stairs, located the door with SECURITY on it, and gave a couple of light taps. A man’s deep voice answered. I opened the door and saw my girlfriend and her son inside seated in front of a desk facing a middle-aged uniformed security guard. Just the three of them.
The room was an in-between size, not too big, not too small. Three desks were lined up along the window, a steel locker against the wall opposite. On the wall between were a duty rota and three security guard caps on a steel shelf. Beyond a frosted-glass door at the far end of the room there seemed to be a second room, which the guards probably used for taking naps. The room we were all in was almost completely devoid of decoration. No flowers, no pictures, not even a calendar. Just an overly large round clock on the wall. A totally barren room, like some ancient corner of the world that time forgot. On top
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of which the place had a strange odour—of cigarette smoke, mouldy documents, and perspiration mixed together over the years.
The security guard in charge was a thickset man in his late fifties. He had beefy arms and a large head covered with a thick patch of coarse salt-and-pepper hair he’d plastered down with some cheap hair tonic, the best he could probably afford on his lowly security guard salary. The ashtray in front of him was overflowing with Seven Star butts. When I came in the room, he took off his black-framed glasses, wiped them with a cloth, and put them back on. Maybe his set way of greeting new people. With his glasses off, his eyes were as cold as moon rocks. When he put them back on, the coldness retreated, replaced by a kind of powerful glazed look. Either way, this wasn’t a look to put people at their ease.
