- Cosmo Clock 21 -

The staff of Cold Stone Creamery join in chorus for a scarce few customers - their only audience. We're here by Shizuka's suggestion, despite the weather. When I asked, she simply said why not. There's a father and his toddler here, and both are smiling. A high school couple is taking videos. No matter how small the audience, the staff seem genuine. Spirited, zestful, and dramatized smiles and enthusiasm. Bigger than life caricatures of outstanding customer service. They believe in the entertainment factor. They are auditioned and chosen for as much musicality as prowess in scooping ice cream and mixing flavours on slabs of frozen granite. They believe and they sing with all their hearts, at the top of their lungs. But they're also college students working part time at a franchise beside an amusement park.

She scowls at me. "Let's share," she says, like we're about to share cannabis.

"What do you want to get?"

She bites her lip - a gesture which seems most photogenic, and almost photographic if I had a camera, like a fragment caught in time - and looks over the menu. It's an extensive one, unfolding like an enormous map of the world, a lavish tapestry that a collector drapes over a wall along with old globes and antique trinkets from his travels. There is much detail in this one, and pinks and reds, written in Katakana characters. Sometimes it takes me much concentration to understand the English names - I would've preferred the English letters.

"This is like an order at the coffee shop all over again."

She grins. "You know, everything we select as individuals may be what sets people apart. I choose a particular one because I am me. I am not you. It reveals something about me."

"He's not me, and I'm not you, you are not her. Because of what we order."

"Are you taunting me?"

"It's like wearing your heart on your sleeve. I'll never forget the first thing you said to me that day."

She points. "How does Cheesecake Fantasy sound?"

"Like diabetes, diabetes in a cone."

She laughs. A genuine laugh. "Cheesecake and beer and chai tea, remember that."

"I'll remember; do those even taste good together?"

She finally seems to be enjoying herself. Away from smart cards, blank faces, luggage, black suits, even if it's only for a moment and I'm relieved.

The customer ahead of us in line is eager when she approaches the counter. She orders a "White Choco-berry Wonder." Maybe she's hoping it'll make her feel better. I wonder if she always orders the same at every Cold Stone Creamery. Or if she also visited Baskin-Robbins and orders something else there. If she happens to pass by one or the other, she knows exactly what she wants each time. Perhaps she stops by Cold Stone Creamery every day on her way home from work and purchases ice cream. Or maybe it's Baskin Robbins, and Cold Stone is just an occasional once-a-week visit. Sweets seem to attract women more than men.

"Order preferences can be considered part of routine. Of course, eventually, everything disappears. But as long as it becomes mindless routine it tends to last the longest," Shizuka says.

"So isn't it a good thing I don't have a preference?"

The cashier shows us his teeth, a well practiced expression. Surely it's a routine. He must have spent hours every day practicing his smile in front of a bathroom mirror, adjusting the angle of his lips and how much teeth he shows, trying different intensities. He might use different smiles for his girlfriend and another for his mother. His eyes bore blankly into mine, despite his best efforts. "Hello and welcome. What would you like?"

Shizuka tucks hair behind an ear and fishes out her wallet, but I pay for it first. She calls me old-fashioned. I add in an extra tip for their singing.

"It can also be a part of an identity, I guess," she says when we wait and watch our ice cream and they begin to sing. "Cold Stone, you're at Cold Stone," the man tosses a scoop of our cheesecake flavour, a morsel of Shizuka's personality, the physical embodiment of an abstract concept, into the air. "We're a scooper dooper family," he sings. Our ice cream is now flat on the stone, rolled like dough, and in go the graham crust and strawberries and blueberries. They look like they're enjoying themselves and their spatulas are covered in carnage. The deed is done.

"Thank you," we say and smile when we pick up the product. Like nuts and bolts screwed in the wrong places, red and blue shards jut out at irregular angles from the cream.

Seeing the process hadn't made it any more personal. Quite the contrary, the violence removed my sense of appetite. I consider it mildly offensive that a piece of our identity is recreated, handled and tampered by hands of a stranger. For all we know, some of the ingredients could be spoiled or perhaps intentionally altered. Yet, food is marketed, bought and sold as finished products.

"Can't you just enjoy some ice cream for once?"

"I just happen to remember an article I read recently about scientific confirmation that we are what we eat."

She tells me she knows about it.

I follow her as she balances the scoops in her hand. The shop is rather small, like it had been fashioned haphazardly within a trailer, tucked on the side of the road. But it's still well-lit and there are small plastic seats for a quick rest. There isn't much around but it's on the way between major attractions in Minato Mirai 21. At the very least, it sits conveniently right outside the Cosmo World amusement park as if it had been waiting for us all along.

"The one about genetically modified foods affecting the human system the more we consume it."

"Right," I say, "for example, corn is modified to produce its own natural pesticides and certain smells to ward off bugs. When we eat enough of it, it's possible that our body not only breaks down nutrients but also begins to break down the genetic compounds. The DNA is then physically absorbed at minuscule rates into our cells. Eventually, our cells adapt portions of DNA as its own and begin to produce its own pesticides right in our organs. Almost everything we eat now has been altered in some way. Our cells are even reprogrammed to be more acidic, which is a major contributing factor to cancer."

I notice the Cold Stone staff following us with their eyes and Shizuka doesn't need me to elaborate but I go on anyway. "And then there are the cover ups of genetically modified products: most quietly relabel products with fresh new scientific names and slap on catchphrases like organic. Even the approval of refined sugar as a flavour carrier in early twentieth century United States resulted in an overlook of its potential danger. Or later, artificial sweeteners which had killed lab animals with tumors, were approved by FDA after alarming underhanded manipulation. Everything is hidden by the government and exploited by massive conglomerates."

"So are you asking me not to eat the ice cream?"

"I just figure it's better to talk things over with you than to think about them."

"I'd prefer that, but his is hardly date material."

"I seem to be able to control myself in your apartment, or just within the frame of my every day routines. But out here, it is much harder."

"Because we're on a date and you're just nervous," she grins.

I laugh. "Nervous?"

She digs the plastic spoon deep and excavates a mouthful. She leans close, studying it as though it were a scientific experiment."Say ah," she says, raising the spoon, playing the role, and I'm playing the role and reluctantly oblige.

"How is it?"

"It's cold."

"No kidding."

I watch as she tries it herself with the same spoon. We have shared ice cream. Perhaps she has a checklist of what we should do. She closes her lips and then her eyes. I look at her eyelashes wave like the wingbeats of seagulls.

"Does it fit your personality?"

"Yes, I think so."

"You like sweets. Does that mean you're a sweet person?"

"I'm not sure if that's how it works Maeda-san."

As if satisfied already, she wipes her hand on a napkin even though it's clean. She takes out her phone. "Let's take a picture." When I look at her strangely, she continues, "without a picture, it's almost like we can't prove we had ever known each other. Or that this ice cream existed once. No permanence. We need photographic evidence. A memory that can't disappear so easily. Emotions, memories, independent thought. They're too easy to lose."

It's strange to see our faces hovering side by side, painted on a screen. They don't give an impression that they are indeed still in our possession. A million pixels make up our existence now. We exist, in permanence, because of these pixels, yet it only appears on a screen, taking over the display temporarily. It could be deleted like it had never been there in the first place - or circulated on the internet, worldwide in an instant.

Still, seeing her face next to mine sends a strange buzz through my body. Like the kick of an addictive drug. My ordinary, college poker-face, beside hers. A heart-shaped face, perfect, immaculate, pristine, well polished and blended, holding up her small pointed nose over rose lips - I wonder how soft they might be. These features seem to be further enhanced on the screen, any blemishes or imbalance, brushed over by a master's stroke. Only her brown hair remains organic, more than ever like liquid coffee trickling down her cheeks. The saturation is up high. I smell the aroma of her house, of the forest, in her hair as I lean closer. But her eyes - the eyes that had shone with such intensity, that if I stare into them, reality might disappear - are no longer there. The camera is incapable of capturing her eyes. For a long time, a deep darkness settles in me. Perhaps, a secret disappointment. The picture would not capture her true being. It would never do justice.

"Photos might never capture the real experience, but it can capture a moment in time, like a page in a history textbook or a yearbook," she says. Her voice is a quiet breath against my ear.

I remain silent. She pulls me closer, til our heads are touching at the top. It looks affectionate on camera. Her head is warm, and hard. She raises the Cheesecake Fantasy with one hand. I put my hand on hers. She smiles. I try to smile. At least our smiles look more genuine than the Cold Stone Creamery staff. I wonder if we look convincing enough as a couple. Would They buy it?

"I'm sorry, excuse me, please refrain from-"

But we had already taken the picture. Our faces forever etched onto the weave of a million pixel textures, onto the terrain of temporal permanence. Textbook history.

-

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