-Small Talk-

I wasn't particularly looking for her - though I had full reason to, with her potentially voyeuristic tendencies - but there also wasn't a chance I could miss such a person, standing out in the open, looking straight in my direction. Cold, clear, piercing, calculating eyes, a bullet fired through the crowds, parting them like the Red Sea. Surely she had known precisely where I was. She's waiting for me.

I can hear the voices around me, the stares and glances. A swirling storm in which I am the eye. Both her and I. I had expected to keep out of sight, but her presence is gravity. No doubt, her short skirt that showed off as much leg as a Korean celebrity and knee high boots do not help my predicament. I can't decide if I am flattered such a girl is looking for me or if I ought to hide before things become irremediable.

Her eyes speak wonders as always, a hidden unspoken message, seeping soundlessly into my mind. They beckon to me, not at all seductively, but with a sense of urgency and panic. Like she is just about as distressed as I am - or perhaps I'm just getting the impression, though she might not appear so. What's unsaid and withheld is always more compelling and more potent.

I fill my lungs with wind-wrecked wintry air and make my way towards her. It isn't easy passage: I fight the coursing fjord of people and they fight back - and with more conviction - plowing back and forth like ghost images and dead soldiers before me. I am no Moses and I have no staff.

But I reach her, as composed as can be, as though I'm meeting an old client for coffee and she reciprocates, taciturn. No greeting or smile or strange revelations. She pulls her poncho coat tighter around herself and spins on her heel, expecting me to follow. She walks briskly and I walk after her but I leave just enough space between us to assert that we are not so close, but not too much as to stalk her. She's giving me a full view of her legs and high heeled posture, the tap tap tap tap of a professional. I watch her and I want to say something but I don't. Around us, the sea of heads starts to dissipate and the traffic lights change. In the distance, a car's horn, as if all on cue. We take the side street towards Kinokuniya and pass by a woman in a red down coat smoking Mevius Lights, a waiter whispering to his phone, a teenage girl and her bleached hair fresh from a tinted Lexus, a grubby looking middle-aged man holding a plastic bag from a convenient store, and likely more - all of them watch us. I can tell because they turn their heads to follow us when they think they're safely out of view.

When we reach Kinokuniya, we don't stop. I give it a good long study, trying to memorize its features for the last time. Its blue logo and red brick and industrial glass and tan metal ledges. I can almost make out the rows of manga and CDs by the windows and a high school kid. It's tall, the floors stretch up like a pagoda, a tower of manufactured creativity. Somewhere within sit the shelves I frequent but no one else does.

Past Kinokuniya we go, past the coffee shop in which I read, in which we met. Where she orders her tall caramel chai tea latte and I, seasonal specials. A sinking guilt hollows out my stomach. The feeling one gets as a child, called into the Principal's office. All reason disappears, and the child trembles from head to toe. He goes through every minute of his day thus far, trying to recall all the details, wondering what has gotten him in trouble and who told on him.

"Where are we going?" I speak up finally.

"Just follow me," she says to nobody in particular.

"I need my coffee." But she doesn't respond.

The streets grow thinner and more abandoned, more godforsaken - and colder. But there are less people, and with every step, my paranoia winds down, an overclocked engine powering off. Her tapping heels grow more pronounced. Her left heel seems to be louder. I watch them flash forward and back and wonder if she had been through cadet drills.

We pass by an empty playground, and nothing there moves. Cut through the sand, between the swings, around the see-saw. A black car passes by but we keep walking. A bar and grill, dark and still closed. Three bicycles flit by, laden with high school students. There's a Family Mart and part-timers. Then, a moped with a delivery box on its back. A little post office. We stop when a truck lumbers by.

"Go in."

She's pointing at a discreet looking door set into the wall; it looked like it both belonged there and didn't. Conceivably, a part of an apartment complex. A flimsy back door or something similar, though I couldn't tell from my proximity to the building. I tell her that it sounds fine by me.

I open it and then open another one inside, in the darkness, no questions asked, while she presses up behind me and eventually I stumble into an apartment. Contrasting the cold of winter, there is a wash of toasty air from artificial heaters, and a humidifier exhales a cloud of mist, like commuters outside. Behind me, I feel her breath on my neck when she bends to take off her shoes on the genkan. I do the same.

"Excuse me," I say to nobody in particular before I step up onto the tatami.

She's still protectively behind me – who's protecting who I don't know - and her fingers reach up to flick a switch she knows is there. The lights come on, this sterile glow. Though it's morning, the apartment doesn't appear to let in any natural light. There are windows but the rice paper screens are so tightly closed and opaque that they seem more akin to walls. The place isn't big at all, a modest abode. There are no distinct smells. No perfume, no cleaning agent, no room fragrances. But something is still in the air. Pleasant, but almost unnoticeable, and just like the aroma, or lack of aroma, the colour scheme is unremarkable. Cream walls, cream ceiling, cream tatami, cream doors, wooden frames, as if everything in the room blends together, a world of blank canvases, that I might walk forward and find no end.

It's neatly organized however, details carefully placed with measured precision: a stack of books on the heated kotatsu table in front of the sofa, so perfectly straight I wonder if they are bound or glued together somehow. There is a vase of plastic flowers – camellia – sitting in the corner, all arranged at a specific angle, sixty degrees or so, and an empty fish tank, adorned with fake seaweed and multicoloured pebbles. But it's empty and its water still clean. A small Nirvana poster hangs behind the sofa, not high, just in the middle as one would do for a shrine to a deceased relative. It seems to be the only remnant of personality. But there are no Nirvana records, no AC/DC, no Led Zeppelin. There is no television or computer. The sliding door to the kitchen is closed but I can assume it's arranged in a similar manner.

"Make yourself at home." She says a little too close to me. Her head barely reaches my shoulder. "You still want coffee?" The corners of her lips barely turn up.

I thank her and she opens the door to the kitchen, but closes it just as quick once she's out of sight. I can hardly make myself at home. Her place itself is so alien and foreign, unable to sustain life, despite its attempt at imitating a home. I struggle trying to place an image of her on the couch, reclining, reading or staring off into space, and couldn't.

After a while of doing nothing, I sit down on the sofa under the watchful eye of Kurt Cobain and set down my bag, and busy myself with the stack of books. I dare not disturb its flawless tower arrangement. The books themselves seem quite old and well read, like they belong to a university library or a professor's private sentimental collection. The six of them are mostly hardcovers, without graphic jackets, leaving only clothbound cardboard. There is a textbook of Japanese economics and modern prosecution law, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Mumford's The City in History, John Berger's Ways of Seeing, Orwell's 1984 in English and Carl Jung's Collective Unconscious theories. I trace the words with my finger and read them over and over again, like deciphering a lonely radio frequency from a distant island, but I can't seem to understand their significance. Still, though it may be a stretch, something resonates through the pages. I'd find it difficult to believe she's reading these for leisure.

She returns before I can give the books another glance over and sets down two saucers with steaming cups. Both aren't remarkable either, pastel pink and blue, but at least a dash of colour. I'm happy for that much.

She straightens her skirt and kneels on a pillow on the floor. Then for a while she watches the coffee, with her intense, crystal eyes, as if the liquid might disappear from her. She doesn't speak. She seems less talkative than yesterday. No philosophical outburst yet.

I clear my throat. "You like Nirvana?"

"Not particularly."

"Why do you have a poster?"

"It was the last thing a friend gave to me. She's dead. Committed suicide."

"I'm," I pause, "really sorry to hear that."

She nods and inspects her hands, and in doing so, looks all the more feminine and smaller than before, like she has breathed out a shell. She doesn't seem the type to keep such a poster on the wall above her couch. "Was years ago."

She lifts her head - she's wearing a beige sweater, one side falling off her shoulder, lopsided, oversized, yet, perhaps still strategically placed - and turns to look at me, right in the eye. And again, I have the feeling she knows what I'm thinking.

"This isn't as good as the coffee shop brews, but it's coffee at least; you wanted coffee."

"Yes, thank you." I don't reach out for the coffee, hoping that she will drink first. But she waits and makes no move. I lift the saucer and raise the cup and find the coffee bitter. A little fruity. It has strong flavour.

"Do you need sugar?"

"No, it's fine."

She watches me, like studying a wild animal, as I take another sip.

"Kona beans. French Roast. In case you were wondering." I can see amusement lighting up her face, though I see no smile. She shifts her weight and adjusts her legs; I try not to notice her thighs.

"Isn't that expensive?"

"They're samples I got for a discount."

Neither of us seems to want to get to the point yet. In this apartment, it's as if time has ceased to flow, doors and windows have shut out reality, and we exist in our own dimensional fragment. There are no sounds outside, despite probably being near the street or next to a stay-at-home mother or someone's loud music. She could decide to kill me and no one would hear.

"Nice place you have," I say pointlessly.

She shrugs. "I get by."

"You live alone then."

"My biological family sent me off to a foster home when I was two, so I am told. Now I'm free. It's funny how things work."

"Doesn't it get lonely?"

"It's how I've lived my life for years. How I'm supposed to live my life perhaps, living like Vladimir and Estragon in Godot. Except alone. At least they had each other to argue and bicker with." Then she looks at me thoughtfully.

"No one is supposed to. We just end up there somehow."

"Maybe."

"I live alone too."

"I know," she says.

"How much do you know?"

"Enough." She looks at her fish tank and takes a deep breath and a long sip of coffee before turning back to me. "Like how you didn't take the train today. You took the bus."

She's getting to the point.

"I'm sorry."

"Yes, be sorry," she says.

I tell her I am.

"You've made a mistake."

"It was hard to believe a stranger I just met, who's telling me about her order and the seasons and my book shopping habits and what to do the next day."

"I didn't find it strange." She peers into her coffee. "On hindsight, perhaps I may have been a little eager. It's been a while since I've spoken to anyone, interesting, anyone who could entertain an interesting conversation."

"That's a first time I heard such a thing."

"That you're interesting?"

"I wake up, eat, read books and have a beer, Sapporo preferably, and sleep. How interesting is that? Surely no women find me interesting."

She is silent. "Sometimes it's what's under the surface that matters the most," she says.

I look at her and say nothing. The feeling that she knows much more than she is supposed to is still there, and growing like yeast.

She smiles at me with glossy lips.

We sink back into silence and I take a longer sip than I intend; she lifted her cup at the same time. But she extends her draught too, and we end up placing our cups, blue and pink, back onto the saucer together, like synchronized swimmers. Behind us, the humidifier wheezes on, a pillar of smoke.

She doesn't seem to notice, as if it's the usual. As though it were a casual everyday conversation between friends. Then she says, "so you took the bus. Did you notice anything different today?"

I wonder if telling her the truth would make for a poor impression.

"Just tell me the truth, Maeda-san."

"There were two identical old ladies."

"And?"

"A station name I hadn't seen before. It had a strange metaphoric meaning like an inside joke I didn't understand – I mean I take the route every day, so it was unusual, well, different, but perhaps -"

"And?"

"Ten identical men, wearing black suits, black ties, black sunglasses."

"Yes, that's what you saw," she says. From her pleasantly shaped face and the impeccable image of a socially adept, decent young woman, her words are impossibly out of place. She might be better off talking about the latest fashion trend or where the next concert is or perhaps if she needs to visit the hair salon. She clears her throat.

"Yes," she says again. "You've seen Them."

-

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