My laptop is where I left it on the nightstand, still on, still open, but the screen is dark, sleeping. I twist around to look at it, kind of rotating, ending up on my stomach. The sheet under me gets pulled along and ends up a little bunched.
The white body of my laptop is not exactly in mint condition. I’ve had the same computer for nearly three years. But I still haven’t named it yet.
I catch sight of my nails, which are painted white. I’ve never once got any illustrations or decorations done on my nails. They’re just all white.
Before my laptop went to sleep, it got pretty hot but now it’s cooled off. I strike a key and the screen wakes up. I was up late reading blogs, dozing off and waking up to read some more, and now the last one I was reading gradually returns to the wakening screen. When that happens, the flecks of dust that were visible on the dark surface of the screen vanish.
The page I have open is the blog cache of someone with the username “armyofme”, who according to the profile is a twenty-eight-year-old woman (that makes her two years younger than me) who “works as a call centre operator at a company that provides outsourced help-desk services, currently dealing with enquiries for an internet service provider in the process of transitioning to fibre-optic cables”, and she blogs about all the callers with their claims that annoy her day after day, and about all her co-workers who are just as bad as the callers, stringing her words together like a stream of curses. armyofme writes a new blog post almost every day.
I just stumbled upon her blog today, I mean last night. How I found it is because there was this guy in my class at art school who used to do comedy stuff, and somebody told me he and another guy have an act that’s been getting them on TV, but since I don’t watch much TV I never knew about it, so I started searching a bunch of things related to my friends from back in school, trying different combinations of words, and after maybe three hours I found myself on armyofme’s blog.
I can hear the garbage truck coming around again. I now realize that when the song on repeat in my head switched off earlier it was because of the garbage truck music.
armyofme had an entry from a few months ago where she wrote about how watching the guy from my art class perform on TV was encouraging for her, but then she got used to seeing him all the time and she stopped feeling encouraged and thought about how he must be having fun, but also that maybe it looks like fun but it’s probably hard work, and in any case he has to be making good money so she doesn’t feel bad about being a little jealous.
It’s pretty normal for me to go looking for websites or blogs or whatever that are about people I know and to end up spending hours surfing. I always feel sleepy, it’s been so long since I’ve felt fully clear-headed and awake that I’ve basically forgotten what that’s like, so for years my whole waking life has been powering down, and now that’s just my body’s default mode. But when I look for blogs and I find a good one and my eyes are glued to the screen, some substance starts flowing from the LCD and pumping into me, and my sleep threshold shoots up, like blood sugar when you’re munching on sweets, so no matter how tired I feel I can still stay awake.
I stretch my body so that I can feel the crook in my spine. I think about people I know who are armyofme’s age and who might write something like this, and I picture the faces of a few girls who could be armyofme. But I can’t say which of them it could be. I mean, I can’t even remember their names.
Last night, or this morning, reading armyofme’s blog kept me energized until I hit my sleep threshold. Even when I did pass that point, I would only nod off for the shortest while and then wake up and get right back to it. I was reading another blog too, before armyofme’s, not anybody who I’m connected to in any way, it’s a guy who writes letters to his college friend who died in an accident the year before. I came across it when I was searching for things about Nakakido.
Not that that blog had anything to do with Nakakido. It must have been one of the other search terms beside his name that landed on it. I ended up reading some of it, but only a little. The writing was a mess, like it was written by someone in a confused mental state. In fact I started to think that there was no such person as the dead friend, and I gave up on it.
In armyofme’s newest post, or anyway the one with the most views, she wrote how people on the phone say talking to an operator like you (meaning her) isn’t getting me (them) anywhere, let me talk to your manager. It happened today, but people who say stuff like that have no idea the way the system works, they probably think that if they keep screaming to talk to somebody more important they’ll eventually get to whoever’s in charge and can finally give whoever it is a piece of their mind and get some satisfaction, but that’s more or less impossible, like no matter how hard they try they’ll never reach anyone with any authority at the fibre-optic cable company because the system is specifically designed to keep that from ever happening, so maybe if their issue is really serious and could turn into a high-profile lawsuit and get picked up by the media and turn into a big story they might get somewhere, but short of that their call will just come into our outsourced call centre, and the highest up it could go would be to the project leader in charge of the fibre-optic cable company account, but even that’s extremely unlikely, because we lowly operators know very well that if we gave in every time someone demanded to talk to our manager things would get messy for us, and we’ve been told to absolutely refuse those kinds of demands, so unless there’s a pushover girl who gets nervous and does what the caller wants, it’ll never happen. And anyway our call centre is just doing work that the fibre-optic cable company has outsourced, the fibre-optic cable company is my company’s client, and I’m sure they’ve told us to deal with whatever claims that come in (I don’t actually know that, since I’m not on the business side of things, I’m just guessing, but I’d bet I’m right), since we’re not located anywhere near them, we’re in Ikebukuro, way past the park to the west of the station in a nine-storey building in an area that’s gone out of style, on the sixth through ninth floors, and I sit on the eighth floor (actually I don’t even know where the client is, though they must be somewhere in Tokyo). Anyway, that’s how it is, so when people call about their claim I tell them the person you’re complaining to isn’t the person you want to be complaining to, and they say they know that which is why they’re shouting that they want to talk to my manager, and the people who are shouting are the ones I want to tell that no matter how much they kick and scream they’ll never get to the person they’re looking for. Of course I can’t actually say that… That’s the kind of stuff in armyofme’s blog. In other entries she actually laid out the details of the clients’ claims, going on and on. I fell asleep after a little while, but before I did, when I was awake, I read all of it. Every so often I would accidentally click on one of the ads flashing in the sidebar, for a new DVD release or a soft drink, or an online credit card application or a job site, and every time I did that a new browser window would open up, and in the few seconds while the page loaded, I felt like I was holding out hope for something, though I’m not sure what. But as soon as the content came on screen my hope vanished. I would go back to the blog and keep reading.
My toes are facing downwards, pressed against the sheet. They’re painted white, same as my fingernails. I work the rumpled bunches in the sheet between my toes so that they’re touching the sensitive skin in there that’s not used to being touched. But I can’t tell from the feel of that skin between the toes whether the sheet is dry or damp, damp from my sweat or maybe from the humidity in the room.