I’d better put in that call to work.
Sometimes when I look at the sign for FamilyMart, with the blue and green stripes, the green part looks beautiful to me (just the green, not the blue). It’s only at a certain time, when the light in the sky is right. Like how I feel about the red of a traffic light when dusk is about to fall and the sky is a little purple. Only thing is I don’t remember at what time of day the light in the sky is right for the green in the FamilyMart sign, except that I’m sure it’s not the beginning of dusk.
The area around my left bicep starts to itch, so I slide my right hand under the sheets and scratch at it through the fabric.
My husband’s arm emerges from the short sleeve of his blue T-shirt, bending at the elbow in a sprawl on top of the white tray on the counter. The elbow has a birthmark, and it comes to a sharp point and looks more grimy to me than the average elbow.
When I yelled at my husband, demanding to know how he could stand to live in such a mouldy-smelling place, it wasn’t because I’m physically unable to stand it, it’s more the fact we have to live somewhere that’s mouldy, but I don’t think he understood where I was coming from. He’s probably still thinking that I’m suffering from the mould smell itself, and if he’s written about it in his blog, even if he didn’t use any names or write enough specifics for someone to figure out who it was about, I think, speaking as someone who was there, I would be able to identify myself from the details, and if he has written about the whole mould-driving-me-crazy business, I’m sure it paints me in a terrible light.
This scenario of mine is now pretty much running on autopilot in my brain. Like maybe he ducked into an internet café for thirty minutes before work last night and wrote it, so that I could find it and read it within a few hours of him writing it. He hadn’t written yesterday or the day before, so he was really feeling like he had to do it, get it written down. Like about me chopping through his controller cord with a knife, and me knowing that I could fly off the handle and destroy his controller and he wouldn’t do anything to me, and even though I knew he loved his video games, I would do it anyway, and how he would say I’m a spoilt brat, only a child would act that way, and how he was surprised by my chopping through his controller cord, but his surprise was quickly taken over by anger, but he didn’t blow up, he just stayed calm, he was trying to vibe me to snap out of it, and then he had this sudden impulse and he slugged me. At least that’s what he would have written, even though in real life he’s never hit me even once. He didn’t even make a sound when I chopped the controller cord, not a peep of surprise or anger, which actually I think made more of an impact on me, but in his blog I bet he wrote that he shouted, really went off, like hey what the hell are you doing, you’re acting fucking crazy!
I call work. There are people there who are all right, and people there who aren’t and I don’t like. One of the ones I don’t like answers. But that just makes it easier for me to fake it, to recite the excuse I planned, to keep up the act for the few seconds it takes without any wavering, not feeling any remorse. I do feel a little guilty as far as my husband is concerned, though.
I mean, I’m supposed to be at work today. I just made up my mind not to go, so even if I tried to force my body to get up and go, at this point it’s impossible. I’ve been lying on my stomach for so long it feels like I’m just another fold of the moisture that’s collecting in layers all the way up to the ceiling.
I wonder what screen name my husband uses.
Once in a while my laptop whirrs and rattles, the sound of the battery vibrating as the computer performs some function or other, and I hear it every time it goes, which stirs a vague feeling of me being somewhere way deep down, like maybe at the bottom of the ocean.
I press my chin down into the futon. My sight line is just above the keyboard, and when I lower my head a little more the keys become a flat field, the LCD screen looming over the horizon. But almost immediately, seeing things like this feels weird, and all I want is to feel normal, so I flip over onto my back and look at the ceiling again. This time my eyes settle on the fluorescent light that’s hanging from the ceiling. Sure enough, the circular bulbs are gargantuan. Somehow the clock on the wall is the only thing that keeps its original proportion.
If I push any key it’ll wake the screen from its dark sleep, her blog still there in my laptop’s cache, all the words armyofme spun out about the customers who won’t give up, and all their complaints, giant text suddenly replacing the black of the night, scrolling now by themselves, on and on:
You must think I’m a real pain in the ass (in fact I do, sir), but I’m not giving up. My service has been out for a month. A month! I can’t get online, I can’t play my games, I feel like I’m stuck on a desert island. Is it standard practice in your industry to make all these promises in your ads that you never keep? Can you explain that to me? (No, I can’t, sir.) I mean, take this phone call, all these phone calls, you don’t have a toll-free number, I’m the one paying for the call, every second that ticks by, I’m paying for it, don’t you think it’s wrong that you make the customer pay for these calls? (Well, maybe you should hang up.) What’s your name, anyway? Hello, your name? (I didn’t know what else to say, so I actually told him my name.) So what do you think about all this, I mean your honest opinion, I’d really like to know, I feel like if you told me I’d be at least a little less aggravated, so will you just tell me, please? It can just be between us, I just want to know what you really think about this, so just for a second would you put aside your professional responsibilities and share with me your unfiltered, personal take on this, as a human being, I’d love to know. Will you tell me? Are the things I’m saying, in my frustration, am I missing the mark? Am I wrong about this?… He kept going and going. Having someone pour their heart out to me for so long starts to trip me up emotionally, so despite myself I agreed with him, No sir, you’re not wrong, and as soon as I said it I regretted it, but it was too late. He was silent for a moment, and then he said, Right, that’s what I thought, I’m not wrong, am I, and it was clear that he was feeling a little better about himself, but I was thinking about the fact that my manager and my group leader were monitoring the conversation. Their computers have admin software that lets them check in at a glance on what’s happening with all the calls in the call centre. When anyone is on with the same caller for more than twenty minutes, the system automatically flags them and one of the group leaders starts listening in.
I was on the line with the caller for almost an hour until he finally ran out of energy and gave up. While I was logging the call, I got an internal page from one of the group leaders, Mr S. As expected, he gave me a soft-pedalled warning about the calclass="underline" Hey there, that was a long call you had to deal with, thanks for hanging in there, good stuff… But you know, sorry, there’s just one thing I wanted to touch on regarding how you handled it, if that’s okay… I’m guessing you know what it is I’m going to say, so I hope you won’t mind, I’m going to just jump in…
The moment I got off the line with him I was overcome by helplessness, a feeling like something was squeezing my insides. I could barely breathe. Somehow I made it to the end of the workday. I took off my headset and immediately put on my own headphones, then walked across the floor and out, first to leave. When I got on the Yurakucho Line, I still had that feeling like my innards were being crushed. I wanted to eat a whole pile of fried chicken drowned in tartar sauce. Not because I was hungry, but because I wanted to stuff myself until I felt even worse.