The job listings said that there was a drugstore hiring not far from our place.
The next morning my husband called exactly when the listing said they’d start taking calls. He hadn’t finished his toast yet, but they were taking calls so he called. I sat there and listened while he arranged a time to go there and apply. Then the morning after that he left home and went straight to the drugstore. Before the day was over he texted me that he got the job.
He started the next day. At first it was all training. Instead of this happening at the actual store where he was going to work, he was sent to the company headquarters in Nishi Shinjuku. One of the floors in the building was all training space. He arrived just before nine. There were three people already seated in the room. He thought there would be more.
There were long folding tables on castors, set up like a classroom. In the front of the room was an electronic whiteboard with a printer attached. The three other people were seated at the back, so my husband went and sat with them. One more person joined them, and immediately after that in walked some people whose smiles and haircuts and clothes told you right away they were the training staff.
The trainers introduced themselves and welcomed the new hires. Then they broke down the training: the next four days will be the first part of the course where you’ll work in a group right here in our training facilities, and for the second part of the course you’ll be at the actual stores where you’ll be working and that on-the-job training will be for three days. My husband and the other four new hires were then given a sheet of paper, which listed the year of the company’s founding, number of employees, previous year’s sales, profit overview from the past five years, the year the company was listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Second Section, the year it aims to be bumped up to the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s First Section. The training staff recited everything written on the paper. Then they showed training videos on customer service and operating the register. The lights were lowered for this.
As this was happening more people trickled into the room, until eventually there were around twenty people who all must have been new hires.
I try to just lie flat on my back but my body won’t cooperate. One side or the other seems to drift. I’m all twisted, and it doesn’t seem like I’ll ever be able to get back to normal.
I thought my husband would be going to work at the drugstore from day one. Was the fact that he didn’t tell me what would be happening, even though there was nothing to hide, was that a quiet little dig at me? When he came back from the convenience store he had two cans of beer, but neither was for me. He had only planned to buy one can, but once he was in the store decided to get another. He also got a bag of chips. The help-wanted weekly was rolled up and stuck, not very neatly, under one arm.
Now, though, the weekly, full of useless information from a couple weeks back, is lying on the floor about a metre from my head. It wants to curl up, as if it remembers when it was rolled up under his arm. The pages are messy, the edges don’t line up neatly, showing the pulp the cloudy white paper is made of.
My husband lay down and fell asleep right where he was, before he even finished his beers. The next morning I picked up the cans and emptied them not in the sink but in the toilet, then took them to the kitchen and rinsed them out and stood them up on the floor to dry. Before he passed out, when he was sitting there drinking his beer and flipping through the weekly, which was only a short while, like fifteen minutes, he had his butt on the vinyl flooring and his legs thrust out in front of him. He was trying to make as little noise as he could, even when he pulled the tab on his beer. But I sat there watching him the whole time, and I really stared, I wasn’t trying to hide it. He drank the first can fast, in gulps, and immediately opened the second, even though I later found there was still some left in the first. He stuffed the chips in his mouth by the handful and in no time the bag was empty.
There’s an unoccupied stool at the counter at Becker’s, to the right of where my husband is slumped over, and on the stool next to it sits a young woman with short hair in a light grey suit. She’s been there for a while, looking over every so often at my sleeping husband, looking back to the phone in her hand where she’s been typing something.
A newspaper sits on the counter. It’s open to the financial page and folded in fourths. There’s a pie chart showing the market share of portable music players, under a picture of Sony’s new Walkman and the iPod nano that debuted the other day. Whoever folded the newspaper didn’t go along with the original creases, and the corners of the squared-up paper look puffy.
When I sent the text to my husband and made his phone buzz, she reacted almost immediately. Her thumbs wiggled in mid-air over her own phone as if still pushing the keys, then she peeled her eyes away from her screen and turned to look at his phone. No one else in the café reacted to his phone buzzing, least of all he, who was asleep. She was sitting a little too far away to make out what it said on his screen. More than likely she was wondering what was up with this passed-out guy who sleeps through his phone buzzing in his face.
He had in his white earbuds. I wonder, if he wasn’t listening to his music turned all the way up, would he have woken up to get my message in real time? Even if he did and wrote back, it would just be a chain of the most predictable words, like it was lifted directly from a composition textbook, dry and meaningless.
He has to be at the drugstore in two hours.
The woman slips off her shoes, dangling her stockinged feet from the stool. A few times she reaches down with both hands to massage her calves, which are a little swollen. Her black pumps are on the floor, the left one tipped on its side. The right one is still standing.
After the text came in, she looked for a moment at the earbud nested in his ear. Then she found herself staring intently, considering the ear as a whole. There was a split second when she saw the music seeping out of the space between earbud and ear like a curl of steam or smoke. My husband’s hair is cut pretty short, so the ear looked exposed and helpless. All the more so because he doesn’t have sideburns, just bare skin.
She stared, but she didn’t let herself get lost in the shape of the ear, this fold and that curve, nothing physical like that, instead she focused on the overall impression of a complex object, zoomed out on it, trying to reach the point where the ear stops looking like an ear, even though she knew it was an ear, so as she little by little lost its ear-ness she got the feeling that something unbelievable was happening to her. She stared some more until she just about reached the point of flipping the values of light and shadow in the textures of his ear. She leant her elbow on the counter, then opened her hand like a flower, but almost immediately drew it back to her face, tracing the span between the ear and eye. She decided she would stay there a little longer. But that’s as far as she got.
I’m starting to think I should sit up. For a while now I’ve been feeling it might be more comfortable than lying here. I roll onto my back instead, raise my butt up into the air and bring my knees in towards my face. Then I prop my hips up on my hands and raise my legs straight up in a perfect vertical. I look at my legs, floating against the ceiling. But I can’t hold the position for long, no more than ten seconds, then I have to drop my legs back down so they’re stretched out flat again.
The earbud cord hanging from my husband’s right ear meets up with the cord hanging from his left ear, and the joined cords rest on the counter, brushing up against the sharp pointiness of his bare right elbow resting on the tray. His arm is set at a nearly perfect right angle. The tip of the elbow is covered in marks from old cuts and burns, dark red and purple, that look like stains. After bumping against his right elbow, the cord snakes along the counter to the right, where it reaches the edge of the counter and drops down into the pocket of his jeans. That was where her attention settled, her interest in my husband suddenly fixed on one question: What is he listening to? The music is pumped steadily up the cord into his ears.