The guy and me got out of the taxi and went into a convenience store for water and beer. Then we picked a hotel at random, because one was just as good as another, and got a room. It had a little fridge. That was all we needed. We were both drunk to the point of exhaustion, pretty much numb. I couldn’t say for sure exactly where we got out of the taxi. I remember that the big intersection, the one in front of Shibuya Station that’s always swarming with people, was as busy as usual even that late at night, so we must have gotten out around there. It would have been a little embarrassing to ask the driver to let us off by Love Hotel Hill, so we probably said that the big intersection was fine. But the driver was just a regular old guy, and we were so messed up, we probably didn’t feel like walking and didn’t care if he knew what we were doing, and maybe we had him drop us off by the Bunkamura. There was a Sunkus convenience store across from the 109 building, so we went there first. He wanted another beer. I didn’t need any more alcohol. He bought a 500ml can. I got a litre of Evian. And also some chocolate. Whenever I get drunk and pass out, I wake up with my mouth feeling all dry and gross, like I’m about to come down with a cold. Even when I’m not that drunk, the air conditioning in love hotels is always pretty harsh, it dries you out more than anything else, which makes me feel sick, so if I don’t remember to bring water I always regret it, which has happened a bunch of times, so to make sure it never happens again I think about how bad it was and always make sure to buy myself some water, no matter how drunk I am. At this point it’s basically a physical reflex. The chocolate I got just because I love chocolate and thought I might want some later. I thought I would eat it when we got to the room, but that didn’t happen. We had only just met, so as soon as we got to the room we undressed and had sex. I didn’t get so entirely carried away that I forgot about the chocolate, but I never got around to eating it the whole time we were there, and when we finally left the hotel I took the chocolate home with me. I ended up eating it at my place, while watching the news about the war.
After sex the first time we had sex again without stopping to rest, but he seemed fine, so I figured we might as well keep going, and then I was like this pace is kind of intense, but we kept at it, full speed. Eventually he slowed down, and then he passed out. I figured I’d get some sleep too—though it wasn’t like I was feeling sad to be left awake alone or anything like that—so I slept. We both slept for the same amount of time, very fair and egalitarian, maybe two hours. But it seemed to pass in no time at all. He woke up first and started touching me, which woke me up. I started touching him back, and before long it was like okay, here we go again. I think at that point we both had every intention to keep going like that forever. It turned out not to be forever, of course, more like three or four or five times. At some point, a feeling settled on both of us that we were cutting the cord of time. You know, time which is always pushing us forwards, pushing us forwards, and even if we want it to slow down a little it never listens, so we give up hope of it ever letting up, but for now, just for now, time felt like it’d been unplugged and we had been given a reprieve. That feeling filled our bodies little by little, or maybe it came all at once, but there it was. That was what we wanted, so we tried to make it happen, and it actually did.
Like all love hotels, this one had no clock in the room, and we didn’t want to know the time. Of course we both had our phones. But they were turned off and tucked away in the mesh pockets of our bags. The bags themselves we set down against the wall farthest from the bed, because we didn’t want to have to see them, we didn’t want them to even exist. We were trying to banish time from our little world, to make it possible for us to say, what’s this time thing anyway? We’d have sex, then lie there all mellow. At some point we’d drift off into unconsciousness, beautifully, unaware who fell asleep first. After a short while one of us would wake up, then the other would wake up or be woken up. Then we’d have sex again. Since our little world had no clocks and no sun, it was hard to say for sure whether it was two days or three days or even just one.
But eventually we got hungry. We hadn’t eaten since we’d checked in, and we were starved. I didn’t think a love hotel was like a regular hotel where you could go out for a meal and come back, but we called the front desk and they said it was no problem. So we decided to head to Centre Street and find somewhere to eat. We put on the clothes that we had yanked off and left balled up on the floor.
Until we opened the door of the hotel we didn’t know if it was day or night. Neither of us had been wondering which it was. Turned out it was daytime. We could see the sun in the narrow stretch of sky visible between the buildings that rose in front of us. The sky was murky, the same exact colour as a cloud. But to us that was the only colour the sky had ever had. The sun looked the same as it did the last time we had seen it, which made us feel a twinge of nostalgia, weird as that sounds. We walked down the hill towards the Bunkamura. We passed a barber shop and could hear the “Tamori” show on the TV inside. So it had to be lunchtime. Where should we go? How about one of those, you know, lunch buffets all over Shibuya? We walked up and down Centre Street, checking out the options, and settled on a place that I’d heard about, an Indian restaurant with a ¥950 all-you-can-eat buffet. It was right near the big intersection. I had been wanting to try this place, but for someone like me with a shitty part-time job ¥950 is kind of a lot for lunch. But hey, the day was kind of an exception, and so we went on in. This could end up being like the best curry we’ve ever had, he said with a laugh. It was for sure the most curry we ever had. And even though we were both low-wage earners, we both wanted a lassi so bad that we shelled out the extra ¥250 and chugged it down.
During the days and nights I spent with him, things felt different. I wasn’t in my everyday mode, I was somewhere special. I realized this when we came down the hill to the flat area by Shibuya Station, and it was like we were walking around on the bottom of a huge empty swimming pool bathed in sunlight, although I probably felt the difference earlier, back in the hotel, and even back at the performance, when the feeling first started stirring. Now we were walking in the same Shibuya as always, but it felt like I was travelling in a foreign country. Weird. Then I began to worry that if I kept thinking how weird it was, then that special mode I was in would evaporate and everything would go back to the way it is all the time. So I made up my mind not to pay any attention to this feeling. But after a bit I began to feel I didn’t have to worry because the feeling didn’t seem to be that fragile after all, that it wouldn’t disappear so easily, and once I realized that I relaxed. I stayed in that special mode for the whole time we were together, which was a really amazing thing. I didn’t think I’d ever be so lucky again. Because after that mode switched off, the next several days were terrible. But I don’t think that cancels out the special feeling of those few days in that mode. I have never once wished they’d never happened.