Honesty Shocker – ‘I’m Not on the Take!’ Integrity Revelation by Minister Stuns Colleagues!”’
I manage a smile, and close the door. So Kozue Yamaya is dead too. I feel hollow with pity for that scarred person who visited me during my week at the study of tales. But I would be a fool to get involved in this. Keeping this disk is suicidally dangerous. I stow it in the most unused corner of my apartment – my condom box under my socks – until I figure out what to do. If no foolproof idea comes today or tomorrow, I should drop it in the river and hope another addressee is in a wiser, stronger position. Uneasily, I imagine us lined up in a row on the bridge, all dropping our disks in, acting on the same cowardly impulse. I change the water for Cat, switch on my fan, unroll my futon and try to sleep. Despite not having slept for twenty hours, I keep thinking of Mrs Yamaya. I sense a weird week ahead, one with sharp teeth. My pulse thuds. An unbreakable spear striking an impenetrable shield.
I arrive at work as Tuesday gasps its last. By the time I have changed into my chef apron and white bandana Wednesday is born. A big group of off-duty taxi-drivers stops by to order an office-party quantity of pizzas, and I am kept busy for ninety minutes. The FM radio keeps changing frequency at whim, swinging between Chinese-, Spanish-and Other-speaking stations. ‘Tagalog, man,’ reckons Doi. ‘The stratospheric ether is hyper-pure tonight, man, I can feel it in my sinuses.’ He waits for the inferno to deliver his pizza, smoking a cigarette of his own creation in the cage. He rubs his eye. ‘Miyake, I got something stuck in the corner here – pass me a toothpick, man?’ I ignore my misgivings and pass him a toothpick. ‘Thanks.’ Doi uses it to pluck his eyelid down. ‘No good. Would you mind looking? I think a tiny fly flew in.’ I walk over, and peer close. Doi suddenly sneezes, his head jerks down and the toothpick punctures his eyeball. A jet of white fluid spatters my face. ‘Shit!’ screams Doi. ‘Oh shit! I hate it when that happens!’ I just stand there, unable to believe that reality is this grotesque. Sachiko appears in the hatch. I gibber – she shakes her head – I stop gibbering. ‘Falling for him once is cute, Miyake, but two strikes and you’re Mr Gullible. Doi, if you waste many more of those coffee whiteners you’re going to force me to be Ms Assistant Manager and dock your salary. I mean it.’ Doi snickers and I realize I have been had again. ‘Hear and ooobey, chieftainess.’ Sachiko addresses a supernatural agency above the inferno. ‘Is it my karmic destiny to oversee lunatic asylums, lifetime after lifetime, over and over, until I get it right? Miyake – one double Titanic, thick base, extra shark meat.’ I box up Doi’s pizza. He leaves in total victory. I keep thinking about the package from Mrs Yamaya. Tomomi slinks into the cage for one of her perpetual coffee breaks. She tells me how frantically busy her life is – ‘busy’ is definitely her favourite word – and asks how I know Ai doesn’t fakes her orgasms when we have sex, because while she was having her affair with Mr Nero she felt obliged to busy things up on a number of occasions, because men are so insecure about performance. Tomomi has a tarantula-in-underpants effect on me. She sharpens her fingernails and keeps prodding for an answer. I am sort of saved by a toy-helicopter-sized wasp that flies in – Tomomi shrieks ‘Kill it! Kill it!’, and runs back through to the front. The hatch doors slam shut. The wasp buzzsaws around for a minute, warily sussing me out through its multi-lens eyes, and lands on Laos. Hard to concentrate on the pizzas, but I prefer its company to Tomomi. I stand on the counter and clap a plastic tub over south-east Asia. The wasp strikes up a death-by-flugelhorn noise and tries to knock a hole through the side – I get unbearably itchy and, instead of making a portable wasp release-box, semi-panic and shove the tub over the extractor fan, which is flush to the wall. The flugelhorn stops with a nearly inaudible crackle. ‘Last of the action heroes,’ says Onizuka, fingering the spike in his lower lip. He always arrives in the