cage quiet as a ghost, and he speaks so softly I have to semi-lip-read. He nods at the inferno, where a pizza is waiting to be boxed. ‘That my Eskimo Quinn for the KDD building? Customers give me shit if their pizzas get cold.’ The hatch opens a crack. ‘Is it dead?’ ask Tomomi. ‘The wasp is fine,’ says Onizuka, ‘but Miyake got mushed trying to leave through the extractor.’ Tomomi performs an overture laugh to see if she can rile me. Onizuka departs with his pizza without another word. Doi arrives back a minute later – I could swear his left leg was limping yesterday, but today it is his right – and Tomomi tells him about the wasp. The drug pusher and the queen of all evil discuss whether I am guilty of the murder of a life form. ‘It was only a wasp,’ I say, ‘there are plenty more where they came from.’ This is not good enough for Tomomi: ‘There are plenty more humans where we come from, so does that make homicide okay?’ This is too stupid to argue about – especially as Tomomi was shrieking ‘Kill it! Kill it!’ – so I watch pizzas inching through the inferno. When I tune in again Doi and Tomomi are talking about crows. ‘Say what you want,’ Tomomi says, ‘crows are cute.’ Doi shakes his head. ‘Crows are winged Nazis, man. The porter in our building, he chased one away with a broom. The next day, the same crow dive-bombed him and pecked his head hard enough to draw blood, man. A crow? Attacking a uniformed porter? Freaky, man. Kinda short-circuits nature.’ Tomomi sharpens her eyeliner pencil and snaps open her hand mirror. ‘The weak are meat, the strong eat.’
Ueno to Kita Senju is easy, even during rush hour, because outbound submarines are empty except for night-shift workers and eccentric billionaires. The subs heading the other way into Ueno are human freight wagons. Tokyo is a model of that serial big-bang theory of the universe. It explodes at five p. m. and people-matter is hurled to the suburbs, but by five a. m. the people-matter gravity reasserts itself, and everything surges back towards the centre in time for the next day’s explosion. My commute is against the natural law of Tokyo. I feel dead-beat. Giving up on my father is taking some getting used to. Ai is coming over to my capsule after her rehearsal, at about five in the afternoon. Her dinner is my breakfast. To my relief she asked if she could do the cooking – she prefers to choose what she eats because of her diabetes. To call my culinary repertoire ‘limited’ would be boastful. As I walk back from Kita Senju to Shooting Star, a weird cloud slides over half the sky. Cyclists, women with pushchairs, taxi-drivers stop to stare up at it. Half the sky is clear October blue – the other half is a dark funnelling churn of storm-cloud. Plastic bags get caught in vortexes and fly out of sight. Buntarois in the shop early to bring the accounts up to date after his week away. He looks up at me and sniffs. ‘I know,’ I say, ‘I know. I stink of cheese.’ Buntaro shrugs, all innocence, and goes back to his calculator. I crawl upstairs. Cat bids me good morning and slips away to her own dimension. I wash her bowl, change her water, shower, and decide to have a quick nap before cleaning up for Ai.
My face is melted out of position. My tongue is a pumice stone. Saliva, collected in my tongue-root gully, drools out on to my pillow. At my table, Ai chops carrots and apples. For a moment I think – I married Ai, and she is making dinner for our nine children – but then I smell the apple. Nutmeg too. Cat is licking her paws and watches me. Buntaro lets Ai up, she knocks, I am too deeply asleep to wake up, Buntaro confirms I am definitely up here, Ai peers in, sees me, goes out and buys food for a salad. Life is sheer bliss when it wants to be. Ai must trust me, to be alone with me in my capsule while I am dressed – or not dressed – how I am. Being trusted makes me trustworthy. Carrot and apple go together great. She is chopping walnuts – I never much cared for walnuts until this moment – and raisins, and