In three days a violent jolt will wake me in the night. It is the first quake that annoys me. My friend and his fiance will be up and walking around the house. Sliding doors to the tatami room, where another visiting pal is sleeping, will open, and she in her pyjamas will ask what time it is before going back to bed without another word. When I wake again she will be gone back to Osaka, and I`ll be under an extra duvet, and I`ll spend the day drinking coffee in and out of the house, on computers, telling people to stop worrying about me, while doing my best to figure out if the Japanese nuclear industry is full of liars or not. All I will want is to go to my lover`s room, and fulfil a romance about leaving Tokyo and starting over together in a far away place, but I`ll let her paint alone through the aftershocks.
The tea salesman insists to walk with me to the next station. His bag is very heavy, I suddenly notice, but he won`t let me carry it.
He talks to another salary man who is towing a small case on wheels. It is dark now. The other man`s walking becomes out of sync and he drifts away from us. He is not in our gang.
I take the salesman to a hotel and rest on the chairs as he talks to the staff. The staff suggest another hotel to him but his phone does not work and he looks nonplussed so I tell him he should use the payphone. But first he sits with me in the front window of the hotel and we realise how tired we`ve already become as we watch parties go to the desk to get turned away one after another.
After his call to confirm his room at the other hotel I take him to the bar of this full hotel. A small child is here in a Pokemon tracksuit. I think this is strange. I am becoming tired. He wears a soft silver pointed hat I realise days later is a quake hat for kids. The bar is empty otherwise and we order a bottle of Asahi Super Dry. Finally he sends email to his wife after he tells me he has two twin daughters who are thirteen. He is ten years older than me and I tell him I am jealous.
On the street he goes to walk back to the previous station where he will be sleeping this night and we part ways.
