In five days my friends will not go to bed while they pack for the next morning`s emergency exit. I will stay up with them and see my friend get more drunk and then, thinking they may never return to Tokyo as it falls to chaos, he will show me his most valuable books in case I need to sell them. They will leave me at four in the morning for the other side of Japan. I will reassure them that I am holding on a day or so more so I can convince my lover to leave too - but I won`t know if it`s really true or not. At this moment I will wonder if this were Nazi Germany whether they would be the Jews who read the signs and had the resources to leave early. They will take the cat and I will be alone in the big house and I will wonder for the first time what ghosts may be there.
I walk on a long time, past a bus, and it passes me again, and this happens several times more. A man in a facemask crushed on the bus makes eye contact with me every time I pass. A sign says Koenji 8km. I walk on perhaps for five kilometers and then I see a sign that says Koenji 5km. Disheartened I come upon an open restaurant with the same name as me and I go inside. Tired staff, unreplaced from earlier shifts are frantic. I order a beer which comes cold and fast and a dinner which comes slow and cold from a manager in a crumpled shirt. When the room starts moving no-one goes outside. After I eat I go for a piss and try to be quick because I don`t want this to be the place I`ll be trapped and dying in, though I do suppose I could undo the plumbing and have water.
I leave and walk on, my brain thinking it is a soldier when my body hasn`t had the training.
