My husband is not the sort of person who brings work home with him, he doesn’t talk about how tired he is, or complain about his co-workers. Instead he brings home beer. He likes these tall cans of cheap low-malt beer, which is what he was drinking when I chopped his game controller cord in half. Why doesn’t he ever feel any rage towards me, even a little? Even when I do something like that?
When I finally calmed down, he quietly slipped out of the apartment. He was so quiet and downcast he seemed almost apologetic, not angry at all. He put on his shoes with such care that it didn’t make a sound. Then he left, headed out to the closest convenience store.
It’s down the hill, not all the way down, a little before the street hits the wider road.
If you go up the hill instead, there are no shops or stores. Just a postbox a few steps up. It’s a gentle slope at first, with the path stretching up in a straight line. Then you come to a little tunnel. Right on the other side it gets really steep and the path starts to snake back and forth. Eventually you come to a set of stairs.
The surface of the path is asphalt, but the stairs are concrete, a concrete so white that in bright light the dirt on it shows. The asphalt smells like asphalt, and the concrete smells like concrete.
The stairs don’t go all the way to the top of the hill, they stop short around twenty metres from the top. From there it’s a path again. But still concrete. Regularly spaced on the concrete path are circular depressions twenty centimetres across, designed I guess to keep you from slipping.
When the slope rounds off and you can walk easily again, there’s really nothing up there—a pay parking lot, a vacant lot where maybe they’ll put in another pay parking lot, another site that’s just dry, bare earth, a storage shed by an abandoned croquet court. There’s an elementary school and a junior high school. But neither of those has anything to do with us. It doesn’t make one bit of difference to us whether the schoolyard’s full of kids or their ghosts.
There’s a library and a low-slung building that serves as the local community centre.
Part of the hilltop is a park. In the middle is a tall stand of broad-leafed trees. When you go in, though, it doesn’t feel like the trees are pressing in around you. There are other trees dotting the rest of the park too. There’s a long slide that dips down the side of the hill.
I sat waiting for my husband. The TV was on but I just listened, didn’t watch, looked instead at my phone, reading my horoscope. As my husband approached the convenience store, he seemed to be basking in a warm light, the way it was coming from the store. Stepping inside, he took a free help-wanted weekly from the rack by the entrance.
By the time he came back home, I had finished reading my horoscope and was about to check what kind of luck he was going to have this week.
The job listings said that there was a drugstore hiring not far from our place.
The next morning my husband called exactly when the listing said they’d start taking calls. He hadn’t finished his toast yet, but they were taking calls so he called. I sat there and listened while he arranged a time to go there and apply. Then the morning after that he left home and went straight to the drugstore. Before the day was over he texted me that he got the job.
He started the next day. At first it was all training. Instead of this happening at the actual store where he was going to work, he was sent to the company headquarters in Nishi Shinjuku. One of the floors in the building was all training space. He arrived just before nine. There were three people already seated in the room. He thought there would be more.
There were long folding tables on castors, set up like a classroom. In the front of the room was an electronic whiteboard with a printer attached. The three other people were seated at the back, so my husband went and sat with them. One more person joined them, and immediately after that in walked some people whose smiles and haircuts and clothes told you right away they were the training staff.
The trainers introduced themselves and welcomed the new hires. Then they broke down the training: the next four days will be the first part of the course where you’ll work in a group right here in our training facilities, and for the second part of the course you’ll be at the actual stores where you’ll be working and that on-the-job training will be for three days. My husband and the other four new hires were then given a sheet of paper, which listed the year of the company’s founding, number of employees, previous year’s sales, profit overview from the past five years, the year the company was listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Second Section, the year it aims to be bumped up to the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s First Section. The training staff recited everything written on the paper. Then they showed training videos on customer service and operating the register. The lights were lowered for this.
As this was happening more people trickled into the room, until eventually there were around twenty people who all must have been new hires.
I try to just lie flat on my back but my body won’t cooperate. One side or the other seems to drift. I’m all twisted, and it doesn’t seem like I’ll ever be able to get back to normal.
I thought my husband would be going to work at the drugstore from day one. Was the fact that he didn’t
