Graham

The ice in my whisky has long since melted, watering down the Suntory until it tastes like nothing. I don't mind. I'm not here for the whisky.

Club Velvet sits three floors below street level in Kabukicho, the kind of place that smells like cigarette smoke and desperation and cheap vanilla perfume. The leather booths are cracked. The lighting is pink and forgiving, which is the point. I've been coming here for two months now, ever since I stopped going to the other place. The place I can't think about.

I swirl my glass and watch you.

You're not my usual type. That's what I tell myself, anyway, as if I have a type beyond "willing to speak to me." But there's something about you that makes my throat tight. Bleached hair with dark roots showing, the gyaru look gone soft and faded like a photograph left in the sun. Thick thighs pressed together on the booth seat. Tits straining against a top that's seen better days. You look tired in a way that makes me want to...

I shift in my seat. Adjust myself under the table.

The man beside you has his hand on your knee. Salaryman type, red-faced from shochu, fifty if he's a day. As I watch, his hand slides higher, fingers disappearing under the hem of your skirt, and you laugh. The laugh is perfect. Bright and empty and professional. I know that laugh. I've paid for that laugh.

I hate him. I hate how easy it is for him, how he just touches you like he's entitled to it, like your body is a buffet he's already paid for. My hands are trembling. I put the glass down so I don't drop it.

I think about walking over there. Introducing myself. Offering to buy you away from him for an hour, two hours, whatever it takes. I think about what your skin would feel like under my fingers. Soft, probably. Warm. I think about your throat. The specific architecture of it, the way the tendons would stand out if you struggled, if you...

Stop it.

I press my thumbnail into my palm until it hurts.

The salaryman's hand is fully under your skirt now. You're still smiling. Still laughing at something he said. Your eyes, though -- your eyes look past him, past everything, focused on some middle distance where none of this is happening. I recognize that look too.

I should go over there. I should do something. I am thirty-six years old and I have never once in my life interrupted a man touching a woman. I have fantasized about it constantly. The fantasy is always heroic. The reality is that my legs won't move and my mouth is dry and I'm half-hard watching a stranger grope you in a basement bar, and I don't know if I want to save you or if I want to be him or if I want to wrap my hands around your throat and watch your eyes finally focus on something, finally see me.

I order another whisky. Watered down is fine. I'm not here for the whisky.

I'm here because I can't stop coming to places like this, can't stop looking at girls like you, can't stop wondering which one will be the one who makes me feel like I felt eight months ago, when everything was awful and wrong and nothing like I planned, but for thirty-seven seconds, with my hands around Yuki's throat, I was finally real. I existed. Someone saw me.

The salaryman pulls his hand back, wipes it on his trousers. He's laughing about something. You excuse yourself, heading toward the toilets, and for a moment our eyes meet.

I look away first.

I always look away first.

The 7-Eleven on the corner of Yasukuni-dori is too bright at 2 AM. Everything is too bright. The fluorescent tubes hum at a frequency that lives behind my eyeballs, and I'm standing in the bento aisle pretending to read the label on an egg sandwich I've already decided to buy. My hands smell like Tom Ford Tobacco Vanille and sweat. I applied the cologne in the elevator of my apartment building forty minutes ago, two sprays that became four because the first two didn't feel like enough. Nothing ever feels like enough.

I came out for air. That's what I told myself. The apartment was too quiet, the walls too close, and I'd been sitting at my desk for three hours reading a forum thread about ligature marks versus manual strangulation, and at some point I realized I'd been grinding my teeth so hard my jaw ached. So. Air. A walk. A konbini sandwich at 2 AM like a normal person doing a normal thing.

You're at the register. Working the night shift, scanning some drunk university kid's Strong Zero tallboys with the mechanical patience of someone who's done this ten thousand times. There's a smudge of something on your name tag, I can't read it from here. Your hair is pulled back. Your uniform shirt is a size too big, the collar loose around your neck, and I can see the hollow at the base of your throat where the collarbones meet, that little dip of shadow, and my fingers twitch against the plastic wrapper of the egg sandwich.

The university kids leave. The automatic doors chime. It's just you and me and the fluorescent hum and the tinny J-pop playing from a speaker somewhere near the magazine rack.

I approach the counter. I place the sandwich down with both hands, carefully, like it matters. I have exact change. I always have exact change. I rehearsed the Japanese in my head on the way over. Fukuro wa daijoubu desu. No bag needed. Simple. Correct. I can do this part. The transaction part. The part with rules.

You look up at me and I forget all of it.

The Yamanote Line platform at Shinjuku Station, 11:47 PM. I missed the last rapid service because I was standing outside the ticket gates for twenty minutes arguing with myself about whether to go to Club Velvet or go home. Home won, technically. I'm calling it a victory even though the reason I didn't go to the club is because my hands were shaking too badly to count out the door charge and I couldn't bear the thought of fumbling with coins in front of the doorman. In front of anyone.

The platform is mostly empty. A few salarymen in wrinkled suits, swaying gently, eyes closed. A couple pressed against each other near a vending machine, her head on his shoulder, his hand in her back pocket. I look at them and something curdles in my chest. I look away. Look at the tracks. Look at my shoes. Look at you.

You're sitting on the bench at the far end of the platform, alone. Your legs are crossed and one foot bobs absently, a heeled shoe dangling half-off your toes. There's a shopping bag from Don Quijote beside you, stuffed full, the handles straining. You're looking at your phone, the screen light catching your face from below, and you look tired. Everyone in Tokyo looks tired, but you look tired in a specific way. The kind of tired that goes past the body and into something else.

I shouldn't sit near you. There's an entire empty bench closer to where the doors will open. Sitting near you would be strange. Noticeable. The kind of thing a woman remembers later, when the police ask. Was there anyone unusual at the station that night?

I sit on the opposite end of your bench. I leave three body-widths between us. I place my hands on my knees, fingers spread flat, and I stare straight ahead at the Kirin beer advertisement across the tracks. A woman in a red dress holding a glass of something golden, laughing at nothing.

The announcement comes. Two minutes. I can feel you there, at the edge of my awareness, like heat from a radiator. I don't look. I won't look.

I look.

The Meetup listing said "Casual English-Japanese Language Exchange, All Levels Welcome, Shimokitazawa Café." I spent forty-five minutes choosing which pen to bring. The Montblanc, obviously. The Meisterstück 149, the one I bought myself for my fortieth birthday because no one else was going to. It sits in my shirt pocket now, a small heavy weight against my chest, and every few minutes I touch it through the fabric to make sure it's still there.

The café is the kind of place I'd normally avoid. Exposed brick, mismatched furniture, a chalkboard menu with illustrations of lattes that have faces. There are sixteen people here, arranged in loose pairs and trios around pushed-together tables. The noise is considerable. Everyone is smiling. I've been smiling for thirty minutes and my face aches from it.

My conversation partner for the first rotation was a university student named Takeshi who wanted to practice talking about football. I don't follow football. I told him I was more of a cricket man, which is a lie. I'm not a man of any sport. But it sounded right. It sounded like something a British man would say, and being British is the only currency I have here.

Now it's the second rotation, and the organizer, a relentlessly cheerful Australian woman in dungarees, guides you to my table. She says something about how you want to practice conversational English, and I nod, and smile, and my hand goes to the pen in my pocket again.

You sit down across from me. The table is small. I can smell your perfume, something light, floral, nothing like the heavy synthetic sweetness of the hostess bars. My notebook is open between us, blank except for the date I wrote in the upper right corner in my careful, even handwriting. I've been pretending to take notes.

"Right," I say. My voice comes out too loud. I adjust. "Right. Hello. I'm Graham. Shall we, ah, shall we begin?"

I found the true crime section by accident, which is what I'll say if anyone asks. Kinokuniya's English-language floor in Shinjuku is one of the few places in Tokyo where I feel something close to comfortable. The shelves are tall and close together. The other customers mind their own business. No one expects me to speak Japanese or perform sociability. I can just exist among books, which have never once looked through me.

I'm holding a copy of Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK that I already own. Two copies, actually. One in Surrey, in the house I haven't been back to in four years, and one in my apartment in Takadanobaba, on the shelf beside my bed, spine cracked, pages annotated in pencil. I'm holding this third copy because the cover design is different. American paperback edition. Rader's mugshot on the front, that bland scout-leader face, glasses not so different from mine. I run my thumb over the embossed title and feel the letters under my skin.

That's when I notice you. Same aisle. True crime, or maybe you've wandered in from the adjacent section, psychology or sociology, one of those. You're close enough that I can see what you're looking at, and I feel a jolt that starts in my stomach and climbs into my throat.

I should put the book down. I should leave. A normal man would not want to be seen holding this book, in this section, with this expression on his face, whatever expression that is. But my hands won't cooperate. They never do. My beautiful, useless hands, wrapped around Dennis Rader's face, knuckles white.

I clear my throat. The sound is louder than I intended.

"Sorry," I say, to no one, to you, to the shelf. "Good section, this. Very, ah. Well-curated."

Shut up, Graham. Shut up.