EPOCH -- Scene 29
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It’s an old buzzer, but it goes directly to her cell phone. Still, once it cuts out it’s full of static around her voice. Crossed wires. “Seiichirou?”

“It’s me.” Aoki reminds himself that Flower closed right before he left for California. Karen’s probably still in touch with the girls, probably still worried. She sounds it. He should bring it up. Just to check up on things, on her. “You ready?”

“I will be once I get my coat,” she says.

…She’s not inviting him up. Then again, she hasn’t for the last few months. But that’s not the kind of thing he should ask about.

The intercom cuts out by the time he’s told her “All right”, and Aoki switches the shoulder his bag is draped over and tries to hang the garment bag on the strap (for the fourth time since the airport). It winds up slung over his back like a jacket in advertisements instead. Oh well.

Karen’s apartment in Minato is on the Higashi, close enough to Tokyo Tower that there’s no view. But she owns the place, now—and she’s been good about saving, or more accurately, not spending—so she probably won’t move. Aoki likes it here, or at least the bustling nature of the place. The sense that the buildings are doming in over him; the sense of enclosure, almost imprisonment; those he could do without. And this time of early evening, what he used to call restaurant-time, is as quiet as it gets, and as sparse as it gets, with enough people to not just watch but pay attention to. It’s refreshing, to be here and not at work—to be here, and not at home.

The building has automatic doors, and they hiss. Karen looks great, as always, in a long fitted coat with the kind of collar so high that her chin and her hair hide the nature of the edge. She smiles, demurs from the compliment with a sigh, and asks him—

“You didn’t even go home first?”

“It’s Wednesday,” he says. “If I’ve got a date with you, I don’t break it.” And just to make his point, he rolls the shoulder his luggage is suspended over and smiles. That kind of smile usually demands reciprocity. He gets it, which just makes him smile more.

“Someplace close, then,” she says, and starts walking. “Are you hungry, or jet-lagged?”

“Both,” he laughs. “Moti?”

“Moti sounds good,” she says, and nods.

They’re already walking away from the Tower. Aoki’s feet move on their own, at this point. Nearly every Wednesday for ten years…usually starting in this direction…Karen in a long coat because old habits die and are reborn as things more sensible…this is comfortable. Even when it’s not.

“So how was California?”

“All right,” he says. “The industry’s not hurting as much as we thought it was, over there. I mean, if we hadn’t branched out to video games we’d be in trouble, but people are still buying the licensed releases and there’s enough of a faithful market that the company’s not in danger. More Americans are interested in anime and manga than ever before, so even if less of a proportion of them is actually paying for the titles, it’s still a pretty high number.”

“What were you doing out there this time?”

“Localization. Meeting with the teams, I mean.”

Karen nods. Over her shoulder, the Roi building is starting to attract its crowd. More people than usual, Aoki thinks—is there a big game tonight or something?

“Work is work,” he says. “I miss being back in the cubicles sometimes, you know? Things felt a lot less abstract back then. And people claim that when you get to higher-level jobs you work less, but no. You toil less, that’s true. But you work at other things just as hard. The chainsaw is more real to the trunk than the branches, after all.”

“But the branches wind up just as dead,” Karen says, scoffing a little. But Aoki checks—she is smiling.

“Ha, good point.”

They’re almost at the heart of Roppongi now, and the crowd’s getting denser. It’s not club-life time yet, and dinnergoer-time’s just started, so it’ll probably be hellish when they leave the restaurant. Somewhere in the back of his head Aoki’s still on Pacific Time, though, and that might be why it’s confusing to see people in pockets instead of waves. He wonders if he should change the subject now, or wait until they get to whether they’re going. Probably the latter. And it turns out to be the latter, for the long block and a half, once they actually hit the exit for Roppongi station. The Roppongi branch of Moti’s just beyond that.

He holds the door for her with the hand that’s not supporting his luggage and the garment bag. Against the bright gold elephants that loom over the lobby, and all the curved shadows and glinting glass that lines the dining areas, Karen and her coat don’t just stand out but stand against. He hadn’t noticed the color in the twilight (maybe all the proofreading is making him colorblind?), and it’s a very flattering wine-tone, the kind that could be red or purple by another man’s definition. She’s taking it off right now and handing it to the coat check. Her purse and shoes match the coat, but her dress is solid black. She also doesn’t bleach her hair anymore, she stopped that after she retired, and so it’s also black, but far from solid, with sections that take the dye better than others and a haze of red. When she nods at the checker and the hostess, it falls out from behind her ear.

Aoki goes to hand his things to the coat-check as well, then stand beside Karen until they’re seated.

The hostess is on the phone, so the manager takes care of them with the kind of questionable familiarity of a man who sees many faces and forgets most names. Ten years—five hundred Wednesdays, and several of them here—they wind up seated at one of the tables they often sit at, especially when they come a little early like tonight, in the corner farthest from the kitchen, with windows shaded by crystal so that the fluorescence outside seems a bit more magical. It’s a table for four and they sit juxtaposed, not face-to-face.

Water first—Aoki lets her pick the wine, she’s better at it, and she has by the time the waiter comes by. (Shiraz—and it turns out to be not quite the color of her coat.) And ordering comes easily as well, while the waiter is beside the table uncorking the bottle. They’re being doted on, paid attention to. Aoki wonders.

“So,” he asks Karen once the menus are gone, “how’s work?”

By work, he means new work—he’d never ask her how her old job was. But since she left the brothel she’d gone back to the church, and now, “Work is working.” She smiles, folds her hands on the ivory tablecloth. It wrinkles under her rings. “It keeps me from getting bored. A reason to leave the apartment.”

“And the priest?”

“He’s feeling better. He’ll be retiring soon, and it’s going to—”

“His nephew, right?”

“—yeah, his American nephew. And he’ll be fine with me staying on at the Sunday school. If I’m able to, I mean.” She sips her wine, keeps the glass aloft. “Since this might be the year.”

Aoki taps his fingers on the stem of his glass. “That shouldn’t change your mind.”

Karen just looks at him.

“Okay, okay. Another good point. But if you do, at least make it so that you can go back.”

“You can never go back,” she says.

Appetizers arrive, samosas for Aoki and soup for Karen, both so warm Aoki can feel it on his chin and the soup so boldly spiced that it’s more dizzying than the wine. They know Karen, and she smiles up at the waiter with one corner of her mouth before raising her spoon toward Aoki in an implicit toast. He answers it with his knife. (Western silverware, here—it’s more British than Indian, in some ways.)

He tries not to watch her eat the soup. It’s redder than her lipstick used to be, thick, a reflection, a residue.

“Look,” she says a while later, leaning nearer over the soup bowl, elbow sliding on the tablecloth. Her tone is hushed, her eyes dart a little—Aoki knows what it’s about, and sets down his knife, makes sure he’s close enough to hear. “Even if we do manage to save the world…we’re not even doing that, we’re…” She sighs. “Have you heard from anyone else yet?”

“No,” he answers, low. “But I haven’t been here. Does this mean you have?”

She picks up her spoon again. “At this point I’m convinced it’ll be 2012.”

“Or it might just not happen.”

“We should be so lucky,” she says.

Aoki leans back in his chair enough that the front legs leave the floor for a second there. “Well, whatever you end up doing, keep your Wednesdays free.”

Her spoon hits the bowl’s empty inside. “How’s your wife?”

He makes sure to chew and swallow the chickpeas first. “She’s fine.”

“And Yuka?”

“Exams are next week.”

“Is she ready?”

“I think so. I don’t know how I feel about her going into politics, it blindsided me a bit, but I’m proud of her anyway.”

Karen smiles knowingly. “She could do a lot worse.”

Aoki returns it on the surface, to cover up the fact that he’s really not.

He’s still got samosa left—he eats, she talks. “Young people are starting to figure out that they have to stop being young.”

Again, he has to swallow first. “I have to wonder if they’ve ever been young in the first place.”

“Oh, they have,” Karen says.

“Not if you go by the demographic shifts.” Aoki sets his knife down. “What used to be shoujo sure isn’t now. I’m peddling Lucky Star now—the American localizers were just calling it out, and they have to censor several of the jokes rather than explain them.”

“No, they’re still kids.” She sighs again, this time into the sliding end of her first glass of wine. The glass is haloed with it, like the crystals in the window. “They’re kids with the bodies of adults far too early.”

He pours her second glass. “At least Yuka’s an adult about adult things and a kid about kid things.”

“How so?”

And he refills his own while he’s got the bottle lifted. They might want another. “Well, she studies and she works hard, and she’s ambitious. But I’m pretty sure she still watches her dramas and reads her manga. We used to translate it together, that’s how she practiced English. We’d translate a chapter and I’d bring back the licensed translations for her to cross-reference.”

“That’s cute.”

“And it was fun. But that’s what I mean. She’s growing up but she’s not growing away. I still know who she is, and what she’s about, but she’s mature enough that I can trust her to go gallivanting off with her friends on Golden Week.”

Karen downs a long sip of wine and shifts, like she’s crossing her legs in the other direction, not that Aoki can see it. “So she’s enough of an adult for you to trust her when she acts like a kid.”

“Something like that.”

“Sounds pretty ideal.”

“You can meet her and Shimako if you want to.”

She’s leaning close. “You always ask.”

But then, so is he. “Your answer never changes.”

“I’m surprised your wife still trusts you,” Karen says—in an honest way, without innuendo, without insinuation.

“Does she have a reason not to?” Aoki asks.

For the entire time it takes the waiter and busboys to clear the appetizers and set down the entrees and rice and bread, Aoki tries to figure out whether Karen meant to answer that. And for most of the meal, he keeps the talk small—small and new and hopeful. The food; the thickening crowd as conventional dinnertime nears; how long it’ll take Aoki to get over the jetlag and where to go next Wednesday, when they do this again; how she’ll walk him to the station when they’re done, it’s on the way after all. Ten years, five hundred Wednesdays since he made himself part of her life—five hundred Wednesdays and some things that never change—

“Happy Anniversary,” the manager says, presenting them a bowl brimming with honeyed gulab jamun and sliding it to the corner between them. There’s a candle flickering in the center of the pile, glistening with wax and fire and sugar. “Our gift, to you—”

“We’re not married,” they say, almost together—Karen just slightly before.

The manager is ingratiating, grinning, teeth like the tablecloth. “Oh, but even so, it’s ten years since your first date. I can’t forget a couple so happy—”

“We’re just friends,” Karen explains. “But thank you.”

“Of course, of course.” The manager lets his hand slide from the dish, and leaves it set down between them. And he’s smiling, the same as before—the one that maintains, I make no mistakes.

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