For The Sake of Convenience
The other day, a man came into the convenience store where I work. He placed a bottle of water on the counter and a handful of coins next to it.
As I sorted through the coins for the 109 yen to pay for his drink, I said, “What are you up to today?”
“I am going to hurt someone very badly,” the man said, “and then I am going to bash myself in the face with a bag of ice until I can’t feel anything anymore. But right now I am thirsty.”
I put the money in the register and handed the man a receipt. My phone vibrated in my pocket; a gentle, persistent buzz like an itch I didn’t want to scratch.
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
My phone continued to buzz even after the man left, but I ignored it.
——
Later, the man returned and placed two rice balls and a sandwich on the counter.
“How’d it go?” I said.
“I haven’t done anything yet,” he said, passing me a crumpled thousand yen note. “I’m still watching. Waiting. But I’ll do something soon. I’m just hungry now.”
Once again, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I had come to associate this feeling with attention — someone cares, someones notices, someone has something to say — and this was no exception.
I just wished the person was someone else.
“Okay,” I said. “Good luck.”
——
Later that evening, as the sun set over a Tokyo sky, the man placed a bag of ice on the counter.
At first I didn’t notice; my shift was wrapping up and I was staring at my phone, thinking about the list of unanswered messages piling up in my inbox.
“Excuse me,” the man said.
I looked at him, then the ice, then put the phone in my pocket and scanned the bag.
“You did it, then?” I said.
The man shook his head.
“He was not the person I was looking for. I thought he was, but I was wrong. But I hurt him anyway, because I’ve never liked him, and I am beyond caring now.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’ll be 432 yen.”
The man placed a 500 hundred yen coin on the counter and walked outside, where I watched as he beat himself in the face with the bag until it burst, spraying ice along his face, the glass windows of the convenience store, and the asphalt upon which he stood.
Then the man slumped against the front window, sat next to the garbage cans, and wept.
——
When my shift was over, I bought two cans of coffee, the most recent issue of Shonen Jump, and a bag of ice.
I knelt down by the man and handed him the ice. I put a can of coffee by his feet.
“This is for your face,” I said. “The coffee is for after.”
The man put the bag of ice against his forehead and nodded.
“Thanks,” he said.
“It’s okay.”
I sat with the man for a time, watching the traffic and the people pass by, and thought about a phone I didn’t want to look at anymore.
“My wife left me,” the man said. “She was seeing someone and I found out about it. I thought I knew who it was. I thought it was this smarmy guy she worked with, so I waited, and I watched, and when the time was right, I confronted him. He said he didn’t know what I was talking about, but I didn’t believe him. I never liked him anyway, so I hit him all the same. It made me feel good, but it didn’t help. You know what I mean?”
“I think so,” I said.
“But by then I was kind of done. Even if I hit a guy and even if I killed him, my wife is still gone. She’s lost to me now, and beating a guy senseless won’t bring her back. I fucked things up a long, long time ago. I just didn’t know it. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think so.”
We dropped into silence and sipped at cans of coffee.
“So how was it?” I said.
“Hm?”
“The bag of ice, I mean.”
“Oh, that.” The man looked at the small puddles of water by his feet, and the drying stains on his shirt. “It was okay. It was what I needed, I think, but probably a cold shower would have been just as good.”
“Live and learn, I guess.”
“Yeah,” the man said, and then, “You’re a nice guy, you know that?”
I shook my head.
“I’ve been where you’ve been,” I said, “and I’ve felt like you feel. Hang in there.”
And I thought then that maybe I should have told him, but instead I found myself thinking of a house in the suburbs of Musashino, and a framed picture on the television stand of a married couple in Guam, years ago, probably on their honeymoon. I thought about the suits in the wardrobe, and the golf clubs by the television, and the road bike in the study.
I thought of how I had come to know a man between bouts of tired sex with his sad, heartbroken wife, and how I had built a picture of him without ever having met him, based only on a framed picture and the artefacts that filled his home.
He was, it turned out, nothing like I had imagined.
So I didn’t say anything.
I simply got up, and went home.
— -
Music
(Chad Lawson — Heart in Hand)
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— Hengtee