After a while he began to doze, and was jerked awake when his cell phone on the glass table rang.

“Hello?” The man’s voice sounded familiar.

“Uh, hello!” He instinctively sat up in bed.

“Sorry, were you asleep?” It was without a doubt Keigo’s voice.

“Keigo? Is that you?” Koki said loudly, and the phlegm in his throat made him cough. “Don’t-don’t hang up!” he managed to say, then coughed loudly and spit up the phlegm. It shot out and splattered on the DVD package of the porn film.

“Keigo? Are you-okay?” Koki asked. There were a million things he wanted to ask, but that was all that came out.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” Keigo said, sounding tired.

It was only six a.m. and he figured Koki must be asleep, but Koki picked up.

Keigo hadn’t called with the intention of missing Koki-but the moment he heard Koki’s voice, he realized he’d been hoping there would be no answer.

He was at a sauna in Nagoya. At the end of the red-carpeted hallway was a darkened room where guests could nap. The public phone was in one corner of the hallway. Next to it was a vending machine selling nutritional supplement drinks, three of the five buttons lit up indicating they were sold out.

“You’re really okay?” he heard Koki ask. He sounded as if he’d just woken up, but his voice was tense and strained, and told Keigo in no uncertain terms the situation he was in.

“So where are you?” Koki’s voice suddenly grew gentle. Keigo instinctively gripped the receiver more tightly.

He figured they must be tapping the phones in his apartment and his parents’ home, but they couldn’t be tracing calls from Koki’s cell phone. Still, Koki sounded too gentle and nice, as if he was putting on an act in front of somebody.

His hand was resting on the phone’s cradle and he pushed down hard on it. The call over, a few ten-yen coins plunked down into the coin return, clattering in the silent hallway. Keigo turned. Nobody else was around, just his own reflection in the mirror on a pillar, decked out in the light blue robe of a sauna patron. Keigo replaced the receiver on its cradle. He’d never noticed before how heavy a public phone receiver could be.

He hadn’t called Koki because he wanted to tell him something, or to find out what was happening with the investigation. The last few days he hadn’t spoken to a soul. At the front desk of the sauna and the hotel, he’d merely nodded or shaken his head in response to their questions. A moment ago when he told Koki he was okay, it felt like the first time in a long time that he’d heard his own voice.

Keigo walked back down the red-carpeted hallway to the nap room. Beyond the curtains he could hear a man snoring, the sound of which had bothered him all night long. The snoring man was sprawled out next to the chaise longue where Keigo had planted himself earlier and it made Keigo want to kick him. But he knew that he couldn’t-if he caused a problem here, that would be the end for him. About fifty chaise longues were lined up in the spacious room. These chairs-with their synthetic leather split open and foam rubber sticking out-were the only place where Keigo could now be free.

It might have been his imagination, but as he entered the nap room of the sauna he smelled a feral, animal-like odor. Even after sweating in the sauna and scrubbing themselves clean in the bath, if you put this many men together in one room maybe this smell is unavoidable.

Guided only by the exit light, Keigo made his way back to his chaise longue. The others contained sleeping men in a variety of poses. One man kept his glasses on as he slept. Another had skillfully arranged the tiny blanket provided them to cover himself completely. And then there was his next-door neighbor, gaping mouth emitting thunderous snores.

Keigo cleared his throat loudly and lay down, wrapping the still warm blanket up around him. His throat-clearing only made the man beside him roll over, but did nothing to stop his awful snoring.

When Keigo closed his eyes he could picture Koki’s face on the other end of the phone line.

Why did he make the call? And why to Koki? Did he think that Koki would be able to rescue him from this predicament? The more he thought about it, the stupider it felt. In school and out, he had plenty of friends and acquaintances, but he couldn’t think of anyone else he could call at a time like this. People tended to flock to him, and Keigo was aware of this. But not one of them was worth a damn. He might hang out with them, but deep down he despised them.

Keigo squeezed his eyes shut, trying to force himself to sleep despite the snores. But closing his eyes tightly only produced more memories, like juice oozing from a piece of fruit, and though he didn’t want to think about it, the memories of that night, and running across Yoshino Ishibashi by chance, at Higashi Park, all rushed back at him.

Why do I have to run away, he thought, just because of a girl like that? And lie here listening to the snores of a stranger? The more he thought about it, the angrier he became.

Why did he run across her again in a place like that? If only he’d waited until he got back to his apartment to go to the bathroom, none of this would have happened.

He’d been in a crappy mood all that night. He’d gone out drinking in a bar in Tenjin, and then got in his car, which he’d parked on the road, planning to drive back to his apartment. It was just a five-minute drive back to his place, but somehow he was terribly on edge and decided to go for a longer drive instead.

He was drunk. When he looked back on it now, he had no idea where he drove, or how he ended up at Higashi Park. At any rate he was in a bad mood. But he couldn’t pinpoint what was irritating him, which bothered him all the more.

He knew any number of girls he could call who’d sleep with him, but the desire he felt tonight was for something more violent, something fierce, like himself and a girl biting each other’s skin, drawing blood. What he’d really wanted wasn’t to sleep with a girl, but to punch out a guy. But it was too late; he couldn’t go back to that night and undo what had happened.

After he’d been driving around the streets of Hakata for two hours, the liquor he’d drunk got to him and he had to urinate. At the end of the street was Higashi Park, and he figured there had to be a public restroom, so he parked his car there. There was a sprinkling of cars in the parking lot alongside the park. After the long drive he was no longer drunk.

He got out of his car and saw, at the end of the road, a young man standing there urinating. His dyed blond hair was visible in the streetlights. Keigo stepped over the low fence and went into the darkened park. He soon found the public restroom. He ran inside, and as he was peeing into the dirty urinal, his urine smelling of alcohol, he heard a strange snorting sound coming from one of the stalls. It gave him the creeps but he couldn’t very well stop in the middle of peeing.

The door to the stall opened right then and he flinched, getting urine on his fingers. The guy coming out of the stall was the same age as he. The man cast him an ugly look. In a flash it came to him what kind of guy this was, and Keigo, the liquor helping, him along, called out to the man as he was leaving, “How ’bout sucking me off?” He laughed, and the man came to a halt and laughed, too. “How ’bout you suck me?”

This enraged Keigo for an instant, but the piss was still coming out hard and he couldn’t make a move to hit the guy. He finally finished peeing and ran out in pursuit. The scattered streetlights made the park seem even gloomier. Keigo gazed around, checking the bushes and the walking path, but couldn’t spot him.

Being made fun of by someone he’d made fun of-the frustration shot through him. His body should have shrunk back in the wintry wind, but it was filled with a blazing hot irritation. If he could only find the guy and pound him, this bitterness that had filled him all night would be blown away. If he could get hit back as hard as he hit the other guy, maybe even get a bloody nose, he could finally get rid of this pointless frustration.