Lit Fic #1: Sato. A short story in 5100 Words
Is she losing her mind? Hearing voices? Falling in love?
Sato • 佐藤
I
The door is thrust open. It cracks like a whip. A dirty blue and white tennis shoe hits the concrete hallway. It runs to the elevator as if the apartment building were on fire.
The elevator doors slip shut as the shoes are within striking distance.
“Damn,” the woman hisses. She bends at the waist. With no bend to her knees, she ties her shoelaces; a bra drops to the hallway. She wraps the shoelace around and then through the loop and cinches it tight. The shoelace breaks, snaps in half.
“Damn,” the woman cries out. She shoves the remaining shoelace into the tennis shoe and grabs the off-white frayed bra. She throws the bra into her purse. She straightens up, checking her blouse and hair in the elevator doors’ mirrors.
She misses a button on her blouse. She buttons it, smooths the front of her unironed blouse down and sees, in the doors’ mirrors, a man.
She has seen him almost every morning for the last seven months but chooses to ignore him. Again. He has not greeted her and she has repaid his kindness. She smiles at him in the mirror; a female habit she wishes she could stop. Like her smoking.
The elevator doors open depriving her of a mirrored view of her neighbor. She steps in and pushes One. He steps in behind her. They wait in silence.
‘Why,’ she wonders, ‘do I need one single solitary cigarette in the morning in bed before facing my day?’
On its descent the elevator gathers eight more cogs in the corporate wheel of Tokyo; men assigned to the sales division, women relegated to the accounting department, new employees in their seven-month old professionally ironed shirts and blouses, new highly polished shoes, and two old men in rumpled suits, broken shoes, reeking of cigarette smoke and cheap alcohol.
One of the old men nods to her.
“Good morning, Ms Sato.” His voice almost cheerful but she notices him staring at her chest although he attempts to hide his gaze by looking down at her shoes.
“Good morning, Mr Goto,” she replies cheerfully. She looks down at her breasts. ‘Are my nipples showing?’ she wonders.
Mr Goto sees her bowing her head and averting her gaze as a sign of her modesty and her subservience to the older male. He feels emboldened. He feels as if a shrine maiden has elevated him to the highest rank of samurai. He does not smile; a samurai is not allowed to smile. But inwardly he feels joy. Happiness. A twinge of sexual pleasure that he hasn’t had lately.
The elevator doors open and the eight passengers flow out. Rushing like homing pigeons they scurry to different platforms at different subway stations.
Sato is hampered in this race by her loose blue and white tennis shoe, but she limps and shuffles quickly.
She is overtaken by hordes of businessmen and office ladies as they race past skyscrapers owned by the Mori, Marubeni or another 57-story edifice seasoned with a generous sprinkling of Tokyo University graduates tolerating their seniority-based climb up Mitsubishi bank’s long and lonely executive track.
Her untied shoe breaks down. It flops off her foot. She stumbles a few steps in her nylon-ed feet. She’s bumped by busy people. She swims upstream to retrieve her blue and white tennis shoe. She hops and fights the current until she can cuddle against the granite chest of a skyscraper. She lifts a foot to slip into the errant shoe.
“Suuneeeka,” a voice hisses. The Japanese word for ‘sneaker’ echoes against the concrete.
She jumps. She scans the crowd. She looks left and right. She looks up. No one. No one seems to be looking at her. Or talking to her. Or admitting she exists.
She slips her blue and white tennis shoe onto her foot. She takes another look around. Sees no one interested in her. She hurries off to work.
Nine hours, or is it ten? hours later she slips her heels off in the women’s dressing room and remembers.
“Damn,” she says aloud looking down at her dirty blue and white tennis shoes.
“What?” Ms Kawakami asks as she slips on her jeans under her office skirt.
“I need to buy some shoelaces,” Ms Sato says as she continues to look down at her tennis shoes.
Ms Kawakami nods, unhooks, and unzips her office skirt, and drops it to the floor beside her black tennis shoes.
“There’s a place on the first floor in the building opposite,” she says looking north through the walls and windows of her own building, “that sells all sorts of stuff like that. Next to the coffee shop?” she asks hoping Ms Sato knows at least the coffee shop.
“Thank you,” Ms Sato says in English for no particular reason. But she knows the phrase has been usurped by Japanese speakers long enough that it is no longer English but a Japanese phrase.
Ms Kawakami nods again, says good night and strolls out of the dressing room leaving Ms Sato to deal with her street clothes and dirty blue and white tennis shoes with the broken shoelace by herself.
“Suneeekaaaaaaa,” a voice says.
“Who’s there!” Ms Sato shouts.
There is no one. She is alone with fifteen closed metal lockers and two flickering fluorescent lights that need replacing. Ms Sato crams her foot into the tennis shoe, grabs her purse, and rushes out of the dressing room.
The voice was deep. And slow. And chills Ms Sato’s bones. She hurries into the main floor with all the desks nestled together. Eight men are busy staring at their computers and one woman is closing her computer down.
Ms Sato looks but no one cares about the voice or her. Is the voice in her head, she wonders.
She turns away from the main floor and walks to the elevator. She hopes she is not alone when it drops to B3, the third basement, where it anchors her building to the subway for ease of transport between the workers’ homes and their workplace.
She exits along with dozens of other tired workers who need a different subway or bus or are merely meeting a lover for drinks or a tryst at a local hotel before going home.
“May I help you,” the store clerk mumbles as Ms Sato stumbles into the store.
“A pair of shoelaces,” she announces quietly. “Pink or orange,” she adds by way of clarification.
“We have black?” the clerk asks hoping this customer won’t argue but merely agree, buy the shoelaces, and disappear into the night.
“Do you have pink or orange?” Ms Sato asks.
The clerk sighs and pushes herself away from the cash register counter. “This way, please,” she says. She leads Ms Sato through the labyrinth that is the store’s parallel shelving to a rack of shoelaces in a rainbow of colors including pink, orange, and black.
Ms Sato grabs a pink lace. “This’ll do,” she states and heads back to the cash register. She is pleased. She smiles. The clerk wonders what is so wonderful about a shoelace.
‘Now,’ Ms Sato says to herself ‘I have one pink and one orange shoelace to go with my beautiful dirty blue and white tennis shoes.’
She looks north to her subway stop. The road, crammed with taxis, cars, buses, trucks, and motorcycles, is surrounded by concrete and glass skyscrapers that block out the dying light from Earth’s nearest star.
She looks south. The same scenario works its way into existence. She looks at the coffee shop. She heads inside.
“A giant frothy thing,” she says to the overly cheerful barista.
“Giant frothy…?” the barista smiles back at Ms Sato.
“You know,” Ms Sato counters and points at the menu glued to the counter. “That thing.”
“Oh,” the barista smiles and nearly laughs. “A frappuccino. Caramel, chocolate, vanilla, or pumpkin?” she asks.
“Surprise me,” Ms Sato says but knows the coffee clerk can’t do that. She needs a solid order; the barista frowns while still smiling. “Okay, caramel,” Ms Sato says and watches the barista’s smile bloom like a Northumbrian rose.
Ms Sato sits at her small table. She relaxes. and twirls the pink shoelace package around. She thinks of the weekend or her class or Toshiie.
Toshiie claims to be her boyfriend. He also claims to be related to an old samurai, a political leader, a rich person, and a famous musician so Ms Sato isn’t sure what he is. Ms Sato knows Toshiie is on the executive track at his job, whatever that might be. Ms Sato isn’t sure but she’s pretty sure his job deals with numbers, spreadsheets, HTML and CSS, and computers.
She opens the pink shoelace package. She begins to lace the pink shoelace in and out of the holes of her shoelace-less sneaker.
“Sunnnnikkkkka,” a voice whispers.
A blue and white dirty tennis shoe drops to the coffee shop floor. A pink shoelace flutters down beside it. Ms Sato looks quickly around.
Everyone seems normal. Drinking, talking, thumbing messages to their LINE-Facebook-Instagram friends that they’ve never met. Staring into space, thoughts a million miles from a coffee shop in Tokyo.
“Hello?” Ms Sato ventures.
A man at the next table looks up from his iPhone. He smiles at her. He is young and draped in the recommended dark suit of a new employee.
She shakes her head and looks away.
The man goes back to the consistency of his iPhone; he has no desire to deal with a crazy lady.
“Hello?” she says again.
The man refuses to look up; he thinks about gathering his tablet computer, his cell phone, and his mp3 player and going home. But the prospect of his small dirty apartment doesn’t appeal to him. He can put up with the crazy lady.
“Suuuunnniiika?”
“What do you want?”
The man gathers his bag, his iPhone, and his drink. He hurries out of the shop; a 45-minute subway ride and a small dirty apartment being preferable to a crazy lady arguing with herself.
“Sunun’nniká,” the voice says.
“Where are you?” Ms Sato asks.
There is only the silence of an espresso machine howling, dozens of people talking, the grind of traffic on the six-lane road outside, and background music overlapping it all with boring instrumental noise no one listens to.
“Hello?”
But there is no answer. Ms Sato sits in the coffee shop for three hours nursing her caramel frappuccino. Every few minutes she seeks to communicate. But there is never an answer, never a variation on suyuyenneekkaa.
She is, she realizes, alone. In a crowded coffee shop or a crammed street, she is alone.
She is alone at work, she is alone at home. She is even alone when she’s with Toshiie because he’s more interested in his job, his work, his career, than in her.
II
“Toshiie?” she says.
His reply is sleepy with a tinge of regret that he answers his phone so late at night. “Yeah?”
She looks at the time on her Airmac. It’s 12:32, perhaps too late to call. But, he’s her boyfriend, isn’t he?
“Do you think I’m crazy?” she asks.
Now he’s certain he shouldn’t have answered his phone, even if it is from his girlfriend; he had a busy day doing the same thing he does everyday. He needs to sleep. He needs to show up for work early and ready to stare at a computer all day and perhaps talk to his superiors in the proper tone. Refreshed. He can’t be having these long boring conversations to assure his girlfriend, so far as he could remember, that she isn’t:
fat • skinny • wrong • in the wrong job •mean to her mother • responsible for a colleague’s firing • too old • too young • aging poorly • had bad hair • should get a haircut
and now, crazy.
“Do you,” he asks, “have any cats?”
“No.”
“Then you’re not crazy.”
“It’s not that simple, Toshiie,” she says. “Can I be honest?”
He doesn’t want to hear that phrase. Every time he hears that phrase, that ‘Can I be honest?’ phrase, he has to spend hours convincing her:
she was okay • that he really was sorry • she was right • she was right while the other person was wrong • why she was wrong • not wearing a bra was okay
“Sure,” he says with regret.
“I think I’m hearing voices.”
He puts the phone against his pajama top and sighs. ‘this,’ he thinks, ‘is going to take too long.’ He looks at the clock on his Lenovo computer which screams out 12:42 limiting his sleep to less than seven full hours. He suspects he will be nodding off in the afternoon sun at work; not a good activity for someone the company wants to be a section chief someday; and a division chief later.
“Why do you say that?” he asks.
“Four times today I heard a voice say ‘Sunneekaa,’ or something like that.”
“Kawakami?” he asks.
“She wouldn’t do anything like that. Would she?” she asks after a slight pause.
“She was friends of Hashimoto, wasn’t she?”
“But that was a long time…”
“Not so long,” he says and instantly regrets it.
His computer clock twitches to 12:48.
“Do you think she still blames me?” Ms Sato asks.
“I couldn’t even guess.”
“She seems friendly enough at work. It wasn’t my fault, really,” Sato whines to Toshiie.
“Right,” he mumbles. “You pointed out the mistake. The section chief ignored you.”
“Right.”
“What’s he doing now,” Toshiie asks.
ssssuneeekraaaaaaaaaa
“Did you hear that!!?”
Sato doesn’t hear Toshiie’s answer. Only silence. In her room, not even the TV makes noise. From outside, nothing. No cars, trucks, or howling cats.
She jumps to her feet. She runs to the small kitchen and grabs a knife. She holds it in two hands as she checks the bed, the closet, the bathroom, behind the TV, the balcony.
Nothing. Not even a silent drop of a water in a full bathtub. No stranger howling ssssunnneeka at her.
She gathers up her purse, her phone, extra clothes. All the money she can find on the dresser by her bed.
She throws the knife into the kitchen and runs out of her apartment, not even locking the door behind her.
She runs to the elevator, stabs the down button, waits two seconds. It’s too long. She runs to the stairs and rushes down the eight flights. Hoping not to see anyone. Hoping not to hear anything. She bursts out into the short small lobby and runs into the street.
She looks up at her apartment with its light blaring. She checks the street. No one seems weird or interested in her.
Couples gliding back from a love hotel. Drunk gaggles of businessmen stagger station-ward with their blue-striped ties wrapped around their alcohol-flushed red foreheads.
Sato heads to the nearest hotel. An expensive one but she doesn’t have the nerve to stay in her apartment. Alone. In the dark. With that… With that… With that… Voice.
III
The hotel room is quiet. She turns on the TV. She’s relieved to hear the voice of a popular comedian telling jokes about eating raamen.
She lies on the bed. She hears her heart thumping, like a bass drum. She stares at the ceiling and doesn’t listen to the comedian. She listens to the air conditioner. She listens to the elevator slipping up and down its shaft.
She sits up and looks out the window. She sees a vast view of Tokyo. Lights in every building. Cars, trucks, and buses streaming to who knows where or why.
She watches the comedian tell her jokes; the same jokes she always tells when she’s on TV.
Sato drops her clothes on the floor one by one as she approaches the bathroom with its nice hot shower waiting for her.
Naked, she steps into the steaming hot water. She thinks of Toshiie. She thinks of his body next to hers on the big bed in the hotel.
“sssuuunnnnnnnnnneeeeee”
She jumps! She stumbles runs crashes out of the bathroom! She grabs the pillow! She jumps into bed! In the corner. Against two walls. The pillow to protect her. She stares at the TV. The walls. The door. The windows. Nothing. She sees Nothing! She’s afraid. She’s worried she’s losing her mind.
She looks for her cell phone. Over there. On the desk. Too far to go. Too risky. She sees the hotel phone. Beside her cell phone.
If she hurries. If she jumps out of bed, over to the desk, grabs her cell phone and jumps back into bed. She’ll be safe. She thinks.
She leans over slowly. She checks the floor. It seems innocent enough. Vague and serene.
She puts the pillow beside her. She concentrates on her cell phone. She looks around the room quickly. She looks at the window. Everything seems to be like the hotel carpet: vague indiscriminate boring.
She jumps! She grabs her cell phone. She trips on her shoes. She falls! She bashes her head on the bed frame.
Blood oozes from the cut on her forehead.
She hears: Ssssuuuneekraaaa.
She passes out.
IV
The walls are stark, white, and dusty. The bed is dressed in white sheets and a pale white blanket. A curtain surrounds her on three sides. It is a sickly green and lets in light from two flickering fluorscent tubes.
She thinks first that she has ascended into heaven but soon realizes she has a headache and she guesses people in heaven aren’t allowed to have headaches; headaches are verboten in himmel. She next decides she is in a state-run hospital. She’s frightened because she’s using German words she doesn’t know.
She touches her forehead to find a large bandage stuck to it. She assumes the source of her headache is beneath this bandage.
She looks around for a mirror but finds nothing. She looks for her hotel pillow but it, too, has disappeared. She stares up at the ceiling and tries to remember:
the voice • running to the hotel • leaping naked from the bed • hitting her head • the voice
She picks up a blanket and looks down. No, she is not still naked; she is draped in hospital chic.
She sighs. She’s getting tired of being scared of that gravelly, deep, menacing voice.
She hears another voice. A female voice complaining about a certain doctor’s manners. The voice stops when a door slides open.
“Good morning,” the female voice says to the room.
Sato assumes other patients are not surrounded by sickly green curtains and that the female is talking to someone, another patient.
The curtain is ripped open. There! Staring at her! A giant snake head! It stabs her arm.
Sato sees nothing; hears nothing. Feels nothing. Is engulfed in darkness.
“How do you feel?” a woman asks her.
Sato stares at her. Stares at the very unchic white cloak draped around the woman.
“Where?” Sato asks.
“Welcome back. You’ve been unconscious for about three days. You’re in the Minato Toritsu Hospital.” The woman doesn’t add Sato is in the Psychological Evaluation Unit (PEU). That’s best left unsaid until the patient is less… hysterical.
“Why?” Sato asks.
“You had an episode,” the kind woman smiles. “And cut your head. You have eight stitches in your forehead. You’ll have a fascinating scar later.” The woman smiles again, but Sato feels as if the woman is keeping a secret.
“Am I insane?” she asks.
“Oh,” the woman sputters. “How can you… A young lady like you? I mean, really, right?”
What has her age got to do with her sanity? Sato wonders. Why is this woman reluctant to just say ‘No’ rather than splutter about like a child caught in a lie?
“I’m Doctor Nitta,” the woman finally admits.
Sato sees the kanji for Nitta in her head: 新田 a name that can also be read Shinda. Meaning… Dead.
“What happened to me?” Sato asks.
“You hit your head and knocked yourself unconscious. When you first woke up you were, uh, a bit hysterical?” Dr Nitta adds the questioning tone. To help Sato understand more or to encourage her to ask a question? Sato isn’t sure.
“So we sedated you. Too much, I fear, as you were out for two days after that.”
“Two?”
“Yes, after you hit your head you were out for a day, then we sedated you for two.”
“I don’t…” Sato wants to say ‘care’ but stops herself. “I heard a voice,” she finishes.
“In here?” Nitta asks as she points around the hospital room.
“No. Everywhere.”
“I see. What did the voice say?”
Nitta knows her patients hear voices that might urge them to kill themselves, or kill others, or do other dangerous or illegal things.
“Shneeka, or something like that.”
“Oh?!” Nitta stands up. She looks around at the three other patients in the same room. They are strapped to their beds; they are heavily drugged. One never closes her eyes; not even to blink.
Nitta grabs her notebook from Sato’s bedside table.
“I, uh, I have a meeting,” Nitta stammers. “I, uh, I’m late. I’ll see you, uh…” She rushes out of the room.
As she exits, her notebook clenched to her chest like a life preserver from a sinking ship, Sato watches her.
‘Is that a tail?’ she wonders but realizes it was probably a belt that had come loose. But a tail?
Sato looks at the three other patients in their beds. She sees the straps across their shoulders, chests, thighs, knees, and ankles and is happy she isn’t strapped in, too.
Or is she?
She looks down at her body beneath the thin sheet. She doesn’t see any straps. They could be below the sheet, she reasons, and reaches down to pull it off.
V
The eyes open but can’t focus. Together, through the blur of sleep, they work out the color of the room.
Two hands reach up to rub the sleep dust out of the corners of the eyes. They brush strands of hair away from the face.
The eyes see. The walls are not pale white; they are muted but colorful. There is a brownish green small sofa against the far wall. A small stuffed bear lounges against the end of the sofa away from the window, Pooh stitched across his yellow hat brim.
“I know this place,” Sato says aloud to no one. She sits up. She sees the bluish kitchenette leading to the red front door. She sees a TV shoved into one corner.
“This is my place,” she says, happy to be out of the hospital, happy to be safe in her own room.
“Wait,” she says. She thinks, how’d I get here? What about the voices? What hospital? If it was all a dream, is the voice gone?
She looks at the clock above the TV. The clock reads 7:23. Sato looks at the curtains that cover the window. Is it night or morning, she wonders.
She sits up. She wears her Hello Kitty pajamas bottoms with no top that Toshiie prefers if he spends the night curled up beside Sato, snoring lightly.
She stands. She goes to the window. She spreads the curtains open. It is dark. But is it night dark or morning dark?
She reaches for the TV remote and pushes it on.
It flickers. It jumps alive. A newscaster’s concerned face bursts into Sato’s small apartment. She recognizes him as the morning announcer.
“Ah,” Sato smiles. “Morning has broken.” She watches the newscaster’s face morph from Concerned to Amused as the news shows a cat that surfs.
“Which means I might be late!”
Frantically and with great practice, Sato rushes through her morning routine:
• urinating,
• teeth cleansing,
• hair brushing,
• clothes grabbed,
• clothes slipped into,
• cigarette abandoned,
• a bag grabbed,
• breakfast ignored,
• off-white frayed bra shoved into purse,
• hurrying to the red door.
She looks at the shoes lining the entry way. One, her dirty blue and white tennis shoes dominate the space. One has an orange shoe lace. One has a pink one.
‘It happened,’ Sato mumbles in her mind. ‘The hospital. The voice. It happened.’
She touches her forehead. She rubs her hand across it. She can’t feel anything. She can’t feel stitches.
“It didn’t happen?”
She looks back past her apartment at the window with its view of buildings coming alive.
“It happened?” she says aloud.
Frightened, she jams her feet into the tennis shoes and rips open the red door.
A vast expanse of sunshine slips over the horizon. The air is cool, almost cold. The sky is a cloudless brilliant blue accented with skyscrapers and contrails from jets evacuating Narita and Haneda airports.
Sato speed-walks to the elevator where she meets a young businessman who chooses to ignore her while secretly examining her body. He has spent a restless night alone. Again. He wants to not spend nights alone. Will she? If he asks?
The elevator doors slip open, the elevator devours the pair, and falls toward Earth.
It stops to consume more corporate machinery in the form of new employees in new suits that are a day older than yesterday. It gathers two old men in their generational suits and unironed ties.
“Good morning, Ms Sato,” one man says.
“Good morning, Mr Goto,” Sato responds but isn’t sure it is a good morning.
The elevator vomits the car of people out on the first floor.
Everyone rushes in different directions as they have rushed on all the other mornings for the last seven months. They rush to buses, to buildings, to subways, and taxis.
Sato pauses. She steps to the side of the flood of humans. She leans against a pillar that supports the skyscraper that looms over the puny humans.
She waits. She listens. She stares down at her orange and pink shoelaces. She remembers buying the pink one. She remembers slipping it into the holes of her tennis shoes.
She remembers the voice. She doesn’t want to remember. She doesn’t want to hear it again. She is not certain. She wants to avoid uncertainty.
She watches the crowd as they march off to offices with desks crammed against other desks, their contents spilling out, encroaching on a co-worker’s territory.
Sato walks with the river of workers. Other people push against her, irritated at her disrupting the flow.
She waits. For the voice. She turns her head left and right as she strolls to her workspace. She isn’t in a hurry.
If she arrives late, what will happen? She will be expected to apologize; and she will. Will she be fired? No. Will her work suffer? No.
But she is expected to arrive with all her co-workers; with Kawakami and the other females slightly before the men; to clean. The men are being groomed to be Executives.
She is not going to be an executive. She is expected to marry, quit, have children, stay home, support her man, the executive.
She isn’t sure she wants to marry Toshiie; she’s sure she doesn’t want to quit working; she isn’t sure she wants a child. She is sure she will only support her man if he is kind, gentle, and spends time understanding and supporting her, not his company.
She steps into her skyscraper. The elevator doors swing open to greet her. But the car is packed with workers. She stares at them; half stare at their cell phones; half stare at the numbers above the door. None are smiling.
“This is stupid,” she says aloud.
One man looks up. Smiles at her.
As the elevator doors close, the man says, “Hey, Sneakers!” The doors slip silently closed, erasing his face from her vision.
He pronounces it not in English but in Japanese. In Japanese it is decorated with the katakana su instead of sn; ka instead of ker. His words came out not as Hey, sneakers but as Hey suneeekaaas!
Sato is shocked; she steps back. A body has been attached to the voice!
But!? How can she find him? What floor is his crammed desk on? What does he do and who does he do it for?! Why is he haunting her?! How can she escape?
She studies the numbers of the ascending elevator. She wishes she could fly or had stepped into the car so she could talk with, get to know, learn about this singular male who commented on her shoes; her dirty blue and white tennis shoes with the orange shoelace accenting one while a pink shoelace decorated the other.
She studies and memorizes the floors the elevator stops on. On one of them, she hopes, she will find this man, this observant man who speaks of Sneakers as Shuniikas and makes her happy with just his joyous voice: 5, 7, 9, 13, it rises.
It hesitates on 15. Why? too many people getting on? or off? Soon, 19, 25. All are odd numbers.
From the 25th floor, the elevator descends. She hops from one sneakered foot to the other. She will jump on the car and push 5. She will jump off at 5 and rush around like a crazed maniac looking for a ghost that doesn’t exist.
She’ll repeat her act of search and discovery on 7, 9, 13, 15, 19, and 25. And if she can’t find him? She has no time to consider that! She will find him! She will! She will put an end to her insanity.
The elevator’s descent is faster than its ascent because no one is going out of the building. No one leaves the skyscraper in the morning. Everyone is entering, going up to their floor, up to their space in the machine.
It comes down. Stopping at 15 again. What is on 15 that fascinates the elevator? she wonders. It starts again: non-stop to 5. Too long it squats on 5 as Sato jumps from foot-to-foot disturbing the next hired batch of employees waiting for their chance to ascend to their company.
The doors open!
Only one person is inside! Him!
“Hi,” Sato says as the crowd of working stiffs push around her, elbow their way into the elevator car, push him to the back wall.
He swims against the current and pops out of the crowd.
“Hi,” he says. “Nice shoes.”
“You, too,” Sato says without looking down at his feet.
“Feel like grabbing a cup of coffee somewhere?” he asks.
“Work starts soon,” she countered.
“So? Will your work miss you?”
Epilog
And so their adventure of life begins.