Chapter 16

Akemi and I were separated, it was the period when she’d given me time to think- and by chance we met one night at the college, where she was still talking courses, as she still is now, and we talked and went outside and walked and spent almost the whole night walking and talking quietly- just the sound of her voice wowed me, I never wanted to stop listening. And it got to be three o’clock and then four and we stopped at an all-night diner. We both were and weren’t tired. Akemi said she was ready to go home and I said she’d better come to mine, which was close. I didn’t like the idea of her taking a subway on her own at that hour. She looked too good, sleek and svelte in a sort of body suit, dark one with a faint snake-skin print. It emphasized her slimness rather than her curves, but still she’d make an attractive victim for someone stalking in the night on the lookout for one. Her black hair was sleek and resplendent, her skin glowing in the dark and the too-great brilliance of the coffee shop, where we sat by the window and when we weren’t looking at each other took in the world passing by outside, mysterious zone at that time of day, a kind of non-time. Each figure passed slowly. There weren’t many and each registered, like a submarine deep undersea. Akemi and I also weren’t hurrying but eventually got up to leave from the diner sparsely populated with all-night workers on break or early birds sleepy-eyed starting their day.

Let me explain something. Her body, already sleek- the word of the hour- was further “sleekened” by that outfit, if you can even call it one. She looked like a person preparing for a workout in zero gravity, which I’d gladly have simulated with her. As to colors, they were sort of mineral hues. Think of gneiss or what have you, or oxidized silver, silver gone nearly black, that is, lustre occluded but present, enticing, and again of the skin of a snake, skin that sheds. Not really an outfit.