‘And they’re paying ten thousand, each, just to talk? I don’t know —’
‘Hey,’ Ryo cut him off, ‘don’t worry so much. They’re paying, just take the cash.’
‘So why me and Murashita?’
‘Because you got the look. I mean, you know you do, right?’
The way Ryo spoke was so unflinchingly straight, Tomohiko found himself stunned into silence. It was true he thought he had the face for the big screen if he wanted to go there. He dressed the part, too, despite being broke.
‘That’s why I said not everyone can do this job,’ Ryo said, nodding at the evident wisdom in his own words.
‘And they’re not old?’ Murashita said.
Ryo grinned. ‘Not that old. I’d say probably somewhere between thirty and forty?’
‘That’s pretty old, man. What are we supposed to talk to them about?’ Tomohiko was starting to get nervous.
‘Don’t even think about that. Just keep the conversation harmless and you’ll be fine. Oh, you’ll want to comb your hair when we get off the train. Get some hairspray on that too.’
‘I don’t have any,’ Tomohiko said, and Ryo opened his duffel bag to reveal a stash of hairspray and brushes. He even had a dryer.
‘I figured, why not go all out? Make you guys into some leading men, right?’
At Nanba station they switched from the Midosuji line to the Sennichimae line, taking that to Nishinagahori station. Tomohiko was familiar with the place. This was where the central library was located. In the summer, kids studying for college admission tests would be lined up to use the study rooms.
They walked right past the library, going several minutes further before Ryo stopped in front of a small, four-storey apartment building. ‘This is the place.’
Tomohiko looked up and swallowed.
‘What’s with the face? Try to loosen up.’
Ryo chuckled and Tomohiko absently massaged his cheekbones with his fingers.
There was no elevator, so they walked up the stairs and Ryo pressed the button by No 304.
‘Yes?’ came a woman’s voice over the intercom.
‘It’s me,’ Ryo said.
The door opened almost immediately. A woman wearing a skirt and black shirt with more than a few buttons open at the neck was holding the doorknob. She was short, with a small face and short hair.
‘Hi.’ Ryo smiled.
‘Hello,’ she replied. Her eyes were dark with make-up and two bright red round earrings hung from her ears. She might have been dressed young, but there was no mistaking her for a twenty-year-old. There were tiny wrinkles beneath her eyes.
She looked over at Tomohiko and Murashita behind him. He felt like she was scanning them from top to bottom, like the light on a photocopier.
‘Your friends?’ she asked Ryo.
‘I told you they were the real deal.’
The woman smiled at that. She opened the door wider and invited them inside.
Tomohiko followed Ryo in. A dining room and kitchen were just inside the entrance. There were chairs set at the table but no cupboards or pieces of furniture other than the shelves built into the wall, and no cooking utensils in sight, just a small, one-person refrigerator and a microwave sitting on top of that. It was clear that no one actually lived here. It must have been rented for the occasion.
The short-haired woman opened a sliding door to the back of the room, revealing a wide space that had been made by removing the divider between two smaller Japanese-style rooms. At one edge of the room sat a simple, steel-frame bed.
There was a television in the centre of the room where two more women were sitting. One had her brown hair in a ponytail. She was thin, but Tomohiko’s eyes were drawn to the ample swell beneath the breast of her knee-length jersey dress. The other woman was wearing a denim miniskirt and jacket. Her face was rounder and her shoulder-length hair had a gentle wave to it. She was probably the plainest of the three, but that might just have meant that the other two had on too much make-up.
‘We were wondering if you’d ever get here,’ the woman with the ponytail scolded Ryo. She didn’t sound particularly angry.
‘Sorry. It took a while to get everyone ready,’ Ryo apologised, smiling.
‘What, you had to lie to them about the old ladies they were going to meet?’
‘Never!’ Ryo said, stepping into the room. He sat down cross-legged on the tatami-matted floor and indicated with his eyes for Tomohiko and Murashita to join him.
The two other boys sat. Then, almost immediately, Ryo stood again and the short-haired woman took his place, leaving Tomohiko and Murashita surrounded.
‘Beer good?’ Ryo asked the women.
The three women agreed that beer would be great.
‘Beers all around, then,’ Ryo said, without waiting for Tomohiko and Murashita to reply. He went back into the kitchen, where they heard him taking bottles out of the refrigerator.
‘Do you drink a lot?’ ponytail asked Tomohiko.
‘Sometimes.’
‘I’ll bet you can hold your liquor,’ she said.
‘Not really.’ He tried to smile as he shook his head.
Tomohiko noticed the women exchanging glances. He wasn’t entirely sure what it meant, but it seemed like they weren’t dissatisfied with Ryo’s selections. He breathed an inward sigh of relief.
It was a little dark in the room. Tomohiko glanced over at the window to see that the shutter had been pulled down on the outside. The only light in the room came from a single bulb that hung from the ceiling beneath a wicker lampshade. He assumed it was to hide the women’s age, but even in the dim light, when he looked at the woman with the ponytail, he could tell her skin was completely different from that of the girls in his class. It was even more obvious this close.
Ryo brought in three tall bottles of beer, five glasses, and a tray with peanuts and other snacks. Placing these in the middle of the room, he went right back to the kitchen. When he returned, he was carrying a large pizza.
‘You two are hungry, right?’ he said, looking at Tomohiko.
The women filled the boys’ glasses and everyone brought their glasses together in a toast that Tomohiko wasn’t convinced was necessary. Back in the kitchen, Ryo was going through his duffel bag. He didn’t seem to be joining them.
‘You have a girlfriend?’ ponytail asked Tomohiko.
‘Not right now.’
‘Really? Why not?’
‘Because… I don’t know, because I don’t have one.’
‘But I’m sure there’s lots of cute girls at school.’
‘I guess,’ Tomohiko said.
‘I know what it is. You’re picky. I bet you could have any girl you wanted. You should just start asking them out.’
‘I doubt that. Hardly any of them seem worth it, anyway.’
‘Really? That’s too bad,’ ponytail said, placing her right hand on Tomohiko’s thigh.
As Ryo had predicted, the conversation was completely harmless. They traded words without meaning until Tomohiko started wondering how it came to be that you could get paid for something like this, and why he hadn’t done it sooner.
The short-haired woman and ponytail talked the most. The one with the denim jacket just sipped her beer and listened. There was something a little stiff about her smile, Tomohiko thought.
The women were quick to keep the boys’ glasses filled to the brim. Tomohiko kept drinking whatever they poured. Ryo had told them on the way there that if they were offered alcohol or smokes they should just accept.
After about half an hour, Ryo interrupted, saying, ‘I don’t want to kill the conversation, but how about a little movie?’
Tomohiko grinned. He was already pretty buzzed.
‘Ooh, something new?’ the short-haired woman asked, her eyes gleaming.
‘Oh, it’s new all right. I hope you like it.’
Tomohiko had noticed Ryo back at the dining room table setting up a small projector and had just been about to a
sk what it was for.
‘What’s the movie?’ Tomohiko asked.
‘Watch and find out,’ Ryo said with a grin, flicking on the projector switch. A beam of light shot across the room where they sat, making a square on the wall in front of them. The white plaster of the wall made a pretty good movie screen. Ryo said, ‘Sorry, could you get the light?’
Tomohiko reached out and turned off the switch to the overhead light. At the same time Ryo started the film.
It was a colour 8mm reel. There was no sound, but it was obvious what kind of film it was from the first frame. The scene opened on a man and a woman, completely naked. Tomohiko gaped. There were parts of them plainly showing that he knew they never let you see in normal movies. He felt his heart beat suddenly faster. He had seen photos of this kind of stuff before, but this was his first time seeing the images move.
‘Wow, look at that!’
‘I didn’t know you could do it that way.’
The women were commenting and giggling. It was clear they weren’t talking to each other, but to Tomohiko and Murashita.
The woman with the ponytail leaned closer to Tomohiko and whispered in his ear, ‘Have you ever done something like that?’
‘No,’ he said, hearing the quavering in his own voice.
The first movie was over in about ten minutes. Ryo deftly swapped reels on the projector. While he was doing that, the short-haired woman said something like, ‘It’s pretty warm in here,’ and started taking off her shirt. She was only wearing a bra underneath. The light from the projector made her skin glow white.
The woman in the denim jacket stood abruptly. ‘Um, sorry —’ she said, then her voice faltered.
From beside the projector, Ryo asked, ‘You need to go?’
She nodded.
‘I see. That’s too bad.’
With everyone watching, the woman in the denim jacket stepped out through the dining room towards the door, taking care not to meet anyone’s eyes.
Once she’d left, Ryo closed the door behind her and came back into the room.
The short-haired woman was giggling. ‘I think the movie was too exciting for her.’
‘Maybe she just felt left out because you weren’t playing, Ryo?’ the woman with the ponytail said, lightly chastising him.
‘I was paying attention,’ Ryo said. ‘I just think she wasn’t ready.’
‘That’s a shame. After we invited her and everything,’ the short-haired woman said.
‘Who cares?’ said ponytail. ‘Let’s watch the next one.’
‘Right away.’ Ryo flicked the switch on the projector again.
It was halfway through the second show when ponytail took off her dress and leaned over until her bare arm was against Tomohiko’s. In a soft voice she whispered, ‘You can touch, if you want to.’
Tomohiko felt all his blood go to his crotch, though he wasn’t sure whether it was because there was a practically naked woman right next to him, or because of the movie. All he knew was he wasn’t getting paid just to make small talk.
His mouth was dry, but he forced himself to swallow. It wasn’t that he wanted to run away from the job. He just wasn’t sure he could do it.
Tomohiko was still a virgin.
Tomohiko’s house was near Bishoen Station on the Hanwa line, a little two-storey wooden house on the first corner after a short walk down a shopping street.
‘You’re back late. Dinner?’ Tomohiko’s mom asked when he came in just before ten. He used to get an earful if he was home after seven, but that had changed since high school started. Now his mom hardly spoke to him at all.
‘Already ate,’ he called back, before going into his room and shutting the door.
Tomohiko’s room was a small room on the ground floor. Originally a storage space, when he started high school his parents had cleaned out their things, repainted the walls, and given it to him.
He immediately sat in his chair and flicked the ‘on’ switch on the large contraption squatting atop the desk. This was a daily ritual. The contraption was a personal computer. If you were to buy it outright in a store it would have cost nearly a million yen. Of course he hadn’t bought it. His father, who worked at an electronics manufacturer, had used his connections to get one on the cheap in the hope that he’d be able to learn how to use it but he’d given up after two or three attempts. When Tomohiko showed interest, the computer became his, and after poring over books and hours of trial and error, he was now able to write simple programs.
Tomohiko turned on the tape recorder sitting next to the humming computer and tapped on the keyboard. The tape recorder lurched into motion, a warble of electronic static emitting from its speaker.
The tape recorder was for memory storage. Longer programs would be converted to magnetic signals, recorded on the cassette tape, and then read back into the computer’s RAM when it needed to access them. Cassette tapes were a huge improvement over the old punch cards, but it still took a considerable amount of time to read in data.
Tomohiko stepped away from his desk, returning to the keyboard twenty minutes later. He smiled. The shimmering fourteen-inch monochrome monitor displayed the words:
WESTWORLD
And below that:
PLAY? YES=1 NO=0
Tomohiko pressed the 1 key and Return.
Westworld was Tomohiko’s first creation, a simple computer game inspired by the Yul Brynner film. The game featured enemies that chased you, the player, as you navigated the twisting corridors of a maze in search of the exit. As he played, Tomohiko thought up ideas to make gameplay even more interesting. Whenever he had a particularly good one, he would interrupt the game and start rewriting the program. What had begun as a very barebones game grew increasingly complex and the joy he felt was, in a way, like watching something living grow.
For a while his fingers sped over the numeric keypad, controlling the movements of the character on screen. But though his fingers moved as fast as ever, he was having trouble getting his mind into the game. He quickly grew bored. It didn’t even bother him that much when he made a slight error and was caught.
Tomohiko sighed and pulled away from the desk. Leaning back in his chair, he looked up at the wall where he had hung a swimsuit poster. The barely concealed breasts and thighs filled his vision and, imagining touching that water-flecked skin, he felt a stirring in his groin, despite his world-changing experience of only hours before.
Yes, it had been world-changing, he decided, revisiting it in his mind. The intensity of it had faded somewhat, but he was certain it wasn’t a dream or his imagination running wild.
The sex had started after the third 8mm reel, Murashita on a futon with the short-haired woman, Tomohiko on the bed with ponytail. The two high school boys did as they were instructed, as their partners led them through the first sexual experience of their lives. (It was after they left the apartment that Murashita had confided to Tomohiko that he, too, had been a virgin.)
Tomohiko came twice inside ponytail. The first time he hadn’t really been sure what was going on. But the second time he’d gained enough distance from the act to fully appreciate it. The energy of a release he’d never felt masturbating blasted through his entire body and he felt as though he must have drained himself of semen by the time it was over.