Dead Hours — The Name, Page 10

About this chapter

3 A.M., rain on the dead-hours store. The tracksuit regular — the one fixed star Kaito has built his whole sense of order around, in every night for three years — walks in, and Rin greets him by name while Kaito, counting the register, doesn't hear. A beat later Kaito realizes with horror that after three years he has never once learned this man's name, and that it is now far too socially late to simply ask. He declares quiet war on a single fact — the regular's name — and spends the entire dead shift trying to extract it without asking: baiting it 'for our records,' hunting a worn-blank member card the system can't fill in, staging a fake lucky-customer prize, and finally floating deliberately wrong names hoping to be corrected — every attempt landing on the identical dead-eyed beat of the regular giving a tiny noncommittal shrug, lifting his clear bag of blank cans, and saying nothing. A drunk salaryman swears the man is 'Tanaka,' a cheerful jogger insists he's 'Yamada, runs the flower shop' — two confident verdicts that can't both be true and nobody can verify. Kaito even calls head office and is put on hold. Rin livestreams the whole vigil as 'Six Hours, One Name,' with one flicker of near-sincerity — that he's the only person alive who'd care what a stranger is called, that he's rung up ten thousand people and remembers HIM — before raising her phone again. Near dawn Kaito abandons every trick and resolves to just ask, honestly, like a person — and rounds the counter as the man heads out, only for the sliding doors to ding open onto dawn and the regular to step into the light without hearing, the running beat inverting into an empty doorway and a hollow '...gone.' Then Rin delivers the reveal she planted in the first minute: the name is Aizawa; the man told her the instant he walked in, an arm's length from Kaito, who was busy counting the drawer. Kaito gets the name six hours too late and from the wrong person; Rin's 'Six Hours, One Name' hits four hundred thousand viewers. Dawn light fills the spotless store exactly as the night began — and the doors ding as a brand-new customer Kaito has also never named steps in, Rin already greeting her by name, phone already raised, already live.