Dead Hours — Off Camera, Page 6
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Five panels. Panel one: a silent panel. Kaito walks out from behind the counter to the wire stack of nested baskets by the door mat and stares at it hard, hands on hips, as though it has personally offended him. Panel two: he announces it loudly to the empty shop, one hand raised toward the stack, performing an outrage he does not feel and glancing sideways to check. KAITO: This stack is uneven. Panel three: Rin on her stool, not looking up, entirely unmoved. The phone stays face-down beside her. RIN: Is it. Panel four: the sliding doors part and the tracksuit regular walks in out of the rain — tall, shaved head, grey zip-up tracksuit, a clear plastic bag of empty cans in one hand. Panel five: the regular passes Kaito without stopping, delivering the verdict flatly over his shoulder. Kaito turns after him, caught out. REGULAR: You can't make somebody watch you. KAITO: I'm not trying to—
Image description
Kaito stages an outburst about the basket stack; Rin doesn't look up, and the tracksuit regular tells him you can't make somebody watch you.
About this chapter
3 A.M., rain on the dead-hours store. Kaito notices something he cannot put down: Rin's phone is lying face-down on the counter, and he works out that she has not pointed it at him in nine nights. Unable to bear being the one thing in the room not worth filming, he declares quiet war on his own dullness and sets out to earn the camera back before his shift ends, spiralling over whether a person can be interesting on purpose. All night he stages spirals that are not spirals — squaring the receipts, re-stacking the baskets, declaring war on nothing — then cuts his eyes to the counter and finds the same matte black back staring up at him, muttering the same dead-eyed '...still down.' A ladder of night regulars hands him contradictory, unverifiable verdicts: the tracksuit regular says you cannot make somebody watch you; a drunk salaryman insists he should break something, then fall over; a cheerful jogger beams that the secret is just to be yourself, which is the one thing Kaito cannot do on purpose. Rin dismantles every argument he builds without looking up, and has one flicker of near-sincerity late on — that it isn't about him — which she will not explain. Near dawn, hollow, Kaito gives up performing and simply works: mops the gangway, wipes the counter, restocks the rack badly, yawning, watched by nobody. That is exactly when the phone comes up, the running beat inverting — she is filming him at last, and only because he has finally stopped doing it for her. Then the turn: she lowers the phone, sets it down and says it flatly. Someone wants to sign her. For nine nights she has been writing a reply and deleting it, and every time she points the camera at him she has to decide something, so she stopped pointing it. Kaito asks the wrong practical question and gets no answer. Dawn light fills the store from exactly the angle the night began — the phone raised and filming him again, the blank card lying on the counter beside it — and Kaito, who spent six hours wanting the camera back, has it back and would trade it for the nine nights instead.