Dead Hours — The Trial, Page 14

About this chapter

3 A.M., rain on the dead-hours store. Head office sends a trial clerk, Toma — cropped hair, the same striped apron, a name tag reading TOMA, permanently cheerful — to cover Rin's shifts so she can take her agency meetings. Rin pulls on her hoodie, says it's a job, and walks out into the rain, leaving Kaito with a question he cannot put down: is she replaceable? Toma is fast, tireless and correct — he faces the shelves, counts the float twice, tops the oden, fixes the carton rack Kaito has meant to fix for a year, and brings Kaito a coffee unasked — and Kaito can neither fault him nor stand him. All night Kaito keeps half-turning to the empty stool to say something to Rin, and every time Toma, already three steps into being useful, answers first, leaving Kaito to mutter the same dead-eyed '...Right. Thanks.' A ladder of night regulars hand him contradictory, unverifiable verdicts on whether a person can be replaced: the tracksuit regular says everyone can, a job is just a slot; a drunk salaryman swears he was swapped out twice at his own desk and nobody noticed, least of all him; a cheerful jogger beams that you can never replace a person, only a position. Kaito spirals — if the slot is filled, and filled better, what was he guarding, and what is Rin if she is only the slot? Near dawn the running beat inverts: Toma, sincere for the first time all night, turns to Kaito and quietly asks what he is doing wrong, because he wants to get it right — and Kaito, who cannot say a false thing, has to answer 'Nothing,' and mean it. The question is settled the worst possible way: operationally she is entirely replaceable, and that was never what he was afraid of, and now he knows it. Toma beams '...Right! Thanks!' — the beat line handed back, cheerful, landing like a verdict. At dawn Rin comes back through the sliding doors; Toma reports nothing to fix, shoulders his bag and goes, cheerful to the last. Rin takes her stool, notes flatly that he was better than her, and — one flicker under the flat — asks whether Kaito even noticed she was gone; he says, honestly, that he did. She raises the phone and films him. Final page, flat grey dawn, the exact camera angle of page one: Toma gone, Rin back on her stool with the phone up, and Kaito turns to say something to her at last — and this time she is there to answer. He only says her name; she says 'What'; he says 'Nothing' — the same word he gave Toma, meaning the opposite of everything. The slot was never the job. It was who sat in it.