Tomorrow I am supposed to return to the ward office. I spent the morning convincing myself that my mild hopelessness is well-founded. This wasn’t hard to do. I would have been contacted already if something had happened one way or the other.

Like so many people our age he had an escapist core certainly, a perpetual emotional stomachache around which he was sheathed like a knife. But it wasn't critical. This leads me toward thoughts of abduction, murder, freak accidents, sudden deaths, and so on. But I can’t sense his fear from afar, like I intuited I might be able to—I thought it might manifest as an ache, a tenderness, barometric arthritis from a distant depression, or even an itch, but there is nothing. ESP, like love, is probably dead in the world.

The ward officer’s term, 超常現象, was not unreasonable then, if only because I continue to live silently in an apartment I am not paying for, consuming electricity and leftover food that is not under my own name. Maybe someday it will be—maybe this will never end and I will inherit, piece by piece, the remains of his existence, but for now I am living inside ghostly inertia, and the ride is smooth. I drank his milk from the fridge this morning, now at the edge of its shelf-life.

It is a great comfort to be a ghost, if this is what it is like. If there is no haunting involved and instead only a near enlightened simplicity. I could get used to it. I barely leave a dent in the duvet when I rise in the morning.

Some people don’t like having things explained to them, attributing arrogance to the speaker or humiliation to the act of being lectured at. I wish people would look past the obviousness of condescension toward deeper opportunities within it. Depending on whether I nodded or shook my head I could lead my boyfriend to talk for fifteen minutes or an hour, goad him toward alleyways of thought in which his uncertainties multiplied, bouncing infinitely like in a funhouse. I could lead him until he was so lost that I got to see his second, interior face. I hope he enjoyed this, I hope he enjoyed lecturing at me and getting tangled up in his little technical wondering, or else I would feel bad. It made him susceptible to jokes, too, and shame: a totally disarming humor and nakedness that even I let myself be taken by, becoming pliant for him. We became interesting to each other, temporarily but intensely.

I have started thinking more about infinities and endlessnesses—it may be because of the length of the summer days, or that I drink coffee too quickly and without food. I have taken to waking up early, meeting the calm sunrises of Japan’s unusual latitude, screaming at them in my mind, which requires no breath to sustain.

On Sundays a theater nearby puts on a matinee. There is no theme—the owner doesn’t announce the title until a few hours before premiere, meaning the films are usually digitally projected, though I don't care. The digital projector is last-generation, noisy, aliased, dimmer than it should be. The building houses two forty-person theaters, only one of which shows the Sunday afternoon movie, but tickets aren’t hard to come by and attendants are die-hard. I saw no reason to stop the routine today. The movie was a Japanese-subtitled version of the American film “Event horizon” (1997), a sci-fi-action-horror blockbuster, extremely graphic and choppily edited. The audience was almost all younger men, typical, and I was pleased when they shuddered with me. Gruesome practical makeup, satanic horror, decapitation, impalement, autoenucleation, luridity and gore. The cold expanse of space. The movie stars Laurence Fishburne before his break into public consciousness in “The Matrix” (1999). He is young and trim and the crew he leads is loyal and doomed. Space has a hell, and it's terrible. The monsters speak latin. For some reason a lot of the crew members can also speak Latin, and when the blame is ultimately place on the hubris of physicists, I can't help but agree.

The subtitle from the poster, which has been printed out and pasted in the window of the theater, is “INFINITE SPACE, INFINITE TERROR.”

Afterwards I walked to an open-air bar with some of the other attendees, ordering a highball soda. The late afternoon had cooled off considerably. The bartender was a young insectesoid, probably still in college, acned and kyphotic. He dosed too much whiskey in the glass, seemingly out of cluelessness. I thanked him for the four fingers worth of highball and listened as discussed the movie with two other boys next to me, pressing them for details and responding 'all right,' and 'fucking no way.' The highball was blaringly strong, hardly carbonated. I eavesdropped, thinking it might be fun to collect more vocabulary for the horrible and occult that I might otherwise never encounter. They mostly employed expletives though, smudging their vowels within a nasal, slightly pretentious Tokyo accent. Laurence Fishburne is the man, they said, totally fucking cool, really fucking cool, goddamn, I bet he fucks.

Halfway down my drink I was deeply buzzed, scrolling through various news and networking apps on my phone, enamored by the elastic stretch of the feeds when I swiped down on them to load new posts. Ping ping ping. There was only ever a trickle of fresh content. As far as I could tell nothing notable had happened during the day. I rediscovered this fact every ten minutes. No disasters. The bar's hum and the yellowing oblique sunlight moved around my head in a pleasant slosh.

During one of my deep stares at a wall one of the moviegoers, a different one from the two that continued to talk to the barkeep, came and asked me if I usually saw 'The Sunday Surprise.' This was what the theater owner had named the series: 'The Sunday Surprise.' The man had round metal-rimmed glasses and a neat haircut in a popular style recently imported from Korea; an unpressed linen shirt tucked into grey woolen-blend summer slacks that fell flat across his pelvis. I guessed college-aged, maybe a couple years graduated—something about his skin, how it hadn’t begun to thin under the eyes. I told him I came now and then, and we compared which ones we had seen, finding some overlap. We discussed these movies, none of which had been killer. Whether he recognized me or not, whether our meeting was at the end of a sequence of observations from afar, him being a stalker, he didn’t indicate, and I didn’t care. If he hid maliciousness, it was so well done that I deserved to be trapped. I mentioned that I almost didn’t come this week, and when he asked why I told him that a friend of mine had gone missing—I’m not sure why I said a friend. I said the person missing was a foreigner, that it had only been a few days, and that I had needed some distraction. All of this was true.

I expected him to ask about the search, if he was bold, or to offer kind words and then leave, if he was not—made uncomfortable at the mention of something as troubling as disappearance. I could understand staying away from cursed or unfortunate people by instinct. Instead he pulled up a stool and said that he had been hearing from one of his roommates, actually, who lived in the area, that people had been going missing in the ward. Not many, but enough that a couple of neighborhood peace committees had begun to mention it in meetings. I brought up my experience at the ward office, repeating what the ward officer had said, and he nodded along. Useless freaking bureaucrats, he said, and then asked me if I had ever read any short stories by Kafka. I should have expected this from the neighborhood, popular with literary types from a handful of small humanity-focused universities nearby. It was the reason there were thrift shops here. He summarized a passage from “In the Penal Colony,” (流刑地にて) in which the officer praises the overcomplicated torture device built by his superior, which has now fallen to ruin. This is what the ward officer was doing also, he explained to me, and I nodded along. I said that I hoped the ward officer didn't throw himself into the machine also, like in the story. In the story, I remember, a spike is driven through the officer's skull. Then I mentioned a passage I knew from “The Great Wall of China,” and we discussed whether it was possible for someone with a job like the ward officer’s to do anything at all. First he has to fill out of the paperwork, but before that he has to request the proper paperwork, but before he does that he has to make sure the office is accepting requests, and so on. When we ran out of jokes we remembered that the person I knew was missing. 沈黙.

I mentioned I was going into the ward office tomorrow, to hear news, and he offered well wishes, and I thanked him. I don't know what to do with people's hope; it's a sticky, misleading fluid. I mentioned that whatever it was I was in for, it couldn’t be as bad as what Laurence Fishburne and his crew found on the Event Horizon, and he laughed, agreeing, but then went quiet. I became annoyed at my interest in him.

He asked what an event horizon was, the subtitles having only transliterated the English word, and I looked it up on the dictionary app on my phone. It said 事象の地平面（じしょうのちへいめん）, which made sense: an astrophysical phenomenon, an imagined surface from beyond which things can’t return, and not just that it is difficult to return, I emphasized, but impossible. He said terrifying, and I agreed, finishing my drink. Then he asked if the reason I was so calm now was because I thought it was impossible that my friend would return.

We ended the night by having him him write his phone number into the notebook I carry. He wrote it so big and crookedly. By then it was early evening, and it looked like it could rain, though it didn’t, and as far as I can tell it won’t all week. I agreed to keep him updated about what I found out, and he offered to ask his roommate about what was being said in the neighborhood meetings. The meetings are filled with old woman, he said; such woman are thought by children to have four eyes: two facing front, and two back. How lucky, I said.

Even after hours, the bartender is still discussing something with the two young men—perhaps Sunday Special movies long past, from months ago, years, even. Maybe he never saw any of them, and the real entertainment was being told about it afterwards.

Following such a violent movie I ought to fear bad dreams, I think, though I never remember my dreams. This means I sleep very well. This does not mean, however, that my dreams do not contain certain essential terrors.