I like the transient coolness left on my hands after I’ve washed and dried them. This is caused by evaporation, which begins at the back of my hand and my fingertips and continues until the only remaining damp, chilled spots are the recesses between my fingers. Their webbing. I looked it up just now, this is called the plica interdigitalis. I appreciate that the smell of soap takes time to travel from my hands to my nose. I made a diagram for this.

I have been vain about my hands since I was little—an adult told me my nails were pretty when I was four, and ever since then I have never picked my cuticles or treated my hands harshly. It is not so difficult. I don’t paint my nails or manicure them or use expensive products beyond the occasional neutral lotion during winter months. Consequently my hands stay as they are—functional, clean, consistent, soft.

It was only after I had left the ward office this morning, having decided to take a train to 下北沢 in a fit of mania that I looked at my hands and noticed how dirty they had become. I sat in the corner of a small cafe run by a man in a striped shirt and a beret—he smoked while operating the levers and knobs of the sleek espresso machine. He frothed cream and decanted pour-over coffee. It was all very cool. The smoke off his cigarette, a bluish grey, wreathed him. The stains on my hands were from blue Pilot ink and the sticky crimson of 朱肉, their confluences forming a contusive argument of tickmarks. These wounds seemed minor in comparison to the volume of paperwork I had been instructed to infill, sign, stamp, have notarized. I recalled the notary, a stranger to both of us called in from a neighboring ward who watched quietly from a side table, periodically injecting the authority of a witness to the increasingly absurd documents, which were covered in terms so impenetrable that they may well have been elaborate jokes. I am not yet sure they weren’t. A form to affirm that jurisdiction for the search could be transferred to one of five neighboring wards who had a previous agreement dating to the 1970s for sharing cases such as this, another form for wards outside of this consortium but inside of the major metropolitan 23, another form again for 千葉県 and finally a stopgap form for yet unconsidered locations, not including 沖縄 of course (which I was told was somewhere we best not even consider for now, such was the volume of paperwork it implied), none of these forms including the extreme north of 東北, despite my reminder that my boyfriend had last sent me a message from his hotel in 青森市, some 700 km away.

It was the longest conversation I’ve had about my boyfriend ever, including with him. He wasn’t prone to self-exegesis, or else I was just uncaring. I know that his mother died when he was twelve and that his father hadn’t maintained consistent contact since he had graduated college and begun the series of research assistantships culminating here. He has one brother who runs a small selection of mobile phone stores somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, though I don’t know his contact information. This became relevant when it was revealed that my boyfriend had listed only me and his research supervisors as emergency contacts—this was not strictly legal for him to have done. This oversight was remarkably consistent, spanning his residency documentation, his lease, his healthcare application, his ドコモ contract, and so on. I shared the names I knew with the ward officer, but he seemed uninterested in them. This all, I am told, could take weeks if not longer, depending on who knows what, and outreach to US-based relatives would be left to the future.

It was not unlike a therapy session, save that the intended patient was not present, and there were no chairs to lie on. We finished at the two-hour’s mark, unceremoniously.

The beret-clad barista brought my drink, having arranged in the saucer below the cup of black coffee a triplet of cinnamon teddy graham crackers, a packet of light brown sugar, and a small silver spoon with a filigreed handle. I ignored the sugar packet but asked for some non-dairy creamer, which he provided after returning to the bar. He got back to polishing the La Marzocco’s chrome, lighting another cigarette.

No one has suggested that it is my responsibility to find my boyfriend. In fact, the ward officer said I should send no further texts, and that if I were to receive one that I should travel to a ward police box immediately. My responsibility for the incident, the 事件, if it ever existed, has now been soundly denied, its mechanism subsumed by the state—any connection between my personal actions and that of my boyfriend pried apart and reconnected by a massive, inscrutable switchboard whose conduits carry only stamped documents at snail's paces to and fro. Is this beautiful? It sort of is. If he were to appear now, unharmed and fully present, it would be almost embarrassing, I think, to me and the ward office. In such a world it is not clear even that his return would signal resolution, or if it would only represent one new instance of data to the ongoing case: the ongoing computation.

I am proud of this one—it has his voice, all of its failings and ridiculousness. But I can take it seriously too. There is something amusing to me in the careful treatment of uncertainties, which was most of his work, and which is generally seen as important work, though I inferred this importance mostly from his stress. Believe it or not there was no paradox in this, i.e., in a precise theory of uncertainty, just a sadness or disappointment that all the precision in the world served only to surround the uncertainty, to swaddle it or to glaze it attractively, not to remedy it, or to taste it. Men confuse knowledge with intimacy.

I tried to consume my teddy graham crackers and the coffee at equal rates, but ended up finishing the coffee first, having valued the ursiform biscuits too highly. I wanted them too bad. This left my mouth sticky and sweet, glutinous paste in my gumline, a film on my teeth. I almost considered ordering another coffee, but didn’t, flagging a check instead, nodding at the francophile barista. I think he said oui oui. At my cleared table I shot a text to the man from the theater, 小村, saying that I hadn’t learned much at the ward office, besides that the entire Japanese legal system depended heavily on the fax machine.

Our conversation continued for a little while; 小村 said his roommate was staying at his (the roommate’s) parents' place until Wednesday, and so wouldn’t be able to tell him about what he had heard about the ward community meetings until then, him being a rare texter. So we set a date for Friday, at a cafe that split the distance between our two neighborhoods. It will be good for you to get out of the ward, he said, sending a map screenshot that showed our intended meeting place just beside a virtual pin.