Our Italian-style oat milk café au laits came with packets of sugar and small oviform biscuits covered in poorly-tempered chocolate. 小村 ate his biscuit first, emptied the packet into his café au lait, stirred vigorously, and set the dirtied spoon onto his cloth napkin.

You’ve got some crumbs on your chin, I said. 小村 dabbed with the napkin, upsetting the spoon, which clattered and caromed and left a spider of coffee on the white tablecloth. The spoon, laying in its pool, like a little gunshot victim.

There’s nothing stopping you from writing down whatever you want and passing it off as what I say, 小村 said, noticing my notebook, to which I said something clever and subtle in reply. I deftly tucked a loose strand of dark hair up and over and behind my ear so that none would fall into my coffee while sipping, so my face’s germanic planes and angles might be better framed, might more gently subsurface-scatter the morning’s tisanal light through the window. He looked at me with a wry smile. We dined and ditched. We went into his bedroom. We were there for years and years, we got married even, before he eventually did something even I thought was unforgivable, right up and until the point where I forgave him, surprising myself and submitting to God, after which we melted into a pool of bliss and enduring mutual comprehension and sex. Fiction is my favorite, he says—smoke from the postcoital cigarette curling at the ceiling like an injured dog—it’s so brutal.

Most of the pseudodate was actually spent listening to 小村 meticulously describe his roommate.

We went through two café au laits each and many, many biscuits, one of the side effects of listening to long crooked conversations being, I discovered, an urge to snack. The two of them met in university, 小村 and his roommate, in a small reading circle comprising university students who met in university buildings and took university classes but who decided they were only university-adjacent: outsiders. The fact that it made such heavy use of university resources was in no small part to thumb-the-nose at the university, actually, I learned, against which the small reading circle rebelled by consuming a lot of outsider lit, developing a coarse shared lexicon and repartee, drafting extreme and somewhat juvenile rules or ‘manifestos,’ and drinking canned sake on the floor.

Only over the course of year or so of attending these circles, whose membership was nearly constant modulo a couple of abortive mixers with some other obviously less irreverent and subversive circles (e.g., the Byzantine circle, the Ancient Greek circle, the horticulture circle, the 弓道 circle, the 紫式部 circle, the sustainable agriculture and farming circle, and most disastrously the 19th century French lit-crit circle) did the habits and obsessions of the roommate began to unveil themselves.

The roommate came into a sort of limbic stardom or wunderkindness, apparently. This status was attributed alternately to the roommate’s eidetic memory, ghoulish knack for finding outsider art ephemera on sub-legal forums and repositories, exacting curation of shared circle screenings of relevant, vertiginously high-brow cinema, icily astute knowledge of constantly rotating local installations and subterranean shows, and most often and, to 小村, most direly and depressingly, a by-now vedic corpus of incredibly lengthy emails sent to the shared reading group list-host, which had until this year been scarcely used at all besides in rare cases of change of venue for the aforementioned ill-advised mixers.

小村 saw my face and reiterated that the emails were truly and absurdly lengthy, and while I might think this was silly, this was because I hadn’t seen them.

They weren’t filler—they were a ‘species of written word,’ of ‘graphology itself,’ even, that made the reader feel like he or she were ‘being dominated,’ or that they were being given ‘ECT.’ Such was their clinicality and penetrative power. References to the notorious face-melting Arc of the Covenant scene from Indiana Jones were made. Inline images, exegesis, pathos, glandular ache, subheadings and sub-subheadings and internal hyperlinks, not to mention delicate lacunae for stopping and taking breaths, for coming to understanding, for prayer and respite. Zettelkästenic. A prehumous nachlass. The emotion I hadn't been able to place in 小村’s voice until now was fear.

Maybe it is hard to understand that text can be like this, he said. Some days he forgot it was possible too, and then he read them again. Maybe you don’t believe me, but that doesn’t matter, he said.

小村 said that if he were talking to a man he would say that it was not unlike intimacy with someone that you love, which he has never said to anyone. But he is saying it now. He is saying what feels natural, to convince me of something. He is not sure if this impulse means anything at all, besides that he is feeling it. He thinks things like this whenever he tries to think about what the emails are doing, what they are for, and why he would not be comfortable employing the analogy of sexual intimacy when talking to a woman, and how this seems to be another point of the text, another feature or property that is mystifying and weird about it—and that perhaps all of his unanswerable questions about it are not unanswerable because they are complex, but because they are somehow extremely close, like one’s finger on one’s nose: impossible to resolve except in blur, or double, or with extreme intraocular pain.

What if your habit against woman was less profound and more psychopathic, I said. He said that he is just telling me about how he would talk about all this, if he could, instead of actually talking about this, which couldn't be done, he thought, ever. We were talking about something other than what we were talking about, which was almost always the case. I shouldn’t believe anything he said, even if such belief could even be conjured and directed. That doesn't mean, he added, that he wasn't trying to tell the truth.

Do you love him, I asked.

小村 stirred what was an almost empty coffee. Of course, he said, averting his eyes. I had a feeling 小村 was convinced he would be unable convince himself that he had convinced me of this love, even if I said I had been convinced. I felt very far from him. I became very aware I would not be sleeping with him, instead only stuck considering what endless horrors and curiosities it could have produced. And this was sad but comprehensible. The coffee was starting to make me a little sick, like three loop-the-loops back-to-back on an iron-rail coaster: loop, loop, loop.

I politely excused myself and spent a few minutes in the bathroom, dampening a paper towel and draping it over my neck. Had we really been consuming food and drink for close to an hour and a half? Had an older man with a bandana and an apron really set down the small porcelain cups with palsied and liver-spotted phalanges before whisking away the spent cup carcasses and replacing them? How many calories had been in all those cookies, and were they bought already covered in chocolate, or dipped somewhere in the back, perhaps by the old man’s wife, who had long ago given up trying to be warm to him but had, perhaps by pure accident, immersed herself in work at the coffee shop which, unintentionally, had pleased the husband far more than any shallow romantic gesture she could have ever conceived of? I let this flow through me. I vomited a little, but cleaned up.

Above the commode, next to an oddly-placed mirror, was a framed photo of a cat. Three sticks emerged from a bottle of essential oil on a side table, and a small box fan ran near the floor, sat in front of a small crude ventilation duct grafted through drywall.

小村 was writing something in a small MUJI notebook when I returned, and he was unselfconscious about it, continuing to write in it even as the old man returned and placed one wrapped strawberry hard candy in front of each of us. He took away cups and plates, until only crumbs and the blot of coffee on 小村’s napkin remained. What are you writing, I asked, and 小村 showed me a short list—the notebook was only about four inches high—of movie titles, which were mixed English, phonetic syllabary, and official Japanese translation. Almost all of them were action thrillers from ten to twenty years ago. Sometimes, he said, he forgets to write them down and then he never gets to watch them, so he was taking the time to record them. I nodded—not all of us can have a eidetic memory, I said.

Before I went home, as we stood outside the coffee shop, 小村 reiterated that he thought it would be helpful for me to meet his roommate sometime to discuss the ward meetings. It was the first time I had thought about my boyfriend that day, the recognition of which immediately brought back some of the nausea I had flushed away in the bathroom. But I agreed. Think of it as a little side-quest, he said, and I laughed, perhaps against his expectation, as he set his face again and apologized to me for what I was going through, as if he had been thinking about it the whole time, which as I walked home I thought must have been the case, and it was me that had been distracted, who had been cruel and lost in another place entirely.