I'm writing this in the ドトールコーヒーショップ at the base a building which is part of a complex of buildings which together constitute the 東京大学理学部; the coffee comes in tiny porcelain teacups with delicate handles and is a syrupy, angry black color. The otherwise playful ドトール logo on the cup is chipped and worn, the bamboo-topped two-seater wobbly and light. I fidget. Adrenally, I am empty, in headrush, hot all over and incredibly rarefied and tense. A server in a ドトール uniform cap and apron sets down an cellophane wrapped half-rye half-white ham sandwich in front of me. ハム、ハム、ハム. I am going to pick at it for the next half hour and then leave, but for now I want to remain here, so close, still, to the scene of my little crime.

I broke into my boyfriend's office. He is in 東京大学理学部４号館. His office has a view of lackluster 小柴ホール, from the ninth floor, north facing dusty windows awash only with poor and suffocating light; also views of the co-op bookstore in its small arciform building, of the cairnlike entrance to the underground cafeteria in which I have eaten alone many times. 東大 is a little like an ant farm. If it were a different time of day the evil parallelogram of his building's shadow might invade the light natural airiness of the amicable ドトール, but it doesn't. Employees mill and a couple sallow students munch ハム. It is morning; the small forest around 三四郎池 was laden with dew and velveteen silence when I passed through, the 育徳堂's gravel unmolested and absent of the thwacking of student arrows. I arrived so early that the little plastic vestibules every one hundred meters along the long downsloping roads toward the science quadrant, for smokers, were empty and useless, refracting and deathlike still.

Sodium vapor streetlamps clicked off just around when I was passing by the old clocktower, near the second co-op, and the Lawson's. A student employee at the Lawsons in her blue apron with the milk-pail logo saw me and looked, before turning back to her keys, the shuttered shop. She is the only person I make eye contact with.

Front doors unlock automatically at 8, the elevators don't require a keycard, and I had his spare keys. It was so easy. His was one of the small offices, three people at most. The hallway smelled like soap and bleach but the office was humid, faintly sour. It was not, was never, about planning around some unknown office-mate's schedule, about being careful, but rather about completely and devotedly accepting the possibility of being discovered into my life. I wish I had been. Describing this now, half of the furiously dark signature ドトールコーヒー in my system, in my medulla, I am sure that I wanted to be found—that sometime later I will feel even huger disappointment than I do now about how ghostlike I sleuthed, how forgettable I was—but of course the critical instigating fear was real. The neurosis. The desperate and embarrassing desire to touch his stuff. I wanted to reaffirm, as many previously dependent people do, that I was not being misled, and that if he was really gone, then at least some evidence of his absence was strewn around, carelessly and visibly.

I find myself thinking about 小村 and his apparent inability to tell certain stories to women; how this reflects on him and also onto his roommate, who has laid the much sinister groundwork to convince 小村 that he is known, and respected, and part of something so jaw-slackeningly meaningful that it makes him revert to genital fixation.

I let myself be angry. I was angry that I didn't open the door and see his murdered body, packed on ice. If he had been hanging from a rope, or a belt, or a strong smart silk necktie, then my visit would have been cathartic, redemptive, or even exonerating, and I could have yelled for someone else to call in authority figures, who would have streamed in, and I would be understood in my sitting still, legs tucked underneath me, crying on the linoleum of the ninth floor, over by the large windowed hallway, where the view is beautiful among the nice potted plants.

Of course no note, no gruesome surprise. His computer, keyboard stowed embarrassingly in a keyboard tray, a couple of pilot pens, a few monographs on signal processing, coding theory, and the Laplace transform. The desk of the absent office-mate is full with vinyl figurines and half finished PET bottles of decaffeinated milk tea and wrappers—so full of life in comparison to the laughably morose triplet of M.C. Escher prints in postcard size which alone adorn the blank cream wall above my boyfriend's desk.

I stole the pens, the most marked-up monograph (Elementary Coding Theory and Applications), and a pack of spearmint gum.

Outside the glass front of ドトールコーヒーショップ are a row of 銀杏 for which the university is so famous. Ancient trees with their strange parallel veins whose pattern is, I discover, known as 'dichotomous venation.' Venation, veneration, venal, venereal, venenose, venusian, veneer, vengeance. Seeing the trees makes me immediately think of the color they will turn once summer is done—a painful saffronic yellow.

I conjure a fake memory: coming home to my boyfriend asleep on his side of the bed, under the striped purple duvet we fought over, his taste being against all things garish, colorful, or complex, and but the central focus or point of the memory being that on my white pillow, fluffed and aligned with the headboard, terminally still, was a single faniform 銀杏葉, like some sort of chocolate mint in a pricy hotel, except for this little leaf was exactly what my boyfriend thought I had wanted and would enjoy and love, and moreover was a metonym, a communication in real time from my boyfriend who was by then adumbrated in sleep but was nevertheless still talking to me, by the leaf, showing me he wanted to understand something fundamental about me, in direct and dramatic opposition to the complex and twisted purpleness of the duvet (the significance of his having wrapped himself in it not lost on me)—i.e., an attempt by him of understanding of a 淡い and 単純な truth, rather than a puzzle to complete, an aesthetic pose to satiate, or an insecurity to soothe, the net effect of which was to lead me unto sleep, into enduring sleep, my having found nothing else to do to suppress the insomniacing spasms of love just then radiating from the leaf than to place it on my tongue and swallow.

As a parting gift I take some keyboard cleaner from the office-mate's desk and give my boyfriend's dusty station a spray. Weak music perfumes the ドトールコーヒーショップ and one of the students in the back, a guy with huge black hair, puts his head down on his laptop.

On my phone I type single letters and characters into the youtube search bar, seeing what it remembers about me. In the same way that a waiter nervously covers the day's specials and recommendations I am given detailed low-entropy information whose actual utility is to be forgotten quickly. No one wants to be told what to eat.

My attention is broken by the clatter of falling and shattering plates, but when I look over there is no movement, just a student employee knelt over a pile of broken dishes, hands cartoonishly over his eyes. He could be making a birthday wish. I spend too much time in cafés, I am starting to realize, in part because of my excitement over the dropped plates and cups and saucers. Its cheap drama. Quickly enough another older employee comes by, not to help, just to stand in front of the student, perhaps an apprentice, shielding him, who starts to gather the pieces gingerly by hand. Jagged white musical shards. In the back corner someone begins typing on a chunky old macbook again, and then someone unfurls the saran on a half a ハム sandwich. I am, as is nice, filtered out, noise canceled, destructively interfered. If I were at home I would fall asleep on my big, white, vacant, unwrinkled bed.