A highway separates the shore from a row of aging hotels. Cars transit infrequently, tracing an S. The hotels are clustered around a hot-spring I learned has been visited for 800 years, if not longer, which spooks me, honestly. I don't think I've ever seen the sea look so sickly, so un-well. I have seen disused buildings before though, peeling cubes, though these hotels look especially old: taupe tumors of the '70s and '80s, all kidney-bean silhouettes, faniform porticos, zigguratish terraces. Bloat. They are old because they are so new. Because they would never make it 800+ years. Some are stuccoed and others have immense numbers of small navy-blue tiles and coruscant tar-paper shingles knit in ichthyoid lattices. Some of them sit on foundations of what might have once been blindingly white concrete. I am far away. Even from here I can still smell the sulfurous geo-thermed water: its calcareous minerals. My Airbnb is up on a hill, from which I spect and leer. I am drowsed. I am voyeuring. I think I am becoming alkaline like the water. The people who designed these hotels aren't even dead yet, probably, though they are probably in homes. The hills interrupt the narrow flat between the sea and Japan's cuspate interior, ridge after ridge of toothed igneousness. I am on edge. The incline is so severe that the back of the house meets the slope while its front perches on slender wooden beams driven down into clay caissons. And I am alone. I am remote. I probably lack the right angles to reflect radar and microwaves, evading detection unintentionally. What if there is a storm? What if the Earth's poles switch polarity and all elevated wires arc and explode, unshielded from coronal mass ejections? The owner included a small laserjet pamphlet on the history of the house and the keys and, for some reason, a selection of local coupons, but no emergency information, no maps, no whistles or crank-operated flashlights.

The highway has kept the sea and hotels from exchanging some necessary fluid or hormone, I think. Both have shriveled because of it, and it makes me ill although curious. Highways are very nearly demonic and regardless probably deeply injurious and bad. I once read some statistic about the number of deer killed by cars, or maybe some species of frog prevented from migrating to breed, or a type of bird whose sensitive internal magnetic sense is interrupted by slaggy iron filings impregnating the linear scar of a highway's asphalt and are coerced to divebomb headfirst into the blacktop. But here, far from the pitch incision down there, the trees seem to be doing fine, the wood of the house is well-oiled and pliant, night has fallen, insects susurrate and whinny, and beyond the highway lights and the multicolored awnings of sleepy restaurants the sea is, even if sick and unhappy, sleepy and black. Comatose but maybe someday convalescent. I have never had a problem with sleep, not even at the prospect of passing away unexpectedly within it—this was the fear that took hold of May when she was young. She wet her bed so many times Mom made her sleep in mine, which she wet too, though less terrifiedly, less furiously. Eventually a simple sorbefacient pad tucked beneath her became sufficient. She said that unconsciousness was one of the most insidious inventions ever to be made, years later, relying on all of the new things she had learned, in part because, she said, by all accounts of modern medicine, it was inescapable.

I attribute my relative calm to my near total lack of dreams: a sleep-specific aphantasia that indicates, I think, either grievous childhood injury (always possible) or else an amygdalic aversion to remembering whatever it is, while sleeping, that I see.

By 20:45 it is astronomical twilight. There are three kinds of twilight: civil, nautical, and astronomical, and each has a mathematical and practical definition. At astronomical twilight the horizon is no longer a distinguishable (and thus navigable) feature: all but the faintest stars and nebulae become visible. Throughout civil twilight people can do fieldwork. At certain latitudes some or all of these twilights are not experienced at all, or experienced for weeks on end as the sun traces a shallow lentil in the sky. Many people, I think, if only they had the chance to know more about themselves, would be terrified of geometry and its immense relevance.

The sandwiches I bought on the train are stacked neatly in the minifridge at the northeast corner of the room. I bought a bottle of green tea as well, although I drank it and refilled it with water, placing this also in the minifridge to chill. The minifridge has a small LED in its ceiling that flickers at ultra-high frequency. Will the water taste a little like the tea, still, later? The rate for the room was quite reasonable, maybe because of the place's size—no more than 60sq m—and its remoteness. The taxi fare alone rivaled a nice meal, though the pamphlet indicated that there was a bike I was free to use, and sure enough there it leaned, against a wall. My phone shows highs in the 80s all week, wildly fluctuating humidity, meek winds, but this is for the city, for the compressed plane down there covered in concrete and metal and bitumen shingles, and so must be hotter, surely, and more humid than up here, where no such rules apply.

I crave an email from May, honestly. Even one of the mean ones, or one of the ones in which which she references so many of her current interests that I can't help but feel completely dizzy and like shit. Even when she writes about Mom it is with energy, somehow, and by now she's been subjected to far worse than I ever was. I have begun to realize that there are many people who, when subjected to intense stress, to deoxyribonucleically rending impingement, are Lamarkianly or atavistically flexible—and that even if I know that such people can feel pain, and that were we to discuss it I would agree it was real and recognizable and terrible pain, that I would still find it easy to hate these people. May is one of these people, or else I think that she is, which is worse. It is worse because I can like her and feel it is not unreasonable to be able to like her. She still lives with Mom, she still studies rhetoric and Tang poetry and that small cadre of French authors whose names begin with 'A' or 'B' or 'C' or 'D' only, and whose resolute goal seems to be to escape language or meaning or television or something, and every day she doesn't send an email I feel like I know more and more about her. I ascribe so much intimacy to her silence that I worry sometimes I have necromanced her. And is it okay to hate her for insisting on staying behind, to in fact insist so hard on this point that she never says anything about it at all, i.e., only implies it, i.e., simply just does it silently? Is there a name for the hatred by the totally innactive toward the totally active, or maybe just an image of the totally active, a picture? Why are we so dumb?

If there is a special tier of hate then it is, as Dante probably alluded to at the end of that book he wrote, reserved for liars and especially for skillful liars who sculpt their face, their voice, their body and all its terror-secreting glands. The tier is worse than that for those who kill themselves, apparently; it is the buried-in-ice tier, the one where the big-winged thing chews on you and flays your back and you say nothing. It is dark and rheumy. It is where traitors lie supine while their tears freeze in their eyes. If there were a handhold in the messages from May, an indication of fear or more understandably of catalepsy or absence, then I would feel better, or be moved to feel less uncharitable, or else just be totally broken down and cleansed, but May seems too good to reveal such weaknesses, if she has them, although it is a most horrifying possibility that she does not have them at all. That I am like this for no reason, and alone. That I am staring through frozen tears like pendants heavy in my eyes, and the refracted image shows things as broken when they are not.

It is strange that any event would be held near here, on this marshy peninsula at the extreme north of 本州. I learn that they have weird accents here with phonemes like か゚, き゚, く゚, け゚, and こ゚, that the area was known in antiquity as the last refuge on the mainland of the Ainu, who are for most purposes gone, and that almost 60% of Japan's apples are grown somewhere nearby. That seems like too large a percentage. The most famous person beyond a few modern baseball players to be from here is 太宰治, and I download a few e-books by him, including the one titled 津軽, the name of this peninsula. 太宰's given name, 津島修治, contains the same 津, meaning harbor. It appears also in 津波, which is mostly what people think about when they think about Japan. My internet connection is too shitty to stream the black wall of water moving in.

太宰 tried to kill himself so many times it was almost comical, besides that he often convinced young and more ambitious woman to do it with him. I remember a short story I read, in the original, from a small 文庫本 I bought used; in the story a mother goes with her children to the beach, and the nanny who was watching the children has a heart attack and dies, and in the commotion no one watches the children, two of whom (of three) drown in the waves. They have to find them with long poles, probing the dark summer water. The mother must call the father, who takes the news calmly, and they continue to live. They experience the discomfort of marriage and grief. Years later they visit the beach again, recognized by only a few among the small town whose beach it is, but largely they are forgotten. There is kelp. I remember this story was by 三島, not 津島, so it doesn't much matter to think about, really, though they both killed themselves, which is mostly what people think about when they think about Japan. Again I think about videos I could watch, interviews and clips from old movies, but the baud is too low, and I am somehow unready.

I eat another one of the sandwiches I bought at the transfer stop, leaving one more in the fridge standing upright on its spine like a little pyramid. In the morning I will worship it, I think, or else be buried beneath it. I sip a little of the water but it's too soon after the sandwich so I can't tell if it tastes like tea or not; it tastes just like the sandwich. I don't hate May, not really, but it's hard to imagine her saying something that makes me feel better. The fact that I feel like I need an essential miracle to emerge into activity implies a greater aspect of religiosity to my turmoil than I am comfortable confronting. I miss being relied on by May. I miss my Mom.

This blockage and my evil feelings say nothing about May's skill or duty, but rather the gordianness of my own issues. I can't see her, no matter how hard I seem to try—other images appear more immediately and in multiplet. The Airbnb has nightlights in two of its corners, and I don't turn them off because they comfort me. They are close to the floor. I am, like them, prostrate and passive. It is so dim that the shadows of trees outside blocking the lights of the small town below, and the real features of the room—its furniture, appliances, decorations—are of equal intensity, and everything superposes into complex patterns of interference.

It takes me a while to understand that the process of getting here was not effortless—and that whatever occurred at the community meeting was important, although maybe only in its precipitated effect, and that to consider what it was that compelled me to come here would be not only beside the point or inaccurate but wrong and injurious. This is another religious aspect to my thought that I can't help but feel allergic to. But I do it anyway, think about being saved; I worry that I will continue trying to spend immense energy trying to explain things to myself, to order and inspect, and that I have never been nor will be able to soon do this properly. May learned in middle school that to live is to suffer and that the origin of this pain is connection, and would chant in her room, first alone, and then one day unexpectedly with some thin epileptic girl whose mom cut our Mom's hair for free out of pity. The two of them seen by me through a cracked door lotused on their floor-pillows, thin backs toward me and faces up toward the tulle-softened light of her window in tandem, chanting together the 念仏 and swaying just a little.