Abe, Masaru: Scorned Salaryman

The clack of a dozen keyboards in the office fills the place with a drone of pure thought, like a mausoleum for youth and dreams.

All of a sudden, a shout disturbs the relative peace of the busy atmosphere.

“How annoying!” Manager Inoue Takaaki spits between the rows of now-leaning associates. “You know that the report goes into the incoming folder always. You can’t expect me to see everything!”

From that alone, fingernails at a certain desk near the elevator begin tapping impatiently.

Yoshida Yuki, the new temp at the company, ducks his head down as his eyes invariably lift to the beer-speckled collar of his manager.

“Sir, the operating procedure said that if it’s a renegotiated quote-”

“I don’t care about what you think it said. It doesn’t say that, and you screwed up again, idiot!”

Mister Inoue continues to berate Mister Yoshida.

The rest of the office is silent but for one cubicle.

Abe Masaru, his tired eyes already scanning through the company’s standard operating procedure document, uses the find function to locate the part that instructs employees on renegotiated quotes from vendors.

It takes him only ten seconds, but he locates the section, copies it to the body of a new message and, after selecting the company’s full email distribution, sends it with the simple subject line: For Situational Awareness.

Masaru gets up from his chair as the “email received” ping sounds off like an alarm across the office.

“I’m going to my appointment,” he says with a dull tone before pressing the button to call the elevator.

There’s a short silence as people read the email, and then one of the other employees speaks up.

“Huh, you really do put it in the ‘check’ folder!”

Another chimes in. “Seems like Yuki had the right idea.”

The elevator doors open for Masaru and he swings in, pressing the button to the first floor as he trails his gaze out to Manager Inoue’s face, flaring with indignancy as he looks back to the elevator.

“Mister Abe!” Inoue shouts from across the room. “Did you send that email?”

“Doesn’t matter,” the company’s executive officer, Mori Osamu, says with a light smile as he leans over from his corner desk, “get back to work.”

Laughter and smiles ripple across the office as the elevator doors close, Masaru’s final glance filled with the look of fury on Inoue’s face, and a slight, appreciative smile from Yuki.

“Serves him right,” a smiling Masaru says as the closed elevator sends him down.

His smirk is short-lived; however.

When the elevator doors reopen, his face has returned to the frowning, jaded look of an overworked salesperson: another suited body in Japan’s endless struggle forward.

He exits the building into the balmy heat of the Summer night, and heads down to the train station.

“Always the same,” Masaru mumbles to himself as he boards the train headed to the center of the city. A short ride, only a few minutes, but he’ll take his time on the walk over to the hospital.

It technically is an appointment. He’s planning on visiting his dad, after all, and he might not be with him much longer.

He keeps to himself on the whole ride. He glazes his eyes over to a few passengers glued to their phones.

“How stupid everyone is,” he thinks to himself before the train slows to a stop. “Wasting their lives wishing they could have what’s on their screens.”

In fact, he begins remembering how stupid his dad was before he fell into that coma. He kind of likes him better now that he’s not constantly yapping about how he should “be a proper man” and “take some responsibility to get that promotion.”

Masaru shakes his head for a few meters before reaching the alley between the 5th and 6th blocks.

Dense clouds shroud the even sky, hiding the moon from the lonesome streets.

“Dammit, old man,” Masaru sighs under his breath as the darkness of the alleyway overtakes him. “You don’t deserve a visit. Not from me.”

He’s almost all the way through the alley, when he spots a cat looking at him near the road.

“How’s it going?” Masaru says as it mews at him, but unmoving from its spot next to the curb. “You got another thing coming if you think I’m gonna give you food.”

The cat mews again, looking at him as if he had a hidden answer to an even more secret question.

“I get it, I smell like fish,” Masaru says with a chuckle. “Not my choice. I work for a fishing company. Too bad though. I’d give just about anything to get out of here,” he admits to the cat.

As if by a hidden cue, the cat steps gently into the road with its little white paws.

Masaru assumes the cat understood him somehow and is about to head off to bother someone else, but the horn of a vehicle blares over his thoughts.

A shipping truck, from his own company of all things, is racing down the street and headed right for the cat, which is keeping all its focus on Masaru.

Reflexively, the salaryman leans into a sprint.

“Hey, moron!”

A flash of light overtakes him as he reaches out for the cat, the blare of the horn ringing in his ears like an oncoming train.

With a swing, and a second of time that Masaru could only perceive as miraculous, he dips in, picks up the cat, and spins aside just before the leading edge of the truck could strike the little thing.

A trembling Masaru pauses to regain his wits as the truck blares its horn down the street.

He turns to look at the cat, still staring at Masaru as if he has a fish in his suit.

“Hey, dumbass! You can’t just stand in the road like that!” he snaps before putting the cat down into the alley. “My life is the horrible one. You’re just a moron that gets handouts all day!”

The cat steps down the alleyway a few paces, and then it stops as it looks out to the dark trees.

Masaru gets a strange feeling in his chest, as if it were filling up with water.

The cicadas cry out: they annoy him so.

“You heard me?” Masaru asks.

The cat does nothing for a few seconds…

…And then the cat peers back at him in with an impossible face: a look that a cat shouldn’t be able to make, and its eyes gleam an unnatural red under the rays of the dim streetlights.

Masaru holds still for a moment as he watches the raised brow, the widened grin, and the showing of the teeth.

He tells himself it’s all nonsense… but if he were to try and guess, he’d say it’s the kind of face that says, “let’s find out, shall we?”

“Pretty weird,” Abe says, raising his head up a bit to pull himself back to reality. “A cat like you shouldn’t do shit like that, okay? Someone might get the wrong idea.”

The cat’s expression returns to normal, but Masaru can still see the glint in its eye, as if it knows something special and horrible that he does not. He hates that look, and wonders if it’s evil.

But, like cats love to do, it gives another short meow, and then steps off with marshmallow feet to deeper into the alley.

Such white paws for such a black fur coat: like an evil spirit gliding across the world on moonlit clouds.

Masaru shakes his head and slings his suitcase back over his shoulder.

“Man, what an annoying day,” he says.

Then, he feels a presence behind him, and he’s sure it’s evil. His right-side cheek feels extremely hot all of a sudden.

A curious thing about the alley between 5th and 6th block: no windows from the warehouse on 5th overlook it, nor do any from the hospital on 6th.

In fact, if someone were to suddenly disappear, no one would be around to see it happen.

Masaru looks behind himself just in time to understand that someone’s in the alley with him, and then he feels it— a long, stiletto-style knife, edged on both sides of the blade like a dagger, slinging perfectly into his aortic arch: pumping the largest volume of blood anywhere else in his body.

He tries to yell, but all that comes out is a splurt of himself, out his chest and his mouth, right before he feels a heel pass under his own, tossing him to the ground.

It was so quick, so deviously firm and vicious, that he couldn’t believe a human was capable of such precise and instant violence.

Masaru reaches up with his hand to the face of his attacker, but he doesn’t see anything, just the dark of some unknowable enemy, looming over him as the cicadas cry out for his passing.

He couldn’t breathe anymore. It was only fluid, grayness, and the numb passing of the encroaching blackness pulling him somewhere else. It feels like he’s drowning.

Masaru loses himself, alone in an alleyway at 8:17 PM.