Sea of Eden by Andrés Ibáñez

Author:Andrés Ibáñez
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786079213
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

43

I befriend Noboru

Dharma, my Brazilian fairy godfather, carved me a pair of crutches, which I used to start walking again. He later measured me up and said he was going to make me an artificial leg and foot. I was a bit of an emotional wreck around this time, and Dharma’s kindness made me well up.

I finally got up out of my reclining chair in front of the lagoon and began practising walking with my crutches. I hadn’t imagined using crutches would be so hard. I was constantly falling over and it sapped my arms of all their strength. But soon enough I was moving about with relative ease. After all, I said to myself, humans get about on two legs, and now I had three.

We still took turns to keep guard from airplane beach, looking out on the plane’s ruins. I was the perfect candidate to spend hours stretched out there in the shade of the palm trees, waiting for the help we all knew wasn’t coming.

We’d made the rule that there must always be two people at the ‘lookout post’. One day it was my turn to do a shift with Noboru, the young Japanese man who’d died in my arms and who we’d all watched be brought back to life by three lightning bolts. Since we both quite enjoyed doing our lookout shift we were now spending a lot of time together, and struck up a friendship. And, as new friends tend to do, we told each other our life stories.

Noboru was one of those young Japanese kids overwhelmed by social pressures. He reminded me that he had been a hikikomori, and had locked himself up in a room for most of his youth. By the sounds of things, before taking that trip to Los Angeles he’d gone almost three years without leaving a hotel room in Yokohama. The hotel was called the Science Hotel.

‘Three years in the Science Hotel?’ I asked, thinking I hadn’t understood properly and that maybe the Science Hotel was a health spa, a resort up in the mountains, a monastery or a university. But no, it was a real hotel, a twenty-three-storey modern building in Yokohama with views overlooking the bay, the port, the futuristic Minato Mirai district and the Cosmo Clock 21 Ferris wheel, which also happens to be the biggest clock in the world. Noboru explained, however, that he kept his curtains permanently drawn: firstly because he wasn’t interested in ‘views’, particularly when the view was of the biggest clock in the world; and secondly because, in general, he spent all night awake and his days asleep, which is what hikikomori tend to do. Given that he never left the room and the light in any hotel room with the curtains drawn is practically the same day or night, that decision to sleep during the day might come across as a little bit affected. But it wasn’t a decision, he told me. He didn’t have any reason in particular to spend all night awake and to sleep during the day.

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