The first morning he arose a man who had spent the night with Madoka, Madoka turned to him and said, “I like to let the sheets cool before I make the bed.” This struck him as both erotic and sensible; every morning since then, when he got out of any bed, he said that sentence in his head, and followed its advice. Yoshi stretches his full length, touches the ceiling of his wedge, thinks that he will let his sleep sack cool before he zips it up, and puts on his slippers.
Helen had made him the slippers as a birthday present. For the soles, she used some of the extra rubber matting they’d cut away from the Lav floor when it started tripping everyone up, and she’d sacrificed the bottoms of one of her pants to provide material for the tops. She’d braided the fabric, so it made an attractive pattern. They fit perfectly: bespoke. And having slippers meant that he did not have to wear the Prime sneakers all day long, but could put on the slippers in the morning, before he began work, and in the evening, when work was finished. It was interesting how helpful this was. The slippers served the function of demarcating time to perfection. It was exactly the sort of kind and thoughtful thing Helen would do. She had said, “Whenever I am incredibly irritating, just try to remember that I’m also the person who made you slippers!” Sometimes he found her smile or the way she spoke not irritating, but unlovely. Hearty was the word to describe it. Bluff, although that was more commonly used to describe men who spoke in a hearty way.
Yoshi can tell he is the first person to use the Lav wedge this morning: no one else’s towel is damp, although he can hear that Helen is awake. In the morning, he and Helen only urinate, clean their teeth, and wash their faces, but Sergei needs to do more, so he goes last.
Yoshi returns to his room and sets up for the day: his bed is hinged to the wall on one side so that it may be latched against it; the underside of his bed contains a shelf that unfolds for desk and workstation use, and a collapsible ergonomic stool. His clothes are stacked in lockers on the opposite wall—paper-thin disposable underwear and Solox pants, T-shirts with short or long sleeves, socks—along with his personal effects, his bag of acorns.
For the real voyage, Prime will have them on a cocktail of nutraceuticals for additional radiation protection and to counteract effects caused by the centrifugal forces of their craft; for purposes of Eidolon they take placebos as a matter of establishing routine. Likewise, they have a regimen of ear and eye exercises.
Yoshi sets up his stool, unties a thick pair of goggles and plugs their cord into his Prime screen. The routine was simple enough: at intervals a small circle of light would appear and one merely had to track this light as it moved. The lenses inside the goggles flipped; sometimes the circle of light would be very far away, sometimes very close. This lasted approximately seven minutes. To Yoshi, it felt like hours.
Of all the goggles and masks Yoshi had worn his life, none had ever made him feel as claustrophobic, as vulnerable, and as disoriented as these did. He didn’t understand this reaction. He’d tried listening to music while it was going on, but it only increased the anxiety. The advancing and retreating lights made him want to run, or hit out. He had no idea if the experience affected the others similarly. He had not asked. He would not ask.
While waiting for the first point of light, Yoshi takes several deep breaths. The thing was not to strain your eyes against the darkness.
Junya. Funny Yoshi should think of Junya just now. A childhood memory. Junya’s hand had been cold and dry, and then hot and damp. One hand. Large, because Junya was large and Yoshi had been small then, ten, newly arrived in Japan. “Watch others to see what they do,” had been his father’s advice. Perhaps Yoshi had been watching too keenly. Junya had pinned him against the wall by holding one hand over his eyes.
The light appears now, and Yoshi dutifully tracks its darting progress.
The other boys had taken turns, not hitting him, but hitting their baseball bats against the wall next to him, or letting him feel how they were swinging their bats right in front of his face. “Oh, you almost hit him!” one boy kept shouting. “Oh, you almost killed him right there!” Yoshi didn’t understand everything they said: there were words and phrases unfamiliar to him. Some things were quite clear. “You’re not one of us!” and “Go back to where you came from!” and “No one wants you here!”
Inside the goggles, the lenses flip.
Inside Junya’s hand it had been dark, and then yellow with spots of pink and red. Then dark again, then exploding stars of hot red. They took the cap off his head. He’d been concerned, at the beginning of the ordeal that they would not give it back and he would have to tell the coach that he had lost it. You couldn’t practice if you didn’t have your cap; he would have to just do running and jumping jacks on the side. Then he became concerned that they would hit his face with the bat, break his nose. He became afraid of pain.
Inside the goggles, the lenses flip.
He hadn’t known if they would stop. In London, boys got in fights at his school and they didn’t always end well, but they did end. He’d also heard, in London, that Japanese were vicious and cruel and cut off their own fingers just to show how tough they were. This had been said with admiration. He hadn’t been bullied in London, because he was good at sport and didn’t show off about being so good at lessons and his best friend, Malcolm, had older twin brothers who had spread the word that “Yosh is alright.” He assumed a similar strategy would work in Japan. He’d be starting with no mates, but this was supposed to be his home. “We’re going home,” his parents had said. At his new school, for the first time in his life, he was in a room where everyone looked like him.