Tokyo panic.

Today was a day of panic. I hadn’t realised how late in the afternoon it was till  Wanda the tea lady arrived at the office door with the tea cart. “You want anything Sugar?” she yelled in at me. I looked up from the screen I’d been absorbed in so heavily and the sound of Wanda’s voice became an alarm warning me that something was not the way it should have been. I should have been somewhere else, and I remembered where that was, and it wasn’t the office.

In less time than it should have taken I was down the stairs, out of the building, into the car and out on the street sitting in heavy traffic in a dense fog of fumes. Tokyo traffic is always that way on a Friday afternoon, especially if you’re trying to cut across town. The fuel gauge taunted me, suggesting maliciously that I might or might not make it across town so I stopped looking at it. The clock taunted me too with the same suggestion so I tried to ignore that too but there were big clocks on every building and they were all laughing at me. Panic was building, and I could have sworn that the drivers on either side of me were winking at each other through my car, silently laughing at me. Everything was a conspiracy.

The office I was headed to was on the top floor of an old building that was always encased by scaffolding as if the city was trying to reinforce it against earthquakes but wasn’t having too much success. I had to get there, just had to get there before it closed at 5.30. I was angry at having left it so late, especially since I’d known about the deadline for months in advance. My wife kept reminding me, the alarm on my diary kept reminding me, the window cleaner even tried to remind me but I got snarky with him. And with my diary.

Would I even get parked anywhere near the building? Probably not. And it was all so simple, or should have been. All I need was for a man to give me one lousy stamp on my vasectomy certificate to have it renewed for another year. It would only cost a few Yen along with a recent photograph (of my face), but without that stamp my vasectomy would no longer be valid and my wife’s quite particular about that sort of thing.