He was fiddling with a child’s puzzle discarded by the little girl sitting next to him on the plane. It was one of the free toys handed out to pacify children on long-haul flights, and he found himself unusually captivated by it. He had only a vague memory of ever trying to solve one of these puzzles. This particular conundrum presented a nine-square mosaic depicting a lizard, and it wasn’t until he started to move the pieces around that he realised he had tried this kind of thing many times as a child and had always ended up frustrated. Now, just as then, it was a jumble of rectangles, a shifting Cubist collage from which a lone, baleful eye sought him out.

He dropped it down in disgust and looked out of the window, wondering what Yuka was doing right now. They had argued so badly before the trip that she had pulled out, and now he was flying to Hawaii on his own, uncertain as to how things stood between them and what exactly he would do for the next ten days. His sole consolation right now was the sight of a tall, thin Chinese woman with long, beautifully crimped hair sitting across the aisle to his right. From time to time she looked around at him, but he was resigned to the fact that he wouldn’t be able to strike up a conversation with her as she was one row up, just out of reach.

His bad mood and his guilt were not assuaged by the fact that he was terrified of flying, especially in the wake of recent hijackings and terrorist attacks, and this was compounded by the announcement as they approached Honolulu that the plane would circle the airport in a holding pattern until further notice. No reason was given, but Hikaru prepared himself, as he did several times during flights like these, for some sudden jolt that would signal the plane was in difficulty and have it plummet to earth or sea and explode in a ball of fire.

In the event, the only ordeal he had to endure was to watch the aircraft land on the runway live via the television monitor a few rows ahead of him; if they had crashed into another plane – or maybe a maintenance vehicle – at this stage, then watching it on a TV screen was one experience he could have been spared. 

As he collected his luggage and made his way through customs, both impressed and irritated by the post-9/11 security measures now in place, that brief flurry of anxiety and horrible suspension of life’s possibilities that went through him just before the jet landed safely was soon supplanted by thoughts of how to make the most of his time on Waikiki Beach; the depressing conversation that had led up to Yuka’s cancelling, and his memory of what they had said to each other, were slightly less prominent now, but it should only take a sequence of mundane activities and some minor, probably trivial, preoccupations, to ease them from the forefront of his mind. After this, his first concern was with what his hotel room would be like. He had booked it on the Net, but little could be gleaned from the digital images on the site, aside from the fact that the room looked clean and not too small.

The hotel itself was next to the lush Honolulu Zoo, a detail that had escaped him and Yuka even after several perusals of the fold-out map in their travel guide back in Japan. The Zoo was fronted by what in Tokyo would have counted as a mini-park all its own, and on the morning he arrived, a group of youths were practising their juggling. For a moment, when he first saw them, Hikaru found his attention arrested by the clubs – which he saw as independent of the arms that gave them thrust and lift – hovering like dragonflies or even airships, transfixing him, until one juggler let a club fall and Hikaru was released back into the busyness of life going on around him. He walked on.

The foyer was clean, open to the street, and the receptionist was friendly and efficient. He glanced at his room number, 42. An image flashed through his head but he was too eager to see his room to give thought to it.

Only one wall had a window, entirely glass from coffee-table height, but it offered an expansive view of the hills in the far distance. The immediate foreground, however, was dominated by three imposing tower blocks of varying heights, looking a little like fuel rods in a nuclear reactor.

Squeezed between his own building and the tower block of about twenty storeys to his right, a narrow band of space offered up a view of Diamond Head. The view was not ideal, but not totally dispiriting either, and the multitude of windows facing his own appeared to him like opportunities of distant but comforting acquaintance.

He sank into the four-poster bed and instantly fell asleep. On waking, he remembered a dream in which he was standing in a lift with a man of a saurian complexion who was wearing a straw hat. That was all he could remember, along with a feeling of extreme cold when the man’s hand touched his as they both reached for the same button. But now Hikaru was more put out by the fact that it was already getting dark; he had had no idea that he was so jet-lagged.   

Still slightly sleepy, he looked out of the window and saw a sequence of lights dance across the windows of one whole floor of the tower block on the right over to those of another floor of the one in the middle, then down to the windows of a lower floor in the third, like flashing panels on an old-fashioned computer in a sci-fi movie. But it was a split-second observation, and he forgot it almost as quickly as it had happened.

 

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