‘But I’m sure there’s lots of cute girls at school.’
‘I guess,’ Tomohiko said.
‘I know what it is. You’re picky. I bet you could have any girl you wanted. You should just start asking them out.’
‘I doubt that. Hardly any of them seem worth it, anyway.’
‘Really? That’s too bad,’ ponytail said, placing her right hand on Tomohiko’s thigh.
As Ryo had predicted, the conversation was completely harmless. They traded words without meaning until Tomohiko started wondering how it came to be that you could get paid for something like this, and why he hadn’t done it sooner.
The short-haired woman and ponytail talked the most. The one with the denim jacket just sipped her beer and listened. There was something a little stiff about her smile, Tomohiko thought.
The women were quick to keep the boys’ glasses filled to the brim. Tomohiko kept drinking whatever they poured. Ryo had told them on the way there that if they were offered alcohol or smokes they should just accept.
After about half an hour, Ryo interrupted, saying, ‘I don’t want to kill the conversation, but how about a little movie?’
Tomohiko grinned. He was already pretty buzzed.
‘Ooh, something new?’ the short-haired woman asked, her eyes gleaming.
‘Oh, it’s new all right. I hope you like it.’
Tomohiko had noticed Ryo back at the dining room table setting up a small projector and had just been about to ask what it was for.
‘What’s the movie?’ Tomohiko asked.
‘Watch and find out,’ Ryo said with a grin, flicking on the projector switch. A beam of light shot across the room where they sat, making a square on the wall in front of them. The white plaster of the wall made a pretty good movie screen. Ryo said, ‘Sorry, could you get the light?’
Tomohiko reached out and turned off the switch to the overhead light. At the same time Ryo started the film.
It was a colour 8mm reel. There was no sound, but it was obvious what kind of film it was from the first frame. The scene opened on a man and a woman, completely naked. Tomohiko gaped. There were parts of them plainly showing that he knew they never let you see in normal movies. He felt his heart beat suddenly faster. He had seen photos of this kind of stuff before, but this was his first time seeing the images move.
‘Wow, look at that!’
‘I didn’t know you could do it that way.’
The women were commenting and giggling. It was clear they weren’t talking to each other, but to Tomohiko and Murashita.
The woman with the ponytail leaned closer to Tomohiko and whispered in his ear, ‘Have you ever done something like that?’
‘No,’ he said, hearing the quavering in his own voice.
The first movie was over in about ten minutes. Ryo deftly swapped reels on the projector. While he was doing that, the short-haired woman said something like, ‘It’s pretty warm in here,’ and started taking off her shirt. She was only wearing a bra underneath. The light from the projector made her skin glow white.
The woman in the denim jacket stood abruptly. ‘Um, sorry —’ she said, then her voice faltered.
From beside the projector, Ryo asked, ‘You need to go?’
She nodded.
‘I see. That’s too bad.’
With everyone watching, the woman in the denim jacket stepped out through the dining room towards the door, taking care not to meet anyone’s eyes.
Once she’d left, Ryo closed the door behind her and came back into the room.
The short-haired woman was giggling. ‘I think the movie was too exciting for her.’
‘Maybe she just felt left out because you weren’t playing, Ryo?’ the woman with the ponytail said, lightly chastising him.
‘I was paying attention,’ Ryo said. ‘I just think she wasn’t ready.’
‘That’s a shame. After we invited her and everything,’ the short-haired woman said.
‘Who cares?’ said ponytail. ‘Let’s watch the next one.’
‘Right away.’ Ryo flicked the switch on the projector again.
It was halfway through the second show when ponytail took off her dress and leaned over until her bare arm was against Tomohiko’s. In a soft voice she whispered, ‘You can touch, if you want to.’
Tomohiko felt all his blood go to his crotch, though he wasn’t sure whether it was because there was a practically naked woman right next to him, or because of the movie. All he knew was he wasn’t getting paid just to make small talk.
His mouth was dry, but he forced himself to swallow. It wasn’t that he wanted to run away from the job. He just wasn’t sure he could do it.
Tomohiko was still a virgin.
Tomohiko’s house was near Bishoen Station on the Hanwa line, a little two-storey wooden house on the first corner after a short walk down a shopping street.
‘You’re back late. Dinner?’ Tomohiko’s mom asked when he came in just before ten. He used to get an earful if he was home after seven, but that had changed since high school started. Now his mom hardly spoke to him at all.
‘Already ate,’ he called back, before going into his room and shutting the door.
Tomohiko’s room was a small room on the ground floor. Originally a storage space, when he started high school his parents had cleaned out their things, repainted the walls, and given it to him.
He immediately sat in his chair and flicked the ‘on’ switch on the large contraption squatting atop the desk. This was a daily ritual. The contraption was a personal computer. If you were to buy it outright in a store it would have cost nearly a million yen. Of course he hadn’t bought it. His father, who worked at an electronics manufacturer, had used his connections to get one on the cheap in the hope that he’d be able to learn how to use it but he’d given up after two or three attempts. When Tomohiko showed interest, the computer became his, and after poring over books and hours of trial and error, he was now able to write simple programs.
Tomohiko turned on the tape recorder sitting next to the humming computer and tapped on the keyboard. The tape recorder lurched into motion, a warble of electronic static emitting from its speaker.
The tape recorder was for memory storage. Longer programs would be converted to magnetic signals, recorded on the cassette tape, and then read back into the computer’s RAM when it needed to access them. Cassette tapes were a huge improvement over the old punch cards, but it still took a considerable amount of time to read in data.
Tomohiko stepped away from his desk, returning to the keyboard twenty minutes later. He smiled. The shimmering fourteen-inch monochrome monitor displayed the words:
WESTWORLD
And below that:
PLAY? YES=1 NO=0
Tomohiko pressed the 1 key and Return.
Westworld was Tomohiko’s first creation, a simple computer game inspired by the Yul Brynner film. The game featured enemies that chased you, the player, as you navigated the twisting corridors of a maze in search of the exit. As he played, Tomohiko thought up ideas to make gameplay even more interesting. Whenever he had a particularly good one, he would interrupt the game and start rewriting the program. What had begun as a very barebones game grew increasingly complex and the joy he felt was, in a way, like watching something living grow.
For a while his fingers sped over the numeric keypad, controlling the movements of the character on screen. But though his fingers moved as fast as ever, he was having trouble getting his mind into the game. He quickly grew bored. It didn’t even bother him that much when he made a slight error and was caught.
Tomohiko sighed and pulled away from the desk. Leaning back in his chair, he looked up at the wall where he had hung a swimsuit poster. The barely concealed breasts and thighs filled his vision and, imagining touching that water-flecked skin, he felt a stirring in his groin, despite his world-changing experience of only hours before.