He had gone back to work at Hölburtt & Co. after the exact number of weeks’ rest his doctor advised and felt eager to rejoin his routine; he packed the same prepared lunch each day, walked the same route to work, sat at the same desk and clocked in the same number of hours processing contract compliance forms he always had, noticing the same approximate apportioning of fifty percent 204t forms, forty percent 404c forms and ten percent 20t-3 forms (a ratio he technically was not supposed to reveal) then retracing his route home like picking up dropped breadcrumbs, except on Wednesday evenings when, just as he always had, he would detour to his favourite sushi restaurant for dinner.
This Wednesday evening however, after the smiling Japanese waitress had allotted him a spot between a morbidly obese man who had flecks of rice catching in his ginger beard and a group of four or five giggling Japanese high school girls, he watched the coloured plates circle with the strange sense that none of these offerings — not the cheap green plates with inari or cucumber hosomaki that he would usually take as token appetisers, not the moderately priced red plates with various flavours of nigiri and uramaki that would usually fill most of his finished stack of plates, not the expensive black plates with the more extravagant freshwater eel or sliced squid temaki that he would sometimes treat himself with, and none of the variants in between — not one seemed to arouse his appetite. It was not as if his taste for sushi had waned, as only the previous Wednesday he had eaten a good half more than his usual total plates, creating such a tall and accomplished stack of finished plates that, when appraising this stack in his moment of gastric satisfaction, he felt a sense of pride, even if this pride was quickly quashed with the weight of potential embarrassment that anyone should notice the faint glimmer of this in his glance-or-two at the sushi plate tower and surmised his exact thoughts. It was silly, he thought, that he had hungered for sushi during the final hours of his workday and during the walk along his usual route and detour to his usual Wednesday evening dinner destination, and even hungered for sushi during his brief wait in the sushi restaurant’s waiting area for a vacant spot to begin his meal, and now, as the plates encircled in mechanised display, that hunger had vanished. He didn’t really even consider the sushi edible, but rather a collection of food props like the type he had heard they used in fast food TV commercials to both make the food look more idealised and appetising and to prevent it from decomposing under the film lights. From his spot between the morbidly obese man and the Japanese high school girls, he looked back to the restaurant’s waiting area where there were now a few new customers waiting for those who were currently eating to finish their inari and nigiri and uramaki and leave to make room, and as he looked at this group, one of them, a deathly looking man of broad shoulders and hard features, returned his gaze with a stony, unreadable expression. The heart of the 76-year-old organ donor jumped, quickening its step like someone walking along the night’s empty street and hearing shadowing footsteps. Each beat became like a kind of oil-slick piston clunk — was this deathly man, this hulking potential footballer, becoming impatient? More specifically, was he becoming impatient with the recovering heart-transplant patient who seemed to be taking none of the sushi plates from the rotating train and definitely not getting on with his meal, even while more customers were waiting to eat?
“Is everything okay sir?”