He's like the guy I worked with at Mico Plumbing Supplies who returned to Thailand to visit every year or two. But this guy comes out here to New Zealand twice a year he told me today, every summer and winter. Why in winter? He’s from Japan, which is far enough away from New Zealand to be the opposite season, isn’t it? I see him in town occasionally from a distance, his distinctive gait and spindly frame, cargo shorts and ageless face, unkempt hair and glasses, a real loner. God knows what sort of cracks he’s fallen through in Japan. He’d stay at the backpackers where I lived and worked 13 years ago. Maybe he still stays there - we didn’t discuss that today. He’d come here and watch TV endlessly in a shitty room off the kitchen at Conor’s Topfloor Hostel. The wide open spaces.
He’s an accountant, and he’d done his math because Conor’s was the cheapest room in town at only $16 or $22, depending on whether you wanted to share a room with others, or just hear them through the walls. A British relationship breakdown; the operatic sounds of a Latino woman being pleasured. Little surprise that I should bump into him at the language school where I now work, our orbits colliding on the fourth floor - he sitting serenely in the window waiting for a free English class to start, me in the corridor fast lane, head turned deciphering his side profile. He couldn't get his head around that I now work as a teacher, a far cry from my days cleaning toilets five floors up, yet still traveling through Auckland.
