This is based on a real-life experience. Really. Details have been changed to protect the innocent. Sort of. 
It occurs to me, as I sit at this incredibly boring and digressive meeting, that I could be doing something better. In fact, my thoughts transgress time and space and reality in a moment, because some other people are having exactly the same thoughts, and these thoughts all undergo quantum imaginative entanglement.
So there I am, at a meeting, and also in my airy, sunlit, writing room. And there she is, forcing herself to endure the weekly corporate grind of her profitable restaurant enterprise in Edinburgh. And there is the other, who is at my meeting, and also… well, I’ll let them tell it in their own words.
*****
Not happy to be doing this, but fuck, it’s money in the bank. Posing. Getting money. I suppose I should be grateful. I’ve just had the shittiest month of my life, far outstinking (outstenching?) a garbage fire. Was marooned in Shithole, Some State in the USA. And now I have to be talking to somebody I really don’t like, princess to princess as it were.
“Good morning,” she says. “Are you Miss Leaty?” she says. I’ve said ‘she says’ twice because each phrase she enunciates so clearly needs a ‘she says’ after it, because she is clearly saying it. I know that isn’t as clear as it might be, but I’m off my caffeine (or on too much of it) and that’s what happens.
“Yes,” I growl, although not quite, because ‘yes’ is more properly hissed than growled. I compromise by making it a mild snarl. I tell myself to behave because I really don’t know this person, and maybe (yeah, yeah) she doesn’t deserve the shitty thoughts I think about her.
After all, I’m here to interview her about her late boyfriend Nakai, and I’ve known his ex-girlfriend all my life. Trust me, the ex is a far more interesting character.
*****
Author-san has normally had reasonably good taste. While he is not Japanese at all, and I try very hard to live up to the half of me that is, he makes deliberate concessions to politeness and has also made efforts to express my narrative appropriately. So when his mind reaches out to mine during a horribly boring board meeting, at which my sister Akira is handling most matters in her usual aggressive and effective way, I close my eyes to indicate to her that I am taking a break.
And here I am, being antagonized by someone that author-san says is a more excellent writer than he. It is hard, painfully hard, to reconcile that idea with the new reality presented to me. The woman before me is like a more intense version of my sister, and she sounds like she could mobilise an equally vivid vocabulary.
So far, she’s asked me about my relationship with Hisao (do people ever stop doing that?) and how close I really was to him. I give her the usual replies. She just glares at me—if I'm reading her silence right—and then, from out of nowhere, says, “You do know that you weren’t really his first, right?”
*****
Much later, I sit back in my ergonomic seat and sip neat whisky from a classic tumbler. That could’ve gone better, I suppose. I’ll need to write this up some other day, once my heart rate gets back to normal. Not for me a Hisao-type life, no. I sigh, take another sip, and wait for the metaphysical fumes of the Lilly-Leaty encounter to disperse.
