Three Minute
Thomas Wanebo

The room was dark. Loud music was being strangled somewhere, and all that was coming from the speakers in the ceiling was the victim’s squeals and thrashing against a bass drum. Fake ferns and potted trees obscured what little view the dim red light allowed in the depths of the room. Just inside the door was a small booth, clearly not a part of the building’s original construction. It was wooden, and the wall facing the door was a screen made from a crosshatch of skinny, wooden planks. From a waist-high slot, two heavily manicured hands emerged, and a tobacco-hardened voice from behind the screen asked for my money in Japanese. I paid and was handed off to another man, a big one by Japanese standards, who listed my beverage choices: whisky, beer or cola. I wanted cola, but I said beer. I’d be damned if I was going to look like some kid.

The big one led me through the plants and curtains, shining a flashlight behind him, down at his feet for me to follow. I caught a glimpse of four women slumped on sagging couches in a little alcove. After several turns, we went down a row of curtained booths, past one with an overturned loafer and a black-socked foot sticking halfway out. We passed several more and stopped at a booth where the man pulled back the curtain and motioned me in. One side was a two-person bench; the other, a table with four small glasses turned upside down in a rack. He thumped down a big bottle of beer I didn’t know he was carrying, bowed, shut the curtain and left. I sat there and waited a couple of minutes. Waited without any idea what I was waiting for. Tried to twist the beer open, searched the table for a bottle-opener, didn’t find one, put the bottle down. Waited, with butterflies in my stomach and the same whispering in my head; now, it was asking me what I was doing here.

There was a mirror over the table, and I watched myself waiting and wondered what normal people were doing.They weren’t doing this.

I waited. I rocked my feet against the floor. Picked up the beer, wedged the cap against the table’s edge, moved to hit it. Decided not to. Put it back. Looked at the curtain and its floral print. Looked at the wall ahead of me: carpeted, three-quarter wall. Cubicle wall. It looked red. Everything did. I wondered if I’d get one of the women I had seen. I wondered if they were arguing over who should go. I waited and tried to avoid catching my own eyes in the mirror. I thought about trying to fix my hair.

Little feet scuffled to the curtain and stopped.They wore little slippers that looked pink, with little bows on them. A moment later, a woman, taller than I thought she’d be, in a tube top and miniskirt of indeterminate color, slipped through as though trying to enter without being seen by someone outside. I couldn’t really see her. One moment, she looked 20; the next, 40. If she were 20, though, they probably wouldn’t light the place so dimly as to allow for that kind of confusion. She put a square, plastic basket, filled with things I couldn’t see, on the floor and motioned for me to scoot over on the bench. I did, and she sat next to me, threw her leg over me and stuck her tongue in my ear.

I hadn’t been waiting for that.