He had worked in the building for five months before he found the outdoor patio. Only the very corner of its perimeter fence could be glimpsed through a window as he walked down the rearmost hallway, and only if he turned his head at just the right moment. One day, when he decided to try pushing open the poorly-lit door near the end of that hall, he nearly gasped in delight when he saw what lay beyond. It was the first sound he had needed to utter so far that day.
There was a small paved patio, hemmed in with a five-foot wooden fence, nestled in a happenstance angle where the two wings of the building met. Two octagonal picnic tables, stained dark under two folded umbrellas that looked like giant slumbering bats, occupied an area that could have easily held three times as many of them. They looked brand new, which led Hiroshi to believe that this small piece of tranquility had been designed, built, and then merely forgotten about behind a disused door. Flicking a quick look up and down the interior hall to make sure that no one was looking his direction, he stepped through and into the fresh air.
The door closed almost silently behind him, and he was alone. Finally, gloriously alone. He began to wonder just how long it had been since he had been entirely beyond the range of human voices. Out here, there was nothing but wind and distant birdsong. Being on the fifth floor of the building, only a few of the highest tree tops were visible above the top of the fence, and being at the rear, most of the traffic noise was muffled. The patio's only roof was a blank slate of late-spring sky. It was if he had found a pocket universe of blue and green and white sunlight. It was perfect.
He began taking his lunches out there the very next day, waiting until everyone else was embroiled in the furor and arguments of which local restaurant they should order group lunches from, or possibly drive to, all in separate cars. It was surprisingly easy to slip away from them and through the unnoticed door, shutting everything else out, and sit on one of the lacquered, sun-warmed benches. It took him sixteen lunch intervals to try each section of both tables, testing which he found to be the most pleasant.
It was the solitude he enjoyed the most, more than the natural sunlight, even more than the birdsong. He sometimes looked up to see a small coterie of serenaders sitting along the top of the fence, quizzically posing musical questions to him. He imagined that they were all typically bird-like questions -- How did you get up so high? and Are you going to finish that?
For a long time, Hiroshi just sat and ate his lunch, in no way missing half-heard television shows piped through someone's phone and shared among slurping, chewing clusters of co-workers, determined to believe they were sharing some kind of communal experience. Out on the forgotten patio, everything was clear air and sweet nature sounds.
Of course, after a while, it wasn't enough just to sit and eat. He began smuggling small books outside with him, hiding them however he could, packing them in his insulated lunch bag when they wouldn't conveniently fit in his pockets. But he often found his mind wandering even as he read, clearly not requiring an imagined world inside of this new, idyllic real one. So his progress was slow, having to re-read passages over and over until the timer on his watch let him know it was time to return to his other, less comfortable chair.
Lunches were his heaven after that, until the day when he found an interloper sitting out on the patio when he stepped through the unremarkable door. She was at the far table, sitting so that she was facing the door. Alongside her lunch was a thick book that she was almost halfway through, and she let it lay flat and open as she dined. She did not look up at Hiroshi as he came out into the sunlight.
He halted for a moment, unsure of what to do. How had this woman -- about his age, dressed in blouse and skirt, only as formal as necessary, straight hair surgically trimmed at her collarbones -- found out about Hiroshi's sanctuary? Had he been seen ducking through the door? He tried to think back through the last few days. No, he had been as careful as always to make sure that no one saw him when he did. But still, here she was... perhaps she had found the place entirely by herself, and was currently just as confused by his appearance as he was by hers.
Whatever the reason, a full five seconds had passed by this time, and neither of them had tried to make eye contact. Hiroshi stepped to the near table, sat down at it, and opened his lunch. He carried on as if she had not been there, and she did the same for him. After a few minutes, he felt just as relaxed as if he were alone.
She was there again the next day, and the next. She always sat in the same place, the only difference being the clothes she wore. He could tell by the pace that she was working her way through her book that lunch was the only time she had to read it. He wondered at many points whether he should talk to her or not, but at none of them did he feel comfortable enough to do so. In the first few days, it was because he didn't know her, and after that too much time had passed and his first words would have had to couch an explanation for why he had waited for so long. So he remained silent. Even that did not seem too uncomfortable in this open air space; in truth, it seemed designed for silence. Maybe she understood that, too.
The lunch periods passed, the ritual always identical -- he arriving with the woman always in place at her table, the two of them never making eye contact when she walked past him to go back inside, five minutes before his own lunchtime ended -- and always silent. The only deviations were when rain made going outdoors impossible. On these days, Hiroshi always took a circuitous route back to his desk through the building's public corridors; perhaps she worked at one of the other companies whose offices were nearby. He began to wonder if she passed by him all the time, but he was simply incapable of recognizing her in any environment other than natural sunlight.
There came a day in late spring when he finally resolved to speak to her. This idea always came to him when he was anywhere other than their mutual lunch spot, most likely because then it was entirely impossible for him to act on it. He knew his mind well enough to understand this. But one morning, the apparent simplicity of the act remained with him through his morning rituals at home, followed him on his commute, and sat at his elbow all morning long, instead of fading like it always had before. Something was different about this day, and the feeling seemed to conspire to keep his co-workers quieter than usual, conversations more hushed and less frequent. There was an unusual lack of comfortable smiles, but as long as it kept the general office volume down, he didn't care.
The clock hands crept, and people seemed to begin gathering around their common screens a little early. Hiroshi decided to follow their cue and head out to the patio a few minutes early. Perhaps the woman wouldn't be there yet, and when she did arrive the deviation in schedule would give him the perfect excuse to look up and say hello. She would be approaching him instead of him approaching her, which seemed infinitely less intimidating. For some reason, the sense of fear and awkwardness was still staying away. He had no understanding of why, and didn't even want to question it too deeply for fear that would wake it up.
The sky was unusually clear as he stepped out, so clear that he imagined that, if he were to stand on his toes and look over the top of the fence, there would be no world below, only sky and more sky. He almost did just that, walking up to the vertical sun-warmed boards before stopping himself; he became aware that he was very near the unknown woman's usual lunch spot. What if he were to place himself, before she arrived, in the spot right next to it? Something about the day's clarity of air seemed to be brushing aside every last ounce of self-doubt, and he did just that.
He hadn't seen the patio from this particular vantage point since the first days after its discovery, when he had tried out every available spot. He tried to imagine, as closely as he could, what he would look like to the woman each day as he sat in his usual place. That is, if she were ever to look up from her book.
He was so deep into this fantasy that he actually saw his imagined self look up, startled, when the door opened. The woman came out onto the patio and stopped short, looking at him sitting in her place, clearly thrown by the fact that the dining area was not empty as it always was.
Hiroshi opened his mouth without thinking, without knowing what he was going to say. But as soon as he did, a far-off sound began. It started out low, buzzing, but quickly rose into a persistent howl that seemingly came from everywhere at once. Hiroshi had never heard it before, but his head cocked in a similar fashion to the woman's as it filled the empty space between them.
Just his luck, he thought, for some industrial machine far below to take this moment to intrude. He figured it must be some overly loud garbage truck or loading dock maneuver, and would soon subside. But not only did the mechanical whine go on and on, now other sounds -- car sounds -- seemed to be intruding from the outside world far below: the slamming of doors, the start of engines, a few screeching tires.
Hiroshi realized that, to his lunchtime companion, it must have looked like the sound was coming from him. He managed to shut his mouth before he snorted a laugh at that thought. And then she smiled back. He had been watching her face for so long, catching glimpses of her when he dared to look up from his lunch and book, that he had never even considered her expression in any other configuration than bemused concentration. To see the corners of her mouth turn up this way was entrancing, and the fact that the cause and direction of it was him, was a revelation. It almost made his jaw drop open all over again. He wondered about the possibility of never looking away from her again. How feasible was that?
Somewhere beyond the fence, the noises were growing. The slamming of more doors, more squealing tires, something that was maybe a distant crunch and tinkling of glass. There seemed to be a sense of hurry washing up from the world far below, and Hiroshi wondered what it could mean, when his world hung suspended here on the patio, entirely outside of time.
The sky brightened for just a second, like a flash of lightning, even though the noon air beyond the fence was perfectly blue. Although he never turned his gaze from the woman, her eyes flicked over and beyond him reflexively, searching for the source of the already-vanished illumination. He saw her expression change as her eyes locked onto something in the sky, something that took away her smile as quickly as if a raptor were already descending toward her, talons extended.
Hiroshi turned and followed her gaze, hoping there was something he could do about whatever had disturbed her. Then he saw that the sky, while he had not been looking, had split. An off-white seam had appeared down the middle of it, emerging from behind the building and arcing high over their heads until it disappeared behind the fence on his right. While the rest of the sky was utterly still, that thin line seemed to shift and roil within itself, chaos churning within that thin form, miles overhead.
Then, from behind the building on his left, Hiroshi's eye caught another line like the first, just starting to form. This one was thicker, growing in a tendril that arced above him. He wasn't sure if he could make out a tiny, dark something at the lead of the smoke pillar -- for now he understood that that was what the line was -- as it tracked parallel to the first one. With surprising speed, much faster than a plane, which was the only thing that his mind could attempt to compare it to, it followed the first, descending until it vanished below the level of the fence on his right. Almost without thinking, Hiroshi stepped up onto the bench of the picnic table he had been sitting at, and then onto its wooden surface, his eyes wanting to continue following the white column.
He did gain a few more moments of witnessing it, but there was something more puzzling revealed which shifted his attention. It was a black cloud, as far away as the unseeable horizon must be, just rising over the top of the fence, lifting and expanding with inexorable slowness, right around the spot where the first smoke-line disappeared. The line he was following seemed to be headed to almost the same spot, and was eventually lost behind the wooden planks. A few seconds later, there was another sky-covering flash, originating from a point just out of sight.
Hiroshi finally understood. So it was all coming true. There were only a few seconds left before the building-shattering sound and the superheated wind would reach him. For a moment he considered running, like the others below were still doing, the horns and the screeches and the crunching becoming only more audible in the pre-firestorm hush, but in the end did not move, because he couldn't think of a better place to run to than this.
He felt pressure on his hand. The woman -- whose name he realized he would never know, and also that he didn't need to -- had stepped up onto the picnic table next to him, and had pressed her fingers against his palm. He turned to her and looked into her eyes, closer and clearer than they had ever been. He hoped that she saw in his what he saw in hers: an apology, for the time they had lost by not doing this sooner; but also relief that they had found each other, at least soon enough to wait there together, standing on a picnic table on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday under a cloudless sky.
