Chapter 20: Floor Review

The painting studio on the fourth floor of the art college had a concrete floor and a window the size of a garage door.

At nine fifty, Emi and Haruka unrolled three meters of cotton across it, with Misaki holding the far corner.

Fourteen students in paint-stiff aprons stood around the edges with coffee.

Two professors in black stood at the head of the room, one with a clipboard, one with a pencil behind her ear.

Nobody spoke for a long time.

The city lay across the floor, dark blue and gold, with the rivers running through it and the Shinjuku tower glowing red at its center.

"Hm," said the professor with the pencil.

Emi's palms were wet.

"Tell us about the red point," said the professor with the clipboard.

"It's the tower in Shinjuku with the blinking top."

"I know the tower. Why is it the center?"

Emi opened her mouth to give the answer she had practiced.

It was about scale and isolation and the loneliness of night, and it had cost her two weeks of worry.

She looked down at the cloth.

At a smudge in the Koto ward that was a little too thick, painted by someone who did it badly.

At a thumbprint in the corner of the harbor, in blue that had dried with a faint pink sequin in it.

"I painted it the way I see the city from my window," she said, "and then somebody came in and added a part, and now it's better."

The professors said nothing.

"I left that red light blank for a week because I didn't know where it belonged. Someone else put it where she'd see it from a train."

"And the sequin?" the pencil professor asked, tapping a spot with her foot.

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