I watch the clock as Friday night turns into Saturday, and he’s still not home. He could at least call, or send a message. Footsteps on the stairs. Is it him, or a neighbour? Some rattling at the door. It’s him. I measure his drunkenness by how long it takes him to unlock the front door. Clang, clang, rattle… he keeps missing the keyhole. Oh, wrong set of keys? Finally, the door swings open. It must have been a good night, he can’t even walk straight. Having to go drinking with his boss and colleagues is his excuse for coming home all sweaty and intoxicated. Dinner’s on the kitchen table, long cold, my half of it already eaten. He’s not hungry.

He goes straight for the bathtub. I wait for him to put his suit on a hanger and enter the tub, then I tiptoe near. I check his clothes for traces of her perfume. Quickly, before the scents disperse! But the suit stinks only of cigarette smoke. He’s too careful to catch anything, or perhaps it’s already gone. I pull his phone from the inside pocket of his blazer, carefully flip it open without a sound and go through the recent mail. No traces. He must delete her messages right away.

“I don’t like coming home so late,” he says later, as he comes back from the bathtub. “And I hate the drinking sprees, honey, but you know I need to build a good relationship to my boss. It’s all for the sake of my career!”

Career as a, womanizer, huh? Being too exhausted after work is his excuse for not sleeping with me more than once a week anymore. “So tired,” he mumbles as he drops into bed. I guess he’s already overspent himself. His well’s run dry.

Of course, I haven’t confronted him about her. For one, he could deny everything and I’d have no evidence to nail him. Revealing your suspicions will only make him more careful. I learned this by doing some internet research on how to catch a cheating spouse. So now I’m taking notes of where he says he went, and when, and cross-reference them with the call records on his phone, ATM and bank account history, the log on his railway fare card and so on. One day, he will slip.

On the train I saw an advertisement for a private investigator who specializes in these kind of things. Miss Sherlock, she called herself. But agencies are costly. Are they expecting me to pay such a large sum all at once without him noticing? So, whenever I shop for groceries my secret wallet grows a little fatter. The rest of the day I split between dirty clothes, the vacuum cleaner, a dusting towel and cleaning-rags. These are my day to day companions, while he spends his time at the office ogling young secretaries in tight skirts. 

Lately, he’s a lot more mindful of his weight. On the net they say a sudden awareness of his physical appearance is a sure sign of cheating. It’s him trying to impress someone. I know he’s cheating. Call it a woman’s intuition.

Oh right, the Neck-Tie Incident! That happened last month and removed all doubt. He came home wearing a different necktie, a new one I’d never seen before. When I asked what was up with that he lowered his eyes and said he’d spilled some tea on his other one during lunch. That’s why he had to get a new one. Now, either he forgot his original tie at a love-hotel and had to come up with that story, or she bought the new one for him and he put it on straight away, throwing away the old tie like he would some day discard me. When I inquired about what happened to the tie he had worn that morning, he said he’d already discarded it. Tea stains were impossible to remove, was his excuse. The tie that I selected for him, in the trash! Replaced by this wine-red-with-white-dots symbol of his unfaithfulness! One that I will have to wash and dry and iron and fold. The realization hit me like a burst of pepper spray and I had to sit down for a moment.

“Honey, it was just a tie.” He feigned ignorance.

But that was only the beginning. End of last month, he got a pair of new shoes. Shoes! I almost lost my composure when I saw them at the doorstep. He was all nonchalant about it, like it’s the most natural thing in the world for him to buy a pair of shoes. He either bought them to impress her, or they’re already past that stage, and she selected them for him.

So you see, that is the kind of man I am married to. But do you think I’d crumble? Do you think I’d lay down and die, as that popular song goes? (I think it was about a cheating husband, too.) No. I cannot confront him with evidence, so I enacted revenge in a different way. I gave him a taste of his own medicine. Last week, the electrician came to fix our air conditioning, to which I had taken a screwdriver beforehand. When the repair man ringed, I opened the door wearing nothing but a bathrobe. I put on an act like I had forgotten the appointment. “So sorry, oh, but please come in Mr. Electrician! Cup of tea?” That made him flustered and probably gave him all kinds of ideas. When he had taken the unit off the wall, I leaned over his shoulder to watch him work. You’re so skilful with your fingers, Mr. Electrician! I rubbed my chest against his backside and he stirred. We did it right there, on the floor, next to the gutted air conditioning unit. While he was doing me, my eyes fell on the new pair of shoes, sitting at the doorstep. And I smiled, and grinned, and then I laughed.

Let’s see how this looks likey.

I got the idea from Joelchrono’s blog.

Final Fantasy VII Remake

This one’s fairly easy.

FF7R is fun by merit of its presentation, cutscenes and fights. However, shortly after I met Aerith it dropped me into a hub area where Aerith is having fun making Cloud run errands for locals. Things like finding lost cats.

It’s. So. Boring.

Washing the dishes is more fun that watching Cloud crawl between the debris that is placed to obscure loading times. I don’t care about finding lost cats. It’s all padding. I feel compelled to go through it all, because I don’t want to miss out on a Materia on account of not finding all the cats, and then be stuck on a boss, underpowered. I keep mentioning the cat quest, because I remember them the most. The other side quests were just as boring and apparently even less memorable.

Disco Elysium

Aaah… tough one. I keep meaning to return, but it’s been a while. I’m afraid I’ll Ihave forgotten which of the NPCs I already talked to, or what they had to say. I’ll have to go through the same dialogue trees again while thinking “Didn’t I hear this before…?” I’m still fairly early in the game, I believe, but I’ve done quite a few things in the first area. Last time I played, I was wandering around trying to see if I’d missed something, because I didn’t have a specific place or thing in mind to continue. All the moseying around. The game doesn’t hold the players hand and this is the right decision, over showing a quest marker. After all this isn’t Dragon Quest where you grind to get a level up, but a game that lives through its world and dialogue. But for someone like me, this leads to a risk of not coming back.

Citizen Sleeper 2

I haven’t played the first game, but Citizen Sleeper has always caught my eye due to its art style. Since it may be a lesser known game, I’ll describe it a bit: It has great writing, by which I mean the prose is really solid and evocative. Like Disco Elysium, the UI is focused on making the reading pleasant and the text isn’t only dialogue but environments and character’s actions are also conveyed through prose.

The game itself is a bit divorced from this. It feels almost like a board game or pen & paper RPG. The mechanics seem abstract. You don’t control or even see your character directly, but click different spots on a space station, select actions and decide which one of a number of dice or resources to spend, determining your chances to succeed or fail.

Then I mis-clicked and wasted some resources. The game auto-saves, but it’s not a Roguelike where you get to start over quickly. You have to live with your decisions (or mis-clicks). It’s a bleak, “no hope” type of setting, which amplifies my feeling that I inadvertently doomed myself by mis-clicking.

I got this game along with a bunch of others in a Humblebundle set, so at the time there were a lot of alternatives I hadn’t tried yet.

If I want to go back to the game, I’ll have to get a hold of the abstract mechanics again, probably replay the entire beginning … I didn’t play that long yet, but the prospect of spending an hour of playtime going through the beginning of the same game again isn’t making me want to go back.

I think the game has a “narrative” difficulty mode and I’m tempted to try. But then I get doubts and think that, to really experience the narrative to its fullest I have to also go through the hardships the game presents me with.

“What?”

“I sold half my lands.” He rifled through the papers and showed Masao the contract, an exorbitant sum underneath.

“No way! Are you being blackmailed?”

Hiroshi laughed. “Don’t tell me you haven’t gotten any offers.” He shook the contract at Masaos face. “This one’s the third. I already rejected two last month! Almost scary, no?”

The following weeks, like Hiroshi had said, offers came. Even though the offered sums were quite formidable, Masao rejected them. For Masao Endo and his younger brother Kunimoto, cultivating their lands was as natural as the sun rising and setting. Even those years when the crops were bad, the idea of selling his fields and doing something else had never crossed his mind.

Over time, more letters arrived, offering bigger sums. And Masao rejected them. Old Hiroshi moved away without so much as saying goodbye. A construction site grew where his fields had been, and soon the skeleton of a four story apartment building cast its shadow onto Masaos fields. A train station here, another one there. Tracks inbetween. The number of cars per hour on the patchy asphalt in front of his house doubled and then tripled.

“Tokyo’s growing”, Masaos wife Ayako said, looking at a passing train, wiping sweat from her forehead. “Soon we’ll be surrounded by shopping centers and parking garages.”

“Then we’ll grow cabbage in the middle of shopping centers and garages.” Masao planted another seed into the ground. He had never wanted to do anything but farming. The soil he and his brother had inherited wasn’t great, but it was theirs. Their father had been a farmer, and so had his father before him. Age comes fast, when you spend your days out in the fields. A bead of sweat dripped from his forehead to the earth and left a tiny dark spot where it landed. Like watering the soil with his very own body, he thought. Pouring his life into these fields. One day, he’d die here, he was sure of that.

Two days later, his brother Kunimoto rang his doorbell. Masao opened and Kunimoto greeted him with a stack of files under his arm. Masao took one look at the paper and slammed the door shut.

“Hey,” Kunimoto yelled from outside. “That’s no way to treat your brother.” He knocked at the door.

“No,” Masao shouted through the thin wood. “The answer is no.”

“You haven’t heard the question.”

“I know what you’re up to. I’m not gonna see the fields I grew up on make way for another one of these malls or whatever.”

“Masao, let me in.” Kunimoto pounded his fist against the door several times. “You need to see this.” He kept on thumping the door. A vase on the wall-fitted shelf jumped half a centimeter each time Kunimotos hand made contact. It hopped closer and closer towards the edge. Masao unlocked the door.

“Wise decision, brother.”

…

Kunimoto knelt in front of the living room table and spread documents all over it. He had consulted an investment firm in Tokyo about the value growth not only of his own land, but that of Masao as well.

“That fool Hiroshi,” Kunimoto said, “sold his real estate a year ago. Now its worth is already six-point-three percent up! Scammed him, whoever bought his fields. I’d go and laugh at his face, if I knew where to old fool went.”

Masao leaned back, his arms crossed. “What is your point?”

“Look at this.” Kunimoto snatched a document and held it for Masao to see. “We’re sitting on a gold mine. Whoever owns this land in ten or twenty years will be like royalty. The smartest move is to rent it out.”

Footsteps on the stairs. The door slid open and Ayako entered. She gave Kunimoto a greeting.

“Look Ayako,” Kunimoto said, waving the paper at her, “look at this and tell me we’re not fools if we keep on digging through the dirt. Open your husbands eyes.”

Ayako took the paper, eyed it over, then went to the next. Then the next. Masao started wiggling his foot. His wife took her time looking through the heaps of paper. Like she had a business sense, Masao thought and rolled his eyes. Some time passed. Finally, Ayako turned towards the two brothers.

“Those last five or so years, things have already changed,” she said. “Look out of the window, Masao. There’s a train station now, five minutes by foot. A supermarket fifteen minutes.”

Masao shook his head. Yes, Matsune-Station. That damned train station no one had asked for. It stood right where the big old pine tree once stood. Where he had played as a child, and where he had said goodbye to Ayako after their first date, almost ten years ago. She had kissed him on the cheek before she turned to walk home. He’d stood there for fifteen more minutes, watching her walk between the fields towards her own home until she was out of sight. She hadn’t looked back once. Ayako sure knew how to put a boy on the rack. But now that oh so convenient train station had taken the pine tree’s place on the side of the road, and Ayako seemed happy for it. He shook his head again. He didn’t want to bring this sob story up in front of his brother.

But Ayako seemed to have read his mind. “Even the pine tree is gone. Maybe it’s time for us to leave as well? And besides…” She touched her belly.

Masao had never given much thought to becoming a father. He had always assumed the day would come eventually, and he’d had a vague idea about a son as his successor. Because that’s how things went. Ayako however, said she wanted something “better” for her son than to be a farmer.

“Better?” Masao stared at her with an open mouth. “You say that like we are rabble.”

Ayako looked down at her hands, slowly rubbing her palms together. Her family had lived in the area for generations, just like Masaos. How could she betray her lineage? But he knew that she and Kunimoto were right. It wasn’t about being something “better” than a farmer. It was not even a matter of choice. There would be no more farms around here in a couple of years, because the urban sprawl was eating them all up. So in the end, he agreed. Together with his brother he made several appointments at that consulting company in Tokyo and arranged the lease of his lands. During the long meetings, Masao kept mostly quiet and let Kunimoto do the talking. He didn’t understand most of the business talk, and he wasn’t interested in educating himself either. Sometimes he found his thoughts wandering, and when someone suddenly adressed him to ask if this and that was alright with him, he looked at Kunimoto and nodded it off. If Kunimoto thought it was right, then it probably was. And if Kunimoto was wrong, then Masao wouldn’t be able to correct him anyways.

Masao and Ayako Endo moved that same year. They picked an apartment near Matsune-Station, in one of the modern flats that had been erected recently. The new apartment was air conditioned, certainly an improvement over the barely heat insulated farmhouse that his parents had built in the early 50s.

He attended the razing of his old home like someone would attend a funeral. The tiny crack in the kitchen wall, where he had once seen a cockroach disappear as a child. Was the cockroach home behind that wall, he had asked his mother. The stairs that would creak on the third and fifth step (when he had snuck outside at night as a child, he had to make sure not to tread on them). The room where his father had died an early death, and his mother had followed him the year after. Everything was gone now, turned to memories.

Instead, there was Kazuo. Ayako was in labor for 12 hours before Kazuo finally decided to leave his mothers belly. Thanks to Kunimoto, Masao had few duties besides signing papers and being present on occasions, bowing and greeting and drinking with important people, business partners.

Money started rolling in all by itself. Kunimoto managed it all.

Thinking back, Masao couldn’t remember him and his wife ever talking a lot. But it hadn’t been as apparent when they had their farm to care for. There was always something to do, and they had been a good team. They had coordinated their efforts without many words, and it had seemed to Masao at the time that this meant they had some sort of bond or connection. Now their daily routine had been broken up. He could have spend more time with his wife and son. But he didn’t. He took long walks. He watched TV. He sat in a chair. Some nights he would go to a bar and drink.