As soon as he'd left the hotel and its touristy concision (no shoes on the floor, ichijiu sansai at both 7s, canvas doors with painted flowers), and stepped into the warm, open night, a familiar problem posed itself to him again. He left in what he thought was rage, stamping his feet in an almost self-affected fashion, hoping to convince himself that his anger was sincere, his grievances were legitimate, and Victoria, the (of course) cause of his hasty exit, was guilty, guilty! of all charges. But how to keep the fire burning all the way down the street? The night was cool and dark; how to be a pure, white flame in its belly?

By the time he arrived at the place Google had so dutifully revealed to him while he stood in their room  hurling invective, her hurling back, he had worked himself into a second fit, and a third. His attempts to call her were met with a protracted ring, the voice mail, the beep. Fine, then. As he turned the corner where the hotel was, he had risen to an emotional zenith. No stares from passerby, he noted. No passerby.

"...and you always take your sweet fucking time deciding when you've had enough, and when I've crossed a fucking line. First night in Japan. Big dream of yours, see Tokyo at night, first night, and this shit, Victoria." was the first Word of James's world anyone in Japan could catch a syllable of. The woman at the front desk attended to the door. His phone was desperately low. "I'm not done, Vic. I'll be calling back later."

Awkwardly, as if chafing against the still air, he entered the lobby. Muted colors and  nice, charitable empty spaces convinced him: this is the place they should have been staying. There were no contrivances of form, no sense of carefully arranged illusion. Just good, functional, wholesome design. He admired the window, how it stretched almost all the way to the high, slanted ceiling, its upper edge running parallel to the slope. Indisputably modern. He loved the sense that he was taking up as little room as possible.

"Hello." asked the woman after a minute of watching him stare at the windows.
"Oh yeah, sorry. It's just, man I really like the look of this place. These windows, you know?"
She nodded, then stared.
"Um, yeah I'd like a room."
After a long pause, he figured it out.
"Oh, don't speak any English, do you?" At the front desk? of a capsule hotel? in Tokyo? and no English? What spirit or whatever the fuck did you piss off, James?
"That's fine, then." A heat was rising from his chest, "I'll just... see if I can translate..." Low as it was, his phone had died; he'd never hung up the call. How simple things would be right now, if Victoria were here... his interpreter, his... but if things (read: she) had been different, he would have never needed to leave. Or the two of them would have been here in the first place.
In. Out. Don't explode at the nice lady. It's not her fault her employers thought a capacity to speak a lick of English was unnecessary to perform her duties. It's not her fault the night is cruel.

They progressed by pidgin, gesture. "Room." He said, drawing a box in the air with one hand. "Me." The word left his mouth with the zeal of condescension. From a drawer she removed a form, entirely in Japanese.
"The only room we have left is a room for shrunken people, is that okay? You'll have to sign a waiver." she said, hardly looking at him. In fact, she said it so low, so indistinctly, he might not have understood it regardless of language barrier. She yawned and turned her gaze to anything in the room that might interest her more than the apparently fatuous tourist standing before her.
Speaking slower will not help me understand Japanese! "Is this for a room? I just sign here and we're all good? Thank you!" He bowed and signed and reached for his wallet. All he found was lint. "Oh fuck. I left my shit at the hotel." For a moment, he considered it: walking all the way back up the street, stalking through the hotel lobby, explaining why he left in such a huff if his reappearance drew judgemental stares from the staff, and reaching, slowly, through the slightest crack he could make in the hotel room door to the bag he'd left by his shoes, where he was sure his wallet lay. It occurred to him to look down. It occurred to him that he had left his shoes.

"Look, uh... is there any chance you could squeeze me into that room, pro bono? It's not that much space, that I need, I can take a smaller one, even, if they come in different sizes... I can pay tomorrow, promise, it's just that tonight, no chance, you know... and I know I sounded angry on the phone there earlier but look I'm good for it, I'm an upright kind of person, but sometimes I just get..." Already she'd noticed him gesturing to his empty pockets and scooped the form back up. Her eyes ran across it, over it and into the small painting of a tengu over the front door. Into the trash, then, and me, into the lonely night. Instead, she signed the line below his and arrayed her arms in an arrow towards the corridor on the left, a smile opening along her face.
"Yes! Thank you, I promise I'll get it all sorted out, soon as I can."

Wordlessly, he trailed her through the hall, gliding his hands along the walls, the doors tightly-wound circles carved into them; he noticed, as well, other circles arranged in rows and columns, each no bigger than the head of a fan, but he could summon no explanation for them. Ornamental designs, put in a pattern to please the eye. He considered himself a fan of such decorative abstraction. "Like Kandinsky or something." he said, to silence. He thought he heard her laugh. The light would flicker on occasion, and as they moved deeper into the nest of doors the air grew colder. A strange feeling pricked his nerves and grew more palpable with each passing second until, suddenly, the woman stopped before a strange console. A wide, plastic door opened upward, and she beckoned him to enter.

It was a chamber like a hollowed-out tree trunk, a shower, an outhouse. "Did you bring me to a closet or something by mistake? I can't sleep here. Look, I can't even stretch my arms out." He was denied his full wingspan (quite considerable, he thought) at the elbow. "See, impossible. Could you just take me to a proper room please, I thought we already worked this out?"

The door shot downward and shut, and through the head-sized window he could see her tapping on the console. A pale, blue light began to glow above him, and he began to yell like he had when he'd first arrived, then louder when he noticed her indifference, louder when the whirring in the walls began to match him, louder when he realized whatever was happening was happening. Then softer. And softer. And softer. And silence, until the door flew upward again, and he found himself staring at a set of smooth, white pillars, arcing towards the sky. It occurred to him that the pillars had shoes. He strained his neck, following the pillars' trajectory. The skirt, the well-pressed button-down. The distant, gently smiling face of a young Japanese woman, hundreds of feet tall. She made a small wave, arched her back and reached for him with her other hand.

He screamed as her fingers closed around him.