Vacant

At the vacant pizza place next to the vacant doughnut establishment they are playing Silver Bells over and over again. It's a particularly irritating wind instrument version, a saxophone groaning out the main part, and the recording plays from the beginning to the end and then starts at the beginning again, like a recurrent nightmare. A single man sits with his coffee and his untouched doughnut at the unoccupied doughnut and coffee café, trudging half-consciously through a book called The Fourth Monkey, a silly, not-so-thrilling thriller about a psychotic murderer who kidnaps his victims, then cuts out first an eye, then the tongue, then one ear. See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil. He is a gruesome, though not very original killer. But the book is an easy read in Indonesian and better suited to the dim light of evening at a vacant doughnut shop than Hiroki Murakami would be, which the man reads during the sunlit mornings. The other half of the man's consciousness is fixed on three emails he had written just after getting out of bed that day--one to his son, one to his son's mother and stepfather, and one to his stepdaughter. Christmas greetings, nothing more. None of the emails had been answered. He looks again at his phone just to make sure. A light rain begins to fall, turning the gray street black, and the black street twinkles with the white and red reflections of headlights and tail lights. A swarm of motorbikes buzzes into the vacant lot of the vacant doughnut establishment and alights on the wet pavement while the drivers dismount and retrieve their rain smocks from the seat compartments. A wind-like hiss sings from the car tires on the road. City sidewalks, busy sidewalks, dressed in holiday style. The man wonders whether he is invisible. What proof is there of his existence? He has no record. His phone shows no messages at all. Three emails, not seen, not answered, not heard. Whatever happened to Christmas? Remember how love was all around? Whatever happened to it all?