## Chapter 363 — Four Screw Holes

By Saturday, 2 October, the wedding had acquired clothes.

Thomas and Isha had solved that part separately during the week, by agreement and with enough deliberate inconvenience that neither had seen the other's final choice. One opaque garment bag hung in Thomas's office. Another occupied the back of the flexible-room door. A pair of smaller shopping bags had been divided between cupboards with the seriousness usually reserved for correspondence or tax papers, although nothing inside them was secret in any meaningful sense. The point was simply that 30 October should still contain at least one thing neither of them had already inspected together.

Isha had tested Thomas's tolerance on Friday night by standing outside his office and asking whether curiosity counted as a practical need.

“No.”

“You answered too quickly.”

“I prepared for the question.”

She had accepted this, which made Thomas more suspicious than if she had argued.

On Saturday morning neither garment bag mattered because Kanno arrived at 202 carrying a camera, a thin document case and no interest in wedding clothes at all.

“I need you for an hour,” she said after taking off her shoes. “Possibly two. Not for the wedding.”

Thomas looked at the camera. “That qualification is reassuring.”

“It should not be. I may require you to stand near walls.”

Isha came from the kitchen with three coffees and set one in front of Kanno. “You have decided what the wall is.”

“No.” Kanno opened the document case on the low table. Inside were twelve small prints, all colour, all roughly postcard-sized. “I have decided there are more walls.”

The photograph she had sent during the previous week sat on top: pale concrete, a rectangular shadow where something had once covered the surface, four screw holes and a strip of newer paint that stopped before the corner. The image had been flat enough on Thomas's phone to look almost diagrammatic. Printed, it contained more small failures. One screw hole had been filled badly. Dirt had gathered along the lower edge of the pale rectangle. The new paint was not merely newer; it had been rolled in a different direction.

Kanno spread the other prints without arranging them into a sequence. A tiled corridor held two clean squares where signs had been removed from a darker wall. Another photograph showed a narrow strip of adhesive and the pale outline of tape on a municipal noticeboard after the paper itself had gone. One exterior wall had six anchor holes at shoulder height and a faint rust line descending from the lowest pair. A convenience-store side wall showed the clean rectangular patch left after a machine or cabinet had been removed, along with a capped outlet and a short length of pipe no longer serving anything visible.

Thomas picked up that one. “You know what used to be there?”

“No.”

“Do you want to?”

Kanno considered the question. “Maybe. Not yet.”

Isha had taken the photograph of the tiled corridor. She tilted it towards the window, then away again. “These two shapes look intentional together.”

“They were two separate boards.”

“You know that?”

“I took the photograph after seeing an older image of the corridor online. The boards were unrelated.”

Isha looked at the paired pale rectangles again. “Then the wall is making a better composition than the people did.”

Kanno's mouth moved. “That is one reason I kept it.”

Thomas set down the convenience-store photograph. “Is this another *Until Replaced*?”

“No.”

The answer was immediate enough that he stopped there.

Kanno drank some coffee and looked over the scattered prints. “The first booklet was about things still doing work after the official thing failed, disappeared or stopped being adequate. These are mostly after the work has gone. Or after the object has gone. Or after somebody has tried to make the wall normal again and failed.” She frowned at her own sentence. “That is three different subjects.”

“Four screw holes can support several departments,” Thomas said.

Kanno ignored him. “I keep taking the photographs. I do not yet know if that makes a project.”

Isha put the corridor print back. “What do you need from us?”

“To walk. I have five places I want to look at again. You are both good at noticing where I stop.” Kanno slid the photographs back into the case. “You are not allowed to invent categories while we are outside.”

Thomas looked injured. “I can notice without classifying.”

“No, you can delay classifying until you have enough examples.”

“That is different.”

“It is not different enough.”

They left after ten. The morning had the dry brightness Sendai sometimes produced after a week of intermittent rain: sharp shadows, cooler air, sunlight that made every repaired patch of concrete easier to see. Isha wore a light jacket over dark trousers and had put the engagement ring on after breakfast. Kanno carried the camera cross-body and the document case in her work bag. Thomas carried nothing beyond his phone and wallet because Kanno had refused his offer of an extra bag before he finished making it.

The first wall stood beside a narrow service lane behind a row of ordinary shops west of the station. A business had changed tenants sometime in the previous year. The front sign was new. Around the side, where fewer people were expected to care, an older painted name had been covered with a rectangle of grey close to the wall colour but not close enough. Morning sun struck it at an angle that made the repair look raised even though it was only paint.

Kanno stopped before the lane narrowed, and Thomas and Isha stopped with her. For almost a minute nobody said anything. Kanno moved a pace left, lifted the camera, lowered it again and crossed to the other side. A delivery bicycle came through the lane; they moved aside, then returned after it passed.

Isha looked at the wall from where Kanno had first stood. “The drainpipe cuts it.”

“Yes.”

“Is that bad?”

“I don't know.” Kanno raised the camera again. The first frame included the pipe. For the second she moved closer until the grey rectangle occupied most of the image and the pipe disappeared. She checked both on the rear screen. “The close one looks like abstract painting.”

Thomas leaned in only when she angled the camera towards them. “The wider one tells me it is a wall.”

“I know.”

“You said I was here to notice where you stop.”

“I did not say I would enjoy the result.”

She kept the wider frame. At the next location, Isha was less useful. The wall belonged to a small public building with a former notice case removed from beside the entrance. Four metal anchors remained in a neat rectangle. The paint beneath where the case had protected it was slightly less faded than the rest.

Kanno photographed it straight on, then from lower down. Isha walked to the edge of the entrance path and suggested that the shadow from a nearby tree might cross the empty rectangle if they waited.

Kanno looked at the tree, then at the wall. “That would make it prettier.”

“Yes.”

“I don't want it prettier.”

Isha accepted the rejection without changing it into a discussion. She sat on the low retaining edge while Kanno tried three more angles and discarded all of them. Thomas joined Isha and watched a man wheel a bicycle out of the building.

“This is going well,” he said.

“She rejected my tree.”

“You are coping admirably.”

Isha looked at him. “You are pleased because she rejected something that was not yours.”

“Shared hardship strengthens friendship.”

Kanno turned from the wall. “I can still reject something of yours.” Thomas became quiet.

The third place had disappeared.

Kanno led them to the side of an older office building where, according to the photograph on her phone, a line of old cable clips and an unused mounting plate had remained beneath a service sign. The wall was now uniformly cream. The holes had been filled and sanded, the plate removed, the whole section repainted from corner to corner.

Kanno stood in front of it with the camera hanging against her coat. Thomas checked the building number. “This is the place.”

“I know.”

Isha compared the phone photograph with the wall. The older image showed seven clips marching diagonally towards nothing, each leaving a dark crescent beneath it. “When did you take this?”

“Three weeks ago.”

The new surface was not perfect. Close up, slight changes in texture revealed where filler had covered some of the holes. From the pavement it looked finished.

Kanno took one photograph anyway.

“Of the repair?” Thomas asked.

“Of the wall now.” Kanno put the camera down after checking it. “I don't know if I want it.”

Thomas let the statement remain where it was.

They continued towards a small café Kanno had marked because it sat roughly between the third and fourth locations. She had not made a reservation. Thomas noticed and said nothing.

Inside, they found a table near the back. Kanno put the camera on the chair beside her rather than on the table and ordered coffee and toast. Isha chose tea and a small egg sandwich. Thomas added a chestnut pastry to his coffee because October had apparently given bakeries permission to put chestnut into everything.

Kanno took out the document case while they waited and placed the original photograph of the now-repainted wall beside the new image on the camera screen.

“The old one is better,” she said.

Thomas looked from one to the other. “As a photograph?”

“Yes.”

“The new one is more complete as a sequence.”

Kanno gave him a look.

He lifted one hand. “I know. Category violation.”

“No. That was a useful question.” She looked at the two images again. “It may be the problem. A sequence makes me want to explain change. I am not sure I want to explain anything yet.”

Isha took the older print from the edge and studied it. “Why did you photograph it the first time?”

Kanno answered only after the drinks arrived and the server had left. “Because somebody removed the cable and left all the things that had held it. It looked unfinished, but not in a way that needed me to fix it.”

“That sounds close to the booklet,” Thomas said.

“Too close.” Kanno tore her toast in half. “That is why I am suspicious of it.”

The food gave the conversation somewhere else to go. Thomas told Kanno that the venue was booked, which she already knew, and that the clothing problem had been resolved, which she did not.

“Both of you?” she asked.

“Yes,” Isha said.

Kanno looked at Thomas. “You have seen hers?”

“No.”

“And she has seen yours?”

“No.”

Kanno drank her coffee. “Unexpected restraint.”

“We are keeping the final choices separate,” Thomas said. “The garments are currently stored in different rooms under a mutual non-inspection arrangement.”

“You make surprise sound contractual.”

“It has reduced accidental disclosure.”

Isha ate the last half of her sandwich and added, “He nearly described the shape of the bag as evidence.”

“It was an opaque garment bag.”

“That is already too much information.”

Kanno looked between them. “I am pleased the wedding contains at least one security classification I do not need to know.”

She did not ask what either had chosen. Thomas had half expected her to because clothing was one of the places where Kanno's visual judgement had repeatedly entered their lives, but the absence of the question felt deliberate. Whatever the outfits were, they would arrive on 30 October rather than becoming another proof stage at her table.

After lunch they walked to the fourth location, a covered pedestrian connection near a municipal building. Here the wall carried no obvious removed sign. Instead, a broad patch of paint had aged differently behind where a row of plastic chairs had once sat. The chairs themselves had been replaced by a bench farther down the corridor. A pale horizontal band remained at shoulder height, interrupted by darker marks where heads or coats had touched the exposed wall above it.

Kanno had photographed the band once from far enough away to include the new bench. This time she ignored the bench and moved close to the wall.

Isha stood behind her. “I would not have seen that if you had not shown me.”

“Neither would I, a month ago.”

Thomas stayed several paces back. “Does that make it better or worse?”

Kanno looked at him over her shoulder. “That is suspiciously close to an actual art question.”

“I contain multitudes.”

“You contain office administration.”

She photographed the pale band twice and then stopped. A family passed behind them without paying attention. Somewhere beyond the covered connection, a pedestrian signal began its repeating electronic call.

The final place was the one Kanno had expected to be easiest and disliked immediately on arrival.

A closed shopfront had been stripped before renovation. The old signboard was gone, leaving a large clean rectangle above the shutters. Stickers had been removed from the glass badly enough that their adhesive ghosts caught the light. Inside, the empty room showed pale squares on the floor where shelving had stood.

Thomas understood why Kanno had brought them there. It contained everything the other photographs contained, only more visibly.

Kanno lifted the camera once, framed the front and lowered it.

“No.”

Isha looked through the glass. “Too much?”

“Yes.” Kanno crossed the pavement before the answer could become attached to the shop itself. “It already looks like a photograph about absence. I don't have to do anything.”

Thomas followed. “The wall is doing your job.”

“The wall is doing everybody's job.”

They left it unphotographed.

By mid-afternoon Kanno had taken twenty-eight frames and kept perhaps nine. They ended at a quiet public seating area near the river, not because the river belonged to the project but because all three wanted to sit down. Kanno reviewed images on the camera while Thomas and Isha shared a bottle of water they had bought from a vending machine.

The day had not answered what Kanno was making. It had narrowed a few things she did not want. She rejected the obviously abandoned shop. She rejected one close crop because it severed the mark from its material. She kept the newly repainted wall only because she wanted to look at it next to the earlier photograph later. The tree shadow never returned as an idea.

Thomas watched her mark one frame and unmark another. “Do you think it becomes another booklet?”

“Maybe. I don't know the size, and I am not choosing a printer before I know whether there is a thing to print.” Kanno looked at him over the camera. “That was going to be your next question.”

“It was one of two.”

“Keep the other one.”

Isha laughed quietly and leaned back against the bench. The sun had moved behind thin cloud. Across the water, a line of apartment balconies held laundry, bicycles and one bright red blanket that had nothing to do with Kanno's project.

Kanno put the camera away. “I think I want the marks to be ordinary enough that people usually stop seeing them.”

Thomas waited, but Kanno had finished. Isha looked towards the river. “Then the closed shop was too easy.”

“Yes.”

“And the painted wall may be too finished.”

“Maybe.”

Kanno stood and adjusted the strap of her bag. “That is all I know today.”

They got up and started back towards the station.

They separated near the station. Kanno was going home to put the images beside the older set and, she said, probably make the folder structure worse before making it better. Thomas and Isha headed towards their train.

At the crossing, Kanno looked at Isha. “Do not send me photographs of the outfit.”

“I was not going to.”

Kanno turned to Thomas. “You either.”

“I had not considered it.”

“You would have by Tuesday.”

Thomas could not prove otherwise. Kanno left when the pedestrian light changed.

---

Sunday morning brought the wedding notebook back to the table. The venue was paid for, the date sat on the refrigerator calendar in Isha's handwriting, and the two garment bags remained in their separate rooms. The restaurant needed final numbers later in the month; rings, photographs, flowers and the exact ceremony shape could wait.

Thomas had opened the notebook for the restaurant's next deadline. The names above it caught Isha's attention first.

**Kanno — yes**

**Matsuda — yes**

**Saitō — yes**

**Miyake — yes**

Isha sat opposite him with tea warming both hands. “I keep putting Ishikawa in the room.”

Thomas looked up. She had not said *we should invite Ishikawa*. The sentence was more useful than that.

“At the ceremony?” he asked.

“Yes.” Isha looked down at the four names. “When it was only an imaginary room, I did not know. Now I see the actual table, and she is there.”

Thomas remembered the first interview clothes, the centre training, Mina's frightened descent, the seminar, Graves restrictions, the permanent contract and the first-aid certificate copied into the staff records. He could picture Ishikawa at the long table without effort.

“Then ask her.”

Isha nodded and took the pen without writing yet. “What about you?”

Thomas looked at the blank space beneath Miyake.

Mori came first. Thomas saw her leaning over a document at the office, telling him that being able to finish work was not the only condition for being there. He saw her warning him not to volunteer international support merely because silence made him uncomfortable. More recently, he saw her looking at the four-date pilot and asking who owned a field before asking who could fill it.

“Yes,” he said after a moment. “Mori.”

“Only Mori?”

Thomas considered Sugiyama next. She had been beside him through ordinary cases, broken notices, delayed arrivals and the process becoming something other people could use. He had eaten lunch with her often enough that he knew which convenience-store soup she disliked. She had sent him the cropped pilot screenshot on his birthday because she knew he would want to know it worked and also knew he should not be working.

He pictured the restaurant room again. Kanno would probably notice the menu typography. Miyake might join her. Saitō would have the chair nearest the easiest route. Matsuda would arrive from Tokyo with a bag he insisted was small enough for one night. Ishikawa fitted beside Isha's Earth working life without needing explanation.

Sugiyama fitted too. Thomas found that this surprised him less than the thought of leaving her out.

“Sugiyama as well.”

Isha nodded. “Then ask both.”

Thomas looked at her. “Does inviting Ishikawa make you feel that you have to invite Yoshida?”

“No.”

Isha liked Yoshida. They had run together, worked together and laughed enough that the friendship was real. She simply did not see her at the ceremony table.

Isha turned the notebook towards herself and wrote:

**Ishikawa — ask**

She handed Thomas the pen. He wrote beneath it:

**Mori — ask**

**Sugiyama — ask**