## Chapter 424 — Before and After Thursday, 20 April, was less interesting than Wednesday. Kanno appreciated it. She went to work with the same black shoulder bag she normally carried and spent the morning correcting a catalogue whose photographs had arrived in three different colour spaces. One caption was eight characters too long for the layout its author had approved the previous week. A client returned a file labelled *final* with nine alterations. By lunch, Kanno had performed no interworld travel, met no royalty and thought about Mercury only when somebody complained that one product photograph contained shadows which were "too black." She did not suggest that black could be considerably blacker. Aelira remained in her thoughts in a less cooperative way. Kanno could remember the room, the garden, Aelira's face when Mercury became a planet rather than a metal, and the exact moment the permission had changed. *Next time, you may bring your camera.* Not use it. Bring it. There was no next meeting arranged, no reason to decide which lens she would take, and no photograph waiting to be made merely because Kanno could already imagine several. She returned to the catalogue. At twelve forty-five, Thomas sent the ordinary three-person thread a photograph of an office document with three phrases underlined. **Apparently "registered address", "current address" and "contact address" have all been translated from wording which may or may not mean the same thing.** Kanno looked at it for several seconds. **This is the sort of problem you wanted.** His answer came a minute later. **I wanted the sort where somebody else tells me what their words mean.** Isha responded with: **Have they?** Thomas did not reply immediately. Kanno put the phone away, pleased by the implication that he was probably making the correct office answer the question. That was enough excitement for lunch. --- Thomas had, in fact, sent the question back. The source document came from a faculty office whose internal Japanese guidance distinguished between an address registered with the university, an address used for correspondence and the address held elsewhere in a student's records. The proposed English had compressed two of those into *current address* and introduced *contact address* for the third. Thomas could identify the collision. He could not decide what the faculty intended students to update. Two weeks earlier, the difference would probably have become a small research problem. He would have checked related pages, looked for precedent, perhaps asked Sugiyama what the office usually meant, then built a provisional answer which could be returned with enough qualifications to keep everyone moving. Instead he wrote: **Please confirm which record or decision each source term refers to. Once the owning distinction is clear, I can review the shared English terminology for consistency.** Then he went back to the student email he had been answering before the document arrived. Sugiyama noticed later because the faculty reply appeared in the shared mailbox asking one of its own administrators to confirm the distinction. "You sent it back." "Yes." She read enough of the thread to understand why. "They may take until tomorrow." "Then they take until tomorrow." Sugiyama looked at him with mild suspicion, as though checking whether this was really Thomas. He ignored her and continued typing. Nothing else happened. By five-thirty he had finished his normal allocation, flagged one terminology question for Friday and left the building without opening the spreadsheet again. Outside, the campus cherry trees had passed the point that encouraged people to stop beneath them. Enough petals remained to show what the branches had been doing a week earlier, but the paths now carried more evidence of blossom than the trees did. Thomas walked towards the station. He did not photograph them. --- Isha had nowhere she was required to be on Thursday. Her single ordinary climbing-centre shift for the week had been Wednesday. Saturday and Sunday would supply the remaining sixteen paid hours through Coach 1, leaving Thursday and Friday genuinely outside her work schedule. The distinction had been made very clearly. Isha nevertheless had the preparation pack open by ten in the morning. She had already read all of it once. That was the problem. The coloured tabs remained along the edge: things she knew, things she wanted to practise explaining, and the large yellow population of things she regarded with suspicion. Several exercises had acquired pencil notes. One page had *ask before changing* written beside a photograph. Another now carried three different examples of how she might adapt a beginner task when the original movement favoured a taller climber. By half past ten, she was adding a fourth. Isha stopped. The imaginary climber in the exercise had no face, no height beyond what the photograph suggested, no history, no reason for failing and no opinion about what the problem was. She had begun preparing increasingly good answers for somebody who did not exist. Isha put down the pencil. For a while she sat at the dining table and looked at the page. Then she closed the pack. She went to the gym instead. The session was ordinary and not especially long. She trained, showered, bought vegetables on the way home and spent part of the afternoon doing nothing that would improve her coaching qualification. At four she opened the pack again. This time she read for thirty minutes. When Thomas came home, it was closed. He noticed because the coloured tabs normally made the thing difficult to ignore. "Finished?" "No." Thomas removed his shoes and looked towards the table. Isha was cutting spring cabbage into thin strips beside the sink. She had tied her hair high enough to keep it away from the knife, though the pale length still reached well below her shoulders. "I stopped." "Different." "Yes." He put his bag down. Isha finished the cabbage before continuing. "I was preparing answers for people I haven't met." "That seems difficult." "It became easy. That was why I stopped." Thomas understood after a moment. He washed his hands and came beside her. "Are you doing more tomorrow?" "Some." "How much?" Isha looked at him. Thomas recognised the mistake before she spoke. "That sounded like I was assigning homework." "It did." "I withdraw it." She handed him the cabbage. "I am going to read the sections I marked because I want to read them. Then I am putting the pack in my bag." "That sounds considerably better than my question." "Yes." Thomas took the knife when she offered it. The conversation ended because dinner required the rest of the cabbage. --- Friday made the decision harder by supplying time. Thomas went to work. Isha did not. Rain began shortly after breakfast, too light to make staying indoors necessary and persistent enough to make it attractive. Isha put laundry on, answered two ordinary messages, spent forty minutes on the second paper hanging she had been neglecting and eventually returned to the Coach 1 material. She started with the yellow tabs. Some remained suspicious. One section used language about motivation that Isha thought risked treating every climber as someone waiting to be persuaded into wanting more. She wrote a question beside it and left the question unanswered. Another section distinguished demonstration from instruction more sharply than she had on her first reading. Isha reread the sentence she had already underlined twice: **The demonstration is information, not the standard body.** She thought about Nishimura. Her own height had solved a movement Nishimura's body could not use. The correction afterward had been straightforward enough, but the first demonstration had still been bad. The page did not require another note. A later exercise asked what a coach should observe before altering a task. Isha had already filled most of the margin. She looked at it. Then, deliberately, she did not add anything. The unread final exercise remained four pages farther on. Isha closed the pack. She put the pencil into its case, removed the loose sheets she had no reason to carry and placed the preparation material into her work bag beside a notebook and water bottle. The bag stayed there. At eleven twenty, Isha went out into the rain. She came home with bread she had not needed and a small packet of cream, green and smoky-blue paper from the shop west of central Sendai. The Coach 1 pack remained in the bag. --- Thomas discovered this at six fourteen. He had spent the final hour of Friday dealing with the answer to Thursday's address question. The faculty had confirmed that two of the three terms genuinely referred to separate records and the third was a badly maintained leftover from an older process. Thomas changed none of them himself. He added the confirmed meanings to the terminology table, flagged the obsolete term for its source office to remove, and suggested two English labels for the remaining pair. Then he stopped. Mori passed his desk while he was closing the file. "Working group?" "Finished for today." She nodded and kept walking. Thomas found this slightly disappointing. Some part of him had apparently expected continued recognition for not acquiring other people's responsibilities. He considered that evidence of a problem and went home. The Coach 1 material was absent from the dining table. Isha was on the floor near the balcony doors with several loops of coloured paper around her, attempting to persuade two pieces to hang at slightly different angles without one twisting the other out of position. Thomas watched the structure rotate slowly. "Is that intended?" "No." "Good." Isha looked up. "Why good?" "I was worried I didn't understand it." "You don't." "Excellent." She returned to the paper. Thomas went into the kitchen. Ten minutes later, while he was washing rice, the front door buzzer sounded. Kanno had agreed earlier in the day to come for dinner. She arrived carrying nothing except her work bag and an umbrella whose folding mechanism had lost an argument with the wind. Thomas took the umbrella from her. "Do you want me to fix that?" Kanno looked at him. "With what?" "Tools." She considered this acceptable. By the time she entered the LDK, Isha had abandoned the hanging on the floor. Kanno looked at the paper. "Improved?" "No." "Good." Thomas stared at both of them from the kitchen. "This household has developed a strange relationship with failure." Kanno removed her jacket. "Your rice is not yet cooked." "That is not failure. It is chronological." "Convenient." The conversation moved elsewhere before Thomas could defend cooking as a process. Kanno did not mention Aelira. Thomas and Isha did not ask. They had already been told what Kanno wanted them to know: the meeting had gone well, both women might want another, and a future camera could enter the room without acquiring permission to make a photograph. Nothing in Thursday or Friday had changed that. Kanno sat at the table and noticed the absence of the Coach 1 pack. "Where is the suspicious paperwork?" "In my bag." "Course tomorrow?" "Yes." "Prepared?" Isha considered the word while Thomas set bowls on the table. "I stopped preparing." Kanno looked at her. "For the course." "Yes." "Deliberately?" "Yes." Kanno nodded. "Good." Thomas pointed at her with the serving spoon. "I was told that asking how much preparation remained sounded like assigning homework." "It did." "You weren't there." "I didn't need to be." Isha's mouth moved. Thomas gave up and served dinner. The meal was simple enough that nobody discussed it much. They ate rice, miso soup, cabbage and pork, with the rain tapping lightly against the balcony glass. Kanno complained about the catalogue she had spent the morning correcting. Thomas described the address terminology without showing anyone the spreadsheet. Isha told them that the final four pages of her preparation pack remained unread. Thomas looked at her. "You left unread pages?" "Yes." "Voluntarily?" Isha gave him a level stare. Kanno put down her chopsticks. "Do not make this harder for her." "I am impressed." "That is making it harder." Isha reached across the table and took the last piece of pork from Thomas's side of the serving plate. He looked at the empty space. "Abuse of authority." "You were slow." "These are not equivalent concepts." "No." She ate it. Kanno watched the exchange. "You appear ready for professional education." Isha laughed. The course did not become more important because it was tomorrow. After dinner, Kanno helped Isha hold two sections of the paper hanging apart while Thomas adjusted the thread under instructions he was not permitted to improve. The result remained crooked. Isha left it that way. Kanno went home shortly after nine. Before bed, Isha checked her bag once. Course material. Notebook. Water. Wallet. Phone. The ordinary things she needed for the morning. Thomas was brushing his teeth when she came into the washroom. "Ready?" "I think so." He rinsed. Isha leaned against the door frame. "I will probably be bad at some of it." Thomas dried his mouth. "Probably." She smiled. That was all the reassurance she required. --- Saturday began early. Isha left after breakfast with her hair tied back, the Coach 1 material still closed inside her bag. Thomas kissed her at the genkan. "Have fun." "I am working." "You can do both." "I know." Then she left. The door closed. Thomas stood for a moment in the unusually quiet hall before remembering that he had an entire Saturday whose structure did not depend on anyone else. He went to the gym in the morning, bought groceries afterward and spent part of the afternoon reading in the LDK with the balcony door cracked open to cooler air. Isha came home tired enough to eat immediately and interested enough to talk for twenty minutes before deciding she had spoken sufficiently for one day. Thomas did not ask for the course in order. Sunday repeated the early departure. By late afternoon, flat 202 had accumulated the ordinary evidence of Thomas being alone in it for a day: one mug beside his office keyboard, laundry dry on the rack, vegetables prepared for dinner and a half-repaired umbrella belonging to Kanno on the dining table because he had discovered one bent metal rib required more patience than expected. At seventeen forty-three, he heard the front door. Isha entered, closed it behind her and remained in the genkan for several seconds. Thomas came into the hall. Her posture was fine. She was not limping. Her face held none of the contained physical exhaustion he recognised after hard climbing or MMA. She simply looked finished with receiving information. Thomas waited. Isha removed her shoes, placed them neatly beside his and held out her arms. He went into them. She folded herself around him and rested her chin briefly against his hair. "Hello." "Hello." They stayed there for a few seconds. Thomas could feel the weight of her bag against his hip. Eventually Isha released him. "Food." "I have food." "Good." "Tea first?" Isha considered. "Food first." Thomas went to the kitchen. That answer told him more than a detailed report would have. Dinner had already been mostly prepared. He reheated soup, cooked fish and rice, and left Isha alone long enough to change into soft trousers and an old shirt. She returned with her hair loose and the course bag abandoned in the bedroom. They began eating before Thomas asked anything. Halfway through the rice, Isha put down her chopsticks. "It was good." Thomas looked at her. He had not asked yet. "Good." "And irritating." "Also good?" "Sometimes." She took another bite. Thomas waited. Isha noticed. "You are being careful." "I was told not to examine you." "By whom?" "History." That made her smile. Thomas drank some water. "How was it?" The question opened considerably more than he expected. Isha began with Saturday morning and did not tell the story in order. There had been more talking than climbing. That had surprised her despite the preparation material clearly warning her. They spent time observing one another, planning short activities, changing instructions and discussing what a coach could infer from movement before the climber had said anything. "The answer is less than I thought," Isha said. Thomas leaned back slightly. "Less what?" "Less that I should use." She thought about the wording. "I can see many things. Weight on the wrong foot. Fear before a move. Someone protecting a shoulder. A person looking at the next hold and already deciding they cannot reach it." Thomas nodded. "But if I say everything I see, I make them climb my explanation." That sounded like something the course might have taught her until Isha continued. "Nobody said that. Their phrase was worse." Thomas smiled. "What was theirs?" "I have forgotten it." "Convenient." "I remember what I meant." She continued eating. One of the practical exercises had prohibited demonstration for part of the session. Isha had expected to dislike the restriction and discovered she did. Then she discovered why it existed. "I wanted to show the movement." "Of course." "It would have been faster." "For you." Isha pointed her chopsticks at him. "Yes. That was the problem." The person she was coaching had been shorter and built differently through the legs and torso. Without using her own body as the answer, Isha had needed to describe weight, direction and intention while watching what the other person actually did with the information. Her first instruction contained too much. The climber had tried to change feet, hips and hand timing simultaneously. "I gave three corrections." "Did it work?" "Badly." Thomas smiled before he could stop himself. Isha saw. "I improved." "I assumed." "The second time I gave one." "And?" "She still didn't do what I expected." Thomas laughed. Isha did too. That, apparently, had been useful. Another participant had coached Isha later and made the opposite mistake, speaking so cautiously that Isha had no idea which suggestion mattered. The resulting conversation had been more valuable than either successful attempt. "They told us to ask what the climber thinks is failing before changing the task." "You wrote that in the pack." "I know." Isha looked faintly offended by this. Thomas understood. "It is annoying when preparation material is correct." "Yes." He allowed her to continue. The course had not transformed her into a different instructor in two days. Some exercises felt artificial. Some terminology worked better in the room than on paper. One group discussion lasted longer than Isha thought the problem deserved. She disagreed with another participant about when encouragement became distracting and discovered that both answers worked differently depending on the person being coached. Nobody resolved that neatly. Isha liked that. By the time they finished dinner, Thomas had heard perhaps half of the weekend. He stood to clear the plates. Isha caught his wrist. "I enjoyed it." Thomas looked down at her hand and then at her face. Months earlier he had asked whether she would enjoy teaching more if the course helped. This answer did not require the old question to be repeated. "Good." She released him. Thomas took the plates into the kitchen. --- Kanno arrived at seven twenty with the repaired umbrella still absent from her possession and two convenience-store puddings in a paper bag. She looked at the umbrella on the dining table. "You haven't finished." "One rib is bent in two places." "So?" Thomas stared at her. "Do you want it repaired or punished?" "Repaired." "Then allow me standards." Kanno accepted this and put the puddings in the refrigerator. Isha was on the sofa with her legs stretched out beneath the low table. She looked more awake after food, though her course bag remained out of sight. Kanno sat in the chair opposite her. "How was it?" Isha looked towards Thomas. He lifted both hands. "I asked once." "And got an hour?" "Approximately." "It was not an hour." "It began during dinner." Kanno looked back at Isha. "Useful?" "Yes." "Yellow?" Isha smiled slowly. "Yellow won several arguments." "Good." "Some lost." "Also good." Thomas brought tea before the exchange could become an assessment. Kanno had no need for the course syllabus. She asked what had surprised Isha most. "The amount of speaking." Kanno considered this. "You chose coaching." "I know." "Speaking is commonly involved." "I also climbed." "Reassuring." Isha pulled one cushion behind her back. "I am tired of listening to myself explain things." Kanno nodded. "That sounds more serious." "It may be." Thomas sat beside Isha and handed her tea. Kanno spent the next half-hour telling them about an entirely unrelated print problem from work. Nobody objected. The three of them moved between subjects with no obligation to remain on the weekend's important event. Kanno's catalogue client had eventually accepted that nine changes created a new proof. Thomas's faculty terminology problem had produced two useful terms and one obsolete one. Isha's paper hanging was still crooked. Aelira did not enter the conversation. Neither did Mercury, Mars, the reunion or the page waiting somewhere beyond the next thirty-cycle interval. At eight-thirty, Isha retrieved the Coach 1 pack. Kanno looked alarmed. "I thought you stopped." "I did." Isha opened it to the section with the coloured tabs. Several pencil notes had been crossed out during the weekend. One yellow marker had migrated to a different page. Beside the exercise on changing a task, Isha had added only one new line. **One thing at a time.** Thomas read it over her shoulder. "That's all?" "For now." She closed the pack again. Kanno approved more visibly than she probably intended. The material went back into the bag. At nine, Kanno collected the two remaining pudding containers, remembered that they were empty and put them in Thomas's recycling instead. She left without the umbrella because Thomas still refused to return it with one rib misaligned. After the door closed, flat 202 became quiet. Isha showered. Thomas finished the kitchen and turned off the dining light. When she returned, her hair was damp and loose down her back, and the tiredness had finally moved from her expression into the rest of her body. She sat beside him on the sofa and leaned against his shoulder. Thomas put an arm around her. For a while neither spoke. The Coach 1 bag remained where Isha had left it beside the bedroom door. Eventually Thomas asked, "Would you do another course?" Isha opened one eye. "Ask me after I have slept."