COTE : Parasite in Love.

Chapter 1: Poisolation

The water from the faucet was piercingly cold. But there was no time to wait around for it to warm up. Ayanokouji began washing his hands. Immediately, the running water took away all heat in his hands, and they went numb. He stopped the faucet, soaped up his hands and washed thoroughly, then ran the water again. Even after the bubbles were drained away, he kept his hands in the running water. After about two minutes, the water heater finally remembered its duty, and the tap water began to warm up. His frozen hands had a prickling numbness, and couldn't tell hot from cold.

He stopped the faucet and carefully wiped the water with a paper towel. Bringing the numb hands to his face, he closed his eyes and sniffed. Once certain they were odorless, he applied rubbing alcohol from the table all over his hands. Gradually, he started to calm down.

Back in the living room, he threw himself down on the bed. Light weakly shined through a gap in the white curtains; it could have been early morning, or it could have been evening. But either way, time was currently not all that important in this man's life.

He heard a constant stream of children's voices outside. It was the elementary school nearby. Hearing the children playing and having fun would occasionally cause him suffocating sadness. Ayanokouji turned on the radio by his bed, tuned it to a random frequency, and let music play. An old staticy song covered the shouts of the children.

After quitting his last job, Ayanokouji made no effort to find a new place of employment, steadily exhausted his savings, and spent his days lying in bed, pretending to think about something. Of course, he wasn't actually thinking about anything. He was just trying to keep up appearances. I'm storing up vitality for the time I'll need it, he told himself. He himself didn't know how to give a "when" to this "time I'll need it."

Once a week, he reluctantly had to go out to do shopping, but the rest of his time was spent in his room. The reason was simple: he had a serious case of germaphobia.

He lived in a small, neat dining-room-plus-kitchen rental apartment within twenty minutes of the nearest train station. It was his one and only holy space.

There, he always had two air purifiers running, and there was a faint smell of antiseptic. The floors were so polished as to appear brand new, and his shelves were lined with disposable latex gloves, surgical masks, bacterial spray, wet tissues, etcetera. Most of his clothes and furniture were white or close to it, and his closet was stocked with new shirts still in the bags.

Ayanokouji washed his hands over a hundred times a day, so they were terribly rough. His nails were neatly cut, with the exception of a long nail on the index finger of his dominant hand. This was his backup measure for when he was driven into situations that called for touching elevator or ATM buttons with his bare hands.

Another part of Ayanokouji's body that was dubiously "clean" was his hair. He'd let it grow somewhat long. He recognized it was better to have short hair for keeping his room clean, but he really couldn't handle salons and barber shops, so he had a habit of putting off haircuts as much as he could.

While it would be easiest to call him a clean freak, he really had a variety of conditions. If you dig into such people's perceptions of "uncleanliness," you'll discover a number of irrational beliefs. People who call themselves clean freaks in spite of having messy rooms are a superb example.

Ayanokouji's image of uncleanliness was "other people." More than actual dirtiness, the major issue lied in whether or not another person had some involvement. If it came to having to eat food another person's hand had touched, he'd rather eat something that's been expired for a week.

He saw people other than himself like petri dishes generating bacteria. He felt just the touch of a fingertip would make microorganisms propagate and contaminate his body. Ayanokouji couldn't hold hands even with someone he was close to - of course, for better or worse, he had no one to hold hands with right now anyway.