At the end of the corridor we come to a wall of bars. The orderly asks me to turn away as he fiddles with the lock.

When the barred door is opened, I’m told to walk through and face the other way again. Even still, I can watch him from the corner of my eye as he locks the door. Of all the keys dangling from a chain on his belt, he’s using the one with a blue rubber collar on it.

The orderly leads me up four flights of stairs and down a wide hallway, the walls of which are covered with posters of Kyūshū’s scenic spots—Takachihō in Miyazaki Prefecture, the hot-spring town of Beppu in Ōita.

Down another flight of stairs we go to the third floor, where, turning a corner, we arrive at the infirmary, a cramped, dimly lit, and dingy room.

Entering, I find two thugs seated on folding chairs. One looks up with weary amusement, and, elbowing the other, whispers, “Check out the gaijin!”

Holding up a paper cup in his scabby red hand, the orderly gestures towards a toilet in the rear. I take the cup and head for the lavatory.

On the wall above the toilet is a calendar.

It’s been ten days . . . Ten days since last Sunday . . . I should be in the clear by now, but Christ . . . you never can tell, can you, what will show up if they know what to look for . . . God, what was I thinking?

I take a deep breath and start dribbling into the paper cup.

A moment later, I emerge from the lavatory and hand the warm sample back to the orderly who dips a slip of paper into it.

“Right, nothing out of the ordinary here,” he says and makes a notation on a form attached to a clipboard. Returning the cup to me, he tells me to flush it down the toilet.

After washing my hands, I sit down opposite the orderly at a clunky old steel desk, easily as old as this tumbledown jail, and answer a questionnaire.

“Number?” he asks.

“Rokuban,” I reply.

After asking my name, age, date of birth, and so on, the orderly wants to know if I’m gay.

“No,” I reply, indignant.

What the hell are you throwing out a question like that with those two bruisers sitting just on the other side of this curtain?

He ticks a box that says “No”, then moves onto the next question: “Have you got pearls or piercing of any kind in your genitalia?”

Enough with the pearls already!

“No, I do not.”

“Have you got any tattoos?”

“No.”

“You ever go to Soapland?”

“Excuse me?”

I know exactly what he means. It just flabbergasts me that anyone would ask so matter-of-factly whether I got my pipes cleaned at massage parlors.

Listen: part of me clings stubbornly to the belief that there is no reason to pay good money for a commodity that still remains abundant and free. After all, even at the age of forty with my graying hair and all, young Japanese women still manage to find me only slightly less attractive than they did when I was ten years younger. The day I have to go to Soapland in order to get my knob polished is a day I dread with the same trepidation I suspect many women must face menopause.

“No, I have never been to a Soapland,” I tell him, mildly indignant.

“Right,” he says. “No worries about AIDS, then.”

Well, that was thorough.

After making a notation on the form, the orderly scratches a dry spot behind his ear with the end of the pen, sending a small flurry of dandruff fluttering down.

“Do you drink?”

“Yes,” I answer, averting my eyes from an eczema snowdrift forming on the desk.

“How much?”

“Depends.”

“On average?”

I shrug. On average, I suppose I don’t drink much, but I do go on the occasional binge if the mood strikes me. I can polish off a bottle of Ron Zacapa Centenario in a day and a half and not feel the worse for it. I can hold my own in the company of Russians over a bottle of raspberry-infused vodka. I drink, but I’m no drunk.

“A beer, maybe two, a day,” I offer the orderly.

“Tobacco?”

“Yes.”

“How many cigarettes a day?” he asks, ticking a box on the form.

“I don’t smoke cigarettes,” I reply.

“What? You smoke, right?”

“Yes, but I don’t smoke cigarettes.”

“What do you smoke then?”

“Narghilè,” I reply. “A water pipe.”

“Marijuana?”

“No, no, no. Tobacco.”

“With a water pipe?” It doesn’t seem to register in that scabby head of his, and, to be perfectly honest, I couldn’t care less if it did.

“Yeah,” I say. “With a water pipe.”

“How often?”

“Once or twice a week.”

“How about drugs?” he asks.

“Drugs?”

“Do you take drugs?”

They guy must be high to think he’ll get a straight answer to a question like that.

“Aside from alcohol and tobacco and caffeine and the occasional aspirin? No. No drugs.”

“Marijuana?”

“No.”

“Methamphetamine?”

“Methamphetamine? No.”

“Right, stand up against the wall over there. Cover your left eye with this,” he says, handing me a plastic spoon.

The eye chart is across the room on the opposite wall and I have to look over the heads of the two thugs to read it.

The test reveals that my eyesight isn’t nearly as good as I believed it was, but it’s little more than a ripple on the sea of upsetting news I’ve had all week.

Next, the orderly sits me down before a sphygmomanometer.

I stick my arm through the cuff. A button is pressed and the cuff inflates, constricting my arm. Red numbers flash on the screen.

“Your blood pressure’s quite high,” he says grimly.

“I just humped up four flights of stairs,” I remind him. What’s more, I’m in jail!

“Stay there and I’ll retake it in a few minutes.”

As I wait, the orderly tells one of the thugs that the doctor is ready to see him. The goon stands up, dawdles past me, and disappears behind a shabby gray curtain where the doctor is waiting.

“What’s the problem,” the doctor asks, his voice tired and unsympathetic.

“My foot itches.”

“Show me.”

“You’ve got athlete’s foot,” the doctor says flatly. “Don’t scratch it. Next!”

The man returns to his seat, cursing under his breath, and the other inmate stands up with a groan and walks around the curtain where the doctor asks again: “What’s the problem?”

“I’ve got the runs.”

“It’ll pass,” the doctor replies.

The orderly returns to retake my blood pressure and half a minute later says, “Mild hypertension. Tsk, tsk.”

Boy, that’s the least of my worries right now.

I am instructed to lie down on the examining table and wait quietly for the doctor.

Lying on my back, I notice a strip of flypaper the color of earwax hanging from the ceiling directly above my head. Speckled with the black remains of flies and gnats, I am reminded that the two thugs, the orderly, who must surely be an inmate himself, and I myself amount to little more than bugs trapped on flypaper.

After a few minutes, the doctor comes to the examining table, where he gives my abdomen a few perfunctory taps.

“How are you feeling,” he asks while looking pensively out the window.

“I’m a bit depressed.”

“Yes, well, aren’t we all, aren’t we all.”

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.