The Nipponese have, and have always had, a marvelous skill with graphic images—this is clear in their manga and their anime, but reaches its fullest expressive flower in safety ideograms. Licking red flames, buildings splitting and falling as the jagged earth parts beneath them, a fleeing figure silhouetted in a doorway, suspended in the stroboscopic flash of a detonation. The written materials accompanying these images are, of course, not understandable to Randy, and so there is nothing for his rational mind to work on; the terrifying ideograms blaze, fragmentary nightmare images popping up on walls, and in the drawers of his room’s desk, whenever he lets his guard down for a moment. What he can read is not exactly soothing. Trying to sleep, he lies in bed, mentally checking the locations of his bedside emergency flashlight and the pair of freebie slippers (much too small) thoughtfully left there so that he can sprint out of the burning and collapsing hotel without cutting his feet to sashimi when the next magnitude 8.0 tremblor shivers the windows out of their frames. He stares up at the ceiling, which is fraught with safety equipment whose LEDs form a glowering red constellation, a crouching figure known to the ancient Greeks as Ganymede, the Anally Receptive Cupbearer, and to the Nipponese, as Hideo, the Plucky Disaster Relief Worker, bending over to probe a pile of jagged concrete slabs for anything that’s squishy. All of this leaves him in a state of free-floating terror. He gets up at five in the morning, grabs two capsules of Japanese Snack from his minibar, and leaves the hotel, following one of the two emergency exit routes that he has memorized. He starts wandering, thinking it would be fun to get lost. Getting lost happens in about thirty seconds. He should have brought his GPS, and marked the latitude and longitude of the hotel.