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In retrospect, Katsuya will remember the first month in his room as the longest day of his life. He lies in bed and sometimes eats and when his bladder aches too much to bare he pisses into a bottle, which he shamefully hides under his bed.
This is the adjustment period.
Time becomes abstract to Katsuya. It squashes and stretches, like the smear frames in an anime, like rubberbanding in a video game. Just as he starts to catch up the AI snaps forward and leaves him frustrated and lost. A day lasts a week which lasts a month which lasts an hour and then a year has gone by. He squints against the glow of his bedside clock and the minute never changes. He blinks and the electronic display has gone out. He gets a new clock and it tells him the days of the week. Half a year passes before he realizes it's off by one day.
His mother brings him food. Of course she does. She can't just stand by and let her son starve. Sometimes Katsuya wishes she would. She leaves meals that Katsuya lets go cold outside his door, then she leaves grocery bags of snacks; the sort of stuff that'll probably still be edible decades from now. There's always some kind of vitamin drink thrown in with the garbage. Katsuya doesn't get any sun, after all.
Mornings are the worst because his bedroom window faces the sunrise. The thick curtain fabric heats up and radiates into his room, turning everything hot and musty. Katsuya could probably alleviate it by cracking the window open, but it's been so long since he last touched the curtain its gathered a layer of dust maybe an inch deep.
Trash piles up. Every once in a while Katsuya leaves an overfilled garbage bag outside his door for his mother to throw away, but mostly he just pushes things to the side. In his small room he uses an even smaller amount of space. All he needs is a clear footpath from his bed to his tv to his door. Sometimes he sits at his desk, but that has also become a resting spot of piles of filth. When he uses his old computer he has to clear candy wrappers and dust out of the way just to move the mouse.
Even with regularly delivered meals, with his perfectly constructed towers of trash, Katsuya is forced to leave his room on occasion. He needs to use the bathroom, and he can only piss in so many bottles. Katsuya only ventures out into the house at very specific times. He's memorized his mother's work schedule from the sounds of her movement alone. He knows exactly when she'll be gone for hours, and he knows exactly how long to wait after he hears the front door close. Still, he walks carefully, quietly; intimately aware of which floorboards creak, of how much water pressure he can use before the pipes make noise.
Sometimes on his little excursions Katsuya will brush his teeth or wash his hair. Sometimes he even shaves, or at least trims back his filthy facial hair. When Katsuya tries to wash or cut his hair it's always full of knots. They're worse on the left side of his head, the side he prefers to sleep on. He roughly finger combs through them and gets stuck in the snarls. When he pulls his hands free his hair comes out in dead clumps. It goes pop, pop, pop, where the roots tear from his scalp. Sometimes Katsuya pulls his hair just because. It's not like there's anyone to see the small bald spots, and the hair fits just as easily in the trash as anything else.
Katsuya doesn't hurt himself, not really. He only pulls his hair and bites his nails too far back and picks at his acne. It's the sort of thing even normal people do on occasion. And so what if sometimes he goes so long without eating it makes him woozy? It's not self harm, it's self neglect. It's pathetic. He stumbles to a stale bag of chips and thinks about how he has no one to blame but himself.
Katsuya rarely thinks of life outside of his room. Time is passing, seasons change, people grow old, world events swirl together. None of that affects him. Katsuya's room is a location plucked out of time. Mostly, Katsuya thinks about the past, about how he spent the entire previous day wasting in bed, about what a horrible person he is, but sometimes, very rarely, sometimes, Katsuya thinks about the future.
In all of his imaginings of the future Katsuya is dead. When the thought rears up at him Katsuya plays video games until the patterns numb his mind, but sometimes he can't even work up the energy to do that. It gnaws on him like a tick and Katsuya thinks it'd be best if it happens soon. He picks at the scab and Katsuya thinks what if it happens late.
In the present he dies and his mother doesn't notice until long after he's fossilized. It's tragic and grotesque but ultimately she is free. She moves into a new house, one that doesn't have rooms like yawning pits. She opens the windows. She meets people. She doesn't feel ashamed to invite them over. Maybe, if it's not too late, she even has a new son. She is happy.
In the future she dies and Katsuya doesn't notice until they break down his door. The neighbors get worried when they no longer see her coming and going, when weeds overtake the front steps, when the lights stop coming on. And through it all Katsuya sees nothing. He lives off snacks and sink water, and when they question him they ask how did he not see? How did he not smell? And Katsuya will not be able to explain that his nostrils have been filled with rot long before encountering an actual corpse.
And then, and this is the most selfish part, Katsuya thinks about what would happen to himself. He picks past the scab into healthy skin, and with no one paying the bills he is forced out of his room. How many people will he hurt? Will he live on the streets? Will he die in a gutter?
Katsuya doesn't think about death, but when he does he is resolute to die soon. He doesn't know how or when or why it will happen, but he knows one day he will wake up and it will be time.
This room will be his sarcophagus. Not like the ones they have in Egypt, like the one in Chernobyl. He read about that online once, a massive steel structure hastily built over the reactor to hold back the spread of radiation. When they pull Katsuya from his tomb they will find no treasure or curses, only a decaying heap of slag, deadly to all who look at it.
He swallows stale rice crackers, he swallows room temperature ramen, he swallows stagnant water. If it starts to rot he kicks it into the piles of trash. Out of sight, out of mind. Forgotten until he breathes nothing but spores.