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“And bring back the water, let your ships roll in, in my heart, she left a hole.” – Us Against the World by Coldplay
Nemesis is balance and resentment, the bringer of destruction when destruction is due, the angel without mercy. Her children are all very beautiful or very angry, and a few have the great misfortune of being both.
My first memory is of hate.
I can’t remember what I was so angry about, exactly – only that it had something to do with my father. I think, maybe, he took one of my toys, or fed me something disgusting, or shushed me when I didn’t want to be shushed. I’m not sure.
What I do remember is a feeling deep in my gut, like burning but more destructive. I remember a forest fire raging in my veins and threatening to tear me apart from the inside out. I remember screaming and crying, desperately wishing it would stop.
I bit my father. He still has a scar.
Us against the world is, I think, what it’s called.
My father and I are alone, but we aren’t lonely. We have a little apartment in the center of New Haven cluttered with my toys and his hats, a tank of clownfish by the window and a flimsy balcony overlooking an abandoned lot. He takes me to work with him – to both of his jobs, the one with the boats and the wide seas and the one with the scary children who shout all the time. At night, we cook fish (alright, he cooks, I help) and watch bad television and fall asleep together on the tiny couch.
It’s not much of a life, but it’s all I know. My father helps me when the rages come – when I really want to go swimming with the other children, or take my life jacket off in the boat, or have something else for dinner besides mackerel the third night in the row. He kneels down, looks me right in the eyes, and puts on his Very Serious Face.
“With me, Rin,” he says. “Breathe. In, out. In, out. One, two, three, four, five. You are a warrior, and warriors do not give in to anger. Breathe.”
Sometimes, it doesn’t work, and I tear things apart with my hands and my words and my teeth. But sometimes, it does, and I stand, hands clenched into fists, for what could be hours until my pulse slows and my breathing becomes normal without my having to think about it.
My father takes me swimming, and the water is cool – cool against the burning in my heart. I swim as fast as I can, and it’s enough to imagine for a moment that I’ve outrun it, that I’ve gone so far so quickly that it can’t follow. It catches up to me eventually, but I can fight it so much more easily when I’ve won at something else.
He knows that – understands, somehow, even though he doesn’t have rage, only water and kindness. I wish I was more like my father and less like me. (It would be easier.)
In first grade, we go on a field trip to the aquarium.
There are so many different kinds of animals here, and all of them from the ocean. Such a great, big ocean, to give us fish and dolphins and penguins and stingrays and seals and jellyfish. Everyone in my class is so excited about the big, glass panels with creatures of all shapes and sizes locked behind. We press our faces up to the glass and grin as widely as we can, waving hello and pretending the fish wave back.
Someone – I don’t know who – starts up a game: try to figure out which sea creature you would be. Every time we stumble past an exhibit, we find someone’s sea creature counterpart. It’s this big mystery, this puzzle that we’re all trying to solve together.
And then, we get to the shark exhibit, and someone says, “Hey, Rin, I think you’re a shark!”
Everyone thinks about it, and the agreement isn’t long in following: “Oh, definitely a shark.” “He’s mean like a shark, for sure.” “And possessive like a shark.” “And dangerous when he gets mad.” “Scary like a shark.” “Maybe he should just turn into a shark.”
I know they don’t like me. They’ve made it clear enough, excluding me from games and sitting far away from me at lunch time. This is different from just plain distrust, though – this is fear, and I hate it.
I close my eyes, breathe slowly, and count to five, trying to stall the rage before it can begin. And yet, oddly enough, nothing happens.
Slowly, ever so slowly, I peel my eyelids open and stare into the tank. The sharks – predators of the seas, with their razor-sharp teeth and their lightning-fast reflexes – are circling, but not hunting. To me, it looks like they’re racing.
Sharks are scary, but they’re good-scary. Powerful-scary. Impressive-scary. I’m okay with being a shark.
I find people who could almost be friends on something called a swim team.
When he was younger, my father dreamed of being a star swimmer, winning a gold medal in the Olympics and returning home triumphant. Somewhere between college and me, he realized that dreams can change, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing – he’s not just satisfied with the swim team and the ocean, he’s happy.
I don’t carry his dream, but I carry his love for the water, so I join his team. I want to swim so quickly I leave my rage behind, and I want to learn how to become the man my father is.
Most of the other boys on the team are afraid of me – they can tell there’s something off about me, with my blood-red eyes and swift rage – but three of them aren’t. There’s Nagisa, with hair like a crown of women gold and a mischievous grin that could destroy a city. There’s Makoto, with arms like growing tree branches, constantly strengthening, and a soft, malleable heart, constantly expanding. And there’s Haruka, for whom I would do anything to see smile.
The four of us form a relay team. It was my idea, but all of us make it happen – butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, freestyle, four powerful winds coming together to create a maelstrom of foaming water and cheering victory. Somewhere in between hanging on lane lines and diving over each other’s finishes, we become friends.
I’ve never had friends before. I think I like it.
My father gets us pizza after competitions (win or lose) and takes us for rides on his boat when the weather’s nice. We make it to the statewide swimming championships, so my father drives us there – the four of us plus my father crammed into his little, banged-up Volvo, blasting the radio and fighting for the last chocolate bar. Something strange and not quite human comes after us during a late practice at the pool, and Nagisa distracts it so that Haru, Makoto, and I can run at it from behind and push it into the water. We play games together, and race against each other (Haru always beats me in freestyle, but I can kick his ass in butterfly, so it’s okay. And it’s okay because it’s Haru. Haru, who keeps swimming with me long after practice is over, who runs home with me in the space between sunset and twilight, matching me stride for stride, who watches me scream at him for no good reason, really and then wordlessly offers me his water bottle and doesn’t move until I take it, who smiles with the tiniest glint in the depths of his dark blue eyes, who challenges me to go faster, who makes me want to be better.)
These guys, Haru especially ... They don’t think I’m weird or scary, like a shark out to eat them. They actually want to hang out with me.
For the first time in my life, I feel normal.
And then, of course, my father goes and screws everything up.
It’s not that I hate Manami, it’s just that she’s stealing my father away from me. She’s a miniature queen, or a force of nature, four foot eleven in unwavering high-heeled sandals and long, flowing dresses covered in wildflowers. She brings me cookies and speaks to me in soft tones, but her smiles don’t reach her eyes and her cookies make me want to puke. (I let them go stale, then throw them out the window so that my father doesn’t see.) I get left with her daughter, a girl five years my junior named Gou who stares at me with wide eyes and a hesitant grin, then begins to cry when I tell her I don’t want to play.
My father doesn’t understand – or worse, he’s forgotten. I thought he and I were a team, us against the world, swimming and fishing and beating the rages – but now he doesn’t care about what I want, only about buying this woman flowers and making her laugh.
One night, he comes into my room and tells me that he and Manami are getting married. She’s got a new job in San Francisco, all the way on the other side of the country, and he and I are going to move there with her.
“Won’t that be great?” he says. “We’ll be a proper family – me, you, Manami, and Gou. You’ll have a mom and a sister.”
“NO!” I scream, feeling my blood boil and my heart freeze (and it won’t stop – I couldn’t stop it even if I wanted to.) “I don’t want a mother who hates me and a sister who’s afraid of me! I want to stay here, with my friends! I want to stay here and I want Manami to leave and I want everything to be like it was before!”
He tries to talk me out of it, calm me down the way he used to, but it’s no use. This storm is a fucking monstropolous beast, and he’s going to drown in it, he’s going to pay.
(I break two windows and his jaw. He kicks me off of the swim team. I sit in my room for a week and never see my friends again.)
“Why her?”
My father blinks slowly at me, a silhouette in the doorway to his bedroom. It’s his wedding day already and he doesn’t sleep enough as it is, but I need to know.
“I love Manami very, very much,” he answers sleepily, half-yawning. “Please, Rin, go to bed.”
“Not her,” I snarl. The rage bubbles, close to bursting, and I don’t try to stall it. “She doesn’t matter. My mom.”
“Your mother ...” My father sits up, rubbing his eyes, and then swings his legs over the side of the bed. His footsteps are muted on the carpet floor as he walks over to me – four strides, and he’s close enough that I can pick out every line on his face.
“Your mother rode into my life on a high-speed motorbike,” he tells me, “and stayed for one day, but that one day was one of the best in my life. It was as if she had ... judged me, somehow, and found me worthy. She asked me to tell her about my dreams, and she didn’t think they were silly. She could walk on water. I can’t quite recall her face, but I can trace the exact shape of her smile. She was something special, your mother. Something out of this world.”
“Not angry?” I ask. My voice sounds so small in the darkness compared to his wistfulness.
“Oh, she was,” my father replies. “She was angry at everything, but a beautiful kind of angry – like, the anger was only for people who deserved it. I wanted her to stay forever, but she was gone so quickly and I had no idea how to find her again. She was, I don’t know – she was this forest fire that could only stay for so long. I think of her. Not every day, but often.”
And he looks at me sternly, cups my cheek in his hand as though I’m something precious. “She left me you, though. And that’s the best thing she could’ve given me.”
There’s something in my chest. I think it’s something like rage, but it’s not. This is wider, and tinged purple.
“I hate her,” I whisper. “I want to find her, and punch her in the face for leaving you. Leaving us.”
My father’s arms encircle me, a cocoon of warmth that tries to stifle the flame inside of me, a bucket of water on still-hot coals. I turn my face away, fight him off, run away – but he speaks to me before I can shut the door and the words linger.
“No, you don’t hate her. But you’ll find her someday, I’m sure of it.”
San Francisco is cold.
It’s cold, and it’s also damp, because it rains, all of the time, as though it has some kind of personal grudge against me. I fight back, though – I go running, rain, wind, or snow, sprinting up slanted streets to the pounding beat echoing in my head that never fades, no matter how much sweat I pour into wishing it away. When I reach the top of the hill, I turn and look down, trying to be proud of myself for ascending peaks of cobblestone and cement, but all I feel is anger. The rain can’t put this fire out.
Everything here is so strange to me. My family is made up of strangers now: this man I used to know who only seems to push me away, this woman who is all fake smiles and barely-concealed fear, this little girl who wants a perfect brother who will play with her and teach her and protect her. I have no friends, only strangers who I sit next to in class, nod to as I jog through the streets. This city itself is a stranger. I wish I could punch it, meld it, reshape it into something familiar, but the only thing deserving of punishment is me.
Even I am a stranger, I suppose. The friends I used to know would not like this Rin, who runs away from his problems and punches stop signs, who can’t even begin to control the fire inside of him. I don’t contact them – I’m too ashamed.
I’m not sure what I’m angry at, exactly. I tell myself I’m angry at people, a city, a whole world, but sometimes, late at night just before I fall asleep, I think maybe I’m angry at myself. (And that’s more terrifying than anything else.)
The thing is – the problem is – that life isn’t fair.
I know that life isn’t fair, that there are children starving and innocents tyrannized and criminals unpunished, but there are parts of me that logic doesn’t reach. I feel, somewhere deep in my gut, that life should be fair, it needs to be fair, but it isn’t, and that tears me apart. I ache with the desire to punish, to seek out the trespassers and give them what they’re due – whether they’re boys teasing a girl who doesn’t meet their standards or terrorists who blew up an elementary school. Sometimes it’s righteous anger, sometimes it’s revenge, and sometimes it’s just a desire to win, but it never leaves me.
It’s a calling, I think. A calling for justice. A calling I don’t know how to answer.
On my sixteenth birthday, I receive a note.
I don’t know how it reached my desk – I interrogate my housemates, and they seem to know nothing – but nonetheless, there it is. It’s a single sheet of stiff, white paper, folded into thirds. On it is printed a map leading me to some place called the Wolf House, and a simple message:
It is time for you to learn who you truly are. Those who are patient will always get what they’re due.
I know I probably shouldn’t follow the map, that it’s dangerous or some kind of trick. But, well, I’ve got nothing to lose, and running away is only too easy.
And besides, there’s something about the symbol on the other side of the paper. The set of scales.
“Rin Matsuoka, son of Nemesis,” the wolf calls me.
On the fourth day, I gather the courage to ask her who Nemesis is.
She laughs, leaning back and throwing her growling chuckles to the pale moon. “Silly boy, don’t even know your own mother.”
“My mother?”
“Your mother. Nemesis, goddess of revenge. Bit of a minor goddess. Useless, if you ask me. Just like her stupid children.”
The rage surges and I can’t control it – it’s a river of hatred scorching away my insides until the only instinct that remains is destroy. Destroy the wolf, destroy her house, destroy any ounce of weakness left inside me.
(Later, I’ll ask if the wolf is always less kind to children of minor gods, and they’ll look at me, eyes open and concerned, say that the only hierarchy she bows to is the hierarchy of strength. And I’ll know that she gave me precisely the right words to help me win.)
They show me this place and they call it Camp Jupiter.
It’s a city inside of a mountain range, hidden in this valley beneath indigo peaks and beyond aquamarine waves. There are people here, they tell me – people like me, people who are special, people with powers that they can learn to control.
They smile at me kindly and try to convince me that I can find a family here. It will be strict, and I will have to earn my place, but it will be worth it.
“Do you have a swim team?” I ask.