Work Text:
July 16, 1951
“You know who’s amazing?” Tendou asks.
“Who?” Semi replies, his voice conveying about as much enthusiasm as a sputtering car engine.
The group of guys formerly known as the Shiratorizawa Volleyball Team is walking through the twilight Tokyo streets. Or, well, most of them are walking. Tendou is skipping. Like a five-year-old visiting a playground for the first time. As the group passes beneath a streetlamp, his grin is illuminated in faint yellow, making him appear almost demonic.
“Wakatoshi,” Tendou says.
The former captain in question gives a small smile at that, swings his and Tendou’s entwined hands ever so slightly up.
And then, Tendou keeps talking. “Do you know who’s terrific?”
“Who,” Semi repeats.
“Wakatoshi!” Tendou lifts into the air a little bit, with this response.
Groans erupt from about half of the group – but Tendou’s still not done.
“Do you know who’s incredible?”
Kawanishi steps in this time. “Who.”
Tendou tilts his head back to the sky, illuminated half by lights flickering up and half by stars shining down. “Wakatoshi! Do you know who’s –”
“This is embarrassing,” Semi says, striding ahead of the group, presumably so that he doesn’t have to look at Tendou anymore. “Seriously, does nobody else find it embarrassing?”
He stops in the middle of the sidewalk next to an empty laundromat, its fluorescent lights fizzling quietly, and turns back to examine each of his former teammates in turn, imploring them to join him in chastising the yokai-taken-solid-form that is Tendou Satori.
“I think it’s unfair!” Goshiki exclaims, pointing at the middle blocker-turned-criminal in question. “You’re not the only one who came here to see Ushijima-san play, Tendou. All of us did. So how come you get to monopolize him?”
“I don’t mind it,” Ushijima contributes. Nobody pays attention to him.
“Give them a break, guys,” Reon says. “They haven’t seen each other in months.”
Tendou holds up a hand for Reon to high five, at that. Ushijima gives him a small nod. But Reon waves them off, raising one eyebrow.
“What I do think is unfair,” he goes on, “is that Wakatoshi has spent the past year – the past year – living fifteen blocks away from the best jazz club in Tokyo, and never thought to go there.”
Ushijima shrugs.
“None of us listen to music much besides you,” Kawanishi points out.
“But jazz is not just music,” Reon says. “It’s poetry. Movement. An extension of the soul.”
Yamagata lets out a snicker.
“When did you get into jazz, Oohira-san?” Goshiki asks.
“A few months ago,” Reon replies. “I went into a café where they were playing a record by the Duke Ellington orchestra, and this bass player – Jimmy Blanton, I found out it was later – was laying down this structure that sounded like a train racing down railroad tracks, or like the pounding of rain on a hot summer day, or like – I don’t know. It was the coolest thing I’d ever heard. So, I bought that record. And the next day, I bought another record. And I just kept finding new records, finding new bands, made friends with this lady who owns a record store near the academy so that she’ll call me if anything good comes in, and…”
His words fizzle out into the night as he catches sight of an awning on the next block. It’s blue, the color of the sky on a sunny day, with bright orange block kanji spelling out THE SKYSCRAPER. When Reon listens hard, he can pick out the beat of drums and bass drifting on the breeze.
“And then what?” Goshiki asks. “Oohira-san?”
“There it is,” Reon breathes.
“It doesn’t look that special,” Semi immediately says.
Reon is a very peaceful person. He’s never gotten into a fight. He’s able to resolve the most vindictive of conflicts between his friends. Hell, he’s training to be a schoolteacher. But when Semi says the Skyscraper doesn’t look that special, Reon nearly punches his friend in the face.
“It’s not the look that counts, though, right?” Yamagata says, tugging on Reon’s arm and shooting him a warning glance. “It’s the sound.”
Reon takes a deep breath, lets the tension flow out of his shoulders. “Exactly.”
As he leads his friends towards the club, more pieces of the band slowly become audible. A piano, banging out wild chords. A saxophone and trombone, trading syncopated riffs. And a trumpet, soaring above the sound like an airplane dancing with the clouds.
There’s a line to get in, which has Goshiki ooh-ing and aah-ing, and Semi and Shirabu complaining, and Yamagata pulling out the bag of chips he’d somehow stashed in his pants pocket. Reon doesn’t mind the wait (he’d be surprised if there wasn’t a wait), but every time the door opens and he catches another, louder glimpse of the music, he feels something in him itching, as though an invisible string tied him to something inside that club and he needs to follow its pull.
To distract himself and his friends, Reon starts explaining the history of the group they’re about to see.
“The Donny Nova Band is one of the greatest swing bands in America today,” he says. “They’re all veterans – army, navy, and marines, I think – except for the lady singer, whose husband died in combat, although rumor is she’s now seeing Donny – that’s the band leader and pianist. They became famous in December 1945, when they got to the final round of his huge swing ‘tribute to the troops’ contest. Instead of playing something patriotic and happy, they did this song, Welcome Home, that tells the honest truth of what veterans have to face.”
“Wait, did you say veterans?” Shirabu asks. “Like, they were in the war against us?”
“Well, some of them,” Reon replies. “Some were in Europe.”
“And now they think they can just come here and play, like they weren’t part of the destruction of our country.”
“I’m sure they weren’t intentionally out to destroy Japan – they were just doing their jobs.”
Funny, how Reon has been a fan of this band for months – he’s bought all their records, memorized many of their lyrics, pored over their interviews – but he never made the connection between “band of American vets” and the superpower that destroyed his city, defunded his school, dropped bombs on his friends’ families. Funny, how he’s missed this – Shirabu glaring at him, the rest of his team silently watching him to retaliate – an unspoken challenge pushing against Reon’s world, making it wider.
“How do you know?” Shirabu asks quietly.
“I. Um.” Reon flounders for words, comes up short.
“Why don’t you ask them?” Tendou says. It takes Reon a moment to realize the suggestion is directed at Shirabu. “Go up to the stage during a break and say, ‘Hey! Assholes! What’s your stance on the atomic bombs your great nation dropped on mine?’”
“That would be unspeakably rude,” Reon says.
Shirabu’s nodding, though. And Semi’s grinning at him, daring him to do it. Goshiki looks as impressed as he did in the stadium earlier when Ushijima served an ace.
Reon wants to contest it more, insist that as virtuous as the sentiment may be, shouting at musicians about a war crime in the middle of their set is just not good behavior – but before he can formulate a counterattack, the door opens and a burly man with the most intricately trimmed mustache Reon has ever seen waves them forward.
Unsurprisingly, Reon ends up paying the cover charge for about half the group. (Goshiki forgot his wallet at Ushijima’s apartment, Tendou forgot there would be a cover charge, Yamagata remembered both but spent all his money on food.) And then the door opens again, and they’re pushed forward, and a stormcloud of sound greets them more immense and more powerful than any record.
The club is set up less like an auditorium and more like an outdoor stage, with a raised platform in the center and metal tables and chairs staggered around outside it. There’s a space for dancing near the back and a bar tucked against one side wall, waitresses in black pencil skirts and stylish American haircuts shuffling drinks back and forth. Reon and his friends aren’t the youngest people here – there are plenty of college guys, young secretaries, even a couple of high school girls in half-unbuttoned uniforms – but they definitely stand out, with Goshiki’s loud shouts and Tendou’s devilish grin and Ushijima’s practice shorts (god, Reon should have worked harder to get him to change.)
Ushijima and Kawanishi go secure a table while Yamagata, Semi, and Shirabu make for the bar, loudly complaining in Reon’s direction when they note the high cost of beer. Reon probably should be embarrassed of them. Part of him is. But he doesn’t chastise, doesn’t say “get your voices down” or “of course the beer is expensive” – he just watches the band. The Donny Nova Band. The picture on his records given dimension, given life.
They’re shorter than Reon imagined. (He thought all Americans were tall, like the buildings in their cities.) But they’re also brighter than he imagined. The fluorescent lights gleam off the brass of Nick Radel’s trumpet, Wayne Wright’s trombone, Jimmy Campbell’s sax, off the silver casings of Johnny Simpson’s drumset, off the pins in Julia Trojan’s hair. This set up looks just like the picture on Reon’s records – piano and drums off to the left, bass slightly in front, horns on the right, and Julia in the center, a big silver mic illuminating her better than any halo – and it looks nothing like the picture on his records – a sheen of sweat on the instrumentalists’ faces, Wayne’s tie loosened, Davy Zlatic’s hair slipping out of its tight grease, Julia’s red high heel tapping back against the slick wood floor. They’re less polished, but they’re louder, more real.
As Reon watches, feet stuck to the floor somewhere in the front part of the room, a song ends (Nick hoists his trumpet into the air as he slurs up to a high trill) and the room explodes into applause.
It takes a moment for Reon’s hands to move, coming together as though moving through molasses. Donny shouts a thank you into his mic, motions something to his band out of it, waits for everyone to shift over sheets of music on their stands, then waves at Johnny to get going.
A swing piece, Reon thinks, is a lot like a point of volleyball. First Johnny gives the beat – like Ushijima serving, laying a foundation of strength, clean rhythms and focused energy. Next Davy adds the bassline – like Yamagata receiving, building a backbone, often inaudible or forgettable in the larger piece but a crucial piece to keep the structure from collapsing in on itself. Then Donny fills in the chords – like Shirabu controlling the court, setting up attacks and counterattacks in a cloud of potential all-win scenarios. After that Wayne or Johnny or Nick or all three of them sing out a countermelody – like Tendou jumping for a decoy, all tight rhythm and bravado to take your attention, steal your focus, make you forget about the main event. And finally Julia soars over the instruments – like Goshiki coming in to spike, hanging suspended for a moment as he shoots the ball over the net like a comet coming home to earth.
As she hits a high note, Julia raises her arms up from her sides as though she is growing wings, and Reon can almost see Goshiki leaping behind her.
He stands transfixed for the whole song, an up-tempo ballad about falling in love on a rainy afternoon that Reon thinks must be new or otherwise not on any of the band’s records. Reon wants to memorize every melody, every chord, every flourish of brass and swing of vibrato. He wants to remember exactly how this feels, to be surrounded by the music and lifted by it, as though he is standing on a court built of rhythm and counterpoint.
“How many of their records do you have?”
Reon turns – at first to find out if that question was really directed at him, then to gaze at the person who asked it. It’s a guy around Reno’s age, with olive skin, closely cropped dark hair, and a smile in his eyes that reminds Reon of a triumphant fanfare. He’s wearing black slacks and a light blue dress shirt open at the collar, and there’s a half-full drink in his right hand, condensation spilling onto his long, thin fingers. And he’s watching Reon expectantly, as though placing him in a spotlight nobody else can see.
Reon clears his throat – he finds it’s gone suddenly dry – then answers, “All three. Welcome Home, Songs for Cleveland, and Give Me Your Tired.”
“Shit.” The guy lets out a whistle like a bass line, low and powerful. “I didn’t know they even sold Welcome Home in Japan.”
“They do if you’re determined,” Reon replies. And if you go to your friend’s record store every Saturday for six months begging her to custom order it, he doesn’t add.
“How’d you know I was a fan?” he asks instead.
“The way you were watching them play,” the guy says. “You seemed like someone who really… knows his jazz.”
Reon gets a feeling that this guy has been watching him the same way that he has been watching the band. And he’s not entirely sure he minds.
He’s about to say as much when a shout from the back has the other guy turning his head. “Hey, Kai, stop stalling and grab those peanuts!”
“I’ll get those peanuts when I want to get those peanuts!” the guy – Kai, Reon rolls the name around his mind like a new melody – shouts back.
He then turns back to Reon, gives an apologetic shrug. “Sorry. Duty calls.”
And he heads for the bar, leaving Reon feeling somewhat weightless. (Until he catches Semi laughing at him out of the corner of his eye, that is.)
Reon’s former teammates are about as amenable to jazz as he’d expected them to be.
Goshiki thinks the fast, loud numbers are cool but finds the slower stuff boring. Kawanishi likes the lyrics but finds Julia’s voice grating, moving to cover his ears whenever she hits a high note. Yamagata enjoys it, but mostly because he likes the challenge of coordinating his snacking to the beat of the music. (Reon cuts him off from buying more peanuts half an hour in, at which point he begins to suck on ice cubes in four-four time, which is… really not something Reon feels capable of stopping.) Semi claims it’s terrible, but Reon catches him tapping his foot on two and four during Nobody. Tendou says it’s catchy, but he likes old-school marches better. Ushijima listens to the music without ever interrupting (the others have to carry out conversations with him strictly in between songs), but his expression during the numbers is as unreliable as ever. And Shirabu sits very still, tightens his arms across his chest, teeth clenching more with every lyric about the glories of the war or the pride of being an American vet.
Reon tries to explain pieces of history, pieces of music – why it’s impressive that the band pulled off a key change here, a drum-less section there. At one point, Nick and Wayne solo simultaneously over a bridge, their melodies intertwining in a counterpoint so expect that Reon’s jaw nearly drops onto the table when Donny admits afterwards that it was unrehearsed. Whenever Reon starts getting into the complexities of blues scales and comped rhythms, though, his friends’ eyes start to glaze over, so he settles for just watching Davy Zlatic on the bass, trying to hear how his easy walking lines build a foundation for the rest of his band.
The last song in the first half of the band’s set is First Steps, an old American standard that (if Reon remembers the interview he read in Time correctly) was the first song Julia ever sang with them. Donny stands up halfway through the tune to share the mic with her, and they somehow manage to stay on-melody while gazing into each other’s eyes as though inhabiting a world of their own.
Reon has never been in love like that. He’s gone out with girls a few times – other students at the pedagogical school, mostly – and it’s been fun, it’s been pleasant. Girls like his kind smile and his schoolteacher manners, like how he always shakes their hands at the beginning of a date and walks them to their doors at the end. And he likes the soft velvet of girls’ voices, the light bells of their laughter, the curves of their hips and chests. He’s lost himself in kissing, once or twice. But he’s never felt the magnetism that he sees between Donny and Julia onstage, the pull like a planet and a star.
And then, Reon looks past the band and sees Kai watching him.
Kai is watching Reon the way Reon Is watching the band – as though he wants to take this moment, expand it until the tiniest details are loud as trumpets – the shine of the brass and the scent of cigars and the click of the snare drum and the hazy yellow of the fluorescent lights – and then pull those details into himself, etch them onto his heart like carving initials in the bark of a tree.
Reon meets his gaze and feels breathless, or weightless, or mindless. He is struck with the sudden impossible urge to ask Kai to dance.
Somewhere – on an adjacent planet – Donny and Julia are singing.
No need to be so shy
Take reassurance, I
Know how to guide you through
The worst steps, first steps first.
The song ends, and Reon feels his soul return to his body slowly, slowly, like a balloon suddenly tied to a stone. He should go over there. He should talk to Kai. But, god, what could he say – How many Donny Nova records do you have? Which song of theirs is your favorite? Did you make a deal with an evil spirit to win that smile?
He’s too busy debating possibilities to notice the whispered conversation between Tendou and Shirabu, the clench of Shirabu’s fists, the scrape of his chair as he stands ramrod-straight and opens his mouth against the blues record now spinning quietly in the background.
“Hey! Assholes! What’s your stance on the atomic bombs your great nation dropped on mine?’”
The club falls silent. An invisible spotlight drops on Shirabu – standing, almost imperceptibly shaking, light hair shining like a brass bell. His eyes remain fixed on Donny Nova as the band leader stands from behind his piano, closes the lid with a dull thump.
“What did you say?” he asks slowly.
“You heard me.” And it’s true – Shirabu’s English is accented, out of practice, but his enunciation is clear as a middle C.
“I did,” Donny says. There’s something dark and heavy in his blue eyes, and Reon remembers suddenly that this man fought in a war – this man killed people. “But I want you to say it again.”
“Okay.” Shirabu shifts his feet, steadies himself. Semi grabs his right hand, over the clenched knuckles.
“How can you stand up there singing about how the war was all pride and glory, and how your country is the best in the world, when your country killed Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and most of Tokyo, and Okinawa, and my father, and my friend’s fathers? How can you expect us to just cheer for you? Your music is catchy, but it’s not that catchy.”
The club holds its breath. Waitresses and musicians and dancers frozen, as though cast in a block of ice.
And then Davy Zlatic begins to laugh. It’s a booming laugh, a filing the room laugh, yet if modulated one key it would sound like a sob. The spotlight turns off of Shirabu.
“Davy,” Donny says mildly, “what the fuck.”
“He said our music is catchy,” Davy replies.
Somehow this sets Donny off, and then the whole band is laughing – loud and American and unfamiliar. Reon looks at his friends one by one, wordlessly asking if any one of them understands what is going on. They respond with head-shakes, shrugs. Shirabu sits back down, still trembling.
“We will return after this short break,” Donny says into his microphone. All the musicians put their instruments down and head to some private back room. And so begins the longest fifteen minutes of Reon’s life.
“Why did you do that,” he hisses at Shirabu. “You realize they’re never coming to Japan again after this, right?”
“Good,” Shirabu shoots back.
“He’s kinda right,” Tendou says. “These guys are just glorifying their country as though it did nothing wrong. At least our government is learning from its mistakes. No more military, no more propaganda.”
“We’re never going to build a new Japan with people like them pushing us to be another America,” Semi adds.
Reon doesn’t know how to respond – doesn’t know how to explain that this band isn’t just glorifying America, that they’re famous for doing the opposite – so he gets up instead, goes to grab another round of cheap beer. He doesn’t say anything to his friends when he returns, either. He only watches the stage and waits, drowning out questions and insufficient explanations with the taste of beer and the beat of his heart.
After fifteen minutes (fifteen hours), the Donny Nova Band takes the stage again. This time, before he takes his seat behind the piano, Donny stands in the center of the band (in the center of his world) and speaks into the big silver microphone.
“Hello again, Tokyo. I’ve gotta be honest – it wasn’t easy for us to come here. Some of us have memories – memories that ain’t easy to relive. But we were invited here because, as your kind patron Mr. Takashi said to me last week, Japan is building itself over. A new government, a new culture, a new nation. You’re being honest about the past and hopeful about the future, and we Americans… we haven’t been great to you. We dropped bombs. We toppled buildings. We started fires that we couldn’t put out.
“I’m trying to be honest, because you all deserve that, and the truth is America hasn’t been good to itself either. Our government is hiding everything bad that happened during the war. America isn’t like what you might see in movies or hear in songs like ours – it’s worse. It’s more prideful, more vengeful, more vindictive. But it’s also better – it’s a place where you can make something of yourself, if you’re honest about who you are and what you want. I hope Japan can be a place like that too, someday soon. And I hope all of you one day feel welcome in our home the way that we – we, the Donny Nova Band – felt welcomed in yours.”
Donny looks straight at Shirabu, and Reon remembers that he led a television broadcast that shocked and enamored a nation.
“I hope this answers your question.”
And then the band launches into Welcome Home. They don’t play it like this in shows, Reon knows – they’ve played it, with the original lyrics, only once, and that performance lost them a contest and won them a nation. He listens to Julia’s words and the instrumentalists’ solos now and wonders if this is the same Welcome Home that was played on that broadcast, or if it has evolved in the five years since, molded for new battles and new victories. He watches the tight look on Wayne’s face and the sheen of sweat on Donny’s forehead and the raising of Julia’s arms.
But mostly, he watches his friends. Not all of them have the best proficiency in English (Tendou has to help with translating), but each of them quickly catches onto the fact that this song is not as triumphant as it sounds. Tendou grabs Ushijima’s hand beneath the table, Kawanishi excuses himself for the bathroom, Semi swipes a hand over his eyes, Yamagata keeps turning to Reon mouthing did she really say that. Shirabu’s shoulders loosen, bar by bar, word by word.
When the song ends, their table applauds louder than any other.
“Reon,” Ushijima says once the noise has died down. “I see why you like this band. They’re like us.”
“Mr. Zlatic, could I speak to you for a moment?”
The musician in question glances up from his case, where he’s rubbing rosin on the strings of his bass.
“Sure, kid,” he says. “What’s up?”
Reon cocks his head, trying to deduce the meaning in that question. “What’s…”
“Ah, sorry – it means, like, what’s going on, or what do you want,” Davy clarifies.
“Oh.” Reon shifts from one foot to the other, folds and unfolds his hands where they’re clasped behind his back. “Then what is up is, I would like to apologize for what my friend said earlier.”
Davy surveys Reon for a moment, then closes his case and stands up, turning his full attention to the younger man.
“So, the kid who shouted at us about bombs, that was your friend,” he says. “Well, no apologies necessary, he had a point. And he was less rude than I would’ve been if I were him. But why’re you talking to me about it? Donny’s the leader, Julia’s the most approachable, Johnny’s the kindest, Wayne’s the funniest – or, at least, messing with him is the funniest.”
Wayne shoots Davy a glare, from where he’s warming down on the other side of the stage. Davy grins back.
“I wanted to talk to you because the bass is my favorite instrument,” Reon explains. “And I was hoping I could ask you about it as well.”
“Oh, well, in that case…” Davy’s face brightens, as though someone flicked a switch in the back of his head, and he makes for the bar. “Let me buy you a drink.”
“What about your bass?”
“Don’t worry about it – we have stage crews for this kinda thing.”
Reon gapes, at that.
But then Davy claps a hand on his shoulder – heavy and sturdy as his bass – and says, “I was joking, I’ll grab it later.”
Reon follows the bassist to the bar, where they grab two stools near the middle. The club is mostly empty now that the band’s set is finished, its only occupants besides the musicians a few waitresses cleaning up and drunk businessmen helping each other stagger out the door. Reon catches a glimpse of Kai, talking to Donny by the piano – for a moment, their eyes meet, and Reon looks away, his chest oddly warm.
“Two whiskeys,” Davy tells the bartender.
The bartender, a tall, skinny man with more grease in his hair than any one person should need in a month, looks up from wiping off a glass just long enough to say, “We don’t carry any whiskey, Mr. Zlatic. I told you this yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and every day last week.”
“And I told you yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and every day last week, what kind of bar doesn’t carry whiskey?”
“A Japanese one,” the bartender replies politely.
Reon stiles a laugh.
“Okay, fine,” Davy capitulates. “Two sakes, please.”
The bartender smiles slightly, then reaches into a cabinet and pulls out a thin silvery bottle.
As he pours, Davy turns to Reon. “So, what’s your name, kid?”
“Oohira Reon.”
“Ou-hira Leon,” Davy repeats, his voice clumsy around the vowels. “Was that right?”
“Close.”
“Good. I’ve been getting better at this pronunciation thing. Everyone in the places we visit has such good English, seems only fair for me to at least get their names right.”
Reon nods. The bartender pushes two short white cups towards them. Davy picks one up and holds it aloft, invites Reon to do the same. Once they clink, Davy knocks his sake back in one go. Reon compromises with a sip, drinking around a quarter. It’s very good sake, so good it would probably cost two months’ salary from the shop where he works, and it burns like a tiny supernova as it goes down.
“Tell me something, Oohira,” Davy says. “Why is the bass your favorite instrument?”
“Because it’s the foundation,” Reon replies. “It’s the setup, the firsts of the chords, the structure of the piece. It holds the band together. I used to play volleyball – the friends I was with tonight, those were my teammates – and I think the bassline is like a receive. You need it to build the rest of the piece, or to score a point.”
Davy nods slowly. “I like how you think, kid. Do you play?”
“Play?”
“The bass. Or any other lesser instrument.”
“Oh – no, no.” Reon feels oddly light, at the thought that his favorite musician would think he could play. “I’m just a fan. I’m studying to be a schoolteacher.”
“No reason a schoolteacher can’t play,” Davy says. “I’d give you a lesson right now, but Julia’s booked us some historical tour of Kyoto tomorrow and we need to be up at seven in the goddamned morning to catch a train, so I should be getting to sleep sooner rather than later. Come back tomorrow, though, and maybe we can do something.”
If Reon was feeling light before, he’s weightless now. He’s floating. He’s thanking every god he can think of that he has the next week off school for summer vacation.
“Okay,” he says. “I will come back tomorrow.”
“Good.”
“Now, ah, may I ask you something, Mr. Zlatic?” Reon adds, feeling emboldened by the night’s music and the fluorescent lights and the come back tomorrow.
“Call me Davy,” the bassit says. “And yeah, ask away.”
“Why did you laugh, when my friend shouted at your band?”
“Well.” Davy fiddles with an empty napkin holder, sitting on top of the bar. “It was funny. Not ha-ha funny, but ironic funny. We’ve spent so long standing up against authority that we forgot we could be an authority to be stood up against. And your friend did it in style. That make sense, Ou-hira Leon?”
Reon thinks of clenched fists, torched schoolhouses, bass melodies that are barely audible yet hold a whole band together. They’re like us, Ushijima said.
“Yes,” he tells Davy. “It makes sense.”
Davy stands up, gives a nod to the bartender. “I really should be going,” he tells Reon. “But – I like you. I like your country. I hope you and your friends get to help build it the way you want. And I will see you tomorrow.”
Reon stands as well, then offers his hand. (His father always used to say that a firm handshake is the best way to make a good first impression.) As Davy takes it, Reon catches sight of Kai – sitting by himself at a table near the bar now, nursing a beer, watching Reon like he’s a newly tuned piano and Kai wants to dance on the keys. Their eyes meet, and Davy must catch a change in Reon’s expression because he leans in close and whispers right into Reon’s ear:
“Don’t be afraid to be yourself, kid. Say – what’s the difference between an army squadron and the Donny Nova Band?”
Reon pulls back. “What?”
Davy grins. “One guy in every squadron is queer, but for this band, it’s half the fucking lineup.”
And then – as Reon watches, mouth wide as a tuba’s bell – the bassist strides over to the door of the men’s room in the back left corner, knocks three loud raps, and shouts: “Hey, Radel! Wright! Get out, go home, you guys can do that shit at the hotel!”
Reon hears some muffled scuffling and cursing, and then the trumpet and trombone players emerge, both decidedly less put together than they were on stage.
Well. If they can do it, so can Reon. He heads for Kai’s table, puts on his best smile.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hi,” Kai replies. He finishes his beer in one long gulp – Reon’s gaze is caught by the slow movement of his Adam’s apple, up and down like waves on the sea – then stands and offers his hand.
Reon shakes it. His grip is firm, steady, but not too tight.
“I’m Kai Nobuyuki, as you probably heard earlier.”
“Oohira Reon,” Reon replies.
“Boys, it’s last call,” the bartender informs them. “Get out or I’ll have to kick you out.”
Kai looks at Reon. Reon looks at Kai. (In the back of his mind, he hears a rhythm starting – a string bass, plucking out even quarter notes.)
“Want company on your walk home?” Kai asks.
“You’re a bassist, right?”
The city is quiet around them. Not sleeping, but getting ready for bed, perhaps – flipping through an old paper, reading a few pages of a novel, turning out a light. The rhythm of people and cars and movement has slowed to an occasional train whistling in the distance. And the night is hot, humid, the air so heavy it feels like a sauna.
Reon has never felt more awake.
“No – not yet,” he amends, stopping at an intersection. “Zlatic said he’d give me a lesson tomorrow, if I wanted.”
“And you want to, I’m guessing.” Kai heads across the empty street despite the stop sign, waves for Reon to do the same.
Reon hesitates for a moment, then crosses. “Yeah. Do you play piano? I saw you talking to Mr. Nova.”
“I’m trying to learn,” Kai says. He passes under a street light and for a moment is illuminated gold, a grinning sun. “Mr. Nova didn’t offer me lessons, though. Guess I’m not as good a smooth talker as you are.”
“I think you’re plenty smooth,” Reon tells him.
Kai gets a strange soft look in his eyes, at that. A block passes without them speaking to each other, the only sounds a faraway horn honking, a radio playing out an open window.
And then, Kai says, “That was your friend, right? The kid who stood up and confronted the band.”
“Yeah.” Reon sighs. “He’s impulsive when he gets mad about something, and I think my other friend dared him to do it, which didn’t help. But – and this is selfish, but – I’m glad he did – because it meant we got to hear them do Welcome Home.”
“Yeah,” Kai agrees. “And I think it was brave of him to say. What he said about all of his friends having lost their fathers – it’s true. Even if we didn’t all lose our fathers, we all lost someone. I lost my older sister. My best friend lost his mom. And to listen to music by the people who made that happen, even indirectly… it’s weird.”
“I think it’s weird for them, too, though,” Reon says. “It’s like Nova’s verse in Welcome Home. Some of them lost people fighting us. Or, not us us, but, you know.”
Kai nods. They cross another street, this one cracking through the center of the pavement.
“What’s your story?” Kai asks next.
“What do you mean?”
“Like, who are you? What are you doing, what do you want to do?”
Nobody has ever asked Reon that before. And he’s strangely pulled open by the question, as though with a few words Kai ripped through his skin and bones and cartilage to reveal his beating heart.
“That’s a big question,” he says.
Kai smiles, one that almost reaches his eyes. “So give me a big answer.”
And Reon does. He tells Kai about his schoolteacher parents, about morning walks and sunlit classrooms, about an accidental bombing the newspapers never covered, about a group of friends who pulled him from the wreckage, about an idea that became a team that became a victory, about his dream to honor his parents and his friends together. He hasn’t talked this much since an abandoned classroom in the aftermath of an earthquake, years ago. Reon is so focused on being a good listener that he forgets to talk, sometimes, and having Kai focus on him so intensely, he feels like a backup player pulled to top soloist. He feels like he’s the only person in the world.
Partway through Reon’s story, they arrive at Ushijima’s building and stop on the doorstep, sitting with their legs scant centimeters apart as though it would rupture the world if they were further, the concrete cool and smooth beneath Reon’s jeans. He asks Kai the same questions Kai asked him, and, grinning, Kai tells him about a group of friends always broken and bickering until they found volleyball, about dreams of running a little bookshop or maybe a record store, about a piano in a back closet that seemed destined for Kai to tune, about –
“Wait,” Reon says, halfway through Kai’s description of the lettering on the front of his and his friends’ store someday. “Wait. That volleyball tournament.”
Reon isn’t a big believer in destiny (he gave that up one cornflower-blue morning in 1944), but there are few other explanations for how two boys who faced each other in a national high school volleyball tournament could end up in the same Tokyo jazz club two years later.
(Reon isn’t a big believer in his chances of finding romance, either. But, well.)
Kawanishi opens the front door sometime around two o’clock in the morning and informs Reon that he really should get upstairs, Tendou and Semi tried to shower at the same time without looking at each other and now the bathroom is flooded.
“Duty calls,” Reon tells Kai.
Kai smiles – and it’s like a sunset, this smile. Colorful, soft illuminated, promising a new day if you can only wait out the night.
“But you’ll be back at the Skyscraper tomorrow.”
“I will.”
Kai turns to go – then turns back – hesitates – caught between one step forward and one step back – the moment of lift just before a conductor lowers his baton.
Don’t be afraid to be yourself, Davy said.
Reon steps forward and kisses Kai. Right on the lips. One heartbeat, two heartbeats, three – and Kai kisses back.
They hold on for half a minute (a tiny eternity) and then Reon pulls away. Waits as the world settles back into focus around him slowly, slowly, like a balloon suddenly tied to a stone.
“It was really nice to see you again,” he says.
Kai grins – and, god, he’s a whole fucking constellation.
“Yeah. You, too.”