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~
The first time Kou hit a homer no one expected at a game everyone attended it was fall tournament, boys’ league. Tepid autumn sunshine. Two outs, runner on second. Lead slender as an eyelash. A low fence on the ballpark so when Kou crushed it it cleared the outfield and flew into the void beyond the chainlinks, out into the blue evening. They used wooden bats and from the on-deck circle you could smell the scorched wood the moment it made contact. It was like a tree being felled. The clap of an earthquake. A force of nature with all the attendant inevitability, so the outfielders didn’t even bother to move. The infielders did, but it was a motion like a drawstring being gathered, as if they were coming together to watch him more closely, with the prescience you sometimes had before something wonderful was about to happen in front of your peeled eyes. Shiba had been having it on and off all afternoon, whenever he looked at Kou, who at eleven was the kind of player who made audience members of everyone no matter what position you played. Force of nature—that was about right.
He shifted in the on-deck circle, one knee to another. The same position he’d hold in the lineup all the way to their last game, seven years later. Before the scoreboard light went on—the first time Shiba had ever seen the home run light used officially—Kou turned to him, the smile skewed and bashful to the point of galling. “Yuuki!” he called. “Yuuki, did you—“
“No,” said Shiba, “hey, what happened, did I miss something?” and the force of nature doubled up, convulsed with mirth right there at the plate, the heel of a batting-gloved hand over his mouth. The smell of smoked wood floated out with the scent of burning leaves, so the entire season centrifuged around them then, his best friend, newly anointed with genius, helpless with laughter, helpless with him.
~
“One forty,” said Shiba. “That fastball was one forty at the least, that’s Kou. He’s a little prince. He’s gonna wait out on the nastiest bullets you send him. That’s why we didn’t see any homers off him when we were up against—well, you know. Anyone who wasn’t Haruna. He’s got a complex. Our battery’s got a complex. Our entire team’s got a complex! I’ve got a complex! Don’t be fooled by our uniforms, we’re all just—a bunch of hero-worshipping Haruna fans!”
The reporter looked like she didn’t know whether to take any of this down or ascribe it to the toxic cocktail of overheated delirium and sketchy copper-infused tap water characteristic of the prefectural stadium. “Any comment, Takahashi-kun?”
“Makin’ me blush,” drawled Kou. “He’s giving me too much credit, I don’t wait out for anything. It’s just my job.”
He was worrying the tongue of his baseball cap over and over. In and out, opening and closing the button notches. He resized the cap to its elementary-school size, its middle-school one. At the well-worn high school notch he let it dangle and hang open. Kou was usually so devoid of nervous energy Shiba had once painted an entire baseball team on his back with his finger during a nap hour in middle-school camp. The almond-sized elliptical of the catcher’s helmet, each individual finger on the batter’s batting gloves all cleanly articulated before he’d woken up.
“He’s shy,” said Shiba. “Making him blush is my job, so you can get good pictures. Take good care of him, won’t you, onee-san? In your article.”
She went scarlet. Shiba didn’t grab Kou’s cap from him until she’d gathered her shoulder bag and hightailed it off to bother the battery. He caught his elder sister’s eye in the stands and gestured with his chin; she gave him a thumbs-up and took the bleachers down two at a time to head Aoi and Ryo off.
“Thanks,” said Kou. “For talking for me. I couldn’t, um—just didn’t really know what to say.”
Shiba tightened the cap to its right size and slapped it on Kou’s head. His hair was disgusting, gelled with sweat, the same clamminess on his cheeks. He cried openly after games. No change in expression. It was strange that his face was so cold; Shiba’s shoulder was still warm with where he’d touched it after the blaring horn sounded off and Musashino spilled out onto the field. He thought idly that it’d be sore there for the rest of his life, as if he’d torn something inside the chrysalis of his skin, something mutated below the surface where it might be readily diagnosed. The weight of Kou’s hand shorting the injury out before the pain had a chance to reach his bones and change him irreparably.
I’d talk for you anytime, he could say. I’d talk all day and all night, I’d say your name as many times as it takes for everyone in this stadium to say it the way I want it heard. I’d talk your way onto national television. I’d do anything for you, I just couldn't do this one thing.
“That is like, crazy ironic considering you said it, not me,” he said. “It’s my job. C’mon, we’ve got a lot more people to see.”
It was hurting again. He rolled his shoulder experimentally. His undershirt and jersey felt welded to his skin by the astounding heat of the day. Aoi, he thought, must have suffocated in his long undershirt. They should both go home and change. He had to; it was disgusting how they were all walking around drenched like this, only there was so much still to be done. Disgraceful. What a sorry way to look after the biggest game of your life. What a sorry goddamn way to look.
“Right behind you, captain,” said Kou.
~
A lot would have been easier and harder, as it turned out, if Kou hadn’t been so good. Not at baseball, though that was true, just in the general sense of the term. He’d look at Shiba before opening his test books in class, as if to ask if it were all right to start; unwrap his onigiri and let them wait there roundly on his desk until Shiba put together his donburi in the order he liked them, the vegetables and strips of pork alternating in a latticework pattern that grew more or less complicated depending on how moody he was feeling that day. It had never been very moody. They’d had a charmed life. Middle school, their form sharpened up, ushered lovingly through growth spurts and injuries by gleaming landscapes of exercise equipment and the coaches who navigated them for the two of them.
He and Kou had gone to all the games trying to find the place where they’d fit. Tosei's stately sleepiness unsettled them both, too burnished a place for the panache of a once-in-a-lifetime slugger. Bijou hadn’t been an option then though it might have now. Senda was already too big, and their captain made Kou nervous, though he’d never have said it—Shiba had said it for both of them, shrugging it off cheerily as batters’ instinct. They’d skipped over a lot of schools that had teams. They’d never talked about the reasons they’d done it (a quality joke, crazy! ironic: at the time, they wouldn’t have been able to imagine Musashino Dai Ichi).
All in all, it was the same as that home run had been: a force of nature. Kou’s ascension was steady and brilliant. At the time, loving him had inoculated Shiba from anything that could hurt about being attached to that kind of trajectory. It was inevitable that the best would happen to them in baseball because it had already happened. They’d already gotten the best from it from the moment Kou had hit the kid next to him with his bat on accident in boys’ league and Shiba had talked him out of a time out as a courtesy because he looked so utterly stricken; now it was only a matter of waiting for it all to bear fruit. There was no question that it couldn’t have. When that much was given into your hands completely free of charge you repaid it, there was no question of failure. You owed the universe for your good fortune: that was the meaning of excelling at a place like Kasukabe. That was the reason they belonged.
~
It occurred to him as he was wringing his jersey out that he hated having an oendan. It was ostentatiously loud. The miasma of sound came in under the dugout door. The moment the water hit his eyes he hated that he’d thought this and wished he could burn the thought out of his grey matter entirely but it felt cauterized there now, like the image of the scoreboard. He clicked his tongue and dunked an entire cup of water over his head.
“Lecturing the sink, huh,” said Kou. “Don’t go too hard on it, it did a good job.”
He laughed in spite of himself. “We’ve gotta go talk to the oendan. Don’t come with me, I’ll tell them you were icing down the homerun-hitting wing. Kasukabe’s prizewinning chicken wing. Yeah, like a farm. We’re like a farm. All those—hormones.” He had no idea what the fuck was coming out of his mouth. “Anyway, I’m just parting my hair, as you can see.” His hair had flopped down into his eyes. His goatee, he saw in the shitty dugout mirror, looked like a rat nailed to a cheeseboard—why did they have a mirror in the dugout? Who was going to be preening? Was that how Haruna Motoki’s hair always looked like it’d come out of a pudding mold?
“I can ice later.”
“That’s not the point, you want to come?”
“You have to go.”
“It’s—“ He felt like if he breathed in he would swallow water, choke, drown. “Yeah, that’s. I have to go. So why are you hovering, are you gonna do something about about that?”
“You know how you feel safer having someone good behind you on deck?” said Kou.
The indecision of the way he talked became something to love, juxtaposed as it was against the habit he had of going after what he wanted with the surefire certainty dozens of coaches had wheedled to have on their team, bench first year, starting roster second, free tuition, well-rounded cram school package, anything he wanted, and he—he wanted Shiba.
Shiba put his hands on the edge of the sink and leaned back, gauging the distance. Kou’s eyes were already closed; this like so many things intuitive for him. The athlete’s knack of finding beauty in total unthought.
They kissed slowly. It had an overindulgent, winding feeling to it that was too much too soon, for now, and he bolted back for a moment, but Kou put his hand on the back of his neck, the same way he’d put his hand on his shoulder after the game, and kept him there, thumb lazily working the tendons at the base of Shiba’s throat until he opened his mouth. He cupped Kou’s elbows, drew him closer. Their last game, and Shiba had watched him hit a home run, and cock his head over his shoulder to look back at him in the on-deck circle as always. Kou did his job. Kou always did his job. Leave it to Kou.
“You’re crying,” said Kou. His sleepy eyes were full of tears. “That’s just insulting. You don’t see me sniveling over your ridiculous beard thing—“
“Goatee, it’s a goatee, grow some fashion sense, dweeb,” said Shiba. He rested his forehead on Kou’s shoulder. All the weight of the afternoon seemed to go with it; he didn’t want to move. He was shaking like a leaf. Kou’s homerun-hitting arms around him shaking just as badly. “This thing—excuse me, this, this signature look, right—it’s going to get me laid like crazy in cram school.”
“Well, reason twenty-fucking-five to hate it,” said Kou.
“Oh, yeah? What are reasons one through twenty-four?”
Kou made a pained face. “I don’t wanna talk about my balls right now, after like, our last game, but—“
They were laughing when they went out into the sunlight. Our last game: he’d said it, but how could they help but laugh, with the kind of stupid segue only Kou could manage, and this was why, after all, Shiba did the talking for both of them. Kou’s hand left his when they got up the steps to the dugout. One finger tracing the standing vein on his wrist, perfunctory and a promise, and then the warm presence of him was separate again, and Shiba was standing straight.
A cheer went up from the stands when he waved, as though that was what they’d been waiting for. It was like the years of that upward trajectory came together, pulling Shiba back into himself with all their accumulated gravity; he thought with a sense of renewed self that he couldn’t have possibly thought he hated having an oendan, how could he have? The violet and white laddered up towards the sun, as far as he could see. TAKAHASHI, he saw, on signs held up, SUZUKI on banners and rollers; the twins battery was a novelty and drew families out with a verve and vigor he’d exploited blithely for fund-raising purposes since he was a second-year and wouldn’t have dreamed of being a captain who had to do what he did now, bowing to the oendan.
“Thank you very, very much,” he called, and straightened up. Kou was watching him respectfully, cap doffed. Shiba turned to the oendan, and opened his arms wide. “Hey, I want to say, though, Aoi could barely hear you out on the mound—maybe you’re getting a little old to cheer, oyaji, what do you say?”
~
When Shiba made captain, his father made him shave off the beard he’d been cultivating religiously since he was old enough to bear that kind of follicular magnificence with gravitas, and everybody he knew did him the grave injustice of acting like that was more exciting than the whole part where he’d been appointed captain of a hundred-man baseball club that was going to go to Koshien this year, because it had a battery of lethal and funding-friendly twins, and a homerun slugger who’d was so press-shy the press all wanted to have his children, and now had Shiba too. Monikerless Shiba. You did not, ultimately, give people much to say about you with a medium-to-high average. At least with ‘captain,’ the logic went, now people would have something to talk about.
“I always knew you’d get it, senpai,” Aoi had said.
Because of Aoi’s personality these things always came out wrong; he had no grasp of where to put inflections. Shiba took him and Ryo out because they were there, because it was tradition, and because Kou hadn’t made it out of the locker room in time. No other reason, and no reason to check his phone either. They sat at a hexagonal booth in a hype restaurant that looked like the inside of a lantern, and he ordered them novelty virgin cocktails in impractical glasses, tiny slices of sea bream, pearl tapioca ladled over molded tropical fruit desserts. He felt like he was a good captain, possibly even a great one.
“You’re a sweetheart. So who was it that didn’t, anyway?”
“I didn’t say that!” cried Aoi, and snatched up his virgin cocktail. It tasted awful—anything that overpriced and luridly blue had to—but he sucked it down anyway, glaring daggers at Shiba over the salted rim of his glass. Ryo let his sit there, priming himself to drink it, and the blue light shimmered in his eyes, big sincere reservoirs of infinite catchers’ patience. Ryo was always waiting for a nod. They were fragile but compacted, like ice, their closeness to one another taut like a stretched and stretching wire. Shiba loved them nearly as wholely as they loved him. Not for lack of trying, but when you had everything you needed, what you came to love extraneously was a constant escalation of deliberate choices, and had too much potency for someone else to approximate. That was true of Kou as well, so he didn’t check his phone, not more than twice anyway.
Out back after he put them in a cab he took his Kasukabe jacket off and walked for a while on the winnowing lines of the train track bisecting the city. The florescent lights were on in full force, honeycombing iridescence in gemstone colors all over the dense, humid dark that surrounded him, like the faceted eyes of an insect. Without the beard his face felt raw and scraped. Flashbulb ready. He thought of oendans, of Kou in the batter’s box with his ascetic concentration. He didn’t know whether he’d ever wanted to break it, or only to hitch himself to that upward trajectory. It might have been different if he weren’t the most important slugger in their prefecture and Shiba was—something, a star pitcher, or the shortstop of the century, or something, but he was only himself; they were eleven, and on the on-deck circle he was made part of the audience by the focus of his eyes on Kou’s shoulders, his heart full and aching with his admiration.
Did it count, if it wasn’t yours? If you took a team to Koshien, with its battery of lethal and funding-friendly twins, and its homerun slugger who’d was so press-shy the press all wanted to have his children, did that also have something to do with your medium-to-high average?
He put the jacket back on. The phone buzzed in his pocket, and he tipped it out of the pocket into his palm. His fist had been clenched so hard the fingers felt stiff, like he’d been walking for hours out in the night, which couldn’t have been true. Couldn’t. He thumbed the line of his shaven jaw.
“Captain,” said the message. “Leave it to Yuuki.”
~
The last two responsibilities on his dwindling list were sitting on the events side of the stadium, far enough to avoid the crush of spectators from the game but not practically committed enough to escaping to actually leave the premises, which was why Shiba would never be half the people the twins were except purely mathematically. They sprang up and into their low bows the second they saw him and Kou. He’d been dreading it. He thought perhaps it might have been a good idea to just stay on the side for a moment and watch them trundle around, kicking their duffel bags despondently and refusing to look at one another. But instead he was here, and they were there, and they were bowing to him.
“You guys,” he said, “Aoi, you already—hey, did you talk to Kou? His last tournament too, go cheer him up. He looks like he could use some kohai love.”
Kou gave him what for Kou was a downright filthy look as Aoi rocketed over to him. Shiba watched them gamely, Aoi’s fervent machinations, Kou’s steadily less tense denials. He’d never see it again, anyway. Best to laugh at it while you could. Snap a picture or two.
He eased up on the railing next to Ryo, who was—it was wrong to have favorites, but it was wrong to be the captain of a team like Kasukabe and have it handed to you and still not be able to take a team to Koshien too, and here he was anyway. He slung an arm around Ryo’s shoulders.
“You’re getting better at uncorking those check throws,” he said. “Wow! What check throws. The Takahashi Kou of check throws.” If it were Aoi, he would have said the Haruna Motoki. “Those check throws can wear the violet and white.”
“You were watching them?”
“It’s my job, you—of course I was.” Suzuki Ryo, too, had a medium-to-high average. Always before his brother in the lineup, the way Shiba came along after Takahashi. He tightened his arm on the kid’s shoulders.
“Do you have any advice on how to improve them?”
“Sure, don’t—“ he jittered his fingers uselessly. It was part of having good eyes for extraordinary talent without actual extraordinary talent yourself, you always knew, you just couldn’t say. “You could be a little lighter on your feet, Ryo. I mean, not like you throw with your knees—which are gonna go out before thirty, by the way, if you don’t ease up on the stance—but it makes a difference.”
“I’ll remember, senpai. We’ll crush them next time.” No idea if he was talking about his knees or opponents or something entirely different; you could never tell with Ryo. He was so used to getting away with being the well-adjusted one that people tended to miss what a vicious monomaniac he actually was. He was, Shiba thought, going to grow up to be a hell of a kid. Amazing. Captain material, a little miserable, a lot good at watching. Good at making it his job.
They watched now, silently, as a little way off Kou spun Aoi slowly in their usual headlock. Aoi was holding onto Kou’s forearm and sobbing; Kou was pretending not to do the same or to pay attention. There was so much you did for one another at times like this. In the past hour Shiba had cycled through endless iterations of what he wouldn’t get back now, what parts of Captain Shiba Yuuki would end with high school baseball, but now he settled on this idea, and the pain began to ebb and flow quickly, like the suggested pattern of breathing in a fatal emergency.
“Well, no next time for me,” he said stupidly. Only because Ryo wouldn’t cry.
The shoulders under his arm tightened up, then loosened. Ryo’s cheek made it to his shoulder. He closed his eyes, overcome a little by what he’d been holding studiously at bay.
“I—know, senpai. Any, um—is there anything else I can do for you?”
Yes, Shiba wanted to say. Haruna Motoki is not—you were all wrong, to treat that the way you did, thinking you were fighting nine against one, and I want you to learn that. It’s never nine against one, the way no one will ever pick a fight with your brother and leave you out of it, and the way no one could say of Kou that he was the best thing to happen to Saitama without him looking over his shoulder, asking me if that was all right. I want you to learn a lot more, too. It’s not bad, watching from the on-deck circle. Actually, you get to see a lot. Actually, you get to see things grow, and that’s not always something you can do, if you’re growing yourself. And after that—I know, because you are so much of me—after that it will be your responsibility to talk to the papers, and to your oendan, and to the people who loved you. It’s a great responsibility. One of the biggest, which you won’t know until you do it. But by then you’ll be able to. Because you’ll have been watching.
“Oh, please,” he said. “We’re both going to be fine.”
They saw the twins to their car. Kou thumped the top of the station wagon as if he were seeing off a date, which was hilarious. “Look at you,” said Shiba. “Chivalry isn’t a bad look for you, who knew?”
“Yeah, yeah. Shut up.”
“You want to go play chinese checkers?”
After a game, they’d usually go and sit in the ramen restaurant closest to their house, which wasn’t the best ramen place in the neighborhood or even the cleanest but which was the one that put up violet and white lanterns on game days, and gave them discounts for being Kasukabe players that they refused to take advantage of. Shiba would get his modest cream croquette with rice and Kou would act like the apocalypse was upon them and load his bowl of ramen with spring onions, extra eggs, pork cutlets and so much chili sauce it was a chore to sit downwind of him. They’d eat every bit of it in efficient silence, and then Shiba would negotiate and bow and renegotiate the price, refusing to take the discount, and Kou would painstakingly set up the dusty game of chinese checkers at the back of the restaurant, which had never to their knowledge been used by anyone but them. Half the pieces had been replaced with things they’d brought over the years, thimbles, a mindbogglingly expensive good-luck charm Kou had been given at a shichi-go-san. And then later, as they grew, the tags from the zippers of their school duffels as they changed colors. The purple Kasukabe pin, a brassy K. They’d slouch on their stools like the oldest of the old oendan members and play twenty times worse than any of them did, talking as they did, going through the day’s game play by play, unspooling the memories of Kou’s triumphs before them, that had gradually become the triumphs of everyone Shiba knew but were first and preciously given to him.
“Yeah, I want to go.”
“Let me get the keys from my sister, then. I’ll give her a call, let’s see where she is. She can go home with my parents.”
“Nah, hold off on that. Is it okay to walk?”
“It’ll take an hour! Maybe more.”
“You have someplace to be?”
Shiba looked at him. He’d been—he knew now—a little bit wrong. The last of his responsibilities.
He didn’t feel as tired as he should have. He texted his parents, put the phone in his pocket. The heat was still oppressive, so he peeled off the Kasukabe jacket, and then his jersey. He put them in his bag and straightened up, now in track pants and a plain undershirt, like Kou was. It’s over, he thought, with an eerie certainty. I played this game for nearly seventeen years, and now—I’m going to play chinese checkers with my best friend.
“Good game, Kou,” he said. “Thanks for putting on a show.”
Their hands met, interlocked finger by finger together. Premeditated. The kind of thing you could afford, with noplace to be. It was like putting on a batting glove, waiting for the sound of the bat—the readiness to be felled by lightning. He thought he would die, would lose the last of it, if Kou told him it was his job.
Kou said, “You left it to me.”
They put one foot in front of another, one more step and another, and then they were out of the stadium. Without his jersey the heat had lifted, and there was a light wind buffeting his shirt to his body. Not tomorrow, but maybe the day after, he thought, he might start growing his beard out. Maybe get an earring, which wasn’t allowed at Koshien. Maybe Kou could come with him to get the piercing and be unable to look when they got the needle out. Really, there was so much on the plate for the rest of the summer; he was going to be busy.
The wind made shutters of the crisp leaves at the edge of the stadium. A too-early autumn filigreed the air. Leafsmoke and a scorched bat, the afterimages and sense memory of a summer day that had begun and ended the same way. Even now, the oendan would be cheering in the stands next year, pulled forward and along, the way he had been. Even now Suzuki Ryo’s check-throws would get better and better, and his brother would learn to cry without fear. Even now, Kou would look at him and ask if he’d seen, even if there were nothing to see, no on-deck circle anymore, and Shiba would attest that he had. A frisson of excitement ran up his spine, the prescience of that long-ago day, that first homerun. So much, still, to look out for.
~
There was a story about Koshien he’d been told when he was young, that had seemed like one of the standard bromides they told kids to keep them studying and prevent them from getting the odd bad decision earring and disqualifying their team, or whatever, but which had like most things acquired its contours only with the momentum of time. 1958. Healthcare was getting better; nuclearization was getting worse. Japanese football had had a shining season. A famous manga released, retroactively fitting, about twins, and at Koshien the first Okinawan team to qualify had lost in the first round and scooped up its traditional soil from the grounds to take back, only to have it confiscated at the airport as they flew back to the islands. A few flight attendants had heard about the tradition, and gone to the stadium to take a stone from the courtyard and ship it to the baseball team, people they didn’t know, tied together only by association with that single dream, and that great accomplishment. Yet here they were now, enshrined in the same story, what they’d done for the people in their care as great as what the team had accomplished on its own. Now they, too, would live forever.
the end