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A little over a year ago, Mitsuko Shindou remarked to her husband that it was like their son had been possessed. By way of cruel irony, this was perhaps the single deepest insight of Mitsuko's intellectually unremarkable life, and she had meant it as a joke. To make matters worse yet, her husband wasn't even listening. He had his face buried in the sports section of the evening paper; baseball season was just getting started.
*
"But Hikaru, what are you going to do when this Go craze dies down?"
At first he thinks is mother is talking about his own feelings for the game, and he protests hotly, insisting that he loves Go, that Go matters to him more than anything, that he knows he wants to do this for the rest of his life. The table vibrates with the force of his nervous fidgeting.
"No, no - I mean, when the fad ends, when it stops being popular. When you can't make a living playing Go anymore. What then?"
"Mom," Hikaru says, low, intense, "Go's been around for a thousand years. It's going to be around for at least another thousand more."
If Mitsuko were less preoccupied with wringing an imaginary dishcloth, she might be wondering why her son's eyes had slid seekingly off to one side.
For his part, Hikaru is looking at Sai, at the soft, approving curve of Sai's painted lips. He does not know if the smile is for him or the fish tank on the kitchen counter, which Sai is watching raptly. Hikaru bought it last August for his mother's birthday. Mitsuko accepted her son's present with puzzled graciousness; she had never expressed any particular interest in aquariums or fish.
*
"I don't see what the big deal is." Hikaru has learned to treat any and all Go boards with respect, even reverence, so he doesn't quite slam his stone down, but it's a close thing. "All she has to do is sign a few papers–"
Sai gestures at a certain intersection in the upper left of the board. Hikaru sighs. He's getting trounced, more so than usual, absolutely ground into the dust.
"I'm going to lose, aren't I?"
"In five moves or so," Sai confirms dispassionately.
The worst part is, he can't tell if Sai's being unusually vicious or if he's just being unusually incompetent, and isn't that the sort of thing that a soon-to-be-pro should be able to figure out? He thinks about resigning, sweeping the stones off the board for both of them and starting again, but then he thinks no, he's going to play this game down to the marrow, for all that it's worth.
*
When he tells Akari that he won't be going to high school, that he's going to become a professional Go player instead, of course she teases him about just wanting to get out of entrance exams, which he'd obviously fail anyway. Then she congratulates him in an underhanded way: "All this time we thought you were just an idiot, but you were really an idiot savant." And finally, she kisses him on the cheek. She has to stand on her tiptoes to do this, heels sliding out of her nice, sensible penny loafers; he's been going through a fierce growth spurt over the past month.
Hikaru blushes and sputters and pushes her away. And Akari acts like she was joking, but Hikaru's pretty sure that she wasn't. Something twists in his innards, because Akari's okay – not just okay, she's his oldest friend, and she can hardly help being a girl and not a ghost or a genius – but the things she wants are not the things he wants.
"Maybe you'll have to pursue a career in Go, too, after you flunk all your exams," he tells her, then, "no, I'm just joking. You'll do great, I know you will."
Watching Akari skip away is almost as much of a relief as knowing that he'll never need to to calculate the area under a curve or explain cellular division. And then he feels guilty for feeling relieved, and then he looks at Sai, standing by the school gate, under a cherry tree in full bloom; a pale petal drifts down through his upturned face, and Hikaru feels something very different altogether.
*
His school uniform has gotten too tight across the shoulders, too short at the wrists and ankles, and Hikaru knows he's grinning like a lunatic as he peels it off for the last time ever. His mom's out of the house, so he doesn't even bother to go up to his room – he just undresses right there in the kitchen, while the microwave hums around a cup of instant noodles.
Sai would usually have his phantasmal nose pressed up against the glass of the aquarium or the window of the microwave – and that last one freaks Hikaru out a little, though it's not exactly like he has to worry about Sai getting radiation poisoning – but today he's just watching Hikaru from behind lowered eyelashes. His fan rests, half-folded, against the arch of one cheekbone.
"You've gotten older."
"Yeah, well, that's what humans do. When we're not, you know, dead." And sure, that was probably a mean thing to say, but he's feeling prickly all of a sudden; Sai's scrutiny is making him uncomfortable in ways he'd rather not think about. Hikaru hurries over to the beeping microwave and concentrates on stirring the noodles exactly the way it says to on the package.
(And if he's so busy concentrating on pretending to concentrate that he somehow forgets that the bowl is hot - or if he's so startled by that that he raises his burned fingers to his mouth without thinking - if he's so absorbed in dabbing at pinkening skin with the tip of his tongue, oh so very absorbed that he doesn't notice the way Sai's lips are pursed against the corner of his fan . . . If so, then well. Then there is probably some part of this that isn't a lie.)
*
"My mother was delighted when I showed an aptitude for Go." Sai taps his fan noiselessly against the board. "Before my talent became apparent, she regarded me with – how should I put it – gentle indifference."
Aside from recounting the historic exploits of his more distant relatives, Sai has never talked about his family before. Hikaru doesn't know why this is coming up now – his own mother sighed and signed the papers weeks ago – but he places a white stone where Sai pointed and leans back, not thinking about his next move as much as he should.
"I remember that she expressed regret that I had not been born a girl. 'Your beauty is wasted on you,' she told me." Sai, who can be childishly vain, smirks in a way that says he knows exactly how beautiful he is, and he doesn't think that beauty is wasted on him at all.
Hikaru dips his hand in his goke and lets the stones ease coolly between his fingers. He has a pretty good idea where he's going to move next. "Wait – a girl? Didn't people want boys back then?"
"You never did learn anything in your history class, did you? A daughter could be married up, into the imperial family - to the Emperor, even. Not so a son. But my talent for Go offered some slight opportunity for political advancement -"
"Sometimes, I think my mother wanted a girl," Hikaru volunteers suddenly. And when Sai answers with perfect earnestness that he's sure Hikaru's mother loves him just the way he is, he is desperate to talk about anything else, and he blurts out: "Do you ever miss it? Your own time, I mean?"
Sai seems to have found something of consuming interest on his spotless, trailing sleeve. "Not particularly. I miss - incidental things. Moon viewings, poetry readings, my bamboo flute. But you have your share of diversions in this age, too. And all that really matters is Go. The rest is . . . well, inconsequential." Perhaps he reads some reaction in Hikaru's face that Hikaru is not aware of himself, because he hastens to add, "Of course, I'm very glad to have met you."
When Hikaru finally lays his stone, Sai snaps his fan open and demands that he explain at least three ways in which that was an unwise move.
*
June, and the air conditioning whirs and sputters and stirs the heat like a spoon in coffee. Hikaru comes home from the Go Institute just before midnight, exhausted, but here it is two a.m. and he's awake again. He rolls over in bed, away from the glowing digits of his clock.
There is moonlight on the floor, where he has never seen moonlight before. He has to rub his eyes a little before the image comes clear, but when it does, there's Sai, kneeling before the window, luminous against the vague gray night.
Moon viewing? Hikaru mouths into the darkness. Sai's head does not turn.
"It's not the season for it. Summer is too hazy."
"Oh, that's probably just the pollution," Hikaru mumbles. "Smog, you know. And streetlights." His eyes are going blurry again, and a long yawn shudders its way up through his chest. When he settles himself back down on the pillow, he realizes that almost an hour has dropped away from him - just like that, watching Sai watch the moon. "Sai? I'm going back to sleep now, okay?"
"Good," Sai murmurs - distracted, Hikaru thinks, though who knows by what. "Sleep is good for you."
Later (although he will not remember in the morning), Hikaru flutters awake between one strange dream and the next to find Sai stretched out beside him, bathing them both in that strange pearly glow, casting shadows on sheets creased by the weight of a single body. His hair spills all around them like ink. Even when they’re this close, it's impossible for Sai to smell like anything, but if he did, it would be dust and pine resin and bloodstains set in deep -
*
A little less than two years from now, Mitsuko Shindou will tell her husband that it's like their son has had his heart broken. Her husband will try to say something supportive, but it will come out as him asking for another bowl of rice. And Mitsuko will oblige, just as happy not to have to wonder who could possibly have broken Hikaru’s heart, when he’s spent the last three years cloistered in an obsession all his own.