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Kaori parked her Toyota outside the animal shelter. She and Akira had decided that it was time to get a cat for little Sakaki to play with.
"Can I help you?" the tall woman behind the counter asked.
Kaori couldn't believe her eyes. It was her! The namesake of her firstborn! She looked even more serious than before and her hair didn't even reach her shoulders now, but there was no doubt in Kaori's mind that it was really her. "Didn't we go to high school together?" she stammered.
The woman behind the counter stared blankly into space as if she was thinking deeply. "Were you in Nyamo-sensei's class?" she finally asked.
"Yes! At least in the third year. And you were in Yukari-sensei's, right?" Kaori asked back even though she knew very well which class Sakaki had been in.
Sakaki nodded. "Kaori, right?"
Kaori felt her cheeks flush and her heart beat faster. Why did she still react this way after all these years?
"It's nice to meet you again. Please call me 'Kaorin'. Why don't we catch up over a drink sometime?" She said, even though she could hardly believe it herself. She wasn't a shy teenager anymore, but what the hell did she think that going out for drinks with Sakaki would accomplish?
Sakaki gave a half-nod. "I'm meeting Chiyo at a bar in Roppongi tonight. You are welcome to join us if you would like."
"Chiyo? I haven't seen her since she was twelve!" Kaori said enthusiastically. Yes! This was good! They would just be old high-school friends catching up! That was completely compatible with having a husband and a child and would not lead to any embarrassment or disappointment.
"She has changed." Sakaki said without her body language giving any hint of how the girl genius had changed.
"I would very much like to join you." Kaori said and stopped herself from punctuating the statement with a formal bow.
"Good. If it's the three of us, it won't look so suspicious." Sakaki said absentmindedly, as if to herself. Maybe she was married as well? Maybe the ravenous sexuality that Kaori had so often fantasized about really was there under her dignified exterior? If so, she should cancel. The privilege of being one of Sakaki's little girlfriends for a few steamy hours could not possibly be worth risking her family for. Kaori felt as if she was not getting enough air.
"Were you looking to adopt a kitten?" Sakaki asked with a look of mild concern on her face.
"Yes, that's what I'm here for!" Kaori replied quickly.
Sakaki's expression softened. "I'm so happy about that! I have to euthanize the ones that I can't find a home for." She said, with the word 'euthanize' accompanied with a shiver of discomfort.
-----
"Kurosawa! Pull yourself together!" Kagura-sensei said sharply. She always used the pupil's last name when she really wanted to get her point across. There was no meaningful response from the pupil, she didn't even turn her head to look at her teacher but instead her gaze wandered around the classroom. "Are you looking at dust motes?" Kagura-sensei asked in a bid to understand the girls's behavior. There was no reply. Instead her head fell face-down onto the desk. "Kurosawa! Now you really have to pull yourself together!" Kagura tried again, but now with concern rather than authority in her voice.
-----
"Hey, Kaorin!" a short-haired woman in a trench coat called just as Kaori exited Roppongi station.
Kaori recognized the voice, but she could not place it. "Hey." she replied cautiously.
"Don't you recognize me! Tomo! It's not even twenty years since we were in high school together!" The woman said.
"Yes, of course! You look so much more mature." Kaori replied. "But still young." she added quickly.
"Do you still see anyone from the old gang?" Tomo asked.
"Well, Chihiro and I are still friends. And I'm on my way to see Chiyo and Sakaki right now." Kaori said.
Tomo suddenly seemed interested. "Do you hang out with Chiyo and Sakaki a lot?" she asked.
"No, it's the first time we meet in ages. Do you still hang out with anyone from the class?"
"Well, me and Yomi try to go out and get hammered together at least a couple of times a year." Tomo said. "Listen, I have been trying to get a hold of those two for a while now. Do you mind if I join you guys later?"
"I guess not." Kaori said, even though she actually did. "We're meeting at this little place just down the street." she continued and reluctantly gave the address.
"Great! See you later!" Tomo said.
-----
Sakaki was already at the bar, nursing a beer at a table, when Kaori got there. Beside her was a handbag and a tote that bore the image of a cartoon cat with a kitten on its back. There was no sign of Chiyo.
When the waiter asked her what she wanted, Kaori suddenly became nervous and ordered a glass of juice. "We have not even announced it yet, but I'm pregnant. It will be our second." she explained to Sakaki.
"Congratulations." Sakaki replied.
"Do you have children?" Kaori asked, even though the thought of Sakaki even being touched by a man was almost too much for her to bear.
"No." Sakaki replied. After a while she continued: "I rarely feel comfortable around men. I spent most of my twenties around only women."
Kaori's jaw dropped and drops of cold sweat broke on her brow. What would have happened if they had met by chance like this ten or fifteen years ago instead of now? She and Akira could still meet and be good friends. Maybe even good enough friends that he would be willing to donate sperm? Then it would be like Sakaki was her and Sakaki's daughter. They couldn't name her that, obviously, but she would still be the same person.
Neither of them said anything for a long while. Sakaki was the one to break the silence: "I know that what I did was wrong. Maya and I got two years together, then they found him."
"Who's Maya?" Kaori asked breathlessly.
"My cat." Sakaki said, with a hint of defiant pride in her voice. "When the police came to take him from me, an officer fell down a flight of stairs and he later died from his injuries. I got twelve years in a maximum security women's penitentiary. Maya was transferred to the Ueno zoo. He died of old age two weeks before I was released." Sakaki stopped talking and her eyes glazed over.
At the time, Kaori had read in the papers about the student who kept a critically endangered Iriomote cat in her apartment but they had not printed the name. To see Sakaki vulnerable like this was completely new to her. It felt like she had betrayed her by failing to develop the relationship that would let her help her in a real way. Now she finally understood how childish and selfish her youthful infatuation had been.
"I was able to finish my studies, but I could not get a job. Not even one stacking boxes in a warehouse. Who would hire a convicted cop killer?" Sakaki continued after a while.
"But what about the animal shelter?" Kaori asked.
"It's volunteer work. I don't get paid. Even they were reluctant, but they were desperate for a veterinarian."
"Then what do you do to survive?"
"Whatever I have to do."
Kaori knew well what those words usually meant when spoken by a woman, especially one as beautiful as Sakaki. She imagined her dressed in lingerie on a heart-shaped bed in a love hotel. The thought made her feel dirty, almost entirely in the bad sense of the word, as if she was complicit in the degradation of the wonderful woman in front of her.
"Sakaki!" a voice called across the bar. It came from a tall, slender woman with western-style tattoos visible on her bare arms and on the visible portion of her breasts, which was daringly large. She wore elaborate piercings in her lips, ears and nose and there was something strange with her pupils. Only two things were the same as always: her pigtails.
Chiyo ordered a shot of neat vodka at the bar and sat down next to Sakaki. She put down her tote, which was decorated with the image of a vaguely cat-like character with ellipsoidal body, triangular ears and ribbon-like limbs, next to Sakaki's. She greeted Kaori and then turned to Sakaki: "Imagine a cafe that is decorated with stuffed animals – that 'kawaii'-aesthetic that we were all so into when we were kids – but they are real animals and they are dead."
Sakaki didn't reply.
"A disturbing image isn't it?" Chiyo pressed.
"Very." Sakaki conceded with a shiver of disgust.
"Well, that's my new installation. I made time lapses of decaying animal cadavers that I put on loop projected on the walls and the cafe serves only absinthe. The opening is tonight. I'd put you guys on the guest list but it's kind of late for people with regular jobs." Chiyo gushed.
"That's fine. I wouldn't want to go anyway" Sakaki said.
"Are you an artist?" Kaori asked.
"In one sense: yes, definitely. In another sense I'm more like a counter-artist. You know what I'm saying?" Chiyo replied.
Kaori shook her head slowly.
Chiyo drank her shot. "I got to go. See you guys around." She said and grabbed the tote bag with the cat-and-kitten decoration.
"I think that one is..." Kaori started saying but Sakaki shut her up with a steely gaze.
Not five minutes later, there was another familiar voice: "Sakaki! Kaorin! Long time no see! We all went to high school together, remember?" It was Tomo. She produced a police badge and held it up with considerable pride.
"Tomo! So you did become a police officer!" Kaori said excitedly.
Sakaki's gaze darted around the room, like that of a trapped animal.
"Yeah, I'm a cop now. I'm still on the narcotics unit but I interviewed for a position at the ICBO like yesterday." Tomo replied excitedly to Kaori. "Anyway, I just ran into Chiyo. She was holding probably a good couple of kilos of ketamine. I bet you have a fat stack of 10,000-yen notes on you." she said to Sakaki.
"I'm not going back there!" Sakaki said in a frantic voice.
"Oh, but I think you are. With your priors you are looking at at least…" Tomo started saying, but didn't get to finish the sentence.
"I'm sorry." Sakaki whispered as she sprang up from her seat and punched Tomo square in the jaw in a single fluid movement. In the same moment there was a loud bang, then a sickening crack as Tomo's head hit the floor and a clatter as a handgun fell next to her. Sakaki took a single magnificent stride towards the exit and then she slumped to the floor as well. Kaori watched in horror as a red pool formed rapidly underneath and around her.
-----
"Your daughter has tested positive for ketamine." the social worker said.
"What's ketamine?" the mother asked.
"It is a veterinary anesthetic, and also a popular so-called 'party drug'." the social worker replied.
Tears welled up in the mother's eyes. "Drugs? During class?" she asked in a tone of utter disbelief.
"There is a lot of it floating around and many of the kids seem to think of it as something normal." the social worker explained with visible discomfort, as if she was admitting failure, and nervously adjusted the position of her glasses.
"It wasn't like this when you were in high school, was it Yomi?" the mother sobbed.
"Tomo-chan said she had 'scored weed' once, but it turned out to be oregano. So no, it was not at all like this Kurosawa-sensei." Koyomi replied.
Minamo buried her face in her hands and sobbed for several minutes. Then she took a tissue from her handbag and dried her eyes. "Are you still friends with her. Tomo I mean?" she asked.
"It was a while since we saw each other socially, but I should call her. I heard through a colleague of hers that she has been put on sick leave, so something bad must have happened." Koyomi replied.
-----
Sakaki opened her eyes. A dust mote hovered in the sunlight flooding in from the window. For a while, it felt to Sakaki like it was the only thing that existed in the world. She felt like a dust mote suspended in a sea of light as well, except that the light was pain.
This bed she was lying in, it had no stuffed toys. It had to be a hospital bed. Then there was a face instead of the dust mote. A familiar face, but it took a while for her to place it. "Chihiro! What a coincidence, I just ran into Kaorin! Are you a nurse now?" Sakaki said. Or maybe she just thought it? It was probably the later as Chihiro didn't in any way react to her words. Instead she disappeared again. "She's awake! She's awake!" Sakaki heard Chihiro yell, as if from a great distance.
The next face that appeared was also familiar. It had new lines that accentuated its expression of confused concern and was now adorned with a pair of round spectacles, but otherwise it was the same as it was almost two decades ago. Just as Sakaki had concluded that she was either dreaming or hallucinating, the face spoke: "Are you able to make a statement?"
"Osaka? What are you doing here?" Sakaki tried to ask. This time she really did make sound, though it was not speech. The slightest movement of her chest made her lungs burn like fire and the sentence came out as something between a groan and a scream.
"I was assigned as your court-appointed attorney." Osaka explained. "Don't worry; you're not in trouble." She added when she saw the terror in Sakaki's eyes. "You were a suspect initially, but then Kaori confessed. I got totally the wrong impression of her in high school. I never thought of her as a person who would sell drugs to children."
"To children?" Sakaki tried to ask, to no avail. It just came out as a gurgling sound. Why would Chiyo sell to children? Or to anyone at all? Did she really need the money? Sakaki had just assumed that all that ketamine was for her parties. Had her parents cut her off? That would mean that she financed her lifestyle just by dealing.
"I didn't realize that Kaori was so savvy either. She was able to forge your log-in credentials to fraudulently order tens of kilos of ketamine over an eighteen-month period and then use you and Chiyo as unwitting couriers. And to think that she was able to learn how to punch hard enough to break a policewoman's skull from a sitting position across a table, just by watching her daughter's karate lessons." Osaka continued, without showing any indication of understanding that the policewoman was the same Tomo that they both had been friends with in high school.
"It was me! I broke Tomo's skull." Sakaki wanted to say, but she didn't have the strength anymore to even try. Chiyo must have done something to make Kaori give that false confession. Did she threaten her? Her family? When Chiyo was using, it was easy to forget that she was a genius. Now she was a criminal genius, apparently. Someone who could make serious drug and assault charges go away by ruining the life of whoever was expedient.
Chiyo had always insisted that her tattoos were a purely aesthetic choice, and usually added that Japanese people were too uptight about body art. That in some European countries, it was more normal to have tattoos than not. Maybe they were, in fact, a big middle finger to the Yakuza? A grotesque parody of traditional motifs and patterns that Sakaki wasn't hip enough to understand? Just to show that she could get away with it?
"You really should press charges against that policewoman when you get better. This is not America! The police can't just go around shooting innocent people! But either way she will be off the force, I can guarantee that." Osaka said in an increasingly agitated voice.
-----
There was a store selling pork buns on the other side of the street from where Koyomi was standing, and the wind carried the smell to her. She did not find it appealing at all. Ever since she found out about Tomo she had simply had no appetite. She could imagine exactly what Tomo would have said: 'Now you won't get so fat! I actually did you a favor by dying!'
Kagura, Yukari and Minamo all arrived in Minamo's car. They were all wearing somber but not formal clothes and each one was carrying a stuffed animal. Koyomi had had hardly any contact with any of them from high school up until 'the drug crisis', as they called it. Now they were in almost weekly contact through work. Together, the four of them started walking towards the tall hospital building.
"Do you think the stroke was related to the head injury?" Kagura asked.
"I guess so. She was only 34, right?" Yukari replied.
"I visited her at the rehabilitation facility, just a few day before she died." Koyomi said and all eyes turned towards her.
"I had to lead her by the hand when we took a walk in the garden. She had the motor skills to walk, but if left to herself she would just stand there. She didn't even react when her children visited. Her husband said that they went once and then they refused." Koyomi paused and tears formed in her eyes. "I'm not saying that she is better off this way, but if you had asked her before it happened she probably would have thought so." Koyomi started crying uncontrollably. Minamo led her to a bench under a ginkgo tree and offered her a tissue.
Osaka and Chihiro were waiting for them just inside the hospital entrance. They all greeted each other formally. This was the first time that they saw each other in years; Chihiro couldn't even meet Koyomi's gaze. They all took the elevator to the twentieth floor.
"Long time no see!" Minamo said on behalf of them all as they entered Sakaki's room.
The woman in the bed slowly turned her head. She didn't smile but it seemed like she was trying to. Her skin was as pale as Tomo's had been at the wake. In some ways she looked even more like a corpse.
"We each brought you a stuffed animal. Maybe you think it is stupid, but you were so into them in high school that it was all we could think of." Minamo continued.
Sakaki slowly moved her head from side to side.
"You don't think it's stupid?"
Sakaki repeated the gesture.
"Can we put them in the bed with you?"
Sakaki moved her head up and down even more slowly and each of the visitors in turn showed their toy to her and placed it next to her pillow.
Minamo hesitated and then she spoke again: "I wish we could bring better news, but Yomi has something to say."
"Tomo is dead. It happened a week ago." Koyomi declared solemnly. "It's not like I expect you to mourn her or anything." – her gaze wandered to Sakaki's midsection, which was covered by a blanket – "I just thought you would like to know." Then she started crying so much that she couldn't continue.
"A..." Sakaki tried to reply and tears started flowing down her cheeks.
"Don't try to speak." Osaka admonished. "You know what the doctors say about that!"
Chihiro kept her eyes firmly trained on the floor.
"I never knew Kaori was like this. A drug dealer!" Minamo said. "My daughter had to go to the hospital. She won't get into any university and it will be a miracle if she even graduates." She continued, shaking with rage. "She's not the only one. Sometimes it's like I'm teaching a class of zombies. And now Tomo is dead!" The tears came with such force that she had to stop talking as well.
"Neither did I! I had no idea!" Chihiro stammered. "I saw her just the week before it happened. Our children played together. I didn't know! I swear I didn't know!" She buried her face in her hands and ran out of the room. No one followed her.
"If she weren't in jail I would kick her ass!" Yukari shouted and Kagura nodded emphatically.
"Me too! Even though I might lose my license!" Osaka chimed in.
Koyomi started talking again, through her tears: "Kaori just threw a punch and now Tomo is dead and Sakaki is like this! What kind of a black miracle is this? Tomo should have just shot her and that would have been the end of her! That's what should have happened, right?" Her reddened eyes were glowing like embers with hatred.
"A…" Sakaki started and interrupted herself with fit of coughing that left her hospital gown stained with blood and spittle. She didn't try to say anything more, but she reached like a toddler for the phone in Osaka's hand.
"Do you want to write something? Are you sure that is a good idea? Maybe you should rest first?" Osaka said.
Sakaki didn't put her hand down even as it started shaking with the effort of staying aloft.
"OK, I guess." Osaka said and held out the device to Sakaki, who slowly and seemingly painfully started tapping out characters with her rested hand.
'I killed her.' read the finished sentence.
"Yes, you did kill him in the sense that your actions caused him to die." Osaka said in a serious tone. "But that was a long time ago and your have payed for your crime many times over. In my professional opinion the sentence was excessive. You did resist arrest, but the police officer's death was a genuine accident – no one here thinks of you as a killer."
Sakaki reached for the phone again, but now her hands trembled so much that it was of no use to her.
-----
"I'm so happy that you are back to work!" Chiyo said when Sakaki showed her the vial of white powder. Chiyo's studio was a mess. There was a canvas with some splatters of unknown origin, but it was the same one that Sakaki had seen the one time that she had been there before, almost a year ago. Most of the bottles, both full and empty, were new and so were many of the stains on the hardwood floor.
"Personal consumption. Larger volumes soon." Sakaki lied in a voice that sounded somehow hollow; this was the last dose she would ever deliver. So much of the damage they had done could not be undone, but Sakaki had to do what little she could. Maybe Kaori could still be saved.
"That's great." Chiyo said, completely distracted by the vial. She poured the content onto a spoon and added the few drops that were left in a champagne bottle on her coffee table. Chiyo hummed a childish tune about cooking as she heated the spoon with a lighter so the white powder would dissolve in the liquid.
Sakaki watched her from her wheelchair with a disapproving look on her face. "Why did you sell to high school kids?" she asked with great effort.
"High school kids need to have some fun, too." Chiyo replied dismissively. "I did all kinds of drugs at that age, and look what I went on to do for the Tokyo art scene."
That was not an empty boast; in the first few years after she came back from America Chiyo really did make an impact with work commensurate with her ability. Then, at some point, the parties became more important than the art. Now, she usually didn't even bother to go out. Sakaki often wondered what had happened in America for Chiyo to turn out the way she did.
"Yes! Done!" Chiyo sang to punctuate the tune and went on to draw the now-homogenous solution into a syringe. She found a vein and punctured it with the needle. "Fuck yeah! That is some good shit!" She exclaimed as soon as the liquid emanating from the syringe started mixing with her blood. Then her eyes rolled so far up their sockets that only the whites were visible and slumped down onto the sofa, the syringe still in her arm. Sakaki knew how to calculate lethal dose; she had been euthanizing cats and kittens on an almost daily basis for years now. "Yukari-sensei! That was a stop sign!" Chiyo slurred and then she was silent. In a virtual instant, tears started flowing down Sakaki's cheeks. Now it suddenly dawned on her which festering trauma Chiyo was trying to drown with all her drugs. She looked so much like her younger self now, just like that time that they had a sleepover together, even as her breathing became infrequent and shallow.
Sakaki scrambled to dial the emergency number. Her voice came out as a sobbing wail and it was not until the operator read the correct address back to her that she was confident that she could be understood at all. Only after she had hung up, she began to think about self preservation. She wheeled herself out of the studio as fast as she could, which was painfully slowly. The sound of sirens came just as she exited the building. She rolled herself into an alleyway and waited. There were no sirens when the ambulance departed. Now Sakaki was not just a cop killer and a friend killer. She was a friend murderer.
-----
A guard pushed Sakaki's wheelchair into the visitation room. Kaori, who was already there, got up from her chair with some effort; her bulging belly looked as if the baby was due any day now. "Oh my god! Your legs! Does it hurt?" She exclaimed.
"No." Sakaki lied. "Please don't do this to yourself. Just tell the truth. I have sent a written confession to your lawyer. That should be all you need. You could be out of here in a matter days if you just tell the truth." she pleaded.
"But then…" Kaori protested.
"Don't worry. Chiyo is dead."
"But they will come for you!"
"I won't be around, either."
"What do you mean?" Kaori demanded frantically. There was something in Sakaki's voice that alarmed her.
"I am already dead."
"What?"
"A while ago we got a smuggled kitten to the shelter. A few days later it started to show signs of rabies. I reported it, just as I'm supposed to do, but not before I let it bite me." Sakaki said solemnly.
"You have to go to the emergency room. No! Call an ambulance! If you get the vaccine right now…" Kaori started breathing so fast that she could not go on talking,
"The symptoms have started. I will get what I deserve whatever happens now." Sakaki tried to sound calm, but she could not completely erase the tinge of terror from her voice.
Kaori didn't say anything for a long while. Her gaze shifted focus to a point infinitely far behind Sakaki. "Do you know how I will give birth?" she finally asked.
Sakaki shook her head.
"I will be chained to the bed. It's because I'm a violent offender." Kaori said. She pronounced 'violent offender' without any hint of doubt or sarcasm, as if she really believed that she was guilty. "Akira will be waiting for the baby in another room. He got custody of both the children in the divorce." she added.
"I'm sorry." Sakaki said. What else could she say?
"Kimura-sensei is retired now. He does volunteer work, like you. He comes here to teach us about the classics." Kaori said in a strange, droning voice. Tears dripped from her eyes onto the floor like water from a leaking faucet. "He said that if I didn't do as he said, he would make them put me into solitary confinement. I didn't believe him. They did put me in solitary for a week. The next time I said 'no', it was a month. So now I do what he says. Like when he said that I should pretend that the baby was his. Then I pretended that the baby was his." she stopped talking and stared into space for a long while. "If I pretend hard enough, Kimurin-sama and I will be happy together. Don't you think so Sakaki?" she finally said.
"I… A…" Sakaki stammered.
"You like to pretend with your stuffed toys? Don't you Sakaki?" Kaori asked, but didn't wait for an answer. "Let's pretend that they will hold a funeral for you! First, they will clean you. Mop up all that foam around your mouth. They will all wear little gloves and masks, of course, because we must all work together to keep Japan rabies-free!" Kaori seemed elated now, even though the tears flowed at the same rate as before. "Then they will dress you in a white kimono. They will put cherry-red lipstick on you – they're just stuffed toys after all – and each of them will bring a flower to decorate the coffin. You will be so beautiful!" Kaori sighed wistfully. "After the cremation, they will all help to pick your bones out of the ashes and put them in the urn." She made motions as if manipulating over-sized chopsticks with childish ineptitude. "It will be so cute!"
Sakaki didn't know how to react. There was in fact no one but her stuffed toys to hold a funeral for her, not since she had told the truth. Was Kaori taunting her?
"And they will cry and cry and cry." Kaori continued and started making a mournful meowing noise. She didn't stop until what felt like an eternity had passed. "But you won't have a widow to mourn you!" Kaori finally declared. "You prefer to pretend with your stuffed toys, don't you? Late at night, so their fur is all sticky in the morning." Suddenly her eyes lit up with rage. "Pervert! Whore!" she screeched and lifted her hand to strike at Sakaki, who feebly tried to shield herself with her arms. The guards intervened and handily subdued Kaori. She kept screaming and calling Sakaki names until they dragged her out of the room.
Now Sakaki finally understood. She had undeservingly benefited from Kaori's mental illness all along. Chiyo had had nothing to do with it. She started turning her wheelchair around, painfully slowly. Her upper-body strength had never fully recovered and the early stages of encephalitis were affecting her coordination. A guard intervened to help wheel Sakaki back through the corridor.
"That kind of thing happens from time to time." he said. "You were never in any real danger, but I don't blame you for being so freaked out: that one has killed a cop with her bare hands."
Once back in her minuscule apartment, Sakaki used her last ounce of strength to transfer herself to the bed. The light shining through the window hurt her eyes. She had left the blinds open on purpose. She deserved to suffer through her last days. Sometime at night the thirst became unbearable, so she reached under the bed and found a can of juice. She propped herself up to a sitting position, supported by a pile of stuffed animals, and struggled to open the can with her trembling hands. The taste was still perceivable as pleasant to her, but the fluid uselessly dribbled out of her mouth and onto her chest. She had lost her ability to swallow and the thirst was only going to get worse.