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Izaya was blue in the glow.
He stood in the thick light of that huge tank, less of a panther than a half-drowned housecat, drenched bone-hard and shivering in the dark. The shadow of a whale shark passed over his face like a shroud; he clutched his coat tighter to himself, involuntarily. The solitude smelled like must and water. Sounded like the rattle of broken heating with no one there to appreciate it.
He looked closer to angelic than I’d ever seen him.
This, with everything I knew about him?
I must have been desperate too.
I breathed and he turned to look at me, his shoulder drawn up instinctively in defense. Something kicked in my chest, and I froze, caught in the sudden floodlight glare of breathlessness in the second suspended between dropped vase and shattered landing.
“Izaya,” I said.
Porcelain in a thousand pieces. There it was.
“Shizu-chan.
The way he said it, slow as honey, I still wasn’t sure if I was dreaming. This was not how anyone would have expected to find him. Sinking in the shadow of a near-abandoned, dilapidated aquarium at the edge of an empty, grey sea was not—stylish.
I moved towards him slowly.
A revolution and a half around the sun spun in the space between us. The planet had and was even now hurtling through space on a path just so insidiously, subtly curved to bring us back, yet again, right back to where we had started. Chained, despite our breakneck attempts, our nervous sweat.
Five hundred days, for this?
I was fucking stupid.
I was moving fast now, the celestial bodies slumping to the sides like the aftermaths of all our old fights, bloodied. Then I was in front of him, fist raised, but he didn’t run, didn’t flinch.
“Careful,” he said, smoky-voiced.
He stood flattened against the glass. Behind him, the fish moved slowly in circles, uncaring of the predator in their midst.
I wanted to break it, badly. I wanted to see him drown in glass.
“’zaya-kun?”
In an instant he was gone, looking over my shoulder, jittery. The voice was young, female, a wispy sprite of a jellyfish that had somehow managed to escape its tank. Out of place.
I hesitated, caught between a question and the certainty that if I looked away it’d be another thousand days, a thousand miles the wrong way round the sun.
The shark passed us, and we were shadowed again.
()
“Maria.”
He spoke the girl’s name listlessly. Distracted, looking down the road, playing with the rings around his fingers.
I looked at her. There was nothing special about the kid. She was probably seven or eight, wearing the neatly-knotted red kerchief of an elementary-schooler, sporting the same greasy blunt-cut bangs and stringy ponytails of any girl I’d known of that age. Her eyes were small and somewhat puffy and her skin was pale enough to rival Izaya’s.
Ikebukuro girls like the Orihara twins could’ve crushed her with a wink.
She didn’t speak, didn’t sneak glances at me or Izaya. Just plodded dutifully along the road, planting her t-strap shoeprints in the dirt as evenly as seeds in a field.
I didn’t get it.The connection between him and this child, his sudden disappearance, the injury Shinra had spoken of and this grey seaside town—and us. Why I had come here, what words needed to be spoken and what I hoped to accomplish. Like always, it was all beyond me. The mist that had been creeping forwards ever since a sunny afternoon at Raira thickened again, and I was—fucking—helpless.
I ground my teeth. Izaya stopped. “Run along,” he said to the girl. He used the same tone of voice with her that he would have used on me.
She bowed slightly and went off up the street. He didn’t stop to watch her go but immediately walked on.
After a while, he said, “I’m quite surprised to see you here, Shizu-chan. I didn’t think you could find me. Ah, don’t tell me. Someone must have told you.” He flicked a glance at me—cold and sudden, like water. “Dear Shinra, was it?”
“I made him tell me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. You had no idea he knew. He just said the wrong thing at the wrong time again.”
“What’ve you been calling him for?”
“What business is it of yours?”
“He said you were hurt.”
“Maybe I’m here to recuperate.”
“You can’t stand being away from the city.”
“People anywhere interest me.”
“Not here.”
Izaya clicked his tongue, dragging his coat around him again. It swamped him in a way it had never before. His fingers straggled beneath the salt-sticky fur.
“I hate this wind… so annoying. It never lets up.”
I ignored him. “What are you doing here?”
“Like I said. I’m supposed to be recovering.”
“Bullshit. It’s been a year and a half.”
“Has it been so long?”
We were approaching a house on a hill, of a faded pink-grey color that reminded me of a sick man’s cheeks. Izaya looked at it with a sort of resigned dread.
“I don’t feel any different,” he said.
()
That much, at least, was true: that the wind never stopped in that seaside town. It moved uneasily from house to house, shaking and moaning like an addict. Gulls drifted above it, restless packs of tissue paper, moored and hunting for trash. It tossed the grey ocean into tired, dirty-looking foam.
That wind drove me crazy. All that and it couldn’t accomplish a single thing.
Other than its constant low death rattle, the town was quiet. Walking around in the day, you might hear a dog bark, but the sound would only serve to carve out the silence even sharper. Although it was right next to the ocean, you couldn’t imagine tourists ever coming here. The place seemed like an unused draft stage set, or a kid’s diorama project. The grey men I saw fishing on the grey pier looked like paper dolls.
I sat on the dirty towel of a beach and looked at the water. Izaya had been sick since I came. He paced the house like it was a cage, paced with the key lying on his nightstand. Fevers came and went on him like sunspots, flaring up for days at a time, painting his cheeks flushed. He threw up in the depths of night, watched sunrises with edgy eyes and slept through the sunsets restlessly.
I couldn’t fight him. So I was trapped, too. Equally cursed by whatever malaise lay over the town and blew through the streets. By the time Shinra called, I had already lost track of the days. Tokyo seemed a thousand years away at the cradle of the sun and we walked the slow part of Halley’s far orbit, freezing in the dark.
“Without you two around, Ikebukuro is a graveyard. I don’t know how long you’re planning on staying, but don’t make it too long.”
“I can’t leave.”
“You mean he won’t leave? You’re not his hostage.”
“There’s something wrong with him.”
“He shouldn’t still be hurt.”
“He’s sick all the time.”
“I wouldn’t know about that. He hasn’t asked me for help since that time.”
“What was he calling you about, then?”
“You wouldn’t believe me, but nothing much. I think he just wanted to talk.”
I snorted. “Yeah, like he’d just want to chat.”
“It’s not as unreasonable as you make it sound. Izaya’s always been more human than you give him credit for.”
“He doesn’t show it.”
“That’s his weakness. He’s fallen out of the habit of it. But you know…”
“Just spit it out.”
“Back when we were in Raira, sometimes I’d look at the two of you and think—my God, I’m not even dealing with people anymore.”
“…Thanks.”
“Just my professional opinion. Try to have fun. You’re the last one who can do anything about him.”
In other words, Shinra was as insufferable to talk to as always.
Just before he hung up, I blurted, “What if he dies?”
The silence was as blunt as a bat to the back of the head.
“If that’s the case, I’m afraid I can’t help you anymore, Shizuo-kun. We’re waiting for you back in Tokyo.”
Then the line went dry.
()
We went to go see Maria. The bustling of the kids spilling out of their schoolyard was the first real sign of life I’d seen there. Their red kerchiefs were fresh as blood.
She came out an hour later than the rest. She was alone, fiddling with the straps of her backpack. When she saw Izaya she brightened up and danced like water down the last few steps.
“Hi ‘zaya-kun.”
“Come on.” He sounded brusque, almost irritated.
She was chattier than before. She talked about her day, a boy who ate a bug at lunch, a writing assignment of hers that the teacher had read as a good example. Izaya seemed to pay her no mind at all, other than to ask her abruptly what she wanted to do.
“Movie,” she said.
In the theater I looked at Izaya as he looked at the screen. A second film played upside-down and miniature in the glaze over his eyes. The movie started out as a typical enough kid’s feature but got stranger and stranger as it went on. The girl put her fingers in her ears and whimpered.
When we got out the lobby was empty and stale. The girl shuffled her feet, looking down at its faded red carpet.
“Can I go to the bathroom?” she said.
Izaya seemed to look at her for the first time. “Right now?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m itchy.”
It was weird. She was acting like a much littler kid than she had all afternoon.
Eventually Izaya nodded. “See you in a second, Shizu-chan.” He went with her down an ill-lit hallway. I heard the door close.
I sat on a plastic bench between two lighted posters, both for horror films. After a few minutes absent of the presence of any employees, I took out a cigarette. It anchored me, a little. I’d almost expected it to taste different, now that I was here, or maybe for it to fall apart in a shower of ash.
Christ, this place was getting to me. That damn wind. What the hell was wrong with me?
And what, again, was I doing here?
I hadn’t fucked Izaya since I got here—first thing I thought of. It’s not like I thought whatever he had was catching, but the way he was, I didn’t really want to touch him. Which was a first. Instead I slept on a mattress still sealed in plastic in a bedroom down the hall from him, waking up every time Izaya got up in the dead of night to wander the place like a ghost. He didn’t look at me with hate. He didn’t look at me like anything. I was like an extra piece of furniture he hadn’t asked to be delivered.
I had been interesting to Izaya. That much I was sure of. I couldn’t tell if it was him who had changed, or me. My cigarette was burning out. For a moment I contemplated stubbing it out on my palm, or my thigh. To feel something for a change.
I was still looking at the ember at the end of it, slowly burning out, when the girl came out of the hallway. We looked at one another.
“Where’s that guy?” I asked for a moment.
“He’s sick,” she said.
The flaming paper nipped at my fingers. I dropped it, crushed it out with my shoe.
Izaya knelt in the first stall of the women’s toilet. His wet puking noises hurt the air. I crouched awkwardly outside the stall and rubbed his back a bit, fingers shot through with the wrongness of the action. His forehead was creased with sweat and he bit into his stomach with the ring on his finger.
“Calm down,” I muttered at him as he heaved beneath my hands. “What the hell is up with you?”
I didn’t think he’d heard me, but when he finally staggered up, sagging against the stall wall, he said, “Ah, Shizu-chan, everything is poisoning me.”
Peering in from around the bathroom door, Maria piped in, “Are you okay?”
Izaya glanced down at her through drooping eyelids and laughed oddly.
()
You might injure him beyond recovery, someday. It’s not at all impossible. Maybe Izaya will go blind. Or maybe he won’t be able to walk again.
In that case, what would you do?
You’d take care of him for the rest of his life, wouldn’t you? You’d put aside everything that’s happened up until now. That’s because you’re kind, and good-hearted.
I don’t want to preach—but I think humans have some wounds in their hearts that they can never heal.
I came unstuck from my sleep. Breathing quickly in the cool night. I could hear Izaya moving around the house again.
These were the words Shinra had said before I left Tokyo. Right after the call he’d picked up from Izaya, he’d spoken calmly to me as I sat on his couch with the shards of his phone in my hand, cracked from the pressure, like if I grabbed hard enough I could keep Izaya there. If I hadn’t been in his apartment at the right moment, I wouldn’t have had a clue that that guy was still alive.
The popular theory in Ikebukuro was that I’d killed him, but the truth was that he had made no move to return or to find me in over an year.
He’d been badly injured, Shinra told me that day. He didn’t know how. “If I had to guess, he got caught up in something with the yakuza.” Which told me—nothing. The second he’d healed enough to move, he’d run, which wasn’t new. But he never came back.
And the girl bothered me. Kids didn’t have a place in Izaya’s schemes—at least not kids that young.
I got up. My soles stuck to the floor with cold. I was about to walk past his darkened room when I saw the pale snap of a fluttering curtain through the open door.
He didn’t turn around when I stepped onto the balcony.
“Spare a light?”
He took the cigarette and the lighter carefully, our hands not touching. I had never seen him smoke before. As far as I knew he’d only tasted nicotine from my lips, when in the after-sex ease sometimes he’d ask me for a blowback, lung-to-lung in a cancerous chicken race.
The flame kept going out in the wind. Eventually I reached for the lighter. He cupped his hands between mine and the wind. The fire went up in a flare sharp as the crack of bone, orange lightning strike throwing the fractured cave of our fingers bright against the night. In the light his hands shook.
When he talked his words emerged in a haze. “Shizu-chan shouldn’t be here.”
“I don’t give a damn what you think.”
Izaya shrugged. “What do you want to do, then? You’re not taking care of me.”
“I’m not your fucking nurse.”
“Oh, far from it, of course. But if not that, then what?” He dragged on the cigarette and managed not to cough. “You want me to come back to Tokyo? Didn’t you always say you wanted me gone?”
“I want to know why you left.”
“I’ve already. Told. You. I needed to get away for a bit to lick my wounds, so to speak.”
“Shinra told me it’s been long enough for that.”
“Some things take longer to heal.”
It was too close to what Shinra had said. “Like what?”
“Old ones. Don’t worry, it’s nothing you’ve given me. Maybe hearing that stresses you out. Do you still think you’ll be the one to kill me? Or have you given up on that dream?”
“I’ve got better things to think about.”
“Ouch.” He spread his hands. “However, that’s clearly not true. Poor Shizu-chan. Just can’t get away from me.”
I sighed. “Who’s Maria?”
“No one you know.”
“Quit bullshitting. What’re you doing with her?”
He looked at me soberly. “When did you start caring about what I do?”
“I’m not gonna watch you get a kid into one of your fucked-up plans.”
“What if I told you she’d involved me in one of hers?”
“Fuck you.”
He shook his head. “Look, Shizu-chan, I’m trying my very best not to get you involved, here. There’s only one thing I need of you, and that’s to leave me alone. Go back to Tokyo. Forget that I’m here, and forget about that girl.” He tapped his fingers on the railing. “It’s all a lost cause.”
“Whatever you’re doing, that’s what’s making you sick,” I hazarded.
He close his eyes briefly and swallowed. “It doesn’t matter.”
He looked—oddly miserable. I shifted, uneasy. “Just stop it, then.”
“I already told you. I can’t.”
“You never said that.”
“I’m coming close to losing my temper.”
“You couldn’t win a fight right now.”
“Maybe not. So you win. Kill me then. You can stop this.”
After a moment, he said, “But you won’t do that. Because Shizu-chan is Shizu-chan. Still so weak.”
“You don’t want me to stop you.”
“Doesn’t matter. You couldn’t if you tried.” He closed his eyes again, longer this time, and swayed against the balcony, clutched hard at the railing. “You couldn’t help me, and you couldn’t stop me. Remember that.”
()
Izaya, the girl, I. We occupied the house like three ghosts from different centuries. Unable to speak or hear or touch one another across the barrier of our hauntings.
I sat on my plastic mattress, reading Tokyo news on my phone. The girl was downstairs at the kitchen table, I thought, working on an art assignment or something. Izaya, I didn’t care to know about.
Funny. I had been so intent on finding him. Yet now that I had him my grip was loose. He was gold among dust that at anytime might fall through my fingers. He might be in his room, right then, or out of the house, or on the roof.
He might even be dead.
I went down the stairs. The girl had spilled her crayons all over the table. I watched her carry the electric kettle in a two-handed wobbling grip to her cup and slop water into it. She ignored me when I sat down. She drank the tea right away; it must have scalded the roof of her mouth, but she said nothing and set about coloring furiously. I looked slantwise at my phone and tried to decipher what she was drawing. A big rosy flower, maybe, or a bloody sunset. But really, the thing being madly formed on the paper reminded me of nothing but a great swirling mass of flesh, the churning of sausage being made—or—mine and Izaya’s limbs, knotted together mid-coitus like two animals’, bound irrevocably together until we finished.
I blinked, recoiled. The pink crayon in her fist had worn down to a fat, round-headed nub, like a severed digit.
She seized a black marker with an expression on her face like pain. She was sweating slightly and her palms left damp marks on the paper. She wrote the characters of her name small and dark, a smudged brand across the side.
I tried to make my voice kind. “What’s that a drawing of?”
“Nothing. I’m going to go practice,” she said in a high thin voice.
After she had marched off, I turned the drawing towards me. After a while, I decided there was nothing sinister about it. It was an abstract molten mess with no meaning outside its creator’s schoolchild mind and her inability to translate her world adequately into reason and paper. Still I could not shake myself of the haze of lust. Heat turned my throat like a key.
It was awfully quiet.
Where the hell was Izaya, anyway?
I went upstairs. I went to my room first. He was not there and had not been there for a long time.
The door to his room leant just ajar of closed, like a painting hanging half an inch off-center. I flicked it open with a finger. He was not there. Instead, Maria stood in the dead center of his bed. Her weedy legs were planted a foot apart in the spongy mattress, tense and quivering like she was ready to leap from its surface. The skin over her ribcage went taut, slack, taut, slack with her breath. Her dress was on the floor and she was naked.
Her name fell from me like an accident; like sand through my fingers.
She turned to look at me. Her skin seemed to glow in the light.
()
“We don’t know anyone named Maria.”
Talking to the twins was like talking to one person.
“It’s not like Iza-nii to hang around children. Even when he was a kid he hated kids. He wanted to be a grown-up as quickly as possible. Obviously though, those are the types of people that end up being childish for longest.”
“He’s not like any kid I’ve ever known.”
“Hmm, you’re right. Maybe not. But Shizuo-kun, do you know what dwarfism is?”
“Dwarfism? Isn’t that some medical condition?”
“It’s when you never grow tall. Grown-ups with dwarfism have children’s bodies and old faces.”
“Sounds creepy.”
“They’re also called little people,” Mairu singsonged. “Iza-nii is like that. He is a little person.”
()
“Hey. Don’t go anywhere.”
“I’m not,” he said. He was fidgety, sprung from chair to counter to window and back again. His eyes darted back and forth through the air like he was sewing it closed.
“I need to tell you—something about Maria.”
“Maria?” he said distractedly. “Listen, I need you to sit down and listen. I’ve got a plan to deal with that Saika girl.”
“Saika?”
“Anri Sonohara. Don’t you know anything? I’ve decided, I’d rather not hurt her if I can avoid it. I want to talk with her. I want to see if I’m right about what makes her tick.”
“I don’t get it. Anri Sonohara is—”
He put his fingers on my lips. His skin felt like a corpse’s.
“Shhh. I’ve just figured her all out and if you talk it’s going to fall right out of me.”
“What is?”
“She can’t love. She—cannot—love. She’s, like, disfigured. Did you know her mom murdered her dad with that same sword? It’s crazy—absolutely batshit insane! This goddamn city—in any apartment, it could be—! Wow! But, I mean, seriously, can you imagine the shit that’ll do to a kid? She’ll be screwed up forever.”
“I don’t know about that, Izaya. She’s dating that Ryuugamine kid now. They seem pretty in love to me.”
Izaya leapt up and struck the table, lightning in his eyes and thunder beneath his palm, and his hand as he lifted it was angry pink with the impact. “Ryuugamine?” he demanded. “Who the hell is Ryuugamine? What the hell is Shizu-chan talking about?”
()
[he’s going crazy.]
[Shinra says he’s always been.]
[he can’t have. he was normal once. like everyone is normal once.]
[But some people really are born different. Some people have never seen. Some people have never heard or never walked.]
[that’s different.]
[How is it different? If you were born like that, and didn’t know anything else, how would you know? How could you understand that you were the wrong one, not the world?]
I had no answer for her.
On the screen, her last text blinked, forlorn:
[How could you possibly?]
()
It is the year 2016. You’ve been gone from Ikebukuro for a year and a half. You were shot, and then you left. Nobody knows what happened. Nobody but you.
I rehearsed the words until they cut my tongue. I searched for him with a sense of urgency hissing like static in my head.
I found him on the roof and all my speech left me.
“Izaya.”
“If I jump fast enough from here, I can reach the ocean.”
“You won’t reach the ocean. You’ll fall straight down into the street and break your neck.”
“How could you possibly know, Shizu-chan? You were never the greatest in physics class, if I do recall, and besides, you haven’t tried it.”
“You try this, you won’t come back.”
“And I suppose you don’t need physics to know that.”
The wind raised tears in my eyes. “What’s wrong with you?” I said, fighting the begging sound from my voice. “You used to be clever. You were never this stupid before.”
“Consider that I’m not. Consider that I know everything.”
“You act like you’re crazy.”
“No, you,” he hisses. “You come here and stand on this roof and for what? To sleep with me before I jump? To stare at my lovely broken neck after? What the hell are you doing here?”
I spread my hands wide. It was easier to ask another question than answer one. “What do you want?”
“I’ve told you a thousand times already—I want you to go back to Tokyo. I want to sit on the beach and talk to the ocean. I want to finish my plans. And I need you to leave. I can’t fucking think with you around. Insufferable—you’re such a headache. You and the wind—just—fucking—” He twirled his finger around his head madly, like he was winding a wind-up toy. “—clanging around in here, making noise when all I need is it to be quiet for a damn second—”
He was standing too damn far and too damn close. I lunged forwards and grabbed him and he looked at me soundless and fury and bit me in the arm.
I threw him against the roof door. He landed like a cat and spat my blood against the tiles.
“Touch me next time, and I’ll walk,” he said. “And that’s the last thing Shizu-chan wants.”
()
“Are you the parent?”
“What?”
The woman came closer to me, her eyebrows drawn together like a fist. Once again, I was alone with Maria and this stranger—school had ended hours ago, and I had watched everybody else vanish.
“I need to talk to you. Maria drew this today. Many of the other children found it—upsetting.”
It took me a moment to make sense of the thing she thrust into my fist. It didn’t look like anything troubling, at first.
She crossed her arms. “Maybe you can speak to this.”
I thought it was her drawing from the other day—but no, this was only the same in the way that an older sister is similar to her younger, an evolution, a progression. She had smoothed the fleshy squiggles out into figures. They were grouped in pairs and the occasional triplet across the page, neatly spaced apart like spots on a polka-dot ribbon. Pink and brown and peach pieces slotted into one another like puzzle pieces, bent at familiar angles. Their mouths were all in the same lurid cherry red, all open in lopsided ‘o’s.
Love, she had written, small and neat at the bottom.
The teacher’s eyes were brands in my skull. I became very aware of her breathing, of mine. Somewhere far below us rested Maria’s black mossy head. Her eyes were very dull and reflected the blue of the sky like a plate covered with dishwasher.
“Would you speak to her about this?” the woman said through teeth gritted tight as pearls in a necklace. She still held one corner of the drawing, and I could feel her hand shake through it. “Would you please?”
()
“I’m not clean.”
There was blood in the bathtub. The water made it pink, like the first drawing and the second; sent it down the drain. I imagined it running all the way to the sea. Imagined the ocean staining rose.
“Don’t come in,” he whispered. I could barely hear him over the water. “Don’t move.”
“Stop doing that.”
“You’ll get it on you too.”
“You’re scratching yourself. Izaya—”
“Shhh. Shhh, darling. Let me alone. I need to get ready.”
“You have nowhere to go.”
“I’m not going anywhere. I never go anywhere. I wait. Then he’ll come in here.”
“Who?”
“Come here, Shizu-chan. Darling Shizuo. Come closer. Closer. Just like that. Sit still. It feels like it’s been so long since you were close like this. Do you miss it?”
He raised my hands and put them around his throat. He felt just as slim as I remembered. How many years of bliss had I wasted there? I had always had the most animal desire to mark it. The throb of his jugular beneath that thin skin so close it became adrenaline in my own veins, heady as perfume.
There was never a sensation closer to flying in mankind’s history than the summer afterschool hours at Raira, the gold and the fire and the kisses that burned like poison.
Izaya let his arms fall. Leaned back into my hands as I tentatively pressed my right thumb into the gentle hollow just above the jut of his Adam’s apple.
“You remember it,” he breathed. “You remember every hour.”
“Every fucking minute.”
He laughed. “Everybody said you were so in love with me.”
My fingers clenched at his nape.
“Weren’t you?” I asked.
He laughed again. I could read his answer well before it blossomed from his lips, saw it coiling dark in his bright manic eyes, poised and ready to strike. I would have let him go, let him fall—but for the fact that I knew if I moved my hands away he would not catch himself, and I would have to watch that lovely, dark, exquisite little head shatter against the rim of the bathtub like a wineglass.
So I cupped his cool scalp like an egg, and looked at his bloodied fingernails, and waited.
“I’m like Sonohara,” he said.
It was still a knife to the heart, even if I saw him draw it.
He looked me, dead, in the eye, and said, “I could never.”
()
Now, I, too, could not sleep.
In the dead hours I held the girl named Maria in my right hand and Izaya in the left. They remained oil and water. No matter how hard I pressed them together they would not join. They were utterly unbound to one another.
I rubbed my eyes, hard. They stood together in the dark of my mind, nicely spaced apart like the lovers of Maria’s drawing and outlined in white. They were naked and glowing, and they held one another’s hands.
()
“Oh, Shizu-chan. The other day—the name of the city you’re in, is it—?”
“…Yeah, I’m in—.”
“…How peculiar. How unpleasantly, disgustingly, revoltingly peculiar.”
“How’d you know?”
“The area code. That stupid area code.”
“What’re you talking about?”
Trancelike, she said, “From our old phone number. It’s the same code as the one you’re calling from. That town—it’s the one we were born in.”
I held my breath.
And I, I began to understand.
()
The thermometer read 39 degrees.
Izaya’s skin was an iron. He sweated stains into the blankets beneath him. Overnight his eyes had sunken into cesspools of bruise, his bones risen in glittering damp ridges to meet the air. It wasn’t a quiet sleep, either. He thrashed and ground his teeth and nightmared out loud in mumbled bits of Japanese, English, Russian.
The most frightening was when his eyes would peel open onto a world surrounding him that I couldn’t see. Gaze and breathing shallow and darting fast, the crust of drying tears gunked on his lower eyelids as he looked straight through me. It never lasted for more than a half-minute or so, and then he’d be under again, jackhammer pulse and twitching on the couch.
I guess I’d thought he would weather even sickness with a sickle smile. None of that; he was the last gasp of paper writhing into ash. Flame trampled him into the ground like a stallion.
I managed to pull his jacket off, although he twisted away when I touched him. The fur at the hem at the back of his neck was matted and damp. The neck of his shirt had been pulled low with his movements; beneath his collarbones were door handles. A thin wire of some sort cut a red arc into the flesh of his neck. When I touched it, Izaya moaned and opened his eyes, digging his nails into my wrist.
“Stop it,” I said. He snarled something foreign.
A flash and a wince. He’d broken skin.
“Goddamnit…”
I drew off. Didn’t have to wait long anyway before he pushed himself back under. When he was relatively still again, I began trying to pull the wire loose from where it creased his throat.
It was a necklace, I thought. But instead of a pendant or some jewel at the end, there hung a small key.
I picked it off his chest. The metal was dull and oily; the side which had been resting on Izaya’s chest shone slightly with sweat.
()
The girl would barely look at me. Her arms were crossed, her lower lip ripped sideways into a scowl.
“Where’s ‘Zaya-kun?” she muttered.
“He’s sick.”
“I don’t wanna go with you.”
“You don’t have to.”
After she had moved a few steps away, I said, “Maria. It’s better if you stay away from him.”
“Why?”
“He’s not a good person.”
“Why?”
“He’s—just—not.”
“Why?”
“He was born like that.”
“Nobody’s born bad,” she intoned seriously. Her bangs kept sticking and unsticking from her face in the wind, like butterfly wings caught in oil. “‘Zaya-kun says that, always.”
()
I cannot remember, now, what I thought as I climbed the stairs, nor what I expected to find. The only thing that comes back to me is the dread. Thick over my mouth, and cold, and ashen, like poured concrete.
When I pushed the door open, the brass of the desk gleamed once and silently, seeking me like the eye of a lighthouse. The key did not fit smoothly. Its teeth scratched and gnawed at the lock’s insides. Its small tinny screeches were the only sound in the room. Eventually the lock gave way and slid open with a defeated rasp. I slid the desk drawer open hastily, with sweating hands.
There was nothing in the drawer but a few empty envelopes and a photograph, face-down in the dust like a body beneath a shroud. It left its own shadow behind as I picked it up, a neat rectangular hole in the grit. The gloss of the paper stuck to my thumb, slightly tacky, as I turned it over.
The boy in the photograph was obviously Izaya. He was a child, his face rounder and his eyes wider above the stiff collar and jacket of his school uniform, but it was impossible to mistake the way he looked out from the paper, bored and slit-eyed, blank—God, how many times had I woken up and seen Izaya looking at me like that in the predawn dark, disdainful of our sticky limbs and thin sheets and thin-lipped as if he had not been one half of our sex. That look used to make me hate him. It was only much later that I realized that my anger was exactly what Izaya had wanted. Because if, instead of fighting him or biting him or fucking him, I had at those moments touched him tenderly and asked him what was wrong, he would have broken like glass, and I am sure that he was terrified by that possibility as he was by little else.
But in the end it never happened. My rage was too predictable, clockwork. I couldn’t see his enormous fragility through the mist like blood before my eyes, and by the time that had cleared he was gone from Ikebukuro and gone from me.
The other person in the picture, I didn’t know. He was a young man, perhaps in his early thirties, with a thin high nose, flat almond eyes, complex hair carefully tucked behind his ears. He wore his dress shirt tight; its thin blue stripes wrinkled like a cardiogram at his waist and above his belt. The uppermost button was undone. His hands rested on the boy Izaya’s shoulders.
I went back and forth between Izaya’s face and his a few times, but couldn’t detect anything else. A relative? A family friend? I knew nothing about this man whom Izaya had seen fit to lock into a desk drawer for what looked like decades. He was a secret whose key Izaya kept wound around his throat like choking. The only clue I had was the look on Izaya’s face. His familiar expression of breaking.
I ran my thumb over the photo, felt the dust of years flake over my hands, and something cold and dry touched the back of my neck.
I turned around slowly, and as I turned, that cold point traced a frost line along my throat.
Over the handle of the switchblade, Izaya looked at me with blackened eyes.
()
When the girl saw Izaya she began to cry.
Even when she had quieted down and sat at the kitchen table with her homework splayed out in front of her, she looked sullen and tired. “I feel sick,” she kept saying.
“Since when?”
“Right now.”
“You aren’t sick from Izaya. You can’t catch something from someone that quickly.”
“I feel sick,” she insisted.
I wasn’t in the mood to deal with it. I took the photograph out of my pocket and showed it to her.
“That boy is Izaya. Do you know who the man is?”
“No,” she said, her voice high and thin.
“Are you sure?”
“No,” she said again, and dove away and down into her papers, a sea of refuge.
There were two possibilities: she was lying, or I was seeing things. Either was ominous.
In the house, the ghosts seemed to thicken. The air was cold.
()
“And, after that?”
That’s mine.
I shifted the phone to my other ear.
“He blacked out again.”
He had been crying. I had never seen Izaya cry before.
“He’s really sick.”
“It does sound like it. I wonder if it’s psychological.”
“Like in his head?”
“More or less. Stress, sadness; things like that can actually compromise your body’s immune system to a physical degree.”
“Did you look at the picture I sent you?”
“I did, but I don’t know the man. Izaya moved into my neighborhood when we were in middle school, so I didn’t know him then.”
“I can’t figure it out. Something is going on between him and this girl, and it must have something to do with this man.”
“Has Izaya said anything?”
“No, he’s been out of it since a couple days ago. Anyways, even if I asked him he wouldn’t tell me anything.”
“Izaya talks sometimes, when he’s injured.”
“I haven’t heard anything coherent out of him.”
“I see.” Shinra paused. I could hear him tapping something close to the speaker, perhaps a pen.
“Do you know what grooming is?” he asked.
“What?”
“Grooming.”
“Like when you clean a dog?”
“It can also be done to humans.”
I felt uneasy. “What do you mean?”
“It happens to children, sometimes. Especially ones that are lonely, or vulnerable. We say that an adult grooms them.”
“What for?”
“Abuse,” he said bluntly.
He went on: “The abuser—usually an adult—seeks to develop a special relationship with the child. He exploits the child’s thirst for love, his naivety and his desire to be an adult. Sometimes he substitutes for an absent or neglectful parent figure, in which case his job is so much the easier. The child is introduced to the act in stages—first, he might be shown—”
I was barely listening. There was a thundering in my ears.
“You think that’s what’s happening to this girl?”
A long pause. Then Shinra said quietly, “Well, it’s interesting from a psychological perspective.”
He didn’t care, I realized. Shinra had never cared about any of this. All of our conversation had been a no more than an abstraction, a theoretical exercise, a textbook dialogue between Jane and John Doe. Of course. He might smile often, but he was never any less of a monster than the other two of us.
If I had religion, I would have taken God by the collar, then, and shaken him, and asked him what the point was of bringing the three of us together, of corralling us like slavering beasts to be stared at. What was our purpose, outside of serving as a lesson to the rest of humanity, of engendering pity and disgust? And how could he, how dare he? We were humans, too, and we deserved no more of his cruelty than the rest.
Or perhaps we were trapped in a hell of one another’s making, each of us staring at the others and piling wood into the fire.
If this was friendship and love, then being alone and free would have been a sweeter heaven.
()
[You’ve been gone a long time.]
[i need a favor.]
[What is it?]
[there’s three addresses i want you to go to.]
[And what do you want me to deliver?]
[i don’t have anything. just—tell me what you see there.]
[Are you trying to find someone?]
[there were three envelopes in his desk, and they were all addressed. i want to know why.]
[Very well. I understand, and I’ll do my best. But, Shizuo—stay safe. I’ve never known you to get involved in Izaya’s schemes before.]
[i wouldn’t if i didn’t have to.]
[You don’t], she said.
Her chat icon blinked to grey.
()
I left Izaya to his nightmares in the house, and went out into the air. There were no guards walking the school grounds, and the front door was unlocked.
I would have thought that a place full of kids would be more guarded. Then again, the main school hours were over; the only people here would probably be students serving detention or remedial lessons and their bored minders, thinking of the commute home and dinner.
I went inside. The interior of the school felt odd, disjointed from the cold air I’d just left, like a slightly crooked street. It took me a moment to place it—it was that everything was scaled down, posters and signs placed low on the walls, water fountains just above knee-height and tiny trash cans sprouting from the ground like mushrooms, tiny desks and chairs. To be an adult there was to swim above the waterline of interest; the walls at my eye level were barren, the doors empty save for a narrow strip of glass set a foot from the top of each, an arrowslit through which teachers could ferry their silent, mysterious communication above the unquestioning heads of their pupils. Maybe my school had had these too; if it did, I had never noticed.
I looked through one of them. Inside, the classroom was empty and shadows and light lay still, dozing and half-asleep in the sun like worn-out dogs. Here and there the students had left signs of their passing, like debris after a parade—a forgotten lunch tin, a handful of markers, small triangles of leftover construction paper scattered like confetti around a desk, a book splayed spine up. I shifted and my view moved too; someone had scrawled a dick on the board, the end of the white line trailing away down and to the right, like the artist had run away, nervous and giggling into his hand. Children everywhere probably did the same at that age; certainly at my school the bolder boys had gathered us around an illustrated encyclopedia filched from the library and dared us to look up parts, tracing a finger down those ink drawings as if that brought us any closer to the real thing. We drew pictures in the girls’ textbooks to make them shriek, unaware that years later, fumbling drunk with our belts, we’d do the same, them nervous, wearing too much perfume and soft hair, soft lips and hopes.
Sex with girls, I had because I wanted to feel more for them. Only with Izaya did the fucking convey the spillover, all the things we could not or did not want to say. Neither of us were girls, and tenderness never occurred to us; violence was the only way we knew. We used it to mask the hints of sweetness in the moments after the cataclysm, the touch of Izaya’s toes to mine or how he’d sometimes smile against my neck. Then he’d run away, leaving me to clean the desks in silence, the golden light pouring in warm like bathwater. Standing there, heady, I would think of how much I hated him, how much I would have liked him to stay. Sometimes, too, he looked into me and promised me my death like he was wedding me, and I’d have to go and fight the next fifty people that looked at me the wrong way just to cope, to be able to stand him.
Damn him—damneverything. What sweetness and misery we tasted then.
I shook my head. Izaya lay ill, and I was ten years too late. I didn’t have time to linger, and this wasn’t the place.
I looked into the next room, and she was there, and so was the man from the photograph.
Their bodies stood in profile to me, casting long shadows towards the door, her smaller one engulfed by his. Maria was writing something with the same strained, glazed expression I knew well by now, chewing on her lip, her little feet hanging still an inch or two short of the floor. He sat on the desk behind her, watching her work. The top button of his shirt was undone and he rested one hand on her head, stroking it almost absentmindedly. The clock at the front of the room read half past four.
There was something here. Something this tableau was warning me of, and my stomach reared, nervous—
“Excuse me—”
I turned too quickly with my fists tight and the woman standing close behind me flinched. Inside the room, I saw the man stand fluidly, walk towards the front of the room.
It was the same teacher from the other day. She recognized me, too, and the suspicion drained from her face—a little.
“Maria—was taking a long time,” I croaked.
“Yes,” she said, slowly. “You’re right. Arai-sensei is running late.”
()
Home again, in a hurry. The wind had picked up and howled across the landscape, creeping through backyards to snatch at clotheslines and children’s toys and steal them away into the great, gray waste of the ocean.
The names, the damn names on the envelopes—why couldn’t I remember if they were there? Arai. Arai-sensei. I had to remember it. I snatched at the inside of my pocket and couldn’t find the photograph. The wind had taken that, too.
Inside the house Izaya lay still on the couch. Maybe his fever had broken, at last. I rushed past him and up the stairs. None of the three envelopes had an addressee.
Damn it! I just needed one more thing. One more piece and I’d understand it all.
I checked my phone again; no word from Celty. I went back down the stairs and began to throw open the cupboards and the drawers. Dust blew up like geysers from each as I opened them—empty, empty, empty. This fucking paper house, this two-dimensional world. Everything was fake, from the crumbling furniture down to the crumbling occupants.
For good measure, I opened the refrigerator, and they spilled out in a dry wave. Inside, the racks were bare and grown over with crumpled balls of paper, like a strange mold. The fluorescent light blared and flickered lonely over its Arctic paper kingdom. The fridge contained nothing else.
I picked one up and opened it, carefully and slowly, as if I expected to find something hideous waiting, a spider or a chopped-off finger. But only Izaya’s words lay inside, scrawled longhand and bleeding black. Every line on the page was scored out. I struggled to read his writing, pierced as it was through the heart by those long black stakes of his own making.
I’ve never forgotten, I saw, and I’ll never forgive you, and you’ll pay for this, you’ll see what you’ve made of me, you monster.
Had he been living off these?
Good God, had he been cramming them into his mouth every day, taking them down like poison?
Something crashed into the back of my head with astounding force. Then the pages were close and closer. I landed in a field of snow.
Somewhere above me, I thought I heard a switchblade flick closed.
The word monster lay next to me, throbbing black.
It bled outwards, onwards.
()
There was something buzzing next to my ear.
I opened my eyes. The sheets beneath my head were stained brownish. Next to me the fridge whirred loudly, gasping. Its door was still open.
The buzzing was coming from my phone. My fingers left red smears against its screen as I unlocked it.
[I checked out those three addresses on the envelopes that you sent me.]
[The second and third one were residences in the suburbs. I made up a story about a package that needed signing and got the household names—Machiko Arai, married to a Ryuusei Arai, and the other one was Keita Arai. Both were pretty young, I’d say in their early twenties.]
[The first was to an office building, but after I’d visited the other two I figured I might be looking for an Arai as well. I talked to the receptionist and she said she did know someone, a woman accountant called Midori Arai who’s a longtime employee of a real estate company that rents space there.]
[That’s about all I could get without getting people’s suspicions up. Hope this helps.]
[I don’t know what you need to know this for, but whatever you’re planning, please stay safe.]
()
“… why, of course you can!”
I squinted at Izaya. He had framed himself carefully against the setting sun, and I couldn’t see his face, let alone the singing movements of his mouth. Far below us and Raira’s roof, the city lay in flame. We were sixteen and it seemed the world could never end.
“What’re you spouting off about?”
“Didn't quite catch me? Time to brush up on your English, Shizu-chan.”
“If you have something to tell me, tell me so I understand it.”
“But that takes away half the fun.”
“Me not understanding.”
“No, you trying to figure it out.”
I took a step forwards. He took one back.
“Let’s play a game.”
“I’m not in the mood.”
“You think about what I’ve said. Look it up online, ask a friend, grab a dictionary and translate it word-by-word if you have to, I don’t care.”
“Where the fuck are you going with this?”
“Meanwhile, I’m going to go for a run while you work your little brain around it. And when you figure it out, whether it’s ten or twenty years from now, text me and I’ll stop running.”
“You’ll stop running, and what?”
“Then you can come find me.”
“And if I don’t want to find you?”
He smiled.
“I wouldn’t ask too much of you,” he said, and plunged over the roof ledge.
I rushed to the edge. Izaya was already almost at the bottom of the fire escape ladder; I watched as he jumped the last ten feet lightly and strolled away laughing.
But what had he said?
The wind was loud in my ears; it made it hard to think.
Something about repeating, something about the past.
()
This was the memory that came to me as I ran for the school through grey and empty streets, spotting them with my blood, through a town that felt like a stage two hours after the last curtain call, under the rustling, uneasy wind.
I hadn’t bothered to chase him that day, nor to figure out what it was he’d said. Of course, I couldn’t remember any better now.
I knew, now, what I would say to him: Tell me what you said. Tell me yourself, and we can both stop running.
You’ve always had that power, Izaya.
The hallways of the little school were no longer strong with gold; they were blue and dark and faded, resigned.
When I came to the room, I kicked the door clean off its hinges.
I saw the girl first, standing knock-kneed in the corner with bare stocking feet and tears in her eyes. The man, next, backed up against the podium with terror shiny and plastic as a mask over his face. And last Izaya, standing closest to the door in a near crouch, knife in one hand and his phone outstretched in the other, its camera still on.
All three of them seemed to accept my presence calmly, as if they had been standing frozen just like that for the last half hour, waiting for me to show up so events could roll on.
At the front of the room, the clock still read 4:31 PM. It didn’t tick, I realized. It was broken.
“Did you touch her?” I said quietly.
“He hasn’t done anything yet,” said Izaya in a low voice. He was breathing very quickly, almost panting. The heaving of his chest was the only movement in the room; even the shadows were frozen to the floor like black ice.
“I’m talking to you.”
The sound that ripped out of him was the bastard chimera of a sob and a laugh. The liquid that landed on the floor was spit or tears and madness either way.
“What—” He broke off to bite his own hand, impulsively, the blade quavering in the other. “What are you going to do about it?”
I came to in the middle of my own leap for him; perhaps I had blacked out from the velocity of my rage. The desk between us flew away like it had never been. Very, very distantly I was aware of its shattering; the chair’s limbs rang high and metallic against the tiled floor, as far away as falling bullet shells from a war already past. The child and the man had become nothing more than light fixtures, nothing more than shadows, not even significant enough to bear human witness to this destruction.
Then my hands closed around that slender, slender throat and Izaya was sprawled backwards across the floor, his knees up and his hands up—but still his eyes did not beg. They were as dark as they had ever been, rimmed with that little ring of rusty brown that only served to enhance the endless pit of the pupil Izaya had once been.
I slowed.
His knees, I thought. They were bare, white as snowcaps. He wore black shorts cut high, a black jacket, white collared shirt. He didn’t have the woolen knee socks or the little dress shoes or the necktie, but I recognized him nonetheless. Twenty years ago I had worn a uniform much the same. My mother had been so worried to leave me alone, that day. I had turned back three times, and each time she was there, waving at the gate of the school.
His hands were around my wrists, but they did not push me away. They held me there.
He wanted to go back.
I realized this in horror. Against all odds, he thought he could return. This room, this man, a child, him.
And I, too, was a player like all the others. I, too, had been assigned a role to fulfill.
He looked into me and the simplicity of his desire struck me like a bell. I saw the thousand-and-one shades of the times he had returned to this day and hour, circling around it as a chained beast circles the stake. I saw the tactician he was consider every angle of attack, scour every impervious inch for weakness, and I saw him fall away in despair, clenching his teeth and calling it a smile. Perhaps it was the only thing that had ever truly hurt him; perhaps it was only that all the other hurts had fallen by the wayside of a single apricot-colored afternoon in a schoolyard in a little nowhere town by the sea. What I knew for certain was that Izaya could not abide it. That he wanted it out like a thorn beneath his skin, like a dagger in his side. Only without it could he ascend to the godhood he’d always looked towards. With it, he was hopelessly forever flawed.
And I saw that I was there because he thought he could change even time, and that if time would not yield, he’d alter his own timeline by my hand.
Tighter, said his eyes.
Keep me twenty years ago; keep me always in the minute before, safe and sound, and rock me down to sleep.
Do not let me leave.
Do not let me go.
I licked my lips. I understood, now, what it was he wanted from me. But I still had to try.
“In Raira, you said something to me.”
He spun in my vision. I shook my head, hazy, and watched as my blood smeared across his cheek.
“We were standing on the roof, and you told me when I understood it you’d stop running.”
When he spoke at last his voice was high and thin and fragile. He sounded like a little boy.
“And did you figure it out?”
“Izaya,” I begged. “You have to tell me. You’re the only one that knows.”
He looked at me quietly, his hands tight around mine.
()
“Shizuo-kun.”
I startled, badly. I didn’t know where I’d been or where I was now. All around me were lights and rain and people, weaving around me and looking oddly at the blood crowning my hair.
“You’re in Shinjuku,” said Shinra. He spoke quite calmly, and he kept his hands at his side and slightly out, his umbrella down and rain misting his shoulders. “It’s a Tuesday night. Three days ago you texted Celty saying you still weren’t back in the city. We didn’t know you’d come back. How are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve wrapped things up in that other place?”
“Yes,” I said. This at least I knew with clarity. How could I forget! How could I, possibly!
I felt at my head again. It seemed to hurt more than before. Was I still bleeding? My fingernails were all red.
Far away I heard police sirens, echoing through the rain like the baying of a pack of wolves.
What had Izaya said? If only I knew—I would surely understand it all—!
But Shinra was still looking at me, steadily.
“Where is he?” he asked.
When I didn’t respond, he said it again, looking at me from within his gentle, kind, blank monster’s eyes:
“Where is Izaya now?”
()
Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!
I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before.
()
Fin.