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Nothing feels apocalyptic anymore. Is that a skill? Kotetsu counts it as one. A glimmering wrench in his toolbox of tenacity, stubborn as the hair that curled around the shells of Barnaby's ears. Your eyes are like splashes of oil. Sometimes Kaede read her lines aloud to him and Kotetsu imagined himself in the thick armour of a medieval knight, his hair too dirty, liver too yellow, kneeling at the stone temple of a goddess that looked like Barnaby and refused to bless any of Kotetsu’s quests for the sole reason that he was a poor knight and, therefore, perfect to keep by one's side. Your eyes are like splashes of oil. Show me mercy for I am yours, most faithful—
He never had to go anywhere. Cities burned until the idea of one was lost to time. The sword rusted and still the goddess asked him to stay stay stay, my brave knight, you who have seen so much your virgin hands and your useless blade you are my most faithful my most beloved I'll keep you—
Kotetsu wakes slowly and finds himself on the sofa downstairs. The television was turned off sometime in the night. The back of his neck is crawling with a damp heat. Blunt squareness digs against his hip.
You have 25 missed calls from Bunny
Outside heat pours in sheets. He wonders about his daughter and remembers that she moved away years ago. A face comes to him from the cottony mist of his dreams; a woman who looks like Tomoe from the right and Barnaby from the left. He climbs out of the sofa and heads into the kitchen. The back door is open. He can see his mother tending her vegetable patch from the screen door. Hard sun bounces off the brim of her hat, yellowing the faded straw. She is buried 10 minutes away.
From the living room, he hears the mechanical herald. You have 26 missed calls from Bunny.
The garage is 10 minutes away on his old bicycle. He sweats in his thin cotton shirt and remembers with incredulity the two piece suit he had worn for most of his life. The young boy from next door is already there, waiting for Kotetsu to unlock the shutters. They roll them up together and get started on old man Nozaki’s scooter.
On his break, he realises that he forgot to pack a lunch and Shun offers him one of his onigiri. It is stuffed with tuna and some sweet, slightly tangy sauce that reminds Kotetsu of Karina’s California rolls that she claimed to have made but had been, in fact, made by her mother. Or had it been Nathan? Memory is a summer cloud, quickly disintegrating into a blue sky. He remembers the taste of the sushi, the soy sauce thickened with too much wasabi, but the bearer is shrouded in a milky haze that alights in thin drops on Kotetsu's mind and vanishes into the aether before he can so much as call a name any name and have the head turn and emerge into the light where Kotetsu knows it will appear as it has always done in his dreams the gentle goddess of fevered sleep beautiful in her two-ness and simple misery the grief of parting spread like perfume on her neck finding river paths in her golden curls to drip into the hollows of the backs of her knees mouth neither thin nor plush set into the ashen face of a widow prowling the coast for a lover long lost to sea singing some ancient mariner's rime that echoed across time in a green and yellow valley where an old green knight gloomily fixed scooters and oiled bike chains noon till night thinking of people he cannot remember and food he can still taste.
He goes to church and sits in the pews with the rest of the scant weekday crowd. He takes communion and murmurs his prayers on the way home. Our Father who art in heaven, like all those that worship I betray the cult of your still beauty and imagine the creeping hand of Time touching you where you are still tender. It has touched me, too. I have become softly misshapen. My skin folds and thins down to the bone. My understanding of change is become the lens through which I perceive you and notice for the first time how I see only sharp colour where once there was a whole being. I seek what is lost in me. I find it in the ancient greenness of your eyes, the prickling rot of your cold yellow hair. I touch you and the dream jumps like goosebumps. I leave you mounted on the cross of comprehension. My understanding desecrates you.
Kaede comes to visit and Kotetsu makes her okonomiyaki which elicits joyful surprise. He sits and watches her eat, stomach full from all the cooking yet pitted like a pubescent cheek. Underneath it all, hunger flares. She will have to stop travelling soon. Doctor's orders. She is happy, flushed. She is loved. This is all good. Is Kotetsu doing okay? What about his sciatica? Maybe he should move with them. The suggestion lies like a spinning top on the table between them, shifting colours, becoming blurred. She puts her chopsticks neatly down across the rim of her bowl and stares at him. Isn't he lonely? That's normal. Maybe he should remarry. He couldn't. His aged body doesn't allow.
It doesn't make Kaede laugh. She reaches out and closes a hand around his.
It's too early to climb into that grave you're digging.
Kotetsu pats her forearm. Seconds? You're eating for two now.
Sometimes they play reruns of old chase scenes. Blue Rose. Sky High. Fire Emblem. Cyclones and dragons and cats. Bold colours. Gold, white, black, blue. Outlandish names flutter and stream from the heavens. A green light appears, trembling water lily entwined with a surefooted lotus, eternal and rosy. The mask lifts and retreats into the helmet and from within a face appears like bas-relief of flesh and glass. Hail Mary, mother of God, why do you appear to me in visions dressed like a boy? Your hair golden upon your forlorn cheek and I have the distinct dream of having kissed it once when I too, was young. Not a boy. I was never a boy. The years have sat like doves and murmured their baleful song upon my shoulders. Hail Mary, mother of God you were a boy when I wasn't and I saw you glow pink in the summer heatwave when the crime rate spiked and the desire to kiss browbeat me into submission. The world ended at the bend of your waist and the curl of your snarling lip. Even now I hear the fifth trumpet sound.
You have: 1 message and 26 missed calls from Bunny.
Kotetsu goes to Stern Bild City and finds that it has forgotten him like a nothing dream. He walks to his old apartment building and finds a brownstone standing impiously among others, pretending to have been there for longer than it has. HeroTV drones fly around the city even where there is nothing to be caught on camera. There is a long obelisk stabbed downtown, belted with a thin green strip. Traffic winds around it like spooling and unspooling threads. Those curious enough to cross through and reach the obelisk find a large stone slab at its foot. To those who lived to die for others. Thou art exalted in God's heavenly kingdom and are bestowed with His eternal grace. Kotetsu needlessly searches for a familiar name among those etched. No Barnaby. No Bunny. Barnaby lived. Maybe he will live forever.
His flat is still there. Kotetsu enters the lobby and makes his way to the lift with a smile at the receptionist. The doors open to the same short, empty hallway laid with dark carpet. The door waits at the far end. The camera is disabled and the keys lie dead and unlit. Kotetsu knocks. He hears it echo hollowly inside the dark, vacant flat. He lives, Kotetsu thinks with wispy fatherly pride, but no longer where I can go.
His phone is ringing. It has been ringing since he exited the lift but has only now made its insistence clear. Bunny calling. Answer? Decline? Type custom message? Think fast old man maybe this is a figment of your going mind wouldn't that be awful to be led by the tip of your nose to the very edge of the world where the corners of your imagination warp to form the shape of that most beloved creature of your distant dream that inhabits neither world nor underworld that takes neither sustenance nor thought to nourish its pinkfoam body yet leaves your knees soft and bruised like a child's unformed skull. Think fast. You are going to die. If not now, then soon, grave dug shroud sewn what is there but an epitaph and what is there to write?
In memory of Wild Tiger, the man who outlived his 5 minutes by 25 years.
The voice on the other end is clear and breathless. Kotetsu. It echoes. Kotetsu. Kotetsu?
Bunny.
A tomb, Kotetsu thinks, that's what he sounds like. Thin air whispering through chinks in brick and mortar, stone and metal. It sounds strange. Older. Old. Bunny who was supposed to live forever. Bunny who is slouching towards the end. Just like everyone else.
Kotetsu's eyes fill with tears. Barnaby says, I've been trying to reach you for forever. To which Kotetsu says, I came to see you.
He doesn't live there anymore. No, the receptionist informed him. Yes, he had asked her to. No, he could not believe Kotetsu had come. I never thought you would come. Barnaby keeps saying that. As if he had waited. Kotetsu asks him. He does not answer. Instead, he says, There's a key at the front desk. Wait inside.
In Barnaby's abandoned apartment, Kotetsu falls asleep and has a dream. There is a forest glimmering with dew. The light between the trees is bright green. Dappled shadows move across the cool, foamy forest floor. A secret whistles softly all around. Kotetsu sees his face nestled in metal. His helmet sits like a crown at the foot of a large oak tree, his broadsword impales the earth. From between the steady rain of moss emerges a decaying suit of armour, rust clinging to each hinge like a parting kiss. It stumbles and creaks its way to Kotetsu and kneels on one knee. It says, You are not unreachable.
Maybe my luck will change, Kotetsu answers.
The old knight rises to his feet. It comes for us all, it says, It came for me. It will come for you. Nasty work, this. Beautiful. You are waiting to wage your war now. And war is wonderful, is it not? But this is not war. This is the inexorable march of the beast towards the sea. The evening star lights its path. All is well in the satin world of the foxes and the hounds and beneath the earth the carcasses of giants sleep a gentle sleep. Are ye mortal? If so, speak. Thou shall not reap what ye have not sown and thy reward shall be the great abode of those who go as dreams and protest not their departure. For they are grateful for love's melancholy farewell and find great reprieve in the vast unknown.
Barnaby has grown old. His hands are coarse. His skin has thinned and his hair has shortened. He is smiling and the smile presses lines around both corners of his mouth. He says Kotetsu's name and Kotetsu slowly sits up to stare at him.
How's things?
Barnaby places a hand on Kotetsu's cheek and leans forward. His hair, previously, mistakenly, thought to be shorter unfurls like grey fabric across his sloping shoulder. Being kissed reminds Kotetsu of where he is and where he has been. The years that had hidden away behind the amorphous mist of complacency emerge with fuzzy steadiness. Unceasing, true-blue years. Tangible weight. Measured in people born and dead. And sure, they had lived through it, past the age where such things as a kiss seem to matter as much as the price of potatoes everyday and they have seen the sad sputter of applause into grunts of mild recognition heard the carriage clattering miles away when fat still used to cling to Kotetsu's thighs and Barnaby's hair had its gold lustre when names etched onto the Stern Bild obelisk sprang deftly across rooftops and numbers on glowing screens held the entire world in their rapid rise and fall. But there is every reason to believe that he can find his way back to that forgotten universe, race across sprawling pastures and rolled up passages back to where tomorrow was a furry, evasive thing and Kotetsu found the state of things as they were neither to be argued with nor made sense of because each new morning brought with it Barnaby, his stern prickly ways and his broad back his clean fingernails and certain light footsteps and now his kiss this brand new flavour of what Now feels like his fragile hands building a home on the hill of the nape of Kotetsu's neck his legs moving opening accommodating accepting that is this Kotetsu now kissing him in spite of that kissing him because of that kissing him kissing him kissing him.
Did you think I'd forget you? Barnaby asks, still holding on.
Kotetsu finds that he cannot bring himself to lie. I would have. I did.
They sit knee to folded knee in the waning light of day that had blistered through the gigantic window only an hour ago. Barnaby talks about things, among them his hair which Kotetsu grasps curiously and cannot let go. Barnaby is an old man with hair longer than Kaede tied in a low ponytail at the base of his skull and Kotetsu finds it so endlessly fascinating, how people are milled to fine dust and pressed into various shapes by the invisible hand of Time. He understands then the nature of this arrangement. He sees the two of them, him sparser, half-erased; Barnaby as austere but miraculously less grim, far less grim.
This is the inexorable march of the beast towards the sea, says a voice from somewhere deep within the empty house, echoes laced with the wet abundance of great forests, green upon green upon green. Green from which pink spurts and shimmers nervously in the dark before blooming steadfast among the perennial coppices. It will rot one day. It will come for us all. But today is miles from decay and a great hush has fallen across the shining city of Stern Bild that still stands, despite the war that ravages its heart. Today, even as it vanishes into night, there is time.
And there is Barnaby, long-haired, smiling again. He is old. Yet, there is time.