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The white of his bedroom walls played at holiness. It pretended to be the color of pearly gates and vestment robes, but Ryo knew better. Half a shade off, all it called to mind was the cold sterility of a hospital hallway, a padded cell, the glint of his own winking, perfect teeth, neat as gravestones in the bone of his skull.
When Ryo woke at night from some half-remembered dream to patrol the length of the penthouse—back and forth and back again—the whiteness shrouded him like a second skin. He wore it uncomfortably, waiting for it to shed. He had the strangest feeling that the color was haunting him.
Tonight the room was nothing out of the ordinary, and Ryo hated it.
The t-shirt he slipped on as he slunk out of bed was the same white as everything else. The city lights blinking through the windows offered the only shocks of warmth, little constellations twinkling in the distant high rises.
It was 3 a.m. and Ryo had resumed his nighttime ritual of pacing. A bad habit he couldn't seem to break. There were only so many hours in a day (so many minutes, so many seconds), and the block of his schedule allocated to necessary sleep was chipped away little by little.
The penthouse’s sitting room was bathed in deep swallows of shadow, the overhead light strips dim and cold, switched off hours ago. He didn’t bother turning them back on.
It was 3 a.m. and the noise of Tokyo drifted up from the streets far below, the pulsing thrum of nightlife and traffic like the arrhythmia of a heart. Louder, now that it was the only sound besides the tap-tap of Ryo’s bare feet on the slick floor.
This too was familiar.
It was times like these when Ryo wondered if he’d ever felt anything but apathy.
Professor Fikara was a horror in the end. Grotesque and inhumane. The thing that had once been the Professor had writhed as it burned—the acrid odor of the gasoline marrying the charred, blackened stench of its flesh as it peeled and sloughed off from the heat. The pyre spit a lazy plume of smoke up into the dark, rolling sky.
And yet, there was something missing.
The thought burned up like the gasoline, wisping through Ryo’s fingers as he tried to catch it. The horror had been half-removed, almost artificial, and faded quickly in the aftermath. Like it had been preconceived. Curtains close, end scene.
Like most of the world, Professor Fikara was an abstract, a caricature of a caricature being puppeted to an expected conclusion. He had been worn down to nothing more than a concept by the end of it. His death was the natural progression of things, and somehow Ryo knew that it would have happened regardless of what he might have done in the interim to prevent it. Maybe that was the cause of the rift between them and, more so, the cold, calm resignation with which he observed the Professor’s descent into madness.
He had cleaned bird carcasses off the floor of their hut and felt nothing.
It didn’t matter what he said or carefully precautioned or noted in the margins of the Professor’s field notes. If it changed anything at all, it wouldn’t change the inevitable, inescapable end to the night that waited patiently down the line. It was as simple as this: The thing that had once been the Professor would writhe as it burned—the acrid odor of the gasoline would marry the charred, blackened stench of its flesh as it peeled and sloughed off from the heat. The pyre would spit a lazy plume of smoke up into the dark, rolling sky.
Akira was different.
As long as they had spent apart, Akira was still the one constant in the bubble Ryo lived in. If the rest of the city was below him, purposefully cordoned off, then Akira was the one exception. Even miles away, he still felt like the only thing real enough to touch.
Ryo turned on his heel and collapsed onto the couch, ruining the neat line of Jenny’s white throw pillows. He pulled his knees up into his chest like a child, feeling inexplicably exposed. His laptop beckoned on the farthest end of the coffee table, but Ryo left it, steepling his hands together and resting his forehead against the point. A wisp of hair lightly tickled his brow and he stifled the sudden, manic urge to yank it out. He couldn’t afford distraction, worst of all those which self-originated. It was paramount his attention remained undivided, judgement unclouded. There was no detail too small or inconsequential to account for. The most minute piece out of place on the board could domino into unforeseeable effects down the line. Risk the objective.
Strange then, that he let Akira continue to run unchecked.
It was maddening how it all seemed to come back to Akira.
Ryo tried, of course, to discipline him. He had committed to keeping a tight leash on Akira’s newfound abilities since day one. Months of careful planning would not go to waste because of his own carelessness.
But Akira was, as usual, the exception. He was continually surprising. He resisted being accounted for.
When Akira poked and prodded him with his signature insistent attention, balancing the infuriating line between teasing and fond, Ryo let him. When Akira burst out of the elevator with armfuls of cheap fast food from around the corner and left greasy fingerprints on the polished marble countertops, Ryo let him. When Akira shoved food down his throat with a chiding, “Jeez Ryo, would it kill you to eat once in a while?” Ryo let him with nothing more than a token protest. When Akira hung over the back of the couch in a graceless sprawl while Ryo worked (the gall to interrupt his work, he shouldn’t tolerate it— wouldn’t tolerate it from anyone else), toying with his hair and mindlessly chatting his ear off, Ryo let him. When Akira hauled Ryo over his shoulder and tossed him bodily into the pool (the breath before he hit the still, mirror surface of the water, suspended weightless in the air, wasn’t that familiar ) Ryo let him, even if it took hours for his clothes to dry.
Ryo couldn’t say precisely why. Rehearsed justifications sounded defensive even to his own ears, built on a flawed, flimsy stage. So maybe it was a matter of admission instead.
It made sense to keep him close. Akira was the anchor of the whole operation, the center point around which every other variable orbited. Ryo was responsible for wielding Akira, he was the whetstone on which Akira was sharpened, made precise and deadly under his direction.
Regardless, the nagging feeling remained—that in the midst of all his painstakingly laid plans was a mistake. Some glaring, obvious fault that he had missed ready to domino. A tipping point Ryo knew was coming, one he was accelerating towards but unable to stop, as impossible to prevent as if it had already happened.
The familiar suspicion crept up on him that no matter what he changed, it wouldn’t change the inevitable, inescapable end to the night that waited patiently down the line.
“I’m not sad, it was going to die anyway.” Ryo had told Akira on the cliff by the sea once, years ago (or he would, someday), veiled by grey, misting rain. Far under their feet, the waves churned.
The kitten in the box was dead, and it would always be dead and it had always been dead.
It wasn’t sadness this time around, Ryo realized. It might have been grief—so old and leviathan he could barely comprehend it.
The first pinkish entrails of dawn spilled over the Tokyo skyline and through the eastern-facing floor-to-ceiling glass. The lightening twilight was halved by the shadow cast from the back of the couch, bisecting the floor in a straight, surgical slice.
Ryo set himself into the morning, and knew it would change nothing.