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Gen closes his eyes when he swings.
People told him it’d make him feel like flying. Because ignorance, he is told, is what makes magic possible.
He was nine when he met Senku. It’s an incredibly Japanese name for someone who didn’t look so Japanese. Senku with slightly wavy green tips that shoot up from what Gen was sure was blonde but looked white in certain light. Senku with red eyes. January fourth, winter wind biting into his skin that was probably too soft to withstand it all.
Senku had told the old man who took him outside for his birthday to quit pushing because he could do it himself.
Swinging, like many other things, is a sinusoid. Senku had told Gen that. In theory at least.
The thing is that a sinusoid oscillates forever unless its domain is restricted, that’s just basic precalculus, or even trigonometry. Senku had said it so simply, anyway.
Senku told Gen once that he jumped off the swing despite the whole point of the mechanism being to stay in the seat.
“I touched the tree,” he had said. The swingset was located under a large tree that had leaves and branches that spread above like a canopy. It certainly looked possible.
So Gen laughed and closed his eyes, but opened them after he heard a crash into the ground.
“Did you see that?”
He remembers Senku laid there with limbs folded in uncomfortable ways that certainly didn’t hurt if Senku was grinning.
“What did the leaves feel like?”
Senku continued to grin.
“You’re going to have to find that out yourself.”
The old man had just stood there laughing. He gave Gen a nod and Gen never saw him again.
It is a world of myths. The world, as it turns out, is also just one big myth that you choose to believe.
That’s how Gen starts off his writing career, delegating young readers the myth that they can be the ones to control the reality around them. That gives a little control, doesn’t it? He once thought so.
Senku didn’t believe in myths. Or he did, he just called them facts and science. Rules that dictated the universe. Indeed, rules that he chose to believe exist.
It’s this kind of thing that Gen finds to drive himself the most crazy. How could they, mortals, ever determine anything to be fact? Is it true until proven false, is that the world they live in?
I think therefore I am, everyone knows this. Descartes also tried to use this argument to prove the existence of god. This, not everyone knows, nor believes. Somewhere along the way, while building the tower of truth there is a stumble where Descartes’s argument starts to become pokeable.
At what point is Gen’s reality pokeable?
When is Senku’s?
Poke.
Familiarity, Gen decided, is odd.
Because everyday without fail the Japanese yet non-Japanese kid would sit on the swing next to the leftmost one with his knees bending at locked intervals.
And there’s a lot someone like Gen could be doing instead of swinging next to a younger kid in a world full of parks.
But the leftmost swing was open, and Senku pulled out his latest gadget.
And Gen pulled out the deck of cards in his hands.
So it goes.
Acting and writing are more similar than Gen thought. Getting into a character’s mind— feeling every gnarly cranny of their soul and scrunching your face the same as on a silver screen just to jot it down into a page.
Staying there for long enough until the words and expression made sense to the audience. Staying there for so long you forget what your own soul feels like.
Gen writes nonfiction— what is he talking about?
Senku once asked Gen what it’s like to be a magician.
Gen once replied by asking what it’s like to be a scholar.
The following conversation was terribly uninteresting.
Gen once asked Senku why he swings. Senku told him he wanted to go to space, to touch pockets of sky that tunneled through the trees. They were almost taunting him, he had said.
Senku would swing until he got enough momentum. Then, Gen noticed, he’d do one of two things. He’d either continue until he jumps and try to snag a leaf in his fingers, or if he’s feeling more tired, he’d simply spread his arms wide and let the wind try and steal his clothes in the breeze.
His hair stuck up like it was always meant to be in zero-g. Pushed around by manmade air he chose to create.
Senku talked a lot. He talked a lot about science and not much else.
Gen swears he learned more from Senku’s tangents than school.
“The mechanism behind it is actually stupidly simple,” Senku kicks his feet against the grass below. Green unroots itself and dark brown cozies into the soles of his shoe. “The panels of the airplane increase air resistance which slows the airplane down, and you stop flying.”
In a way, Senku didn’t talk a lot.
The old man Gen saw on the first day he met Senku was his guardian. Senku didn’t say he missed him but it’s there in the silence that lulls between explanations. Gen bulldozed through the silence with cards. Fought the silence hard with sound and noise and flamboyance. Crushed the silence, absolutely demolished it.
In a way, Gen talked too much.
A magician is never supposed to reveal their secrets, but—
“The mechanism behind it is actually quite simple, a card was tucked in my palm the entire time.”
The bodies of silence lay on the ground. They stacked them and built a tower to climb all the way till it reached the moon. Then Senku would smile, and Gen would be able to close his eyes and fall back to earth. He’d hold the sky that was taunting Senku, and for a moment, he’d fly.
Card cuts: Charlier cut, kick cut, blind swivel cut, triple cut, one handed cut.
Labels upon labels for things that are virtually the same.
Cut the deck so cheating is mitigated. Rarely does this ever do anything for the experienced dealer, but in someone’s myth it does.
Subatomic particles: Protons, neutrons, electrons.
There’s a need in people to label things so clearly, Gen thinks. It’s important, they’re different and everyone has got to know why they are so.
Senku: Blonde(?), scientist, lonely.
Lonely?
Gen: Brunette, mentalist, trickster.
So it goes.
And it goes.
Gen once asked Senku what he would have to disregard in a physics problem for a swing to oscillate back and forth forever. The answer was air resistance.
See, there’s just a little bit of energy that gets lost with each swing due to the friction, like how each day Gen just feels a little more wearier. Like how each day Senku’s dreams feel a little more achievable.
If they lived in a frictionless vacuum then a swing could stay in perpetual motion forever.
Perhaps if they lived in a frictionless vacuum—
But so it goes.
“You can’t do anything through ignorance alone,” Senku once said. “You’ve got to see it to believe it.”
Senku grabbed Gen’s deck and revealed the marker on the card. “Look.”
Gen had angrily grabbed it back. “No! You ruined the magic.”
“It wasn’t magic,” Senku retorted. “You’re lying to yourself.”
How could he be lying to himself when he’s the trickster? Trickster tricking himself? Senku painted Gen as the clown and sat himself down in front of a mirror. A new myth, should he choose to believe it. Gen shut his eyes even tighter, and the dead rose.
The silence of the moment of stillness at a critical point between the whooshes of wind as gravity takes him back. The silence of combing the hair between violent whirs of a hairdryer, black dye smearing the countertop. The silence came crawling back and Gen fell from the tower. He was never meant for zero-g.
Aren’t you tired?
It’s one of those questions that could be asked with or without quotation marks. It’s there in the way Senku looks at him, disbelief at how his eyes still remain closed.
Isn’t he?
He is, isn’t he? Two words and their placement change it from somewhat certain to nearly certain.
The wind blows gently even as they’re nearly still at the bottom of the swing. Senku looks at Gen and Gen knows this, knows it well. He’s grown accustomed to the way red will pierce into him like a vaccine; hurts like hell, but ultimately for the better. He knows, but if he could just look back for once—
He kicks back and starts again. A gentle breeze turns into a violent whip. Senku’s voice is drowned out by howling air. He closes his eyes and begins to imagine flying.
A bubble in the injection, a vein pops.
Tired, yes. Very. Absolutely.
But so it goes.
Uninteresting? Did he write that? Gen takes it back.
Senku once asked Gen what it is like to be a mentalist.
Gen would never say it is to live with being a liar.
Gen would answer by asking what it is like to be a scientist.
Senku would say it is to live with knowing you will never know the complete truth.
So it goes.
Another swing. Sometimes Gen imagines himself as a baseball. Batter up, get ready, throw, wind the arm back and swing. Hit, miss, run, cheer.
What is it like to want things?
Senku got up after Gen asked the question. Stalked over to a fallen leaf and stamped it with his foot.
“I wanted to feel a leaf crunch.”
Senku at eight knowing who he was. Senku at ten who knew what he was going to become. Senku at fifteen doing everything he wants. Senku at thirty with fulfilled dreams.
Gen kept swinging.
Senku once asked Gen what it is like to be a liar.
Gen never told him it was to be a chocolatier of words.
Gen once asked Senku what it is like to be temporary.
Senku had said to be human.
“I’m going to space, as soon as possible.”
Good for you, dear Senku. You are going to change the world, and I believe in you. Good middle school, great high school, excellent college.
You want things and you will chase things, and God if that isn’t the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. You are excellency wrapped in a bubble, you are ambitious, you keep your eyes open and glare at what doesn’t please you.
Gen tosses the note he found in the pocket of his sweater into the bin next to manuscripts littered about.
So it goes.
Senku once asked Gen what it meant to be a magician.
Beautiful feelings make bad literature. Gen tells himself this more times than he’d like to admit.
Being a magician is being an equivocator. Being a magician is following steps to a T. Being a magician is more than what Gen can summarize in a single sentence. Being Gen is being a magician, and that he certainly cannot summarize.
There’s a special place for people like him. In his mind, he lives his days jolly and his nights sat in front of a mirror watching the paint drip off his skin like acid only to harden like candlewax and stay. In his mind, he lives from scene change to scene change. In his myth, he does not die. In his reality, he is awake while the whole rest of the world is asleep, watching the mirror crack when his makeup sizzles against a porcelain countertop.
Poke.
Gen once did something. Senku also once did something. Once, once, once upon a time, there was a boy.
Once upon a time, there was another boy.
Once upon a boy, there was a time.
Once upon two boys, there was nothing.
But once upon every time, a swing rattled.
So it goes.
There’s a kind of desperation in prose that Gen’s always wanted to achieve. To create shortness of breath in the reader’s mind with repetition that says a lot of nothing, but means everything. Multiple, running in parallel, and if that isn’t just the most beautiful emotional dream where everything chases its way up a steady slope then he doesn’t know what is.
If it was Gen’s way he’d do the magic on big stages and sell books he wanted to write and be on every screen in Japan. He’d go to America and get even bigger. He’d stay at Hollywood overnight and feel like a real accomplished fellow.
He would quit performing in small ads and pubs and acting like he enjoys it. He would write real books that he wants to and get noticed for being him: big words, big booms, big successes. He would make it big so that he could look Senku in the eye and said “I chased and I sought and I won.” He’d hit a homerun.
“You’ve always wanted to fly, haven’t you?” Senku had asked.
If it was Gen’s way, he’d have said yes. Yes I have dear Senku and I’ve never wanted it any other way.
It would taste like cola’s gentle buzz in the throat when he gulps too fast. It would feel like makeup remover sliding across his skin and seeping burns into the cracks that are left behind. But Gen could finally put on moisturizer. Good Lord— Gen could finally sleep.
But it’s at most Gen’s myth.
And so it goes.
One day Senku doesn’t show up. Swings were just practice wings for the boy before he found his real ones.
So it goes.
Lights out, everyone. Cut.
Strike three, batter out.
There’s something about the callouses gripping a swing that no hand cream could remove. It’s white against yellow out in the cold.
The day after forever Gen sat alone at the swings with Senku orbiting 408 km above him.
Senku the astronaut. Senku the scientist. Senku the scholar, the temporary moment in time, the Japanese who’s so unJapanese like. Senku the eight year old who could swing better than any person in the damn world. Senku the eight year old who held sky in his hand when he jumped from the swings.
Senku the one Gen won’t stop categorizing.
Once upon a time, Gen gave Senku a million different labels.
Once upon a second time, he realized they’d never be enough.
Familiarity may be odd, but what’s weirder is time broken down to the pocket of the moment. The instant where it’s silent. The instant that turns into forever.
Gen is old. Not necessarily for real old— just older. Which, to someone who’d lived life being young, is really old.
He pulls the chain, it’s tight and bites harsher than the cold into his callouses.
So it goes.
There's nobody next to him talking; his cards are a dead weight in his pocket.
He lets go of his hand to give the skin a break from the friction for a second. The chain rebounds and he straightens his knees as he swoops back down.
So it goes again.
He breathes as he goes up again, his knees retract and he’s looking at the tree. Komorebi, the word everyone likes to claim is unique to Japanese and Japanese alone. Gorgeous dappled light that makes him squint in disbelief because no matter how short of a period one sees it, it sticks to any human. His hands tighten, his butt lifts from the seat briefly, his cards fall out the pocket.
So it goes for however long until air resistance catches up.
He closes his eyes, his legs separate and they stretch out to be sticks again. There is weightlessness and he can hear the clatter of the metal chains colliding with each other. Gen cannot calculate the physics of how they do it, but he’s sure Senku could. He releases and for a moment he’s as close as he can be to salvation. His arm brushes up against the rough leaves and he briefly holds a piece of sky in his hand. For a moment he is truly flying.
Look.