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Kenji Kon was the prodigal son of Kon Industries, owner of a multi-million dollar trust fund, and a survivor of Jurassic World.
These things are contradictions. He had read the tabloid in the bodega window proclaiming such. Had seen his father’s face interspliced with his own, like some grand conspiracy. Kon Industries, perhaps more than the government and certainly more than anyone else, had the resources to extract his son. He could’ve lobbied, he could’ve lied, his father could’ve torn the world apart for him.
Why hadn’t he? It was all they could ask him—they wanted to know how Brooklynn survived, what sorts of tricks she had learned. They wanted Darius to recount his beaten, lost field guide, to recall something great and then say it was false, without real evidence to back up his claims and no way to test it. They pressed Ben about Toro because, if Kenji remembered right, it was cool the first time he’d heard it. Not the sixtieth and definitely not for the cameras, but the first time. They buried Sammy under so many NDAs and threatened Witsec forms that she could barely glance at a camera, let alone talk to one. Yaz in an act of solidarity and hatred for all things technical, took a vow of silence with Sammy.
But what could they ask Kenji Kon that was not about his father? And what could he say that was not about his father? No bravery and no knowledge, so skills or new experience. They covered those bases, heard the stories and ate them and churned them out to the public.
It was a scab, a bump they couldn’t quite get over because it didn’t make any fucking sense, did it? They could’ve gone to the penthouse, triggered some begotten alarm and his dad would’ve known. Wouldn’t he? He must’ve gotten the notification when they tripped the property, the cameras were solar powered, the grounds were a tripwire maze.
But it must’ve been a fluke. All the electricity on the island had been shut off and the radios—even the emergency ones!—hadn’t worked either. Right? So obviously his dad wouldn’t have known they were there.
Nobody liked that answer.
His eyes strained against the glare of the TV screen, body cocooned in a blanket that smelt like the cabinets. Slightly musty from disuse over the summer, holed up in the upper cabinets above the bathroom sink. Old wallpaper peeling from the inner lining, revealing chipping plywood and beyond that, the faint crumblings of disintergrated…what? Wood? Paper? Some secret third thing that Kenji had no knowledge of.
“They’re smart kids,” Roxie wore a suit that hung a bit strangely around her broad shoulders. But it was nice enough, nearly professional. Dave stood by her side in a button-up and slacks, far less put together and yet an entirely different person.
Roxie looked like she belonged in a suit, in a good, professionally made suit. But Dave in anything nice was offputting. “I have no doubts that they survived the initial attack and I urge congress to lift the ban and to send rescue for the survivors. For my kids.”
She’d stood on the floor in Washington D.C a week—no, six days, after Jurassic World fell. The camera was shitty but the audio was clear from someone's phone. They’d posted it to YouTube an hour after she’d made her speech.
Kenji wrestled an arm out from the cocoon, reaching for the remote on the coffee table and flicking it down. The comments were a blur of support—of people with probably dead families urging them to relook, of Brooklynn fans wanting her back, of people mourning and mourning, and some, more recent, with edits about them being found, of Roxie and Dave being right.
Isn’t that kid that tech mogul's son? Why cant they just ask him?? He has to be super loaded.
His hand stilled, hovering over the exclamation. It wasn’t like he hadn’t heard the theories before. Fuck, they were berating him with it. It was the fact that they’d posted it months ago, when the video had first gone up.
So many people clung to it as a retrospective after hearing Brand had crossed the ocean with nothing—no money and no resources and no fucking clue what to do if he got caught by the United State’s government. If Brand Bowman could do it, why couldn’t Daniel Kon? It seemed so laughable when they put it like that.
There was no way they could possibly understand any of it. They were just, just these people peering in. They had no idea that dad was balancing a business and a front and so many black market connections it made him sick. They had no idea that this was how it worked. Kenji was self sufficient, he didn’t need and didn’t want his dad breathing down his neck. Of course, he would’ve been too busy to hear about the collapse in the first couple of days. Weeks, maybe, sometimes it took a while for Kandi to get in contact with him.
“She tried everything. We got involved at first, I wanted to believe she was right. But congress was dragging their feet and six months passed. I thought my baby was dead. I gave up on him.” Ms. Bowman leaned in the doorway, her scrubs wrinkled from use. She squinted at the brightness, ignored the comment queued on screen to look at him, fully for perhaps the first time. He braced for her disgust at his appearance, the disappointment lingering in her features for him. He’d never looked at an adult fully without spotting it in the corner of their mouth or splattered across their entire face.
Ms. Bowman just leaned, something passive and soft resting where the disgust should be. It was strange to see it head on, to see it fully instead of spotting a passing glance that was meant to go to someone else, a voyeur to an emotion not meant for him.
“Okay,” Kenji said and mentally slapped himself for it. Okay? Really? But something in her stare petrified him and the TV was glowing with those words. Blaring out into the openness. He should shut off the TV, he should move, he should tell her something reasonable and good. That made sense and would make her look away.
“I’m going to bed.”
“Have a good night, hun. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Which was probably the worst thing she could’ve possibly said to him.
Kenji was not unloved. No matter what Brooklynn tried to say, no matter how different Ms. Bowman—who was sort of his mom—acted around her sons. Their relationship was complicated, Kenji was a hard son to have.
He remembered getting high for the first time at his father’s lake house. It had been faux logger style, which after Isla Nubar, he’d realized the falseness of. Everything was modern and sharp and a bit too clean to be natural. Kenji lit up a joint he’d bought from a kid at his private school while he sat on the kitchen island. Choked on the smoke and smudged the ash on the marble. He trailed around the living room, letting it soak into the cushions of the couch and the wood paneling. He’d closed all the windows, trapped it in, and when he’d finished—a bit too giddy and far hungrier than he thought possible—he crushed it against the leather sofa. Burning a hole through the dead animal, mixing with skunk in the air, and left the remains on the smudged countertop.
They had to understand that he had not been a good kid. He enjoyed breaking things, demanding things, taunting the staff, and pulling his father away from work. He’d been expelled from three schools and he thought he’d only lasted that long because dad bought his way back in after he was suspended.
He remembered little of his childhood, it was confusing swathes of colors, moments, snatches of sound that weren’t all that important. But he remembered his father looking down at him, saying, you are a hard person to love, Kenji.
He did not doubt it. It had taken work for his friends, for his Camp Fam, to actually love him. To peel back his shitty, destructive layers, to pull him away from his dad’s business. To love Kenji was to strip him of some parts, to choose the part you wanted and love that. That was alright, for the most part.
Brooklynn pushed a finger into his chest, “You are not difficult to love, your dad is just an asshole.”
“Well at least we can agree on that.” Kenji said, taking a sip of her coffee. It was too strong, made his vision go blurry around the edges and he didn’t dare ask how many shots of espresso she’d ordered.
“So his opinion shouldn’t matter like at all. He was an idiot and in jail so fuck him.”
“Yeah,” Kenji muttered and he suddenly couldn’t look at her. Which was a shame, because Brooklynn was beautiful especially when she wore her glasses. “Fuck him.”
He remembered getting sick as the high came crashing down. He’d wanted his dad there, to hold him when he was hovering over the toilet. To rub his back and tell him it was going to be alright. To find a glass of water to wash his mouth out with and pain pills on the counter beside him.
Instead, Kenji laid on the bathroom floor until his stomach stopped spinning, filled a glass of water himself, collected his pain pills, and slept on the burnt couch. Headache formed in the base of his skull from the thick, cloying smell of the room.
Kenji Kon was the prodigal son of the defunct Kon Industries, his trust fund had gone to charity for the most part, he was a survivor of Jurassic World, and his mother wanted him home for Christmas this year.
His father had also died for him.
This is a contradiction.
After it all, he’d gotten a call from the police that his dad was dead. Which they knew he knew, this is a formality, they said, dinosaur deaths are becoming more common these days. Our condolences, they said.
Kenji didn’t ask why Daniel didn’t have more guards in dinosaur country. In the winding forests of Colorado, where so many of them had come to hide from civilization. He didn’t rage at why his father, in all his crimes, had been allowed parole like this. He had thanked them like an adult, because he wasn’t fifteen, he was in his twenties. He was perfectly pleasant, because this is how adults spoke to the police about death.
He asked if he was needed to identify the body. They told him there was nothing left to identify. Besides, the blood samples had been enough.
They’d cremated him because Kenji had been a missing person—again—and hadn’t told them what to do with the body. Daniel Kon had not left him any money or houses or businesses and he wanted none of it.
Good, it should end with him. Good, it should be over, but there was something heavy in his chest. A teenager rearing his head, old anxieties and all. Kenji was not good enough for his father’s business. He was not savvy or a particularly good negotiator. He gave discounts for birthdays and only booked small events that he could handle alone. He let people record the dinosaur run without a fee and he always provided snacks and water for the longer events.
Without the trust fund, he probably would’ve run himself bankrupt by now. Getting started had cost more than anticipated and he’d taken more from his dad than he’d wanted.
“Can you come over?” The phone line crackled out here, the service was shit at both their places but there was something in his throat. He couldn’t get his hands to stop shaking.
“Are you okay?” There was a thump, a panicking in Darius’ voice that set him off again. Kenji gripped the phone in his fist, threatened to break it against the vinyl countertop.
He couldn’t possibly answer that. He couldn’t get his voice to work.
“Are you alone?” Darius tried again, he heard his boots slam into the ground, the shaking of his keys. Kenji loved Darius’ old truck; the way it always smelt like gasoline and sputtered, hiccuped just after starting. Like it needed a moment to catch its breath.
“Kenji? Are you still with me?”
“Yeah. Yeah I’m alone, D.”
He heard him curse faintly under his breath. “I’ll be there soon, okay, I promise. Do you want me to keep talking?”
“Can you?” And his fist loosened, he took his first breath in what must have been hours. Days.
They’d sent his father to his doorstep in a little baggy, not unlike the one he’d bought from the kid at his private school.
His little brother was a day away.
He didn’t why, all of the sudden, on a perfectly fucking good November morning, on his day off, mind you, he needed to get his father’s cardboard box out of the house. It was just that…Kenji had not touched him since he’d arrived. He opened the package and after a moment of animal panic, neatly put him back in the cardboard, tucking it away for another time.
He had not brought himself to buy an urn. Where do people even get urns? Was there an urn store? Was he just supposed to go and buy something from T.J Max or HomeGoods? Was an urn just a fancy vase with a lid? Were these things adults were supposed to know?
There was something crawling under his skin, he had not slept in days. He’d loathed Brooklynn’s coffee habit when they lived together but he fell right alongside her with energy drinks. So really, it was hypocritical. It was a fracture in a breaking relationship.
Kenji Kon was manic-depressive. Kenji Kon was a hard person to love. Kenji Kon had to call his little brother to bury the man they both hated. Was it burying him? No, spread his ashes, but where was he supposed to spread his ashes? It felt more like a burial than anything else.
“Hey, I missed you,” They hugged tightly, pressed their bodies into each other until there were no borders. He thought this wasn’t how men, even brothers, were supposed to hug. He’d seen Darius and Brand to a light, back-pat sort of thing. He’d seen his peers, when he considered going to college, give each other light, almost not-touching, greetings. This was something strange and wholly, to be enveloped in someone else's arms.
Darius’ eye glanced first at the knife block, if they had not survived on being vigilant, perhaps it would’ve been subtle. It looked like a glowing are you okay? sign to him.
Everyone was worried he was going to kill himself. Ben called twice a week from payphones and Kenji learned to answer from unknown callers. Yaz kept sending him therapist recommendations and if not that, community classes or events. Just pick something, Kenji, something to get you out of the goddamn woods.
“What do you want to do?” Darius whispered into his chest, because that is the only way to ask a question like that. Something gentle and prodding all at once, that if spoken too loudly, could mean the end of everything as they know it.
“I want him gone. I need him gone, D. I can’t—I can’t do this anymore.” Daniel Kon had left his son to die. He had also saved his life. This does not make sense and Kenji is not sure which is real. He will never get a chance to ask. It is only that he needs him gone, he needs to shed him like he did when he was fifteen and moved in with the Bowmans. He needs this man to be dealt with neatly, because at least then he could put him in the corner of his mind and never look at him.
Darius nodded, grabbed his hand and grabbed his dad’s ashes. They picked their way through the woods, down to the creek that flowed into the river cutting through the valley.
“Ready?” Darius asked, like this was not a funeral.
“Yeah”
So they cut the top of the bag and dumped his father entirely at the base of the creek. One moment, all of the ash piled up, rose into the air in a puff, and then it was gone. Lapped over by the tiny streams of water eating it whole.
He shook the bag to get the last of him out.