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“Congratulations!”
Kaworu tossed a cloud of silver confetti into the air, but Shinji, upon whom he’d presumably intended to shower it, passed out and hit the floor a good few seconds before the confetti could.
~
Shinji wished he could say that he didn’t believe in ghosts, but at the same time, when one goes through the trouble of acquiring some friends for once and invites said friends over to one’s place of residence for a change of pace from one’s usual regimen of sleeping, not strictly legally watching shows on the internet, and sleeping with the curtains closed during the day, and one of one’s friends asks if she can bring her cat along, and one says yes because one is not in a position to alienate potential chums, and one’s friend’s cat keeps staring obsessively at the corner of the room, and one is pretty sure that the cat is not simply admiring the fetching philodendron in the hanging planter, well, exactly what is one supposed to conclude other than that there are spirits about the premises? Nothing, that’s what, thought Shinji, and ever since Rei and Rei’s cat’s fateful visit to his apartment, Shinji couldn’t help but feel like there were some metaphysical shenanigans happening there that he as a homeowner was entitled to know about.
From this conclusion he then moved to suppositions. He supposed that 1) it was entirely possible that all the sundries that suddenly seemed to go missing around the apartment were all components of a healthy confirmation bias. Growing up with a scientist father, however absent, had installed the knowledge of such things as a handy logical failsafe in his brain, and try as his imagination might, Shinji doubted he’d ever be able to shake off all of the distilled, deionized water in which his childhood had been baptized. He also supposed that 2) on the off chance that he was truly sharing his home with a roommate (“Shinji, dear, I know you’re probably not aware of this since you’re at school during the day, but could you please tell your roommate to stop blasting classical music when you’re gone? I’ve tried to tell him myself, but he never answers the door when I knock,” his downstairs neighbor had said), as long as that roommate didn’t cause too much of a fuss and wasn’t out to murder him and steal his body or his underwear, then that was all right. That’s what he told himself when he replaced the fourth missing spoon that week, anyway. And he still counted the underwear in his drawer every day just to make sure.
His inner cranky octogenarian (“Nice sweater; it really brings out your grandma style,” his friend Kensuke said once) finally emerged from her cocoon of homemade afghan blankets and doilies about a week after the whole haunting business had begun. “Stop,” he sat up to yell crabbily at his empty desk chair, because this was the second day in a row now that his afternoon nap had been interrupted by someone politely coughing across the room. His houseguest did, to his credit, retire his title of the Coughing Cambion of Desk Chair Corner, but only because he immediately took up the alternate mantle of the Chair-Scraping Chit of the Kitchen. “Unbelievable,” the same subconscious grandmotherly voice griped when the slow drag of the kitchen chair across the floor abruptly ceased upon Shinji’s arrival. “Really now,” she harrumphed as a previously unheard cadence of staccato squeaks heralded the debut of a new, cheeky little dance that the chair was performing across the linoleum, “this is getting to be ridiculous.”
The night that things finally came to a head, Shinji had just returned to his apartment from his trip to the nearby convenience store. After staring blankly at the cupboards which he’d known were going to be empty, he’d managed to muster enough willpower to make the four-minute dash there, and he’d nearly made it back home without any of his classmates seeing him in the sweatpants he hadn’t bothered to change out of before the door across from his room was flung open.
“I thought I heard the little pitter-patter of introvert feet,” said his neighbor Asuka. “Is this the day that you’ll finally eat some actual food?”
“I have actual food,” Shinji protested, curling himself around his purchases. He didn’t shift his arms quickly enough to avoid Asuka seeing the small tin of almonds and the lonely bottle of carbonated water that constituted his dinner, and he wasn’t much of a student in the field of social interaction, but he was still pretty sure that, based on her expression, she was trying very hard not to look too openly pitying. Right now, she was hovering around 30% pitying, trying to keep it under 40%.
“Don’t go anywhere,” she said firmly, marching back into her room and throwing hasty glances over her shoulder to make sure he didn’t try to escape.
He did try to escape, but before he could close the door, Asuka bolted out of her room and pitched a packet of instant ramen over his threshold with impressive athleticism. “That ramen had better be gone the next time I see you,” he heard her shout after him. “And I don’t mean gone as in decomposing in the trash; I mean gone as in decomposing in your stomach.”
Shinji downed the almonds the same way he downed his meds (well, aside from the quantity — although he couldn’t say he hadn’t considered rectifying that from time to time — and the chewing), popping them several at a time into his mouth and quickly swallowing them with a gulp of water. The ramen was left untouched on the counter, though it was, as per Asuka’s request, spared from the trash bin to which Shinji relegated the almond tin and water bottle he’d emptied in five minutes. I really ought to take the trash out today, he found himself thinking for the third or so day in a row, shortly before he collapsed into his desk chair to relax after surviving the threat of confrontation. Unfortunately, it wasn’t much of a respite, because a mere few seconds later, all his vertebrae tensed right back up so that he could have a spine to face the invisible entity that was currently very visibly opening and closing the silverware drawer over and over. In the matrix of his mind, “seeing is believing” quickly overrode “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and without further impediment, his consciousness accessed the protocol that Shinji would never admit he’d actually found on the internet.
“Look,” he announced. The tracks of the silverware drawer gave one last scrape of exertion as their tormentor paused with it halfway open. “I know you’re here, and so now I’m officially acknowledging you. If you want to stay here, that’s fine, just don’t be a pervert about it.”
And that’s when Kaworu had materialized before him in full technicolor corporeal form, bearing felicitations and confetti as the Ode to Joy began to blast from Shinji’s portable speaker, and that was how we found our hero passed out on the floor.
~
“Congratulations!” Kaworu whispered this time from his perch on the counter, and he still somehow managed to convey his previous enthusiasm through a muted golf clap. “You caught me!” He fished out a few stray pieces of confetti that had been stuck to the lining of his pocket and sprinkled them over where Shinji was lying.
“Oh my god.”
“My name’s Kaworu. What do you want to wish for?”
Shinji’s awe-with-sharp-overtones-of-disgust expression hadn’t changed since he’d come to. “I’m… not really sure what you mean.”
“I’m a house spirit! You caught me!” Kaworu repeated, beaming. “Now I have to grant you a wish in exchange for my freedom.”
His face fell when Shinji’s only response was to flop back onto the floor and stare disinterestedly at the ceiling while he asked, “What if I wish for you to go away and stop bothering me?”
“I mean… you could,” said Kaworu. “But I leave and move on to the next person after I grant the wish anyway, so you might as well get something else out of it.” He offered another smile. “If it makes you feel better, I currently have, to the best of my knowledge, 100% customer satisfaction.”
“Good for you.”
Kaworu swung his legs restlessly while he waited for Shinji to ask him for his backstory and/or mission statement, and when he received no such prompt, he launched into it himself. “It’s my life’s work to make people happy, see. Because I have this ability to grant wishes, I figured I might as well use it for good. Oh, I should probably tell you in advance: I can only grant lower-caliber wishes; like, I couldn’t give you a million dollars, but I could probably give you… say, ten thousand? Anyway, I’ve been going around and observing different people, and when I think I’ve found someone who deserves a wish, I make sure they catch me so that I can give it to them, and this time it’s you!”
“Oh,” Shinji said foggily, nodding and still not making eye contact. “Any rules besides no wishing for more wishes, then?”
“You’re taking this very well. And yes, only that I can’t mess with anyone’s free will.”
“All right, then,” Shinji said evenly, and the room once again fell into a thick silence.
Kaworu filled up the subsequent dead air with a bit more leg swinging, but as the art of leg-swinging was not where his true passion lay, he quickly resumed his attempts to stoke the conversation into something productive. “You don’t have to know it now,” he said. “If you need time to think about it, I’ll just hang around here in the meantime and look after the place, and when you’ve decided on your wish, we can go from there.”
“Cool.”
Kaworu resisted the urge to begin opening and closing the drawer again to feel like he was accomplishing something. “Right, well… I’ll see you in the morning, then, I suppose.”
Shinji woke up the next morning to Kaworu gently nudging his shoulder.
“Shinji,” he said, “you have class in an hour. You should get up.”
“Ugh, Kaworu, it’s fine; you don’t need to wake me up. I have an alarm set for it.”
“Yes,” Kaworu said, “but it’s set to seven minutes before your class starts.”
“ ‘Cause it takes six minutes to walk there,” Shinji grunted, pulling the covers up over his head.
“Shinji,” Kaworu said sternly. He nudged Shinji’s shoulder a bit more forcefully. “Shinji.” Nudging quickly escalated to shaking. “Shinji. Shinji. Shinji.”
“God, fine, I’m up,” Shinji said, petulantly kicking his foot out at Kaworu before the rest of him emerged.
Kaworu waited in one of the empty chairs for further instruction while Shinji shuffled his way through an oft-neglected morning routine in the bathroom.
“Wish I had some coffee right about now,” Kaworu overheard him mumble, and he cast his gaze around nervously before he cautiously raised his voice to ask, “Is that what you want to wish for, then?”
“What?” Shinji poked his head out of the bathroom to peer at him. “No, um, look Kaworu, when I figure out what my wish is, I’ll make it really clear.”
“Right. Okay.” He managed to sit quietly up until the moment Shinji was about to depart, when he broke down and asked, “So what should I do while you’re gone?”
Shinji gave a small, minimal-effort shrug. “I dunno. It really doesn’t matter to me.” Upon further observation, he noticed that Kaworu kept looking almost guiltily at the keyboard in the corner of the room like a child stealing wistful glances at the toy he’s trying to ask for.
“You can use the keyboard if you want; it’s not like it’s super expensive or anything.”
Kaworu smiled bashfully, looking down at his hands as one thumbnail scratched at the other out of nerves. “I’ve always wanted to learn about music,” he said. “When I started staying here I kept hoping I’d hear you play, but…” He trailed off, and neither of them acknowledged the dust that had graced the keys in Shinji’s absence for the better part of a year.
“Well, knock yourself out,” Shinji said hurriedly, ducking through the barely Shinji-sized gap he’d made in the door. “Oh, and you can look at the sheet music books there too. They’re not secret,” he added before he shut it.
On the seventh morning of Kaworu’s official stay, and the fifth morning of “Shinji. Shinji, it’s time to get up. Shinji. Shinji. Shinji. Shinji. Shinji,” the popularly demanded Shinji found himself with his backpack awkwardly slung over one shoulder, staring at a plain white disc in a bargain-bin clear case that had “home movie” written all over it implicitly and “music school audition tape” written on it explicitly.
“Is it okay if I watch this?” Kaworu asked. He must have found it rooting around in Shinji’s sheet music bag.
“Um,” Shinji said. He fiddled with the zipper of his backpack, then properly heaved it onto his other shoulder to alleviate the strain on his arm. Unfortunately, this meant he had to look Kaworu in the eye now. “… Yeah. Just don’t watch it when I’m around, though.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t like being reminded about how good I used to be,” was the response Kaworu received before the door shut a little more forcefully than it had the past two days.
Several hours later, as Shinji was rummaging in his pocket for his house key, he suddenly stopped and pressed his ear against the door to better hear the curious melody creeping out from the sill. When he did eventually come inside, he saw Kaworu sitting at the keyboard, watching an introductory piano lesson on the phone he held in his left hand (“Where did you get a phone?” “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies, Shinji.”) and clumsily mimicking the movements of the instructor’s very photogenic hands with his right. Presently, he was trying to decode the mysterious patterns that formed “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” giving little “ugh”s of frustration when he struck a sour note and pulling his hand away from the offending key like it had bitten him.
“What’s up, Kaworu?”
“Shinji!” Kaworu turned around eagerly to greet him. “I watched your video! Actually, I watched it four times. It was amazing; you’ve inspired me to finally start learning.” He laughed in self-deprecation, waving around his phone. “It’s about as hard as I thought it would be. So many notes to keep track of. It’d probably take me, like, fifty years to get anywhere near as good as you.”
“Oh, uh, thanks,” Shinji said uncomfortably. Kaworu noticed. “But actually, you could probably do it in ten. Well, and to get to where I’m at now, you could probably do it in… like… I dunno, five; I’ve forgotten a lot.”
“You should give yourself more credit,” Kaworu said. Then he paused, set down his phone, and gazed at Shinji intently. “But if you wanted to get back to where you were… I could probably do that for you. I could probably do a little bit more and set you ahead a few years. Do you have an opinion either way?”
Shinji looked at Kaworu sitting in his chair with his audition DVD case open on the left keyboard speaker and a previously unused notebook sitting on the floor at Kaworu’s feet that was turned to a page he’d titled, “Notes on Proper Posture and Hand Position.” He did have an opinion, but he tried to package it in something nice and obfuscating for delivery (he was going for the conversational equivalent of a series of ever smaller nesting boxes, all covered in floral patterned wrapping paper). “I’m still thinking,” he said. “Could you give me more time? It’s just that I want it to be something really good. Also, I think I still have the musical note flashcards I used for sight-reading around here somewhere; I could help you learn if you wanted.”
Shinji smiled when Kaworu did. “Of course, Shinji.”
“Have you decided on a wish yet?” Kaworu asked him a month later when they were perusing the spectrum of available pasta shapes in the grocery store.
“Sorry?”
“The wish. Have you thought about it at all?”
Shinji looked into the box of linguine he was holding like it was a heretofore uncatalogued divining instrument. “… I still haven’t decided,” he said, then, after a few more seconds, he ventured an anxious, “Why? Have you been waiting on me?”
“Oh no, nothing like that,” Kaworu reassured him. “I thought I’d just check in to make sure you weren’t afraid of asking. I thought maybe you thought you’d be inconveniencing me or something. But there’s no pressure.” He quickly smoothed things over by taking the box of linguine and cheerily throwing it in his basket so that he could saunter over to the baking aisle.
“I’ve been seeing you out and about a lot more often,” Asuka said when she’d run into Shinji in the hallway for the second time that day, sending small clumps of snow spilling off Shinji’s shoulders onto the hallway carpet.
“Oh… yeah,” Shinji replied absentmindedly, and he did a poor job of hiding his smile behind the new sheet music he’d just bought. “There’s a new music store a few blocks away; they’ve got a lot of really good stuff.”
“Uh-huh. And you’re sure it’s got nothing to do with the guy who moved in with you a while back?”
“Um,” was all Shinji had to say, and he tucked his face even further down behind his Bach inventions.
“Look, I don’t blame you. If I had someone cute move in with me, I wouldn’t spend all day sitting around in my underwear watching Netflix with a tub of ice cream on my stomach, either.” Then she turned her head to yell, “BUT INSTEAD I JUST GOT MARI.”
From somewhere inside their apartment, Mari shouted back that Asuka could go do something with herself that sounded very uncomfortable indeed, and Shinji had to admire her originality; he’d never considered such a use for sandpaper before. Must be why Mari’s an engineer, he thought.
After he’d excused himself and locked the door back up, he tossed his new sheet music, already wrinkling in a few spots from the snow, onto his desk. In the corner, Kaworu was walking his fingers up and down the keyboard in C natural, harmonic, and melodic minor, and sitting open in his lap was his notebook, turned to a page containing helpful tips Shinji had given him on the top half and a smattering of encouraging messages and compliments on the bottom.
Every once in a while, there’d be a day when all the promises in the world to listen to Shinji’s spiels on Schumann (Robert or Clara) over pasta with garlic-white wine-butter sauce still couldn’t get Shinji out of bed. On these days, Kaworu would bend down, put his forehead to the back of Shinji’s head (Shinji was a stomach sleeper) and ask, “Scale of one to ten?”
“Four.”
“Taken your meds?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
After these short dialogues, Kaworu would usually make the short trip to Asuka’s to spend some time socializing with her and Mari, but not before reassuring Shinji that he’d be right across the hall if he needed him. He still made the pasta when he got back.
Six months later, Shinji was trying to explain to Kaworu that, “See, the number of times it takes you to blow out the candles is the number of years it’ll take for your wish to come true, so don’t put the candles too far apart.”
Kaworu was confused. “Mari told me that in her family, the number of times it takes you to blow out the candles is the number of boyfriends you’ll have.”
“Well, I don’t want that to be a really big number, either, so keep them close together.”
Kaworu wriggled one of the outlying candles out of its previous home and frowned at the unattractive divot it left in the frosting where the cake was now visible. As he plopped it back in closer to its waxy kith, he said, “You know, even if it did take too many tries to blow out your candles — er, you might have forgotten because I was trying not to bring it up — but anyway, if it was too many years to wait for your wish to come true, I would be able to expedite that process for you.”
Shinji looked up at him, a hint of distress on his face. “Is that a suggestion?”
“No,” said Kaworu, pulling a match from the box. “I’m just saying you could. If you wanted to.”
“Well, I don’t think I want to just yet. And I think you’re supposed to keep it a secret anyway, otherwise it won’t come true at all.”
Kaworu smiled at him right before he turned out the kitchen light. Through the glow of the candles illuminating his face, he was barely able to make out the shape of Kaworu’s mouth as he said, “Then I shan’t ask about it again, Shinji.”
Shinji was relying on Kaworu to keep that promise, because he was also relying on this wish to get Kaworu to stay. He extinguished all the candles on his first try.
“Make a wish,” Kaworu whispered playfully, and then he pulled Shinji forward into a kiss.
“Drunk Romantic Dramedy Netflix Roulette” had seemed like a much better idea at the beginning of the evening. Now, the movie had been paused for nearly fifteen minutes while Asuka and Shinji cried on the floor together about every tragic development in the last two films they’d watched, scene by scene.
“Why,” Asuka was sobbing at the time Kaworu walked in, “is it always leukemia anyway? Why is it never, like, lupus?”
“I… take it that Drunk Romantic Dramedy Netflix Roulette was a… success?” Kaworu hazarded.
“Kaworu,” Shinji bawled, planting his wet face right into Kaworu’s shirt. “Kaworu, I’ve done something horrible.”
“I suppose that as long as it’s not murder, I can forgive you,” Kaworu said while he patted Shinji’s head. Off in the background, they could hear Mari’s exclamation of disgust as Asuka wiped her nose on one of Mari’s shirts.
“I did something horrible to you.”
“Of course you did,” Kaworu said in the same indulging tone one directs toward the high school artist who insists that no, my painting of the Seven Deadly Sins as sexy ladies isn’t like those other paintings of the Seven Deadly Sins as sexy ladies.
“No, listen,” Shinji insisted with a little shove of his head against Kaworu’s chest. “The whole time I’ve been saying I was still thinking of a wish… well, okay, not the whole time but like… a lot of the time, pretty much everything except the beginning… The whole time that I kept saying I was thinking of a wish, I wasn’t actually thinking of a wish.”
“Yeah?”
“Because you said the wish couldn’t affect anyone’s free will, but I wanted to wish for you to stay here with me, so I just made all of that up since it was the only way you’d stay, and this whole time I’ve actually been —” Shinji stopped to locate a tissue box so he could blow his nose, “— keeping you, and that sounds really, really gross, but I told you it was something horrible and now you know, so I’ll wish for something really stupid if you want just so you can leave, like, I’ll wish for a nose hair trimmer or something because I’ll probably need it when you’re not around to tell me if I look decent —”
Apparently, Shinji was quite the raconteur when drunk, and one of those avant-garde, not-beholden-to-the-bounds-of-narrative-structure raconteurs, too, which Kaworu found sort of zen-like to listen to, in a way. He listened to the entire story, all the way up until Shinji wore himself out and passed out on their couch in the middle of talking about how he used to count the underwear in his drawer.
“You could still wish for it,” Kaworu said quietly the next day when Shinji was back in his right mind. “Because the rule is that you can’t impose on someone’s free will. But… if I wanted to stay, then that would be all right. Hypothetically.” He put his chin on Shinji’s shoulder. “I’d even let you seal it with a kiss if you wanted.”
Kaworu laughed at Shinji’s crestfallen expression when nothing dramatic happened after he’d officially made his wish — in fact, nothing had happened at all, even though they’d sealed it several times over — but he assured Shinji that it had been granted.