Welcome to the Real World
a Revolutionary Girl Utena fic by sarahtheboring
Written with rampant speed and very little sense for NaNoWriMo 2004, and therefore not the peak of anything. In some ways it's absolutely terrible, but it has its moments. Excerpted, with notes about the skipped parts. Also, half the names in this story were made up out of thin air: Nemuro doesn't have a canon second name, and married Tokiko doesn't have a family name. And "metaphysics" is a terrible name for whatever it is that Nemuro does, but I couldn't think of anything decent. Now, enjoy the story. Thank you.
One. Graduation
Nemuro Souji returned the telephone receiver to its cradle, silencing the dial tone. The lines of the receiver and his hand holding it were blurred, and habitually he motioned to push his glasses up, but they were missing. He knew that. Old habits die hard.
He turned slowly from the phone booth, toward the street. He knew this street, though it had been a long time since he’d been here. He could have seen the hill where the Academy stood, and the tower at its peak, if he turned around. But he did not turn around. To see it now, he thought, might drive him mad. If indeed he wasn’t mad already. In that tower, so rumor had it, lived the man – was he a man? – on the other end of the telephone line. To see the tower on the hill now would be to accept that the call, and all that had come before it, were real, and at the moment Nemuro allowed himself the indulgence of not thinking about that.
His mind swirled gray. Home, then. If home was still there. There was nowhere else to go, after all. He started to walk down the sidewalk, slowly and steadily. What if his house had been sold, or razed? Perhaps if the Chidas still lived nearby; he might visit them. But he doubted they did. Mamiya was dead. So the voice on the telephone had told him. Which only made sense; there was no way the boy could have lived much longer, no matter what he’d thought had happened. And Tokiko was probably married. Nemuro wondered if she’d married the Chairman, after what he’d seen in the solarium that day. That day long ago, he reminded himself. Such an odd thing to have to remember. Yesterday was long ago.
Best not to think about Tokiko and the Chairman. He would probably never know, after all.
He went over the telephone conversation again in his mind. Mamiya was dead. Time had passed. A very long time had passed. Years, decades. He didn’t know how long. But he had spent years out of time, not aging. As someone else. And now he was back, himself again, and walking from the Academy that had been his realm and prison. Walking home.
Staring at himself would be even more madness, and difficult at best, without his glasses, but he felt different. No taller, unfortunately. Had he aged all at once or would he have to catch up from where he began? His other self – his mind skipped around the name – his other self, the Other, had been eighteen years old, even younger than he, Nemuro, had been when all of this began. He had been twenty-five then. Was he now eighteen, twenty-five, forty, sixty? His flickering, blurred reflection in passing car windows gave him little clue. He would find out at home, he supposed.
It was madness. None of it made sense.
It was a warm afternoon, and walking was pleasant enough. It wasn’t far. He would be home in another five minutes, if the roads were good – of course the roads were good. It wasn’t winter anymore.
He looked forward to finding his spare pair of glasses. His regular pair had probably broken when they hit the ground. And at any rate, they were back inside the walls of the Academy, where he didn’t even want to look, let alone return.
And that was years ago. Right. That, too.
It felt so close, so vivid. The smell of smoke, Tokiko’s voice, rising and hysterical, ragged around the edges. Shouting at him. And her hand raised to strike him, the thunderclap of time ending.
Nemuro blinked back to the present. Not too much further now. He hoped that home was still there.
There was a fairy tale in Europe, he thought, about a man who fell asleep for years, decades, and woke to find himself impossibly old and all of his friends dead. Nemuro didn’t remember what had happened after that. Fairy tales were not his forte.
Coming at last to the street where he lived – had lived, years ago – he turned a corner and prayed that the house was still there, and belonged to him. If not, he had nowhere else to go – his parents had been dead for years, even in the time he remembered, and he had few acquaintances other than Tokiko, who was probably married and gone. And he would rather be back on the street than return to the Academy.
He came to his own front door. The house and its front walk looked well tended, which was paradoxically worrying. Perhaps someone lived here now.
The front door was open when he tried the doorknob. Hesitating, wondering if he should knock, he slowly pushed the door open.
“Hello?”
The house was silent. He stepped into the entryway.
“Is anyone home?”
No answer. He closed the door, took off his shoes and looked around the hallway. On the hall table, where he usually – used to – stack the mail, there was a small white rectangle. An envelope. He picked it up; it was addressed to his name, without an address. He broke the wax seal on the back, opened it and pulled out the paper inside. A small object fell into his hand, and he knew it by touch in an instant, having used it every day for years. The key to the front door of this house.
The paper was a small notecard with a delicate pattern around the edges, just large enough for a few lines of handwriting. He squinted at them now, the key in his other hand, standing in the hallway of the house that had once been his.
A graduation present, Professor. It seemed only fair, after all, after your long service.
The End of the World
He set the paper down on the table, squinted at the seal on the back of the envelope, ran his fingers over it. Perhaps it was a rose seal. Perhaps. But there was time to think about that later.
Nemuro set the envelope and the key down as well, turned to lock the door, and then turned back toward the hallway. Slowly, as if at any instant the house might pop like a soap bubble, he made his way into the house and up the stairs to the second floor.
He had thought about the spare glasses, but now he thought his first priority was getting rid of this uniform. It did not belong to him. He had woken up – if that was the right word for it – he had come back to consciousness wearing it, but it did not belong to him; it belonged to the Other, and he did not want it.
There was a full-length mirror on the back of the closet door, which he ignored. The uniform jacket was dark blue and the trousers white; he knew that much from walking in it that far. He knew that much from living in it, or others like it, for the last who knew how many years. But, he thought again, it did not belong to him. It was of a time that was not time, and which was now over.
He undressed slowly, folding the pieces of the uniform, considering whether to throw it away or burn it. But finally he packed it away in the closet. No need for dramatics, after all. He dressed again in his own clothes, then found, finally, the spare pair of glasses in a drawer.
The room sharpened around him. He gave in to the impulse to stare at his own hands. Not sixty, then. He was older, but not ancient. The time that had passed hadn’t been centuries. He angled the mirror to catch his face, and stared for a moment, but he knew what he would find, wouldn’t he?
He had passed out of time at twenty-five. He now appeared to be a man of forty, perhaps fifty. Older than his father had been when he died.
Madness. But he was becoming used to that.
Dressed and clearly sighted again, his business in this room settled, Nemuro went back downstairs. Looked through the rooms to find them all in good repair and clean. This was his gift, then. From End of the World, the person or persons who had spoken to him on the telephone, had perhaps orchestrated everything, from the very beginning. Apparently End of the World took good care of his tools. His, or her, or their.
He wondered if End of the World might be God after all, or Fate, at least within the walls of the Academy. He wondered if End of the World’s power extended beyond those walls. He was released from his or her or their service; that much was clear from the telephone call. Well, there was all the time in the world to wonder about that, wasn’t there. In the meantime, Nemuro put some water on for tea.
He was just straining the water into the first cup when the doorbell rang.
Nemuro looked up, puzzled. Who could that be? Did anyone know he’d returned? How could they? The doorbell rang again. He straightened, set the teakettle down and walked to the front door. He swung it open to find a woman standing on his doorstep. She was well-dressed and attractive, for a woman her age – his age, he thought, at least in some corner concerned with such trifling matters as correcting his own chronology.
His mind was preoccupied, apart from that corner, with something more important. Even behind the stylish sunglasses he recognized her. After however much time had passed, he recognized her. He would have recognized her at any time and in any place; her face, even aged, was more familiar to him than any other woman’s ever had been.
Tokiko stood on his doorstep. At this moment, in this place. An impossibility.
She looked at him critically, as if waiting for some reaction. “It’s you,” she said at last. He could not answer. “Do you recognize me?”
“Of course I recognize you. How could I not -” Caught off guard, he continued aloud, unselfconsciously. “Your hair is long, though. I just saw you; it was short just now. When I fought you in the arena.” Time separated, swirled. “No... no, I never fought you. You don’t swordfight. It was Tenjou Utena.”
Tokiko frowned quizzically. “Who is Tenjou Utena?”
Two. Old Friends
He invited her in for tea, not knowing what else he could do. Tokiko stared at him, evidently just as stunned to find him at home as he had been to find her on his doorstep, but moved like a sleepwalker to come in, take off her shoes and hat and set her handbag by the door. He watched her, but he would have done that on an ordinary day. She too had aged, and aged well, the young woman he knew having become a handsome woman in her middle forties overnight. - Not overnight. Over the years. But she was still beautiful, and gracefully dressed in a dark tailored dress, and he liked her hair even more now than he had then. It had grown long – when he knew her it had been short, cropped around her face - and she wore it loose down her back, a little like the young duelist’s, Utena’s, but darker. And if there was a certain new deliberation in her movements, a certain wariness, it might have been his imagination.
Shaking off his train of thought, Nemuro led her into the main room and asked her to have a seat on the sofa. She did so, and he loved the way she sat, her feet turned a little to the side. God, had nothing changed? He excused himself and returned to the kitchen to get another teacup, leaving his own untouched on the table. He remembered her angry voice, her words cutting into him like knives. He remembered the humiliating sting across his cheek that had, perhaps, been the last thing he knew before waking to the sound of the telephone ringing. He remembered the solarium, stopping dead in his tracks at the door as he saw her and the Chairman together. He remembered the cold fury in his heart. But he still felt drawn to her. Now, perhaps, more than then, mixed with these things. Mellowed, ripened, aged like wine with a tang of bitterness and winter frost. He missed her. He hadn’t realized how much he missed her until now, and for a moment he thought he couldn’t face going back into the living room with a pot of tea and making conversation. It had been too long and the rift between them too great.
He had missed her all along; perhaps missing her was the only thing left of him, when the Other took over. The Other resented her and he missed her, and the two had coiled around one another until he could hardly tell them apart. But now the Other was gone, dead, possibly, and he was left with missing her, twined around the resentment like a climbing rose on a rotting trellis.
The resentment was still there, in some form. The two were almost inextricable now. Because the hell of it, in the beginning, hadn’t been that he resented her. The hell of it had been that he resented her and still wanted her. Loved her. The hell of it had been that he couldn’t stop. Even though she had betrayed him, and with a man he couldn’t stand. It hadn’t killed what he felt for her. It should have; he always thought it should have. But it didn’t. It changed everything, and it changed nothing. It defied logic.
He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the two of them, seeing the two of them, Tokiko with her head turned away from him, her feet turned a little to the side, so pretty, as always. Sitting in the Chairman’s lap. That man he couldn’t stand. Nemuro’s heart had stopped, cracked. Frozen. He’d never known anything like this before. He had felt grief when his parents died, of course, but he knew that would happen someday; everyone dies. This was something else. This was the death of something that had barely lived. Tokiko had made him, had pulled him from himself like a gardener coaxing a dormant plant into flower. He had lived for her, and her brother, reaching slowly toward them, toward their light. But then he came across the solarium, and Tokiko’s pretty face turned away from him, and her arms around that man he couldn’t stand. Tokiko did not love him. Mamiya her brother would die someday; his body was failing and they could all see it, and never spoke of it. Tokiko did not love him and Mamiya was going to die and everything was wrong. But they had brought him out into the light, pulled him out of shape; he couldn’t go back to the way he had been, before they had come. Back into the cold.
So it cracked. Everything cracked and the world filled with darkness. And he still loved her. And she shouted at him, and slapped him, like a wayward child, and he still loved her, even as her anger and her hatred made him die inside.
That was the hell of it.
And in the hall of mirrors in his head the Other plotted revenge, plotted the day that he would show her that he was too good to love her. That he was too good to be hurt by her anymore, too smart, too strong. She couldn’t hurt him anymore. The Other was immune, cold and powerful, too smart and cynical to love her. He wanted her too, but he pushed that away. He left loving her to Nemuro. Nemuro was weak. Nemuro could be hurt.
“Professor Nemuro?”
Nemuro blinked. The kitchen of his old house waited around him, and Tokiko called from the next room. “Just a moment,” he answered, and gathered another saucer and teacup and the teapot full of hot water.
“Thank you,” she said, as he set out the china and poured her tea.
“Souji, please,” he said quietly.
“I’m sorry?”
“You called me Professor. I’d rather you called me Souji.”
She picked up her teacup, not looking at him, a strange sad smile at the corner of her lips. “Like old friends, right?”
Old friends. He liked the sound of that very much. That was exactly what he wanted them to be. He hesitated before answering. “Yes.”
Tokiko sipped her tea. “You were always so formal,” she remarked. “I might have called you by your name back then, but I always thought somehow that you wouldn’t like it.”
I would like it, he thought. In my mind that’s what you called me. But I couldn’t tell you why. I can’t tell you now. I don’t know how. I don’t speak that language. “It doesn’t matter now,” he said.
“I suppose it doesn’t.”
For a moment they sipped their tea in silence together, Tokiko on the sofa and Nemuro himself on the chair on the other side of the little table between them. It was almost friendly.
Tokiko spoke first. “I guess it wouldn’t be wise to ask you what you’ve been doing all this time.”
“I don’t know that I could explain it, even if I tried.” He paused. “How long has it been?”
She looked up at him, startled. Realizing, perhaps, that it was not a rhetorical question. “Twenty-three years.”
“I see.”
She took another sip of tea, watched the teacup in her hands as she spoke again. “I’ve been married for twenty years. My husband and I live on the other side of the city. My daughter is eighteen, and just started university.”
Her husband. He wondered if she had married the Chairman. And her daughter was older than he was? But how – Nemuro snapped back to the present. Not older; that was the Other who was eighteen. “And Mamiya? The End of – I mean, I’d heard that Mamiya...”
“Mamiya passed away twenty-two years ago,” Tokiko replied evenly. “Only about six months after you... disappeared.”
So it was true what the voice on the telephone had said. He’d had no reason to doubt it; Mamiya had been ill for many years, after all. Tokiko’s brother had known himself that he didn’t have much longer to live. But somehow it hadn’t been real until Tokiko said it, until he heard it in her voice.
But he still wondered. He wondered if she had married the Chairman. It probably wasn’t a wise question to ask. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it. “Your husband. Is he...”
“My husband is a good man,” Tokiko said, cutting him off. “He has always provided well for our daughter and I.”
It wasn’t the answer he wanted, although it was good to hear, in a way. “And the Chairman...?”
Tokiko blinked. “Mr. Ohtori? What about him? I talked to him yesterday. He’s the same as he always was. Too much the same, actually. The man doesn’t age. It’s uncanny.”
It still wasn’t what he wanted. She didn’t understand. “I saw you,” he said finally.
“Yesterday, in the corridor? I know. I passed you on the way to Mr. Ohtori’s observatory. You didn’t recognize me, though. I asked Mr. Ohtori about you, but -”
“No. Not then.” That had been the Other, yesterday; why the Other didn’t recognize her he could only guess. But he had begun saying it now, and he had to finish. “I saw you together. In the solarium. Years ago. You and the Chairman.”
Tokiko stared, her eyes wide. Her hands slowly set the teacup and saucer on the table; he heard them clatter for an instant. “Oh, Souji.” Her voice was hushed. “I’m so sorry.”
He sat back, embarrassed now by his outburst. Swallowed some tea a little too hard. Held the teacup and saucer to have something to hold on to. “There’s no need to be. You were both adults, after all, and perfectly free to conduct yourselves however you like -”
“Stop,” she said softly. He was quiet, watching her. “I’m sorry you had to see that. You weren’t supposed to. It had nothing to do with you.” She sighed. “There’s something about Mr. Ohtori that draws people. Women, always, but I think it’s some magnetism about him that’s not even about that. All people. It’s a gift he has. I don’t think he always uses it for the right reasons. But something about him just draws you in and makes you feel special. Chosen.” She was looking down at her hands, clasped together in her lap, tightening. “I can’t... I can’t really justify myself. He showed interest in me. It had been a long time since anyone had.” Nemuro swallowed. Tokiko’s voice wavered. “And when he notices you, you feel lit up, you feel like the most desirable woman in the world. And I needed that then. I needed to be desirable. I needed to be young. I needed to be more than an employee and a caretaker for once.”
Tears were beginning to fill her eyes. Nemuro’s throat tightened. He looked away. To him she had been more than those things, and desirable, and admirable, but apparently to her that didn’t count. “I’m sorry.” It was ridiculous to apologize to her; this had nothing to do with him. But he didn’t want to see her cry anymore. He didn’t want to see her hurt. Even though some small part of him was glad to see it. “It’s done now,” he said, not looking. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” His own voice failed. He didn’t know how to comfort her. “Please don’t cry. It’s over now.”
“Is it?” He looked up, and the tears had spilled down her cheeks. She was still beautiful when she cried. Nemuro looked away again.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I don’t want you to be hurt.” I want you to hurt, he thought. I want you to be sorry. But more than that I want it to stop.
“Hurt me if you want to!” she snapped. “If it’s what you really want! Are you angry with me? What?”
“I was,” he said. “At one time hurting you was all I could think about. Because of what you did to me.”
“Did to you? What did I do?”
“With the Chairman,” he said weakly. He was out of his depth now, speaking that language he never fully understood. He set the teacup down on the table before he could drop it. His hands felt weak.
“You...” Her half-finished sentence hung in the air. Nemuro bent forward, leaned his forehead on his folded hands. Contemplation. Covering for the attack. It ripped my world apart, he thought. It killed me, what you did. You may as well kill me again. “You were interested in me? Souji?”
He didn’t answer at first. Interested in her. The words seemed so flimsy. Inadequate to the sheer logic-bending force of what he wanted.
“I loved you,” he said at last, not looking up. “I loved both of you. You and Mamiya. I... I wanted to be part of you.” It hadn’t come out right. Part of your family. Part of whatever it was that you had.
He heard her hitching breath and looked up; another sob escaped her, and his heart ached. She was still so open that it hurt to watch her. “You were,” she said, her voice strange. “Or you would have been. You were going to be. Mamiya loved you. I...” She wiped her tears with her hands; he felt stupid now for leaving her handbag by the door, but didn’t want to leave her to retrieve it. He had to listen. “I didn’t know,” she said. “You never said anything.”
“I didn’t know what to say.”
“I’m sorry, Souji.” It was half voice, half desperation.
“Please don’t.”
“I was a little afraid of you. Intimidated by you. You were so strange. So distant. As if you lived on another plane of reality than the rest of us, wherever your ideas came from. I wondered sometimes if there might be something there, but then I thought I was just a silly girl who had been alone too long and let herself get carried away.” She burst out in a strange little laugh. “You were so brilliant. Above everyone else. I thought I was imagining things.”
He wanted to reach out to her, to make her stop crying, to make her pain stop. But that was something he didn’t know how to do, had never done, would never do. His instinct was to stay apart, to draw back, and the conflicting needs pulled him to a standstill.
The Other wouldn’t do this. The Other was bolder than he was. He remembered the Other’s clever hands and his dark, cynical voice, how he would reach out to snatch the hand of his lover as he passed by, murmuring some smooth entreaty, and touch him whenever he wanted. The lover he called – Nemuro flinched from that. It seemed like blasphemy now. But the Other was not afraid of these things.
Nemuro rose from his seat and sank down next to her. And it was done before he had time to think. Her arms were around him. Her face was buried in his shoulder. She was still crying, holding onto him. He fought the panic that clawed into his throat. She couldn’t know how this felt to him, what this was doing to him, how terrified he was. She was too upset to notice. And her soft whimpering breath, and her hands on his back, clutching his shirt, brought up a rising hot tide to choke him. He fought it and put his arms around her, because he thought he should. And then it felt good, to have her in his arms, after all this time, after all his dreaming. He held on to her tighter, steadied her against the storm that rocked her.
“We could have been so happy,” she said, through her tears. “You and I and Mamiya. If you had stayed. If you had told me. But you disappeared.” A harder note had crept into her voice, a note of desperation, of loss. “Mamiya kept asking me where you had gone. I didn’t know what I could tell him. What could I tell him? The only other adult he trusted left us. I couldn’t tell him that. I had to tell him you were dead. I had to tell him you were dead, that his only friend left in the world was dead.” Her fingers were clawed now, her nails against his back, and he was both frightened and attracted by her fierceness, his pulse quickening. Her anger coiled like a snake against his chest. “You could have stayed with us. At least until he was gone. He didn’t have much longer. It would have made him happy.”
“I’m sorry,” Nemuro said, his voice not much more than a whisper. For a moment he thought he might cry as well, thinking of Mamiya again, thinking of Mamiya alone, but it passed. The urge to cry passed. The image did not. It would never go away.
Tokiko shook her head, against his shoulder, and her hands were gentle again. The tension had gone out of her like an electrical charge, and she leaned against him, soft and unthreatening and unafraid. “I should have said something, too,” she admitted. “I should have known. I know how you are. I should have known you wouldn’t go about it like any other man.”
Nemuro felt cold. Tokiko must have felt his arms stiffen; she looked up at him, then put her head back on his shoulder. “I didn’t mean it in a bad way.” Her hand was on the back of his neck, her fingers stroking his hair. He was miserable and lost and everything had gone so far out of control and he wanted to pull her so tight against him that he couldn’t breathe. “You’re unique,” she was saying, her voice so soft and warm, like the woman he had once known. “You’re blessed. A genius.”
“I am like any other man,” he managed to say, weakly, defensively, and knew it was a lie. Was it still? Maybe it wasn’t a lie anymore.
“I don’t want you to be like any other man.”
“Toki...” And she stopped him with her lips, and everything was lost. He had pulled her tighter against him and her body was warm and her mouth was on his, and her hand was on the back of his head, pulling him in closer. This moment overlapped with every time he had dreamed of this, every time over all the empty years, and it was so right and so wrong and twenty years too late. It changed nothing and it solved nothing and it was all he had ever wanted, except that it wasn’t. But he didn’t stop.
She was married. He reflected on this from some place removed, inside himself, as he kissed her. But she had made an advance on him. She had – she had done this. Why was she doing this? Was she unhappy with her marriage? Was this ungrateful? Should he stop? He didn’t want to stop. He had waited for this so long, so very, very long, and nothing could make him stop. He had wanted this for longer than her husband had even known her. Whoever her husband was. Whoever that man was, who had had all those years with her all to himself, who had lived with her and slept beside her and had a child with her. Who would have her always. But that man didn’t have her now, did he. She had come to him, to Nemuro, and done this, even if he didn’t understand why.
He broke away, feeling the strange heaviness of his breath. The words would not come, for a moment. “You... you’re married.”
“No,” she said, almost petulantly, almost desperately. “Don’t let me remember that. Souji, please. I want to forget that. I want it to be back then. You came to see us and I’ve tucked my brother in for the night, and we’re alone. Please...”
He knew he couldn’t resist anymore. He wanted it to be true now, but more than that, he wanted it to be true then. More than she would ever know. And for now, maybe it was true. Maybe none of it had happened, maybe Mamiya was still alive, all the boys of Nemuro Hall were alive, the Other had never been born. For now, he would make it true. He got to his feet before he could start to reconsider, catching her hand, leading her toward the stairs.
Things were out of control. This was not what should have happened. He should not be climbing up the stairs to his bedroom with her now. This didn’t make sense. But things had been out of control all day, and nothing had made sense since he woke from a dream decades long to hear the pay phone ringing on the street two blocks from Ohtori Academy. He would have this moment, at least, be exactly what he wanted, and escape the headlong hurtling race of time.
He was frightened. This was not something he ever expected to be doing, not only now but ever. The Other hadn’t even done this. Years ago there had been a girl, a student at the Academy, a year younger than he (than the Other, a year younger than his younger self, time formed concentric rings in his history), who had appeared fleeting at the edges of his vision, at first, while he was doing other things. Letters had appeared in his mail, on his doorstep, in a flirtatious feminine hand, scented with perfume, with single flower stems laid across them and lipstick kisses as signatures. Professing fascination, professing admiration, obsession. She had followed him, increasingly boldly, shown up where he would be, and finally came to his office uninvited. Her boldness had caught his interest, had caught the Other’s interest – he had liked her daring spirit, although he saw the edge of madness under it. And he had smiled his slow smile and spoken to her, and she had followed him ever more obsessively, until something in her – perhaps that she was a woman at all, perhaps because she was bold – reminded the Other of Tokiko, and he began speaking to her about Tokiko, and then began speaking to her as if she were Tokiko. And he saw Tokiko where she stood, heard her speak in Tokiko’s voice. She hadn’t understood. He remembered having her pinned against the wall of the elevator, her body so small when it was pressed against him, so powerless. Her hands caught in his, his mouth on hers, triumph at last, overpowered. He called her Tokiko, murmuring his half-taunting words against her mouth as she trembled. She had crumbled, melted from his arms, fallen at his feet, pleaded to go. It was all he needed, really. He let her go. It hadn’t helped; her mind had cracked, and before long she was dead, her body cold in the lily pond. There had been some displeased letters from End of the World, over the next few days. And then Mamiya had come to him. But Mamiya had always been with him. But Mamiya was dead.
His memory fractured, and he was back in his house, at the top of the stairs, at the door to his bedroom. This was not right. It wasn’t what he had intended, when Tokiko had come to his door. It solved nothing. She was married. She would still be married. He could not have what he wanted. But he wanted this, too.
She was kissing him again, unbuttoning his shirt, and for a moment reality shuddered. There was no way it could be real, but it was. Instinct was taking over, the rehearsal that wasn’t rehearsal of years and years of dreaming this, over and over, leading him to unfasten her tailored dress with hands that only shook a little. And to kiss her mouth, to bend his head to kiss the soft skin of her neck. The curve of her bare shoulder was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. Her fingers loosened his belt, and a little moan escaped his throat.
“Already?” she murmured, as if amused, as if teasing him. He pushed her down on the bed and gritted his teeth against another wave of rising heat. She took his glasses off gently, and her body dissolved into soft lines, but he felt everything, felt the warmth of her skin burning against his, and that was enough. He closed his eyes; she smelled like perfume, faintly, like roses. Her hands moved soothingly down his back, and for a moment he almost relaxed, his breath trembling in his throat. She hadn’t slept with the Chairman. He had wondered, but she smelled like roses, and he believed she hadn’t slept with him. She had come to him, only to him, and not to the Chairman.
“Souji...”
He shook off the thoughts and kissed her again, more roughly. Let her see what he could do. Let her forget the Chairman and the man who had had her for all these years. Nothing else was important. This moment was good, the heat of her skin against his was good, the sight (however blurred) of the lace edge of her stocking across her thigh was good. Nothing existed outside that. She was still working to undress him, and he was almost too impatient to stop and let her do it. It was all so bizarre and so raw, so new, and every moment he was reminded that he had never done this before, but she didn’t comment. As if he were any other man. He thought that he should probably say something, confess his love, whisper something to inflame her passion, but nothing would come to him. Even pushed to this extent, so far beyond the limits of everything he knew, his instinct was silence, and he hoped that she would not hate him for it.
Finally her determination had worked around his inattentive distractedness, and nothing was left between them; the rush of embarrassment as she looked at his body was eclipsed when she touched him, and the singing howl of his need drowned out everything else. She was still wearing something, lingerie, dark and lacy, cupping her breasts. The sight of the lace against her pale skin aroused him, and he did not want to fumble with the intricacies of unfastening it and embarrassing himself, either. Some other time. There was a desperate immediacy to making love to her despite that, a thing of rushed urgency, and even though this was his own bed it seemed fittingly illicit.
The sheets of his bed were fresh and neatly folded. He probably wouldn’t have kept house so well if he had lived here all that time. But he soon forgot that as he realized the imminence of what he was about to do, how far this had gone, how it was too late to stop even if he had wanted to.
And then it had started, and he lost himself again. His breath was heavy against her shoulder, and at first he almost regretted this, disturbed and shaken by something he couldn’t define at first, something like doubling, something like memory but not memory. The movements of his body, the slow rhythm, the pulse in his throat, were so familiar that it left a hollow feeling in his stomach, a sick deja vu of something he had never done. Was it instinct? Once again, was the dreaming so fervent that it had worn a path into waking reality? Had he ever dreamed of this, this completely, this concretely, or only in half-finished impressions and naive wishes?
He did remember this. The Other. The Other had never done this with a woman, but he had done this. Nemuro closed his eyes, ground his teeth for a moment. He felt cheated. The Other had beaten him to this by years. Or would Nemuro have gotten this far, if it weren’t for him? Would he have lost Tokiko, and would she have come to him like this? Had everything in his life been for some purpose?
Before Tokiko came into his life he had thought himself not quite human. Wanting to be human. Calling himself human. But fearing that somehow, innately, he was not. He had feared himself to be set apart by a wall of glass and metal, a cold star far out of their orbit. He had read about Sir Isaac Newton, who was said to have never bothered with lovers or friends, and wondered about geniuses and love. Whether being set apart from humanity was a sign of a certain kind of mind.
But Tokiko had come, and melted him down, and recast him into something else. And she was here with him now, and everything else was unimportant.
In his dream he walked along a road under bare trees and a sky smeared with clouds, gray and distant, and the edges of everything blurred like a watercolor painting. A path forked from the road, and he followed it up to the doors of a church, a solitary building surrounded by gravestones and silent fields. The doors swung open without a sound when he pushed them.
In his hand was a small bunch of flowers. He thought they might be black roses. He hadn’t looked. But considering why he was there, they probably were. He could picture the young man lying in state in this church, and approached the closed casket with little but patient calm.
He thought he ought to put the roses in the casket. It was the proper thing to do. If they were roses. He still hadn’t looked. No matter. He put them down, put both hands on the closed lid of the coffin and pushed.
Three. Rooms and Pages
When he woke, Tokiko was gone. It was probably better that way, he thought, lying in the cool white light of early morning. It probably would have been awkward, and her husband would have wondered where she’d been as it was. He wondered if she would be back. He hoped she would, of course, and suspected that she would. But he couldn’t spend all his time worrying about that.
In the early morning light and with a full night’s sleep it seemed clearer, and even more nonsensical at the same time. He had been dropped into this life out of time, without warning and without preparation. He knew nothing about the times or what had happened in the intervening years, when he had spun in spirals of his own mad design. And whatever had happened then, he was here now, at this time, and should probably figure out when it was that he had been dropped. It was time to catch up.
[Nemuro re-acquaints himself with life a little bit.]
With the statement in his satchel and the money in his pocket Nemuro walked through the business district, deciding what to do next. Information was his next priority, as he had decided that morning. He stopped in a bookstore and spent an hour or so finding several books – history, politics, not things he read about often, but this was an unusual situation. Also what little he could find on metaphysics, books that made him ache with memory; he knew some of the names, people whose work he had read or who he had corresponded with by letter, so many years ago. His work was not dead, he thought. It was still being carried on, somewhere. Being around books again had brought welling up a powerful nostalgia for his work, for reading itself, for letting his mind wander in the far reaches of abstraction. He could hardly wait to get home.
Leaving the store, he reflected on the possible foolishness of this. He knew he could have gone to a library instead. But he wanted to be home again, right now, and mull over this strange situation in private.
He bought enough food for the day on the way through the shopping district and walked home with the two packages. He read one of the, to him, less interesting books while cooking and eating lunch – politics, something he had never cared much for. But it was good to know the state of things now. Naturally, little had changed; people were people in any age.
He turned to history next, after lunch, thinking that he probably should have switched the order of the two, but that didn’t matter now; the news weaved together in his mind, year by year. The constant forward flow of time was something that everyone took for granted, each day with its trivial urgencies, most of them forgotten, some standing out like jewels, some like beacons, some like polished blades. He could not remember this time, with the organic compilation of layer after layer of trivial days. But he knew, at least, with the objectivity of a scholar, what had happened in that time.
He felt like himself again, that afternoon, reading in the study as the sunlight slanted in and then past the pages. Fitting together ideas, lost in the architecture of theory and thought. It had been a long time. He had begun to lose this even before the world came apart. Before Tokiko. He hadn’t really cared about the world or even ideas, his usual realm, for a while. He had plodded in circles, yoked to the Chairman’s directives, not caring to explore the project more than what he was directed. She had brought it all back, for a while. He had drunk of her light and warmth and let himself fly for a while, and his work had been spun out in shining lines of diagrams and crystal-clear theories, wheels spinning in wheels. But in the end it had been only a summer’s afternoon, a brief moment of clarity and enthusiasm in the gathering dark. When she betrayed him it swallowed the world. The Other did not care about any of it; the Other did not care about anything.
But he was back now. This was home.
He didn’t feel exactly the same as he had then, he thought, putting aside the book he was reading for a while, to stand and stretch and rest his eyes. Before Tokiko had come he had been dead, bitter, cold. He had never really lived. While she was there, and he lived for the promise of being part of her and what she had – even if he didn’t fully realize that that was what he did – he had been electrified, half drunk, dizzy with possibilities. This was neither state, and not a combination of the two, but something subtly different. He felt neither dead nor on fire, and more deliberate in his thoughts, and less lost.
It was still strange to be here, to pace this study, to walk through the streets again as he had so many years before. The places were familiar, changed in some spots, or refreshed with things he had known and then forgotten. He had picked up his life all at once at the midpoint, like a book set aside half-finished, at once new and oddly familiar.
As evening approached he made himself something to eat again. He wondered if Tokiko would visit today, and hesitated, wondering if he should plan for it. Shaking off this thought, he went on and made only enough for himself. He would not spend his days waiting for her. If she came back, she came back, but living for her moments of attention would drive him into misery. He refused to live that way.
And tried not to think about what she might be doing now. At home with her husband, in the life they shared.
After that he read a little more, and sat in the study thinking as night fell, piecing together what he had read. He had left the metaphysics for last, all the books still unopened, the reward for suffering through all the boring foibles of the last twenty years of mankind. He looked forward to reading them. He thought about visiting the library as well, to look up what papers had been published in the field. The idea made him feel warm and dreamlike. He was getting sleepy; his mind was wandering, but the prospect of slipping back into his work was very attractive. The library, tomorrow, then.
His work. There was also that question. He was now, effectively, unemployed. Retired? He didn’t feel ready to retire, and he was only forty-eight. Only! What a strange thing to think. Regardless, he would at some time have to decide what to do with his days once he was done catching up with time. He still had so much time ahead of him, and could do anything he wanted.
The same, most likely. Not at the same place, of course. But going back to his graduate work, when he had been empty but content to live in the realm of ideas, that was an attractive thought. Of course, now he had changed and his attitude would be somewhat different, but he did miss that, in some way. In the morning he would see to that, then.
Back to his graduate days. So much time had passed! What would people say about that? How might one explain a twenty-three-year gap in one’s history?
Nemuro started to laugh to himself. Of course. Twenty-three years in the employ of Ohtori Academy. Supervised, naturally, by Ohtori Akio, acting chairman. Let Ohtori do him that favor. He’d earned that much.
He was tiring now, his head heavy and his eyes strained. He put aside the book he’d been reading and went upstairs to prepare for bed.
He dreamed of Tokiko first, a dream of little but impressions, her voice and her mouth and a flash of her eyes that filled him with faintly resentful longing. It faded away, and he was on the road again, under the sketched limbs of trees with their still-budded leaves. The path to the church forked off the road to his left, but he walked by it and out onto the open road lined with banks of melting snow.
Four. More Every Day
The next day – which he couldn’t help but think of as the third day – Nemuro went to the library, as he had planned. However, rather than going to the scientific publications as he’d planned, he found himself seeking out the microfilm archives of newspapers. He had read the history of the world that he had missed, but there was something he wanted to see directly. He knew it wasn’t right or healthy, but he let himself submit to the temptation. It wouldn’t break him. He resolved to stay together.
He pulled up the local newspaper from twenty-three years ago, the day after he passed out of time, and a series of the same newspaper, several weeks’ worth, from six months later.
The fire at Ohtori Academy was not front-page news. It was somewhere in the middle of a section, and there were no photographs of Nemuro Hall blazing with light. He needed no photographs, of course; it was burned into his memory, an afterimage like the dark flare left by staring into the sun. It was probably not surprising that there had been no photographers. It had happened so unexpectedly, after all. But the headline, which might have been lurid, was unusually restrained. Fire at Local School. That was all. The short article remarked with strange calmness that one hundred graduate students, along with their leader, had been killed. The cause was unknown. Ohtori Academy – that meant the Chairman, most likely – would release more details soon. He doubted that they ever had.
He remembered their laughing. They had laughed all night, it seemed, at the wrapup party for the Eternity Project. And talked. Talked incessantly, their voices bright and young. About the project, how glad they were to have it done, and where they were going next. About their lives, their sweethearts, their futures. Forever talking, and himself a burnt-out star on the edge of their hearing, all but forgotten. Dead already. A living ghost. He had picked up a candelabra from a table full of hors d’oeuvres and bowls of fruit as he passed out of the room. No one noticed. The solarium went up first, the flames reflecting from the windows in an endless refraction of light. No one noticed that. The flames followed him down the hall to his office, which went up next, all the rooms and hallways in between filling slowly. All those books lost, all his work lost. Such a shame. No one noticed that either. And he passed out of the front doors like a man in a dream, and locked them and barred them, and no one noticed until the fire crept quietly downstairs and surrounded them. But by then it was too late. And he stood outside in a cold colder than winter, and Tokiko’s light racing steps clattered on the sidewalk to seal his fate.
He pulled up the other microfilm.
It took several minutes, paging through one day at a time, to find the right one. His stomach felt heavy with dread. He knew what he would find, but he wanted to see it anyway, in print, verified by the outside world. Even though the subject of the notice he sought had belonged so little to the outside world, it owed him an acknowledgement anyway. And it would prove the Other wrong, again, and if it took him forever to prove the Other wrong he would do everything it took.
Chida Mamiya, fourteen years old. Died at six-fifteen in the evening, on a late summer evening. His roses would have been in bloom then, Nemuro thought. Died in the hospital of a respiratory infection; his immune system had been weakened by long illness. He was survived by an older sister, Chida Tokiko.
“You were always so ill,” the Other had said one night. “Are you sure you should be up and about?”
“Aren’t you looking for eternity?” the boy had said, a small smile slipping across his lips. “For me?”
“Yes.” The Other’s fingers slid along the line of the boy’s jaw, around his throat. Delicate. Beautiful. His own skin was so pale in the dark, the boy’s melting into the darkness itself. “Yes. Always.”
“Then I will live forever, won’t I.” The boy feigned coyness; he usually did, knowing that he liked it. That time he shifted with what looked like discomfort, removed his neck from the Other’s touch, but in doing so his lithe body pressed briefly against his own. The Other closed his eyes for a moment. He loved this dance, this deception. He loved the idea of corrupting the boy and he loved the idea that the boy was already far more corrupt than he himself would ever be.
“The darkness feeds me,” the boy went on, his voice a quiet purr. “Like it feeds my roses. I don’t have to worry about that anymore. You don’t need to think about it again.”
“I won’t think about it again,” the Other had breathed. And the boy’s hand was stealing around his waist, shy but not shy, and the Other kissed him hungrily, for the first time, and not the last. Not the last by over twenty ageless years.
“Mamiya...”
Nemuro startled back into himself, his nerves simmering with caged lust and his stomach twisting in revulsion. He swallowed, took the microfilm out of the viewer and took the stack of film to the return cart. He gathered up his things and left the library, walking back to the train station as the sickness and the tension slowly ebbed.
It was in the past. He hadn’t been the one to do those things. More than that, it had never happened. Mamiya was dead, had been dead for all those years that the Other and his lover held court in darkness. No matter what he had believed, that was not Mamiya, not Tokiko’s brother. He would never have done such a thing to Tokiko’s brother.
On the train he stared out of the window at the city sliding by and lost himself in thought. Who was that boy, then? That quiet, strange boy that the Other called Mamiya, but who was not. Dark skin, calm, dreamy eyes. Who looked... who looked, come to think of it, like the Chairman.
Nemuro felt cold for a moment. But it couldn’t have been the Chairman. He was taller, for one thing, quite a bit taller than Nemuro himself, and this boy was smaller. And younger. And he would never have... Nemuro looked away from the buildings and the telephone poles flashing past. He would never have done some of the things they had done. The Chairman didn’t have brothers, did he? Or sons...
Nemuro shuddered. The Chairman would never have stood for that.
Who was he, then? A figment of the Other’s cracked imagination? He had to have been real. He was elusive, mysterious, but the Other had touched him too often and too... thoroughly to be an illusion. He remembered licking the blood from the boy’s finger when he had pricked himself on a thorn, and shivered again at the memory. He remembered the taste of it on his tongue. The boy was not a ghost. Ghosts don’t bleed.
Perhaps he would never know. He watched the city passing again, letting the unsettled feeling subside. Perhaps the boy was a prisoner, like he had been, mad and caged and not himself. Perhaps he would return to himself someday, and be free. Nemuro hoped so.
The afternoon was mellowing toward evening when he walked home from the train station. Outside his house a car was parked, and someone waited in it. Tokiko. Not a wise decision, he thought. Her husband would find out if she carried on like this. He hadn’t expected her to be here; her appearance almost annoyed him, in some way. This would probably end up the same way as last time. She had shown up for what she wanted, was that it? He was there to be used whenever she saw fit? He had wanted to spend the evening reading. That plan was out, for one thing.
It probably would end up the same way. He sighed as he walked up to the car, wishing he could talk to her like anyone else, about anything else. Anything but what had gone wrong in the past. He had had enough of the past today. He had lived for twenty years in the past; he was tiring of it.
She got out of her car as he drew closer. She was still beautiful. He was struck by this again, as always. But her expression was underlaid with something blank and not quite sane. It worried him. Her coming back here worried him. Something was not right, with her marriage, with herself. This would come to no good.
“Good afternoon,” she said.
“Good afternoon. Would you like to come in?” It was a pointless formality. It made him feel tired. He turned toward the front walk as she closed the door of her car.
“I had to see you,” she said, behind him.
He turned. What could one say to that? “I see.”
She was hurt. He didn’t understand that. People were tiring. He was glad to see her, but he wished things were not as they were.
Once inside, she spoke up again. “My husband is out of town. He’ll be away for another week.”
Her husband again. Again, again, again. Despite her insistence on breaking her marriage vows, she certainly talked about her husband enough. Must she taunt him with it, with her twenty years of wedded bliss, reminding him of what he could not have? “So that’s why you came.” It came out harsh, sarcastic. He turned away, but not soon enough to avoid seeing the hurt look on her face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I had to see you,” she said again, and this time it was miserable. “I couldn’t stay away. You don’t understand what this means, you don’t understand what’s happened here. You’ve come back from the dead, Souji. I can’t just forget about you.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. And meant it more. “Excuse me. I’ll make some tea. Please have a seat.”
He escaped to the kitchen and set about heating the water, letting the irritation cool off. Controlling the little ache that had never been fully extinguished and which had flared back to life when he saw her, when she came back to him, still beautiful, still everything he wanted and nothing he could have. He dearly wanted a few hours to himself, to think. But he was used to controlling himself, after all. He breathed evenly and put it away for later and brought back the hot water and teacups.
Methodically he strained the tea. She said nothing. “I’ve been doing some reading,” he said. “Catching up with the world.”
“The world is overrated,” Tokiko said darkly, and laughed a sharp little laugh.
“I’m thinking about what to do next,” he said, not knowing how to react to her strange joke. If it was a joke. “I may go back into research.”
“Back to Ohtori?”
He tried not to flinch. “No. I hope never to go there again. I’d be afraid of never coming back out.”
Tokiko took her teacup and sipped. “Thank you. Come to think of it, there is something strange about that place. I noticed that when I visited the other day. Not just the Chairman; he is who he is. The whole place is...” She shook her head, as if unable to find the words to express it. “I’d say I’m sorry I went back there, but I’m not, not really. I found you again because of it, after all. I’d never have known you were alive if I hadn’t seen you in the hall.”
She hadn’t seen him, not really, but it was too complicated to explain. “Why were you there, anyway?”
“I thought I’d reminisce.” She laughed again, and her laugh was tired. “It’s morbid, I suppose. I was in the area to visit Mamiya’s grave; it was the anniversary of his death. And I stopped by the Academy... I don’t know why. To think. It was an impulse.”
“I see.” He sipped some tea. This was not quite normal, but it was better than last time. “What have you been doing since then?”
“Then?”
“The last several years.” Since Mamiya died. He didn’t quite want to say that.
“Ah. I... took care of my daughter,” she said blandly. “You know.”
He didn’t, but she didn’t seem interested in talking about it. “And the rest?”
“That’s all I’ve done, really.” She shrugged. “And now I die, day by day. That’s all there is.”
He shook his head. “This isn’t like you. You were always so determined.”
“Deluded.”
“And alive.” She had been so alive that it hurt to be near her; she had reached out to him, not as a lover but as a human being, so easily and so quickly that it had frightened him. She had been connected to life; it had flowed through her like light through clear water. And now that was darkened, deadened.
“I used to be.”
“No... you are. It’s who you are. That is who Chida Tokiko is.”
“Matsushita Tokiko,” she corrected without interest.
“Tokiko,” he said softly. “The one I knew.”
“I don’t think she exists anymore.”
“She does.” He wanted to see her alive again, wanted to hear a true laugh. Wanted to hear her admonishing someone not to give up. Even to see her impatient, or angry, in some way that showed she still cared about anything at all. “And if you don’t believe it, I’ll bring her back myself.”
She looked up at him with a tired smile, got to her feet and stood in front of him. Cupped his cheek in her hand. A little tender, a little condescending. She bent and kissed him on the forehead, then after a moment, on the lips. Her forwardness attracted him, despite himself; he had always liked that about her. It would end up the same as last time, after all.
Grasping for the vain gesture of romanticism even though the predictability of it all tired him, he took her upstairs again. This would have to change. He thought this even while giving in to her hands and her mouth and his own long loneliness, even while feeling relieved that this caged-up tension that had built all day could be released at last. This would have to change somehow. Even if it meant nothing but a cheap fling to her, he couldn’t let it be like this anymore. Not for her sake, and not for his own. It had to mean more than that.
It took him a little longer to fall asleep than last time. He lay not touching her, a little bitter, not wanting to feel her pulling away from him when she left. It was better that she left, though, anyway. He didn’t want to playact, didn’t want to pretend that she could stay. He didn’t want to be her imaginary husband, and taunt himself with what could have been.
He thought about asking her whether she wanted to divorce her husband, then thought the question was selfish. For him? Why would she do that?
Before any more questions came he was asleep, and did not hear her leave.
In his dream he walked again on the road under the trees. The path to the church forked from the road to the left. He turned down it and walked down the path into the church. A shaft of sunlight fell through the stained-glass windows onto the coffin that lay at the head of the aisle, wreathed with flowers that in the shadows were as gray as death. He walked down the aisle to the coffin, knelt by it, set his hands against the lid and pushed.
Five. The Bloom is Off the Rose
[Nemuro decides to try re-entering academia, and sends some letters to that end.]
In the late afternoon more people came to the park, wandering through by twos and threes, talking amongst themselves; Nemuro watched them from a park bench, as he watched the trees and the passing birds. He wondered if Tokiko had shown up at his house again. She had arrived at about this time, the times she’d come before.
Something was definitely wrong about her. Perhaps not with her; that was a harsh thing to say. But something was amiss in her. Something had dulled her from the hopeful, dedicated woman he knew into this creature of sorrow and resignation. She was no longer herself, he was sure of it. When she was near him he had found it harder to approach this; he instinctively craved her attention, having no other human contact, and perhaps he didn’t want to drive her away. But reflecting on it from afar, something was undoubtedly wrong. He knew now that he didn’t want things to go on this way, either. Not only because she was married; not only because her husband would return after a week. It wasn’t healthy. Possibly not for either of them, and certainly not for her. Even without him, without what they’d done, she couldn’t go on this way indefinitely. At least, he didn’t want her to. He wasn’t sure whether she realized that something was wrong, or whether she just took it as the way of the world. She didn’t seem to see any way out of it, that was becoming clear.
Was there anything he could do? How did one bring a friend back from the dead in this day and age?
Nemuro watched the darkening sky for a few more minutes, then started back home. If she did show up, it was cruel to intentionally make her wait for him. And it would probably be better for her to be with him than to be left alone with her thoughts. He knew that much about madness.
When he arrived home her car was parked in front of the house again, but when he approached the car she did not get out. He touched the glass, not able to see her face, hoping she was all right. The window slid down; it was clear that she had been crying.
“Why are you avoiding me?”
He looked away. No use in lying. “I needed to think. But I’m here now. Please come in.”
“How could you be so selfish?” she lashed out. “Did you know I was coming? That I’d wait for you? Were you going to make me wait until I started to wonder whether you’d vanished again?”
“I planned to come back after I’d had some time to think. Please come in.”
The window slid back up, and she stepped out of her car. He touched her arm, squeezed it, on a strange impulse. But it seemed to calm her a little. They went inside.
“Are you happy?” he asked as they passed into the living room.
Tokiko gave a tight little half-laugh and dabbed her eyes with a white handkerchief. “I don’t think I need to answer that.”
“Hm.” He motioned the the sofa, and she sat down; this was becoming a ritual, it seemed. He turned toward the kitchen to make tea.
“Forever making tea,” Tokiko said with a trace of sullenness.
He turned back to look at her and answered dryly, “It calms my nerves.”
He wasn’t sure if she understood. Well, no matter. He heated the water as usual – odd that doing something for the third time made it “usual” – and brought the teacups and all the other accoutrements into the living room on a tray.
Regular tea, without rose petals, he thought. It’s all I can offer you. I don’t have any roses. I don’t know if I could stand them, nowadays.
He remembered the days when their positions were reversed, when he had called on her, the pretty assistant from the Ohtori Board of Directors who had come to assess his project. She was good with dainty things, graceful touches; she made tea out of the rose hips from her brother’s garden, with petals floating in it delicately. She served him this tea in china probably passed on from her parents and grandparents. He had come to talk about his project. He didn’t know what else to talk about. They had spoken instead about eternity, about genius; he had denied that he was a genius, denied that he was any different from other men. And he, feeling lost in something he couldn’t quite understand, something that surrounded him like water and seeped into his blood, couldn’t stop watching her mouth as she spoke. He tried to listen. He took an instant longer to process the words than he normally would have. She didn’t seem to notice. And she had smiled at him, kind and friendly, merely friendly, nothing more, but still so warm and open and alive. And listened to him speak. As if he were like any other man.
She had gotten up to rush into the greenhouse, and he couldn’t stop thinking about kissing her. It was obscene and bizarre and inappropriate, and he couldn’t stop it. He hardly knew her. But he wanted this more than anything he’d ever known. It made no sense at all. Hearing her voice from the next room, he had gotten up and followed her, uninvited, not thinking. And perhaps then it had all truly started.
Nemuro poured the tea and sat down across from Tokiko in his own living room. He had decided not to let this time end like the others had. It was better for both of them. He could control himself. He had never had an unusually powerful libido to start with, and he could convince himself now that it had been tapped. Convince himself that he didn’t still want it to happen, despite himself.
They sipped their tea, Nemuro calmly, Tokiko returning to some semblance of calm. “Are you happy?” he asked again.
“No,” she replied flatly.
“How long has it been since you were?”
She looked up at him, smirking a little. “Have you become a psychiatrist since the old days?”
“Go deeper...” They had all come to him, come to the Other, all of those people, all of those children who were tired of being children. Desperate, quivering with self-righteous rage, angry and despairing and lost. One after another after another for years upon years. All of them willing to surrender the deepest secrets of their hearts if someone would only listen to them. If you have nothing left, if no one will help you, see Mikage Souji and join his Seminar. He can help. He had never said such a thing, but word spread anyway, and circled the Academy year after year. See Mikage Souji. Champion of the unimportant, the ignored, the desperate, and the vicious. He gathered the darkest secrets of their sickened souls, sharpened their hearts into blades, tended their anger like a garden of poisoned thorns.
He sipped his tea. “In a manner of speaking. A counselor, you could say.” But he couldn’t fall back on that. Whatever he did now, it would be without Mikage’s help... He changed his train of thought. “I consider you a dear friend, Tokiko, and I want you to be happy.”
“You’re too kind. But it’s a few years too late for that.”
“I don’t think it is.”
“I don’t think you could understand.”
“What don’t I understand?”
“What it’s like to be a grownup. What it’s like to be alive. What it’s like to live one day after another, with nothing ahead of you but thousands more exactly like them.”
“That’s being alive?”
She scowled. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re disappointed.”
He sighed. “I am disappointed. I used to think the way you do now, but someone showed me otherwise.”
She looked into her tea. “I was different then. I was young. I had... purpose.”
“You can’t have purpose now? I should hope people can have more than one purpose throughout their lives. Otherwise it would be unversatile.”
“Don’t mock me!”
He sipped his tea. “I’m not.”
“What were you doing all those years at Ohtori? Hiding? The Chairman said you were hiding from the world. Refusing to grow up.”
“I was. I can’t justify what I did. I did many things that were wrong. But I’ve learned about human beings in the process.”
“How very like a scientist.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
She crossed one knee over the other, looked away from him. “You’ve changed.”
“Thank you.” He knew it was not meant as a compliment, but to him it was. “You have as well, but I don’t mean that as a compliment.”
“That’s what life does to people. You can’t keep hope alive forever.”
“I don’t believe that. Not always.”
He had known a girl at Ohtori, near the end. Another girl that he had sometimes confused with Tokiko, as part of the Other’s madness. But this girl was, in many ways, very much like Tokiko had been when she was young. And he did remember her as herself, unconfused with the phantoms in his mind. She was a person of very high ideals, and very dedicated. She had held to her ideals her whole life long. He had felt himself drawn to her, more than he had felt in a long time for anyone other than his young lover. He had felt echoes of Tokiko in her, but he was also drawn to her as herself, to the magnetic, unselfconscious clarity of her personality, so like and yet unlike himself. She had held her course, and not backed down in the face of life’s challenges. She had resisted the Other’s lure of a reconstructed past, and held her ideals to the end. She had been strong and innocent and beautiful. He wondered how she was doing now.
Nemuro came back to the present. Poured himself some more tea. Best to change the subject. “You keep coming here, I see,” he said. “Is your marriage that terrible that you have to escape it every day?”
“Don’t be rude,” she snapped. “You have no idea what it’s like.” She looked away, her anger paling. “I wanted to see you.”
“So you do like spending time with me after all. Though you’re angry with me.”
She shifted uncomfortably. “Yes, I do. But then, you don’t seem very happy to see me, either, you know.”
“I am happy to see you. I don’t think you understand how much. But I...” Out of his depth again, he hesitated. “I want this to stop. It’s not right.”
Her eyes were cold, hard. “You didn’t protest so much last night.”
“No – no, I don’t mean that. Well, that, but not only that. I mean how you’ve been. How you’re living. This isn’t the Tokiko I knew.” And loved. And love now. But saying that would only make it more complicated.
“That was a long time ago.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“How would you know?”
He retreated into the chair’s cushions a little, his shoulders hunching. “That was cruel. But you aren’t going to stop me.”
“Insensate, as always.”
He refused to answer. She seemed to be challenging him, daring him to give up, or to get angry. He could wait as long as it took. He was used to ignoring time, was he not?
“You say you care about me, but do you really? When we needed you most, you left us. No, you went berserk, and then you left us. You not only left, you disappeared, and no one had any clue about what had happened to you. Souji. You disappeared for twenty-three years. Do you even comprehend what’s happened here? Do you have any idea what that did to us? Do you have any excuse for what you’ve done?”
“I wasn’t well,” he said quietly.
She laughed bitterly. “Twenty-three years and a hundred dead boys, and abandoning us for dead, the ones you claimed to care about, and that’s all you have to say? That’s what it took to figure out that stroke of insight?”
“It would seem so.”
Her hands were squeezed into fists in her lap. “You don’t understand what you did to us. It was too much for us to take. You broke Mamiya’s heart. He had nothing left in his life but taking care of his garden and talking to you, and he was almost too weak for his garden at the end. And you took away the only thing he had left. All that was left was the sickness, and the medicine and the pain.”
“And what about you?”
She shook her head, frustrated. “I missed you too, of course I missed you. Don’t be stupid.”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant he still had you. You were still a bright spot in his life.”
She did not answer, or look at him.
“You had each other before I met you. That’s... that’s why I felt how I did. I... I cared for you, for your own sake, but I wanted more than anything to have what the two of you had. To be near that. You had each other before all of that happened, and after I was gone you still had each other. That wasn’t good enough?”
Her voice came out a little choked. His heart thudded, but he did not lose his nerve. “I can’t keep that up forever.”
“I don’t believe that. It’s who you were. It’s who you are. You were love, you were passion. It was in everything you did and everything you were.” He was finding it hard to breathe. It was strange to say these things out loud. “I could hardly stand to be around you. You were too alive, too bright.”
“I got tired, after a while,” she said in a small voice.
He relaxed, relented. “From holding out too long?”
“From holding out alone.”
“Alone? The Chairman didn’t stay with you?”
She scoffed, a sharp glitter of tears in her eyes. “You don’t understand the Chairman very well, do you.”
“I suppose I don’t. I didn’t know him very well, in person. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right.”
He picked up his tea, realized that it had probably gotten cold, put it down again. “But something went wrong. You lost your light.”
“I did. He died six months after you left.”
Nemuro froze, his breath stopped in his throat. It wasn’t what he expected to hear at all, and it hit him hard. “Mamiya.”
“So you do remember him.”
“Of course I remember him. I was very fond of him.” The real Mamiya, fading even after years of bed rest and his sister’s constant attentions. Who loved tending his garden, but let the roses die without complaint when their time came. He had read Nemuro’s research papers and understood them, even though there were few adults who could say the same. His questions were insightful, respectful; their conversations were some of the best things in both their lives. Nemuro had felt more kinship with him than he had with anyone he’d ever known. Such a bright boy, such a short life, such a shame.
“And he knew you were fond of him, and I appreciate that. But you don’t understand how it was. You didn’t live half your life for him.”
Something in him ached at that. “I would have. Given the chance.”
“No.” She folded her arms across her body, seemed to retreat inside herself. “He started getting sick when he was seven. I was still in high school then. And our parents were killed in a car accident a year later. I wasn’t that much older than he was when he died, and... there I was, and I had to take care of him, because the two of us were all we had. I loved my brother more than anything in the world, but my whole life had been taking care of him.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, not knowing what else to say. “I didn’t realize...”
“Do you even understand, could you even understand what it’s like to pour your whole life into something you care about that much, only to have it taken away from you?”
He closed his eyes, remembering linen tablecloths and gold candelabras, laughter, young voices. And the light filtering through the windows of the solarium, and the Chairman kissing that mouth that he had never touched and could not stop thinking about. And the end of everything his world was built on.
He did not answer. It would only make things worse. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
“If you had stayed, I might have been all right. I know you loved my brother too, although you didn’t know him for very long. I saw that you two had a bond. You were alike in a lot of ways. But then you vanished, and when he was gone there was nobody left who remembered him but me. Oh, the doctors remembered his name and his illness. They remembered his case. But they didn’t remember my brother as he really was. Not like I did. Not even like you did. And it was like... it was like he had never existed.”
“I didn’t know.”
“And that’s... that was the end, for me.”
“And you became like you are now.”
“Not all at once. But that part of my life was over. I left Ohtori; I couldn’t stand to be there anymore, and there was nothing left for me to report on, anyway. I got another job. I was asked to be married. Had my daughter. Followed the path that presented itself.”
It was sad. But he was curious about one part of it. “What is your daughter like?”
She smiled a little. “She’s smart. Sensible. I’ve never had to worry about her.”
“And you love her?”
“Of course.”
“She’s off at university now.”
“Yes. She loves it there.”
“And now there’s no one left,” he said quietly. “Again.”
Her eyes, turned to him, were pained. He looked away. “I thought you were my friend,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I am. I meant before this.”
She retreated again. “There’s no point thinking about that now.”
“I suppose so.”
“It’s such a long time, Souji. Twenty-three years is a very long time. Too many days that are too much the same. And there’s no point to any of it.”
“Because Mamiya is gone?”
She said nothing.
“What about now?”
She shrugged. “My husband will be back in three days. And then there are two months until he leaves again, for a conference in Europe, for six weeks. And then back again.”
“I meant you, not your husband.”
She looked at him blankly. He waved it off. “Never mind, then. Are you happy with him?”
“Do you think I sleep with every old friend I come across, for no reason?”
He didn’t know how to respond to that, and her candor embarrassed him. How strange. “Are you going to stay with him?” It hurt to say this, to think of what her answer would most certainly be, but it had to be said. It wasn’t right, what they were doing. It wasn’t right to him not so much because it was considered immoral, but because it was pointless. If she stayed with her husband, if nothing changed, then there was no reason to go on that way.
He let himself think, for a moment, of a Tokiko who was free. Who had always been free. He saw her in the sunlight, smiling, and her voice was warm and bright, and she loved him -
Nemuro made the vision stop. It hurt too much.
“What would be the point of leaving him?”
It was hard to speak. “I see.”
She sighed. “It’s getting late, Souji. I should be getting home. Or would you like to cross-examine me for another few hours?”
“I haven’t seen you in such a long time,” he said, trying not to sound sulky. “I want to know how you’ve been. I want to get to know you again.” Or was she only interested in using him, only interested in his body? How absurd that thought was. He was the last person on earth anyone would want to use like that. And yet...
“I suppose you’re right. My apologies.” She stood to leave, and as he got up to escort her outside, he touched her arm. And on another strange impulse, kissed her cheek. And that was all. He might have done that, in the past. Given the chance.
She smiled at him, oddly amused. “What’s gotten into you?”
Despite his sadness he found himself smiling back. “Who knows. I’m getting used to living again.”
“You’re so strange, Souji.” But her voice was affectionate. He felt a little better. Things might be all right, after all, in time.
As she got into her car, he hesitated. “Are you going to come back?”
She looked at him quizzically. “Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
Because... “Never mind. I’m glad of that.” She closed the door. “And wish me luck,” he added, louder.
The window slid down. “What was that?”
He paused, suddenly embarrassed. “I said, please wish me luck. I’ve sent letters to most of the universities in the city. I’m hoping for a research position.”
She looked thoughtful for a moment. “Good luck.”
“Thank you. Goodbye.”
“Goodnight.” And she was gone again.
Inside, alone, he made a late dinner and finished the rest of the tea. Finished the last of the books apart from metaphysics; he would start on those tomorrow. And got ready for bed. Things he would have done, had done, in the past. Even though everything had changed.
It was his second night sleeping alone. It would have been nice to have some consistency, he thought, lying in the dark. But he wouldn’t argue about that. He had always slept alone, and so had the Other; his lover had been as impossible to hold as a shadow, and always disappeared by morning.
The room where he slept had been dark, always, when he went to bed in the still hours of the night. It was usually chilly, too, though he didn’t care. He had been lying in the dark, falling asleep, trying to forget as always that the boy would be gone when he woke, melted away like a thief in the night. But he could hear his breathing, steady and slow. Ghosts don’t breathe.
Out of the silence had come that light, smooth voice, like a length of silk drawn across his skin. “Mikage-sempai?”
He almost wished the boy would not call him that. It was perverse. Of course, that was part of the charm. “What is it?”
A faint rustle of the covers as the boy turned toward him. “What do you want me to be?”
“What kind of a ridiculous question is that?” he had muttered, half asleep, irritated.
A light kiss on his cheek, insubstantial as a dream, and a soft voice. “Don’t leave me, Mikage.”
“Don’t intend to.”
And the shadow was gone.
Nemuro wondered, half-asleep, if he looked like him, with his glasses off. He decided not to test this theory. Besides, Mikage had never been this age...
A stone wall stood beside the road, under the trees with the closed flowers that waited for spring. The Other sat on the wall, unmindful of how the stone would probably leave marks on his white trousers.
Nemuro stopped, looked at him. “Do you know you’re dead?”
The Other yawned. “It’s a relative term, anyway. Did you know you were?”
“I wasn’t dead,” he replied, annoyed. “I was asleep.”
“Seems to me it’s a matter of degree.”
“Maybe. But things are different now.”
“Things are never different,” the Other smirked. “Not in my world.”
“They are in mine.”
“You remember me, don’t you,” he said, as if it proved something, as if it proved him right.
“I do. But I didn’t come looking for you today.”
When he found himself again, he was entering the church, in the middle of the graveyard, with the sunlight slanting in through the windows. He walked up the aisle with his bunch of flowers to the coffin in the center. He put his hands against the lid, and when it slowly slid open he knew who would be in it all along.
Six. Friends with Problems
[Nemuro gets a call from a university researcher who wants to interview him for a position. The field still remembers his work, as it turns out.]
He hung up, then read and reread the note, as the afternoon mellowed outside, the sunlight slanting through the windows into his study. It was as easy as that, then, was it? Of course, there was still the meeting tomorrow to consider. It could go badly. But he didn’t think it would.
Perhaps it was as easy as that.
A feeling that was nostalgia and not nostalgia rose into him again – a warm feeling, like being home. He would soon be in his element again. As easy as that, as easy as expressing a desire and having it answered.
He returned to his chair in the study, sat back, watched the pattern of leaves breaking up the sunlight as it came through the window. It was that easy... it was almost frightening, thinking of it that way. The world was there for the asking, if he wanted to reach out for it, with nothing more than wanting it. He could start over entirely, sell the house, study overseas, in India or England or Germany. Anywhere. He still read a few languages and could polish up his speaking. He could vanish again into another world if he wanted to, merely by deciding to do so. The world was wide open. And the world was endless.
It was dizzying.
He wouldn’t leave, though. Not now, at least. There was still work to be done – not only at the University, if all went well, but here. There was Tokiko, of course. Even if he could do nothing for her but watch her slip away, he didn’t want to be the one to leave her. Not this time.
“Friends with problems,” he murmured out loud, his head resting on the back of the chair. If no one else can help you, if you have friends with problems, see the Mikage Seminar...
He remembered the elevator, where they came to confess their rage and plot their sins. Somewhere in his heart he felt for them, now. All of them were unimportant, or didn’t measure up to some other, brighter star. Overlooked. Unloved. Outdone. Or replaced...
And now Mikage was gone, and no one could be his champion but himself.
She did not come to him that day. He spent the rest of the afternoon at the library, reading more of the recent research in the field that he was soon to reenter, and came home to a silent and darkening house. He was not entirely surprised, although disappointment set in before he decided to try to forget about it. He was resisting one part of it, he had made that decision, and although he still craved her attention it was probably for the best. He told himself this, somewhere between making dinner and going back to his reading in the study. It wasn’t quite the same as being ignored or being rejected. Her husband would be back soon, after all. And though some part of him thought that this was all the more reason for spending all the time together that they could while they could, control won out; it was for the best. He silenced the rest for now. It would do no good to think about that.
He read for a few more hours, long enough to forget about Tokiko, at least for a while. Long enough to lose himself in diagrams and concepts and the turning gears of time. When night came he soaked in the bath, not thinking about anything at all, and went to bed, chasing off disappointment with rationality until both sank into the apathy of sleep.
He walked on the road under the trees, the edges of the world smearing like a painting. Someone walked behind him, but he didn’t care right now; he had something important to do. He followed the path that forked to the left, and walked between the rows of mute gravestones to the doors of the church. The doors swung open without a sound.
In the center of the church lay the coffin, wreathed with flowers. He didn’t stop to look at it, but continued down the aisle and set down the bouquet in his hand to open the lid. It slid open slowly and landed on the other side with a soft thud.
She was alive. He knew this, even though she lay cold as death, surrounded by satin and flowers. He bent to lay his lips against her cheek. Like Prince Charming, coming to wake Snow White. Another fairy tale. But he was no prince, and she was not sleeping.
In that moment the worshipful silence was cracked by a voice behind him.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
He turned.
The lights flickered on. A small room, with a one-way mirror in front of him. A confessional.
An elevator.
“All right,” said the voice on the intercom, “please begin.”
The floor hummed and the room – the elevator – began to move. The soft whirring in the walls was strangely pacifying. Nemuro cleared his throat.
“A dear friend came back to me recently.” He looked down at his hands, folded in his lap. Trying not to look up into the mirror. “More than a dear friend. I... I love her. I have loved her for a long time, and I still love her.” He knows all of this, he thought. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to bring it out into the light, where such thoughts did not belong. At least, such was true everywhere except in this place. “She was always so bright, so alive. Determined. Optimistic. And she... she was always kind to me.” It hurt to say it, to admit that this was a rare thing, to admit that his normal state of being was one of being ignored, overlooked. But it was true, was it not? He was not like other men.
“And beautiful,” he added quietly. “She still is. And when she came back I... thought at first that this was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I thought I had lost her forever, after what I did. But she came back, and for a little while everything was good.” He hesitated. The elevator stopped, suspended in space and time.
“Deeper,” said the voice, as he knew it would. Something in him shivered; he hadn’t realized that it was that obvious. He was enjoying this, the pervert. Enjoying his uneasiness, his nervousness, his pain. But Nemuro knew that, did he not? “Go deeper.”
“But it wasn’t good.” With a faint rumble the elevator started moving again. “She couldn’t come back to me, not in any real way. Not to stay. It was always halfhearted. And she... she never really belonged to me in the first place, not even years ago.” He closed his eyes. There was nothing on earth that could make this any less painful. Nothing at all. “I don’t think she’s ever loved me. She means well, but she doesn’t. She’s kind to me, she still is, and she might appreciate what I’ve done, but she doesn’t.”
The elevator slowed again. “Doesn’t what, Souji?” The voice was real now, unfiltered, close behind him. Nemuro looked in the mirror and saw nothing but his own face, frightened and still faintly unfamiliar. He looked down again. Would not turn around. A slender hand slipped onto his shoulder, almost comforting. He felt a presence close behind him, the filled silence of a waiting body.
“She doesn’t love me,” he admitted, with a slow strangling panic that was not entirely due to having to say this aloud. “I don’t really mean anything to her.”
“Yet you still chase after her. You still need her. Not being with her kills you. Even though you know you mean nothing to her.” Another hand crept up onto his other shoulder, and the sly, cynical voice was close by his ear, close enough to feel the speaker’s lips moving. “She still rules you and everything you do. You, the man who once held eternity. You poor, sad, deluded little man. Look what she’s done to you.”
“It’s not her fault,” Nemuro said, weakly. “She can’t help how she feels any more than I can.” The rest of it, the part about it being his fault, was left out. He thought the Other probably knew that, too. He thought that might be why he was so close behind him now, why his hands moved with such insistent, lingering slowness. He always seemed to have something to prove.
The Other made a low groan of irritation. He seemed to have stood up for a moment, backed off. “You feel nothing else but that? Nothing but apologies? I don’t believe that for a second.”
“I...” The elevator was running again, descending slowly, and the Other’s hands moved restlessly on his shoulders. One strayed close to Nemuro’s neck, his cool fingertips lightly touching his skin. He felt his throat close up for a moment. “No, I... it’s frustrating. Sometimes I’m angry. I don’t understand why she does this.”
The Other had bent close to him again, close enough that Nemuro could feel his cheek lying feather-light against his hair. His voice was close in his ear, in his mind. “And you don’t like it.”
“Of course not.” The hand lay against his neck now, lightly stroking it. He couldn’t catch his breath anymore. “But I still... I can’t help it.”
“Mm. Not that, Souji, not that.” He closed his eyes as the Other touched him, stroked the line of his jaw. Teased him. He felt his breath quiver. “There’s someone else in this little situation, isn’t there.”
In the dark room of his mind something opened, unfolded. He covered his eyes, fingers steepled against his forehead as if to ward off a headache, but nothing would chase it away. “Yes... I hate him.”
“What was that?”
He dropped his hands, crossed his arms across himself, holding onto his elbows. The Other’s fingers still draped langorously around his throat. “I... I hate him. I hate her husband. I hate all the time he’s had with her. All to himself. The perfect life they’ve had all this time. And he doesn’t even appreciate what he has. He doesn’t even notice. He’s not even there. She’s not happy. She hates everything. And he’s done nothing to stop it.”
“That’s it,” the Other said, and Nemuro knew this was the part he liked, but he didn’t care. The thing inside him grew, wound around everything in dark vines with thorns. He closed his eyes, tipped his head back, let his arms drop. Gave up. His head rested on the Other’s stomach; if he looked up he would see his own eyes mirrored. He would not look up. His nemesis, his counterpart, enfolded him, slid around him like darkness falling. He knelt behind the confessional seat, his breath in Nemuro’s ear. Nemuro kept speaking because to stay silent now was more than he could bear.
“I loved her so much and for so long, and got nothing. Some scraps of attention, because she’s bored. Because she knows what she can do to me, she knows I’ll always take the bait.” He flinched, shivered, as he felt the Other nuzzling at his neck, like a lover, like a predator. “After what she did to me, then, she does this to me now, and I can’t stop feeling the way I do about her, but I... sometimes I...” His voice failed as he felt the nimble slide of the Other’s tongue along his neck, his lips nibbling at his ear. The Other’s hand was on his side now, straying across his stomach, wrapping him in an embrace that sang with madness, and the tension coiled in Nemuro’s body. This was not what he wanted. He wasn’t... This wasn’t... he didn’t want it, but his body cried out for it all the same. He wanted to be touched, he wanted to be hurt, he wanted to be ripped apart, absorbed, negated, unmade. To break everything loose, to pour it out, to make it all stop. “Sometimes I...” His voice was little more than a whisper now, but the Other was so close that he would have heard it, spoken or not. “Sometimes I hate her, too.”
“Tell me...”
The voice was hoarse, rapturous. He squirmed as the Other’s teeth grazed his throat. He thought he could no longer speak, not driven this far, but the words rushed out of him, into their mingled breath, charged with dark electricity. “But I hate him more. He doesn’t deserve what they have. Not when it’s the only thing I wanted, the only thing I ever wanted, in all that time. He doesn’t, he doesn’t deserve it. It was taken away from me. It was mine, and she took it away from me and he -” His voice broke out in a rough moan as the Other touched him, and his hands were his own and they were not, and his body shivered, teeth clenched. And when a voice cried out in the dark he could not tell to whom it belonged.
Seven. Contact
He checked and rechecked the note the next morning, and took the train to the university just as the morning rush hour ebbed. He had woken with a vague sense of unease and no memory of his dreams, but that was easily ascribed to stress about the upcoming interview. Not an interview, he corrected to himself, watching the buildings slide past. A “visit.” How uselessly diplomatic. He hoped that their communication in person was more efficient and less concerned with flattery. Well, no matter. Once he was on task, the subject at hand would be the work, and flattery would be pointless. That was one advantage of science over diplomacy. Less wasted time.
It was going to rain today. It would probably be raining when he got out of the not an interview, although he had prepared for that. It had been a wet year, if he was keeping his time straight. It had seemed to rain all summer. Yes... this had been the year that Tenjou Utena had come. That year’s little band of tragedians had seemed to show up in the rain more often than not. One of them, if he was not mistaken, had been the Chairman’s fiancee. Poor thing. Daughter of the old acting Chairman, now a useless old man. He remembered her, hardly fit to wear the black rose, really. It had almost been a relief to deliver her back to herself; it would have been complicated to have the Chairman’s fiancee as a champion. And so many of the others had seemed to revolve around some friend of Utena’s – was she a friend of Utena’s? – with whom he had had lunch once.
He had spoken to one of her classmates already, but that had been pointless; the boy was bright, and beautiful, let’s not forget, but utterly uninterested in revenge, and too difficult to corrupt. This girl, on the other hand, did show promise, even though there were already two better candidates near her. At least, she showed promise at first.
“Where are we going to lunch?” she had demanded, almost before they were out of earshot of her young helper.
“I don’t really have time to leave the campus, Miss Kiryuu,” he had demurred. It was an excuse that usually worked, although he wasn’t sure why he should constantly use it. “Shall we meet in my office? I’ll have lunch delivered to us.”
“Oh, all right, I suppose that would be satisfactory,” she had replied, with a trace of belabored patience, as if she were humoring him.
Half an hour later, they had met in the solarium, with lunch laid out on a little table between them. She sat as she spoke, with snappish precision, although she had tucked her napkin into the front of her shirt like a child. She hardly looked at him, either. It was rather strange. Perhaps he wasn’t her type.
“So who’s in this Seminar?” she had asked, pointing her fork at him.
“I’m sorry?”
“Who’s in this famous Seminar of yours? Anyone I know? Is Mickey in it yet?”
“Mickey?”
She had sighed, rolling her eyes. “Kaoru Miki. My secretary? Of the Student Council? About my height, really polite, plays the piano?”
“Ah, yes. We’ve met. But no, he’s not in the Seminar.”
“Oh, well then.” She shrugged and took another bite of noodles. “I suppose he has enough to do already. Who else, then? My brother’s not in it. I would have known if he was. Jury doesn’t join anything but fencing, on account of her job and everything. Oh!” She looked at him again, and he had the strange feeling that he was being challenged. “What about Utena?”
“Tenjou Utena?” The Champion. The one his soldiers had tried, and failed, to bring down two times already. Ask her into the Seminar? What a bizarre idea. Was it even possible? Could he win her over, bring her down without a fight? He would have to speak with her some time... “No... we haven’t met.”
“Hm. Well, she was never all that great at academics anyway.”
As far as he’d heard, neither was she, but he chose not to bring up that point.
“So,” he said, hoping and suspecting that this would catch her interest, “tell me about yourself.”
The train had reached the station. Nemuro, back in his time again, disboarded and started toward the University. It was a short walk, and it was still well before ten o’clock. As he entered the campus he felt a chill of over-familiarity; it had been years since he’d come here, and then only briefly, for a seminar or two, but the atmosphere, the structure of the campus, the students loitering on the grounds, were stifling for a moment. But the hermetic unreality of Ohtori was not in evidence here; he had walked onto the campus freely, and would walk back out again. Would walk back out again soon, with no encumbrance, in the proper flow of time. He reminded himself of this as he found the correct building and went inside.
He rode the elevator to the third floor, shaking off an inexplicable dread – was it dread? – and found the room that the woman on the telephone had told him to find. He was a few minutes early, but with any luck they wouldn’t mind the intrusion. He crumpled the note into his pocket and knocked on the door.
It was answered by an older woman – middle-aged, he corrected himself, then amended, my age, probably. He had never been very good at guessing that. She was small, shorter than he was, and her short dark hair had a few threads of gray in it. He liked it, he reflected for a moment. He’d always liked... stop that, now.
“Mr. Nemuro?”
He bowed. “Nemuro Souji. Pleased to meet you.”
“Pleasure’s all mine. Kagura Mari. We spoke on the phone yesterday?”
“Yes, of course.”
She waved him in after breaking the introductory handshake, sipping from a coffee mug in her other hand as she led him into the room. “We could have met in a conference room, of course, but I thought it would be more to the point to come into our department directly.” She named the students they passed, and in turn they looked up from their notes or their books and nodded politely. Kagura went on, “My office is right this way; we can start there. Or if you’d rather wander, that’s all right as well.”
“Mm. This is fine.”
“All right then.” They passed into a room that adjoined the main study, and the woman closed the door behind them. “A little more privacy. Not that my students would admit to eavesdropping, of course. Please have a seat.”
Nemuro took the chair she indicated and glanced around the office, which was lined with bookshelves and corkboards covered with diagrams, lists, and bulletins. It was becoming clear that she was the leader of this group. It was a strange thought. Not wrong, of course; just strange. Some of her students were female, as well. It was almost annoying to have to remind himself that he had slipped in time like that, that things that were exceptional in his time were commonplace now.
“So, Mr. Nemuro. As I said, we’re very impressed that you’ve decided to return to the field after such a long time. The common assumption in the field was that you’d retired. As I’m sure you’re well aware, many theoretical geniuses have bright careers and burn out early. It’s encouraging to see one return.”
He looked at his hands in his lap and tried very hard not to sigh. Must it start again, and so soon? “Thank you, but I wouldn’t consider myself a genius.”
She smiled; he saw it from the corner of his eye, as he was trying to stifle his irritation at hearing the old routine repeated. “If you insist. At any rate, it’s not often that researchers in our field return once they’ve retired. We’ll leave it at that, if you like.” She adjusted her glasses, shuffled some papers on her desk and glanced over one of them; it was most likely one of the things he’d sent, his letter or his resume. “Really, I have no questions. If you’d like to join our team, we would be happy to have you. The first two months are our customary trial period. As I’m sure you know, every group is different; if it works out between all of us, we hope you’ll stay on. We may even have some teaching opportunities, if there are enough interested students next term. On the other hand, if you think the team isn’t suited to your purposes, perhaps another team would be more to your liking. Is that agreeable to you?”
He blinked. He had been preparing for more speeches and niceties, and here they were at the point after all. “Y-yes.”
“Excellent.” She held her hand out across the desk, and he shook it. It was that easy. “Welcome to the team, Mr. Nemuro.”
“Thank you.” On an impulse he heard himself adding, “‘Souji’ is fine.”
He had thought again of the boys of Ohtori, and their insistence on keeping him apart. And some part of him longed terribly to feel some sort of connection with these people. Kagura’s smile was cool, cordial, but still in some way helped to soothe the sudden feeling that he had broken a boundary, had said something inappropriate. “Understood. We don’t mind familiarity here, either. ‘Mari’ is fine for me, as well. Unless you’d like to call me ‘Aunt Marin’ like the younger students do.” She chuckled. “Sometimes I’d like to know who started that trend.”
He smiled faintly, merely glad that his offer hadn’t fallen flat. It was beginning to seem promising, after all.
“That’s all for my interview,” she said, spreading her hands. “Would you like to have a look around the place?”
“I would. Thank you.”
The rain had stopped by the time he got off the train in his neighborhood. He spent four hours in the park that afternoon. It took that long before he was ready to go home, that time and the time in the train, and the time between the train and the park, and all this past week, and all the years before that. He stood now at the beginning of a new life. This much was clear.
They considered him an eccentric. That had become evident as Kagura Mari had shown him around the study, and introduced him more directly to the students, and he had heard their curious, naive questions. They considered him an eccentric who had burned out in his twenties like so many others, and had probably spent the intervening years in some sort of hilltop mansion in gothic-novel seclusion, with optional pet raven. It had been disappointing to hear this. He would have to work against this assumption if he meant to make any inroads into the team at all; he no longer had the patience to put up with a team that would not accept him, and secretly he feared losing himself again if they did not. But for all their preconceived notions of how the returning “genius” had spent his time, Kagura and her team did not seem closed to him yet. He was a curiosity, an eccentric, but he was not alien to them. They did not seem eager to shut him out. They did not discredit him; they were still interested in what he had to say and what he might do for their team. Perhaps their youthful imagination had embellished the history of the local forerunners in their field, and that was all. Perhaps it didn’t mean as much as he thought it did.
After three hours in the park he started to think about going home. He wondered, of course, whether Tokiko would be there, although if her outburst last time was any indication she would have either left or come looking for him in a furor by now. Though it still hurt to think of her, and though he still wanted her to be happy, her behavior was beginning to annoy him. He had had enough of veiled accusations, enough of hearing about her dead soul and her rich husband. If she wanted to live, she could live; if she wanted to stay a ghost, waiting nervelessly for death, then...
He half-remembered a dream in which he had found her in a coffin, still alive, and bent over it to kiss her like a prince in a fairy tale waking the enchanted princess. That was all he remembered. It was sad and poignant and, he thought, oddly juvenile. His kiss would not wake her; she had received his kiss, along with his love and everything else he could offer. And she had remained as she was, as the living dead. The story did not hold true this time. The kiss was just a kiss. Was there anything he could do? Were all of his efforts futile by definition?
In some way he almost sympathized with the Other now, despite the Other’s perverse darkness. The Other had fought without end – through subterfuge and treachery, and finally in open combat – to save the one he loved. And, in the end, he had failed. His lover, if he was not a complete illusion to begin with, now almost certainly remained a prisoner of the same delusionary trap that the Other himself had occupied for all those years. His efforts had been futile, accomplishing nothing other than, perhaps, ending his own life and giving it back to Nemuro. But that in itself was a kind of failure, if his goal had been to give his lover eternity.
Nemuro watched the sky and remembered those times, which were still vivid in his mind, but as surreal and half-complete as a dream. Eternity had not been the Other’s only goal. He remembered pinning his hapless half-mad admirer to the wall of the confessional; he remembered his blank white fury, sword in hand, staring down Tokiko on the arena floor. Not Tokiko. Tenjou Utena, the girl with high ideals. But to the Other she had been Tokiko, and that duel had revealed his goal: to bring Tokiko down, to make her suffer. To punish the woman who had betrayed him. Had betrayed Nemuro. Had driven him to such heights and then such depths, and then humiliated him and left him with nothing but the ashes of his life.
The Other had wanted to see Tokiko punished. He saw himself as an instrument of vengeance, although more than anything he merely wanted her to suffer, wanted to prove himself more powerful than she. And now she did suffer. It was not by Nemuro’s hand, but did he, in some way, enjoy it? He had become impatient with her pain and almost wished her back with her husband, so that he would not have to hear her speak of him again. Some part of him wished to resign her to the fate she had chosen and walk down his path alone.
The choice lay before him now, at the crossroads. He could leave her to herself, and try to forget. He could stay with her and try to make her live again. And he realized that he could still pick up the Other’s sword. In his heart slept a poisonous hatred toward Tokiko’s husband. He realized this now as well. It was envy for what the man had always had, and sorrow for what he himself could never have, but both had begun to ferment into something wild and irrational, something dark and full of thorns. Perhaps the ones he ought to sympathize with now were the Other’s puppet soldiers. They who had nothing, or thought they had nothing, and demanded the world. Who wanted what others had, what others were. Who were willing to sacrifice their friends for their own desires.
There were no rose-bearing duels in the outside world, no dramatic declarations of war, no letters, no swords, no End of the World. But he could influence Tokiko. He could convince her to leave her husband, to come to him. He could convince her that he loved her more and deserved her more than her husband did. Convince her that what had never been in the past deserved to live now. Convince her that together they could bring to life some shining past that had never existed, in which they were together and happy and always had been. He could break down her life and make it into what he wanted it to be.
The thought, once formed, nearly made him sick. To do so was to exploit the memory of her brother, to summon up those days and those memories like an army of the walking dead. To hold up a redrawn past like a prize – come with me, and you can have again that which never was. To, in short, pervert her brother’s memory, not the same way as the Other had, but just as unforgivably.
And if he did that, he was really no better than the Other at all.
Besides, he knew it wouldn’t work, in the end. None of the Other’s soldiers had succeeded, had they. They had all gone down tragically, one after another after another, and gone back to their unhappy lives. Not one had remade the world. Tokiko’s life was what it was; he couldn’t go back and start from the beginning. The past had been written. There was no unwriting it now. Mamiya was dead, and Tokiko did not love him. These were truths. The question was what to do now, in spite of those things.
Each of the Duelists under the Other’s command had tried to change the world – more than this, they had usually tried to change others’ hearts. They had wanted attention, respect, love from those who did not want to give it or could not give it. All of them had failed.
The wind was turning chilly, but he remained in the park for a while longer. He could not make Tokiko love him. More than this, he could not make her happy. He could not make her life what he wanted, nor could he really make her life what she wanted – if, indeed, she wanted to go back to the time when her brother still lived. What, then, could he do? Anything?
Perhaps he could do nothing. But at least now he did not feel such an urge to walk away. If he knew there was nothing he could do, and that this was not a failing of any one person, he could wait until the answer came to him. They could drink tea together and talk, and be old friends again as best they could. He would not push her to leave her husband. It would not solve anything. He would remain, and wait until he understood what it was he had to do.
He walked home in the dark; even if Tokiko had come, she was long gone by now. As he was making dinner, the phone rang.
“Nemuro residence.”
“Souji? Oh, thank God. Where have you been?”
Tokiko. It was strange to hear her on the telephone; he hadn’t been entirely sure that she knew this number. “I had an interview at the university, and then spent the afternoon at the park. Is something wrong?”
“No, I had just stopped by and saw that you weren’t home. I was worried. I called, but there was no answer. You don’t have an answering machine?”
He hesitated, not entirely sure what she meant, and went on before he embarrassed himself with that ignorance. “No. I’m sorry for worrying you. But everything is all right?”
“As well as can be expected. My husband got home safely.”
It was a hint, stressed a bit too much. Meaning more than it said. Challenging him, perhaps, to be jealous. He ignored it. “Good. Welcome him home for me.”
“Are you being sarcastic?”
“Not at all.”
She sighed. “You are strange. Well, I just wanted to make sure you were safe.”
“Quite. Thank you. I appreciate the concern.” Thinking of them together, in some theoretical house in some theoretical neighborhood, made him think of something he could do. It might be a bad idea, but it would at least stop this uncertainty. He took a breath to ask her now, but decided against it. It would be better to say this in person. “Tokiko. Can you meet me tomorrow?” It felt strange to ask this of her, to ask for a favor. He felt uncomfortably vulnerable.
“I... well, my husband will be at work until six, so as long as I’m home by then...”
“That’s fine. The park by my house? One o’clock?”
“All right.” She sounded nervous. “Souji, I don’t want any trouble. Please?”
“Nothing could be further from my mind, I assure you.”
“Fine, then... I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Thank you. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
After he’d hung up the phone he realized that he had forgotten to tell her about the interview today. He could always tell her tomorrow. He had agreed to start at the beginning of the following week; there was still time for that news. He wondered if she would be annoyed or happy. If she had the ability to be happy for him, or whether she would be irritated at the change in what had become her habit. Or perhaps she wouldn’t care at all. Maybe she would give him one of those absent, polite half-smiles that strangers gave each other. That might be worse than anything.
He finished making dinner and read for a while, though he could not fully concentrate. The day had been too important, too full of speculation and theory. And now he felt himself growing nervous, not only for the meeting with Tokiko and what lay beyond that but about going back to Kagura’s study. About becoming a researcher again, about truly entering the real world and leaving this shadowy interlude behind. Going out among people again. Risking the wall of silence and hastily stilled whispers and a world of people who insisted on calling him “sir.” Risking more than that, perhaps. Risking the opposite.
In the bath he finally let himself think this, while soaking for longer than usual, letting the hot water melt the day from his skin. He risked another Eternity Project, all those boys and their cheerful, respectful, uncrossable wall of silence. But more than that, he risked another Tokiko. He risked finding something he wanted, something he could live for, only to have it taken away.
If that happened, he thought with a little bitterness, he would tell the Other to take his life and do with it what he wished. I yield. Your turn.
Having women on the team was an interesting turn of events, though, he reflected, staring at the out-of-focus bathroom ceiling. Obviously it was better for the field, in that they could gather the best minds in the field regardless of other factors. But for the researchers themselves, it was probably also good. It had always been hermetic and unreal, in some sense, within a research team. The interplay of human beings was altered when you cut half of them out of the equation. Perhaps that had been why meeting Tokiko had hit him as hard as it did, sooner than it should have, while he still barely knew her. He had lived like a monk for too long.
His mind wandered over this, over what it might be like working with these people. Kagura, the leader of this team, certainly lent a particular mood to her group; they were all at ease with each other and with their leader. They seemed to have quite a sense of camaraderie. He wondered how the others would be; he had only met some of them, as many of the other senior researchers had been busy or out of the office when Kagura had shown him around the place. But from what he had seen so far, he trusted this woman to assemble a group of good people. He would still be nervous, of course. That could not be helped. But he knew it would probably be all right.
The water and the steam had made him lethargic and comfortable, and he lay for a while, drifting, silent, emptied. But emptied so that he might be filled again. Cleansed.
Prepared.
He dreamed that night of walking on the path. The church did not appear, but he did not miss it. He passed under the trees, into the evening, under the stars, and walked toward a morning filled with calm.
Eight. Invitation
Though she was wearing sunglasses and a hat and overcoat, against the chill, he recognized her at once and put his book aside. He had come early, hoping to settle his nerves before she arrived, and it had, for the most part, been successful. He did not fear losing his nerve now that she had come.
She took off her sunglasses and folded them into her handbag. Her eyes darted around the park. “It’s nice here. I’m not sure why you wanted to meet here, but it’s a nice place.”
“Yes. I quite like it.” He motioned to the space next to him on the bench, and she sat, holding her handbag on her lap.
“We shouldn’t do this,” she said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Dangerous?”
“My husband is back home now,” she said, almost whispering, although there was no one around close enough to hear them even at a normal conversational volume. “We can’t go on meeting like this.”
“I don’t see why not,” he said calmly.
“You said you weren’t going to cause trouble!”
“I don’t intend to.”
“Look, why did you ask me to come out here, anyway?”
“Ah. Some good news, first of all, and then an invitation.”
She looked puzzled, suspicious. “All right. Go on.”
“I’ve accepted a position at the university,” he said, looking out over the park, although he glanced back at her despite himself. “I’ll start in the metaphysics department at the beginning of next week.”
She smiled. Genuinely smiled. He almost sighed with relief. “That is good news. Congratulations.”
“Thank you. The other thing was...” He paused, gathering his nerve. Pigeons flew over the trees in the park; a mother walked hand in hand with her small child, who pointed at the birds. Nemuro looked away. “I’d like to invite you and your husband to dinner.”
There was silence for a moment. “You’d what?” She was staring at him. He folded his arms across his chest, resolute. “Are you crazy?”
“I might be,” he replied dryly, “but that’s hardly relevant.”
“You – you can’t do this. You promised you wouldn’t cause trouble. You promised! What do you think you’re trying to do?”
“I’m trying to invite you and your husband to dinner. Tomorrow, six o’clock?”
“This is ridiculous.”
“Do you already have plans?”
“No, but –”
He went on as if she were already playing along, as if his heart were not about to burst from conflicting impulses. He wanted to shake her, to tell her to stop complaining and accept it. It wasn’t so hard, was it? To do something normal,to act like a friend? He wasn’t asking for much. He never asked for much. She couldn’t even do this for him? Would it kill her to be kind to him for once, to try to make him happy? “I would hate to impose,” he said, sounding casual, sounding controlled, “but I would be very happy if you would be so kind as to bring a cake for dessert. I don’t normally care much for sweets, but yours were always so good.”
She was still staring. “You’re serious about this.”
“When am I not serious?”
“This doesn’t make any sense.”
“What makes you say that? I’d like to meet him, that’s all.”
“Why, so you can torture him?”
For an instant his mind flicked to the Other – he didn’t torture people, did he? She wouldn’t know about that anyway; she didn’t know the Other. She had to be speaking metaphorically. “What do you mean?”
She pressed her gloved fingertips against her forehead, as if she had a headache. “Souji. Men don’t – people don’t take it very well when their spouses...” She trailed off, shook her head. “It’s an awkward social situation to have to interact with the person that your spouse is sleeping with. All right?”
“Is sleeping with, present tense?”
She looked up. Her voice froze. “Is that what this is about.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You’re not torturing him; you’re torturing me.”
“I don’t think my cooking is that bad, Tokiko.”
She struck her knee with a gloved fist. “Ugh! Listen to me.”
“I’m listening.”
“You’re trying to torture me with what I could have. Showing off yourself and your life and making me pretend to be the perfect little wife.”
“I would never ask you to pretend anything. I’m trying to invite you and your husband to dinner, Tokiko. I would like to meet him. I don’t consider this a bad thing, let alone torture.”
“It’s not proper,” she muttered, withdrawing, folding her arms.
“What do you mean?”
She made an annoyed sound. “I – we – may have broken my marriage vows, but there’s no need to flaunt it.”
“I don’t intend to flaunt anything. Your husband has come home. I have recently moved back to the area and would like to meet the man who married my old and dear friend. Cake is optional.”
“There’s more to it than that. It’s not that simple.”
“It is that simple to me.”
She was quiet for a moment, brooding. “I’m being rejected, then.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“I’m just a friend to you, you said. I thought you said you loved me.”
“I do. I always have. I would have liked...” He took a deeper breath. “I would have liked nothing more than to have come home to find that you were unattached. But what might have happened isn’t important. What did happen is that you are married, after all. This is the way things are now. I am doing what I think is best given the state of things now.”
She watched him, as if expecting him to break down, or take it back. He watched the clouds as they moved across the sky.
“My course of action is to remain your friend. I care for you deeply, more than I’ve ever cared for anyone. But in the past I’ve...” He broke off, realized that explaining it all, once again, was too complicated. “Never mind what I used to think. I was once selfish, but I think I’m still being selfish now. It is not selfless to give up something that I want in order to keep something that I want even more.”
“What are you talking about?” Her voice had softened, lost its challenging edge.
“I want to be near you. I want to know you. If I need to give up... being closer to you in order to avoid causing trouble for you and your husband, that is what I will do.”
“Souji...”
“More than that,” he interrupted, not wanting to hear her excuses or her sympathy. He wasn’t done yet. “I’ve caused you enough pain. I was selfish when I first came back, and confused, and easily distracted by the immediate. For a while I thought I – I thought I’d gotten everything I wanted. But no matter how good it seemed at the moment, it would only make things worse in the end. It’s not worth breaking your marriage apart for something I’m not even sure exists in the first place.” He had to catch his breath for a moment, rein himself in. “I need to meet your husband. I need to stop thinking of him as my enemy. Because I can’t think that way if I am to remain a friend to you.” She would have to answer soon, and he feared her answer, but there was nothing else he could do or say. “So please. Come to dinner. Let this be cordial and normal and leave the rest alone. For me.”
For a while, neither of them said anything. Slowly, her hand found his where it was curled on his knee and closed over it.
“Thank you, Souji.”
“Will you come?”
“Yes. Six o’clock, tomorrow.”
“Thank you.”
In his dream he entered the church under the smeared gray skies, a bunch of flowers in his hand. They were white, touched with gray shadows deep within their furled petals, roses with the stems wrapped in ribbons to keep the thorns from catching. The church lay in silence with a coffin at the end of the aisle; he approached it calmly, set down the roses for a moment, and pushed the lid back. It landed on the opposite side of the coffin with a hollow thump. She lay surrounded by satin and flowers, not dead, not asleep, eyes closed, insensate. He bent to kiss her cheek, closing his eyes as his lips touched her warm skin.
“I love you,” he whispered into her ear, resisting the impulse to touch her again, knowing it would do no good. “I know you don’t care. I know you don’t want to come out. But I love you, and I am going to wait.”
He sat on the floor of the church at the coffin’s side, the roses in his lap, winding the ribbons around his fingers absently. Watching her as she lay without sleeping.
“It’s not so bad, you know,” he said. “Out there. It’s not perfect, but it really isn’t so bad.”
He looked up, through the door of the church toward the graveyard beyond, and outside he saw a mist of rain, a crowd around a fresh grave. A small grave. He turned back to her, reached into the coffin to cover her unmoving hand with his. “I know. I know. But you’re alive. I’m alive. You are more than this. You always were. You were always so much more than that to me.”
A shadow crossed the light from the door. “Weak. You always were weak.”
He turned to see a silhouette in the doorway, a slender young man in an immaculate uniform, his posture rigid with fury. He sighed.
The young man went on. “Look at you. She doesn’t care. She never cared.”
“That isn’t important. I care.”
“That’s ridiculous. You’re a glutton for punishment, aren’t you.” The young man smirked. “Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. But look at you. Reduced to this.”
“I don’t see it that way. Must we go through this again? This isn’t the time or place.”
“It is the time and place. You don’t see what she’s done to you? What she’s driven you to?”
“Mikage, you were always one to beat dead horses. We’ve gone over this.”
“We have. And you still insist on doing this, on being this.”
“Yes. I do.”
The young man had reached the first row of pews by now and leaned on them, sullenly, his arms folded, watching him and the casket. “I am sickened. I am actually sickened.”
“Interesting feat for a boy without a body.”
The young man made an irritated face. “Why do you reduce yourself to this? Why don’t you just take what you want? Why do you insist on being such a weakling? You could have it. She is easily led. And you want her. I know you do, and you know you do. There’s nothing on earth you’ve ever wanted more.”
“That’s not true,” he said quietly. “But you wouldn’t understand that.”
The young man went on as if he hadn’t heard. “You could do it so easily. You know you could. Do it. Win her back from that soulless automaton she yoked herself to, and get what you want.”
“Soulless automaton? I thought I was the soulless automaton. For a while it was my claim to fame.”
The boy glared at him darkly. “You aren’t listening to me.”
“I am listening. I’m not agreeing.”
“Why not? Are you too weak to take what you want?”
He sighed deeply, tired of the neverending cycle, tired of the constant accusation. “Must everything come down to weakness in your world? Mikage, I am not going to have this argument with you again. It’s always the same.” Theatrics, hysteria, grand declarations. Props and scripted lines, actors on their marks. Illusions, shadows on a screen. “This isn’t how the world works. You don’t understand it, that’s all.”
“Then change the world!”
He found himself smiling then, indulgently. “I intend to. But I will do it my way, not yours.”
The young man hung back again, brooding. “This is madness.”
“If it were, you would probably enjoy it.”
“That’s a cheap shot, Nemuro.”
“Duly noted.” He turned away, back to the casket and its silent occupant, having nothing else to say to his other self. After a little while he leaned against the edge of the coffin, his head pillowed on his arm, breathing evenly and quietly in the dim stillness, watching the light of the flickering candles on her skin. By the time he thought to think of the young man again, he was gone, vanished into the shadows or into the graveyard outside, under the clouded sky. He was alone with her now, for a time.
His kiss would not wake her, and she did not answer to his voice. But he did not and would not leave. He would wait here, and be here when she awoke. He had all the time in the world.
Nine. Ritual
Another university called the next morning. He was a bit surprised, not having considered that possibility, but informed them of his regret that he had already accepted a position elsewhere. They spoke for a short time about the field, and the man on the other end of the line – whose name was familiar from his reading in the library – was interested in sustaining correspondence by electronic mail. Writing this down surreptitiously, Nemuro promised to do so once he had begun his study and hoped with a rising nausea that this was appropriate. The man seemed satisfied, and Nemuro breathed more easily as he brought the conversation to a close and hung up the telephone. He would have to learn more about such things, and quickly. Perhaps the younger members of the research team would take his ignorance for an old-fashioned affectation and bring him up to date without suspicion. Perhaps. He would look into this if he had time, between now and then. But there were much more pressing matters at hand today.
For the rest of the morning and into the afternoon he prepared, slowly, methodically, almost meditatively, not allowing himself to think. He swept the floors, dusted every object within sight, gathered up his books and lined them neatly into bookcases. As the afternoon lengthened he escaped from the house to buy food for dinner and flowers for the hall table. By five he had accounted for everything and settled into a plan in his mind, what to do, when to set the water to boil, when to expect the knock on the door. And he moved through this plan one step at a time, not allowing himself to think, until the point that when the knock came he felt not so much in control as in rhythm, in step to a dance of mundane things, invoking their coming like a magician summoning spirits from the ether, one incantation at a time.
As summoned, they knocked on the door at six o’clock. He answered the door.
Tokiko. Tokiko was beautiful, of course. But over time – and perhaps some sort of biochemical change, he thought, some mitigating factor of full adulthood – this did not cause the weak panic in him that it once did, long ago. Tokiko was beautiful, and impeccably dressed, and her hair fell in soft waves around her face and down her back – but first, and last, and always, Tokiko was Tokiko, a person whom he loved.
Her husband. The man he had thought of so much until now and never seen, a powerful specter, an entity beyond reason, a shadow over the world. Her husband was just a man, after all, an ordinary man, standing on his doorstep, no larger than life. He too was well dressed, not overly handsome but distinguished, several years older – probably seven or ten years older than Tokiko or himself. And that was all.
Nemuro bowed and welcomed them in, together, as one, and they returned the gesture. Tokiko’s husband held a bunch of flowers wrapped in thin paper, which he handed over; Nemuro thanked him. Tokiko, smiling a little sadly, carried a cake iced in white frosting and decorated with sugared roses. Nemuro took this, his cool, polite thanks both affectionate and controlled. He would not comment on the roses, other than to say that the cake looked lovely. The roses were the same type of delicacy that she had made years ago, with the roses from her brother’s garden, in those days of rose-iced cakes and rosehip tea, heirloom china with a smudge of lipstick on the edge and conversations about eternity. The memories washed over him in a wave, but did not bring him under. He smiled politely and invited the two of them in.
He served them and they ate, in companionable quiet at first apart from the required compliments and required demurrals about the food, but soon her husband spoke up. “It’s good to finally meet you, Mr. Nemuro,” he said.
“Likewise, Mr. Matsushita. I’m glad I was able to catch you at home.”
Tokiko’s husband laughed. “I suppose so. I hadn’t heard much about you, but I understand that you and Tokiko were very good friends once.”
“We were. And are, I hope. And will be.” He folded his hands for a moment, looking off past them, out the window. “It’s good to find old friends, or keep them, when you can. Without family, it can sometimes be hard to find others who understand where you came from.”
“Hm. You’re not married, then?”
Nemuro found himself suppressing a small, almost bitter smile. As if it weren’t obvious from the house, his solitude, the reception. “I’m afraid not. Perhaps someday I will find someone to ease my old age, but so far it seems it was not meant to be.” It was a philosophical answer, a circuitous route around a sore place. Tokiko’s husband moved on as if it were a matter of course, simply moving from one topic of conversation to another, a man at ease, in his element. Tokiko did not speak at all, though not out of deference. She seemed guardedly curious about the conversation between them, this interaction between the opposing poles, and was content to see how things developed.
“What do you do for a living, Mr. Nemuro?”
“Well, I’ve been... semi-retired for some time, working for Ohtori Academy.”
“Ah, you must have met there,” the other man nodded, including Tokiko in his statement. She acknowledged it with her eyes, a movement of her head, but did not speak.
“Yes, we did,” Nemuro replied. “Though at the time my situation was different. Now, since I’ve come back to live in town, I will be taking a position as a university researcher.”
Tokiko’s husband seemed interested by this. “What sort of research do you do?”
“Mm. Metaphysics. It’s a complex field. The formation of thoughts, the structure of time, how reality is perceived, whether time even exists without being observed by an intelligent being...”
“You sound like a philosopher,” the man said, not unagreeably.
“In a manner of speaking, I am. My field borrows from philosophy as well as physics and other disciplines.”
“I see.”
“He was quite the star in his day,” Tokiko said, the first time she had spoken in quite some time. Her voice was neutral, admiring, without an ulterior motive or a challenge. For a moment Nemuro feared he might blush, and he looked at his hands as Tokiko went on. “His work was widely appreciated in the field; it was very influential.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Matsushita,” Nemuro murmured.
“We’re all friends here,” she said quietly, and if there was a sting there it was hidden well. “‘Tokiko’ is fine.”
As if he hadn’t heard – perhaps he hadn’t – her husband replied, “Well then, I’m sure they were glad to have you come out of retirement.”
“So I’ve gathered,” Nemuro said, adding hurriedly, “but all the same I would just like to be a productive member of a team again.”
“Hm.” The man seemed appreciative. A work ethic was something many people could relate to, after all. “Do you teach at all?”
“I haven’t in a long time, but I may, if the opportunity arises.”
“It’s good to keep your options open,” Tokiko’s husband said, a little vaguely. “I work mostly in an administrative capacity, as you may have heard.”
He hadn’t, but Nemuro wasn’t sure whether saying so would be offensive to him or not. “I see.”
Taking his vague reply in stride, Tokiko’s husband went on, “It’s a biomedical research consortium, an association of several companies. Tokiko had worked for us at first – I don’t know whether you’ve heard that, either.”
“I hadn’t,” Nemuro said truthfully. “We had fallen out of touch by then.” And she hadn’t seen fit to explain how she and her husband had met, which, he realized, was telling and a little sad. It was something most friends knew about one another, was it not?
“Pity. Well, as you may be aware, most of the cutting edge is in genetics and electronics these days, and nanotechnology. The beginnings of nanotechnology, at least. Though the field moves forward every day. Such is always the case in research, of course, but this is such a competitive field.”
“Indeed.” Which in a way was the comfort of metaphysics; it was so arcane and isolated that most of the researchers worked together, sharing information, rather than bothering to compete. It also wasn’t very lucrative, at least in the vast majority of situations. Few people could turn the perception of illusion into an enterprise...
He wondered, abstractly, whether Tokiko had come to her future husband’s company in search of a cure for her brother. Or perhaps by then he was already gone. But that was something to think about later, something to be turned over in solitude.
They had all finished eating by now, and Nemuro cleared the dishes from the table as Tokiko and her husband, at Nemuro’s direction, adjourned to the living room. Nemuro came back with tea, regular tea in regular teacups, but the best he could offer. He poured and they sipped for a while in companionable quiet.
“Mr. Matsushita,” Nemuro said after a little while, “do you by any chance play chess?”
“Yes, though I imagine you’re probably better at it than I am. I would be happy to play.”
“I’m out of practice,” Nemuro demurred, getting up to retrieve the board and pieces from the study. He returned and set up the board on the low table between them, kneeling on the floor.
“Tokiko, would you like to play? We could alternate.” She knew how to play, he remembered, although she had been largely indifferent to the game. She had watched more often than she had played. Nemuro had played against her brother several times, on a fine set inherited from Tokiko and Mamiya’s parents, set up on the table in Mamiya’s garden. The boy’s concentration had been fierce; he had been a good player.
Tokiko smiled, holding her tea delicately. “I’ll just watch for now, thank you.”
“All right.” Tokiko’s husband got into position and they began the game, between sips of tea; Tokiko watched them play with calm interest. She seemed relaxed. This, in turn, eased Nemuro’s residual nervousness. It was progressing well. This would be all right after all.
“I have to admit, I’ve never been one for philosophy,” Tokiko’s husband remarked absently, several moves into the game. Nemuro looked up from the pieces, mildly startled. Tokiko’s husband made his move, and Nemuro considered the board for a moment. The other man went on, “I’ve always been of a practical bent. I would hope this doesn’t make me seem too obtuse in your sight.”
Nemuro paused, his fingers still touching the rook he had just moved. “Not at all.” He slowly released the piece and relaxed his arm. “If everyone were of the same mindset, nothing would get done. Some push, some pull, some plan and some do. Our differences are what make humanity interesting.”
“Spoken like a true philosopher,” Tokiko’s husband replied, but he was smiling.
They continued the game; Nemuro kept his mind on the pieces for the most part, on his strategy, but it wandered a little, in the quiet, amid the intermittent, muffled clicking of the chess pieces and the clink of teacups. He did not feel driven to confess his sins with Tokiko to the man she had wronged – the man they had wronged. Perhaps this was wrong. But at this moment, companionably drinking tea with the husband he had helped to cuckold, he could almost imagine it as something past, as a mistake not to be repeated, a lapse in judgment now over and buried. More than that, there was more than that, of course. It wasn’t proper to love another man’s wife like that, was it? To feel this way, to think about stealing glances at her mouth and at the edge of her skirt where it rode up just the slightest bit... but more than that, to worship her like this, to hold her in his heart above all others. It was not proper at all.
But the two of them had history, and some of it could be forgiven, he hoped. As long as the other things didn’t happen again.
It was also strange not to hate this man, not to feel much of anything except a muted companionship, the situational acquaintanceship of two strangers made to share a train car on a long trip. Tokiko’s husband did not seem unduly oblivious to her pain. Nemuro was a little puzzled at this, and mulled it over as the chess game continued. Though then, she hadn’t said much of anything tonight; perhaps she simply didn’t reveal her thoughts to her husband the way she had to him. Perhaps she maintained this cool dignity everywhere but with him. The thought gave him a sort of selfish pride, which he quickly stifled. But it would, nevertheless, explain some things. In some way.
He could envy this man, wish that he had been able to have what this man had, all those years together with her in peace, the life they had built, rearing the daughter they had together. He could envy, but envy was not the same as hatred. Tokiko’s husband was, for all his apparent prestige and comfortable lifestyle, an ordinary man, with the same everyday concerns as any other man on the street. He did not seem to gloat over what he had, or think less of others for not having the same. His life, his money, his still-beautiful wife, all of these things seemed to have been gotten honestly, without lies or subterfuge. Nemuro could not resent him for that. If he was blind to his wife’s quiet pain, that was unfortunate and a problem, but it did not seem intentional. Try as he might, he could not hate this man. They had little to converse about, little in common, but they could play chess and share a meal and carry on like civil acquaintances. Nemuro had no serpent to strangle in his heart. He couldn’t find it in himself to hate this man at all.
Nemuro won the first game of chess, and her husband offered Tokiko his spot, but she declined, saying that she would rather watch them. They began another round, after Nemuro poured them all some more tea. This time he could keep his mind on the game, for the most part, and won again.
“I’ll accept that,” Tokiko’s husband said. “I should be glad that I lasted that long against a genius, right?”
He heard Tokiko’s light laugh and didn’t bother protesting. It wasn’t worth the trouble. “Thank you. It was a pleasure.”
Tokiko and her husband exchanged a glance, and Nemuro looked away. “We really should be going,” she said, getting to her feet. “Thank you so much, Souji. It was a lovely evening.”
He stood, not sure what would be appropriate; finally he decided to risk it, trusting their old friendship to give it the innocence he wanted it to have, and kissed her chastely on the cheek. “Thank you both for coming.” He turned to her husband as he stood and brushed off his trousers and gave him a handshake, wishing that this were over; the pleasantries were tiring, although their company was pleasant enough, all things considered. “I’m glad to finally meet you, Mr. Matsushita.”
“Likewise, Mr. Nemuro. Thank you for your hospitality.”
“You’re very welcome.”
“We’ll have to have you over some time,” Tokiko said.
“Yes, we will,” her husband chimed in. “Perhaps when our daughter is home from university.”
Nemuro nodded, trying to conceal the simmering impatience. He wished for solitude, for silent time to clean up, for sleep. They were at the door, and the couple – he tried not to be hurt by this, tried, as he had all evening, not to think too much about that – prepared to leave.
“Thank you again,” Tokiko said at the door, her husband’s arm lightly placed across her shoulders; Nemuro felt cold, colder than death, but hid it under the same calm blank manner. If she mistook his pain as jealousy, this would all be undone. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” he replied to both of them, and then they were gone, and their car’s engine purred to life outside as he stood with his back against the door.
In silence he washed the dishes, put them away, covered the rest of Tokiko’s cake with its sugared roses. Moved like a ghost into the living room and put away the chessboard. Washed and dried the teacups and put them back in the cupboard. Swept the rooms again. In the morning he would open the windows for a while, to bring in some fresh air, when it was warmer.
He read for an hour or two, halfheartedly, his mind craving silence and stillness; he put the book away, leaving it on a side table in the study, and went upstairs to bed.
He dreamed of something he could not define, once again, something bounded in vague impressions, shadows and suggestions, tactile longings, waves of thought. He drifted off to sleep in his dream, rooms within rooms like a surrealist painting, but in his dream he did not sleep alone. Time came and went, receding down the years like the tide from a beach, and he rode it without trying to force its channel. And love flowed through him like lifeblood, something calm and sure and warm.
He did not dream of Tokiko.
Ten. Silhouette Symphony
Welcome to the real world, mysterious traveller!
Or perhaps not so mysterious.
Really, not mysterious at all.
Welcome to the real world, not so mysterious traveller!
How do you come into the real world? Where are you before that?
To get to the real world, you have to grow up. To grow up, you have to let go.
It’s complicated. How do you find your way?
You can’t. You just go. You make it up as you go along.
It’s exciting.
It’s dangerous!
Really, it’s kind of boring.
Ohh.
But very big.
It’s huge!
There are signs, but you might not see them. There is a path, but you don’t have to follow it.
People along your way that you don’t know! But you could.
There are no guides in the real world.
You’re on your own!
The well traveled path is the safest way, but it only leads to one place.
Every other way leads to every other place!
But if you step off the path, you never know where you might end up.
Good or bad!
The real world doesn’t really have so much good and bad.
It’s complicated.
Yes, it’s complicated.
Good luck, not so mysterious traveller!
Good luck.
[This felt like the end of the story, but I still had several thousand words to go for NaNo. So after this it went on to a second half about building a life outside Ohtori's influence. It's mostly about the new research team, and how he slowly accepts that they aren't going to freeze him out as "unlike them" as the old Ohtori team did. Which leads to becoming part of everyday life again. It's very boring, but felt kind of good to write. At any rate, that's almost like a different story entirely.]