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[“in between the moon and you”]
Every time he blinks at night, he creates the world anew. It’s a patchwork of memories, impressions and thoughts – his own and others’ – that his divided mind cannot tell apart. See the wafting sliver in the washed-out dark, peeking through the eye of stone? It’s the moon’s conspiring grin, the same one for all of us, it knows where we are heading, what we’re about to do, but does it know when this began and how we’ll end?
Shallow breathing is the only answer to his unvoiced question. Sometimes they are like ghosts at night.
Sometimes he envies them: their spindly bodies droop with exhaustion, and their edges soften in the forgiveness of sleep. His own body, heavy like a cloak of water, wants to pull him down with them, into the deep-sea realm of the subconscious, the uncontrollable. He doesn’t let it; someone has to keep watch. He wants to be awake when Lancia finds what he is looking for.
Sometimes he forgets why he pushes his body over every brink and boundary he comes across.
[“we are all of us haunted and haunting”]
Every time they jerk or thrash or mangle words through their tense jaws, he thinks of some unseen power prodding them with orange-glowing tongs to force their darkest secrets out. It’s what he’d do: torment his enemies in their sleep, have them confess their whereabouts and their next course of action, then swoop in unannounced and neutralize them. It’s what he does.
It’s unconceivable why they are so trusting, why they drift off to sleep and leave their guard wide open, vulnerable to any attack. He could crush them like ants beneath his fingers, before they had the chance to wake. They know this and yet he is no threat to them. They know he needn’t wait for them to drop their guard.
It’s at night that they do, when they would curl around him like ropes or snakes, writhing, twining creatures on either side, constricting what little space his body fills up. This rift from their daytime coldness interests him, it’s a thing to be exploited, he could let them in, share his space with their unconscious need for closeness and for warmth.
Instead, he gets up.
[
Neither illusion nor sleep can cage them for long, knowing what dangers their profession holds, red shadows reaching from the darkness.
“What is it?” Chikusa’s voice is not quite there yet when he wakes, but his eyes are; he can feel them.
He doesn’t turn or answer; he continues to look at his tiny hands, pale and flickering in the bleaching moonlight. They fascinate him, shadows dance on them like dark liquid. He clenches, unclenches them, they don’t feel like his at all, they’re too heavy – heavy, broad and stretched tight like gloves. (These are Lancia’s hands he sees.)
“I’ll keep watch for the rest of the night,” Chikusa says, but his voice sounds muted, as through a closed door, or else far away. Eager to please, he thinks, never change. “You can go to sleep if you want to.”
He hums approval, lets his clenched fists fall to his sides. He catches a whiff of fresh apples and bloodied metal, a taste both sweet and stale. It’s time. “I won’t be long.”
Chikusa nods, an acknowledgment of sorts, nothing else. He knows better than to interfere.
]
Every time he closes his eyes, the world shifts and he’s somewhere else, in someone else's mind. He has forgotten what it’s like to wake up from a dream, the fluidity of movement between his world and theirs has blurred any common grounds. Is it like waking from death and its skull-splitting pain?
He has never actually died in another body and doesn't know how close he came – even if it’s not his own body, he can feel every muscle twitch in agitation and the fear pulsing in his throat, his hand shaking as he signs a suicide note with Giuseppe Masini’s handwriting and picks up the handgun. Even the moonlight is brighter now.
He picks up a poison-green apple on his way to the bedroom, takes a bite and thinks: Am I not going too easy on you, Giuseppe? You won't see the face of death coming at all. But maybe it'll be enough that you feel it.
It’s not his own body, but the trembling excitement and horror he soaks up around the mad nano-edge between pulling the trigger and pulling out must be influenced in part by Masini. Oh, the frenzy is better than any drug that could ever be created.
Sometimes it’s this pleasure he looks for night after night instead of going to sleep, because he’s high-strung and loaded like the guns he points to his head and this game with death is his only release.
”The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,
I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen.”
He recites this passage from a poem that Lancia once read to him, when he drops back into his own body. It’s Ken who catches him, who is puzzled by the garbled words he cannot understand, who worries if something is wrong and he hates the momentary loss of control over his body as it teeters on the edge of sleep.
For a second the shell has cracked and he has escaped the drowning weight of his own confining body. He’s light-headed and laughing, soaring high on the light of the moon and the scent of apples.
He’s invincible.