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You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?
— Richard Siken, “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out”
This is the one where all you know about him is what you read in the newspaper—just a little fine print under a headline and not much else. A grainy photo of the street where he lives. The façade of a house on the corner, bizarrely ordinary. No faces to attach to any names anywhere; nothing so much as a mugshot, because what transpired in that house is not a crime anymore, just a tragedy. The sort of story people tend to tell in whispers, with their eyes lowered. Whether this is in sorrow or in relief, you can’t say.
That’s the way your grandparents talk about it, the morning the news breaks. It’s a Sunday. You are in your room, buried in your books, but the whispers still reach you. He is all over the neighborhood gossip in the days that follow, and those whispers reach you too, whether you like it or not. They follow you home from school, drifting behind you in the lavender twilight. They wait behind you in line at the corner store, when your grandmother sends you out for eggs. A boy and a girl, they said. Poor children. Poor children.
You turn fifteen that spring. The cherry trees bloom undeterred, perfectly in season. A boy and a girl, the boy about your age, a little older. The girl younger, much younger. You never learn their names.
This is the one where, out of every old friend, every safehouse, every acquaintance who owes him a favor, every come-hither neon light in Tokyo, he chooses you.
It’s not so impossible to imagine. Granted, it’s after midnight, but the city never sleeps and neither would you, if you had any choice in the matter, and by some small miracle or whimsy or cosmic turn of the screw he still has your number. You both say you’ve forgotten the circumstances in which you first gave it to him, in another time now out of mind, but you still have his, and so you know exactly who you are making wait when you let your phone ring thrice before you answer.
The war you lived through together is years behind you, but you still hear it burning in his voice when he speaks. You already smell the gasoline. This does not surprise you. You ought to be living in a world without weapons now, but there’s nothing about him that doesn’t have a jagged edge, and you don’t think it’s presumptuous to imagine even now that there isn't anyone who knows how to hold him like you do.
He knows this place. He knows you’ve got your mic on the mantelpiece, a switchblade and a sewing kit and a bottle of painkillers in the cabinet behind the mirror. Possibly he still knows you, after a fashion—so you smile into the darkness, phone to your ear, and ask him how you can help.
This is the one that begins with an emergency. You are twelve and reading alone in a hospital lobby, though the truth is you're not reading so much as holding the book up in front of your face to keep the world out. It’s working like a charm, so far; no one has looked at you for at least an hour, spoken to you for close to three. By your fourth hour, you wonder if you’ll succeed at receding into the wall and disappearing.
This is the one where the end of the world unfolds without spectacle. All that happens is the doors to the emergency department open and regurgitate a pale, gangly boy with shadows under his eyes. There’s a little girl by his side, tearful, one hand in his hand and the other fisted so hard in her skirt the knuckles are white. His free hand is clenched, too, down by his side, and you wonder what will happen the next time he opens it—if he means to reach out and tear down the sky when he does.
They walk across the lobby toward you, their footsteps soundless across the floor. You cannot say why you find yourself listening anyway, when the boy sits the girl down at the end of the long couch and goes down on one knee in front of her, a knight before a queen.
Wait here for me, okay? you hear him say. You only hear him because you are listening. Wait here for me.
This is the one where you see him before you hear him, all lit up on the side of a skyscraper.
He makes quite the impression. All four of them do, of course, together and individually, even like this. Even if right now they’re only faces without names, images without words. The tall one who makes you think of tower spires, of shadows growing long in the dusk. The sweet-looking one: stargazer lilies. Licorice sticks. Spiders the size of your palm. The boy with the mismatched eyes: a comet, and a candle flame. And then him, the one that keeps drawing your eye. The one that looks like a forest fire. The one with the skeletons walking in his footsteps.
Word on the street says they’re halfway to being legends already, but you are not interested in their war. Or, rather, you’re not interested in it for what it is. You couldn’t care less about drawing lines—about this concern of territory, about money or fame. You are a little more interested in power, in the sort of power that opens doors and dismantles empires and does not need to announce itself with so many bright lights. It needs only to fit in your hand.
You know what they say about the spark that starts a fire. When the time comes, you wonder if he’d open a door for you, if you asked politely. You wonder if he’ll survive long enough for it to become the right time.
This is the one where you get to touch him. This is the one that begins in a dingy apartment where nobody lives, one he has keys to because his boss has safehouses all over the city—and while this one damn well isn’t the nicest it’s at least the closest, and if nothing else it’ll give you a place to rest your head and clean the blood off your face before you part for the night. You tell him beggars can’t be choosers. The cut above your eyebrow looks worse than it is; it’s decided to bleed dramatically, down your face in streaks, hot and dark and already half-coagulated against your skin. It makes your eyes sting and your head go in spirals, the world around you tilting off its axis, but somehow you summon the breath to laugh anyway.
This is the one where he cleans the wound by the light of one candle and your mobile phone, sitting on the coffee table opposite the moth-eaten couch. He holds your face in one hand and a wet washcloth in the other, and somewhere in the shadows out of sight his knees have pressed in on either side of yours.
This is the one where, after it’s over, you reach out with the last vestige of strength you have, pull him by the wrist until he falls toward you. Somewhere else, your one candle is drowning. Here, you lean into him and breathe.
This is the one where you have a gun, and you know how to use it. This is the one where a frosty-eyed woman from Chuuoku walks up to you in an izakaya after a hit and tells you the ones on high will gladly overlook your transgressions if you tell her who the gunrunners are. This is the one where she tells you that if you bring her the heart of one, carve it up neat and pretty and serve it to her on a plate like a hunter in a fairytale, you can have anything you desire.
This is the one where you’ll give up anything to stay alive, do any dance, tell any lie. The fact of the matter is you’ve never met anyone you’ve ever regretted lying to—not even him, not in any way that matters. It’s not a betrayal without trust, after all. Not a partnership if one of you is always watching the other out of the corner of their eye, waiting.
When the time comes, you find him past midnight in one of the abandoned warehouses by the bay. You let him look at you, one final time, the harbor lights so bright and brash through the grime on the window that they make your eyes burn. You call yourself his enemy. When the time comes, you pull the trigger.
You can see him as he falls to the ground, against the light, his head and shoulders edged in lurid gold. There’s a grin on his face like you’ve given him his heart’s dearest wish—and maybe you have. You don’t look away.
This is the one where you hear him before you see him. You are nineteen and on your way home from the hospital, the smells of stale air and antiseptic still clinging to your clothes, and there is no one left who loves you enough to accompany you back through the dark to your tiny apartment by the harbor. Someone with more sense than you might say you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, but these are the last years of the war, and the city is desperate and sharp-toothed and hungry—everywhere is the wrong place, and every time the wrong time.
You make it home whole and unwounded. You lock your door, hang up your coat, turn on the guttering lights, but you’re not foolish enough to feel safe. You do not flinch when you hear his boots thudding around overhead, back and forth, back and forth; you can already imagine the floor of the flat upstairs swelling beneath his feet, wood and plaster cracking. You hear his voice before anything else, rough and reckless, punching through every paper-thin wall: Where’s my fuckin’ money? And again, louder: where’s my fuckin’ money? Again, reverberating through your ceiling, as though it means to reach down to where you are and take you by the throat: Where’s my goddamn money, you motherfucker?
This is the one that starts in a ballroom in Chuuoku, and it’s plain as the nose on his face that he doesn’t want to be here. Which is to say he looks exactly the way you feel, but you’d like to think you are better at pretending than that. Not so ruled by your anger. Not so contrary about having to play by other people’s rules.
He cleans up well. You’ve watched him battle on the live broadcasts; you’ve seen him with his nose broken, half his face covered in blood. You’ve seen the battle-madness that takes him over in the moments the sound is densest—eyes white, lips pulled back in a trapped animal’s snarl. There’s none of that now, just a suit jacket lined with blue silk. Just a pair of polished shoes tapping out a warning across the floor. On the surface at least he is so pulled together it looks thoroughly unnatural. You look at him and think: the eye of a hurricane. You think: flowers growing at ground zero.
There are so many questions you want to ask him. It only stands to reason that none of them are the ones you’ve been sent here to ask. You may be here for information, but there’s no reason you can’t please yourself as well.
It’s close to midnight when he takes himself out of the party, retreating into the garden for a smoke. You glance down at your wrist, wait for the second hand on your thin gold watch to make one slow circle around the face, before you follow.
This is the one where the only thing between you and your death is a pane of dark glass and his hands on the wheel of a blue sedan that’s seen better days. You don’t know anything about him. Nothing worth knowing, at least, just his name and the fact that your employers had known someone who had known someone who had known someone who’d insisted that if anyone could keep a crazy correspondent safe on the Yokohama beat, it would be him.
The rest is all hearsay. He had murdered his father at fifteen, murdered the scion of a rival family at seventeen, run away and formed his own smuggling ring at twenty. He used to be a gunrunner. He still is a gunrunner. He’s no longer a gunrunner because he has a battalion of them at his command now. He carries around a veritable armory in the trunk of that car of his. Each tale is taller than the one before, and you care less about their veracity than about the shadows they cast.
Yokohama’s not a war zone, not anymore. But wars don’t end, not really, and there are always stories to be gathered in the places the fighting is thickest, and maybe he and you are alike in the ways you seem to like to make a game out of your own survival. You see him watching you in the rearview as you cruise down an unlit street out past the flophouses, the night your investigation starts. When you hear the crack of a pistol shot somewhere behind you, you smile, and you meet his eyes, and you don’t look over your shoulder.
This is the one where you invent him. It isn’t difficult to do. You have a talent for writing stories about unhappy people, perhaps because you believe any story worth its salt begins unhappily. Every story you’ve ever written has begun with someone being unhappy and deciding to do something about it—but what comes after that is anybody’s guess.
In between him and his happiness, you place every imaginable obstacle. You lay his family down on the page, and then you tear it apart. You start one kind of war, and then another. You put him, always, in the wrong place at the wrong time. You make it so that everyone he meets is out to ruin him in some way—business associates, rivals, jilted lovers and old friends. A thousand enemies. A thousand pretexts for fighting or chasing or running away, ramifying from page to page. You’d be willing to bet it’s even more entertaining to write than to read.
If you’ve already decided what lies at the end of all these things, you haven’t told a single soul; not even your editor, whose business it is to know everything you do, and plan to do. Novels are born, after all, in the act of drawing things out.
This is the one where nobody gets hurt. Or maybe the one where nobody gets hurt anymore.
There are no battles in this one—no wars, no betrayals, no one to lie to, nothing to talk in circles about. Just days and days and days full of nothing. Just a flat facing the sea in a city where nobody knows your names, an open window, an easterly wind. Just his head in your lap and your fingers in his hair, loose and aimless as the patter of rain on the roof, going nowhere, going nowhere.
This is the one where you don’t need to tell stories to keep yourself alive. Instead, you take other people’s books down from your shelves and beckon him to come as close to you as he pleases, and read other people’s words to him until he falls asleep to the sound of your voice.
This is the one where he has a gun, too, and he’s just a little bit faster on the draw, and you don’t get to see what his eyes look like when the bullet buries itself in your shoulder. In this one, there are no safe places, no street lamps to light up the dark, and the two of you have never held each other in the jagged, narrow shadows of an alleyway, one of his hands over your mouth and one over the knife wound in your side, his voice at your ear murmuring shut up if you know what’s good for you, shut up, shut up. In this one, there is nothing. Only you, and him, and the pounding of his boots against the pavement, reverberating behind you as you run.
The ones who sent him after you call you traitor and runaway, and it’s true. You can only imagine the dangerous game they fancy they’re playing, sending him and not another. It’s a test of loyalty, a storytelling-game, a garden of forking paths. Maybe you will turn to look at him, and then you’ll be dead a second later. Maybe he will fumble the gun, send the first bullet wide on purpose, and then he’ll be dead a second later.
It’s also true he hadn’t been shooting to kill the first time, but you know better than to mistake this for sentiment or mercy. With him, the chase is everything. If he catches you, he’ll kill you—but first he must catch you.
This is the one where you meet a girl in a café in Sancha, somewhere in the gentle unfurling of days between winter and spring. She has one of your books in her hand and a dusty pink scarf around her neck, and it takes a little time for her voice to come to you from underneath the chatter of strangers and the rolling lilt of smooth coffeehouse jazz. She’s shy, but she’s smiling, and she must be the first person in all your visits to this place to come and speak to you. You cannot place where you’ve seen her before.
She smiles wider when you ask for her name, all the way up to her sunset eyes. You cannot explain, either, the unseen part of you that goes suddenly tender when she tells it to you, as though you should already know it, or have just remembered it—so you look away from it, tell yourself you’ll play this game with your own memory later where no one can see you. You have a long memory, and a keen eye, and even in a city full of people, you never forget a face. And there is something about this girl, for all her appearance of nondescript, sweet-faced innocence, that tells you she’s one to watch.
You affect a steady hand as you write her name out on the title page. This, at least, is a game you know how to play. Below it, you write be well. Below that, you sign.
This is the one where you lose him. This is the one where you see it happen, slowly, over one long, mercurial autumn—over the rainy days of stasis where you watch his desk by the window on the far side of the classroom. You don’t see him again until the storm passes.
He will be eighteen in a week, but he looks barely alive, sunken in the face and hollow-eyed. There’s a band of bruising across his knuckles, a bandage on his cheek your classmates act like they don’t notice. No one says anything when he sleeps through Physics in the morning, World History in the afternoon. By the time the last bell rings it’s like nobody knows he’s there at all.
This is the one where you corner him in the empty classroom as the sun goes down, and he pulls you close to the wall, out of sight, to show you what he’s becoming—lets you unbutton his gakuran and the shirt underneath and put your hands on the scars. This is the one where you count them: the bullet hole in the shoulder, the gash above the ribcage, the pin-straight hair-thin cut at the base of his throat as though someone had pressed a knife there. The only thing he tells you is there’s no going back.
This is the one where you watch the sunset bleed all over him, staining his shirt and the ends of his hair, the light leaking into the dip of his collarbones. This is the one where he lets you reach out and wrap your arms around his neck, pull him to you tight enough to choke—and keep holding, and keep holding, and keep holding.
This is the one that can be anything, because you are sleepless in a hotel in Chuuoku and carrying your defeat like a bitter pill under your tongue, and after you descend the elevator, as you drift silent as a ghost through the revolving doors and out into the navy blue midnight, you already know who you will meet.