Work Text:
We always say the best part of our work, the part that induces the greatest joy, is the process of creating it: the sweat, the agonizing destructions and reconstructions, the doubt, details, finish, period. Lift the finger, look back. Before you is a one-way gate built out of patient time; you carved each corner and embossed every spiral to make it your own to climb through. Once on the other side you are better, supposedly. You have “conveyed” and “made yourself a vessel”. But to Suguru—
“I feel like I’m shitting Type 1 on the poo chart,” he tells Satoru. He closes his laptop gingerly because there’s a miniscule spider web of cracks starting to form in the top right corner, and begins picking at the TMCU Archery Club plastered on the back. Which he’d quit three weeks after joining last spring semester, but they’d just had their merch drop then and he was in his sticker collection phase and he was too lazy to use rubbing alcohol to break down the adhesive and tear it off.
“Poo chart?”
They’re in the vet school library, just the two of them, because for some reason it’s the only library on campus that isn’t inundated with sad, stinking undergrads during exam season, which is honestly just the entire semester, and has a connected cafe that has the same shitty coffee every other cafe has but is 50 cents cheaper. There are a couple of sad, stinking grad students that look like they haven’t been back to their apartments in a week, but Suguru and Satoru are sitting far enough away to where they can’t smell the poor souls and in return they can’t hear them procrastinating.
It’s cloudy outside, the kind of April day that traps you between chilly gusts of wind and a drowsy sun murmuring promises in the gaps. Suguru sweats in a puffer, but he prefers it to rain; he forgot his umbrella and Satoru lost his fifth one of the year just last week. Sitting near a floor-to-ceiling window, their bags propped against the glass, the central garden-ish area with a half-hearted bench nestled in the rhododendron shrubs is visible with multiple squirrels squirreling about.
Multiple squirrels…squirreling…about. Suguru is amazing. His brain cells (>1) are multiplying every nanosecond.
“You of all people should know what the poo chart is,” says Suguru, opening his laptop back up and typing into a new Google search tab. He swivels the screen towards Satoru. “See? The Bristol Stool chart. Tells you how backed up you are so you can tell your medical professional how to fix you.”
Satoru clicks on the top link, scrolls down. “Incredible. I’m going to start including these in the caption of my Poop App updates so I can chart the health distribution of my shits at the end of the year. I’ll need to get Shoko on this too—”
A book hits the blue carpet next to their table with a soft thump. Suguru leans over and snags it with a hand, holding onto it instead of immediately handing it back to its owner: One Piece, vol. 25. Nanami is staring balefully at him when Suguru tosses it on top of the massive, teetering stack of books he has balanced in his arms. The volume slides. If Nanami takes another step, it’ll fall again.
“I’m predicting a high kurtosis right-skewed distribution overall,” Satoru goes on smoothly. When Suguru glances back at him, he can see Satoru opening up towards Nanami like a sunflower in bloom, his petal of a face unfurling, eyes dew-bright; and it isn’t even because it’s Nanami in particular, it’s because, Suguru has come to know, Satoru is an attention whore, and if he can’t needle people with low-level pranks anymore in college he’ll simply graduate to needling their soul. “I got Type 2s and 3s a lot. Got any advice for me, Nanamin?”
Nanami—no one calls him Kento, even the non-international Japanese students, mildly notorious pre-med freshman, known for the fall stalker incident: a girl had left a deluge of anonymous love declarations on the university’s confessions board, escalating from blonde asian guy with the white button-down and navy tie in chem203 go on a date with me! xo to we made eye contact seven times today so RESPOND TO MY TEXT, then was found hiding in Nanami’s closet twice before being asked to take a leave of absence. It even made the local news. At the time Suguru had been lab partners with Nanami, and every Tuesday evening they met in the dark, hot basement of their chemistry building to squeeze pipettes into glass beakers to make the mystery liquids turn yellow or bubble or whatever. Suguru had taken the introductory class to fulfill a distributional requirement, pass/fail, no letter grade; Nanami had not, and was fastidious and slow, shaming Suguru into copying his careful manners instead of fudging data and typing in half-nonsense answers. Throughout the entire ordeal, Nanami had been the same, as if adhering to an acting playbook he’d be punished for deviating even the slightest from. He was never late, wore contacts instead of glasses under lab safety goggles, and his cuticles were neat and pushed into perfect curves. The only time Suguru had seen anything shift was when Nanami had reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of lacy panties instead of a handkerchief: Nanami made a little gagging sound in the back of his throat, disposed of the panties in the trash bin, washed his hands with antibacterial soap, then asked Suguru if he could start on the lab while he stepped out.
They never got close, never met each other outside of class. Taciturn rather than shy, with single-minded focus: that’s how Suguru knows him. He doesn’t even think Nanami is repressed or boiling underneath the surface or the polar opposite at heart. It’s probably just how Nanami is, just like how most people aren’t much different from how they present themselves to be. More likely to be worse inside, repulsive or pathetic, than simply different.
“None,” says Nanami. He turns to Suguru: “Can you move the book back? — Thank you.”
As they watch Nanami glacially approach the checkout counter, Satoru mutters, “He’s so boring. I don’t get it. He’s gotta take like three showers a day, right?”
“I think two.”
“He’ll never understand the glory of a full-body thirty-minute super hot shower after fifty-seven hours of pure debauchery.”
“Did I miss that?”
“The pre-triple-final marathon where we split seven Red Bulls and camped in Randy’s from Tuesday night to Friday morning?”
“Ah…”
A pattering sound starts up; rain has begun to fall, sliding down the window glass in fat droplets. Suguru presses his nose close and can see the uneven edges of the water smooth out, the bottom half beginning to pull from gravity, the vanishing trail breaking into smaller droplets. In the distance, under the entrance of the library Nanami is pulling out a plastic tote bag and sealing the books inside. A large black umbrella is already open at his feet.
Satoru drums his fingers on the desk. “You think he actually reads One Piece?”
“Yes and no. He’s doing an East Asian Studies minor.”
“Reading manga for the sake of studying, huh,” says Satoru, not at all thoughtful. He takes his glasses off and tucks his head into the crook of his arm, positioning himself for a nap. Suguru picks up his glasses and folds them, tucks them into his case for him. He loves Satoru so regularly, like a muscle that has never been sore, like putting on comfortable, colorful socks in the morning: without having to think. “Turning fun into work. He’s so talented.”
“He really is.”
Nanami, reserved and quiet, cold and boring. Never spotted at a party or even off-campus, often nose-deep in his notes with a laptop open in front of him, the sole undergraduate in his lab, honors track without question. Sometimes a kid builds a reputation for himself and sometimes the world, upon noticing the kid, builds it for him. Or sometimes, Suguru thinks sourly, there’s a few cards lined up and flipped over already, and the kid knows the state of play, and all he has to do is line up the rest in order.
Because if you follow the river of fireflies, even if you walk at night and stumble from time to time, it’s okay; you’ll make it to where you want to go. The road has already been created. The memory of a thousand travelers will buoy you as a current in the right direction. If you buy the 200000 lumens Imalent MS32 flashlight and make it daytime, then strap on a pair of Hokas while everyone is wearing sandals with white tabi socks, then you’ll be there in no time at all. Look back: everyone is now behind you, just shadows with sound. Everybody wants to be you. Their fingernails are crusted full of the ghost of you.
An index finger finds its way into Suguru’s mouth, but he retracts it when he remembers he put on nail polish to keep from chewing. His feet hurt even though he’s been wearing nothing but sneakers, no new leather loafers to break in for job interviews or formal galas. He closes the Bristol Stool Chart informational site tab and is met with his five paragraphs of progress: just shit. Just plain shit.
Satoru makes a little noise, something between a snort and a snore. He’s not fully asleep, Suguru is certain; he can only sleep hard when it’s just him in his own bed with two plaid blankets from home and three firm pillows. So Suguru gives him what he wants, cards a gentle hand through his white-blonde hair as the rain picks up. The laptop screen dims, then goes black.
Nanami, cold and boring, boring and cold. Stands apart from the world—stands above, the only acceptable kind of apart. Suguru is so jealous his teeth hurt down to the roots.
—
The problem with work is that it has a beginning, middle, and end. There is so much traveling to be done.
“I hate navel-gazers,” says Shoko. Suguru cocks his head. She flaps a thin sheaf of paper at him, stapled together at the corner. On the grading application she has open on her screen there are comment boxes spread all over the document like treasure chests in a video game.
It’s an open dorm lounge, where anyone can walk by and hear their conversation; old posters from the bulletin board no one looks at are scattered around Suguru’s feet, torn down to make space for the new. From here they can hear the next lounge down the long cream-colored hallway, the designated hangout spot for the resident Chinese internationals, who are all on Shanghai time: they sleep at 8 AM and wake up in the afternoon, DoorDash brunch, change from oversized Balenciaga sleep shirts into Vivienne Westwood cardigans, DoorDash dinner and dessert from two different places, then game and watch shows all through the night until sunrise. They’re constantly on the verge of being unbearably loud. It’s incredible, really, how they’ve crafted a separate universe just a few doors down; Suguru is almost fond of them.
“I’m a navel-gazer,” Suguru replies. “D-1.”
“The only D-1 you are is a D-1 self-deprecator,” Shoko says, dismissive. “You know you always stick the landing. I don’t wanna hear it from you, don’t make it about yourself.”
Shoko is fake-mean, the kind that sounds like she’s speaking her mind but is only ever a lighthearted jab, strictly within a dashed zone outside of sensitive areas; it isn’t so easy to meet people that will be mean to your face, these days. It requires a special setting, like a boss-employee relationship where you are far from the top performer.
Suguru likes Shoko. He had a raging orientation week crush on her that coincided with fresh on-campus nerves, but it faded as he settled into university life. The exact reason he can never pinpoint, but maybe it has to do with how the blunted barbs that fall from her tongue, meant to bounce off the skin and induce at most a laugh and a playful shove, sometimes pierce and burrow deep into the insides of his elbows. Suguru’s made it to twenty years alive still with the skin of a baby, it seems. But still, he likes her sharpness, and how closely she controls it.
“They’re always talking about the same small things.” Another comment box is created and furiously filled in. “Which is fine, but it’s always dressed up, too. You know that comparison in Akane Banashi: a character expects a gourmet French dish but is served katsudon instead, and the issue is the mismatched expectation rather than what’s actually being served?”
“No.”
“Point is, I don’t need them to stretch their small stories into big, grandiose ones. I think you can let them become meaningful, but this is just overkill. And I don’t know how to explain to them that there is so much more to write about if they just look outside instead of licking their own belly buttons clean.”
Suguru twists his ankle back and forth, the posters crunching under his sole. “It’s too hard for most people. You know yourself so much more than you know anything else, and there’s no research you have to do, nothing you have to be careful or aware of—”
“Blah,” says Shoko, and she lets her mouth fall open, and Suguru can see that her tongue is blue from a blue raspberry-flavored Jolly Rancher. “Excuses for a lack of imagination. Or—passion. A lack of passion.”
From the neighboring lounge, a bout of raucous laughter and clapping.
“Sorry,” says Suguru. His laptop lies in his backpack, dormant. Shoko says nothing in reply.
—
Screaming through any choice of medium takes far longer than just screaming. Even if your vocal cords have been rented out to banshee and you’re temporarily devoid of a voice, banging on the wall and destroying a few shelves is a lot more efficient than weaving a tapestry depicting the source and shape of your agony. Especially if what you’re screaming about can be summed up in a sentence or two, or you don’t even know what you’re screaming about, only that you need to scream.
Right now there is screaming, but not coming out of Suguru’s mouth. John, not to be confused with Jon sitting two places away from him, has thrown his cards down with a howl.
“Chill, bro,” says Jon.
“THIS IS BULLSHIT,” John tells him. “BULL.”
“Serafina—”
Serafina, John’s on-again, off-again girlfriend sets her drink down and starts hauling John to his feet. She asks over her shoulder, “How much does he owe?”
Satoru squints for a second, then holds up three fingers. “Bought in three times, so sixty and your remaining stack at five fifty-eight to Xiaowu. I’ll send you his Venmo.”
Serafina makes an OK sign with the hand not clasped under John’s armpit and kicks John’s sneakers out of the door after slipping into her own, then disappears onto the porch. There’s a brief lull at the poker table, no one moving to collect and re-shuffle the cards. Xiaowu, a short, baby-faced statistics major who by default hosts most poker games since he has an actual table, makes a show of counting the people left.
“Still five left,” he says, “if you’re back in, Suguru?”
Suguru lays a palm against his cheek; it’s still hot from a bottle of soju. “Give me a couple more rounds.”
Xiaowu nods and begins gathering the cards again, his hands practiced. The cards are so crisp they sound almost like they’re ripping as they slap against each other; secretly, Suguru loves the sound, like he loves seeing the gears of machinery exposed but still grinding against each other, whirring, clicking in tandem. “That’s four for now—let’s pick it up.”
The four still playing are all proper classmates; there’s the aforementioned Xiaowu, then Jon, a math major that wears basketball shorts regardless of weather ( We say there’s no possible forecast prior on his fit, Satoru explained once), and Adeya, another math major with restless, beautiful hands, and Satoru himself. He’d begged Suguru to grace his so-called nerd conventions (poker nights) with his presence, but Suguru had figured out that he was only adding money to the pot by coming; he was essentially paying to attend the nerd convention.
Xiaowu deals. Satoru lets Suguru take a peek at his cards: queen of diamonds, three of hearts. His gaze slides from the cards to the bony knuckles supporting Satoru’s chin, then that small, grinning mouth, the tip of his nose.
I’m glad I met him later, Suguru thinks occasionally. When there was more of me.
Preflop, no one folds. The first three community cards are dealt: five of hearts, jack of spades, eight of hearts.
He doesn’t know if he and Satoru could be together had they met at an earlier point in his life. Suguru hasn’t transmuted by any means, but he views it as a metamorphosis of a kind, finding a form from which he isn’t so tempted to claw at the veneer of; because Satoru, bright, magnetic being that he is, would have led Suguru on a race to another dimension, wherever he wanted to go. Suguru would have gone on doggedly, tripping all over himself and wasting all his years only to grasp at the rippling edge of Satoru’s shirt.
Or so he hypothesizes, because you can never say for certain. But Suguru has a feeling.
“Watch,” says Satoru. Adeya places down four chips, her face mountain-still. In response Satoru pushes in eight; she stays unmoving for a second, then matches him. Jon folds, and Xiaowu, after muttering a few numbers under his breath, also folds.
Suguru says, “You can’t know.”
“No, I can’t,” agrees Satoru, “since that’d be cheating. But I can have a feeling.”
The turn: ten of hearts.
Ayeda raps the table. Satoru follows suit.
Under the table, Suguru gives Satoru’s thigh a pinch. If Adeya has two hearts of any rank, or any pair, or a nine and a seven or a queen and a nine, Satoru’s done for; he has nothing better than a high card, which is only a queen.
“Watch,” Satoru says again, and he gives Suguru a wink.
The river, the final card of five: a two of spades. The breath that’s crawled slowly into Suguru’s throat over the course of the round doesn’t abate; not even a pair.
Without a blink, Ayeda tosses a chip past the betting line. “All in.”
“Sure,” says Satoru, and he’s laughing now.
This is why Suguru pays every time, and never comes out net positive: he can never hold the fort down. Either he’s conservative and is chipped away by the blinds, or he folds, his bluff splintered. Satoru, though—he’s usually up, and tonight he’s certainly up, having made a good amount from John and Xiaowu; but Ayeda’s profits match his, so it’s double or nothing.
They flip their cards at the same time. Jon lets out a squawk. Ayeda’s poker face melts, and she’s laughing too: nine of spades, four of hearts. As nothing as nothing gets, worse than Satoru’s hand.
Shoving her stack of chips across the table, she says, “Any other night you would have folded.”
“But it’s you, and you have more guts than me, so I couldn’t,” Satoru says simply. He sneaks a glance at Suguru, waiting for his praise; Suguru tries to convey his unimpressed-ness as best as he can in a single expression, but his heartbeat’s still in his ears. “And I wanted to show my dearie sweetie—”
“That was just straight gambling, dumbass.” Suguru starts arranging Satoru’s chips for him by color, pushing them into neat rows. “Don’t act like you were demonstrating some great skill.”
“But following your nose is a skill,” says Satoru. “You use it all the time. You write with it.”
Suguru winces involuntarily; even the word write being used in conjunction with anything related to him makes him shift in his seat. Instead of slowing, his heart takes on another rhythm, a familiar, harried one. “That’s different.”
“It isn’t as different as you think, really. Whatever you hear in those sentences, whatever it is that tells you that this is good and that is bad and this is really super-duper mega good, you can hear it here, too.”
What do you know, Suguru wants to say.
“What do I know,” says Satoru, mock-rueful, and Suguru feels his blood surge at that. It’s the alcohol, he tells himself, the alcohol, and lets the acid air in his lungs leave through his nose in one heavy breath. “You could be better than me, Suguru. If you tried.”
Satoru’s eyes on his face, clear behind his silver-rimmed glasses. That blue on Suguru. Suguru has to turn away, focus on everything else outside of him: the oval poker table’s slick red surface, the half-finished drinks languishing in the cupholders, the humming of the warm LED lamp. Ayeda’s manicured hands, bright red gel polish in perfect contrast with her dark skin; Jon picking at the angry pimple on his jaw, one hand swiping on his phone, Serafina and John’s empty seats. Xiaowu shuffling the cards again, so crisp. This little room turning into half a dream from the early hour. Because otherwise he’s afraid Satoru will be able to see the ugly bubbling up through his torso and to the surface; because had they met earlier, Suguru would now be ugly all the time, instead of only rarely.
How easy it must be to know yourself from the start, and to be able to start looking all around at others right after, right away. There is not even a need to be brilliant, but of course brilliance makes it sting all the more. Suguru lets that old nauseous mix of self-awareness and exhaustion catch up to him as he turns back to Satoru, meets his eyes.
He smiles. “But I’m not.”
Then quick as that he breaks away and gives Xiaowu a nudge, says, “I’m alright now, actually. Back in.”
“Really!” Xiaowu beams and slides the dealer button over to him; it bounces off Suguru’s forearm and settles next to his small, diminished stack of chips. “Great! Ready to win it back, that’s the spirit—”
Suguru loses.
—
You are making something very small and very simple. It’s almost nothing at all. It’s so small that it could blow away in the wind, but then again the wind has blown much bigger things away so the premise is not strong enough to draw any useful conclusion. We argue that such mighty gusts of wind are black swan events, that the retrospective is not and will never be our now when we are concerned with the act of creation, which is everything present, okay, so we must make the most of what we know. Maybe we should be looking at mass instead, because we (I) bet that soon we will see that not so many atoms are needed after all. In fact, some of the best things hardly seem to require atoms at all.
Electronics are really miraculous, for one. Suguru could teach himself how all of it works and the underlying science with a string of XXX For Dummies webpages, but he prefers to believe in magic. He receives a text from an unsaved number one day that says Hello, are you free to grab a coffee sometime? I’d like to ask you for some advice. full punctuation and all, and he thinks it’s a scam text looking to extract $100 for Grandma Bethany’s hip replacement surgery until he scrolls upwards through the text history; it’s Nanami.
They sit across from each other on high stools in the cafe of the vet building library, Suguru holding an iced Americano, Nanami sipping at something light brown. Satoru hates it when he does that, calls a latte or cappuccino or macchiato light brown liquid: now it won’t taste as good, Suguru!
“Uh,” says Suguru. What kind of advice is he, a mere pleb of a fellow classmate with far dimmer aspirations, supposed to give to the illustrious Nanami Kento? He’s exaggerating, but Suguru isn’t the kind of person people come to for advice. He doesn’t do that much right, after all. Even if he doesn’t do much wrong.
He and Shoko have times in the year where they send each other long emails or text chains where they talk at each other, and very occasionally to each other. It feels like all he needs, sometimes. Dramatically, he thinks it’s like gulping down fresh-squeezed lemonade after playing in the afternoon sun for hours, that instant of being seen; or perhaps it’s being seen on his own terms, no unpredicted angle, everything important and nothing more.
Suguru—The problem is no one is a character, Suguru.
“How are you?” asks Nanami.
Suguru blinks. Nanami’s never asked him that before, and he didn’t think Nanami had that phrase in his no-nonsense vocabulary.
“I’m good,” he says blandly. “What advice do you need from me? I don’t know if I can help, though.”
“You can.” Nanami laces his fingers together, then unlaces them and sets his hands down flat. “It’s about the business management major—you’re majoring in it, right? Or minoring?”
“Fifty-fifty. I might, I might not. But what about it? You wanna take a class for a distribution? You can do that with less boring classes.”
Shoko—But we can never really know a person. We have limited exposure, so we can’t help but draw pictures of other people inside my head. Did you listen to the song I sent you earlier?
Nanami shakes his head, sweeps his bangs away from his forehead even though they’re not long enough to come anywhere near his eyes. There’s a smattering of pimples near his hairline. “I’m transferring and trying to affiliate in the next two semesters, and I wanted to ask if you think there’s any best alignment of classes so I can catch up.”
“In two—now? You want to switch now?” Suguru is sure he’s goggling rudely right now, but he’s never been an actor.
“Yes,” says Nanami.
Suguru—No, I didn’t. You’ve literally never sent me a song I thought was good and I need every three-minute block of time possible to listen to other, better songs. And my point is that no one is a character. From start to end, you can’t say there’s a chain of events that cause this, then this, then this to happen, because it was set up in some specific way.
“Man, I’m not trying to be a downer or whatever, but—why? You’ve already made so much progress.”
“I want to.”
“If you start all over now, it’s just making life harder for yourself.”
“I know,” says Nanami, and although he sounds no different than he usually does, flat and disaffected, Suguru realizes all he’s said so far is just a repetition of what Nanami must’ve asked himself already. “It’s annoying, but I want to do it and I know it’s possible.”
“But you’re good at what you do already,” Suguru says, still. Still. “It just makes sense, for you. It fits you.”
“It might not always. And how are you defining ‘easy’ and ‘hard’? There are more reasons people do things other than being good at them or because a lot of other people do it. Or even just wanting to do it. There’s a lot.”
Shoko—I’m not saying that anyone is destined to be something. I’m just saying that having a destiny in the first place is like having the flat escalators in airports that speed you up instead of dragging a sixty-pound suitcase over gravel. And it’s basic stats that if you have a prior event you can condition on it to figure out what the posterior is, Satoru’s always going on about it. And it isn’t true that you’ve never liked a long I’ve sent you, you liked that Japanese/Korean/English song I sent last semester.
Suguru—It’s called a travelator. F.Y.I. And stop trying to use math metaphors, they don’t make any sense because you don’t actually know what it means. Neither of us do. No, you spend your time taking all these high-level literary analysis political environment historical deconstruction classes and somehow still end up so black and white, linear cause and effect. The song was literally a joke song. It says ‘Ojousama, it’s time to go to bed’ and ‘yare yare~’ every thirty seconds. Of course I love it, but it doesn’t count as actual music. You weren’t recommending it with your entire earnest, pure heart.
“Sorry, Nanami,” says Suguru, because this isn’t what Nanami came here for.
“Don’t say that.”
Suguru picks at the lid of his Americano, watching the ice bob. “I don’t have a single definition, I guess. ‘Easy’ can be something actually being simple. But it can also be having less responsibility, or having a lot of guidance and momentum, even with a complicated process.”
Nanami is quiet, and the chatter of the cafe—the mundane conversations about relationships and schoolwork, the screech of the blender crushing ice and fruit together, the click-tap of pens and keyboards—seep into the space. Embarrassment creeps up Suguru’s spine.
Shoko—And you’re so much better because you think you can face the ‘real truth’, right? It’s FYI, not F.Y.I.
Suguru—No need to get touchy. I’m aware of how acronyms work. I wrote it like that for emphasis, but clearly that went over your head. We’re getting away from the point again. I’m just saying that you should remember that we don’t live in a rational world, and humans are irrational all the way to the heart. It’s randomness. And a probability is only a probability. It’s a value representing a chance, not a fact. You should ask Satoru about Brownian motion. Do it when you’re cuddling him and he’ll fall twenty times deeper in love with you.
Shoko—You are such a hypocrite.
“That’s an interesting way to think about it,” Nanami says finally. “But by that definition, I still think I’m doing something easy.”
“I don’t think so.”
“We can agree to disagree, then.”
Suguru—I never claimed to be anything else. Again, I’m only saying that it takes an extraordinary level of discipline to stay consistent to an image all the time, even in private. Only characters have the potential to do so. But once you let them become real, they lose that potential and are beholden to all the world’s fluctuations. Bobby wiped his ass today but he didn’t do it yesterday. Who can say what he’ll do tomorrow?
Shoko—Whatever I say Bobby will do you’ll say the opposite.
Suguru—But can you really say that I’ll do that, Suguru? Every time?
Shoko—No. You’ll throw in a match to piss me off instead.
“Yeah,” says Suguru, and he tries smiling a little at Nanami, which has never been returned in the time he’s known him. “I’ll tell you what I’ve done so far, then, and an order I think might work out. But it might not be all that relevant.”
“I wouldn’t ask if I thought you had nothing worth listening to,” and the corner of Nanami’s mouth is tipped upwards, just slightly. “Thank you.”
Suguru—You could try getting on my nerves instead.
Shoko—That isn’t possible. I’ll never cause you more grief than the kids in your office hours. You’re like a Buddha but a mean one.
“I might turn out to be better at being a salesman than I’d ever be as a doctor,” Nanami is saying as they walk out of the cafe, tossing their empty cups in the recycling bin, “who knows?”
Suguru shrugs.
Suguru—And tomorrow I could be a yokai with a benevolent, philanthropic spirit, so you should give it a try. Who knows?
—
He closes his laptop and Xiaowu snaps upright. “Done writing your—” he flaps his hand in Suguru’s general direction, “ — thing now?”
“Done,” says Suguru, and is immediately dealt two hole cards. Satoru rubs his ankle against his, toes down the top part of Suguru’s sock. Suguru kicks him.
The cards flit out, turn over, are gathered and reshuffled again.
After four rounds, John, sober this time, says thoughtfully, “I just realized something about you, Suguru. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you mad at the poker table.”
“He’s not happy or mad in general here,” says Xiaowu, “but today…”
Satoru gives Suguru’s cheek a sharp poke before Suguru can react. “He’s mad as hell today, actually. You just can’t tell. So cute!”
“Something on your mind? Bad final coming up?”
“Nah,” says Suguru, and raises Satoru twenty. “Today, I’m just playing for keeps.”
—
Dammit…! How?! How can you just give it all up like that?!
Aniki…
(Silence. Kisoba is trembling, Rokuen wears a pensive expression. Kiroku smiles, slight.)
So…what now?
We’re back…to having nothing again. (Kiroku spreads his arms.) Not even a name this time! Ha ha!
(A pause. Kiroku lowers his arms and looks away from his two apprentices.)
But then… if it’s gone, we just give ourselves a new one.
Akane-banashi, Story 138: Chance to Shine