Work Text:
Like a man should
Instead of becoming what you hated
You were born good
You just gotta remember how to stay it
— Born Good, Doris Club (2024)
A small café in Kitano-chō, bathed in later afternoon glow. The scent of ground coffee and savoury pastries mingles with the clinking of plates and silverware.
“Thank you very much. These are excellent terms.”
“Of course. It’s only beneficial to both of our families.”
“I’ll send you the other documents when I get back. Also, are you sure I can’t pay for our coffee? I’d love to.”
Tomoe Hideyo laughs, a cluster of warm breaths. He slides his copy of the contract into a leather folder.
“Definitely not, Sakuma-kun. I’m the one who called on you. And your recommendation, the Rwandan single origin, it was fantastic. I feel indebted.”
“I’ve never seen you waver as a gentleman,” grins Rei. “I appreciate it. It’s kind of you.”
“Thanks for agreeing to meet me today, by the way. It’s your birthday, isn’t it?” He smiles, lilac eyes crinkling at the corners, forming lovely flowers. “Twenty-nine is a wonderful age. I hope you enjoy it.”
He must have known that from the internet that’s been trending his name, even now. He left his mobile phone at home, shut off and hidden under a throw cushion.
“It has been a good day,” he answers simply.
“Also…” Hideyo makes an odd expression, unpractised. A brief flicker of hesitation. “I’m not certain if this is a burden, but something in me is thinking you should know. My sister is well, and she thinks of you.”
When he was overseas in the worst, most listless part of his life, in the tea country of Sri Lanka, the locals on the field asked him to climb a rickety wooden ladder up an old tree to retrieve a bird’s nest. He did, muddy shoes on the top step, and scooped the single round egg into his palm.
He didn’t know why he did it, but the next instant he remembers after that the egg was smashed, yolk and amniotic fluid and shell strung between his fingers, dripping membrane. He came down with the empty nest and his murderous hand. The same way, hearing her name, he thought his heart would go into seizure crushed to burst.
It barely reacts. Dispassionately, he thinks of dying.
Rei looks back with little feeling. What an odd closure to a business meeting. He should be used to the mess living is already, all entangled threads and unexpected twists, with how much of the world he’s seen.
“Thank you, brother-in-law,” he says. “Please send Hiyori my kindest regards.”
“You’re back,” the sixteen-year-old ghost sitting on his kitchen counter exclaims. “Happy birthday!”
He sets his groceries down, flicks on the incandescent light. Warm white fills his old apartment, passes through her. “Thank you. Why are you here?”
“Don’t ask stupid questions, okay?” She jerks her chin at his plastic bags. “You’re cooking dinner. Is any of it for me?”
He chuckles. “Since when do my hallucinations eat at my dining table?”
“When you’re so lonely you need one.”
Rei begins to put away his groceries.
A pleasant hum. She kicks her feet. “Hm-hm, twenty-nine. What a big age! Okay, tell me what’s happened for you. Catch me up on the past few years.”
One loafer slips off her heel, dangling by her socked toes. What’d he give to take it off for her, put it back in the genkan.
He picks up a packet of leafy bai cai. “I wrote a collection of poems in Tromsø last winter, under the Northern Lights in the back of a stranger’s van, chattering from hypothermia,” he says. “I accidentally gave thirteen kids music tuition in Seoul, at some point. I quit entertainment. I went back to Transilvania. I couldn’t stand it and left—stayed in Nuwara Eliya picking tea leaves for a month. I miss the rolling mist and the cold. I miss how it felt. Cleansing. Real. It made me real.“
She holds his eyes. Young and unforgiving. “That’s not a lot.”
“I don’t need a lot.”
“What are you trying to prove to me?”
“All of me has changed.”
The smile drops completely from her face. Everything drops from her face—leaving a vacant, eerie slate of pale skin, talking to him with a voice from his sleep, a nightmare lullaby.
“If you were going to leave Hyōgo again, you shouldn’t have bothered to come back.”
“I didn’t fall in love with anyone else.” He puts the vegetables into the drawer at the bottom of the refrigerator. “The you that’s older is stunning, you know. She’s so happy now.”
Wavering, “That’s what you think.”
The last time he saw his wife, she was talking to people he didn’t know outside the TV station. Shaking hands, winning smile, laughing polite. Her hair was cut wonderfully short to her shoulders.
“You’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong!” screams Hiyori. She lunges for him, immaterial hands bunched into his sweater, evaporated tears dripping onto the skin of his face. His back hits the counter. The white ribbon falls from her loose hair. “I’m so unhappy. I’m so unhappy, I want to die!”
Softly, like he’s placating a child, “Hiyori,” he breathes.
That’s what this ghost a head shorter than him is: the hidden truth of the person he’d loved when he was just as young. The truth his wife has been nursing in her this whole time, fetal. The beginnings of a dream, learning that it couldn’t have intuited that he would one day upend it all.
When they were sixteen they rehearsed a life together, thinking themselves grown, talking about leaving their quiet town, longing for Tokyo from the radio songs. When they were twenty they thought having a breakup be water under the bridge was maturity. When they were twenty-four they married, their most convincing performance yet. They kept themselves afloat on the fumes of their sanguine, dissolute, indecent youth. They believed they could keep each other alive. They believed love was just that—a belief.
Sometimes you can lie to yourself for more than ten years straight.
She folds back, crosses her arms around herself, shivering. The face of his wife fills in the blank.
“I can’t go back.” He rubs the ring on his left fourth finger, a tarnished band of silver. “I don’t recognise the person I was before I left.”
She sniffles. Her ring glints in the dry light. “I have half a mind to wonder about you now. I can’t help it when I do. I don’t even want to talk to you anymore.”
Outside of this house there is another life. A life being lived elsewhere, a life that doesn’t need him. Where, again? He doesn’t remember her new address.
“You don’t have to. You let me go. We just made a mistake, Hiyori. I only feel relief when I see you live.”
The ghost disappears altogether. The kitchenette is left with only the buzzing lightbulb and Rei, like there was no one else in the room at all.
“You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Creakily, he makes dinner. He sets it on one plate of white ceramic.
He eats it alone.
He washes the plate and the silverware.
Caretaking. It’s prophylactic, wards away delusional things like a younger Hiyori coming into his house and asking to be fed.
He disposes of the thin fish bones in the waste bin.
In their sticky teenage days they were forever hungry. They ate by sharing things between their mouths, so starving they would then share each other’s tongues. They longed for each other through saliva and cheap sweet things, in a way they would then deny.
When they grew older they cared for each other and it felt geriatric. Automatic minutiae of living, chore after chore, they were still newly twenty-five. Why keep a man alive if he wants to die? They couldn’t shake the horrific feeling that there was
so much more to life than this.
Their thirteen years together were soluble. Tears on the paper they wrote the dream down on wrecked it.
With dry eyes, in this new life to write up alone, he shuts off the light.
Before he gets ready for bed, his landline rings.
“Rei! Hello? Can you hear me?”
“Yes, Ma. Loud and clear. How are you?”
“Hush,” she says. “Happy birthday, Rei. Your father’s going to come up in a moment. You can speak to him then. How was your day?”
He smiles, heart in his throat. “I had a meeting, got home, and made dinner.”
“Working so hard as usual. You should’ve rested today.”
His mother laughs, dark and misty and loving and faraway. Like on the roads in the cold tea hills of Nuwara Eliya. Like the mountaintops surrounding Cluj-Napoca. He closes his eyes, lets it wash over him, a tide.
He should tell her about the deal he’d drawn up in the afternoon, the advantageous clauses in the terms. Instead, he just wants to be just her son, amniotic, for the few moments he can spare.
“I’m sorry I left home so suddenly,” he says softly. “I’ll come back soon. Once I’ve settled everything in Hyōgo. I can bring Ritsu with me.”
“Oh, Rei. There’s always time. Come by when you’re done.”
There isn’t, he wants to cry, they’re running out of time, there’s no getting younger from here. He needs to make something of the remainder of his life.
He thinks about the egg in the tree. Negligible, in the scheme of things. But a life so incredibly precious. When he’d lost himself, when he didn’t even have it in him to remember what he was about to do, he broke it. Because if not you, then it’ll be me.
The same thing as leaving the person he’d drawn up a life with. He wanted to die, he did it to keep himself alive.
And there’s so much longer to go. Keep walking, utterly lost, in debt to every person of the earth, the wild fallow field of the world.
He wishes he could live right, too.
“Yeah, Ma. I know,” he answers, tears lining his throat. “I’ve got to go. I’ll tell you when I book the flight. Don’t forget to bundle up and eat on time, alright?”
…if you’ll only come by. Know I told you
it was okay to go. Know I told you
it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me?
You always believed me. Wish you would
come back so we could talk about truth.
— Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you., Gabrielle Calvocoressi (2021)