i never had the courage of my convictions
as long as danger is near
On Monday morning I wake up three hours before my alarm. I check my emails, including the one from my grandfather's assistant with the subject line THINK ABOUT IT, screaming at me in all caps. I heat up last night's dinner for breakfast. I put on five different trousers before I find the right one. I towel my long hair dry and think about shaving them. There is a sort of isolated brown-mustard color ringing the hollow of my eye, hideous against the paleness of my complexion, and I don't want anyone to think it has anything to do with my inadequacy. I finish a complex routine that is not so much a choice as a necessity.
There is a framed Christmas photo on my nightstand near the door. I stand in front of it and remain like this as the minutes tick, the faces staring back at me bright and injurious. My father and I are almost obscenely dissimilar in appearance, though our conspicuous rigidity is a genetic inheritance, and it makes our smiles look slightly identical. I reach for it, trying not to swallow my tongue, and something feels strange. Of course there is disappointment. In suspension I look desperate, wearing thin the version of me that seems well-adjusted and deeply loved. But this strange feeling has nothing to do with that, nothing to do with me staring into this presumed absolute in which I pretend to be an irreplaceable part of a functioning motor. It is that it is 6.45 a.m. and I am conscious about my misery. I am spending my mornings perfecting a routine, afraid of that inevitable shift which marks the beginning of those familiar, unbearable months. I am in my room, thinking over and over again, will my life be good even if I can't remember how, even if I can't see the possibility it still exists? And in the midst of this abrupt self-reflection, I realize I am late. In a dire way that forces me to put one foot in front of the other, across the street, down the bustling subway, and to Keio Private University.
———
The days I don't want to disappear are very few and far in-between, non-anatomical feats that, sure, happen fleetingly. But they are extraordinary. All the people I encounter seemingly searching for something good to start their day with and beaming, I mean beaming, when they see me. I am their perfect morning coffee, or at least an especially eager compliment sent their way, and just like the memory of my grandmother's dried apples, I stretch them out until they distort into something incomprehensible. In a 50 square meters bathroom of a bustling train station as I close my eyes and will myself not to empty whatever still remained from last night's dinner. In the middle of a high traffic I often meet on my way to the city, feeling as though something died inside of me and with no possibility of it ever being removed. And now I am walking to the administrator's office, knowing I only have so much time before my inevitable crumble, and I greet the first person I see with a stilted bow, a polite smile, and vividly feel the muscles throb underneath the bruise.
———
By the time I push my way out the office, the sun is already flooding most of the campus grounds. I take the elevator down, and the dark shaft walls make mirror of the window, I turn away from my reflection and two students are craned over a phone screen. In the lobby, there is an art history exhibition. I go up the viewing platform and scan the partition walls, and there is a painting that I love by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Virgin of Consolation. In it, the black-clad Virgin of Consolation is sitting on a white marble throne. Across her lap is a young woman who grieves at the death of her child laying naked at the Virgin's feet. It is a pensive, sfumato masterpiece, drenched in Catholic tragedy. Bouguereau painted it after his wife, Nelly, died in childbirth along with his youngest son. As I am taking in the details of this painting, Asahina Ukyo comes to stand beside me. I'm not proud of what I do then, which is to turn away and run down the stairs, and I look over my shoulder and see that he is coming after me, his hair catching a shaft of sun. Of all the thirteen siblings, he is the one who costs me the most. And it's not that I'm scared of him, but the idea of forming complete sentences and listening to his complete sentences when he had seen exactly what I was so desperate to hide seems unbearable, and in spite of me pretending that it was nothing—that at some point I have chalked the happenings as a sleight of hand—being slapped across the face is humiliating, mostly because in the aftermath of it there is no hiding the despicable decadence of my anatomical function.
———
He is behind me as I cut through the yard and into an alleyway, the reminder that he has become an inseparable part of what happened that night in the bathroom turning my stomach, and then I feel myself falling through a cracked pavement, my feet losing tread on the asphalt. I see a student watching from the above-ground library, and I am embarrassed, shamed by the professional backdrop of this cul-de-sac. The research papers and unmanned printers and me, breathing heavily over a mistake. So I turn my head sideways and let him take my damp hands, then have him pull me to my feet.
"I know what you are thinking," he murmurs under his breath. There is sweat beading his forehead and loose strands of hair, which against his immaculately pressed suit is more disturbing to me than the event that just transpired. "I'm not here to discuss that."
"I know that." Of course I don't know that, but now that he has said it out loud in an attempt at clarification, I feel chagrined.
"I just wasn't finished looking at you. I haven't seen you since that morning," he says, and the student rises up from his seat and slips back inside the building.
"I see."
"It's almost lunch. You should join me." He thumbs the bruise that is forming in my arm, and it is an understatement to say that I would rather do anything else, but then I feel his expectation, that he is not so much asking a question as allowing me time to confirm an obvious conclusion—that in exchange for his compromise, for his cooperative silence about everything that happened, something is owed. He directs me to a lounge reserved for faculty members and alumni, looks me over, and says, Let's order, which is an indirect way of bringing my attention to the thing I am already aware of—this skeletal shiver-me-timbers happening underneath my clothes. I look at him, and he is staring at the angular shape of my joints. He takes the menu and orders for the both of us. When the meals are served, he offers a smile that takes up the most minuscule portion of his face, and when I open the stainless covering the plates, I begin to suspect he is trying to humiliate me. It is so big that finishing it comes at the expanse of ninety percent of my digestive capability. This potential cruelty is so specific, so much like a courtesy that has merely gone awry, that I feel obligated to be a good sport. I consider escaping through the bathroom window, but then he looks up at me through his fringes, grains of rice caught in-between his chopsticks, and I think of his mother's smile, the sound of her laughter as she attempts to fashion my hair into something more than a straight line. How I wanted her to do it again.
So I force every piece in that plate down my throat, each mouthful a threat to the durability of my esophagus separating the contents of my stomach from everyone in the room. I wish I had known there would be this many side dishes, Ukyo's omission of this information makes me wonder if this is, in fact, deliberate. It's clear this is a test of some sort: in the ample time it has taken me to finish half of the main dish, the man in front of me has completely ignored his own meal, instead he is looking at me as if someone just dared him to do something ludicrous and super-chucklesome and he is just going along with it, waiting for me to call his bluff.
"Is it distracting?"
"What?"
"The bruise," I say, and his smile thins into a straight line.
"I just didn't think I would ever get to see it again."
"I'm sorry you had to."
"It wasn't your fault someone spilled their champagne on me," he says, and I like him less and more. Less because he appears now to be observant and impractical, and more because this is something he can afford to be. "You weren't the one who made the mistake. Don't be so polite," he says, directing all his attention to one side of my face where the bruise sits, and it feels petrifying to be probed like this, to have been sought specifically for the inconvenient truth, and for him to sit on the other side of the table and unravel all the crepe.
"It was a mistake. My father is not a bad person."
"I'm sure," he says, a little patronizing. Our table is not particularly private, and I don't want to be reminded of the humiliation. I reach for the chawan as he pulls out a worn-out paperback and flattens it out with his hand. "It's not my place to tell you how to live your life, or what to do with it, so I'm not going to."
"Come downstairs for dinner tonight," he continues, sliding the book further forward. I steal a look, take it from the table, and this is the first time I made contact with his past.
"You wrote these," I say, scanning what seems to be annotations. The papers are soft and deeply creased, as if they have been flipped and unflipped frequently.
"We have similar handwriting, don't we?" he says, and when I lower the book and look at him, I see him, the man who insisted on accompanying me back the night of my father's wedding. And I can't tell if this oppressive generosity is meant to be a compensation, because here is precisely the time he tells me that during the evenings, sometimes he sits by the railing and watches me read the notes stuck to the refrigerator until he has to go to the bathroom or to work, and he tells me that I am a welcome addition, and I laugh at this because rule number one is that I cannot appear to be desperate. But after I laugh, I realize I am sunken in the middle, exhausted in a way that is cemented by time, and I remember the gentle clinking of my father's flute, the silk and stilted silence under the golden light of the chandelier, and I think about the long periods of inebriation I call vacations and wonder if patience is a virtue, if all the suffering I had endured so far has no substantial meaning and no actual purpose than merely being dealt a bad card. And when Ukyo smiles at me, whatever conviction I painstakingly fostered has been blown to a mere suggestion, and I tell him I am going to be there for dinner, and his smile widens as he returns to his plate. At first it is relieving, but as I watch him pick up his chopsticks and tear the belly of the fish, I realize that I hate it. I hate it a lot. I can't decide if it's the familiarity, the instinct to be soft and obedient every time a person offers the smallest gesture of kindness, or his sympathy for my condition—the consideration in his disappointment, the willingness to bargain anew what is unnecessary.