November 19 – December 2016

Tokyo & Yukikaze Academy, Sapporo, Hokkaido

0–5°C, deepening snow

I take the first shinkansen south on a Saturday morning.

The platform at Sapporo Station is cold in the particular way of enclosed spaces that have given up trying to be warm — the heat is there, technically, but the ceiling is too high and the crowds too thin at this hour for it to mean anything. I buy a coffee from the kiosk near the gate and stand with it and watch the board update. My bag is over one shoulder. It contains: a change of clothes, a book I won't read, my wallet, my phone, and the thing wrapped in cloth at the bottom that I packed last night with the particular care I bring to things that matter.

I have told no one where I'm going. This required no particular effort — there is no one to tell. Akira texted me at seven and I wrote back that I was running an errand, which is accurate, and he said okay, text me when you're back, which he always says, and I said I will, which I will. The exchange took forty seconds. The shinkansen boards in four minutes. I finish my coffee and throw the cup away and find my seat.

The journey is four hours. I spend most of it looking out the window at Japan moving past — the coast, then the interior, then the gradual southward shift from Hokkaido's spare winter geometry to something greener, something that has not yet committed to full cold. The snow thins and disappears somewhere around Hakodate. By the time we reach Tohoku the sky is just grey, ordinary grey, the grey of a country that has not had its first snow yet and doesn't know what it's missing. I watch it go past and I don't think about much. I have a particular quality of mind when I've made a decision — settled, clear, oriented. The decision was made some time ago. All that remains is the execution.

I've been thinking about Hayase Ren since October 31st. Not constantly — not the way I think about Akira, which is continuous and involuntary, woven into the background of everything. More like the way you think about a task that's been on a list for too long, a thing that needs doing that you keep finding reasons to defer. I've deferred it for three weeks. I've watched the deferral accumulate and I've made note of it and I've decided, this week, that I'm done deferring.

He is in Tokyo. I know this from the photography program he mentioned in October, from the name of the building he said with the ease of someone who lives somewhere and has stopped thinking about the address. I've verified the building exists. I've verified, from the route between it and the nearest station, that it's the kind of building without a doorman. Ground floor apartment, he said. He said it because he was making a point about the city — Tokyo doesn't do ground floor the way Sapporo does, ground floor in Tokyo means something different — and I filed it the way I file everything, without deciding to.

He said his name was on the buzzer.

The shinkansen arrives at Tokyo Station at eleven forty-three. I walk to the subway and take it south and transfer once and come up from the underground into a neighbourhood that is quieter than the parts of Tokyo most people mean when they say Tokyo. Residential. The kind of street where the buildings are close together and the light comes through at angles. His building is off the main road, down a side street, the kind of building that has four storeys and a bicycle rack out front and a row of buzzers with handwritten labels that haven't been updated in a while. I find his name. I note which apartment. I don't ring the buzzer.

I wait.

This is the part that requires patience, which I have. I stand across the street with my bag and my book — actually reading, this time, because standing and reading is less visible than standing and waiting — and I wait until the door opens from the inside. A woman with a grocery bag, not looking at me, not looking at anything in particular. I catch the door.

The stairs are concrete. The building smells like other people's cooking and the particular staleness of a place with old ventilation. Ground floor, he said. The door at the end of the corridor has his name on a piece of tape that's begun to peel at one corner.

I knock.

The pause before he opens the door is long enough that I think for a moment he's not home, and I am calculating the logistics of an alternate plan when I hear the deadbolt. The door opens. He's in a t-shirt and sweatpants, clearly not expecting anyone, his hair pushed back with the unconscious hand of someone who's been working. He has a smear of something dark — ink, or developer fluid — on his forearm. He looks at me.

He needs a full second to place me. I watch the second pass.

"Hoshino," he says. Not unfriendly. Surprised.

"Hi," I say.

"What are you — " he starts, and then he steps back, the reflexive hospitality of someone who has been taught that you invite people in before you ask why they're there. He moves to make room.

I step forward instead.

The thing in my bag is in my hand before he's finished the motion of stepping back, before the sentence has closed, before the surprise on his face has resolved into anything else. I hit him once, hard, in the chest — the flat impact of it, the specific give of ribs under force, the sound he makes which is not a word, just the body's response to something happening to it before the mind has caught up. He goes down in the doorway. The door is still open. I step over him and close it.

He's on the floor. He's breathing — shallow, wrong, the breathing of someone whose chest has been told something they haven't processed yet. His eyes are open and they find me and there's something in them — not quite fear, not yet, something more like: this doesn't make sense, which is correct. It doesn't make sense to him. It doesn't need to.

I wait.

I wait in the same quality of stillness I bring to everything that requires waiting — without restlessness, without anxiety. I've thought about this part. The chest. The heart. The bruising that a fall can explain, if the fall is set up correctly. I wait until his breathing has done what it's going to do, until the sequence is complete, until I'm certain.

Then I do the rest.

His closet is where a closet is in a building like this — along the interior wall, sliding door. The bar is the right height. I've brought what I need for the rope because I didn't know what he would have, and he has nothing, which is what I expected. I'm careful. I'm careful in the particular way I'm careful about things that need to be done correctly — not frantically, not rushing. There's no one coming. The building is quiet. Outside the light has barely moved.

I go through his apartment once, methodically. I'm not looking for anything specific. I'm checking for anything that needs not to exist. There's nothing — he lives lightly, the apartment of someone who hasn't fully arrived yet. A few photographs pinned above his desk. Camera equipment on the shelf. The particular spare quality of a person who owns only what they need and hasn't accumulated the rest.

I wash my hands in his kitchen. I check my gloves. I pick up my bag.

I leave the door the way I found it — closed, locked from outside with the spare key I take with me, which goes into a drain three streets away. I walk back to the station at the pace of someone who has an errand to finish. I take the subway north. I board the shinkansen at fourteen twenty.

The journey back is four hours. The snow reappears somewhere around Hakodate, tentative at first and then definite, the landscape reasserting its winter. By the time we reach Sapporo Station it's dark and the platform is cold and there are hand warmers in the kiosk that weren't there this morning. I buy one for each pocket. I walk back to campus. I text Akira from the gate.

Back. Long errand. Come to my room?

The three dots appear immediately.

Already on my way.

Two weeks pass.

I'm aware of the two weeks the way I'm aware of most things — continuously, without urgency. I go to classes. I eat. I sleep. I spend my evenings with Akira, which is the thing I was always going to do. The campus has gone fully into winter now — the snow settled and staying, the paths shovelled each morning by the maintenance staff who arrive before anyone else, the trees along the east walk bare and clean against a sky that has taken on the particular white-grey of a Hokkaido winter in earnest. The air smells like cold, which is not an absence of smell but a smell in itself — clean, faintly metallic, the smell of a world that has stopped producing.

I don't think about Tokyo. This isn't avoidance — I'm not pushing anything away. There's simply nothing to think about. The thing is done. The thinking that needed to happen happened before, in the planning, in the three weeks of deferral and decision-making. Afterward there's nothing to review. I've reviewed it already. It was fine.

The news arrives on a Friday, the way things arrive that you've been expecting — without surprise, just the event itself, the thing you were waiting to happen having happened. Not to me directly. A thing Akira sees on his phone and mentions without ceremony, the way he mentions things he doesn't know require ceremony.

"Hayase Ren died," he says. He says it in the voice he uses for facts — level, unadorned. He's looking at his phone. "They found him in his apartment."

I look at him. He's not looking at me — he's looking at the screen, at whatever the item says. His face has the quality it has when he's processing something — still, very slightly inward, the expression of someone taking something in before deciding how to hold it.

"I'm sorry," I say.

He's quiet for a moment. Then: "They're saying suicide."

I say nothing. I wait.

He puts the phone down. He looks at the window — the snow outside, the early dark of a December afternoon, the campus quiet and white and sealed in. He looks at it for a long time.

"He wasn't," he says finally. He doesn't say it to me specifically. He says it the way you say something you know and can't do anything with.

I look at him steadily. "How do you know?"

Another long pause. "I don't," he says. "I just — " He stops. Starts again. "He wasn't the kind of person who would."

I don't say anything to this. There's nothing to say to it that would be useful.

He's quiet for the rest of the evening. Not a heavy quiet — not the kind that fills the room and requires management. Just: subdued, inward, the particular quality of someone carrying a fact they haven't finished locating yet. I sit with him and I let the quiet be what it is. I don't reach for him more than usual. I don't say Ren's name. I just exist beside him in the winter dark and wait for the evening to do what evenings do.

Before he sleeps, he finds my hand under the blanket. He holds it. Not tightly — just present, just the warmth of his palm against mine, the fact of the contact.

I hold his hand back.

I write one line in my journal that night.

Hayase Ren is dead. They found him two weeks later.

I read it back. I don't add anything.

I close the journal and lie still in the dark and listen to him breathe beside me, slow and even, the breathing of someone who has processed a grief to the extent that he can and has set it down for the night. I watch the shadows the snow makes on the ceiling — the light from outside filtered through white, diffused, the particular dim luminosity of a campus under winter. It's a clean light. It makes the room look like something inside a globe, something contained and still and private.

I think about the east path, the bare trees. The structure visible now that the cover is gone.

I think about Akira's hand in mine, the warmth of it, the specific weight. I think about October 31st and the courtyard and the leaves coming down and the cold thing in my chest when I watched him walk Ren to the gate, the thing I named and sat with and let tell me what it was telling me.

I think: he wasn't the kind of person who would. He said it knowing it was true and knowing he had nothing to do with the truth of it. He said it and put it down and reached for my hand.

The hand that was in Tokyo three weeks ago.

I let this sit for a moment. I observe it. I find, observing it, that I feel nothing in particular — not triumph, not guilt, not the dissonance I've read about in people who have done things and then looked at what they've done. Just: clarity. The particular clarity of a thing resolved. A list item closed. A variable that has stopped varying.

He is asleep. His arm is across my back. Outside the window the snow keeps doing what snow does — covering, softening, erasing the outline of things and leaving only the fact of them, the smooth white surface of a world that has put everything unnecessary to bed.

I close my eyes.

Only one left, I think, and then I think: that isn't quite accurate. There's no list. There was never a list. There's just us, and the things that enter the space between us, and what happens to them eventually.

There's just us.

That's been true for a while now. I think it's been true since before I knew it was true. I think it will be true for as long as there's an us to be true of, which is indefinitely, which is the rest.

December arrives the way December always does in Hokkaido: without ceremony, without the feeling of arrival. One morning you wake up and the world outside has settled deeper into itself, the cold no longer bracing but simply the condition of things, the snow no longer new but just the ground. The campus adjusts. The students move faster between buildings and linger less. The dining hall is warmer and busier. Hand warmers appear in pockets and on desks. The world contracts to the space between heated places.

We barely go outside.

This isn't a decision we make together, not something either of us names. It just happens, the way most things happen between us now — without discussion, without a moment I can point to. The outdoors is cold and the indoors is ours and the calculation resolves in the same direction every time. We are in his room, or mine, or the corner classroom in Building C that has stopped feeling like a borrowed space and started feeling like somewhere we actually are. We are in the library in adjacent chairs with our books and our tea. We are always, in some configuration, together.

I have stopped keeping track of the last time I spoke to anyone else at length. Not because I've lost count — I don't lose count — but because the number isn't interesting. It's a small number. It has been small for months. It will get smaller.

One evening in mid-December we walk outside after dinner — the last time, though I don't know it's the last time, which is fine, which is how last times work. The east path in full winter: the trees bare and clean and specific against the dark sky, the snow on the ground undisturbed except for our footprints behind us, the path lights making small warm circles on the white. The cold is real tonight, the kind that comes in through your collar and means it. I can see our breath. I watch it rise and disappear and rise again.

He's beside me. We're not talking. The silence is the silence we've been building all year, the kind that has weight and warmth and no gaps that need filling. I look at the trees and I think about what he said in summer — in winter you can see what things are actually made of — and I think: yes. I've been looking at the structure of things for months and finding it sufficient. More than sufficient. Finding it to be, in fact, the only thing worth looking at.

We go back inside.

We don't go outside again like that — the world still existing around us in the way it existed that night, present, noticed, a landscape we were moving through. After that night the world is something outside windows. Something we observe from the correct side of glass.

I don't mark the transition. It doesn't require marking.

It's just what happens next.

Later in December, in the still of a Thursday night with the snow coming down outside and both of us in his room, I realise something.

I'm in the middle of a thought about the text we're supposed to have read for Monday — a genuine thought, a thought with traction, the kind that used to require me to pick up a pen immediately. And the thought completes itself. Not toward Monday. Not toward the seminar. It completes itself toward him. Not even as a thought I want to share. Just: his shape is at the end of every thought now. The thoughts lead there the way paths lead to a landmark so familiar you've stopped seeing it as a destination. You just go there. You've always been going there.

I look at him. He's reading, his book open on his chest, his expression the one he has when he's actually absorbed — slightly unfocused, very still, somewhere else in the best way.

I don't say anything.

I open my journal.

I've been trying to locate a thought today that doesn't end with him and I can't find one. Not because I'm looking for them — I stopped looking for them some time ago — but because I wanted to check. I wanted to verify. I have verified. There are no thoughts that don't end with him. The thoughts begin somewhere else and they arrive here and here is where they stay.

I'm writing this as a fact. I notice it the way I notice most facts — with interest, without alarm. It seems correct. It seems like the natural conclusion of a year that has been moving in this direction since April. Since the auditorium. Since the water bottle with condensation at nine in the morning and the flake that drifted through the open window and turned once in the air between us.

Everything led here. I think everything always leads somewhere. I think this is where I was always going.

I think this is the most known I have ever been. I think this is the most I have ever known. I think these two things are the same thing, actually — or they've become the same thing, or they were always the same thing and I've only now found the right angle to see it from.

He is asleep. Or nearly. His book is still on his chest but his breathing has slowed.

I am going to close this journal and lie down and tomorrow will be what tomorrow is.

I'm not afraid of tomorrow.

I'm not afraid of anything.

I close the journal.

Outside the snow keeps coming down — quiet, thorough, covering everything it touches and leaving the surface smooth. The room is warm.

He's there. The world outside the window is white and soft and distant and entirely irrelevant.

I lie down.

His arm finds me in the dark.