Chapter 3

May 19, 2016

Library

Yukikaze Academy

19°C, clear

There is a particular alcove in the library that gets the afternoon light from two directions.

I found it in my second week. South-facing window on one side, a gap between shelves on the other where the west light comes through in the late afternoon and turns everything the colour of old paper. It is, by any reasonable assessment, the best seat in the building. I have been sitting in it every Tuesday and Thursday since I found it, and no one has contested this, which means either no one else has noticed or no one else has wanted it badly enough to arrive before me.

I am here now. It is a Thursday. My notes are open, my tea is getting cold, and I am doing the thing I have been doing more frequently over the past three weeks, which is thinking about a conversation I had and turning it over to see what's underneath it.

This is new behaviour. I don't usually turn things over. I process, I file, I move on. The filing system I've built for myself is thorough and efficient and has worked well for eighteen years. But the conversations I've been having recently don't seem to want to be filed — they keep surfacing, the way certain things surface when you're trying to sleep, precise and uninvited. I'm treating this as interesting rather than anything else. It's a more comfortable category.

I hear him before I see him. Not his voice — just the particular sound of someone settling into the alcove seat across from mine, the one I've always treated as a natural extension of my own space without thinking about it, the one that has been empty every Tuesday and Thursday until now.

I look up.

He has a book and his water bottle and the expression of someone who has found a good seat and intends to use it. He glances at me. I glance at him.

"This is where you've been," he says. Not a question.

"This is where I've been," I say.

He opens his book. I look back at my notes. The afternoon light comes through from two directions and falls across both of us, and neither of us says anything else for a while, and the silence has the quality it's been developing for weeks now — the kind that doesn't require filling, that exists comfortably between two people who have both, separately, decided that silence is not a problem to be solved.

I find that I don't mind him being here. I find, in fact, that the alcove feels more like itself with him in it, which is the kind of thought I note and then set aside.

We stay until the light shifts. By then the conversation has ranged across the texts we're studying, a disagreement about the library's shelving system that reveals we've both independently memorised large sections of it, and something about the campus in winter that he mentions in passing — that it's different, that the cold changes the geometry of it somehow, that you have to relearn the routes. He's been here through two winters. I haven't been through one yet.

"You'll see," he says, which is a thing people say, but he says it like a fact.

I'm the one who asks for his number. I've given myself a reason — we've been talking about a text neither of us has, and it would be practical to be able to send the title — but I'm aware, as I'm saying it, of the reason underneath the reason. I'm aware that I've decided to do this and that the decision was made somewhere below the level of deliberation.

He gives it to me. I save it immediately, the way I do everything — efficiently, without ceremony.

Kanzaki Akira.

I put my phone back in my bag and we keep talking, and I don't look at my phone again for the rest of the afternoon. The text I mentioned goes unsent. I'd already known the title.

The days between the library and the rooftop have a particular texture that I notice only in retrospect.

We message occasionally — nothing significant, just the small currency of two people who have established that this is possible. He sends me a line from something he's reading that he thinks I'll have an opinion about. I do. He sends me something else. I look forward to this in a way I don't examine. What I notice instead: that I've started taking slightly different routes between buildings, ones that pass more of the campus, more of the places where I might encounter him. I notice this the way you notice that you've been holding your breath — after the fact, with mild interest, without immediately correcting it.

He finds me in the library again the following Thursday. And the one after that.

He takes me to the rooftop four days later.

He mentions it the way he mentions most things — without preamble, in the middle of something else. We're walking back from the dining hall after dinner, the evening still light the way Hokkaido evenings are in late May, the sky doing something complicated and orange above the buildings, and he says there's something I should see before the light goes. That's all. I follow him.

The access is through a door at the top of the main building's east stairwell — third-years only, which I knew in theory but hadn't tested. He has a reason to be here that I don't need to ask about. I suspect the reason is simply that he's been a third-year long enough to have found every door that opens for him.

The rooftop is nothing like I expected and exactly what it should be. Flat, exposed, a low concrete ledge running the perimeter. A cluster of ventilation units in one corner breaks the wind slightly. From up here you can see the whole campus — the academic buildings, the track, the dormitories, the gap in the treeline where the road begins — and beyond that the outskirts of the city, and beyond that the suggestion of mountains in the fading light. The sky has more room in it from up here than anywhere else I've been on campus, more than anywhere I've been in a while.

"Oh," I say.

It's not what I usually say. He looks at me when I say it, and I can tell from his expression that my face has done something he found worth looking at, which I note and don't examine.

We stand at the ledge and watch the city lights come on below us, one by one and then in clusters, the way they always do — as if the city is remembering itself in the dark. The air is cool up here even in May. I don't mind. I think I understand why he knows this place. I think I understand why it's a third-years-only space in a way that has nothing to do with the administration's reasons for it.

We stay until the sky goes dark.

It starts with the city. He knows the layout of it the way people know the places they've grown up near — not the tourist version, not the official map, but the real one, the one made of personal detail. He points out a building on the western edge where the light always pools strangely at this hour. A gap in the skyline where something used to be. I find myself looking at the city through what he's showing me and finding it different, more specific, more real.

Then at some point — I don't notice the transition, which is itself unusual, I almost always notice transitions — we're not talking about the city anymore. We're talking about something else. About being the kind of person who moves through rooms without quite landing in them. About what it means to be alone in a way that isn't loneliness, that is in fact preferable, that people keep trying to fix in you because they've decided it's a problem. He says this carefully, like he's checking whether it lands correctly, and it lands correctly, which I tell him.

"People assume it means something is missing," I say.

"It does mean something is missing," he says. "Just not what they think."

I look at him. He's looking at the city.

"What does it mean?" I ask, though I think I already know.

He's quiet for a moment. The wind moves through the ventilation units in the corner and makes a low, hollow sound. Below us the campus has gone mostly dark, the path lights on, a few lit windows in the dormitory buildings.

"That you've learned to be careful," he says. "About what you let matter."

I have thought this before. I have thought it many times, in different configurations, and never said it to anyone because there was no one to say it to — no one who would receive it as a statement rather than a symptom, no one who would understand that careful is not the same as closed, that the distance is a function of standards rather than damage.

I say it back to him. Not the same words — slightly differently, from a different angle, the same thing seen from another side. He goes quiet in the way he goes quiet when he's actually receiving something, not formulating a response but sitting with what he's been given.

The sky has finished going dark by the time either of us says anything else.

There's a moment — not dramatic, not marked by anything external, no music, no gesture, just the cold air and the city below and the two of us standing at the ledge — where I become aware that I am being seen. Not observed, which I'm used to, which I can manage. Not assessed, which I'm also used to, which I can also manage. Seen, in the particular way that requires the other person to be paying a specific kind of attention, and to have been paying it for longer than this conversation, and to have decided that what they see is worth continuing to look at.

I don't say anything about this.

He doesn't either.

But it's there, in the space between us on the cold rooftop, as real as the city lights below and the dark above and the wind coming off the mountains we can no longer see.

He messages me that night.

It's late — past quiet hours, the dorm settled into its nighttime sounds. I'm at my desk, journal open, pen in hand, not writing. My phone lights up on the desk beside me.

Akira

The message is small. Something about the view from the rooftop — a detail he noticed after I left, something about the way the light sits on a particular building at a particular angle, the kind of thing you'd only notice if you stayed to look. He's not asking anything. He's not expecting a response, exactly. He's just — telling me.

I look at the message for a moment.

I write back.

We text for a long time, longer than the hour warrants. The conversation goes somewhere I don't try to map. At some point, I realise I'm sitting differently than I was — I've turned toward the phone, pulled my knees up, the journal forgotten beside me — and I notice this, the posture of someone absorbed, and I don't correct it.

Eventually, he says goodnight. I say goodnight. I put my phone down and look at the ceiling for a while.

I have always known, about myself, that I do not let things in easily. That the distance between observable and real is one I maintain deliberately, that most people never get close enough to notice the gap. I'm aware of this. I've always been aware of this.

I'm aware, now, of something narrowing.

I pick up my pen. I write one line in my journal. I close it.

I don't reread it.