October 31, 2016

Yukikaze Academy & Sapporo, Hokkaido

Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan

10°C, wind, clear

The last of the leaves come down in October like they've decided to stop arguing.

Not all at once — Hokkaido doesn't do things all at once, that's a different climate, a different temperament. It happens in stages, one branch conceding at a time, the wind making the decision and the tree accepting it. By the end of the month the east path is nearly bare. I've been watching it happen for weeks without meaning to, the way you watch things you pass every day until the accumulation of days makes a kind of time-lapse out of it. The ginkgo went first. The maples held on. By October 31st even the maples have given up, and the path is just the path — stone and air and the clean, cold geometry of branches against a sky that has stopped doing anything complicated.

I notice this the way I notice most things. I note it. I move on.

It’s Halloween. Japan observes this in a particular register — the konbini are orange and black, the cafés in Sapporo's central arcades have pumpkin everything in their windows, a few of the second-year students have managed decorations in the common room that the RAs haven't taken down yet. There's a holiday underneath the holiday: a licensed occasion to be strange, to wear something and say it's a costume. I observe this academically. I don't wear anything. I have no particular interest in licensed strangeness. My actual strangeness requires no occasion.

I know where he is. I know where he'll be. I know, specifically, that at two-thirty this afternoon someone will arrive on campus who will require from me a kind of attention I haven't needed to give since late September.

His name is Hayase Ren.

I found out three days ago, the way I find out most things — through proximity, through a conversation not addressed to me that I absorbed nonetheless. Akira mentioned it briefly, in the particular register he uses for things he's introducing rather than disclosing: a friend from before, back in Sapporo for a while. He said it without looking at me, which is unusual. He generally looks at me when he says things. I noted the not-looking. I filed it.

I have been thinking about it since.

A friend from before is a phrase with coordinates in it. Before means prior to this year, prior to Yukikaze, prior to the configuration of his life that currently exists. Before means someone who knew him when I didn't, who accumulated a version of him I have no access to, who holds the particular knowledge of someone who has watched a person grow without being watched back. Before is a category I occupy only partially. There are things in him I know better than anyone — the specific way his stillness changes quality when he's genuinely thinking versus when he's managing something, the condensation pattern on his water bottle at different temperatures, the handwriting he uses when he's writing fast versus when he's writing carefully. I have accumulated these. They are mine.

But before is not mine. Before predates me. That is the information I've been sitting with for three days.

I have not said any of this out loud. I have not said any of this in my journal. I've been living alongside it the way you live alongside a draft you can feel but can't locate — present, sourceless, the kind of thing you'd address if you could find it.

I find it now, in the library, in the alcove, with my book open and my tea gone cold and the afternoon stretching toward two-thirty. I locate it. I look at it directly.

What I find is this: I am not afraid of Hayase Ren. I don't do afraid — it's the wrong category. What I am is attentive. I am paying a specific kind of attention to a new variable, and the attention is not anxious, just thorough, the way all my attention is thorough. I'm noting his existence. I'm taking him seriously in the way that anything that matters to Akira deserves to be taken seriously.

I close my book. I check my phone. Nothing yet. I put my phone back in my bag and walk to the courtyard.

He's already there when I arrive.

This is the first thing I note: he's early. He's standing near the main gate with his bag over one shoulder, wearing a dark jacket with paint on the sleeve — not new paint, the residue of old work, the kind of mark that doesn't come out — and he's looking at his phone with the ease of someone who has arrived somewhere they've been before and doesn't need to prove it.

He's taller than I expected. He has the particular build of someone who was probably lanky in middle school and hasn't quite caught up to himself since. His hair is longer than Akira's, lighter, pushed back without ceremony. When he smiles — which he does, when Akira appears from the direction of the library — it's the smile of someone who means it. No performance. I note this.

He says Akira's given name with the ease of someone who has always said it. Not Kanzaki — Akira, flat and familiar, the name used without thought because it has been used for years and requires no decision. I hear it across the courtyard. I watch Akira's face change — not dramatically, just a small unlocking, the expression of someone returning to a context that is entirely safe. An expression I've only ever seen directed at me.

I stand still for a moment.

What moves through me is clean and cold and precise. Not rage — I've said this before, I've established this category for myself, and it holds. Not the hot reactive kind that makes people loud and visible. The cold kind. The kind that arrives knowing exactly what it is and doesn't require permission to be felt.

I take a breath. I cross the courtyard.

He turns when I arrive. He has the social awareness of someone who has practised it — not instinct, practice, the deliberate skill of someone who has learned to pay attention. He takes me in quickly: one look, comprehensive, the particular assessment of someone deciding how much of their surface to present.

"Hoshino Aiko," Akira says, in the particular way he says my name, which is different from how he says everything else. "This is Hayase Ren."

"Ren is fine," he says, and his voice is warm, easy. The voice of someone who has never had to work at being likeable. He extends his hand. I take it.

His handshake is straightforward. He looks at me when we shake, not away, which is either social confidence or genuine curiosity. I look back. We are, I think, both doing the same thing: assembling a picture, comparing it to what we were told, finding the discrepancies.

"He's mentioned you," Ren says.

I look at Akira. Something in Akira's expression — very brief, very controlled — shifts.

"Has he," I say.

"A lot," Ren says, and he says it simply, like a statement rather than a compliment, like a thing he is reporting because it is factually true. I file this. I file the particular way Akira becomes slightly more still when Ren says it.

"Good things, I hope," I say, the standard response, the one that sounds like it expects an affirmative and functions as a way of moving past the moment.

"Mostly observations," Ren says. "Which is more than he gives most people."

This is interesting. I note that it's interesting. I note that Hayase Ren has, in the space of ninety seconds, demonstrated fluency with the particular dialect of understatement that Akira uses for things that matter to him. He's fluent in this language. He's been speaking it for longer than I've been learning it.

I note that this bothers me more than the handshake did.

We walk together through the campus. This was not my plan — I had intended to greet him and then find a reason to leave, give them the particular privacy of people who have been friends since before they had reasons to be private. But Akira stays close to me as we walk, his shoulder near mine, and the staying is not accidental. It is the same quality of staying as every other gesture he makes — deliberate, communicative, a thing his body does that his face doesn't need to explain.

Ren is good company. This is worth noting because I would prefer, on some level, that he not be. It would be simpler. He is funny in the wry way of people who observe more than they announce, who hold their punchlines until they're inevitable rather than deploying them early. He asks questions that aren't small talk — he wants actual answers, and when he gets them he does something with them, builds on them, which is rare and valuable and also, in this particular hour, slightly unwelcome.

He asks me what I came from. Aomori, I say. He asks what Aomori was like. I give him the answer I always give: quiet, the sea always visible, a city that knew itself. He listens. Then he says: that sounds like somewhere you left on purpose. Which is accurate. Which Akira has never said in quite those words. Which makes me look at Ren for a half-second longer than necessary before I say: yes.

He smiles. Not triumphantly — just the smile of someone who has connected something correctly and is noting it. The paint on his jacket sleeve catches the afternoon light. I look at it without meaning to.

"You sketch," I say, because it's there and I'm me and I can't not.

He looks at his sleeve. "Since forever." He looks at Akira. "He never mentioned?"

"I mentioned," Akira says.

"When."

"Once."

"Once," Ren repeats, and there's something in how he says it — fond, unsurprised, the specific tolerance of someone who has been receiving Akira's economy of information for years and has made peace with it.

I think: Akira told him about me a lot. I think: Akira told me about Ren once. I think about what this asymmetry means and find that I know what it means and am not done with knowing it yet.

We eat in the dining hall together, the three of us. This is strange — the dining hall has been ours for months, the particular corner near the east window where I can see the courtyard, where he always sits across from me because the light from outside is better that way for reading and we read while we eat. Tonight Ren is at the table. His bag is on the chair beside him. He's taking up space in the geography of us, and he's doing it without effort or intention, which makes it more not less.

Ren talks about what he's been doing since he left Sapporo — a photography program in Tokyo, a residency that didn't work out the way he expected but gave him things the working-out would have missed. He talks about it the way people talk about failure they've metabolised: with the particular fluency that comes from having already told the story enough times to know which version is true.

Akira listens. He listens to Ren the way he listens to me — with the full weight of his attention, not performing engagement, actually there. I watch this. I am aware that I'm watching it with a precision and thoroughness that I would describe, if I were being accurate, as surveillance.

I am being accurate.

Ren asks about us — not directly, but in the way of someone trained to frame questions: how long have you two— and then catches himself, and rephrases: how did you meet.

We tell him. The literature class, the poem about the city, the seam being the point. I tell most of it. Akira fills in the parts I leave gaps for, the same way he always does, the same instinct for where I end and where more is needed. Ren watches this happen — the interrupting and completing, the gaps filled without being asked — and I watch him watching it, and something moves across his face that I file without yet knowing what label to put on it.

"Okay," he says, when we've finished.

Just: okay.

"What does that mean," I say.

He looks at me. "It means I understand now," he says. "What he meant by observations."

He says it without edge, without anything that could be called a warning or a claim. But I sit with it for the rest of dinner, turning it over, looking at it from the angles available to me. He understands. He has been given some prior version of what I am to Akira — observations, a lot of them — and he has arrived at this table with that information already in him, already processing, already forming a picture. He has a version of me that predates me.

This is the thing I keep returning to. Everyone who matters to Akira has a version of me I haven't authored.

After dinner the three of us stand in the courtyard for a moment, the particular pause of an evening that hasn't decided whether it's over. The wind has picked up — an October wind, the kind with teeth, the kind that means business. The last of the leaves on the east path come down in small spinning clusters, a few of them catching the path lighting before they settle.

Ren pulls his jacket tighter. He's not built for Hokkaido autumn — Tokyo weather for too long, probably. "I should head to the guesthouse," he says. He's not boarding on campus, obviously; he's in one of the rental accommodations near the school that exist for visiting families and the occasional old student. "Early bus tomorrow anyway."

Something shifts in me when he says it. Early bus. Tomorrow. The timeline is shorter than I thought.

I look at Akira. He's looking at Ren with the particular expression of someone who is doing the same calculation.

"I'll walk you to the gate," Akira says.

"You don't have to."

"I know."

They go. I stay. I watch them walk across the courtyard, the two of them — the particular ease of people who have been each other's company enough times to have worn a groove in the way they walk together. Ren says something. Akira says something back. I can't hear the words. I watch the distance between them until it passes the gate and I can't see them anymore.

I look at the empty courtyard. The last leaves are still coming down, slow and certain.

I count the seconds.

Twelve, thirty, sixty. The gate doesn't reopen. I know he's still there — I know where he is the way I always know, the low continuous signal of it — just on the other side of the wall, talking to someone who has known him since before I existed in his life. The signal is there. He's there. But there's something between me and the signal right now, something opaque, something I can't account for, and I stand in the cold courtyard and feel the particular cold of it and name it, because I promised myself I would name things when they were nameable.

The cold has a different quality than the July 8th cold. That one was about a girl approaching him who didn't know the landscape she was entering. This one is different. This one has a past tense in it. This one is cold in the way of something that has been there before you and will know things about you that you don't know yet.

The gate opens. He's back.

He crosses the courtyard to me — not quickly, he never does anything quickly, but with the deliberateness that is its own kind of urgency. He stops in front of me. He reads my face, which I'm not hiding and not performing. He reads it the way he reads everything — completely, without comment.

Then he takes my hand.

Not dramatically. Just takes it, his fingers through mine, the warmth of his palm against mine in the October cold. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't ask what I'm thinking, which would be the wrong question. He just stands there with my hand in his in the empty courtyard while the last of the leaves come down, and I look at him and he looks at me, and I feel the cold thing in my chest slowly warm to something else.

"He's gone," I say.

"He's gone," Akira says.

We stand there for another moment.

"Come inside," he says.

I go with him.

That night, in his room, with the wind against the window and the October dark pressing on the glass, he tells me.

Not everything — he doesn't narrate, doesn't produce an accounting of Hayase Ren's history with him the way some people would, don't you want to know everything, let me explain myself. That's not how he operates. He tells me the shape of it: childhood, the particular proximity of two people who grew up close together in a small coastal community, the easy intimacy of people who didn't choose each other and didn't need to because the choosing was already done by circumstance. He tells me that Ren is good. He says it plainly, the way he says true things — without qualification, without the hedging that would soften it into something manageable.

"He's good," he says. "He always has been."

I sit with this. "And now he's gone," I say.

"He's always going somewhere," Akira says. "He was like that even when we were twelve. You'd get used to him being there and then he'd be somewhere else. I stopped expecting it to feel different."

"Did it? Feel different?"

He looks at the window. Outside the wind does something complicated in the branches of the tree at the edge of the courtyard. "Less, now," he says. "Before, it would have mattered more. Now I have the thing that matters most." He doesn't look at me when he says it. He's still looking at the window. "So the leaving is just — the leaving. It's not also a loss."

I think about this for a long time.

I have no word for what this is. What he's just said is: you are the measure by which everything else is surplus or deficit, and Ren leaving is deficit only against a surplus so large that the deficit doesn't register. He said it in six words but that's what it is. I've been doing this all year — receiving his compressed language and uncompressing it, finding the original statement under the reduction — and this is the most compressed thing he's ever said to me and the most complete thing.

I don't say anything. I move closer to him on the bed. He shifts to accommodate this without commenting on it, the natural physics of two people who have spent enough time in proximity that the adjustments happen below the level of decision.

The wind keeps going on the window.

"You're the only person I need," he says. Still to the window. Like it's a thing he's been holding and is now setting down, not because it's too heavy but because there's somewhere to put it now.

I take his hand. I hold it. I feel the warmth of it — his hand, which is always slightly warmer than mine, which I've been aware of since the first time he reached across in the literature classroom to turn the text toward me.

"I know," I say. The same thing I said in Susukino, on the corner with the neon. I know.

He knows I know.

I don't open my journal until much later. The wind has settled to something lower, less insistent. He's asleep — one arm across my back, the deliberate weight of it, the weight that means what it always means. I reach for the journal without waking him.

I write:

His name was Hayase Ren. He has a paint stain on his jacket sleeve that's been washed too many times to come out. He's been to places Akira hasn't mentioned. He says Akira's name the way people say names they've said for years — without thinking about it, which means without thinking that saying it is a thing, which is a kind of ownership I can't replicate.

I watched Akira's face when Ren arrived. There was an expression there I've only ever seen directed at me. I noticed this. I don't know what to do with noticing it, so I'm writing it down instead.

He said I'm the only person he needs. He said it like a fact about the weather — the same way he says everything true. I believed him. I believe him the way I believe things I've verified, things I've checked from multiple angles and found consistent. This is consistent. He means it.

But Hayase Ren knew him when the north coast was still a whole world to him and I was still someone who existed in Aomori not knowing his name. He knew him first.

I keep coming back to this.

I keep coming back to it and then I keep coming back to Akira asleep beside me with his arm across my back and the weight of him that is different from every other weight I've felt, and I think: first doesn't mean most. First doesn't mean fixed point. First just means earlier.

He doesn't need anyone else. He said so. I believe him.

I believe him.

I close the journal. I read back the last line twice.

Then I lie down. I fit myself against him in the particular way I've learned, in the particular way that requires no adjustment from either of us anymore. The wind goes on outside. The campus is dark and quiet. The leaves that are coming down are coming down without us watching.

Akira's arm tightens slightly in sleep. A small increase of pressure. A decision his body makes without him.

I close my eyes.

I believe him.

The morning comes grey and still, the wind spent. The east path outside the window is bare now — I know this without looking, I know the campus the way I know him, from accumulated attention — and the morning has that particular quality of the day after something: quieter, more itself, the drama gone and only the fact remaining.

I'm awake before he is. I am often awake before he is; there's something in me that returns to consciousness in the early hours and lies still and takes inventory. I lie still now and take inventory.

Hayase Ren leaves on the early bus. He's probably already gone, or going. His jacket with the paint stain on the sleeve is on a bus heading south, or will be. The version of Akira he carries — the twelve-year-old on the north coast, the childhood friend, the before — is going with him. I don't have access to that version. I never will.

I find, lying here in the grey morning, that I'm looking at this differently than I was last night.

Last night the not-having-access felt like a gap. Like a place I couldn't reach, a room I couldn't enter. Now, in the morning, in the particular clarity of a campus that has shed everything it was going to shed, it feels like something else. It feels like: accurate. I didn't know him at twelve. I know him now. Now is not lesser than then. Now is different — it is the version of him that has accumulated all of then and also this, also the rooftop in May, also the festival and the canal at midnight and the specific way he holds me in sleep as if even unconscious he has opinions about where I should be.

Now has me in it.

Then didn't.

I close my eyes. I breathe in the particular smell of his room, which I know the way I know most things I've been in proximity to long enough — completely, without thinking about it, the knowledge below the level of decision. He smells like the early morning and like himself, which is not a thing I could have said in April and can say now without hesitation.

He shifts. His breathing changes. He's waking up.

"You're thinking loudly," he says, his voice rough with sleep.

"I'm not thinking anything," I say.

"Yes you are."

I'm quiet for a moment. "He's probably on the bus already," I say.

Akira is quiet too. Then: "Probably."

"You'll see him again."

"Probably," he says again. Then: "Does that — " he starts, and stops.

"No," I say.

He understands without me finishing. He always does. He pulls me slightly closer, which is not necessary and is what I wanted without knowing I wanted it, and we lie there in the grey morning and the campus outside goes from dark to pale and the bare branches of the east path trees are probably very clear in this light, the structure of them visible, everything unnecessary already shed.

In winter you can see what things are actually made of.

He said that in July. On the rooftop, walking the eastern edge of campus in the heat, talking about what the cold reveals. I thought about it then. I think about it now, in the first real cold of the season, lying still and feeling the weight of his arm.

I know what he's made of. I know the structure. The rest was just cover.

I note this. I file it.

I don't move on from it.