Saturday bottled in a daze. Half conscious, half delirious. Steve brings me medicine, but asks me to meet him, so I stumble down empty stairs and thank him with a burning tongue. In the night I watch Kill Bill and I want to die.
Sunday dawns in my frosted window. I ache along the knuckles of my spine; my stomach's empty and withered. The worst has past. Steve and I lunch together and stare out the restaurant at the swashing river, the bridge, the lonely waterfront, the mountains like bowed monks. We talk. My voice is gone.
The waitress reminds us that Gabe's photo exhibit is on display today, so we bike to the place and halt at the doorway when we realize we have to pay. Steve points to an mundane parking lot and says it's a tryst for cheating couples. He points to a closed door and says inside is a basketball court where he used to bring his son. That was over ten years ago. He remembers anticipating his son's coming of age and the day he would shed dependence. Then he comments on how everything seems reversed now. Strange how that works out. They just grow up too fast. You're a parent for fifteen years and then you're an onlooker. At best.
The weather is bleak; it rips through me. A cloudless sky, an icy breeze. I dread biking home but it's inevitable.
Winter is too quiet here, an antithesis to the constant hums and rustles of summer, when cicada sing an undercurrent of vitality and mosquitos deliver a crescendo in your ear, reminding you that life abounds. Little stirs in this cold. I see winged animals, far away and disdainful, and nothing else.
Monday registers like the blow of a hammer and I'm not ready. The cold embraces me the moment I step outside and rides my spokes from home to school. Classrooms are arctic caves, students eskimos in school uniforms. The staff room is the only room with a heater. We play Mad Libs and the students unwittingly create comic genius: "My mom will cook MRS. FUJI", "It's as COLD as a MONKEY", "I have a PAT as LONG as a BANANA. Everyone loves it" (I didn't make that up).
I shiver through work and return home to my kotatsu. I reschedule Japanese lessons to evade the cold, but Ryan and Will invite me to dinner and I accept. We share pizza while discussing nothing in particular then head to Jusco to buy a flashlight for our adventure. Will drives us to the abandoned apartment building at the top of a desolate hill that we mean to explore.
The spooks are out tonight. The four-story building is ramshackle and stands alone against the arm of the mountain, draped in darkness. We prowl the corners looking for a way in. No luck. So we take the stairs and peek inside the mail slots and see spotless rooms and some of the doorbells work but sound like electric charges and Ryan jokes and says, "What if this was your JET placement?"
With a little acrobatics involving rusted, nearly unusable steel rungs, Will and I climb the roof while Ryan cowers in the dark hallway and begs us to come down or give him the flashlight. We do neither for a while. Sumoto is wedged between the mountains and lay bare before us, shimmering in a light rain and stretching toward the sea. On this concrete rooftop, standing above a dozen phantom apartments, wiping the rust from our hands and the rain from our eyes, we are the ephemeral gods, the temporary rulers of our everything, and the glowing city beneath us bends at the command of our imagination.
As we leave, snow begins to fall. Damp cotton balls coughed from the black sky. The cold sinks into me again and I seek refuge.
