Published at 4th of December 2019 10:13 am

Volume 2, Part V: Paradox Spiral III

This chapter is updated by NovelFree.ml

I’ve been living with Ryōgi for close to a week now. Over time, we’ve established a simple pattern to our lifestyle. She wakes up, sometimes going out earlier than me. Sometime later, I go out for the day as well, and we only really see each other’s faces again when I come back to sleep at night. It’s strange business to be sure. At some point, we gave each other our names, thinking that it’d be quite strange to not know each other’s names when it’s obvious I’d be over for some time.

Shiki Ryōgi. A repeating high school student…well, on paper at least, considering her current truant history. That’s pretty much the sum total of what I know about her.

She calls me by my last name, Enjō, which is why I might be given to referring to her similarly as Ryōgi. She’s said more than once that she didn’t like being called by her surname, but I can’t bring myself to call her Shiki. It’s a pretty simple reason. Calling someone by their first name has always seemed to me to be like some stamp of permanence, but this daily life right now is as temporary a setup as I can imagine, which means someday, me and Ryōgi will part ways. At any given time I could be actively hunted by the police. I could be forced to run. Calling her Shiki, with all the baggage that the first name tends to give you, will just weigh me down when that day comes.

“Don’t you have a girlfriend, Enjō?”

On this night, like all the other nights, Ryōgi sits cross-legged atop her bed, and as always, asks me a question that seems to come straight out of nowhere. As for me, rolling around on the floor right next to her bed, I’ve long become accustomed to them.

“If I had one, I wouldn’t need to swing by this dump every night, would I?”

“That’s kind of strange, considering you’re not all that shabby looking.” “That actually sounds more like an insult than a complement, coming from you. And besides, I’ve had enough of women.”

“Interesting. Why, I wonder?” She lies down on the bed, which from my position on the floor next to it, makes her temporarily unseen, though she soon pops her head out directly above mine. She’s actually kind of cute like this. “Are you gay?”

I take that back. Seeing her as anything resembling cute must have been a trick of the mind.

“No way. It’s just that, well…I’ve got a history with girls, and it didn’t work out too well.” Before I know it, I’m already reminiscing with her. “Back in high school, I went out with a girl for two months, and we spent most of that quality time arguing. I didn’t want anything special from the relationship, but she certainly did. She wanted all the cool, fancy things that also happened to be expensive. I could practically hear my wallet screaming at the time, but I still did it for her. When I could buy her things, she was happy. When I couldn’t, she complained. That didn’t warm me to the experience. And the sex wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be, honestly. Besides, I could’ve just jacked off if I wanted to feel good.”

I thought this story would bore Ryōgi, but she actually seems to be hanging on every word, so I continue with a sigh. “Eventually, I started to dislike her. All the money and affection I gave her slowly looked more like a waste of time. Maybe if I was a normal student, I could’ve given her more of my time, but as it stood then, I didn’t have that kind of freedom. The hours I spent with her started draining any hours I had left for sleep. Without the free time, I guess it was doomed from the start. But, stupid as I was, I never tried breaking up with her. I never liked to hurt or get hurt, and it was definitely one of those times where I could’ve made her cry.”

“But you did break up with her, didn’t you? How did you do it?” Ryōgi asks, intrigued.

“Hey, I ain’t the bad guy here. She dumped me. One night, after we had sex at a motel, she turned towards me on the bed and said—and this is a direct quote I swear—that I never really looked at her. That I only looked at her appearance and not her heart. Now that was a real sucker punch right there.” Before I even finish talking, I already hear the spasms of laughter from Ryōgi going from chuckle to guffaw. When I shrug my shoulders as I finish my story, her head disappears back toward the bed, and she finally lets the suppressed laughter out.

“Wow, you are a piece of work, Enjō! ‘Didn’t look at her heart?’ That was a girl with a lot of baggage, I can tell you that.” I hear the springs on her bed creaking as she rolls to and fro in her bed, laughing accusatorily.

“Well, at least I never made the mistake of making fun of children’s love. It ain’t funny.” I stand up, indignant, which makes Ryōgi restrain her laughter by degrees. She rubs her eyes before she sits up and looks at me straight.

“But it is funny, Enjō. You just don’t see it. I mean, look, what’s the only thing people can see of other people? Their appearance! She thinks her appearance is so insignificant, and yet she forces you to buy all that flashy bullshit. And then she asks you to somehow look at her ‘heart’ or something, which no one can really see? Shit ain’t right, man. So you see, it’s funny! If she wanted to you to see her heart, she could’ve been better served writing some literature down on paper. Breaking up with her was the best thing that ever happened to you, Enjō.”

She returns to lying down on the bed, facing away from me. There is a beat of silence before she looks back at me again, her catlike eyes staring into me. She starts to open her mouth somewhat pensively, but hesitates and looks away, then looks back again before she finally speaks.

“Well, just so you know there’s no hard feelings, I’ll tell you something someone once told me. He said that ‘it’s those unseen, unvoiced things that form love. And it isn’t right to give voice to them, or else they might turn into lies.’ That’s what he said anyway.” At that, she turns away from me again, and I know then that she’s already closed her eyes to sleep. With that abrupt end to our conversation, I turn off the lights and lie down on the floor to sleep as well, letting the rare silence engulf the room and allowing myself to think. I accept that I might have slipped up with one girl, but my mind entertains the thought. What if—what if it was this girl? Would the same things still apply? Or would she, as she always seems inclined to do, just laugh it off and accept it?

I come back to Ryōgi’s room one night on the second week of my extended stay. I plunge the key inside the lock, turn it, and open the door. I walk inside to find Ryōgi already sleeping. Though the noise I’m making just stepping into her room is probably enough to wake her, she doesn’t. She must be sound asleep, or else ascribing my footfalls to a category of acceptable noise not worth waking up to. Either way is good.

I hold a palm to my cheek, still smarting from being hit, as I approach my usual spot on the floor and sit down. The clock on the desk beside Ryōgi’s bed ticks the time away as the second hand moves to the next mark, and the next, on and on in a circle. At the moment, both the minute and hour hand lie at peace pointing at twelve. I’ve never liked the analog ones. Staring at them, I always feel like I could slowly lose myself in the rotating, spiraling hands. The pain from the kicks I received in my leg flares up again, and I utter a low grunt of complaint in spite of myself. Ryōgi however, still remains unmoving, allowing me to look at her face deep in her deathly, petrified sleep. In two weeks of staying in this empty room, one thing always arrests my vision. When Ryōgi sleeps, she looks almost like a doll, a lifeless thing sleeping atop the bed; so much so that when the sun rises, she doesn’t “awaken,” but performs something I liken to an act of resurrection, as if life has been breathed into her for another day.

At first, I thought that she woke up early for school but I soon realized that was not the case. It’s always a phone call that gives Ryōgi the impetus to actually go out. She waits for it everyday. If no call comes, she confines herself here, consumed again by the doll-like languor. Needless to say, while I didn’t know the subject of those calls, they were no doubt about something dangerous, something that excites Ryōgi enough to have the willingness to go outside.

The interminable ticking of the clock burrows its way deep into my head as I ponder on the simplicity of Ryōgi, her beautiful life devoid of any sadness, returning only to a joyous vitality when she does whatever it is she needs to do. The perfectly empty life without overindulgence, the existence of the “real” that I never thought I would find. The sort of Platonic ideal of existence that I wanted to become.

“Shiki.” The word escapes my lips, more silent than a whisper and seeping out like a silent exhalation, and yet, seemingly at cue, Ryōgi chooses that exact moment to wake up. A crease forms between her eyes as she looks me over.

“What the hell happened to you?” she asks. Guess she noticed all the bruises on me.

“Had no choice,” I sigh. “Two guys I didn’t even know tried to jump me, and since they were spoiling for a fight, it got messy. Not really good at this whole fighting business, so there you go.”

“You must have studied something, at least. And yet, you still have trouble beating on two guys. What, does getting hurt turn you on?” Ryōgi observes wryly as she pushes herself up from the bed.

“Don’t assume anything. I’ve never taken any sort of class in a martial art. Still, if it comes to a fight I can give as good as the next guy.”

“Which is to say, not much at all. I thought for sure you learned something, since I saw you use the palm of your hand to fight when we first met. So where’d you learn that?”

“I heard somewhere that for someone who wasn’t used to it, using your fists would just hurt you as much as you hurt them. So it’s better for people like me to just use the palm. Besides, isn’t the palm harder? I mean, look at cans. No one punches a can. Everyone crushes it with their palm, right? There’s something there, man.”

“It’s cause it’s easier that way, dumbass,” she says with the usual calmness in her voice. This time though, I detect a sense of faint praise from it as well. Her eyes are as intense as they ever are, and it makes me break eye contact with her from embarrassment.

“How about you, Ryōgi? You must have studied aikidō or something.” “Just a passing interest in aikidō, actually. I’ve only been really serious with one style that I’ve been into ever since I was a spoiled brat.” “Since you were a kid? No wonder you could plant a roundhouse in the back of a running guy’s head. I’m guessing that’s not all there is to your style, though.” Though I only intended it to be a casual statement, Ryōgi takes my last sentence to think on seriously.

“Kind of. It’s sort of a style of my own. The key to it is the mindset. You rethink everything about yourself. Your breathing, your footwork, your perspective, how you think—even the way you move your muscles changes, and it’s almost like becoming someone else. All of it is honed towards taking down your enemy as economically as possible. I mean, I suppose all martial arts touch on it to some extent, but I guess we…I mean, I took it too far.”

She spits the last words out as if she hated the entire concept, to which I have to react with some amusement. “What’s so bad about that? At least you don’t get hit like me, and you get to take out two dudes in two seconds. It’s one cool self-made style if you ask me.”

Her eyes wander away from me, and seem to hint at some heavy disquiet before she replies. “Weird thing about that self-made style: I learned it by sort of watching someone else do it.”

When she immediately plops back down on the bed, I get the feeling she doesn’t want to continue the conversation anymore. As she goes back to sleep, I’m left to contemplate what exactly her last words meant.

In a room in a slice of nothingness, dull gray steam rises, the hissing sharp enough to pierce the ears. There is a heat here enough to make anyone break into sweat in moments. The room is unlit, save for the dim orange glow of something burning on an iron plate. All around me, there are large canisters lined up one after another, and on the floor, I feel countless amounts of narrow tubing brush against my legs.

Not a single soul can be found in the room. Only the hissing of the billowing steam and the useless sound of bubbling water keep each other company.

I wake up violently to a cold, dead night. A dream. It was a dream. A nightmare maybe, different from the usual one. Still, there was little to like about it. The second hand on the clock ticks away as if to mock me, and when I turn to look at it, I see the time has not even passed 3:00am. Still quite a while before I usually wake up.

The next thing I notice is that the familiar shape of Ryōgi lying on the bed is gone. Must be another one of her strolls. She does them every so often. Why they need to be done at an ungodly hour when even the fauna sleep is beyond me. I worry about her sometimes. Even though she can fight, that doesn’t make it all right for her to take a walk so late alone in a city full of people ready to take advantage of that. I briefly think about going out to find her, even though I know full well that not messing with each other’s private lives has become some sort of unspoken rule for me to live here.

Ah, fuck it, I’ll go. She’s pretty enough that it’s going to be hard for all the thugs down in Shinsen to just let her pass by without incident. I rise, and as I’m about to open the door to go out into the hallway, the door unexpectedly opens with to admit a girl dressed in a familiar kimono and leather jacket inside. Ryōgi promptly closes it with as little sound as she made opening it.

“Hey, you’re home,” I say. She casts her glare upwards to look at me. And in that moment, I feel something.

She could kill me.

The lights in the hallway behind her are turned off, and only Ryōgi’s eyes shine a frighteningly deep blue in the darkness. My breathing is cut off, and for a while, my mind spaces out and I stand stock still unable to do anything in that moment of pure dread.

“You won’t do either,” Ryōgi says, not even trying to hide the consternation in her voice. When she speaks, I snap back to normalcy. She brushes past me, taking off her jacket and flinging it across the room toward her bed in anger. She takes a seat on top of the bed and lazily leans back on the wall behind her, offering an upturned head and a blank stare towards the ceiling.

Trying to ignore the chill that is still running the circuit of my spine, I make an awkward about-face from the door and return to the living room to sit down in a random spot on the floor. The invisible third inhabitant of this room—the unseen and heavy silence that blankets everything— again passes between us, as it does so commonly, until she breaks it with her monotone words.

“I went out to kill.”

Unable to form any sort of appropriate response to her, I only nod my head to acknowledge what she said. She seems to take it as a sign to continue.

“Useless. I couldn’t find anyone I wanted to kill. When I opened the door and you were there, I thought that you could satisfy me for a time, but you couldn’t. Killing you would’ve been meaningless.”

“I honest to God thought you were going to kill me right then and there,” I reply hesitantly but truthfully.

“I want to feel like I’m alive. But I know a simple murder has no meaning. It’s why I drift aimlessly at the late hours, trying to find a reason to live. It’s almost like being a ghost. One day…I just know I’m going to kill someone for no reason.” The words come out like a conversation thrown toward some unseen presence as much as it does a disclosure confided in me, almost resembling the torpid speech of a junkie on withdrawal. This is the first time I’ve seen her like this. The first time we met was during one of her nightly strolls, but she didn’t seem to be spoiling for a fight back then.

“Get a grip on yourself, Ryōgi. You’ll manage,” I tell her, as I stand up and place my hands on her shoulders. Shoulders that seem so unnaturally slender for someone as dangerous as her.

“I am managing. This is how I do it. I got this feeling back in summer too, and that time when—” her speech trails off, like she just remembered a memory she’d like to forget. I sit back down on the floor, and Ryōgi takes that as a sign to abandon her position on the wall and collapse on top of the bed sideways.

“Hey, Ryōgi,” I probe, not really expecting any further clarification. She’s the one that said to me that the heart is unvoiced and unknown to all except you, lest it turn into a lie. It’s easy to understand. She’s all alone. I was once like that, but at least I had, if not real friends, then just people who I could distract myself with so that the problem wouldn’t be so obvious. But she doesn’t have that luxury. She had no need of them.

“Hey, Ryōgi,” I repeat, letting my back rest against the bed so I wouldn’t see her. “Do you have any friends?” Some seconds pass to delay her response before she speaks again.

“Yeah. I think I do.”

“Wait, you do?” I say incredulously, expecting a completely opposite answer. In contrast, Ryōgi just nods calmly. “Then there’s an easy solution! Just go to them and dump all your problems on their lap so they help you. It’s the best and easiest thing to do in your condition. Even just small talk is usually enough to make you forget all about it.”

“Well, he’s not here now. He’s out of town, doing God knows what.” I fall silent listening to the echo of loneliness in her words, but then, as if to say that the spirit of her solitude was only something I imagined, she starts to hit the bed violently with her clenched fists. “I mean, that guy just barges in here without so much as a warning, and how does he return the favor? Oh, nothing except a freaking phone number, is all. He even had to take a nappynap in bed for a whole month while I took care of business last summer. Why do I have to be constantly irritated at him? I mean, what an asshole, right?”

The sound of her fist hitting a pillow repeats itself, and her voice grows increasingly louder with each new sentence of her spontaneous rant. I almost can’t believe that Ryōgi is getting this much of a rise from a single question. Now the dull thuds turn into sounds of sharp stabbing, almost like Ryōgi is piercing the pillow with a knife. I don’t think I really want to know exactly what she’s doing so I restrain my curiosity to turn around and look. In a little while, the tearing sounds stop and she finally calms down. As for me, I kind of become envious at this friend who can raise her to such heights of emotion (for her at least), and at the risk of further reaction, I decide to ask her about this person.

“Say, Ryōgi…” No answer. Guess she must still be mad. I pay it no mind and continue. “This friend of yours from your school or something? What’s he like?”

“Yeah, from high school,” Ryōgi responds nonchalantly. “Guy with a name like a poet.” I decide not to puzzle out the meaning to that just yet.

“So this guy is the reason you go out at night, isn’t he?”

“Nah. My urge to go out at night and kill is just me being me. What’s the matter? You really wanna find out what could possibly make me scary enough for you to practically wet yourself when I went in?”

“What, me, scared? I’m not—”

“You’re the one that said you thought I was going to kill you.” Her voice is a cold sing-song tune that latches itself onto the nape of my neck, tracing a chokingly smooth line around it, and for a moment, I am forced to wonder if the person lying behind me is truly human. “See? You’re thinking it again. But rest easy. It’s the danger that really pumps those pleasure chemicals for me, and killing you wouldn’t be so dangerous now, would it? Still, it would probably be best for you to find a new place to hide, Enjō. In the end, the pleasure I get from murder is going to bite me in the ass, and you with it.”

Her intonation falls to the volume one expects of an act of contrition. Goddamn it. The only thing it does for me is make an already distant woman even more distant and inscrutable. I understand now; that easily as much as I am terrified of this implacable person—

—I have fallen for her just as much.

“Dumbass. That’s not like you and you know it,” I say. “That’s just you being upset. You’ve got two options here: mope, or call that friend of yours and go through it together. That’s what friends are for, and if you don’t do it, you’ll just cut yourself off from socie—”

Awkwardly, my words cut off at that point. Like Ryōgi a few minutes ago, my mouth was starting to take over my mind and spouted the first thing that came to mind. With both of us noting the strange pause, I decide to end the conversation. “Well, that’s all I wanted to say. Good night, Ryōgi.” I then proceed to lie sprawled on the floor, still not permitting myself to look at her.

She says something to me, but I ignore it as I try to sink into slumber from the embarrassment. For tonight at least, I’ve lost all confidence to talk with Ryōgi. It’s a pretty simple reason. When I was saying those words, when I don’t even have a friend to call my own like Ryōgi does, I felt like the biggest hypocritical bastard alive.

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