Published at 4th of December 2019 10:16 am

Volume 2, Part V: Paradox Spiral IV

This chapter is updated by NovelFree.ml

Here, back in the dilapidated back alley where I first met Ryōgi, even the buzzing sounds of the city streets turn into nothing more than distant echoes coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. I can remember the blood here so vividly that I can even recall their bitter smell. But they’re gone now, swept up, like everything else, into the alley grime and the cold of the late October morning. Even the white puff of air that quickly disappears as I exhale is a testament to this phenomenon. From the same everywhere and nowhere that the flood of people are located, I single out the sound of a clock and its ticking, imagining the hands going round and round.

It’s now been a month since I threw away my home and my livelihood and ran away. And yet, there is still no visible indication that the police are after me, or even actively investigating what I did. Every day, I pass by the window of a nearby electronics store with a display television tuned to the news. I watch diligently, but up till now it has not reported anything on the murder I committed. The story is the same for the newspapers I can spy or steal from the stands. What I did was far more than a simple, random murder. No, it’s the kind of thing that journalists can’t resist putting up on the 6:30 news for the public to go crazy about, no matter what police embargo they were under.

Maybe they haven’t found it? No, that can’t be possible. Still, the thought of the bodies not being found after a month makes something churn in my stomach in a feeling almost like nausea, and engulfs me in a sense of melancholy. I briefly entertain the idea of checking to see if they’re still there, but pass on it because I don’t have the guts to, and the possibility of any five-oh staking the place out to see if I’ll come back. I suppose there’s nothing else to do except sit here on the sidelines and wait for any sort of sign.

Still, at least once…at least once I want to see it on television so I can finally have an excuse to disappear from Ryōgi’s life. Once the name Tomoe Enjō rings out in society as a the name of a murderer, I’ll only cause trouble for Ryōgi, and that’s when I can finally cut what little ties we have and make my exit from this wretched city. But maybe that’s already too late for me.

The clock echoes from its indeterminate location, and the wind seems to grow in strength with each recurring tick. Following the course of the cold north wind, I walk away from the alley.

As I exit the maze of back lanes, I notice a familiar figure come into view in a far pedestrian crossing. Who else could it be in a kimono and a leather jacket except Ryōgi? And yet, even further away from her I manage to see another faintly familiar face: one of the guys present on that violent night when me and Ryōgi first met. With well-practiced steps, he lurks a ways behind Ryōgi, trying not to draw attention to himself.

This could get bad. I stand there for a moment debating what to do, but the ticking of the clock forces me to action. I make my way into and through the press of people and stalk the man stalking Ryōgi. It doesn’t take very long and far for another of his number to join the man, the same person that Ryōgi delivered a roundhouse to. It doesn’t seem like they plan on doing anything to her, or they’d have done it already; there were plenty of chances for them in the past few minutes to do so away from prying eyes. Instead, they seem to be content in keeping watch on her for now. Surprisingly enough, they seem organized and rehearsed, with not a single step out of place or fumbled. After an hour, the front-and-follow show comes to an end with the two breaking off their tail. Curious as to their destination, I continue to shadow them as they quicken their pace to head into the same alley I was in an hour ago.

This looks like a trap, but if it’s for me or for Ryōgi, and for what purpose, I can’t know. The disquiet in me grows. I slip beside the entrance to the alleyway, where the space is graduated into a narrow passageway, and stop to listen. I turn my head little by little around the corner to sneak a glance at what the two could be doing. As my vision pans over to what little I can see inside, I freeze at what I see.

A man in a vivid wine-red long coat, whose silhouette tells of long, tall, and slender features, stands in the middle of the alleyway. His hair is a long, blonde fall from head to back. Even from this distance, I can see the condescending, almost pitying expression on his face as he opens his mouth to speak.

“■■■■■■――――――――” He speaks in a language that echoes out in power, and magic, and ambition. And though I don’t understand it, I somehow understand the fluency with which he wields it.

I feel someone’s presence behind me and quickly turn to meet whoever it was, but find no one there. I swing my head back to look at the alleyway, but in that small span of an instant that could not have been more than a second, the man had vanished.

The north wind blows through the alleyway, passing through me, seemingly more frigid now than before. I shiver in spite of myself, and hold my arms close to my body. The shiver starts to intensify uncontrollably, and for no particular reason, an urge to cry takes over me, and I barely resist it. In that urge, I feel in my skin a tremble of entropy, the end of an autumn, and in my bare face I feel the very end of me.

When night falls and me and Ryōgi are back at her room, I tell her all about what happened this morning. As usual, however, her reply is concise to the point of unhelpfulness.

“Really?” She draws the word out with a barely suppressed yawn. “And?”

“Don’t fucking ‘and?” me! Those guys weren’t the only one watching you. Do you remember seeing any foreign dude with a red long coat?”

“Hmm, guy sounds like a ball to hang out with. But no, I don’t.” She quickly loses her interest in the conversation, just as she always does in anything she deems of no real or immediate consequence. I have a feeling that even if you falsely accuse her of murder, she’ll pay it no real heed. To her, the weight of external events is far less important than her own feelings. Sometimes, I almost feel like I want to emulate that state of mind, but this was a moment of exception. That man was as real as anything I’ve ever seen, containing something like a purity similar to Shiki Ryōgi, and beyond my reach.

“Can you just listen for one second to what I’m saying? It’s not like this is someone else’s problem. It’s yours!” My yelling somehow gets Ryōgi to prop herself up on the bed and sit atop it with crossed legs. She looked at me as I tried my hardest to show a stern face. After staring each other down for a brief moment, she speaks.

“Alright, I get it, it’s a problem. What I don’t get is why you’re so worked up about this, Enjō.”

“I worry because you’re an idiot and wouldn’t know better.” A brief pause. “I don’t want you to get hurt or anything.” A gulp, a moment’s glance away from her, and then, “because I love you, goddammit.”

The bickering atmosphere seemed to evaporate in an instant. There, I said it. The word that should never be. Even though I promised not to say it on account of me leaving eventually. Ryōgi, for her part, looks at me with cocked brow, as if observing some quaint curiosity. Several seconds pass in this way until she finally… …bursts out laughing. Her first laugh was so sudden that she would have spitted out milk if she had any in her mouth.

“What—” She tries to stop herself from laughing but can’t. “What the hell, Enjō? Shit ain’t right, man. You’re not in love with me. You’re just—”

Another fit of boisterous laughter. “You’ve just been hypnotized or something by that guy in a red coat. Take a flashback, I’m sure you’ll remember a pendulum dangling in front of you!”

So even this is a matter to laugh off. Her disbelief only agitates me further.

“No, it’s the god’s honest truth! When I saw you, it was the first time I saw anyone so real, and someone so like me. But you—you’re not fake like everyone else. I’d do anything for you to believe me.”

I draw closer to Ryōgi and put my hands atop her shoulders. That reduces her laughter to a giggle, and finally stops it altogether. I see her shift her eyes to look at my arm, and then back at me.

“I see,” she says dryly. Suddenly, she grasps my shirt collar with blinding speed. With one smooth movement, she throws me like paper over and atop the bed, leaving me looking upwards with her face looming close above mine as she lies on top of me. I have no idea when she had the time to produce the knife that she is now holding in her free hand. “Then will you die for me?”

I feel the tip of the blade prick my neck ever so lightly, and see Ryōgi’s eyes narrow into a sinister glint. I know at that moment that her question isn’t whether I would die doing something for her, but if I would allow her to kill me for her own pleasure, nonchalant and indifferent as she always is. The only way she can show any real affection. I’m scared, so scared of death that my body is paralyzed by it. And yet, I don’t have long for this world anyway. One day, the police are going to come knocking, and then there’ll be no going back. And it is with that consideration that I say:

“Yeah. I’d gladly die for you.” There is the tiniest shift, the smallest movement on Ryōgi’s brow, and it lets me know that I said something she didn’t expect, and for a moment, she hesitated, and her eyes slightly return to familiarity. “Do it. Kill me. It’s not going to be long now anyway. I killed my parents, and that means the death penalty. I’d rather have you kill me than the law and a noose.”

“You’re a parricide?” I can still feel the knife tip keenly on my neck, but the strength behind its grip has ebbed noticeably. There, before I die, I decide to lay bare the horrible memory that haunts me, just to convince myself I took my one last opportunity at penance.

“Yeah, killed both of them. They were no good—kept racking up debts that I didn’t know about and wasting all of the money. Had enough dealing with their bullshit, so I took a kitchen knife to their guts and stabbed them over and over, to make sure I didn’t make any mistake. That night was cold as hell, but those organs and intestines…they were all so warm. Like you could feel the heat going up from their spilled guts and it wrapped all over you. It almost made me go numb and crazy. My fingers wouldn’t let go of the knife, and my arm just kept going up and down, up and down by itself. You couldn’t tell whether I took a knife to them to kill, or if I just wanted to go crazy and mix up some human insides; you couldn’t even tell whether a person killed them, or an animal.”

I think that it would only be appropriate for me to break down in tears now, but the tears won’t come. Instead, I feel a strange sort of relief, as if killing my parents truly did make me find freedom.

“Tomoe, why did you kill them?” Her voice hangs on the border between inquisitiveness and pity as she asks the question I know would come. What was the answer, then? Was it because I hated them? Because they were more trouble than they were worth? Only lies I whisper in silent nights to salve the memory. The truth, the real reason is,

“I was scared…of a dream. A dream where I come home from my job late at night and lie down on my bed. I can hear the shouting match between my mom and dad from the other side of the door, but the noise stops. Soon after, the door opens, my mother standing in the doorway, and beyond her, my dad covered in blood and lying dead. Then my mother kneels down on top of me, brings up a knife to stab me over and over before she slits her own throat. The dream is so real, I thought I’d really died. But morning came and I woke up just the same. That’s supposed to be the end of it, right? Just my desire to kill my parents manifesting itself one night, right? But when I started to see it every single fucking night, every time waking up breathing hard, almost screaming, I couldn’t stand it. I was scared of that fictional night where the dream would come alive. And one night, I decided I couldn’t stand to experience it one more night, and I broke. So I killed them, before they could kill me.”

I remember that night as clearly as a happy memory. I’d hid the kitchen knife beside the mattress, and when mom opened the door for some reason or another, I charged her, knife out and straight towards her chest. I stabbed her over and over, as if to make up for all the times I had been stabbed myself in my dreams. And with that, I was free from my useless folks, free from that ominous dream, with nothing to tie me down. A dirty, bloodstained freedom.

“You’re one goddamned idiot, you know that?” says Ryōgi frankly, with a lack of restraint that snaps me out of my reverie. She’s right, more resoundingly and more profoundly than probably even she knows. I’m one hell of an idiot to have not thought of any other way out of my situation except to kill my own parents. But even now, I don’t regret it for a second.

I’d sooner be caught by the police and be put behind bars than to have endured another day of my former life. But I did realize one thing when I was explaining my crime to Ryōgi: how can a boy who has only ever looked out and cared for himself start to care about a stranger like Ryōgi? It seems like some sort of fallacy, a lingering paradox, an act to which I do not have any right to perform. Knowing this, it’s probably no mystery why she just laughed off my proposal. But that doesn’t sway my love for her, the one thought that I find in me to be truly real, if still regrettably tainted by my sin. When I realize this, the fever of passion that had seized me minutes ago began to subside. But even in this paradox, I still consider the murder a necessary action, and for me there are no regrets.

Ryōgi’s eyes hanging above me are distant and unclouded as they stare into me, studying every quiver of the lip shaped by spoken words and every crease and line formed on my face from unspoken emotion.

“You misunderstood your choices. If your parents were like that, and you’ve lasted until now, then you could have borne that pain a bit more, like you always did; chosen the easier way. But in the end, you had to make it harder for yourself. When I first met you, I thought you were trying to deny who you were. You were empty. So here’s the question: did you change since that night? Or do you want to die now just as much as you wanted to then?” asks the girl who would kill me on a whim, the girl I had surrendered my life to.

She is right again. Another contradiction. I tried to cast my life away on that night, thinking it alright to murder someone in a deserted alley, but also thinking it wouldn’t be so bad for the same thing to happen to me. Just continuing to exist aimlessly, like a wind-up doll conducting some bad facsimile of humanity, seemed like a burden with each step. And yet, I didn’t want to die, didn’t even want to kill myself. That cruel paradox seized me as if to tear me apart, and the same thing is occurring now: facing Ryōgi now with my sins bare before her, and still not completely embracing the death that is staring into my face, even though I know life is just a slow slide to the eventual end. My end will just be a little earlier, a little stupider, and a little more worthless than other people. It’s the worthlessness that I can’t seem to bear. If that’s the way it’s going to go, then…

“…dying by your hand would be more worthwhile, more real.” “Maybe, maybe not. The only thing I know is that you’re not dying tonight. Not because of me, anyway. I don’t need to take your life.” Ryōgi lifts the knife away from my throat, and then puts it away. Like a cat losing interest in a toy, she gets up from the bed and walks away from me, retrieving her jacket from the coat rack as she does so. Looks like she’s about to go out somewhere. I can’t stand to look at her anymore. “Tell me, Enjō. Where’s home for you?” Ryōgi’s voice reverts to the coldness I recognize since the first night we met.

Funny question to ask. Me and my folks kept moving, never staying for more than half a year in any one place; I assume either because of the unpaid rents, or the collection agencies would come knocking. Ever since that started happening, I’ve hated the setup and wanted a real, normal house. Like the one we had when I was a kid.

“A dump called unit 405 in an apartment somewhere. Why are you asking?”

“That isn’t what I asked. I’m asking about the place you really want to go back to. Well, if you don’t know, can’t say I didn’t expect it.” Ryōgi opens the door leading outside, and without turning to face me, she says, “Ciao, Enjō. Come by any time you feel the need.”

She goes out the door, and with a turn, she disappears from view, seemingly taking all of the color of the room with her, leaving everything with an air of dreariness. For several minutes, my rust-tainted soul looks over the room where I’d spent the last month of my life, before I decide to depart and separate myself from the dull monochrome.

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