Chapter Text
Yamagata had phoned Tetsuo’s latest foster mother in a very long line of foster mothers, but she didn’t know where he was. She wasn’t of the temperament to waste her time rifling through the city for a little boy she’d only agreed to adopt because her husband threatened to leave her once they’d discovered that she couldn’t conceive. She had more pressing matters at hand. Like yesterday’s laundry rotting in the dryer, and the mackerel wasting away in the oven, which she was thinking wouldn’t quite be ready by the time her husband came home.
All she said was, “Aren’t you boys supposed to take care of him? That was the deal, no?”
“I know nothing ’bout no deal,” said Yamagata, a little absently, because now he was thinking how loaded Tetsuo’s foster mother must be, if she had real fish—real stinking fish! You had to get that imported, these days—and her primary concern was timeliness, of all things. Her husband was a lucky bastard. Lucky, ungrateful little bastard.
Something clattered at the other end of the telephone. Then she came back to say, “Why don’t you ask your boss what he has to say about all this?”
“Haven’t seen Kaneda around for the past three days,” Yamagata grumbled. “We think he’s slumming it, maybe, which for Kaneda is sayin’ lots. And I guess that’s more than you’ll ever do for him, lady, and—” He thought, again, about the fish. He thought about Tetsuo, who always cut up his school-assigned serving of synthetic meat into neat halves and gave Kaneda the portion that was inevitably a smidge bigger than the other, because they knew Kaneda had the most impossible appetite of them all, and Yamagata’s throat did a funny little seizing thing, and he could barely get the next words out, but the vitriol was not only necessary; it was righteous. So he said, “And you should be ashamed.”
He slammed the phone back into the receiver. He spent the next five minutes trying to shake the payphone off of its hinges, because he couldn’t believe he’d wasted ten yen per minute trying to wring some godforsaken information out of a woman who couldn’t care less, but the damned machine refused to spit out his coins no matter how hard he kicked it. And Yamagata was angry now, because those yen could’ve gone towards charging costs for his electric motorbike or even a meal, and no way that cheapskate Kaneda was ever gonna pay him back, and that woman made him mad the way his own mother had made him mad, when she’d slipped quietly from his life and left him to look after six younger siblings—all before he’d even learned how to do up his laces.
It was nearing midnight when he finally got back to the apartment. Kaneda’s door was wide open like it always was, caught midway through its inward arc, his unmade bed on proud and unabashed display. Beside it, in a similar state of dazed disarray, was the spare futon he kept for Tetsuo. Nothing in the room had changed for four days—the same crumpled magazines and crushed beer cans littered Kaneda’s sheets, and the same old hoodies thrown haphazardly on the floor mapped out a labyrinth next to Tetsuo’s bed—because for four days nobody had slept in it, not since Tetsuo’s accident.
At least Kaisuke wasn’t with his parents tonight. He was still awake in the common area, his tie undone and his hair sticking up where he’d leaned back against the moth-bitten couch. The sight of him calmed some of the anxious storm that had been brewing inside Yamagata; at the very least, he wouldn’t be alone. Quiet was rare in the apartment. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten a full night’s rest, but at this point he’d settled into looking for those rowdy markers of presence. If he didn’t startle awake at two in the morning because Tetsuo didn’t know how to be quiet as he crept into the kitchen looking for snacks, or if he slept past eight because Kaneda’s engine wasn’t roaring outside the window to drag him up from sleep, then he knew something was amiss.
Kai peered up at Yamagata as he kicked off his boots. “Any luck?”
“Nah. Dead end on my end. Dead end on my part? Ah, y’know what I mean.” Yamagata shook his head and threw down his shoes by the door with unwarranted force. The coiled aggression faded from his body, cooling from red-hot maroon to muted coral; he collapsed beside Kai with a yawn. “And she was a bitch about it to boot. You?”
Kai pursed his lips. “Well, sorta. Nobody knew where he was, but I called the military hospital, and it seems like he might be there. No visitors allowed, though.”
“Not even family?”
“Not like he’s got one,” Kai said. His fingers drummed a steady rhythm on his thigh, worrying the stiff material of his dress pants. “Well….”
When he fell silent like this, Yamagata knew he should keep quiet, to let him think, but patience was one of those virtues no one ever praised him for having. “Oh, come on. Out with it now.”
“He’s got his mother,” Kai hedged. “His birth mother, I mean. You remember Kaneda saying she’s still alive?”
His birth mother? Yeah, Yamagata remembered. Kaneda had an unshakable habit of saying things he wasn’t supposed to, but his filter was a billion times thinner when he was drunk. The first time Tetsuo stormed out after they’d fought with the Clowns, talking up a storm about how he could handle himself and he didn’t need Kaneda to fight all his fights for him, Kaneda had gotten so drunk it’d made him honest for once, and he said, “Now I’m not saying I’m mad at ’im, ’cause honest I’m not, but I’ve had it up to here with all his lies. No his dumbass can’t go after the fuckin’ Clowns himself, that’ll get himself killed, no his mama ain’t dead and I dunno why he says that—she left him! I saw her once. I saw her! And who the fuck does he think he is, keeping all these fuckin’ secrets from me like I haven’t been looking out for him since we were stupid little kids!”
Later, Yamagata had sat beside him on the bathroom floor as Kaneda vomited into the toilet. They’d shut the door so the other guys would stop craning their necks to get a good look at their leader, though Yamagata didn’t know why they’d want to, because it was a horrible, horrible sight. He’d been so beat up after taking all those punches that’d been meant for Tetsuo, angry violet bruises already flaring beneath his collar. A body so young and strong shouldn’t ever convulse like that. Kaneda had lain his hot cheek against the cold rim of the toilet bowl and closed his eyes, which was when Yamagata realized for the first time that his lashes, long and dark with the sheer downward swoop that normally had girls so taken with him, were wet. Just before he passed out, Yamagata remembered him slurring, “I’m owed it. I’m owed it. He shoulda stayed with me….”
Yamagata would never understand those two, because he’d really thought Kaneda had been unforgivably, irrevocably angry, and if he never saw Tetsuo’s face round here again then he would just have to prepare to live with that. But then he’d found them both a couple nights later, slumped together on the same moth-bitten couch. Silence again, strange and heavy but not uncomfortable, like an old blanket they would’ve dug out from the shed, if they’d had a shed to speak of. They were running low on bandages, but Yamagata watched from the hallway as Kaneda neglected his own wounds and wrapped Tetsuo’s bloody fist in the last of their clean gauze. It was a tender motion, a touching moment that he never would’ve guessed either of them was capable of, a kind of ancient ritual that must’ve come from somewhere in their youth before the gang—at least until Tetsuo lifted his eyes and found Yamagata’s, and he wrenched away from Kaneda, quick as a criminal, leaving Yamagata to wonder exactly what kind of secret he’d stumbled upon.
Yamagata could tell just by looking at Kai’s sour face that the idea didn’t sit quite well with him either. “You know,” he said, “I’m not sure Tetsuo’s mother will be any help. But then again I don’t think Kaneda won’t ever stop looking for him, and we’re all he’s got.”
“So you’re saying we should at least try,” Kai mused. “Well, who’s to say Kaneda ain’t been looking for Tetsuo all this time anyway, since that first time Tetsuo walked out?”
“Figured he’d gotten used to it by now,” Yamagata muttered. Tetsuo did tend to go off on his own a lot—more often than the rest of them, anyway—and Kaneda was no longer in the habit of drinking himself till he blacked out anymore when it happened. He’d graduated past that kind of public display of anguish. Now he just hauled his bike out of the lot outside and gunned it, and it was loud, so loud, loud enough to drown out any doubts, any fears, to follow his friend.
“Naw. Hard to get used to that shit when you’ve been friends since—” Kai tried to think about it, but quickly abandoned that errand. It had been too long ago. “Since forever.”
So Kai went and talked to his mother, who knew someone who knew someone who had access to the phonebook archives, and the next morning found the two of them digging through the crumbling white pages as if they’d never left the decades past. The sun was barely out, but already they could feel its embrace, sticky with humidity in the poorly ventilated office lobby. Sweat beaded on their fingers, sticking to the pages.
Nearly two hundred Shimas had registered within the boundaries of Neo Tokyo within the past decade; probably more than half of them were women. It took them a long time to call all the way down the list. Many of them were sympathetic—think you’ve got the wrong person, son, but hope you found him, whoever he is—but just as many had the local Neo Tokyo nastiness, and still more hung up when Yamagata was still in the process of pronouncing a word, rolling it around in his mouth to ensure he was saying things right, because now more than ever it was paramount that these people take him seriously. He was just glad the office phone was free; Kai’s family always seemed to know the right people.
Just when Yamagata was thinking of telling Kai that they oughta give up, he remembered that he hadn’t heard from Kaneda in—how long?—running on five days now. No sign of him, and his bike was still parked out front; he hadn’t taken it this time, because he said his girl would draw far too much attention on the road, and anyway he still had faith that Tetsuo couldn’t have gone that far. Hadn’t even stopped by for cash, or pills, or even to see how his other friends were doing. Yamagata wondered if he should be offended. In Kaneda’s absence the other boys looked to him for guidance, but of course Yamagata was just as lost, too.
Recently Watanabe had wheeled his bike into the lot in front of Yamagata’s apartment. It made a strange rattling sound whenever he lay off from the throttle, and Yamagata wasn’t as good as Kaneda—Kaneda, who had good grades despite skipping half their shop classes and disrupting the other half, just because he was a natural with an engine, like he’d been born with a wrench in hand—but Yamagata had still done his best to inspect it. Even so, it had taken him the better part of a day just to realize the rattling was coming from a loose chain and nothing more serious.
“Can’t call us together just to race, can’t spell the words right when we’re out painting, takes ya forever to realize it was just a chain issue—who even got the big idea to leave you in charge?” Watanabe teased him.
It was in good humor, so Yamagata did what was expected of him: He scowled good-naturedly and pretended none of it stung when he said, “Kaneda, actually.”
“Mmm. That’s right. Heard he ran off again. You heard anything from him?” When Yamagata shook his head, Watanabe sighed and tapped his chin with the ruler that Yamagata had used to measure his drive chain. “And here I thought the two of you were close. What’s eating him, anyway?”
“Tetsuo’s gone missing,” said Yamagata. “C’mon, don’t play dumb. No way you heard about Kaneda but not Tetsuo.”
Watanabe barked a laugh. “Well, guess I can’t blame him for hiding away. Must get old, bein’ nothing but Kaneda’s dog.”
At first Yamagata wasn’t sure if he was supposed to think about that more deeply, but then he dismissed it; this was Watanabe he was talking to. Watanabe had a mean tilt to his mouth, sometimes even meaner than Kaneda’s, and Kaneda loved his boys too much to ever punish them—except for that one time. Last year, if Yamagata remembered correctly, when he’d unilaterally kicked out Watanabe just for saying nasty shit about Tetsuo. He’d been so mad that he’d broken Watanabe’s glasses clean in half in the ensuing fight, and only when they’d nearly felled one of the arcade machines did the barman finally pull them both by the scruffs of their necks and say Take it outside, boys, take it outside, so they did, and half an hour later Kaneda stumbled back into the bar alone, his mouth full of blood but his spine stiff with pride. Nobody else had had the balls to give Tetsuo any shit ever since.
Watanabe had come back a couple days later with his head shaved in penance, but Kaneda had only howled with laughter. “I woulda taken you back anyway,” he’d said, “’cause I know I already taught you a damn good lesson. That’s what you got me for, yeah? No need to do it to yourself.”
Once they’d made sure Watanabe’s bike wasn’t rattling like a snake anymore, Yamagata invited him inside for a beer. It had been just the two of them, so they turned on the TV only to turn it down again because the news kept replaying the same forty-second reel of university student protests downtown, and it had been long enough that it wasn’t really breaking news anymore, more like a default state of being. Watanabe stayed for longer than he usually would have, talking himself in circles because Kaneda wasn’t there and he knew Yamagata was good at keeping secrets.
“Hopefully you get ahold of him soon,” Watanabe said before he left for the night, “but give it two or three days and you know they’ll both show up again together outta nowhere like nothin’ was ever wrong. They’re close, aren’t they? That’s how they work, those two, but don’t ask me why.”
It was their third day calling when it finally happened. She was garbled by the speaker, but it was easy enough to make out her words through the thin plastic when she said, “Hello?”
“Sorry to be a bother,” Kai said. It was his turn calling; they’d let him take the phonebooks home courtesy of only a small bribe. Yamagata sat beside him on the floor of Kaneda’s room, the knobs of the dresser digging into his back as Kai’s fingers twisted anxiously between the cords of the landline. “But by any chance are you missing your son? Last name’s Shima.”
Silence on the other end. The sound of her telephone clicking against her cradle. Yamagata and Kai held their breath. Then she must have changed her mind, because she withdrew the phone again and responded with reluctance, “How…did you know?”
Her voice had a heavy, exhausted tilt. It was only morning, but this one was a heavy morning, quiet with nothing to pierce through the stillness, not even insects whirring outside and no tires screeching on the hot pavement, not a single siren in the near distance. A Saturday. Maybe it was a holy day, but if it was then Yamagata didn’t know.
“We’re friends of his,” Kai explained politely, “and we think he’s in Neo Tokyo Military Hospital, that big ugly building at the edge of town that you can see no matter where you are in the city ’cause it’s so freakin’ tall. They wouldn’t let us in. They said it was blood family only.”
“You don’t sound like a scammer,” she said thoughtfully. Carefully. She, like Yamagata, felt the shape of the words in her mouth before she released them. “But then again I’ve got no way to know—”
“No! No, of course not. Wish I could give you proof, ma’am, but unfortunately my word’s all I got.”
“Hmm.” She thought about it some more. “Are you sure you’ve got the right person? What’s this boy’s name, anyway?” The question came stilted, awkward, like she wasn’t even sure she wanted to ask it. Posed like an afterthought, but Yamagata had spent enough time with Kaneda to know when innocence was feigned.
“Tetsuo,” said Kai. “Shima Tetsuo is his name.”
“Tetsuo,” she murmured. “Haven’t heard that name in a long, long time.” And this time there was no hesitation, because the little click when she hung up was louder than insects, or wheels, or sirens; it was definite, and resolute.