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He wakes up with an ID in his hand and the lingering taste of blood on his tongue.
The concrete is hard against his spine, but he is exhausted and does not want to move, his skin uncomfortably tight and his body oddly small. He remembers, in bits and pieces. Vollof. A crime. Alula’s expulsion. The blank stare of a blond janitor who’d given up, his voice steady even as he faced a god in his final moments.
He stretches his fingers until they cooperate, then turns his attention to the ID, flipping it open clumsily. Obikawa Kiyoshi, it reads, and when he reaches up to pat his head, he feels the braid that the man in the photo wears.
That’s right, he thinks. His name was Obikawa Kiyoshi.
-
Tokinaga Sachiyuki is a wonder, and Obikawa cannot help but marvel at the world that brings them together.
He’s 1) unfailingly kind, even if his actions belie a certain sharp intelligence that he keeps to himself, 2) exceedingly patient in teaching Obikawa human characteristics, believing him to be rural and a little unused to city living, and 3) a fantastic cook. Obikawa will overtake him, of course, but for a human Tokinaga is second to none, and as such Obikawa moves in four days after Tokinaga does to his new apartment.
Tokinaga brightens when Obikawa, hearing a knock later that evening, opens his door.
“It’s you,” he says. “The new neighbor?”
“I guess,” Obikawa responds, as if this is a development he, too, is shocked to realize. And then: “I’ve got no food in here…”
Tokinaga exclaims something about extra groceries, and before Obikawa knows it, he’s sitting on Tokinaga’s floor, next to an old lady who keeps eyeing him in between pats of his hand and comments on how healthy he looks. There’s cat hair in the food— it’s called sukiyaki, you’ve never had it?— and Tokinaga’s apartment is freezing, but since Obikawa has retained Orokapi’s immunity to the weather, Obikawa only knows this because throughout the course of the night, Tokinaga inches closer and closer to his side, apparently without realizing it. Obikawa then decides that the weather is best when it is cold.
After dinner, the old lady asks to converse with Tokinaga in the kitchen about some cooking technique that Obikawa, frankly, has no interest in. He rolls around a bit with the lady’s cat, burying his face in its warm fur, and ends up with three parallel scratches on his cheek, which the lady apologizes profusely for before bundling up her companion and taking her leave, scolding the cat all the way.
“I’ve got some first aid,” Tokinaga offers, leading Obikawa into the bathroom. He sits down on the toilet cover, blinking at the rusty pipes disappearing into the wall, the shower curtain, the toothbrush with its little cap. Tokinaga hums as he douses a cotton pad with some foul-smelling liquid, leaning over Obikawa’s lap with his arm outstretched.
Obikawa flinches, his eyes watering. “Poison?”
“Alcohol,” Tokinaga says, pulling back. “The medicine kind. It’ll sting, but it’ll clean the wound. Necessary, ‘cause you don’t know what those cats have stepped in.”
He’s never been taken care of.
-
Slowly, Obikawa learns what it’s like to live. In the human sense, where you wake up with the knowledge that someday, you will die, and that day could very well be today. Humans are fascinating creatures, all of them, down to the sallow-faced maglev conductor who appears like a ghostly apparition at the window of the conductor’s car and the pink-haired cashier at the 24/7 convenience store. They’re hardy. Even with the end of the world—because Obikawa doesn’t doubt that it’s coming, though with each week he wishes it could be pushed back a little more—on their doorstep, their limp little bodies trudge through the streets, calling out greetings to each other.
“Hi,” the old lady says, when they run into each other at the water collection point. “Bringing one back for Tokinaga?” She points at the second of Obikawa’s three-gallon jugs.
“Yes,” Obikawa answers. “He said he’d make something good with it. And he’s injured, I think.”
“Poor boy.” The old lady shakes her head. “I’m happy you two are getting along. I think he rather enjoys the company of someone his age.”
Obikawa almost retorts, but the old lady’s eyes are sharp from the cavernous depths of her sockets, and it puts Obikawa ill at ease. Instead, he smiles thinly. “I enjoy the company, too.”
-
He really does.
Yes, Tokinaga is frequently away, and Obikawa has to come up with his own schedules—which he is capable of, thank you very much, regardless of the looks that Tokinaga throws at him when he finds out that Obikawa has just spent the better part of his week watching pigeons at the park and browsing the stores. But on the days when Obikawa wakes up and hears Tokinaga going about his morning routine on the other side of the wall—like today—Obikawa beelines for the door and insists they go shopping, or for a day trip, or to the park. ( I’m not catching them for you, Tokinaga will say, and then he might put up a fight, saying he’d much rather rest, but there hasn’t yet been a time where he hasn’t eventually agreed.)
And it’s only an added bonus that Tokinaga seems to have an unlimited supply of money, that paper and coin that Obikawa finds wholly unnecessary, given the currency itself has no value. He cannot wrap his head around the idea, much preferring to simply take what he wants and then breeze off. It won’t work when Tokinaga’s around, though, because he’s a good person and finds stealing immoral. Obikawa has never tried it, but he’s fairly certain that if he asked Tokinaga to be an accomplice, the other man would freeze up and probably turn an incriminating shade of red, as is typical when he goes under pressure.
He’s not sure why that is, either. Tokinaga has to be competent to an almost frightening degree. No sane person would live so close to a god-zone, and yet here Tokinaga is, with all his moral righteousness and his stupid-looking eyepatch and his deft hands. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, Obikawa remembers to be cautious. Remembers that Alula had once been his friend, too.
But his new body is still too novel for Obikawa to waste his time with stressful thoughts. Whenever possible, he instead turns his attention toward the blessedly mundane: the weak sunlight coming in through bare branches; the scuff of their shoes against the concrete; the way Tokinaga walks with a slight limp, a byproduct of the injury that he still hasn’t talked to Obikawa about and might, at this rate, forever withhold.
“You really want to go all the way to the end of the line for an aquarium?” Tokinaga asks warily, veering out of the way of a bedraggled businessman’s suitcase.
“You already said yes,” Obikawa points out.
“I’m just checking.”
“I want to go all the way to the end of the line,” Obikawa says, stubborn. “For an aquarium.”
Tokinaga sighs, shakes his head, mutters something that sounds suspiciously like impossible, but when they get to the station, he hands over his own cash and passes Obikawa his ticket.
-
“This one’s you,” Obikawa says, stabbing a finger at the glass. Camouflaged under a pile of rocks, an octopus’s single visible eye twitches this way and that, following the blurs of motions it sees from its hideout. “It’s all timid and shrunken.”
“What?” Tokinaga demands, offended. He bats Obikawa’s hand away from the tank. “And don’t tap on it, dumbass. You’re going to stress it out.”
“Good,” Obikawa says, “then it’d look even more like you.”
Thus begins Tokinaga’s hunt for the single ugliest creature in the building. Being a veterinarian, though—Obikawa knows this to be an animal-loving job—Tokinaga clearly feels bad about even trying to take on a judgmental view of his little friends, and settles half-heartedly for a case of jellyfish floating aimlessly about.
“Is this a compliment?” Obikawa asks, bending over to get a closer look. “They’re pretty.”
“They’ve got no brain,” Tokinaga says. “And they don’t do anything but float.”
“ While these jellyfish are harmless,” Obikawa reads aloud, from the little placard to the side of the tank, “ their relatives, the Australian box jellyfish, can kill people with their stingers, which can be up to 3 meters long.”
As Tokinaga wanders off, defeated, to peer over the side of a turtle enclosure, Obikawa keeps reading. When he’s done, he leans forward, a hair’s breadth between the tip of his nose and the glass. We’re pretty similar, he thinks, watching the jellyfish undulate past him. I could kill them, too.
A peal of laughter rings out, too high to be Tokinaga, and Obikawa snaps to attention—the aquarium had been mostly empty, being a weekday after the end of the world. He turns slowly, carefully.
A few exhibits down, just past the turtles, Tokinaga stands with his back to Obikawa. In front of him, a little girl in a puffy winter jacket giggles, her hands pressed to her mouth.
“Again!” she cries, stepping closer to Tokinaga, raising her arms. “Again, again!”
“I shouldn’t,” Tokinaga says, his tone apologetic. “Your parents—?”
“Again!”
Tokinaga looks around, his gaze landing on Obikawa helplessly. At the same time, an old woman hobbles through the doorway, clutching a large purse, and the girl squeals and throws herself at her, coming just short of bowling her over.
“He picked me up,” the girl announces loudly, pointing at Tokinaga, who whirls back, blanching. “Granny! I saw the big fish.”
“Did he?” the grandmother says, a slow, gummy smile spreading across her face. “How nice. Thank you, dear.” She lowers her white head at Tokinaga. “I’m always upset that I can’t pick her up anymore.”
“Again!” the girl repeats, running back to Tokinaga. This time, Tokinaga lifts her up by the armpits, bringing her over his head, the furry collar of her jacket coming up to obscure her chin and mouth until she’s just a pair of delighted eyes with pigtails. “Look! Granny, look!”
Tokinaga brings the girl over to the upper layer of tanks, and her eyes blow wide, the blue of the water reflected on her forehead and cheeks. “Cool, right?” he says to her, and if Obikawa were any less than he is, he wouldn’t have heard it at all. “They’ve lived through a lot. Good survivors, like you and your grandmother.”
“And you!” the girl says, reaching for Tokinaga’s eyepatch. He gently unhooks her fingers from the string, smiling.
I could kill them, Obikawa thinks heavily. I could.
-
“I should just live with you,” Obikawa says, a month after he becomes Tokinaga’s neighbor. They’ve finished dinner, and Obikawa is sprawled on the couch, watching the news and playing guess-which-god, a game he invented where he privately guesses which god will be featured for the day.
“That’s a shit idea,” Tokinaga responds, not even looking up from his computer. He has odd work, something that takes up the majority of his attention and time, and tonight he is slumped over the table in front of Obikawa, the cursor on an empty e-mail draft blinking obnoxiously from his screen. “I’m not getting anything out of the deal.”
“Sure you are,” Obikawa says, aimlessly following the words of the news anchor. Up next, the most recent disappearance in a string of god-related incidents. “Me.”
Tokinaga tilts his head back so that his cheek is pressed against Obikawa’s thigh, closing his eyes. “So, like I said. Nothing.”
“I’m a great thing to have,” Obikawa insists, observing the thin veins spidering across Tokinaga’s one visible eyelid, pale from stress or some equally-awful human affliction. “I cook—”
“Barely.”
“I get your water—”
“Out of self-interest.”
“And I’m good company,” Obikawa finishes proudly. All things he’s managed since inhabiting his human host, with his own force of will and Tokinaga’s instruction. “You’d probably go crazy if it was just you and that grandma with her cats.”
“She’s very capable,” Tokinaga says vaguely, sitting up straight as he’s struck with an idea. His fingers begin to dance across the keyboard.
We are coming to you live from just outside Ebisu, where Watanabe Gin, a thirty-two-year-old office worker, was last sighted yesterday at 9:18 PM, from a nearby security camera. The streets have been ransacked, as you can see, and although there are signs in place to keep out civilians, Gin was captured on footage with a pair of wire cutters.
Damn it, Obikawa thinks. Didn’t have enough time to guess.
Tokinaga is listening intently, his gaze trained on the television even as he continues pounding out words.
In posts online, Gin expressed his wishes to travel to a nearby god-zone, but his friends believed him to have a humorous personality and thought he was joking. His girlfriend, who has chosen to remain anonymous, said that she had no idea he felt so strongly about his plans and hopes that others can take Gin’s story as a cautionary tale. With the rise in god-related…
“How can they do that?” Tokinaga asks, his hands slowing. “The gods?”
“It’s easy for them,” Obikawa says thoughtlessly.
The lines of Tokinaga’s shoulders are tense, his jaw working as he tracks the reporter’s movements, taking the camera crew over to the hole in the fence Gin had cut. In the lower right corner of the screen, they’ve put up a photo taken at a company dinner, where Gin smiles with his teeth, lifting a cup up for a toast. His suit is pristine. The man next to him has his arm slung across Gin’s broad shoulders, and the restaurant is bustling—a pre-god shot. Ebisu has cleared out since then, its residents fearful of the barely-contained danger.
“It shouldn’t be,” Tokinaga says tightly. “It shouldn’t be easy to take someone’s life.”
He grabs the remote from Obikawa, shuts off the television, and goes back to typing, this time with a renewed vigor.
In the reflection of the computer screen, Obikawa can see Tokinaga’s face. His good eye is flinty, and his mouth is drawn into a thin, displeased line. Every few seconds, Tokinaga pauses, whispers a few iterations of the same sentence to himself, and throws himself back into his e-mail. (Obikawa reads over his shoulder: Immediate action must be taken to mitigate the threat that UASX-202306 poses to the facility. Taking into consideration the sentiment of my predecessor, Dr. Baba, I believe that the best course of action would be to destroy what amount of UASX-202306 we currently have in our possession… Obikawa doesn’t understand a word of it.
But with Tokinaga looking like that, his mind so obviously made up, Obikawa finds it hard to disagree.)
-
On the coldest day of the year, as Obikawa is stuffing foam insulator into the crack between his door and the floor, someone shakes the doorknob on the other side. He cracks the door open to find Tokinaga staring at the keys clutched in his hand, dark smudges under his eye, his body shaking. He lifts his head, frowning at Obikawa.
“Did you get mugged?” Obikawa asks, pushing the door fully open. The wind threatens to slam it shut, but he holds on, squinting at Tokinaga. “You look like shit. Worse than usual.”
Tokinaga doesn’t respond.
The unfamiliar thing in Obikawa’s chest stutters. “Hey!”
Death is something that happens to characters on TV, to the weak, frail people littering the streets. To the believers flocking toward the gods. It doesn’t happen to Tokinaga, who feeds everyone, stays up all night on hushed work calls that Obikawa could hear through the wall if he tried. The idea of it—of Tokinaga simply not existing anymore—is…
“Why are you in my apartment?” Tokinaga asks, his voice hoarse.
Obikawa checks the number on the door. “This is my apartment.”
“Oh.”
Presumably to move to the correct door, Tokinaga takes a sluggish step to the right. As he does, his foot lags, and he stumbles. Obikawa catches him by the elbow. “What’s wrong with you?”
He drags Tokinaga into his own apartment, yanking the door shut. “Seriously, what’s wrong with you? You got drugs in there?” Obikawa taps Tokinaga’s stomach, only half-kidding. “Throw it up.”
“I’m tired, asshole,” Tokinaga manages, but there’s no venom in his tone.
His skin is hot, Obikawa realizes, feeling the heat coming off of his body in waves. Tokinaga has always been warmer than himself, but even Obikawa knows that there’s a limit before their fragile brains will snap. “You’re sick,” he says. “You’re sick.”
Tokinaga is too weak to respond, his gaze unfocused, his head too heavy to hold up straight. His winter coat is making him unwieldy, and Obikawa quickly strips him of it, tossing it over the back of his only armchair. Tokinaga is similarly deposited on the couch, on top of Obikawa’s own blankets and pillow, where he sleeps. He doesn’t like the open edges of the bed, pushed into the corner and used as extra storage.
“Your place,” Tokinaga slurs. “Here. ‘s messy.”
“Shut the hell up,” Obikawa mutters, rooting around in the bathroom for the pills he sees on commercials. Twenty years of headaches gone, he can remember the model-actor saying, a stiff, forced smile on his face. Buy now for the lowest-ever price!
He turns up with nothing. With no human ailments, he has no use for human medicine. If Tokinaga were a little stronger, he could burn the fever out of his body easier than breathing—but in the state he’s in, Tokinaga would probably dissipate before healing up. He returns to the living room empty-handed, finding Tokinaga with his good eye squeezed shut, his breath heavy and uneven.
“How do I fix you?” Obikawa asks, crouching down in front of him. “Should I get the landlady?”
“She’s busy,” Tokinaga says, muffled into the sleeve of his sweater. It’s a nice sweater, knit and dark blue. Obikawa, trying to refocus himself on the more imminent problem of Tokinaga possibly dying on his couch, scratches his head.
“I’ll just—go to sleep,” Tokinaga continues, before Obikawa can think up some brilliant solution. Without any further preamble, Tokinaga splays out on the couch, a mess of limbs and blue sweater, and weakly holds out Obikawa’s pillow to him. “Gonna get this dirty. Take it ‘way.”
Obikawa stares at the offering. “Keep it. I have more.”
“Take it.” The pillow waves, faltering as Tokinaga begins to grope around with his other hand. “And the blanket, too.”
Obikawa takes the pillow, then tosses it back at Tokinaga, who puts up no fight—maybe because he can’t see—and allows it to lie where it lands, deflated on his back. Then, he leaves, retiring to his own bedroom and shutting the door.
He is a god. He sinks to the ground and breathes in, the door not nearly enough material to prevent him from feeling Tokinaga’s silhouette in the next room, the steadying rise and fall of his chest, his shifting to wedge the pillow into a more comfortable position. Beyond Tokinaga, there is the sparse life in the apartment building, the landlady’s cats and another tenant a few floors down. Beyond that, the barren sprawl of the city, festering with corpses. One of them takes the hand of a smaller one and swings it between them as they walk, offering her full attention to her daughter’s poor attempts at joke-telling, laughing when it is necessitated.
Strange. They do not seem so much like corpses, anymore.
-
You passed out (on the floor?), and I didn’t want to wake you. Thanks for letting me sleep here. I don’t remember much, but I was probably being weird.
I made some curry with the stuff in your pantry. It’s in the fridge.
Thanks again.
—Tokinaga.
-
“Scale of one to ten,” Tokinaga asks, when Obikawa rings his doorbell the next day. “How much did I embarrass myself?”
“Ten,” Obikawa says immediately. “You took off your clothes and swung them around. Said you wanted to be a helicopter.”
“Fuck you, too.” The door shuts in his face, but Obikawa can hear Tokinaga walking around inside, and, after a minute, his pillow and blankets are produced, smelling faintly of flowers. “Here. Your stuff. I washed it.”
That night Obikawa, for the first time, dreams. He wanders rolling hills under an azure sky until he sees a little cabin at the bottom of a valley. As he approaches the cabin, a man walks out, lifts his hand, and smiles.
Obikawa wakes up, cheeks wet.
-
And then the girl comes, Alula curled in the pit of her stomach, and Obikawa relinquishes himself to the past. Cuts free all the fleshy bits that had pulsed out. Corners the horrifyingly pregnant woman.
His betrayal was always bound to be exposed, but he doesn’t expect it to hurt when Tokinaga yells at him to get up, move, is that your blood? we have to leave! He hears the other man, the husband, scream the truth, and horror clouds Tokinaga’s face, his eyes so wide that his pupils are surrounded by the bloodshot whites of his eyes.
Tokinaga takes the captive and runs, and Obikawa, from his vantage point on the ground, thinks that this is what heartbreak must feel like.
-
He lets Tokinaga beat him bloody despite the fact that he has only the vaguest whisper of belief in an imminent partnership. It feels better than when Yoriko had caressed Akio-him, seeing Tokinaga cry over him, demand an apology, his face flushed and his knees on either side of Obikawa’s hips. Tokinaga doesn’t believe in sex the way other people do, had told him as much when he’d been massaging shampoo into Obikawa’s hair—he could have turned back into the husband, could have cut down the amount of time he’d spent crouched over that bathtub, but around Tokinaga, he didn’t want to be a husband with a wife.
Even if it’s not sex, it feels pretty damn close.
Obikawa is warm where Tokinaga is pressed against him, cold everywhere else; a reptile’s instincts are not so easily shed. He lays back and takes it, ignoring the insistent buzzing of Tokinaga’s phone, where, no doubt, some or other official is trying to get him to back off the assault so that there’s a clear shot through the window.
To get him close, Obikawa threatens to eat him. Tokinaga whispers the best words Obikawa has heard in a long while. The climax. Obikawa cannot help but smile, and going by the sheepish look Tokinaga musters, there’s a lot of damage to fix in his face.
No matter. Tokinaga rolls off him, and Obikawa stretches out, knowing he has time, and Tokinaga will help.