Hojo-e
It is Twelve who says they should make graves for the others, when it's all done.
He says one afternoon, sitting on a moth's dinner that had once been a couch cushion, while rain drizzles weakly outside, that they should cut down a cherry blossom and split the bark into twenty-six pieces.
Nine, who feels a drop of water plop onto his scalp from the mouldy ceiling, does not correct him about those two extra pieces. Because Twelve is not wrong.
It's degenerative encephalopathy, hastened by aging and stress.
In an effort by the Rising Peace Academy to enhance the left prefrontal cortex, the left temporal cortex, and the left parietal cortex—the areas of the brain believed to be most associated with intelligence—the surrounding areas are becoming enflamed. The ears ring like bells and dopamine trickles in to upset the balance of things, creating gradual paranoia, hallucinations.
This is all, of course, before the final aneurysm.
Nine thought he had it bad. Some days are perfectly fine and some days he simply has to lie, tethered in blankets, with a damp cloth over his eyes to cool a fire eight years old. They pick dark, chilly places to live in because the light hurts Nine's head.
Nine thought he had it bad, but one night he catches Twelve vomiting into the toilet, trembling hands grappling at the scuffed, porcelain rim, and he realizes with a sickening jolt that neither one of them will make it to twenty.
They don't talk about it, though. They don't talk about how they will never have steady jobs, or a mortgaged house in the country that doesn't leak; how they will never have love or sex or a family to share their stories with. Nine has a tested IQ of 157, and Twelve's creative scores can't even be charted. They both know that their time falls like the sand through an hourglass smeared with dust and resentment.
It won't be long now. Nine has done the math.
One day they pass a school on the way home. The air is sweet yet tangy with sunlight and there is a gym class out in the courtyard. Kids in uniform running behind a chain-link fence dotted with rust. Twelve feels the air whistle in his throat and hears Nine telling him to breathe, in, out, repeat.
There's sweat pasted on Twelve's brow and it's hours before his hands can stop shaking. Since then they take a different route home.
They start planning when they are fourteen, around the same time Lisa Mishima's father boards a one-way flight to Paris with his secretary and a demoted officer named Kenjirou Shibazaki is on a Mister Donut run for Mukasa, nursing a massive paper cut from the records archives and wondering what the hell he is doing with his life.
Twelve's ID bracelet survives, and he keeps it looped around his left wrist. He's added some chains so that it still fits. The tag is worn, barely legible, but it reads LOT 3 1076-12. Nine keeps telling him to throw it in the river, but Twelve says not yet (and later, when Twelve lies bleeding in the mud, Nine quickly slips the tag bracelet off so neither Lisa nor the Detective sees, because it's somehow more private than anything Shibazaki will ever tell the public).
They find themselves in the Akihabara district, making good use of an oddly vacant Sofmap garage. At least they have electricity. Nine dips into world mythology, of remote places like Egypt and Iceland and Greece and comes across a creature called a Sphinx that dies after its riddles are solved. His eyesight is getting worse.
No one teaches them how to survive in the world. How to get things like money, food. How to find abandoned spaces to live in, when to move on, how to sneak into public bathing areas under fresh moonlight. How to obtain credit card information. How to forge documents and doctors' records and enroll in schools and conveniently be on vacation for parent-teacher nights for more reasons than one. But they do okay, for a while.
They spend a windy autumn night coming up with names they should use.
Nine plays his Icelandic music on the stereo and Twelve sees the colors of the rainbow.
Twelve spends two Sundays out of every month at the bookstore, alternating between the history and science sections. He doesn't consider the two mutually exclusive.
Twelve passes an old WWII book on eugenics and for a brief second, his smile slips. Luckily, most literary enthusiasts spend more time looking at the shelves than at anybody else, otherwise they might have been frightened off by a truly horrible expression from a skinny boy in the history isle.
He goes and pays for a nuclear physics workbook with rumpled cash and a somewhat decayed smile on his lips. He hums a tune from Voces Thules, note for note, on the way home.
They hack into Interpol on Christmas and spend a night looking at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police files slurping cold beef ramen with hard chili bits floating on the top.
A former detective catches their eye, a rumpled, scruffy man who is both younger and healthier than his ID picture appears.
Nine points to him with a finger that has a spot of chili paste under the nail and says that he's got the right eyes.
Oedipus must be someone brilliant, you see.
Nine buys Twelve a motorcycle for his birthday, because Twelve insists that December twelfth is his day and Nine didn't actually buy the motorcycle. For New Years, Twelve gets Nine a chessboard because he figures Nine should have a real one to play on. Nine beats him every time because Twelve always uses the same moves, but Twelve doesn't mind.
Some might say the two are dangerously co-dependent. They might, if you bothered to ask either one of them, point out the difference between co-dependence and having no one else. How they see it, there are only two people in their world.
Records officer Mukasa watches LOLcats on Youtube while next to him, Kenjirou Shibazaki bites down on an unlit cigarette, moves Shogi tiles, and watches the ceiling fan go 'round again and again with bloodshot eyes.
That spring, Haruka Shibazaki graduates from her third year at Todai, summa cum laude in bio engineering.
"Wait a year," Twelve says one day, when Nine can barely see straight and his head throbs in a compound meter of wet, thudding agony. "Can you do that?"
Twelve's clothes are drooping, sagging, and his skin is pale like fresh bone. Nine pretends not to notice, and Twelve pretends not to notice Nine pretending not to notice. Nine pushes hair away from his face and tries not to look at the smears of bruised purple skin under Twelve's eyes. It is not a good day for either of them.
"We'll have to," he says quietly.
Aomori gives them a real apartment with real beds and a view of the city's poison lights.
Nobody at the plant questions two seventeen-year old boys. Especially when they somehow have all the credentials, prior training, and look older than they have any right to be. They do their work diligently, quietly, and by the time summer comes around, they will have enough money to enroll in a school.
Nine has Twelve read The Infernal Machine and Twelve does, nose dripping all the while from newfound hay fever—a product of his immune system's last attempts to defend his failing body, and afterwards they come up with a book of riddles. It's all mythology and gods, and the only real thing they can make of it is to ensure nothing like Athena ever happens again.
Kenjirou "Razor" Shibazaki finishes his second crossword of the day around a cooling cup of coffee and dreads the oncome of summer.
An albino girl eyes the fake fireplace in her suite impassively, wishing it were real. She whispers "folie à plusieurs" to herself, over and over again, unaware that she has smudged her nail polish.
The first time Nine and Twelve try filming they end up laughing so hard by the end Nine gives himself another headache, but somehow this time it's worth it.
Twelve jumps into a pool on a hot day and meets Lisa Mishima.
"Catch us if you can," Nine whispers, and clicks "UPLOAD VIDEO" with a smile.
Nine has hyperthymesia, though the only one who knows this is Twelve, of course. It's why he still dreams of that day; feels the catch of plastic around his wrist and ash in his lungs. The whip of dry, crackling deadgrass at his ankles and the smell of burning hair.
When he asks, Twelve answers that he doesn't always remember.
Twelve says this, but sometimes when he talks his voice takes on the exact speech patterns of Eight; of Fourteen when he's excited. He shouts like Twenty-three and sings like Two. Nine hears them all and something in him twinges a little because it has always been Twelve who longs for companionship the most.
And when Twelve brings Lisa home one night—a stonewashed stain of a girl, eyes bright with hope and promise and a future that they will never have—Nine is only a little surprised. Their world has been two for so long, and maybe now what they need is three.
At least for a little while.
They eat what they can, which is not so much a problem of money these days as it is appetite, and pretend they don't hear the ringing in their ears. Nine can no longer sleep like he used to, although he finds he is tired all the time now. Twelve can no longer work on the fine wires and miniature grenade assembly, because of the tremors.
Summer blooms in a wave of hot sidewalks and cicadas. Detective Shibazaki rolls up the cuffs of his pants and drinks barley tea, which makes him think of his daughter. He chews his bottom lip and would give anything for a cigarette.
Twelve sees death everywhere. White feathers, slowly rising into the sky. It's sort of peaceful, and sometimes he spends hours on the rooftop watching them. He likes to think of a creature so big that when it molts, its feathers drift for miles and that's what he is seeing. Or maybe it's several creatures, kindly angels, psychopomps.
"We should go back there, in the end," he says as they upload their third video to Youtube. His ID bracelet hangs low on a wrist that is a little too sharp and bony, and half of his face is cast in the dusk shadows. They don't use electric lights anymore, because it hurts their heads.
Nine looks up from a copy of the Odyssey whose cover is frayed and smells like acetone. He's running a fever.
They don't need to talk about where "there" is. It is a place with more name than they ever got there, a place where weeds now grow unabashed and cover the bones of children. And those children…well. They will see them soon.
"Yeah," Nine says, the taste of cordite in his mouth.
End.
(1) Hojo-e is a Buddhist ceremony, held in summer, in which small, animals that have been held captive are freed into the wild.
(2) folie à plusieurs is literally "the madness of many," referring to a shared delusion.
(3) Dopamine is a chemical that acts as a neurotransmitter in the brain. Too much dopamine is linked with schizophrenia, paranoia/psychosis, and autism.