Note: Written for a drabble prompt from seashores. This one's not really a drabble either...
Kinzo Ushiromiya is a man who knows the value of order. Not of his own choosing—his impulses dictated more towards the bottle, of Western novels read on lazy afternoons, and of daydreams filtered for too long in monochrome gray. But through long years training with the Ushiromiya family elders, and then again through a short-lived military career, he had learned – that order could become synonymous with trust, that trust was synonymous with security, which meant secrets safely kept—and that order in itself was something that only came with self-restraint.
On a certain day of each week, he tells himself, he will allow himself to switch lives—leaving his signature on the final documents of the day and ending the last phone call, exchanging the last terse words with his wife. As he moves through the hallways of the mansion, passing wide-eyed, cowed children who keep their heads low until the sound of his footsteps has long faded into the distance—there is a crackling within his body like the shedding of skin.
He slips from the mansion and once outside the Ushiromiya walls, the taste of the sea upon his lips already sharpens, seems sweeter. He feels his steps become more hurried, listens to the crushing of grass and twigs beneath his feet. When he reaches the boat, his hands fold in front of him, sway slightly with the waves of the sea, and he tries to recollect himself.
One evening.
But when he reaches the shore and she is waiting, there is dawn captured in her eyes and—his heart does a strange, immature flutter in his chest and the corners of his lips move on their own—the lingering stain of some kitchen failure across the front of her apron, he finds himself looking into the face of another person and the last remnants of suffocation releasing itself from his throat. Another human being, the single human being, that frees rather than constricts his breathing. He finds himself forgetting.
And he finds himself willing to forget.
One evening transforms into one day, and one day becomes days; and Kinzo sometimes thinks to himself, lying beside her, caressing the ends of her blonde hair and watching the faint rays of daylight creep their way slowly across the contours of her face, what he could call this—love, yes, and obsession, and addiction.
Love and obsession and addiction with her, but also—she stirs slightly, and her lips curve into a smile before her eyes open—with life, he thinks, because the two had become inseparable with each other, irrevocably distinct from the faint, fading memory of an island filled with death.
When he orders for the construction of Kuwadorian – Kumasawa's lips purse slightly but she says nothing; Genji's eyes flick to the side once but he says nothing, and Nanjo clears his throat but, ultimately, says nothing—he revisits the deadly network wired beneath the island, left behind by the war.
Quietly, in hushed voices, his hired specialists affirm and reaffirm the precise extent of the explosion radius in the event of a theoretical accident. As he rejects their suggestions of disarmament, they look at him like a madman, like a specter descended upon them from a darker and unknown world, but he doesn't care.
Once they're dismissed, he considers the problem of Kuwadorian again—the place of its construction. He lays a single finger on the map at a point outside the blood-red circle signifying the obliteration of everything else that had been constructed on Rokkenjima, and says: "Here."
The day comes, eventually, when he stops bothering to give his wife answers when her eyes bore into his back and she asks, politely, where he's going at such a late hour, if he wouldn't rather relax with her and speak to her about his business, about the garden, about the children.
He remembers that he used to devise excuses—pre-planned, scripted reasons for leaving the side of his legal family. A few of them rattle as old phantoms within his memory, with the same relevancy to him, now, as old, discarded bottles colliding against one another.
These days he usually chooses to answer with the sound of a shutting door. The next time he thinks to look her over, she seems thinner, and her voice is a note shriller. He closes the door more firmly.
At a certain moment at every meeting, he tells himself, he will allow himself to touch her hair.
She looks surprised the first time. She smiles the second. By the time of the third—her gaze moves skyward and she speaks in a more vigorous voice than usual about the gardener's work on that particular day.
(Vigorous, but not forceful—she is never forceful, these days. He misses that about her, the way her smile would sometimes turn sly, striking his hand with her book or her eating utensil, the lilt in her voice as she would tease him about the habits of Japanese men—)
The fourth time, his hand lingers, and his thumb draws itself slowly down the curve of her cheek, and he tells himself that the way she shifts slightly in her chair, the way her fingers tighten subtly on the handle of her teacup, might be born of nostalgia rather than discomfort.
He looks at Lion and sees a miracle.
Lion rocks slightly from his cradle and blinks up at his grandfather sleepily, mouth working on the ends of his blanket.
It was an impossible paradox, one that keeps Kinzo by the child's side as the phones continue to ring and the financial documents of the day remain untouched—an existence born of an unforgivable sin, but who lived on as a path to salvation. A miracle that could reconcile the two halves of his soul, two lives he had long come to think of as separated by life and death. A reconciliation he had never thought possible. Yet with the existence of Lion Ushiromiya, he thinks—for the first time—that he may be able to bring himself to love the Ushiromiya name after all.
Lion gurgles once—his grandchild—and Kinzo smiles.
As the time wears on and Kinzo continues to stare and to wonder, Lion becomes restless, then begins to cry. Natsuhi sweeps in to care for the infant with a harrowed look on her face and an unreadable light in her eyes—but Kinzo's smile lingers.
Genji gives him the news. Whatever he is holding slips from his hands.
The subsequent crash, the sound of glass breaking, reminds him, somehow, of the sea.
As time passes, his wife continues to thin until Nanjo recommends she be committed to the hospital on Nijima. When Nanjo gives him the news of her passing, he's mired in one of the books that hold the mad, absinthe-soaked promise of reviving his other wife—his true wife. After a moment, Kinzo lays it open-faced on his desk.
Nanjo waits briefly for further reaction, discomforted; when it doesn't come, he eventually excuses himself from the room, his feet shuffling and awkward across the hardwood floor.
At the occurrence of a certain miracle, he tells himself, he will allow himself to apologize.
When she appears, uncertain and hands fiddling at the front of the black dress, awkward and bulky around pale, thin shoulders, he falls to his knees and feels a kind of weightlessness overtake his body. Though the dress is the same, the calloused hands feel different – and the voice is similar but not quite exact, huskier—remnants of Lion. She always spoke in the past with a kind of radiance – the promise of quiet, gentle laughter behind every word, even as she spoke of death and of an uncertain future.
But he forgives it. Rather, he knows he is beyond the position of forgiving.
Beatrice stares down at him with uncomprehending eyes as he babbles and spasms and weeps at her feet like a child; her lips move a few times, faint and pale, but she falters and, in the end, answers, in the way he demands—in accordance to the script he had turned and refined over and over in his head while dreaming endlessly of this day.
He knows the value of order. It requires a kind of acting, of stagecraft, on all parts—once, he remembers, there was a woman he had loved, whom he had called witch, and to believe in her now was to quietly snuff out the existence of two servants and the child he had once embraced as his salvation, nineteen years ago.
But he thinks to himself—as his heart gives out, and he hears Beatrice's startled cry and senses Genji moving forward towards him—that he will allow himself this faux salvation, as a final act of selfishness.