Author's note: Gosh, I don't usually do these. Hi, everyone.
The poetry reading is from "A Time to Dance", by Cecil Day-Lewis.
Thanks to Stephanie and Kim for proofreading. x
Thanks to Libby for creating the Light to my other-Light, and then allowing me to mangle him so comprehensively.
Finally, I wrote this for Libby, of course, but I would be remiss if I did not also dedicate it to my Dad, who I love very much and who died just as I finished uploading this. I got the call 10 minutes later. He never knew I'd dedicated this story to him.
. o .
"Every morning I walk towards the edge."
—Björk
Light finds that memory, now, is what distracts him. Not just the pictures of things past and things lost that come and go like sharp little pins beneath his fingernails, but thoughts about the process of remembering itself.
It's tied, he thinks, to objects, to actions. And the first things you learned, of course, would be the things you remembered most strongly. They were, after all, the things you'd associated with objects and actions the longest. They were the things you imprinted on yourself with infant intensity.
His hands pause on the potato he's peeling, and he looks down at the backs of them, into the sink with its pool of muddied water. They look just as he's learned to see them: shrivelled with water and with age, spotted with brown flecks and with the small leftover cuts and burns of a lifetime in the kitchen. The fingernails, once carefully trimmed, are bitten to the quick.
The paring knife he's using is top-notch Japanese steel, though not nearly as expensive as some. Even now he wouldn't dream of neglecting his tools; he keeps his knives exquisitely sharp. Another quick twist of the blade, just below the surface of the potato, and it's stripped of its dusty brown skin; he cuts it in half and lowers it into the pot beside him, touching it to the water so it won't splash. He could turn the edges to keep them from crumbling into the pot, but the mash he's making doesn't call for such delicacy.
As he reaches into the sink for another unpeeled potato, his eyes—which are not as clear as they once were—rise reluctantly back towards the window, where he's keeping vigil over the garden. Over the garden, and what—who—it contains. Outside, the sun is shining.
. o .
When he's done with the potatoes and they're heating on the stove—high heat, starting from cold, salt scattered twice across the surface of the water—he takes the caddy with the potato peelings and the morning's coffee grounds and eggshells, and he heads out into the garden with them. Summer hasn't really set in yet, but his skin, these days, is delicate; he feels the sun scorch the back of his neck. Is it possible that it's brighter now than it was when he was young? Is it really just the passage of time? Because he knows that Tokyo, where he grew up, is even in this world on more of a latitude with the Carolinas than with Connecticut. In this new world that he and his twin found for themselves, he's never set foot in Tokyo—or Edo, as they still call it here. He hasn't been in Japan since he left his own world, back when it was his only world; back when his father shot him in the head.
The garden is not large. They'd offered him properties that had a lot more land, but because of the potential catastrophe a large garden could cause, he'd shaken his head and declined. Across from the kitchen window is a hunched figure, silent and unmoving, head bowed, almost lost beneath an enormous sun hat; deposited in a heap on the lawn as if he's crashed from a great height to burst open on the earth.
Light swallows, gathering himself before calling out. He always has to do this, and he's always careful to mask his distress, though he thinks the chances that it will matter are negligible. "Hey, Aki."
The hunched figure turns, slowly, almost lazily, and his heart leaps into his mouth at the awful familiarity of it—but then he sees the gracelessness of it, and the clumsy, dirt-streaked hand that props up the figure as it turns. Pain rises in his throat again, but it is, he finds, easy to manage. Nothing new.
Other-Light's face is blank and loose, beneath his sun hat with the broad black band; it creases into a stupid smile as he looks up. And Light, for his part, could cry, because other-Light should still be beautiful; seventy-four, he tells himself, is not old, no, not old at all. So his hair is that powdery white that he'd once made look so distinguished, and the skin of his head and hands has withered with time in the way it does. True beauty, Light has always thought, is in the mind—in sharp angles of smile, and in bright eyes, laughing at some secret joke, or flashing with quick anger, or burning irrepressibly even at rest, with that inner fire that had somehow made the two of them so different.
But other-Light's eyes, now, are murkier than his own, and empty, and confused. It seems so terribly lost, that wide smile of his, with that little confused crease between coarse, overgrown eyebrows. Other-Light smiles like a baby smiles, as if the movements of his own face are some huge surprise. Or as if he's been taken by some great revelation, and then forgotten it the next moment, with nothing left but the joy still smeared across his face like the scrambled egg Light feeds him in the morning.
Light looks down into his twin's confusion, wearing his own sickening mask of gentle smile, with the scraps bin still in his hand, and he hopes—even prays, to the greater power that he knows for sure is out there—that today will be the day other-Light recognises him. But it's not to be. "You. Again," other-Light says, in a querulous, cracked singsong, more curious than angry. "Where's other-me? Send him out. I want to see him."
The words settle in Light's stomach like hammer blows, just as they do every time Light repeats them. He drops, with the nagging dignity of age, to rest on the grass beside his twin. "That's me, Aki. Do you remember?" he tries to explain, emphasising other-Light's old alias carefully. Desperate to remind other-him of the lie they crafted together as young men, Light takes his hand. Today, it rests easily in his grasp, and isn't snatched away in frustrated pique. He gives the puffy flesh a lonely squeeze, and gives the wrong name, as he always does for fear of what other-Light might inadvertently reveal to the wrong person. "I'm Yuki. Your brother. We got old. I know it's confusing."
Other-Light might have pulled his hand away again there, but he doesn't. Instead, he lets out a tiny hum of a laugh, both heartbreakingly familiar and vertiginously alien. "You're funny. I never had a brother. A sister..." And Light's heart almost stops, because the two of them, in this world, should never have had a sister at all—though he is aware of a Sayu Yagami, a little younger than him, who grew up in this world's Kyoto. "Other-me is my age," explains other-Light, through his wrinkles and his tumbling white hair, for all the world as if he's the one who's making sense here. And isn't that exactly the problem? "He looks like me. He's in the kitchen. In the back," he adds, kindly.
Tears sting Light's eyes, as a thousand images of his twin hit him simultaneously; these days, he does always seem to be on the verge of tears. Other-Light on the restaurant floor in New York, a charming and disarming presence in a tailored black suit that he wore like his skin; or in the upstairs office, sleeves unbuttoned in casual clothes that he still made look elegant, turning the daily accounts and booking lists and the payroll of their tiny bubble of a business into high art. Or on the one night a week that they'd leave the restaurant dark, right from the beginning, always eating out—making a point of it even before they had a restaurant to leave dark, when they were both working two awful jobs each, in different places, in the front and back of the house. First it had been the cheapest places they could snatch an hour to eat at: pizza houses and pancake stalls that sometimes surprised them, and conveyor belt sushi bars that were uniformly awful. The two of them slowly moving up, one tier after the next.
There are more than four thousand restaurants in NYC alone, and we're going to try them all, he hears himself proclaiming once again, with fifteen variations of his first menu on his lap, and twice as many reference books around his feet, all of them fluttering with paper bookmarks. And other-Light had lifted the glass of water he was sipping from, with a wry slant of his face and a precise jerk of his wrist, and had toasted him. Know your enemy, other-me.
Something in the foreground shifts, and Light blinks his eyes to clear them. The pages of the photo album he keeps in his mind riffle closed. Other-Light has plucked a blade of grass, awkwardly, with two fingers and a thumb. He turns it this way and that, in the morning sunshine, as if the little splash of green is where all his secrets are hidden. Light's hand closes, again, on the handkerchief in his pocket.
. o .
That afternoon, the doorbell rings, sounding a soft, digitised piano D from concealed speakers in every room of the small house. Light isn't expecting company, so the noise takes him by surprise. Other-Light, bereft of his hat now, looks up from his chair where he's ponderously stringing French beans, and blinks at the chime as if it's new to him.
Light recognises the figure through the textured glass at once, and his face screws up in astonished annoyance as he jerks the front door open. Owlish eyes stare in at him, through small round lenses framed in titanium. The hair is still a bushy mess, though it's mostly silver now; the face, so expressionless and thus so permanently unused, is almost unlined except for deep, wavering creases in the forehead.
"You should have called first," Light says, abruptly.
"I should have, Yuki-san," acknowledges L, who has always insisted on addressing him in strangely flawless, formal Japanese. He pushes past, hunched as always, kicking off serge slippers to reveal thin, angular feet. "But I didn't. He is through here?"
. o .
L had stopped by quite often, for a while, every time he was on the East Coast. In fact, it had seemed to Light as if he made excuses to visit with the young Japanese twins, who served such extraordinary wagashi, and who made such superb conversation.
He had shown up in the restaurant when it had been open only two years, flouting the dress code as if it didn't exist ("Technically," he remembers saying that night after service, "an unwritten dress code doesn't exist"; he's never forgotten the huff of frustration other-Light had treated that mild observation to). But at that moment, faced with a scruffy, impossible vision from their past, other-Light had handled himself with his usual flexibility—he'd seated L in a quiet corner, and assigned him the best server they had. And then he'd kept his distance, which he'd described later as "the most difficult thing. Light, tiptoeing on broken glass would have been easier." And Light's never forgotten, for his part, the way the two of them had drawn themselves aside into the upstairs office, and how, as soon as the door had closed behind them, the colour had drained from other-Light's face. "Do you think he suspects?" "How can he? There's nothing to suspect. There's no case here, no Kira, no crime. There is nothing to detect." And other-Light had pulled his wallet out of the safe, and taken out his driver's licence, turning it over and over. It seemed perfect, because it was perfect; the magic that inserted the two of them into the world they'd chosen as if they had the right to be there had been the most complicated aspect of the spell that took them to their new home. "You're saying he just wants cake," other-Light had said, begrudging every word as he looked down at the younger boy on the card. "I find that very hard to believe. This is L we're talking about."
But he'd gathered himself, and gone downstairs to continue doing his job in the flawless way he did. And L must have liked the place, because his one visit had become two, then three, and then he'd been in there every night for a month. Even then, this had been some feat, but other-Light had made room for him.
Of course, just as they were getting used to having him around, L had vanished as if he'd never been. "Gone somewhere else," the two of them had wisely agreed, knowing the way Ls tended to come and go, to move around the world's hotels the way more normal people moved between rooms in their houses. And in the end he had come back, a year later, staring at other-Light with those eyes like black holes and demanding, in Japanese, a deconstructed strawberry daifuku: thin squares of pink mochi rice dough, overly sweetened to Light's taste, soft like baby skin. He'd layered the mochi and the red bean paste with chantilly cream and meringue for texture, and dressed it with icing sugar and fresh strawberry slices. And other-Light had taken the plate to L in person, overstepping himself the smallest amount to add a murmured, "Welcome back."
On such things, Light thought, were working relationships built. And out of those cursory acquaintances, casual friendships sometimes grew. And then it had become less casual—when was the first time L had attempted to observe the dress code of the restaurant, the same way a monkey might imitate visitors at the zoo, wearing his customary long-sleeved t-shirt under a tie that had the distinct air of having been the first one on the rack? When had Light and other-Light murmured nervously to each other, deciding that other-Light should mention, gracefully, quietly, in passing, that if L wanted to join them for lunch the next Sunday he would be welcome? L, of course, had declined—"sadly, Aki-san, my work does not permit it"—and other-Light had covered it over beautifully until L had unexpectedly added, "I could, however, join you in the evening." So then, that Sunday night, their table for two had become a table for three, at an up-and-coming Javanese eatery that was said to serve the most extraordinary pecel lele. Other-Light had said it was a bit too spicy for most customers, which had meant it was a bit too spicy for him.
. o .
But it had been a good evening, Light remembers. It really had. And so, now, an L even more elderly than he and his twin has shown up on their doorstep after an absence of years, without a word, to drag his feet up onto the overstuffed chair beside other-Light, with an audible creak and a wince. Other-Light, for his part, favours L with another of his beaming smiles, and with just as little explanation offers him a bean.
L takes the green bean in a pinch of his finger and thumb, wide-eyed, the same way other-Light had earlier plucked the grass from the lawn. The bean, just as fresh from the garden as the blade of grass, hasn't begun to wither yet; it curls around on itself, plump, velvet-skinned, still weeping from the raw end of its stem. "Good afternoon, Aki," L says, in experimental English. "Things are well, I trust."
Other-Light just blinks across at him. From the doorway, behind L's back, Light bites his lip. Don't call him L, Light. Don't call him L. Don't call him... "He doesn't respond to English any more," he says aloud. "Won't speak it. Try Japanese." He just represses his first terse instinct: You speak better Japanese than he does now; use that.
L fixes those penetrating eyes on Light, and he feels his cracked mask being flayed from his face like pork crackling beneath his carving knife. Then L is looking back to other-Light, and starting over in his formal Japanese. "I see. Well, Aki-san. Thank you for the bean, I suppose. I don't know what I shall do with it, but something will present itself."
A sound escapes from Light's throat, gulping and strange. There's just enough time for him to panic—no no no I can't cry, not here, not now—before he realises the sound was laughter, stifled and choked. L favours him with an even stare, and other-Light, twisting another bean in his hand, makes a startled sound in turn before coming out with a mild objection. "They sent me a frog."
Something is happening to Light's face: an awful pressure, as if someone else's features are emerging through his own, stabbing their way through the thin muscle and cartilage over his skull. He covers his eyes, as if to press the invader back in, and—yes, after all this time he recognises it, has it really been years since he last did this—the laugh emerges in full, high, desperate and hollow. When he takes his hands away, his eyes are wet, but he looks on L with a strange fondness, and gives him another wrong name. "It's good to see you, Leo."
L—or Leo, as they've always known this iteration of him—nods equably, and agrees. "It is good to see you as well. Both of you," he adds, nodding in other-Light's direction, again pulling his drifting attention away from his beans. When he turns back to Light, he looks hopeful. "Do you happen to have any uiro?"
. o .
"You can't care for him alone."
At L's assertion, Light's chin lifts; it's an arrogant gesture of disdain that he's never quite shed himself of. He retains it now as a partial memorial to other-Light, who would never have dreamed of trying to shed himself of any such thing. Other-Light, who's asleep now in the twin room the two of them share, with a baby monitor on his bedside table. The monitor's twin rests on the low table in front of L, who somehow is maintaining that awkward, uncomfortable knees-below-chin posture despite being in his eighties.
Light looks away, annoyed and cornered. His eyes fall on the tiny plate beside the baby monitor, which is scattered with pink and white detritus and powdered sugar. There hadn't been uiro, because Light lacks a restaurant kitchen to fill and layer it in, but there are always simpler sorts of mochi, because grinding the glutinous pudding rice by hand is one of the few tasks other-Light will complete without losing his temper. "When are you going to stop sitting like that, Leo?" Light asks, grasping for a distraction.
"When they cut off my legs, Yuki-san. Not before," replies L, evenly. "You understand what I am telling you?"
Bile rises in Light's throat. It's not the idea of someone else feeding other-Light, of some stranger washing him where only Light has ever touched him, changing his incontinence pants, taking him to the bathroom and sitting there beside him. It's the idea of anyone seeing him at all. Even L, for all their long association, for all of their history both in other worlds and outside them, is a stretch.
"I won't have anyone else here," Light snaps, smacking his saucer down onto a folded cloth where it won't clatter loudly or break. "You've seen how he is. I won't expose him to strangers."
"But to Aki-san, you are a stranger." There is a dreadful clarity, a finality to the way L says it. Light notices in passing that his hands are shaking, and clasps them together to make it less obvious. As if L could be so easily fooled.
L continues. "Let us put this simply, Yuki-san. You don't want to bring in outsiders. You fear for Aki-san's dignity, and for your own, if the understandable strain you are under were to become public. But Aki-san—" and he nods downwards, pointing at the baby monitor with his nose—"he no longer has any dignity to lose. He is invulnerable. He does not care. He cannot be hurt. But you—" And now it's Light L is analysing, as his blank focus scans Light's taut face like a bar code, and stops on his thin wrists, on his hands that won't stop shaking, despite his efforts—"you certainly can be hurt enough for both of you. It will not bring him back."
Light's stomach is turning over, and his face has gone into hiding in his lap. How many times did he die, back when the two of them were young and still trapped in the mansion, in that weird space between universes that had sucked them both in? How many times did he give his life to keep other-him from suffering? "You're describing someone dead," he says, hearing the tremor in his voice and hating it. "I won't think of him that way. He won't be that."
"Yuki-san, you are being absurd," L quietly remonstrates. But Light's hands have gone now, instinctively, not to his mouth but to his throat, where old, old scars lie invisible to the eye. His fingers press against them tightly, bending out of shape against the rough turtle skin. It was for you, he finds himself thinking, dizzily to the sleeping duplicate of himself lying in the bedroom, all of it was for you. I must be able to fix it now. We didn't come this far just to—to...
He's remembering other-Light with a knife to his throat, ready to die rather than divert attention away from himself. But Light had called out in turn, and so he had been the one to die that day. The knife had been sharp, he hadn't even felt it, not until his flesh parted and the blood poured down onto his shirt collar.
He finds himself picturing the polishing steel that hangs on his kitchen wall, and the little paring knife he used on the potatoes. He hasn't resharpened it yet, but he suspects it's still sharper than the blade the ghost girl had used on him. And even at his age—perhaps because of the years of moving his twin around—he still has that wiry strength in his arms and shoulders, and across his back. He was very strong, he remembers the ghost saying, with that horrible girlish laugh that has never quite left him. Left to right, like parting a rack of lamb, and then—and then...
"Yuki-san." Again, L addresses him, louder this time, and annoyed. Light looks up far enough to see long, elegant fingers tense around L's thin china cup. "I have flown from London to visit with you," he's saying. "I had to supply the cake for the flight myself. Kindly pay attention."
Light just looks up at him, shaking, eyes fraught with his determination and his grief. Who is there to bargain with now? Why did the pair of them ever leave the mansion, where they had suffered, yes, and been bored, but where magic and eternal youth had been within their grasp?
There is a deep, profound sigh, as if rifts are opening between continents on L's armchair, and then bare feet are making their dignified way across the room. L rests his hand on Light's shoulder, and Light, for his part, blinks up at him as if he isn't sure what to do next. Which is true.
L sits beside him, drawing his feet back up with less concern for Light's comfort than his previous act might have indicated. "Yuki-san," he says again. "Do you think I haven't always known? You and Aki-san—you are brothers, that cannot be denied, yet you are also more than that."
The words, Light thinks, should shock him more than they do. He should feel more of an urge to deny them; he should die before admitting what this world can only see as incest. Instead, he just gives the L next to him that hollow look again, and covers his face with his hand. Were, he's thinking. We were more than that. L, you can't ever understand.
. o .
They talk long into the evening, after that—about other-Light as he was, and is; about the dreary details of Light's everyday life; about L's business empire in England, which Light suspects of not existing at all, or of being nothing more than a front. Light confesses things, here and there: tiny details which he hopes will satisfy L, but nothing too outlandish or incriminating. Just two twin brothers, inseparable, closer than they ought to be.
They reminisce, as well, about the past they've shared in snatched interludes here and there, as old men will. "I never thought you came for the wagashi," Light says, distant with memory. "It doesn't appeal to Western palates."
"Then why make it in the first place?"
"A chef is first and foremost a teacher," Light replies, with a sad, wry smile.
"Indeed," L acknowledges. "And over time, your desserts did become less sweet. You changed the norm. You educated us. You and Aki-san—you even educated me."
And Light reaches out, wordless with gratitude, to rest a quiet hand on L's shoulder. "You're a good friend, Leo."
"I am no such thing," L admonishes him. "I am only 'in it', as they say, for the desserts."
Either of them could be lying, Light thinks, as he always does. Or both. There is a point where it simply ceases to matter.
. o .
Time passes, and the situation does not improve. They get from day to day, somehow. Light tries to focus on his twin as he now is, on the kindness and the affection and the sunny, mindless happiness of him, ignoring the times other-Light screams at him to get away, or mouths obscenities like a parrot, or lashes out at him with a flailing open palm, or an object. He tries to love him for his own sake, untidy hair and incontinence pads and all, and not to perpetually see him through the lens of the extraordinary man he was. Sometimes, he succeeds.
He occupies himself devising endless varieties of soups and soft foods, never anything too unfamiliar, never anything that other-Light will choke on; things that can keep both of them entertained. Devising new recipes, after all, has always been one of his main diversions, and other-Light had always loved to sample his creations.
Well, almost always. His eyes become far away, as he remembers the durian parfait that other-Light had refused to have in the front of house. Jelly, too, is something he's tried never to use too extensively—and his mind flits back through the decades to the mansion, which is so long ago but never far away. He tries to swallow the sudden sense of panic, to move again past the years of psychological and physical torture, past the half-dozen violent deaths that were inflicted on him. He's never tried to feed other-him jelly, because other-him had lain in bed for weeks, barely conscious, gone away into a stupor, and when he'd come out of it one of the first things he'd said had been No more jelly. He'd been pale, his eyes bruised and far away, and his hair had spread onto his pillow in a lank brown cloud, yet he'd still managed a faint, strained smile for Light.
He'd had his Kira memories then, Light remembers, and he'd remained in the mansion despite them. Would he have been so ready to do so if he'd known what the future held for him? Light wants to say yes, but he can't know. His eyes fix, tormented, on the restless form in the bed opposite.
In July, the festival of the dead rolls around. They've always celebrated Obon, without a word to each other, simply because there are things it doesn't do to forget. But it's been different, the last few years; progressively so, as other-Light has become clumsier, and more forgetful, and more likely to get bored and wander off. So Light's celebration that summer is simple and private: a basket of carefully-chosen fruits and tiny artisan breads laid at the edge of the water, and some floating paper lanterns that glow from within, and a man paid on the far side of the lake to send up some fireworks that will be bright and colourful but not too loud. As other-Light stares wide-eyed and reaches out towards the sky, Light feels it was money well spent.
The summer is mostly hot and bright, when it's not sending down torrents of rain and hail, or lightning. The air conditioning makes it bearable, and Light's habitual close eye on his twin keeps him from wandering off into the storms, or just out into the street. He checks the locked doors and windows twice over before going to sleep, and keeps the keys under his mattress; the whole house is wired with motion detectors that beep, not at the local police station, but quietly under his pillow, nestled against a handkerchief. Sometimes they go off in the night, and Light will find other-him at the bedroom door, confused by the simple hook and eye catch; then he returns other-him to his bed, or cleans him up and changes his pants, or talks to him in calm, gentle words. Sometimes he sings, simple, popular songs and old lullabies from their mother's knee; it turned out that the two of them sang well, though other-Light was always better. He sits beside other-him's bed, watching till dawn, attuned to his breathing, waiting for it to stop. He becomes used to the routine, numbed by it.
He sleeps in fits and starts, with both ears open for the soft, repetitive pip-pip-pip of the motion detector. Other-Light no longer speaks, and seems not to listen. Often, he won't look up, or move his hands; or he can't, which is worse. Light sits beside him, keeping him company, feeding him gently, wiping drool from his face and wishing useless wishes: if only he would focus and look Light in the face, talk and be himself again! Instead, Light holds his limp hand, and tries to wake the dead with murmured questions: imouto no sayu o omoidasu ka? okaasan mo, otousan mo? o-yashiki o omoidashite dekiru ka?
And eventually there comes a night, towards the beginning of autumn, when he opens his eyes wide in the night, unsure of what has woken him. The quiet alarm isn't sounding beneath his pillow. The burglar alarm isn't going off; no other loud sound has disturbed him. But his stomach, for reasons he can't pin down, feels bruised and tight. Perhaps other-him has stumbled out of bed, without triggering the alarms..?
But no. When he turns his head to look at the other bed, through the shaft of moonlight the parted curtains are letting in, other-him is lying there, silent, motionless, facing the ceiling. His eyes are open.
. o .
The funeral is quiet—just Light, L, and the coffin, and a handful of other people who are allowed to think they got inside the bubble of the twins. The death after a euphemistic "long illness" of Asayoshi "Aki" Yagami, co-founder of a restaurant that was rarely spoken of above an awed whisper, is not real news outside the culinary world, but that's enough. Condolences come from all corners of America; from England, France, Italy and Spain; from China, India, Australia and Indonesia, and in their thousands upon thousands from Japan, for the boy from Edo who made good. The flowers would fill the chapel of rest twice over, along with the street outside; Light has them distributed to the local hospitals, and issues a brief but kind written statement of thanks.
He doesn't let any of it move him. Nothing can move him. He's captured, he thinks, the inner vacancy that his twin found before he died. He feels nothing, and often, when people address him, he doesn't hear, or see their concerned looks. Most of him is still back in the funeral home, sitting beside the casket at three in the morning, flitting from relief to guilt to hideous, paralysing aloneness.
He's prepared for this moment for six years, and now that it's come, he's ready. With his glasses folded in his lapel pocket, and the handkerchief splashed with other-Light's old cologne clutched in his hand, he stares blind and resolute past the terrible oak box waiting to enter the furnace, and past the reader in his blurry white robe, and tries to ignore the sour irony of his lying recitation. "His laughter was better than birds in the morning, his smile turned the edge of the wind... too early we saw his light put out, yet we could not grieve more than a little while, for he lives in the earth around us, laughs from the sky."
. o .
More people are invited to the wake than were asked to the cremation. It doesn't make it easier for Light to hide, because he's worked with most of them for years, and has known them all for decades; and it doesn't begin to make it any less awful. The gathering takes place in a small, subdued memorial hall in Greenfield Hill. It has its own garden, set far back from the road; it's a calm enclave of peace in the bustle of the neighbourhood. The food is catered by an old acquaintance from the earliest days, back from when he and other-Light were scrabbling to start the very first version of Hikari up in Sunset Park; and it's served tapas-style, for all that the small, portable come-and-go dishes have been out of fashion for twenty-five years, because Light can think of nothing he'd rather do less than sit and eat at a table trying to ignore pitying eyes. He's defined the fashion all his life; he has, in the end, made a point of telling others how to think and how to be, and so now, today, he will do as he pleases.
What it turns out that he wants, more than anything, is to sit in an alcove, recessed away from the main corridor and out of the way of the gathering. His fingers are folded clumsily around a glass of calamondin juice, barely touched, bright like orange juice, but acid and sharp.
He's not sure how long he sits there, staring unseeing through the texture of the walls; they're painted in a luminous cream colour, almost like paper; like a shōji screen out of his youth. What penetrates his dim stupor is a woman's voice on the far side of the doorway, inside the hall, elevated and nasal: a bright Brooklyn accent that's not entirely dissimilar to his own Japanese-tinged English. Other-Light, he thinks, had always had the better accent of the two of them. It had been so much more professional, so much a part of him, and he'd worked so very hard for it. Light's not even proud that the lid over his feelings trembles only a little.
The woman with the irritating voice is Lena, who has three children, all with children of their own now. He used to lift expiring petit fours from the store cupboard when he and other-Light—again, that ugly shiver of his self-control—would walk in Central Park, against the chance that they'd run into Lena's unruly family. And Lena would give the two of them a scolding look and accuse them of bribery, because before she'd been Lena-in-Central-Park and then shall-we-ask-Lena-to-breakfast-this-week and then you-know-Lena-asked-us-to-her-Christmas-party, she'd been a pushy up-and-coming food critic who other-Light had made a well-judged point of inviting in, to feed her her own words about fusion food—"It's a law of the universe that fusion restaurants are always terrible, and Japanese fusion is the worst by far..."
Light thinks, distant on his own side of the wall, that she sounds more nasal than usual—subdued, and not her usual self. Knowing her, he thinks it's not a put-on for the occasion, but genuine grief for other-Light; she had called, and then written, and she'd kept writing for years for all that he never replied.
It's what she's saying that catches his ear: the name of the restaurant that he and his twin had chosen together, laughing at the secret. Stylised red kanji, lowercase letters spaced out wide. The syllables spill out of the open door. "...you know, I was in the city not long ago, and I did stop by Hikari—"
He vaguely knows, even before the answer comes, who she'll be talking to. The voice confirms it: careful and broad, redolent of the Midwest in its ambling manner, it's Lena's perpetual hanger-on, Ted. He'd written Hikari up for a popular food blog when he and other-Light were just making a name for themselves, and then he'd come back, and come back again, writing about them each time, creating what Light understood was called "buzz", and always teasing Light and other-Light about how they were an old married couple—which they'd taken in good nature, of course. He's lonely, he remembers saying to other-Light, and he recalls other-Light replying snippishly, Then he should have a proper job, instead of a blog.
But as a regular customer, Ted knew just what was involved in getting a reservation for Hikari, which is why he replies as he does. Light can hear the arch of his eyebrows. "You stopped by?"
Lena tries to skip past it. "I might have had a reservation—"
"You might have had a reservation," Ted mimics, trying and failing to capture the quickness of her voice, the high-pitched patter of it. "You mean you made a reservation a year in advance."
"A year and a half," she admits. "Are you going to let me talk? Because that's not the point. The point is that it's not as good as it was."
"Wh—"
"No, it still deserves its status," Lena adds in a hurry, as if she's remembered where she is. "No doubt of it. Remy's doing a great job—" and she nods across the room. By this time, Light has moved silently to look inside; Lena and Ted are facing away from him, and he can see, on the other side of the room, an overtired, balding man of perhaps forty, engaged in quiet conversation—with L, as it happens. Unsurprising, that, since Light's protégé is by now known across America and Europe for his special study of pâtisserie. Lena goes on, "It's still one of the best places to eat in the world. But the twins? They had something special. Something unique, you know? No doubt of that at all."
In the space between them, the bourbon in Ted's glass catches the light, deep and golden. His shoulders have hunched a little, as Light knows they do when he's thinking something over. "I asked Aki out once, you know. It would have been... God, maybe thirty years ago?"
Back in the doorway, Light's stomach ties itself in an ugly knot. Lena gives Ted a quick glance sideways, and answers; despite her words, she sounds surprised. "You did not. Huh, I can't say I'm totally shocked. I did think for a while there wasn't anyone left on the East Coast you hadn't hit on."
Ted manages an abortive laugh that Light can barely hear, and comes back with, "Yeah, well, now you know why I spent all that time in Oakland. Out there, I think someone even said 'yes' once."
Lena slowly jiggles the ice in her own glass, as she continues. "I can't blame you. I nearly had a go at Aki myself, way back when. Come on, that ass in that suit? So how did he distract you?"
It's a story Light knows already. His legs feel like they might collapse beneath him. He remembers all the times he looked sideways from the pass for a quick glimpse of other-Light leaving the kitchen at Hikari, remembers lying in his twin's bed with the baby blue sheets, spooned together with him and laughing as he first heard this story. So his lips move in time with Ted's, silently echoing the response. "He didn't, quite. He said he was married to his work," Ted says ruefully. "Which I took as a gentle way of telling me he wasn't gay, what with him being him, and me being the, you know, picture of irresistibility I am." He gestures up and down himself, past the heavy tweed jacket and the spreading stomach that had been well in place thirty years before. His hair, braided down his back almost to his waist, stranded and laced up with black leather, is iron grey. And Light hears, in his mind as fresh as yesterday, the other half of the story that other-Light had enjoyed telling him so much, with his head rested back in the crook of Light's neck, and his hand slipping back to find Light's own. "Married to my work", really. What a joke—though I suppose you could call it that. Other-me, I swear I almost told him just to see his face...
He realises, wiping the tears from his eyes with the hand that's not holding the glass of juice, that Ted is still talking, laying out the story that other-Light had repeated that same evening, the one that's seared into Light's memory just because it came from his twin's mouth. The words sound coarse and, even now, foreign in the slow Idaho drawl of this man who—besides L, of course—is one of the closest things Light has to a friend, and who he does not, really, care about at all. "... and, you know, since I'm also the soul of tact I asked him how it was he wasn't gay. I was mostly joking, mostly joking, but there were guys up and down America trying to be like him, to have what he had—"
"—and of course you had to tell him that," Lena interjects.
"I did. I did tell him exactly that, and he smiled at me, you know? Over the booking counter, with his tablet in one hand. And he just said to me, 'Well, Ted, they'll have to get their own restaurants and their own resident food bloggers'. And I just—"
Ted's head lifts, as if he's staring at the ceiling. Lena's head is tilted towards him in silence. Light realises that he, too, is holding his breath, ready to cling to even the barest mention of other-him. And Ted finishes, "I swear, I almost went to pieces on the floor. It wasn't even what he said. It never was that. It was the way he said it, the way he'd look at you. Like you were the whole world to him, even when he had ninety covers to organise the next second. I don't think I ever even saw him break a sweat. He just—made everything happen."
Lifting his glass, Ted takes what seems to be a pretty deep sip of the bourbon. Light is still hidden behind the two of them, in the doorway. Except the picture of other-Light is so vivid in front of him, so very bright, that Light finds himself stifling a sob. The fruit juice in his glass trembles. Ted and Lena hear, of course, and turn quickly, breaking off nervously as they see him, glancing down and shifting on the spot. "Oh God, Yuki, sweetheart," Lena says, as Light watches the last couple of minutes of her conversation reviewing themselves behind her eyes. "I've been looking out for you all afternoon. I don't know what to say."
"That's fine," Light hears himself saying; his mouth has never quite lost the knack of running itself. "Please, you mustn't worry at all. I got your flowers—well, both of your flowers. They were beautiful."
He knows Lena and Ted and everyone else here will have sent flowers, that they wouldn't dream of doing anything else, and indeed, both of them nod, murmuring variants on "It was nothing".
There are tears in Light's eyes still, and he wants more than anything to be alone, so though Ted rests a hand on his shoulder to stop him leaving, or to try and comfort him, he pulls away. His head inclines in an acknowledgment—maybe it's thank you, or maybe it's please continue. And he turns his back, picking his way blindly down the corridor, half-mad with what he's lost, with the sights and sounds and smells and the memories that crash over him. Ted hadn't begun to realise that other-Light was laughing at him. And other-Light is gone, and all that Light has left are these vacant, stupid shells of people: cheap, hollow, charmless surfaces, like dense pastry cases in convenience stores, with nothing at all worthwhile inside them.
. o .
The weather outside is grey and cold, blown in off the Atlantic. Light heads out there anyway, turning his face to the clouds, imagining other-Light pelting back down to earth in every raindrop. The garden is neatly tailored, laid out in squares and rectangles like the map of America, with flowerbeds enclosed in pale brick like sarcophagi. Light makes his way slowly along one of the paved pathways, edging tentatively forward, feeling every minute of his advanced age, ignoring the benches where the rain has pooled and soaked into the wood.
He remembers all the junior staff who came through his kitchen, even those who were only there a fortnight. Many vanished into obscurity, but no small number have gone on to greater things. Light remembers the precise count, every face and every name. It had been easy, in the end, to select not the one with the most innate gifts, but the hardest worker—though his gifts had been in no small supply. Remy had travelled from Provence fifteen years earlier to study with Light. And when the two Lights had retired, Remy had been the one Light handed the restaurant over to.
Light supposes Remy can't be blamed, strictly, if Hikari has lost some of its lustre. It's not as if he could expect to outdo Light, who's always been the best; his understanding of process, his choice of ingredients, his command of cuisines and his ability to mingle them together are all peerless. But then, there had always been a small set of chefs who'd approached Light's culinary genius. Most of them are at the wake. All have in their time produced transcendent food, and any one of them, in his place, could have run a kitchen with the reputation of Hikari's.
But what had made Hikari truly unique was not Light's cuisine, he knows, but other-Light. His ability to market and sell and teach others, his perpetual control of the customers and staff; the beauty of him, even as he grew old; the flash of his eyes and his hair and the subtle grace of his hands and form, the music of his voice, the way he'd dazzled everyone without their ever realising that he was doing so—
There are dogwood trees in the corners of the garden, low and spreading, flowers long gone in the summer's heat, leaves green and dignified with their ignorance of the season, there to give shade and shelter on days like this one. Light steps off the path and right behind one, still the picture of composure. But once he's out of sight, as alone and as inconsolable as the day the doctor dragged him feet-first from his mother's womb, he crumbles against the wet mud in his dark funeral suit, and, for the first time since the two of them learned together what was coming, he stops long enough to consider the magnitude of his loss.
. o .
He never returns to the little house near Fairfield with its twin bedroom and its kitchen garden, with the ornamental cherry tree and the bright spring and summer flowers that other-Light had, in the end, begun to love. Instead, caked in dark mud, he heads out of the memorial garden onto the street, and starts to walk. Two blocks down, he calls a taxi, and when it arrives, he shuts off the receiver on his phone.
. o .
New York is not far away—it's not an hour's drive around the water—but the taxi driver still doesn't want to go there, let alone take Light on board when he's covered in mud. And Light doesn't have it in him to smile and act charming. In the end, he touches his phone to the credit chit that's set between the seats, and pays the driver an outlandish sum to take him to the airport. And then he doubles it to get the bastard to shut up.
He sits back in the chair, and turns the little device over to check the time. The clock gleams from its outer surface, in an understated sans-serif font: 13:55. He could unfold it like a piece of paper to see the route the driver is taking, but he doesn't. Instead, he slips it into his pocket, and watches the miles tick by towards the Interstate. He and other-Light—and a twinge of travel sickness hits him—had thought about this, they'd laughed about it; they'd thought they'd have chips implanted in their ears by the time they were old, or at least some super-miniaturised device stuck to their wrist like a watch. But real estate, in the end, had proved to be the limiting factor. Wasn't it always? A screen, a kitchen, a notebook. I know there would have been a difference in the end. I have to believe that this was better.
Once they're properly underway, it doesn't take long for Light to fall asleep, not like an old man on a slow, rainy afternoon but like someone exhausted who has nothing left to give. And he dreams a fitful dream. Other-Light is there, of course, bright and beautiful—and young again, somehow, in a way Light doesn't realise is strange. They hold hands and lean against each other, and Light's joy spills up inside him like a spring of fresh water. God, he murmurs to other-him, I dreamed you were dead. And other-him slips an arm around his shoulders and brushes a kiss against his cheek, and stifles an affectionate laugh in that way he always did, as he murmurs his reply. Don't be silly, other-me. Of course I'm not dead. You know where I am.
. o .
It's the jerk of the car stopping at the dropoff point that wakes him. The lazy afternoon rain has stayed behind in the Nutmeg State, and at the airport the sun is shining; it glares through the window onto his face. The warmth of his dream stays with him just long enough for the reality of the empty seat beside him to flood in. He manages to get the door open before he vomits up the few sips of juice he drank at the wake.
"You okay?" the driver asks, as Light is hanging out of the door and retching onto the road—well, for four times his probable daily income, Light supposes the man can manage concern. He nods tentatively, breathlessly in response, adds a tip to the credit chit, and tumbles painfully out of the taxi. In front of the terminal building, he stares up at the glass and metal architecture, and doesn't begin to see it. Instead, he sees the long-ago memory of ugly flock wallpaper that the two of them had been sitting in front of in his dream. You know where I am.
By the door, a girl is standing with an electric piano: layers of brightly coloured skirts, and painted hair, and her voice thin and awkward and ignored. She has a credit chit too, identical to the one in the taxi and as ubiquitous, mounted hopefully on her piano stand; and she's singing a bouncy upbeat version of something Light vaguely recognises: "... no-one's picking up the phone, guess it's clear he's gone..." The words register, but he doesn't favour the singer with a second glance.
Inside the terminal, Light makes his way slowly to the departure boards. He doesn't, particularly, have a destination in mind. All he wants is to get away from the northeast, with as much speed as he can manage, and as little thought as he can muster. Turning off his brain, though, is still a difficult process; as he passes a coffee concession, a head of fuzzy white hair catches his eye. His chest bunches unpleasantly before the man looks up from his tall mug, catches his stare and looks away. As it turns out, the face is all wrong, coarse and bovine beneath the prematurely ageing hair, and Light, stupidly, feels other-Light's absence yawn beneath him all over again.
The boards stretch up far above him. They look printed on paper, like a huge magazine spread in glossy red and white on blue, except that sometimes a line will blink, and a flight will vanish, or a time will change. From Wheaton International—formerly JFK; it had been renamed in the end, in 2032 after yet another president got himself assassinated—he can fly anywhere in the world; the choices confuse him. There are flights to the West Coast and Canada and South America and Hawaii; there are flights to Africa, to Europe and Australia, to New Delhi and Beijing and Pyongyang.
Or no, he realises, as the destinations tick through his mind. It's not the choices that are confusing him. His shoulders sag further as the problem comes into focus: there isn't one of these places he hasn't been before, with other-Light. They'd always eaten out together, one night a week, yes. But when the restaurant had found its feet, they'd also closed its doors twice a year, in the spring and in the autumn, to go away for a few days and try things they couldn't find in New York. "Research trips," he remembers saying, with his arms around other-him's shoulders, and his chin hooked over a collarbone. Other-him who hadn't wanted to leave the restaurant dark, and who'd thrown himself so completely into those vacations once Light had managed to get him on a plane. They'd eaten guinea pig in Peru, and chicken feet in the Philippines, and then they'd gone all the way to the middle of Africa to eat rice porridge in Kinshasa. And one spring, in Cambodia, they'd sat by a green pool surrounded by creepy statues of naked children that somehow reminded him of jizō, and they'd sampled cashew nuts and giant spiders fried in garlic, while other-Light pursed his lips into his lap and muttered sardonic asides about snails.
He reads the lists of destinations over and over, increasingly bleakly, increasingly tortured by what should have been happy memories. There's nowhere the two of them haven't been together. Together, they girdled the planet from west to east and back again like Ariel; there's nowhere he can go where he won't be trailed forever by memories of other-him—
Except no. He's mistaken. There is somewhere he's never been. His eye falls, finally, on the one destination the two of them always avoided.
16:05 ITM Kyoto/ITAMI. JAPAN, it says next to it in parentheses, with a tiny rising sun flag next to the country name for people who can't read English. Because the capital never moved east, he remembers, it's still located in Kyoto, and the international airport is not at Narita, but Itami, south of the city near Osaka. But it wasn't, he thinks, defensive against people who aren't there any more, against the universe in general, as if the two of them had deliberately stayed away. There just had always been somewhere else to go; somewhere truly new and fresh, where they could make the best use of their time. Again, he remembers the mansion, and the endless hours in the libraries researching other worlds and the differences between them; he remembers meeting other-him's eyes, with stricken, wordless horror upon learning that in the world they were researching, the one that seemed so promising, the first port city to be hit with the atomic bomb had not been Hiroshima, but Edo, the city that should have been their home. Unavoidable, they'd agreed. Part and parcel of finding a universe so like their own, except that they—the template, the original—had never existed.
Butterflies, other-him had said, taking his hand. Edo, in this world, is not what Tokyo was. We don't exist there, and by the same token, neither does our home. He hears the words again, looks up at the board without seeing it. His phone beeps in his hand, calling his attention to the booking he has half-written there. But it doesn't matter, other-me. We're going to build a new home. Somewhere safe.
You know where I am. His eyes, he realises, have filled again with tears.
. o .
As he returns to the terminal doors, with his wafer-thin phone still folded into four quarters in his hand, he taps it a couple of times to clear the display, then writes idly on it with one finger. And as he passes the young singer, with her ugly hair and her tuneless warble, he touches his phone to her credit chit. It blinks red, then green, and gives her more money than most people will see in their lifetimes.