"Can you write?" Mori asked the boy on his first visit to his office.
"I want you to write. Oh, it can be really anything." He tells the him. "Think of it as homework.
I would hate it if you were to miss out due to my lack of didactic skills. Besides I believe writing helps to organize your thoughts." he leans back in his chair behind the desk over stacked with papers. "And who will do it for you if you can't do it yourself?"
As time passes Dazai goes from assisting Mori in his office, running errands for him to gradually working more and more out in the field, until he becomes officially acknowledged as one of the members within the mafia ranks.
He complies with Mori's request, treating it as a somewhat eccentric whim of the mafia doctor. It isn't too demanding and Mori on his side does not seem to pay much attention to the papers he turns in, usually caught up somewhere between treating a gunshot victim or striking up a black market deal on the side. Only on rare occasions, Mori would out of nowhere bring up something that was just on Dazai's mind. Locked into an unnerving stare with Mori, Dazai would rake his memory for anything he did or said that could have tipped the man off, the sudden tension in Dazai's expression making Mori laugh. He tells Dazai to work on his vocabulary.
His routine becomes more and more hectic over time. Dazai knows it's not just him, that all the mafia members are affected by the erratic and directionless tactics not like anything that could have ever been conceived in a war room, but more akin to the spasms of a trapped animal thrashing in agony. The goals they set out for remain unattainable with the constant backtracking not helping their cause as they keep making more enemies than allies along the way, all the while adding to the seemingly endless body count.
It's late afternoon as Dazai descends the staircase, heading to the basement that served Mori as his office. He knocks at the door.
"Come in"
He enters the office, just in time to see Mori get up from the cot standing in the corner. The room looks like a battlefield with bloodied utensils scattered left and right, the air thick with tobacco smoke.
He puts a sheet on Mori's desk.
"What's that?" Mori asks taking out a crumpled pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his white coat.
"A resignation letter." Dazai shrugs.
Mori laughs hollowly into the palm of his hand as he puts an unlit cigarette between his lips. He skims over the faux report Dazai prepared. He sits behind his desk and takes out a printout from a file holder, still looking around his desk. "Get me these by tomorrow. I ran out of whole supply all in one day." he says still going through the scattered papers.
"I'm doing the exchange tomorrow." Daza reminds him.
"Do it in the morning then. You know the man" Mori tells him opening the drawer. He retrieves a lighter, tries it once, turning his attention to the monitor. Assuming that Mori is done with him, Dazai turns away.
"Dazai?" he looks over his shoulder. Mori's eyes are still puffed from the nap, as he squints at the monitor in front of him.
"The boss's health has been recently in a rather... poor condition." Mori says breathing out a waft of smoke. Dazai watches as it raises into the air, as if trying to escape through the narrow basement window.
By his third year in Port Mafia Dazai read everything Mori had to offer, including some old medical journals and a stray guidebook on nutria breeding techniques. He doesn't stop there and he starts seeking information from other sources, but this does nothing more than only make unease grow. He quickly discovers, that the reality of life that he initially took for a wild forest of unlimited opportunities is actually a very narrow path with cheap road shows. And there are only that may steps he can take on that path. He realizes he can't really back off from it, that it was decided for him before he was born. He's trapped. He could try turning back, perhaps even run away, but he knows that each step in the opposite direction would only reaffirm the reality of the dirt he steps on.
He discovers there is some to what Mori told him. As he puts words on a paper, they inflect in a way that he did not intend, as if they attained a life of their own. The words that he believed to be his own, expressing his own thoughts were in fact marked with fickle shades of uncanny meanings. They carried a baggage of joys and disappointments of people that came before him, accumulated over time like a patina of centuries old grime. The words never for a moment really belonged to him. They were empty vessels waiting to be filled with his thoughts, rows of rows of test tubes waiting for him to bleed himself into. The sight of his own handwriting makes a testament to his own realization that he exists only as long as he plays the ball tossed to him. He starts to feel as if he were disappearing.
He finds ways to make himself more real. He discovers that he finds the sight of his own blood to be oddly reassuring. It lets him distance himself, in the long hours he spends tending to his own wounds using the gauze and disinfectants from Mori's medical supply. He wraps himself up regularly, finding comfort in the fast tug of gauze around his chest, his arms and abdomen, and he continues to do so long after the angry reds become only a memory of pale scratches that keep getting fainter and fainter each day.
He stops doing harm to himself because soon he discovers there isn't really any need for this as Mori introduces him to a new responsibility that comes with being the mafia doctor's assistant, letting him supervise the interrogations. And he's thriving in this new role, because he just has so much to draw from and share with the poor fools that stood in the way of Part Mafia, letting them on the terrible secret of human limitedness.
The day of the coup is a frenzy: from cleaning the bloody mess, to announcing the change to the inner circle while staying cautious, careful not to give out under the pressure, keeping the situation from spinning out of control.
After all is done, they are both in the late boss's office at the top floor, Mori is standing behind the mahogany desk, when Dazai hands him the sheet of paper that he managed to scribble earlier that day.
"It's been a long day. You should get some sleep." Mori tells him not looking at the piece of paper and Dazai tries to hide his confusion. The unease he feels strikes him as a bit too Pavlovian for his own comfort.
"We're done for tonight." he looks Dazai in the eye.
The rules have changed, he understands that much. With only a cursive look at Dazai's writing Mori tells him to try again. Sometimes he requires him to rewrite, making him stay in his office well into late evening.
"It would help if I could get some feedback." Dazai says on one of such occasions.
"I don't want you to lie." Mori answers him. "When you lie you're playing into your own pettiness. You become a warped version of yourself and you start edging away from the actual reality that you're supposed to act upon." Mori is the master of his reality. He made all the forces realign in accordance to his will. "Lying is a sign of weakness. You're better than that."
Over the time it becomes clear that Mori requires more of his involvement. Dazai spends more and more time working exclusively for Port Mafia intelligence as Mori keeps expanding his reach, raising the stakes and involving more and more resources into realization of his ambitious goals. Mori's presence is overwhelming. It's looming over him like a shadow. It engulfs him requiring more and more of his energy. Mori keeps expanding Dazai's duties, stacking more responsibilities over his already existing duties. Dazai sometimes wonders how much time and energy Mori had to devote in preparation for the coup, building an extensive network of people, collaborating with the aim of setting up the new structure, all of the while keeping his cards close, leading the organization into such a smooth and painless power transition, that even Dazai in spite of all his indifference, had to admit this to be quite an impressive feat.
"It'll pass." Mori tells him on one occasion. "In two years you'll feel considerably better, in five years you won't be able to remember what this all was about." he gives him a smile that could be considered sympathetic if it wasn't for the cold mask his face shaped itself into over the years, the wrinkles around his mouth and eyes stretching too tight as if threatening to break at the seams with the unnatural rearrangement. "Because it's impossible to go on like this."
He gives Mori a deadpan stare, feeling as if the man had spit him in the eye, because in many ways he doesn't want it to pass. He hates the way things look, but he doesn't want to change, and he doesn't want to fit into the picture. His dissatisfaction sits deep in his chest, almost suffocating him, like a disease, yet more than anything he wants to savour it, until it consumes him, inside out, like cancer. And no one has the right to take this from him, especially not Mori. In response he wants to laugh Mori in the face, but he knows the man would only derive some twisted satisfaction from such a display, so instead of making a show of himself, he returns Mori a condescending smile.
When Dazai enters Mori's office, the sun is hanging low, brushing over the roofs of buildings, illuminating the wide panorama of the city.
"I want to do things a little differently today." Mori tells Dazai as he takes his seat at Mori's desk, a pen and a stack of paper prepared for him beforehand.
"I want you to write a short characteristic of each mafia member that you came into close contact with during your career. One up to two pages." He says sitting behind the desk. "Basic information, like how do you find them in work environment, what are their assets or what factors could cause them a liability." He makes a small pause. "What do you know about their past."
Dazai crosses his legs, leaning back in his chair.
They sit in silence interrupted only by Mori's voice feeding him names.
He finds it laughable that someone's existence can be summarized on a piece of paper, that this is it, this is all everything in life amounts to as he hands the sheets one by one to Mori.
"I couldn't have put it better." Mori laughs as he reads through them before putting them in a folder.
"Good. You have a keen eye." Tapping his finger on the folder, Mori suddenly gets up from his seat. He comes up to Dazai and leans in close.
"Would you be able to write one on me?" The sudden change in Mori's tone cuts with a not too thinly veiled threat. Mori looks him hard in the eye. Careful not to break the eye contact, Dazai returns the cold look. They remain like that in tense silence, until Mori concedes.
"I'm promoting you to the position of executive." Mori says returning to his seat. "You'll be answering directly to me. All operational reports on my desk by 3 p.m. Any questions?"
Dazai remains silent. He shakes his head in response. Mori nods in a gesture of finality. Dazai bows his head, uttering under his breath the customary respects and he turns for the door.
"Dazai_" he stops in his steps. I takes him off guard and he doesn't catch the false note in Mori's voice on time. The sun has hidden behind the horizon, in the near dusk the artificial light is casting long shadows distorting the the shape of things. Mori is sitting behind his desk, as if lost in thought, the unfinished sentence lingering in he air. Something is off, he can feel it coming undone, he recognizes it in the way Mori is hunching over his desk, resting his head in the palm of his hand. There's something almost obscene in this show of vulnerability. This isn't what he wanted to see, but it's too late now and before he can turn away and slam the door, Mori's words reach Dazai, like a soft sigh, his voice carrying no trace of malice.
"Congratulations, Dazai".