Isn't it strange, how things turn out?
Oh, my apologies. Please, don't mind me. I would say I'm just passing through, but that would be a lie and an undeserved one at that.
I have no reason to lie to you. Or, for that matter, to anybody.
I was already here.
I will always be here.
I am a very constant companion.
You, on the other hand, are passing through.
What am I here for? Well, let's see. I'm here because I am, though that is hardly a satisfactory answer, even for myself. I am here because you are and eventually I'll be here to help you on the way.
Until then, I am simply here, a possibility at every turning, an unlucky roll of the die, a footstep upon your grave.
No, I am no death god, no Shinigami. I am what I am. I do not need to be believed in to exist. I do not have a life that requires sustenance by the strokes of names within a book. I am in every world and every home, in every breath and every beat of a bleeding heart, in the rolling spin of days and nights, in the dark at the edge of every flame, the golden burn of the sun, the cold expansion of the universe.
You fear me. You have every right to fear me. You knew me well when you were younger. I watched you grow and you were always appreciative of my presence, perhaps even sensitive to it. These past few weeks, I think you even began to see me at your shoulder. I wonder, what face it was you gave me, or perhaps it would be better that I asked, 'Whose'? It differs for everybody.
But your younger years, your younger years! Let's talk about those - for old times' sake.
As I recall, I believe your mother introduced us. Your father had yet to return from work. I was, of course, with him as I was with everybody. You had yet to know me. Your mother (kind woman, pallid woman, not quite there woman, always perfectly humble, always perfectly a mother, always perfectly out of your way, perfect, perfect, perfect, perfectly performing to whatever was expected of her, so perhaps you were your mother's son after all) had laid out a place at the table for dinner - for your father, she said, but it was I who sat opposite you, there in that empty chair.
You could say that we didn't see eye to eye.
I was a profoundly rude guest that night, I do apologise. I was very much present, far more present than I usually care to be. I was there in the shadows of the hallway, in the thin silhouette of your mother at the porch, in the passing night as your bedtime came and went and your little sister had closed her eyes but you remained awake. You were listening for a phone call and when it didn't come you defied your father's rules for the first time and slipped, so quietly I fancied you were hiding from me, out of your bedroom and down the stairs.
Your mother was still waiting. She had the cordless phone in her hand in the living room. She had the news on the television, turned down to silent so that the blue and ivory colours shifted over her face like the underwater glow of an aquarium tank, and she was just another poefaced fish - with shiny eyes and a mouth that flapped for air. You thought of the fish you had for dinner. I know this because I was on your mind.
Your father returned as he had always done so, but you realised then that there was those out there in the shadows who might dare to stop that and, now that you knew me, you saw me and became familiar with my features.
I was in the evening news in cordoned off houses and taped outlines, knives in vacuum sealed bags and circled stains on carpets with a neat cardboard label; in the rows of cemeteries on the hillsides with their stone cupboards full of ash and bone; in the plimsolls left on the rooftop when that boy that nobody talks about anymore got tired of bullies that followed him home in his falling grades; in the sudden crackling announcement of a delayed train; and, when you were nine, in a drop of sarin the size of a pinhead that kept your father away from home for a week and then another week more when the then chief of the NPA was shot four times near his own house.
Don't people do terrible things to each other? You know, occasionally, I feel that I can understand the sentiment behind all this deliberate mutual removal business. In a world as crowded and full of people such as yours, sometimes you just need some elbow room, don't you? Breathing space, perhaps. Simply to be and, for a moment, feel irreplaceable.
Then as you grew it got a little more complicated. Life tends to do that to you, because unlike me life is deceptive, mischievous and enjoys constant surprise. The joke of life is, very much, on you.
Your father carried a gun. He never brought it home but you knew because he used it frequently enough, or had practised it enough in the preparation of using it frequently, to have hardened, shiny calluses on his fingers. Sometimes he came back and he wouldn't look you in the eye but he would take a long hard look at his hands.
Your father might not have shot to kill but he could have and we both know that so long as he values you and you sister and coming home to your mother, when the situation came down to it he would have, so there I was in the lines of his hand as well. I touched you with every page of his files that you turned through on the kitchen table when you thought he wasn't looking, then later with his permission, and then finally on his request.
But with the gun your father carried you realised that there were some people who deserved to be shot. Some murder was permissible, so long as enough people approved of it. Your father said it was self-defence in the same breath he showed you and your little sister useful judo moves for getting out of a chokehold. If you were protecting what you valued and what you valued was right, then it was a right and honourable thing to defend them.
Your father valued the law and he valued you, but with every night your mother waited by the phone and every sudden call from a hospital, sometimes you had to wonder if he valued the law more than you – it was not surprising then if you thought whether if you became the law he would finally value you more, but I digress.
I go by another guise here and you came to know that young too: Execution, capital punishment, the hangman's noose, the special chair – admittedly, it's something of a throne to me.
You were nine when the men of those long sarin days were sentenced to death and you were seventeen when you killed each and every one of them in their cells.
Some people deserved to die. Why was the world taking so long? Eight years since three men walked into the Tokyo underground with seven bags of liquid sarin, wrapped in newspaper like bouquets, and stabbed them open on the trains. Eight years since May of the same year that hydrogen cyanide canisters were found in Tokyo stations for another deadlier attack. Eight years since a bomb was sent to the Governor of Tokyo's office and blew off five of his secretary's fingers. Eight years since arrests were made and death sentences promised – and yet! The hand was stayed. Why?
There was nothing wrong in hurrying others my way if the cause was just, if the cause was agreed upon by the many, if the vengeance was approved and taken upon as a collective responsibility on behalf of the victims, if there was one less shadow on the street corner waiting to shoot down your father like they did with the last chief of the NPA.
Well, you got them all good, I'll grant you that. No more need for those agonising court cases assessing their fitness for trial. It didn't matter what state of mind the culprits had been in. They did what they did and if they were mad when they did it then all the more the reason to get rid of them. Rabid dogs are put down. Gangrene is burnt out from a wound.
Yes, a festering wound. A rotten world in which the rot was allowed to run rampant because the majority were too lazy, too self-absorbed, too wilfully ignorant, too cruel in their stupidity to bother to do anything about it or dare dirty their hands.
No need to seem so surprised. Like I said, I've been on your mind, remember? I'm always a possibility and, considering the easy solution I have presented to so many of your problems, I'd say we were the firmest of friends. A friend in need is a friend indeed!
And I'm sure you'd know all about friends, Light.
I thought that friendship was all an abstract concept to you, just like your justice, your god, or even like me, or some aspects of me at any rate. You're very good at abstract concepts. You're more at home with the remote idea of adding to the tally of your kill count than feeling the cool grip of a gun in your hands.
Now, here I am. I am here again, not only in your mind, but in another empty chair and the echo of a spoon on the floor, and in the night time when you are alone I am even closer still. You wake up and there is a space, a gap, a new wound, where before there was a problem to be endlessly solved, and it was the most wonderfully grand game you had ever played, and now you do not even try to probe it with your thoughts. You don't want to fall into it and realise that something is amiss.
Nobody should have such a space as that inside, such a gap to be filled. It allows for too much freedom, freedom enough to become a contradiction to yourself, and no man survives long once his mind starts playing tricks like that on itself. I speak from the experience of observation.
It wouldn't be too much of a boast to say that my experience is substantial.
It is a wound, is it not? Shouldn't you try to take care of it? It will fester, you know. The new rot for your new world. It could kill you. Unless you are already one of mine and I have yet to see it.
I suppose you grew up as much in my shadow as you did in your father's, and that makes me a second father of sorts.
I am neither proud nor disappointed in you. All things must come my way eventually, and it is not in my nature to judge how they come. I can only observe, watch and wait, but having watched you grow and seen all that you have accomplished, I find myself wondering.
How much longer will this wait of mine be?