The Tower (The Serenity to Accept)

[Sunday, 12/20]

The nice thing about taking the night train to the middle of nowhere was that nobody bugged you. Mutatsu had an entire car to himself for the first leg of the trip, and when he transferred to a rattly diesel train shortly after dawn, he was one of only three passengers. Pleased, he helped himself to a seat in an empty smoking car, propped his feet up, and re-lit his cigar.

He wasn't satisfied with his speech, but sunrise over the mountains was a real sight to behold, and his stop wasn't for a while yet. No reason not to relax until the view and the nicotine got his nerves steady. He'd always worked best at the edge of a deadline, anyway.

After the train stopped at a tiny blip of a station, a kid who looked about high school age entered the car, glanced at all the empty seats, and took the one across the aisle from Mutatsu. "Hello," he said brightly.

Mutatsu puffed on his cigar and declined to make eye contact.

The kid waved for a while, as if sociability could be cranked to life like an old car, before drooping toward his window. When it became apparent that he wasn't going to be driven off, Mutatsu grunted and went back to his notes. Pleasant relaxation time was clearly over.

I wanna recite the sutras with you by my side, for the rest of my life. Hmph. I'm sorry from the bottom of my heart. Tch, everything had sounded better with that cheeky kid encouraging him.

The kid on the train said, "Look, you can see the snow sparkling on the mountains. Do you ever want to cry when you see something beautiful?" He waited so long for a reply that Mutatsu started to hope he'd spend the rest of the ride in silent expectation, but then he added, "I cry too much. I've got to stop."

What was it, Mutatsu wondered, with the youth these days? He cleared his throat. "Hey, kid."

The kid turned eagerly to face him, knees jutting into the aisle. "Yeah?"

"Cram it."

This earned him a pout and a few more seconds of peace, until the kid leaned over and asked, "What are you working on?"

Mutatsu tilted his notebook toward his chest. "Nothin' that's any of your business. Hey, here's an idea: why don't ya take your pretty pink lungs and go find a seat where you won't get soot all over 'em?" He puffed out a concentrated cloud of smoke to make his point.

The kid coughed but didn't retreat. "Too late, my lungs are already impure. Say, is what you're working on a love letter? I think I'd be good at love letters."

Getting up and finding somewhere else to sit would require straining creaky old joints that were already unhappy enough from the cold. Mutatsu scowled and flicked ashes from the end of his cigar, which sent the kid scrambling out of his personal space. "What I'm workin' on is getting ya to buzz off."

The pout returned. "You're not feeling any sort of special connection here?"

Mutatsu glowered over his cigar. "I'm goin' to see my wife."

"Ah, no, I didn't mean it like that!" The kid's look of panicked denial swiftly rearranged itself, until he was beaming like he'd just heard good news about a friend. "That's really great, though, that you're seeing your wife! That's what I was hoping—I mean, never mind." He leaned in so close that he was no longer even technically in his own seat. "So that is a love letter, isn't it?"

Maybe this was some kind of divine punishment for all the times he'd recited a sutra hungover. Or maybe it was just a divine reminder that living in the world instead of transcending it meant dealing with the world's bullshit. Mutatsu let out a heavy, grumbling sigh. "Look, you've got nothin' to offer here. I'm writing an apology, not askin' her out for bubbly tea or whatever the hell it is you kids do."

"A good apology needs flattery," the kid replied. He flipped his excess of scarf over his shoulder and leaned in as if he intended to get down to business. "So you want to describe the sophisticated charms of a mature woman, right?"

"Only if I want her to laugh the fat off my ass." Mutatsu reclaimed his personal space with a puff of smoke.

"Tell her she's like a maple tree in autumn, when the colors are at their most brilliant." Damn persistent kid was already leaning back in. "Hey, that was pretty good, wasn't it? Ooh, or she's like a pearl, worn to a perfect shine. What else gets better with age? Natto? Don't old people like natto?"

With a slow, steady shove, Mutatsu exiled him to the other side of the aisle. "This is the goddamn definitionof none of your business."

"Okay, okay. I was just trying to help."

The kid slumped into a sulk, which, annoyingly, roused Mutatsu's paternal instinct; the posture slotted too neatly into memories of "You're not gettin' another yen out of me," "You'll have another birthday next year," and "Why would I even want to go your culture festival?" When all you had was a hammer, everything looked like a nail, they said; when all you had was a need to make amends, every teenage boy looked like a four-year-old shadow of your son. (And if you'd been hitting the brandy hard enough, he'd learned, a teenage girl filled the role just as well.)

It didn't help when the kid looked up and said, "Maybe this is supposed to work the other way. Can I ask you for advice?"

Mutatsu harrumphed. "I'm off the clock, kid. You plannin' to pay me for my words of wisdom?"

The kid's forehead wrinkled before he looked abruptly, alarmingly pleased with himself. "If you don't want to include any flattery in your apology, you'd better have a present, right?" From somewhere on his person he produced a very pink book. "Does your wife enjoy the classics?"

"The hell kind of classic is that?" Curiosity compelled Mutatsu to take the thing when it was offered. It turned out to be a volume of manga—and more like the kind he recognized from his youth, not those weekly toy ads the kids read nowadays, where everyone had spiky hair and couldn't stop yelling. Still stupid, of course, but a little less grating.

"Doesn't it fill you with a warm sense of nostalgia?" the kid asked, with faint desperation.

Mutatsu snorted. "What, you think I used to read this junk? Although..." Puffing thoughtfully on his cigar, he flipped back to the beginning of the volume in search of a publication date. "Yeah, I think the old bag used to read something like this. I remember it was ugly as sin. 'Course, she must like ugly, seein' as she married me."

"Then it's all yours!" For a change, the kid scooted backward of his volition, grinning like an idiot. "All yours forever! Hope you enjoy it!"

With a frown, Mutatsu shook the book to see if anything suspicious fell out. Nothing seemed out of order. Damn weird kid. He tucked the book into his bag and said, "So ya want a crappy comic's worth of advice? Don't bother a grumpy old monk outside his temple."

The stupid grin fell. "That wasn't really what I had in mind."

"Well, whaddya expect, going around bothering strangers?"

"An emotional connection?"

Mutatsu snorted out a mouthful of smoke. "And that's workin' out for ya?"

"So far, yeah." The kid looked thoughtful. "It's never really strangers, though, more... second-hand friends? Does that make sense?" Without waiting for a no, he continued, "Maybe it's wrong of me, I don't know. It just keeps happening, so I figured I might as well go along with it. Finding her reflection in the world comforts me. It's probably selfish, but I don't know what else to do."

Hard to imagine that girl at the bar telling her teenybopper friends how she'd wasted her evenings on a cowardly old drunk, in enough detail that one could recognize Mutatsu out of context. Or maybe she'd talked him up as better than he deserved; he'd always had the sense that she saw right through him to his potential, and he'd found himself trying to match his reflection in her eyes.

"In my professional opinion," said Mutatsu, "it sounds like ya need to get your act together."

"I know. I'm trying."

"I mean in a less stupid way." Mutatsu cracked the window just enough to ash his cigar into the winter wind. "I should tell you to seek enlightenment by letting go of your attachments, but here's me trying to clap the old ball and chain back on. So you want my advice? Go home."

The kid winced. "I can't. Not yet. It's very complicated, but I'm just trying to cause as little suffering as possible."

"That so? Well, don't go taking your bodhisattva vows just yet." It had been a while since Mutatsu was young, but he remembered the frustrating sense that everything was suddenly so complicated. Thing was, you grew up and realized that nothing was getting any simpler, so you just had to let go of getting your head all the way around it. "You want some bonus advice?" he added, less gruffly. "Never think you've got it all figured out."

The kid looked stricken. "But I have. I wish I didn't."

"Yeah, you and every other seventeen-year-old genius." Mutatsu drew a slow cloud of smoke into his mouth and let it out with a low chuckle. "Just go home and listen to your old man. He'll tell ya the same."

For a moment the kid looked withdrawn, almost wounded, and Mutatsu wondered if he'd stepped in it again; probably better not to take it for granted these days that any kid had the right number of parents. Not like he didn't have first-hand experience there. Come to think of it, he should have figured out a lot sooner that any teenage girl who frequented Club Escapade didn't have much in the way of adult supervision.

He wasn't going to apologize, because damned if he was going to apologize to some brat who couldn't seem to mind his own business, but Mutatsu was on the verge of adding something conciliatory when the kid asked, "Do you actually like the taste of that thing?"

"What, this?" Mutatsu rolled his cigar between his finger and thumb. "It's what they call an acquired taste."

"Doesn't that mean you have to make yourself like it? I always figured vices would be fun."

Mutatsu shrugged. "It's not about the taste, anyway. You'll understand when you're older."

"What about alcohol?" the kid asked. "Does that one start off fun?"

Clucking his tongue, Mutatsu wagged a finger. "Don't start. It doesn't fix anything in the long run."

"But it does in the short run?"

"Never once fixed a damn thing for anyone. Feels like it does, but all booze'll do for ya is shut your brain up for a while."

Mutatsu got the impression that this advice was having the opposite of the intended effect, but some people never leaned without making their own mistakes. Not that it was any of his business, of course. This continued to be the very definition of not his problem.

Still. "Ya know," he said, drawling his way into a deadpan lie, "I was a real handsome fella when I was your age. Couldn't keep the girls off me. Then I started in with the brandy."

The kid looked skeptical but also faintly aghast, which was probably the best that could be expected.

The train rolled to a shuddering halt at the first stop of the day attached to anything like a proper town. Mutatsu read the station sign twice, then took a deep breath and asked, "Is this where you're from?"

"No," the kid replied.

"Then keep riding till you get there." Mutatsu put out his cigar against the windowpane and heaved himself out of his seat. As he picked up his bag, he added, "And go yell at your old man, even if all you've got is his ashes. Bastard probably deserves it."

He was almost out of the car when the kid called after him, "Tell your wife she's the only one there is for you."

With a noncommittal grunt, Mutatsu exited the train. His shoulder complained at the weight of his luggage as he made his way from the tracks to the adjoining bus stop, where he settled in on a bench. Per the bus schedule, he had twenty minutes to script the perfect apology to his wife. (Apologizing to his son would be easier, he assumed; he almost looked forward to getting socked in the face.)

On a fresh page, he began a new draft: I'm sorry from the bottom of my heart. I was a stubborn old fool, and all I am now is older and stubborner, but I'm turning it around. I'm gonna apologize to you a thousand times. I'll live the rest of my life on my knees if that's what it takes. You're all there is for me in this world. I wanna recite the sutras with you by my side, for the rest of my life.

It seemed like a pretty good start.