Chapter 11: December 10

Impact: the Technological Evolution and Moral Ambiguity of Post Second Impact Nations

In 2003, there was a particular house in Osaka prefecture, Japan. The Nishiguchi house, like old houses everywhere, held secrets. Stories whispered in the shadows, tales etched in dark wood, confidences that if exposed would diminish the teller and scar the listener.

In 1991 the Japanese stock market crashed. Equity and asset prices fell. Banks and insurance companies had storage units packed to the ceiling with books of bad debt. The nation fell into a crippling stagnation.

There wasn't very much use for an embryologist like Toshiro Nishiguchi, fresh out of Nagoya University, and aiming to fill the Nobel peace prize-winning shoes of his father. Instead, Toshiro struggled as a pharmacist at a local drug store chain up until 2000. In the following year, the JSSDF was under investigation for war crimes in Sumatra. Entire coastal prefectures had been taken underwater and Tokyo was little more than a black crater.

Japan was on the brink of utter collapse.

There was not much use for an embryologist like Toshiro Nishiguchi, who had so thoroughly dedicated his life to such a specific branch of biology, toiling away on the boat cities of Imabari in the wake of Second Impact. Until a particular UN joint research laboratory erected itself in the Hakone region, in need of such a very particular biologist. What the gap between 2000 and 2003 entailed for our intrepid embryologist is hard to pin down in detail. He was married late in 2001, taking in a step daughter with the union. On August 19th of 2003, the former had been missing for two months and the latter purportedly hadn't shown up for school in nearly a year.

That day, Mr. Nishiguchi left his house in Osaka prefecture and never came back. He was found on an isolated island off the coast hanging from a maple tree, a note tucked in his pocket, scrawled with a short message:

I was never fond of towns, houses, society or, it seems, civilization.

His wife and step daughter were never found. He was, as we now know, in part responsible for developing the cloning phases for the biologically based Evangelion weapon system.

In many ways, Mr. Nishiguchi adequately frames the mindset of post Third World War Japan–

"Langley." I jump, a knee banging against the underside of my desk. Pip stands across from me, eyes not quite as sleep deprived as usual. "Planning on taking Chief's place? Desk is shaping up real nice. Whole Department's backlogged."

I close the book and move it out of sight, other hand rubbing my knee. The in-pile has reached new heights, my very own leaning tower. The empty, sterile and sometimes dust-laden space on my desk has now been occupied by smaller, disorganized piles of paperwork. So much for being Department Manager.

"Guess I've been distracted lately."

Pip takes a sip from his coffee, the equivalent of a shrug. His pale, yellowish fingers take the book up from where I tried to hide it under my monitor. On the cover is a pair of webbed, golden wings. I'm glad my father gave me the writer's name, otherwise I never would have found it in the mind-numbingly long list of books similarly titled Impact.

"Impact," Pip says, tossing it back atop my desk. "Didn't peg you for that Culto di Cassius shit."

Shamal and Fredric glance over from their desks and I frown, hiding the book again. "I'm not. It's supposed to be about the Angel War."

"Isn't that grade school stuff? You absent that day Langley? Home schooled?"

It isn't easy to glare at someone like Pip, mostly because his dead-on-the-inside expression makes you feel stupid for even trying. So I work my jaw, tapping my fingers instead of chewing on them. "You're pretty talkative today."

Another sip-shrug. "D-ten. Dad was a firefighter in Newark, before the riots. Heavy drinker, real asshole. Kinda hated the guy. Died last year."

Newark. It wasn't enough that most of it had burned down in the 1960s and was subjected to some nasty rioting in the same decade, but displaced Japs had turned the city into a warzone. A lot of dead firefighters. Nobody lives there now except the homeless and the criminally-inclined poor. Most of it is abandoned. Today's the anniversary.

"Sorry to hear that," I say, carefully. If anyone would have reason to hock spit and curse at me for looking Japanese, I suppose it would be Pip. Instead, he stares into his mug and dumps the brown slop he calls coffee into my trash can.

"Old man was sick of living anyway. Drank himself to death."

The relative quiet between us is measured – weighted. I can't say I know Pip, not even as a coworker. He's just our resident blunt and to-the-point kind of asshole. I've seen him chuckle once and it was at dead baby jokes on the net. But for him to still be standing at my desk tells me the subject isn't something he tosses about lightly.

"You miss him?" I ask.

Pip doesn't answer for a long, strangled moment.

"Hard to miss a man I never knew," he says, dropping the coffee mug into my can too. With that, he shambles off and I peer into the trash bin, where I can read the red, bolded letters printed on the cup: World's Greatest Dad.

I pretend to work for the next six hours, making my manila pile a little neater. Now it's a very organized stack of unfiltered case files. Class-A Manager. I'm sure I'll be chewed out by the Chief later, but I just don't care anymore. He could fire me right now and I don't think I'd blink an eye. Not with this book in front of me. It's the first real piece of the war I've ever bothered to take in, even if it never really talks about the conflict itself. I'm okay with that. Baby steps.

Harry takes entire chapters to deal with background development of the Evangelions. It's disturbing that nations who held themselves as sophisticated and socially advanced had decided the Hitlerjugend wasn't such a bad idea after all and brought the program up to 21st century standards. I phase out of some parts, wondering what kind of training an Eva pilot must've been put through. Not even Harry knows for sure.

By the end of the day, I've entered a few new classifications in our servers, and read at least a hundred pages. Back at my apartment, I force myself to wait another hour or so before dialing home. I'm excited to tell my father what I've read so far, nervous too.

"It was actually the Sixth Angel," I say after he answers. "The one that attacked the Pacific Fleet, I mean."

The book described it as something like a Mosasaur, some old prehistoric fish – except the Angel's teeth were easily the size of an Eva's arm. Said they punched right through the fortified armor. Jesus, I'm a freaking kid again, all too eager to share my knowledge.

"Was it?" he asks, thoughtful. "I know the one before it looked like a big diamond. Guess that was the Fifth."

Harry spent exactly one sentence explaining it was an octahedron, but I don't correct him, fumbling for the name instead. My fingers snap. "Ramiel."

"Yeah, my third sortie."

"I also read that they hooked up the Evas with cables," I say, trying to reign in my amusement. I know everything was pretty run down and slapped on back then, but I never suspected the most powerful WMDs of the 21st century would have to be plugged into the wall outlet. I suppose no one ever thought they would be operated by kids either.

"It was the only way Nerv could power them. Hooking up a nuclear reactor inside a machine made for close quarters combat didn't seem too bright an idea. Especially not in the middle of a city. So they used cables. Ended up screwing us over more often than not. Without them, you only had five minutes of power from the internal batteries. Coil range was short too and you'd get stuck if you didn't keep track of it. Then you'd have to unplug and jack in a new one – if there was another plug nearby."

"Did that ever happen to you?"

A sardonic chuckle answers me first. "No. Angels usually cut the damn thing off before I could do much of anything. Happened to your mom once. We were moving into position around an Angel, right in the city, and I got impatient. I think she tried to save me." the last part he adds hesitantly and I hear him shift over the line.

I meander into the kitchen, searching for coffee. "Save you from what?"

"The Angel," he says, pausing and sounding a little more exasperated this time. "I don't remember its name. It had a shadow that could suck you up into it. That's what happened to me."

"Did that one have teeth too?"

"No. It was a big black and white striped ball – floating up in the sky."

I blink, trying to build a mental image. So far the book hasn't talked much about the Angels. Harry doesn't seem interested in the battles themselves.

"How did you get out?"

"What do you care what your old man did in some stupid war?" he asks, the twinge of a sneer there. It takes me aback, like it did yesterday. He still doesn't trust me.

I suppose it's justified. I've said some pretty awful shit over the years. Still, I want to throw my phone out the window. Stinging words try and tempt my tongue into giving them voice. I clamp my mouth shut and, with deliberate movements, I lie back on the bed, free arm stiff at my side. Staying upright is hard.

"So when are you going to tell mom?" I manage after a while.

"What?"

Ah, I've surprised him.

"About the Dementia."

He grumbles a bit, rueful now. "She won't know for a while, not if I can help it."

"Why?"

"I don't want her to worry," he mutters, but his tone gives him away.

"You're a pretty lousy liar, dad," I droll, doing my best not to sound accusatory. While I certainly learned how to pretend to be happy from my parents, lying has never been a well-honed art for the Soryu men, not with a woman like my mother. You could be talking to her from across the world with a voice modulator – and she'd still know if you were bullshitting her.

My father sighs.

"Kazuya... do you like yourself?" he asks. The question makes the line bleed out, because I don't know how to answer. "Are you happy with who you are?"

"Yeah, I guess," I say, chewing on a finger. Then my nerves become razors, splitting into me and releasing that resentment I keep pushing down. "Why? Got some fatherly advice after all these years? Going to tell me how to live my life right?" I hop off the bed, heart beating faster. "Tell me dad, what should I do?"

"What you should've done is taken me out back and hit me over the head with our shovel," he growls.

A cold avalanche may as well have swept through my apartment.

Back when we buried Frau, I saw him standing down in that grave with her – a pair of corpses. As much as I might have wished it, dreamed of it, I never wanted to be the one standing over his tombstone – not like those other kids at the military base in Jacksonville.

There was one night, out by the dark palmettos and flame vines in our old Panama house, where someone had interrupted the clacking of the loose screen door out front. A broken window and smashed-in door later, some asshole made off with our T.V. and a toaster. Dad went out and bought a handgun the next day – forty-five caliber Smith and Wesson. It quickly became his own bit of insurance – a way to make those threats of suicide all the more present. I know it didn't start that way, but that's what his brain twisted it to be. An escape route. I can always go. I can always leave if I want to.

He wouldn't shout that he was going to blow his brains out, not like in Catalina. In fact, it was how quietly it all happened that made it so much worse.

"I'm going down to the beach," he'd say, walking out with that gun at his hip. Sometimes he wouldn't come back until morning. Mother stayed out on the porch with her pack of Newports, emptied by the time he got home. She got tired of that real quick. One day took his gun, drove out to the beach and hurled it into the ocean.

When we moved out to Catalina, when they would fight and he had nowhere to escape except out the front door, I used to wish he'd died in that goddamn war. I came so close to telling him too. But a small sliver of me was afraid, as always, that those words to him might be my last.

"I must be the world's greatest dad, huh?" he says, bringing me into the present again. I can hear how tired he is of talking, of everything. Like this is it for us. I could hang up right now, and that really would be the end of it. We'll go on staying out of one another's lives, until one day he forgets me and I put him six feet under, hating him all the same. But I don't want to be angry anymore. I'm tired too.

I'm so tired of being miserable.

"Guess that makes me the world's greatest son."

He makes a cough that might've been the start of a laugh and I feel a crooked smile come free, though it doesn't last. I step onto the linoleum, picking at that warped square from spilled coffee long nights ago. I never got to know this man, Shinji Soryu. Who he was, what he valued in life. There were bits and pieces. Parts of a man who was kind and had a gentle heart.

"Why'd you do it, dad?" I ask, throat raw. "Why'd you always lock yourself up in your room?"

For the most part, I've always known where I stood with my mother – never with my father. Up until I was sixteen, I had started to assume that he just hated me. That there must have been something wrong with me. When I realized that he did care, I didn't know what to think. I'd trusted him and been betrayed so many times before. I decided it was better to push him and those feelings away.

"I'd hear a noise, catch a whiff of some smell," he stops, struggling for words. "And it was like I was sitting right back in the entry plug again. Like I was fighting the Angels. It all just... overflowed." he sighs through his nose and I can feel his reluctance.

"I didn't want to hurt you," he says, and I think I hear a bit of hurt there too. As if that's something I should have realized. How could I have? Most memories I have of my father can be associated with the door to his room. I used to draw on it too, just to make him mad, just to get him to look at me and yell at me. Rotten things like 'liar' or 'crazy old man'. It never worked, bringing down mother's wrath instead. As punishment she would have me hold stress positions, sometimes with an armful of books or something else just as heavy. The sitting position was her favorite.

"Your mother said to me once, in Panama, after she tossed out that old forty-five," he goes on, trying to fill the silence for both of us. "She said, 'you've got a son to take care of. You can die later'. Your old man was a real fool back then, Kazuya."

"Was?"

"Still is," he grumbles and I know there's a smile this time. "Smartass."

I'm not sure why, but that makes me smile too. They're exactly alike, he and mom. So hard to deal with, so stubborn. In their own ways of course.

As I grew older, I came to realize how scared I was of getting close to anyone. Because I hurt people so much and so well that it became second nature. I hated being that way. When I couldn't reign in that anger and anxiety, I found ways to hurt myself instead. I knew if I didn't, I'd end up catching someone else in the whirlwind. Someone far less deserving.

When I was with Carrie, we used to fight about everything. Stupid, little, insignificant things like which route to take to work, where to go out that night, cleaning around our respective apartments. When I started to feel like I was slipping, I'd pop a few pills and let her rail into me instead of arguing. I wouldn't try and reach out and reason with her as she told me what a terrible person I was. If I didn't put up a fight, if I just let her hurt me and get it out of her system, everything would be fine. We could keep going on. One day things would be better.

That was just make believe, and all it did was push Carrie further away from me. So she started hiding my pills. I screamed at her then, made threats, lost control – like my father and his episodes.

"Do you think you'll come down for Christmas this year?" he asks, switching gears. We've both had enough of the war for tonight.

"Hell, I don't know. We've never been big on it. You know how mom gets."

"I know."

We never had a tree in the living room, never put up colored lights or exchanged presents. Mother couldn't stand it.

On Christmas Eve my parents would send me over to Misato's so they could have the house to themselves. The next day, me and mom would laze about in the living room watching sports. There's only one Christmas I can remember my father ever coming out of his room. He'd settled into his armchair – a huge seat of red leather stuffed to bursting with padding. We called it the Throne.

He was folding paper in the shape of a crane and I sat on the floor next to him, where he taught me how to make them. He wanted to see if we could manage to make a thousand before the day was up. Mother glanced our way every now and then, content to spend Christmas watching hockey and cursing at the television in her native tongue. I'm pretty sure the only reason she cared for the sport at all was for the violence, and I'm more than pretty sure she just liked getting riled up with all that adrenaline.

Whatever team she was rooting for – the Jersey Devils were her favorite – I'd pick the opposite, just for the chance to gloat when my team won. Eventually, as night came crawling, mother made crepes and sat down to fold paper cranes, helping us litter the floor with them.

On my floor, here in Silver Springs, the linoleum tile's been ripped open by my fingers, bits and pieces torn off and thrown to the side.

"Maybe next year, dad."

The eighteenth interim report for the Intelligence Community Analysis Assistance Plan is missing. Not that the project has gained any headway in the last month, but the big wigs like having officially labeled, dry assessments to read over – even if it could all be summed up in a sentence or less – as opposed to twenty-two pages. Communicating with the other offices shared by our department has been enough of a hair-pulling hassle. So everyone is in a sour mood and the Chief gives us all shit.

He tells me to, "just sit the fuck down," after I spend a few minutes floundering through papers looking for the damn report. The higher-ups must be getting on his case. The plan itself has proven to be a giant waste of time for the past two years. It's basically a very officially worded find ways to do your job better kind of project. For which the Project Committee has been less than helpful.

After we've been thoroughly chewed out, the Chief calls for me to stay behind. I can count on my hand the number of times I've seen him out from behind the Great Wall. He's thin, deathly thin, skin wrinkled and wrapped tight to his bones. If that wasn't enough of an indicator that the man is edging into his eighties, he's got this gray, forever frizzed hair clinging to his balding scalp.

When the last person files out, he leans against the conference desk, fixing me with a pair of beady eyes that glint – dangerously. "Kazuya, you're a hard worker, but no one gives a damn who your father was. Well... maybe some do, but I don't."

I think I manage to hide my surprise. I hadn't thought I was being so obvious about it. But there isn't much that the CIA considers confidential about its employees. The Chief already knows everything – even has the psych reports from my sessions with the therapists. It's all apart of the screening process. He reaches back and takes something from his opened briefcase, letting it slap down on the table between us.

It's Harry's book.

"We've all got baggage – but rule one is that you don't bring it here."

When did he grab it from my desk? It doesn't matter, I knew this was coming. I really shouldn't be surprised.

"You going to fire me?"

Chief huffs. "If you can't get your act together, I'll have to replace you. You've got a week to get that head on straight."

At the very least I'm being given a choice – and a week's notice too. It's tempting. Throw the book out, call mom and dad a few times a month, keep working. Keep living. That way, I can just plow through the holidays on my own, empty a bottle of brandy on the Eve, and keep making half-assed forays into the Angel War.

"How about the rest of the month?" I ask. Even with the days I've already taken, I still have an entire month's worth of vacation time to use before the year's up.

Chief works his jaw, allowing himself a wheezing chuckle and shaking his head. One of his withered hands shoos me out as he turns away, grumbling, "Oh the Committee is going to love this..."

Go stay with my parents for a few weeks, or lose my job.

If it wasn't so ridiculously expensive to live in Washington, I might choose the latter.

The next day, I ask my father about A-tens.

I've read through more of the book and going by the title, I should have expected Harry would be dealing more with the political end of it all as opposed to the Evas and their battles. It's late in the evening when I call and he seems to be in a better mood, even a little candid.

"Couldn't do it without them," he says, and I recall how often he would wake in a panic trying to find them. "Well, you could synchronize just fine, but you couldn't project commands without the A-tens."

I stop pouring coffee. "What do you mean synchronize?"

"Pilots were linked mentally and physically to the Eva. That's how you controlled it, the trade off being sympathetic pain."

I guess I always pictured it like the cockpit of an airplane. How the hell do you connect a person to such a huge machine?

"So if the Eva was damaged, you got hurt too?"

"If your sync-ratio was high enough. Otherwise you could feel the pain, but it wouldn't manifest into any physical trauma. Neural shock would've been enough to kill us a few times."

The half-painted imagery of Toji's story churns up. All that talk of blood and ripping. Does that mean he felt all of that as my father's Eva tore into his? A tremble shivers tight around my stomach and the coffee isn't nearly so alluring anymore. All those marks on my mother's skin. The Eva's wounds were real for her once, too.

"Did you... ever get hurt like that?"

"No, woke up in the hospital more times than I can count, though. They had to stick me in an intensive care pod once."

The beginning of another question jumps free, only to be cut off by my father. "Your mother says the Rangers are facing off against the Devils this year. I don't keep up with sports, but I know you used to like the Rangers a lot."

Like is a bit much. I don't keep up with sports either. The only time I ever did was with mom and, the Rangers being the decidedly brutal adversaries of the Devils, naturally I gravitated towards them. One year I ordered a big team banner online and hung it up for Christmas.

2041 – Rangers came out on top 6-2. Victory was sweet. I kept that banner up for the rest of the week, taunting my mother every chance I got.

"Rotten kid," she'd say, but couldn't keep a smile from me forever.

I suppose that's all I'll be getting out of my father tonight.

Every conversation between us has been like trying to pry a clam open with toothpicks. I'm worried that he just doesn't remember much of it anymore, so he shuts up because he's embarrassed, because we're finally able to come to some understanding and he doesn't have the answers. Or that's just what I want it to be, instead of acknowledging I've turned my back too many times for him to open up – or that I might ever be able to understand anyway.

I crouch down over the eviscerated linoleum from a day ago, picking at the remnants. "What's your favorite memory of mom when you were kids?"

He makes a thoughtful noise. "I don't remember much."

Classic line.

"Well, what do you remember?"

His tongue clicks and I think he holds back a sigh. I pick the patch of tile clean, revealing a black, stained floor beneath the thin covering. The contrast with the faded beige of the other tiles is sharp and for a while all I can do is stare into it.

"We were training for a battle," dad says, rough voice softer. "Me and your mom didn't get along so well at first and Misato threatened to take her off the mission. So she stormed off to the convenience store down the street. I went after her and we sat out on a balcony for a while. Well, I was sitting, she was standing, stuffing her face with junk food while she ranted about Misato. Sun was setting I think. We stayed out there for a long time. I remember thinking she was kind of pretty, all worked up like that."

I can hear another voice then, distant and indistinct. It can only be my mother.

Dad chuckles. "I've just been corrected. Apparently, I have and always will think your mother is the most beautiful woman I have ever met from the minute I laid eyes on her."

"Naturally," I say, smirking.

Thoughts of Catalina and my last visit fill the nooks and crannies of my small kitchen. I've already taken the month off from work, but I've been debating all day if I actually want to go back to Arizona. Sitting on my coffee table is the photo album mom brought up. She left it here with me, so I could remember how happy I used to be.

"You can let her know I'll be coming down for Christmas," I say, pulling at another tile piece.

"Your room's still here, just the way you left it."

"Really?"

There's a smile again, and something wistful. "Your mother's been waiting a long time for you to come home."