Shinji Ikari Goes to New York
Chapter One - Over the Rainbow
Shinji was sweating despite the chill that had come with evening. He was sitting on a bench at 5th and 97th, trying to appear at ease and unconcerned despite the rising certainty that everything in his immediate vicinity was preparing to attack him.
"I'm telling you, there's nothing in there," said the man draped across the bench beside him, one stretching hand inches from Shinji's shoulder.
Shinji tightened his grip on the top of his travel pack, the pads of his fingers stretching, thinning as the bones within tried to reach the black aluminum frame.
Papers were spread out across his thighs. A letter. He had been reading it when the man sat down beside him, and had half-disclosed its contents to the man automatically, because Shinji had been alone for the past two days, and had spent all that time in a state of spiraling anxiety so profound that he had spent last night sleeping in the closet of his hotel room, wrapped in an electric blanket.
The man had flopped down, asked what Shinji was doing, in the polite way people do when they're getting ready to wedge themselves into your life, and it had taken an act of will for Shinji to shut up, even with the English grinding up his brain.
"I am not going to plant anything," Shinji answered the man. No. Wait. "Camp," he corrected. "Not going to camp. Or. Anything."
"That's good, because the rangers won't let you," the man replied, words coming out slow, in a sagely drawl. "That's a felony. They don't mess around. Better you just take the M bus," he gestured vaguely up the street, "because the Park isn't any kind of shortcut. Especially this time of day."
Shinji hated this person. Hated the way English just shot out of him whenever he opened his mouth. It seemed that the man, and everything else in this city, was mocking him with the unfamiliar. The inscrutable.
"All it's the same," Shinji said, intentionally fudging the expression so it didn't mean anything. Trying to build up that easy wall of incomprehension. He stuffed the letter into one of the pouches at the front of the travel pack and pulled out a book. He opened it easy, skimming through pages, as though finding his spot, settling on a page at random, and pretending to read. He angled the book so the man couldn't see it was written in English and get the wrong idea. Reading the language was a lot easier than deciphering it spoken aloud. Reading it was meditative. Like a puzzle.
The man pulled himself upright, leaned forward with hands steepled, and set one khaki-covered leg to skipping up and down, sole tapping out a febrile Geiger Counter scratch that ratcheted Shinji's nerves tighter and tighter. He focused on the book. Picking out words at random.
Bathetic.
Coalescent.
Psychocinematic.
Australia.
No cars allowed on Fifth Avenue, only people, and the crowd was thin. There was vehicle traffic a block away, but all Shinji could hear of it was the occasional angry chirp of a digital horn.
Across the street, beyond the iron fence set atop a low cement wall, the treetops of Central Park were visible, though almost entirely in silhouette, framed by the orange-red sunset beyond. One shape in particular caught Shinji's attention, where sunset shon through two bald spots in the foliage, creating a lantern-eyed face peeking just over the wall. A demoniac Kilroy. The burgundy-bruised evening moon was clearly visible through one 'eye', and the sunset-sclera around that moon-iris seemed, just for a moment, to be threaded through with lines of blue. The prayer was there, ready to come out, but Shinji bit down the impulse. Looked back down at the book.
The man's leg was still bounce, bounce, bouncing away, hateful and mocking.
In the book Shinji read: "...privation of fundamental certainties, notably the sequence of life and death..."
He wanted to scream at the watcher, at the moon. He wanted to shout out and be heard, to drive away the man, to call home all that was missing.
"Feeeshur Keene," the voice was low, almost a whisper. For a moment, embarrassingly long, Shinji thought the watcher was speaking to him. But it was just the man, of course. His bench buddy.
Shinji looked down at the book. The pages were spotted with sweat. He made a sound deep in his throat, neutral but deflective. The sound one makes when your Asuka announces the weather station up the mountain is still out and it is -still- your turn to fix it, or did you want another Monsoon Surprise?
The man wasn't Asuka, of course, and seemed to have mistaken Shinji's latest attempt to terminate the conversation for gas. The horrible man was shifting posture, looking at Shinji directly. Resolute. His tapping heel stilled, planted itself on the pavement.
Shinji closed the book. He wondered how much damage it would take before the binding broke. He turned to the man, and saw: Nut-brown skin, close-cropped hair, a splash of freckles across the bridge of broad nose. The teeth, visible past lips pulled into a grimacing smile, were very bright. The man was squinting, searching for something just over Shinji's shoulder.
"I saw you," the man said, finally. "And the girl."
He had to run. One quick punch to the man's throat, make for the Park, do what was necessary to get the contents of the travel pack to its destination.
Since people had started coming back, the only girl in Shinji's life that any outsider might know of had been Izumi. And that had been more than three years ago.
Was it possible this random person had been in Japan back then, in the Murakami East Ward, to witness Shinji jumping from the second floor of a Nintendo Plus Love-Love hotel in only his boxers? Maybe this was the Good Samaritan that had called EMS after Shinji had taken a bunker boot to the back of the head and tumbled off the roof of the parked delivery van he'd been using to make good his escape.
No. Entertaining that amount of coincidence was stupid. If the man wasn't simply lying, making a broad claim that was bound to strike a cord in whomever he addressed, that meant one of two things. Either this was about NERV, about intelligence... or the man had recognized Shinji from the Sea Under the Sea.
People remembered Shinji. Not well enough to identify him, just enough for them to understand that someone had existed at the fulcrum of things. Enough for them to give him a name.
Perhaps this man was an exception. Perhaps, after being pulled free of his body and into the sky, he had peered out between the laced fingers of the bright thing that had taken him and seen Shinji and Ayanami, whole and together, in their seclusion.
If that had happened, if this man had just seen him on the street and recognized him, the smart thing to do here was not to run, no. The smart thing was also be one of the very worst things Shinji could imagine.
Before that, before really even beginning to consider the smart thing, he had to engage, to dig just one layer deeper. To make sure this was the existential threat it sounded like.
And so Shinji tilted his head, in the universal sign of confusion.
"Feeeshur," the man repeated, gathering his hands low on his torso. For a moment, Shinji took this to be some kind of lewd suggestion. Then the man's wrist was rolling, his other hand hovering out in front of him in pantomime of pulling back at something.
Oh. "Fisheru," Shinji repeated.
The man grinned. "Fisher king," he said, and Shinji finally understood.
"You wouldn't remember me," the man continued, expression now clouding with a kind of anxious exasperation, "I was stationed on the Over the Rainbow."