CHAPTER XXIII

…

There are certain things that you don't ever want to hear in life. You don't want to come home and hear, "honey, remember how we told the children not to play on the railroad tracks?" You don't want to come home to that; you don't want to hear, "dude, it's the police! They have a search warrant, and the two hundred pounds of amphetamines are still sitting out in the living room!"

Here's something I don't want to hear: say, I'm in a car with my (hypothetically existent) girlfriend. It's a Sunday afternoon, and she's driving down the freeway. Then she turns to me and says, "I'm pregnant, you're the father, and I'm going to kill the three of us!" Holy hell. Woman, at least wait until I'm out of the car before you go kamikaze. And that's why I have reservations when it comes to romantic relationships. You never know when she's going to -ahem- try to kill you out of love. Japan: the yandere-bitch headquarters of the world. If you're looking for that neurotic ball of psychosis to brighten up your life, this is the place to look. Where the possessed go to mingle. That's why sometimes, love does more harm than good.

And you don't want to be waking up in a hospital - you don't know why you're there or for how long you've been there - hooked up to an IV, then the doctor comes in and you hear this: "hello, Tom. Now here's what happened: you had a seizure and you fell into a coma. The MRI scans reported that you have a severe brain tumour. Things are really bad. Heck, I don't even know why you're still alive, god knows. The good news is that there's a procedure that can save your life. Tom, there's no reason why you shouldn't live another twenty to thirty years. However, we're going to have to crack open your skull, and take out three-fourths of your brain with precision spoons… calm down, Tom. Stay in bed- hey, leave the tubes alone, will you please? Look, this procedure is going to remove all of the cancer and save your life. However, Tom, there's a good chance... no, actually, you're definitely never going to be able to see again. Or hear. Or talk, dance, play sports or recognize simple shapes and patterns. But you'll still be able to gurgle and whistle. And Tom, nine out of ten people die from this operation on the table. But don't worry, because we've already done nine people this year, and they're all fucking dead. So you're gonna survive, you know what I mean?"

Imagine how dreadful that would be. And here's a dark truth that most terminal patients don't know about: when your family isn't by your bedside, they're downtown picking out a nice gravestone for you. But wouldn't it be nice to have a doctor with some emotional understanding and empathy - sympathy for you in your time of need? These days there's not much of those people in medicine as there used to be. I think doctors, who deal with death everyday, and who must always remain emotionally detached, should be accompanied on their hospital rounds by the devoted nuns from the church. The ones who cry and wail and throw themselves on the coffin at the Pope's funeral you see on television. Just for balance.

That's a condensed block of really disturbing thoughts of mine right there. That's me. Just a comprehensive paragraph that's self-explanatory as to why I always ought to be separated from the rest of the class in school. Anyway, cynical and offensive monologues aside, it really wasn't fun finding out on Google what "muscular dystrophy" is about. The twitches I began to experience in my hands were the onset of the symptoms. The most common type of myopathy is Duchenne's muscular dystrophy; a highly aggressive degenerative disease that disrupts the nervous system's ability to control movement and muscle metabolism. My body is getting weaker because it's losing the ability to produce the necessary proteins to repair my muscles. Eventually, I'll die when my heart becomes too weak to sustain me.

Degenerative muscular dystrophy; one of life's weirdest and worst jokes imaginable. It's just as bad as cancer. At least I don't have to go bald. There's no cure for this kind of disease. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to live into my thirties. But I was never really the lucky type. I haven't received the latest diagnosis yet, but I don't need to.

They say that it takes death to see the value of life. I think I'm starting to understand what that means. I've always thought my life was shitty, but still. I don't want to die. Life can be cruel, that's true. But I'd rather struggle, bleed, sweat, and suffer living than accept the alternative, which is death. I'm not afraid of death as much as I'm afraid of dying. Everyone dies, and that I acknowledged. But death is just the easy part. It's dying that is the hard part.

Death is easy. But suffering takes courage. I'm not courageous. I don't want to be confined to a bed, like a vegetable slowly withering away. I want to die standing on my own two feet. Between slowly dying of a disease and getting murdered, I think I'd rather choose the latter. Make it quick.

Things just went from bad to worse for me. For several days I couldn't sleep, I lost my appetite, and I was always nauseous. I didn't show up at work. I didn't go to school. I just stayed inside my house. I cried. I screamed.

I kept on asking, "Why me? Why me?!"

Oh, great. But- but I was just getting started! I've been making so much progress with my attitude, my social life, and my career… all the imagination, the determination. All for what? Everything, every minute of my life, all for what? What a goddamn waste of time!

It really doesn't matter how much effort and hope you put into it. The universe can still be a very cruel place.

Then finally, I woke up one day. The same hollow feeling inside me that I had first felt when I witnessed Kenji shoot a man nearly a month ago had returned. Again, I felt like I had lost a part of me. I couldn't feel a certain emotional sense anymore. But I didn't feel as depressed and demoralized anymore. It sort of felt like a heavy boulder had been lifted off my chest, if only for an inch. I knew crying wouldn't change anything. I would just have to accept the reality and face it.

I poured myself a glass of bourbon and lit a cigarette. It offered a bit of consolation at least, though I could never get myself drunk enough to forget my problems. And I didn't want to play dumb and turn a blind eye on reality. The truth is that in the likely worst case scenario, I probably have only 36 months to live, maybe ten more good years if I get myself treated. I accepted that I eventually was going to die, but it's not so much that I'm afraid. Rather, I am frustrated, angry and confused that it had to be me. It felt like I've wasted my entire life. Now, perhaps I realized what "youth" really meant. You've got to make the most out of life while you still can.

I must've been sitting there in my thoughts for a while when I snapped out of my stupor. I poured myself another glass, and lit another cigarette, throwing the previous one into a bin. Well, you'd think I've gone through the five stages of grief at this point, and is now again falling into depression, but no. We're all going to die at some point, and I happen to have my time set earlier than most. So I might as well say fuck it, and stop caring anymore. Ironically, just when I'm soon going to die, I'm starting to live.

I still have a lot of time in this wretched world, and there's no use getting drunk at four o' clock in the morning. I started laughing. What's so funny? Well, when you think about it, we try to be careful in life, just so we can safely make it to death.

Although there's no cure for muscular dystrophy, there are treatments which are relatively effective in alleviating the worst symptoms. That's when I acquired - through a discreet meeting with a local physician - a prescription for a corticosteroid medication. They gave me a pack of Dexamethasone injections, which stopped my hand tremors and solved the muscle spasms. This also meant that I'm not going to get killed by a heart attack or spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, which was a huge relief. Later in the morning, Hanzo came around to pry me out of my apartment.

"Jesus Christ, open a window, will you please? It smells like death shit in here," Hanzo said, pushing the door wide open.

I was blinded by the sudden burst of sunlight and rolled off my couch. "Close the door, damn!"

"What the hell's the matter with you, Hikio?" He walked around the messy living room, picking up a still-cold bottle of whiskey and taking a swig. He gave a contented sigh and plopped down on an armchair. "You haven't showed up for three days. I would've thought you got hit." I brushed myself off as he looked at me. "Have you been drinking? Go and take a shower. Uncle wants you back in the scene, some of our bookies got mugged by thugs. Yakuza again, maybe."

"Why me? I think Ieyori-san can handle such a trivial incident," I said. I took out some clean clothes and entered the bathroom. Hanzo was still talking aloud.

"Yeah, but you're the best bookmaker we've got. You run almost all of our betting parlors and crap games in Fujimi now."

"Do I?" I called back.

"And for the record, you've got two ex-Yakuza crews in Ichihara, so let's just say you're the boss now."

After getting out of the shower and getting dressed, I combed my hair and put on my shoes. Hanzo was leaning on the doorway. "That's funny," I said. "Our bookies got mugged? What do you want me to do?"

"Well, Manny is leaving it up to you," Hanzo said. We went down the stairs and walked over to his car. It was a clear day today. "Most of our guys are pinned down in their hangouts. Keepin' an eye out for Yakuza button men. You know someone, maybe get them to take out the trash."

"It's always going to be me who'll do the dirty work, huh?"

Hanzo chuckled sarcastically. "Well, you're the best in the waste management business."

"Ah, well I can't spend more than a couple of days away without shit going down, huh? I guess business needs professional supervision." I began to laugh, relieved. Maybe I've been twisted from the cradle up. I'd already gotten off life on the wrong foot. Just as I was about to start living, I get slapped with this kind of tragedy. Twenty-two years of naive optimism, and little has fundamentally changed in me.

So bear with me please, while I plaster on a fake smile and plow through this shit one more time.