Note: This isn't really a "chapter two," or even a sequel because they really are separate, but the premise is the same as in "Photograph" so I've put the two together. "Hello" by Evanescence convinced me to write a second part, so instead of a songfic some of the lines are taken from the lyrics.


The school bell rings again. Class is over. Rainclouds gather overhead. Another storm is coming. It dims the world like a wool blanket that has been thrown over it, black-bellied, trapping the humidity. The upper branches of trees sway with a breeze that never reaches the ground. The upturned leaves dance a solemn rain dance. Their white undersides flash dully as they turn round and round with the joy a distant roll of thunder promises.

The boy sat down on a wooden bench that had been placed in the school yard. He wore the black gakuran and cap of a middle school student. He did not mind that the seat was damp as he drew his knees up to his chest with the intent to stay rooted to this spot through any weather. Everyone else had gone home long ago, afraid of getting wet. But he would have remained there with his thoughts until lightning forced him inside. He thought he had all the time in the world. The poor boy, the man thought. Has no one told you she's no longer breathing?

The boy looked up at the man standing under the street lamp, who was in turn looking at him. The man wore a Western suit and glasses and stared at him as if the boy were already dead. Did he know the boy could see him?

"Hello," said the boy.

"Hello," said the man after a moment like a miming parrot. He deliberated over it as if the boy had spoken in another language. He hadn't planned on speaking at all. Was this what I was supposed to see? he wondered. But if that were the case, why? Ignoring him, the boy took a folded old photograph from the pocket of his uniform and the man was driven by his curiosity to peer at it from where he stood. It was a young married couple—a young woman in kimono patterned with crocuses and painted white face; a Japanese man in a frock coat who looked no older than himself except for the lines engraved into the skin around the eyes. He looked so tired. Is that how I'm destined to become? the man thought to himself.

There was something familiar about that picture. No, on second thought it was not a wedding picture after all. The subjects did not sit like married couples. He knew the pose. There was no distance, no discomfort. They had been in love.

"What do you want?" The boy's voice wavered.

"Shouldn't you be heading home?" the man asked him. "You know your mother is dying, don't you?"

"I know."

He did not ask how the man knew. She had been dying of tuberculosis for a while.

"Don't you think she would want you to be there with her?"

The boy sighed.

"You don't understand." When the man said nothing, he continued: "I can't stand the way they all look at me. My uncle and his wife hate me, like I did this—like it was my fault. Like it was his fault. . . . My sister just smiles all the time, when she doesn't want to be smiling, she just wants to cry. I hear her at night, and she won't talk to me. And everyone lies and tells me everything will turn out fine. . . . I wish they would all just go away."

He wiped the side of his face that was turned away from the man as though only to brush the hair out of his eyes. He clutched the photograph closer to his body as though it embarrassed him for the man to see.

"I can't bear to see her like this," the boy said. "I can't."

It was not a feeling to be rationalized, the fear to move one way or another that kept him rooted to this bench. The man smiled. It hurt to do so. But was it not the same fear that kept him standing under this street lamp, a mere observer, instead of taking hold of the boy's arm and forcing him home? Was it not the same feeling of indecision that had brought him to this point? His feet would not move him out from under this street lamp.

"I know," the man said.

And I can do nothing—just as I could do nothing then.

A raindrop fell on the pavement, leaving a small, black polka dot. One fell on the photograph, blurring the strange, sepia eyes of the man in the frock coat. A few more hit the paper, pattering. The boy wiped them off in haste, putting the picture back inside his jacket.

These two people who watched the rain come down beside one another were conscious that even then they remained alone. The force of the raindrops hitting the puddles left over from yesterday's rainfall made bubbles bounce to the surface and just as quickly disappear. The warm air was all that was left to tell of summer in this gray world. The man wondered, where did the cicadas go when it rained?

———

"Why did you send me there?" the man in the glasses said.

The figure sitting across from him in the dark was silent. "I wanted you to see," he said after a time. His words were carefully measured.

"See what?" said the man.

"What I've accomplished. What I've brought into that world, little though it is." The figure paused as though he were shaking his head. "You will have to forgive me: my motives were selfish."

The man sat up. His new posture begged pardon for the insubordination he was about to speak. "You don't mean to tell me, sir, that King Enma did not order it. I cannot believe that."

The figure's gaze on him seemed to harden. The blank holes in the otherwise featureless Jômon-style mask were incapable of holding the emotions of the man who wore it, nor did his pressed frock coat and white gloves make any movement that might indicate the nature of his reaction. "Why would you come to that conclusion?" he said simply.

"Because you knew, as Enma does, that that boy's situation has certain similarities to my own. Why else would you force me to witness it if it were not a test?"

"I regret that you took it that way, but you were merely my witness. Truly, anyone would have done."

"But you sent me." The man, aware of the rising tone of his voice, took a deep breath. He clenched his fists in his lap, as though clenching those bitter things that became bottlenecked in his throat. "You sent me," he said, "knowing I could do nothing to help that boy's pain. It could only be excessively cruel for him. When he returns home and finds his mother has died while he was out avoiding her, thinking everything would be the same when he got there . . . While he was talking with me. . . ." He knew that she had already gone long before then, and that the boy would never have made it anyway, that he could never have known. He knew that he had done nothing more to stall the boy than the boy would have done already. But he knew he had done nothing less either. "When he finds her like that, the guilt will destroy him. How foolish he was not to return right away. That's what he will think. That somehow he betrayed her. What if I had arrived just one minute earlier? He will never stop asking himself that.

"He will never forgive himself."

The man lowered his head, resting his temples on his fingers. He hid like this from that eyeless gaze that did not waver from him. Why could it not torment someone else? He hated it. He hated the man in the mask, not least because he feared him. He feared the silence that made him unpredictable. And he could not escape the feeling the man in the mask resented him as well.

"Tatsumi-san," the man in the mask said, "don't blame yourself."

Tatsumi stood and pushed up his glasses. What would you know about it? he thought; you who aren't even and never was human. Who was never fallible. Was this outreaching of pity just a pathetic imitation of human compassion? Even if it was sincere, he did not want it. He did not need it. "Please. Don't try to fix me, sir," he said. "I'm not broken."

The man in the mask was silent.

Away from his gaze, in the dark halls of that castle, Tatsumi told himself this was true. It was a long time ago that it happened, long enough for any wound to heal. But the boy who sat alone on a bench with the picture of his parents, both unreachable, just as he was to Tatsumi, had been as his own reflection in a mirror. The image came to him again from out of the past: murder. A white kimono and black hair in disarray. Blood soaking the brocade in a wild pattern like the kind fashionable now in Tokyo. Blood soaking the tatami. His sister was wailing again and again, Mother! Mother! The sound stuck in his head like the incessant drone of insects, though outside it had been snowing.

The image never changed. It was a still photograph that sat forever in a corner of his mind. Even in death it refused to stay buried in the shadows he had piled atop it. It refused to fade, or be torn up. It refused to let him forget that at that time too he was powerless. He had done nothing.

But then, there was nothing he could have done.

———

This time it was final. He could feel it with certainty. He could feel them departing from him, reluctantly but with no other choice and no hard feelings—slowly bleeding out from his memory, leaving him feeling weightless as he said good-bye to each of them, gratefully. Good-bye, sister. Good-bye, mother. Good-bye, all those I have hurt or burdened. Leave me in peace, even if you cannot forgive me. Even if I don't deserve it. Please, allow me that much.

In the back of his consciousness, as though from far away he could hear the panicked voices.

"Sensei, quickly! He's done it again!"

"You turn your back on him for one minute . . . How long has he been like this?"

Was he only dreaming this? He had the vague sensation of someone pressing something against his arm. Yet he could not be sure that it was his own body and not someone else's. It did not seem real. It hurt, and that was real, though he could not be sure if it was from the pressure. Stop, he wanted to tell them. This is what I want; can't you see that? I can't bear it anymore.

"It will heal, right? It always does. Last time was slow, too, wasn't it?"

The man let out a frustrated sigh.

"It's no good. He's lost too much blood already."

It was flowing like a spring from between the rocks in the mountains, in the summer when it glows red from the setting sun, out from under a piece of broken, mossy green glass. Had he really done that? He was so tired, he could not remember anymore. The roar of water was in his ears. Was it a downpour? The world outside the window had been white when he woke. It was falling down slowly, so slowly, like the tufts of cotton that evaded his hand and might never touch down on a breezy early-summer day. But it was the wrong time of year for that.

It was snowing. . . . Had the year passed so quickly?

Suddenly he knew he wasn't sleeping. He opened his eyes, what little he was able. The world outside the window was hazy and bright and gray, like ashes blowing away after the fire has died. It was no longer that summer day that he had longed to escape from, already almost a decade and a half ago. How could it have been so long ago? He had no concept of time in this place. He only knew that for too long he had awoken from one prison only to find himself in another. That school yard Eden or this room that smelled like medicine—neither was equipped with an exit. All his efforts only ran him in circles. Now that he had finally found the way out, he would not be denied it again. He was certain of that much.

The man with the glasses was here looking down at him. He stood just as still as he had that day, though he had no street lamp to hold on to. The weak daylight was behind him, his face in shadow, but Tsuzuki knew it was he nonetheless. He had not changed. . . . The doctor and his assistants did not see the man as they muttered something about losing a pulse and silently mourned the last eight years. Let it stay that way, Tsuzuki thought. I've overstayed my welcome. I should have listened to you the first time.

Take me away from them, he begged as he stared into the man's eyes. Far away. . . .

He could not see the man's response. The light from the window was reflected dully off the rim of his glasses, snowflakes drifted across the lenses. But there was something behind them that was sympathetic. It was difficult for him to return Tsuzuki's gaze. Perhaps he did not want to deceive him. Or perhaps he was simply ashamed he could do nothing else. His shadow. His Kannon. . . .

All that was left of yesterday.

Tsuzuki turned to him and mouthed the words he should have said then:

"Take me home."

Was he able to see the man nod ever so slightly in that moment? The snow was already thick on the ground before they finally confirmed he was gone.