6. What it Means to Disappear
He doesn't have a name?
The boy looked at him, shoulders tensed as if expecting a rebuke. Fujitaka stared back, stunned. "You don't . . . have a name?"
Liquid pooled in the corners of the boy's visible eye. His lips parted slightly. Instead of crying, though, he looked down at his feet. "Sorry."
The word was layered with such shame and defeat that Fujitaka pulled the boy into his arms without thinking about it. The boy stiffened for a moment, then relaxed.
The female officer watched the exchange, her brown eyes going wide. "Wait, what does he mean by that?"
Fujitaka ran his hand through the boy's hair. "I don't know," he admitted. "I guess it means someone needs to name him."
"But—he must have a name."
"He probably did. But he's forgotten it along with everything else."
"Wait," said another officer. "We don't know that yet. Maybe if you ask him what happened before you found him, we'll figure something out."
The boy squirmed free of Fujitaka's embrace and turned to the police officer. "I didn't exist," the boy said.
The room fell silent.
All at once, everyone started yelling.
"How can that be—"
"He must have amnesia—"
"God, this is a nightmare . . ."
"What's wrong with him?"
The boy retreated, flinching away from the sudden spike in conversation. His expression went from unaffected to uncertain, and his teeth buried themselves in his lower lip. "Everybody calm down—" Fujitaka began, holding up a hand. The chatter continued, heedless.
The boy made a soft sound at the back of his throat.
It was strange how the whole room went quiet, despite the whine being almost inaudible beneath the shouting. Everyone turned the boy, the frustration falling from their faces like broken masks. Several of them took a step forward, responding to whatever they saw on the boy's face before he doubled back into Fujitaka's arms.
"I think that's enough questions for today," Fujitaka said. The boy sniffled into his shoulder, hiding his face from everyone else. Like a wolf pup fleeing into its den, he thought. "In any case, someone needs to name him."
This triggered another round of half-spun arguments, but unlike the first time, these passed after only a few seconds. "What are we going to call him?" asked the female officer.
I don't know, Fujitaka thought. "Let's watch him tonight and see if we think of anything interesting."
The boy's sniffles ceased. With a jolt, Fujitaka realized he'd never seen the boy cry before. He develops faster than any child I've ever seen, Fujitaka thought as the boy wiped his eyes. Both mentally and emotionally. He ran a hand through the child's dark hair. "How about we learn some new words today?"
The boy nodded hesitantly. Fujitaka pulled his notebook from his bag and tore out a clean page. "I thought it might be good for you to learn the alphabet, so you can start reading soon." He wrote several simple letters on the page, large enough to display every feature of the character. "These are the first five letters of Clow Country's alphabet. Each letter has its own sound." He pointed to the first letter and made the accompanying noise. The boy parroted it back to him. He repeated the process for the next letter, then the one after that, until he reached the end of the series. When he asked the boy to recite the syllables, the officers started clearing out of the room, returning to their daily business.
Once the boy was able to mimic the syllables, Fujitaka gave him a pencil and coached him through the writing process. For the first few minutes, the boy busied himself with the mechanics of holding a pencil. It's so strange, Fujitaka thought. That he's advancing so rapidly in a few areas while having so little grasp of the others.
Even after he got used to holding the pencil, the boy managed only to reproduce the most basic features of the letters. After a while, a wrinkle formed between his eyebrows, expressing his frustration.
"You can work on copying these down while I'm gone tomorrow," Fujitaka told him, slipping the pencil out of the boy's grasp. He looked down at his empty hand, frowning.
Evening darkened to night. Even then, Fujitaka had no idea what to call the nameless boy. "We'll think of a good name," he assured the boy.
"How about 'Syaoran'?"
Fujitaka glanced up to see the female officer standing in the doorway, watching their progress. It was the same woman who'd allowed him to tuck the boy in last night, who'd enlisted his help in trying to discover the boy's name.
"It means 'small wolf,'" the woman explained. "In my country, children aren't named until their third year. Such a name would be given to a child who was expected to face adversity, so they might find strength in themselves."
He looked down at the boy, thinking of just how much adversity he'd already faced. In less than two weeks, he'd endured hunger and thirst, healed from wounds he didn't remember receiving, learned bits and pieces of a language previously unknown to him. All that, he'd faced without complaint, without even an understanding of how much he'd struggled. Truly like a wolf pup coming into the world.
"Syaoran, huh?" he murmured. The boy didn't respond to the word—Fujitaka suspected he didn't understand half of what the woman had explained, despite his quick understanding of more common words. He knelt down in front of the boy. "What do you think of that?
Confusion clouded the child's eyes. Fujitaka tapped him on the chest, just as he'd done when trying to ascertain his real name. "Syaoran."
The boy lifted a hand to his chest, right where Fujitaka had touched him. His lips parted slightly. His left eye—the other was still covered in bandages, like it had been when he'd first come here—rose to look at Fujitaka. After a moment, he repeated the name in a soft voice. "Syao . . . ran."
Fujitaka smiled. "That's right."
Syaoran stepped forward and wrapped his arms around Fujitaka's neck. "Tomorrow?" he asked.
"Yes. I'll see you tomorrow."
The boy hugged him tighter, then stepped back.
Fujitaka turned to the female officer. "Will you make sure he practices writing those letters after he wakes up?"
She nodded. "Sure." He smiled once more at both of them, then started for home.
It took Syaoran a long time to fall asleep that night.
He'd thought no gift could possibly measure up to the cloak Fujitaka had given him that day in the rain. But now he'd been given something of even greater value, something that couldn't be taken from him.
I have a name, he thought, rolling over on the lumpy mattress. I have a name, so I must really exist.
He hadn't even been aware of that concern until the moment he'd been freed from it. He hadn't realized how much he'd feared fading away until the name had grounded him to this world. It was as if the name was a cord, tethering him to this world, a permanent link to the man who'd already given him so much.
Trying to follow the man out into the desert city had been unwise. But if there was anything he could do about it, Syaoran would find a way to stay with him.
They settled into an easy rhythm over the next few days.
Every day, while Fujitaka was busy at the ruins, Syaoran practiced the letters he'd been taught the night before, copying them down on reams of paper until his hand cramped. When Fujitaka checked in every evening, he'd display his best copy, hoping for a positive reaction. No matter how clumsily he wrote the letters, Fujitaka would always smile and applaud.
Each day, he learned five letters and their sounds. When no new letters came on the seventh day, Fujitaka reviewed everything he'd learned, asking him to pronounce certain letters in rapid succession. These sounds, he claimed, were the beginnings of written words.
Syaoran struggled to recall the growing list of vocabulary he'd acquired, trying to memorize the flavor of each syllable, the sculpted lines of the letters.
On the tenth day, one of the men with the blue uniforms interrupted their session to speak with Fujitaka in private. The kind man's eyebrows slanted downward. "Well, all right. Syaoran, you stay right here."
The boy knew enough of the words to understand the command, though he couldn't see why the two had to speak privately.
Syaoran looked down to the paper he'd been using to practice his letters and set to work stringing them together. Today, the man had been trying to teach him how to write his name phonetically. He'd gotten the first four letters down, but after that, he started to forget what the word was supposed to look like. Dismay crept in without having the man here to help him. I can't do this, he thought. I don't understand. But I don't want him to be disappointed, so I have to.
He gnawed his lip, looking back to the sheet Fujitaka had written on. From there, he looked over the letters he knew and wrote in what he thought was the right combination for the end of his name. By the time he finished, the man was on his way back.
Syaoran detected the shift in his demeanor right away. The man's movements were stiff, and he walked faster than usual. When he sat down, the air pushed forward by his approach stirred the papers they'd been working on.
"I wrote my name," Syaoran said, holding up the paper. The man blinked and refocused, plucking the paper from his hands to examine it. He returned it a moment later, pointing to one of the letters.
"This should be an 'A,' not an 'O.'"
Syaoran deflated and picked up a pencil to make the correction. When he did, he offered the paper to the man again.
"That's good," Fujitaka said quietly, still not smiling. If words could've been tinged with colors, these would've been a pale, ashy gray.
"What's wrong?" Syaoran asked, setting his pencil down. Something like surprise flashed across the man's face.
"It's nothing."
"Did I do something bad?"
The man blinked. "No, no. It's not your fault."
"Then what's wrong?"
Fujitaka sighed, burying his hands in his hair. "Sometimes things happen that are out of our control, and we just have to deal with them."
Syaoran looked at him for a long moment, at a loss. To watch something spiral out of control with no way to stop it . . . That was scary. It's like I was before I had a name, he thought, remembering the dismal fear that he didn't really exist, that he could vanish like a puff of vapor. "Did someone disappear?" he asked quietly.
Fujitaka stared at him. "What do you mean?"
"Well . . ." He struggled for words he wasn't sure he knew. He found himself making hand gestures, like the man sometimes did to illustrate a point. "Did someone . . . disappear?" He made a gesture like he was scattering sand to the wind.
The man's expression changed to fascination. "You mean die?"
Syaoran blinked at the unfamiliar word. "No, I mean disappeared."
Fujitaka arched an eyebrow. "You mean like someone left?"
He shook his head. "No. Like someone was there, and then they weren't. Like they turned to sand."
There was a silence. Then Fujitaka lifted a hand to his mouth to stifle the strange hiccupping sounds building there. It didn't help; his lips curled up at the corners as he doubled over, clutching his side.
"What's wrong?" he asked warily.
"Syaoran, people don't just vanish."
"How do you know?"
"Because—" He broke off, his laughter silenced. The man blinked several times, staring at him. "My god, you're serious."
Syaoran's throat grew raw, as if someone had scrubbed it out with steel wool. His vision blurred. "What if I disappear? What happens then?"
The man pulled him into his arms. Syaoran pressed his face into the his shoulder, as if that could hide him from whatever forces caused people to vanish.
"You won't disappear," the man whispered, running a hand down his back. Syaoran buried his face in the man's cloak, wishing he could believe he was more than a wisp of fog in a windswept world, wishing he could retain the permanence his name had given him.
"Do you promise?" he asked.
"I promise. I won't let you disappear."
Syaoran relaxed, feeling as if someone had been squeezing the air out of his lungs and finally let go.
"I have to leave for the night," the man said after a while. These words, at least, he recognized. He wrapped his arms around the man's torso and squeezed, as if he had the strength to hold the man here. The embrace broke when the man pulled away. "I'll see you again tomorrow."
"You promise?"
"I promise."
It wasn't until the next day that Syaoran realized promises could be broken.