June 3, 2004. Day three of confinement. Your mind is restless, your gaze boring into the walls. The jittery feeling of all this emptiness about you merges with your anticipation, into something near-pain, yet you feel serene. "What's happening, Ryuzaki?" you ask the camera. "Have new criminals been announced these last few days that Kira would target?"
L presses the button, answers you readily: "some new criminals have been shown on the news… but none have been killed since you were put in confinement."
"Nobody's been killed? Are you sure?" Your heart thuds in your chest, but you can't pinpoint the reason within the tangle of feeling, the sweet breath of air into your lungs. "I see…" you say quietly. "So then I really am Kira?"
You have to say it. You have to seem like the thought is occurring to you.
It isn't, not really.
This is a minor setback at most—if you just wait a little longer, everything will go according to plan. Kira will kill. Your innocence will be proven without question.
"It's only been three days," L allows. "It may be a coincidence."
If anything, you allow yourself to triumph at the petulant unease in L's tone: he still doesn't know what to make of you locking yourself up. He hasn't been able to predict any of this.
"Ryuzaki, what about Misa?" you ask. "Has she revealed anything that would help in the investigation?"
"Light-kun," L admonishes, "you and Amane are being held as Kira and the Second Kira. I cannot reveal that kind of information to you."
You sigh. "You sure are strict," you complain. "I'm doing this to help figure out the truth too, you know?"
June 5, 2004. Day five of confinement. "Just have to get through it… even if there's nothing to do…" you mutter, as though trying to convince someone. You're irritated, and the irritation prickles on your skin like sweat. This, this situation, is exactly what you've engineered, so there's no reason to worry; as soon as Kira kills you'll be out of here for good. It's worth it. That's one thing you've never doubted.
You keep thinking about apples.
June 15, 2004. Day fifteen of confinement. "Light-kun."
How you hate hearing your name in that voice. Like fingers jabbing into an open wound. It is so loud it nearly shakes you, that voice. You are sitting on the concrete floor in front of the bed, your knees bent, your head hidden between them, and a moment ago you had been lost in the complexities of a deep thought but now all you can think of is how much your shoulders ache and how much you want to slam Ryuzaki's face down on the ground until his skull cracks open like an egg.
"What is it, Ryuzaki?"
"It's been two weeks with no new criminals killed. Why don't you confess to being Kira?"
Huh. L's lost what little subtlety he once confessed. Your lip curls in a snarl.
"Don't be ridiculous, Ryuzaki!"
With your expression hidden between your knees he will not be able to read the hatred there. No. On the other hand—let him. You have reason to hate him, don't you? After all this, still keeping you locked up—threatening you at every turn— "Ryuzaki, you're wrong," you shout, craning your neck to look up at him, your expression poison. "I can understand how you concluded that I was Kira, but this is a trap! I'm not Kira!" But you don't know how to convince him. You have no arguments to hold; your words are meaningless; still, can't he see you're innocent? Can't he see it? He's a detective, damn it—shouldn't he be able to detect something as obvious as that? Your breath is uneven, your skin cold in a sudden sweat.
"Zoom in or whatever and look into my eyes!" you say. "Are these the eyes of someone who's lying?!" God—damn it— "let me out of here, Ryuzaki!"
You don't even know if he's listening to you anymore.
"Ryuzaki! Let me out of here, damn it! I told you I'm not Kira! What more do you want? Ryuzaki!"
June 28, 2004. Day twenty-eight of confinement. Everything passes by in a haze. Thoughts don't stay pinned down, float out of reach. In the night you can't sleep, and during the day, you slide in and out of vivid dreams. You have become too tired to hope, too tired to plan. If you were to go up against Kira at this very moment he would easily defeat you. Your mind is your most powerful weapon but it is rusting with disuse and you are never leaving here. Are you?
Of course you are. You just have to outwait Kira. It won't take long.
You retreat to the dubious sanctity of the single bed and then, in disgust, slide off it again. It has been a long time since you've tried to talk to L. It has been a long time. Everything is so quiet here, and you watch the foot of the bed bolted to the floor and think about immobility. You think about maybe biting your tongue—but that would take far too much effort and you can't be bothered. You had been brilliant, once, but it's all flaking away like red rust. You can't hold anything together: not a theory, not a conversation, not the complexities of your own thoughts. Maybe someday you'll have rusted away so far that the only thing left in this shell will be a person-shaped creature made of skin, maybe if you rust away you can slide out of the small spaces and reach the soft soil underneath, and maybe then it will stop mattering that you're here falsely, and that Kira had ruined you: maybe it will. all. stop. And then, once that has happened, you just won't care anymore, and there will be nothing left for L to poke into, just the red rust, and if he tries he will find that his hands have come out of you red, all red, and drifting, smeared, into piles at his feet.
June 29, 2004. Day twenty-nine of confinement. "Keep moving."
"Why," you say. Your voice is a quiet rasp; it sounds like the voice of someone defeated. There is no energy in it. "What's the point, Aizawa-san?" He stands on the other side of the bars in the camera's blind spot. You have stopped moving, and although you are not supposed to you have wrapped your hands around the bars, marvelling at the freedom they have to move during this hour of exercise, watching the muscles work. Your forehead against the bars, too. You know you are not supposed to do this and so does Aizawa, because the uncomfortable frown of worry is sliding onto his face again.
"It's for your own good, Light-kun," he says. "When you get out of here, you'll be happy you've kept up your strength."
"I'm never getting out of here, Aizawa-san," you say dully. "So what does it matter?"
"Yes, you will, Light-kun," Aizawa says.
You stare at him, numb. "Kira hasn't killed again. It's been almost thirty days, L said. You all think I'm Kira anyway, so what does it matter?"
"Light-kun, please step away from the bars."
You don't move. Staring past Aizawa.
"If you step away from the bars, I'll stay with you a little longer," Aizawa tries.
"You don't want to stay with me. It would be like staying with Kira."
"Step away from the bars, Light-kun," L's voice says pitilessly from the camera overhead, "or I will have to take extreme measures. Aizawa-san is attempting to be kind to you."
You step blankly away from the bars. "I'm sorry," you say quietly. "I'm not trying to be difficult. I know you're just trying to solve this case." You brush the back of your hand across your suddenly stinging eyes, and trudge around the room.
June 30, 2004. Day thirty of confinement. "Light-kun. It has been thirty days since you went into confinement. Tomorrow it will be July. Would you like to spend thirty more days in here, as you have been, or are you ready to confess?"
Thirty days. All of June has drifted by while you were in this room. The rainy season must have started. Under the city, the cisterns will be filled with water, vast arches and pillars of stone drowned in an artificial sea. You've missed Sayu's birthday. You'd had a dream about her one night, floating in the dark: she had been asleep at her desk, care-worn, silent but for her breathing. If you confess, L will kill you. You might confess if you had anything to say. You don't know how Kira kills. You still haven't figured it out.
You hate him for putting you in here.
"Light-kun?"
The ceiling is bare stone, each edge squared-off and predictable. It is like one of those catacombs, maybe. It has grown around you and it is now an impermeable barrier, and you think you can hear water rushing by. One month. It seems an age, and yet too small a time for the momentum of entropy; you cannot imagine living in here any longer and yet you know there is nowhere else you will ever exist. Life is over for you. This entombment in a timeless vault is the only place you will ever see again.
"Light-kun, did you hear me?"
"I heard you," you say. Your voice is a quiet thing, these days. It has lost the vigour in your chest, become thready and uncertain. You hardly do anything other than whisper, and barely speak: even the effort of speaking seems too much, but L's constant requests are bugging you. As soon as you acknowledge him, L will leave you alone again, and you can lie on your bed as you have been and stare up at the ceiling and think about nothing at all, drift back into the crumbled ruins of your thoughts. You don't like the way his voice pulls you into reality, into time, into the hateful continuality of it all.
"What do you think about the fact that it has been a month since you were put into confinement?"
"I don't know," you say. "I'm tired."
"This kind of response is unlike the Light-kun I know," L says.
"I guess so," you say.
"What do you think about the fact that Kira has not been killing for thirty days?"
"You don't want to hear what I think," you say.
"Yes I do."
You scrunch up your nose. There's an itch there, and for a moment, you wonder whether it would be worth the effort to drag yourself over onto your side so you could scratch it on the edge of the bed.
"You don't," you say.
"Whether I do or do not want to hear what you think, I am willing to listen."
"I told you," you say. "I've been framed."
A hiss of breath from the microphone. "That is not true."
"All right," you say.
"All right?"
"Yeah. All right. Whatever. I told you you didn't want to hear what I think," you say. "So I don't know why you keep bothering to ask."
July 1, 2004. Day thirty-one of confinement. Everything follows a predictable pattern: in the morning, the darkness of false-night is exchanged for false-day, and when Aizawa appears you get out of bed. You stand, at his urging, while he brushes your teeth. You spit out white foam into the open toilet and watch bubbles disperse into the water. He pulls a comb through your hair a few times, trying to make you presentable. Even now, when you are so lethargic you can no longer see the purpose of such a thing, Aizawa makes certain of it. You suppose he is just carrying out your wishes in the matter, from before, when such things had mattered to you.
"I don't really need to look good for the cameras," you admit, when he lathers up the razor in his hand. Aizawa pauses, and places the edge of his calloused hand on your cheek.
"It's all right, Light-kun," he says.
A terrible, crooked smile lands on the edge of your lips, and after a moment he huffs.
It's all right? Is it? Is it really? Aizawa pulls the razor down your cheek, dark flecks of stubble mixing into foam.
Later on, you lie on your side on the floor and close your eyes. There is a symphony awaiting you beyond the limits of the world.
July 2, 2004. Day thirty-two of confinement. "When you acted as Kira, did you come upon the power on your own, or was it somehow given to you?"
You blink your eyes open in confusion. "Nn?"
It's dark, nighttime, and you had been in bed drifting in and out of a restless slumber.
"When you acted as Kira, did you act on your own or at the behest of a shinigami, as you implied when you locked yourself up here?"
"Wha—"
"When you acted as Kira, were you a puppet?"
"Ryuzaki, I didn't—"
"Then you acted willingly?"
You've been tugged cruelly from sleep, and it is so dark you can't even make out the camera; you know this is a tactic L's using but your emotions are strung taut. "No! I never did that—"
"Were you forced to act as Kira?"
"St-stop it, Ryuzaki, stop it, I know what you're doing…"
"Yes, of course you do. I recall you said once that 'if you were Kira, you would know how L thought, if I were L.' Isn't that right? You always found it very easy to think about what you would do, if you were Kira. But that is because you are Kira. You have been from the start."
"I'm not Kira!" you say; your voice catches and you find yourself choking on a sob.
"I understand that you want to keep your secrets, but the longer you stay in confinement the worse your position will be, whereas I will still be just as capable of interrogating you. Why not just tell me now, and skip your inevitable mental degradation? I do respect you, Light-kun, and I have no need to put you through something like that if I don't have to."
A noise tears itself from your throat. "Tell you? I can't! I fucking can't! I don't h-have anything to tell you!"
"That is not true, Light-kun. You can tell me many things about how you acted as Kira. Don't you think?"
The noise coming from your throat is an ugly tangle of wordless sound and heaving breath, all the air in your throat twisting to a point. You think L may still be speaking—you can hear your name—you can hear the thud of his inexorable voice—continual and ever-rolling—but the sounds from the camera are wavering quiet, so quiet it is almost indistinct; each syllable of his words crackling into pieces. "I'm n-not K-Kira m'not Kira n-not I'm not."
July 3, 2004. Day thirty-three of confinement. In Pragmatics of Human Communication, Watzlawick talks about what he calls the impossibility of not communicating. That is, any and all behavior between two forces, whether that behavior consists of interaction on the level of words and body language, or non-interaction, still communicates something to the other party, which then informs what the other party does next. In this framework it becomes ridiculous to think of one thing "beginning" another or "reacting" to it, what becomes of most importance are patterns. Patterns between people can be symmetrical, where one type of behavior in person A creates the same type of behavior in person B, or complementarity, where it creates the opposite. Therefore, relationships may be in a basic sense one of "equality" or "inequality."
The symmetry-complementarity paradigm comes perhaps closest to the mathematical concept of function, the individuals' positions merely being variables within an infinity of possible values whose meaning is not absolute but rather emerges only in relation to each other.
Your and L's continual interrogations of are-you-or-are-you-not-Kira have become a set of symmetrical patterns in which the content is no longer what is being communicated: instead, each interrogation serves to reinforce a system in which L claims you're something you're not, and you assert that he's wrong, a continual battle where neither of you can back down. And yet by not backing down, you and he are confining yourselves to a future consisting of nothing other than this: a back-and-forth volley between you-being-Kira and you-not-being-Kira. If only there was some way to get out of this bind—but it's zero-sum. You can give only one "acceptable" answer to L, and doing so will mean your death; not doing so means that you continue only your imprisonment.
Still, there's Kira's part in all this. It's really a mistake to think of yourself and L as the important parties in this scenario. It's not L, with his infinite patience, that you have to outwait, but only Kira, who must surely feel the pressure at some point to continue his work…
July 4, 2004. Day thirty-four of confinement. Except that most of the time is taken up not by these miserable snatches of interaction, but in complete solitude. How many hours can you possibly sit here and wait, feeling like a dead tree slowly becoming petrified stone, only the shape of what had been before, immoveable. You spend most of the day doing nothing, thinking about nothing, or thinking about Kira; thinking about how you were wronged and the righteous vengeance you will enact when you're finally freed, and yet alternatively knowing that this is your eternal future: feeling stuck in an everpresent fear that grows in scope. You have always been able to predict the world and so had a great deal of control over it; this, though, you cannot come to grips with: the intolerable sameness of it all. You'd never felt yourself as someone in need of the companionship of others, and yet in this unending box, small pieces of daily interaction, comprising at the very most four hours of being in anyone's physical presence, one hour of composite touch, and only a handful of words, is like having small pieces of you chopped off under anasthesia. When you go back to look for them, they are not there… when you go back to look for yourself…
July 5, 2004. Day thirty-five of confinement. Today your clothes are being washed. This means that for some time you sit wearing nothing under the camera's eye, and trying to tell yourself that you have gotten over your capacity for humiliation. It is not so difficult once you remember that your entire body is no longer something that belongs to you, just a kind of moveable space that can be tugged this way and that by circumstance and the whims of others. The worst trouble is that no matter how many times you realize this, something remains connected between your body and your mind; if you could only find the key to make the disconnect permanent you could leave yourself behind forever…
"Light-kun. Are you sure you're not Kira?"
Your gaze is tugged up to the camera with those words, to the flat reflective darkness that speaks your name. It catalogues your naked body without hunger, like something to put in a file-folder, a piece of evidence, wayward DNA, flesh, bone.
An almost-silent laugh chokes your throat. "Do you enjoy pushing me around?" you ask, nearly whimsical.
"Do you find it humiliating?" he responds. And even with the speakers on the wall turning everything to tin you can hear the smile in his voice, the man who hides behind the mirror of necessary justice. You cling onto that scrap of feeling, knowing it for a weakness, L pulled in despite himself.
You could have killed me already, but you won't, you think clearly. This is just another move in the game…
July 6, 2004. Day thirty-six of confinement. L does not speak a word to you. You do not really care. It's something that happens more often than not, and the days when you'd been able to come up with clever ways to gain his attention have gone; you spend the day curled up on your side, and you cry until your face is stinging with tears and your headache is a pulse pounding behind your eyes.
July 7, 2004. Day thirty-seven of confinement. L does not speak a word to you. You do not really care. You have long since realized that you can never convince him of your innocence. You will be in here forever. Today, you can view it with a kind of apathetic calm: well, you have enough to eat, don't you? There's a bed. You even have a flush toilet. There are many prisoners who would kill to have what you have. It's really not a bad cell when you think about it. It's tall enough for you to stand up in, and wide enough to walk around in, and you have not been buried alive.
July 8, 2004. Day thirty-eight of confinement. You have been thinking recently about burial, about what it means to be alive, and so when you see the hole in the floor it does not disturb you. This is the grave in which I'll throw Kira. Kira's body looks like L's, all huddled up with its arms and legs clutching each other, a mass of pale skin and dark hair. It doesn't say anything, but you can see by the movement of its eyes that it's alive when you throw the first clump of sod on top. It stares up at you in a kind of mute pleading as you throw on another clump of dirt, and then another: clayey and thick, the dirt propels downward with gravity and reaches up over his thighs, up to the pink of his knees; then, it is pressed up finally to his elbows and his flat, pasty stomach, and his curled shoulders… you throw in clods of dirt until the dirt is up to his neck and the black loam rings itself around him and his head stares up at you; you pour in more dirt and watch his mouth filled, and the dirt gather in piles under his ears, and his nose, and stopper up his eyes. By the time you have filled Kira's grave, you are back in the unblemished cell staring only at concrete, with no clue as to where the grave must be underneath, and you listen as though for the sound of crumbling dirt and a voice, but there's nothing—nothing.
July 11, 2004. Day forty-one of confinement. How strange and unfulfilling the world is, you think: if you were an architect you would not build it out of so many identical rooms. The staying-power of concrete is different depending on the composition of it; the modern concretes do not last very long, while Roman concrete is still standing today. This room seems to be built out of something everlastingly strong, and maybe indeed it has existed for aeons. You fall into a doze and wake with your heart in your throat for no discernable reason, only then wondering, did I only imagine it—everywhere outside of this place?
July 12, 2004. Day forty-two of confinement. A thin strand of reddish hair has been sticking to the edge of your shirt, and you have been looking at it for a very long time from as many angles as you can. It was not there yesterday and probably will not be there tomorrow, so this kind of opportunity can't be missed. You could write a dissertation about this piece of hair on a black cotton sleeve, if not poetry—there's too much to uncover in mundanity.
July 13, 2004. Day forty-three of confinement. "Light-kun."
"What."
You are sitting tucked between the end of your bed and the toilet, pressing your feet against the base of the cold porcelain. It is so much smoother than concrete, and the illumination from the bulbs overhead reflects off it evenly. It is cold and smooth against your toes, and you'd much rather think about how beautiful a sensation this is than think about the horrible camera that says your name.
"How exactly did you kill when you acted as Kira?" L says.
"Fuck you."
"That is how you killed when you acted as Kira?" L asks. "By speaking profanities?"
"Piss off."
"Perhaps Light-kun has gotten off on the wrong side of the bed today," L says regretfully.
You glance over at the camera. Say, with relish, "You can shove your theories right up your ass you bastard fucking torturer—"
July 14, 2004. Day forty-four of confinement. L does not speak to you again. You wish you hadn't sworn at him. It had made you feel so powerful for one infinite moment, as though you were as godlike as Kira fancies himself, and then—you had been alone again, and the cool beauty of the porcelain had seemed of so much less importance than before. Today, you touch it again, hoping perhaps to recapture some of that elusive yesterday-moment, but it's gone like it had never once existed.
"You're Kira." And no matter how much you try to ignore the thing that whispers, you can't. "L is going to kill you," it hisses.
"You're Kira," says the thing that whispers. "You know you are. You prayed for the power to change the world and the gods gave it to you. Every time you looked at the world you saw how rotten it was. You agree with Kira because you are him. L knows it, why else did he put you in here? He wanted to destroy you before he killed you. He hates you because you almost made him lose. One day he'll take you out of here with a hood on your head, and he'll lead you into a walled courtyard and put a rope around your neck. All the cameras will be watching, everyone in Japan will be watching, the whole world will watch the platform open up under you and the rope tighten around your neck. Maybe if he's feeling kind it'll happen quickly and you'll die soon without having to suffocate. Your family won't want the body, so your bones will burn and become nameless. No one will care that you're dead. Even L will forget you. How many criminals has he seen die?"
"You're a criminal," says the thing that whispers.
"You deserve to die."
July 15, 2004. Day forty-five of confinement. Someone has framed you. Out of everything you don't know, this is one thing you know for certain. It crawls into your ears at night and takes paces around your skull, wearing down the grooves. Someone has framed you but L doesn't want anyone to know about it.
July 16, 2004. Day forty-six of confinement. You hate all of existence, which is constant and interminable. You are too tired to cry.
July 17, 2004. Day forty-seven of confinement. Your clothes are being washed again. You look down the ridges of your ribcage under the skin with a kind of abstracted interest, and at the jut of your hips and the private space between them that is now exposed, as though you were perhaps a kind of table or something equally non-human and incapable of thought. As a sculpture of a body there is nothing wrong with it, but you feel a half-step behind, somehow lagging outside of the image. You had once had pride in your looks, of a quite understandable sort: you were blessed enough to be naturally good-looking. You think you must be, still, and yet the idea no longer holds meaning. The only thing that looks is the camera and the only thing the camera sees is the body of a suspect. No one adulates the body of a suspect; if they think about it at all they think of it with a kind of cringe, for the body of the suspect is the suspect's physical existence in the world, a mark that cannot be wiped out. Surely the body of the suspect would be more beautiful if it were dead, when it could again gain relevance as an object d'art, when the horrible mechanisms that moves it have been cleared away, when the idea of Kira-or-not-Kira could be washed away, when in fact Yagami Light was no longer inside it. It really is a body that deserves adulation. Your mind, which also had once deserved such a thing, has turned against you so far as to put you in here, and you have not forgiven it; your strength of character and perseverance are similarly abhorrent, as, if you'd been weaker-willed perhaps you'd have confessed or killed yourself already and saved you all this trouble. Your body, though, seems sturdy and trustworthy enough, even if the thing inside it is not.
July 18, 2004. Day forty-eight of confinement. Today you wake up and recite "three point one four one five nine two six…" and although you know you've memorised the first fifteen digits of pi the next number eludes you. You open your mouth and press your tongue to the roof of your mouth and search for the next number but it's:
You cry most of the day.
July 19, 2004. Day forty-nine of confinement. You will definitely get out of here soon. Kira won't wait around, he has to keep killing people, and once he does you will step out of this place forever. It's predictable. You are confident in his psychological profile. Kira will start killing again soon. If these thoughts sound too much like a prayer, no one will know but you.
July 20, 2004. Day fifty of confinement. "Light-kun. Are you okay?" You do not know whether L is asking this out of courtesy, or out of a secret wish that you will not be okay. Perhaps he simply wants to gauge the mental state of his main suspect. You are lying on your side in front of the bed, facing the cameras, staring blankly at the roughened surface of the concrete, all these little particles of sand turned to stone.
"Yeah," you say dully. You have to hope that there are others in the room with L, that you won't be speaking your theory into the void of his insatiable secrecy. You have given up on secret messages and codes and hints; L is immoveable. You have to hope there's someone, anyone with him right now that's more amenable to reason. "I'm fine, but… Ryuzaki… the killing has stopped since I've been confined… from that, I think that Kira must know what's going on here… using that line of reasoning…"
"No," L interrupts. "The killings have stopped because you are Kira."
His implacable voice shakes your nerves to the breaking; you find yourself shouting, "no!" and pleading for the mercy of the bulbous, unseeing eye on the wall. "I'm not Kira! How many times do I have to tell you?"
He does not like your answer, or he does not like your weakness, the shaking desperation in your voice: you don't know how to entertain him anymore, you cannot give him anything he wants.
The hiss of the microphone goes dead.
July 21, 2004. Day fifty-one of confinement. Most of the day, you sleep.
.
.
.