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“It’s been hotter than the surface of the sun this summer.”
A drop of sweat slips down the back of Muichiro’s neck. He really didn’t need to call his attention to that, at least no more than the damp underside of his ponytail already does. But that’s how people always start these conversations, he thinks. The weather. It’s stupid and boring but Muichiro doesn’t exactly have keynotes prepared.
Maybe he should have keynotes prepared. It never has been easy for him to come up with adequate things to say.
“It’s albatross season,” he says, since there is little more mileage he’s going to get out of the weather. “I took the ferry out to Oshima to see them.”
He thinks for a moment about how to elaborate on this before he says, “that’s a pretty common name for an island, I guess. I mean the one off the Izu Peninsula.” Muichiro pauses. “I don’t think you ever would’ve been to the Izu Peninsula, though, so maybe that doesn’t mean much. I don’t know.” It is probably not the heat making his cheeks feel warm anymore. “But it’s nice for getting out of Tokyo when you don’t have a car.”
This, too, requires context.
“I refuse to own a car,” he says. “It’s the principle of a thing.”
The principle of two things, actually. One being that owning a car is stupid in a city where there are perfectly good trains going just about everywhere and buses where they don’t, which makes paying all that money to own a thing he only wants to use once every couple of weeks – and a thing which needlessly and exponentially increases his carbon footprint at that – the height of futility. The other being that Giyuu and Shinobu have one, and if he wants to go somewhere that requires a car, it is more profitable for everyone if he can engage Giyuu’s services as a companion and chauffer.
Well, at least it used to be. Now Muichiro is beginning to wonder if he really should reconsider his stance on car ownership.
“Anyway, you can spot good stuff from the ferry,” Muichiro goes on, and then thinks: what a silly attempt at conversation this is.
“You’d laugh at me if you could,” he says, “wouldn’t you,” and is entirely convinced that this statement is correct.
Yes. He would most certainly laugh – at the birds, at the stubborn refusal to own a car, at the things that pass for conversation with Muichiro these days.
“You always used to,” he says. “Although I’m really not sure what room you had to talk. It’s not like picking fights with everyone who says anything to you is actually all that much better than only knowing to talk about birds.” Muichiro, feeling spiteful, picks up a tangerine from the bowl set against the base of the headstone beside him and begins to peel it, dropping the peel back into the bowl as he goes like a quiet insult. “You were a real jerk. Wonder if you knew that.”
Except that Muichiro can’t find it within himself, in spite of the accuracy of this statement, to feel as vindicated by finally coming out and saying it as he thought he would. Such is life. Two years on, he still can’t manage to say what he used to mean without a boulder-sized lump forcing its way into his throat.
“Anyway,” he forces himself to go on. “Giyuu and Shinobu-senpai are having a baby.”
This, too, would probably earn him an ugly disdainful look. He’s still going to say it. Yuichiro never hated either of them as much as he probably wanted his brother to believe he did.
“It’s due in October,” he says. “She isn’t doing so hot.”
Why am I even talking about this?, he thinks, but goes on anyway.
“Frankly, I find that whole situation horrifying,” Muichiro says. He tilts back his head against the headstone and another bead of sweat rolls down his neck, this one following the curve of his shoulder. He hates that feeling. “It’s all very distasteful.”
It simply unnerves him, having known them both for as long as he has. He is also not fond of the strange symptoms Giyuu reports to him, or the anxiety for her safety that presses lines into both of their faces every time he sees them, or the fact of Shinobu acting as the temporary incubator of a tiny person in the first place. He does not want to think about her walking like a penguin. He especially does not want to think about the fact that she is also supposed to evict the tenant soon, and that people die doing that. But he doesn’t say any of this. There is a certain distance from Yuichiro that he learned long ago to maintain.
“Anyway, it seems terrible, and I’m not going to be their pet project anymore.” He peels off a segment of tangerine and pops it in his mouth; the oranges have been sitting in the sun so long that the juice is distastefully warm when it bursts on his tongue. “Which is only natural. We were never really family.”
He pauses.
“I think I was the practice round,” he says, “but my being their practice child didn’t propagate the species, so I guess biologically it makes sense.” Then he thinks, adds, “but then, we were never much of a family, either, were we.”
Muichiro forces down another too-warm segment of orange to force down the lump in his throat again.
“You really were a jerk,” he says. “I bet you wish you’d eaten me in the womb.”
But of course, saying this only makes that boulder-sized lump expand, and Muichiro wonders if this was what Yuichiro felt like in the final weeks of his life – barely able to open his throat enough to breathe. It is a dance he knows well.
Yuichiro never did really learn how to say what he meant without sixteen layers of barbed wire.
“Well,” Muichiro says shakily. “You didn’t, so happy birthday, I guess.”
He shoves the remaining half of the offering tangerine in his mouth at once.
“You’d be twenty-four,” he says. “I’ll do my best.”