Yesterday We Were the Seas

They fished him out of the sea first and Majima second, and he hated them for months afterward.

Hated, with the kind of malevolence his person was unused to, which he had reserved for the worst men he ever met, and not even they. These cruel fishermen.

He didn't understand how it could have happened. Majima was wearing a fucking yellow jacket. He was in grey. Any fool could have told you Majima would be easier to find. The sea is grey-white-blue. It was him who should have drowned. It was Majima that they should have rescued.

Later they tell him shit like, well it doesn't matter. Majima had broken his neck on the way down. Even if Majima had been saved first, it would just mean they'd both drown.

And he told them — that's the fucking point.

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There's no note.

He went home and searched the place up and down, turned half the house around. He was worried and frightened; what if in the time he'd been sleepwalking the note had been blown away? What if someone puts a kettle on it (maybe even himself) or else it was eaten by rats? Could be he left a window open and it got rained on. Anything could happen, and it's been — days?

How long do funerals take.

They've turned Majima into powder by now, and put him in a little pot; in a few days he can pick up the urn at a counter, like a bagged purchase. Like sea-salt.

He should have looked for this days ago, he's such a fool...

Well he looked, and he didn't find one. Why was he surprised? Majima's probably illiterate. Five decades they've been together and the only literature he ever read was the address book. Unless you count the manga, and let's be honest it's just the pictures he's looking at. Even the address book he read wrong; he'd been calling Saejima and Nishida years after they're gone. Kiryu added a star beside those numbers, and still he didn't catch on.

Suppose he told Majima now: "I need closure."

Majima would just cock his head, then chuckle, "Whazzat? Sounds like a wrestling move. Don't know what that is, but I got a mean-ass chokehold. Ya wanna see?"

And either he liked it or not he'll see.

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There's no note.

There really isn't a note.

There's just… A whole lot of nothing.

Is this funny to him? Is this a game to him?

Goddammit Majima, have some fucking decency.

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One night he came home and started making dinner, Haruka about to be in at either ten or eleven, back from a long trip to the mainland. It's tough running her own business. Traveled a lot. Proud of her. Thinking they could celebrate and have something nicer, he started making all her favorites — braised pork stews, gyoza, a mushroom-tofu salad, and omurice. Beer he got too, and by the time she came home there's a ton of food on the table.

"Oji-san!" She said, and hugged him, then handed over all the souvenirs and things you accrue in a trip like this. Somewhere in the house some sixteen boxes of Tokyo Bananas. Never had the heart to tell her neither of them liked it. He took her luggage from her and stowed it away in her room; later she'll put everything in the rightful place. She's a neat girl, unlike Majima.

In her room there's no window, you can't hear the sea.

"Oh," She said, looking at the table. "Quite a lot of food, isn't there?"

"Yeah."

"I'm not sure we can finish this."

"I made a mistake with the portions."

"Well, I guess anything leftover we can bag for tomorrow."

"Yeah."

Halfway through the meal he said, "You'd think it doesn't matter. Not like I never made a portion for two before."

Haruka looked at him; responded.

What she'd said he didn't hear, he'd gone back to sleepwalking.

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They keep telling him he needs to go out more, play some mahjong, drink with friends. What they don't understand is that they're not his friends; they're just people peopling his life. He had friends, and most of them are dead. He had one best friend, and the idiot had thrown himself off a cliff.

He'd lived for Majima. Do they understand this? Can they understand that?

They went everywhere together, did everything halfway. It's the others and Majima's that's got the wrong idea. Majima always telling him — ya can do everything. Put a worm on a hook, stir porridge with one hand, cut radishes with the other. The way Majima said it he was a wholly independent unit, that didn't need anyone, that existed okay alone.

That's not true, he was terrible at being alone, and it's just one of the long line of things he wish he'd told Majima in time. He went now to that great receptacle of forgotten time — the sea, and told it to the waves instead.

"I hate pruning the garden," He confessed. "That's why I made you do it. Back's probably worse off than yours."

That didn't sound right, so he tried again. "Omurice is really hard to make right. The recipe's actually yours, did you know that? That time you tried it with flour, and you figured it out."

Then running out of words but desperate for his one-sided conversation he said, "You left the soap on the floor. Someone could get hurt."

It's no use, he's just nagging the sea. This isn't a conversation, this isn't anything. He dusted the sand off his pants and walked back, slowly up the narrow path home. The sea, petulant and angry at being scolded, washed its hands of him.

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In the house somewhere there's a hoard of things, all of them Majima's. It looks like a garage sale, or else a dump for old clothes, which he'd folded and pressed together into a large pile without washing any of them. The way he thought about this is, if he took out one every week and slept with it until its scent was displaced by his own, he had maybe fifty or fifty-five, which could last him a whole year.

If it was Majima's favorites — like that smelly hat of his that he'd soaked with sweat since its purchase some twenty years ago and never washed — it could go longer, maybe forever. He remembered nagging Majima about that; well he was glad Majima never listened to him.

This is his secret but not his shame.

If someone walks in and mocks him for it he won't care. They won't understand just how little he gives a shit about them.

Majima had taken the snakeskin jacket with him, cruel til the very end.

"Dragon's hoard of shit," Majima would cackle if he saw this now.

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Someone handed him a brochure, and he thought it was a festival; it had the colorful tones of a travel ad, pictures of woodland and low-lying hills and windswept tea farms on it. Deciduous trees a thousand years old. Maybe one of those bus trips they're always selling, for Mt. Fuji or Shizuoka, and it was on the tip of his tongue to say he'd been to all those places before: they'd been kicked out of almost every ryokan between Tokyo and Okinawa — Majima had a bad habit of wrecking shit and having sex on the rocks. Public rocks.

Then he took a second look at the brochure, and realized it was trying to counsel him.

"The five stages of grief," It got in, before he crumpled it. In his balled-up fist the paper added, "The first of which is denial."

"Don't worry," He said. "I'm not denying it. He's gone. I'm straight in angry."

He shoved it politely into his pockets; he'll throw it when he gets back home. Then with polite meaningless words he was off to the store, where he did his weekly groceries. Into the cart he added heads of cauliflowers and shoulders of lamb, long ribs and liver-shaped salmon slips. Dug out change and counted it high enough. Hated breaking his money up. He went home alone up the long cliff roads, where footsteps used to chase him along this way, saying — Oi Kiryu-chan! Fight! Fight! Fight! Even around dentures those words were said.

Shush, said the mid-noon seas. Shush, shush. It swept cleanly, and everything came away smooth. The wind blew clean through him, so invisible was he. By the rocks a dozen seagulls, eyeing him.

He got home and put away one by one all his purchases into the fridge, and realized it was still stock full with last week's groceries. Every inch of it crammed full of meat, and no one in the damned house to eat it.

There wasn't anyone around to see how stupid he was being, so he cooked, and cooked, and cooked — made grilled platters by the dozen, too hard for octogenarian teeth, and when he was done with that everything else: homemade yakitori, braised vinegar pork, sesame ginger chicken, marinated spicy beef. When he was finished he set out the table and ate alone everything on his side, saw that Majima would never eat his, and took it outside with the urn. He fed one to the gulls and the other to the sea.

Majima wants so much to be drowned he can stay fucking drowned.

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Then he regretted it and sat around all day wondering if he could fish it all back out; if science had come far enough to separate a dead man from the seas.

When he realized he couldn't get it back, that this was it — nothing left at all — he sat crying on the steps to their house unwilling to go in, until Haruka came home at night to bring him inside by the elbow.

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And so it goes.

But before asking this question of whether there was a way to capture ashes in the sea, there were many other questions each by degrees more important than the last.

Was there anything he could have done?

Did he miss out something, skipped something that should have been tried?

Was it something he'd said? Was it something he didn't say?

Had he been too obsessed with his own griefs and what was to come, and forgot to tell Majima the important stuff — said please, please stay, for a single moment more with you I'll personally break the heads of everyone we know?

Had Majima been unhappy? If he'd cried less, cried alone, cried elsewhere, would it have stopped Majima from feeling bad about what was happening to him? If Kiryu had just bottled it up inside. Take it out of himself and set it on a voyage, a message for the sea. Crampin' his style, Majima had said.

Suppose he go back now in time and pretended everything was fine would it - ?

Oh for fuck's sake, it never would have worked. Majima sees through him every time.

If only he had made dishes that Majima likes. Something to look forward to everyday. Took him more to town even if it was so hard, so damned painful, to watch him fumbling around town lost and unable to place himself, then unable to place the faces he knows so well. Watching him with words curled on his tongue half-said, or else spilling out things that should be left unsaid. Getting the days and times and places wrong; one day thinking there was still a bubble, next day thinking the bubble never popped.

Youda, he said, to Osa. Called his daughter Yuki. Said Yuki, ya still sing like a drunken cow. Use yer belly, girl.

Would it have made Majima happy in those moments between forgetting and remembering, if he'd been living his many lives in the sun? Is that where he made a mistake? To keep Majima fiercely to himself, guarding every second they had together against everyone else — so that alone Majima felt and thought and concluded and so went ahead and did this, and left a vacuum behind.

Fucking idiot!

They're both fucking idiots.

Well what should he have done then? What else is there left to do? Angrily he walked these questions down to the shore, where he sat in a boat trying to fish and nearly wrecking himself; rocking the boat with the motions of a body in rage. There was no fish that would come near him, not with that attitude — his line trembled in the water like someone else's heartbeat. In the thin rheumatic sunlight of a cloudy spring day that should have been beautiful but was not, he imagined it was Majima's, beating beneath the waters.

"Weak heart," He chided.

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In an empty bed two-futons wide one cold one warm he slept angry at himself for his unwillingness to dream. He'd never been able to dream — that was the problem — of the things important to him.

All his life it'd been this way and it'd never been an issue up til now. His dreams always came to him as fragmented still life: an arrangement of flowers in someone's hall, the calligraphy on the wall of Kazama's old office. He could dream of any thing. The sewer grates of Kamurocho, the graffiti on long-demolished walls, someone's upended bookshelf, even once the teeth of a zipper he'd pulled down a long long time ago in a dirty bathroom and found inside that he was gay.

"Yo, ya gonna do somethin' or paint a picture?" Those zippers had said.

That was about as close as he was ever going to get to a dream of Majima. Everything else just still life, life still — but not important.

Grinding his insomniac's back into the thin mattress (the shirt Majima last wore somewhere close but carefully away; he couldn't bear it, if he wrinkled it with his own scent) — he willed himself to dream of Majima, recalled every single memory he could and then made up some, and still nothing would come. No dreams. No ghostly love. From outside the sound of the eternal sea, wracked now in a crepuscular storm like his moods. Thunder and light. Tomorrow there'll be clear skies as far as the eye can see. Might be grey — unlike the vibrant day Majima had gone into the sea.

Stop it, he groaned. Stop it.

He had to move on but he didn't know how to; was there a point in moving on? He was eighty two now. Maybe he can just nurse this wound until it dies with him. When he too is reduced to ashes none of this will matter. In the skinny darkness the wet bugs flying in from the storm took pity on him and came winding up to his ears; with their little wings they clapped the answer into him.

"That'll hurt her," He said. "Haruka-chan."

"Well," They said. "You think you're helping right now?"

"No," He said, and yes he went out and slipped down the wet cliffs until he rolled falling over tumbling gangly limbs into the sand that had become mud in the space between granite and the raging water. He stood there thinking how easy it could be, how the water might come and dash him upon the rocky teeth and he'd be eaten whole, soul and all, and wake up somewhere on the other side in the exact same hell as He.

"Kiryu-chan," He'll say. "Ya thief! Trying to swipe my moves?"

He stood there shivering in the wetness of the storm that covered for him, covered the extent of his wet miseries, and thought — no guts for this. All these years and he's still braver than me. In the end he worked himself into a depression between the rocks and stood there waiting for the storm to pass so he could go home.

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Got sick.

You stand in the storm when you're eighty for hours you get sick.

"Oji-san, what happened?" Haruka asked, putting a cold cloth across his forehead the temperature of a wintry day.

"Stayed too long in the bath," He said on a thick tongue.

Technically it's true.

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On a Thursday he went into the bar to get a couple of drinks, trying to soak up air that didn't smell salty with memories. The old crew was all there and he took his place among them, silent but showing up, and took drinks one by one and put it in himself. They were playing old music but nothing he or Majima liked — not that anyone except Majima would ever play those tracks. Get to the top always gonna be bottom of the pile now. 24-hour Cinderella in the 25th becomes a pumpkin. He'd gotten good and drunk on his sixth drink when he started listening, and heard for the first time they were reminiscing about Majima — with all the pieces wrong.

Wildcat, they began — and incorrect already. Rabid dog.

They made Majima kinder than he really was, crueler than he meant to be, talking non-shit out of politeness and the nearness of their feelings. They said he said things that he never said, then refused to accept the shit he spewed; they mixed up the stuff he liked with the stuff he loved, then said he hated things that he loved best of all.

Remember, they say, without remembering. Or else remembering wrong with so much effort when they could have just turned to him, and he'd fill up accurately and precisely everything they got wrong and then some. Memory like a vice; that was his curse. Nothing ever forgotten, nothing ever escapes. Grief pooling in the secret places stagnant forever. They were making a courtesy out of Majima's memory, pulling out pieces to examine in the dim bug-glow of the bar's single bulb, and saying — was that Majima or Tanaka who always did that? Well guess it doesn't matter now.

Doesn't matter?

Out of his sleepwalking flesh he came out swinging with a right hook, and hit their flat lying faces; with long practice he went for the bottle on the counter, shattered it with short ease on the wood. Nearly blinded someone's head and broke someone's eye. Sometime later they found him about to cut someone's throat, but unable to decide which one; wanting to hit more but couldn't find an inch on them that he hadn't bruise. In pity more than anger they led him to the police station to chalk it up as a mistake.

"Kazuma-san," They said.

"Kiryu-san," said someone else.

Probably they said other things too but he won't listen. He's heard enough.

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Alone he went swimming instead.

Used to be Majima and him would swim down all the lakes near their place, before they graduated to the seas. Just to be safe. Not Majima's idea, obviously. Back when they first came to Okinawa, between the both of them they couldn't out-paddle a dog. Kiryu is a strong swimmer now, the best of his age probably — which Majima jealously said and generously told him, "Ya the best at anything ya do anyway."

Best but he wished he was less so, when he sometimes pulled ahead as much by accident and fate than ill will, and found Majima somewhere behind him almost a pool-width away. He'd panic then and swim backwards afraid Majima would cramp up and drown in the time it took him to get back, and finding Majima wholesomely strong as he but still no relief.

"Stop ya hen-head," Majima said. "I ain't gonna drown in a kiddy pool like this. I wanna drown I'll be in the big leagues, Pacific or bust."

"Just worried."

"Stop worrying about everythin' and go."

"I can stay."

"Go, asshole. I like watchin' ya swim. Ya wanted me to say? Fuckin' go."

Now he can swim.

Swim as far as he wants, as fast as he wants. He never has to double back unless he wants to. He can swim until his arms are overcome with lethargy, and then float upon that soothing cauldron and let it carry him wherever it will; generously the seas decided this would be the shore, and by inches and seconds he was brought braver and braver back onto the foamy edges of the sea, and laid gently upon the wet sandy casket.

He held up a fistful of it to wound the sands. In some small insignificant way he was angry at it; if it'd been calm as this on that day Majima would have washed up alive. His anger clung some to his hands but most fell back to the land, and became no more when next the waves retreat. Smooth as cut marble. Compact as his grief.

He swam out again. Far and long enough that the seas became a single sunless sea, and the rocks ringing the edges of their home disappeared into the brightness of night, until he felt physically that his joints could take no more, either the sea carried him home or he'll fall apart at the seams. Still the sea was generous, and he was brought back to the edge in one piece.

"You could have done this," He told the living water, lying in the shallows. In the sea the dreamless fishes stirred for the night, about to begin their discourse with the heavens; through it they'll find out what lies in store. A fourscore more than anything a man might have.

"You could have saved him, if you wanted to." He said.

The sea laughed at him, and the tides came to his ankles and pushed him away. "Go," It said. "Your miseries mean nothing to me."

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He moved on to denial, which for everyone else was not acceptance (was in fact a step backwards) but it calmed him and made him feel better — and Majima had always told him, even way back when, that what mattered was themselves and nobody else.

"Listenin's for fools," said Majima. "Let's stop doing that."

He took those words, and accompanied by them he began to pack as he did, as he used to do — for two. Lunches in double, bait in triplicate, and twin poles. Basket brimming with gloves, blankets, shawls, everything a petulant spoiled Majima might need down at the beach. Extra change for snowcones too.

"Three of everything," Majima might say any time to the shop, without even checking if they'd brought money. Then it'd be his job to run back to the house to get his wallet, Majima going: "Got bad legs! Can't walk! Oh my aching ankles! Ya really gonna put an old man through this, Kiryu-chan? Beast!"

He took the boat out to the waters and found enough peace to bring home a small dinner. He wanted to talk to Majima, but when he tried the words still won't fit right.

"Heard there's a typhoon coming beginning of Summer," He said. "Make sure you stay in when it comes."

It didn't work, felt artificial. His ashes sprinkled everywhere a typhoon would only bring him further out. Maybe out to the larger world full of countries they've always said they'd like to see — but never made time for. You know how it is. Anyway they liked home best. Homebodies, Majima said. Maybe by now Majima had been swallowed somewhere by a whale. He would like that. Would tickle him pink, to be in a whale's belly. Adventures still to be had.

He tried next: "Haruka's in discussions again with that asshole. Could be they might get back together. I'm thinking of going down and giving him a talking-to,"

A little better, but it only made him think of Majima with a fearsome grin on his face; a demonic old man with a wavering knife still deadly as pox.

"You wanna come with?" He said, and knew in his heart this wasn't true at all.

He would never have told Majima. Majima would have stalked him across the trains, already knowing what he was up to before he knew himself, and having followed him would appear startlingly in one of the train stations he passes, grinning fiercely, "Oi, ya think ya was gonna shake me, fuckwad? Ya givin' anybody hell ya call me!"

In this way, he told many untrue things to the waters, which mirrored the sky but not his boat. his reflection swallowed up by the significance of summer blues. Tales from the future. The stories dropped into the water one by one like little stones, which the deep blue swallowed and said, gurgling lazily and gently, tell me more.

He went home with just the small fish and found at home that Haruka had come back earlier than planned. She made tea and they sat. Outside since the weather was nice.

They didn't talk much. It'd been a long time since he talked to anything that wasn't water, and she didn't push him, so he wasn't pulled. He spoke more to the tea than her.

Halfway down the teapot she sighed, and said, "I wish I'm half as good as him at talking to you. He'll know just the right thing to say, if he's here."

"Won't need anything if he is."

"Yeah," She said. "Yeah, I guess so."

She too is old now. Not old like them, but not young anymore. Had her own life and her own sorrows.

"If you're going to court again you'll be away for a long time, won't you."

"Yes," She said. "But— I'm thinking, later."

"Don't wait on my account."

"Oh, not really."

"Don't hold up your life for mine, Haruka," He said. Ours, he nearly slipped.

"A pause."

"A stop. Not worth it. Just keep moving on. He was here, he'd chase you away himself."

"With a bat, I suppose?" She smiled, thinking of ancient days, when Majima had terrified her into going to school, then putting that fear into her young enemies.

"Yeah."

She poured them both tea, the last remnants of it. In it was the used twiggy tea leaves, and petals too — for flavor.

"Will you promise me that you won't… Do anything silly while I'm away?" She asked, hesitating every other word. "That there'll be no long baths again."

He looked at her. He didn't think he was being expressive, but things were expressed.

"Leaves stuck to your hair," She said. "Sand between your toes, mud under your nails."

Oh, he said. Drank his tea and thought shortly. "No. No more long baths. He'll beat me black and blue if I went for no reason." Thought longer. "If it hadn't been — for that, he would have lived to a hundred and still went screaming. Loved life too much. If it wasn't for that." Upon the wood he traced the fluctuating patterns of dew.

"You promise?"

"I promise."

She nodded, and next week her bags were slowly packed and about to go — off elsewhere to the mainland to get her own stories in order. He watched upon their doorsteps her small retreating back walking down the path to where the car sat beneath the slope, angled too steeply for him to see. Remembering how small she'd been once upon a time, and them all grown now large then small, in the end everyone grains of sand.

He did not think he'll see her again, even with the promise he'd made and intended to keep. Some things were. Some things will be.

"Safe trip, Haruka," He called out, and she turned and waved smiling at him.

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On a certain day in June he walked as he did many times before out into the gardens and off the narrow path to the side, descending steeply step by step down the cliff roads attended by a court of gulls bowing curious beaks until he reached the shores, bringing with him always things in double but eventually less and less because he'd found a way to squirrel them into his heart instead, so that though his hands swing lightly his heart became heavier — but kindly, with love.

There he spoke at first in silence and then in madness and then eventually in pleading and forgiveness, until he could speak without having inflections of deep grief in his words, and then not at all, for the sea had returned to him for his loyalty a ghostly love, whom he could see sitting by his side if he promised not to look, so he didn't.

He pushed the boat out to the sea most days when the weather was fine and the ocean glittered like a jewel, this sight that had once decided for him their home, and either singing or playing to entertain the fishes or else disturbing them with softly worded songs for a dinner, he'd spend his day.

In fitting and refitting his words he found that he'd been saying too much, either about the past or the future, which held no meaning to the both of them — because they'd always lived strictly in the present. This he knew now and he reduced the words one by one bit by bit until there was no further news, no bygone days, no worried futures, and no prying questions. Everything known now between them, as it's always been.

"Hey," He said, as he did every day. "Nice weather today."

When he got far enough out he realized he'd sailed into a canvas of unvaried blue, blue above and below, skies and sea ending in a silver line beyond what his eyes could see. The sun ascending in a blazing celebration of daylight. He cast his line into the waters and heard again the beating of a heart, now as slow as his. He yawned, balanced the pole, and said, "Good breeze. Maybe I should sleep too."

Whiling away time until they could meet again, he slept.

Dreamt while he slept, for the first time in his life, of someone.

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