Buruu, help me!
WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
I can’t keep it out!
It rose up on black wings, like some forgotten beast beneath the bed in the days when blankets were armor and her father’s voice the only sword she needed to keep the dark at bay. But he was gone, gone to his pyre, gone to the great judge Enma-ō. She could see him now; the ashes of offerings daubed on his face, cadaverous skin hanging loose from his bones, black blood still leaking from the hole in his throat. Her hands on the wound, trying to stop the flow, but it was too much, too deep, too late. Heat and thoughts and screams and floods, and as it rose up to swallow her, she felt Buruu in the black, groping toward her, burning in her mind.
HOLD ON TO ME.
Buruu!
HOLD ON TO ME, SISTER.
A tracery of blood vessels pulsing across the backs of her eyelids, strobing light beyond.
Reaching for him, her rock, her anchor, all that held her still in that gnashing swell.
His wings about her, ozone and feathers and warmth, soft as pillows.
And into the dark, she fell.
8
NO ONE
No matter the shape of the shoreline, or the color of the horizon, there are three breeds of drunk to be found beneath the rising and setting of the sun.
There’s the jovial kind who takes to the bottle when he has cause to celebrate, who has a few too many at festival feasts and revels in the rush of blood to his cheeks. He slurs his songs and argues with his friends about the gaijin war or the last arena match, grinning to the eyeteeth all the while. And though he might swim deep in the bottle, he doesn’t drown, and when he looks at the bottom he can still see his own reflection and smile.
Then there’s the kind who drinks like it’s his calling. Hunched silent over his glass, charging headlong toward stupor as fast as lips and throat can take him. He takes no joy in the journey, nor solace in company upon the road, but he keens for his destination with an intensity that leaves shadows under his eyes. Oblivion. A sleep where the dreams are so far submerged beneath Forgetting’s warm embrace that their voices are a vibration rather than a sound, like a mother’s lullaby in the blurred days before words had shape or meaning.
And then, there was No One’s father.
Seven shades mean, the kind who saw the bottle as a doorway to the black inside. A solvent to peel the paint from his mask, the luster of bone and blood beneath. A mumbled excuse for what had happened the last time, and the unspoken promise why it would happen the next.
The bottle’s lips pressed against his own like a mistress, a balm discovered in empty days after he returned from the war overseas. A tranquilizer to silence the cries of the gaijin that still haunted his dreams, numb the pain of the parts he was missing. And though he was a gambler too, hopeless and helpless, the bottle was his first and truest love.
But he loved her too, in his own stumbling, ugly way. He called their mother “bitch,” her brother “bastard.” But his daughter? His dearest? His flower? Even at his worst, he still called her by name.
Hana.
Her earliest memories of her mother were of tears spilling from swollen eyes, irises of gleaming blue. Of slumped shoulders, trembling hands and broken fingers. Of screamed abuse. Open palms and bloody lips and spitting teeth. Long days without a crumb to eat. Brief periods of plenty, of laden tables and tiny toys (dolls for her, soldiers for her brother) that he would give them with his broad, broken-toothed smile, and hock to the pawnman a few weeks later.
Running in the gutters of Yama city with other orphans of the bottle or the smoke or the war, she and Yoshi, both harder than a Lotusman’s skin by the time she was six. Violence and grime and bloody knuckles, wrapped in the stink of chi and shit. Fistfights. Broken glass. Blacklung beggars rotting in drains, or coughing their last in the squeezeways where the children played and laughed and forgot, if only for a moment. But through it all, they had each other. At least she and Yoshi had each other.
Blood is blood.
And then Father bought the farm. Literally. A tiny crop of lotus near Kigen city, snatched on a triple-nine hand in some yakuza smoke house. War hero turned man of the land. And so they left Yama, caught an airship south to Kigen; the first and only time in her life she’d ever flown. The engines were a thrum in her bones, and the wind a shower of gentle kisses on her cheeks, and she stood at the prow and watched the world sailing away beneath them, wishing they would never, ever have to come down from the clouds.
Yoshi hated him. Hated him like poison. But even when the beatings became too numerous to count, when the bottle had stolen all he was and would ever be, she loved him. She loved him with all her heart.
She couldn’t help it.
He was her da.
She’d rolled out of bed before the sunset and dragged on her servant’s clothes, the taste of stale exhaust buttered on her tongue. Washing her face in their bucket of tepid water, she felt at her cheek, her eyebrow, the scar tissue smooth beneath her fingers. Her memory awash with the gleam of candlelight on broken glass. Spit and blood. She straightened the patch over her eye, smoothed her unruly bob down as best she could and prepared to inhale her night. A glance into Yoshi and Jurou’s bedroom showed both boys asleep, sprawled across grubby sheets, mercifully free of cat excrement.
Bye, Daken.
The tom was sitting at the windowsill, a black silhouette against the slowly darkening sky, watching her with piss-colored eyes.
… careful …
No One picked up the iron-thrower, lying amidst the empty bottles and scattered playing cards. She slipped the weight into a hidden pocket beneath her shoulder, patted its bulk.
I’m always careful. See you tonight.
… will see you first …
Out the door and down the stairs into dirty streets and long shadows, hundreds of people scurrying about their business before the nighttime curfew fell. The city’s stink was waiting for her—human waste, black seawater and chi fumes. Autumn’s chill was a welcome relief after the blistering summer, but the scarlet sunset was still bright as a blast furnace, and she slipped her decrepit goggles over her eye to spare it the burn.
She could feel the noise pressing on her skin, the bustle and murmur of people hurrying to end their day, the hum of motor-rickshaw, generator growls. Beneath it all, more a vibration than a sound, she could sense the subtle ring of discontent. Of anger. Broken glass crunching underfoot, the straw-dry crackle of tinder, ready to ignite. Graffiti splashed over army recruitment posters; the same message on almost every street.
ARASHI-NO-ODORIKO COMES.
She walked over the tar-black Shoujo and Shiroi rivers, into the cramped symmetry of Upside. Here the mood shifted; neo-chōnin merchants scurrying about, hunched shoulders and nervous glances, market stalls standing empty. The sun was kissing the horizon by the time she made it to the palace grounds, bowing low before the gate guards, proffering her permit with downcast gaze. The lowly Shit Girl was unworthy of evening salutations, of course, and the men simply opened the gate and stood aside. The thought of speaking to a Burakumin would no more have crossed their minds than the thought of addressing raw sewage floating in the gutter.