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Ogata tapped a single fingernail on the side of his mug. It felt sturdy, like it could make a good dent in a wall if thrown. From the corner where he sat, there was a clear shot to the far wall, just past where the baristas coaxed the burr grinder into doing its job. Which it did, eventually. Loudly. Its blades ripped through the beans with a horrible battle cry as it sent their broken bits ricocheting throughout the chamber.
He tapped his fingernail again, debating whether his mug would break into massive shards, or if it would shatter like the coffee beans, in an explosion of ceramic shrapnel and scalding coffee.
“Wow,” Yuusaku said, raising his voice to compete with the machine’s caterwauling. “Should it be that loud?”
Ogata shifted his gaze three inches to the left, away from the spot on the wall that could do with a new dent, to where his half-brother sat. Yuusaku had hot chocolate in a to-go cup that spilled with every sip. A whole mess of used napkins wilted in front of him, half of them folded into soggy cranes.
“No,” he replied. “It’s probably broken.”
Yuusaku made a vague noise and ducked his head as he began fumbling with another napkin. A tinkling bell and a gust of bracing winter air announced the arrival of a new customer, the rush of cold rustling Yuusaku’s growing flock of cranes and blowing Ogata’s hair into his eyes. Yuusaku adjusted his scarf, pulling it more snugly around his neck, and grinned up at Ogata. “My little birds almost took flight,” he joked.
Ogata smiled thinly. “Close call,” he said, and brushed his hair back into place.
*
He had thought himself free of his mother and Hanazawa Koujirou and all those headaches when he had bought that one-way ticket to New York and didn’t look back. Tanigaki had tried to warn him, back before he left, that wet shit always stuck to your shoe and you never noticed until it was all over your genkan. But Ogata had assumed that all the shit with his parents was about as over as it could ever be, given the circumstances. That by now, it would not only have been dry shit, but a gloriously preserved sample of coprolite that future peoples would marvel at and study in attempts to understand How Not To Raise a Child.
He was wrong, of course, which was what Tanigaki’s sort-of-girlfriend with the mouth tattoo had told him back before he left.
“You’ll always carry the soil from your homeland in the tracks of your shoes” were Inkarmat’s exact words, said as offhand as one might observe that it was raining. She hadn't even glanced up from the grim horoscope readings she was drafting for her clientele of increasingly superstitious, petrified, and soon-to-be bankrupt people.
“Were you talking to me?” Ogata had asked, even though he would have preferred to avoid this whole song and dance.
Inkarmat finally looked up at him then and elaborated, albeit in that sly way she did everything, with the minimum amount of actual movement and the maximum amount of cryptic metaphors. “You won’t be carrying only physical baggage with you when you travel overseas. Furthermore, just because you have chosen to leave doesn’t mean that no one will choose to follow you.”
“Dog shit,” Tanigaki said, grim. At his ankles, Ryuu growled as if offended.
“Noted,” Ogata had replied. “I’ll be sure to buy new shoes at the airport and leave no forwarding address.”
None of it mattered though, not when Hanazawa Yuusaku had taken it upon himself to track him down based on a breadcrumb trail of vague Instagram posts and third hand accounts from friends of friends of whatever-passed-for-friends-with-Ogata-Hyakunosuke.
He was tenacious, that Yuusaku. He couldn’t have inherited that streak from their father.
*
When Ogata was a child, he once took his grandfather’s gun and killed a duck with a single shot.
Whether it had been dumb luck, or what a more romantic person might have called talent, was irrelevant. All that had mattered was that he had a duck lying in the grass, its neck a pulpy mess of torn sinew and shards of exposed bone.
He touched it, ran a hand over the rumpled feathers of its downy breast. It felt warm. He held his hand there, half expecting to still feel a fluttering heartbeat, but found none.
Then he’d grabbed its ruined neck, blood seeping beneath his nails and into the grooves of his fingerprints, and brought it home.
This story had ended the way they always did: with monkfish hot pot and dissatisfaction.
*
The rifle looked outrageously incorrect in Yuusaku’s hands, like Sugimoto without a hat on, or childhood photos where Ogata and his mother were both smiling. The sight was vaguely unsettling, maybe even a little offensive, but more than anything else it was hilarious .
This probably wasn’t what Sugimoto meant when he advised Ogata to introduce a pastime he enjoyed to Yuusaku, but watching him flinch every time a round exploded down the nose of the barrel was having an undeniably good effect on Ogata’s mood.
“You point and shoot,” he said, not even bothering to hide his grin. “Like a camera.”
Yuusaku appeared disturbed by the weapon he held at arm’s distance, like it was poisonous. “This is very different from any camera I’ve ever used,” he said, laughing weakly. He tried to return Ogata’s smile, but couldn’t manage much beyond a feeble twitch of the mouth. “Did someone teach you how to shoot?” he asked. “Maybe it’d be better if I just watched you?”
“The best way to learn anything is by doing it.”
“Ah.” Yuusaku’s brows knitted together and his mouth pinched into an unhappy shape, but in the end he slowly nodded. His face had gone a little pale. “Right.”
Too polite for his own good and desperate to please. What a bad combination of traits.
Ogata stepped aside, offering Yuusaku a wide berth and retreating from the firing line. “Good.” He adjusted his ear protection, smoothed his hair back. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“Okay.”
Yuusaku lifted the gun awkwardly, bracing its butt against his shoulder and standing like demonstrated in the instructional video they had to sit through earlier. Much of the more specific English narration had gone over Yuusaku’s head, but the important stuff seemed to have been internalized. His right elbow stuck out a little too much, but it was decent form overall. Ogata leaned against the back wall, eyes glinting.
Maybe Yuusaku would be good at this, like him. A natural. That was an interesting idea. He might have even liked the sound of it.
But then Yuusaku went and obliterated the fantasy. He lowered the nose of the rifle, turned to face Ogata, his expression pained.
“Brother, I don’t think I can do this,” he admitted, and Ogata considered pretending he hadn’t heard him. He bowed sharply, which drew some curious glances from locals with small children carrying weapons that looked like they belonged in a video game. “I am sorry. Please use my ammo, since it has already been paid for.”
Ogata’s lips pulled to the side.
Yuusaku engaged the safety switch, set the gun down, and pushed it away like he was refusing food with a fly in it. “I am very sorry, Brother,” he said again.
“Don’t worry about it.”
They exchanged places, Yuusaku’s head ducked as he made his way to slump on the bench against the wall. He looked ashamed. Ogata fought the urge to roll his eyes. He picked up the rifle.
“Hey,” he said. “I’ve got some cash in my wallet. Can you go get us water or something from the vending machine?”
“Oh!” Yuusaku perked up with puppyish hope, relieved for even the slightest opportunity to polish the smears out of their dirtied time together. “Let me pay. I’ll be right back.”
He fished around in his coat pockets for a couple dollars before hopping up and hurrying away from their lane. Ogata watched him leave.
He stared at the retreating form of Yuusaku, the line of his back, the curve of his skull.
Then he had a thought. He flicked the rifle’s safety off.
Given the sort of thought it was, he would have expected more drama to accompany it. But instead, the thought flitted across his mind in the same way anything else ever did. Casually. As if it carried the same importance as every other thought he had ever had.
I think I’ll get Thai food for lunch. Should I buy this shirt in blue or black? There’s a lot of subway traffic today. I could shoot my half-brother in the back of the head.
It was all inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Or it felt that way. He was something of a bad judge of how much of a ripple his choices caused. He supposed this one would be a sizable splash, if not a full tsunami.
But that didn’t make the thought any less interesting to consider.
“Here.” Yuusaku set the two waters down on the bench beside him. The bottles were already foggy with condensation, sweating onto the bench’s cheap laminate, as if nervous. “I bought some chips too, but I thought it might be better for us to eat them afterwards.”
Ogata smiled. “How kind.”
Yuusaku smiled back, a glare from the fluorescent lighting overhead catching on his protective eye gear. “It’s the least I can do.”
Ogata fired off the rest of the ammo into the paper target. Headshot, headshot, headshot, until the rifle clicked empty and the target flew to meet them.
“You have good aim,” Yuusaku said, forcing cheer.
“Maybe next time you’ll try too,” Ogata said, even though he knew it would never happen. Not a single round had gone off without provoking a jolt from Yuusaku. It was like every bullet had pierced him.
“Maybe,” Yuusaku lied. The two waters sat beside him on the bench, untouched, sitting in a puddle of their own perspiration. The laminate was irreparably warped.
*
“Why is everything here so expensive?” Sugimoto lamented as they shuffled with the crowd along the rows of kiosks offering everything from fine jewelry and hand-painted Christmas ornaments, to pierogies and whole duck leg confit. The crisp night air of the outdoor holiday market was scented with apple cider, hot chocolate, and pine needles. Unfortunately, as much as it all smelled delicious, they hadn’t bought a single thing in the thirty minutes they’d wasted dragging their feet around the park.
“Let’s think,” Ogata said. “You’re shopping for gifts at a holiday market in December. You know that winter holidays are a big thing here, right?”
Sugimoto groaned. “I just thought I’d be able to find Asirpa a birthday present that she can’t get back home.”
“And you thought a sweater would be the answer?”
“Shut up, shut up.” Sugimoto tugged at the scarf around his neck, exposing a couple inches of skin to the cold. “Fuck this, I want one of those big cookies,” he said, yanking Ogata to the end of a kiosk’s stretching line. Seeing the sour-lemon expression Ogata was making, he added a stubborn, “It will be delicious.”
“It will be five dollars,” Ogata said, “for a cookie.”
Sugimoto sucked his teeth. “Your commentary is extremely unwelcome. It’ll be so hinna, even you’ll be impressed.”
“I’ll be very impressed if it’s worth the full five dollars,” Ogata agreed. Sugimoto shoved at him and Ogata neatly sidestepped the attack.
“Asirpa would have wanted to try the big cookie. You need to be more adventurous like her.”
“I seriously doubt that Asirpa would consider an overpriced gingersnap to be ‘adventurous’ eating.”
“Wasn’t I just saying that your commentary was unwelcome?” Sugimoto sneered. But then his expression went thoughtful. “But there were some kind of weird honeys and sauces in some of the shops we passed. Maybe she’d like one of those?”
Ogata drawled, “You should ask the salespeople what goes best with raw brains.”
“Yeah,” Sugimoto said, clearly not paying attention. “Then I can focus on buying Koito’s birthday present.” A pause. “So,” Sugimoto began, in that wheedling tone that promised nothing but imminent frustration. “Your birthday is coming up too. Do you want anything in particular?”
“I want to not have this conversation.”
“Not an option.” They took two steps forward in line as someone ahead of them gave up and rushed away to join a much shorter queue for artisanal hot chocolate. “Wait, does your half-brother know that’s coming up?”
Ogata blinked. “How should I know?” he asked. “I don’t know when his birthday is.” This was a lie. “And I don’t want or expect anything from him.”
Sugimoto rolled his eyes. “So standoffish,” he muttered. They took a few steps forward in line. “I guess I just thought things were going okay with him. It sounded like you had a good time when you two went to—where was that again?”
“A gun range.”
Sugimoto’s head whipped around. “Wait, you were serious about going there? I thought that was a joke.”
Ogata shrugged.
“You’re sort of a weird guy sometimes,” Sugimoto said, letting out a bark of laughter. “How did he like it?”
He couldn’t help the small smile that pulled at the corners of his mouth. “He didn’t.”
Sugimoto laughed again. “That poor kid. You’re such an asshole, Ogata.”
“Isn’t the point for Yuusaku to get to know me?” Ogata asked, lifting his chin slightly. “The last thing I want him to do is get any false impressions.”
*
Ribs snapped apart beneath Ogata’s kitchen shears in sharp pops as he cut out the spine of a chicken. Broken bones arched out of the torn crevice, red pinpricks of drained vessels bright amidst pink flesh. He flipped it, fingers hooking into the cavity and pulling it open onto his cutting board. The hump of the breast meat and ribcage rose up, just a little, as if the chicken was struggling to take a breath.
He layered his hands over the curve of the breastbone and shoved down, once. Hard . The cartilage gave out and broke with a sick crack. Ogata withdrew and looked at the flattened bird.
Its carved body had felt cold beneath his touch.
*
When Ogata was a child, he took his grandfather’s gun and killed a duck with a single shot.
But when he had arrived at home, duck blood drying in big tacky flakes over his palm and its warm body swinging from his grasp, it was to the sizzle and pop of monkfish liver sauteeing in the donabe. The smell of liver darkening with char lived in his nose throughout his entire childhood, a presence more constant than anyone or anything else. That smell had worked its way into the drywall, had become the strange third member of their household.
Ogata woke up, body heavy beneath his soaked sheets. He tried to sit up, but his skeleton remained pressed into his mattress, refusing to do more than twitch and ache from the effort. Chicken on the cutting board.
After waging war with his body for minutes, hours, days, he rolled over. His vision wavered. A steady beat of cruel spasms pounded right behind his eyes. There was a fresh glass of water waiting on the nightstand. He grabbed at it with clumsy fingers, cold water sloshing over the lip and running down his burning skin. He drank.
Then he heard it.
The barely audible sizzle and pop of something cooking in the next room.
No, not something . He knew that unctuous smell. Had lived in it.
He set his glass down. Dragged his leaden legs over the edge of his mattress, soles of his feet flat on the floor. The bedroom swam around him as he drifted from his bed out to the main room of his apartment, fingers ghosting over the mottled patch of wall that had been spackled after Sugimoto accidentally smashed a hole into it.
The smell of liver cooking was stronger out here, the fan left off and forgotten. While the shade in the bedroom had still been drawn down over the window, the ones out in the rest of the apartment were raised, and Ogata blinked furiously as his eyes adjusted.
Someone hovered by the stove, singing an old Utada song as they poured dashi over the monkfish liver. It hissed in the donabe like an angry cat.
For an unsettling moment, he was a kid back in the countryside again, dead duck swinging from his fist as he peered into the house from the genkan and saw his mother’s thin form cooking monkfish hot pot like she did every day. Like she was probably doing even now, years and years down the road.
Ogata stared, trying to make sense of this person standing in his kitchen, the sliced long green onions and napa cabbage and other ingredients piled on the tiny countertop. He rested a hand on the bedroom doorknob, the metal growing warm and clammy beneath his palm. He said, voice hoarse, “How did you get in?”
“Oh!” Yuusaku turned, face lighting up. “You’re awake!” He was wearing Ogata’s apron. “Sugimoto texted to let me know you’re sick.”
Of course he did. Fucking Sugimoto.
“He loaned me his keys to your place and asked me to come check on you, and make sure you ate,” Yuusaku explained. He twirled a wooden spoon like a flag at a small box of fever suppressants sitting on the counter. “You should take some of those. You were burning up when I got in.”
Ogata felt itchy all over at the thought of Yuusaku leaning over him as he slept, checking his temperature. “How long have you been here?”
Yuusaku hummed and returned to adding more broth and stirring in miso. “Maybe half an hour?” he hedged. “How are you feeling?”
Annoyed . “I’ve been better,” Ogata said.
His gaze dropped to the food items covering his countertop. Brand new bottles of mirin and soy sauce, a new package of medium tofu, and fresh vegetables that definitely weren’t from his fridge. He’d clearly gone to a lot of trouble; monkfish wasn’t known for being cheap. “You didn’t have to do all of this,” he said.
“It’s my pleasure, Brother,” Yuusaku assured him. He added the remaining wet ingredients. “And I also wanted to do something nice for you, since I won’t be around for your birthday next month.”
Ogata fell silent. Yuusaku fetched him a new glass of water, like he was the host and not some interloper. After watching him cook for another moment, Ogata tore open the box of drugs and pushed two pills free from the foil. He washed them both down with a gulp of water, but not before the chemical bitterness spread across his tongue. He licked over his teeth.
Before he could think too much about it, he asked, “Why this dish?”
Yuusaku made a surprised noise. “Because, Brother,” he said, glancing back at Ogata over his shoulder, “you mentioned that it’s your favorite.”
Their gazes locked and Ogata took a good hard look at Hanazawa Yuusaku for the first time. They didn’t resemble each other at all, except in the eyes. Those were the same.
Or very nearly.
There was a warmth to Yuusaku’s that Ogata’s seemed to lack. Something that a trick of genetics had left him fundamentally unable to replicate, perhaps.
Yuusaku smiled at him, eyes crinkling at the corners, and didn’t seem bothered when it went unreciprocated. He started adding ingredients to the donabe, carefully arranging the items that would need more time. The edge of a bundle of enoki mushrooms peeked up out of the broth, a pale tree in the middle of an ocean.
Ogata had eaten an excess of monkfish hot pot over the years—had seen it prepared enough times that he could probably do it himself even while blindfolded. The recipe was a touchstone from his childhood that he suspected would survive even amnesia. Which was why it was easy to see that Yuusaku’s spread lacked a notable ingredient.
“You forgot the shiitake mushrooms.”
“No, I didn’t,” Yuusaku replied, and Ogata could hear that he was grinning. “I didn’t buy any.”
“None at the store?”
Chuckling, Yuusaku said, “No, I didn’t even check. I’m not going to make you eat something that you hate.”
Ogata’s mouth went dry.
It was a comment he had only said once in passing. Most of everything he had said to Yuusaku was only in passing. Stuff he left to the wind and expected to be lost and forgotten. But of course Hanazawa Yuusaku was picking up every discarded piece of him that could be foraged, collecting everything and holding it close.
Then, low enough that Yuusaku probably couldn’t hear it over the bubbling pot, Ogata muttered, “I don’t understand you.”
It was the most honest thing he had ever said to his brother. Or maybe to anyone.
*
They wandered through an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History, Yuusaku struggling to read the informational plaques and Ogata staring into the glass eyes of the taxidermy birds suspended in each display, frozen in the charade of flight.
“It must take a very artistic mind to come up with these dioramas, don’t you think?” Yuusaku mused, stooping to get a better look at the small prairie dog peeking out from its burrow between the spindly legs of the surrounding American antelope. Ogata hadn’t noticed it.
“I met a taxidermist once,” Ogata said. “I don’t think I’d consider him artistic so much as disturbed.”
Yuusaku laughed, like he had made a joke. “If you had to pursue an artistic career,” he said, “what would it be?”
Ogata cut him a sideways look and replied, “I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it.”
“I think…” Yuusaku squinted as he considered. “I think you would make an excellent photographer.” A startled laugh escaped Ogata, and Yuusaku smiled, straightening. “Because you are good with a gun.”
“Right. Point and shoot.”
They left the museum after a few hours of exploring its wings to meander through the streets in search of a restaurant that wasn’t looking to bleed them dry. Yuusaku spent much of the walk with his head tipped back, eyes sparkling as he gazed at the buildings towering overhead, stopping to point out interesting façades or to inspect the menus of the eateries they passed. Manhattan had lost some of its luster over the course of Ogata’s time here, and his attention was focused on making sure they didn’t step in dog shit or gum. While scouring the pavement ahead of them, he observed that their footsteps had fallen almost into sync. There was still the barest fragment of time separating them from mirroring each other’s strides, turning what could have been the heartbeat of their walk into a heart murmur.
They turned a corner to walk along a street whizzing with cars. They passed a pair of women speaking to each other in agitated Japanese as they squinted at the onslaught of incoming vehicles, glancing up and down from the plate number in their rideshare app and trying to find their taxi. Ogata made brief eye contact with one of them. She looked miserable, and he wondered if she had been dragged along on this adventure by her companion.
Following his gaze, Yuusaku asked, “Do you ever think about coming back to Japan?”
Ogata didn’t even need to think about it. “No.”
Japan had become a non-option long before he had ever left. At this point, permanent relocation to Antarctica was infinitely more attractive than returning to Japan.
Yuusaku’s mouth twitched downward in an unhappy little frown, but he didn’t push for an explanation. Ogata rolled his shoulders and exhaled through his nose. Their footsteps, which had been almost in sync, fell apart into mismatched beats.
“I guess I thought it might be nice if we could spend more time together,” Yuusaku admitted, picking up his pace to try and match Ogata’s. “But maybe I can come back and visit the next time I have time off?”
“There are plenty of better ways to spend your vacations,” Ogata said, absent. He sidestepped a woman who was cleaning up after her dog.
Yuusaku sighed. “I’d rather come here. Getting to know you is important to me.” He hesitated. “And I think that Father should try getting to know you, too.”
Ogata bit his tongue.
“I know that you two have…history. But I don’t think that means it should be this way—or that it will always be this way, Brother.” Now that he’d started, it was like he couldn’t stop. “You’re both good men, and I wish that you two could see each other the way that I do.” Yuusaku gripped Ogata by the sleeve of his coat, halting him in his tracks. “Don’t you wish things could be different?”
Once upon a time, maybe. Back when he was a child, Ogata had entertained the occasional thought of what could have been, what the more standard experiences of his classmates might have been like. He had closed his eyes and tried their lives on in his mind, slipping on their skins.
But he had never quite managed to stretch the fantasy to fit him. He hadn’t possessed the imagination for it to make sense. He suspected no one did.
It wasn’t even like he was angry about it. Not really. It was something he had accepted and walked away from. The same way he had walked away from Japan.
Looking backwards ruined people. That was the one lesson his mother had imparted.
Yuusaku was still talking, totally unaware of the landmine he had stepped on. “I don’t want things to go back to the way they were, Brother, especially now that we’re finally spending time together. It may take a while, but I’m sure that if I keep hard at it, Father will listen to me, and we can all build a future together.”
Ogata stared at Yuusaku, whose words weren’t an aspirational goal so much as they were an unbreakable promise. If he said that he would badger Hanazawa Koujirou until he finally relented and agreed to forge some line of communication, then he would.
Yuusaku’s fingers dug into the heavy wool of Ogata’s coat. His lips twitched, like he was struggling to smile while fighting back tears. Ogata could see them glossing over his eyes. They had the same eyes, or very nearly. While Yuusaku’s were bright, blazing with fire, there was no oxygen left in Ogata’s to burn.
“Brother,” Yuusaku said, voice cracking. “I’m so sorry that we never met until now. I’m so sorry that I never tried—I should have tried harder…” He sniffled, and the tears that were welled in his bright, bright eyes slipped to cling at his eyelashes like melted snow. He shook his head. “I promise things will be different. I promise that I’ll get Father to understand.” His words were almost lost amidst the traffic screaming behind him. His face crumpled. “I promise, Brother!”
For all that they didn’t share the same mother, Yuusaku bore a disquieting resemblance to Ogata Tome; not in anything physical, but in that same rabid streak that kept her withering form at the stove, making monkfish hot pot every day like she was trying to relive a single perfect day, or perhaps trying to correct every one thereafter.
Looking backwards ruined people.
Ogata pried Yuusaku’s hands off him and tugged him down into a hug. He could feel the hot slide of tears over his ear, the thump of Yuusaku’s heartbeat, his warmth. Shushing him, Ogata murmured, “I believe you.”
He meant it, too.
After all.
He was tenacious, that Yuusaku.
“I believe you,” Ogata said. “I believe you.”
And then he shoved Hanazawa Yuusaku into incoming traffic.