Post by Downfall on Apr 29, 2023 21:10:56 GMT -5
"Goodbye, 'Chelle..." Some months ago, a weary man had stood on the lip of a bridge, overlooking a frigid, choppy black Bay, and opened his fingers, letting a gold band inscribed with "To my heart" slip from beneath his fingers, it's glint immediately swallowed by the night and absorbed into the abyss as it plunged down, down, down, out of sight.
We don't follow the man as he turns a shoulder and walks back up the bridge, pelted as he goes by falling sleet; We follow the trajectory of the ring as it tumbles, freefalling.
The golden band cuts through the water with a plip that wouldn't have been audible from ten feet away, let alone from the bridge high above.
Darkness, then.
The icy waters of the Bay in December swallow the golden ring in an inky abyss, and the world is awash, everything seen through a glass darkly, black into blue.
Permitted to view it, as we are, we still see the ring fumbling end-over-end, heavy enough (due to the gold) to sink, but light enough to be caught and buffeted by underwater current and pushed aloft.
The ring continues it's sideways, downward trajectory, and an undersea world begins opening up around it as it drifts further from the bridge. Outcroppings of reef spotted with florae bloom in the darkness, and silvery schools of fish flash through the dark blue in shimmering, choreographed clusters. Anemone, sponge, bright tassels of plants and kelp can be seen as the ring begins to fall, almost swallowed by waving seagrass nestled in a forest of sponges.
The seagrasses are buffeted then on all sides by a swarm of silver fish moving in tandem, slicing through the water in high speeds and consuming the cephalopods and shellfish that live in the grass; The wake of their passing shifts the grasses up and sends up a cloud of dust from the outcropping.
And just as the ring had begun to settle towards the dirt, down Bay quite a ways from the bridge in which it was tossed, as a final, last wish, a silver, streaking blur move towards it, attracted by the glint of shiny in this dark environment, moves on it quick, snatching it in jaws that consume pounds of small prey per day to feed. Thunnus alalunga, the Pacific albacore tuna.
With a swish of it's tail, it rejoins the formation of the school, leaving the outcropping of rock and seagrass in a wake of dust, thinking no more of the golden band it had just consumed, which nonetheless joins it as a passenger.
In this way, the golden ring, inscribed, carefully, "To my heart", begins a journey, rather than ending it.
Spring is entering Pine Street in force this week, and I'm boxing up the remainders of my life here.
I guess maybe it was an empty dream, low-cost dental care for a neighborhood that's spent the last decade ruled by fear. It's certainly something I never had to reflect on much... hell, three blocks over, in my little glass storefront near enough to the boardwalk that tourists pass by throwing fries to the seagulls, for so long the world of Pine Street could have been foreign to me, if I'd just closed my eyes to it. If I turned the other way.
But something drew me back here after med school, that I now have nothing to reflect on except bitterness as I box up my diploma for the second time. Amazed that it had even survived being firebombed.
The decimation of my place of business was retaliation for... his stubborn defiance of the Death Riders, for... his violent reprisal against Tetsuya, but even more so, balking his boss... a man that... Danny apparently knew by name, but refused to tell me, and...
I sigh. No.
No, I can't pin any, or at least, all of this on Danny. Fact is, his initial wish, to come in and make something out of an old property I held the deed to, mirrored mine in establishing a dental practice within stones throw of the street I grew up on.
We both came here to give back. We both came here because it tied in to a specific point in our past.
It isn't about him, I tell myself as I lift the box containing the last few items of mine that survived the fire.
This... my dental practice ending, this is a result of my failure. Business didn't take off like I thought or hoped.
I didn't have the resources to hire the hygenists I needed, receptionists came and went and it... It doesn't matter, does it. I'm not a businesswoman. Owning your own establishment is business 101.
But there is, the cursing, the recriminating myself, that I wasn't good enough, that I didn't measure up.
I'd spent my entire lifetime in father's eyes toiling in your shadow, Hinata... You, the perfect, golden son; I shift my gaze through the window (That I've never bothered to replace) and glance out at the boardwalk, wistful for times gone bye; Can almost see us as-we-were, just two more little runt kids in Japantown, cavorting on the beach and playing tag weaving through tourists.
And from there, how the ghosts changed, and grew up. Hinata, the perfect, golden son, whom everyone (myself included) ignored the feet of clay, the listlessness of his moving from dream to dream.
And he was good at them, is what used to kill me. In his time, my brother was a polymath, who was instantly better at whatever he touched than I could hope to be. How hard I had to grow up, studying textbooks every night just to get a grunt of acknowledgement, but you, Hinata... you ran around all night, charismatic and free, a teenager too cool for the world. Better than me.
All well and good and so far in the past.
Bet if Hinata had owned this dental practice, he would have made it a success. Bet if Hinata was still in charge of the dojo, I'd never have to deal with Daniel Conner Fehl...
Who... crippled Hinata, when Hinata (following his guiding star) had gone to the motherland, had tried his new dream of becoming the best professional wrestler in the world... when he trained, befriended and matched up against a young, arrogant boy following his own father's dream and chasing him to Japan... Daniel had savagely broken him, in what Daniel, described later, as the first emergence of something terrible and dark inside of him.
Old wounds, I thought, as I began shifting the boxes containing the last, lingering bits of a start of something for myself.
That is something that both of our houses have in common... an unhealthy attachment to pleasing the ghosts, the memories of our father and brother figures, and the dogged resistance that meets us when we try desperately to start something new.
And, as I take one look back at the practice I let burn through my own fear of action long before a gang had chucked a Molotov through it's plate-glass, that trickling fear comes over me once again. Not even that Danny is right, that none of it matters.
But my own shapeless anxiety that it never did.
I vow, as I close my trunk, that this will be the last I think of it. Think of Pine Street, think of... Danny, and whether or not he's right, or even, in some small way, think of giving something to this community where Hinata and I grew up that has never given me anything back. Nah. You know what. Fuck 'em.
It's time I start living for me, right?
I wonder if Rita, who came up with me through med school would want to meet for drinks; I know she works as a hygenist for a dental practictioner in Inglewood, and, yeah, the pay would be terrible and I'd be not even close to being my own boss but I could start a life.
Maybe I could put Pine Street in my rear view mirror, exactly as he had said I should, months ago...
As these mundane, slightly leaden thoughts flit through my brain, I do look up in my rear view mirror...
And a large, tattooed man, a grizzled white gaijin with what looked like burn scars and a rotund keg belly covering ropy, corded muscle, was sitting in my back seat. He grinned at me, wolfishly, as he leaned forward, forearms on my seats.
"Hiya doc," the menacing white man said, his voice gravel and nails, "My employer thinks it's past time the two of you had a reunion, and who am I to say no to family bonding."
He reached a hand over my face, and I had just enough time to register the sharp chemical taste filling my sinuses before darkness overcame me like a cloud.
The school of tuna ranged farther from the Bay area, cutting like an evolving, roving cloud that pitched and eddied through the water; Occassionally, a sudden shock, or the advent of a predator slicing through like an arrow would scatter the albacore.
The albacore still carrying an oddly shaped pebble (to it), had it the brain capacity, would have been filled with daily discomfort at the way the golden band had lodged deep into a recess in it's throat, as it was, it's movements occasionally jerked.
The school moved on with the time and tide.
Business as usual in their food web, members it it's pack were picked off one by one, swallowed whole or bitten in half, and the instinctual acts of mating and catching food were all that consumed it.
Came the day when the school found itself in the open water, nothing around for seemingly miles, and blissfully unaware, the fish could not hear the boss music coming for it if they had tried. To a crustacean on the ocean floor, seeing an albacore descend upon it with it's gullet wide open would be a harbinger of doom, if it only had the brain space for such an existential concept; For the tuna, much the same applies to a rival school of dolphins.
The fish do not feel that fear or trepidation, but still, the looming shadows and quick movements are enough to inspire them to bolt.
And so the albacore shattered like light through a prism, their silver sides a shimmering explosion as they scatter to the winds, and the albacore with the ring in it's throat went it's own way.
Separated from it's school, it's speed slowed in time, as it recognized it was away from the deeper parts of the ocean floor teeming with the life that perserved it, and the company of the other like simple fish in it's group... exposed, if such were in it's kin, it swam a little further... taking refuge under a large shadow from the sun's rays. The albacore, such as it did, did not recognize this passing shadow over it for the portent it was; What tuna knows a fishing boat from first glance, or even has the memory capacity to hold on to that?
So concerned with swimming forward, the albacore saw something glint in the light, just underneath that big, strange shadow, and it gave no further thought than shiny and dove towards it, fin pushing, hundred of pounds of tuna surging forward.
It's jaws closed around the shiny.
"Got damn, it's a big'un!"
A captured albacore on a line, flopping helplessly on a deck, thrashing in it's throes of being unable to breathe this strange atmosphere. An excruciating pain of a barb shoved into the meat of it's throat.
"Two hunnert pounds, easy - "
"I got the hook."
"Hey... there's somethin' in it's throat?"
I swam to consciousness... and I beheld a ghost.
The first thing to happen was to reject this. No. This can't be. It can't be.
But he stood there over me, glowering down at me, one hand on an ornate cane. For a moment, hysteria clamped around my throat and I nearly seized, this couldn't be him; And it was different.
He wasn't the young man I knew who'd left San Fran at eighteen to go to a homeland his parents had left behind.
He wasn't carefree, a cheeky smile on a disposition that made you immediately forgive him for being that much better than you were under any circumstances, that papered over any jealousy there ever could have been through rose colors... That was the one I knew. Not this one.
Sallow, sunken-cheeked, his eyebrows knitted, his face perpetually scowling with all of the contempt, his shoulders slumped from the weight of the world.
But he spoke. His voice thickened by cigar smoke, blackened by his rage against the world that had passed him by.
"Sister."
And it was him.
"HINATA?"
He didn't answer, not at first, he brought a cigar to his lips and inhaled, the cherry glowing briefly, and he exhaled through his nostrils. Considering me, keenly.
Over his shoulder, he called, "Adam."
The white man who'd drugged me, seen in full, was frightening to look at in his biker leathers, his gloves, and his swarthy facial hair. He had the past-prime look of someone who was forced to take a job due to bad life decisions, and although he towered over the emaciated figure next to him leaning on his cane, he listened attentively.
"You know what's next," he told Adam, who grinned wickedly. The former wrestler, now thug, just turned and walked away.
"So," I said uneasily, not liking where any of this started or has gone since then.
"So," Hinata (?) said, tension in his voice, despite all of the years between the last time I'd seen him. But he offered nothing more, not an explanation of why he had disappeared, his body reportedly fished out of the Bay; Why he had let the kendo dojo that had become his new dream after returning him go fallow. And after everything, I had nothing left to give him, no tears, no joy at being reunited... because I knew what him summoning me like this meant; The penny dropping, I knew the name of the secret boss of this town, had been all along.
He didn't quite get the emotional reaction he'd wanted, that disappointment showed on his face... Sorry, brother. I always was a disappointment, in the end.
He smoked, furiously, and from my place in the chair, I looked at the lavishly decorated office. (Danny would have recognized it, he stormed in here months before, and had attempted to make a deal that would get him out of Japantown. I didn't know that, then.) The frescoes on the wall had gold leaf, and there were knick knacks that would have fit perfectly well in a Sax Roehmer yellow peril novel, incense holders, golden lions. The strains of a violin playing Salieri. I'd swear Hinata was just doing it for a bit. But there was little about my older brother that appeared mirthful or whimsical.
Not wanting to let the suddenly awkward silence spin out, I pushed, "So are you going to kill me?"
"Kill you?" He started, "Rumiko, I haven't killed anyone since this started..."
"Bullshit, Hinata.... you were the hand behind the black SUV's roaming the block for how long now, and in retaliation your men... Your men..." It was still hard thinking of her... One last gift for the year. The death of Tomie. How it broke the Hasegawa family; How it made everything in the world come apart. "Your men shot a little girl."
That concerned him, and he frowned, "I didn't know anything about that. What was her name?" I fumed, and he blinked; If he was playing a role he was the best actor I'd ever seen.
"No, that can't..." Then, angrier, "Your men have been ravaging this block for the last years. All along. Extortion. Burning people out of their homes. Selling drugs. I came here to look after your affairs when you disappeared... and you were here? The whole time? As a... as a drug kingpin?"
His expression soured, and he leaned forward on his cane, favoring one leg. His lower limbs were painfully skinny, and his right was not true, and probably hadn't been for decades.
"I'm the drug kingpin? Are you sure that isn't your boyfriend? Daniel Fehl, the Beast Unleashed onto Japantown?"
"He's not my boyfriend..."
His voice rose over mine, an accusation, "The Purveyor of Anarchy? The Patron Saint of Nihilism? And you... let him hole up in squalor in the dojo that was my work... and you kiss his booboos and speak kindly when he's sad, and you bring him soup??"
Each word more of a lash than the next, decades of anger bubbling up. It's almost enough that I have to remind myself that, as Daniel put it, the two of them parted on friendly terms in 2008... but now, Hinata stands before me, and the effort of his rage makes him shrink back, trembling weakly.
I look away. I can't... look at my brother like this. Glowering, his thin cheeks wasted and not by time. He looks like a nightmare, worse than father ever did. All of father's disapproval. All of his anger. All of the petulance, taking out on a world gone by. I recognized it in the instant and I couldn't reconcile it with my brother as-he-was. What happened to you?
Breath shaking, he stands back, the effort of leaning against his cane to help his bad leg now more apparent, and he waves the cigar in the air.
"We need to reset... this... isn't how I wanted to see you again, for the first time in... all of these years," he says, tinged with genuine regret.
He walks around the chair where they'd sat me, to a desk, and leans against it for support. My legs are still numbed, but I can at least turn my torso and look at him. And I see the conflict in him as he bows his head, arms folded, thinking.
"Where did you go, Hina?" Tears are welling up in my eye, angry and so hurt. "We thought you were gone. All we heard from the medical examiner was that your body was unrecognizable because of how long it had been in the Bay... What we buried..."
"Yes, I regret the deception I practiced with that cadaver... Do you know how hard it is to watch your own funeral from afar?"
A pause, then as an afterthought, "You looked beautiful that day. Mom looked broken. Father..."
I sob back a little laugh, "All of the light went out of Father when you went away, Hina. Both times, when you went to Japan to train to be a wrestler, and when you -"
"I know."
"You were always the apple of his eye. How he held you on his knee as you gushed about your dreams... and it always seemed like you had a new dream every month! And how he indulged it, and smiled when you told him your newest, crazy dream!" A beat, then, "Really, it didn't surprise him when you said you wanted to become a wrestler. He just smiled, distantly, as he did, and said, "Ahh, Hina-kun..." But with me? Everything was harder. He never listened to my dreams, Hina. He just stared at me as if he didn't know what to say. He just said, awkwardly, "Stick to your studies.""
"I wish I could apologize for that. For you living, so long, in my shadow," my brother admitted, but I continued.
"But when you... when you DIED, when you left your dojo without even a note? And we had to wait MONTHS? I was in college, Hina. I was studying so hard to make something... and I knew that you returned from Japan and things were never the same. I knew you didn't have that reckless, listless flamboyancy, to dream a new crazy dream every month, I knew that things weren't the same after -"
(......After Daniel injured you......)
" --After you got hurt... but I really thought the kendo dojo, what you came back to this city and poured yourself into... was enough to make you happy?"
He holds his hands out, struggling to put it into words and finding none, before letting them fall. And the truth is that sometimes, when our dreams are taken from us in certain ways, ever after, we go through life never being able to replicate that feeling. It's a hole nothing can fill.
It's almost ironic in that. In a way, Daniel and he are more alike than they think. Brothers, after all.
I shake my head. I still can't believe it. "But you survived... how -"
He muses for a second, and then, stubs the cigar down firmly into an ashtray, some of that old bitterness crawling back in.
"The truth is, that I did go to the bridge that year to take my own life. Because, and you'll laugh at this, an old friend came to me, and showed me that everything I hoped to build in Japantown was all for nothing."
"Do you think he's a good person, deep down, Rumiko?" He says, holding the golden tip of his cane up to eye level, examining it harshly, mouth puckered. "Do you think he came to my old dojo, seeing it in the state of disrepair of being ravaged, turned into a drug den and homeless camp, the shambles left of it after I abandoned it, and... out of the goodness of his heart... he decided he would fix something broken up... restore it... as a favor to me? As a symbol of the brotherhood we shared when we were teenagers... before he SHATTERED my LEG and TORE my LIGAMENTS to such a degree that, several reconstructive surgeries and numerous pins later... will never allow me to even walk without extreme pain?"
"I..........."
"You do," He says, voice wrathful with judgment. "Does it surprise you, then, that he showed up to me, too, looking for the succor, the validation that deep down he isn't as bad as he wants his image to be... that there is still a way for him to look at his own face in the mirror?"
"This isn't about him." It isn't quite in defense of Daniel Fehl. I don't... know if I can defend him, truth be told.
"It's always been about him, because he won't let it be about anything else!! Hinata explodes, hurling a glass from his desk. This is not a calm, composed kingpin of the street. Hinata is a decades old, scarred over wound.
Without his cane he hobbles to the front of me, until we're inches apart, his lip peeling back in a snarl and Hinata's eyes burn into mine.
"Daniel took my entire dream and shattered it along with my leg, and then what did he do? He threw it away in a juvenile quien-es-mas-macho contest with that fat idiot Warpath I've hired... a man even more pathetic and even more needy to be the center of attention. Daniel threw away his career just so he could say he had it... and he came to me, in the months after he lost the career that again, I HAD GIVEN MY LEG FOR... he showed up, hat in hand, to Japantown, and wanted me to take him in. But he told me that everything we fought for, together, everything we encountered in the House of Pain, the grueling training... was for nothing. It meant nothing to him. It brought him no closure, no satisfaction. He ended my career, my life, for a chance to chase after something that he ended up throwing away. Do you know how that felt to me? So I took that... and I walked out of this dojo, that suddenly seemed hollow. A second place trophy in a contest I was never going to win. Because I came up against Daniel Fehl... the man who never has let anything stop him from grasping the brass ring... And the man who, once he's savaged everyone in his path for it... once he's crippled friend and brother... shafted ally and partner... HE THROWS IT AWAY BECAUSE IT DOESN'T MAKE HIM SATISFIED??"
It sounds like you've been harboring this grudge for a long time, brother...
Again, Hinata sees my face. And it's plain, after all of this, after all of his bluster and rage is spent out, he doesn't want to hurt me. He backs up, even though it obviously pains him to do so.
"So I walked to the Golden Gate Bridge that night, fully intending to jump off."
"Fun fact about the bridge; The fatality rate of jumping from it is 98%. There is an art to going over the side, an art of drowning, if you will, that isn't taught to anyone... first and foremost, do not jump feet first, you'll break so many bones once you hit the water, and you are immediately sucked into the current. So, provided that you're able to avoid the security, and find yourself on the ledge looking down... You have to absolutely commit to it. You have to dive head first."
"But imagine the view once you're halfway down."
"Imagine turning, and looking back up to the bridge; Time slowing to a crawl, as you realize that the despair that robbed all of your life of meaning was a fleeting thing in itself, that could pass you by if only you let it."
"Because that's the double-edged sword of nothing matters, right? The truly zen act of nihilism in the universe, that humbles you at a moment you think is your weakest? That you know that this didn't have to be the end, and now, you feel stupid that you've taken it."
"And the anger that comes with that, oh, the rising epiphany that strikes you that this isn't because of you... the reason you walked to this bridge to jump off of it is that one miserable piece of shit came along and ruined your life."
"It'll drive you mad, somewhat. And believe me... time is relative when you fall, so you feel like you have seconds, but also all the time in the world to come to these realizations."
"I hit the water and it destroyed my body just as badly as Daniel's heel hook did, Kyoto 2001; I landed in it with the force of a comet, and immediately blacked out... but again, I thought, as I began to sink... that Daniel did this to me. And despite it all, despite the pain shooting through me... despite the darkness creeping in at the edges of my vision as I began to sink, I didn't let myself drown."
He sits back against the desk. I look at the waste of his body, after it had knit itself together. And I can understand his rage at the world... he had to birth himself back into it in a reversed baptism.
"Brother..."
He doesn't look at me for a second. "So I tell you, I faced the darkest nights of my soul thanks to everything this man has done... and you still, somehow, think he's capable of good. When it should have been him jumping off that bridge that night... it would have done us all a favor."
For a long, pregnant moment, I have to let the silence play out. I see his fall in my mind's eye. The desperation, the loss of everything that mattered in his life, and the terrified panic that set in as he found himself looking up from halfway down.
"I see... a reflection, Hinata."
"A reflection."
"That's all."
He smiles at me, then. Not the bright smile of an honor student, prize athlete, apple of our father's eye, this is the cold, merciless, icy grin of a revenant who emerged from a choppy, frigid Bay. We'll see, this smile promises such torments. We'll see.
"Come with me, Rumiko."
"Why?" I'm not liking this... but I also look around, not seeing where Adam had gone to and not liking that feeling.
"If you can believe it, my own sojourn that night wasn't the only time someone in Daniel's sphere of influence chose to try the bridge, but... funnily enough, he's still here. I wonder, will he have the same perspective on the matter as I do?"
"Wait, what? What are you talking about?" I rub my wrists and ankles, trying to get some feeling into them.
We've crossed the room, and along one wall, there is a two-way partition of glass overlooking a small side office. There are three figures inside, two seated... and, between them, there's a third man, a large man standing.
"Hinata........ what have you done..."
Hinata smiles at me.
And this time, his smile is genuine.
"Fuck," Danny groans.
He feels blood on his temple, sticky and hot... he has been hit enough with blunt instruments to know, from the pounding in his head and the cotton wrapped railroad spikes shooting into his synapses that he was hit with something akin to a bat.
And he hears whimpering on the other side of him... but his vision, blurred as it is, swims lazily, not clearing.
Out of the hazed, concussed darkness, a familiar voice calls to him, "You ready to start?" wait what what is warpath doing here
what
On the other side of the room, screams.
Jaime Rodriquez palms the small glinting thing. He looks around him furtively as he gets to his locker room. He still can't believe the improbability of it all, that he pulled this ring out of a two hundred pound albacore... granted they had found some crazy shit in the mouths of fish on the San Trieste... but as soon as his fingers had pulled it out into the air, he had seen the other fishermen marvel at it. Especially Iban.
He pulled it closer, holding it almost to his chest. No. Wasn't right. None of them deserved it. It was his damn haul, he -
And just then, he saw Iban come in, snapping open his locker. Iban greeted him, but the blood pounding in Jaime's ears won't let him hear it. Iban had seniority on this ship, after all, he had the pick of his shifts and when he could take his PTO. All Jaime had was mounting medical debt from his little girl's surgery. And his son wanted more damn chemistry books. And Maria was talkin' bout saving up for Disney.
Iban smiled at him through a gap tooth, too friendly, too solicitous. Asking him que pasa. Jaime turned away from him.
This ring meant something... a literal gold nugget out of the mouth of a fish... sure it was a little tarnished due to being digested... but didn't somethin' like this only happen in a fairy tale?
And anyway, maybe he could get a little money for it once they got back to dock in San Diego...
Until then, his eyes shifted. Luis asked him, "<Bro, what's the deal, you hidin' something?>" but he just ignored it. If he caught them looking through his duffel tonight though, well... he was gonna keep his knife on him, just in case.
He shoved the ring into an interior pocket of his coveralls, making sure that it was in a place nobody was going to see. He didn't trust like that.
The golden band, who had already come a long, long way from the bridge it had been abandoned on, nestled deeply into Jaime's pocket.
It still had a ways to go on it's journey.
We don't follow the man as he turns a shoulder and walks back up the bridge, pelted as he goes by falling sleet; We follow the trajectory of the ring as it tumbles, freefalling.
The golden band cuts through the water with a plip that wouldn't have been audible from ten feet away, let alone from the bridge high above.
Darkness, then.
The icy waters of the Bay in December swallow the golden ring in an inky abyss, and the world is awash, everything seen through a glass darkly, black into blue.
Permitted to view it, as we are, we still see the ring fumbling end-over-end, heavy enough (due to the gold) to sink, but light enough to be caught and buffeted by underwater current and pushed aloft.
The ring continues it's sideways, downward trajectory, and an undersea world begins opening up around it as it drifts further from the bridge. Outcroppings of reef spotted with florae bloom in the darkness, and silvery schools of fish flash through the dark blue in shimmering, choreographed clusters. Anemone, sponge, bright tassels of plants and kelp can be seen as the ring begins to fall, almost swallowed by waving seagrass nestled in a forest of sponges.
The seagrasses are buffeted then on all sides by a swarm of silver fish moving in tandem, slicing through the water in high speeds and consuming the cephalopods and shellfish that live in the grass; The wake of their passing shifts the grasses up and sends up a cloud of dust from the outcropping.
And just as the ring had begun to settle towards the dirt, down Bay quite a ways from the bridge in which it was tossed, as a final, last wish, a silver, streaking blur move towards it, attracted by the glint of shiny in this dark environment, moves on it quick, snatching it in jaws that consume pounds of small prey per day to feed. Thunnus alalunga, the Pacific albacore tuna.
With a swish of it's tail, it rejoins the formation of the school, leaving the outcropping of rock and seagrass in a wake of dust, thinking no more of the golden band it had just consumed, which nonetheless joins it as a passenger.
In this way, the golden ring, inscribed, carefully, "To my heart", begins a journey, rather than ending it.
Spring is entering Pine Street in force this week, and I'm boxing up the remainders of my life here.
I guess maybe it was an empty dream, low-cost dental care for a neighborhood that's spent the last decade ruled by fear. It's certainly something I never had to reflect on much... hell, three blocks over, in my little glass storefront near enough to the boardwalk that tourists pass by throwing fries to the seagulls, for so long the world of Pine Street could have been foreign to me, if I'd just closed my eyes to it. If I turned the other way.
But something drew me back here after med school, that I now have nothing to reflect on except bitterness as I box up my diploma for the second time. Amazed that it had even survived being firebombed.
The decimation of my place of business was retaliation for... his stubborn defiance of the Death Riders, for... his violent reprisal against Tetsuya, but even more so, balking his boss... a man that... Danny apparently knew by name, but refused to tell me, and...
I sigh. No.
No, I can't pin any, or at least, all of this on Danny. Fact is, his initial wish, to come in and make something out of an old property I held the deed to, mirrored mine in establishing a dental practice within stones throw of the street I grew up on.
We both came here to give back. We both came here because it tied in to a specific point in our past.
It isn't about him, I tell myself as I lift the box containing the last few items of mine that survived the fire.
This... my dental practice ending, this is a result of my failure. Business didn't take off like I thought or hoped.
I didn't have the resources to hire the hygenists I needed, receptionists came and went and it... It doesn't matter, does it. I'm not a businesswoman. Owning your own establishment is business 101.
But there is, the cursing, the recriminating myself, that I wasn't good enough, that I didn't measure up.
I'd spent my entire lifetime in father's eyes toiling in your shadow, Hinata... You, the perfect, golden son; I shift my gaze through the window (That I've never bothered to replace) and glance out at the boardwalk, wistful for times gone bye; Can almost see us as-we-were, just two more little runt kids in Japantown, cavorting on the beach and playing tag weaving through tourists.
And from there, how the ghosts changed, and grew up. Hinata, the perfect, golden son, whom everyone (myself included) ignored the feet of clay, the listlessness of his moving from dream to dream.
And he was good at them, is what used to kill me. In his time, my brother was a polymath, who was instantly better at whatever he touched than I could hope to be. How hard I had to grow up, studying textbooks every night just to get a grunt of acknowledgement, but you, Hinata... you ran around all night, charismatic and free, a teenager too cool for the world. Better than me.
All well and good and so far in the past.
Bet if Hinata had owned this dental practice, he would have made it a success. Bet if Hinata was still in charge of the dojo, I'd never have to deal with Daniel Conner Fehl...
Who... crippled Hinata, when Hinata (following his guiding star) had gone to the motherland, had tried his new dream of becoming the best professional wrestler in the world... when he trained, befriended and matched up against a young, arrogant boy following his own father's dream and chasing him to Japan... Daniel had savagely broken him, in what Daniel, described later, as the first emergence of something terrible and dark inside of him.
Old wounds, I thought, as I began shifting the boxes containing the last, lingering bits of a start of something for myself.
That is something that both of our houses have in common... an unhealthy attachment to pleasing the ghosts, the memories of our father and brother figures, and the dogged resistance that meets us when we try desperately to start something new.
And, as I take one look back at the practice I let burn through my own fear of action long before a gang had chucked a Molotov through it's plate-glass, that trickling fear comes over me once again. Not even that Danny is right, that none of it matters.
But my own shapeless anxiety that it never did.
I vow, as I close my trunk, that this will be the last I think of it. Think of Pine Street, think of... Danny, and whether or not he's right, or even, in some small way, think of giving something to this community where Hinata and I grew up that has never given me anything back. Nah. You know what. Fuck 'em.
It's time I start living for me, right?
I wonder if Rita, who came up with me through med school would want to meet for drinks; I know she works as a hygenist for a dental practictioner in Inglewood, and, yeah, the pay would be terrible and I'd be not even close to being my own boss but I could start a life.
Maybe I could put Pine Street in my rear view mirror, exactly as he had said I should, months ago...
As these mundane, slightly leaden thoughts flit through my brain, I do look up in my rear view mirror...
And a large, tattooed man, a grizzled white gaijin with what looked like burn scars and a rotund keg belly covering ropy, corded muscle, was sitting in my back seat. He grinned at me, wolfishly, as he leaned forward, forearms on my seats.
"Hiya doc," the menacing white man said, his voice gravel and nails, "My employer thinks it's past time the two of you had a reunion, and who am I to say no to family bonding."
He reached a hand over my face, and I had just enough time to register the sharp chemical taste filling my sinuses before darkness overcame me like a cloud.
The school of tuna ranged farther from the Bay area, cutting like an evolving, roving cloud that pitched and eddied through the water; Occassionally, a sudden shock, or the advent of a predator slicing through like an arrow would scatter the albacore.
The albacore still carrying an oddly shaped pebble (to it), had it the brain capacity, would have been filled with daily discomfort at the way the golden band had lodged deep into a recess in it's throat, as it was, it's movements occasionally jerked.
The school moved on with the time and tide.
Business as usual in their food web, members it it's pack were picked off one by one, swallowed whole or bitten in half, and the instinctual acts of mating and catching food were all that consumed it.
Came the day when the school found itself in the open water, nothing around for seemingly miles, and blissfully unaware, the fish could not hear the boss music coming for it if they had tried. To a crustacean on the ocean floor, seeing an albacore descend upon it with it's gullet wide open would be a harbinger of doom, if it only had the brain space for such an existential concept; For the tuna, much the same applies to a rival school of dolphins.
The fish do not feel that fear or trepidation, but still, the looming shadows and quick movements are enough to inspire them to bolt.
And so the albacore shattered like light through a prism, their silver sides a shimmering explosion as they scatter to the winds, and the albacore with the ring in it's throat went it's own way.
Separated from it's school, it's speed slowed in time, as it recognized it was away from the deeper parts of the ocean floor teeming with the life that perserved it, and the company of the other like simple fish in it's group... exposed, if such were in it's kin, it swam a little further... taking refuge under a large shadow from the sun's rays. The albacore, such as it did, did not recognize this passing shadow over it for the portent it was; What tuna knows a fishing boat from first glance, or even has the memory capacity to hold on to that?
So concerned with swimming forward, the albacore saw something glint in the light, just underneath that big, strange shadow, and it gave no further thought than shiny and dove towards it, fin pushing, hundred of pounds of tuna surging forward.
It's jaws closed around the shiny.
"Got damn, it's a big'un!"
A captured albacore on a line, flopping helplessly on a deck, thrashing in it's throes of being unable to breathe this strange atmosphere. An excruciating pain of a barb shoved into the meat of it's throat.
"Two hunnert pounds, easy - "
"I got the hook."
"Hey... there's somethin' in it's throat?"
I swam to consciousness... and I beheld a ghost.
The first thing to happen was to reject this. No. This can't be. It can't be.
But he stood there over me, glowering down at me, one hand on an ornate cane. For a moment, hysteria clamped around my throat and I nearly seized, this couldn't be him; And it was different.
He wasn't the young man I knew who'd left San Fran at eighteen to go to a homeland his parents had left behind.
He wasn't carefree, a cheeky smile on a disposition that made you immediately forgive him for being that much better than you were under any circumstances, that papered over any jealousy there ever could have been through rose colors... That was the one I knew. Not this one.
Sallow, sunken-cheeked, his eyebrows knitted, his face perpetually scowling with all of the contempt, his shoulders slumped from the weight of the world.
But he spoke. His voice thickened by cigar smoke, blackened by his rage against the world that had passed him by.
"Sister."
And it was him.
"HINATA?"
He didn't answer, not at first, he brought a cigar to his lips and inhaled, the cherry glowing briefly, and he exhaled through his nostrils. Considering me, keenly.
Over his shoulder, he called, "Adam."
The white man who'd drugged me, seen in full, was frightening to look at in his biker leathers, his gloves, and his swarthy facial hair. He had the past-prime look of someone who was forced to take a job due to bad life decisions, and although he towered over the emaciated figure next to him leaning on his cane, he listened attentively.
"You know what's next," he told Adam, who grinned wickedly. The former wrestler, now thug, just turned and walked away.
"So," I said uneasily, not liking where any of this started or has gone since then.
"So," Hinata (?) said, tension in his voice, despite all of the years between the last time I'd seen him. But he offered nothing more, not an explanation of why he had disappeared, his body reportedly fished out of the Bay; Why he had let the kendo dojo that had become his new dream after returning him go fallow. And after everything, I had nothing left to give him, no tears, no joy at being reunited... because I knew what him summoning me like this meant; The penny dropping, I knew the name of the secret boss of this town, had been all along.
He didn't quite get the emotional reaction he'd wanted, that disappointment showed on his face... Sorry, brother. I always was a disappointment, in the end.
He smoked, furiously, and from my place in the chair, I looked at the lavishly decorated office. (Danny would have recognized it, he stormed in here months before, and had attempted to make a deal that would get him out of Japantown. I didn't know that, then.) The frescoes on the wall had gold leaf, and there were knick knacks that would have fit perfectly well in a Sax Roehmer yellow peril novel, incense holders, golden lions. The strains of a violin playing Salieri. I'd swear Hinata was just doing it for a bit. But there was little about my older brother that appeared mirthful or whimsical.
Not wanting to let the suddenly awkward silence spin out, I pushed, "So are you going to kill me?"
"Kill you?" He started, "Rumiko, I haven't killed anyone since this started..."
"Bullshit, Hinata.... you were the hand behind the black SUV's roaming the block for how long now, and in retaliation your men... Your men..." It was still hard thinking of her... One last gift for the year. The death of Tomie. How it broke the Hasegawa family; How it made everything in the world come apart. "Your men shot a little girl."
That concerned him, and he frowned, "I didn't know anything about that. What was her name?" I fumed, and he blinked; If he was playing a role he was the best actor I'd ever seen.
"No, that can't..." Then, angrier, "Your men have been ravaging this block for the last years. All along. Extortion. Burning people out of their homes. Selling drugs. I came here to look after your affairs when you disappeared... and you were here? The whole time? As a... as a drug kingpin?"
His expression soured, and he leaned forward on his cane, favoring one leg. His lower limbs were painfully skinny, and his right was not true, and probably hadn't been for decades.
"I'm the drug kingpin? Are you sure that isn't your boyfriend? Daniel Fehl, the Beast Unleashed onto Japantown?"
"He's not my boyfriend..."
His voice rose over mine, an accusation, "The Purveyor of Anarchy? The Patron Saint of Nihilism? And you... let him hole up in squalor in the dojo that was my work... and you kiss his booboos and speak kindly when he's sad, and you bring him soup??"
Each word more of a lash than the next, decades of anger bubbling up. It's almost enough that I have to remind myself that, as Daniel put it, the two of them parted on friendly terms in 2008... but now, Hinata stands before me, and the effort of his rage makes him shrink back, trembling weakly.
I look away. I can't... look at my brother like this. Glowering, his thin cheeks wasted and not by time. He looks like a nightmare, worse than father ever did. All of father's disapproval. All of his anger. All of the petulance, taking out on a world gone by. I recognized it in the instant and I couldn't reconcile it with my brother as-he-was. What happened to you?
Breath shaking, he stands back, the effort of leaning against his cane to help his bad leg now more apparent, and he waves the cigar in the air.
"We need to reset... this... isn't how I wanted to see you again, for the first time in... all of these years," he says, tinged with genuine regret.
He walks around the chair where they'd sat me, to a desk, and leans against it for support. My legs are still numbed, but I can at least turn my torso and look at him. And I see the conflict in him as he bows his head, arms folded, thinking.
"Where did you go, Hina?" Tears are welling up in my eye, angry and so hurt. "We thought you were gone. All we heard from the medical examiner was that your body was unrecognizable because of how long it had been in the Bay... What we buried..."
"Yes, I regret the deception I practiced with that cadaver... Do you know how hard it is to watch your own funeral from afar?"
A pause, then as an afterthought, "You looked beautiful that day. Mom looked broken. Father..."
I sob back a little laugh, "All of the light went out of Father when you went away, Hina. Both times, when you went to Japan to train to be a wrestler, and when you -"
"I know."
"You were always the apple of his eye. How he held you on his knee as you gushed about your dreams... and it always seemed like you had a new dream every month! And how he indulged it, and smiled when you told him your newest, crazy dream!" A beat, then, "Really, it didn't surprise him when you said you wanted to become a wrestler. He just smiled, distantly, as he did, and said, "Ahh, Hina-kun..." But with me? Everything was harder. He never listened to my dreams, Hina. He just stared at me as if he didn't know what to say. He just said, awkwardly, "Stick to your studies.""
"I wish I could apologize for that. For you living, so long, in my shadow," my brother admitted, but I continued.
"But when you... when you DIED, when you left your dojo without even a note? And we had to wait MONTHS? I was in college, Hina. I was studying so hard to make something... and I knew that you returned from Japan and things were never the same. I knew you didn't have that reckless, listless flamboyancy, to dream a new crazy dream every month, I knew that things weren't the same after -"
(......After Daniel injured you......)
" --After you got hurt... but I really thought the kendo dojo, what you came back to this city and poured yourself into... was enough to make you happy?"
He holds his hands out, struggling to put it into words and finding none, before letting them fall. And the truth is that sometimes, when our dreams are taken from us in certain ways, ever after, we go through life never being able to replicate that feeling. It's a hole nothing can fill.
It's almost ironic in that. In a way, Daniel and he are more alike than they think. Brothers, after all.
I shake my head. I still can't believe it. "But you survived... how -"
He muses for a second, and then, stubs the cigar down firmly into an ashtray, some of that old bitterness crawling back in.
"The truth is, that I did go to the bridge that year to take my own life. Because, and you'll laugh at this, an old friend came to me, and showed me that everything I hoped to build in Japantown was all for nothing."
"Do you think he's a good person, deep down, Rumiko?" He says, holding the golden tip of his cane up to eye level, examining it harshly, mouth puckered. "Do you think he came to my old dojo, seeing it in the state of disrepair of being ravaged, turned into a drug den and homeless camp, the shambles left of it after I abandoned it, and... out of the goodness of his heart... he decided he would fix something broken up... restore it... as a favor to me? As a symbol of the brotherhood we shared when we were teenagers... before he SHATTERED my LEG and TORE my LIGAMENTS to such a degree that, several reconstructive surgeries and numerous pins later... will never allow me to even walk without extreme pain?"
"I..........."
"You do," He says, voice wrathful with judgment. "Does it surprise you, then, that he showed up to me, too, looking for the succor, the validation that deep down he isn't as bad as he wants his image to be... that there is still a way for him to look at his own face in the mirror?"
"This isn't about him." It isn't quite in defense of Daniel Fehl. I don't... know if I can defend him, truth be told.
"It's always been about him, because he won't let it be about anything else!! Hinata explodes, hurling a glass from his desk. This is not a calm, composed kingpin of the street. Hinata is a decades old, scarred over wound.
Without his cane he hobbles to the front of me, until we're inches apart, his lip peeling back in a snarl and Hinata's eyes burn into mine.
"Daniel took my entire dream and shattered it along with my leg, and then what did he do? He threw it away in a juvenile quien-es-mas-macho contest with that fat idiot Warpath I've hired... a man even more pathetic and even more needy to be the center of attention. Daniel threw away his career just so he could say he had it... and he came to me, in the months after he lost the career that again, I HAD GIVEN MY LEG FOR... he showed up, hat in hand, to Japantown, and wanted me to take him in. But he told me that everything we fought for, together, everything we encountered in the House of Pain, the grueling training... was for nothing. It meant nothing to him. It brought him no closure, no satisfaction. He ended my career, my life, for a chance to chase after something that he ended up throwing away. Do you know how that felt to me? So I took that... and I walked out of this dojo, that suddenly seemed hollow. A second place trophy in a contest I was never going to win. Because I came up against Daniel Fehl... the man who never has let anything stop him from grasping the brass ring... And the man who, once he's savaged everyone in his path for it... once he's crippled friend and brother... shafted ally and partner... HE THROWS IT AWAY BECAUSE IT DOESN'T MAKE HIM SATISFIED??"
It sounds like you've been harboring this grudge for a long time, brother...
Again, Hinata sees my face. And it's plain, after all of this, after all of his bluster and rage is spent out, he doesn't want to hurt me. He backs up, even though it obviously pains him to do so.
"So I walked to the Golden Gate Bridge that night, fully intending to jump off."
"Fun fact about the bridge; The fatality rate of jumping from it is 98%. There is an art to going over the side, an art of drowning, if you will, that isn't taught to anyone... first and foremost, do not jump feet first, you'll break so many bones once you hit the water, and you are immediately sucked into the current. So, provided that you're able to avoid the security, and find yourself on the ledge looking down... You have to absolutely commit to it. You have to dive head first."
"But imagine the view once you're halfway down."
"Imagine turning, and looking back up to the bridge; Time slowing to a crawl, as you realize that the despair that robbed all of your life of meaning was a fleeting thing in itself, that could pass you by if only you let it."
"Because that's the double-edged sword of nothing matters, right? The truly zen act of nihilism in the universe, that humbles you at a moment you think is your weakest? That you know that this didn't have to be the end, and now, you feel stupid that you've taken it."
"And the anger that comes with that, oh, the rising epiphany that strikes you that this isn't because of you... the reason you walked to this bridge to jump off of it is that one miserable piece of shit came along and ruined your life."
"It'll drive you mad, somewhat. And believe me... time is relative when you fall, so you feel like you have seconds, but also all the time in the world to come to these realizations."
"I hit the water and it destroyed my body just as badly as Daniel's heel hook did, Kyoto 2001; I landed in it with the force of a comet, and immediately blacked out... but again, I thought, as I began to sink... that Daniel did this to me. And despite it all, despite the pain shooting through me... despite the darkness creeping in at the edges of my vision as I began to sink, I didn't let myself drown."
He sits back against the desk. I look at the waste of his body, after it had knit itself together. And I can understand his rage at the world... he had to birth himself back into it in a reversed baptism.
"Brother..."
He doesn't look at me for a second. "So I tell you, I faced the darkest nights of my soul thanks to everything this man has done... and you still, somehow, think he's capable of good. When it should have been him jumping off that bridge that night... it would have done us all a favor."
For a long, pregnant moment, I have to let the silence play out. I see his fall in my mind's eye. The desperation, the loss of everything that mattered in his life, and the terrified panic that set in as he found himself looking up from halfway down.
"I see... a reflection, Hinata."
"A reflection."
"That's all."
He smiles at me, then. Not the bright smile of an honor student, prize athlete, apple of our father's eye, this is the cold, merciless, icy grin of a revenant who emerged from a choppy, frigid Bay. We'll see, this smile promises such torments. We'll see.
"Come with me, Rumiko."
"Why?" I'm not liking this... but I also look around, not seeing where Adam had gone to and not liking that feeling.
"If you can believe it, my own sojourn that night wasn't the only time someone in Daniel's sphere of influence chose to try the bridge, but... funnily enough, he's still here. I wonder, will he have the same perspective on the matter as I do?"
"Wait, what? What are you talking about?" I rub my wrists and ankles, trying to get some feeling into them.
We've crossed the room, and along one wall, there is a two-way partition of glass overlooking a small side office. There are three figures inside, two seated... and, between them, there's a third man, a large man standing.
"Hinata........ what have you done..."
Hinata smiles at me.
And this time, his smile is genuine.
"Fuck," Danny groans.
He feels blood on his temple, sticky and hot... he has been hit enough with blunt instruments to know, from the pounding in his head and the cotton wrapped railroad spikes shooting into his synapses that he was hit with something akin to a bat.
And he hears whimpering on the other side of him... but his vision, blurred as it is, swims lazily, not clearing.
Out of the hazed, concussed darkness, a familiar voice calls to him, "You ready to start?" wait what what is warpath doing here
what
On the other side of the room, screams.
Jaime Rodriquez palms the small glinting thing. He looks around him furtively as he gets to his locker room. He still can't believe the improbability of it all, that he pulled this ring out of a two hundred pound albacore... granted they had found some crazy shit in the mouths of fish on the San Trieste... but as soon as his fingers had pulled it out into the air, he had seen the other fishermen marvel at it. Especially Iban.
He pulled it closer, holding it almost to his chest. No. Wasn't right. None of them deserved it. It was his damn haul, he -
And just then, he saw Iban come in, snapping open his locker. Iban greeted him, but the blood pounding in Jaime's ears won't let him hear it. Iban had seniority on this ship, after all, he had the pick of his shifts and when he could take his PTO. All Jaime had was mounting medical debt from his little girl's surgery. And his son wanted more damn chemistry books. And Maria was talkin' bout saving up for Disney.
Iban smiled at him through a gap tooth, too friendly, too solicitous. Asking him que pasa. Jaime turned away from him.
This ring meant something... a literal gold nugget out of the mouth of a fish... sure it was a little tarnished due to being digested... but didn't somethin' like this only happen in a fairy tale?
And anyway, maybe he could get a little money for it once they got back to dock in San Diego...
Until then, his eyes shifted. Luis asked him, "<Bro, what's the deal, you hidin' something?>" but he just ignored it. If he caught them looking through his duffel tonight though, well... he was gonna keep his knife on him, just in case.
He shoved the ring into an interior pocket of his coveralls, making sure that it was in a place nobody was going to see. He didn't trust like that.
The golden band, who had already come a long, long way from the bridge it had been abandoned on, nestled deeply into Jaime's pocket.
It still had a ways to go on it's journey.