Gensomaden Saiyuki Fan Fiction ❯ Suite on Rte. 86 ❯ Resonance ( Chapter 8 )

Resonance   They had introduced us purposefully when he first got there, and we had avoided each other purposefully for weeks after that. But I was always aware of him when he was around, his blank expression lingering in the corner of my eye. He was quiet, polite, a small mousy boy with big glasses who hid the unsettling age in his stare behind book after book. No one was going to adopt him with an attitude like that, which, I suspected, was how he planned it; he was punishing himself for whatever weight of sorrow he was carting around.   I noticed because I notice things, not because I cared in particular. I would never be adopted, either, because most people couldn't stand the truth and I didn't care to humor anyone. Here was as good as anywhere was likely to be; I had food and shelter, and I had them all trained to leave me the hell alone.   It was my ninth birthday when we finally spoke. A coincidence. They only celebrated birthdays once a year, in the summer, because some of the kids didn't know theirs. He walked up to my table at lunch, the corner one that everyone knew was mine, and said, "May I sit here?"   I glared at him, but it didn't seem to faze him in the least. I hadn't really expected it to.   "Do what you want."   The second time we spoke was after he moved in with me. My roommate was adopted, and since he had been sitting at my table for meals, they thought we were friends.   We may have been, at that.   I was lying awake, listening to the rain, and he was lying awake grinding his teeth and feeling sorry for himself. The tiny shadows of raindrops were trickling across the ceiling.   "Everything that happens, happens."   He was quiet for a while, shifting almost soundlessly on the creaky mattress.   "But everything happens for a reason," he said, more steadily than I'd been expecting. “Cause and effect.”   "So?"   "So murderers shouldn't be punished for killing innocent people?"   I rolled my eyes. "Blame is tricky. Most people don't know how to use it."   When I looked over at him he had his back to me, shoulder caught in a corner of rain-soaked light.   "If you actually murdered anyone, you'd be in court or in juvie, not here," I told him in my best stop-feeling-so-damn-sorry-for-yourself tone.   "Courts don't know how to use blame right either," he muttered.   I grinned into the dark, quickly so he wouldn't see.   "Of course not."   "You know, you don't fool me," he said and I was taken aback at the venom in his tone.   We didn't say anything else that night, and I didn't sleep until the sky faded into gray.     Even before Bran I had liked the library because it was one of the few places they would leave me relatively unsupervised. After Bran, I spent even more time there while he devoured books by the dozen.   In the reading room, squatting amidst fraying sofas and claw-footed chairs there was an antique sideboard. It was vast and old, its dark stain cracked by the fingers of many years. I had first heard it when I was only six or seven, muttering to itself about the company and the butler and darling Louise. I had checked in all the drawers and cabinets but found no one. It hadn’t answered when I talked to it.   Bran’s favorite chair was right next to that sideboard until I’d asked how he could stand the way it rattled on and on. Then, I’d had to explain and then I’d had to show him all the other things in the library that I could hear, old books down in the stacks, and a certain wall, and the youngish blonde librarian. It had occurred to me before that most people don’t hear as much as I do; I remember thinking it was typical of them to ignore something so obvious. But it hadn’t occurred to me that since I could hear things I was different. This unsettled me for almost a week before I remembered that I didn’t care what they thought of me.   When I got sick of school or Bran or staring at the Library’s somber paneling and dusty fluorescents, I’d go walk by the river and let the soft sounds of the brown water drown all the voices out.     Everyone called Feng Long by his full name because no one knew whether Feng or Long was his family name, if either, in fact, was. The first time I met him was the first and only time Bran talked me into going to Aikido with him. He was tiny and ancient and pale, his hair bone-white, posture ruler-straight, eyes milky with cataracts in a strangely ageless face. Bran had told me he was blind, but I could still feel him looking at me as I walked through the door, staring at me knowingly as I watched Bran guide the novices through their exercises.   He was excellent at faking it, but he couldn’t fool me.   His tiny office somehow gave the impression of being both overcrowded and meticulously organized. He didn’t smile when Bran introduced us. This man brought out something strangely familiar in him, something disciplined and cool. They spoke in formal tones and I shifted uncomfortably on a narrow, straight-backed chair. One of the ornate covered vases on his shelves was projecting a fearful, whispered sobbing. It was annoyingly hard to ignore.   “Are you still looking for a place to live?” the old man asked.   Bran nodded, almost a bow, “Yes. The orphanage badly needs the space.”   “It happens that one of my apartments is ready to be rented.”   Bran did bow, this time, and shot me a cheerful glance that said ‘don’t screw this up.’   “I am honored that you would offer it to us, Sensei.”   “We’ll look,” I said.   Feng Long’s gaze on me was unnervingly direct, all pretense of blindness dropped. His abrupt, wide smile was even more unnerving, though it disappeared before I’d really registered it.  His teeth were too long. Sharp.   "You're very self-contained, Shane," he said, “But then you’ve always been that way, haven’t you? Very well. Are you free this afternoon?”   His building was a rambling brick monstrosity which took up half a block, housing dojo, apartments, offices and empty store fronts upstairs, and a jumbled mass of dusty, loud junk in the basement. He offered to trade us work for rent and I was recruited to clean, catalogue and sell his vast and arcane collections within a week of moving in. He was infuriatingly eccentric, scheduled his life to the minute, gave long, detailed directions for everything, and liked to imply that he knew me better than I knew myself. Blunt and unfailingly forthright, he had high expectations for everyone and didn’t accept excuses.   I liked him.   Our apartment was a tiny two bedroom which would have been cramped had we owned much of anything. The old steam radiators sputtered and hissed and heated the top floor unbearably, so that we had to keep a window open even in the coldest weeks of winter. Bran cooked well and cleaned religiously, all except for his room, which gradually filled with books until he had to sleep on the couch when he was home. I wondered where he’d learned how to do those things, though I never asked.   Bran’s girlfriend, Tamar, lived downstairs for nearly a year before moving on. She was a snotty bitch with an uncanny knack for showing up right when I’d finished making coffee. She was older than us by a couple years, poised, proud and hot-tempered. But the most annoying thing about her was the way she projected, all in half-musical tones and remembered sounds, like wind or doors slamming or distant bells. Whenever she was around, it got hard to tell which sounds were real and which were only her. I had to forbid them from having sex in our apartment. She worked as a runner and body-guard and I didn’t care to know what else. She and Bran had met when the old man hired her to watch Bran’s ass for the pickup of a particularly valuable antique. He had a bad tendency to take on too much by himself if no one was keeping track of him, one that Feng Long was careful to account for.   I wasn’t worried about the jobs he did for Feng Long. At the time, the idea of the old man being involved in anything illegal struck me as inherently ridiculous. I also wasn’t worried about him tutoring or teaching at the dojo or the odd jobs he did around the building. It was the research I had a bad feeling about, one that mounted steadily as he began taking fewer and fewer jobs from the old man and dropped out of Aikido.  His clients and informants started showing up at the store, breezing through my clearly marked ‘employees only’ door and into the back without more than a shifty glance in my direction.   I bought a gun and started keeping it under the front counter. When the dusky clutter of the antiques and their rattling chorus of half-voices gave me a headache, I’d drive Bran’s junky Olds out into the fields and shoot things until I felt better. The most annoying voice was the one in Feng Long’s office, which was right through the wall behind the counter. It hadn’t stopped crying once since we’d moved in.     “Tamar is pregnant,” Bran told me one morning as he whisked eggs with sugar. He’d started smoking recently and I still wasn’t used to the bitter ash-scent that clung to his clothes.   “Really,” I said, flatly. It had been a few years since they broke it off and Bran hadn’t gone on so much as a date since, as far as I knew. I had thought he’d snapped out of his self-pity by then.   “Apparently the father’s an old friend, a soldier stationed in Peking. She says he’s talking about marrying her,” his voice was utterly even and unconcerned, as if he were trying to gauge my reaction.   I snorted dubiously, “She’s too self-absorbed to be a mother… or a wife.”           &n bsp;             ;            &n bsp;             ;            &n bsp;             ;            &n bsp;             ;            &n bsp; “They say parenthood changes you,” he said magnanimously.   “Some people never change,” I said, going back to my paper.   He smiled at me benignly but didn’t comment.     “What makes you think he isn’t still working for me?” Feng Long asked, coolly, when I stormed over to his office to complain.   “You’re too honest for that kind of business, old man.”   “It’s honesty that makes me successful. Trust is the foundation of all relationships- business and otherwise,” he’d said.   “That’s not what I mean. His latest client is Oleg Dibrova. Are you saying you got him that contract?”    “You’re trying to accuse me of being a hypocrite. Consistency is a virtue of small minds, Shane,” and his voice took on a familiar hint of mockery as he continued, “The law has as little or as much to do with justice or virtue as the people who create and enforce it. I’m old enough to know it first hand. I’m surprised, really, that you’re so unsympathetic. You’ve always struck me as a man who lives only for himself.”   “And you’ve always struck me as a man with sense,” I bit out, “If you get yourself killed it’s none of my business, but leave Bran out of it.”   “Ungrateful as ever,” he smiled his knife-edged smile and rose abruptly. “You’ll probably want to put those new books on sale,” he said, ushering me towards the door, “after you weed out the valuable ones, of course. And make sure the displays are dusted every day, inside and out. You only think I don’t notice.”     Our kitchen was barely large enough for a fridge, stove and table. The windows faced south over the weedy backyard, the fences, roofs and smoke stacks. On clear days the river glittered in the distance.  Bran grew basil and lemongrass in plastic pots on the sill above the sink, though I was the one who had to water them when he was out of town.  Now that he was researching full time he was away at least as much as he was there.   I should have known who it was when the knock echoed the contented gurgle of our aging coffee maker. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days. Her hair had been combed recently but she wasn’t wearing makeup.   “Bran’s not here,” I told her.   “Oh,” She said, softly, “I, um-“   I had barely restrained myself from rolling my eyes.   “You never were any good at asking for things,” I told her, standing aside to let her in.   She laughed weakly, “True.”   I sat her down, poured her coffee into the blue mug she’d always used. She downed it black, still scalding hot, then tried to discretely blink the water from her eyes. I folded my arms and pointedly didn’t look at the paper I’d left lying open.   She reached across the scarred, rickety table and traced a fingertip down my forearm, parsing a line of characters inked there.   “When did you get these?” she asked.   “A while ago.”   We were quiet for some time. She poured herself more coffee and sipped at it slowly.   Finally, she said, “I lost the baby.”   Her frosty lavender eyes sought mine out. I refused to be the first to look away. She sounded like trickling, crystalline water: vulnerable, utterly lacking expectation.    “You need to stay here for a while,” I’d asked, though I already knew the answer.   She looked down, her lips quirking somewhere between a smile and a rictus of pain. Her water-sound dispersed in a relieved whoosh. I went back to my paper, let her steal the business section. We sat at the table until the afternoon shifted into gold.   Tamar stayed for three weeks, putting up with my cooking, doing the dishes and sleeping on the couch. She left the morning Bran was supposed to return. I woke when she perched on the side of my bed, and she’d said “Thank you,” and planted a kiss on the corner of my mouth as I sat up, and she was gone.   The only thing I told Bran was that she’d lost the baby. For a while, she showed up at the apartment every now and then. Once, she brought the simpering boy she was dating over to introduce him. She was upset when I asked her bluntly what she saw in him. After that she stopped coming by.     Feng Long was a man of habit, predictable, but he’d been going down to the dojo less often than usual, apparently orchestrating some large contract. It had taken them several days to ask after him.  His phone was busy for hours, and Bran was away again, possibly working on whatever deal the old man was cooking up, so I’d had to close the shop and go looking for him.   The stench in his office made me reel back when I opened the door. If I’d had anything in my stomach, I would have vomited. As it was, I retreated down the hall until the dry heaving stopped, found a cloth to hold over my face.   My hands were shaking minutely, a fine tremor that I couldn’t repress. His long hair was tangled in the limp pinkness of his intestines, congealed in a matted, black puddle. I could see a concave white glimmer in the red obscurity of the lateral incision. His face was twisted, jaws projecting forward too far, strange teeth more knife-like than I’d remembered. The telephone was lying on the floor, receiver smeared with blood. A fly flew out of his mouth and landed on his open, milk-blue eye, buzzing loud in the silence. The crying in his office was gone.   It had taken me twenty minutes to collect myself enough to call the cops. The next week was a blur of questioning, funeral arrangements, calls at all hours of the night. I tried to open the store twice before I gave up and kept it locked. Bran arrived home just in time to keep me from strangling the idiot detective, who had come by again to ask me the same questions again because they still didn’t believe this was about the contract with Dibrova he’d turned down. As far as they were concerned, said contract, or indeed any contracts between the two had never existed. The old man had been too goddamn good.     The map Skuratov drew for us had been accurate, but not detailed enough. We’d gotten lost in the maze of alleys that made up the warehouse district, but the voice from Feng Long’s office was there, somewhere, and I’d been able to follow it well enough to get us back on track. It was undeniably the same voice, though it wasn’t crying anymore aside from an occasional hitch like a hiccupped sob. Instead, it seemed to be concentrating fiercely on something, breaking intermittently into unintelligible, babbling calls. The closer to it we got, the more it sounded like it was coming from everywhere at once.   “Get the child,” Skuratov had said, “I don’t care what else you do, but get the child out of there.”   Our breath was solidifying in the air, furring Bran’s stocking cap with frost. His mouth was set in an expressionless line, eyes darting sharply toward any hint of movement. He looked ready to kill someone.