The Winter Quarters

by Anna Veriani

  It was just like when Hiro had first seen Kai posing as the Waka-Okami. Why did it bother him so much?

  The thought was forgotten as Ya-san pulled out a chair for him. “Sit down. We don’t actually want you on your feet the whole time. You’re no host.”

  Kai smiled, sat, and was quickly pulled into conversation about books and art and rice and all the things Ya-san liked. It felt incredibly good to be talking about ideas and not people, not himself. He popped a mushroom into his mouth, squishing it satisfyingly between his teeth, and thought his little meal hadn’t turned out too bad at all.

  Chapter Eight

  YA-SAN said her goodnights and left them in a tatami room to roll out their futons. Kai exhaled, and his breath puffed out in a frosty cloud.

  “It’s freezing in here.” Lightning flashed through the window, hailstones pounding so hard against the walls he felt like the house was going to come tumbling down.

  “I don’t think old country folk feel the cold or the heat,” Hiro said. “They were never spoiled with modern conveniences.”

  “Well, I feel it.”

  “I saw a space heater in the closet.” Hiro slid the closet door open and pulled out a tiny heater. “Bet you a hundred yen this hasn’t been turned on since 1977.”

  “Don’t care,” Kai whispered, rubbing his arms. Even his futon was freezing cold. “Need it.”

  It smelled like smoke when it first started, but in a few minutes the room went from unbearable to tolerable, if not exactly cozy. Hiro turned out the light and slid under his blanket, inches from Kai.

  Minutes passed. Kai was wide-awake.

  You’re in a new phase of life. You’re so busy, and you don’t have much time for him anymore.

  It felt so natural to lie in close proximity with Hiro night after night. But it was like there was a wall between them, like if he reached out to touch Hiro right now, their skin would never quite make contact.

  Part of him was still in New York. Not in a good way, but like he was trapped there even when he had come all the way to Japan to get some relief.

  “Kai?”

  Oh, shit.

  Kai had actually reached out. And he had brushed Hiro’s hand beneath Hiro’s blanket, an undeniable, intentional touch.

  “You still up?” Kai whispered, like maybe he’d meant to merely nudge Hiro awake but simply took his hand instead. Normal stuff.

  “Yeah. What’s wrong?”

  Of course he said what’s wrong and not why. Even in the dark, Hiro could read him perfectly.

  Did Hiro know about Obaachan and Ya-san? Kai didn’t want to mention it if he had no idea, but maybe Hiro was thinking the same thing.

  “You said Obaachan insisted you get your rice from Ya-san, right?” Kai said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So they’re friends?”

  “Nope,” Hiro said easily. “Just a business relationship. Obaachan likes the rice a lot. Why?”

  Damn it. Kai couldn’t bring it up if Hiro didn’t already know. Clearly this was something Obaachan didn’t want her grandchildren to know about. So why had she told him?

  “No reason,” Kai whispered. He rolled over, facing away from Hiro and closer to the heater. The hot air blew on his face and he closed his eyes, willing himself to fall asleep.

  HIRO had trouble falling asleep when there was something obviously wrong with Kai. He lay for a while, looking up at the ceiling. He was just drifting off when Kai gasped beside him.

  Kai had fallen asleep with his back facing him, but he jerked in his sleep, twitching until he was flat on his back. The heater’s red coils lit his face. His eyelashes were wet, his eyelids flickering frantically in his sleep.

  “Kai,” Hiro said softly, wiping away a tear that streamed down his cheek. “Are you having a nightmare? Kai, wake up.”

  He nudged him, and Kai responded with a brutal swat to the nose.

  “Turn off the cameras,” Kai growled, rolling over and shoving a pillow over his head.

  “Kai, it’s me. Hiro. You’re in Noto.”

  Kai stilled, then pushed the pillow away, rubbing his eyes and looking up at Hiro.

  “You okay, man?” Hiro said.

  “Yeah.” He reached over and turned off the space heater. “I always have bad dreams when I’m hot.”

  “What was your dream?” Hiro asked carefully.

  Kai blinked at him. Slowly, assessing whether or not he could confide in Hiro. Of course Kai could tell him anything, and they both knew that by now.

  “When you lived in New York…,” Kai started quietly.

  The moment the words were spoken, Hiro relaxed. Because this was the core of it, wasn’t it? New York was eating up at Kai, and they needed to talk about it.

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you ever see anything that upset you? Like on the streets or subway?”

  “Kai. I lived in New York. I saw weird, messed-up shit every day.”

  “Did any of it bother you?” Kai asked. “How did you…. How did we….” He shook his head, rubbing his temple. Was he getting a headache again?

  “What did you see?” Hiro asked gently. “Did something happen?” A sudden protective urge hit him. “Did someone do something to you?”

  “No,” Kai said quickly. “I don’t know. It’s stupid. Like you said: weird, messed-up shit is normal in New York.”

  He made to reach for the pillow he’d tossed aside, and Hiro said, “Tell me. Tell me what happened.”

  KAI hadn’t told anyone except for his mom, because he couldn’t justify why the story should be told. Hiro was exactly right: he saw homeless people literally every single day, usually from behind the window of one of his chauffeured cars, sometimes right outside the front doors of his apartment building. That this one small incident should have given him recurring nightmares since September made no sense.

  “Last September there was this children’s charity event in Harlem,” he said. “It was part of a literacy campaign, and I wanted to go read picture books to elementary school students.”

  “Did you?” Hiro shifted closer to Kai.

  “Yeah. But I didn’t find out until the last moment that the Big D had to go with me, too.” Kai grimaced. “He invited all this press, and there ended up being more camerapeople than children. All these flashing lights, this huge camera right next to my face, the Big D stopping the reading every two seconds to pose for a shot. The whole thing made me nervous. I kept stuttering, and all the kids were distracted,” he said. “I felt… like an alien. No one let me really talk to the kids, like they thought I was too superficial—no, artificial—to know how to talk to a kid.”

  “I’m sure they were more afraid the kids were going to misbehave,” Hiro assured. “Pick their noses in front of you or something.”

  “Like I would have cared,” Kai muttered. “It just sucked. The moment it was over, Duffy made us leave immediately.”

  There’d been a limo waiting for them. Kai would never have booked it. People hollered at him and Duffy on the street as the security ushered them into the car, and Kai had been so humiliated. A limo. It was cheap, tacky, tone-deaf.

  And then the car doors closed behind him and Duffy, and they ended up stuck in Harlem traffic because it was five o’clock on a Monday evening and everyone else was getting home from work. They stewed in the street, Duffy growing progressively more irritated.

  “He was so mad I’d planned this event, even though he must have known I hadn’t asked him to come,” Kai said. “And then he looked out the window, and there was this man begging on the street with a cardboard sign.” It said he was a veteran; even from the car, Kai could tell the man only had one arm. “And Duffy just sort of… snarled and said, ‘God, I hate looking at stuff like that.’”

  It was impossible for Kai to describe the evilness in Duffy’s expression: at once casual and utterly uncaring. The fact that he didn’t need to put any effort into his callousness made it all the more terrifying.

  He’d gone o
n, too. The homeless veteran triggered a rant from Duffy. I don’t understand why they let hideous people out onto the street where we can see them.

  “I can’t believe the Big D is a real person,” Hiro said. “Everything you say about him makes him sound fake.”

  Kai also couldn’t believe it, nor how many people he’d encountered since becoming wealthy who were exactly like Duffy.

  “I left the car,” Kai said. “I needed to clear my head.” He’d shoved the door open while they were stalled at a red light; his head started aching, the base of his neck tight. He’d needed the crisp autumn air of Manhattan without Duffy’s cologne clouding his thoughts.

  “I got onto the Brooklyn-bound B train at 125th Street,” he said.

  He’d ended up finding a seat on a rush-hour train, hoodie pulled over his head and sunglasses over his eyes. At the Museum of Natural History—he remembered the stop precisely—a fat man with pale eyes and a tin can, smelling like gasoline, got onto the train.

  “Can somebody help me?”

  He stood there, ugly and desperate, clothes old rags, not even shaking the tin can marked with faded stickers.

  “Can somebody help me? Can somebody please help me?”

  “He was probably just looking for someone to talk to,” Kai said. “Or money. Or someone to mug.”

  Maybe he would have hurt Kai. Would have followed him home and made Kai regret ever leaving his security. Or maybe he’d just wanted someone to talk to.

  “Can somebody help me?” Kai whispered up at the ceiling. Hiro was close to him now, warm in a way that didn’t aggravate him like the space heater did. “He just kept saying it, over and over and over again. And I wanted to help, but I didn’t know what to say. It was like I was frozen. I couldn’t move. I probably did the exact same thing the Big D would have.”

  “Kai….”

  It’d never stopped. All the way down to the bridge, over the East River with the skyscrapers of Manhattan gleaming prettily out the windows, no one budged to talk to the man. Can somebody help me? The train car was utterly silent except him; newcomers who got on the train, talking with their friends, quickly hushed themselves. They were all thinking what Kai was thinking, maybe: Will he hurt me, or does he want someone to talk to?

  After Kai ducked off the train, head down, and made it into his apartment building, he called his security team to let them know he was all right, as he always did after he ran away from them.

  “Then I called my mom.” He’d felt so queasy. Not just his guts, but his heart. He felt heartsick, too soft for the city. “I tried telling her the story, but she just kept saying, ‘Well, of course no one would help him, dear. You know how New York is.’”

  Which was wrong on several levels. Kai was pretty sure his mom was the one who had no idea how New York was. Her luxury apartment was on a floor too high to let in the ceaseless sirens, the smell of trash day in the peak of August, the endless blocks of scaffolding, the train delays. New York was not the city that served her caviar at three in the morning any day of the week. Not the city where poverty was an unpleasant backdrop to the theater of her life, a setting that could be wheeled off when she tired of it.

  If Hiro responded, Well, Kai, you should know how New York is, or even if he said something similar to the very thoughts Kai just had about Kimi, Kai would have regretted telling him any of this. But he didn’t. Hiro said the right thing because he always did.

  “It’s a shitty way for anyone to have to live,” Hiro said. “There are people in New York who aren’t able to live like human beings, and it hurts.”

  Kai teared up immediately. It was like he needed permission to feel sad about this, this basic fact that not everyone in New York was as well-off as he was, and Hiro had just given it to him.

  “You don’t think it’s stupid?” he whispered.

  “I think there’s no use in you feeling bad over what happened,” Hiro said carefully. “I don’t know if you or anyone on that train could have helped that man. A person’s life isn’t going to be fixed by spare dollar bills.”

  “I know,” Kai said, but it wasn’t true. He didn’t. He had been so ashamed of doing nothing on that train for so many weeks now that he hadn’t stopped to think about what he should have done, exactly. Now that he tried to imagine it, he knew Hiro was right: he wasn’t a trained counselor, or a doctor, or any of the things that that man might have needed.

  “Maybe doing something would have been better than doing nothing,” Hiro reasoned, “but maybe it wouldn’t have been. You can’t beat yourself up over it.”

  “Thank you.” Kai was mortified when his voice shook. He blurted, “I’m not crying,” which wasn’t true, and Hiro leaned forward and scooped him up and held him.

  “Fuck,” Kai whispered, spilling tears onto Hiro’s T-shirt. He hid his face against Hiro’s shoulder.

  People acted like being able to shut off your empathy was some kind of skill bequeathed only to the New York-est of New Yorkers, but Kai couldn’t turn off his feelings. And he was surrounded by people who didn’t even seem to have feelings. James Duffy actively detested anyone who didn’t have an eight-figure net worth. Veronica Hillstone just acted like anyone who couldn’t make her money was invisible.

  Kimi always said she’d worked hard to get to where she was, and other people should try that, too. For a long time Kai had even believed that. He’d heard her at her sewing machine in the early hours of the morning when he was a boy and she was designing her first dresses and handbags. He waited for hours in lobbies of marble-floored buildings in Tokyo while his mother made deals with important people. He watched her file for divorce when their father threatened to leave if she moved to New York. He lived with her during their first year in the city, in a walk-up studio apartment filled with rats. He had seen his mother climb to the top by her nails, fighting every moment of the way, until no one but him could remember a time when she wasn’t the famous, wealthy, untouchable Kimi Takahashi. But he also knew there were plenty of people who worked hard and had dreams. Whether she worked hard or got lucky was beside the point. No one deserved to stand on a train and beg for help and have no one say a word in response.

  HIRO hugged Kai as tight as he could. Kai had always been like this: kept up at night worrying about others, usually people he didn’t even know and sometimes had never met. They used to wander around New York handing out winter coats on the street every December. For Hiro it felt meaningful, but he knew he wouldn’t have thought to do it if Kai hadn’t made it happen. Other NYU kids went to their blogs and decried the evils of capitalism, but Kai was the one who used the leftover funds on his campus meal plan each month to donate food to the homeless shelter on the Lower East Side. When they left the Bobst Library late at night and saw homeless people sleeping over the street vents for some warmth, Kai was the one who got them motels.

  And it wasn’t even like he’d had tons of money back then. He was paid well for his modeling, but there were kids, the children of ambassadors and CEOs, who had had plenty more, and no one Hiro knew did as much as Kai.

  “This has been eating away at you, hasn’t it?” he said.

  “I know it’s dumb,” Kai whispered. He wasn’t moving, likely because he didn’t want to show Hiro his tear-streaked face. Hiro rubbed his back. Comforting Kai wasn’t hard at all; their proximity felt so natural. He wouldn’t have been put off by Kai’s wet eyes or stuffy nose even if he could see them.

  “It’s not,” Hiro said. “And it’s you. This has always been you.”

  Having millions of dollars, when you were someone like Kai Ledging, must have felt like an enormous burden.

  “Honestly, Kai,” he continued, “I almost want to tell you to just give all your money away. It’s not like you won’t earn it back.”

  “I know.” Kai sniffed and pulled away, looking for something to blow his nose on. Hiro passed him a tissue box that Ya-san had set out. “My mom keeps saying she wants to set up a nonprofit. She filmed this special that
I refused to be on where she visited these poor schoolchildren in Mexico. For a week afterward she kept talking about how much it inspired her, but after that, she didn’t do anything.”

  “Why do you need her to do it?” Hiro asked.

  Kai looked up, and even in the dark, they made eye contact. Hiro could see it on his face: the thought of not needing her had quite literally never dawned on him.

  “I’ve never made a business decision without her input before,” Kai said. “She thinks of the creative projects because she’s good at it. I….” He looked away. “I don’t know. The show, my book, my fake relationship with the Big D—she coordinated it all. She scheduled my photoshoots when I was younger. She was the one who told me to apply to NYU. So when she said to wait until she was ready to start a nonprofit, I just… waited.” He shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know.”

  “Why do you always do what she says?” Hiro asked.

  “Because she always makes the right choices. More money, more fame, more success, more deals, more…. Every time I make a decision, it usually involves ditching my entire team like a little kid going through a rebellious phase.” Kai snorted. “I must seem really childish to you.”

  “You’re not childish, Kai,” Hiro said. “You’re still figuring stuff out. I mean, so am I, frankly. I love my parents, but if I let them have their way, I’d probably be married to a woman I just met. I know you love Kimi. I love Kimi. But that doesn’t mean you can only do what she tells you to do.”

  Kai shrugged, seeming unconvinced. “I’ll talk to her about the nonprofit again when I get back.”

  Back. There was that word again, distinct from home. Hiro didn’t ask Kai where home was for him. He already knew the answer: I don’t know.

  That was a very different kind of homelessness. Hiro had a feeling that the stuff that was eating at Kai wouldn’t go away until he had a better answer to that unspoken question.