by Kaz Morran
Taiyo paced the length of the stockpile of crates. He got to one end and swept his light beam farther distant. “I found what the kerosene is actually for,” he called back to everyone.
As soon as he said it, Nel got a message from T3 telling them the generator was for charging their phones, flashlights, headlamps, and research equipment. It also doubled as a mount for a construction-style floodlight tower, which they found folded up in one of the crates.
Three days of exploring a perilous cave system had honed their teamwork, so it didn’t take long to fill the generator’s tank with kerosene and get the lighting mast up. Once started up, it became clear that in addition to powering the bank of thousand-watt halide lamps, the generator would also ruin any further moments of serenity.
Ronin shouted over the din of the generator, “They could’ve run power cables down the chimney.” He stood, arms crossed, faced off against the deafening machine. “What kind of space agency uses kerosene? Not Japan’s.” Under the dim glow of the floodlight, which would take a while to warm up, he tried to wink at Taiyo but couldn’t. Instead, it looked like he had something in his eye.
“You okay?” Taiyo asked, but he was thinking that, actually, kerosene made for pretty decent rocket fuel.
The annual ritual of bringing the kerosene stove out of the closet had always marked the start of winter In the Yamazaki home, as had the resulting dispute. Dad loathed the devilish mechanism for sucking the oxygen out of the room, while Taiyo’s mother lauded it for no other reason than other houses used kerosene, too. “If it’s not okay, then why do gas stations sell kerosene?” she’d argue. When that logic broke down, she’d claim the cost of electric heat was made kerosene heaters the only option. From grades one through four, Taiyo recorded and calculated the costs, proving the rising cost of kerosene—not to mention the hassle of refilling the tank, the fumes, and the fire hazard—made electric the more economical choice. But his mother never relented.
“What?” yelled Ronin.
Taiyo shouted back, “I didn’t say anything.”
“How many?”
Taiyo shook his head and tried to wave Ronin off. “Never mind.”
“Never?”
“I didn’t say anything!”
“Okay, fuck you then,” said Ronin. He followed Taiyo several paces away from the noise of the generator, back to the crates. “How about I climb up out of here and plug us into the hab’s solar panels?”
Taiyo turned and looked up to the blackness of the roof. “The logistics would be challenging,” he said and resumed scrolling the inventory list on his phone, committing essential items and their locations to memory.
“You don’t think I could get up there?” Ronin said. Ronin breathed into his palm and smelled it. Satisfied, he added, “Twenty-five meters is nothing.”
Without looking up from his phone, Taiyo commented dryly, “Twenty-five to the roof. Fifteen more through the chimney—through a twisted rock-pipe.”
“Want to see me scale it?”
“Yes,” said Taiyo. He raised his focus from the phone, up to Ronin. “Seriously, yes. Please do it.” Ronin must have known an attempt would end in hilarity, if not death.
Taiyo stepped toward the far end of the crates. The floodlight had come on enough now that he saw Ronin’s shadow—the ponytail and gorilla gait—in pursuit. Taiyo’s guts lurched. He pocketed the phone and kept walking, but with a widened posture and perked shoulders in case Ronin pounced.
When he got to the crates without issue, he took a seat on one with a stack behind it so he could face Ronin. He ran the numbers in his head and confirmed there weren’t nearly enough crates to build a staircase to the chimney with.
Seeing that Ronin stood just a stride away, arms crossed and stroking his ponytail, Taiyo indulged him: “I guess you could toss up a rope if there’s something to grapple.”
Even if Ronin did manage such a feat, and his shoulders and barrel chest didn’t get stuck in the narrow twists of the chimney, leaving the Asylum ahead of schedule would immediately disqualify him.
“So … ?” said Taiyo.
Like the monitor lizard with its tail in the bathroom stall, Ronin shot out his hand and cuffed him three times fast on the ear—an act of assault if not for the follow-up laughter meant to downplay it as Ronin walked away.
The darkness hid him, but Taiyo refrained from rubbing his ear or in any way acknowledging the sting—even to himself. He clenched his jaw and gazed up toward the chimney, though he still couldn’t see it. The floodlight had warmed up, but the illumination could no more reach the ceiling than Ronin could. Taiyo made it a thought experiment, how one might go about reaching that emergency exit if they had to, but he had no idea. He could only think of reasons they might have to.
***
Ronin swore at the mud for being muddy. Taiyo ignored him and stared off into the distant, to where the generator-powered floodlight looked like the Sun as viewed from an outer planet: a point of bright light, its halo fainter than a fog-swept moon, and abruptly giving way to the hallow black expanse it had dared to intrude upon.
That dimness made it hard to collect proper samples of the mud. And the noise of the generator didn’t help with Taiyo’s focus either. Even from hundreds of meters away, the din of the generator mimicked the ambiance of a real space mission—pumps, fans, air scrubbers, water reclamation.
Then the generator cut out. The glow of the floodlight faded and extinguished.
Taiyo shot to his feet, spine straight, skin tingling on high-alert. No light. No sound. The purity of absence was a vacuum, owning his senses like a tightening blanket. Ronin coughed but didn’t speak. They waited. The light did not return. Voices murmured in Taiyo’s ears like rats in the drain. Camp was not far, but the acoustics played tricks with the AsCans’ calls through the dark, refracting pitch and tone, amplifying one syllable in Taiyo’s ear while another died on the floor at his feet.
Ronin flipped on his headlamp and flashlight and stomped off toward camp. Taiyo trailed at a safe distance, arriving to find Ronin kneeling at the generator, surrounded by the other candidates.
“Piece of shit, made-in-China,” Ronin grumbled. He’d torn open a side panel and had his head and flashlight halfway inside.
“Is Yamaha Chinese?” Anton said from just behind Taiyo.
Ronin slammed the panel shut. He reeled around in a crouch and pointed his flashlight at Anton. “You can bet your wife and kids it was made in a Chinese factory,” Ronin said and forced a garish laugh.
After a minute of everyone standing around watching Ronin work, Anton commented idly, “We used the same generators in Zaatari.”
“That’s not in China, is it?” said Kristen.
“Jordan,” said Anton. “A camp for fleeing Syrians.”
Then Ronin stood and shouted, “Hafu,” even though Taiyo was only a few strides away, “get me a hammer so I can fix this paper tiger.” Taiyo hoped he was not referring to Anton. “The rest of you go set up the hammocks and take a nap.”
A headlamp popped up from the shadows behind the crates like a gopher. “That’s right,” came the feeble voice of Commander Walter Tate. “Hammocks. Exactly,” he added a little more firmly as if he’d been about to give the same order.
A minute later, Ronin had fixed the short in the generator and got it back up and running. The AsCans clapped and cheered with half-ass enthusiasm, and Taiyo played along, more surprised than impressed.
They placed the hammocks in a loose circle, far enough from the generator to lower the load on their ears, but too far for the floodlight to reach. Like kids at summer camp, they sat up and sunk into the netting, legs dangling restlessly in the dark to a chorus of squeaking aluminum hammock frames as they chattered.
Sensing that joy had infiltrated the camp, Walter put an abrupt end to their playtime. He plunked his feet on the ground to stop his swinging hammock. “Okay, ladies and gentlemen,” he called over the clamor of the generator, “on to the next task.�
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Ronin jumped into the center of the ring of hammocks and struck a sumo pose. “The next task is wrestling,” he said. He swatted Godzilla-like at imaginary dive bombers, and he pivoted to face each AsCan in turn, and to each, he repeated his challenge to wrestle.
“Uh, no,” Nel told him from her hammock. “We talked about this, remember?”
“What’s your point, hidden figure?”
“The point is,” she said, “that there—what you’re doing now—the squatting and bug-eyed neck-and-growl thing—that’s not good for team cohesion.”
Ronin pivoted so fast that dust spun up from the ground and his ponytail lashed him in the face. He leveled a finger at Taiyo. “Taiyo Yamazaki,” he said, as if to stab Taiyo with his own name. “I know you want to wrestle, don’t you?”
“Surprisingly, I don’t.”
Ronin kept his hand outstretched, but it disappeared in the glare of Taiyo’s headlamp as Ronin stepped closer. Gravel crunched under Ronin’s footfalls. Taiyo peddled his hammock backward into the launch position, preparing to swing feet-first at Ronin if he had to.
Ronin charged. Taiyo twitched his legs, about to spring from his seat in the mesh of the hammock, but Ronin stopped short of impact, thus averting the counter-attack. Ronin walked the remaining three steps and ruffled the week’s worth of fuzz that had grown back since Taiyo had last shaved his head. “That’s my boy,” Ronin said. “A gentleman and a scholar.”
“Ronin,” Nel said sharply.
“What?”
“You’re being creepy.”
“Not possible.” Ronin sniffed the tip of his ponytail.
“How about we stop doing that?” Nel said.
Walter jumped to his feet and faced off against the monster at center-ring. “Let’s do it, bro,” he yelled to Ronin. Only Kristen cheered as the pair took turns with chokeholds and takedowns. Ronin won easily. When it ended, they hugged—but in a manly way, with back slaps and cursing.
Just last year, Taiyo had been caught in his own “wrestling” incident with Ronin. Though it certainly hadn’t ended in hugs.
Taiyo remembered the incident well. He'd taken the stairs two at a time, as had become his routine, up toward the fourth floor of the Department of Interdisciplinary Space Sciences, building A. At about halfway between the third and fourth floors, that familiar dread roiled up from the coils of his intestines, and he switched to stealth mode.
As a post-grad at JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Taiyo had had his own space to prepare lectures and coordinate research from, but calling it an office was a stretch. An architectural error, aptly labeled room 404, had him wedged into a windowless sliver between Ronin’s office and one other professor, whom he never saw.
Once at the fourth-floor landing, as always, Taiyo paused to collect himself. Then he crept ever so carefully down the hallway, aiming past Ronin’s office to his own. Sometimes—and this was one of those times—it didn’t matter how careful he was to place his steps without making scuffs or taps or squeaks on the floor, Ronin knew he was there.
The eye of a webcam, which Ronin had mounted below the peephole with aluminum tape, stared at Taiyo as he crossed in front of the steel door marked 406.
“Tai,” Ronin called. “Tai, come in here.” He didn’t yell, but the door vibrated as he spoke.
Taiyo had his arms around a stack of student folders, and his shoulder was weighted by the strap of a bag stuffed with a laptop, hard drive, thermos, and the spherical aberration profiles he’d sketched over lunch. He had a meeting with the optics team to get to and still hadn’t gotten back to Baleen or Aves about—
“Hafu! Inside. Now.”
He knew better than to brush Ronin off. He hiked the strap of his shoulder bag higher, closed his eyes, and took a breath. He rapped softly, but the hollow steal carried the sound like a drum. The other offices had doors made of cheap laminated wood, but Ronin had replaced his with the top floor’s fire door.
“Yes, yes. Get in here already.”
Taiyo lifted the latch from its circular inset, pulled to disengage the mechanism, and then leaned in with a shoulder. The misaligned door made a grinding sound and reverberated with the friction as it came unstuck. He held the latch as it swung inward on groaning hinges, letting it open just enough to peak his head. He despised himself for feeling timid.
“Where were you?” Ronin grumbled from behind his metal desk. The air-conditioner moaned, chilling the room and giving Ronin cause to wear his trademark vest—a collage of botched Central Asian rodent pelts.
“JAXA headquarters,” Taiyo said truthfully. He’d gone into Tokyo to politely demand an explanation for why, for the second time, he’d been turned down by the astronaut selection committee.
“Someone left this for you.” Ronin slid a business card across the unpolished surface of the desk. He took his finger off the card and leaned back, creaking in his folding chair and crossing his arms. He locked eyes with Taiyo, daring him to come deeper into the lair to snag the bait.
Taiyo knew who the card had come from. He’d already been given the same card and didn’t need another.
“Sit,” said Ronin, and he pointed his chin at the folding chair in front of the desk. The look on Ronin’s face said, Or else.
Taiyo edged the former fire door further open and slinked through. The towering dark shelves behind Ronin blocked the window. Only a desk lamp lit the room. The carpets had been removed, and Taiyo scraped the chair over concrete to pull it back closer to the door, farther from Ronin. Ronin scrutinized every micro-action Taiyo performed, and Taiyo sat with his bag still weighing on his shoulder and the stack of folders held on his lap.
“Take the card,” said Ronin. Their eyes stayed locked as Taiyo reached across the desk, but the instant he broke their mutual gaze, Ronin snagged him by the wrist. The shoulder bag dropped. Folders cascaded to the floor. Taiyo regained eye contact, putting up no resistance as Ronin pressed Taiyo’s hand onto the card and onto the desk. Ronin held his grip and leaned in. “Do not—” he paused for effect “—let this fuck up the proposal. You follow me?”
Taiyo and his team were designing a spacecraft and mission of unprecedented ambition and scientific reward. It had garnered interest. There were stakeholders. Investors. Contractors. Subcontractors. Patent buyers.
“Yeah, I follow,” Taiyo said through a set jaw.
To Ronin and to JAXA, Taiyo’s future was no more than a variable in a financial equation.
Ronin tightened his grip on Taiyo’s wrist, but Taiyo didn’t flinch or break eye contact. Though his muscles had tensed against his will, and his nostrils flared— first from anger and now fear—Taiyo refused to swallow the lump in his throat. He commanded his breathing to keep steady. He studied Ronin’s intentions. Obeying, he met no resistance sliding his hand free, business card in tow and eyes fixed on Ronin.
He slipped the card into his shirt pocket without so much as dignifying it with a glance. To this, Ronin raised an eyebrow before snorting derisively.
Taiyo knew the card came from Detective Sekihara. The Dick. The only question was whether the Dick had come to visit the school on his own accord, or if Ronin had summoned him.
Ronin stood up, his appliance-size torso rose and fell inside the vest. His arms swelled, neck veins throbbed, and head drew back—only to spring forward as he bellowed, “Imagine a world without recorded music!”
Taiyo, having no idea what this lunatic was getting at, kept his hands free and backed his chair up over some of the folders, almost to the door now. His heart raced, but he kept his composure. An astronaut had to be composed in times of danger. “Okay,” Taiyo said in his most placating voice. “Um, I suppose … the world would be more culturally deprived without recorded music.”
Ronin, still seething, held the edge of his desk and whispered through clenched teeth, “I’ll tell you something, hafu. Alexander Bell invented sound recording. He wasn’t out to make the world more culturally rich. He was tire
d of all the fuck-ups in his business transcriptions and wanted a better way.”
“Is this a lesson on serendipity?”
“So stop playing astronaut,” Ronin shouted. He stood up, knocking his chair against the shelf, and waved his fist at Taiyo. “You failed. Twice. The end. Now it’s time to go invent stuff. Got it?”
Taiyo found himself nodding under the weight of Ronin’s hard stare and menacing fist.
“Answer me, hafu. Do you get it, or not?”
“Okay.” He held up his palms.
“Say it. Say, I got it.” Ronin pounded the desk in tune to the words. “Say, I will not be an astronaut. I am going to invent stuff.”
Taiyo let his eyes rest shut a moment while he breathed. Seated, trapped between Ronin and the door, Taiyo said, “Why are you doing this? You don’t have to make it an ultimatum.”
“Fucking say it, you insolent little shit.” Ronin stormed out from behind his desk. Taiyo leaped from his chair, his bag up as a shield. Ronin’s shoulder slammed him into the steel door and onto the floor. The bag absorbed a punch on his way down. Taiyo tried to get up but slipped on the scattered folders. Ronin shot an arm down to grab him, but Taiyo rolled to dodge it. From the floor, he kicked the chair at Ronin, and it bought him time to scramble for the open door.
He’d just gotten upright and squeezed into the doorframe when Ronin charged. The door hammered Taiyo’s side, throwing him across the hallway and into the floor wall. Air was still evacuating his lungs from the blow when Ronin clenched him by the neck. Taiyo gasped and flailed. Ronin lifted him off the floor by the throat and pinned him to the wall, cocking back the right fist. Taiyo grabbed the wrist near his throat. He dug in his thumbnail and twisted against the blood vessels. It did nothing. The fist crashed into his skull. A flash of light and a dull thud rung like a pulsing halo around his head, reverberating until the pain localized between his eyes and in the back of his head where he’d whiplashed against the wall.
