Chapter 2: What It Tastes Like
They hold the funeral on a Tuesday, in a temple in Setagaya with a gravel courtyard that crunches under every footstep, and it is so hot that the incense smoke stands straight up in the air and refuses to move.
You aren't a sorcerer, so you stand at the back with the other auxiliary managers in your black suit, and you watch the sorcerers in the front rows. Nanami, who doesn't move once in two hours, his blond head bowed, his hands in fists on his knees. Gojo Satoru, enormously tall even sitting down, white hair stark against his black clothes, round dark glasses hiding his eyes, so still that you'd think he was asleep if not for the muscle working in his jaw. And Geto, beside him, with his hair tied back neatly and his head held perfectly straight, looking at the photograph of Haibara Yu on the altar.
Haibara is smiling in the photograph. He was always smiling. You drove him twice, last spring. He talked the whole way to Shizuoka about his sister's baseball team and asked you whether you had any brothers or sisters and seemed genuinely sorry when you said no. He offered you half his rice ball. He was twenty-three.
When it's over, you find Nanami alone on the temple steps, his tie pulled loose, staring at nothing. You don't know him well. You stand next to him anyway, because nobody else is.
"He would have liked the weather," Nanami says, after a long time. His voice is very flat. "He liked the heat. He said it made him feel like he was on holiday."
"I'm sorry," you say. It's useless. You say it anyway.
Nanami nods once. Then he looks across the courtyard to where Gojo and Geto are standing together under the eaves, not talking, and something hard comes into his face.
"I'm going to quit," he says. "When this is over. I'm going to get a normal job somewhere, with a desk and a pension, and I'm never going to do this again." He rubs his eyes. "It's fine. Gojo-san can handle everything now anyway. He's the strongest. He can just do it all."
He says it bitterly, and he doesn't mean it for anyone but himself. But you look across the courtyard as he says it, and you see Geto standing under the eaves, and you see his face, and you know he heard.
In the weeks after the funeral, Geto Suguru stops eating soba.
He still sits in the front seat. He still thanks you for driving. He still smiles in that pleasant polite way when you pick him up at the gate. But when you stop at the stand in Kawagoe on the way back from a job, he orders one basket and eats half of it and pushes the rest away and sits looking at the counter. He gets thinner. You see it in his wrists, and in his face, the bones standing out under the skin. There are shadows under his eyes like thumbprints.
He swallows curses every day. Sometimes five or six. The higher-ups are sending him more and more, now that Gojo is off doing jobs nobody else can do and Nanami has put in his notice. You fill in the logs. Some nights you sit in the car at the office after dropping him off and read them back to yourself and feel sick.
He stops telling you about the cat behind the dormitory. He starts asking you questions instead.
"Your parents," he says one evening, on the drive back from a job in Ibaraki where a curse had taken up residence in an old people's home and eaten three residents before anyone noticed. "What do they do?"
"They run a dry cleaner. In Kumagaya. Near the station."
"Non-sorcerers."
"Yes."
He's looking out of the window at the rice fields going past, gold-green in the last of the light. "Do they know what you do?"
"They think I work in logistics for a religious foundation."
"That's not untrue," he says, with a flicker of the old humour. Then, after a pause: "Do they ever... I don't know how to put this. Do they ever make you angry? The way they don't see it?"
You glance over. He's still looking out of the window.
"What do you mean?"
"Those people today. In the care home. The ones who worked there." His voice is very even, very reasonable. "They'd been complaining about the place for years. Low pay, long hours, terrible management. They hated it. Everyone who lived there hated it. And all that hate sat in the walls and grew, and it turned into the thing that ate three people. And not one of them could see it. They'll go back to work on Monday and complain about the pay and make another one, and I'll come back in a year and swallow that one too." He finally turns his head and looks at you. In the dusk his eyes are very dark. "Doesn't that make you angry? That we protect them from what they make? That they never even know?"
There's something in his voice you've never heard before. It isn't anger exactly. It's colder than anger. It sounds like someone working through a sum and not liking the answer, and doing it again, and getting the same answer every time.
You don't like it. It makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up the way it does when a curse is close.
"My dad irons shirts," you say.
He blinks. "What?"
"At the dry cleaner. My dad irons shirts. He's done it for thirty years. He gets there at six in the morning and he irons other people's work shirts for twelve hours, and he goes home with burns on his wrists, and he's never once complained about it. He could. He's got every right." Your hands are tight on the wheel. "He presses a crease into every sleeve. Every single one. Nobody's ever going to notice. He does it anyway, because he thinks people should walk into their offices feeling like someone took care of them." You breathe out. "He can't see a single curse. He doesn't know they exist. He's still the best person I know."
The car is very quiet. Outside, the rice fields go on and on into the dark.
"I'm one of them, you know," you say. "I can see the curses, sure. I can raise a curtain. But I don't have a technique. I grew up in a dry cleaner in Kumagaya. If you're angry at people who can't see, you're a little bit angry at me."
He doesn't answer for so long that you think he isn't going to. Then he says, quietly, "I'm not angry at you."
"Good."
"I couldn't be angry at you." He turns back to the window. His reflection in the glass is pale and thin and very tired. "That's what I don't understand."
That night, you take him to the stand in Kawagoe, even though it's past ten and they're closing, and you talk the owner into one last basket of zaru soba by standing at the counter and refusing to leave. You put it in front of Geto in the car park, on the bonnet of the sedan, still in its bamboo tray with the dipping sauce on the side, and stand there with your arms folded until he picks up the chopsticks.
"I'm not hungry," he says.
"You've swallowed six curses since Monday. I filled in the logs. You're hungry."
He eats. Slowly at first, then less slowly. You lean against the car beside him and look up at the sky, which is orange with the city's light and starless, and listen to the cicadas winding down.
"When you swallow them," you say, "what do you do afterwards? With the taste?"
He's quiet a moment. "Nothing. You get used to it."
"Do you?"
He sets down the chopsticks. "No."
"Then tell me." You don't look at him. It's easier, somehow, to say it to the sky. "Every time. When you get back in the car. Tell me what it tasted like. Out loud. I'll listen, and you won't have to carry it on your own. And then we'll get soba."
Beside you, he goes very still.
"That's an odd thing to offer," he says, eventually.
"I'm from Kumagaya."
He makes a sound. It isn't quite a laugh. It's thinner, cracked down the middle. When you finally turn your head, he's looking down at the empty bamboo tray with his hair fallen over his face, and his shoulders are shaking very slightly.
You don't say anything. You don't touch him. You just stand next to him in the car park of a closed soba stand in Kawagoe until the shaking stops.
He tells you. It becomes a ritual, like the soba, like the curtain. He gets back into the car and before you start the engine he says, "Rotten fish," or, "Mould. The kind on bathroom ceilings," or once, after a big one in a shuttered hospital in Chiba, "Blood. Someone else's. Old." And you say, "That's awful," and he says, "Yes," and you drive him somewhere good.
It doesn't fix anything. You know that. He's still getting thinner. He still goes quiet in the evenings in a way that frightens you. But one night in September, driving back from a job on the coast with the windows down and the sea air coming in, he falls asleep in the passenger seat. You glance over at a red light and see him with his head tipped against the window, his face slack and unguarded in a way you've never seen it, his long hands lying open on his knees.
You don't think about it. You reach over and put your hand in his.
He doesn't wake. But his fingers close around yours, slowly, in his sleep, and hold on.
The light goes green. You drive the rest of the way back to Tokyo one-handed, very carefully, and you don't let go once.
The assignment comes through on a grey morning at the end of September, a printout handed over the desk by a tired woman from dispatch who doesn't look up.
A village in the mountains of the north. Population barely a hundred. A string of disappearances and deaths over the last year that the local police have put down to bears. A window posted nearby has flagged it: possible curse activity, grade unknown. Recommended sorcerer: Geto Suguru. Auxiliary manager assigned: you.
You read it twice. There's nothing strange about it. You've driven a hundred jobs exactly like it.
You don't know why, as you fold the paper and put it in your jacket pocket and go out into the car park where Geto is waiting by the sedan with his hands in his pockets, smiling at you with his tired polite smile, you suddenly feel cold all over.
"Where are we going?" he asks.
"North," you say. "A long way."
He nods and gets into the front seat. You get in beside him. You start the engine.
Somewhere behind your ribs, something very small and very certain is telling you to turn the car around.