Chapter 2: Seven to Three
The thing on your oven is roughly the size of a cat and shaped like a mistake.
It has too many joints in its forelimbs and no face to speak of, only a wet slit that opens and closes in time with the oven's ticking as it cools. It is crouched on the stovetop with its back legs folded under it like a heron's, and when Nanami steps into your kitchen it turns that slit toward him with the slow interest of something that has never once been interrupted.
Fourth grade, he thinks. Possibly not even that. A curse born out of an old building's small miseries: leases broken, rent unpaid, a hundred tenants lying awake under this ceiling hating their jobs. It is not dangerous to him. It could very easily be dangerous to you, if it got hungry enough, and from the way it has been pressing itself against the warm metal of your oven he suspects it has learned that this kitchen, at six-oh-one every evening, is the warmest and happiest place in the building.
He understands that. He resents being made to understand it.
"Stay behind me," he says.
"I am behind you. I've been behind you since the doorway." Your voice is very close to his shoulder. "Is it going to... what is it going to do?"
"Nothing." He reaches into his jacket, which he put back on for this, because he is not going to fight anything in his shirtsleeves in your kitchen like an animal, and draws the blade he keeps wrapped in its pale cloth along the inside of his coat. You make a small sound when you see it. He doesn't turn round. "Close your eyes if you'd prefer."
"I would not prefer," you say, and he hears you step to the side so you can see past him.
The curse moves first. They usually do. It unfolds off the stovetop in one long rubbery motion, the forelimbs reaching for the light over the sink, and Nanami's eyes find the line without his asking them to: there, across the widest part of the body, seven parts to three. He doesn't need it. He takes it anyway. His blade goes through the weak point the way a knife goes through a loaf that has proofed exactly right, a clean resistance and then none at all, and the thing comes apart into a black ash that hangs in the air for a heartbeat before it is gone.
The whole thing takes four seconds. Your oven ticks.
Nanami wraps the blade, slides it back into his coat, and checks his watch. Six-forty-one. Eleven minutes of overtime. On a curse that small, his technique wouldn't even notice.
When he turns around, you are standing by your fridge with both hands over your mouth.
"I'm going to need you to explain," you say through your fingers, "what consulting is."
He explains, in the end, more than he means to.
Not everything. There are things he has signed agreements about and things he simply does not say out loud, the way you would not describe a road accident to someone who has just eaten. But he sits at your little two-person table while you make coffee, because your hands need something to do and he has decided to allow it, and he tells you the shape of it. That the things you have been seeing out of the side of your eye since you were small are real. That they come from people, from the bad feelings that collect in places where people are unhappy. That there are other people who can see them clearly and fight them, and that he is one of those people, and that the risk he consults on is the risk that one of those things eats a commuter on the Den-en-toshi line.
You listen without interrupting. When he finishes, you put a cup in front of him and sit down opposite and say, "So it's a job."
"Yes."
"Like an actual job. With a boss."
"Several."
"Do you like it?"
No one has asked him that in a long time. He drinks some of the coffee to give himself a moment. It is better than he expected, strong and a little bitter, made in one of those stovetop pots that he thought only existed in Italian films.
"No," he says.
You nod, as if this is the answer you expected. "Then why do you do it?"
"Because the other job was worse." He sets the cup down. "I spent two years at a securities firm after I graduated. Before that I did this. I left because it was a terrible way to live, and I went into finance because I thought a normal job would be better, and I found out that it was simply a different terrible way to live, only with worse lighting and nothing to show for it. At least in this one, occasionally, I help someone."
"Like me."
"That was very minor."
"It was sitting on my oven," you say, "for an hour. I was hiding in my shoe cupboard. It was not minor to me."
There is a pause in which he looks at you properly for the first time since the corridor. You have taken your coat off. Your hands are wrapped around your cup and they are shaking, just slightly, now that it's over. He remembers the sticky note. A sheet tray thrown at the wall beside your head. Nobody did anything.
"You did the right thing," he says. "Coming to get me. Most people who see them tell themselves they're imagining it until it's too late to be wrong."
You look down into your coffee. "I almost didn't. I stood there for twenty minutes. I thought, he's going to think I'm insane, and then I thought, he writes notes about crumb structure, he can't judge anyone." You glance up. "And then I thought, it's after six. He doesn't do anything after six."
"I do some things after six."
"Like what?"
"Eat," says Nanami. "Drink. Read." He hesitates. "Lately, critique bread."
You smile at that, finally, a real one, and some knot under his sternum that he hadn't known was there comes loose. Then you get up abruptly, scraping the chair, and go to the oven.
"I didn't get to bake," you say, opening the door to peer into it. "It was sitting there and I wasn't going to reach past it for a tray. My dough's been sitting in the fridge this whole time, it's going to be completely overproofed, it'll be flat as a..." You stop. You look at him over your shoulder. "Do you want to watch me try to rescue it?"
He should go home. His tea is going cold on his counter. His evening is, technically, still his, and he has always been careful with it.
"Yes," he says.
It is a disaster. Then it isn't.
You knock the dough back and reshape it in a way he has never seen, folding it over and over on itself like a letter, swearing under your breath at it in a dialect he only half understands. You put the oven on. You make him slice tomatoes, because if he is going to sit in your kitchen he is going to be useful, and you are both briefly furious with each other about the correct thickness. You tell him about your grandmother, who kept a starter alive in a ceramic jar through two house moves and a typhoon, and who left it to you, and how half the bread you make still has a little of that jar in it, two decades of feeding later. He tells you, without quite deciding to, about the bakery near his old office where he used to buy a jambon-beurre every day at twelve-oh-five, and how it was the only part of those two years he misses.
"That's very sad," you say.
"It was a very good sandwich."
"No, I mean it's sad that the best part of your life for two years was a sandwich." You take the tray out of the oven. The loaves are smaller than they should be, a little squat, but the crusts are deep brown and crackling as they cool. "Is it still the best part? Of this job?"
He thinks about the question longer than he should. He thinks about the six o'clock watch and the train home and the onigiri on the counter and the quiet apartment where he has lived for nineteen months without once learning a neighbour's name.
"It's been bread lately," he says.
You tear one of the rescued loaves in half. Steam comes out of it. You hand him the bigger piece, and he takes it, and for a while neither of you says anything at all.
Afterwards, it should go back to normal. That is what he tells himself when he gets back to 4B close to eleven o'clock, with his collar open and his blade still in his coat and the smell of your kitchen in his clothes. He has done his job. A small curse is gone. A neighbour is safe. The rest is just bread.
Except that before he left you said, "Thank you, Nanami," at your door, looking up at him, and he heard himself say, "Kento is fine," which he has not said to a single person since he quit the firm.
Except that on Saturday a bag appears on his handle with six salt butter rolls and a note that reads, FOR THE RISK CONSULTANT. EARNED IT. And on Sunday you come round at six-ten with two coffees and ask him to show you, from the window, where the bad places in the neighbourhood are so you can avoid them, and he does, and it takes an hour, and at the end of it you are sitting on his sofa telling him a long story about a wedding cake that collapsed in a hotel lift, and he is laughing. Actually laughing. He can't remember when he last did that without Gojo having caused it.
Except that on Monday evening his phone rings at six-oh-three as he walks up from the station and it is Ijichi, apologising the way Ijichi always apologises, saying there has been a report. Something in Setagaya. Second grade at least, possibly first. They need someone tonight. Gojo is in Kyoto. Ijichi is very sorry.
Nanami stops on the pavement. Above him, four floors up, there is a light in your kitchen window.
He thinks of the curse on your oven. Of its slit turning toward him with that terrible patience. Of the fact that it found you, of all the warm kitchens in this building, because you are the brightest thing in it. He thinks about what he does for a living and how it ends for people who do it. He has been to the funerals. He has stood at the back of them in his good suit and counted the colleagues he had left.
He thinks: this is how it starts. With bread. With a name.
"I'll go," he tells Ijichi.
That night he comes home at two in the morning with a cut across the back of his left hand and finds the paper bag on his door handle. He takes it inside without opening it. He sits at his kitchen table in the dark for a long time, listening to the silence through the wall.
Then he takes out a sticky note and writes on it, in handwriting much steadier than he feels:
I think it would be best if we kept to our own sides of the wall. Thank you for everything. K.