Chapter 2: Use the Door Like a Coward
You don't go down the stairs.
You're scared of the dark in the ordinary way, not the stupid way. You lock the door, put the kikufuku in the fridge, sit on your kitchen floor with your back against the cabinets, and text Shoko a photo of the note with no caption.
She replies in under a minute. don't go out. he's coming.
You type: he LEFT.
he's coming back, she sends. that's new. be nice about it.
You don't hear him arrive. You never do. What you hear is the bulb on the second-floor landing buzz back to life, a thin whine through the door, and then three knocks, very polite, the knock of someone who has watched people knock on television and is trying it for the first time.
You open the door with the chain on.
Gojo Satoru is standing on your landing with his sunglasses pushed up into his hair, and for the first time since you've known him, he looks like he doesn't know what to do with his hands. He's put them in his pockets, taken them out, and settled on folding his arms like a nightclub bouncer.
"Hi," he says.
"You left."
"I did leave. Yes. That happened." He winces. "In my defense, I came back with mochi."
"From Sendai."
"The good place. Not the station place. The station place is for tourists."
"You went three hundred and fifty kilometers to avoid finishing a conversation."
"Three hundred and fifty-two," he says, and then, seeing your face, "which is not the point, I know, I heard it as I said it."
Behind him, the stairwell looks normal. Concrete steps, a dead moth on the sill, someone's bicycle chained to the rail. You can't see anything wrong with it. That's what makes the back of your neck prickle.
"What's on my stairs?"
The clowning drains out of him so quickly it's like watching a tide go out. "Nothing, right now. It was. It's a curse, a low one, but a weird one. It doesn't like being looked at, so it hides, and it's good at hiding. It's hiding from me, which is rude." His eyes, uncovered and terrible in the yellow landing light, flick down the stairwell and back. "And it's hiding from you. Which is interesting. Things like that usually go after people who can see them. It's the only kind of attention they get."
"So it's following me."
"I think so. I swept your whole route home. I swept the yakitori place. I swept a guy's car on Kannana-dori, I'll be honest, that was a whim." He rocks on his heels. "I'll find it. I just need you to not walk around alone after dark for a few days, and maybe let me put someone on..."
"No."
"...the building. No? Okay. Why no?"
"Because you can't vanish in the middle of dinner and then show up an hour later with a security detail." You lean your head on the doorframe. You're so tired. The kikufuku are in your fridge and they're probably delicious and it makes you angrier. "I'm not a mission. I asked you out."
That lands. You watch it land.
"I know," he says quietly. "I know you did."
You look at him for a long moment through the gap in the door: the strongest man in the world, standing in a concrete stairwell at eleven at night with his arms crossed over his chest like he's holding something in.
"You get one more try," you say. "Conditions."
He straightens like a dog hearing its name. "Name them."
"One. No teleporting on dates. I don't care how you do it, I don't care what it's called..."
"It's not technically teleporting, it's more of a..."
"I don't care what it's called. If you need to leave, you say so, and you use the door like every other coward on earth."
"Like a coward. Using the door. Got it." He's nodding, very seriously. "Two?"
"Two. You don't put people on my building without asking me first."
"Okay." A pause. "Can I ask you first?"
"Ask me tomorrow." You start to close the door. Stop. "Three. Bring the castella back. I've fixed it."
He grins, finally, the real one, crooked and too wide for his face. "That's not a condition, that's bait."
"Goodnight, Gojo."
"Goodnight," he says to the closed door. And then, muffled, as if he's leaned his forehead against it: "The note was right, by the way. The castella was a war crime. I'm glad you fixed it."
You don't hear him leave either. But the landing light stays on all night, and in the morning the dead moth on the sill is gone.
The second date is the aquarium in Ikebukuro, on top of the Sunshine building, because he says he's never been and you don't believe him.
"I've never been," he insists, in the elevator. "I've been to aquariums. I've been to this building. I've exorcised something in this building, actually, a very sad curse on the forty-first floor, it was mostly made of office workers' feelings about Mondays. But I've never been to the aquarium as a person."
"As opposed to?"
"As opposed to as a guy who's working." He's wearing the blindfold today, which you've learned means he's tired, because the sunglasses let in more of the world than he can stand on bad days. "You know what you do at an aquarium when you're working? Check the corners. Count exits. Think about whether that big tank of water would be a problem if something heavy fell into it."
"And as a person?"
He considers. "Look at the fish?"
"Look at the fish," you agree.
He looks at the fish. He looks at them with total, ridiculous wonder. He stands in front of the jellyfish tunnel for eleven minutes, while violet lights pulse over his white hair, and narrates the inner lives of individual jellyfish. One of them is named Kenji and is going through a divorce. He buys you a penguin plushie at the gift shop without asking and holds it out at arm's length like he's handing over a live grenade.
"For the shop," he says. "Mascot. It can sit on the register and judge people."
"It looks like you."
"It looks like a penguin."
"It has your exact expression. Smug, but frightened."
"I'm never frightened," he says, and then a tour group behind him shrieks at the otters, and he flinches so hard the penguin nearly goes over the railing, and you laugh so loudly a staff member turns to look.
It's on the rooftop, afterward, with the city going blue around you and the wind smelling like rain, that it happens again. You're sitting on a bench, sharing a crepe that is mostly whipped cream, and you've been talking about nothing, and you tell him the truth because the truth is right there in your mouth and you're tired of holding it.
"I like you," you say. "I just wanted to say it out loud once without you leaving."
The bench beside you is empty.
You stare at the space. The crepe wrapper flutters. You sit there in the wind and you think, very calmly, I'm going to kill him, I'm going to learn jujutsu and kill him.
Four seconds later, he's back.
He's standing in front of the bench, slightly out of breath, which you didn't know he could be. He's holding his blindfold in one hand like he ripped it off on the way. His eyes are wide and absurdly blue in the dusk and he looks, honestly, like a man who has just sprinted back into a burning building to grab one thing.
"I came back," he says. "I left, I know I left, but I came back. That has to count for something. Four seconds. That's a record."
"Where did you go?"
"Hokkaido."
"For four seconds?"
"It was snowing," he says helplessly. "I stood in it. It didn't help."
You should be angry. You were angry, four seconds ago. But he's standing there with snow melting in his hair, actual snow, in Tokyo in October, and he came back, and the look on his face is the most honest thing you've ever seen on it.
"Sit down," you say.
He sits down. He doesn't say anything for a while, and neither do you. Eventually he takes the crepe out of your hand and finishes it, and that's how you know you're going to give him a third try.
The man who comes into Yoake the following Tuesday is blond, built like a vending machine, and wearing a suit so precisely pressed it could be used as a level. He takes stool four. He reads the chalkboard top to bottom with the expression of a man reviewing a contract.
"The jambon-beurre," he says. "And coffee. Black."
You don't usually do savory. You do one sandwich, on a baguette you make at five in the afternoon, because your grandfather was a baker and you refuse to let the craft die with him. You make it. He takes a bite, closes his eyes, and chews for a long time in total silence.
"This is very good bread," he says finally.
"Thank you."
"I mean that. It's the best I've had in Tokyo." He sets the sandwich down, squares it on the plate, and looks at you over small, angular glasses. "My name is Nanami Kento. I work with Gojo Satoru. He asked me for advice about you on Sunday, and I declined to give it. I came here to tell you that I declined, because I think you should know that I am not involved."
"Okay," you say slowly.
"I also came for the bread. Shoko mentioned it."
"Everyone just does what Shoko says."
"It's easier," Nanami agrees. He takes another bite. "He told me about the conditions. The door rule."
"Is it a bad rule?"
"It's an excellent rule. I wish I had thought of it in 2007." Nanami wipes his fingers on a napkin, one at a time. "I'm going to say one thing, and then I'm going to finish this sandwich and leave, and I would appreciate it if you didn't tell him I was here."
You wait.
"He has been the strongest since he was born," Nanami says. "Everyone who has ever stood near him wanted something. To use him, to kill him, to be him, to be protected by him. There is one person who didn't. That person isn't in his life anymore, and it was not a happy ending." His mouth goes flat. "I am not telling you that to make you responsible for him. You're not. I'm telling you because when he runs, it isn't because of you. It's because no one has ever reached for him and not wanted something, and he doesn't know what to do with his hands."
You think of Gojo on your landing, arms crossed, holding something in.
"What am I supposed to do with that?" you ask.
"Nothing. I'm not giving advice." Nanami finishes the jambon-beurre and lays a precise stack of coins on the counter, exact change, plus exactly fifteen percent. "That would be involvement."
He leaves through the door, the way normal people do.
That Friday the oven dies at a quarter to two.
The light inside it flickers, and then the whole bank of overheads buzzes and dims, all at once, and you're standing behind your counter in a yellow half-dark with a tray of madeleines in your mitts. The penguin on the register stares at you with its smug, frightened face.
It's the cold you notice first. Not a draft. A cold that starts at the back of your neck and slides down your spine like someone has opened a freezer behind you.
You turn around.
There's nothing there. Of course there's nothing there. Your kitchen is three square meters of stainless steel and you can see every inch of it. The walk-in. The sink. The rack of cooling baguettes. Nothing.
But the baguettes are moving. Very gently, one after another, they're tilting on the rack as if something long and invisible is pushing past them, coming slowly around the corner toward you. And for the first time in your life, the thing in the dark is the thing you can't see.
Your phone is on the counter. You pick it up. Your thumb is shaking so badly you hit his name twice.
He doesn't answer. He doesn't need to.
The bell over the front door rings.
You look up. The door is swinging open, letting in the wet night air and the red glow of the vending machine across the street, and Gojo Satoru is standing in it, hand still on the frame, blindfold off and eyes blazing in the dark like two blue stars.
"You said use the door," he says. "So I'm using the door."