Carry Me Away

In the deep blue dark at the bottom of the sea, I hold my breath. If memory shines like a sky full of stars, then the brightest one must be you. Let me close my eyes and recall your face, your voice, your smile. You are the only light in my endless night, the only star above my boundless, lightless sea.

There is a rule in that wildly popular online list called 138 Things Every Woman Must Know: if something can be won, strive for it; if it cannot be won, let it go, and then whether you lose or win, at least you will look good doing it. I always thought the person who wrote those one hundred and thirty-eight rules had to be some kind of goddess, and anyone who could actually live by them deserved a place in a pantheon of her own. I used to think Morikawa Kana's IQ dropped to zero whenever she fell in love. But after I myself got tangled in that tug-of-war with Hayashibara Yuto, I discovered with humiliating clarity that I was even worse. My IQ was two hundred. My emotional intelligence was zero. All those principles, all those rules, all those lessons older people had drilled into me, I remembered every one of them perfectly, and yet the moment I saw Hayashibara Yuto, the moment I saw him smile at me, I forgot everything. If you let Hayashibara Yuto smoke and smile at me for ten minutes and then asked my name, I might honestly answer, "Ah... let me think." That day in the pouring rain, I walked straight into the downpour without looking back. I saw only the person standing before me: gray hoodie, a tiny Nike mark on the chest, Wrangler jeans in the same brand I wore, coffee-colored Adidas shoes, a checkered umbrella above him. Smiling, he said to me, "I don't feel like driving today." The smoke he breathed out vanished into the thick rain. All at once my nose stung. I shook my head and ran to him without another thought. Let every kind-hearted lecture, every affected doctrine, every tidy little list of 138 Things Every Woman Must Know go to hell. What do I care about poise anymore? I was in love.

When we got back to Hayashibara Yuto's place, we were both soaked through on one side. He tossed me a dry towel and grumbled, "I told you to stand closer. Were you going to die if you did?" As I dried my hair, I admitted honestly, "I really might have. I was that nervous." He turned to look at me, the corner of his mouth lifting of its own accord. I truly did have the ability to make him feel better just by looking at me. The room glowed warm under yellow lamplight, thick with something intimate, and with exquisite lack of tact I shattered it at once. Just as his hand reached out and touched my cheek, I asked the most catastrophically stupid question imaginable: "Has some other girl used this towel before?"

Was that what they call asking for humiliation? It was more like digging my own grave. Sulking, I threw the bear-print towel to the floor and rummaged through his wardrobe for one of his shirts to change into. While I was taking off my coat, I saw the tattoo beneath my own collarbone, the one exactly like the pattern on his shoulder blade. A sudden thought struck me. When he came out of the bathroom in a robe, wiping his dripping hair, the sight that greeted him was this: a fresh-faced girl in the first bloom of youth, wrapped only in a white bath towel from chest to thigh, smiling at him with bright eyes and white teeth. I had never imagined that Hayashibara Yuto, whose exploits were supposed to make him invincible in love, would blush. I did not even get time to explain before he flung the towel he had just used on his hair straight into my face and growled, "That is a naked seduction." I thought about it and decided he had to mean barefaced, not naked, because the man was an illiterate at heart. With his back turned, I could not see his expression at all. I was being ridiculous. I had never in my life willingly shown this much skin in front of any man. Even in high summer, when Morikawa Kana dragged me swimming, I wore more than that. And the moment I thought of Morikawa Kana, it felt as though some little insect began gnawing at my heart. When that insect lies dormant, you can forget it exists. But once it wakes, the sorrow comes crawling out of those twisting old memories you thought had long been sealed away. I shook my head hard, as if I could fling those unhappy recollections off me. Of course I knew perfectly well that I could not.

I gathered my courage and walked up to Hayashibara Yuto. He was putting on an act, fiddling with his PSP and not even looking up when he tossed out, "Get lost, all right?" Anyone could tell he was only pretending to be calm. I reached out and blocked the screen with my hand, staring straight at his faintly flushed face. At last he lost to my stubbornness and glared at me. "What the hell do you want?"

I laughed. His overblown menace was too ridiculous not to laugh at. I pointed at my tattoo and said, "Look. Doesn't it seem familiar?" Of course it did. Countless times he had admired that design in the mirror as one of his own masterpieces. Now it had appeared on someone else. For one instant his eyes were overwhelmed with shock, and in that same instant his expression softened completely. He looked at my tattoo. I looked at his eyes. Time stopped there. Heaven can bear witness to how dearly I treasured that small silence. After a very long time, he reached out and ruffled my hair. The affection in his voice was impossible to hide. The intimate gesture, together with that absurd nickname he called me by, made me want to laugh and cry at once. Tears gathered for no clear reason. Was I too sentimental? Maybe. But I really, truly wanted to cry. Not because I could explain it, only because that moment was too beautiful. I cursed myself inwardly for being melodramatic. Then the doorbell rang. He got up and said, "That should be the delivery. Don't be scared." I looked at his back and sniffed. What was I supposed to be scared of? I had long since taken it for granted that I was the future Mrs. Hayashibara Yuto. A delivery person was not a policeman. What could I possibly fear? And yet neither he nor I had imagined that the person at the door would bring such an enormous surprise. When I heard her voice, I did not react at first. Then I heard Hayashibara Yuto, panicked and rough, trying to stop her from entering the bedroom. It was no use. A girl in love with a sharp tongue is not someone anybody can block. So the two of us ended up staring at each other in terrible embarrassment, unable to say a word. She looked at me like that, and I watched her expression change from shock to composure to instant understanding. I wanted to explain, but after seeing all that in her eyes I decided there was no need. Some women are simply like that. Once they think they are already worldly-wise, they assume the entire world is one filthy cesspool.

To defend my rightful place, I was the first to summon up my poise. Smiling, I said, "Miaoqin. You're here too." People say you never strike a smiling face. I would really love to ask which idiot coined that saying. Standing there with her arms folded, Feng Miaoqin did not merely look as though she wanted to hit me. If the law had permitted it, I think she might have killed me. The moment Hayashibara Yuto sensed the situation turning bad, he dragged her out of the bedroom by sheer force. A moment later I heard the door close. When he came back in, I snatched up a pillow and hurled it at him. He caught the pillow easily enough, but not my fury. "You've been sneaking around with my friend behind my back!" He flared at once. "Her chest isn't as big as yours and her ass is flatter. If I wanted to fool around, why the hell would I pick her?" That only made me angrier. "How do you know her chest isn't as big as mine? Did you touch it?" He lunged over, pinned my head to the bed, and beat me with the pillow while cursing, "I used my eyes. Learn to measure things, idiot." He was absurdly strong. I gave up resisting and thought vaguely that if he hit me just twice more, the bath towel around my body would come undone. At the height of our complete loss of dignity, the doorbell rang again. This time he was even angrier than I was. He sprang off the bed muttering, "Is this ever going to end?" and stormed out of the room. I scrambled up to make myself presentable. A few minutes later he came back in grinning. "This time," he said, "it really was the delivery."

I remember that after hearing those two sentences, I sat silent for a full two minutes before finally choking out, "Damn. This bastard is really something." That was the moment I knew I was absolutely not his match.

As for that list, 138 Things Every Woman Must Know, I had once revered it like scripture. Every line sounded so sensible. I thought I ought to live exactly as it told me. But then I discovered that Ruko was right: it was all paper talk. Out of those one hundred and thirty-eight rules, I forgot one hundred and thirty-seven. I remembered only the last: you only get one life. So what the hell are you hesitating for? If you love, then love.

If the way I once loved Zhou Jianchen was the brave ignorance of youth, then what I felt for Hayashibara Yuto was pure moth-to-flame madness. I knew perfectly well it was fire, and still I could not help flying toward it. Even many years later, I can still say without shame that I do not regret it.

Every time Takahashi Xiaowen's chain of murderous calls came in, my vision darkened. I had to lower my voice and play along with his mincing tone. Once, after I finished one of those calls on the train with my nose pinched shut, I discovered that a woman beside me, with hair like a whole thatched roof, was looking at me with outrageous disdain. I got furious at once. What gave a tacky non-mainstream freak the right to despise me? I was just about to glare back when the train stopped, and we got off together. Then I saw a whole crowd of equally alarming creatures sweeping toward me and nearly fainted on the spot. It turned out they were hair-salon boys trying to drum up customers. Instantly my confidence returned. "What's wrong with my hair? You think I need you to design it?" Later, when I met up with Takahashi Xiaowen and told him the story as a joke, all I got was mockery. This time the wretched little pansy was once again crooning through the phone, "Big sis, it's my birthday, come play." The second I heard that sugary tone, I knew there would be handsome men around that night. But I am sorry to say that at that point both my eyes and my heart held only Hayashibara Yuto. Takahashi Xiaowen could have stripped ten handsome men naked and lined them up before me and I still would have remained pure of heart. He ignored all my hesitation and cut through it at once. "Hurry, hurry, hurry back to the apartment. There's a car picking us up." The moment I heard there would be a car, I immediately hailed a cab to school. Beautiful life ought to be like this: no ride, no appearance. If there is a ride, then yes, let's go.

While I was waiting outside the apartment building for the two Takahashi siblings, something got into my eye. Sand, a bit of dust, one of my own thick lashes, who knew. At that moment I suddenly understood why Takahashi Saori always carried an Anna Sui compact mirror. I could not afford the real thing, but on Festival Street there were enough cheap imitations for me to grab without a second thought. Rubbing my eye, I looked around for anything reflective enough to show me my own lovely face. Then I turned and saw a car parked nearby. Without thinking I ran over, pulled up my eyelid, and stared at myself in the side mirror. At last I managed to fish the lash out. Tears streamed down my face, and the two monsters still had not come downstairs, so in boredom I began striking poses at the window glass. I swear I am not an idiot. But I truly had not realized there was someone inside. When the window rolled down and I saw that face trying not to laugh, my very first thought was: is there a knife in this car?

That graceful, elegant young man stepped out still holding the leash of an enormous dog and asked, smiling, "Done admiring yourself?" I am not entirely ignorant of the world. The trick is to laugh at yourself before someone else can do it for you, and then you cannot lose. So I flashed a row of white teeth and said, "I've admired enough. Heh." The dog kept staring at me as if it might pounce and bite me at any second. Truly, even dogs could look down on people. Had it perhaps already noticed that the Swarovski necklace around my neck was a fake? Seeing me tense up, the dog's owner comforted me at once. "He's very well behaved. He doesn't bite." Pretending complete calm, I asked, "Mm. I'm not scared. What's his name?" He looked at me as if I were slow. "Samoyed." I glared at him. "I know it's a Samoyed, not some village mutt. I'm asking what he's called." He lifted his head with the most innocent eyes imaginable. "He's called Samoyed." Only then did I understand that Samoyed was both the breed and the dog's name. I honestly could not imagine a more irresponsible pet owner. This refined and elegant man, standing somewhere and calling out, "Samoyed, come back," would look unbelievably ridiculous. Then as he straightened, a deep green glimmer flashed twice at his throat. I saw the jade Guanyin pendant, and everything exploded in my head like thunder. Old memories crashed straight toward me through the flying dust: the boy in the black shirt who had once stood among the crowd by the roadside watching me, the boy who had escorted Takahashi Saori to school and whom I had seen only from several floors away, the boy who brushed past me on the cable car, the boy whose name I had heard countless times. I stared at him, so hard I nearly asked out loud, "Are you Ryo Kitagawa?" But before I could speak, the answer came from behind me in Takahashi Xiaowen's shriek: "Ryo Kitagawa, we're here!"

Takahashi Saori and Takahashi Xiaowen got into the back seat without the slightest ceremony, leaving me to share the front with Samoyed. I stood there frozen, my soul practically floating out of my body, until Ryo Kitagawa, who had just opened the door and then come back toward me, asked, "What's wrong with you?" So many thoughts, so many memories, and in the end all of them became a heavy sob lodged in my throat. Across mountains and rivers, through all the years between, there he was again: Ryo Kitagawa. He looked at my reddened eyes for a long moment, then suddenly smiled. That smile held meanings I was not yet able to understand.

Naturally, I did not choose to squeeze into the front seat beside the dog. Compete with a dog for a seat? Was I insane? But when I quietly asked Takahashi Xiaowen what brand that car with the funny less-than-sign logo was, he immediately repeated the question to Takahashi Saori. The two of them laughed themselves silly over the fact that I did not even recognize a Lexus. At that moment I truly felt I would have been better off sitting with Samoyed. As the scenery flew past the window, I found myself wondering what Hayashibara Yuto might be doing and never noticed the smiling eyes in the rearview mirror. After they dropped us off and Ryo took the dog home, I saw clearly that Takahashi Saori still carried a deep attachment to him. I asked her whether there was still any chance. On the face of a rich girl who had once seemed to know nothing of worry, there appeared a bitter smile of helplessness. It made her look suddenly, startlingly older. She shook her head. "No chance. I've known him too long. I understand what he's like. He seems mild, but inside he's as fixed as stone. Once he's decided something, nobody can change it." Once I would have found those words a little affected, but paired with her boundless desolation that day, I had to believe she had really grown up. Does youth matter? Not really. Hear a few songs, love a few people, and you grow old. I suddenly thought of Zhou Jianchen. We had long since lost all connection, yet whenever someone mentioned him in front of me I still felt struck down by a small, dull ache. He had been someone I loved deeply in the innocent years of my life. The truth is, I am not afraid of death, and I am not afraid of aging. I am only afraid that the people I once loved might be unhappy. Once Zhou Jianchen crossed my mind, Kong Yan and Morikawa Kana followed as if by chain reaction. We had seen one another not long before, and yet for some reason I could no longer remember their faces. Perhaps I really was like a hedgehog. After being hurt too badly, all I could do was wrap myself in spines and retreat into a safe place where every danger and disaster might be kept away before it happened.

At Takahashi Xiaowen's birthday party, everyone went wild. Beer spilled everywhere. I crouched alone in a corner with a peach-flavored alcopop and drank happily by myself. After Ryo Kitagawa came in, he sat down beside me, watched me for quite a while, and then laughed. "Your face is awfully red. Are you drunk?" With no grace at all, I hiccuped and answered solemnly, "Of course not. Nanami Mio is known far and wide as the girl who never gets drunk." All the shrieking and noise in that room still failed to drown out what he said next. In the blurred half-dark I could see that his eyes were as clear as spring water. "Nanami Mio," he said, "you've changed a lot these past few years." He did not ask, as boys in novels and dramas always do, "How have you been?" Yet this mild little sentence hurt more. Sometimes when I looked at my own reflection, the weariness in my eyes was enough to make me shiver. Where does a girl's aging begin? Plenty of girls around me swore it began with the eyes, and spent a fortune on eye creams. Some ordered cheaper gels online; those with a little money bought better brands. Takahashi Saori used Estee Lauder. The two most extravagant women around me used Sisley and La Mer. I had tried a little of everything by basking in their reflected glory. I did not know whether any of those jellylike creams could truly restore lost collagen, but I understood one thing with absolute clarity: the first part of a girl to grow old is something no luxury skincare can ever save. It is her gaze.

He took an orange-flavored bottle from someone nearby and tapped it against mine. "Let's not talk about unhappy things. Drink." The biggest sensation of the night was Takahashi Xiaowen's grand confession. He rambled on and on before concluding, with astonishing seriousness, "I, Takahashi Xiaowen, have no great ambition in life. I only wish to be a comrade." Everybody laughed. I turned to Ryo Kitagawa and murmured, "Does he like you?" He only smiled and said nothing. I liked Ryo Kitagawa very much. I had not met him often face-to-face, yet in him I saw a steadiness and thoughtfulness that boys our age usually lacked. Takahashi Saori had said long ago that Ryo Kitagawa was the kind of person whom even people who did not love him still could not bring themselves to dislike. Sometimes I think men like that are rather frightening, all strategy and flawless composure. Yet Takahashi Saori had once spoken dreamily of what it felt like to be with him, and the expression on her face then could only have been called happiness. And what about the person I loved? Hayashibara Yuto wore everything plainly on his face. Joy or anger, love or indifference, you could read it at a glance. I think that when it came to disguise, it was not that he could not do it. He simply disdained it. To live as one pleased, to walk crookedly through the world and do exactly as one wished even with a blade at one's throat: that was the Hayashibara Yuto I loved.

Much later, after Ryo Kitagawa and I had become lovers who knew one another well, he would speak of that first meeting with the faintest trace of a smile and say, looking at me very steadily, "When you were baring your teeth at my car window, I sat inside watching you. At that moment I really felt you weren't the same as before." Of course I wasn't. Fate had always arranged for him to pass through my life like a visitor, witnessing my panic, my loneliness, my desolation. He had not missed my green youth. Yet by the time we truly faced one another, I had already grown into a woman with stories. Our lives were like two shores separated by a long river, finally meeting at the edge of youth. He gave me an embrace so clean it almost hurt to look at. At the time when I no longer expected warmth from the world, he made me believe that in this chaotic city there was still warmth, and love. So many things I never raised, and he never asked. He only wanted to give me a steady life. It was like that old line I loved when I was young: laugh drunkenly through thirty thousand cups with you and speak no word of parting sorrow. He did not necessarily understand the line, but he lived it. He gave me every ounce of patience and tenderness within his power.

If it had been possible, I truly wish he could have entered my life a little earlier. Before those wounds had taken the stage. Before my youth had ceased to be blank and bright. Before the goodness in my smile had been worn away.

But it was too late. I remember that night with terrible clarity. I used the spare key to Hayashibara Yuto's apartment, opened the door, and walked into the bedroom. He was bare to the waist. The tattoo on him burned at my eyes like flame. In the white quilt beneath him lay a girl with dyed blond hair, glaring at me with utter annoyance. And Hayashibara Yuto looked straight at me and said only, "Get out." The beautiful cake from Ganso in my hands hit the polished wooden floor with a flat, helpless slap.

I crouched by the Yodo River with the wild urge to fling myself in. I wanted desperately to cry. I thought if I could just cry it out, I might feel better. But it was useless. Truly, utterly useless. I could not force even one tear out.

At that moment Osaka had already become an empty city in my eyes. I pressed a hand over my chest. It hurt there, terribly, terribly.

His name seemed lit by some holy light. I forced myself to sound calm when I said, "Ryo Kitagawa... could you do me a favor?" I sat in his car in rigid silence all the way there, though inside that silence my teeth were clenched with hatred. In the parking lot below Hayashibara Yuto's building, with the whole place sunk in stillness, Ryo Kitagawa asked in confusion, "What exactly do you want me to do?" I pointed at the BMW Z4 parked in the corner and said, "Could you smash it up for me?" He sucked in a breath. "Miss, don't be ridiculous. My car isn't any cheaper than his, and besides, there are cameras here. Are you trying to get me killed?" In truth I did not really want to do anything to his car. I only wanted an outlet. The moment Ryo saw me cry, he understood most of it. How embarrassing. All these years, he had always somehow ended up seeing my most wretched side. In the end he said nothing at all, only drove me away from that place of heartbreak. Later he pulled over at the roadside, got out alone, and went into a pretty little cafe. When he returned, he had a box of tiramisu in one hand and a packet of tissues in the other.

I ate that delicate dessert in huge, graceless bites like some country girl, so single-mindedly that I did not taste any of its fine sweetness. Ryo Kitagawa sat beside me, watching without looking away. A great many people know that tiramisu in Italian means "carry me away."