An interlude between Chapters 1 and 2. A breath.
I.
He kept walking east.
The afternoon had not changed in the half-hour since he had stepped out of the ramen shop. The humidity was still doing its civic work. The temples were still gracious. The young, on the sidewalks, were still saying whatever they liked at whatever volume they liked. The baby in the empty booth was, by now, probably back with whoever had brought her, laughing at her foot for the twelfth or thirteenth time. The air, in that particular booth, would have begun accepting sounds again. The air was professional about these things. The air took disruptions personally only briefly.
Takohito did not know any of this. He was eleven blocks east of the shop by now, and the city had become, around him, the steadier and quieter thing it sometimes became when one had been walking through it long enough to feel slightly invisible.
He kept the polite pace. He had time.
A delivery scooter passed him on the inside, carrying a stack of insulated bento boxes the colour of old jade. The driver did not see him, which was as it should be. A child on a parent’s shoulders waved at the world generally. Takohito waved back, very small, with the part of his hand that was still entirely his. The child laughed. The parent did not turn around.
He walked.
He used the walking, as he often did, to take an inventory. The inventory was small. The inventory was specific. The inventory was older than most living things on this planet.
He began, as he often began, with the elbow.
II.
His left elbow ached.
It always ached. This had been true since the spring of 1974, when he had been sent to a fracture in Kuala Lumpur involving a small office above a teh tarik stall on Jalan Imbi.
The fracture had been around a woman named Lim Boon Hee, a forty-three-year-old accountant who had recently learned, on the same Thursday afternoon, that her husband was leaving her and that her father had died in another country without telling anyone he was sick. The fracture had not been catastrophic in the cosmic sense. It had been catastrophic in the human sense, which was the sense Takohito had — over many centuries — come to take more seriously.
He had audited the fracture the long way.
The Auditor handbook, on the question of long-way audits, was specific: do not. The handbook had been written by a committee, in a hurry, on a planet that no longer existed. The handbook was, in places, wrong.
The long way meant taking the fracture’s pain into the Auditor’s own body, briefly, in order to file the report from the inside. The Auditor handbook preferred reports filed from outside. From outside, the Auditor remained whole. From inside, the Auditor took something away with him that did not belong to him and could not be returned.
He had done the long way anyway. He had not been able to file the report from outside. The fracture had needed somebody to know, from inside, what it cost a woman to lose two people in a single afternoon. The fracture had not been asking. The fracture had been waiting.
He had taken the pain into his elbow — the way a person takes a stranger’s umbrella by mistake from a café rack, knowing they will probably never give it back. He had filed the report. The fracture had closed.
Lim Boon Hee had wept for three weeks, then stopped weeping, then lived for thirty-four more years. She had remarried at fifty-one. She had a granddaughter now who liked horses. She did not know any of this had been audited.
The elbow had kept the umbrella.
The elbow still ached. Always, in dry weather. Less in damp. It had its preferences.
He sometimes told the elbow, in his head, what the weather would be that day. The elbow appreciated this. The elbow had, in some unspoken sense, become more of a roommate than a body part — and Takohito had, over the decades, developed the manners one developed with a roommate one liked but had not chosen.
III.
Two of his vertebrae sighed when he cracked his neck.
They had done this since 1903.
The vertebrae had belonged, before that, to a man named Tadashi Sato — a railway engineer in Hokkaido who had spent thirty-one years building track across snow that did not always want to stay where engineers thought it should stay. Tadashi had liked his job. He had liked the snow more than the track, but had not told this to his employers, who would have considered it insubordinate.
Tadashi had died in February 1903, at sixty-seven, of a small heart event he did not entirely notice. He had been sitting at his kitchen table, finishing a bowl of soba his wife Hideko had made. The soba had been cold. He had been too tired to notice. He had set down the chopsticks and rested his head briefly on his arms, the way a man rests when he means to keep working in a moment. He had not lifted his head again.
The fracture that took Tadashi was small. The fracture was in Hideko, not in him. For the first thirty hours, Hideko had not believed the death was real. She had kept setting his place at the table. She had refilled his teacup. She had, twice, spoken to him about the neighbour’s son, who had been making noise the previous night. The neighbour’s son had been making noise the previous night. The conversation, in some small structural way, was still owed.
The fracture had been about the conversation being owed. The fracture had been about consensus refusing, for thirty hours, to admit that one half of the conversation had stopped existing.
Takohito had audited the fracture. He had not been able to file the report from outside. He had taken some of Tadashi into himself — specifically the part of Tadashi that had been most surprised by dying, which had lodged in two vertebrae at the base of Takohito’s neck.
Hideko had, on the thirty-first hour, finally allowed the funeral to be arranged. She had lived for another fourteen years. The soba bowl, family lore eventually held, was buried with Tadashi rather than washed.
The vertebrae remembered all of this without being asked. They remembered it the way a chair remembers, for years, the shape of the person who sat in it most often. They sighed when Takohito cracked his neck because being surprised by dying is the kind of thing that, once it lodges in a body, has to be aired out occasionally.
He cracked his neck now.
They sighed.
He thanked them, in his head. He had been thanking them every time, for one hundred and twenty-three years. They had not, as far as he could tell, ever stopped appreciating it.
IV.
His right hand had developed, over the past four years, a small tremor.
The tremor was not Parkinson’s. The tremor was not arthritis. The tremor was the residue of a small fracture he had audited in Marseille in 2022 — around a Tunisian baker named Karim who, on a Wednesday morning in the back of his patisserie on Rue Sainte, had dropped a tray of mille-feuille onto a tiled floor for no reason he could later explain.
The pastries had been perfect. Karim had been making mille-feuille for twenty-one years. His hand had simply, without warning, opened.
The fracture had not been about the pastries.
The fracture had been about what Karim had not told his wife Yasmine, of nineteen years — a small ongoing grief that had reached, that Wednesday morning, the kind of pressure that has to express itself somewhere, and had chosen his right hand. The hand was, in some structural sense, the part of him most able to spare a tray.
Takohito had audited the fracture the long way.
He had taken into his own right hand the small tremor Karim’s hand had been about to develop and then, with the fracture audited, not developed. Karim had, the following Wednesday, made a perfect tray of mille-feuille. He had also, that night, told Yasmine the small ongoing grief.
Yasmine had received the telling with a calm Karim had not expected. They had sat at their kitchen table for two hours afterward, drinking weak tea, not saying much. The marriage had not ended. The marriage had, in some respects, begun.
Takohito’s hand had taken on what Karim’s hand had not had to. The tremor came and went. He could still hold a chopstick. He could still hold a cup. The tremor only became noticeable when he was tired, and even then, only to people who had been looking at his hands for a while.
Most people did not look at his hands.
The tremor visited him now, briefly, the way Karim’s wife visited the patisserie at three in the afternoon, on the days she was passing.
It left again.
He kept walking.
V.
This was, by his own count, the thing he was.
Not a single being but a small accumulating archive of small fractures, each carrying inside it a single person’s afternoon.
He had stopped counting at one thousand six hundred and twenty-three.
Counting beyond a certain number, he had found, began to feel like denial of a different sort — pretending each one was still a separate event, when in truth they had begun, over centuries, to talk to each other inside him.
Lim Boon Hee occasionally remembered Tadashi Sato now. Tadashi sometimes flinched at the smell of mille-feuille. Karim’s hand, on humid afternoons, briefly suspected it had once been a railway engineer in Hokkaido. None of them had asked for this. None of them complained.
They were not him. They had not become him. They were tenants — each renting a small room, each paying with a small ache or sigh or tremor, each grateful (Takohito suspected, on his more sentimental afternoons) for the room.
The room, in turn, was glad of the tenants.
He had read, in a book once, the word haunted. He had set the book down for a moment and considered the word. Haunted was, he had concluded, not quite right. Haunted suggested that the tenants did not belong, that they were intruders, that they had unfinished business that the host had not chosen to carry.
He had chosen.
He had chosen each one. He had taken the long way each time, in the full knowledge that the long way meant a small new permanent roommate. He had not, in sixteen hundred and twenty-three cases, regretted the choice.
He had not, in any of them, asked the roommate to leave.
The accountants and engineers and bakers had been, in their small specific ways, worth the room.
He kept walking east.
VI.
There was also the other room.
Not a tenant, this one. Not centuries of small fractures politely carried. One large mistake he had made himself, a long time ago.
The closed room was not a tenant.
The closed room was his own.
The closed room held what he had done — not what he had taken in to spare others, but what he had done that nobody else had asked him to do, and that had hurt people he had loved, and that he had locked behind a door a long time ago in the year he decided to stop being the person who had done it.
He passed the room now, in the way one passes any door one has decided not to open today. The walk did not slow. The pace stayed polite. The door was where it had always been: behind his sternum, slightly to the left, accessible only by the part of him that knew the password and would not say it.
He had not said the password for a long time.
He had developed, in the long time, the discipline of walking past.
VII.
He passed an old woman watering an orchid.
She was in front of a stationery shop two blocks east of the cross-street where he had taken his three slow breaths an hour earlier. The orchid lived in a clay pot beside the shop’s doorway. The woman was watering it with the water remaining in her teacup, the way she had done, by Takohito’s small unscientific guess, every afternoon at this hour for somewhere between twelve and fourteen years.
The orchid had nine open blooms.
The water came out of the teacup in a thin polite stream, and the woman watched it go in the way a person watches the last of something they have been saving without exactly knowing they were saving it.
She did not see Takohito. He did not need her to. She was, in some small unspoken sense, doing the work of the entire city for a moment — keeping a small bright living thing alive with what was left at the bottom of a cup.
He did not stop. He did not speak.
He had learned, over many lifetimes of trying, that the kind of grace that lived in old women watering orchids with the dregs of their afternoon tea was not the kind of grace that needed witnesses. To witness it, beyond a passing glance, was to take a small piece of it away with you, which the orchid would feel and the woman would not.
He kept walking. The polite pace did not change.
He took, with him, only the small fact of having passed.
It was enough. It was nearly always enough.
Tat tvam asi.