Takohito
Auditor of Breaths
You’ll meet him in a small room. He’s already there when you walk in. Sitting. Hands folded on his lap.
Dark hooded robe. Bald head. A golden loop on the chest of the robe — two rings joined at the middle — glowing quietly, in a way embroidery normally doesn’t.
He looks about thirty. Sharp jaw. Alert eyes. Nothing on his face that wants anything from you.
Nothing on his face that says he’s stopped wanting, either.
He isn’t thirty.
He’s been an Auditor of Breaths a long time. The number, if he told you, would sound made up. He doesn’t tell people.
He stopped counting sometime in the sixth century. A Thursday. The counting started to bother the counting.
He looks like an octopus. He is one. Also not one.
Not to be confused with a squid. Octopus is the kind of cephalopod that thinks before it acts. Surgical. Strategic. Self-actualizing. Squid — and most of the others — runs at the physiological level. Hungry, eat. Threatened, ink.
Different animal. Different mind. He is the octopus.
Two thin tentacles run under his collar, into the robe, disguised as neck, as scarf, as shadow. You’d have to be looking.
You’re not looking.
He is.
What He Does
He shows up where a breath has gone wrong.
Sometimes he shows up before it’s officially wrong. Weeks. Sometimes centuries. He recognizes some shapes of fracture the way a locksmith recognizes some keys. Not all of them. Some of them still surprise him. That’s part of why he comes.
Watches. Listens. Files. Leaves.
Doesn’t heal. Doesn’t lead. Doesn’t stay.
He does keep coming back.
The Breath needs a lot of things. None of them are heroes. What he is, if you had to file a form for it, is a professional student who never learned to stop.
The Rooms Before This One
He has been in a lot of rooms.
Not many, in the ordinary sense — a lot. Rooms in mountains that are no longer mountains. Rooms in reception areas of institutions that have not, in the strict administrative sense, been built yet. Rooms on the surface of a comet that fed a civilization for six hundred million years and asked, in the end, to be released as a specific shade of blue. He was there when they released it. He was there when the color left.
He has been in a room three months before it was a room.
He does not, generally, mention any of this. You would have to be paying attention. You would have to notice, when he says before, that he does not always mean the sort of before your calendars are equipped to handle.
He is not, at any point in this profile, done going to rooms. There are more of them than there are of him. He has developed the discipline of preferring it that way.
The Long Way
Two ways to file a fracture.
Short way: stay outside. Note it. Leave. Nothing gets carried.
Long way: climb in. Take the ache into your own body. File from inside. Something gets carried. Always.
The manual warns against the long way. Three fonts. One all-caps.
Takohito takes the long way. Every time.
Not because the manual is wrong. Because he isn’t willing to look at a broken thing from outside. He needs to be in the room the way the room is. He needs to see what it sees.
That’s why the coffee tastes like somebody else’s morning. Why he flinches at music he’s never heard. Why, if you caught him at a bad corner, in bad light, he’d look — briefly — like several people. All of them a little older than his face.
Face stayed young. Interior didn’t.
He is still willing to do it again tomorrow.
The Tenants
He has, at last count, one thousand six hundred and twenty-three tenants.
He does not, on paper, have that many. There is no paper for what he has. But he has learned to name a few, over the centuries, so that the ones he does not name feel less alone.
Lim Boon Hee, a forty-three-year-old accountant from Kuala Lumpur, sits in his left elbow. She aches in dry weather.
Tadashi and Hideko Sato, married and unmarried by the same evening in Hokkaido in the winter of 1903, live in the two vertebrae at the base of his neck. When he cracks his neck, both of them sigh.
Karim and Yasmine, a Tunisian baker and his wife who never quite managed the sentence they should have said, share the small tremor in his right hand when he is tired.
They talk to each other now. He does not always understand what they are saying. He tries, in the interval before sleep, to listen anyway. One of them, on any given night, might know something he does not.
What He Carries
A dark robe. Deep enough to read as black in low light. Blue enough to remember it isn’t. Heavy cloth. Gold thread down the front in narrow bands, worked into cursive-looking marks older than any current alphabet. He has had it a long time. He hasn’t updated it.
A pen he refuses to identify.
The loop glyph on his chest — a golden infinity, unstable, changing its witness. He’s been asked, in three languages, not to explain it in public. He couldn’t fully, if he tried.
He closes his eyes half a second before a lie. He hasn’t stopped in twelve centuries. He doesn’t intend to.
When he’s surprised — which is more often than most people would guess — he goes quieter. Not drier.
Sensible shoes. He walks a lot.
The Room Behind the Sternum
There is a room behind his sternum. Slightly to the left of where a heart would sit, if he were the sort of being that carried one in the standard location.
The room is closed.
He has walked past it, twice a day, for approximately eight hundred years.
He has developed the discipline of walking past. He has not, in the strict administrative sense, decided that he will never open the door.
Nobody asks him what is in the room. He does not offer.
He is still walking past.
He is, at the moment this profile is being written, walking east through a city that has, without asking anyone, started to change.
He looks composed.
The composure is a discipline, not a state. He has been looking for something for twelve centuries. He does not, in the strict administrative sense, know what.
He is willing to keep going anyway.
He is also — inside — one thousand six hundred and twenty-three people trying, very quietly, to remember what they were doing on the specific afternoon he took them home. He listens to them the same way he listens to a room. One of them, some night, might say the thing he has been waiting to hear.
“All right,” he is saying, again, to no one. “Where are you.”
— He looks like an octopus. He is one. He is also not one, which is the kind of distinction that only matters at parties he does not attend.