A Single Breath

A Single Breath

Kaito had a memory of sleeping with Shuichi Minamino when they were very young, on a school trip. They were scattered around the resort house. It was a depressing place, which was why the school got such a deal; it had once been a prison for those guilty of minor crimes, juvenile delinquents being rehabilitated with art and psychiatrists. The windows still had bars and wire criss-crossed inside the glass. There were cages around the clocks.

They were allowed to explore it freely. Kaito enjoyed the horrors of the dark rooms, empty and dripping or closed and shuddering. He had been standing on a stage in the auditorium when a group of other student had come in, saw Kaito’s silhouette, and began screaming.

“Who’s that?”

“There’s a face!”

Like mirrors set to face one another, their fears magnified, panic reflected infinitely, and they crouched on the aisle carpet, paralyzed, clutching one another’s elbows.

Kaito had moved into greater light. “It’s me.”

At that moment, a dark shape swooped out of the balcony seats. It arched down, catching the light, and for a moment Kaito’s heart stopped.

He saw it cross the light, instantly recognizable, and opened his mouth to warn them. It thudded behind the small group and scattered them like rabbits. The bounce, the twang, confirmed his eyes; just a basketball. It bounced and rolled past Kaito’s feet down toward the stage.

Some hidden student in the balcony had laughed then, invisible. The scared students turned indignant and pounded up the stairs to give chase. Having lobbed the ball, whoever it was cowered and vanished by the time the students caught up to the loft.

Though Kaito had watched cautiously, his eyes caught nothing.

The rest of the night, Kaito evaluated the class for suspects, trying to identify the actor by the action. Who played with fear when they were alone?

He suspected Minamino, but had immediately found the boy outside the building in the dimming light. For him to have done anything, he’d have had to slip through the window some thirty feet up and drop onto hard packed clay. It was impossible, so he was innocent.

Minamino was completely calm, as well. As Kaito watched, he carried two handfuls of dead flowers over to a clear space. There he knelt and bent over dry weeds he’d collected and placed in neat lines.

Minamino glanced over, a flash of green eyes though rough hair. “Hello.”

His voice was barely audible in the wind, high and timid, not piercingly nasal and over-loud like Kaito’s.

“What are you doing?” Kaito asked.

Minamino lifted a stem with a hanging, dry golden-brown pod. He plucked out some of the down, which held tiny black seeds the size of ground pepper. “Collecting seeds.”

“Why?”

“I’ll give them a new place to grow.”

Kaito watched until Minamino finished sorting them. He put the seed in a piece of folded notebook paper, pocketed it, and moved away.

Kaito remained outside and looked at the stars after the red head left.

He had the strangest feeling that Minamino did not see the same stars. In the middle of his thoughts, the teachers rounded everyone up and corralled them all inside.

The students were shoved into the dorms, two or more to a room. The bedrooms were set about like an all-seeing eye design of Killingham Gaol, where the rooms arced like the inside of a Faberge egg, enabling a single guard or chaperone to see each door from the center of the room.

The teacher who sat up in a chair, watching and reading a book of pleasant but plebian poetry, placed Kaito with Shuichi Minamino.

Minamino must have been inside and obeyed immediately, because he made it into the room first. He took the bed for himself.

Kaito remembered that sensei was forever trying to pair smart students together to force them socialize.

Kaito spread his futon on the concrete floor, gave the red haired boy one sneer, and put his back to him.

Later that night, Kaito remembered that he had rolled over, shivering, and he’d seen Minamino up on the bed, still awake with the light on.

Minamino’s frame looked as fragile as the shed skin of an insect – translucent, holding a center of air. He had a flap-paged novel propped on his pillow and lay on his stomach, propped up on his elbows. It made his shoulder blades jut through his thin t-shirt.

Minamino was peering at the book like it held the world to him. There was something about the boy’s eyes. The lids were lifted slightly, as if he were reading something that excited him. Or perhaps everything he read excited him. He had a hand out as if he were imagining what it would be like to deliver the speech that he was reading.

“Minamino-kun.” Kaito growled.

“Oh - yes?” Minamino looked up. His eyes were darkened by the glasses. The thick plastic frames made his head look larger even than his narrow, jagged shoulders.

“If you’re going to stay up, let me have the bed.”

Minamino looked out the door into the great room, where the teacher had gone to bed. “I believe everyone else is asleep. Even if they aren’t, it’s quite late, and cold. I’m sure we could share the bed without anyone assuming it was something sexual.”

Kaito winced and looked away. Sexual. Half the class didn’t know that word yet, and the other half wouldn’t be able to say it without giggling. Here the little gaijin was telling him something obscene as if it was solving a problem.

“I can move over,” Minamino offered.

Kaito looked at him. The other boys were generally cruel to Minamino for looking like a girl, for acting like a girl, for speaking like a girl. Minamino would correct his behavior dutifully and without fuss. He watched and mimicked them, becoming a real boy. The insincerity of it bothered Kaito. Minamino seemed to have no loyalty to his natural personality – resulting in a character so detached, cold, and pliant that he was terrifying, like a walking statue.

Kaito felt cold every time he spoke to him.

Minamino pushed up his glasses, waiting. He added, “Or…there’s space by the wall, if you want.”

Kaito wondered if those glasses were bought second hand, rather than prescribed. They didn’t fit.

Lately, Minamino was shabby. He wore the full uniform everywhere. It was immaculate, except for an inconspicuous patch on the cuff of his dominant hand, where it rubbed the table as he wrote. No one had ever caught Minamino in jeans, though he was regularly seen doing errands, buying groceries completely alone. One time, a boy claimed to have seen Minamino in a café bathroom, washing blood off his jacket with hand soap. The encounter was plausible – the boy lived in the same neighborhood; but the blood was not – Minamino had never come to school looking beat up or in any way injured. He was never sick. He glowed, though he seldom smiled.

Now Kaito knew he didn’t have pajamas either. He just stripped to his white t-shirt and his boxers.

Kaito remembered that Shuichi Minamino had missed weeks of class. He offered no explanation, not even to Sensei. Later, Kaito heard from a boy whose mother was an oncologist that Mr. Minamino had been a client of hers for many months. The illness and intense treatments were bankrupting the family.

In their place, Kaito would have pulled their son from pricey private school and saved money that way. But with Shuichi Minamino’s head for logic, and with his instinctive direction and creativity, Kaito wasn’t surprised that the school had worked around any financial need that might have occurred.

Shuichi’s father had died at the beginning of the year.

Now his mother worked as a grocery clerk. Everyone knew it.

Shuichi Minamino loved her still. Going without fashionable casual clothes, hair cuts, new sneakers – it didn’t bother him.

Kaito did not want to go near him, as if misery and smallness were catching.

Minamino blinked and looked back to his book.

Kaito sneered at the poor boy on the bed. Conjuring up the irascible nose of drama that had served heads like Rousseau and Voltaire’s so well, he addressed the other boy: “Your dad’s dead, isn’t he?”

Minamino said, “Yes.”

Kaito stared. “So?”

“He was kind,” Minamino admitted. “But fathers die.”

Whatever reaction Kaito had hoped for was not there. Minamino answered and waited for a more relevant remark.

“Don’t you care?”

“Yes,” Minamino said, reproachfully.

Kaito flushed and pulled his blanket up over him.

Minamino kept speaking: “It was very painful. My mother is still upset. Cancer is very slow, and interesting, and fatal.” He seemed to consider these things one by one. Then he looked up at Kaito and, seeming to find him inadequate to confide in, went back to his book.

“Sorry,” Kaito mumbled.

“No. Curiosity, particularly about death, is natural for our age group.”

“So is mourning.”

Without looking, Minamino said, “Do not criticize how I mourn. You have never lost anything so precious.”

“Oh…” Kaito squirmed. “Oh. Yeah, you’re right.”

Minamino had lost his train of thought, and was looking up at the ancient graffiti on the wall rather than reading. He had to turn back the page.

Kaito wanted him to speak, to say anything, to cry. Until he did, Kaito couldn’t sleep with him in the room. He didn’t feel like he could turn his back on him.

Kaito suggested, in apology, “Tell me about your dad.”

Minamino pulled the book up, with his forearms under it, until his chin rested on the top of the spine. “He…knew me.”

Kaito waited.

Minamino only seemed to be more sure. “He knew me.”

“What does that mean?”

“He didn’t particularly like me. I know he presented me constantly with gifts and opportunities to please him, but they made no mark in my memory; they were given to hide his unease and lack of feeling. But, he was a more generous person for that – because he did what he did not want to do, so that he would not injure his family.” Minamino touched a finger to his lip, considering. “I hope to be like him.”

“Cold?”

“Generous.” Minamino glared, then seemed to go over the story again in his head, as one would think back over a statement made in a foreign language. “I understand it is a taboo for parents to not feel absolute attachment and preference to their children, but I think he did remarkably well for his position – “

“Were you a bastard child?”

Minamino pushed his slipping glasses up. “No.”

“You’re Irish looking.”

“There’s blood in my heritage that prescribes this appearance.”

“Oh.”

“Now, you tell me a story.” Minamino said, putting down his book. “What happened when your father ran off?”

Kaito’s lip twitched. He never hid the story from his classmates; he was too angry to be ashamed. He remembered the picture his father had sent Kaito in a birthday card, of his new baby girlfriend and him on the dock of a ship.

Kaito remembered his grandmother’s words. He told Minamino, “The slumbag followed his dick to less responsibility.”

“Is that why you study human characters to the point of brutality – to understand his abandonment, to judge and influence behavior, and to protect yourself from such unpredictable behavior in the future?”

The words spun in Kaito’s mind, shaking contempt off like a wet dog scatters water and jogging footprints. Kaito had no answer, and so he said, “No, I just find it interesting. What drives people to do what they do, you know?

“Lust, hunger, fear, and love.”

Kaito stared.

“I never liked stories.” Minamino went back to his book.

Kaito caught his breath, stung by the sudden malice. Talking to this boy was like looking though a peephole in a door and seeing a jungle, full of strange death-dealing beasts the size of buses, with jaws that issued earthshaking roars. Yet to step back was to look at the door, plain and quiet. Minamino, who never liked stories.

“Then what are you reading?” Kaito dragged himself back to familiar topics.

“A compilation of research investigating white-nose syndrome – a fungus that’s killing off entire species of bats.” He looked up, pensive. “There’s so few massive fires in the world now, too much moisture. Maybe that’s it.”

He looked like a pyro for a moment. Kaito grimaced, imagining a flesh melting fire sweeping the landscape, rushing at the building.

Everything in Minamino’s mind was horrible.

“Don’t you want to read something cheerful before bed? A fairy tale?”

Minamino looked over. His face looked haunted, as if he had undergone the chemo with his dad. “Why?”

“To help you sleep.”

Minamino contemplated that.

Kaito swallowed. “I could tell you one.”

The boy nodded. “I…would like that.”

Kaito stood, shaking loose blankets. He gathered up his bed things and pillows and dumped them on the bed.

Minamino stared, said nothing and moved towards the wall.

Kaito lay down and rolled over, away. “Keep the light off me.”

“Of course,” Minamino said, still propped sideways.

After a moment, Kaito began to breathe evenly, and the surprised waif settled back. Kaito imagined the sounds he heard were Minamino’s pointy elbows hitting the futon.

“Ow!” Minamino yelped. Kaito squinted, turned. Minamino was holding his hand to his mouth.

Kaito looked up at the lamp, a mixture of iron that looked like the electric lanterns used to signal old time coal-fueled trains. “Oh yeah. These old lamps get really hot. Forget it. Don’t move it, I’ll wait till you finish.” He stuck his hands behind his head. “It’s not like tomorrow will be especially taxing for either of us.”

Minamino smiled. He removed his hand and licked the spot, inside his forefinger.

Kaito took his hand and pulled it near. He blew on it. “Keep it cool. It’ll keep burning, otherwise.”

“Oh. Okay,” Minamino let him. Then he pulled his hand back and did the same.

Seeing the boy purse his lips and hearing the thin sound of air made Kaito choose a story.

“Once,” Kaito murmured. “There was a demon.”

Minamino’s eyes stretched with fear.

Kaito smirked. He was king of campfire horror, among his cousins.

“A demon that ate people. He was going out to find prey on a cold night, when he came upon a homeless – grade school student.”Kaito reached out and pulled on Minamino’s bangs. “With red hair.”

Minamino sniffed. “Anyone we know?”

“A total stranger. The demon was like, Come with me, young man. I will take care of you. The boy said, Thank you, for I am famished and the wind is cruel. And so, he followed the demon through the streets back to his lair, a dark mansion that smelled of blood - and screams.”

Minamino clutched his book to his chin, listening.

“The demon watched him as he walked, for the boy was – alien to him. And then, he saw the boy blew breath into his hands.” Kaito cupped his hands over his mouth. “Just like this, to warm them.”

Minamino mimicked him discreetly.

Kaito went on: “The demon, having never seen this before, asked what he was doing. The boy said, I am breathing hot air onto my hands to warm them.

“The demon was shocked. It could not do such a thing as blow hot breath, for it was not of this world. It feared the boy could breathe fire or smoke. So he watched the boy carefully. He suspected that green eyed student was more than what he seemed.”

Minamino swallowed, hooking a finger in his collar.

“The demon led the boy inside his mansion and sat him at his table. He decided to fatten the boy up before he ate him. As we stuff birds full of bread and sauce, he fed the boy a bread and a bowl of steaming hot soup.

“The boy thanked the demon. He was sorely grateful, for he was starving and weak. Then the boy leaned over the soup and blew off the steam.”

Kaito took a breath and blew gently over Minamino’s hand.

Minamino smiled. “And the demon?”

“The demon could not understand it. He said, Boy, the soup is already hot! And the boy returned, Of course, that is why I’m blowing on it – to cool it off. At that, the demon stumbled back.

“He spun on his scaled heels and ran out the door, shaking his head and shouting: No monster that blows hot and cold in the same breath is prey for me!”

Kaito finished, “And the demon was never seen again! The boy kept the big house, all the demon’s food and treasure, and he became loved by the local farmers, for he knew what it was to be hungry, and was always generous – as he felt the demon had been to him.”

There was silence.

Kaito waited for a reaction, a little disappointed. He’d put out a lot of theatrics in and expected some reward.

Minamino looked at the ceiling for a moment, calculating. Then he said very quietly, “Your story is funny because the boy increased the air’s velocity to evaporate the steam over his soup, closely after he had used the warmth of his lungs to expel internal heat onto his extremities to support an inefficient vascular system. To humans, control over breath is so familiar that they do not notice or think it’s strange if it results in a different temperature – but another creature may be startled enough to be afraid, if already sufficiently suspicious.”

Kaito grimaced. He reached over and patted Minamino’s head, sighing, “Yes. That’s why it’s funny.”

“There’s also a play on the word ‘breath,’ which assumes that a singular item has immutable traits, when in reality it has two or more natures and associated functions,” Minamino mused. “That is interesting.”

“What?”

“That one breath can blow hot and cold.”

Kaito shut his eyes. “Is your hand alright?”

“Yes, it’s fine.” Minamino blew on it.

“Great.” Kaito reached up and turned off the light. He grabbed Minamino’s book and tossed it onto the floor. “Now, good night.”

“Good night.”

Kaito fell asleep, listening to Minamino huffing hot breath into his palms and then blowing long strokes of air across them to cool his sweat.