She sits up straight, pulling the fur tighter, looking furious; then the fight goes out of her and she wipes her hand over her face. “What the fuck, dude,” she says, her voice flat and angry. “You really are a true fan. How did you find out about that?”
“You told me.”
This brings her up short. “Oh,” she says.
“You don’t remember?”
She shrugs. “I get blackouts,” she says. “And migraines. Part of the price of doing business. I lose days. Weeks, sometimes. Price of success. But maybe you already knew that.”
“Did you black out last night?”
“Not that I recall,” she says lightly, smiling, like she thinks it’s kind of funny, and he realizes that she’s channeling her glamorous old actresses, and thus blowing him off, which means there might not be any answers.
“Hey now,” she says. “Come on, it’s not as bad as all that,” and lays him back down. She turns off the bedside light and gets in beside him, saying, “So why don’t you tell me everything, from the beginning. Maybe we’re already old friends and I forgot.”
Head propped on her hand, she pays close attention as he tells her about the last two days. “Those are my stories,” she says, “but they’re not ones I tell. I must be so much lonelier than I thought. But I’ve never had a Swiss bank account, and I haven’t been locked in some house in the mountains. That I remember. And here I thought you were just this fan for the taking.”
Later she says, “You know your girl sold you out, right? The little thing. Kayla. I mean, how do you think the hitman knew where to find your friend Lares, or even that he should?” Silence, and eventually she says, “You didn’t know. I’m sorry, baby. That’s just how they are, the Kaylas of the world.”
“That’s what you said before.”
“I know exactly what she was thinking. She made it seem okay by pretending it wasn’t real. Something would happen so they wouldn’t really find you, and she’d get something, probably money, for doing nothing, which is how the world works, she thinks, ideally.”
“Oh,” he says.
“It’s okay. You got through it, didn’t you? But maybe you should think about whether she’s worth holding on to.” He’s silent, watching the clouds go by, and she says, “Okay. You know a lot about me, and I still know almost nothing about you, so why don’t you tell me how you met her.”
“There are fights at night on the favelas’ rooftops,” he says. “I did it for money, and for practice, and so they’d know to be afraid of me. One night I was going to fight this kid, actually he was my age but he looked frightened until his older brother came up and started rubbing his shoulders, and they were looking at me while the brother told him how to beat me.”
“Did you have someone there, a coach or something?”
“I’ve never had a coach,” Kern says. “I’d meant to go for a low-risk technical win but when the ref said ‘fight’ I rushed him. The louder the brother shouted the harder I hit. I’m usually conservative, but that time I took punches so I could get my hands on. I knocked him down and got the mount and felt his nose break under my hand. I kept punching until the ref pulled me off and then I flicked the blood from my hands into the brother’s face.”
“Why?” asks Akemi, who’s looking at him like he’s really interesting for the first time, and it’s because of this and because she’s seemingly without judgment that he’s able to say, “Because they made a show of it,” though the words almost stick in his throat. “They didn’t have to let me know.
“Afterwards I was sitting on the edge of the roof and this girl came up to me. Kayla, as it turned out. My eye was swelling shut, but I could see that she was pretty. I couldn’t think of anything to say—it was like I’d become an animal, and all I could do was look at her. She wiped off the blood from under my eye. ‘You’re hurt,’ she said.”
*
In the night her breathing turns fast and shallow, like she’s having a bad dream, and he shakes her and whispers her name but she doesn’t wake up. Moisture on her upper lip—he holds his fingers up to the little light, sees they’re dark, licks them, tastes blood. Not knowing what to do, he wraps himself around her, hoping the heat and contact will at least comfort her, and after a while the bleeding stops—he throws the stained pillow to the floor—but her breathing doesn’t slow. His fingertips trace the hardness of her socket, which he imagines would annoy her, if she were conscious.
It’s dark but he’s irrevocably awake. It’s been days since he bathed, barring a quick wash with paper towels in the plane’s cramped lavatory, and he’s always made a point of washing every day, even when it was hard to get water. He pads naked into the bathroom, which is tiled in smooth stone—easing the light on, he sees it’s granite, mottled with the cross-sections of tiny fossil shells. The shower’s pipes are a convolution of silver, like old-style espresso machines; he figures out how to use the knobs to set the water temperature digitally. The hot water beats on the stone and sluices over his hair, the pressure like a cataract, diluting his thoughts. The water pressure is still high after several minutes, and for the first time he finds himself envying the rich.
When he turns off the water he hears her moving, wonders if she’s recovered over the course of his shower and gotten out of bed, but when he comes back into the dark room he sees the swell of her body under the duvet and sitting beside her is a man, or the shadow of one, cross-legged on the bed, his laptop beside him, and as in a nightmare there’s a small silver pistol gleaming on a table, just beyond the man’s reach, and Kern is acutely aware of the glass walls behind him, of how he’s silhouetted before the moonlit clouds, and then there’s nothing but the question of whether he can reach the man before the man can reach the gun but it seems it would take hours, or even years, to cross the twelve feet of carpet, and it seems that he’d never reach the man, and the man would never reach the gun, both forever suspended in motion, but even in the dark Kern registers the man’s calm, guesses that the gun is on the table not through carelessness but as a sort of joke, and is still.
After a while the man says, “I’m almost done here,” and then, “If you took longer showers we might never have met.”
“Can I put on my clothes?” asks Kern.
“Go ahead,” says the man, “though so much for intimacy.”
As Kern tugs on his pants he feels the mass of the phone and of the money in his pockets, and is relieved, when he pulls his shoes on, because now if he dies he won’t look so pathetic.
Laptop light, shining in the man’s face—he looks Japanese, but doesn’t sound it, and Kern realizes this is probably Hiro.
Kern says, “What are you doing here?”
“Collecting a debt. We take everything, but it’s nothing she’ll miss.”