Chapter Text
There was a place at the edge of town where the road sloped into a gentle hill, overlooking a vacant lot that must have once been the intended site of an apartment complex or shopping center, the project now postponed or abandoned. Eventually, someone would no doubt start building here again, but for now the lot stood empty and apart from the road, so that late at night, the guardrail dropped off into a sea of impenetrable darkness.
Odokawa leaned against the rail, smoking. It was a recent habit and a bad one to learn for someone his age, but he stuck to it, tenderly nursing each cigarette down to the filter. The headlights of passing cars illuminated the garish colors of his shirt, his tusks stained the color of old plastic by nicotine and age. The stars twinkled overhead, unfettered by the city’s light pollution, but he kept his gaze down, at the sea of black. Beside him, his taxicab rested on its tires, engine off, tires settling.
He cast the glowing stub of his cigarette over the rail and watched the dark swallow it. He returned to the car and eased into the driver’s seat and adjusted the mirror; his heavy-lidded walrus’ face looked back at him. The magazines at his feet rustled as he groped through them and produced a half-full bottle of barley tea. He unscrewed the cap, drank deep, then screwed it back on and started the engine. The dashboard glowed with its panoply of lights. These constellations were always familiar.
With a practiced hand, he guided the car off the shoulder and re-entered the circulation of the road, taking his place amongst these late-night drivers, foggy shapes rendered amorphous by window-glass. It was time to go back to work.
* * *
His insomnia made the job easier in some ways. He could work through the midnight hours, after the trains shut down and his more weak-willed fellow cabbies returned to their own beds, so customers were easy to find. Often they were on the strange side, but this time of night warped everyone a little, and he was no paragon of normalcy himself.
There were parts of every city wracked with their own sleeplessness, where the storefronts and marquee signs never went dim. Smears of gangrenous color in the surrounding dark. Odokawa trundled down those roads, the shopping centers and red-light districts, watching for a raised hand.
He found one not too far from a large-carnivore hospital near midtown, a spindly shape that stood stiff as a mannequin. When he pulled over, the shape turned out to be a female fox in a cheap blouse and slacks, but still mannequin from the neck up – there was something eerily stiff about her face, beyond the sagging exhaustion of most people he picked up at this hour. It was like it had been whittled out of her skull. The breeze picked up and pushed her clothes against her matchstick build. He let her in.
“Where to?” he asked.
“The Open Window Hostel, please,” she said, in a husky croak of a voice. “District 12.”
“Got it.”
“And can you take the long way?”
The eye in his rearview window narrowed. “What do you mean? There shouldn’t be much traffic.”
“I know. Just take your time, if that’s alright. Show me the sights. I can pay.”
He sighed, whiskers fluttering. Every other late-night fare dragged in some sort of complication. Grasping for reasons not to return home.
“I can bring us around Dura Boulevard,” he said. “It goes past B-Strike. That okay?”
“That’s fine.”
He nodded and pulled back into the street. In the mirror, the fox’s gaze lingered on the driver’s license mounted on his dash, and then drifted back to the window.
Like most cabbies, he navigated by landmarks, like survey stakes pounded in the earth – through his eyes, everything between those guiding points was reduced to abstraction, a snarl of light and uneven geometry which he’d scan for those raised arms. The radio babbled and spit as he took them further into midtown, and the city’s sleepless sparkle washed over his passenger’s unemotive face.
They reached B-Strike, which also stood open at all hours – for the sake of nocturnal customers, he’d always guessed, he never went in there himself. Its irregular shape stood out from its neighbors, like a piece of badly-blown glass. The fox’s head swiveled on her neck as they passed it by, and then it was gone, another fading bit of shine in the mirror.
“None of it’s changed,” she said.
Odokawa didn’t respond.
“I went this way all the time when I was younger,” she said. “I keep expecting to see something different.”
Many people believed it was a cabbie’s responsibility to make conversation, but he’d never agreed with them. He was comfortable to let silence pile up in suffocating layers like woolen blankets until his passengers had no choice but to thrash out of it themselves. But this one seemed nice enough, so he threw her a line.
“Hasn’t been any construction lately,” he said.
“I didn’t mean it that way. I meant…” She trailed off, hands folded in her lap. “Do you ever feel that way? That this whole city’s stayed the same?”
“I wouldn’t know. Haven’t been here long.”
“Oh. How long?”
“I know the roads. That’s about it.” He flicked his blinker on, turned, flicked it off. On a street corner, a heavyset tapir tout vainly tried to bait some canine salarymen into his club. The fox slumped against the passenger door. He felt the silence building up again. When it grew this thick, it usually burst open into something that was better left unsaid.
She told him, “I was in prison. A predatorial offender.”
And there it was.
He knew all about them. It was impossible not to – a sizable portion of his agency’s brief training had dealt with pred offenders, how to appear non-threatening so that herbivorous fares would stay relaxed and calm around him. Maybe they all thought he would drive them onto some deserted backroad and eat them alive. But while he wasn’t exactly thrilled with a vegetarian diet, he’d never been overcome with the urge to eat meat, live or otherwise. It was possible he’d taken on other fares who had that crime on their records, it wasn’t as if they glowed in the dark or anything, but this fox was the first one who’d openly announced it to him.
“Do you have a problem with that?” she asked. Her face still frozen, melancholy in its blankness.
“I’m not totally comfortable with it, if that’s what you mean.”
“I can get off here, if you want.”
“Are you planning to eat me?”
“No. I’m not.”
“Then I don’t care.”
It was an absurd question, in any case. He could have fended her off one-handed, and he was far from the athletic type. She was quiet for a minute and then went on, dripping her unwanted confessions into his ear.
“It built up inside me, for about a year. School was going badly. I didn’t have anyone to talk to. Anything to hope for. One day some homeless rabbit started harassing me on the way home, and, well.” She ran a finger down the windowpane. “I ended up in a…psychiatrist’s office, I guess you could call it. The doctor there tried to rehabilitate me. He thought I could re-integrate without any trouble. But instead, I turned myself in.”
“Noble of you.” His voice was dry enough to boil away any sarcasm.
“I don’t think nobility was part of it. It just felt necessary.”
“How long did they keep you there?”
“Three years. I’ve been out for a few months now. But it’s strange. I don’t feel any different than I did the day I went to the police station.”
“I don’t know what you were expecting.” They were entering the poorer parts of the city now, splintered pavements, irregular lights. His headlights scythed across the road.
“You don’t think jail can change someone?” she asked.
“If it could, then repeat offenders wouldn’t exist. Whether or not you change is up to you.”
For an instant, her face gained a wistful cast, thin as a plume of smoke. “I wonder that that says about me.”
The engine’s hum filled the silence.
“Did you ever see that doctor again?” he asked.
“Yes. He got me a job.”
“He sounds like a decent guy.”
“He did so much for me. I wanted to repay him somehow. Promised I’d be able to smile for him once I got out. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t do it. Not in a way that feels true.” There was grief in her voice but still her expression didn’t move a millimeter. “I feel like I’ve made so many mistakes. The devouring. Turning myself in. Everything was unbearable. I wish that I could find the words for it. When I was younger, my family often brought me to the seaside. I loved to swim, to see how far beneath the water I could go. Alone in that little capsule of silence. But the day came when I dove so deep I couldn’t see the sun, didn’t know which way to go.”
The steering wheel’s aged leather creaked under his grip.
“I did break the surface eventually,” she went on. “My parents pulled me to shore. They were furious, never took me to the beach again. But I found myself there anyway. You breathe and breathe but you never get enough air. There wasn’t anyone to help this time. I chose to shock myself out of it. I had to do something unforgivable, or I’d die. But here I am again. The same place. The same thing.”
It was all too common, passengers treating a taxi like a confessional. Understandable enough – the driver was a neutral party, especially the quieter ones like himself, and after the ride was over, the chances of them ever meeting again were very, very slim. He’d never taken the same fare twice. For that same reason, he was typically unmoved by their woes, but he wasn’t above occasionally speaking a line or two to assuage them, if only so they’d shut up.
“What about the doctor?” he asked.
“What?”
“This doctor of yours. Doesn’t sound like you’d have met him if you’d just kept going to school. Did you have anyone like that before?”
The fox blinked, slowly. “I guess not.”
“Well, that’s something.”
He turned another corner, eased off the gas. She straightened in her seat.
“You said you moved here recently?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Why did you-”
“We’re here.”
He pulled up next to the hostel, a three-story box with most of its windows unlit; from the others, their glow spilled onto paint that may have once been some shade of blue but was now reduced to a sooty gray, peeling like eczema. Cheap lodgings, but he didn’t judge. His own apartment probably wasn’t much better.
“The fare is ¥4150,” he said, and watched her count out exact change and hand it over. “Thank you. Don’t forget anything in the car.”
The door opened and she started to climb out, and then paused at the threshold. Her face was already outside the mirror’s gaze, so that even if some new emotion had crept onto those carved angles, he wouldn’t be able to see it.
“I like your smell,” she said. “That cigarette smell.”
With that, she stepped onto the curb and towards the building’s entrance. The front doors opened, and shut, and she was gone. Odokawa put away the money and, after a moment’s thought, huffed onto his palm and sniffed deep. No trace of smoke. He’d never get used to how sharp some of their noses could be.
There was still time before dawn. He restarted the engine and returned the way he’d come. Behind him, the hostel’s lights became indistinguishable from the surrounding glimmer; one window on the third story was briefly illuminated, and then went out.