formiito

 This was a strange conversation to have at five am, but somehow you are here in the Agency building, again, with about one hour exactly to go before one of the others woke up, a gun in your hand, and the most infuriating man on earth on it’s other end.

It’s not even your fault, it’s the fact that you’re forced to work with this guy that you didn’t know almost three weeks ago, which coincidentally was time enough for you to find this piece, although you really shouldn’t have. Emergencies only, you said, walking around with what was essentially a piece of old scrap metal stuffed in the back of your jeans and under your torn jacket. The thing jammed nearly all the time. Looking at Dazai’s expression, the thought entered your head that maybe the bastard knew that. Out there in the streets there’s a cop completely distraught at having lost his licensed gun somewhere after a week long bender. At five am you are here in the Agency dorms having dragged both yourself and Dazai in after an all night investigation, grime still stuck on your leather jacket and on his shitty polyester coat.

It’s cold and damp and neither of you can come to a conclusion. Outside it’s somehow still dark, though you wish it were morning already and that with the coming light, you two would forget all about everything as per usual and go out for some coffee, muddy boots drying out.

And you do, sort of, after everything is mostly said and nothing is done. The trigger finger feels stupid and the gun is back in it’s place. His words without gentleness and your anger without restraint feel out of place then, in the morning, when you’re getting coffee like nothing happened. The argument melts like a wisp of smoke in the night.

“You want sugar?” You ask him once you both get downstairs, lights dimmed in the cafe, no one save the two of you. Your tasteless flat white and his bitter americano. You note that neither of you can make good coffee.

 —

The autopsy was brutal.

Something about handling a sodden body out in the rain didn’t sound right to you, especially one left in a car for almost a day. 8pm and the flesh is slowly enmeshing itself with the leather. There’s an extinguished cigarette butt on the ground and something in you almost makes you want to pick it up and smoke it even though it’s broken at the filter. Some respite would have been nice, though for you it’s just mourning all the cigarettes you can’t smoke in this world.

Next to you Dazai is peering into the broken window, though with how banged up the car was, it feels like the damage was done after the fact. That is, if you could even tell where this man ended or began. There were the grey eyes, wide as a baby’s, the misshapen nose and the curved mouth, but nothing of the sack of skin you saw could ever feel vaguely human. The very thought of something like that alive and walking around just yesterday seemed strange. Something with all the symptoms of a person but none of the visage. A wash of rigor mortis on his face. If you squint your eyes, he looked somewhat like a massive, lonely wound. Just another dead motherfucker out on the streets. Dazai poked at the drooping head twice, with a bored expression, though something in his eyes expressed some kind of vague solidarity between him and the car murder mess. Dead motherfuckers out on the streets.

“Sooooo… he’s dead.”

“I got eyes, you know. Tell me something I don’t know-”

“Wait, shh. He’s got something in his pockets.”

Dazai interjected, prodding around at the black and blue flesh, and the flannel shirt connected to it. There was something in the pockets. A fleeting thought crossed your mind, and before you could reason it, your lips moved.

“Hey, what’s the line between investigating and just looting a dead man?”

“As long as you don’t take his money, I guess?” Dazai answered, though he had already fished out and pocketed the notes from the wallet he’d found. It caught your eye for a second… hm. No. There was nothing. You didn’t want to know if there was, anyway.

“Found anything strange?”

“A note with a date and zip code on it. Two days ago, here.”

The date of the murder… suicide… whatever that happened flashed across your mind. You couldn't tell if the body was too fresh for two days old, or too old. Something in a heated car in the rain was bound to age a little differently. Your eyes flitted down to the rags and flesh clumped around together, to the dried blood on the windows on the back.

“And I guess we’re going on a wild goose chase to find out what those mean? It’s not the date of the murder. That’d make no sense to be here. A meeting?”

“I guess so. Could be anything, though. There’s also two tickets to a B-movie here, but I don’t think that’s related.”

“For when?”

“8pm tonight.”

You took a quick look at your watch, squinting your eyes.

“It’s eight. So he wasn’t expecting to die so early, I guess.”

And there are two, so he was expecting to be there with someone. Standing somewhere, a stranger with no face, under the projector glow forever... the alive always wait for the dead.

Dazai took a step back from the car window, shutting the dead man inside. “Does anyone expect to die?” You ran your hand over your hair once in exasperation. “You wanna expect to die right now? Cause I will, you know. And I’ll put you in the car too, so you and your dead friend here don’t piss me off anymore.”

Dazai tuts gently, taking a picture of the corpse with your instant camera that you gave him a while ago for just this purpose. The ink slides onto the paper, the image develops, and there he is. Mystery maybe-a-man in all his putrid, black and blue glory, cradled tight by his machinery. The black seatbelt straps hold him like a mother to her child.

The smell takes a while to disappear when you two eventually walk away after the quick external exam of the body. You press the ammonia to your nose, and somehow it only makes you feel worse. Dazai looks almost entirely unfazed, looking through the broken glass once more before turning his heel and going on with you. He wonders if there is someone waiting at the theatre after all. But the time’s already passed, and the man is dead. You carefully step past the half eaten carcass of a rat on the road. Dazai thinks it’s a lucky thing.

You feel vaguely dizzy from the smell and the bright lights in the city, everything mirrored onto the wet ground. The droplets slide off your jacket, and Dazai thinks he must’ve somehow absorbed half his weight in water. The sight of him makes you feel just a tinge of pity, despite yourself, so you slide off the leather and plop it onto him, the beige coat hanging off your arm instead. He doesn’t let you hear the end of it. He talks like a wounded dog, you think. On and on until the end of the night. Your shoelaces get caught under his step and for a moment you fantasize about his untimely end. He buys a pack of cigarettes from the convenience store with the stolen money and offers one to you. It looks enticing, but you turn it down out of principle.

Enough of the smoke and the city and the dead things in all it’s corners today. You stare at the trails of smoke from his lips. A few hours earlier you would've done anything to be one of them, but you don’t trust it. Emotions come and go like strange tides. Some days you could trust Dazai with your life, other days you swear he can never know anything about you ever again—that you’re leaving, you don’t know how, but you are. Except the next day you’re here again, his coat on your arm and your shoelaces caught under his step.

The jacket on his shoulders feels heavy as lead and almost oppressively warm. The faint scent of vanilla gives him a headache. He almost always hates it and he almost always wants it around.

 —

 It’s another odd hour of the night, somewhere in the middle of the autopsy report and the morning coffee. It’s when Dazai ends up on the stairs of a stranger, though it truly isn’t that late. You always do tell him that you’re leaving, that you don’t know how, but you are. That you’re sick of your dead end job and the violence that inflames every corner of this city. The city, she is an organism, and clotted all around at the choke points. The laughing women and the men with them as they go by, all the fashioned freaks with a fever for nightlife and surveillance. In the distance he sees them all go. He fantasizes of the train ticket to nowhere and he likes to think you’d take him. Save him from being the dying cell in the breathing, living city. He wonders if someone else in the world is in the exact same situation he is right now; collapsed on a stranger’s steps, convinced he is slowly dying.

He didn’t know what made him drink. Nothing about the day was stressful, only annoying, but there was something in the air itself. Too warm. Too bright. The sodium lights meet his gaze and he angles his head into the shadows. He’s not sure where to go, only that he wanted to be away.

He wondered that if he called you now, you’d make good on your complaining and take him away. The thought only hits him too late that your fantasy of escape would have only been for you. He too is the part of the city, her organism, that you wanted to break away from. The death on every corner. The shadow under the staircases of strangers and the cigarettes broken at the filter.

So, where do you want to go?

Wherever you’re taking me!

He doesn’t bother calling you. It’s no use. When he gets home, and he always does, he’d say he got distracted by every puddle on the road and every curb and every sidewalk that he spent hours making love to the cracks in the pavements. His skin is cold and under the fluorescents it looks almost blue. There is a lazy smile on his face when he thinks that this is it, he’s done it. Rigor mortis. But he’s felt that way for such a long time. It won’t last.