But, she also told me that you never forgot your friends. “I may have done some reading between the lines. “And are you sure that those are the words she used?” The eyebrow stayed raised, joined by a smirk. That you never let anything, or anyone, let you think that you were worth less than you were.” But I did understand everything else: she told me you were a driven, brilliant businesswoman. “She told me you two had been friends since before she moved to Canada, when she was small,” he said, “and that you were some sort of heiress.”
Once again, with a mournful slowness, he was granted it. “What all did Stella ever tell you about me?” She crossed her legs, taking another long puff of her cigarette she looked tired, but elegant all for it. Kiryu blinked, and then, for reasons he wouldn’t himself quite be able to name, looked to Stella he was, he realized, looking for permission. Kiryu looked over his shoulder, slowing down so they wouldn’t plow headlong into the brush. “That’s because they weren’t-after he was done, the nurse pricked him with a morphine syrette, and his last words ended up being ‘Ow! Fuck!’ I doubt his family remembered it like that, though.” After a beat, “Or, maybe they did… excuse me, Kiryu?” There was a long enough pause for someone to shake their head. Did you know Roald Dahl’s last words were ‘I’m not frightened, it’s just that I will miss you all so much’?” If you go back far enough before someone died, you’ll find when they led into it with something scandalizing-although, if you go back too far the other way, you can get the same problem. No, I suppose the better word is ‘overrated’ you realize dignity in death is, without a doubt, a matter of scale. That makes it sound like it was your fault. “But, then you meet a stranger over a pancake breakfast, discuss Japanese politics, decide that you want to die, and then have to wait 8 hours longer than you expected for it, before suddenly, it seems like the dignity’s gone-or, not gone, sorry. She took a long, contemplative pause after that, puffing away at her cigarette. It would have been a nice, dignified speech to round out a life, I think.” “I thought I could wax all poetic about how I couldn’t escape being here, and didn’t dwell on the past, and so on, and so on. “Yeah,” she said, sighing out a wisp of smoke.
Life after death could still have its surprises, it seemed. Kiryu heard the snick of a lighter, and sure enough, when he glanced over his shoulder, she had pulled out a perfectly dry cigarette, put it on her perfectly dry holder, and lit up. “It was nothing,” Kiryu said, pulling deep from his bag of stock responses. “But then the universe conspired to prove me wrong-I’ve been given escape after escape today, haven’t I? First we lose the boat, then Albert puts us a week down his docket, and then we nearly talk Kiryu here out of giving us a ride…” There was a hand patting one of Kiryu’s fins.
“You should always come to battle with a plan of attack, so to speak-anyway, I was going to say something like, ‘Seems I couldn’t escape it, doesn’t it?’ I thought it’d be a good opener, better than anything else I could have come up with.” She paused, and laughed. “The first thing I was going to say-yes, I’d planned my opening remarks, Stella,” she went on, apparently responding to some quizzical look on the latter’s part Kiryu, for the moment, was keeping his own gaze locked forward. They’d been swimming for only a minute or two, the boat disappeared behind them amidst the cherry blossom foliage it had been silent, save for the sound of Kiryu’s body gently lapping through the water, before Gwen finally spoke.
0 kommentar(er)
