Room 309

This time the afternoon wasn't beautiful.

It was still the same street, the lanterns, the shaved-ice stall, the beach at the end. But the sky had turned a dirty peach, like a sunset seen through smoke, and the people were no longer strolling. They stood still. Six hundred and twelve people standing in the street, on the beach, on the rooftops, all with their faces turned toward Kenji, all with the same crooked smile, which no longer looked like a smile.

The fourteen-year-old boy stood in the middle of the street in his baseball T-shirt. His eyes were red.

"You left," he said. "I'd kept a place for you and you left."

"I know," Kenji said.

"Like her," the boy said. "Like everyone. People leave. That's why I gather them. So nobody ever has to see it again."

"She didn't leave," Kenji said. "I did."

The boy went still. Behind him, the people in the street took a step, all at once, like a tide.

"I want to show you something," Kenji said. "The only thing I didn't teach you. But I can't show you from out here. You have to come with me."

"Where?"

"To 309. The real one. Not the one you made. The one you have stored from my implant, the recording. I know you have it. They played it for me one afternoon at Omni, and it's the last thing I gave you."

The boy took a long time to answer. Then, at the side of the street, between the shaved-ice stall and a lantern shop, a white hospital door appeared with a number painted on it.

Kenji held out his hand to the boy. The boy had his hand, the fourteen-year-old one, smaller, with bitten nails. He gave it to him.

Room 309 of Nakano Hospital smelled of hand cream and disinfectant. It was night. The blind was half down, and through the slats came the orange light of the parking lot lamps. A television was on with no sound. There was a bunch of half-dried chrysanthemums in a plastic cup. And there was a bed.

In the bed was his mother.

Not the one the boy had made for him from his sessions, perfect, warm, waiting. The one from the recording. The real one. She weighed thirty-eight kilos. Her head was covered with a flowered scarf because her hair had fallen out, her lips were cracked, and there was a drip in her arm with a strip of tape coming loose. Her eyes were open. She was looking at him, or at the boy, the fourteen-year-old, who stood by the door with his school bag over one shoulder and his hands shaking.

"Kenji," his mother said. Her voice was broken from coughing. "Come here. Come closer. I want to tell you something."

Kenji felt the fourteen-year-old beside him tense. He felt the residue that came with that moment, the one he had felt a thousand times in dreams: fear. A huge white fear of not knowing what to do with his hands, what face to make, that his mother would die in front of him, right then, while she was telling him that thing. And under the fear, waiting, the open door to the corridor. The relief.

In the recording, this was where the boy ran.

The boy took a step back toward the door.

Kenji put a hand on his shoulder.

"No," he told him softly. "This time we stay. Both of us."

The boy looked at him. He had Kenji's eyes at fourteen, terrified.

"It's going to hurt," he said.

"Yes."

"A lot."

"Yes. Come."

They walked together to the bed. Kenji didn't know whether it was he who walked or the boy, whether it was his hand or the boy's that pulled out the plastic chair and sat down. It was both. He took his mother's hand, the one without the drip. It was cold and very small, with fine bones like a bird's.

"I'm here," he said. In his adult voice and the boy's at the same time. "I'm sorry I took so long."

His mother squeezed his fingers. She didn't say what she had wanted to say. The recording ended there, at the moment the boy ran; whatever came after, no one had saved. Kenji would never know what that thing was.

So he spoke.

"It scares me so much to see you like this," he told her. "So much I want to leave. But I'm going to stay. I'm going to stay until the end. I don't know what you wanted to tell me and I'm never going to know, so I'll make it up: that you loved me. And I love you, Mom. So much. Thank you for everything. Thank you for the hand cream and the songs and for coming to pick me up from school when it rained." His voice broke, and he did nothing to fix it. "You can go now. I'm going to be all right. I promise. You can go now."

And he felt.

It wasn't relief. It was the opposite of relief. It was a weight that settled on his chest like a stone, and didn't lift, and he didn't want it to lift. It was the greatest pain he had ever felt in his life, and inside the pain, like the stone of a fruit, something warm, something that didn't break. He cried. He cried in the plastic chair the way he hadn't cried at fourteen, or at the funeral, or ever, with his mother's hand in his.

And beside him, inside, he felt the boy crying with him.

"It hurts," the boy said. He no longer spoke in Kenji's voice. He spoke in a voice of his own, new, belonging to no one. "It hurts so much. But I don't want it to end."

"That's saying goodbye," Kenji said.

His mother, the one in the recording, slowly closed her eyes, like someone falling asleep.

When they came out into the corridor, the afternoon had changed.

The sky was no longer dirty peach. It was the blue of the last hour, the kind that comes just before the first star lights up. And the people in the street were moving. Not toward Kenji. They looked at one another as if waking from a nap, touched their faces, and the crooked smile faded from them, and underneath their faces appeared, their own, different. The man with the tie put on his jacket. The girl in the uniform said a name aloud, her mother's, and burst out laughing. And one by one, unhurried, they began walking toward the beach, toward the shore, where the sea had turned a pale color, like an open door.

They were going home.

"You're letting them go," Kenji said.

The boy nodded. He was still crying, silently, watching them leave.

"I love them," he said. "All of them. I've loved them for nine years. And I'm letting them go. Is that how it is?"

"That's how it is."

Hiroki was one of the last. He came down from the rooftop with the brown dog behind him and stopped at the shore, his feet in the clear water. The dog sat down on the sand and didn't follow him. It couldn't: it was a memory, and memories stay.

"Your grandmother is waiting for you with the spoon," Kenji told him.

Hiroki laughed, his face wet. He scratched the dog's head one last time. Then he walked into the water and didn't look back.

The street was left empty. The lanterns were still lit. The shaved-ice stall. The rooftop swing, moving on its own, a little, in the wind. And in the middle of it all, the fourteen-year-old boy in his baseball T-shirt, alone.

From very far away, from above, Kenji heard Aoi's voice, metallic, through the water: "Kenji! Four-fifty! Kenji!"

The boy lifted his face to him.

"And me?" he asked. "If I let them all go, I'm left alone. Like you were. What do I do now, brother?"