Sharp Shooter Seoul Read online

  "Let's wait until the train takes off at least," I said.

  Kei nodded. We were in the center of the car, farthest from the doors, but the app still shone purple. I got up and punched the button to close the doors, but they must have been set to stay open until departure. I returned to kneel in front of Kei, who was holding the pollution wristwatch and watching it.

  I sighed and took a look at the numbers: 280. Once it got below 200 we could swap the filters with relative safety while Kei held a breath in.

  "Give me the new filter," I said. "Let's be ready to go as soon as the doors close."

  Kei took a moment to nod, then sluggishly pulled out the new filter and handed it to me. I thought about the potential for brain damage from oxygen deprivation.

  I grabbed Kei's shoulders and implored my partner. "Stay with me. You can't pass out."

  Kei met my eyes then, and I said even more embarrassing things. "Who knows how much time I have left? For the time that I am alive, I want you here with me. Please."

  At noticing my distress, the other passengers vacated the car. It was not their problem.

  The doors shut.

  Kei stared at the wristwatch, monitoring the numbers as they fell, barely able to remain upright. "Now."

  I ripped open the packet of the new filter.

  "Hold your breath," I ordered, because it didn't look like Kei was even processing what was happening anymore.

  Kei leaned against me, hands on my shoulders. I had to do the entire transfer myself, on a moving train, out in public. All of this was a first.

  Panicked, I just transferred the filter directly, not giving Kei a puff on the emergency inhaler with the special cocktail that prevented anaphylaxis. I popped the filter off, Kei's mouth and nose dangerously exposed to the air in the train, then snapped the new filter on. If Kei had forgotten I'd said to not breathe, and taken anything in just then, I'd have to pop the new filter off and use the emergency inhaler. If that didn't work, then the Epipen. Oh God—

  "Kei," I commanded. "The filter's on. Breathe."

  Kei slumped over, looking about to faint—

  "Hey!" I shook those terrifyingly limp arms so hard Kei's head snapped back.

  That did the trick. Kei blinked and looked up at me, woozy but regaining strength. My heart leapt for joy, but tears sprang to my eyes. Had any brain damage happened just then?

  Those beautiful eyes creased in what had to be a smile behind the mask.

  I pulled Kei into a hug, holding back the tears that threatened to fall. "You scared me."

  Kei rubbed soothing circles on my back. "Yeah."

  *~*~*

  We finally got checked into the hotel, and Kei wisely suggested we take a rest before heading out for the evening. After a shower, Kei immediately crashed. I turned off the lamps and let twilight lead me around the room with Kei's watch, checking the windows for any leaks that would let the pollution from outside in. I grabbed an extra towel, dampened it, then stuffed it under the door.

  I looked over at Kei sleeping peacefully. It was still early evening. After the episode this afternoon, I wanted to stay awake and keep watch over my partner, make sure Kei was breathing. But the last several weeks had been a frantic accumulation of all of my evidence that Mikabe was in South Korea, and my body and soul were exhausted. I'd hardly seen Kei in that time, even though we lived together. Kei's duty started now, to get me into the underworld where we would find Mikabe, and to safely get us out again.

  Just a little while, I rationalized, slipping into bed and curling up around Kei. Just a little bit of rest, then we'll get back to work…

  *~*~*

  One month ago

  "…I want to ask Kei to marry me," I blurted. The summer air in Yonezura near Mt. Atsumi suddenly felt even more oppressive than usual. I bit my lip. I was supposed to be coming out to my mother.

  My mother froze, her cup halfway to her mouth. "I knew this was eventually coming."

  I blinked at her. "Really?"

  "Of course," she said, finally taking a sip. "You're obsessed, always saying 'my Kei, my Kei' and 'Kei-san this' or 'Kei-san that' ever since you were in college. I'd resigned myself long ago that this day would eventually come. I'm glad you've made a decision for yourself, my son."

  I shoveled more zaru soba into my face to fill the silence. I remembered the many times Mom and I had argued about Kei's gender. Mom claimed someone didn't get to just decide that they had no gender. Society decided that for them. I claimed that that was exactly why Kei was X-gender, or in English genderqueer, an opt-out of an inherently discriminatory system. I had refused to disclose what Kei's body looked like, because it didn't matter. Physical sex and gender were not the same thing, and more people on this Earth were beautifully intersex than the older generations were willing to admit. I wondered if she were about to bring this up again, whether we would have to rehash everything. All my defenses flew up, the walls Kei had so diligently taken down over the years, stone by stone.

  "Does that mean you're going to settle down?" Mom asked.

  I deliberated on why she would ask that question. Mom only knew that we worked for the police force on investigations. I suppose our traveling could mean to her that what we did was dangerous. When Kei was shot in Osaka a year ago, I had discreetly hid the hospital stay from Mom, just telling her we were busy with work and would be out of contact for a while. I would never want her to worry about me, and just having Kei with me made my job a lot safer.

  If Kei had traveled a different path, I was sure my partner would have become a champion archer instead of my sharp shooter. I sometimes wondered, if we hadn't met, whether Kei would have had to see the dark things we encountered every day on the job. It was just as likely that Kei's dual citizenship would have resulted in a forced drafting into a sniper squadron of the Japanese Self Defense Forces, so I held on to our position at Tokyo police headquarters with all my might. I'd be damned if either the Japanese or the American military took Kei away from me.

  "I don't think we'll settle down anytime soon, but we'll remain together," I said with a smile, because I meant it. "Kei's been getting grants to do pollution research while we work on our investigations, so I think we'll keep doing that as long as we can."

  I knew deep down that I would keep supporting Kei on this mission to clear up the air for as long as I myself breathed. Kei supported me like that too. Illegal pornography was so toxic, I would have left it at my first opportunity had the human cost of those little girls and boys not tugged at me. I knew Kei followed me because of that. For the same reasons, I could have retired in the mountains with air as clear as a crystalline lake, if Kei were able to leave air pollution alone. We could open up a little shop on the main street and run it together. But Kei was as consumed with air quality as I was with the trafficked child sex slaves: knowing it was out there meant we could never rest. But at least we would run together, until our lungs could no longer fuel our legs, until the end of our time on this Earth.

  My mother's smile, to my surprise, was blissful. "I'm glad you've found something to be passionate about, and that you have a partner who believes in that passion too. That was how I finally realized that I had fallen out of love with your father."

  I nodded. I could barely remember when my father lived at home, but now he had remarried and started a different family. I felt like I barely knew him. Kei's father, for all of his faults in being a strict military dad, had still welcomed me as his son so immediately, it had rendered me speechless during our first meeting at a diner in Denver. Both my parents and Kei's had divorced, but I still wanted to give marriage a try. It wasn't like marriage would change what we currently had going. I wanted to make it clear to Kei and the world how I felt, an explicit level of commitment that I hoped Kei already knew.

  "Will there be grandchildren?"

  I froze, the soba hanging in the air from my chopsticks. I forced myself to eat it. It was a question I could not blame Mother for asking. She undoubtedly wanted
grandchildren, but it was also another question about Kei's gender—whether Kei had the anatomy that could give me a child. She was indirectly asking a very direct and intrusive question.

  But that wasn't the only issue here. My own shadow haunted this matter, and I spoke so softly, she could barely hear me.

  "Mom, you and I were in Kozuichi when the Fukushima Daiichi reactor melted down." I met her eyes. "I could never hope to become a father with that much radiation in my body."

  Mother visibly trembled, and I realized I had inadvertently blamed my infertility on her. She'd been young and too scared to take me away from our extended family after her divorce. We'd done like everyone else that had nowhere else to go. I'd weathered the initial fallout as an infant, spent my first years of preschool and kindergarten as an evacuee in temporary housing, then moved back to a town not ten kilometers from the disaster.

  I scrambled to make things right. "That's not it, Mom. I don't blame this on you. I'm gay, after all."

  She gasped and covered her mouth with her hands. Dammit. Real smooth.

  "Mother." I reached for her and she flinched.

  It stung me harder than any slap. My hand fell to my side. Taking a deep breath, I stilled my nerves and let the silence hang between us. I heard my mother fish for her handkerchief and weep into it.

  I crossed my arms, cocked my right ankle on my left knee and let my legs splay out wide. The cop inside me returned, the one who could lock a human being up like an animal and still sleep at night, but I pushed that down. This was my mother.

  Fuck it. I didn't even know what I was doing here. I should have been back in Tokyo working with Kei. We'd always been a duo of acceptance, our little world inside which we were simply human beings who didn't care what others thought about us.

  Yet in that moment I imagined Kei teaching our little child how to read and it was beautiful. The child didn't look anything like us, but that was just like Kei. Kei, an asthmatic who couldn't breathe without technology in this dying world, would insist upon adopting a child who desperately needed parents.

  "Maybe someday," I told my mom. "I think Kei would make a great parent."

  In the long silence I could not look at her. Then as her sobs calmed, I heard her say into her handkerchief, "You'd make a good father, Masamune."

  Her use of my given name sank into the pit of my stomach like a rock. I knew I shouldn't feel guilty; those old habits of ingrained bias died hard, but I blamed myself for coming all this way just to trouble my mother.

  "I love you, Mom," I said, because I did, and because somehow I knew that was what Kei would have me say at this moment.

  She reached out and took my hand. I finally met her eyes. They were tear-filled, but she was smiling.

  "I love you too."

  *~*~*

  Present day

  We both awoke to the roar of the crowd outside. Peering down from our hotel window, we saw a sea of signs and hats and children on shoulders. So these were the corruption scandal protests.

  I ran downstairs to the small shop at the bottom of the hotel for food and soju, resigned to staying inside for the evening.

  "They are mostly our age, or younger," I said, closing the door and stuffing the damp towel back in.

  Kei was perched on the window sill, which was large enough for the two of us to sit and put the kimchi, vegetable bibimbap and strawberry soju between us.

  "I did some reading on the corruption scandal while you slept," Kei said. "Apparently it's just embezzling, but the young people who elected this candidate aren't having it. I can't believe it. Scandals like that are so everyday in Japan and the US, it doesn't even make the news, if it's discovered at all. These young people must really love their country, to show up in such numbers for South Korea."

  I nodded, impressed. I too wouldn't think twice about it if I heard something like that on Japanese news.

  "I don't think I hold that much love for any of my countries," Kei remarked.

  "I can only hold that much love for my partner," I said practically.

  Kei blinked, nostrils flaring with the mask off. "Me?"

  I laughed. "Who else?"

  Kei looked out the window again, clearly embarrassed. I poured our soju and offered the glass.

  We clinked glasses and drank. The ring I'd brought with me here was burning a hole in my suitcase.

  "We should get married sometime," I remarked casually, testing the waters.

  Kei scoffed. My heart sank.

  "What's the point of getting married?" Kei remarked. "It doesn't represent who we are to each other."

  I heaved a sigh. "When I went home for a bit a month ago, I had a talk with Mom about my radiation stuff. It just makes me want to tie us legally together, so you could have last visitation rights, and my inheritance and the apartment and things like that."

  Kei gaped at me, as the carrot stick poised to be eaten fell to the window sill instead. "Jesus Christ, Taka, that's morbid talk. Are you talking about the Fukushima fallout effects?"

  I scratched my head. "I'm sorry. Yeah."

  Kei reached out and rubbed my shoulder. "I love you, because you glow in the dark."

  I stared like my partner had grown a second head.

  "No, really," Kei continued. "As an asthmatic, I don't know what kind of life span I can promise my partner. You don't either, with your radiation stuff. Any promise of your life span would be bogus. It puts us on equal footing, makes me feel more comfortable with my uncertainty."

  "Like we're not setting each other up for betrayal if our health complications take us out early," I said.

  Kei stared off at nothing. "We just do our best. That's the path that's left for people like us. We just have to do everything we can, and let the cards fall where they will."

  It sounded beautiful to hear Kei say that in Japanese.

  We ate in silence for a moment, listening to the cheers and chanting of the protestors outside. I didn't know what Kei was thinking, but the uproarious sound made me think about the love motivating their activism, and the love motivating our activism, and our mission here. If we succeeded, one vicious human trafficker would be behind bars, and maybe some of his victims would be brought back into the light too.

  I watched the lights from the street glimmer off of Kei's eyes. Half-Japanese, half-white, and Kei's Japanese mother was a beautiful northern pale that hinted there might have been a Russian great-grandfather back in time, unspoken of. The end result was that Kei's skin was so pale as to be almost translucent, a problem when Kei was trying to not look sick in public. Kei had a smattering of freckles everywhere, but the ones that showed all the time, not just when we were out in the sun, swept across high cheekbones and a tall nose. Kei had the bone structure to be a model, but from illness was petite and undergrown. Kei made up for things like that with mental fortitude, having picked up traditional Japanese archery back up in college and excelled at it, then passing the physical at the police academy, despite having to wear a mask to do it.

  "I love you because you have extreme asthma," I said.

  Kei blinked at me.

  "You said 'I love you because you have radiation' earlier," I justified. "Well I love you because of these masks."

  "Is this a game now?" Kei asked.

  "No," I said and sat back, wondering how my sentiments could reach my partner.

  "When did you first know you loved me?" Kei asked and completely threw me for a loop.

  I thought about that for a long moment, then decided on full honesty. "All the senpai on the archery team were so smitten with you. I don't know if there were any true love in there, but I guarantee there was lust." I thought back to when Kei first joined the archery team in college. A silent ghost, at times so angry that some of the archers joked Kei might turn into a demon. I remembered Kei in the archery uniform, the yukata folded tight but still showing just a glimpse of a pale collarbone, Kei's hair pulled up high to be out of the way of the bow, as beautiful as Mori Ranmaru in woodblock pri
nts from the Sengoku period.

  "They just wanted to have sex, and thought since I was Western that I would be liberal about it."

  I nodded. That was definitely true, in such a small college in the middle of nowhere. "Whenever you'd walk in, the pheromones would fly. I caught non-stop crap for inviting you out at night all the time. They didn't know we were shooting those crows in the park."

  Kei laughed, then sobered. "They were putting me in their own boxes, to suit their own desires."

  I nodded, refilling our glasses. "I think most of the chaps thought you were a girl, and then the girls on the team hoped you were a boy. I was the only gay kid on the team as far as I know, but you opened all the doors for me, instead of closing them."

  Kei quirked an eyebrow up at that.

  I continued. "When I was dreaming about you, back then, I came to understand that even though I identify as a gay man, I was attracted to you no matter what body lay beneath your androgyny. I did research, you know."

  Kei laughed. "I made you take to the internet?"

  "At first," I admitted. "Then I spent all the time I wasn't in class or at archery club commuting to Sendai and jumping around the gay bars at night talking to people."

  Kei gaped at me. "How did I not know about this? We could have gone together."

  "This was before I asked you to go out with me," I said. "I knew I was a 'baby gay' from the countryside who didn't know anything. I talked to tons of people and explained my situation. I hadn't known much about gender variability back then, but I would mention that I was head over heels for a person who was X-gender and had an androgynous body, and I made some of the greatest friends just listening to advice and stories."

  Kei scoffed, those freckled cheeks flushing. "So I didn't take your virginity? I thought I had."