DAI

I don’t leave right away. I didn’t really have to go, just needed to get away from so many dangerous feelings, bull’s-eye words. Instead, I stand and stare at the shell. It’s a flawless thing. Almost too perfect. When I was younger and the summer days grew too long, my mother and Emiyo used to take us walking along the seashore to look for shells. My plastic pail was always filled to the brim with chipped oysters and hollowed-out crab carcasses. Things Emiyo always chucked in the garbage when we got home.

I never found anything as perfect and whole as this.

It makes me wonder where Tsang got it. He doesn’t strike me as the walk along the seashore with your pants rolled up searching for treasures of the sea type. Besides, I’m not even sure nautiluses live around here. (My brother would’ve known. It would be an encyclopedia factoid he gleaned from his I love dolphins and want to be a marine biologist phase.) Tsang probably bought it from the gift shop at Seng Ngoi’s Grand Aquarium or from a grungy stall at the night market.

Most likely it was made in a factory with chemicals and synthetics. It’s probably not even a real shell at all. As glamorous and hollowed-out and fake as me and my promises.

My stomach churns, and for just a minute I want to rap on the window again. I want to look through the lattice and tell the girl it’s all a mistake. I can’t promise her freedom. I can’t even free myself.

But I don’t. Maybe it’s because I think I really can pull this off. That against all the odds, all of Longwai’s men and their guns, I can get the girl out. Fill the emptiness of her eyes. Of my own echoed stare.

Beautiful. Sad. It made me wish I were somewhere else. Someone else.

Was I talking about watching sunrises or seeing her? I’m not so sure.

Whatever the subject matter, it was the truth.

So is this: I’m not a good person. I’m a selfish bastard, needing and taking, leaving her behind with nothing but trinkets. Just like Osamu.

I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re you.

Salt words rubbed in a wound. Stinging like a few dozen obscenities strung together. If the girl has any sense at all, she’ll forget about the names. Forget about me. And a small part of me—the same hint of Dai that wishes we’d met in a completely different life, the pieces of Dai the window doesn’t reflect—hopes she does.

I shove my hands into my pockets, where they twitch and tap and curl into fists.

I walk away.