“And perhaps that is where you will find your place, at the ever-expanding edge. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find it in Japan.”
“I wish it were that simple.”
“It is that simple, Kei. There is only one question that requires an answer. It’s all the other questions spinning around it that make it look more complicated than it is.” Ramesh dug into his pocket and pulled out a coin. He pressed it into Keishin’s palm. “Here. You know what to do.”
Eight years ago
Keishin’s father liked to say that he was in a rush even before he was born. He broke his mother’s water one and a half months early and forced her to give birth on a restaurant’s floor. He started talking at six months and had taught himself to read bythe time he turned two. Keishin entered college at fifteen only because his father insisted that he defer his enrollment by a year.Why are you in such a hurry to grow up?he asked. Keishin would have given him an answer if he thought he would understand. Slowing down wasn’t a choice. The questions that chased him were too fast. They were going to bury him alive if he stopped. Until he met Ramesh Kashyap, Keishin did not believe that it was possible to find another person who was just as terrified of standing still.
“The first thing you need to accept is that most if not all of your questions will outlive you.” Ramesh looked out from the rooftop of the university’s physics building and took a long drag of his cigarette.
“That dirty habit of yours isn’t going to help,” Keishin said. “You should quit.”
“And you should start.”
“You’re my mentor and I take most of your advice, but I think I’m going to have to draw the line at knowingly reducing my life span. You do remember that I told you my father died of lung cancer, right?”
Ramesh shrugged. “Of course I don’t. You’ve known me long enough to know that I’m not good at that sort of thing. The point is, you need to find something to do, at least a few minutes each day, that doesn’t involve trying to figure out how the universe works. I hate slowing down as much as you do, but if you want to stay sane long enough to have at least one of your theories be proven true, you’ll listen to me. Smoke. Watch funny dog videos. Knit, for all I care. Just go somewhere quiet and slow down. But not here. This is my place. Go find your own rooftop. Try the economics building. It has a nice view.”
Keishin folded his arms over his chest. “And if I don’t?”
“It’s basically a choice between jumping out of a plane with a parachute or without one. Terminal velocity. You’re a physics major. Figure it out.”
Keishin never took up smoking or learned how to knit. But he did find a little space he could call his own. Ramesh had been right about the economics building. Keishin came to an arrangement with the maintenance guy to leave the door to the rooftop unlocked at night. The rooftop was best when it was dark. It was harder to see where the edge of the roof ended and the long fall to the campus’s courtyard began.
Keishin liked spinning coins on the ledge, holding his breath, wondering if they were going to drop off the building or come to a stop. If he had been braver, he might have taken to walking along the ledge himself. But he had never been that kind of man. He was content to have pennies as his proxy. He lost half of the coins he spun, but it was a small price to pay for a moment of quiet. His mind was at its most still when resting on the third side of a coin. As the coin teetered on the edge of the roof, Keishin could think of nothing else but its fate. There was no fraction of time before or after it that mattered more. Ramesh had taught him that the best way to tackle his questions was to leave them behind. When the coin stopped, the answers he was looking for were usually waiting for him, twiddling their thumbs and wondering where he had been.
One month ago
The coin slipped off the ledge, abandoning Keishin on the economics building’s wet rooftop. A downpour that had stopped as suddenly as it began had left puddles on the roof and Keishin soaked. He wasn’t surprised. The weather took every opportunity to show its disdain for him.
He pushed his wet hair off his face and sat on the roof’s slick ledge, no closer to coming to a decision about whether to accept the position in Japan at the world’s largest neutrino detector. He stared up at the night sky, searching for the constellations through the clouds. As a boy, he’d taken pride in knowing all of their names. He later came to realize that the names were just another of man’s early attempts to impose an order to things he didn’t understand. Generations had looked to the stars for meaning, but tonight, Keishin needed to decide if he was willing to uproot his life and search for answers deep in the ground.
The Super-Kamiokande detector was located one thousand meters beneath Mount Ikeno in Japan’s Gifu prefecture, silently keeping watch for dying stars and the neutrinos their explosions sent the earth’s way. These invisible, elusive particles were the rarest of breadcrumbs, a trail of clues to how the universe began. Without mass or electrical charge, they were little more than ghosts. Ramesh liked to joke that to study neutrinos was to search for nothing to figure out everything. Keishin pretended to laugh even if he didn’t find it funny. To work at the detector was essentially a commitment to wait for something that might never come, and Keishin did not have any illusions of being a patient man.
He spun another coin and watched it twirl toward the edge. He lunged forward and scooped it up. He squeezed his fist around it, digging his nails into his palm. In a debate with himself, there was never going to be a winner. He could spend the night thinking of as many reasons to go as to stay. He stepped back from the ledge and into a puddle, rippling the moon floating inside it. “Kyouka suigetsu,” Keishin whispered to himself.Mirror flower, water moon.
It was a phrase he had learned from his stepmother. Sheenjoyed painting on Sunday afternoons, and reflections were her favorite subject. She made chrysanthemums bloom inside shimmering glass and poured the sky into the sea. She also painted Keishin’s father, capturing his smile in a mirror, frozen in a time before he had gotten sick.
When Keishin asked her why she liked painting reflections, she told him that it was because the most desirable things were the ones that you could see, but never touch. Keishin crouched by the small moon floating in the puddle and wondered if it longed for the sky. His reflection stared back at him from the water, looking more trapped than content.
Keishin got to his feet and looked at the coin in his hand. He tossed logic and the coin into the air and, for the first time, surrendered one of the most important choices of his life to fate. “Heads.”
Chapter Ten
Tails and Tea Boxes
On their own, one man’s eyes were not more memorable than another’s. It was how they looked at you that made you remember them. Hana understood, in the moment that Minatozaki Keishin had told her about his lie, that his were going to be impossible to forget. No person’s eyes had ever invited her in. Her father’s had always been guarded, their clients’ more so. But Keishin’s eyes were an open door that drew her inside, offering her a seat and hot green tea.
“I’m sorry for misleading you. I really just wanted to help,” Keishin said. “As you now know, I am a doctor, just not the kind that’s qualified to stitch up wounds.”
“I see,” Hana said.
“And you were absolutely right when you said that I shouldn’t be here. Not if I followed logic. Tossing a coin isn’t any way to make a decision. I suppose that doesn’t speak well of me as a scientist, but, as I told you earlier, I chose heads, and here I am. I could have opened another door and could be eating a bowl of steaming ramen right now, but I didn’t. Instead I opened your door and found you, your bleeding foot, and a pawnshop that’s been turned upside down.”
“The door is not locked. You can turn around and leave anytime you want.”
“I could, but my father taught me better than to abandon someone simply because it’s easier to walk away.”
