Chapter 37:

There's no elevator in this building. There never has been. Five floors, one stairwell, the kind of stairwell that smells like a hundred different dinners happening behind a hundred different doors, instead of the specific consistent cleaning-product smell of the one I know best, the one with the pipes along the upper wall, the one I identified through investigation because investigation felt more productive than peace.

I take the stairs anyway. Obviously.

This stairwell is not that stairwell. I want to be precise about the comparison rather than let it collapse into something lazier than it deserves — this one has a window on the third-floor landing, small and grimy, letting in actual daylight, which the east stairwell doesn't have. This one has somebody's bicycle chained to the railing on the second floor that's been there long enough to develop a personality. This one smells like soy sauce and someone's laundry detergent and, faintly, fried fish, rotating depending on which door you're passing.

It's not claustrophobic in the same way.

It's claustrophobic in its own way, which is different, which I don't have a full taxonomy for yet because I've only really started paying attention to it just now, climbing it, thinking about a stairwell that's twenty minutes away by foot and has occupied considerably more of my interior architecture than five flights of residential concrete ever has.

You can say hi next time.

The sentence arrives on the second-floor landing, next to the bicycle with the personality, and it sits there the way sentences sit when you're climbing something repetitive, something that doesn't require enough conscious attention to keep other thoughts out.

I don't examine it. Not properly. I let it exist for one full flight, the specific weight of it, the fact that it's the smallest possible door left open and I'm still not sure I have the architecture to walk through it next time any more than I had it today.

Third floor. The grimy window. Actual daylight.

I think about something else instead, because that's apparently what I do now when something gets too close — not avoid it exactly, just set it down gently and pick up something with less weight, the way you'd switch hands carrying groceries rather than put the bag down entirely.

I think about my school.

Specifically I think about the kokusai-ka, the international course, the reason my school has has more exchange students and dual-nationality kids than most schools in this city — Yokohama's always had this, the port history, the specific accumulated decades of foreign residents settling here in numbers that other cities don't have, which means my school built an entire program around it instead of treating international students as an occasional anomaly. There are kids in my year who split time between three languages without performing the effort of it. There's a kid two years above me who's apparently fluent in Tagalog, Japanese, and English and treats this as roughly as remarkable as having three siblings.

I don't know why I'm thinking about this.

I think it's because I spent an afternoon being half a person caught between two languages with my own sister — the futon joke she still hasn't gotten out of me, the Japanese I used specifically because I wanted one thing today that stayed exactly where it landed — and somewhere in the stairwell my brain decided that thread connected to a much larger thread, the kokusai-ka, the school built around the specific premise that belonging to more than one place at once is just a normal condition rather than a complication requiring explanation.

I am, biologically, exactly that. Half belonging to one place, half to another. Nobody at school finds this remarkable. Nobody asks me to explain it the way you'd explain something that needs explaining.

Anyway.

Fourth floor. Fifth.

My floor.

I stop thinking about international student demographics, mostly, because I've arrived, because the door is right there, and because something underneath the door's gap is reaching me that the stairwell hadn't prepared me for at all.

Smoke.

Not house-fire smoke. Cooking smoke. The specific smell of something that has been left slightly too long on slightly too much heat, an oil smell with an edge to it that shouldn't be there, the olfactory signature of a kitchen currently undergoing an event.

I know this smell.

I know it because I have caused it, exactly twice, both times when I was nine and hadn't yet developed any of the principles that currently govern my cooking — the resting rice, the low heat, the patience — and I associate it, viscerally, immediately, with disaster.

My mother is cooking.

I need you to understand the full weight of this sentence the way you needed to understand how have you been an hour ago, because my mother possesses many genuinely remarkable qualities — she can fold a blouse one-handed while exhausted, she remembers idioms from three different decades, she watched me from a window during the entire juggling phase without my knowing — and cooking is not among them. Cooking has never been among them. There exists, somewhere in family lore, an incident involving rice that should not be repeated even in summary, and another involving a fish that achieved a texture nobody could identify, including the fish.

I open the door.

The smoke is not dramatic. I want to be fair about this even in the middle of my own internal alarm. It's not billowing. It's just present, hovering near the kitchen ceiling in a thin grey layer, the specific visual signature of something that got slightly too aggressive with the stove and has not yet escalated into a structural emergency.

"I'm making lunch," my mother announces, from somewhere inside the smoke, with the unearned confidence of someone who has clearly not yet noticed the smoke is a problem.

"I can see that," I say.

"Don't use that tone."

"What tone."

"The tone," she says. "The one where you're already planning how you're going to fix this before you've even taken your shoes off."

I have, in fact, already started taking my shoes off specifically so I can move faster toward the kitchen.

"It's under control," she says.

Something makes a sound behind her that does not sound like a food item that is under control.

"I'm going to wash my hands," I say, already moving, already calculating — the stove, the exhaust fan apparently not running, the window that needs opening, whatever's in the pan that has clearly exceeded its intended cooking parameters by a significant margin.

"It's a SURPRISE," my mother calls after me, slightly too loud, slightly too defensive, the specific tone of someone defending a position she already privately suspects is collapsing. "I wanted to surprise you and your sister with—"

"Mom."

"It's FINE, Michael—"

I'm already at the stove.

It is not fine.