A Cacophony of Angels
Part I

 
"I'm home."

I didn't expect anyone to answer. The silence of the house was palpable, so thick I could almost taste it on my tongue, and I shivered, shrugging out of my expensive leather jacket and tossing it in a heap onto the table against the left wall of the enormous foyer. Outside I could hear the starting roar of the engine of my Mustang as the chauffeur drove it away to park it.

It was so quiet.

The clock on the wall read five minutes to six 'o clock and the October sun was just beginning to set, casting a reddish-orange glow on the peach walls of the foyer through the large glass window above the entryway. I slid my left arm out of my backpack strap, hearing the pack slide to the floor with a light thunk as I kicked my shoes off and headed into the kitchen to get something to drink.

The maid wasn't there, as I'd expected. Father hardly kept any of the servants, except the butler and the chauffeur, after four 'o clock anymore, saying that he was never home for dinner anyway and so it was a waste of money to keep them around to cook a dinner that no one would eat. I'd begun to argue, to tell him that I needed to eat, but stopped before things got ugly. It was pointless arguing with him anyway.

Obviously the maid hadn't gone shopping either, because the refrigerator was almost empty except for a six-pack of beer, a lone can of Coke, a bag of deli meat, and some apples. I grabbed the Coke and fished around in the pantry for some crackers, then climbed the stairs to my room and flopped down on my bed, turning on the TV.

The light on the answering machine was blinking. With a groan, I pushed myself off the bed and pushed the button to listen. Maybe it was Kevin, telling me about some party or other. I hated parties, but anything was better than staying home on a Friday night in this huge empty house.

The voice was familiar, but it wasn't Kevin, and the message was in Japanese. "Kouki, this is your father. I might be home early from work tonight. Maybe we can get something to eat. I will see you when I get home." Click.

I made a face at the phone and hit delete. He was forever making promises like that, and I had learned after the first few times not to wait for him, because he would end up coming home at midnight anyway as he always did. I used to worry about him, as much as I had it in me to worry about a father who seemed to forget that his son existed, anyway. But in the last few years, I had just let it go. It was too much trouble.

There were college applications on my desk that needed filling out, but I lay back on my bed and stared at the vaulted ceiling, hearing the television mutter in the background, filling the awful silence with white noise.

My father had, in his younger and wilder days when he was still with his rock band, produced a song called Voiceless Screaming. That's what I felt like now…screaming with no one listening, screaming until my voice gave out and I could no longer make myself heard, even if anyone was there.

I supposed it was funny, in a way, that almost everything that I knew about my father's past I had learned not from him, but from the internet. By the time I was nine, I'd learned the basic rule that most kids in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles learn: if your parents say no, there's always another way. So I'd snuck online - behind Father's back of course; as huge a technology freak as he was, he wouldn't let me touch his computer, saying that I was too young - and discovered search engines.

It was a simple step from that discovery to realize that I would find out all I needed to know if I just put my fingers to the keyboard and typed in "YOSHIKI."

I learned things that I didn't even know if he knew that I had found out about him. He'd never talked about our family back in Japan. Sometimes my uncle Kouki, who I'd been named after, would call and inquire politely about us, but as Father was never home, usually it was I who took those calls. He hadn't called in a few years. I suppose talking to a kid nephew, no matter how much you loved him, just wasn't the same as talking to your brother. I learned that my grandfather had committed suicide when my father was ten. I learned that Father and Grandmother used to be very close, but she had died the year before I was born and I had never had the chance to meet her.

I learned all about the legendary band X Japan. It was amazing, really, how after twenty years, X Japan still had fans all over the world. The band itself didn't interest me all that much, and even at nine, seeing pictures of my father dressed as a woman were frightening, but if not for those websites, I would never have learned how important X Japan had been to him. According to fans, it had been his life, his dream.

In seventeen years of us living under the same roof, never once had he talked about it.

I learned about hide, the guitarist who had killed himself at the same age as my grandfather had been - 33 years old. I did know about hide…my father kept a picture of him in the study downstairs. I used to go down and look at it sometimes when I couldn't sleep. It wasn't one of those magazine pictures with the heavy makeup and the wild costumes and the funny hairstyles. It was an old color photo in a simple frame. hide was sitting on a stool with his guitar cradled in his lap, bending forward to adjust something on an amp in front of him, looking towards the camera with a slightly startled but pleased smile on his face. He was barefoot, dressed in athletic pants and a loose t-shirt with some sort of writing scrawled on the front that I couldn't read.

It used to soothe me, that one link to my father's mysterious past. It was as if hide was smiling directly at me, that he knew, more than twenty years ago, that this picture would one day be sitting on a desk in Los Angeles and that his friend's son would be staring at it, trying to decipher the past through a piece of colored paper. But I hadn't looked at the picture in some time, now. The last time I had done so, it had given me a hollow feeling that I hadn't been able to push away.

Your father doesn't care about you, my mind had whispered. He cares more about a dead friend than about his only son. He doesn't have any pictures of you around the house.

It was then that I decided that I didn't like hide.

I managed to keep my internet excursions secret from my father until I was thirteen, when I'd gotten my own computer and could access the net from the safety of my own room. One night I had been playing around on another X Japan site, purely by accident - I hadn't had the urge to visit those sites in some time - when he walked into my room.

He hadn't said anything, simply glanced at the screen, then at me, and then walked back out. But by the look on his face, I knew something would happen. When I got home from school the next day, my computer was gone.

If Mother had still been alive, maybe she could have talked some sense into him. Maybe we'd have been a real family, as much as we could have been with both of them so involved in the music industry. She had been Japanese-American, a minor movie star and a singer on her way to the top when Father had married her, and she'd put her career on hold when I came around. It was thanks to her that I had learned Japanese as my first language in an age when being bilingual wasn't all that popular around the fast-living, money-spending younger generation of Beverly Hills.

But Mother had died in a car crash when I was five, and Father hadn't remarried. There were no pictures of her around the house, either, though I knew there were a few in the photo album which Father always kept locked in a desk drawer in his study, the same desk on which the picture of hide stood.

When I was fifteen, I had come to a decision. I would never be a movie star. I would never be a singer or a guitarist or a producer or a talk show host or anything that had to do with the entertainment industry, either in America or in Japan. The pressure was there, but I wanted a normal life. I'd never enjoyed the drugs and the alcohol that the rest of the kids in my age group considered an everyday part of their existence. Father smoked like a chimney, but I smoked rarely and then only at parties. While my friends were out playing, I studied. I didn't want to be like my father.

I wanted to be a doctor.

I told my father my decision, and he gave me the look that meant "you and I are not going to be speaking again for quite sometime." I knew I was not going to find out the reason from him, so I persuaded my friend Colleen to let me come over and use her internet, since it was still forbidden to me at home.

After only five minutes of searching, I had found that Deyama Toshimitsu, the vocalist of X Japan and my father's former best friend, had also wanted to be a doctor.

The TV was playing commercial jingles in the background and I decided I was hungry. There was still nothing in the refrigerator so I reached around under my bed for the phone book and flipped to the pages for pizza. I'd had pizza last night too, and the night before, but I figured being on the track team was enough to keep me in shape and I didn't need to count calories.

I was just reaching for the phone when I heard the front door open downstairs.

"Kouki?"

Amazing. He had kept his promise, for once.

"Coming!" I called, throwing the phone book back under the bed, catching a glimpse of the digital clock on my dresser as I headed downstairs. It was 7:30 PM.

My father was standing in the hallway, handing his coat to the butler, looking tired but very satisfied, as he usually did after a long day of work. He gave me a half-smile and I nodded my head at him. I supposed I should hug him or something, since I hadn't seen him in almost a week, but neither of us were comfortable with displays of physical affection. From what I'd gleaned in my research, he'd used to be very idealistically romantic. The idealism was still there, but the romantic side seemed to have disappeared with my mother's death.

"Hungry?"

I realized belatedly that comment was addressed to me. "Oh. Yeah, a little, I guess."

"Good," he said over his shoulder, tucking a strand of dark, graying black hair behind his ear. He'd had it blond until I was twelve, then for some reason he had stopped coloring it and now it was simply black. "We'll order something. How does Chinese food sound?"

"Sure," I said, trailing him to the den and leaning against the doorframe, watching him place his briefcase neatly against the side of the desk and loosen his tie.

It was then I realized that the photo was gone.

"Dad, where'd you put the picture?"

"What picture?" he said, in that tone he always used when he wanted to avoid the question.

"The picture of hide. It used to be there on your desk-" I gestured, but before I could finish my sentence, he turned around.

"It was old. It didn't match."

It was a lie, but I didn't say anything. The sun had completely set, and the glow of the streetlights came in filtered slightly through the curtains of the den.

"I umm…I'll wait for you in the living room."

He didn't answer as I made my exit.

The couches in the living room were elegant, Italian designer furniture like most everything else in the house, and I sat down gingerly on the one facing the wide-screen television. I reached for the remote and flicked the television on, turning the sound down. It was only a few minutes before he came in, now dressed in a comfortable button-down shirt with the collar open and a pair of sleeping pants.

"I ordered for you."

"All right," I mumbled, knowing that he would have ordered for me anyway if I had told him not to.

"So how was your day?" he said absently, sitting down beside me.

"Fine."

"Anything interesting happen at school?"

"No."

He leaned back against the leather couch. "You should go out more, Kouki. It's Friday night and you're young…live life to the fullest before you get to be like me."

I'll never be like you.

The phrase came unbidden to my mind, but I didn't say it. "You asked me to wait for you to come home," I said instead.

"Well." He sounded pleased. "Yes, I did."

I stole a glance at him. His eyes were closed and his head was leaning slightly back against the top of the couch. I had been surprised that he hadn't chosen to dye his hair black when it had started to gray, but he hadn't. It made him look more human, somehow. The man that had graced so many magazines and been the desire of so many women back in the day was finally growing old, but he didn't seem to mind.

He seemed to feel my eyes on him, because he shook himself slightly and opened his eyes, smiling at me. "Sorry. It's been a long day."

"It's OK," I said automatically, hoping the food would come soon so I could have something to focus on. It was awkward sitting with him like this. The only times we'd do this was during Christmas or Thanksgiving when he would have some of the executives from his office come over and we would have to pretend to be father and son for a day or two. In my memory, we had almost never done this voluntarily.

"Food should be here any minute now," he said.

I shifted. "Father, was there something you wanted to talk about?"

He coughed slightly, but I gave him a look, and he sighed. "I was wondering what colleges you were going to apply to. Applications are due soon, aren't they?"

"In about a week," I said. "I'm going to mail most of them out tomorrow. I'm applying to five schools but I don't know if I'm going to get into the ones I want."

"Which ones?"

The butler entered with our takeout food and I didn't answer for a moment as I unsnapped my chopsticks and poured the soy sauce on my rice. He'd ordered Kung Pao chicken for me, one of my favorites. I was surprised he remembered what I liked.

"Case Western and Stanford are the ones I really want. My scores are good, but I don't know if they're good enough. I'm applying to Columbia too…University of Michigan. Berkeley is mostly a backup. I don't want to go there if I can help it, but if I can't get into any of the other ones, I might as well. It's close to home."

"Those are hard schools, I hear." He sounded pleased. I shifted uncomfortably and chewed my chicken. My father hadn't gone to college, and I didn't particularly relish discussing this with him.

"When I-" he said, then stopped, sounding uncertain. "When I was in high school…a long time ago…" he laughed. "My friend Toshi wanted to go to college. He was going to be a doctor, he said." He didn't show any sign of discomfort as he spoke those last words.

I know he did, I wanted to say, but I didn't.

"But he didn't go at the last minute. We moved to Tokyo and formed a band…I guess life is just like that sometimes." He looked directly at me. "Kouki, you know I'd like you to follow me into the music industry…"

"It's not for me," I said stonily, staring at my food. I had suddenly lost my appetite.

He put down his chopsticks and placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. It took all my willpower not to shrug it away. "Kouki, I know you and I are different. But the music industry isn't as bad as you think it is. I know you don't like it, and I don't blame you."

"It's stupid," I mumbled. "There's no point."

He sighed. "I know I haven't been the best father-"

I put down my chopsticks and pushed his hand off my shoulder. "Look," I said, standing up. "I don't want to listen to this. For seventeen years, you've just neglected me, and now you're trying to tell me what to do? Now you're telling me to be like you? That's not how it works, Father."

There was hurt in his eyes. "Kouki, I'm just trying to-"

"I don't know anything about you," I said quietly. "I don't know anything about your past, anything about our family. I've spent the last five years wondering why there's a picture of a dead man on your desk when there isn't one picture of me or Mother around this house. You love hide more than you love me!"

The look on his face was crushing, as if I'd just dealt him a deathblow. But I didn't care…it was what I'd been wanting to say to him for years, and I wasn't about to lose this opportunity. We'd probably never talk again, but that wasn't anything different.

"The picture isn't there anymore," he began, but I cut in.

"Like that makes a big difference. All right, so now you don't care about anyone anymore. Fine. I can deal."

"Kouki!" he called after me as I turned and left the room, his voice thin and reedy like an old man's, but I didn't turn around. He could call after me all he cared to, but it was too late for that. I'd been calling after him all the years of my life, and not once had he acknowledged me.

I wouldn't care if I never saw him again.

Strangely, I didn't feel angry, just frustrated, defeated. It was with a perfectly lucid mind that I took the stairs up to my room, a perfectly calm motion of one foot above the other on the steps. But for some reason, I didn't place one foot right, didn't carry my weight forward enough.

I lost my balance.

I don't think I screamed as I fell, and I don't remember hitting my head. I do remember footsteps and a shout and the sensation of flying as the marble floor of the hall came crashing towards me.

And then everything went dark.

The next thing I knew was the touch of a hand, someone shaking my shoulder, a thin shaft of light piercing my vision as I opened my eyes groggily.

"Look, look, he's opening his eyes! He's all right!"

Though I could tell the light was supposed to be dim, it was blinding to me and I groaned and closed my eyes again. I didn't recognize the voice, but it was speaking Japanese.

"Come on, come on." A hand slapped my cheek and my eyes snapped open again. "Don't do that, come on, wake up."

"Where am I?" I tried to say, but it came out as a slight "urgh."

Someone laughed.

"He sounds all right to me, Yoshiki."

Yoshiki?

Another low laugh, and a face hovered within my vision. My eyes were adjusting now and I could make out the features. Asian eyes, high, slightly feminine cheekbones, blond hair. "We were worried about you for a while." It took me another second to realize he was talking to me. "You had quite a spill down the stairs…hey say, something."

"I…am I alive?"

Apparently he found that funny, as well as did the other people crowded around me, because they all burst into laughter.

"You're alive, fortunately. Or maybe, unfortunately?"

A hand rested on my forehead. "We should probably take him home to get some rest. All right, practice is canceled for the rest of the day."

"Damn," said someone else. "Never thought I'd hear you say that." I heard various people stand up and then the face came into view again.

"I'll take you home, hide."

hide?

"That's not my name," I started to say, before I felt an arm around my shoulders, someone gently trying to help me stand. I looked down at myself.

I was barefoot, dressed in dark green athletic pants and a loose white t-shirt that read "Money Is Spirit Of Life." There was a familiar-looking guitar on a stand a few feet away. I blinked.

A hollow sense of horror washed over me.

It was the guitar from the picture of hide on my father's desk. These had been the clothes he'd been wearing…

Am I hide?

No…this wasn't right. I had to be dreaming.

"I’m dreaming," I said, pushing against the arm around my shoulders…the arm that belonged to the slightly feminine-looking man holding me up.

"You're not dreaming," said my father, with a laugh. Except it wasn't my father, but a twenty-something version of my father, younger, slighter, with a more carefree look around his eyes, gesturing to someone out of the range of my vision. I could have turned my head to look, but my mind was whirling and I felt sick.

"Yo-Yoshiki?"

He frowned. "Are you all right, hide? I think we'd better get you home to bed. Toshi, can you bring his guitar out to the car for me?"

"Sure," said a familiar voice, the first one that had addressed me earlier.

"What year is it?" I said urgently.

The man who was my father and yet wasn't looked closely at me again, and his frown deepened. "Do you need to see a doctor, hide? You don't seem to be bleeding anywhere…" His hand came up to examine my head, but before he could touch me, I jerked away.

"The year. What year is it?" I demanded.

He stared at me.

"Tell me, please! It's important."

"1995," he responded, as if it should be obvious. "It's October 1995."

 
to part II