A Cacophony of Angels
Part X

 
I was up early the next morning, and as I lay there staring at the ceiling and wondering if I should just go back to sleep, I heard movement in the kitchen.

I froze. It was a few seconds before my ears caught the rattle of dishes and then the smell of frying...something...and I relaxed a little. A robber or an assassin would not try to cook breakfast in my kitchen. I hoped.

My dreams last night had been fragments of disturbing images, and I lay back in bed, trying to sort them out. I remembered a piano. Cars. Yoshiki's face. Taiji? I frowned, trying to call the images back from wherever dreams faded to upon waking, but all I could manage to hold on to were scraps of voices, brushing the edge of my consciousness.

I wondered if it was hide cooking breakfast in my kitchen, and I opened my mouth to call for him when I decided against it. It could, unlikely as it was, be someone else, and me as hide calling for hide would just earn me a weird look and a recurring barrage of "all you all right?" questions, which I was heartily sick of by now.

Instead, I pushed myself out of bed, rubbing my eyes, and stumbled to the kitchen, where I was very glad I had decided not to yell out hide's name.

"Good morning," Yoshiki said. "Hope you slept well."

I think I stood there for a few seconds gaping at him, and he frowned back at me, tapping a spatula against one hand as if it were a drumstick. "What?"

"What are you doing here?" I said.

He gestured expansively to the frying pan sizzling on top of the gas stove, as if he were some bizarre, skinny, pale Buddha come down from on high to grace me with his presence. "Cooking."

I hesitated for about two seconds, and then said the first thing that came to my mind. "I didn't know you could cook."

He looked offended, but it was true. My father as I had known him hadn't ever cooked that I could remember. On the rare occasions he was home, he either ordered out or had the maid fix something simple. And obviously he was not home very often, and I could only imagine the places he would eat when he wasn't. It was a wonder he hadn't gained a middle-age paunch.

I wondered why I was suddenly thinking about my father, and then my brain went fuzzy for a moment before I remembered where I was, that I was standing in hide's kitchen with the man who would one day become my father shaking a spatula at me and demanding that I get dressed so I could eat and then we could go.

"Go where?" I said stupidly, and Yoshiki looked at me like I had gone crazy.

"Practice, of course."

I was heartily not looking forward to spending another morning trapped either in hide's consciousness or watching hide play the guitar for me, but there seemed to be little I could do at the moment but go back in my room and do exactly what Yoshiki had told me to do. When I emerged into the kitchen again dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, he'd set what was a passable imitation of bacon and eggs by my chair.

"Thank you," I said, digging in rather dubiously, then, "this isn't bad."

He smiled, and then proceeded to watch me eat. At least, that was what it looked like, because I sat there with a plate of food in front of me and he simply looked out the window and then at his fingernails, then back out the window again. It was a little unnerving. I'd never liked people staring at me while I ate; then again, I had grown accustomed, I supposed, to eating alone.

"Why don't-" I began, and he interrupted me.

"Sorry I haven't seen you in the past few days."

I blinked. "Oh...that's ok."

Yoshiki shook his head. "It's just been really crazy. I'd meant to come by last night and see if you wanted to grab a bite to eat, but something came up unexpectedly and I had to make a run for-"

"It's all right," I interrupted. "It's ok. I don't mind."

His eyes narrowed at me. "I'm just trying to say sorry."

I sighed inwardly. I should have expected something like this. "You can make it up to me tomorrow night," I said, "by coming by."

"Tomorrow?" Yoshiki said. I wasn't sure if the party was supposed to be a secret, and decided that I wouldn't let the cat out of the bag just incase it was. Heath would never forgive me if I did.

"So you can take me out to dinner," I said with a grin, finishing the last of the food and washing it down with the only beverage I could find in the refrigerator - a can of beer. Some things never changed. "You know you want to."

He rolled his eyes at me, but his posture relaxed, and he smiled that embarrassed smile that I'm sure the girls would swoon to see on all the tour videos. "Maybe I do," he said. "And maybe I don't. Hurry up, we don't have all day."

I was in the process of ducking into the bathroom to wash my face when the phone rang. The sound startled me for a second before I realized that the reason it sounded off was that it wasn't my apartment phone, but another phone. Most likely Yoshiki's cell phone. I knew I was right when I heard his voice from far off in the next room answer it.

Through my splashing I heard his murmurs of yes and no, and then a muttered expletive cut short, and then "ja." I reached for the towel as I heard his footsteps down the hall.

"What was that?" I said.

"Practice is cancelled," he grumbled. "Something came up at Extasy."

I snorted. "You're that indispensable?" I ruffled the pink hair back in the mirror and stared at my eyes - hide's eyes - as they blinked sleepily at me and I realized that I needed a cigarette. "You've got a life too, you know. If we don't practice-"

Yoshiki waved an impatient hand at me. "Dammit, don't tell me things I already know. But I need this deal, and apparently the company is having second thoughts. I'm going to have to skip on practice. I'm sorry."

The last was said in such a despondent tone that for a moment I wondered if this was a new trend - Yoshiki feeling sorry for things. We stood quietly there in the hallway of my bathroom with the sun coming in through the window and the tick of the clock's second hand a tiny scritching in the silence before I said, "Don't worry about it. Want me to call the others?"

He scratched his nose. "Yeah....no, I'll do it. You keep doing what you're doing."

"I've got nowhere to go today," I said.

Yoshiki hesitated and I wondered what grand scheme he was cooking up, before he said, "Care to come with me to Extasy then?"

I blinked. "Excuse me?" I said.

"Yeah I figured you wouldn't," he said hurriedly, apparently thinking that my answer was the refusal he'd been waiting for and not a sign that I thought I hadn't heard him correctly. "It's not like there's anything really exciting going on there anyway, but I thought I'd ask, and-"

"I'd love to go," I said.

He stopped in mid-sentence and frowned at me.

"Sorry," I told him with a grin, "I thought you were joking. No, give me five more minutes and I'll meet you downstairs at the car. You drove, right?"

He nodded, looking a bit stunned. I shut the bathroom door with him still standing there and decided that with all the excitement, I should wash my face again.

Five minutes found me in a comfortable outfit trotting down the apartment stairs to meet Yoshiki where he stood leaning against the hood of his car, frowning at his watch. "We're going to have to hurry," he said. "I hadn't realized how late it was."

I slide into the seat and offered him the box of cigarettes, feeling somehow like I shouldn't be smoking, but hell if I was going to give up a cigarette on an unexpected day off. He refused, saying that he had a headache and nicotine was probably bad for him today. "It was in my horoscope," he told me seriously, and I rolled my eyes, lighting up my own cigarette and rolling down the window.

Tokyo traffic was as bad as usual, and the smog was so thick already that I gave up on trying to get a breath of fresh air and rolled the window back up after finishing my cigarette hurriedly. "It doesn't look like it's moving," I told Yoshiki, who was scowling at a truck trying to cut into the lane in front of him. "Maybe we should have taken the tunnel?"

Shinjuku crawled by and he muttered something under his breath that I was sure didn't need repeating. "What did you end up doing yesterday?" I asked, hoping to take his attention off the traffic and onto a safer topic. My father was an irritable driver to begin with, but when traffic was bad, there was no helping him.

Father? What father?

"I went to work," he growled, hitting the gas in short, staccato bursts so vigorously that for a moment I thought he had decided that we were at practice after all, that the gas pedal was the bass drum petal on his drumset, and that we would crash headlong into the truck in front of us. Aomori, the truck's license plate read. I had sudden nightmares of being sued by a trucking company from Aomori. "Then I went home and tried to finish a song, but fell asleep in the middle of it."

I glanced at him, at the tired eyes behind the sunglasses that even I had gotten used to him wearing now. "Take care of yourself," I said.

He didn't respond to that. "What did you do?" he asked instead, and I let him change the subject.

"I went to Heath's. Hung out for a while, went home."

"Heath is interesting company," he said, and I looked sharply at him. The truck in front of us pulled away, but Yoshiki didn't pound the gas pedal to catch up like I had expected he would.

"What do you mean by that?"

"Oh, nothing," he said neutrally. "He's a good man. Great bassist, always on time." A grin twisted his lip. "The other day I asked him if he had an preference for order of songs for the live, and he responded that as long as the order didn't involve Toshi lighting anyone on fire, he didn't care."

The lanes of traffic beside us split and I watched the cars inch forward against the guardrail, following the slope to the lower deck below. The truck from Aomori was trying to change lanes, but there were no cars letting him through. I felt a sudden sense of glee. "I had a good talk with Heath," I said, leaning one hand against the window. "It's good to get away from band politics in a while and just be friends."

"What band politics?" Yoshiki said, and I laughed but didn't respond. After a moment, he said, "I like our band the way it is."

Do you miss Taiji? I wanted to ask him, but the sun was too bright and the cars outside were too loud, and there was an upbeat song playing on the radio, and it wasn't the right time. Maybe later I would pull him aside and ask that, when all this tour business was finished and we'd put out our album and I could sit down to him not as band leader and guitarist, but as friend to friend.

Yoshiki is my greatest regret.

The cell phone rang then, and I jumped before I realized what it was. Yoshiki was already putting the bulky thing to his ear, steering the car with one hand and shifting in his seat to adjust his seatbelt. "Yes?" he said, then, "I'm coming as quickly as I can. There's a traffic jam on the Chuo and it might take me the better part of the hour." Another pause. "Got it. See you then."

"The studio," he said, but I'd already guessed that. "Damn traffic."

"What was that song?" I asked, and he looked at me curiously.

"Song?"

I nodded. "You said you were writing a song last night when you fell asleep. What was it?"

He chewed on his lip. The radio burst into a very loud, obnoxious commercial for some auto repair shop, and I leaned over and switched it off. In the sudden silence, the loud buzz of a motorcycle engine flashed past for an instant, and then it was quiet again.

"It's very hard for me now," he said, "to think of writing for someone other than Toshi's voice."

A feeling of uneasiness crept down my spine then, but I waited for him to continue. When he didn't, I prodded, "So it was for some other band?"

"I didn't used to have trouble writing for other people," he continued, as if I hadn't said a word. "When I wrote for Glay, it seemed very natural for me to bring the chords down a few octaves for Teru's range. But somehow in the past year I've been regressing."

"I don't think that's regressing," I protested, not sure where he was going with this train of thought. "Toshi's our vocalist. You're just used to writing for him, that's all."

He watched the road, and I watched him. The Aomori truck pulled away and two cars with Shinagawa license plates flashed into the lane in front of us, and still he did not hit the gas pedal. "Yo-chan?" I questioned, and he shook his head.

"I don't want to lose this band, hide," he said, and I swallowed. The seatbelt seemed very tight against my chest, and I pulled on it, trying to loosen it as I shifted in my chair.

"You won't lose it," I answered, trying to sound convincing. But there was something in his voice that I couldn't shake, the feeling that somehow, he was right and he'd already lost us. As if the X Japan that had existed in the past year and then the year before that and the year before that had already broken apart and the rest of the time was just one long dream waiting for us to wake up. Was it Toshi? Was it Taiji's departure that had started it? I didn't know, but Heath's words came back to me.

X Japan is X Japan, and I am me. I hope Taiji is happy, wherever he is.

I looked at Yoshiki and looked at the radio, and looked at the sunny skies of Tokyo outside the car windows, and thought to myself that it might be time.

"Do you miss Taiji?" I asked.

I was prepared for a reaction. I wasn't sure what he would do, if he would let go of the steering wheel and try to strangle me with both hands, or start cursing at me with the string of expletives I was so familiar with whenever he got upset at the way Toshi sang or at the way the arranger was adjusting the bass level or at the way the record company executive was speaking to him. Or maybe he would stop the car and turn oft the engine and we'd sit there in the middle of the Chuo Expressway with vehicles honking at us and then the truck from Aomori would be trying to change lanes and crash into us, and we'd be sued after all.

But he didn't do any of those things. The car's engine kept humming and he kept his eyes on the road. I was wondering if he had heard me and was about to take another breath and ask again, when he said something so low that I couldn't hear it.

"What did you say?" I had to ask him, feeling awfully clumsy for making him repeat it twice. But he didn't flinch, simply raised his voice a few decibels and replied in a level voice.

"Taiji to me is nothing but a memory."

There was no answer I could give to that. How could I? I sat there clutching the fabric of the seatbelt and stared out at the clouds.

"I'm sorry," he said after a moment. "I know you two were close. But I don't see what else I could have done. It was hurting the band, hurting you, hurting me. Taiji knew that. He knew he had to go just as well as any of us did."

"I know," I replied quietly. "It's not your fault, really."

"Yes it is," Yoshiki said, and I looked at him sharply. He flicked on the turn signal and glanced over his shoulder to change lanes. The engine purred and the car leapt forward, and I realized that the lane in front of us was clear, and there was less than a kilometer till the exit. "I'm the band leader, hide. I take full responsibility for what Taiji did and what I did to Taiji. There's too much to deal with otherwise. I didn't want it to turn into a soap opera."

We took the exit, turning smoothly into the ramp that spiraled downward to the narrow streets of Ebisu, the tall office buildings rising on either side of us like glass and metal monsters. "I wonder where he is now," I said quietly, and Yoshiki sighed.

"He blames me, I'm sure. Maybe he'll always blame me. But I did what I thought was the right thing."

"You did," I said. "Like you said, I guess there wasn't anything else you could have done."

He didn't answer and I wondered if he was thinking of Taiji again. Or maybe he was thinking of Toshi now, of a friendship that had lasted since childhood and even now as fragile as spider's thread. I glanced at his profile again, the hawk-like nose too prominent against the thin cheekbones, and thought that for a brief moment the profile of an older man settled itself around him, a man with graying hair and crow's feet around his eyes, so like Yoshiki but not.

No, it was Yoshiki.

Father, I thought, and a wave of dizziness hit me. I gasped and reached out to steady myself against the door before I pitched forward against the seatbelt. The car jerked and slowed, and I realized dimly that there was a stoplight right in front of us turning yellow.

"hide?" Yoshiki said, and a hand reached out to shake my shoulder. "Oi. You ok? Answer me!"

We have three more days. And then you can go home.

"Dammit," I ground between my teeth, and the image of another hide appeared before my eyes, pink hair dim against the Tokyo evening. That was hide, I thought. Not me. I was not hide. I was...Hayashi. My last name was Hayashi. Kouki? But no, that couldn't be right. Hayashi Kouki was...

"hide?" Yoshiki sounded panicked.

"I'm fine," I said with effort, sliding back into my seat and blinking my eyes rapidly against the sun. The light turned green and Yoshiki inched the car forward, staring at me.

"I think we should go to the doctor."

"No!" I said forcefully. "Dammit, I'm fine. You're going to be late if you don't hurry up."

The car behind us began to honk, obnoxious long bursts of the horn that blared through the neighborhood and echoed across the buildings, and I would have turned around to give that driver the finger if my head hadn't been swimming. Better not to think of....whatever that was, I decided. I wasn't sure what it had been, just a brief moment of hallucination? Perhaps it had been something I'd dreamed last night and had stuck with me. Nightmares had a tendency to do that.

"You've been acting really strange lately," Yoshiki told me as he paused briefly at the next intersection, then made a wide right turn around four lanes of traffic. The light was yellow and there was another car honking, and out of the corner of my eye I spied two trucks stalled in the middle of the road, waiting for us as we zoomed into the lane. "Are you sure-"

"If your driving doesn't get me killed," I snapped, "I'll be fine."

He chuckled, sounding a little embarrassed, and I took that to mean he'd taken my cue to shut up about my condition and drive on. Had I been acting strange? I supposed that there was something odd about the way I'd almost lost consciousness just then, and for some reason I couldn't quite remember the last week or so, as if there were blank spots in my memory that hadn't been filled in. Too much drinking, I thought. "I might have been going out to the bars too much. Maybe I should cut back."

"I'll believe it when I see it," he told me, and then we were making a left into the parking lot of a large office building, and the sign in front of it read EXTASY RECORDS.

"We're here," he said, easing the car into park just as the cell phone began to ring again.

 
back to part IX | to part XI