I Called Him Necktie Read Online Free Page B

morning. What is the use of what I’m telling today? And does ithave any validity? As I said. It’s difficult. The first thing that occurs to me is: We are skating on melting ice.
    A fine sentence. He repeated it. We are skating on melting ice. Is it yours?
    No, not mine. Kumamoto’s. I swallowed. Kumamoto Akira.
    The words flooded out of me. I was a dry riverbed where hard rain falls after years of drought. The ground is quickly soaked through and then there is no stopping. The water rises and rises, way over the banks, pulls down trees and bushes, laps over the land. I felt a release with every word I spoke.
29
    Kumamoto wrote poems. His school notebooks were full of them. Always on the quest for the perfect poem, his obsession, he sat with a pencil stuck behind his ear, completely withdrawn from the world, a poet through and through, a poem in himself.
    We were both in our final year. Both under the same pressure to pass. He found it easier than I did. Or rather, he pretended to. What’s the point of learning, he joked, when my path is mapped out. Unmistakably. The footprints that have marked it before me. My great grandfather, my grandfather, my father. All lawyers who have paved the way for me. I don’t have to learn anything. They’ve already done it for me. I just have to regurgitate and spit it out afterwards. That’s what I owe them. Look! He showed me his notebooks. Torn up. Father thinks society doesn’t need misfits. Well, he’s right. I just can’t help it. I’ve spenthours taping it back together.
    Under one strip of adhesive tape I read: Hell is cold.
    The most perfect line, he said, that he had ever created.
    Hellfire is not a warming fire.
    I am freezing beside it.
    No place is as cold as this burning desert.
    Thick pencil lines. Scored in the thin paper. In some places a bit was missing. It doesn’t matter.
    Kumamoto beat his chest three times. It’s all in there. My own requiem.
30
    At first I did not understand him. I understood him just as little as the poems he wrote. I read them and understood the words that formed them. I understood hell and fire and ice. But the abyss they described, to understand that required a way of reading into the depths, which I shied away from because I realized I was already down there and didn’t want to admit it. Anyway. If I had understood him then, perhaps some things would have happened differently, but who knows? Who knows what good something is, and whether it counts that it’s good? As far as I remember no word that Kumamoto used was ever good.
    Yet we became friends. Good friends. I admired his single-mindedness. A light emanated from him, showing someone who knew where he was going and that there, wherehe was going, it would be terribly lonely. He couldn’t have cared less about what other people thought. He laughed with those who laughed at him. So with his father he said: You’re quite right. Only I can’t do anything about it. He said it with a wink.
    What he admired in me?
    I don’t know. Perhaps that I believed in him absolutely. I trusted in him and his cheerfulness. I trusted that here was someone who would always stay young, and who, when I was dead, would still be there, with snow-white hair, dreaming of the perfect poem.
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    Usually we met in the evening. He liked the twilight. He said the light was sad and happy at the same time. It was mourning for the day that had passed and anticipating the night to come. We walked aimlessly in the streets. Kumamoto, trailing behind me, surrounded by the smell of an unfamiliar landscape. It smelled of soil frozen hard centimeters down, of unusual plants held hidden beneath. When they shot up, what would come to the surface?
    The answer was an intersection.
    Kumamoto stopped. Above him an advertisement for shampoo pulsed in neon letters. Men and women ran in wide arcs around us. We were an island in the middle of surging waves. An embrace, and suddenly Kumamoto held me tight. With both hands he gripped