Letters from the Underground // fyozai

x. arson

What makes a season change? Is it truly the celestial beasts advancing in their eternal loop, casting their wills onto men? Is it the air growing sick of curdling men's brains inside their skulls, granting them a few months of rest? Is it the families flocking back to the grey city walls when frolicking in their summer homes turns bleak and chilly?

Perhaps it is the sun growing tired of sparing Fyodor's bones the agony, passing them over to the unforgiving cold to break them soundlessly, shattering every dream of comfort he's ever dared to have. There is no telling if winter is the first icicle on the windowsill, or his sleepless nights of ache.

There are good things, too. Like the way silence looms over the alleys with the season, rendering the rats less visible, allowing him to blend into the bricks more easily. Or the way St. Petersburg falls back into the comfortable severity that makes her what she is, paints her back into the home Fyodor has always known.

There is the way murder dries up on his hands better. Less sludgy and sticky and sweaty. Cleaner. The smell of rot adorning the streets is not egged on by the sun bloating up the corpses any longer, so the air is kind. There is also the way Masha cuddles up into Fyodor more often—the silent exchange of what little warmth there is in the fray of his bed.

But then he drops the cello's bow before a piece is finished, has to shred his heart in apology once he wakes up from the faint. He plays less, spares his joints the agony, bleeds himself a butcher instead.

And that blood does not get to crust over before something is at his doorstep, something different this time. The thirty seconds Fyodor takes staring at the package is enough for the smoke to infiltrate his open door, he passed by a house fire on his way to the apartment. The smoke is now inside, but so is the black package.

Carefully cutting open the neat wrapping, black gives way to burgundy when his fingertips meet leather—wrought and worn, kissed by a million fingers and five hundred and fifty seven years. Just like its sender.

In fact, the leather covering and Dazai share even the scent.

The Bible in Fyodor's hands creaks and groans its spine a hurricane in Fyodor's mind. Dazai has surprised him for four years, but this time, only this time Fyodor stares in disbelief, letting the smoke invade the abyss in his gut. The house fire outside spreads, spits onto weeping faces. And the smoke did not have the shame to pretend to stop at Fyodor's lungs before it travels farther, deeper within him.

Now, where in the hell did Dazai get this?

The letter within the package begs urgency.

November 10th, 2012

Fyodor Dostoevsky,

The waves of tourists have finally quieted down, making the streets of Tokyo a little more bearable. So I have been venturing! It only took a few drinks at Lupin for me to end up at the (then) locked gates of the local Keio university campus.

You must've heard of the legend their library collection houses, one of the forty eight Gutenberg Bibles yet existing today. Isn't that fascinating? The earliest trace of one of man's intelligence's best contrivances! Scribing no other than the Lord's scripture itself! Such a rare, fascinatingly unacquirable object—it called to me, just like any of its kind.

And so, the winds carried me right through the twenty three doors between me and the fabled book, and all the way back to Yokohama right after, tracelessly so.

It was only when it finally sat on a shelf in my study that I felt how oddly misplaced it was—like a patch of snow in a scalding desert. I suppose I am not interested in collecting artefacts that prove no use to me, but only in the thrill and pride of acquiring them.