The last stall had a light that should not have been on.
Kenji Mori had been told the rule before he took the night shift at the station. He was thirty-seven, a cleaner who locked the public toilets after the last train, and the old man who had the job before him had said it once, at the handoff, and not as a joke. Do not choose a color. If a voice in the end stall asks red paper or blue paper, you do not pick. You do not explain. You leave. Aka Manto wears the red cloak. He waits where the door is shut and the light is wrong. Red is one death. Blue is another. A choice is how he is invited to finish it.
Kenji had laughed, because a man who mops floors for a living learns to laugh at the things passengers leave behind. He stopped laughing when he saw the light.
The row was empty. He had checked the other stalls. The last door was closed, and a thin bar of green-white showed under it, though he had switched the room to the night circuit and the night circuit did not feed that tube. He set the mop bucket down. He said, station is closed. No one answered. He put his hand on the door and did not push. Pushing is a kind of answer.
The voice came from inside, close to the tile, polite.
Red paper, or blue.
It was not a passenger’s voice. It had no hurry in it. It had been waiting for the question to be asked of someone, and Kenji’s hand on the door had been enough. He saw, through the gap at the hinge, a fold of red cloth. Not a coat. A cloak, the hood up, the face in the hood only a paleness and the suggestion of a mouth. One hand held a strip of red paper. The other held a strip of blue. The hands were the color of the tile.
Aka Manto, the old man had said, and then he had not said the name again. The red cloak in the stall. He offers the paper the way a clerk offers a form. If you take red, the stories say the skin comes off you. If you take blue, the blood leaves and the breath does not return. Kenji did not know which telling was the true one. He knew the rule that sat above both. Do not choose.
He took his hand off the door.
The voice repeated itself, still polite. Red paper, or blue. A question that expects a man to be helpful. Kenji had spent all night being helpful. He almost said red, because red was the first word, and first words are how a tired man ends a conversation. He shut his mouth on it. He stepped back until the bucket was against his heel.
The stall door opened without his hand.
The cloak filled the frame. The hood did not lift. The two strips of paper were held out at the height of a transaction, red on the left, blue on the right, and the paleness in the hood tilted as if listening for the choice he had not made. The fluorescent tube above the stall buzzed and did not belong to the building. Kenji smelled wet paper and the iron of the pipes and nothing of a living man.
He did not run. Running in a wet toilet is how a knee goes and how a story ends against the tile. He walked backward toward the corridor, and he did not take his eyes off the papers, because the papers were the question and the question was not yet answered. The cloak followed at the same pace. It did not hurry. Aka Manto does not need to hurry. A choice can be made at the sink as easily as in the stall.
At the corridor Kenji said the only sentence the old man had given him that was not a color.
No paper.
The strips did not lower. The hood tilted the other way. For a moment the paleness had an eye, dark, patient, the way a form is patient when the line has been left blank. Then the red paper curled at the edge, as if a hand had closed on it too tightly, and the blue did the same, and the cloak stopped at the threshold of the toilet the way a thing stops at a burn it cannot cross. Kenji did not know if the words had been the ward or if the corridor light, the true one, the one on the station circuit, had been enough. He did not stay to learn.
He locked the outer door from the corridor side. He did not go back for the bucket. In the morning the bucket was in the corridor, dry, and the last stall was dark, and the tube that should not have worked was cold. On the floor of the stall lay two strips of paper, red and blue, unmarked, as if they had been set down for the next man who would be helpful.
Kenji still locks the toilets. He does not check the last stall if the light under the door is the wrong light. He does not put his hand on that door. When a passenger jokes about the red cloak he does not laugh, and he does not correct them, because correcting is a way of saying the name. He keeps a third answer in his mouth and he has not had to use it again.
The rule is older than the station.
If the last stall is lit when the room is dark, do not open it.
If a voice offers red paper or blue paper, do not take either.
If you must speak, speak a thing that is not a color, and leave before the cloak decides the blank line is an answer.
Aka Manto does not need to chase.
He waits in the stall with the papers ready, and the ones who choose learn that red and blue are only the two ways the question ends, and that a polite voice in a shut stall was never asking what you preferred.
It was asking whether you would answer at all.
