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The older boy with a nosebleed was sulking. Seto too was sulking, but not about the broken nose. His eyes were fixed on the glorious blue-skied outside where he wanted to build sandcastles with his little brother, but instead he had been called to the orphanage director’s office. And for what? After all, Seto had not broken the boy’s nose. The boy had stolen a bag of glittering, fish-eye marbles from little Mokuba, and Seto had intervened, and then gravity had broken the boy’s nose. That was all.
The orphanage director propped his exhausted face on a sweaty palm. ‘Maesawa, are you going to tell me what happened?’
‘Nothing happened,’ spat the older boy. Shame and swollen blood vessels had turned his face bright red.
‘I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what happened. Seto, do you feel like owning up to what happened here?’
Seto said nothing. The room did not exist for him. He cared only about the sparse garden with its balding grass and its sandbox, which beckoned and shimmered beyond the window.
The director rubbed his face in his hands and thought about the hot dinner and cold beer that awaited him at home. He thought briefly of how he once used to want to change the world in this job. And then he didn’t think about that anymore. He dismissed the older boy and then, alone with Seto, snapped his fingers in Seto’s face.
‘Listen to me. Hey, Seto? Listen.’ Seto looked at him like he was roadkill. ‘This is important. You’ve got three serious assaults on your record now. Three. That’s not just kid stuff, you understand? No one is going to foster you if this continues.’ His eyes were bloodhound-tired. ‘I’m going to need to put you and your brother in separate fostering streams.’
Seto picked up a post-it and began to fold it into an origami crane. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It means you won’t be adopted together. You’ll go to separate homes. Do you understand?’
Seto’s fingers paused in their craft, then resumed. ‘We’re not going to separate homes. You’re not going to take him away from me.’ He said this politely.
‘It’s not going to be up to me, Seto. Mokuba is a good, likeable kid. We really would have no problem rehoming him if he was an unattached adoptee. We’re simply not going to be able to find a home that accepts both your brother and... someone with a record like yours.’
Seto finished his origami crane. Its blank, pointed face observed the room blindly. He wished he could make it fly, white and black against a silken sky. He crushed his palm around it. ‘Then I’ll find a home myself.’
When Seto first saw Gozaburo Kaiba on the news, electricity rattled his spine like hands on cage bars. He was playing daifugō with two older boys in the rec room. Other kids were building block towers, Mokuba and the younger ones were snoozing among threadbare pillows. The TV droned out the one news channel that got reception. Seto cast down a card and one of the boys, his skin ripe with new acne, leaned forward and pointed over Seto’s shoulder.
‘Hey, that’s the guy who’s coming here, right?’
Seto turned and met the low fidelity eyes of Gozaburo Kaiba through the meandering blue lines of the TV screen.
‘No way, that guy?’ said the other boy. ‘He’s ultra rich.’
‘How rich?’ said Seto, his eyes tracking the news ribbon. ‘...won the World Chess Championship against newcomer Viktor Östlund...’
‘Millions! Billions!’ The boy shed a card from his deck and slapped his friend on the arm. ‘He’s scary, no?’
‘I’m not scared of him,’ his friend retorted. ‘He’s gonna come here for some nice publicity, yeah? I’ll take his wallet when he’s in the pisser.’
Seto watched the screen like a hungry cat. He watched clips of this stranger sliding his rook across the board and checking the king, and he studied the curve of his knuckle, the lines of his forehead, the hard set of his mouth. He took in the glint of a golden ring on his finger. Through poor reception and spasms of interference, he memorised every pixel that represented this man. He felt as though the television broadcast was vibrating through his temples and into his bones. He was connected to supernature. God was speaking to him.
‘Seto-chan?’ one of the boys drawled sarcastically. ‘It’s your move.’
Seto threw his cards to the table. ‘I’m going to make him adopt me.’
The two boys looked at each other and melted into mocking laughter. ‘Oh really, Seto? You want to bet on that?’
‘I’ll bet you three thousand yen!’ crowed the other.
‘Sure.’ Seto stood. His body was on fire. ‘I’m won’t be here to collect it, though.’
Seto had expected a limousine. He had expected photographers and news crews, but Gozaburo Kaiba arrived in a quiet, beige Lexus. The press would be coming later.
Seto ignored the groups of rubbernecking children who pressed their sticky fingers against the front windows and he slipped instead around the rough back garden. He clambered up through the open kitchen window, finger-skin tearing on a nail, then dropped down clumsy and bruised to the stains of the linoleum floor. Here he could watch through the mesh window of the kitchen door for their visitor to make his way through the corridors. He could taste sweat on his lips.
His skin hummed as Gozaburo Kaiba appeared. A cold and fantastic titan, the director dogging his heels, a massive bodyguard following them. Gozaburo Kaiba was splendid and magnificent and he was wealth, wealth, wealth. Money sang out with every echo of his soft leather shoes. His face dripped other-wordly disdain. He had come from a different universe. And he had come here! He had come here to see Seto!
Seto waited until the group passed, then pushed out into the hall behind them. His heart hammered high in his chest.
‘Hey!’ he shouted. His tiny voice rang around the hall like a little bullet; the director stumbled. And Gozaburo Kaiba turned and looked at him. Seto thought he might turn to stone. He swallowed and breathed hard. ‘If I beat you in a chess match, will you adopt me and my brother?’
The orphanage director’s face collapsed like a souffle. He began to stagger over apologies, his back bent, his hair dripping sweat to the floor. Gozaburo paid him no attention. He watched Seto with roaring indifference. It was like looking into the sea.
‘A chess match?’ said Gozaburo Kaiba. His voice was a low tide over sea-blunted pebbles. ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘You’re the world chess champion, Gozaburo Kaiba,’ Seto answered. He licked his lips. They had not healed from his last fight and his tongue felt the cracks. ‘But I can beat you.’
The orphanage director interposed himself between them, half-bowed, hands raised in supplication. Gozaburo Kaiba waved his hand and the man fell silent, a swatted insect. He watched Seto like the eye of the maelstrom watches ships. ‘Alright, kid. Someone prepare us a table.’
The cameras had to wait outside as they played. Some of the press corps got bored and left for more lucrative photo opportunities. The director was terrified they would lose out on donations. But to Seto and Gozaburo, the world outside didn’t exist. They were in a place of monochrome geometry. Bishop takes knight. Queen takes bishop. Pawn takes pawn. Seto’s fingers were wet with sweat. Gozaburo barely looked at the board. He looked at Seto as though reading him slowly, like he were a complex, beautiful book. He played effortlessly, glancing at the board only when he had to, letting his eyes roam over Seto. Seto had to keep his attention on the pieces. Pawn takes pawn. Bishop takes pawn. It was going well, he thought, until it wasn’t. His eyes flashed up to Gozaburo’s when he lost his rook and he thought he saw amusement there, bright but far away. Queen takes knight. Queen takes bishop. Queen takes queen. Pawn takes queen. Checkmate.
‘I’ve won,’ said Seto, and the words didn’t seem real.
‘So you have.’ There was no anger in that cold, concrete face. Gozaburo Kaiba extended a large hand. Seto stared at it for a moment, then took it in his own. Gozaburo gripped him hard as they shook. ‘What’s your name, kid?’
‘Seto.’
‘Seto. Seto Kaiba it is, then.’
Mokuba buried his face in Seto’s side all the long limousine drive up to the mansion. Gozaburo had spared no expense. Their car was a black colossus, its engine hummed deep-throatedly, the buttons on the chauffeur’s uniform shone gold in the afternoon sun. Mokuba got carsick and threw up a little and Seto cleaned him with thick, cottony napkins. Seto spit-shone their shoes. He tried to make Mokuba’s hair lie flat.
The manor swelled up on the horizon. It was the biggest house Seto had ever seen and he felt his blood rocketing around his body as he imagined its insides. The chauffeur held the car door open for them, then a butler held the house door open. Neither spoke. Mokuba looked like he was going to cry.
Inside it was gorgeous and cold and echoing, all canine pillars and red tongue carpets. Seto walked on as Mokuba hid behind him. A warm, smiling woman waited for them at the foot of the stairs. She spoke with a voice soft like floating petals.
‘It’s very good to meet you, Mokuba-chan and Seto-chan.’ She bowed low to Seto, then took Mokuba’s hand. She smelled like coconut. ‘Come on, Mokuba-chan. Lets show you to your playroom.’
Seto knew better than to follow. He stood alone in the antechamber and watched Mokuba look at him over his shoulder, his eyes big and scared, and Seto hoped he had made the right decision.
Although he had only heard them once before, he recognised Gozaburo’s footsteps instantly on his approach. Seto turned and met his new father standing upright, his chest thrust out, his eyes solid ice.
‘Welcome to my home.’ Gozaburo still did not seem flesh and blood. He was a walking statue, or a storybook monster. There was something hungry about him. ‘Would you like a tour, son?’ He gilded the son with sarcasm.
Seto nodded yes and so Gozaburo led Seto through the spirals of the mansion. He explained the age and wealth and blood paid for each spectacular piece of art, each mounted weapon, each portrait of a dead man. He took Seto into his close, dark study and laid out a gorgeous chess set with pieces in brass and mahogany. Gozaburo lit a cigar and blew toxic air into Seto’s face, who coughed despite himself, and then he told him to play.
Gozaburo won. They played again. Gozaburo won again. They played eleven times until Seto was making wrong moves just to bring the game to an end more quickly. Gozaburo allowed him to humiliate himself over and over.
‘You made the choice to challenge me,’ he said. ‘And I made the choice to let you win, because I thought you might one day have value to me. Now you are in my debt. This is the deal you made.’
Seto felt spiders crawl over his neck. He swallowed stomach acid and kept his jaw strong and his face blank. Gozaburo smiled at him and breathed that awful smoke over Seto again.
‘I hope you prove a good investment.’
Seto had not cried since his infancy. After the first week in his new home, Gozaburo brought Seto into his study and took a whip to his back. The leather peeled the skin from the muscle like a ripe nectarine. After six lashes, Seto sobbed like he was trying to haul his heart out of him. After nine, Gozaburo held his wrists so he couldn’t get away. When it was finished, Gozaburo spat onto the open mess of Seto’s back.
Seto bled himself to sleep that night.
He was awoken at five AM to begin his lessons and he found he had been bandaged in the night. He sat in his study and bled quietly as he completed fourteen hours of mathematics, languages, history, literature.
At dinner, Seto called his new father sir and he didn’t sit or eat until he was told. Gozaburo was pleased. Seto slept on his stomach to keep pressure off the wounds and cried until his head throbbed. He was ten years old and he was terrified, and Gozaburo was so pleased.
Gozaburo rarely beat him like that again. He preferred the crop; it made neat, sharp, bruises instead of scars. The marks on his back remained like fat white slugs crawling over his skin. It was a reminder of how much worse things could get.
On one evening, Gozaburo had Seto hold out his hands palm down and took a cane to them, ten times. Seto’s jaw clenched and he managed not to cry.
‘Do you know why you’re being punished?’
‘I spoke without permission.’
‘Will you do it again?’
‘No, sir.’
Gozaburo struck him an eleventh time, a twelfth, a thirteenth, until Seto’s ears rang bright white silver.
‘That was a lie, Seto. You’ll screw up again. You always do. Don’t lie to me.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’ His knuckles were oozing fat round drops of blood. Everything that came out of his mouth now was wrong. He had once been good and clever and everything he said would startle the adults around him at its maturity and, sometimes, cruelty. Now he had to be beaten every night for the endless noisy mistakes that fell between his lips. Every night he apologised and promised he would do better, and Gozaburo would make him bleed. He only wanted the pain to stop.
Gozaburo placed a hand on the back of his neck and Seto realised he was quivering, although he could not tell if it was from pain or anxiety. Gozaburo squeezed the back of his neck like he was juicing a lemon. Seto briefly thought he might throw up.
‘Go to bed now,’ Gozaburo said, and Seto sighed with shameless relief.
As Seto turned to leave, Gozaburo struck his backside with the cane. Both sound and pain were dull in the tight, dark room. Seto paused, unsure, and his father laughed. This was an omen.
Comfortably, Gozaburo made himself Seto’s God. Seto learned with horror that the man was exactly as he seemed. The masculine strength, his independence, his contempt for weakness -- these were not an act he shrugged on for the public. He was darkness all the way down. Gozaburo loved no one and needed nothing, and he cut people down like pampas grass. Seto felt like Bluebeard’s wife.
The beatings grew less frequent as Seto internalised the rules, soaked them up, became one with them. Silence became his default. He never spoke to anyone, not even Mokuba, unless addressed first. His back was always straight. When he went to bed at night, he always glanced at the door before getting into bed in case he needed to ask for permission to sit. All of this pleased Gozaburo.
Most of his beatings were from poor marks on tests (97/100, three stripes) or for Mokuba’s transgressions. Seto wanted to hate how easily his fear of pain had cowed him, but he couldn’t afford hatred. He rose at five AM, he ate breakfast and lunch as he worked, he stopped for dinner with his father at seven PM. By nine PM, Seto would fall into bed exhausted and sleep blackly until the process began again.
The dinners were strange. Mokuba would join them sometimes, nodding asleep into his food, and the moment his eyes closed Gozaburo would have him taken away. That was all Seto saw of his little brother, some weeks. He and Gozaburo would finish their meals alone at the table and Gozaburo would tell him about business. Stocks. Deals. Employees that needed to be chastened. Seto drank it in and studied the kingdom to which he was heir, and he studied his new God.
‘You’re improving,’ Gozaburo informed him over one dinner, and Seto glowed inside. Gozaburo held his wine glass thoughtfully. ‘Soon we’ll be able to move on to the next stage.’
Seto said nothing. He pushed a ripe little tomato around his plate.
‘When do you turn twelve?’ said Gozaburo. He watched Seto from across the table with infinite, empty eyes. Meeting those eyes was like falling into an oubliette.
‘In ten months, sir.’
‘Long time.’ Gozaburo sipped the wine. ‘But we’ll wait. Can’t go pushing you into anything before you’re ready.’
‘I’m ready, sir,’ said Seto immediately. ‘Whatever it is, I’m ready.’
Gozaburo’s eyes glittered. Seto felt as if he had stepped on a bear trap. He could feel metal teeth in his calf.
‘We’ll see.’
That night, Gozaburo was cruel to him in a different way.
When Gozaburo came to his bedroom, Seto lay small and quiet in the darkness like a rabbit playing dead. He felt the mattress shift and the large, warm body press up behind him. He stared forwards and counted the whorls in the wallpaper.
‘Are you afraid of me?’
It didn’t seem useful to lie. Seto nodded once.
‘Good. But you don’t need to be afraid of me in here.’ Hot breath curled about his neck. A heavy arm rested around his middle. ‘This is bedtime. It’s quiet here. We can be nice to each other. Would you like that?’
Seto nodded.
‘I’m going to be very nice to you. You’re going to like it. I’m not going to hit you. I’m not going to hurt you at all.’
Seto lay still and counted his breaths in time with the whorls. He planted his mind within the deepest earths of himself and let the roots turn inwards. Gozaburo kissed the back of his neck and Seto felt his skin calcify. He thought about having skin of metal and scales and being so high in the sky that no one could ever touch him again.
Gozaburo was a diligent rapist and brought himself to Seto’s bed every night for a week, trying to weather a way into Seto like a river through rock. He never forced it. Seto didn’t understand why. Gozaburo hurt him often. Gozaburo beat him and smacked him and even cut him sometimes, even shut his fingers in doorways. But when he visited him in the warm private dark of his bedroom at night, there was no intent to damage. Gozaburo told him again and again in that low tarry voice how gentle it was going to be.
It hurt little, and each time it hurt less and less. Gozaburo worked Seto open like a wound but he didn’t bleed. He hadn’t learned words like rape, abuse, violation. He had military history and math. He had invasion, incursion, polynomial expansion. He felt like an x being square rooted. He never cried.
Seto became a kind of scientist. He formulated hypotheses as to why Gozaburo did this to him. He considered how it might be for his own benefit: what lesson was he to learn? How did this improve him? Was it changing him for the better?
In time, his father’s abuse simply became normal. He did not question it as he did not question the changing months. It hurt sometimes, in the morning, between his legs where a fingernail had caught him. He felt like he was carrying around a secret inside him, a secret like a tiny piece of broken glass. Like a tiny egg that might hatch.
Sometimes it made him feel special, sometimes it made him feel plagued. He walked along the hallways of the mansion and the corridors of Kaiba Corporation and he knew that he was unique and different to everybody else around him. He was a tiny green skink, crawling from wall to wall. Things were changing inside him. He had seen what happened to the older boys at the orphanage who, turned down by foster after foster, went off with the older men in dirty cars who parked across the street and returned with fists full of money. They came back wilted. He had watched an alchemical change occur inside those boys and he wondered now if that was going to happen to him. The more Gozaburo touched him, the more Seto felt his skin turn to steel and keratin. He found it mattered less when something so hard and alien was mishandled. He found everything mattered less.
As years passed, Gozaburo began to lead him little by little into the light of the outside world. When Gozaburo gave him a taste of power, Seto got vertigo. He was dragged out of the dark and constraints of the endless, regimented hours and windowless rooms and driven down the highway at ninety miles an hour, just to give him a taste of speed. Gozaburo flew him on a private jet to Okinawa, Seto’s first time in the sky, and Gozaburo molested him while his eyes went wide to see the earth fall away beneath their feet.
Once, Gozaburo didn’t speak to him for a fortnight except to pant above him in bed, then took him to a cold warehouse where a man was bound to a chair. Fear had swollen the man’s eyes to hard boiled eggs and his cloth gag was stained with blood. Gozaburo gave Seto a Smith and Wesson 37, small enough for his young hands, and told his son to shoot. When Seto pulled the trigger he felt power and terror topple through him like dominos. He made a bad job of it and caught the man’s throat. He watched the man choke slowly on his own blood, watched it seep around the gag like syrup. He barely felt Gozaburo’s hand on his neck as he watched the man die. Thrilled and nauseous, Seto initiated sex on the drive home because he didn’t know what else to do.
He bounced from trauma to trauma and his body opened and closed over and over. He bloomed, he shriveled. He didn’t know how to speak to Mokuba any more. He avoided their few allotted hours together and instead spent his time in the gym or the shooting range or letting his father do things to him. Gozaburo was delighted with his progress. Obedience had crystallised into something wonderful and terrifying! What a superb result!
‘I’m proud of you,’ Gozaburo told Seto once, beneath him in bed. Seto thought about what it would feel like to set himself on fire.
Age made it easier. Age made him cocky. He started to play his own games. He watched the women, those secretaries and sex workers his father kept around at work, and mimicked their ways. He flirted with Gozaburo in public and earned a black eye for it, but he did not fail to note the whetted keenness with which his father fucked him afterwards. In private, he kissed Gozaburo deeply and then bit his tongue. When his father made him perform oral sex in the Toyota Century on the way to work, Seto held the semen in his mouth until they arrived and then, when his father’s back was turned, spat it into his coffee. He considered it a victory whenever he baited his father into backhanding him in public.
Seto rebelled wherever he could. He found his father was not the only paedophile in the highest strata of the corporate world. They could smell his trauma and self-destruction like cinnamon and it was easy to lure them into bed. He traded sex for information, degradation for influence. Stocks, information, documents. He accumulated power little by meagre little.
These trysts made Gozaburo furious. When Gozaburo once caught him with an associate, his fury was as rich as his disgust. First he had the man’s hands broken and then, when the man was carted away screaming, Gozaburo brought Seto to his suite and grabbed him by the hair and smacked his head and dragged him around the room. Seto laughed as his ribs were kicked, then squirmed sweat-slick out of his father’s grasp. He fled to the bedroom and they wrestled in the vast white bed and Seto clambered on top and asked if he had been bad.
‘I should shatter your jaw,’ his father said.
‘Then do it,’ Seto hissed, and Gozaburo didn’t.
Seto felt himself going feral, the way a piece of fruit feels itself rotting.
On one occasion, Seto came to his office at work and Gozaburo, distracted, said nothing until his son was pushing onto his lap.
‘I’m working, Seto,’ he said, irritated. But Seto wound himself into place like bindweed and had his father hard and inside him in moments like it was the easiest thing in the world. He murmured fuck me, fuck me, fuck me into his father’s ears, then implored him to fuck me, fucking kill me, come on, put a letter opener in my eye, yes, cut a hole in my stomach and stick your cock in it, come on you fucking coward, is this the best you can do?
Gozaburo held his son by the hips as they fucked and peered into him and found no bottom to the depths within. Seto’s eyes were two blank silver 100 yen coins. He had emerged an awful imago, repugnant and gorgeous. He glistened.
‘What has become of you?’ Gozaburo breathed, sweat wetting his mouth. His hands worked hard as they gripped the body of the boy he had ruined.
Seto spoke in staccato pants. ‘I’m exactly the way you made me, dad.’
Seto rode his father hard and watched his silhouette on the wall and stretched out his arms and pretended he was flying. He felt molten cum spill into him and felt like he was full of fire. He was a dragon. He was going to burn everything down.
Gozaburo sat alone at one end of the board room table. Seto sat at the other end. Ten men stood around him. He was the most powerful person in the room. Without turning, he knew the accountant Nobuo Sakamoto stood behind him to the right. He knew from the smell. The man had ejaculated on his face in exchange for the intimate, vulnerable pieces of financial information so crucial to the takeover.
Gozaburo stared them down with animal fury.
‘Kaiba Corporation is mine,’ Seto murmured. His words were fresh footprints in white snow. It was such a beautiful day.
Laughter exploded across Gozaburo’s face. ‘I lost our game,’ he said. Seto didn’t feel like a winner. He didn’t feel like anything. ‘Watch, Seto, and learn what happens to losers.’
Seto watched his father leave his chair, cross the floor, break the glass, and drop out of sight to the street below. Within the board room he heard gasps and murmurs; beyond the glass, he heard screaming and cars crashing. He watched his father fall and he inside he like glacial bone.
He had died himself a hundred times, it seemed. And now he would never lose again. He would be a winner, winner, winner forever. He was perfect. He was impregnable. He had become God, and no would touch him again.